Fresh Air Fiend (17 page)

Ever the diplomat, Christopher suggested that the man would be more comfortable having his breakfast served on a tray in the privacy of his room.

Oh, yes—Christopher was still smiling gently—and there was the transvestite who was a rather sedate man during the day, and at night put on a wig and a dress and mascara, and drank far too much Drambuie, and turned cartwheels on the rear platform with such energy that Amtrak threatened to uncouple "Los Angeles" and leave it on a siding in Omaha.

And the man who bedded down with his stuffed giraffe and teddy bear. And the man who celebrated his divorce by boarding in Reno and setting off on a ten-day trip in the car with a little harem, five young women who took turns visiting him in his room. And the large, ill-assorted family who used a cross-country trip as the occasion for a noisy three-day binge.

"The minute they boarded I knew there'd be a problem," Christopher said. "They were the sort of people who use the word 'party' as a verb. Very bad sign."

We were by now on dessert, and also near the top of the Wasatch Range—Soldier Summit, almost seventy-five hundred feet high, snow everywhere. From here we traveled in loops and through tunnels to Provo, where a van was waiting. It was about midnight.

"Have a good time skiing," Christopher said.

"Dinner will be served at eight tomorrow," George said. "We'll be waiting for you."

The mist at the station gave way to sleet outside town, and before we had reached Sundance it was snow, drifting down the canyon. There had been so much snow already that we could see the slopes, the lifts, and the stands of white-clad pine gleaming in the lights of the resort.

All night the snow fell, and it was still falling the next morning. Fortified by the late dinner, we had some juice and set off for the wooded cross-country trails. We rented skis, poles, and boots; we had all the rest of our gear. After the eating and drinking of the train, this was perfect—kicking and gliding across the meadows and woods of Sundance. A break for lunch, and then a whole afternoon of skiing. The snow still fell, and the air was mild, hardly freezing. Except for a flock of crows and one invisible woodpecker, the woods were silent.

At dark we handed back our ski gear and were taken to the Salt Lake City train station, about an hour away. There, solitary, detached, at a platform in the middle of the train yard, its lights blazing, was the "Los Angeles."

A movable feast,
I was thinking, as a woman in a white smock greeted us.

This was the chef, Regina Charboneau, just in from San Francisco, where she owned a restaurant and a blues bar. The southern cuisine was Regina's inspiration, but it was southern cooking with a difference, traditional ingredients served with a flourish—the sweet potatoes and crab cakes and buttermilk biscuits we had been eating. Tonight we were being served pheasant and okra gumbo, salmon with potato crust over creamed hominy grits, and warm chocolate bread pudding. The pheasant and okra gumbo, hearty and flavorful, was meant to restore us after our day of skiing. The gumbo, the bread pudding, and the biscuits were full of her own innovations.

"My sous-chef said, 'What about lentils with the salmon?'" Regina said. "I told him, 'Everyone does that. Let's rethink the lentils.'"

The grits they tried had come from Regina's childhood. She had gotten to San Francisco byway of Natchez (where she was one of nine children, her father a chef and restaurateur), Missoula, (where she gained a sense of reality), the settlement of Chignik Lake, Alaska (where at the age of twenty-three she was camp cook), Paris (the Cordon Bleu school), and Anchorage (several successful restaurants). Her stories could not top Christopher's naked passenger, cartwheeling transvestite, and cross-country harem, but they were very good, and included a plane crash in Alaska, strange times at the work camp, and at least one marriage proposal by a young Aleut male: "Marry me," the man said. "You damn good cook. You paint the shanty any color you like. I not beat you very much."

Later, in my room, full of food and warmth and a pleasant fatigue, I began to understand the meaning of the expression "gravy train"—not the sinister implication of voluptuous self-indulgence, but a friendly journey where everything is rosy.

Sometime during the night, the westbound
Zephyr
snatched us from Salt Lake City station and whisked us across the Great Salt Lake Desert at ninety-five miles an hour. We were still in high desert in the morning, a landscape like Tibet, arid stony ground with the peaks and ridges of snowy mountains showing in the distance on almost every side.

