Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

  Lying atop the sleeping bag in the hot night, I heard the first mosquito. I put the screens in place but it was too late. Under the pinching bites I lay sweating and cursing. Unable to stay awake driving, now I couldn’t sleep lying down. I was living someone’s nightmare. “These are the days that must happen to you,” Whitman says.

  It was here, during the Depression, that Douglas County, after acquiring through tax delinquencies thousands of acres of logged-out land, offered a homestead plan intended to relieve unemployment in the cities and put the land back to use. You could buy an acre for two dollars cash or three dollars on time. The land sold, but mostly to people who already had it; of the few new residents moving in for a try at reclaiming the clear-cut barrens, not a single one was an unemployed city dweller. A generation later, trees had returned, but not many people. Hunting a cool spot on the bag, swatting the thirtieth mosquito, I understood why.

  Finally, I gave up and pulled off the screens, and, with windows wide open, drove flat out down the highway to blast away the insects. At Danbury I parked by the town hall, put the screens in place, and again went to bed. I slapped a mosquito and fell asleep.

  Before I left home, I had told someone that part of my purpose for the trip was to be inconvenienced so I might see what would come from dislocation and disrupted custom. Answer: severe irritability.

  12

  WITHOUT ever getting out of my rig the next morning, I left bleak Danbury for blue highway 77 and what is left of the Wisconsin Northwoods. West of Minong, at a small lake, I packed a knapsack, pulled on a swimsuit, and went up the shore to a wooded inlet for a cold, brief swim with a bar of Ivory (“It floats”) to scrub out everything that wasn’t me.

  I built a little fire, cut some sausage, and put it in the skillet with two eggs. The pine popped and snapped in the flames, the sausage hissed like serpents, the warm air moved, and I was washed. Nights like last night made for mornings like this. I could stay on the road forever.

  Scouring the skillet with wet sand, I heard a branch crunch behind me. I turned and stepped back into the lake. At the treeline stood a man in a fringed buckskin coat and a leather hat pulled low. An open knife glinted in his left hand. I was armed with a collapsible Boy Scout skillet. He raised his arm, the knife flashing again.

  “Been watching you,” she said. The knife was the cellophane of a Hostess Ding Dong. “Camping here?”

  “You startled me to hell.” I stepped out of the lake. “Want some coffee?”

  “It makes my arms break out.” She spoke fast and her movements were jittery. Pushing back her hat, she scratched a forehead swollen with mosquito bites.

  “Did you sleep in the woods last night?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”

  “You’ve got bites.” I folded the skillet and put it away as she took a can of Pepsi-Cola from her backpack, opened it, and flipped the tab in the lake. “Fish swallow those tabs and cut their guts open.”

  “So who cares? Are you some big environmentalist?”

  I picked up my gear. A perfect morning disappearing before a bug-bitten teenybopper. I doused the fire.

  “Like I was into ecology,” she said, “but it got boring.” She looked uneasy. “You leaving?”

  “Moving on.” I hiked to the truck, washed the windshield, did a U-turn, and there she stood along the highway. Now she looked frightened.

  “Hey! Sir! Going toward Green Bay?”

  “So who cares?” I drove off, turned around at the top of the hill, and came back. She stood there, a pitiful mess of mosquito bites and stringy hair. “Are you asking for a lift?”

  “I guess.” She was frightened, all right.

  “Do you live in Green Bay?” She shook her head. “Look, I’m not picking up some teenage roadie unless I know what you’re doing.” I kept checking the rearview mirror. “Where do you live?”

  “Eau Claire.” She was trying not to cry.

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Come on, man!” I put the truck in gear. Her face red with rage, she screamed, “I split!”

  “What’s in Green Bay?”

  She took a few steps up the road. “Christ! I don’t need a ride this bad!”

  “And I don’t need your trouble.” I put the van in gear again.

  Through gritted teeth she said, “My grandmother’s in Green Bay!”

  I checked the rearview mirror again. The truth was I thought she might be the bait on some scam. “Hey!” she said. “I’m the one’s supposed to be scared.”

