Driving Home, page 9
I pushed the remains of my steak to the side of the plate. “What courses?”
He evidently thought my interruption rude. “It’s like they say: it’s never too late—”
“What courses?”
“Hey?” His eyes were wary now. I was pestering him.
“What courses are you going to register for? I’m interested. What courses are you going to take?”
Irritably, he said: “Courses in … machinery. And flagging.”
… The water was agitated in a most Shocking manner boils Swell & whorl pools, we passed with great risque.
Buffeted by a strong headwind, the car sped west along the bare, ribbed valley of the Columbia. Lewis and Clark’s river, with its Indian fishing lodges and canoe-swallowing rapids, lay many feet underwater now. Locked and dammed since the 1930s, the Columbia had been turned into a staircase of epic lakes. The surface of the water was chipped and furrowed, streaked with windrows of scud. By the side of the road (another deserted blacktop, Route 14, on the Washington shore), stalks of dry sagebrush stood quivering on the stony ground. This miserable, gale-tormented plant had been new to the explorers, who referred to it, doubtfully, as “whins” and “wild Isoop.”
The feelings of the early settlers here, as they tried to find words to express the extraordinary barrenness of the valley, were plain from the names on the map. To the north lay Sand Ridge; to the south, Poverty Ridge. There was a hamlet called, with a grimly literal eye for the landscape’s salient feature, Sage. Beyond Sage was Dead Canyon. Beyond Dead Canyon was Golgotha Butte.
The West was named, in English, at a time when almost every frontier sod house and log cabin contained a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, resting next to the Bible. Huckleberry Finn notices the book in the Grangerford house:
There was some books too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a big family Bible, full of pictures. One was “Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
The fur trappers, farmers, fishermen, and loggers were comfortable with Bunyan’s landscape of allegory. (Was Paul Bunyan’s name meant as a respectful nod to John Bunyan? Certainly the Bunyan stories have a distinct Pilgrim’s Progress flavor.) The settlers were used to a topography in which places had names like the Slough of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, the Delectable Mountains, Lucre Hill, the River of the Water of Life, the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Western names! Migrants to the West found themselves living in a dramatic and exaggerated landscape that must have seemed more like the country described in Pilgrim’s Progress (or the Book of Revelation) than anywhere in the conventional realistic world. It looked allegorical, so allegorical names were attached to it: Damnation Peak, Mount Despair, Lucky Canyon, Starvation Point. When Lewis called the Jefferson River’s twin forks Philanthropy and Wisdom, he was beginning to create a world in which the pilgrim Christian might wander as he does through Bunyan’s book.
When Lewis and Clark reached the Columbia it was already named (after the ship in which Captain Robert Gray sailed into the river in May 1792), which was a pity since it meant so much to them. The river, surging west through these biscuit-colored hills, was a joy and a deliverance. From here, the explorers could almost smell the ocean. Every day now, they came across tangible signs of the end of the road: an Indian wearing a sailor’s peajacket over his short hide skirt; more handkerchiefs; an English copper tea kettle in a lodge house; a musket. They saw what were probably harbor seals (which live happily in freshwater) and called them “sea otters” to bring the Pacific closer. With each overnight variation in the level of the river, they fancied they could see the influence of the tide. It was a measure of their raised spirits that they now began to lay on regular musical entertainments for the Indians, with Private Pierre Cruzatte on the fiddle.
Pete Crusat played on the violin which pleased the Savage, the men danced.
Past Golgotha Butte, the windsurfers began. The Columbia Gorge gathers in the westerly winds of the Pacific and focuses them like a nozzle. It is one of the great wind funnels of the world, and its effect is exaggerated because the sun-dried desert land east of the Cascades forms a pressure vacuum that sucks in the cool wet oceanic air. So an almost continuous westerly gale blows through the lower Columbia valley, burnishing the rock bluffs and keeping the sagebrush down to a thin and close-cropped fur. It made the going rough for the explorers. Wind hard from the west all the last night and this morning … a verry windy night … a windey morning … a Violent wind … Their canoes lurched and pounded through the lop on the river, often taking on water.
