Several metal-sided churches (once called by an uncharitable acquaintance “Tin-Can Temples of Ready Redemption,” which was only marginally gentler than her “Tin Temples of Tax-Exempt Bias”) announced the availability inside of The Truth, that very thing escaping all other temples. (Loathe thy neighbor — or at least his views.) Other New Hereafters recommended the desirability of life everlasting and noted its perquisite of salvation, although what the area needed was salvage.
The nation, the world, stands prepared with the Salvation Army, but where’s a Salvage Army? A quest for life eternal, contended Gus Kubitzki, who freely admitted his limitations in speculative metaphysics, was spiritual avarice. “Fourscore and ten,” claimed he, “ought to be enough for anybody.” He himself, however, did fudge a bit, dying in his ninety-second year, but his daughter denied him at least one everlasting existence — a second life not postulated, but as real and certain as earth — when she refused to fulfill Gus’s wish his ashes be added to the mulch of his rose garden.* Today I’d like to have a blossom resurrected from some of his oxidized dust so I could imagine a few recycled atoms of his right arm which helped me at age eleven break in my new catcher’s mitt. There’s a clear possibility (he himself might say), until evidence appears to controvert it, a human’s best chance for something approximating life everlasting lies in the memory of others. There I go again, speaking of our tracks.
Q and I persevered on into a darkening morning until, not far from Sulphur, Oklahoma, I saw two signs of hope, one writ small and the other sculpted large. The first was LAWN MOR£ BLADES SHARPEND. Now there was a fellow aware of a time when a scythe didn’t need throwing away, because it got steadily used and sharpened out of existence. The second, a tall sculpture perhaps made of recast mower and scythe blades, was a colossal human-hand rising from the earth to reach toward the heavens. On the uplifted index-finger pointing skyward rested a tremendous, steel butterfly.
Sulphur was Sulphur Springs until the citizens lowered the water-table enough to dry up nearly all the artesian sources that had refreshed and restored Indians for centuries and whites for a generation; gone were springs like Medicine and Bromide. When the mineral flowings ceased and the spas depending on them vanished, Muskogee Avenue began a slow slide from the prosperous to the desperate, although one source, a drilled one, yet remained to leak a lightly sulfurous vapor over downtown. We followed the odor to Vendome Well, formerly the fount of a large swimming pool (long gone), where we came upon a woman filling plastic jugs. I tried the water. It tasted like Hell — that is, brimstone — and I asked how she was able to get it down. “I don’t drink it. My dogs drink it, and when they do they’re not bothered by ticks. But I know a power-company lineman who’s in the brush a lot, and he drinks it and says he’s tick-free.”
On the day we were in Sulphur, the Chickasaw tribe had recently finished clearing an entire town block, once the site of the old Artesian Hotel, to build a casino called Cash Springs. (A man said, “They want your brain to think Cash-in-o, but you know who does the cashing in.”) Since it was Indians themselves who deeded to white men for safekeeping the vale where most of the artesian springs used to rise, the Chickasaws are smart to recognize a new way to cash in on the hope of a life restored and resurrected by another outpouring, this one from a jackpot, a dream only slightly more certain than life everlasting.
West of Sulphur (the town that traded in its national park for a national recreation area) and not far from an enterprise called Junk City, USA, was the Treasure Valley Casino, another of a baker’s dozen owned by the Chickasaws who were happily fulfilling an Anglo urge to convert savings accounts into coins to drop into blinking, dinging machines that in return give a “player” a fleeting glance at little, electronic pictures. Indian slots are, possibly, a part of a Celestial Redemption Plan to take the territory back from usurpers for repatriation through realty purchases funded by small wheels going round and round as if they were land titles. Some Indians and whites alike believe the age-old mineral springs — briefly entrusted to no-deposit/no-return citizens who exhausted them in only a century — should now be given back to those who once knew how to keep them. Call it recycling.
