Blue Highways (39 page)

In truth, the circle of menhirs was a ferro-concretehenge, but it was as arresting on its hill as the real Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. From it, I could see the river Lewis and Clark had opened the Northwest with and awakened a new consciousness of nationhood; I could look across to a far riverside section of the Oregon Trail now buried under I-80N. The setting sun cast an unearthly light on the sixteen-foot megaliths and turned the enormous pyramid of Mount Hood, fifty miles away, to a black triangle. I felt again the curious fusion of time—past with present—that occurred at the Nevada petroglyphs.

A flaking wooden sign said a highway engineer and rail magnate, Sam Hill, whose grave was just down the slope, had built the replica in the twenties as a memorial to doughboys “sacrificed to the heathen god of war.” Over several smooth declivities in the concrete slabs appeared almost imperceptible notations from other travelers:
A.J. WILSON NYC. HELLO STUPID. KT 1936. BOB AND JANEY WAS HERE
. The monument had become a register, and the scribbles gave a historical authenticity that masked its bogus one. The twentieth century had made the stones an equivalent to the petroglyphs.

I picked up a peel-away Polaroid negative—the totemic offering of the American tourist. Barely visible was the reversed image of a woman standing against a monolith, her arms upraised, head bent to the left as if in sacrificial posture. She was unclad. A joke—it must have been. But in the half-light from a disappearing sun completing one more day of a two-hundred-fifty-million-year circle around the galaxy, the stones looking more and more genuine in the shadows, and a cold stillness dropping onto the desert plateau, the pendulous-breasted woman suggested something more.

The hills went dark, the volcano vanished against the black sky, blue ice stars shone as thick as mottles on a trout. A few lights from Biggs, Oregon, several miles across the river, gleamed off the slick water.

The loneliness again. Now I had only the idea of the journey to keep me going. Black Elk says it is in the dark world among the many changing shadows that men get lost. Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

Stars shone with a clarity beyond anything I could remember. I was looking into—actually seeing—the past. By looking up into the darkness, I was looking into time. The old light from Betelgeuse, five hundred twenty light-years away, showed the star that existed when Christopher Columbus was a boy, and the Betelgeuse he saw was the one that burned when Northmen were crossing the Atlantic. For the Betelgeuse of this time, someone else will have to do the looking. The past is for the present, the present for the future.

Astronomers say that when telescopes of greater range can be built, ones that can look down the distant curves of the universe billions of light-years away, they might show existence at the time of creation. And if astrophysicists and countless American Indians are correct in believing that a human being is composed of exploded bits of heavenly matter, billions of galactic atoms, then astronomers may behold us all in the stellar winds; they may observe us when we were something else and very much farther away. In a time when men counted only seven planets, Whitman recognized it:

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I knew I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time.

There came a dry rustle in the desert bush—a skunk, rabbit, coyote, I didn’t know what, but it pulled me back to Sam Hill’s Stonehenge, now just an orbit of shadows. The people who built the British Stonehenge used it as a time machine whereby starlight—the light of the past—could show them a future of equinoxes, solstices, eclipses. Across America I had been looking for something similar. An old urge in man. It seemed the journey had led here.

What was this piece of ground I stood on? Fifty miles away rose the ancient volcano like those that puffed out the first atmosphere, and under me lay the volcanic basalt ridge the old river had cut through. For thousands of years, chinook and chum and bluebacks swam upriver to regenerate, and Indians followed after the salmon; and then new people came down the river after everything. South lay the Oregon Trail under four lanes of concrete marked off by the yellow running lights of the transports; south, too, were glinting rails of the Union Pacific. North a ghost town crumbling, and around me a circle of stones for the dead of the first war called a “world war.”

