—
“That boy’s had too much solo love in his own closet.”
—
“When I was in the Pacific during the war, for some reason two things I missed most were my mother’s burnt-sugar cake and the smell of honeysuckle. One time she sent me a cake wrapped and padded around with honeysuckle leaves and blossoms. The flour sucked up that smell, and the cake wasn’t edible. I had to toss it overboard. I cried like a baby.”
—
“No, goddamnit, sweetheart. I will not go camping out there with all the creepers great and small!”
—
“Mother’s present to Dad on his birthday was an eye tuck so she’d look better to him.”
—
Rancher to a Denver tourist driving a big and gleaming pickup truck: “If you ain’t going to work that machine, then you ought not be driving it.”
—
“You’re so negative about people, if you ever become mayor of San Francisco, you’ll put diving boards on the Golden Gate Bridge.”
—
To a clerk in a bookstore: “I’m looking for a runner’s guide to running for nonrunners.”
—
“Every Sunday in his church it’s the same thing — concoctions about concoctions.”
—
“Your problem is, you think too much.”
“I don’t think that never crossed my mind.”
—
He: “I thought you were going to wear your glitterati coat.”
She, opening her coat to show the spangles turned outside in: “I don’t feel too glitterati tonight.”
—
“Look at you. Life’s been wasted on you.”
—
“You know, Son, a little mileage of thinking isn’t going to wear the tread off your brain.”
—
Earnest advice to a writer at a cocktail party: “You want a good subject for your next book? I’ve got one for you. You can have it — Ten Great Ways to Die.”
—
“Don’t tell me I’ve got no faith. I’ve got great faith in skepticism.”
—
From a hardware-store clerk: “We don’t get much craftsmanship today. What we get is crapmanshit.”
—
Senior fellow: “You say the story of your life could be called Almost. Well, you’re ahead of me. Mine would have to be Nothing Much. Or, better, Whoosh!”
—
“Quit squirming! What’s wrong with you, boy? You got a cockchafer beetle in your shorts?”
—
“That preacher’s so self-righ-teous he’d reform Heaven and heal God.”
—
“Father-in-law’s a mouthful. Mother-in-law too. They got all those dashes in there. We need better words, like fatherado. Motherina.”
—
An elderly man leaning on his cane: “My axles is holding up okay, but my rims is worn down pretty good.”
—
“This is her last year teaching grade school. She’s had it with a bunch of whining, self-centered brats. And their children aren’t much better.”
—
Same man: “One parent complained that telling her kid to stop running in the hallway was ‘too militaristic.’ And there are people who say we don’t need the draft.”
—
“Fred’s appetite isn’t voracious — it’s predacious.”
—
“How’s Mister Wilson?”
“I guess you didn’t hear? Last Friday he got initiated into the fraternity of death.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. He was a good man. Well, I guess we’re all pledged.”
—
“Mother taught us it was bad grammar to end a sentence with a proposition.”
“I don’t know about that, but it could be bad manners.”
—
“That bunch up there at X Ranch ain’t nothing but underbrush that needs to be grubbed out.”
—
At a gas pump after petroleum reached one hundred dollars a barrel:
“Do you remember when we called these places ‘service stations’?”
“I do.”
“The only service here now is the kind the bull gives the cow.”
—
“My wife has long, dark hair. Beautiful hair. When she doesn’t want any hanky-panky, she pulls it down over her face like a drawn curtain, and that means No Show Tonight.”
—
Following a lecture, a man wearing a cross came up to the writer and said, “You speak from the pulpit of deviltry.”
—
“After Walter began recovering from his stroke, he wanted to be of help again to regain a little self-esteem. One night he brought me in a tray of milk and cookies. He stood there holding the tray very formally. He hadn’t tied up his pajama bottoms properly, and they fell to the floor. Poor man was trying to demonstrate recovery, and right there, almost in the macaroons, was his, you know.”
—
Man: “Will you please stop kicking me under the table?”
