Others of us saw the change differently and gathered ten thousand signatures on a petition, and the mayor of Columbia, who had grown up on a hill above the Katy spur running into downtown, urged the state to buy the land for a long, linear parkway. The opposition argued that hikers and bicyclists would trash the route, frighten and maim livestock (of which there was virtually none near the line), and city-born “thugs with their watermelon” (in the racist code) would use the route to rob remote farmhouses.
Things became unpleasant, often bordering on the vicious, and the future of what had been the Katy hung undecided. Then, one morning I saw in the paper that Edward Jones, of brokerage-houses fame, had donated two-hundred-thousand dollars to a private foundation to buy the property from the owners of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad. Opponents filed suit to force the issue into a federal court where, at last, a judge affirmed the constitutionality of an amendment to the National Trails System Act that allows abandoned rail corridors to be set aside voluntarily for use as trails until a day when they might be needed once more for train transport. There was an appeal to this “rail banking,” but a second federal judge concurred with the original decision. A third appeal died when the United States Supreme Court decided in favor of a similar rail conversion in Vermont, and the Katy line was saved to find a new life.
Former railroad tunnel on the present Katy Trail in Boone County, Missouri
But the project required more than mere possession of the corridor. Just before his death, Edward Jones gave the foundation an additional gift—two million dollars—to help build a two-hundred-mile trail from near St. Charles, Missouri, to Sedalia, with the possibility of continuing it one day into Kansas City. The handful of property-righters had to take down their illegal barriers and put away their promised shotguns, and the Katy Trail became the longest rail trail in the United States. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources laid atop the former track bed a crushed-stone surface good for wheels or shoes, and planked over the ties of seventy-year-old steel bridges.
And did the trespassers and vandals come, and did the cattle get mutilated and the path get littered with liquor bottles and watermelon rinds? Not at all.
What did happen along the route was the birth of a new economy: Without losing its quietude and quaintness, Rocheport, to pick a village, was remade. An old church, a bank, a drugstore got turned into antique shops, wooden-floor cafés, and exposed-brick-wall bistros serving Brie cheese drizzled with raspberry vinaigrette, panko-crusted sea bass, gooey butter cake, and clarets from the winery up on the hill. If it was another world from paddlewheeler roustabouts swearing and fighting, and Negro stevedores singing and loading bales of tobacco and hemp, and Katy gandy dancers staggering up Main Street, the villages were just as alive as before.
Former train stations became visitor centers; closed-up groceries and garages and schools transformed into bicycle-rental shops, bed-and-breakfast inns; a micro-publisher even opened a locally oriented press. In the words of a shop owner down the line from Rocheport, “People on the trail leave behind far more cash than trash, and they don’t steal—they buy a meal.”
The great westering river of canoes and pirogues, mackinaws and keelboats, steamboats and towboats, of bankside steam locomotives and diesel engines, all of them transmuted into a route of bicycle wheels and waffle-soled boots. I quote a woman, of some historical bent, who had just finished a three-hour pedal on the Katy Trail running alongside the Missouri: “If Ol Man River could talk, if he saw me pumping along, he’d have said, ‘What in the hell! I’ve seen it all now.’ ” Well, the Ol Man hasn’t seen everything—just everything along his shores for the last several thousand years.
TO EXPLAIN DELIGHT
Among the great questions—those inquiries having answers so difficult they can be considered all but impossible of real solutions (“Why am I here?” or “Is this the life I truly want?” or “Am I bound for eternal glory or the simplicity of oblivion?”)—there’s one less asked than others. To put it plainly: “Why do I like what I like?” Or its negative.
My experience with that question often produces discernments too generic to yield much insight, but that doesn’t mean the effort to determine something is bootless or unyielding of interesting things found along the way to an apparent dead end. After all, aren’t answers, no matter how serviceable, often less intriguing than questions? If a probing into a why uncovers a bland, nothing-new-under-the-sun result, then the commonplaceness suggests an answer plausible if not definitive; more significant, the continual asking may turn up delights not particularly germane to the question. What follows is a stab at why I find making walking sticks so agreeable, and—if I didn’t trip myself up—I hope the response has a touch of the existential.
