How the sound bent, as it passed.
It sounded like a train.
And it made me feel safe.
Even now, in the dark, on my way to Vegas, I keep the window down, hoping I will hear one in the distance. Hear a train. And see one. In the dark they’re scary, moving toward you, that impending headlight hanging in the distance, seeming not to move, until you figure out oh, there must be train tracks over there. In the daylight driving east on this route I see them all the time, usually seeing the first one here, in the Cajon Pass, where the land rises to a sudden 5,000 feet from sea level where the Pacific Plate whacked into the American one. The San Andreas fault runs through here, as do two pipelines, four power lines, Route 15, itself, Route 66, and three separate rail lines. In the daylight I can catch a Burlington Northern Santa Fe toiling uphill here on two engines, dragging several dozen containers from China and Taiwan reading COSCO and HAN JIN into the inland empire from their point of entry at Long Beach or the Port of Los Angeles. Tonight the pass is a necklace of descending headlights trailing toward me, but in daylight this climb is a thriller, the drama of colliding plates strewn across the surface in huge blocks of Pelona schist as big as ship containers, as if the earth, itself, had engineered a train wreck. Here at the Cajon Pass I always feel I’ve really left Los Angeles—after this, the land feels like The West. After this comes the Victorville plateau. After this, it’s Barstow; and the desert. In daylight I like to stop in Barstow, not because, as the sign proclaims on Main Street, it’s the CROSSROADS OF OPPORTUNITY, but because, unlike Las Vegas and a lot of other newly manufactured western towns, Barstow has a past. Barstow has a history. It has ghosts. And many many miles of tracks. It takes its name—like Seligman and Kingman, Arizona, do—from a train man, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe still operates its main RR Classification Yard there. Route 66 is the Main Street, now both alarmingly tough and despairingly shabby, and there’s a railroad museum tucked beside the tracks, but the real roadside attraction in Barstow is the surviving Fred Harvey House built into the depot. Curtis was back and forth through Barstow on his way into the desert to photograph the Mojave, Walapai and Havasupai tribes, and he must have stood beside the tracks in front of the Harvey House a dozen times. The restaurant’s a National Historic site now, not open to the public, but I like to stand there and look through the windows. There were a lot of days, writing this novel about Curtis, when I couldn’t understand him, couldn’t bring what I knew about him, his self-generated myth, the few true scattered facts, into a coherent whole. I’d think about jettisoning the project altogether on those days, to take up the heroic tale of Fred Harvey, instead, who seemed like a genuinely nice guy and whose business had as large an impact on Western tribes as Curtis’s. The Harvey Houses were like missions on the Santa Fe Railroad’s camino real—familiar places in the wild, places where travelers could disembark in desolate and unknown territory and feel immediately at home. It was Fred Harvey’s brainstorm to feature Indians along the tracks, in front of Harvey Houses, sitting nonthreateningly on blankets, selling baskets and turquoise trinkets to the passengers as they stopped along the way in Lamy, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. Fred would feed you Blue Point oysters, iceberg lettuce and vanilla ice cream at some one-hundred-degrees-in-the-shade outpost in Arizona or New Mexico, courtesy of his contract with the Santa Fe to take delivery of refrigerated goods for free, and you would practically expire on the spot not from the heat but from the miracle. Then Fred’s Harvey Girls would lead you out into the blasting sun and point you toward some Indians sitting on the platforms—point you toward some Zuni beadwork or a handy Hopi feathered headdress or an Apache bow-and-arrow set which would look so good hanging on your wall back in Cambridge, Skokie or the Bronx. It was Fred Harvey’s idea to transform people on train journeys into consuming entities, into packets of consumption: Johns and Marys into tourists. Nothing wrong with tourism, I’m a tourist here, myself, I stop and poke around a lot when I’m en route because I think that’s the point of travel. I picked up the habit of stopping to investigate roadside attractions from my father on those early trips. I once followed a sign back in Virginia to a little white wayside building by a scenic pine wood where Stonewall Jackson had died. There was no one there (again) but me. And a sign with a green button on it that read PRESS TO LEARN. The voice of a U.S. National Parks Ranger came out of a hidden speaker when I pressed the button and told me the story of how Stonewall Jackson had been shot accidentally by a member of his own corps, brought to this little cabin where his arm had been amputated, where his wife had been summoned and where he had taken his last breath. I stood there with the talking hidden speaker until the recording of the ranger’s voice stopped, and then, when it stopped, the world was suddenly much quieter than it had been all that morning. From that silence, right there, there was delivered to me, whole, a story I called “Stonewall Jackson’s Wife,” and the whole story arrived, start to finish, the way a train arrives; connected, in a logical sequence; complete, in and of itself. That’s the only time in my life a story has produced itself for me like that out of a roadside attraction, but: you never know. I’ve stopped at a lot of roadside attractions, and it’s the same as waiting for a photograph to assemble: you just never know when, or where, or how, or if the thing will happen. Nine times out of ten—no: nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand—no miracle occurs, no eighteen wheeler thunders past you on the road, blasting out a noise that reminds you of the sound your nation makes: but, still, I stop because it’s worth the gamble.
