THE LAST SUMMER
This title comes from the date of a journey taken around the United States of America
in 1999, the last summer of the millennium. The idea originated with Cris
Yarboruogh, a fulltime photographer, then working for a Connecticut newspaper. Cris
wanted to break into freelance photography, so as to be able to work, on assignment,
for magazines such as National Geographic. His idea was to recruit a travel writer
then assemble a suitable portfolio of travel photographs and text. He put out a feeler
on a travel newsgroup where I noticed it and replied.
From the onset, I had no illusions that there could be any commercial benefit from
such and undertaking. What I saw was an opportunity for my son and I to really ‘see’
America, a country we had come to love by virtue of working on pipeline surveys in
Texas and Louisiana. Cris and I exchanged a great many emails concerning the
logistics of such an enterprise and in the course of that exchange came to better
understand each other’s viewpoints. What convinced me to allocate time for the
undertaking was Cris mentioning that Jack Kerouac was inspirational in the way he
tried to take photographs.
How to write needed much consideration as Cris Yarborough’s future employment
aspirations needed to be accommodated. I decided to write in a manner whereby
extracts could be taken from the text and used as individual travel articles or the whole
thing could be expanded into a travel book. I was therefore conscious that my efforts
might be read by others but considered that unlikely. The result was a compromise;
something written, ‘for myself’, as the thoughts unfolded but conscious that they may
be read by others.
New York to Chicago.
5.6.99.
Until recently I had no idea how many countries were involved in the First World
War. The term ‘world war’ had always seemed to be casting the net a bit too wide.
Now that I realise there were thirty-one separate countries involved, if the Ottoman
Empire counts as a country, it takes on a different perspective. Anyway, somehow or
other the world went mad and when the dust settled America had taken over from
Europe as the dominant world power. Out with the old and in with the new. It’s
something to do with evolution.
My father was born into that turmoil late in 1914. There is every chance he will see
out the century. I was born towards the end of 1945, after another period of seeming
insanity wherein the world tore itself to pieces. So superficially, my father and I
should be pretty similar and in some ways we are. But in reality there are
fundamental differences that belie the genetic relationship and to my mind they can be
attributed to the American writer Jack Kerouac. That could be too simple an
assumption but at this stage of the game it’s good enough for me.
1
In the summer of 1971 I found myself on the trans-Canadian highway, somewhere in
Northern Ontario, hitchhiking to Vancouver with seventy-five dollars in my pocket, a
toothbrush and a change of underclothes. A few weeks earlier I’d been the roadmanger for, in my opinion, Germany’s best rock band. As I waited by the roadside for
a likely looking vehicle to come along I was visited by a feeling of utter contentment
such that, for a brief mellow moment, it seemed that in all this great wide world there
was none so free as I. It was more than that. There was an inner conviction that in
some way I was a trailblazer, a trendsetter, that my lifestyle was one that others could
adopt to their infinite betterment. In reality the trendsetter, Jack Kerouac, had died
two years previously and I was just one of millions benefiting from his vision. So
worldly was my vision that I’d never even heard of him.
New Zealand was where I first discovered Jack Kerouac’s contribution to both
literature and the lifestyle of this century, now almost over. Therein lies the difference
between the father and the son; how they reacted to that decade of optimistic
enthusiasm, the sixties, when the times indeed were ‘a changing.’ That they were
changing for the better few of my generation doubted. We changed with them
willingly; confident the values that had twice turned the world into a slaughterhouse
had been recognized and forever rejected. The world belonged to the young and we to
the world. We were not to be confined within the confines of geography and
destructive nationalistic prejudice. It was a generation thing. Kerouac caused that in
some degree. To what degree is another matter.
I like talking to my father. I hope to still have it together as well as he at the same age.
He speaks with authority on a range of topics and his brain is still quick on the uptake.
He’s never been on an airplane. That’s the generation thing. His generation didn’t
travel - mine did. Jack Kerouac is part of that also.
On the Road was more than a good book; it was a book that caused a lot to happen.
So did the war. But whatever disruptions cause us to travel, or to settle, my dad still
lives a couple of miles from where he was born and I’m off to America. There was no
air travel for his generation. The way out was the merchant navy or the thumb. Jack
Kerouac did both and made it sound so attractive that a lot of young Americans tried it
and agreed. Eventually word got around. Eventually I tried it too. I hitched-hiked
down the highway into another lifestyle and never really came back.
