Driving Home, page 6
On both sides of the Cascade Range, the ultramontanes were regarded as forces of darkness—as the battalions of the Devil, or of ignorant bigotry, depending on whether you saw things from the eastern or the western point of view. Much of Washington state politics consisted of the angry exchange of ballot initiatives between opposite sides of the mountains. From the urban corridor of western Washington, one of the great liberal enclaves of the nation, came measures to protect gay rights, the right to choose, and the right of the terminally ill to die. The east responded with initiatives designed to combat “homosexuality,” to ban abortion, to rid the syllabus of blasphemous and immoral teaching materials, to promote creationist lecturers in high schools. The west of the state tried to apply a brake to the ethical authoritarianism of the east, while the east felt its mission was to curb the ungodly and licentious tendencies of Seattle and its fellow-traveling cities.
Politicians attempting to represent the interests of the whole state had to fudge. The House Speaker, Tom Foley, was a Democrat who stood for an eastern Washington congressional district; his power base lay in the city of Spokane, but he needed a proportion of the farm vote. On most issues, he was thought of as a generally liberal figure, but on gun control he was a live-free-or-die National Rifle Association man. Washington had a death penalty, and used it—but with an odd twist. Sentenced to die, you were accorded the right to choose the means of your execution. Death by hanging, or by lethal injection? Take your pick, loser.
A little short of Spokane, the farm road was fed back onto I–90 and the car sailed over the top of the city on a viaduct, past a sixth-floor roofscape of billboards, clocks, and the shell-like aluminum cowls of air-conditioning systems. Spokane, on the hinge between the plain and the Rocky Mountains, was a dense five-minute metropolis, and it was already gone before I made up my mind to stop for it.
In 1883, a rich lode of silver was found at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and Spokane Falls, fifty miles to the west, was the nearest railroad terminus. Spokane boomed, burned down, and boomed again. Unlike the loggers and farmers who settled most of the Northwest, the silver miners, along with their attendant mineral brokers, engineers, assayers, and lawyers, were predominantly urban people with raffish big-city tastes. Finding themselves far out in the sticks, fresh from San Francisco, St. Louis, or New York and flush with ready money, they brought to the wilderness a Sodom-and-Gomorrah style of plush velvet, gilt, and crystal chandeliers.
From Spokane on, the highway wound through old mining country. Each crevice in the hills had a small, gothic brick town squatting in it. Smelterville. Silverton. The pretty name of Coeur d’Alene was high-rolling French for drill-bit (as I found out later with the help of a dictionary). After the fundamentalist white rectangles and circles of the plain, the Idaho hill towns were happily jumbled, full of nooks and crannies and powerfully redolent of that disreputable culture of the assay office, the dance hall, the saloon, the whorehouse-hotel, and the player piano. Where the farming communities were founded on abstemious virtue and steadfast labor, the mining towns were founded on luck and a thin blue streak in a knob of rough quartz. The Bible was full of awful warnings about silver: “Howl, ye inhabitants of Maktesh,” said Zephaniah, “for all the merchant people are cut down; all they that bear silver are cut off.” Hard on Zephaniah’s heels came Zechariah: “And Tyrus did build herself a stronghold, and heaped up silver as the dust … Behold, the Lord will cast her out, and he will smite her power in the sea; and she shall be devoured with fire.”
The road climbed again into pine forest, with shaved patches where the harvesters had been; and on an exposed bend the car filled with the familiar, unwholesome stench of a pulp mill, like a malfunctioning chemical toilet. The snow level was dropping steadily until, all of a sudden, it had slipped below the highway, and the road surface was a mess of yellow slush. At Lookout Pass, just under 5,000 feet up, the white trees had icicles dripping from their branch ends and the windshield was spotted with the asterisks of singleton snowflakes melting as they hit the glass.