12
A Quest for Querques
CROSSING THE RED RIVER into Texas from Oklahoma is like stepping out a back door onto an avenue instead of an alley, and the difference has little to do with prosperity but much to do with definitions of self and our place in the scheme of things. While I enjoy Oklahomans, I’ve never crossed the Red River southward without a bit of relief and a renewed respect for Lone-Star stewardship. The Texas waysides and the structures and landscape along them all looked flat-out better taken care of. If the alleged Texan braggadocio wants to proclaim its land ethic — at least in comparative terms — only the dim-sighted would try to gainsay it. Dizzy Dean once spouted something along the lines of “It ain’t braggin if you done it.”
Our route toward southern New Mexico was through the lower end of the Great Plains, formerly called by Anglo-Americans the Great American Desert, a land underlain by the Ogallala Aquifer which — were it on the surface and open water — would cover a larger area than the Great Lakes. (It could fill Lake Erie nine times.) The rolling and fertile savannah atop the Ogallala is the thorax and abdomen of America: we breathe it, we digest it. The Osage and Pawnee and dozens of other tribes were unaware of the immense reservoir held in erosional outwash from the Rocky Mountains, as was also Zebulon Pike who wrote in 1810, “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy desarts of Africa.” For many years, his view appeared to be remarkably shortsighted, but with contemporary agriculture having so significantly lowered the Ogallala and turned loose a conjugation of problems reaching well beyond it, Pike’s words now seem to be foresight.
From the Red River near Quanah, Texas, Q and I struck a staggered, forty-five-degree angle composed of numerous left turns followed twenty minutes later by a right turn and thirty minutes after that by another left turn, then a right again; in such a manner we “descended” southwesterly, always heading only due south or due west across the lower Panhandle of Texas. We were following back roads that rarely deviated from the Jeffersonian township-and-range system, staying within the grid as if it were a hog fence.
We entered the southern edge of the grand Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, a description perhaps from Coronado’s men in 1541, setting out sticks to mark a route they could retrace on their return across the naturally featureless and shockingly level and seemingly immeasurable grassland.
For an American traveler of stout heart, the Great Plains, and especially the Llano, are a good measure of one’s capacity to enjoy a landscape apparently without limits, a topography to make patience struggle to remain sovereign over the anxiety of nonarrival. In a place where the dominating feature is an encircling horizon sometimes of nothing more than a thin, flat, unattainable line, where a thousand footsteps or even a sixty-mile-an-hour motoring from sunup till noon seems to have taken you no farther than a gerbil gets on its wheel, travelers can find admiration of the interminable uninterruptedness too much for their resolve to appreciate American spaciousness. The incessant miles challenge pleasure. That perceived vacancy, like the sea it once was, teaches, if not submission, then at least sufferance. You can accept its scope, but you can’t master it. Crossing the Llano is a voyage into space — not the celestial kind, but one fully grounded and possessed of the requisite gravity: whether you’re on wheels, on horseback, or afoot, there’s no weightless floating. Instead, one hauls oneself across as if towing one’s butt. At its perimeters, there should be stations offering to anesthetize the unstringable, those susceptible to the heebie-jeebies, and any children scouring the backseat (although, now that I think about it, the Llano itself soon enough can induce a beneficent stupor).
The Staked Plain, of course, is not vacant: it’s covered with massive cultivations, although in the spring the tilled earth creates a brown desol
ation that erases the awful magnificence of the native grassland, and it’s there human logic founders — the apparent emptiness can dislocate minds and displace reason with its ubiquitous nowhere permeated by absence.
A traveler’s brain will not for long abide infinity because sooner or later we desperately want the other side of an itinerary. After all, the goal of travel is to get somewhere, at least anywhere, because going nowhere takes you into the realm of the insane. Trying to avoid an unhinging, Q and I stopped at heres and theres: a local burp and belch (enchilada), a dip and sip (ice-cream soda to lock it down), a county courthouse (to stretch legs), and once by a fence post to see what was nailed to it (a shot red-tailed hawk). But always reality abides: We’re not there yet. Where? Anywhere, as long as it’s somewhere other than this where.
A tip for happy passage on the Plains is, as I reminded myself, to see the grasslands as an expression of the great planetary respiratory system, and to hear the unslowed sweep of wind as the engine powering that respiration. I recommended to Q she do as does the seaman: lift eyes to the cloudscapes and view them as aerial hills and dales, watch them change as if we were moving through them, as if we were making actual progress. After all, the word cloud, related to clod, means hill in Old English.
