The Great Shark Hunt, page 53
* * *
Ketchum was perhaps the only place in his world that had not changed radically since the good years. Europe had been completely transformed, Africa was in the process of drastic upheaval, and finally even Cuba blew up around him like a volcano. Castro’s educators taught the people that “Mr. Way” had been exploiting them, and he was in no mood in his old age to live with any more hostility than was necessary.
Only Ketchum seemed unchanged, and it was here that he decided to dig in. But there were changes here, too; Sun Valley was no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league. “People were used to him here,” says Chuck Atkinson, owner of a Ketchum motel. “They didn’t bother him and he was grateful for it. His favorite time was the fall. We would go down to Shoshone for the pheasant shooting, or over on the river for some ducks. He was a fine shot, even toward the end, when he was sick.”
Hemingway didn’t have many friends in Ketchum. Chuck Atkinson was one of them, and when I saw him one morning in his house on a peak overlooking the town, he had just received a copy of A Moveable Feast. “Mary sent it from New York,” he explained. “I read part of it after breakfast; it’s good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff.”
Another friend was Taylor “Beartracks” Williams, a veteran guide who died last year and was buried near the man who gave him the original manuscript of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was “Beartracks” who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days when “Papa” was still a meat-hunter.
* * *
Not surprisingly, Hemingway has acquired quite a few friends since his death. “You’re writing a story on Ketchum?” asked a bartender. “Why don’t you do one on all the people who knew Hemingway? Sometimes I get the feeling I’m the only person in town who didn’t.”
Charley Mason, a wandering pianist, is one of the few people who spent much time with him, mainly listening, because “When Ernie had a few drinks he could carry on for hours with all kinds of stories. It was better than reading his books.”
I met Mason in the Sawtooth Club on Main Street, when he came in to order coffee over the bar. He is off the booze these days and people who know him say he looks 10 years younger. As he talked, I had an odd feeling that he was somehow a creation of Hemingway’s, that he had escaped from one of the earlier short stories.
“He was a hell of a drinker,” Mason said with a chuckle. “I remember one time over at the Tram [a local pub] just a few years ago; he was with two Cubans—one was a great big Negro, a gun-runner he knew from the Spanish Civil War, and the other was a delicate little guy, a neurosurgeon from Havana with fine hands like a musician. That was a three-day session. They were blasted on wine the whole time and jabbering in Spanish like revolutionaries. One afternoon when I was there, Hemingway jerked the checkered cloth off the table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They’d whirl and jerk the cloth around—it was a hell of a sight.”
* * *
On another evening, out at Sun Valley, Mason took a break on the stand and sat down for a while at Hemingway’s table. In the course of the conversation Mason asked him what it took “to break in on the literary life, or anything else creative, for that matter.”
“Well,” said Hemingway, “there’s only one thing I live by—that’s having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out.” He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war.
That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner’s conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.
Today we have Mailer, Jones, and Styron, three potentially great writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway’s, by the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.
It is not just a writer’s crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.
* * *
Hemingway was not a political man. He did not care for movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on individuals in a world that seemed far less complex, prior to World War II, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts—to blacks and whites, as it were, and he was not comfortable with the multitude of gray shadings that seem to be the wave of the future.
It was not Hemingway’s wave, and in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says Mason, why he hadn’t been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least, he had mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non-political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the pressures of a world gone mad, and “write truly” about life as he had in the past.
Ketchum was Hemingway’s Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.
Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.
* * *
Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years. Aside from the brute beauty of the mountains, he must have recognized an atavistic distinctness in the people that piqued his sense of dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village, especially in the off season with neither winter skiers nor summer fishermen to dilute the image. Only the main street is paved; most of the others are no more than dirt and gravel tracks that seem at times to run right through front yards.
From such a vantage point a man tends to feel it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole. Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid—like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.
Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn’t. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him—not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.
National Observer, May 25, 1964
Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs
Old-Time Boomers Still Stomp the West, but Air Conditioning’s Better
PIERRE, S.D.
I had met the tramp digger the night before. And because he was broke and I wasn’t, I bought him a hotel room so he wouldn’t have to sleep in the grass beside the road to Spokane. But instead of traveling the next day, he took what was left of his cash and sat by himself on a stool at the Thunderbird Bar in downtown Missoula, sullenly nursing his drinks as he had the night before, and putting his change in the juke box, which can be a very expensive machine for those who need steady noise to keep from thinking.
