Driving Home, page 8
Of course their journey was important—it made the West real—but there was more to it than that. No other figures in American history were as endearing as Lewis and Clark. Partly it was their language, which jumped off the page with its undated plainspokenness. You could imagine bumping into them at a bar and getting along just fine—whereas George Vancouver, say, would strike you as a very weird old windbag with an accent. Most of all, though, it was the relationship between them that put them so easily within reach. Lewis and Clark were America’s foremost male couple. Before Queequeg & Ishmael, before Huck & Jim, there were Lewis & Clark.
When Lewis asked Clark to join him as joint commander of the expedition, he phrased the invitation like a proposal: “If therefore there is anything under those circumstances, in this enterprise, which would induce you to participate with me in it’s fatiegues, it’s dangers and it’s honors, believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them as with yourself.” Clark accepted him: “My friend I do assure that no man lives whith whome I would perfur to undertake Such a Trip.”
Their joint command was an extraordinary success. There seems never to have been a cross word between them. When one fell ill, the other solicitously nursed him back to health. Sometimes Lewis fussed over Clark (“Capt Clark is … still very languid and complains of a general soarness in all his limbs. I prevailed on him to take the barks which he has done and eate tolerably freely of our good venison”); sometimes Clark fussed over Lewis (“Capt Lewis out all night, we arrived at his Camp to brackfast, he was without a blanket”).
Each was protective of the other’s weakness. Lewis, who’d served as Jefferson’s aide, was the brainy one, Clark the better woodsman. Lewis had a smattering of formal natural history and liked to turn a fine phrase on occasion. When they named a Montana river after the president, Lewis wrote:
We … determined that the middle fork was that which ought of right to bear the name we had given to the lower portion or River Jefferson and called the bold rapid and clear stream Wisdom, and the more mild and placid one which flows in from the S.E. Philanthropy, in commemoration of two of those cardinal virtues, which have so eminently marked that deservedly selibrated character through life.
Clark, an enthusiastic cartographer, could draw a beautiful map, but that kind of thing was far beyond the reach of his literary skills. When it came to writing, he was all fists. He couldn’t spell, and the grammar of the simplest sentence had a habit of raveling itself up on him in a bird’s-nest tangle. So he got help from Lewis. Where the two journals run in daily parallel, one can see exactly how they were composed. Lewis wrote his entry first, then passed the elkskin-bound notebook to Clark, who copied what was written there into his own journal. Even when Clark disagreed with Lewis, he borrowed Lewis’s vocabulary and grammar to phrase his own dissent.
So Lewis, the more adventuresome eater, wrote:
our party from necessaty having been obliged to subsist some lenth of time on dogs have now become extreemly fond of their flesh; it is worthy of remark that while we lived principally on the flesh of this anamal we were much more healthy strong and more fleshey than we had been since we left the Buffaloe country, for my own part I have become so perfectly reconciled to the dog that I think it an agreeable food and would prefer it vastly to lean Venison or Elk.
He finished the entry and handed it to Clark. Clark, who felt squeamish about eating dog (and must have thought that Lewis’s last sentence went right over the top), wrote:
our party from necescity have been obliged to Subsist Some length of time on dogs have now become extreamly fond of their flesh; it is worthey of remark that while we lived principally on the flesh of this animal we wer much more helthy Strong and more fleshey than we have been Sence we left the Buffalow Country, as for my own part I have not become reconsiled to the taste of this animal as yet.
Lewis and Clark set the exemplary pattern for friendship in the western wilderness—a landscape in which male friendship took on an intense, sometimes overheated importance. Almost everything difficult and dangerous in the business of clearing and settling the land was done by men working in couples; like the pairs of “fallers” who managed the long saws from a position high above the ground on the trunks of the firs, and formed year-in, year-out partnerships that were as close as marriages. The term “pard” or “pardner” is still used in the West as a term of man-to-man intimacy. I used to think it was merely jocular—Tex Ritter, “howdy pardner” talk from low-budget Westerns; but it’s not. To call someone “pardner” is to make the significant announcement that you are on close tutoyer terms, and the first and best of pardners were Lewis and Clark.