Woman: “I did not kick you. I was just gesturing.”
—
On a man seated at a bar, whose face suggested he had stories: “Forget it. That’s Charles. His closet is invisible, but you won’t get him to open the door.”
—
“I can’t stand his religion or his politics or his lodge hall or the shoes he wears. You name it, we’re diabolically opposite.”
—
At a reunion: “Bob, where the hell would we be today if we’d stayed in this little stinking town?”
—
“You complain about her too much. Here’s one dude who’d like to put the clamps on your old lady.”
—
From a man named Schluckenbeyer: “My grandmother almost didn’t marry Pop-Pop because of names — his and hers. Before him, she could spell her whole name with three letters — Hannah Ann Hanahan.”
—
Father to daughter: “If your dear dad didn’t do everything he didn’t want to do, he wouldn’t have done much. And you’d have starved to death.”
—
“My ex was honest to a fault, and that was her biggest fault — telling me the truth when I didn’t need the truth just then.”
—
“He was mean, and he didn’t get along with his kids. They told me he had big pockets stitched into a shroud, packed them with rolled-up hundred-dollar bills, and had his lawyer see to his cremation. By god, the old bastard took it with him.”
—
“My dad was a preacher, and he didn’t give us an inch. You’d step out of line, and right there in your face he’d open his Bible like a switchblade and cut you down.”
—
“When I moved to Utah, I couldn’t believe how ignorant these Mormons were about Jews. One woman asked if I celebrated Thanksgiving. I said, ‘Of course.’ And she said, ‘But it’s not in your Koran, is it?’”
—
“Before the divorce, I got to hating him so much, I’d leave the wrapping on cheese slices in his sandwich. Maybe he’d choke on it.”
“That’s not so bad. You probably remember both my kids were born at home. Randy never knew I kept their placentas in the freezer in case the boys ever needed a skin graft or something. When things turned south before our divorce, one time after he hit Jason, for dinner that night I cut off a slice of placenta and mixed it in with that meat-loaf Randy loved.”
—
“No sir, I’m not paying for another night in your fancy four-letter hotel.”
—
From a man showing scars on the backs of his hands: “I got caught in a prairie fire in about fifty-six. All I could do was lay out in a low spot, unzip, and pee up in the air, and wet myself down. Of course, that meant I had to keep the wet side up, so I covered my face with my hands.”
—
“The thing I like about the ancient Greeks is they had so many gods, they couldn
’t force just one on people. The people had a choice.”
—
A worried student to a writer at a book signing: “Where’s climate change or jihadism or species decline in your books? What’s the use of a book today if it’s not about survival?”
A woman, unknown to either of them, overhearing: “What’s the use of survival without books that go beyond survival?”
VI.
Down an Old Waterway
Down an Old Waterway
On the Beach
1. Following the Magenta Line
2. At the Temporary Edge of America
3. Where the Turkey Buzzard Won’t Fly
4. He Is Us
5. The Gift of Variant Views
6. Hardtails and Crankshafts
7. Veritable Poverty For Sale
8. Ob De Goole-Bug
9. The Oysters of Folly Creek
10. Meeting Miss Flossie
11. Fanny Kemble Speaks
12. Turn Left at the Fan Belt
On the Beach
The beach, in many ways, is an extremely unpleasant place in which to live. The soil is unstable, shifted by each tide, thoroughly churned by storms; anything projecting from the surface is given a sand blasting with each high wind. The landward edge is saline desert because occasional spring and storm tides bring sea water that evaporates, leaving its salts behind. The plant life, therefore, consists of only a few succulents just above high water. Paradoxically, fresh water is also a danger; for a marine animal may find the rain soaking its precious salts away if it ventures too far up the beach. Without plants to break the winter gales or provide shade from summer sun, the beach can also be very cold and very hot. But animals live there in large numbers.
There are some advantages. Food is concentrated there by the water. Flotsam collects along the high-water mark. Waves furnish a constant supply of fresh sea water for filter feeders, without any effort on their part. Finally, some animals may be able to make a living in a marginal environment who couldn’t stand the competition in more favored places.