"Those are the Ruby Mountains," Christopher said, indicating a great white wall to the east. A bit later, about eighteen miles out of Reno, "And that's Mustang Ranch."

It was pinkish and sprawling, three or four one-story buildings by the side of the tracks. Not very glamorous, the Mustang had the look of a boys' camp, which in a way it was. Reno itself, part circus, part residential, seemed a blight on the landscape, "kitsch in sync," in the words of one wag. Those people who boarded the
Zephyr
here did not look like winners; in fact, no one looked like a winner here at all.

Some friends of mine and their child had been driven from their home in Colfax, farther down the line in California, to join us here. They got on board, and all along the route of the Donner Party we ate and drank. One of them brought me a copy of
Ordeal by Hunger,
the story of the Donner tragedy, by George Stewart, and there I sat as we clunked past Truckee—deep in snow—and Donner Peak and Donner Lake, where the awful events of death and cannibalism unfolded. I sat all afternoon reading and wolfing down coffee cake.

It was downhill after that, in every sense, through the foggy forests of ponderosa to Colfax and farewells; to Sacramento in the dusk; and the moonrise at Martinez, where Howard Hughes's
Glomar Explorer
was riding at anchor.

"Joe DiMaggio was born here," Christopher said. "And so was the martini. Maybe."

Then we were rolling through the Bay Area's back yard.

"May I suggest we put the lights out?" Christopher said with his usual grace. "The last time we came through here some young people threw rocks at our windows. I'd pay each of them two hundred dollars not to! But this way no one will see us."

The darkness inside "Los Angeles" revealed everything outside—the lights of the bay, the distant bridge we had just crossed, the muddy little docks in the foreground, Oakland just by the tracks, the skyline of San Francisco, Emeryville up ahead, where we glided to a stop.

I hated separating myself from the snug comfort of "Los Angeles." Taking nothing for granted, I travel hopefully; but I am not surprised when things go wrong. I am very grateful when things turn out well. If bliss can be described as an exalted state of not wishing to be anywhere else, then this had been bliss.

T
HROUGH THE COLD
late-afternoon forest, down a long, looping slope that looked like a trail, I glided on my cross-country skis, bumping tree trunks with my elbows, until the trail narrowed to nothing—just dark shadows of huge trees patterning the snow. But I had been misled. It was not a trail at all, and within minutes I was lost.

I had to remove my skis to struggle on through dense groves of yellow and silver birch and stands of pine so thick and black they looked impenetrable. The early sunset broke through blindingly to show me another clearing, and I saw large tracks in the snow, the length of my own ski boots, but wider—the prints of a black bear. They were unmistakable: I could make out the claws and see the pads of the paws indented in the snow. And they were recent—they had not iced over. So I was not alone.

There are shaggy, distracted black bears in the north woods of Maine known as beggar bears. They have had some experience of humans—they have raided a camper's garbage pit, perhaps, or they might have been clumsily fed by a bemused hiker. In any case, they are cautious but not afraid. They have learned by association that there is sometimes food in the vicinity of human beings. American black bears tend to be oblique. They do not look for trouble; there is usually plenty for them to eat in the forest. They feed placidly and retreat when they hear an unfamiliar sound. But the beggar bear is dangerous when it is hungry. It may turn predatory at the sight of a person. In America, the urban counterpart of a beggar bear is a mugger with a knife or a pistol.

With that sort of opportunistic bear in mind, I turned and skied back the way I had come, on the tracks I had left. Someone on cross-country skis can eventually find the way back. And perhaps I should not have feared this animal.

"There is nothing in the Maine woods that will hurt you except another human being," a man had told me the day before I set off.

He knew what he was talking about. He was Irvin Caverly, director of Baxter State Park in northern Maine, which is one of the most important wilderness areas of New England. This park is unique in the United States for being privately endowed, the gift of one man, a Maine millionaire and former governor, Percival Baxter. Before he died, at the age of ninety in 1969, Baxter provided a trust fund to support the park. He specified that it should be kept out of the control of politicians and that it should never become a national park. The vast forest (about 300 square miles) he bequeathed contains many mountains, including Maine's highest peak, Katahdin (5,267 feet), which was sacred to the Indians—where their gods dwelled, their equivalent of Mount Olympus. It is a lovely mountain, remote, solitary, and most serene on winter afternoons when its snow is deeply tinted with the gold of the setting sun. All around it are the tall trees and trackless hills of Baxter's wilderness.