Maybe I stop because my father used to.
Certainly he’s the reason I’m enamored of a passing train, because as well as taking those road trips back and forth between our home in Pennsylvania and my mother’s parents’ home in Virginia, my father used to take me on drives from our home in the suburbs of Lancaster out into the county to the church his grandfather had founded and to the farmland where he had been born, and we used to stop at all the railroad crossings to watch trains.
On those journeys we were alone, the two of us, there was no Mary in the backseat asleep because my mother didn’t like my father’s family’s church, it went against her own Greek Orthodox religion, where there were priests who wore embroidered robes and chanted in a minor key instead of a preacher with a turkey neck in a drab suit fulminating against sin.
Stopped at the railroad crossings I counted cars—it was my job.
Lancaster had the largest stockyards east of Chicago in those days so a lot of cars were cattle cars. Some of the cars were full of coal. None of them read HAN JIN.
Those county journeys of my father’s were habitual, part of how he thought and lived. Most certainly they were how he lit out, if only for a couple hours, from his loneliness and from his marriage.
Even after I left home I believed they were a form of rescue to him, maybe even a form of meditation so it came as no particular surprise one day after I was married and a mother, myself, living in New York, when Mary called to tell me, “I don’t think John came home last night.”
She wasn’t sure.
That was the way things were between them.
Uncertain.
“The boys called from the store, he hasn’t been there yet, to open.” It was noon, and for as long as I could remember John had left the house at six o’clock each morning to open up the store for his employees.
“Has he done this before?” I asked her.
Again she wasn’t sure.
“How can I help you, mom? I’m three hundred miles away.”
“I need someone to tell me what to do.”
“Well, if he hasn’t done this before, then something might have happened to him. I think you should call the police.”
“I can’t do that.”
“It’s only a phone call. You can do it.”
“You do it.”
“You’re going to have to do this, mom. In case there’s been an accident.”
“If ther
e’d been an accident someone would have called by now.”
“They’ll want to know what kind of car he drives.”
“Oh god.”
“They might ask if you were arguing. Let them ask. Just answer calmly. They’re not judging you. It’s what they’re trained to do.”
“—police, for godsake. Do I have to—?”
Somehow, she did. The fact that he was missing moved up the chain of command: State troopers they were called, back in Pennsylvania. Out here the State guys are the CHP—California Highway Patrol—and much to my amazement one of them has set a flamingo-colored flare off up ahead of me in my lane on Route 15 and is signaling the east-bound traffic to pull over for a chat beside the road.
I watch the drivers of the two cars in front of me have brief exchanges with the uniform, then proceed ahead with caution, slowly.
“Officer,” I greet him.
“Ma’am.” His flashlight beam sweeps over me. “I have to ask you to go it slow the next few miles. We got sheep loose on the highway.”
“—sheep,” I marvel. In this age of terrorism. “You need help rounding them up?”
The flashlight beam holds my eyes, then sweeps over to where his car is parked, blocking a gaping hole in the wire fence. “You’re the first to ask,” he says. “If you don’t mind putting your car where mine is it would free me up ’til we get some backup—”
The last time I was out among sheep was years ago in Wales, which was enough to convince me that creatures with that much space between their eyes make a wholly appropriate sound to describe their cognitive spatial dilemma.
It’s a toss, which are smarter: sheep or flounder.
I pull up behind the CHP cruiser, block the hole with my car as he drives away, turn the engine off, roll down all the windows. High desert air. Another roadside attraction. Sheep like to light out for the territory, too, I guess. You build a potential escapee every minute that you build a fence. And a fence might make good neighbors but not when it separates two parts of a self. When I first started charting the parts of Curtis that he had left behind, I figured that the panorama he saw from the train ride he had made out West with his father was what had set him off in search of American Indians. I thought it was wide open space that he had longed to light out to. That what he was afraid of, his Aunt Sally, was the cramped intimacy of family. The intimacy of love. He had fallen in love—or seemed to have, at least—with Clara, slightly younger though better educated than he. She was the perfect helpmate for him—frugal, where he was extravagant; level-headed, where he was too quick to pursue his fantasies—but as soon as their first child was born, Edward had lit out. He was gone two or three days every week; then a whole week at a time; then for a month. Soon he was out in the territory, among the tribes, for six or seven months.