—Mildred and John Teal,
Portrait of an Island,
1964
1
Following the Magenta Line
THE FIRST DRAFT of one of the great adventure stories was in watercolor. Robert Louis Stevenson, stormbound for several days inside a cramped Scottish cottage in 1881, took up a brush and his stepson’s shilling box of paints to idle away some hours. Rarely has a writer idled himself into such masterfully unexpected creation, for what first came to his mind was neither words nor even a picture but rather an outline, or more accurately, a shoreline of an imaginary island that Stevenson was soon filling with invented topography. His sketching further brought forth characters and details to fill the landscape — a peg-legged sea cook, an eye-patched buccaneer with a parrot on his shoulder, and even a chantey (“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum”) — all elements that would become virtual requisites in subsequent pirate tales. At its completion he labeled his chart TREASURE ISLAND and thereby set children for a century to drawing their own maps, each containing the sine qua non of such topographs, an X-marks-the-spot above hidden booty.
Whether children today — given their pixel-driven, binary disconnect from a real world — draw such maps, I don’t know. But surely a number of us from years gone did, and we did it in much the same manner with an irregular outline filled in with a few common features: deep woods, dark valley, dismal swamp, and stony outcrops resembling something threatening (Coffin Rock, Deadman’s Jawbone, the Gallows).
Years removed from my versions of such charts, I see now I never quite escaped them. If Stevenson drew a novel from his, from mine I’ve drawn a life. Virtually all I’ve done of any possible consequence has proceeded from imagination confronting printed maps and nautical charts. Maps were — and still are for me — catechism. Place-names pose the questions, and I hunt the answers. To discover in an atlas, say, Dagsboro, Delaware, the questions follow: Have I been there? What’s it like? Any hidden booty? But this catechism has no prescribed responses, for the catechist is only an imagined chorographer and I a secular catechumen.
In my study I have a 1966 U.S. road atlas wherein every roadway I’ve ever traveled is highlighted in yellow. Except for a couple of mountain valleys in Nevada, those yellow centerline routes have taken me within at least twenty-five miles of nearly every place in the forty-eight states, the nation constituted as it was in 1947 when I drew my first treasure map. Far more than has any classroom or textbook, crooked map lines connecting place-names have directed my life. Route Whatever between Puddleton and Podunk, betwixt St. Joe and San Jose, Watertown and Waterville, between me and a land of quoz.
By the time Q and I were bringing to an end our several seasons of quozzing, the evidence of a warming Earth was no longer in question, and we began to change the way we traveled: more canoes and rafts, bicycles and trains — even boots or moving along with a group. That’s how the final leg of these journeys came about.
In November we made our way to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore to meet up with a small boat for a run southward. I echo what a fellow traveler, a Bostonian, would soon answer when I asked what he hoped to see: “I’m just the bear that went over the mountain,” he said. So Q and I too were wanting only to see what we could see on the Intracoastal Waterway, a nine-hundred-mile voyage on inside passages to Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island, Florida, just north of Jacksonville. It may not have been happenstance that the route, indicated on government navigation charts by the so-called magenta line, was a passage into the erstwhile territory of eighteenth-century pirates and their treasured islands.
The day before departure, not far from the dock, we took quarters in a hotel at an intersection where once stood the Indian Queen Tavern antedating the Revolutionary War. The History of Baltimore City and County says it was “a place of great celebrity in its day, and many of the most distinguished men of the past were entertained within its walls.” Q believes William Clark stayed there on the way home from his river-and-sea voyage of 1798 that she was writing about. The Indian Queen, while long vanished, exists in my imagination as a portion of my interior map of old Baltimore.
French visitor Moreau de St. Méry stayed at the tavern a generation after the Revolutionary War and noted “an enormous collection of large slippers to which one helps himself on going to bed so that he may find, on waking the next day, his cleaned shoes or boots outside his door.” Finding a shine in Baltimore has today become rather more challenging, perhaps an indicator of greater prosperity and racial equality.