The Idaho-Montana state line crossed the pass, and it was nice to enter a state whose license plate honored a distinguished local novelist. Montana—Big Sky Country was a salute to A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Big Sky, published in 1947; and every logger’s pickup now advertised the work of a lyrical and indignant conservationist. Guthrie, born in 1901, had lived in the small town of Choteau until his death in 1991—and through the 1980s, in his eighties, he had denounced the timber industry for its careless demolition of his native landscape. It must have given Guthrie some waspish pleasure to see his many enemies driving around the state with plates blazoning his novel’s title like a huge, unwitting fan club.
For more than a hundred miles, I–90 ran up the back side of the Bitterroot Range, skirting crags and shale falls, switching promiscuously from river course to river course in its search for the low ground. As dusk settled, the hills dissolved into clouds of swirling soot. Light from my headlights spilled over the wet road, making driving a tense and headachy business. The car plowed through the dazzle at a breakneck forty-five. Trucks rolled past like speeding ships, leaving the Dodge floundering in their wake. I ate the remains of a cellophane-wrapped ham sandwich, bought before the beginning of Idaho, and counted down the miles to the safe haven of Missoula.
It took a long time coming. Then it was there—a sackful of lights scattered over a broad, flat valley bottom below the highway. I was tired and roadshocked, and it seemed that there was something not quite right about the place. As soon as the car passed under the railroad bridge that marked the beginning of the town, one could taste the complex industrial flavor of carbons in the air. The streetlamps all wore smoggy haloes and the dark brick architecture was slightly out of focus. Expecting a winter resort town—something along the lines of Aspen—I had the powerful impression that I had driven deep into the Rocky Mountains and somehow arrived in England’s industrial West Midlands.
Berthed in a motel room, with a finger of Teacher’s in a plastic tumbler, I called home. The five hundred miles between Seattle and Missoula felt as vast as if we were talking across a continent. We were in different time zones. The temperature here was in the twenties; on Queen Anne Hill it was in the fifties and there was still a tomato red sunset over Puget Sound. I was saying The mountains! The desert! The Christians! like any traveler in a foreign land, and it was disconcerting to discover that my wife, Jean, seemed to think I was just around the corner.
“If you’re coming back through Portland, can you stop by at Powell’s?”
Pick up a pint of milk at the shop on your way home, will you?
For in the expansive terms of American regional geography, Missoula was well within our neighborhood. The industry I knew best reflected that. Publishers’ reps, based in Seattle and given the Northwest as their beat, went at least as far east as the Continental Divide, which I–90 crossed a hundred miles farther down the road at Elk Park Pass; and there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between Seattle and Missoula, with Montana writers showing up regularly in Seattle to give readings and decorate parties, and Seattle writers hitting the road for expenses-paid weekends in Montana. As the book trade traveled, so, presumably, did the rest of the commercial world. Driving to Missoula, an adventure for me, was for a true Westerner no more than a routine commute.
I dialed the number of one of the Missoula writers whom I’d met at a Seattle lunch, the Montana-born novelist Deirdre McNamer. She was out, teaching a writing class at a university in Ohio (how these people moved); but her husband, Bryan Di Salvatore, The New Yorker essayist, was in, stumped for his next sentence, and keen to come out.
We suppered at a barnlike restaurant with a roaring clientele.
How, I wanted to know, had Missoula, this mountain mill town of forty-three thousand people, managed to establish itself as a national literary asylum?
“When Montana divided up the stakes, Helena got the capital, Deer Lodge got the prison, and Missoula got the university.” Di Salvatore lit a cigarette and wagged it at a particularly loud gang of fellow-diners. “Missoula got the flakes. This is the wobbliest, the strangest, town in the state.”
Di Salvatore was tousled and burly, with a mighty Grover Cleveland moustache somewhat improbably attached to an outdoor face that had begun to set along its laughter lines. When William Shawn edited The New Yorker, he appointed Di Salvatore as the magazine’s man in the social wilds. He wrote, at length and affectionately, about long-distance truckers, bears, dynamite blasters, country singers—and in each of these subjects one could see a portion of Di Salvatore himself … a sort of singing grizzly bear, with a taste for travel and big bangs.