But the windsurfers loved the windiness of it. They came from all over. I first heard about this roaring chasm in the bar of the Isle of Man Yacht Club, where a windsurfing bank clerk told me it was his ambition to spend a long season crisscrossing one short patch of water on the Columbia River. He showed me a picture of the place in a magazine; I barely glanced at it, but nodded politely, thinking him an amiable madman who required humoring.
Now I saw his point. Each wetsuited windsurfer had the rigid crouch of a toy gladiator as he skidded hard across the wind on his psychedelic wing. These people made sudden, happy sense of the harsh topography: for a moment, they made the Columbia look homely, in a solitary, Northwestern manner. There were at least a dozen of them in view, but there was no apparent relation between them. They weren’t racing, it wasn’t a regatta. Everyone was striking out on a freelance course of his or her own, each at a different angle to the wind, sailing exactly as people seemed to live here, unsociably and at cross-purposes.
I thought of the Manxman, slow-spoken, somber, and dreamy. During the year I spent on the island, he quit his job at the bank and broke up with his fiancée in order to devote himself to his sailboard. Driving on the coast road to Douglas in the dead of winter, past a sea of blown spume and boiling milk, I’d catch sight of a triangular scrap of rainbow in the storm—the ex-bank clerk at his devotions. This beef-pink, horse-faced loner was made for the Pacific Northwest: put him in a shack at the mouth of Melancholy Canyon, and he’d pass as a native.
As the Cascade Mountains began to crowd around the river, the landscape slowly changed from tan to green. The first fir tree came and went, sparse woodland thickened into forest, and National Public Radio was back on the air, broadcasting from Portland. For the past few days I had been living in a chronological fog, and it came as no particular surprise to learn that the man in the news today was Warren Christopher—a name I hadn’t heard for so many years that it sounded as if it belonged to the historical archives. Go driving long enough in the deep sticks, and you might tune in to find Cokie Roberts interviewing John Quincy Adams.
The road ran abruptly and unambiguously into the fall of 1992, with a lumber mill pumping steam into the overcast, some muddy acres of building lots and model homes, a tangle of concrete ramps and two freeways straddling the Columbia on high bridges. The whole landscape was permeated with the flatulent reek of the timber industry. I had meant to stop in Portland but took the wrong ramp and found myself headed north on Interstate 5, bound for Seattle and Vancouver, and at the next exit I kept on going.
Even on this Sunday afternoon I–5 was clogged. The main Mexico-to-Canada highway west of the Rocky Mountains, this thirteen-hundred-mile-long concrete duct had been a marvel in its time but was now an almost continuous end-to-end traffic jam. I made a slot for myself in the slow-moving stream and settled in. It was restful to have no more landscape to look at for a while, just the weather-stained back of a big milk truck, like a grimy blank page.
When Lewis and Clark returned to Washington in 1806, each was looking for the classic ending to a nineteenth-century story of a young man’s adventures. To go with the worldly honors they’d won with their expedition, they needed two weddings, two budding families. President Jefferson had given Lewis the job of governor of the Louisiana Territory and had promoted Clark to the rank of brigadier general and made him territorial agent for Indian affairs. Lewis was thirty-two, Clark thirty-six: by the standards of the time they were both unusually long gone in bachelordom, and they were in a justifiable hurry to be married.
Clark went back on a visit to his native Virginia, to the hamlet of Fincastle, near Roanoke, just off Interstate 81, where he proposed to Julia Hancock and was immediately accepted. Lewis wasn’t so lucky. For several months, he hung around the social honeypots of Washington and Philadelphia, making advances to likely young women, all of whom turned him down. Lewis was used to hard going and uphill climbs, and he seems to have tackled the business of courtship in much the same spirit as he’d tackled the Lolo Pass. He wrote to a friend: “What may be my next adventure god knows, but on this I am determined, to get a wife.”
But he got nowhere. He was America’s newest and brightest cultural hero, yet when it came to lovemaking he simply couldn’t put himself in luck’s way.