Astronomer Edwin Hubble observed a galaxy moving away from Earth at nine hundred million miles an hour and concluded that the universe is dispersing itself to emptiness. Perhaps so, but the things I saw on the mountain—and more that I didn’t—all had come together briefly while I stood as witness. Now atomic physicists, those who watch the dance of the universe, were saying that in the pursuit of matter one ends up not so much with things as with interconnections—interconnections that give the particularities not merely definition but (even more) their moment, their meaning. Whitman: “A vast similitude interlocks all.”

Who can say how a man comes to see? I appeared surrounded by tombstones: the volcano dead, the basalt solidified, the fast river of cataracts drowned, the Indians and explorers and settlers and thirteen doughboys and Sam Hill too (his tombstone said “Amid nature’s great unrest, he sought rest”), all in their graves. That’s how a man sees the continuum: by the tracks it leaves.

All of those things—rock and men and river—resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back again is uninterrupted and unbroken.

The Ghost Dancers showed both man’s natural opposition to change he doesn’t understand and his natural failure in such opposition. But it is man’s potential to try to see how all things come from the old intense light and how they pause in the darkness of matter only long enough to change back into energy, to see that changelessness would be meaninglessness, to know that the only way the universe can show and prove itself is through change. His job is to do what nothing else he knows of can do: to look about and draw upon time.

A man lives in things and things are moving. He stands apart in such a temporary way it is hardly worth speaking of. If that perception dims egocentrism, that illusion of what man is, then it also enlarges his self, that multiple yet whole part which he has been, will be, is. Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and future, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers the greatest is this:
To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within—he reaches farther out
.

T
HE
light, spreading slowly that morning, came over the hills as if on foot, filling in a hollow here, pushing out a shadow there, working gradually to bring on the colors and forms of day. It bleached the gray eastern sides of the megaliths and rolled a shadow like a great spoked wheel down the scarp; snow on Mount Hood shifted on the spectrum from yellow to ice white.

I walked around what was left of the streets of the ghost town: a stone fountain, a few fireplugs, four rock buildings. A monument out here in the isolation made some sense, but not a town, so I went back up the highway to the Maryhill Museum of Fine Arts (made no sense here either) to ask how come.

Sam Hill had many plans—some shrewd, some cockamamie—and he had money to try them. His plan for Maryhill, Washington (first called Columbus), was to find a narrow zone where coastal rains met desert sun; that belt, he believed, would be an agricultural Eden. Early in the century, he decided the Columbia Hills was that place and laid out a town of thirty-four city blocks, built a reservoir and a few buildings. He talked some Belgian Quakers into considering settlement, but when scouts for the group came, they saw and left. To them, Hill’s ideal zone was the fiction of a creative road engineer more adept at theory than practice when it came to agronomy and climatology. And they were right. The town lay in the rain shadow of the Cascades.

Hill continued building the big and costly stone manor, often called, with some accuracy, “Maryhill Castle.” At one time he said it was for his wife Mary, but she apparently refused even to visit the place. At various other times he said Maryhill would be (a) a fortress to stop foreign invaders, or (b) a cultural center served by his Northern Pacific railroad running down alongside the Columbia and cross river from the competing Union Pacific, or (c) “a universal school for all the people… where farmer folk could find solutions to their problems,” or (d) an international museum, which it turned out to be if you consider America and Rumania to constitute “international.”

As for the town, Hill finally gave the meetinghouse to a couple of English women for their years of service in his employ, and they opened the Meadowlark Inn, a place of good food and quiet. But Hill died, the other buildings fell down, the reservoir silted up, the women died, and in 1958 the inn burned. Hill’s dream had passed, and now, but for the museum, monument, and the ruined rock walls, the desert slope was as vacant as ever.

