“The jar of pickles, Boss,” Wright said. Dick nodded: “When I was three or four, my mother accidentally dropped a jar of pickles at the top of the stair above where I was sitting. She screamed, and I saw the pickles coming down at my head, and I reached up and caught the jar. My point is, I’ve been lucky so far, even on bridges.”
We packed up and turned the bikes around for the climb eastward. Going up the grade, I was relieved to discover, felt less like a high-wire act because pedaling against gravity held the bike to the rails. On some trestles, I even closed my eyes for a few yards as part of my therapy.
Along we rode, quietly, usually talking only when stopped to look at something — a view, a marmot, or a spread of syringa, also called mock orange or arrowwood (Indians made shafts from the stems). Syringa thrives near the Bitterroots and is the Idaho state flower partly because of its lovely white blossoms and partly, so I’d guess, because a healthy patch of it can send out a sweet fragrance a considerable distance. We weren’t far from where Meriwether Lewis, who first recorded the species for science, gathered a couple of sprigs, pressed them, and eventually sent them on to Philadelphia. Against probabilities, those frangible, brittle, ephemeral blossoms are two of the very few things any expedition member actually touched still with us today.
Dick spent his first years in the remote corners of the Bitterroots where his father worked for the U.S. Forest Service. The family’s major link with the world beyond was the Milwaukee Road, and along its tracks Dick watched pass through “fancy people” seated in dining cars with white tablecloths and cut flowers. A Christmas present, no matter how fine, was even more enticingly exotic because it came to him not by a reindeer-drawn sleigh but by a baggage car behind a locomotive. He could only dream of places along the tracks then, places where gifts came from. He said, “Right from the start, I always wanted to go someplace, especially if I could do it on a railroad. To reach the far end. That hasn’t changed at all.”
It was the Milwaukee line that also brought in another exotic for him: hoboes. “Except for being short of money,” he said, “hoboes seemed to an eleven-year-old to live a dream life — camping out, fishing, traveling to far places. We thought they had complete freedom, and riding the rails, that’s how they did it.”
On westward we climbed, the steady ascent requiring only modest pedaling. The route passed through wooded hills, many of them recovering from prior logging, and signs of the old timber camps were overgrown or gone altogether, except one at a former lumber depot called Haley (not to be confused with the Idaho ski-area town of Hailey) where a squatter had taken up residence only a few feet from the rails in a shack hanging to the edge of a cliff above Orofino Creek. Junked machinery cluttered the weedy clearing. Dick and Ken knew the man from other rides and had brought him a few packets of food. He, a long-term trespasser, had put up a sign: WARNING! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN. The alert was intended not for us but for any Seventh-Day Adventist in search of converts or any federal employee in search of anything.
The squatter was Ed. Coming out to greet us, he talked and talked as isolates may do when human ears happen along, and he delighted in any question I asked. I could have inquired about his gender denominator, and he would have joyfully discoursed on that topic. Ed was almost seventy-years old, and his eyes were bright and his manner lively, and his movement spry if not nimble. He showed us around the overgrown clearing, offered to trade me a rusty saw blade from the old timber yard for my cap, all the while explaining he was living there only until he could get to another place more defensible. Who was he defending himself against? Surprised I wouldn’t know about such an apparent enemy, he grumbled, “Why, the feds!” and he explained how he’d seen black helicopters, and he spoke about the federally mandated reintroduction of wolves intended “to drive people away so the government could take the land.” Wasn’t he living in a national forest? “Well,” he countered, “you’ve got them Seventh-Day Adventists too. I’ve driven them off a couple of times.” Whatever could they want with somebody so far from everything? “They know about the gold in here. They know I’ve found the original Pierce mine. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. But I guarantee, they ain’t nobody going to get me.” While he talked, he interjected frequent biblical citations, each attached with chapter and verse.
