Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

  “Off Pitt?” Bartholomew shrugged. “You might live if you made yourself follow natural instincts, but I think you’d get bent up pretty good coming in. That’s nearly a thousand feet up there—about the same as jumping off the observation deck of the Empire State Building.”

  “I don’t think you’d be able to climb or soar because of the turns,” Holliston said. “You’d stall in the first turn, and that would be the show. Turns take time to catch on to.”

  “I learned turning from watching buzzards,” Bartholomew said. “I saw how they hesitate on the downwind leg.”

  “Put it this way,” Wyatt said. “Al was the first ever off Pitt, and he’d been gliding two years before he tried it. The launch has to be almost perfect.”

  “My first real soaring ended me up in a lake,” Bartholomew said, “which may have been the safest landing place considering the way I came in. My first two years I was banged up a lot: sprained neck, twisted ankles. But I haven’t been hurt the last four years. Of course, I’m not a real acrobatic type either. I would like to glide off Mount Adams though. Now that would be highly interesting. The problem there is severe winds. I’d have to pack my kite six thousand feet to the top, which is twelve thousand feet, and hope the wind was up, but not too up. If I ever think I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of getting off, I’ll try it. Watch for it in the newspaper: dead or alive.”

  “That first jump off Pitt must have been hellacious.”

  “Worse than my first glide. Mountain air is rough—much rougher than California-style ocean gliding. I’d read you’ve got to have good airspeed to counteract turbulence, so I knew I had to run off the mountain, not just jump. I stood up there a long time, sort of accepting the possibility of whatever. I promised myself I’d run hard. Gliding’s not like motorcycling; for us, the more speed, the more safety. I’d read everything there was on gliding and that wasn’t much then. I hoped I’d remember it when I needed it. I saw people watching down on the highway, and I knew I’d have a good audience if I stuffed it. Might as well die in a spectacular crash.”

  “We hate audiences,” Holliston said. “Damned applause from beautiful girls.”

  “Anyway, I took my run and jumped. My heart got a good rest up there when it stopped beating. My whole body said, ‘How could you do this to us?’ “

  “The technology was crude then. The glide ratio of early kites was about three to one—three feet horizontal for every foot vertical if you knew what you were doing. Those kites were flying rocks.”

  “This glider,” Bartholomew said, “has a glide ratio of ten to one. Eight years ago it was something for anyone to stay up an hour. Now time aloft depends more on weather and your biceps than on the machine.”

  “How high can you go?”

  “No one knows yet. One pilot did ten thousand feet, but if you don’t get a good thermal, you sink about a hundred feet a minute. With a long burner, who can say? I’ve ridden a hot column up two thousand feet above The Dalles.”

  “Two thousand feet hanging onto a piece of Dacron? No parachute?”

  “After a hundred feet, it’s all the same if you lose it. Except for a new model, parachutes are too heavy and restricting. I wouldn’t buy one anyway because I’d be tempted to try it, and I’ve never parachuted. Lose my kite too if I jumped.”

  “Hang-gliders aren’t as flimsy as they look,” Holliston said. “They’re stressed for six G’s whereas a Boeing Seven Forty-seven is stressed for three. Of course, there’s some relativity in there.”

  Wyatt went home, and Bartholomew rolled up the glider and lashed the twenty-foot bundle to his pickup. He said, “Come on back with us.”

  Holliston rolled his eyes. “Trophy time.”

  Alba Bartholomew lived in Klickitat, a company town of seven hundred in the narrow vale of the Klickitat River. His little frame house was like the others on the street except for the windsock blowing on the roof. He worked at the St. Regis sawmill, where he ran a stacker. It wasn’t the most interesting of jobs. The mill got much of its timber from the Yakima Reservation twelve miles north. St. Regis was the reason for Klickitat, and when the Yakima’s big ponderosa were gone, people feared the company would pull out and Klickitat would go the way of Liberty Bond.