All well and good, but on the day we crossed, we were cursed with a wonderfully clear sky untroubled by even a wisp of cirrostratus, a sky vacuumed of everything but a diaphanous blue so merging with the horizon as to erase it and make the roads seem to lead not necessarily toward New Mexico but simply into a space as perceptible as the ether.
We fell into a steadfast silence rising from prolonged miles elastic enough I thought them incapable of ever stretching to a breaking point: Were they multiplying, self-generating? Did that last mile just hatch out two more? Like duckweed on a pond in spring, they appeared to propagate themselves with unnerving fecundity. My belief in finiteness taunted and made claustrophobia look like a small price to pay for boundaries, and I felt my mind being wiped clean of the petty detritus of daily life: “May I see your registration, sir?” It matters not, Officer. “You know what your speed was?” Speed? What is speed?
Q soon brought me back. She said (in Spanish either because her mind also was wandering from the chummy limits of accustomed routine or because of her conversation with the Hispanic waitress at lunch), “Los conquistadores caminaban esta ruta. Que machos eran!” Oh, they were men indeed to hoof across this plain. Coronado, Pike, a million natives — I admired them all as if they had walked to Neptune.
“Have you got a story of the Llano?” she said. “A true story?” There was this guy — “I’ve heard it.” He was young and witty and friendly but not really a two-fisted chap. One evening he climbed into his car north of Abilene and went west, following county roads that took him into the Llano. He was headed to Albuquerque. Not long after sundown, not even halfway across, a rear tire blew out. He stopped and looked at the flattened rubber, stared uncomprehendingly at the “jack-assembly,” realized he didn’t know how to change a tire, and found himself unnerved and unmanned. He began to whimper, then cry. Then he threw up. He crawled into the backseat, wrapped his arms around his quaking body, rocked himself, summoned up a couple of his favorite show tunes (one of them “I Feel Pretty”), and sang himself to sleep. About dawn a woman rancher saw his car, roused him, showed him how to jack up the rear end, and left him. He turned his machine around and scurried toward home, promising himself he’d never again go alone into the Staked Plain. Moral: vastness teaches humility. Or maybe it’s a modern jack-assembly that does it.
As we crossed into New Mexico, the horizon began to rupture into a marvelous irregularity, with undulations and touches of jaggedness, all of it now cast in a vague blueness that meant not more sky but the Rockies. Hello, the hills! Hello, the other side!
We were looking for a creature frequenting the east versant of the Guadalupe Mountains, a bird for years I’d wanted to see; by reading her a passage from the hand of American ornithologist William Beebe, I’d managed to spark Q’s interest also.
The vermilion flycatcher, whose Latin generic name means firehead, belongs to a family of small and modest birds usually colored in every shade of gray between white and black, and it lives in arid lands where other animate life typically finds survival through a camouflage composed of the common dun hues of the desert, chocolate brown constituting gaudiness. Yet the male firehead flouts the logic of evolution by flaunting itself with a large scarlet cap with matching ascot and doublet. Were that not enough, he performs an aerial display a woodcock might envy. The degree of nonconformity evolution will tolerate can be limited, and to exceed it can be dangerous, can even lead to extinction. If not in numbers, then at least in its behavior, the firehead is a rara avis. It’s a quoz of the desert everyone should witness while it — and we — last. Here’s Beebe’s passage about the vermilion flycatcher I read to Q:
Up shoots one from a mesquite tree, with full, rounded crest, and breast puffed out until it seems a floating ball of vermilion — buoyed up on vibrating wings. Slowly, by successive upward throbs, the bird ascends, at each point of vibrating rest uttering his little love song — a cheerful ching-tink-a-le-tink! ching-tink-a-le-tink! which is the utmost he can do. When at the limit of his flight, fifty or seventy-five feet above our heads, he redoubles his efforts, and the chings and the tinks rapidly succeed each other. Suddenly, his little strength exhausted, the suitor drops to earth almost vertically in a series of downward swoops, and alights near the wee gray form for which he at present exists. He watches eagerly for some sign of favor, but a rival is already climbing skyward, whose feathers seem no brighter than his, whose simple lay of love is no more eager, no more tender, yet some subtle fate, with workings too fine for our senses, decides against the first suitor, and, before the second bird has regained his perch, the female flies low over the cactus-pads, followed by the breathless performer.