Kerouac’s grave is close to John F. Kennedy airport; another making a mark as the
sixties got rolling. Or was it rock and rolling? For ‘beat generation’ Jack it was
Swing & Bebop before the Rock and Roll. Pity he went out so early but he knew
what he was doing and he did it well. His grave seems an appropriate place to start
seeing America, thirty years down the road from when he died.
13.6.99.
Then two weeks before Louis and I were due to fly at last to the Big Apple the letter
came. It was written in long hand, naturally, because my sister refuses, in the nicest
possible way, to be dragged into the twentieth century. A modern computer sits the
width of a wall away from her bedroom but her life is too full to learn how to use it.
2
Well, that’s her story. She passed her driving test in 1977 then started to drive in
1999. That’s concession enough for this century as far as she is concerned. At sixtythree she’s entitled to her opinion.
The letter had originally been typewritten sixty-five years previously by our great aunt
Cecily. Neither my sister nor I had ever seen her. She’d married a farm owner,
brother of a Catholic priest, but that union produced no offspring. The letter was
addressed to a younger sister, our grandmother, who gave birth to eight. This is what
it said.
29 March 1934
Dear Helen
The Gaskells came over with the Gerards as their vassals when William the
Conqueror invaded England in 1066. Living in Ashton today are the descendants of
two other families who came over from Normandy, the Lowes and the Roses. The
Gerards, in return for their services to William the Conqueror, were awarded great
tracts of land in Lancashire between Wigan and Warrington, two ancient Saxon
towns. The Gaskells, Lowes & Roses would have been their men-at-arms. In return
for services they would have been granted smaller tracts of land.
The Gaskells became yeoman farmers
on the Gerard estates. I have heard our
father talk of his grandfather William
Gaskell & grandmother Helen Gaskell
who lived at Low Bank Farm, Ashton.
They had two sons, John & James.
James was our grandfather. He had a
farm of his own, ‘the Greenhalges’ in
North Ashton.
He married Cecily
Burgess, our grandmother. They had a
large family of 12 sons and 2 daughters.
Three sons died in infancy. Our father
used to tell me that our grandfather
objected to being forced to pay tithe to
support the Protestant clergy so he sold
his farm and took his family to America,
except Uncle William who was at Ushaw
College, Durham, studying for the
priesthood. Uncle Will died soon after
his ordination. He was attending the
sick when typhus fever was raging at
Seaham Harbour, Durham. He caught the fever and died in 1865. I am very proud of
him. Our father came back to England in 1875 and married our mother. They were
lovers before Father went to America.
Our grandmother, Cecily Burgess, was a daughter of one of the younger branches of
the Burgess’s who were smaller gentry and came from near Lancaster. They were
3
staunch Catholics and during the penal days came to Bryn to be under the protection
of the Gerards, one of the leading Catholic families of the country. In the course of
the years, when the penal laws were relaxed, the elder branch of the Burgess family
went back to their home near Lancaster whilst the younger branch remained in Bryn.
The Burgess’s were staunch Catholics. To this day a great treasure, ‘the Martyrs
Alter, is in the possession of Mrs. Clarkson, of Bolton-le-Sands, near Lancashire.
This lady is the direct descendant of the eldest branch of the Burgess’s and a
kinswoman of ours. She has a son, a priest. Father Baybutt, my brother in law,
knows him well and has often talked about this altar. I have never seen it but have
seen a photo of it. It’s an oak cupboard with a concealed alter on which many
Lancashire priests, including the martyrs Father Edmund Campion and Father
Edmund Arrowsmith, offered mass in the dead of night in the penal days…
Signed by Cecily A Baybutt nee Gaskell. 29/3/1934.
So, as the grey wet days of English Spring lengthened towards the first day of
Summer, I discovered, for the first time, that my great, great grandparents, and maybe
ten of their children, went to America some time around 1860. Maybe one or more of
them had listened to the Gettysburg Address. Maybe they arrived soon afterwards.
But whenever it was they must have been caught up in the civil war and those were
interesting times. All I could do then was speculate. My great grandfather apparently
came back fifteen years or so later because he loved the girl he’d left behind. I could
relate to that. Few people my age couldn’t. Love is all you need the Beatles taught us
and they were right. But to cross the Atlantic alone in 1875 was a different
proposition to our journey the opposite direction one hundred and twenty four years
later. No matter the tribulations, he’d overcome them, then for twenty-eight years
he’d been with his woman and brought four daughters into the world. He died aged
69, on the second of May 1908, as the Civil War was fading in his memory and the
First World War was looming on the horizon. Now suddenly, out of left field, as my
newly acquired cousins would probably say, somewhere in America there were
generations of relatives whose ancestry could be traced back to 1066. I wondered if I
could find them.