  Bartholomew’s wife grilled hamburgers, and we sat talking and drinking Olympia in the front yard. At first the topics were technical—wing stress, nose altitudes, load factors—but after we’d eaten and had some more beer, the conversation took a different cast. Maybe it was the Tumwater in the beer.

  Bartholomew drew a sketch of an airfoil. “Today, hang-gliders are variations of one a man named Francis Rogallo made about 1949, although most of the changes came in the early seventies, after NASA decided not to use them to bring down space capsules. A new technology for a new sport.”

  “The Wright brothers started out with hang-gliders, but the concept’s older,” Holliston said. “Leonardo da Vinci sketched something that looks like early gliders. Five hundred years before the idea became a working thing.”

  “When I first got into it,” Bartholomew said, “you almost had to buy a new kite every year just to keep up with the aerodynamic changes. New models were much better and safer.” He got out a pamphlet on hang-gliding. “Man who wrote this is paralyzed now from a crash.” He offered that as if he’d told me the man was left-handed.

  14. Bob Holliston, Al Bartholomew, and Garland Wyatt near Pitt, Washington

  “If you stay at it long enough, something’s bound to go wrong,” I said.

  “If I flip a coin ninety-nine times and it comes up heads every time, the odds are still fifty-fifty when I flip the hundredth time. Besides, each flight I learn something, and learning makes for safety.”

  “That’s probably true,” Holliston said, “but I think the real answer to why we fly is because it’s addictive. It’s a buzz to put everything on the line. Whenever we go up, we’re subconsciously asking the most important question in the world—asking it real loud—‘Is this the day I die?’”

  “You’re really pumped up when you come back down; it’s great to be up, but afterwards the earth feels so good and you think how you’ve gotten away with it one more time. Still, it took me a year of flying before I could relax enough to call soaring a pleasure. Even water’s a more natural place for a man than the sky.”

  “You’re not a bird just because you fly like one,” Holliston said, “but it seems like you are. There’s no compartment around you so you feel and hear the wind just like the birds. Man’s oldest dream.”

  “You hear the wind when you’re in it?”

  “You’d better hear it, otherwise you’re into a stall and it’s time for the last thrill. You gauge safety, which is airspeed, by the sound of the wind.”

  “It’s hard to explain how good it feels to be totally alone up there, where everything depends absolutely on yourself. Until you’ve felt the freedom of that, and how your senses come alive, you really can’t understand soaring.”

  “Freedom’s a misleading word, though, because we’re only free as long as we balance gravity and thermals. It’s like both sky and earth want us. They’re both pulling. We get to fly as long as we keep things balanced, and that’s where the sensation is—when we’re hanging between up and down.”

  “Sometimes it seems like—I don’t know,” Bartholomew said abstractedly. “Sometimes I just get to thinking I can stay up forever if I can only keep the balance. You can get so outside yourself, you start believing you belong in the sky. Like you were born up there. That’s when it’s most dangerous—and the best.”

  “You sound like Icarus.”

  “Of course, you never can maintain the balance,” Holliston said. “Something always comes along and changes things. Mr. Down gets you every time.”

  9

  I FOLLOWED the road, the road followed the Klickitat, and the river followed the rocky valley down to the Columbia. At The Dalles another dam—this one wedged between high walls of basalt. Before the rapids he
re disappeared, Indians caught salmon for a couple of thousand years by spearing them in midair as the fish exploded leaps up the falls; Klickitats smoked the salmon over coals, pulverized the dried flesh, and either packed it in wicker baskets lined with fishskins for use during the winter or they tied the cooked salmon in bundles for trading to other tribes. The fish kept for months and some even ended up with Indians living east of the Rockies.

  The cascades provided such a rich fishing site that Lewis and Clark called The Dalles “the great mart of all this country.” Natives found a new source of income in the falls when white traders came with boats to be portaged. One fur trader complained, as did many early travelers, that the Indians were friendly but “habitual thieves”; yet he paid fifty braves only a quid of tobacco each to carry his heavy boats a mile upriver.

