The Many Roads to Japan

  By late afternoon three more rides had taken him to Arcata. He was back where he had started. He believed he had set a hitchhiking record: from the East Coast to the West Coast in four days. He had only about $15 left, but he knew he would find a job soon and make it through the initial tough month or so it would take to get his feet back on the ground.

  The journey had provided the answer to what he had sought. It had all started at his court martial when the single sentence he had uttered in response to his order to fight in the Vietnam War had saved four and a half years of his life and instilled in him an awareness of the power of language. His experiences in Europe had reinforced that awareness and stimulated a need to express himself. He now had a purpose. He would become a writer. He would begin his studies and learn the craft. Through the writing he would get rid of all the confusion and derangement the world had caused in him. In return, he would give back to the world something good and meaningful, the story of a symbolic life.

  *****

  John found a job as a janitor in an elementary school in Orick, a town of 800 people on the California coast about 50 miles north of Arcata. He rented a small room near the school and started training to be a writer. He was practically illiterate. He had no idea what the fundamentals of grammar were or what comprised good literature.

  The job required that he work only five hours a day, five days a week. He often took strolls along the isolated stretch of beach south of Orick, along the riverbank of the Mad River, and on the logging roads that led into the redwood forest that skirted the town's eastern flank. Most of his free time, however, was spent reading all the books he could, copying down sentences and descriptions that appealed to him, and recording in a notebook his journey across the U.S. and Europe. It was a lonely time. Near the beginning of December when the winter rains started, he decided to quit his job, return to Arcata, and go back to school.

  He found another job at a small redwood lath mill in Arcata. In March he was accepted into Humboldt State University and entered the journalism department. His boss at the lath mill agreed to let John work part-time in the mornings to accommodate his schedule of afternoon classes. He also began playing amateur basketball again.

  The next two years were like a return to innocence. All that existed for John was basketball and study. There was even a return to normalcy in his family relationship. His father was retired and occupied with building a new house. He had converted to the Seventh Day Adventist faith and with it came a greater acceptance of John's refusal to fight in Vietnam. He even offered to give some financial help for John's schooling.

  John bypassed all the required general education courses to concentrate on writing and literature classes. Two of his classes required the students to do actual field work and turn in stories to the local newspaper every week. When five of his stories were accepted and printed with his own by-line, John felt that particular joy every writer craves: seeing his name in print.

  After nearly two years of study John felt it was time to get serious about writing fiction. It was time for him to once again make a break from Humboldt County and find his way in the world. He had gotten as much as he could out of his studies at the university. He packed his belongings--a few changes of clothes and two boxes of books--into his car and moved to Los Angeles. He found a small apartment and a job working as a bookkeeper in the main office of a shipping company.

  In the evenings and on weekends he began spending hours at the typewriter, working on short stories that became increasingly longer as he looked ahead to being able to write a novel. He was like a marathon runner in training, starting out with short sprints and working gradually into longer and longer endurance runs. Sometimes he worked on character sketches, sometimes on place descriptions. At other times he practiced stylistic devices such as alliterative writing, stream-of-consciousness narrative, understatement in the Hemingway tradition, or metaphorical comparisons.

  The truth was he had no style of his own. He was in a stage of imitating every writer he fell in love with, only to abandon him or her shortly and copy the style of the next writer who struck his fancy. Of all the writers John was frantically trying to study, Henry Miller appealed to him the most. Miller's intoxication with language, his free spirit, his exaltation of life as seen from the gutter, his unbounded ego, his faith and sense of humor and love of the cranks and artists who inhabited his world all stirred in John deep emotions concerning the life he had chosen to pursue. Miller instilled in John a belief in the divine guidance of the artist. Miller made John want to be a writer, to plunge into the depths of human experience.

  Nearly a year passed. He began making preparations for returning to Europe. Still under the influence of Henry Miller, he had decided it would be impossible to write in the U.S. He believed if he was to experience the true artist's life, he had to live and work where the artist and his work were appreciated and encouraged, not in a country like the U.S., where the artist was repressed into a life of conformity and commercialism at best. John would return to Paris to play the role of the starving young artist, to recapture the past, in particular the events of that journey he had taken four years earlier in search of an identity and a direction in life. He was finally ready to begin his novel, to become a writer. On January 11, 1977 John boarded a plane to Paris, not knowing what his future held, but filled with confidence and a faith that there was meaning in everything he had experienced, in everything that would come.