On the highway again: at a cluster of closed buildings called Roosevelt, I noticed my gas was low. The next town, according to the atlas, was Moonax five miles away. Ten miles on, McCredie; fifteen, Alderdale; twenty, Whitcomb. I drove unconcerned. But Moonax was another Liberty Bond. Same with McCredie. Down went the needle. I could see stations along the interstate a mile south across the bridgeless river. No Alderdale. I locked the speedometer needle on forty-five and my arms to the steering wheel. A traveling salesman once told me that if you tense butt muscles tight enough, you can run on an empty tank for miles. And that’s what it was going to take. Whitcomb was there, more or less, but the station was closed on Sundays. Paterson, the last hope. If it proved a ghost town, I was going to learn more about this deleted landscape on foot. I drove, tensed top to bottom, waiting for that sickening silent glide. Of the one hundred seventy-one thousand gas stations in the country, I needed one.

Paterson, under the Horse Heaven Hills, had an open station, where I pumped in a kilderkin of gas. The odds paid off. I told the attendant—a surly fellow who could have raised mushrooms in the organic decay of his front teeth—about looking for Moonax. Two obese women with faces they might have bought at K-Mart burst out laughing from their aluminum chairs.

“Moonax! Moonax! Moonax!” each crowed one after the other.

“Moonax,” I repeated. I might just as well have said “Mongolia.” I didn’t have the heart to mention McCredie.

“You’re about fifty years late, tootsie,” one said. “Moonax ain’t but a hole in the ground.”

I climbed into my truck. From the greasy room somebody said, “Moonax!” and the laughter began again. Maybe I knew about Betelgeuse, but Moonax I didn’t know from a hole in the ground.

Across the Columbia at Umatilla, Oregon, and up the great bend of river into country where sage grew taller than men. The highway swung north once more into Washington to join U.S. 12 at new Wallula, a town forced to move when McNary Dam turned a segment of the Columbia into Wallula Lake.

Old Wallula was one of those river settlements you can find all over the country that appeared destined to become key cities because of geographical position. Sitting at the confluence of the Walla Walla with the Columbia and just a few miles downstream from where the Snake and Yakima meet the big river, old Wallula was a true joining of waters (the name may be a Nez Perce word meaning “abundant water”), although if you lift your gaze from the rivers you see desert. Astride the Idaho gold rush trail, Wallula began well: riverboats, stagelines, railroads, two highways. But money and history came through, paused, and went on.

The future passed eastward to Walla Walla (“little swift water”) with its many small streams instead of navigable rivers. Outsiders may laugh at the name until they consider the original one: Steptoeville. Walla Walla, a pleasant little city of ivied college buildings, wasn’t at all what you’d expect of a town with a name that sounds like baby babble.

The road went around the Blue Mountains into the Palouse, one of the most visually striking topographical regions in America. The treeless, rounded hills, shaped by ice and wind and water to a sensuous nudity, were sprouting an intensely green fuzz of winter wheat. These fertile highlands, the steepest American cropland, are so vast and rich, special machinery has been built to work them: twelve-wheel, self-leveling tractors and combines that can ride the thirty percent gradients.

Into the Palouse I took state 126, a graveled and slender and precarious piece of aerial roadway running the hills and grassy chasms with bravado, affording magnificently long views of the undulating land, before dropping once more to U.S. 12 along Pataha Creek. Then over the low mountains and down to a shallow basin where the Clearwater River joins the Snake. All the way, chukars crouched along the shoulders only to blast to cover as I approached.

A few miles south of the highway, the Snake River came out of five-thousand-foot-deep Hells Canyon, a place as inaccessible as any in the country. North of the road, the river, called by the voyageurs
La Maudite Rivière Enragée,
“The Accursed Mad River,” went back into a canyon two thousand feet deep and almost as inaccessible. It was as if the Snake, which travels such difficult terrain that explorers proved its true source only in 1970, crawled from underground to see sky before disappearing again.

At the east end of the Clearwater basin lay the twin towns of Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston, Idaho. Clarkston used to be Jawbone Flats, until it became Vineland, then Concord (the grapes, you see); in 1900, the town took the present name to parallel Lewiston across the river. The historical pairing is nice, but give me Jawbone Flats.