Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

  In the afternoon he turned down a wooded road and without explanation stopped my car. “Get out,” he said. His jaw was set tight. As we opened the doors a bit uncertainly, I heard Ollie murmur, “I don’t like this.” Franklin motioned toward an old, broken trunk about nine feet high, hollow, but with a narrow opening. “Go squeeze into that stump,” he said. Ideal, I thought. Hadn’t I foreseen this? I tried to push Ollie forward, but he didn’t budge. “Go ahead!” Franklin ordered. “One of you chickenhearts get in it!” So I had to. My shoulders scraped the interior, and the center of the doomed oak was cool and thick with dry decay, like an old root cellar. Franklin called into the hollow: “How is it? Just right for a dead man?” I asked why I was in there, and he said, “You asked about it. You wanted to see the real county. Pappy showed me this tree one night and told me he jammed a corpse in here years ago.”

  Ollie said, “Faulkner s-s-stuffed a corpse in there?” I said I thought I had the feel of it inside pretty well absorbed. When we were again in the car, I told Ollie about The Hamlet, where a murdered man gets hidden in a tree. “You got it,” Franklin said. “I just played the role of Mink Snopes and you were the dead man, Jack Houston.” Dead man? I thought. Perfect—unless he hands over that book.

  We rolled on through the pines and rusted soil, past washed-out cotton fields and eroded hill farms, Franklin’s commentary flowing almost without pause. Once the afternoon heat came on good, he wound us into a copse to a worn cabin, its paint sun-bleached here, peeled to bare wood there. In a metal lawn chair sat a man, grandly bellied, in bib overalls; he was about seventy years old. Franklin said to us, “Come meet Walter Miller. We call him Uncle Buddy.”

  Uncle Buddy? The one in several of Faulkner’s stories? That Uncle Buddy? Miller said, “I don’t know whether I’m him. Maybe I must be. I don’t much take up with books, but Bill and the others, I know we all sure went out on enough coon hunts.”

  I felt I was standing in front of Huck Finn or Natty Bumppo. Before us was a fellow who had gone into the night woods with his friends, one of whom was a young Bill Falkner before he changed the spelling of his name. Here was a man who had told stories while the fire sparked and dogs howled and the hunters raised tin cups of shine or, when a little more money was available, bootleg. Out of him and the others—farmers, merchants, a lawyer or two, ne’er-do-wells—from them had come tales that got turned into some of the grandest work in American literature. I was sitting at the feet of a source. For the first time, I heard within a phrase that to me would become a travel refrain: It is for this I came.

  My questions poured out, and Uncle Buddy didn’t resent my eagerness or curiosity. Did Faulkner ever take notes around the campfire? Wouldn’t have dared. Did he himself tell stories? Once or twice. He was a listener? Mostly he was, yes. Did he drink out there in the big woods? The first time he did, he drank himself sick, and he later pledged he’d not do it again—on a hunt anyways—and he kept his word. Then Uncle Buddy added, “You won’t find a gooder hunter or woodsman out here. I never had to go in after him.”

  I could see it: the jug going around, a small, sober man sitting and taking in the stories right with the baying of the hounds. From those hunters, some virtually illiterate, he filled himself with the land and its history and a hostility toward any parvenu Johnny-come-lately who arrived to dispossess the woods of almost all it held that was natural and genuine and good; he was standing ready to absorb the myth of the big woods to tell the story to the world, to turn the land into his real subject and make his protagonist what the land had been.

  Uncle Buddy went into his cabin and returned with a couple of tin cups. “Afore ye go on,” he said and nodded toward a rocky crevice in his hill from which a small spring seeped out to flow on down to Toby Tubby Creek. From that cleft Faulkner and the night hunters had pulled a thousand drafts, so we too dipped into the cool, kindly water, and Franklin drew a flask from his pocket and ameliorated our cups with a finger of bourbon, and Ollie—this time stammering in genuine emotion, “Boy, this is m-m-m-memorable!”