  Review for Chapter 5

  I. Comprehension Questions

  1. Which painter at the Prado Museum impressed John the most?

  2. How long did it take John to hitchhike across the United States after he returned from Europe?

  3. What did John decide to become after he returned to the United States?

  4. What did John study after he returned to university?

  5. What did John plan to write his first novel about?

  II. Put the following events in the correct order.

  ___a. John left the United States again.

  ___b. John camped out in a field near the Luxembourg Airport.

  ___c. John was stranded in the desert for a while.

  ___d. John had his first newspaper story published.

  ___e. John visited a famous Spanish museum and was impressed by the paintings he saw there.

  ___f. John decided to become a writer.

  ___g. John was picked up by a Navy man and given a long ride for 2 1/2 days.

  ___h. John returned to university.

  III. Discussion/Essay Questions

  1. John had no plan or itinerary for his journey across the United States and around Europe. Which kind of travel do you prefer--one with a detailed schedule or one with just a simple destination to head for? Explain the advantages of your choice and the disadvantages of the other choice.

  2. John's discoveries and experiences during his journey helped give him a direction for the future. What people or experiences have influenced your life? In what ways?

  3. Chapter 5 of The Many Roads to Japan ends with John setting off to Paris to write his first novel. What kinds of experiences and adventures do you think he will have? Based on what you know about John's character and experiences up to now, explain your predictions.

  Chapter 6

  John had been in Paris for about two months when one day he returned to his hotel to find two Asiatics at the front desk trying desperately to communicate a message in English to the clerk, who spoke only French. John had learned a little French by then and was able to give a crude interpretation to the clerk. The Asiatics were very happy and invited John to have a cup of tea with them at a cafe across the street.

  Introductions were made. One of the men was an Iranian businessman named Hamid. The other was an Afghan motel owner named Abdul. Both were in Paris on business trying to sell carpets. They were disgusted with Paris because the people seemed cold and indifferent to them. John was the first person who had helped them. They
were so impressed with the friendliness John had shown that they invited him to return with them to their countries. Hamid said that life in Iran was not expensive and it was easy to find an English teaching job. Despite his affection for Paris, John's money was dwindling rapidly and the chance for adventure in a country he knew little about appealed to him. He accepted the invitation.

  Hamid and Abdul first had to visit a friend in Germany. John joined them two weeks later. Hamid bought a new BMW car, which he would later sell in Iran to cover the cost of their journey. Abdul would take a train after John and Hamid departed.

  Hamid and John spent a day passing through the Swiss Alps. In the beginning Hamid's driving frightened John. Hamid was a madman behind the wheel, flying along the mountain roads as if in a grand prix road race, taking chances passing other cars at high speeds on blind corners. He laughed at John's fear and told tall tales of his adventures as a driver in the Iranian military.

  Late that night they arrived in Milan, Italy and took a room. The next day the journey continued east through a thick fog to Trieste. They entered Yugoslavia. Hamid drove the BMW as if jet propelled. John took notes on the passing scenery: distant blue hills, scattered farms, stone-and-brick houses, peasants pacing the sides of the road with hoes slung over their shoulders.

  They continued into the night toward Bulgaria, the BMW rushing past Soviet military trucks on a winding, rocky road. They arrived at the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border early in the morning. A Bulgarian military guard detained them for two hours before granting their visas at dawn.

  They entered Sofia. Military transport trucks moved slowly along cobble streets. There were no smiles on the faces of the men and women shoveling dirt on the sides of the road, nor on the faces of the ubiquitous police. They headed into the country, all the time approaching the East over dirt roads and cobble roads and through peasant villages and industrial towns. Everywhere they passed they saw old peasant women with slouched backs, bundled in woolen scarves, socks, and sweaters, packing hoes over their shoulders, pacing slowly in groups of three and four to the fields.

  They entered Istanbul, Turkey, where John got a visa for his entry into Iran. They spent a day exploring the activity of the streets, visiting Mohammedan mosques with high-reaching minarets, and haggling with venders and merchants of all types. The streets were full of older American cars, horse carts, all kinds of carts competing for limited, dirty space. They saw thin, dark, hungry children playing everywhere.

  They headed east toward Ankara. The road from Istanbul to Izmit was a solid stream of trucks and buses carrying great amounts of supplies and goods from all parts of the West to Iran. An army of vehicles carried gas, food, construction equipment, pipes and girders, tires, wood, people, other cars and trucks, everything imaginable. On this road Hamid proved his ability as the self-proclaimed best driver in the East. He swerved to the left and right to pass trucks in front of them, paved new lanes in the dust, narrowly missed oncoming traffic, squeezed between huge trucks where there seemed no space, and passed to the extreme left of trucks passing other trucks. All the time he weaved and honked, braked and shifted gears furiously, and screamed at the other drivers.

  Finally, they arrived in Ankara and spent the night. From Ankara to the Turkish-Iranian border was roughly 1,500 kilometers. Hamid told John that the next section of road was the most dangerous part. Kurdish bandits were said to be in the mountains and would stop cars travelling alone. It was best to drive during the day and in groups of three or four cars.