Ed had been an alcoholic. None of that “recovering” stuff for him. “I did it,” he said. “I am recovered.” He was a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam. If he was willing to shoot somebody for trespassing on land not his, on what grounds did he refuse induction? “That’s all bygones,” he said, and invited us inside.
The floor of his shanty had a decided bias toward the edge of the cliff, and it may have been the stacks of faded National Geographic magazines older than Q that furnished the counterweight to keep the place from tumbling down into the creek. He knew their contents well and quoted details from half-century-old articles almost as often as biblical passages. It was “the wisdom of the good book” and “several hundred yellow books” holding him steady in the vicissitudes of existence — not to mention on the top of the cliff.
Ed was eager to show his larder of organic oats, wheat, flax, dates, nuts, raisins, cranberries, and five gallons of fresh raspberries, and an equivalent amount of honey. “Bears are the strongest animals in the forest — that’s why I eat what they eat, except I drink better water. I treat mine with an electrolytic solution I cook up from colloidal silver. You ought to be on it too.”
His health, given much attention, he additionally aided by mixing into his hand-rolled cigarettes crushed mullein-leaves picked from the clearing, although he would have preferred menthol, had it grown there. “Indians used to smoke mullein,” he said, “and look how strong they were.”
How did he manage to pay for his food? “Social Security checks,” he said. Isn’t that from the feds? “Look,” he said, “I worked as an auto-body mechanic for a lot of years, and I paid my taxes.” Then, touching my arm lightly so I wouldn’t miss his insider’s tip, he said, “The best car ever built was the fifty-nine Cadillac. If you see one for sale, snap it up.” And where was his?
“Hellfire,” he said. “Look at me. Do I need one? I got no debt, no credit cards, my clothes got holes in them, but I own them free and clear. I ain’t wearing any undershorts owned by a credit-card company.” He stopped for me to respond, and I vowed that my shorts too were without a lien. “I’ll tell you what I do have,” he said, “and that’s gold in the ground.”
When we got ready to pedal on up the line, he asked us to come see him again. “You know,” he said, “I ain’t went into that Big Back Room yet.” Off we went, I in hopes ahead were no trestles leading to that Big Back Room. When we were some distance along, I asked Doc about Ed’s gold, and he said, almost sadly, “I’ve flushed more gold down the drain in putting a crown on a tooth than Ed’s ever found.”
Late in the afternoon we turned back for a glassy glide down to the place of our morning departure. When we arrived and had detached the outriggers and rolled the Railcycles up into Dick’s camper-shell pickup, he looked off toward a distant bend in the line and said, “There are people who are never satisfied until they see what’s around the next curve, and I’m one of them, and there’s always a next curve. And it makes no difference if I’ve been around it before because the curve’s never the same.”
Sometime later after I was home again, Dick wrote, “When I’m riding the tracks, I think about the incredible effort it took to build the tunnels and bridges when there was little heavy equipment available. On tunnel ceilings, old smoke stains from the coal burners make me think about all the people who traveled that line and how many died or were injured during construction.
“I like to look closely at the rails to see the date they were made. The oldest I’ve ridden was 1873 — three years before Custer’s Last Stand. And once I found some railroad china in the brush — it was barely chipped. I think an overworked porter might hav
e deliberately left it behind. It’s things like that, when I’m riding steel, that make me feel in touch with things.”
8
Printer’s Pie
UNTIL ONE EVENING IN BICKNELL, UTAH, population about what would fill a couple of cross-town busses, I’d not known pickle pie existed or that it could be agreeably eaten by something other than a scavenger or the deranged. It was, however, the word pie itself (rather than the pickles) that led me to compare it with a book: miscellaneous contents presented between two coverings. In that way also, a pie suggests a life: our assorted ingredients tossed in between a beginning and an end.