“People come here for the university—some as students, some to teach. They stay because it’s cheap and it’s addictive. If Jim Crumley was here, he’d say it was because writers need to live in deep smelly places. Missoula’s on the bottom of a prehistoric lake that used to go all the way to Spokane. You’re down in the sediment here. In the ooze …” He looked out the window at the haloed streetlamps. “You can see clear across the street tonight, which is unusual for Missoula this time of year. When the fog’s down, it’s easy to stay home and write.”
We talked about the writing that had come out of Missoula, from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and the poems of Richard Hugo, to the work of Richard Ford (who moved to Missoula in 1983 but left in 1990) and current residents like William Kittredge, James Crumley, and James Welch. People wrote fondly about Missoula and, in my view, oddly. The usual fate of the small industrial town in literature is to be abused and escaped (rather as Malamud abused and escaped Corvallis). But it was the fate of Missoula to be loved half to death. A line in A River Runs Through It set the prevailing tone: “… my brother and I soon discovered [that the world outside was] full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.” Foggy-bottomed Missoula was the small town as womb.
“It’s a hard-drinking, raucous town. Sexist, but getting less sexist than it was,” said Di Salvatore, himself a transplant from Southern California. “It’s a blue-collar town, a very traditional town. A narrative town. Go to a party with a bunch of writers in Missoula: people get shitfaced and tell stories. They laugh. You get good jokes here. It’s very unpretentious. People don’t talk literary theory in Missoula.”
I said: “Seattle’s a theory city. There are deconstructionists in town. You can get into fights over Paul de Man. Last week I had to read two postmodernist novels in manuscript. Not novels, texts.”
“There’s none of that stuff here. Missoula people go to Seattle for football games. We pretend we haven’t heard of Paul de Man.”
Missoula’s genius loci—at least in the writing line—was Richard Hugo. Hugo grew up in West Seattle, in the working-class suburb of White Center. Born in 1923, he served with the air force in Europe during the Second World War, then studied at the University of Washington under Theodore Roethke.
Teacher and student, fifteen years apart, were eerily alike. Photos of Roethke and Hugo, taken when each was in his forties, show the same jowly fat man with the blurred features of the dedicated drinker. Each has the same anxious How am I doing? smile and the same weepy eyes. Each owns a car of the same make—a Buick—and writes poems about driving dangerously through the landscape of the Northwest.
Hugo’s early poems, written when he was working at Boeing as a technical writer, read like first-draft Roethke. He had learned from Roethke how to describe the rough terrain of the self by seeing it as a place much like Seattle and the surrounding countryside. His tumbling salmon rivers, running free through jungle green, are relatively shallow tributaries of Roethke’s Oyster River. The poems most his own are the ones set in the city, in abandoned rooming houses and rundown immigrant neighborhoods: an urban landscape of loss and defeat in which the solitary drunk weaving down the street is Hugo’s double.
In 1964, a year after Roethke’s death, Hugo went to the University of Montana at Missoula to teach writing, his marriage at an end and his drinking out of control. He found both a home and an office in the Milltown Union Bar. In another university and a different town, Hugo would probably have had his salary stopped at the end of the first month, but Missoula took to this warm, unbuttoned, gregarious man. When he was too depressed and drunk to teach, his departmental colleagues filled in for him and his paycheck kept coming. Very much as Roethke had been protected at the University of Washington, Hugo was regarded by the University of Montana as a precious civic asset, like a picturesque ruin. (Though in 1964, Hugo, with no teaching experience, had published only one book and had no great literary reputation.)
He was a beloved drinking and fishing buddy, an accessible teacher who showed by example that the most ramshackle life was fit material for poetry. Given sanctuary by Missoula, he wrote more freely and intimately than he had ever done in Seattle. He abandoned the gestures of elevated lyricism that he had picked up from Roethke and wrote with increasing plainness about bars and bartenders, fishing trips, mountain drives, the deserted homesteads and down-on-their-luck towns of rural Montana. He wrote about being shitfaced and told stories.