18.6.99.
The old man has his routine well in place by now; at eighty-five, he should have. He
gets up late, makes his own breakfast then reads the paper. Late afternoon he walks
up the road to the pub. Like a well oiled machine he arrives back as dinner hits the
table then goes to bed for a while before getting up if there's football on the television.
The old girl has a different routine. After sixty- four years of marriage there’s not a
lot to talk about so she’s mostly out when he is in and when he’s out she cooks dinner.
I drop round to chat with my dad, late afternoons, before his daily excursion for a
beer. We watch boxing videos and chat about the old days and the folks that filled
them but now are gone.
"His mother drowned herself in the marl pits and his brother Tommy did as well. But
that was ages after. I never knew the mother but Jack and me were about he same age.
Tommy was a few years older. He never was quite with it, Tommy. One of those the
4
kids were frightened of. You know that house near where your aunt lives? That’s
where those Swifts came from"
We were trying to establish lineage where surnames are few and generations many.
My dad is clued up on local genealogy. All the old folk are.
"When you go down the hill and those old stone cottages on the left then there’s a gap
then that big house that faces the other direction. Well the Mellings lived in this end
nearest the road and the Swifts lived in the other. Where the Mellings lived was only
one up one down and they were a big family, at least ten of them. The Swift’s place
was better, more rooms, three bedrooms I think but I never went upstairs. There were
six brothers and two sisters but they were better off because the old man sank the shaft
at Brown Heath Colliery and the other in Tanner’s Wood that linked up with it. So he
always had an under manager’s job at the pit. They were better off than most of us.
Old Melling worked when he could, sometimes at the pit or the farm or sometimes on
the coal wagon, sometimes on the dole. You had to take work where you found it."
Then he paused a while, thinking back to his childhood.
"The women didn’t work them days did they?" I ventured eventually, knowing they
did but wanting to keep him going.
"Not down the pit, well not round here anyway. They worked on the pit brow picking
the shale out of the coal. Some of the Melling girls as well. Then they all used to ride
home on top of the coal wagon."
He laughed then, at some memory he did not want to share with me. In that moment I
pictured the horse-drawn wagon with its cargo of grimy girls sitting on the coal,
taunting the blustering adolescent boy who became my father. He smiled softly and
continued.
"There was a wash house behind the house that both families shared. They’ve turned
it into a garage now. Then a family moved in there as well, in just one room. There
were about six of them. You’d wonder how they managed. There was no baths or
nothing them days. And the Parrs, you know the Parrs, they lived in that first cottage
going back up Long Fold. That was just one up one down and there were at least ten
kids there as well."
He paused again, frowning slightly, so quick this time with the prompting question,
"Where did they all sleep?"
"I don’t know; on the floor - anywhere. Only one of them was musical; you know,
could play an instrument. That was Dave Parr, one of the brothers. He could play a
ukulele. You never saw him without it, used to take it everywhere with him. We all
called him Ukulele Dave."
5
Then he smiled again, his memories out in the street, away from the abject, one up one
down poverty of rural working class England.
"All the girls could sing, you know, harmonise. They were Methodists. Old Hugh
Parr from the Methodists Church, he was their uncle but those Parrs lived up by the
old smithy. It’s gone now," he added needlessly because even I knew that. The
smithy was still there when I was a baby.
"Women had it tough those days. They were just slaves. I don’t think my mother
ever went out, not that I can remember. We kids did all the shopping."
Then he started making moves to leave so I left him to it. He would lock the two up,
two down, pre-war, semi detached council house on his way out. He’s very security
conscious. Somewhere out there in the rain my mother would be walking home with
the shopping. She is pretty fit for eighty-two.
19.6.99.
Today the Royal Wedding, tomorrow Australia v Pakistan for the cricket World Cup.
We’ll miss the game but caught the semi-final, reckoned by most to be the best game
of one-day cricket that was ever played. The taxi and I arrived together at 1.45
p.m.with South Africa padded up for batting. My old man was ready with Louis
hovering in attendance, a timing thing. On the way my father pointed out the mansion
his mother was raised in. For the first time in my life I realised the enormity of the
gulf my grandmother crossed to marry a miner. It may have been a wider gulf than
the Atlantic for her father.
Jack was waiting at the door. He’d last seen his cousin, my father, forty-six years
before in the Brown Cow. Now he was too old to ride the bicycle. I wasn’t. By
bicycle I’d arrived and traced the remaining two of ten children born to the industrial
machine of Victorian England. Their father had been a boss at the mighty Vulcan
Works where the steam trains of the English Empire were created. Their mother has
been eldest of the daughters of James Gaskell.