Charles de Saint Mémin drew a ceremonial crayon portrait of Meriwether Lewis in Indian dress in 1807. It’s no great work of art, nor is its subject, who stares out of the picture with undisguised pathos. His deep-set, doggily soulful eyes are full of trouble. Jug-eared, with a great conk of a nose and a small mouth like a credit-card slot, fantastically crowned with a twin-tailed coonskin hat, Lewis looks a more likely candidate for the comedy circuit than the drawing room.
Poor Lewis. In 1808 he went out to St. Louis, still wifeless, to take up the governorship. The newlywed Clarks had already set up house in the town, and Julia was pregnant. The ugly bachelor found that the one dear companion of his life was lost to him. He felt miserably excluded.
Lewis got drunk. He hit the whiskey with methodical deliberation, looking to the bottle for anesthesia, and almost every day drank himself into oblivion. St. Louis was a hard-drinking place in a hard-drinking period, but the governor’s drinking was a scandal even on the frontier. Pickled in alcohol, he got into shouting matches with the secretary of the territory, who wrote: “Gov Lewis … has fallen from the Public esteem & almost into the public contempt.” He alienated Jefferson by failing to send any reports back to Washington. Sunk in depression and booze, he began to buy large tracts of land, paying for them with unsecured lines of credit.
Julia Clark had her baby—a boy. The Clarks christened him Meriwether Lewis Clark.
Traveling, like whiskey, was a means of escape. In early September 1809, the governor, who’d been summoned back to the national capital under a cloud, left St. Louis to go to Washington via New Orleans—first by flatboat down the Mississippi, then by ship to Chesapeake Bay … a voyage of nearly three thousand miles. The flatboat drifted slowly southward on the current. Lewis drank. After eleven days of drifting and drinking, the travelers were in sight of Fort Pickering, where Memphis would eventually be built, only two hundred and thirty miles south of St. Louis as the crow flies. Lewis changed his mind. He would ride cross-country to Washington.
He was incapacitated with liquor. Captain Russell, the Fort Pickering post commander, forced him to stay and dry out, allowing him to drink only claret and some white wine. After five days of this—it seems to me—tolerant regime, Lewis gave Russell his promise that he would lay off whiskey and saddled up for the ride to Washington.
He was accompanied by two servants, an Indian agent, a slave, an interpreter, and a group of Chickasaw Indians; but Lewis liked to ride alone and went on ahead of the rest. Cantering through the Tennessee wilderness on dreadful roads, bottle back close to hand, Lewis perhaps found some relief from his goading furies. He was high on motion and whiskey. On October 10 he was on the Natchez Trace, heading north for Nashville, when he pulled in to Grinder’s Tavern.
Grinder was away, but Mrs. Grinder was home. Later, she would describe how Lewis called for whiskey, smoked his pipe, and paced the floor talking agitatedly to himself “like a lawyer.” Then she heard shots from his room. At dawn next morning, the governor died of wounds to his head and stomach.
Exactly what happened at Grinder’s was never properly unraveled. The official reports said suicide; gossip said murder. At the time of Lewis’s death, Clark was also en route to Washington, traveling on the main road from St. Louis with his wife and infant son. The news was brought to him on October 28, and Clark, who knew Lewis better than anyone alive, responded with grief but without much surprise.
I fear O! I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him.
After Lewis’s death, Jefferson wrote of his one-time secretary, “He was much afflicted & habitually so with hypochondria’—a word used by Jefferson in its original sense, to mean acute depression or melancholia. In Jefferson’s sympathetic diagnosis, Lewis had managed to keep his illness at bay with the “constant exertion” of his western travels, but that the “sedentary occupations” of the governorship had led him to succumb to “these distressing affections.”
In 1813 Clark was given the job that had broken his partner and became governor of the Louisiana Territory; he lived until 1838, when he was two years short of being seventy. His baby son grew up to work on the Rectangular Survey that Jefferson had begun: in June 1849, Meriwether Lewis Clark became surveyor general of Illinois and Missouri.