I had always thought that what he was running from was the imprisonment of domestic life; from Clara, from their children. Then I took that trip to Pine Ridge and ended up spending the night in Wall, South Dakota, an outpost of ANGLO cowboyism outside the rez where tourists to the Dakota Badlands and Pine Ridge stop to spend the night, eat beef, booze up and buy the fake Sioux tat that passes as real Indian SOUVENIRS. Curtis is an industry in a place like Wall—I had known that postcards of his photographs were big out West but it hadn’t sunk in until I saw a six-foot rotating display in Wall Drug of his reproductions made small. It was the same day I’d had my little crise with the land and the sky and the agoraphobia so I was still feeling the effects of panorama. Panorama was all I could think about: the immensity out there: the uncompromising BIGNESS. And then I came face to face with a display of Edward S. Curtis postcards and all I could think was Oswald, Oswald, Oswald, Oswald—one after another—Oswald, Oswald, the disgusting Lee Harvey slang attribution for a HEADSHOT.
All the Curtis postcards were HEADSHOTS.
A whole rack of them.
And I realized: you don’t go into the West to make HEADSHOTS.
You go into the West the way Ansel Adams did—the way Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins did: for The Big Picture.
For the Views.
The pan-o-rama.
But there they were, lined up on a metal rack in Wall, South Dakota: face after face after face of intimacy—and oh, my Aunt Sally: who are we kidding when we think we can run?
You can flip through the entire Curtis oeuvre—all his photographs from Arizona, the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Washington, Oregon and my beloved California—more than 50,000 photographs in all, and you’ll find that less than half of them were photographed outside.
We reveal ourselves in everything we do. We reveal ourselves even when we think we’re hiding, even when we think we’ve got the wagon streamlined, when we think we’ve left the stuff we need to get away from far behind us.
It’s a tricky business, this invention of identity.
So I make the call:
“Hello, good evening, it’s Marianne Wiggins calling again.”
“—oh, hello, Miss Wiggins, what can we do for you?”
“I just wanted to let you know I decided to make the trip, maybe I can help you figure out who this guy is, posing as my father. But it looks like I won’t get to Vegas ’til the middle of the night.”
“Go to Emergency. I’m on ’til six. Have them call me and I’ll come and get you.”
And then, even though I know the man cannot be my father I ask, “How’s he doing?”
“Still unconscious. They don’t think he’ll linger long. You know, his age. The Indian’s still with him.”
“…the—??”
“—man who called the ambulance. Looks to be some kind of Indian. Truth is, we can’t get him to leave…”
Out in the dark, sheep gather like reflecting pools of moonlight. I realize I’m wearing sandals in snake country and climb up on my car roof. I lie down and gaze up at the stars. I know this man is not my father. Just like I know HAN JIN containers come all the way from China even though my sensory logic tells me the world is only what I see. Maybe that is ultimately the reason anyone lights out. To learn how big the big world is.
To find stories.
What can one 83-year-old stranger posing as my father tell me? He’s unconscious, silent as these stars. Silent as a photograph. You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes. Edward Curtis claimed he lit out for the territory to document a race of people he believed were vanishing before the nation’s eyes—The Vanishing Race was what he called the first photograph in Volume I.
He believed that the indigenous peoples of the United States were laid out on their deathbed, in their final throes, that he better light out for the territory to verify identities.
And maybe I am lighting out for Vegas just like Curtis did—for some final oath. We love the best we can and light out for the territory all our life, hoping for the button that says PRESS TO LEARN, fooling, maybe, no one on the way about who we are and where we’re going and the things we think we’ve left behind as we drive onward into silence past one great roadside attraction after another, never even knowing ’til we get there that we’ve carted our Aunt Sally with us, sound asleep, dormant, snoring, right behind us.
the mad greek
Try leaving all those family ghosts behind you when you’re on
The Mother Road.
That’s what Steinbeck called Route 66 in The Grapes of Wrath—the Joad Road. Is there a Father Road?
Or is every road, every ribbon toward mirage, presumed to be the road to masculinity, the road each one of our American fathers had to take at some time in his life?
Thunder Road.
Highway 61.
Highway out of boyhood. Springsteen and Dylan hammering the licks, their testosterone passed off as social contract, their pretense of melancholy a pretense of some greater ethos called “freedom.”
When it was drawn, grad
ed and paved Route 66 clove to the old railroad routes like young Plato to ol’ Socrates. Wherever there were train routes in this country, automotive roads would follow. “No nails, no Christ,” the poet Donald Hall has written. No Socrates, no Plato. No railroad, no interstate highway system. Before 1956, when the Interstate Highway Act was written, there were already “national” roads—the Dixie Highway, north to south, from Michigan to Florida; the Lincoln Highway, east to west, from New York to San Francisco—but there existed nothing on the scale of what President Eisenhower envisioned, 4-or 6-or 8-lane superhighways built not necessarily as connective tissue between two primary destinations, but for the mandated task of hauling freight across long distances as fast as possible with no unnecessary stops.
To eat, for instance.
Or take in a museum.
Sleep in comfort.
See a show.
Haul ass was the mantra of the new inter-state of being, so we got these monster roads where no roads had gone before, which forced us to face the fact that we could cross the country now in record time without ever seeing, stopping in or pausing at a real place or a real town.