Jubilee Hitchhiker (44 page)

The road north through Horseshoe Bend, Banks, and Smiths Ferry followed the North Fork of the Payette River, still muddy from the spring runoff. Route 55 paralleled the west bank of Cascade Reservoir for its entire scenic sixteen-mile length. “The mountains were so beautiful,” Ginny remembered. “It was just an untouched place at that time.”

The little 1880s town of McCall nestled under the spruce on the southern shore of snow-fed Payette Lake. The area's alpine beauty provided the location for the 1940 Spencer Tracy film
Northwest Passage
. Ginny's cousin and childhood Reseda playmate, Donna, lived in McCall with her husband. She wasn't from Idaho or raised as a Mormon, growing up pagan in Southern California. “She became a Mormon when she was eleven or twelve,” Ginny remembered, “but I guess all along her mother and her mother's family were Mormons.”

Richard and Ginny drank Mormon-brew decaffeinated coffee and discussed the threat of Communism with Donna and her husband. (“The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house.”) Brautigan described the visit in a chapter he called “The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader'.” He also mentioned buying “tennis shoes and three pair of socks at a store in McCall” and fretted about the lost guarantee. Insignificant banal moments became part of Richard's work from the very start.

Idle conversations with strangers in McCall (store clerks, waitresses, and a ten-year-old girl sweeping a restaurant porch) became another continuing concern in his fiction. The chapter followed the Brautigans back across the high country, where patches of snow still resisted summer. They drove along the South Fork of the Payette River, stopping in Lowman for a strawberry milkshake, and caught their first glimpse of the magnificent Sawtooth Mountains when they looped into Stanley Basin from the north on Highway 21.

The town of Stanley, a random collection of log cabins and double-wides scattered beneath the crenellated cathedral upthrust of the Sawtooth Range boasted “four or five bars.” The Ace of Diamonds Club sat derelict with its windows broken out. Richard thought Stanley “a fine town.” On Saturday nights, one of the bars hosted a dance called the “Stanley Stomp.” Once, hitchhiking through town after fishing, Richard stopped in at a tavern and asked if they had any port wine. The bartender said he didn't think so but took a look anyway and, from behind a bunch of dusty bottles below the bar, pulled out the lone jug of port. He blew the dust off the top and uncorked it. Brautigan “drank the first and last bottle of port wine in Stanley, Idaho.”

The Brautigans set up their tent at Unit 4 of the Little Redfish Lake campground, three miles south of Stanley. Right on the lake, the place had a fantastic view of mountains Richard erroneously believed to be in Montana. Best of all, it was free, unlike the Big Redfish Lake campground, charging $3 a week “like a skid row hotel,” and crowded with trailers and Winnebagos. Richard and Ginny decided to spend the rest of the summer in Stanley Basin. Their campsite boasted a fine table for eating and work, in addition to a sheet-metal cookstove with “no bullet holes in the pipe.”

The Salmon River (the River of No Return) flowed on the other side of the highway. In a letter to a friend, Richard described the fishing as “the best I've ever seen.” Ginny had a camera and took pictures of her husband angling, along with potential dust jacket shots of him posed against the gutted hulk of a thirty-year-old derelict automobile. For good times, they gravitated to the Rocky
Bar in Stanley and shook their booties at the “Stomp.” Because of the baby, Richard and Ginny crawled into the sack early most nights, too tired to read from their carton-box library.

At first light on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, forty miles across the mountains as the crow flies, Ernest Hemingway pressed his forehead against the twin upturned barrels of a favorite Boss shotgun, holding the walnut stock firmly against the floor, and tripped both triggers. It was a cloudy day. Richard Brautigan went fishing on Yellow Belly Lake with a forty-year-old Arkansas businessman he met in the campground. All the fellow could talk about was how afraid he was of losing his job. Neither of them heard any news of Hemingway's death that day. Richard didn't learn of his hero's suicide until after returning to San Francisco in the fall, when he happened across the July 14 edition of
Life
with the Yousuf Karsh color portrait of Hemingway on the cover.