"The works of men are short-lived," this far-sighted man said. "Monuments decay, buildings crumble, and wealth vanishes, but Katahdin in its massive grandeur will forever remain the mountain of the people of Maine."

The whole of northern Maine is one enormous logging operation for the pulp and paper mills that provide income and employment in the state. But this forest, especially in winter, is a place apart, in which there is no human sign—no footprints, nothing but the crush of trees, the sound of wind and birds, and deep snow, successive layers of it that first descend in November and continue to accumulate for four or five months, thawing only in April. In May there are still large bright patches of snow all through the forest, which from a distance look as pure and as soft as spilled cream.

Entering the forest on skis on my first day in mid-March, I had seen that the snow was so deep I would be wearing the skis all week. I had chosen skis over more traditional snowshoes, of bentwood and rawhide webbing, which make you unsinkable. Though many hikers use them, I find wearing them is awkward, like walking with a tennis racket strapped to each foot.

Camping in a snowy wilderness is a problem, but cross-country skis are only part of the solution. I had been concerned about finding places to pitch my tent—there was no bare ground anywhere. Wet, windy weather had been forecast. I did not have a sled—wilderness campers often ski in a harness, dragging a sled loaded with as much as one hundred pounds of gear. I would be carrying all my gear in my backpack. I wanted to travel light and see as much of this wilderness as possible, sleeping each night in the snow.

But because of the cold and the possibility of emergencies—a person becoming lost, frostbitten, injured—it was a park rule that in the winter season only teams of three or more well-equipped adults were allowed to camp in the forest or climb Katahdin. As an individual, I could ski into the wilderness area each day, but at sundown I had to leave, signing in and out in the logbook at the gatehouse, which was more than an hour's skiing from the main road, where I had left my car.

When I asked the director whether I could camp just outside the park, he took pity on me and said, "I think I can do better than that," and gave me the use of a rugged one-room cabin that was an occasional shelter for stranded rangers. It was in a snowy pine woods at the fringes of the wilderness, at the shore of a windswept pond.

I skied to the cabin the first day just to see what I would need: it contained a bare mattress and a chair, a potbelly stove, but no water, no lanterns, no cooking facilities. I left a bucket of snow inside the hut to thaw. When I returned the next day, the snow was still frozen. Yet I had all I needed in my backpack: a small camp stove, a sleeping bag, some spare clothes, candles, a flashlight, maps, a compass, a knife, a first-aid kit, and enough fruit and dehydrated food to last six days.

Prepared for the worst, I felt happy, confident—more than that, almost euphoric, with a sense of independence and self-sufficiency. All around me was an endless supply of water in the form of pure meltable snow. The weather was pleasant in spite of the forecast—the daytime temperature just above freezing, the nights very cold. There were birds in the trees—chickadees, woodpeckers, sparrows, jays—and animal tracks in the snow. At the edge of the park I saw signs of humans—the grooves of skis and the flatter, wider tracks of snowmobiles. A few miles into the woods, where the wilderness began, the only sound was the moan of wind in the treetops. Just before sunset the forest took on an atmosphere of utter strangeness, the silence and cold of limitless trees, as though I had entered a time warp, an earlier period on the planet before the emergence of humans.

"It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere," Thoreau wrote in
The Maine Woods
— and he was writing about these very woods, on the slopes of Katahdin, where he had hiked and camped in 1846. He was overwhelmed by the wilderness. "Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful.... This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night ... the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth."

It was impossible for me to travel except on skis. The rangers used snowmobiles for emergencies, or to traverse the backcountry, but these vehicles were useful only on the flatter and more thinly wooded areas. Skis were more versatile, and mine brought me to the brink of rocky precipices, across frozen ponds, and through trackless woods.