After the smiles and handshakes at the doorway Jack took my father through to the
tiny lounge to meet his eighty-nine year old cousin Janie, ending a separation of
seventy-one years. We stayed an hour. Father’s routine does not allow for much
improvisation. The obligatory cup of tea, that English riposte to every eventuality, the
confirmation of family detail - who was living and who was dead - then the taxi came
back before father required the toilet. We got him back to the club as Shane Warne
began his second over. Eight balls later he’d taken three wickets for no runs and
bowled himself into Australian legend. How fortunate to have lived in Australia when
they had a decent cricket team.
20.6.99.
Peter drove over from Yorkshire to see us off. It did not seem so long ago that he
walked off the plane in northern Queensland and I failed to recognise the first relative
to cross my path for twenty years. That was four years ago. He’d flown across the
6
world to go fishing but that first marlin hooked him deeper than he’d hooked it. It
opened new doors in his imagination.
[The appeal is in the state of mind induced by hours
of inactivity, lulled by the throb of the motors and
the rhythm of the sea. In a way it is like being on a
train with an extra dimension of movement. The
narrow visual hypnotism of landscape passing by a
window is replaced with an inverted bowl of sea,
sky and sunshine, so bright in can be painful. The
sun rising from then setting back into the sea marks
time. It is being at the centre, between air and
water, hot and cold infinity, blue in all directions,
with the continuous unpredictability of nature.
Suddenly, like a shooting star invading the silent
night, a reel screams, dragging the mind back from
languid contemplation to super awareness with an
overdose of pure adrenaline. Game fishing is
luxuriating in the beauty of nature whilst accepting
its danger as the price for being there. It is
detachment with involvement, stepping outside of
reality whilst being totally immersed at the same time.]
Isn’t everything?
He’d brought a pile of promotional photos to show us, of marlin, game-boats and the
purple-blue waters beyond the Great Barrier Reef. ‘Saltwater Safaris’ is the way he’s
going and we’ll look for contacts while we’re in America. He stayed the night then
dropped us off at Manchester Airport in good time for the plane. Got myself Paddy
Clark ha ha ha to be mesmerised by on the flight. The Roddy Doyle appreciation
society - count me in.
There must have been a time when air travel had glamour but now it’s hard to find it
in the main cabin. Maybe it’s all up front in first class. The ordeal ended at JFK
where Cris was waiting and he had us out of there in quick time. By then I was falling
asleep so those initial impressions were hazy. We caught a glimpse of the New York
skyline as we crossed the White Horse Bridge, heading north on highway 95. The
Empire State Building marked the spot for a last fling somewhere in the future before
flying back east across the grey Atlantic. A kamikaze drive through New York
commuter traffic, then off the highway onto the quiet country roads of Connecticut
and on to Terryville where Cris conceived the plan.
21.6.99.
Cris was all but ready but not quite. Just little things needed attention. More than one
hundred rolls of film were to be delivered next day, Tuesday, then we were hitting the
road. The tires on the jeep needed changing around, there were odds and sods to buy
7
for the journey, the computers needed taking care of and that was the main thing. The
laptop was to be our workshop and our chief means of communication.
Downloading and testing his web page took hours. It’s a big web page. Setting up the
e-mail facility was comparatively quicker but the fine-tuning had to evolve in time, as
do most things electronic now blossoming along the information highway. Who
would have thought it? Certainly not the founding father of Terryville, a watchmaker,
Eli Terry, commemorated on the gate of the tiny cemetery where dates on fading
gravestones reach back to the early eighteen hundreds.
It was a pleasant day. It was pleasant sitting on the porch watching the chipmunk take
food at arms length, the gray squirrels further out beneath the maple trees, the rabbits
more cautious on the periphery, where sunlight slanted down through the branches.
We drove beyond Hartford looking for an adapter for the scanner, bought a sleeping
bag and phoned England for news of the cricket. We had a sending-off dinner across
the street with Cris’s in-laws, good food, good people and good company. We messed
around with the software until brain-dead, saw the Knicks take the Spurs in game
three of the NBA finals and slept that last evening in Connecticut, almost ready for the
off.
22.6.99.
We leave under a brilliant blue sky just after midday, Cris’s wife and in-laws waving
in the distance. A combination of jet lag and the siesta feeling has me snuggled down
in the baggage gazing at the sky. The enormity of it! And behind the blue the
blackness of that galactic void that waits for all of us. Up ahead the open road winds
on into the vastness of America. There’s one last thing to do before we start this trip
in earnest.