  “Don’t know how far I’m going.”

  “So who cares?” She got in, and I couldn’t prevent one more glance at the mirror. PARENTS FILE CHARGES AGAINST UNEMPLOYED MAN.

  Her name was something like Stacie McDougald, and she had run away two days earlier with another girl who returned home by bus after the first night. Stacie then hitched a ride with a boy who brought her down the back road.

  “He never said anything, but when he stopped by the lake I got scared and ran. He looked for me in the woods and stuff, but the mosquitoes were like real terrible, so he gave up.”

  She had hidden in the trees all night, eaten a couple of Ho Ho’s, and finally put her head in the knapsack to escape the very mosquitoes that had saved her.

  “Sorry my clothes are so gross.” She took a vial from her jacket. “Only three left.” Vacantly she stared at the vial, shook out a pill, and swallowed it with a swig of Pepsi.

  “What’s the pill?”

  “Gotta take them. I’m hyperactive. They’re Ludes.”

  The vial had no label. “Prescribed?”

  “Oh, sort of. Like they used to be. I took Ritalin when I was little.”

  “Have you eaten anything besides the kiddie junk and Quaaludes?”

  “If I eat too much I get gross and fat.”

  East of Hayward we drove into resort country where billboards and small, tacky motels lined the highway. The pavement rose and dropped, up and down, and the van rode like a cockboat. The girl fell asleep. At Park Falls, I stopped for gas. She woke up and disappeared into the restroom with her backpack. She came out wearing clean clothes, her long blonde hair wet and tied behind. Except for the insect bites, her face was smooth and bland and of an unnatural pallor like the underside of an arm. I suggested she telephone her grandmother, but she refused. At Fifield we went east toward Minocqua. The Chequamegon Forest was trees and sandy soil blooming with trillium. “Can you tell me why you took off?”

  “I guess. I mean, so who cares?”

  She opened another can of warm Pepsi and—furtively—took another pill, this one from a labeled bottle. Boasting of Ritalin and Quaaludes, she hid her Midol.

  “Angus lost his ass in a taco franchise and things got really bad at home. I mean, you know. The business got worse, and me and Kevin started catching hell worse.”

  “Who’s Angus and Kevin?”

  “Black Angus is my dad. Kevin’s my brother. Anyway, like Angus was losing it. I mean, he’d always find an excuse to beat up on us like maybe a low grade or using a buttertub lid for a Frisbee in the house, so he’d punch us because he was losing his ass. Like, Kevin’s real smart. I mean, he aced everything. If he messed up a test, Angus would slap him around and pull his hair. Call him things like ‘donkey’ and ‘yellow belly.’ Anyway, the night his partners and him gave up the franchise, Black Angus’s face started twitching like it does when he’s tense. Mom told us to look like we were studying even if we weren’t. God. Two days later he was trying to parallel park, and Kevin didn’t tell him he was getting close to a pole, and Angus dented the fender. Right there in the shopping center, he starts yelling and slapping Kevin. Kevin didn’t say anything then, but he ran off that night. He’s in New York now, but I’m the only one that knows where. He’s into Hare Krishna.”

  “He’s had a hard go of it.”

  “When he was little, he fried out on acid. Then he found Jesus. He saw Jesus in a phone booth.”

  “
A telephone booth?”

  “He said Jesus was arguing with the operator for cutting off his call to God. He wrote last month and said he couldn’t communicate with me anymore unless I dumped my false values. I told him that was cool, but I don’t know what my false values are. I mean, like I’m not into first-promise rings.”

  We turned south onto U.S. 51 at Minocqua. Motels and restaurants gimmicked up like barns and country stores the whole way; most had gift shoppes and some had caged animals for petting. Then the supper clubs, each named after its owner. Looking for the land again, I turned east at Merrill.

  “I’m not going to ever get married,” the girl said. “But if I do, and Mom says don’t marry the guy, I won’t. I mean, if she’d listened to Nana, I’d be somebody else’s kid.”

  “Angus won’t be around forever.”

