Southwestern Homelands Read online

  It was a brave, happy time, most of all because I had a new love, Annick Smith, who has been my life’s companion from then until now. She’d just raised the money to produce a film called Heartland. So, riding a wave, Annick and I put the miss on St. Patrick’s Day. We headed south on Interstate 15, to Salt Lake City and the unknown but warm and welcoming Southwest.

  We made the five hundred miles to Salt Lake City by dark, and ate an elegant meal in the Cafe Santa Fe in Emigration Canyon, the food semi-exotic and far better than we were used to. We were absolutely and at last on the road. Thank you, Mister Kerouac, for your example.

  In southern Utah, below Cedar City on our way to St. George, after hours of traversing snowy March highlands, I-15 topped a long swale scattered with juniper trees. What the locals call Mormon Dixie—looming blue skies, a yellowish rather than gray landscape, exotic red rock canyons, warmth—opened out before and below us as if a curtain had been pulled.

  This was what we came to call The Gateway to the South. There lay the salty land where snow didn’t stick, where winter didn’t live. But what now? Zion National Park, with its red-rock walls, and sweet trail weaving through aspen beside the brook which becomes the Virgin River, was there at hand. But we didn’t go to Zion, not that trip. One thing we knew; we were headed Way Farther South.

  I wanted to go where snow was only a theory, where people had heard about it, where they loved the idea of snowmen but hadn’t actually had an opportunity to drive isolated highways into a blinding blizzard. I knew for sure that winter nights go on too long in Montana. I was looking for a place where the sun came up earlier and went down later.

  We wanted to be canny travelers but didn’t know how. We’d highlighted and underlined in a couple of guidebooks, but we hadn’t learned much beyond abstractions. We didn’t know why the Hopi and the Chiricahua Apache were different, or the difference between Sedona and Green Valley. We didn’t know why the skies before us were cloudless and likely to remain that way most of the time. We blundered but nevertheless had a swell time.

  Just into Arizona, hordes of girls in bright pinafores, yellow and green and pinkish red, seemed both happy and subdued as they traipsed hand in hand on clean streets in Colorado City, a town of multifamily homes where polygamy flourishes. Those children seemed to have emerged straight from a 1940s Judy Garland movie about the virtues of small-town life. Except they never started dancing and singing.

  On down the road, at Pipe Spring National Monument, the headquarters for what had been an enormous Mormon frontier ranch, we wandered through a stonework ranch house built to double as a fortress where settlers defended themselves with weapons. Slots through which rifles could be fired at invaders were built into the kitchen walls.

  South of Kanab, where so many Westerns were filmed, I had opened a long tradition of Utah speeding tickets. It seemed unjust. I’d been drifting and dreaming on an undulating highway built for velocity.

  At Jacob Lake, in the forested highlands of the Kaibab Plateau, the north entrance to the Grand Canyon National Park was drifted with snow and closed for winter. So I’ve never stood on the north edge of that abyss. Which, according to reputable testimony, is absolutely my loss.

  Page Stegner writes of hiking to Widforss Point in order to witness an “endless cacophony of buttes, buttresses, points, pyramids, terraces, and cathedrals soaring out of the ‘awesome cavity’ that defies narration.” Stegner says it would be easier to describe the excellent and complex wine he drank on the spot, and quotes Clarence Dutton, the earliest geologist to study the Kaibab and the canyon, who says, “All these attributes combine with infinite complexity to produce a whole which at first bewilders and at length overpowers.” What’s natural, of course, when studied closely, because of accumulated infinities, often produces that effect.

  But Annick and I plunged down to House Rock Valley (where people had lived in rooms fashioned under the sides of boulders), a flat which breaks off into the Marble Canyon of the Colorado. Above us the Vermilion Cliffs were a stone reef adrift in twilight ocher.

  On the narrow old highway bridge above Marble Canyon, high above the river, gazing into those stony darkening depths, I imagined leaping, falling into a dream of tumbling and tumbling. Here, the actual item—the clear possibility of simply jumping—and fantasy were juxtaposed. The invasion of reality, as someone said of Borges’s stories, by dream. Calm down, I told myself, look around, breathe.