From the corner of Baltimore and Hanover streets, we walked to Lexington Market. Although we’d devote the next two weeks to remotenesses along the Waterway — town-bred fellow that I am — I wanted to get a solid shove off from the culinary docks of Baltimore, the city H. L. Mencken said in 1910 “has the frowzy, unkempt, out-of-the-elbow, forlorn air of a third-rate boarding house.” Only a native can utter such talk without yielding his place of honor; yet, were the old curmudgeon to see downtown Baltimore today, he would have to account differently for all the glassy high-rises surrounding the rebuilt waterfront from where the frowzy, unkempt, and forlorn disappeared a generation ago. No other American city harbor, to my eye, has the pleasing curve of a bent inlet ending in a watery cul-de-sac that baffles rough waters so that even pedal boats can glide about in it.
The market, embracing the natural slope of the hill, was full of voices and the clunk of chopping cleavers and the sizzle of griddles, the scents rising from iced fish, baking dough, and frying oils — a Baltimorean hubbub redolent and cacophonous. Signs everywhere: neon signs, painted ones, signs advertising rabbit, pigs’ feet, scrapple, fried chicken, oysters raw or steamed, clams, fresh grated horse-radish, bean pie, greens (turnip, mustard, rape, kale), and a sign labeled RACCOON AND MUSKRAT IN SEASON and another, HEAD-QUARTERS FOR FRESH HOG MAWS AND CHITTERLINGS. The offerings (suggesting here were no votaries of Levitical dietary law), as much as th
e speech and faces, revealed the importance of Baltimore, sitting almost atop the Mason-Dixon Line, as one of the important urban stops on the Underground Railroad. By my reckoning, Baltimore is the southernmost northern city in no small way because of its significance in African-American life. (The NAACP national headquarters is here, and on its grounds, in a nice ethnic mélange, lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker who, in admiration of Martin Luther King, left her estate to the association. Her marker, in addition to some usual commemorative words, includes her chosen epitaph: EXCUSE MY DUST.)
The jumbling of ethnic foods sharpened my appetite and cleared my mind for the voyage as we strolled about, assembling a meal of Chesapeake crab cake, “Jewish corned beef,” and a side of Korean bibimap (wokked vegetables topped with a fried egg). Gus Kubitzki long believed it an evolutionary injustice that a slow-witted bovine would end up with four stomachs while humankind gets only one (but then, to consider the girth of so many size XXXXL citizens, perhaps evolution knows best). In expiation, we spent the rest of the afternoon in walking downtown Baltimore.
In the hotel room that evening, I sat back to scan the Yellow Pages to help fill in a mental map of the city. There were listings for Accordion Players, Anchors (Marine), Clammers’ Supplies, Crab Houses, Davits, Luncheonettes, Nautical Charts, Naval Architects, Oceanographers, Parrots, Quill Pens, and Yacht Brokers. Predictably, accordion players, oceanographers, and parrots combined were far outnumbered by 104 pages of lawyers.
2
At the Temporary Edge of America
THE NEXT MORNING we went down to the harbor to board our boat — with a length of only 165 feet, it hardly seemed a “ship” to me who first went to sea on a nine-hundred-foot aircraft carrier. Our vessel was tied up across the pier from the sloop USS Constellation — not the first one of that name but the one of 1854, the only Civil War vessel still afloat. The presence of the sloop was apropos to the voyage we were about to undertake, because her initial duty was off the African coast to interdict slave ships commonly headed for southern ports we’d see or pass near. Outdoor speakers at her pier wafted out sea chanteys, and a fair breeze set one’s spiritual sails for two weeks of following the southern half of the Atlantic shores on an engineered inside-passage first proposed by Albert Gallatin in 1808. Abundant with history — human and natural — the Intracoastal Waterway is the backside of the American front door, a route far too little-known, in part because no one has yet written a definitive history of it.