  “Nana says Angus never forgave us kids for changing his life. We kept him from becoming a famous writer. But Nana says it’s because he was too scared to really do it on his own. I mean, he can’t even get to work without Mom, but he likes people to call him Big Mac. It’s all bullshit. The only way he’s big is pushing little people around.”

  “He must have treated you fairly sometimes.”

  “Yeah? Like he calls us ‘hundred-thousand-dollar jerks’ because he read that’s what it costs to raise a kid. Or he calls us ‘unfeathered, two-legged arguments for abortion.’ Anything good we did, he played it up to make himself look good. Always himself. He’s got a drawing of himself dressed like Superman by his chair, and like all the time he lectures us for being conceited. He doesn’t know anything about us. Kevin’s not conceited—he hates himself.”

  “Time for lunch.” She didn’t hear me. She couldn’t get all the bane out.

  “Kevin used to call him Anus. I guess you know what that is. One night Anus heard him say it, and he slapped him around pretty bad. Later, Kevin was laying on his bed crying. Then he starts laughing. I got scared. I thought he was freaking out. I go, ‘What’s wrong?’ and Kevin goes, ‘I’m hungry.’ I go, ‘Jesus!’ I mean he had blood and stuff on his shirt. And he goes, ‘Yeah, I just had a Big Mac attack.’ God, we laughed.”

  While we were eating, she said, “Last year, when I started going out on dates alone, Angus would always say to me before the guy got there—this is gross—‘Just remember, a stiff prick has no conscience.’ He said that every time I went out. The other night when he said it, I screamed at him. I couldn’t take it anymore. I mean, it’s so sick. He started punching me with his thumb, and he told the guy I couldn’t go out. That was cool because the guy was kind’ve a nerd. I guess I finally got to where Kevin got. I split that night.”

  She nibbled a French fry, then said abruptly, “Hey! Can we change the subject? I mean, like what are you doing in Wisconsin?”

  I gave a half-minute outline.

  She looked at me absently and said, “Hmmm,” her curiosity easily satisfied. “If you took me on to Green Bay you could get the ferry across Lake Michigan. You wouldn’t have to drive through Chicago. Please?”

  I agreed to it although now I would be across Wisconsin without really seeing Wisconsin. Later, as we drove along state 29 through the moraine country of dairy farms and fine old barns, across the Embarrass River, it occurred to me that I had seen something of Wisconsin. What I hadn’t seen was the Wisconsin of my blue highway preconceptions. Little is so satisfying to the traveler as realizing he missed seeing what he assumed to be in a place before he went.

  At Green Bay the smell of Lake Michigan blew in strong. The girl directed me to her grandmother’s house. When we arrived, she became excited and jumped down and ran to the bungalow. Then she ran back to the truck.

  “Hey! What’s your name?” I told her. “Okay. Keep on truckin’.”

  Ghost Dancing seemed empty, and I was lonely as I was after every rider left who shared some miles. It would pass, but for a while the quiet always bothered me.

  Kewaunee, sitting on the eastern base of the peninsula that separates the inlet called Green Bay from the open lake, had a business district just a few feet above the water, with homes a hundred feet higher on sheer cliffs that dropped to the shore. It was as if someone had broken a mixing bowl in half, built a toy town in the bottom, and put little houses on the rim.

  At the ferry slip I checked the schedule. I didn’t want a night crossing, but I could take one at noon the next day. On a breakwater near where Father Marquette celebrated a mass in the seventeenth century, I ate a sandwich as killdeer made long glides down along the beach. I was quite alone.

  13

  THERE’S something to be said for banal conversation. After paying the grocery clerk for the yogurt, I commented, “It’s a fine day.”

  She smiled. “Anything else?”

  “That’s it, thanks. I’m taking the ferry today.”

  With a nod, she went back to stamping prices on aspirin bottles. I walked to the breakwater to eat breakfast. A man was fishing. “Any luck?”

  “None.”

  “What’re you fishing for?”

  “Perch.”

  “What’s your bait?”

  “Minnows.”