It was four in the morning when he knocked on the door of my hotel room. “Sorry to bother you, pard,” he said. “I heard your typewriter going, but I just got lonely, you know—I had to talk to somebody.”
“Well,” I said, not really surprised to find him still in town, “I guess we could both use some coffee. Let’s go to the Oxford, it’s open all night.” We went down the stairs of the silent hotel and through the lobby where a sleepy desk clerk looked up and wondered, with that bailiffs leer that desk clerks have been cultivating since the beginning of time, just what sort of a journalist I was if it was necessary to have vagrants calling on me at this rude hour on a chill Montana morning.
* * *
Which may be a valid question. But then somebody else might ask what sort of a journalist would spend six weeks traveling around the West and not write about Bobby Cleary, the tramp digger with no home and a downhill run to a guaranteed early grave; Bob Barnes, the half-deaf wildcat trucker who never understood that his life was a desperate game of musical chairs; or the lean, stuttering redhead from Pennsylvania who said his name was Ray and had hitchhiked West to find a place “where a man can still make an honest living.”
You will find them along the highways, in the all-night diners, and in the old brass-rail bars that still serve to-cent beer—a motley, varied, and always talkative legion of men who fit no pattern except that they all seem like holdovers from the days of the Great Depression. You will not find them any place where men wear suits and ties or work at steady jobs. These are the boomers, the drifters, the hard travelers, and the tramp diggers who roam the long highways of the West as regularly and as stoically as other men ride the subways of New York City. Their work is where they find it, their luggage is rarely more than one small suitcase or a paper sack, and their view of the future is every bit as grim as it is limited.
These are the people who never got the message that rugged individualism has made some drastic adjustments in these hyper-organized times. They are still living in the era of Horace Greeley, Horatio Alger and, in some cases, Eugene Debs. They want no part of “city living,” but they have neither the education nor the interest to understand why it is ever more difficult for them to make a living “out here in the open.” The demise of the easy-living, independent West has made them bitter and sometimes desperate. In the old days a man with a normal variety of skills could roll into any Western hamlet or junction and find an odd job or two that would pay his way and usually provide a little margin to spend with the local sports.
Today it takes a union card before you can talk turkey with most construction foremen, and many of the big companies have a hard core of regulars who move from one project to another. You see them on the highways in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas, caravans of pickups pulling house trailers, flat-beds hauling bulldozers, and hard-faced men from California and Texas with their families in the cab and their automobiles riding high in the beds of big dump trucks en route from an interstate highway job in Montana, for instance, to a dam-building project in Colorado.
This is the well-paid elite of the transient construction industry that is getting fat on Federal projects that more and more Western states are coming to view as economic necessities.
Some people accuse Western governors, senators, and representatives of dipping into the “pork barrel,” but others say these projects are no more than prudent allocations of the taxpayers’ money for necessary construction that Western states either cannot or will not afford. At any rate it is a big industry in the West, a money tree for a lot of people including the foremen and the skilled heavy-equipment operators who make up the construction elite—and a massive source of both hope and frustration to the boomers, drifters, and other free-lance laborers who go high on the hog when they get hired, and live like hobos when they don’t.
* * *
“Bud,” the broad-shouldered, pot-bellied cat driver, was not unhappy with life when I met him in a big dance hall in Jackson, Wyo. He was wearing an expensive gray Stetson and a pair of fancy cowboy boots that had not made much of a dent in his $200-a-week salary on the road-building job outside of town. In the course of an hour he asked about 30 girls to dance, got turned down by at least 25, and spent the rest of his time posing regally at the bar, dispensing wisdom and humor in every direction. At one point he let his gaze flash over the crowd and pronounced in the manner of a man long-skilled in the squandering of vast sums: “These damn silly tourists think they’re big spenders! Ha! We’ll see.” At that, he swept his change off the bar and disappeared.
The tramp digger in Missoula had not been so lucky. He wore a cheap, frayed windbreaker that was all but useless in the bitter nights of a late Rocky Mountain spring. He was tall, with the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a man who works with his back, but his eyes were dull in a slack face, and he walked with a weary shuffle that made him seem like an old man at 26.