In Idaho now, the road began to tumble through the forest like the river whose course it followed, swerving away at the last moment from vertical chimneys of gray rock, eddying out and doubling back. My ears popped as the car lost height. The river grew—like everything else here—prodigiously. One minute, it was a crack of light in the rocks beside the road; the next, its white-water rapids were louder than the Dodge’s engine; the next, it swirled darkly from deep pool to deep pool, dimpling over sunken boulders, its surface scored with lines of current, like penknife doodles in the wax polish of a tabletop.
Clark had a bad time here. For a frontiersman, he had an unduly sensitive stomach, and the combination of broiled dog and unspecified “roots” got from the Indians was too much for him. I am verry Sick to day and puke which relive me. Lewis, raking the trees with his spyglass, found a strange bird:
of a blue shining colour with a very high tuft of feathers on the head a long tale, it feeds on flesh the beak and feet black, it’s note is cha-ah, cha-ah. it is about the size of a pigeon; and in shape and action resembles the jay bird.
… a Steller’s jay—the same bird that perched on a dead branch of the madrona tree outside my study window. Lewis was a careful birdwatcher. He was a poor hand at describing the landscape, though Jefferson had asked him to report on “the face of the country,” its “volcanic appearances” and “mineral productions”; it was perhaps simply too big and strange to find words for. So Lewis concentrated on details that were within the range of his descriptive powers. Faced with the bewildering novelty of the West, he dealt with it by focusing in close-up on western birds. Several he described, like the Steller’s jay and the varied thrush, were new to science. He gave his own name to one species—Lewis’s woodpecker—and it was he, not his partner, who first saw a Clark’s nutcracker.
I eate much & am sick in the evening, Clark wrote.
The road leveled as it entered Nez Perce Indian country. The river grew broad and placid enough to float a ship on. Fir gave way to stands of ash and maple in soggy, unkempt meadows by the water’s edge. The most prominent building in many miles was a sky blue shack, padlocked for the winter, with Wild BillS FireworKS painted on it in careful four-foot-high letters, each i dotted with a circle like a halo. Standing alone in the deep sticks of Idaho, the blue shack looked like a gesture of crazy hopefulness on Wild Bill’s part. The grass and thistles surrounding it were untrodden: no one had yet beaten a path to its door.
All over the Northwest, Indians exploited their separate-nation status by dealing on reservations in goods and services that were prohibited to their white neighbors. Where the reservations were near big towns or abutted major highways, there were Indian casinos and bingo halls and pungent open-air firework markets, each called Boom City. You could buy only the most puny rockets and Catherine wheels from the state-licensed white dealers, but at a Boom City you could get fifty-foot strings of firecrackers and three-inch-mortar skyrockets that would climb 2,000 feet before going off like something out of the Gulf War.
This reservation, though, was seventy miles from the nearest city, U.S. 12 was hardly a major highway, and bingo and the firework trade, both good moneymaking stunts for suburban Indians, would be of little avail here. A bend in the road past Wild Bill’s, I ran into Kooskia, a muddy, one-storey brick village with a rail siding and a lumber mill. Its fringe of Indian homes—peeling prefabs, old trailers, huts knocked together from sheetrock and pieces of two-by-four—was grim even by the unexacting standards set by the reservations on the outskirts of Seattle. It looked like a TV picture of one of the poorer quarters of Soweto, without the mollifying sunshine. I ate lunch at a slovenly diner. The burger might as well have been made of dog.
Jefferson to Lewis: In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner … allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of it’s innocence, make them acquainted with … our wish to be neighborly, friendly & useful to them. For Lewis and Clark, the West was an unexplored wilderness and they were full of the novelty and drama of their own first footsteps in the landscape; yet wherever they went they were moving across a grid whose lines, though wavier and more irregular, were far more substantial than those of Jefferson’s projected checkerboard.