  Give me that old rock and roll, the unbroken circle. All I had to do was vanish into breathing and seeing. This, a voice whispered, is it.

  But what? This is what? I didn’t know. Before me lay “timelessness,” if eternity is a thing, another gateway—but one I didn’t for sure want to enter. What to do? Get off that bridge. I was overstimulated—experiencing too much, seeing altogether too freshly. Enough with the proximity of psychic transitions. How about dinner?

  Solace took the form of a fisherman’s motel near the rim. There’s splendid trout fishing in the dozen miles below the otherwise abominable Glen Canyon Dam; deep water released from the reservoir is cold, and trout thrive. After a supper of baked trout and homemade macaroni-and-cheese served by a Navajo woman who sang a song in her own language as she brought us apple pie adorned with vanilla ice cream, I slept like a child.

  The next morning we breakfasted amid jolly fishermen, a crew of boasting, boisterous old boys and sixtyish sun-dark wives who seemed to be semipermanent local residents in a village of travel trailers. Then we drove down onto the alluvial fan where the Paria River emerges from the chambers of its fantasyland canyon to join the Colorado. We found another gateway.

  A sloping concrete launch ramp was thronging with adventurers—bronzed and sometimes profoundly cool young men and women in black skin-tight Lycra, and twitchy, dumpy midlife men and women with guidebooks, and lean knowing oldsters—all about to launch themselves onto the river. Fat men and weight lifters, very old aristocratic women—pilgrims, a carnival of river rats, both the experienced and the apprentice. The air rang with the clatter of aluminum on concrete and shouts and catcalls. Great gray motorized rafts and occasional one-person kayaks and six-seat rowing dories were being loaded for expeditions into the layered stone depths and lapping silences. Annick was deep into fantasies about running the Grand Canyon. Since then she’s gone twice, and will go again, given twenty minutes to prepare.

  But right then I was more interested in the story of John Doyle Lee, and his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which an entire wagon train was slaughtered. Lee had spent decades running his ferry across the Colorado, and his stone house and orchard are still there, just inland from the boat ramp.

  During the hard summer of 1857, a wagon train bound for southern California came down through the settlements of Utah, raiding gardens and herds, living off what food they could steal. This drove the Mormon settlers to ambush and kill all of them but those children too young to remember. Why, we wonder, this astonishing response?

  D. H. Lawrence wrote, “The savage America was conquered and subdued at the expense of instinctive and intuitive sympathy of the human soul. The fight was too brutal.” History tells us merciless stories about the costs of finding and taking over some promised land or another.

  After that terrifying afternoon, John Doyle Lee was sent by the Mormon Church to run the ferry deep in this canyon, the only viable place within two hundred miles to cross the big river. Lee lived there with his family until, two decades later, he was tried in Cedar City, taken to the site of the massacre, and shot by a firing squad. Among mature pear trees, I found a gray withered limb, carried it out, and keep it yet, to remind me of where we can be led by yearnings and true belief.

  Carrying my limb, I wandered to the trailhead where hikers can head up into the deep confines of the ribbonlike canyon carved by the Paria River. A lean midlife man in shorts and heavy-duty hiking boots was loading a worn backpack. Turned out he wrote guidebooks, and didn’t want much to do with greenhorns like me.
/>   “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Be careful.”

  “How long are you going to be gone?”

  “A few days. But I’m not gone.”

  Back in the car, on the road again, I couldn’t stop thinking about that man. He was deliberately seeking isolation. If I went, what would I find? Maybe silence, eternities, and myself among them, with no voices to listen to but the ones in my head. Was that a good idea? Maybe I’d emerge half-crazed and singing “Why don’t you love me like you used to do” in a loud way, having turned into one of those people who play the radio or CDs and talk on their cell phones and laugh constantly so as to fill the air with something besides what they’re thinking.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mutual Enterprise

  Discoveries were accumulating. In the summer of 1981 I was asked to write an essay about a fellow filming grizzly bears in Glacier National Park, a couple of hours north of Missoula, where I live. “Doug Peacock. He’ll be in the bar at the Belton Chalet at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  A couple of pilgrims had been killed by a grizzly bear at a campsite on the banks of St. Mary Creek, just outside the park. I said I didn’t know anything about grizzly bears.