  East of the dam, the land looked as though someone had drawn a north-south line forbidding green life: west, patches of forest; east, a desert of hills growing only shrubs and dry grasses. The wet coastal country was gone. A little before sunset, in the last long stretch of light, I saw on a great rounded hill hundreds of feet above the river a strange huddle of upright rocks. It looked like Stonehenge. When I got closer, I saw that it was Stonehenge—in perfect repair. I turned off the highway and went down to the bottomland peach groves, where a track up the hill led to the stones. They stood a hundred yards south of several collapsed buildings.

  In truth, the circle of menhirs was a ferro-concretehenge, but it was as arresting on its hill as the real Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. From it, I could see the river Lewis and Clark had opened the Northwest with and awakened a new consciousness of nationhood; I could look across to a far riverside section of the Oregon Trail now buried under I-80N. The setting sun cast an unearthly light on the sixteen-foot megaliths and turned the enormous pyramid of Mount Hood, fifty miles away, to a black triangle. I felt again the curious fusion of time—past with present—that occurred at the Nevada petroglyphs.

  A flaking wooden sign said a highway engineer and rail magnate, Sam Hill, whose grave was just down the slope, had built the replica in the twenties as a memorial to doughboys “sacrificed to the heathen god of war.” Over several smooth declivities in the concrete slabs appeared almost imperceptible notations from other travelers: A.J. WILSON NYC. HELLO STUPID. KT 1936. BOB AND JANEY WAS HERE. The monument had become a register, and the scribbles gave a historical authenticity that masked its bogus one. The twentieth century had made the stones an equivalent to the petroglyphs.

  I picked up a peel-away Polaroid negative—the totemic offering of the American tourist. Barely visible was the reversed image of a woman standing against a monolith, her arms upraised, head bent to the left as if in sacrificial posture. She was unclad. A joke—it must have been. But in the half-light from a disappearing sun completing one more day of a two-hundred-fifty-million-year circle around the galaxy, the stones looking more and more genuine in the shadows, and a cold stillness dropping onto the desert plateau, the pendulous-breasted woman suggested something more.

  The hills went dark, the volcano vanished against the black sky, blue ice stars shone as thick as mottles on a trout. A few lights from Biggs, Oregon, several miles across the river, gleamed off the slick water.

  The loneliness again. Now I had only the idea of the journey to keep me going. Black Elk says it is in the dark world among the many changing shadows that men get lost. Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

  Stars shone with a clarity beyond anything I could remember. I was looking into—actually seeing—the past. By looking up into the darkness, I was looking into time. The old light from Betelgeuse, five hundred twenty light-years away, showed the star that existed when Christopher Columbus was a boy, and the Betelgeuse he saw was the one that burned when Northmen were crossing the Atlantic. For the Betelgeuse of this time, someone else will have to do the looking. The past is for the present, the present for the future.

  Astronomers say that when telescopes of greater range can be built, ones that can look down the distant curves of the universe billions of light-years away, they might show existence at the time of creation. And if astrophysicists and countless American Indians are correct in believing that a human being is composed of exploded bits of heavenly matter, billions of galactic atoms, then astronomers may behold us all in the stellar winds; they may observe us when we were something else and very much farther away. In a time when men counted only seven planets, Whitman recognized it:

  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I knew I was even there, I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, And took my time.

  There came a dry rustle in the desert bush—a skunk, rabbit, coyote, I didn’t know what, but it pulled me back to Sam Hill’s Stonehenge, now just an orbit of shadows. The people who built the British Stonehenge used it as a time machine whereby starlight—the light of the past—could show them a future of equinoxes, solstices, eclipses. Across America I had been looking for something similar. An old urge in man. It seemed the journey had led here.