With a Good Stick in Hand
Far more than I would like, my name as a writer stands linked in the minds of American readers with vehicles and roads, wheels and asphalt, thanks to my first book, Blue Highways. Since its publication, I’ve had little success in suggesting I’m more impassioned by feet and legs moving across natural terrain or down rural lanes or around city blocks. I love walking in all its variations: the stroll, saunter, tramp, traipse, trek, ramble, constitutional, cross-country hike, and—at certain times—the night walk, a kind of wakeful noctambulation into a route darkness can make dreamlike and salutary to the imagination. Whatever the nature of the hoofing, each outing is accomplished a single footfall at a time atop one’s own shank’s mare. How excellent it is to see the world reveal itself to one who goes afoot—and how much larger it is.
Even though built around a series of pedestrious jaunts in the tallgrass prairie of Kansas, my second book, PrairyErth, did little to dispel perceptions of me behind a steering wheel. The truth is, to get to know the three-million square miles of our land, I drive because I have to; but I walk because I want to, and, when I go on foot, I carry something nearly forgotten in our car-crazed nation and auto-damaged landscapes—a walking stick.
Viewing my approach from, say, across a meadow, you might take me for a fellow with a cane, but that would miss the mark because a cane props and steadies the infirm while a walking stick buoys the rambler—both in body and spirit. Once, in a conversation on this topic, a woman said to me, “Why, you’re speaking of a staff!” No, madam. A staff is a pole serving to power a hiker forward as a third leg that transforms the bipedal into a tripedal. What’s more, a staff reaches up to somewhere between the elbow and the shoulder, while a walking stick only to the top of the hip. Today, of course, a hiker may use two staffs, commonly highly technical and fully unnatural. I own a pair of sleek, graphite poles for long-distance hikes over broken terrain, but that experience is something other than a stroll; in my mind it’s the difference between writing with a pencil and clicking on a keyboard, both of which I do.
Etching of Samuel Johnson on his 1773 walking tour of Scotland
For a couple of centuries, some walking-stick shanks have been hollowed out to contain hidden swords, or tubes for brandy, or a spyglass, and some handles have been embedded with a small compass, all of these variations cleverly wrought gizmos. For me, I want only shanks and handles natural to a tree branch. Brass or chrome are inert metal in the hand, either too hot, cold, sweaty, or just plain slippery. A fine walking stick retains something of the living branch to suggest continually not the forge but the forest. Concomitantly, perhaps, my walks are down the woody lane (originally made of oaken planks) where I live, or they’re across nearby open fields, or along an abandoned rail line not far distant. When I walk in a city I like to mark out an area and hoof every square block (say, the inside of the Loop in Chicago), but I don’t carry a stick because urban folk are likely to take it as a weapon. I once was asked in Atlanta, “Whatcha got that billy club fer?”
The nature of my work makes it tricky to distinguish vocation from several avocations except for one that clearly can be called only a hobby: making walking sticks. The initial and keenest pleasure is finding a
branch fit to assist peripatetics. I look for raw material in roadside undergrowth or in freshly cut or fallen limbs. I trim and shape the shaft and handle minimally so the natural treeness remains. Retaining the bark, I brush on satin varnish or rub in tung oil before adding a brass or copper ferrule to keep the road from eating away the shank. Silver maple, aspen, cottonwood, sycamore, Osage orange, mountain mahogany, moosewood, hickory, black locust, apple. I’m always ready to try a new wood, one with requisites of overall straightness—but not machinelike perfection—and a strength allowing a nearly imperceptible springiness. My searches have yet to come upon a suitable sassafras or pawpaw or persimmon despite their abundance outside the front door.