As Lewis and Clark passed from one national territory to the next, they changed guides at each frontier. Even on the roughest passages, they were led, or directed, along paths which they referred to in their journals as “roads.” I found great difficulty in finding the road in the evining as the Snow had fallen, wrote Clark, starting down the budding track of U.S. 12; road bad as usial. There is a big difference between a country with poor roads and one with no roads at all; in Lewis and Clark’s Northwest, the roads were bad but they were definitely there.
At Lolo Pass, the explorers crossed from Flathead to Nez Perce territory and met a band of Nez Perce men who were looking for stolen horses. Clark gave the Indians fishhooks and tied a colored ribbon in each man’s hair, which appeared to please them verry much. Lewis gave them a Steel & a little Powder to make fire. In dumbshow, the Indians explained that they lived in a village in a valley to the west, “five sleeps” away; a six-day hike. (This was the original of the shanty-and-trailer town of Kooskia.) From there, the men said, they had convenient access to the Columbia, which was safely navigable to the Pacific.
Lewis blew his nose, and the Indians were excited by the sight of his handkerchief. It was, they said, almost exactly like the cloth given to some relatives of theirs by an old white man who was camping on an ocean beach near the mouth of the Columbia.
This talk of handkerchiefs took place four hundred and eighty miles as the crow flies—more than six hundred miles by crooked trails and looping river courses—from the Pacific, and it takes some thinking about. Who in, say, Oxfordshire, in 1805, would have been able to gossip knowledgeably about someone seen in Genoa or Turin? Yet Lewis in his journal doesn’t seem overly impressed by his conversation with the Indians; he records it without comment before going on to describe the men as being of large stature and comely form.
Lewis and Clark had arrived in a country that was already well mapped and traveled. Goods and news were transmitted across an immense geographical space and over a large number of heavily policed tribal boundaries. When the caravan of trinket-bearing white men came stumbling down the main road from the mountains, no one seems to have been much surprised: since 1792, at least, the Indians had been getting increasingly used to the presence of eccentric tourists with designs on their homelands.
I put my foot down.
The Dodge Daytona was a measure of my shaky grasp of the basic grammar of American life. Leaving London, I’d sold my two-year-old VW on my way to Heathrow and bought the Dodge in Seattle the next day. It was black; it started smoothly; the stereo worked; I liked its bucket seats and the flip-up eyelids on its headlights. I didn’t think about it from a semiotic point of view until too late. That evening, I was talking on the phone to a Seattle woman whom I’d met on my first visit.
“You bought a car already? What make?”
“A Dodge Daytona.”
She laughed, and not kindly.
“What does it say?”
“Uh, uh—midlife crisis.”
“So who drives them?”
“Kids. Black teenagers. Gang members. They like to total them on Alki Beach.”
After a couple of years in my hands, the car developed a malevolent scowl when its offside eyelid got stuck permanently open. Unwashed, with a missing wheel trim and some bad scars on its paintwork, the one-eyed Dodge looked as if it should be doing time in some automobile correctional facility; but it had the knack (vital in a narrative vehicle) of being able to render large tracts of landscape as an undifferentiated green blur.
So, with the pedal on the floor, it shot from the valley of the Lochsa River to the valley of the Clearwater to the valley of the Snake at a steady cruising speed of five miles a word. Slowing as it reentered the state of Washington, it climbed into the bare and rumpled hills of the Palouse, their sides as smooth as gray suede. Their baldness led one to expect nothing of the summit except sagebrush and snow, but as the Dodge crested the last hill at 3,000 feet, it came out onto a steppe of rich farm country. I stopped to stretch my legs and take in the surprise of it. The sky was an empty duck-egg blue, but the soil was damp from recent rain, and the colors of the land had the unreal paintbox freshness of the last few minutes before a fiery sunset. Between an enormous undulating field of buttery corn stubble and an enormous undulating field of emerald winter wheat there marched a herd of twenty piebald cattle in single file. It was so quiet and still that one could almost hear the cows moving, half a mile off. In the far distance, steepling aluminum grain elevators did the job of churches, landmarking and subordinating the sprawling patchwork of the plateau.