  Before dusk, we drove back to Rowan Oak to see Faulkner’s favorite—if skittish—horse. The animal trotted up, shook and snorted, and rolled its eyes and reared when I reached to stroke it, and it kicked at me, a hoof nicking my hand. “Beautiful trouble,” Franklin said. A year later, a new horse equally fractious would throw Faulkner, and from that fall he would never recover.

  Might we see the master’s writing room? I’d heard he’d scrawled across a wall an outline for a chapter of a novel. “We better not,” Franklin said. “It wouldn’t be right, you know. He’s not here. You can understand.” It was the only request Malcolm declined.

  At supper he explained about how he’d made his walking stick from an old huckleberry, giving details on the craft, then we returned to our room, and he came in for a nightcap, staying long, sipping his whiskey, talking, talking until Ollie fell asleep and I began nodding. Sometime around two in the morning I woke and found him gone. We didn’t see him again.

  A year later, before I went to sea, Life magazine reported on Faulkner’s funeral, and in a photograph taken at the grave site there was Malcolm in a seersucker suit, his face more serene than I’d known it, comforting his mother, the master’s wife. At first I thought my sorrow was for Faulkner, but then I realized it was something else: The chance to meet him face to face was now forever gone. How could we have come so close and missed?

  In the years since, I’ve come not to count it a miss. We had been privileged to travel Yoknapatawpha County with a man who called the master Pappy, a fellow who also saw the land deeply entwined with stories and myth as did he who was never present to reveal to a young adulator flaws any man can be heir to. My perception was safe in imagination, my image pristine and unsullied by reality, a legend I could hold the rest of my life.

  On our last evening together, I had become comfortable enough with Mac to ask what it was like to be William Faulkner’s boy. After a long quiet and without further explanation he said only, almost inaudibly, “He’s ruined me.”

  A CONDUCER

  When the first editor of this story referred to it as a “memoir,” I asked her to look at it more closely and choose another descriptive term, because a memoir so often lies centered inescapably on self. For several reasons, I have little interest in autobiography. The best memoirs, to my mind, are those reaching far enough beyond an author’s life that they leave the genre altogether; like an innocent prisoner, they succeed when they escape confinement.

  In my writing, as the narrator, I’m useful only as eyes and ears for the reader. I’m a mere conductor—not in the orchestral sense but rather in the electrical: a transmitter of sound, heat, light, and latent energy residing in people, places, events. Perhaps a better word is conducer, and what we have, when it works, is conduction.

  Oysters and American Union

  I have a penchant for trying to discover initiating causes, and although I believe beginnings are as infinite as their results, I nevertheless like to look for where and when something got started. Usually I trace a thing backward from effect to possible source. These last several days I’ve been hunting origins of my interest in roadways and connections, and yesterday it was as if I was again in Murphy’s drugstore in Kansas City, Missouri, circa 1951, before me a chocolate ice-cream soda. Take away those basic ingredients—soda fountain, vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and pressurized carbonated water—and I could readily have ended up nowhere near where or who I am now. Ruling out any endeavor requiring higher mathematical skills or daunting physical size, I might have found my way into almost any other location and another life: a clerk in Poughkeepsie, a teacher in Pocatello, a carpenter in El Paso.

  My preferred seat at Murphy’s soda fountain was nearest the large plate-glass window giving a wide view onto the intersection of Seventy-fifth Street and Troost Avenue. With a filled, footed soda-glass before me, I could take in events passing outside: my brother getting cuffed for a flirtation
too forward, a distraught mother who had just dropped a glass jug of bleach and splattered her small and screaming son, the cocksure preacher failing to yield the right-of-way to the detriment of the grille of his Hudson.