Richard didn't include his conversation with the nervous executive in the book. Instead, he recorded a ranting diatribe on the evils of socialized medicine in a chapter called “The Surgeon.” The surgeon was a neighbor in the Little Redfish Lake campground. He'd arrived a couple days before in his Rambler, pulling a trailer with his wife and two infant kids aboard. The Brautigans were leaving that afternoon, north to Lake Josephus. All morning, Richard fished alongside the surgeon, listening to him bitch and ramble, holding his own feelings in reserve. Later, camped on the edge of the Idaho wilderness, he shaped his keen observation of the angry doctor into a deft new chapter.

During a near-monthlong stay in Stanley Basin, Richard Brautigan fished the Salmon River, Yellow Belly Lake, Valley Creek, Stanley Lake, Stanley Lake Creek, and Big and Little Redfish Lakes. Even with all the time spent wading streams and lakes, there were many long summer hours for writing. When not working on the novel, Richard maintained a lively correspondence. He wrote letters to Ron Loewinsohn and to Lou Embree, who was forwarding mail from San Francisco.

In a note to Lester Rosenthal in New York City, Brautigan invented a macabre story about Kenn Davis starving Jake to death because he knew Les had never cared for his cat. One afternoon, Richard drew a number of childlike cartoons in a small notebook to amuse Ianthe, adding nonsense captions under the primitive drawings (“Fruit sign after breakfast,” “Fish without any bus fare, but he don't care,” “Boat that just got over a bad cold,” “Watermelon with a sail on its back”). Richard never offered his daughter anything less than the full megawattage of his unique intelligence.

The passages Richard Brautigan wrote looking out across Little Redfish Lake reflected the peaceful happy time he spent in Stanley Basin. Chapters describing sex in a hot spring surrounded by green slime and dead fish and Ianthe playing happily with a pan full of vanilla-pudding-flavored minnows conveyed the primal pleasures of living outdoors and fishing every day. Brautigan was not a purist. He used a fly rod and wrote of fly tying, dry flies drifting like ephemeral angels through his novel, but also mentioned fishing with salmon eggs and something called a “Super-Duper.” He used bait and lures without shame. The whole point was catching trout destined for the frying pan. In his notebook, Brautigan jotted down, “Number of times that we ate trout / 9 so far / 6 more.” Richard found a writer's paradise in Stanley Basin. “I could not have come to a better place,” he wrote to Les Rosenthal.

The Brautigans pulled up stakes toward the end of July, heading north into the mountains to Lake Josephus, situated between the Seafoam Mine (gold) and the Greyhound Mine (lead and silver). The River of No Return Wilderness stretched impenetrably ahead of them. Scattered all along
the surrounding plateau, dozens of small isolated lakes beckoned the adventurous hiker. Richard fished Float Creek, Helldiver Lake, and Lake Josephus. Camping in such a remote spot provided ample amounts of solitude. Brautigan crafted two new chapters for his novel: “Lake Josephus Days” and “The Towel,” melancholy glimpses into the past and the everyday problems of dealing with a sick baby.

Frost glistened on the morning grass. Chilly nights made campfires a necessity. Their blue smoke drifted down the valley toward the distant clanging of a sheepherder's bell mare. After leaving Lake Josephus, the Brautigans crossed over from Wells Summit and lingered into autumn along Carrie Creek, a spot they'd liked a lot when they fished there earlier. Richard started filling the back of the station wagon with firewood. Although fishing remained excellent, snow might fall any day now. It had been a wonderful trip, but with summer over and cash running low, it was time to head for home.

Back in Frisco, Richard and Ginny found a top-floor North Beach apartment almost right away. Located at 488 Union Street between Montgomery and Kearny (“one unbroken flight of stairs for three stories”), above Yone's Bead Shop, and next door to a Laundromat, the place was a convenient two-block walk from Washington Square. “I can look out the window and see nob hill [
sic
],” Richard wrote in a November letter to Sam Broder. “The lights go on there at night.” Brautigan told his friend about the book he'd been working on for over a year and hoped to have finished by spring. “It is called
Trout Fishing in America
. I don't know whether anyone will want it or not, but it will give me a perfect excuse to get drunk and rant and rave about my poor little lost american novel.”