  “Don’t worry about it. He’s the ace.”

  What kind of ace?

  “He’s the underground hero of grizzly bear stuff. He’ll take you right out there, to the bears, close up.”

  I said I didn’t want anything close-up to do with grizzlies. I mean, in theory, I understood that they were one of nature’s terrific ideas. “He’s the man,” the editor said. “The, get it, man.”

  “Peacock?” The bartender was a huge hippie-biker fellow named Dave. “Shit,” Dave said, “Peacock might not show up for days. Peacock might be dead.”

  Then the evening sun was setting over West Glacier. I’d been waiting for my appointment with Peacock for hours and I was close to very drunk.

  Just in time, through the screen door, there came voices, confusion, and the yapping of huge dogs. Big Dave the friendly bartender grinned at me. “Here’s your man,” he said. And there they came, in from their afternoon amid the forests and animals, seeking drink, the legendary men, Peacock and his old buddy from the Sonoran Desert, Edward Abbey, who helped make Peacock legendary while shaping his own legend.

  In The MonkeyWrench Gang, Abbey created a band of environmental outlaws engaged in war against greedy, dimwit, and use-oriented assholes who would tear up our holy earth in order to build another raft of tract houses, or a shopping center, or expand another airport, or sink a run of canyonland under water behind another hydroelectric dam. The character who came alive, the most energetic, imaginative, and revolutionary of them all, a reckless mountain-man intellectual dedicated to confounding the plans of those given to commodifying nature, from dambuilders to subdividers, was named George Hayduke, and he was modeled on Peacock.

  Hayduke became famous. All over the West, in the men’s rooms, written on walls amid the various scatologies, you’d find Hayduke lives. Which was most of what I knew about Peacock—Hayduke lives.

  What to say about the rest of that night? Abbey was tall, laconic, decent, profoundly ironic, and thoughtful. He was someone I watched, the acerbic celebrity with a handsome woman at his side. I studied Abbey because I was trying to understand how to handle myself as a writer and he was a model who turned out to be funny and ironic and not an acerbic celebrity. Most of all he was dedicated, another man willing to give over his life to what he loved. But what was that? My answers are freedom, vitality, openness, willingness—juices flowing in a country where things are obviously not what they are and visible except for the thousands of shared secrets. But that’s an abstract mouthful of the sort Abbey regarded as ridiculous. His opinions tended to focus on the specific. A thing I recall from that night in the Belton Chalet bar is Abbey on hydroelectric dams. “If citizens want power,” he said, “tell them to shut off their goddamned lights.” He could also get on your ass. At one point he eyed me and said, (I hear his old ghost now), whispering, “Did you ever try to write something you couldn’t take to the prom?”

  Peacock turned out to be rapid, insistent, a man so driven by his force of will and physical strength you might think he was of some other species, like, say, as some wags have said, the grizzly bear. But also, Doug was a fellow whose insights I came to value; he talked about Vietnam, working as a Green Beret medic. The killing and bloodiness, he said, made him crazy, as enough of it would make most of us crazy. He came home to find himself in a tent in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. A great black grizzly shared that territory; repeated sightings of that animal’s dignity brought him back from craziness. I took Peacock to be talking about consequence. Things matter.

  He said something to the effect that we can’t remake the whole world in our own image or we won’t have a damned thing but a world made in our own image, and that would be unworkably simple and partways dead. He said humans have to learn humility, and make allowance for otherness. We can kill everything which threatens us, we can defoliate all the jungles, but then we’d be alone. We can’t kill every cat who might come to live in our night. Firepower won’t save us. Humility might.

  What we ought to do, he said, think of it as an exercise in learning humility, of staying in touch with what we actually are, an animal like any other, making do, is preserve a lot of territory for wilderness and creatures like the grizzly. It was a big-talking night there in the Belton Chalet. I went home and told Annick I’d made some lifetime friends.