As we walked along the deserted sidewalks of Higgins Avenue I asked him what plans he had. “I don’t know, pard,” he said with a shrug and a half smile, “maybe California, maybe Utah, it’s all the same. I’ll just hit the road when it gets light. There’s always work for a good hard-rock digger.”
* * *
Bobby Cleary was a specialist of sorts; as a tramp digger he is a body for hire in any kind of dangerous, underground work. He had come over from Butte where he said he was black-listed in the mines because he had quit too often. There was no work in Missoula, he was stone broke, and his prospects for the immediate future were not real bright. Now he looked up at the sky that was already getting gray, took the butt of an old cigaret from behind his ear, lit it, and recited what seemed to be his motto:
“That’s the way it goes—first your money, then your clothes.”
He had said it several times the night before, when we had struck up a conversation in the Thunderbird after he had frightened everybody else at the bar with a loud diatribe on “justice for the working man, by Jesus. My old man fought for the union and one of these days I’m gonna write it all down like Jack London. By Jesus he cared. He knew what it was like, and how about another whisky here, fella, for a no-count tramp digger!”
In the Oxford Cafe—or “The Ox,” as it is called by its generally unemployed and often homeless habitues—I ordered coffee, and Cleary asked for “a bowl of beans.” He looked at me and grinned: “I figure you’re buyin’, pard. Otherwise I’d have ordered a glass of water and crackers,” he nodded. “Starch and water, it fills the belly.”
I reached in the pocket of my leather sheepherder’s jacket, pulled out a black, passport-sized wallet, and put two dollars on the counter. In the dreary dawn of a hobo’s breakfast at the Oxford Cafe, that wallet seemed as out of place as a diplomatic pouch or a pair of cashmere Levi’s.
It was a week or so later when the wallet embarrassed me again. I had picked up an elderly hitchhiker named Bob Barnes on Interstate 90 near the cattle town of Miles City, Mont. We stopped for gas at the North Dakota line, and I left the wallet on the dashboard while I wired up a defective muffler. When I got back in the car he said very quietly: ‘That’s a real nice wallet; where did you get it?”
“Buenos Aires,” I said, then immediately added, “Things are cheap down there.” But I had not been quick enough and it showed in his face; here was a young punk with a fat black wallet, idly pulling rank on an old man who felt himself going down and out, for some reason that was either senseless or cruel, or both.
Bob Barnes was an ex-truck driver, who looked like an aging schoolteacher. He was too old now for any chance of a job with the big hauling companies, but still able to work as a “wildcatter,” which is like saying a pitcher cut loose by the Yankees might still catch on with the Mets. He had borrowed some money to come out from Minneapolis to Great Falls, Mont., where he had an old friend who owned a small trucking firm and would give him a job. But the friend had moved to California and nothing else was available—at least not before his money ran out, and when that happened he began riding his thumb back to Minneapolis with not even a toothbrush or a pack of cigarets for luggage, and not a dime in his pocket.
* * *
When I picked him up around noon on Saturday, he had not eaten since Friday morning. “Every time I walked past one of those highway restaurants I thought about going in and asking if I could wash dishes for a meal,” he said, “but I just couldn’t do it. I’m not a bum and I don’t know how to act like one.”
We were together all afternoon, a long hot drive across the plains and the badlands to Bismarck, but it was late in the day before he finally got around to admitting that his trip was not a lark of some kind.
When he finally began talking about himself, I wished he hadn’t. His wife had been killed two years earlier in an automobile accident. Since then he had been a drifter, but it was a hard dollar for a man in his 50s, and this wild stab at a job in Montana was his last real idea what to do with himself. When he got back to Minneapolis he thought he could “arrange a loan until things get better.”
Unlike the other boomers I met, Bob Barnes has gone the whole route and found it pretty barren in the homestretch. He has pushed big timber trucks through blizzards in northern Minnesota and driven straight through from Florida to Chicago with a load of tomatoes that would spoil if he stopped to sleep. He has driven every kind of rig on every major highway in the nation. He knows the names of waitresses in truck stops in Virginia and Texas and Oregon. And he can tell you how to get from New York to Los Angeles with a heavyweight load by taking back roads and avoiding the truck scales; there is only one route left, and only a few veteran wildcatters know it.