The graveyard at Lowell in the
stilled afternoon silence, the light
under the trees intoxicating, and the
tiny tableau of Kerouac’s restingplace. Under a stone, placed with
reverence, a message: Savagely
grasping, groping, gyrating for that
ultimately insatiable act which was
once a pure outright testimony of
my immortal desperation. I love
you Jack. Kate Tritley. I love the
life I live and I live the life I love!
It seems an appropriate epitaph. It seems he hasn’t been forgotten. A few empty beer
bottles are placed reverently among the flowers: symbols of homage to the inspirer of
an entire generation. When this century is reviewed what will outshine the aspirations
of the sixties and who was more instrumental in the formulation of those inspirations
than Jack Kerouac? Placing my hand on the gravestone I invite his spirit to join us for
the ride.
8
23.6.99.
Waking up sliding down a cresting Bondi wave, the salt sparkle in my mouth, sad in
the realisation that its gone forever, into the half light of a Fort Dummer morning with
strange yet familiar birdcalls heralding the coming dawn. Where once in childhood
such a wakening would need a reconstruction of past events to put me in this foreign
bed-spot, now the years have blurred the need to make anywhere a home place. It’s
all the same no matter where and those unfamiliar birdcalls are a familiar
phenomenon.
In a clearing, looking up through a tunnel in the branches at remaining night stars as
Cris awakes, back sore from the hard earth still unfamiliar, where forty-three British
soldiers and twelve Mohawk Indians manned Vermont’s first settlement, under oak,
beech, birch and maple, back in 1774. Then with jeep repacked we obey the morning
coffee ritual of this wonderful America, on the outskirts of Brattleboro, with our faces
pointing west. Two plate sized cookies each, still warm from baking, for Louis and I,
remembering the Anzac biscuits of Australia on the road to Mt. Isa not so long ago.
[What can I say about Mt. Isa? It is desert country. They mine Copper, Silver, Lead
& Zinc, deep under ground, from ore bearing seams spreading out for hundreds of
miles. It’s a tough town full of tough people. There is one huge chimney belching out
the fumes from the smelter, mostly dust I imagine. It causes amazing sunsets.
Imagine a flat desert landscape without a cloud in the sky. Nothing to break the
horizon except the chimney and a spreading plume through which the light defuses
into a brilliant tangerine band below the deepening blue of an evening sky; kingfisher
colours. It is beautiful in the manner of Japanese watercolour landscapes; a stark
uncluttered fore ground against a vivid pastel backdrop.]
Cris eats a muffin so sweet to his taste buds that he offers a piece for perusal.
_ Here try this.
_ No thank you.
Cold but protected with zipped up jacket, Ben Webster’s sweet saxophone warbling in
the background, we climb Green Mountain to look across to Massachusetts, a sea of
green waves undulating forever to soft haze horizon at the lip of the world. The sound
of that saxophone, poignant on the day’s crisp wakening, takes me away then brings
me back but how I cannot fathom. Funny how music does that, and not only music,
the explanation is beyond my words.
[It's half past four. We are already an hour and a half behind schedule and we are not
yet in Birmingham, not by a long chalk. Only a minor miracle will give me any
chance of contacting with Eurobus in London - not one I'm counting on. Looking
forward, this complication can only get more problematic. I’ll have to decide soon
whether or not of leave the bus, when it eventually gets into Birmingham, or to solder
on. At this moment, leaving seems the only option - not a pleasing prospect. Need I
add it's raining? Starting now I'm fishing around for an alternative. Perhaps, if I call
9
Aunt Doris to get the number of Aunt Edna, a port in the storm might be forthcoming.
That feels like the best eventuality. Listening to the commentary, between the bus
driver and his base, it's obvious that traffic from London has been arriving hours late
into Birmingham. Even if Eurobus could be persuaded to wait for my arrival we’d
arrive too late anyway. Finding a B&B in Birmingham in the pouring rain - not a
thrilling prospect. It looks like a long night ahead. Some days are diamond: some
days are stone.
We arrive in Birmingham bus station same time we’re due in London. Seas of frantic
faces, mostly coloured, then out of this anger into the grey soup of a dreary English
Spring. Better it seems to opt for adventure, uncertainty and a possible late seat to
Amsterdam than face a night with the obscure relatives whose threshold I've never
crossed in all my wondering. To be stranded in a city - make it Amsterdam before
Birmingham any day. So on into the unknown, as darkness draws on this congested
Motorway and forlorn church spires pierce the darkening cloud cover, letting out the
rain.