  They left Ankara on a sunny morning. Ahead were sun-baked hills with stone-and-mud houses scattered throughout. In the distance lay looming, white mountains. They climbed higher into the hills. Strong winds were howling. They passed sparse, wind-sculpted brush, thin patches of snow, and an occasional mountain village where the soil had been worked by hand.

  They headed into the high eastern mountains, the road rising to summits where wind flurries were a blinding white, then dipping to lower elevations where boulders of slush and white mud crashed against the sides and frame of the car. At one point they passed a mountain village of about 25 rock huts covered with snow. John wondered how these mountain people could survive the winters.

  It took Hamid and John two more days to reach the Iranian border. In that time they once encountered Kurdish bandits on horseback, passed a wreck involving a bus and a truck near Erzurum, and saw several trucks forced off the side of the road. A blizzard forced them to stop for several hours before they could start moving again. They covered themselves with their sleeping bags and waited for the storm to subside. When they were able to start again the road became worse, filled with large potholes. Trucks approaching from the opposite side splattered the BMW with slush and thick, brown mud. One truck sprayed them with small stones and the windshield cracked.

  Finally, they dropped out of the last elevation to the lower ground. They were out of the snow. The road was muddy, but getting better. They passed two more villages of mud hovels where wild dogs roamed the streets. When they reached the border, hundreds of cars and trucks were backed up. They waited an entire day before being allowed into Iran.

  *****

  Three days later they were in Hamid's home in the holy city of Mashad. Hamid was welcomed home as if he were a conquering hero returning from distant lands. His mother, father, three brothers, and two sisters treated John with much warmth and hospitality. In the beginning there was much for John to become accustomed to: the squat toilets, sitting cross-legged on the floor for long periods of time, the sound of the Farsi language, not being able to see the faces of the women, who were required to wear the chador in the presence of a non-Muslim.

  There was much visiting to be done. Hamid had many cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces, all of whom lived in various parts of Mashad. Hamid often took John to visit friends in the bazaar. From there they went for walks around the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza and the mosque where the tomb of the prophet was laid. John was impressed by the generosity, kindness, and gentleness of everyone he met.

  The time soon came when John could no longer stay with Hamid's family. It was uncomfortable for them, particularly the women, to have to share their home too long with a non-Muslim. The schools would not open for a few more weeks, so Hamid introduced John to some carpet sellers in the bazaar. John could obtain a small commission for luring foreign tourists to their shops. This job was known as "street hawking." Another street hawk by the name of Ali offered to share his room with John.

  Ali had come to Mashad as a boy after living his first few years in a family of shepherd nomads. He had picked up portions of five languages from making his living on the streets. His room was located on the bottom floor of a two-storey, brick-and-mortar structure near the bazaar.

  John began to spend his days with Ali walking the streets near the mosque and the bazaar. Ali was known in all the shops. He was the quintessential guide. He knew where to get the best prices, both on the black market and in the shops, as well as find the best and cheapest hotels, entertainment spots, jewelry, carpets, and transportation.

  Mashad was a clean city undergoing great changes. Old buildings were being torn down and modern buildings were replacing them on nearly every street. There was activity everywhere. Women in chador strolled by sensuously, swarthy men in turbans lined the streets, peddlers pushing carts of fresh fruit and nuts hawked their goods, children laughed and played, cars and horse-drawn carts paced to and fro, and men squatting on their haunches spread out their knives, bracelets, tools, pipes, samovars, and rings of precious stones before them for tourists to see. Sounds from the various bread shops, grain shops, copperware shops, and carpet shops filled the air. John walked about in a daze, soaking in the atmosphere of the ancient, holy city.

  In the evenings Ali's friends often stopped by the room. They spoke of falling in love with European women they had met on the streets. They implored John to write love letters in English for them. There was an unspoken paranoia a
bout them. When they spoke about their dreams, they did so in a low whisper as if an enemy might be listening. Many expressed a desire to marry a European woman. It was the only way they could obtain a passport to leave the country. They had a strong fear of the obligatory military service and the punishment given those who refused to serve. When John pressed them for reasons to explain this, they said it was forbidden to discuss politics or religion with a foreigner.

  Meeting Ali's friends, hearing their stories, and seeing the fear they felt about resisting the government's authority caused John to reflect deeply about his own anti-war and prison experiences. He had suffered psychologically after his release from prison and for a long time had succumbed to believing that he really had been a coward and an "undesirable." He had sought to escape the country of his birth and find another life abroad. He could empathize with these young Iranians and their paranoia and dreams of escape. He wanted to explain to them how he had found solace, therapy, and a means of venting some of the insanity of his thoughts through the medium of writing. He wanted to give them some of the hope and optimism he had discovered on the road, but the realization that he was powerless to do so hit him hard. He was again a man without a home.