There were no other cars on the road, and the only tractor in sight, up to its axles in chocolate earth, had a sleepy and forgotten look. The big, lonely geography of the Northwest made it easy to succumb to Lewis and Clarkery—to the sensation of being the first to discover an already well-discovered land. Even here, on territory so obviously occupied and cultivated, the natives of the place seemed to have only a skin-deep tenure of it. In England, all land looks owned. Hundreds of years of continuous possession, of wills and entailments and codicils, are visibly there in the fabric of the place, where most of what you see is the work of dead people and their builders, gardeners, plowmen, and lawyers. In Washington State, the land looks squatted-on, as if tomorrow it might have quite different tenants putting it to an altogether different purpose.
More than in any place I’d ever lived, it felt all right to be a stranger here. I was happy in the Northwest not because I felt at home but because no one else much seemed to be entirely at home either. When people said that they went “way back” in Washington, they meant two generations, three at most. Though they liked to affect a proprietorial air toward the landscape, they hadn’t yet had time to really make it their own. I liked their gimcrack townships because they looked as if they’d been built inside the reach of my own memory, and built by people whose skills as architects and carpenters were not much better than my own. Driving through Pomeroy (“The Key to Friendly Family Living,” pop. 1,716), I could recognize it as exactly the sort of town I might construct myself, if I were doing it in the evenings and weekends and paying for it as I went along.
For as long as whites had been coming here, the Northwest had tended to attract last-chancers in their forties and fifties: it was a region where unsettledness and solitude were part of the normal fabric of things. In their turn, the migrants had written their own morose character onto the face of the country, with lonely, inward-looking houses, hedged, ditched, and electric-fenced against unwelcome advances. Set far back from the road in acres of land for land’s sake, they looked less like homes than gun emplacements. The Dodge was going too fast for me to read the names on their mailboxes, but I could make some fair guesses: the Angsts, the Weltschmerzes.
It was dark when I reached Walla Walla, a big farming town with a college and a state penitentiary where Westley Allan Dodd, the serial child-killer, was waiting to be hanged in six weeks’ time. Because Dodd gave regular television interviews from the prison (in a creaky and pedantic voice he argued the case in favor of executing people like himself), the townscape of Walla Walla had recently become picturesquely famous in a small way. From these broadcasts, I knew its wide dusty streets, its baseball diamond, its old brick grade school, its cinema, its swimming pool. The producers of the Dodd interviews liked to show Walla Walla as the kind of quiet country town to which every parent would like to move; the ultimate safe place to bring up kids. Then they’d cut to the interior of the penitentiary.
It was quiet. Not even a TV crew stirred. Though it was a Saturday night, there was only one other diner in the restaurant of the Whitman Motor Inn, and I was wary of the look of determined interest that showed on his face when I arrived. He looked like a man from whom several diners might have already fled, and I did my best to bury myself conspicuously in the large gray slab of Volume 5 of the University of Nebraska Press edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark. I had just folded the book back on the right page (it had taken the explorers five weeks and two days to get from Lolo to the Walla Walla River), when the catechism started up. That looks like a good book. You like to read? Who’s the author? You ever read Stephen King? He’s a good author.
He was fortyish, with a narrow, sallow face and a limp moustache like a drowned vole. He held out his loneliness in the manner of a derelict exhibiting an open sore; and, having made me meet his eye once, he was a relentless anecdotalist. Through the slowly changing seasons of bread rolls, green salad, and rib-eye steak, I nodded, abjectly, while the man recalled his past in the timber industry, his conversion to environmentalism, and his recent, successful attempt to get in touch with his inner self. It was the search for this lost self that had brought him to Walla Walla, which was a fine town, a college town, an educational town. He had taken some wrong turnings in his early life, the man said, but now he was on the right track. In Walla Walla, he was going to take some courses.