Q and I had spent the day by driving the largely aerial and twisted highway numbered Utah 12. Winding through the south-central portion of the state, 12 is a half-circular course into the plateau-and-mountain country of the Escalante River, a land of exceptional terrain; as a scenic route, the road may be matchable in another place or two, but I don’t believe it can be surpassed. It’s only a little more than a hundred miles long, yet to travel it is to go deep into a time when Earth looked like some other planet, a bare-bones world trying to mantle itself with life. The national forest along parts of the road, even where seriously mangled and manured by cattle, revealed by contrast how far the great stony expanses had yet to go to overcome their extraplanetariness. With the Southwest returning to greater aridity after more than a century of atypical precipitation, the native beauty of sereness would recur to be further enhanced by the reappearance of the ancient climate.
Once we’d taken quarters and I’d spotted a phone-directory ad for a promising café at an opolis on down the road, we set out for the place. In the window was a painted sign: HOME OF THE FAMOUS PICKLE & PINTO BEAN PIES. Another sign, a flickering red-neon OPEN, suffused the interior with a glow like a campfire just barely keeping a desert night at bay. The air was redolent with cinnamon and baking pies, and near the center stood a tall glass-case “pie fridge” holding ten different kinds, both whole and sliced. Among a half-dozen with standard ingredients and the two of self-proclaimed fame were also ones of oatmeal and buttermilk.
We ordered a lone bowl of green-chile stew to share so that we could later take on a few slender wedges of pie. I waited for the supper by walking around the café. In my eyes, the ’60s building was neither old nor quaint, but it did have an austere honesty. On the notice board was the usual array of business cards and penned notes offering well-drilling, cattle sales, pest control, babysitting (different people), and one from a man wanting to buy antlers, and another announcing a charity Haircut-a-Thon.
In a booth, a couple of tough road characters, the bigger with a thick wrist tattooed TRY ME, seemed to take a low view of my note-taking, but they didn’t challenge it, and they nodded to my greeting. (When the men left, Q whispered, “Tell me there isn’t a load of some contraband stashed in that van.”) They ate cheeseburgers, and to the young waitress’s suggestion of some pie, they shook their heads, but when she had stepped away, one made a smutty remark about pie of a more physiological sort.
It was that reference, unseemly as it was, that got me thinking about the nature of pie, and I challenged Q to name a dozen pies not on the menu, which she did, although I felt obligated to question “boiled braunschweiger pie.” I added onion pie, eel pie, funeral pie, and printer’s pie, the last of which she forced me to define: a jumble of assorted and unsorted type of various fonts and sizes a hard-up compositor may hunt through to find letters to complete a story.
That’s when I saw the metaphor: we arise each morning to begin looking for a few letters among the ems and slugs and dingbats of our lives so that we might spell out a couple of words or, on a good day, a complete sentence to fit the longer story of our existence. Is your life to be set in Bodoni or Bembo, Caslon or Clarendon? Does its size belong in four-point gem or ten-point elite? Should we printer’s devils in the Great Cosmic Printery put forth our tales in fullface or blackface, chapel text or old style, condensed or extended? Is your tale in serif or sans serif? If the type at hand has been used many times before to spell other words in other lives, if it’s worn and chipped, nevertheless it’s what we have, and so, journeymen all, we compose our stories that we might publish them in hopes they’ll not too soon go to the fishmonger to wrap a mullet.
In making anything — a book, a suit of clothes, a journey — not every item can be profitably used, because some pieces seem not to fit readily the pattern at hand. In a more frugal time, neglected fonts and rejects weren’t discarded but went instead into a hellbox, a term used by pressmen, tailors, and old-style quilters. I descend from such a line, two of whom you’ve already met: the slain William Grayston’s first wife who was later a tailoress (as the term was) on the border of Indian Territory; you’ll also recall the great-grandmother who delighted in making quilts in the turkey-foot pattern.