Failing to see the flycatcher in one location, we went on to Rattlesnake Springs, south of Carlsbad. I’d no more than stepped from the car to take a position to allow sunlight to illuminate vermilion feathers, than a firehead flew up, cast my way a bold if not disdainful eye, and flew off, only to return to find its grounds again quiet except for a related bird so nondescript it has to carry a man’s name for identification: a Say’s phoebe flitted nervously while a pair of scaled quail scratched about, and a lesser nighthawk with eyelids half closed and body aligned with a fat cottonwood-branch ignored us all. As for the show the flycatcher put on, Professor Beebe might have furnished the script.
When the performance — actually two of them — ended, Q and I rolled on to Carlsbad for the night, arriving late, so we had to finish the long day by eating crackers and cheese in a motel room, the repast made tolerable by twin cups of an aged tequila. Crossing the Llano seemed like another existence, as I guess indeed it was.
The next morning we struck out for Alamogordo via a route of a couple of good Mexican cafés I knew, each serving its own interpretation of green chile. In New Mexico, if a place can’t do a toothsome bowl of green-chile stew, nothing else is going to get done right either. The Cajuns have their roux, the French their white sauce, and the New Mexicans their peppers. Years ago in Socorro a man said to me, “Green chile makes a guy happy — and strong.” As he spoke the last two words, he erected his index-finger.
Rolling on northward, Q told of when she was nine years old and beginning to learn Spanish, she heard about a desert city called “Alba Querque” at the foot of mountains named after watermelons and near a mesa called Encantada. An enchanted place, to be sure! But a querque? Translating literally, she asked about a dawn what-r-what. Sister Maxima Gravitas (or some such) took the translation as impertinence and ignored it, so Q wrote a story about a querque, a quirky what-what that roamed about at dawn to hunt penguins. Sister Gravitas, in those days of black-and-white habits, passed over the penguin reference and corrected only the girl’s misinterpreted etymology while quite fai
ling to kill her mythology, the result being Q, once graduated, left eastern Missouri for a few years in southern Arizona where she began a life of hunting not penguins but querques, of whom, I believe, I am one.
That evening we reached Fat Cottonwood, that is, Alamogordo. We had come to visit another rara avis of the desert, a querque named Jean Ingold whom I’d wanted to see almost as long as I had a vermilion flycatcher. She, I suspected, was creating a quozzical life to give acquisitiveness a smart comeuppance.
13
One-Hundred-Seventeen Square Feet
WE TOOK QUARTERS that evening on the south edge of Alamogordo. Q had work to do, so I went up to the northwest corner of town near the School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, went on beyond the pale of urban lights, crossed the railroad tracks, found the irrigation canal — a weedy ditch of congealing pools — that served as my waymarker, and followed it past a small salvage yard (WE BUY JUNK CARS) toward the end of the road. In the distance on the highway was a lighted billboard showing a gigantic photograph of a tobacco-chewing young man having no mandible, with the caption something like LOOKING GOOD?
The western sky held only enough of sundown to furnish the San Andres Mountains a silhouette, but moonrise over the Sacramentos to the east lighted the Tularosa Basin, a place blanketed with gypsum sands of such brilliant whiteness they reflected moonlight and made the valley floor appear illuminated from its underside (in July they bounce off sufficient solar heat to allow a barefoot stroll at noon). The sands crawled with darkling beetles come up into the night from below where lay the saline residue of ancient Lake Otero. Dig down the length of a man’s arm into the dry sand, and watch the hole magically fill with water, salty stuff that tempts and mocks a desert thirst. Some seasons, even yet, the deepest part of the basin farther south will briefly hold a shallow lake called Lucero: Lucifer, the Morning Star, the Prince of Darkness.