The blues ain't nothing but a cold, grey day. (Duke Ellington)
Victoria bus station, maybe a ten thirty last chance; the last fandango of a system
stretched to breaking point. More by luck than good judgement a seat in a sardine-tin
of mixed humanity, ever watchful of each other, to the channel tunnel mouth where
Big Ron the driver thinks we will make Amsterdam in time for the previously missed
Hanover connection. Just after midnight, a phone call catches McGillivray as he
walks in through the door, then on our weary way through the tunnel (once
experienced one time too many), fitful sleep to wonderful Amsterdam.
Morning comes like the turning on of a light. The Amstel bus station, small, warm
and friendly; the pressure of Victoria now a bad memory across the channel. Along
now uncluttered autobahns though a wider, ordered landscape of rural tranquillity with
room to stretch one's legs and dream in sunlight. Buddy Rich on the headphones,
reading of Jean Goldkette, Fletcher Henderson, & how Jabbo Smith took on Louis
Armstrong at the Roseland in front of a crowd of two thousand when jazz was in its
infancy. Jim McGillivray would know all about that. He would know about the night
Jelly Roll Morton got wiped out by the king of Harlem stride piano, James P Johnson
and that night of magic legend when Coleman Hawkins cut Lester Young at Nightsy
Johnson’s joint with Lady Day on stage. On to Hanover where we see each other
across fifty yards of German bus station and twenty-eight eventful years.
Two days later, with Ben Webster's sax warbling melodiously in the background, we
try to piece together the course of those years. He has remained throughout a
professional musician and, like most musicians, plied his trade in many different
ensembles. He left ‘Epitaph,’ then the best band in Germany, in 71, soon after I'd hit
the road myself, joined the pioneering Udo Lindenberg until 72, then, together with
guitarist Tom Kretchmer, put together 'Gateway Driver' under the management of
Werner Kuhls. When the advance on the recording contract went astray in 74 Jim quit
music in disgust and moved into the country, fifty kilometres south of Bremen, to
raise two Goshawks and two Buzzards from small handfuls of feathers to maturity.
10
The drum kit stood gathering cobwebs with a cat living in one bass drum and a rabbit
in the other. The nearest village was two and a half kilometres away. Ten kilometres
across the moors at Graue, a schoolhouse where two classrooms were used for
practice and a meeting spot for musicians. It was there that the great jazz guitarist
Toto Blanke rescued Jim from the life of a hermit. He turned up one day in 75
looking for a drummer and would not be denied. So Jim released his now mature
birds, took wing himself, and joined Toto Blanke's Electric Circus on tour in France,
Italy and Sicily. Back in Germany he rejoined ‘Epitaph’ for awhile with Cliff
Jackson, Bernd Kolbe and Klaus Walz then went to Hong Kong and Singapore with
Toto's band, which included Joachim Kuhn on piano. Jazz had always been Jim's first
love, starting on oil drums and cardboard boxes in 1965. Somewhere along the line
he’d converted me.
Back in Hanover, working as a studio musician, he put together another band,
'Rocking Horse Manure' and while playing gigs was approached by Achim Kirschning
who had seen ‘Gateway Driver’ backing ‘Soft Machine’ with the jazz icon Allan
Halsworth. Achim needed a drummer and together they formed 'Serene'. That was in
77. They made the LP named after the group at the Horus Sound Studios in Hanover
and there, Frank Bornema, who owned the studio, persuaded Jim to join 'Eloy'. It was
a subtle seduction. Frank got Jim to write lyrics for a single, due for release in
Canada, then talked him into playing with Eloy, who already had six LPs on the
market. His playing for two bands caused tension - the respective leaders were old
friends - but a professional musician has to eat and takes work as he finds it.
With Eloy Jim recorded and wrote lyrics for the LP 'Colours' then went on tour with
them in 1980. Small print in the contract, which allowed Frank to deduct expenses off
the top, caused problems such that after writing lyrics for and recording a further LP
'Planets' Jim quit 'Eloy'. It wasn't a cordial break-up. Shortly before the 81 tour to
Greece got underway Jim refused to leave unless Frank signed a document releasing
him from future contractual obligations. Not able to find a replacement drummer at
such short notice there was nothing Frank could do but agree.
Music in its presentation to the public was changing. It always has and it always will.