Perhaps here a mindful reader says, “Are you, or are you not, going to get to the pickle pie?” Very well: its crust was flaky. With that, a reporter who tries for accuracy must stop, for to describe a taste precisely is no more possible than to write the final decimal of a transcendental number. Gustatory sensations simply cannot be well-conveyed in words, and odd it is that two functions of the human tongue are so unavailing to each other. To speak of a taste, we must do it obliquely, impressionistically, metaphorically, comparatively. For someone who has never had sight, perhaps I could convey the appearance of an apple, but for a person who has never tasted, I could not describe the flavor of even something so simple as salt. Texture, consistency, temperature, and our own response (“Delicious!” “Awful!”) do not convey taste. Describing the flavors of food is verbal sleight of hand.
I can, though, when it comes to pickle pie, give you something of considerable accuracy and usefulness: I can pass along Cula Ekker’s recipe for it as served in the Sunglow Family Restaurant in Bicknell, Utah. “But,” the insistent reader cries, “is the pie any good?” You tell me.*
We tried pinto-bean, oatmeal, and pickle pies, and I liked the latter two well enough that they led me, before Q could get out of the way, back to my metaphoric recipe for printer’s pie.
This chapter, as it turns out, is a found text selected from what I’ve come upon in the printer’s pie of my travels. The hellbox holding the pieces is notebooks composed to a considerable extent of things overheard or said to me during the last two decades of the twentieth century. I began the practice of recording certain chance utterances one afternoon when I found myself wishing for a book by a Shakespeare or a Brontë or a Hawthorne that would contain nothing other than what they heard on their daily rounds, words set down but not otherwise expanded, a kaleidoscope of ordinary quartz-sand. What picture of a vanished day and place would emerge? What was it the cobbler said when Will brought in a shoe beyond repair? What words made Emily smile as she stepped into the tilbury?
Time turns the commonplace uncommon: Archaeologists study the thousand-year-old coprolites of the Anasazi; believers buy and enshrine a dusty hair once attached to the pate of St. Polycarp. The seventeenth-century Japanese pilgrim-poet Basho traveled for twelve-hundred miles over five months, writing prose and verse about landscape and history and passions and death, and still, maybe the most memorable haiku in his Narrow Road to a Far Province is about being kept awake all night by fleas and lice and a horse pissing close to his pillow.
What follows is a selection taken down beyond the hundredth meridian, a congeries Q sportingly calls “Heat-Moon’s Concise Oral History of the American West.” I think of it now more as a printer’s pie of memories. Some of its pieces with their attached stories, its pickled ingredients, helped carry us through the Rockies and across the Great Plains and on home again.
“Lady, I don’t believe in no God. I ride Harleys.”
—
Old fellow to a young man: “You look more like I used to look like than I ever did.”
—
On a woman at her estranged father’s funeral: “I’ve seen dried salt-cod wit
h damper eyes.”
—
“Sure he was a commodities trader, but when it came to his own investments, he wore both a belt and suspenders and maybe two pairs of shorts.”
—
“I got you a date tonight.”
“Who?”
“The guy down at the phone company.”
“Well, he’d better not be cheap.”
—
“When Mike and I went to clean out Mother’s apartment, we emptied the stinking refrigerator first. I set to one side a can of congealed skillet drippings while we did the rest of the rooms, and when I came back to the grease, it had melted, so I took it out to the yard to dump it. Inside the can was a smaller one, and rolled up in it was thirty-five-thousand dollars. That was her entire inheritance to us.”
—
From a young man: “I don’t live according to who I am. I live according to what I pretend I am. It’s working out for me.”
—
Woman on cell phone: “I’m tired of this, Ray. You’ve been allowed one phone call one too many times, and this time I’m not coming down.”
—
To a man behind a piled desk: “You ready to do some fishing?”
“No, I got to waller these papers around for a while.”
—
“What’s wrong with you now?”
“I’m just hungry.”
“You’re a whole lot worse than hungry.”
—
A daughter to her mother in the home center: “Oh, come on! You’re saying the best wallpaper is books?”
—
“She just sort of sat up in bed and looked around and stared at me and said, ‘Well, so long, Jim,’ and she laid back down again, and she was gone. I’m telling you, she went so easy, I think she’d been rehearsing it.”