  One 1951 October afternoon, the streets empty as they rarely are now, I stared vacantly at the pavement of Troost Avenue which at that location was also U.S. Highway 71, the route from Rainy Lake on the Minnesota-Canadian border to the swamps of southern Louisiana. In a week, I was to leave with my parents on my first long road trip, a southbound one with me as navigator; having learned to read maps soon after I learned to read words, I considered myself qualified although innocent of actual over-the-road pilotage. In the midst of imagining our destination at New Orleans, I suddenly realized those concrete slabs of Troost were like a frozen river: They extended in a continuous if unmoving flow from where I sat all the way to the ferry landing on the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge about an hour northwest of New Orleans.

  For a twelve-year-old unexpectedly to comprehend that Murphy’s soda fountain belonged to a distant world of alligators—unseen but nevertheless there, like a character in a book I’d heard about but not read—was to reformulate my perception of American geography. Education and maturity, civilization and creation itself, depend on making connections. Eureka: Alligators lay outside that drugstore window just as did my bedroom, never mind the distance.

  In those days it wasn’t so easy to see a Louisiana alligator, and my lone disappointment of our journey was, disallowing those at the alligator farm, I didn’t spot a single one in nature. But I did discover another ancient creature of Southern waters: a fresh oyster, shucked before my eyes and set out on the counter at a French Quarter oyster house. With boldness fortified by ketchup and horseradish, I nipped into one and was no longer just a kid from Kansas City—now I was on my way to becoming a citizen of America, for it was then and there I began a lifetime of conjoining places and people, accents and aromas, ice-cream sodas and seafood. Murphy’s window, edged with gold letters promising SUNDRIES and PRESCRIPTIONS, was an opening to a nation linked by a federal highway where a wayfarer could find oysters and shrimp at one end and walleyes and pike at the other. A year earlier, on Pelican Lake not far off U.S. 71 in upper Minnesota, my father and I pulled in one of each. Traveling the thousand miles between walleyes and oysters put in me a love of the American open road and its landscapes that eventually turned me from a traveler into a writer of travels.

  A year ago I retraced a fair portion of another highway that passed near my boyhood home. The Old National Road ran from Atlantic City to St. Louis, and from there, under the newer name of U.S. 40, through Kansas City and on two thousand miles farther westward to San Francisco: the Boardwalk at one end and Golden Gate at the other and our kitchen table in the middle. Our house on Flora Avenue was at the center of a radiating web of exotic places: Longitudinally, latitudinally, diagonally, the links ran from moose to horned frogs, from longleaf pines to bristlecones. That simple discovery with its accompanying sense of belonging has held me in thrall ever since, and from it came a wish to memorize the face of America by visiting every American county, all three thousand and some of them, and to get within at least fifteen or twenty miles of everywhere, both slowly evolving quests that required fifty years to complete. (Well, I’m still working on that second phase.)

  It’s difficult to be an American today and be unaware of the significance of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that Thomas Jefferson dispatched to facilitate bringing much of the western half of the United States into a variegated union with the East—politically, strategically, culturally. But another Jeffersonian action to further union is less widely known than the name of Jefferson’s second-term vice president. The earliest published account by a participant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition was still three years away when Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury sent a report to Congress. Addressing the national necessity for good roads, Albert Gallatin in 1808 wrote, “No other single operation, within the power of the Government, can more effectively tend to strengthen and perpetuate that Union which secures external independence, domestic peace, and internal liberty.”

  I poked along the National Road and eventually reached its halfway point at Zanesville, Ohio, where once stood the National Hotel, a name presumably taken from the route at its front door. In 1831 the road had just been completed to that point when the proprietor, Colonel Henry Orndorff, saw an opportunity. Up till then, common fare in eastern roadhouses included pickled oysters eaten with buttered bread or crackers and sometimes accompanied by a side of pickled pigs’ feet. Pickling, of course, was a substitute for refrigeration. The new highway, the colonel reasoned, could make it possible for Chesapeake oysters right from the bay—and unpickled—to reach Ohio. Orndorff rounded up enough wagons to haul the critters from Baltimore to Zanesville—and later on to towns farther west—in such abundance that his transport company became known as the Oyster Line.