Price Dunn showed up to help paint the apartment. The agreement was that he could stay for however long it took to get the job done, one week, two tops, and then he'd be on his way. As Ron Loewinsohn recalled, “The apartment got painted. Price didn't want to move. Richard had to put his foot down. Price moved.” In Loewinsohn's opinion their relationship boiled down to: “Price was always wanting a place to crash, and Richard was always putting up with him, putting up with him, and then finding this person in his house that he couldn't deal with.”

The Brautigans threw a big housewarming party. Price Dunn got “uproariously drunk.” He ended up with some girl he didn't know and couldn't remember the morning after.

Somewhere in the interim they passed out. Richard, Stan Fullerton, and several other cronies carried Price and his “date” naked and comatose from their love nest, depositing them in the bathtub. “A definite giggle session,” Fullerton said. Richard's love for bizarre practical jokes came into play, and he poured several packets of green and red food coloring over the unconscious couple. “We woke up in the bath, screaming,” Price recalled. “
Aaaaaa . . . !
”

Ginny found new secretarial work. Richard went back to his part-time job at Pacific Chemical, measuring out barium swallows formula two or three afternoons each week. To Richard, everything seemed “all right. Ginny is learning Russian and Ianthe is learning English.” The Brautigans returned the borrowed Royal portable to Mr. Lopez and rented an International standard for three months so Richard might continue working on his novel. In the evenings, Ginny neatly typed his notebook entries and rough drafts into legible chapters. When the term on the rental typewriter expired, Richard and Ginny coughed up $65 for a used electric IBM.

After reading the back issue of
Life
magazine with news of Ernest Hemingway's suicide, Brautigan began his first new work since returning from the trip, a chapter he called “The Last
Time I Saw
Trout Fishing in America
.” The sudden loss of his artistic “father” triggered memories of itinerant fry cook Tex Porterfield (who first told him about trout fishing) and the winter they spent together in Great Falls, Montana, during World War II. Richard translated these emotions into a fantasy dialogue between the narrator and his eponymous title character. They discussed the narrator's fear that the Missouri River would someday begin to resemble a forgotten Deanna Durbin movie he had seen “seven times” in Great Falls. Popular culture consumes our perceptions of reality, a parasite replicating its host. Fame ate the heart out of Hemingway. Richard Brautigan recognized the symptoms of this insidious social disease yet remained unable to diagnose them when he was himself infected.

Another new chapter (“In the California Bush”) grew out of weekend trips Richard and Ginny took that fall across the Golden Gate Bridge to visit Lou Embree and his girlfriend, who lived in the hills above Mill Valley in a rented cabin overlooking San Francisco Bay. Their isolated rural world, eventually erased by four decades of relentless development, was still a tranquil rural place back before the million-dollar homes crowded in under the redwoods. Shielded by eucalyptus trees, Embree's cabin had a cool basement, where Ianthe slept. Richard and Ginny, fresh from a summer-long camping adventure, bunked down outside under an apple tree, rising only when the morning sun rose high enough to bake them in their sleeping bags.

The two couples enjoyed long breakfast conversations, fueled by cup after cup of strong black coffee. Brautigan called Lou “Pard” in his new chapter, recounting Embree's exotic international upbringing and heroic war experience. Richard unleashed his refining eloquence in describing the natural world at Embree's cabin, “the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along the path” where he jumped coveys of quail and watched them “set their wings and sail on down the hill.” Brautigan conveyed a stronger feeling for nature in a suburban setting than in his observations of the wilderness backcountry along the River of No Return. The “strange cabin above Mill Valley” remained a magical place where running deer startled Richard awake in the dawn.

By Christmas of 1961, Richard Brautigan's first novel was nearly complete, yet he instinctively felt something was still missing. A trip down to Big Sur early in 1962 solved the problem. Price Dunn had returned to the area in the fall of 1961, taking up with a woman with a nine-year-old daughter. He was looking for an affordable home and heard about an abandoned estate high atop a ridge in the Santa Lucia Mountains south of Gorda. The place at Lime Kiln Creek had been built in the 1920s by Victor Girard, an early Los Angeles land developer who Price thought had been a silent movie star. Back before Highway 1 was completed there were no roads along this remote coastline. Girard and his guests came by boat to San Simeon and rode over the same mountain trail used to pack in construction materials for his remote rural retreat.