  And so on. When I ran out of questions, the exchange was over. Across the central North, conversations had been difficult to strike up. The people were polite but reserved; often they seemed afraid of appearing too inquisitive, while at other times they were simply too taciturn to exchange the banalities and clichés necessary to find a base for conversation.

  When I walked the North towns, people, wondering who the outsider was, would look at me; but as soon as I nodded they looked down, up, left, right, or turned around as if summoned by an invisible caller. “Stranger,” Whitman says, “if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?” I even tried my old stratagem of taking a picture of a blank wall just to give a passerby an excuse to stop and ask what I could possibly be photographing. Nothing breaks down suspicion about a stranger better than curiosity—except in the North; whatever works better there, I didn’t discover. The effect on me was that I felt more alone than I ever had in the desert. I wished for the South where any topic is worth at least a brief exchange. And so I went across the central North, seeing many people, but not often learning where our lives crossed common ground.

  At noon the ferry rocked Kewaunee with her air horns and pulled into the slip just as one had done since 1892. She was the three-hundred-sixty-foot Viking, built in 1925 and converted from steam to diesel-electric in 1965. The boat swallowed a batch of boxcars, a few automobiles, then Ghost Dancing, small against the big steel wheels of the railway cars. Pivoting like a compass needle, the Viking made a ninety-degree turn in the harbor, sailed past the stubby lighthouse, and cut a straight line over the smooth water toward Elberta, Michigan. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the water changed from occluded green to indigo.

  No one is pulling three-hundred-pound sturgeon out of Lake Michigan as the Indians once did, but municipal pollution and industrial contaminants have been reduced significantly since the sixties, and sport fishing is coming back; yet, levels of insecticides, PCB’s, and mercury are still too high to allow a resumption of commercial fishing.

  On the aft deck I took a seat and watched Wisconsin get smaller. I had long wondered whether all shorelines disappear on a clear day in the middle of Lake Michigan (the name means “big water”). I would soon find out. When the ferry had loaded at Kewaunee, an infestation of gnats and midges had swarmed in and with maddening accuracy whizzed into eyes and ears. But, once we were under way, thumb-sized flycatchers flew aboard and hopped and flitted and ran down the bugs. One bird alighted on the arm of my chair, cocked an eye at me, nipped a midge, wiggled its minuscule mustache, peeped, and flew to the next chair. I was guessing the number of gnats it took to fill a flycatcher’s belly, an organ that can’t be any larger than a pinto bean, when a man at the rail pulled an unshelled peanut from his pocket and set it on the deck to lure another bird. r />
  “The peanut’s almost as big as the bird,” I said.

  He just looked at me, his brown eyes shining like pocket-worn chestnuts, his head a creased, leathery bag that might have been dug from a Danish peat bog. The man took a seat and explained that flycatchers followed the ferry from shore to shore. “The peanut is a joke.” He lived in Muskegon and had been visiting a daughter in Menominee. Born in Bavaria, he immigrated to Detroit with his mother in the thirties. For a number of years he had operated a double-crank-toggle-fender-stamping press at Chrysler Motors. “She push a million pounds against steel to make the fenders. But the boom-boom-boom damage the hears.” He pulled his large, Buddha ears.

  There came a terrible clanging from below, and I said I hoped the boxcars hadn’t crushed my van. His eyes widened, and he said, “Boxcars? I tell you boxcars.” There followed a long, entangled tale, full of details about the old German rail system and about trout fishing.

  The essence, as I understood it, was this: Karl (he so called himself), a boy of fourteen, went fishing with a comrade. They caught four trout, but it took all day to do it. In the growing dusk, they chose to use the railway tracks as a shortcut home. The comrade had heard the route was easy if you weren’t frightened of trestles over four deep gorges. The boys soon came to the first bridge; hoping not to meet a train at mid-bridge they crossed as fast as they could. It was terrifying to look between the ties.

  “On the bridges,” he said, “was no place to go if train is coming.”

  Trying not to look down, they crossed the second one; the tracks went into the forest and came out again to the third gorge, deeper than the second; they crossed quickly and again went into the forest and out to the last bridge. By that time it was too dark to see even their feet.