My wrong turning had left me with a day in hand. I quit the interstate and headed northwest for the Olympic Peninsula and the Pacific coast. The road was a dead-straight furrow through rolling plantations of black firs—an enormous canopy of darkness held up by bare gray tree trunks, standing as thick on the ground as stalks of wheat. The trees were of the kind that timber industry people call “pecker poles”—all height and no circumference, like hundred-foot broomsticks. Over their tops was spread a smothering sky of oily-looking rain clouds like a dirty eiderdown. These were the foothills of the razor-edged Olympics, but from the road one could no more guess at the existence of the mountains than one could tell the time of day. Mile after mile slid by of the same dank, unpeopled lightlessness, relieved by the occasional patch of clearcutting.
Great tracts of the Pacific Northwest, like this one, resembled the interior landscape of manic depression. They ran through the same exhausting cycle. For days on end there’d just be gloom and dripping water in this natural dungeon where things grew like some fungal runaway mold. Then, without warning, the sky would clear and you’d find yourself suddenly open to the high white heights, and watch as the world changed color in an instant, from vegetable black to brilliant moss green. The character of the region seemed strangely well matched to the characters of the people who had first discovered and best described it: Vancouver, Lewis, Roethke, Hugo. By commission, choice, or birth, they’d all managed somehow to gravitate to this mood-swing country, where their own disturbed, roller-coaster temperaments seemed to be bodied forth in the objective physical geography.
Foot down through the forest, I kept going until at last the ocean showed, like the ultimate clearcut, as a lightsome vacancy beyond the trees. I parked the Dodge and walked down to the beach. The sky was higher and thinner here, and there was even a meagre ration of evening sunlight, enough to make the big, half-sunken driftlogs cast distinct shadows on the sand. Though there was barely enough wind to keep the pine needles in motion, the sea drummed and rumbled like the traffic on an overhead expressway as the incoming swell broke on the beach.
I sat on a log and listened to the sea.
The Sea which is imedeately in front roars like a repeeted roling thunder, wrote Clark; and have rored in that way ever Since our arrival in its borders which is now 24 Days Since we arrived in Sight of the Great Western Ocian, I cant say Pasific as Since I have Seen it, it has been the reverse.
The Pacific rollers came bursting onto the beach like exploding snowdrifts. Each one started off as an unambitious crease, a pencil line on the smooth water a quarter mile out, where the swell tripped on the shallowing sand bottom. With ponderous slowness, the crease sharpened and built into a translucent crest, through which the dying sunlight showed as through bubbled green bottle-glass. Now the whole wave was really on the up-and-up. Sixty or seventy yards off, it sprouted a thin white handlebar moustache, which widened rapidly along its lip. It kept on climbing. And climbing. The force of gravity appeared to have been suspended to enable its magnificent ascent. The arched wave hung in space, as thick and viscous-looking as a tower of treacle. Then came the break—a ground-shaking crash you could feel in your bowels—as the sea collapsed into powder, then reformed itself back into water again.
I shut my notebook and pocketed my ballpoint. My log was now an island, and both my shoes had sprung serious leaks below the waterline.
That night I put up at a motel in Forks, twelve miles inland, on the slope of the invisible Olympics. It was a timber town, and a minor classic in its genre. I had been driving through timber towns all day and seen them at every stage of their evolution. Forks was the most highly evolved version so far.
The lowest form of timber-industry social life was a camp of trailer homes parked in a line along the roadside. It became a town with a name when the trailers were joined by three or four prefabricated ranch-style bungalows and a 7-Eleven convenience store with a gas pump out front. The next stage up the ladder required the addition of a full-blown gas station with a “deli,” which in these parts meant not a delicatessen but a basic horseshoe-counter diner, serving steak-and-egg breakfasts and sandwiches. Serious civic ambitions set in with the arrival of the video store and the motel. After that came the sculpture.
This was nearly always as formalized as the statue of the bronze infantryman atop the war memorial in a small English market town. I’d seen a dozen variants of it in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Carved from a section of old-growth Douglas fir of massive diameter, it represented, in heavy relief, sometimes painted and sometimes in bare varnished wood, a logger with an axe cutting down an old-growth Douglas fir.