The handle should provide a good feel in the palm and a sound grip for the fingers, and I prefer three basic shapes: the knob, the el, and the tee:
I avoid the crook because it’s a less comfortable shape and it hinders the to-and-fro penduluming of the stick, which reflects the motion of the legs that somehow gets transmitted to the brain and helps create a stroll merry or meditative.
Solvitur ambulando, writes St. Jerome—“to solve a problem, walk”—but I leave problems on my desk and go out to partake and enter into things beyond vexations. My maxim is Observatur ambulando, and that means looking about and trying to avoid being diverted by keeping track of distance or paces per minute or any kind of mensuration whatsoever. To awaken the mind—and mix my measures—five meters can be as useful as five miles. (Besides, when walking I don’t want anything mechanical—like a meter—defined as “the length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red radiation of krypton 86.” After all, one’s tootsies get pretty good at determining distance.) The goal is to step away from selfness and integrate with otherness, something more difficult in a vehicle.
I inherited a single object from a great-grandfather, a man whose face I never knew although I did see Daniel’s hand, so to speak, in a splendidly knobby stick he made in 1910 after a stroll in a friend’s Florida orange grove where he cut a wonderfully curious limb and polished its bark to perfection. Before my father died, he asked what I might want of his, and I said only the old banjo clock and the walking stick. It was Daniel’s craft that drew me into the world of stickery and inspired me to find and shape my first attempt out of a wind-broken aspen I came across in the mountains near Durango, Colorado. In the quarter-century since, I don’t know how many sticks I’ve made for my use or given away to someone I believe will actually take one into the field. Like all of us, my friends spend hours atop four wheels; but when a walking stick stands in the corner by the door, always ready like a faithful canine to be taken out on a saunter, the lure to touch primal and sacred things of the earth can be strong.
THE MANICHEAN
This assignment answered a request to write a “celebratory essay with a distinctive eye and voice expressed in an interpretative style.” After spending some time in southeast Oregon, I decided to try to show magnificence in a land whose very name is Misfortune and attempt to reveal beauty arising from severe austerity, a harshness inimical to human occupation, a place where inhospitality defines its virtue and goodness. I discovered, though, that a dualistic, syncretistic approach to landscape discomfits some readers.
The Old Land of Misfortune
It was a void on my road map, an implication of only emptiness here, and that’s what drew me to southeast Oregon and the edge of a lake so shallow it’s often little more than a fugitive damp. By at least one definition, I was in the most remote spot in the lower forty-eight states, that is, as far from an Interstate highway as one could get. From that place the nearest federal four-lanes—I-5 and I-84—are more than 160 air miles distant. My approach, Interstate 84, was, if you don’t get lost in the maze of dirt tracks making up a fifth of the route, 250 miles from where I stood—the distance, say, from Grand Central Station to the Pentagon, from St. Louis to Kansas City, Detroit to Chicago. It’s true that several miles east of Tonopah, Nevada, one can be equally far from an Interstate, but that location is along U.S. Highway 6 and any aura of remoteness is considerably reduced.
Because I live about two-thousand miles east, it had taken some effort to get into this heart of the Oregon high-desert indicated in my atlas by roads running around and even away from it. The Malheur—French for “misfortune”—is not the Oregon of sixty shades of green arising from rain, rain, rain; and here are no Pacific Coast sea stacks, no Yaquina Bay oysters or sweet geoducks, no espresso at the back of a little bookshop. This is the Other Oregon, the Big Empty, an immense space shaped and volcanically deformed before being turned into desert by the massive rain-shadow cast eastward from the almost-thirty-million-year-old Cascade Mountains to the west. Precipitation does fall here, about enough to fill a lady’s teapot.
That October I was walking along the northern end of Bluejoint Lake just below the high fault-block escarpment of Poker Jim Ridge, a wall of tenebrous basalt broken upward into the light of day by the great shoving of tectonic plates miles below. In a time when the rimrock there had seen fifteen-thousand fewer autumns, the ground I stood on was then twelve-hundred fathoms beneath a body of water that left its imprint in an ancient shoreline on a ridge two-hundred feet above my head. But, only a couple of generations ago, Bluejoint Lake was an unbroken expanse of cracked mud, the bottom of a predecessor basin at least six-hundred-feet deep and part of a concatenation of a dozen similar catchments and uncountable ponds lying to the south; today all are comparatively puny, evanescent lagoons that together mark the grave of a Pleistocene lake large enough to have swallowed Portland, had Portland been here.