  But I didn’t really know how much of his line I’d bought until the next summer, when Peacock took Annick and me to a stifling hot tent-shaped room on the second floor of an A-frame near the entrance to West Glacier, and showed us his bear films—grizzlies eyeing Peacock and his camera from fifteen feet, bears in dark-water tarns in the high country of Glacier, at play and splashing like children, running as they so famously can, with stunning agility and speed, a hundred yards in thirty seconds, over cross-drifted tangles of downed timber.

  Fascinated by the insane risks involved in filming so intimately, I envied Peacock’s sense of purpose, his agenda, the fact that he woke up every morning, as a friend said, with his tools still in the tunnel. Peacock and Abbey were strengthened by their convictions, inclined to act out deep beliefs and let the devil pick up the pieces. I remembered eyeing a long-ago Gila monster, and gray whales surfacing beside an aluminum boat in the Golfo de California, and found that I was two people.

  One fellow was at ease in his life, settled in his prejudices. The other yearned to confidently name what he took to be sacred, and for large purposes. He was convinced the world ought to reinvent its political and economic contrivances, but to what point?

  One simple autobiographical thing became clear. As a child I rode intelligent horses named Moon and Snip and watched mallards and pintails and Canada geese flying north in rafts, one above the other, calling on a spring morning. This simple thing: Early in life I’d learned to revere nature, but I hadn’t acknowledged that fact in decades.

  When my one-or-two-in-a-hundred-years pal, Jim Crumley, who was teaching at the University of Texas–El Paso in 1982, invited me down to give a reading in February, I concocted the idea of spending the spring in the Southwest. I was sick of gray Montana skies and busting my ass on icy sidewalks, and I had landed a yearlong sabbatical with half-time pay from the University of Montana, so why not?

  Annick and I watched the Super Bowl in the bar of a Holiday Inn in Farmington, New Mexico, and then went off into light snow in the early evening. By dark the snow had turned into a blizzard. We were lucky to make the high desert town of Cuba, New Mexico. Even long-haul truckers were getting off the road. We got the last room in a sixth-rate motel with duck tape over the holes where some client had kicked in the door.

  William Eastlake lived for years in the hills outside Cuba, on what he called a starve-to-death ranch. It was there he wrote the novel called Portrait of an Ar
tist With Twenty-Six Horses. It’s both comically surrealist and as close to what I take to be Navajo sensibilities as anything written by anybody. An old man, preparing to die, says, “There is prosperity, joy and wit and wisdom in Navajo heaven.” I like to imagine Eastlake solacing himself with thoughts like that in the hills outside Cuba.

  But maybe I don’t understand Navajo sensibilities. An attempt to reproduce the mind-set of another culture may doom writers to what anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called “at best fiction.” Or it may be that Eastlake got it dead right. Maybe his New Mexico novels are masterworks, and prime to be rediscovered. Let’s hope so.

  Eastlake said Cuba was ultimately too isolated, and Navajo sensibilities, however much he admired them, were not his. They were way too far out-of-the-mainstream for a man who’d grown up in New Jersey and studied for years in Europe. Cuba, he said, drove him to dreams of breaking glass and wildness. Too much nowhere to go but out for the mail, too much distance and not enough spice of life. Too much grasping at straws.

  When I met him, in southeastern Oregon during the summer of 1969, Eastlake was theoretically teaching a two-week writing workshop in Bend. But he drifted away after only a few days. I don’t know that he returned. We went to Crater Lake, and he squinted and said, imitating some movie director he’d come to loath, “Scrub the island.”

  The next weekend we were in Eugene. Eastlake called the late, lamented Ken Kesey. He said they were pals. At Kesey’s house (the famous painted bus sat in a shed beside the barn) we lost track and then it was morning and I was somehow awake in a bed in the house where I belonged in Eugene. I didn’t see Eastlake again for more than a decade.

  Daylight in Cuba came up bright and windless and vividly cold, but we were on a warm patio in Santa Fe for lunch. Annick and I rented a casita uphill from the square, and after an evening nap we ambled into a dark dining room and sat before a fire and made a late meal on famous snacks—smoked salmon, Guaymas shrimp, hot brie with lingonberries, and the tentacles of deep-fried squid.