Hans Lampe, a competent businessman who’d assisted with the contractual
difficulties, found work for Jim around Hanover with his dance band. It was work but
it wasn't jazz. Next off the rank was ‘Bronx’, started in 83 and this band toured Ibiza
and Majorca until 87. In addition to these tours there was work with the dance-band,
studio work and lyric writing. Then came the rock ballet, ‘Faust.’ The original idea
belonged to Jurgen Rosenthal, a former drummer with ‘Eloy’. Together with other
former ‘Eloy’ members and vocalist Kalle Bohsel, the sensation rock ballet took shape
over the next eight months and, in conjunction with the Polish State Ballet, opened in
Lodz in 1986. For the next two years the show went on the road, mostly in Germany.
As he talked about those days, with the CD from the musical playing in the
background, the confirmation that the musicians always get screwed was still evident.
It had been that way in my time too. It will probably always be that way. The
producers have the small print such that in the end they get the icing and the musicians
get the crumbs. In time 'Faust' was being performed with second rate dancers to
11
recorded music and the boys in the band where looking for alternative income. Kalle
and Jim had arranged the score for 'Faust' and become friends in the process.
Together they formed the band 'Destiny' and after playing gigs throughout 1989 made
an LP of the same name. When Kalle moved his recording studios to Celle in 90 Jim
moved with him. His love life was getting complicated. His life has always been
complicated. He’s a complicated man is Jim McGillivray.
As he speaks, trying to put events into some sort of chronological sequence, Jim
constantly digs out recordings from his collection and continues the musical education
he began some thirty years before. He introduces me to Dave Sanborn on sax,
guitarist Bret Mason and the tragic trumpet player Cliff Brown. He plays Ben
Webster together with Coleman Hawkins to underline the differences in their tones.
In return I give him glimpses of my wanderings. But for both of us it’s a scan through
a few pages from a volume of experience that gives just an outline for the imagination
to build upon. In the end we give up and just enjoy each other’s company. We tour
around the surrounding countryside, find the now restored building were Jim raised
the birds of prey and wander together through medieval streets of picture postcard
Germany. When he drops me at the bus station, on his way to Prague, it’s a
confirmation that real friendship, like real music, evolves within the steady march
time.]
On into another day’s dawning. A man, his face a walnut, hitching into Bennington,
sad that we stop but have no room to offer. Cris thinking to phone a breakdown
service but this man’s feet are his vehicle and he waves us onward through forested
Vermont.
After Albany the forests change to farmlands, the earth adapting to the coaxing hand
of man. Along highway 20 fading roadside businesses slowly dying, left adrift on
progress mud flats, stranded as newer Interstate 90 diverts the lifeblood traffic west to
Buffalo and beyond. The Petrified Creatures Museum squatting on the Nedrow
Formation, a shale bed, Upper Onondoga period, where once was the bottom of the
Devonian Sea. Everything is for sale including the business; another victim of
evolution.
Inside the treasure house an Australian clamshell fossilised into white opal that Stella,
the kind lady proprietor, holds in her hand for me to take a photo. Cris takes photos of
me taking photos and Louis smiles, content in power of youth as the old ones run the
race he’s just beginning. His time will come. There’s no hurry. He presses the button
and a recorded voice recalls a time, three hundred million years ago, when not a
creature stirred on earth. They were all in the sea. Then he, the palaeontologist, the
man of science, the disciple of neo-Darwinism, his voice a synopsis of all history’s
accrued knowledge, bows to culture, as all of us must, by saying…
_ If the theory of evolution is correct.
The oldest fossil of any vertebrate yet discovered came from the rock formation we’re
standing on right here in New York State. It was a primitive fish. If the theory of
evolution is correct indeed and creation is not something else’s afterthought, then the
12
forefather of amphibians, reptiles, birds, insects, mammals and ultimately us, crawled
out of the sea some place close to New York City. Now I know my relatives are
Yankees I’ll go along with that.
The long haul. All across New York State on highway 20. Slowly the cultivation
between towns more obvious, the river bridges wide, the Eire Canal unnoticed. Louis
goes to fill a water bottle across the hot cement to Wal-Mart but no machine. From
the tape deck an Irish ballad - Sam Hall. Nat wanted it sung over his grave. Drank
himself to death’s doorstep in the long years of my absence then sat down in the rain
and perished at the age of fifty-three. But first to learn the words first heard that night
held in his memory. His brother, reluctant to tape me this copy, yielded eventually
when no wouldn’t do for an answer. Now across this hot American small town gas
station parking lot float sad words of no significance. Except to me.
For even the best of friends must part, so must I.
Then as the day falls we turn the corner where Buffalo sits under a Turner sunset,
muted orange through the high haze above Lake Erie. South now heading down to
Cleveland, laughing as the day ends and the stars begin to shine.