The fascination of the Malheur depends on trying to see what it has been, how it was once so different, all the while remembering certain kinships and lines of descent: fire the father of liquid stone, volcanoes the mothers of risen valleys, and wind and ice the rods of discipline to shape the offspring. More than any other place I know, the Malheur bespeaks radical changes; any apparently subtle ones mere masks for grander upheavals. Under the Great Sorcerer’s wands of weather and plate tectonics, things—mountains, valleys, hundred-mile-long lakes—vanish, come to light again, only to disappear once more. Sixty miles south, straddling the California line, huge Goose Lake dried up in the 1920s to reveal the indelible 1845 tracks of the famous Applegate immigrant trail striking a course right across the dried bottom strewn with bits of broken-down wagons. Then the lake rose once more to conceal history like a liquid Pompeii: Instead of molten rock and falling cinders, here it was water flow and rainfall covering a human past.
Despite their size, some of these residual waters can be waded shore to shore, and they are as noteworthy for their shallowness as transience, yet they exist today because once they were deep holes of the ancient lake; to slosh across a shallows now is, in effect, to walk the bottom of an inland sea. It’s that kind of inversion, that impermanence, that irony of natural process, which marks the Malheur: What was deepest is now shallowest; what was fiery, flowing magma is rigid mountain; what was a juniper forest lies entombed under a hundred feet of dried mud now turned into a greasewood waste. To traverse this desert in any deep sense, one must move in time to gain an idea of the sweep of years revealing the topsy-turvy undulations of a nature that appears to flip-flop through the eons and toss the logic of creation bum over teakettle.
Bluejoint Lake lies in the Warner Valley which itself is another and larger bottom of a primitive lake; it helps to see these remnant waters as once bigger or smaller, deeper or drier, linked or disconnected—that is, as what’s left of an ancestral body of water. The autumn day I was there, Bluejoint Lake happened to be not completely dry, and its perimeter was golden with bunchgrasses and shrubs creating a perimeter of marshiness waiting for the next chance to return to something like a greater deep. In the 1870s a government report designated the encompassing basin as swamp, but only fifteen years later a writer noted, “The principal portion of the valley is sterile, barren greasewood desert with only an occasi
onal marsh or salt lake varying the monotony. It would be difficult to imagine a more desolate and God-forsaken region outside of Assyria, Arabia, or the Great Sahara.”
The awesome reach of dried-up lakes and desiccated creek beds eastward is not so much a void as what might be better termed a devoid—at first glance, a waste devoid of all but gravel and scrub and alkali flats where the only moving thing is a column of dust, a spectral visitant waiting for wind and the dry rattle of serpents to give it voice. That blankness on a road map has no place for sensible humanity. Like a planet at inception, it’s an igneous sprawl forsaken enough to make a Civilian Conservation Corps worker at the Hart Mountain camp in the 1930s confess, “The country is all right, but there’s too much of it.”
Life other than the reptilian seemed to have so repudiated the gauntness of the flat, I one afternoon found myself waiting for sundown not to escape the heat but to let darkness close down the overwhelming openness, and pull the shades of night across an immense window which looks into another time zone. Then, perhaps from the mountain behind, I could hear through the Plutonian blackness a different voice of the territory, maybe the dolorous call of a coyote, its song-dog belly thin with little but emaciated lizards and withered spiders, its nose coated with alkali, and its eyes ravenous. The sense of desolation was not one of simple abandonment as with the ghost town nearby; rather, this one was severe because, like the resident dust devils, it rose almost perceptibly to suggest people could never endure where they don’t belong. Why would someone be out here anyway except to prepare himself for Hell?