  What was this piece of ground I stood on? Fifty miles away rose the ancient volcano like those that puffed out the first atmosphere, and under me lay the volcanic basalt ridge the old river had cut through. For thousands of years, chinook and chum and bluebacks swam upriver to regenerate, and Indians followed after the salmon; and then new people came down the river after everything. South lay the Oregon Trail under four lanes of concrete marked off by the yellow running lights of the transports; south, too, were glinting rails of the Union Pacific. North a ghost town crumbling, and around me a circle of stones for the dead of the first war called a “world war.”

  Astronomer Edwin Hubble observed a galaxy moving away from Earth at nine hundred million miles an hour and concluded that the universe is dispersing itself to emptiness. Perhaps so, but the things I saw on the mountain—and more that I didn’t—all had come together briefly while I stood as witness. Now atomic physicists, those who watch the dance of the universe, were saying that in the pursuit of matter one ends up not so much with things as with interconnections—interconnections that give the particularities not merely definition but (even more) their moment, their meaning. Whitman: “A vast similitude interlocks all.”

  Who can say how a man comes to see? I appeared surrounded by tombstones: the volcano dead, the basalt solidified, the fast river of cataracts drowned, the Indians and explorers and settlers and thirteen doughboys and Sam Hill too (his tombstone said “Amid nature’s great unrest, he sought rest”), all in their graves. That’s how a man sees the continuum: by the tracks it leaves.

  All of those things—rock and men and river—resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back again is uninterrupted and unbroken.

  The Ghost Dancers showed both man’s natural opposition to change he doesn’t understand and his natural failure in such opposition. But it is man’s potential to try to see how all things come from the old intense light and how they pause in the darkness of matter only long enough to change back into energy, to see that changelessness would be meaninglessness, to know that the only way the universe can show and prove itself is through change. His job is to do what nothing else he knows of can do: to look about and draw upon time.

  A man lives in things and things are moving. He stands apart in such a temporary way it is hardly worth speaking of. If that perception dims egocentrism, that illusion of what man is, then it also enlarges his self, that multiple yet whole part which he has been, will be, is. Ego, craving distinction, belongs to the narrowness of now; but self, looking for union, belongs to the past and f
uture, to the continuum, to the outside. Of all the visions of the Grandfathers the greatest is this: To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within—he reaches farther out.

  10

  THE light, spreading slowly that morning, came over the hills as if on foot, filling in a hollow here, pushing out a shadow there, working gradually to bring on the colors and forms of day. It bleached the gray eastern sides of the megaliths and rolled a shadow like a great spoked wheel down the scarp; snow on Mount Hood shifted on the spectrum from yellow to ice white.

  I walked around what was left of the streets of the ghost town: a stone fountain, a few fireplugs, four rock buildings. A monument out here in the isolation made some sense, but not a town, so I went back up the highway to the Maryhill Museum of Fine Arts (made no sense here either) to ask how come.

  Sam Hill had many plans—some shrewd, some cockamamie—and he had money to try them. His plan for Maryhill, Washington (first called Columbus), was to find a narrow zone where coastal rains met desert sun; that belt, he believed, would be an agricultural Eden. Early in the century, he decided the Columbia Hills was that place and laid out a town of thirty-four city blocks, built a reservoir and a few buildings. He talked some Belgian Quakers into considering settlement, but when scouts for the group came, they saw and left. To them, Hill’s ideal zone was the fiction of a creative road engineer more adept at theory than practice when it came to agronomy and climatology. And they were right. The town lay in the rain shadow of the Cascades.

  Hill continued building the big and costly stone manor, often called, with some accuracy, “Maryhill Castle.” At one time he said it was for his wife Mary, but she apparently refused even to visit the place. At various other times he said Maryhill would be (a) a fortress to stop foreign invaders, or (b) a cultural center served by his Northern Pacific railroad running down alongside the Columbia and cross river from the competing Union Pacific, or (c) “a universal school for all the people… where farmer folk could find solutions to their problems,” or (d) an international museum, which it turned out to be if you consider America and Rumania to constitute “international.”