  Highway 50 in central Nevada

  Few things—perhaps no other—have served more to unite Americans than roads which allow us, whether we’re aware of it or not, to feel that eating oysters in Zanesville helps us share a piece of national destiny with tongers on the Chesapeake. Perhaps I’m thinking this because soon after visiting Zanesville I stopped for gasoline along Route 40 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, not far from Shanksville on the tenth of September 2001. A few miles distant from the National Road lay the grassy field where the fourth hijacked airplane in the September aerial attacks, the flight that didn’t reach its target, came down. In a way televised pictures or printed words never could, my physical passage through that landscape allowed me the next day to imagine with clarity an aspect of those dark final moments.

  The pavement of our highways is more than just concrete—it is also the cement of our national culture. Without the topographical communications that allow and encourage us to meet each other directly and indirectly, whether on my territory or yours, the Constitution would be little more than a theoretical document of a lost history. We have a commonweal and a shared destiny because we can reach each other; we can meet face to face: the Texans (Pass the pepper sauce, please) sitting across the table from the Oregonian introducing them to Yaquina Bay oysters; the Arizonan (May I stand you another round?) explaining to Michiganders why the bed of the Salt River is dry. When such interchanges occur, we continue our perpetual forging of nationhood. Through transport we transform political theory and national history—a meal into a memory, a conversation into a concept—and we become Americans linked into union not just gustatorily but also intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

  It’s a commonplace to say that no one can interpret America without understanding our use of automobiles, but I think what we really mean is that one doesn’t comprehend the United States without taking into account our mobility, and preeminently that means roadways, perhaps the most American of symbols, one even more functionally representative than the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore. We are a widely dispersed and numerous people bound together by three million miles of painted stripes atop concrete and asphalt. The ancient Egyptians didn’t invent the pyramid although it’s the emblem of their desert kingdom; and we invented neither the highway nor the automobile, yet within living recall of our eldest citizens, those paired pieces of engineering—for better and for worse—have put their mark on us because they remade us as soon as we made them and began to use them to find our way onto our land, into our own selves, and unto each other. After all, beyond everyone’s street, somewhere between the oysters in Chesapeake Bay and those in Yaquina Bay, on three-hundred-million little shores and intersections reside fellow citizens.

  YUCATÁN

  A few months after my trip into the backcountry of Japan, I went into a remoteness in the Yucatán Peninsula. Accompanied by a Maya named Berto who in several ways reminded me of my Japanese interpreter, Tadashi Sato, I again found friendship that entered the story. Both Berto and Tadashi, small men agile in mi
nd and body, interpreted far more than just words: Their presence shaped each narrative in ways past ready explanation.

  For a reason I can’t recall, I did something in “The Nose of Chaac” I now avoid unless there is a compelling rationale: I set the story in the present tense which, in a travel account, I’ve come to consider a mark of amateurism, perhaps because the first draft of Blue Highways was eight hundred typed pages of present tense before I dumped it in the third version. Well, I’ve dumped it again, appropriately, I believe, since the events here happened almost thirty years ago.

  The Nose of Chaac

  It was mid-March, and the place was Santa Elena on the Mexican peninsula of Yucatán, nine miles southeast from the grand Mayan temples at Uxmal. My Mayan friend and guide, Ahau-Kin-May-Dzul, called Berto, and I were standing on a rocky road in a village of only a half-dozen lanes, none paved. A domesticated turkey, still sporting wild featherage, had just chased an iguana up a lemon tree and was gobbling either in frustration or exultation. Other animals—roosters, chickens, pigs, a donkey—were sounding out the notes of the national anthem of the third world. A villager burned leaves, the smoke carrying a tinge of banana oil. The family gardens there grew bananas, papayas, lemons, limes, and bitter oranges. An hour earlier, watching a man climb a papaya tree to chop out leaves for his pig snorting below as it shook them from its back to eat, I had trouble believing that Brownsville, Texas, lay only six-hundred air miles distant.