In a prose piece, he described an old man he’d met in the Milltown Union Bar:
Like many Montanans, the man, who had never seen me before, immediately started talking about his personal life. In Montana, many people assume that with the scarce population, 735,000 people in a state bigger in area than any except California, Texas and Alaska, loneliness is the norm and when you meet someone else you have license to speak intimately simply because you are two people in a lonely, nearly uninhabited landscape.
That was exactly Hugo’s own manner in his writing. In his worst poems he is the man on the next bar stool, muttering half to himself and half to you, trading on your indulgence and on the reasonable certainty that your life is as much a mess as his. Why else would you be in this bar? Why else would you be reading this poem?
Once more you’ve degraded yourself on the road.
The freeway turned you back in on yourself
and you found nothing, not even a good false name.
The waitress mocked you and you paid your bill
sweating in her glare. You tried to tell her
how many lovers you’ve had. Only a croak came out.
Your hand shook when she put hot coins in it.
Your face was hot and you ran face down to the car.
His best poems are candid, but soberly so, disciplined by meter and the close observation of externals. In Philipsburg, a depopulated silver-mining town southeast of Missoula, Hugo found a mirror to his own condition:
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage …
By the time he died, in 1982, Hugo had mapped a large chunk of Montana in his poems and named it Vancouver-style after his own desolation: a sad, dark landscape, brightened, at long intervals, by the welcoming lights of bars. Yet the tenor of Hugo’s life in Missoula was jollier than his poems might lead one to think. He attracted a convivial crew of colleagues (some of them his ex-students) to the writing course and gave the university a great name for the interdisciplinary study of fishing and drinking and poetry. He made a happy second marriage. A photograph of him in June 1982, four months before his death from leukemia, shows him capped and gowned, receiving an honorary doctorate at Montana State University; laughing, rubicund, and puckish, he looks like the Pillsbury dough man.
Next morning the air was clear and thin; seen in cold sunshine, the buildings of Missoula seemed to have drifted apart during the night, the huge spaces of the Montana landscape having infected the architecture of the town. Courthouse, bank, and department store were like lonely mountain peaks, with low-lying plains between them, while the snow-dusted sides of real mountains rose almost sheer above the city, boxing it in around the Clark Fork river. The overall effect was oddly unsettling; the streets were too open for comfort, the town itself too closed-in, inducing mild claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time.
The river that ran through it was quick and trouty. It spilled noisily over boulders and the trunks of fallen trees, baffling the sound of the traffic. I sat on a rock and read the beginning of James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, in which Richard Hugo appears under the nom de guerre of Abraham Trahearne, poet and drinker.
When I called Trahearne’s ex-wife, she told me that she had received a postcard from him, a picture of the Golden Gate and a cryptic couplet. Dogs, they say, are man’s best friend, but their pants have no pockets, their thirst no end. “Trahearne has this odd affinity for bar dogs,” she told me, “particularly those who drink as well as do tricks. Once he spent three weeks in Frenchtown, Montana, drinking with a mutt who wore a tiny officer’s cap, sunglasses, and a corncob pipe. Trahearne said they discussed the Pacific campaign over shots of blackberry brandy …”
It was easy to imagine Hugo–Trahearne being happy in Missoula: it was a place where odds and ends naturally collected and cohered. On the far bank of the Clark Fork lay the pleasantly nondescript campus of the university that had taken Hugo in—a mosaic of oddly assorted pieces of “collegiate” architecture. There was a bit of Oriel College, Oxford, a bit of Harvard Yard, quite a lot of ’60s New Brutalist, a touch of corrugated egg carton, and something that might, from a distance, have been taken for an ivory tower. More formal-minded cities would have turned up their noses at this scruffy gang of buildings, but they’d found acceptance in this liberal-hearted mecca, and looked as if they belonged.