24.6.99.
We leave Cleveland in near perfect weather to the sound of Meat Loaf and profanity
on the CB radio. Now Cris has got the hang of it, that device is becoming
indispensable. He hasn’t yet developed the southern draw that seems to be mandatory
for these denizens of CB air space. Chicago seems but a short charge down the
highway compared to yesterday’s meandering. I’m in the back seat. Riding the 99
Jeep Wrangler soft-top with the roof down is like being on a motorbike. In a gas
station the accent betrays me as a foreigner. Randy shakes my hand.
_ You English? I’ve been there. Heathrow sure is a big airport. They told me I’d
only two hours to catch my plane so get going mister.
Two hundred miles down highway 90 we turn off onto 9 south, through the serious
farm town of Lagrange, Indiana. It starts to rain. The boys get the roof and windows
in place like they’re auditioning for a NASCAR pit crew, then we’re into Amish
county back-roads were NASCAR pit crews are thin on the ground. So are tractors.
A dog attacks the jeep. Trying to come to grips with it: trying to grasp the
implications of being within these confines of soil and God worship. The strangeness
of these surroundings, the Dutch Barns, the tiny horse-drawn carriages, the Amish
dress and appearance. It affects us such that Cris is loath to stop for photographs. He
clicks away through the moving rain specked windshield. Louis gives widest berth
when overtaking a black painted carriage with fluorescent triangle vivid on behind.
We pull up in the tiny town of Emma, walk the street, looking for action. We seem to
have missed the parade.
13
Back on highway 6, heading west through the rain squalls until forty miles short of
Chicago we slip out from under cloud cover to join the motoring masses heading ever
inwards, down the toll ways, to this great city squatting by Lake Michigan.
25.6.99.
We pause for breath before hitting the city, setting up, doing the logistics thing. Cris
has friends, Bill and Danielle, in Aurora where we stay the night. They have a nice
home in a good neighborhood with wonderful kids growing into a better day coming.
Fire flies gleaming under a crimson sunset, barbecue smoking in the back yard, is
there a finer four-letter word than home?
Danielle shows me a treasure saved from a family clean out, Roughing It by Mark
Twain, published by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in
1886. These words from its Prefatory - This book is merely a personal narrative, and
not a pretentious history of a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several
years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader
while away an idle hour rather than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with
science. It contains three hundred illustrations.
What would Mark Twain have made of these followers in his footsteps? With all his
imagination how could he have conceived of the Jeep, the CB radio, the vast
American road system, the laptop, the web page updates, the digital camera and the
whole caboodle, bricks, blood and glory of what’s brewing over time’s horizon? How
quickly will these efforts of ours be obsolete? There’s more to life than travel. Today
reaffirms that sentiment.
26.6.99.
Bill pulls a step-by-step route map into Chicago off the Internet. With it Louis directs
us through forty miles of city roadways straight to the intersection of Webster and
Magnolia. Was that street named after Ben Webster? We are in the right block facing
the right direction in a one-way street. I’m beginning to think these computer things
might catch on. Just down the street from the intersection is a Barns and Noble
bookstore. We’ve arrived with time enough to spare so Louis and Cris stroll around
the neighborhood while I take in the books. So much on offer, Aladdin’s cave by
comparison to the north England now fading like a thirst well sated. Lost for choice.
Happy to be lost.
From the magazine rack Scientific America, July edition, a profile of Steven Pinker The language Instinct, How The Mind Works - his dispute with paleontologist Stephen
Jay Gould and linguist Noam Chomsky. Wise minds think alike, but not always. My
dad’s bigger than yours. Came the day when Chomsky and his Eminence the Pope
did their thing separated by less than a mile of sunburned Australia. The Pope at
Radwick race course, Noam Chomsky at Sydney University. It seemed and ironic
twist of circumstance to have to choose between the two.
14
A pupil is at the Steinway when we knock on Erwin Helfer’s door five minutes earlier
than arranged. I will discover that he uses time economically. He lets us in. We take
off our footwear. Piano notes hang easily in the shaded old apartment, doves cooing
in accompaniment, records stacked in shelves against the wall, sunlight filtering
through bamboo window shades. On the fridge door Desiderata, a flashback to
Toronto in the cold January snow almost thirty years before.
With the lesson finished the pupil leaves. We chat awhile about mutual acquaintances
in Germany, he shows us around his place, and gets the feel of what we were after
then takes us to the local bar. Beer and the ball game - Chicago Saturday afternoon
unfolding. On the wall a sign - I can’t be nice to everyone. Today is not your day.
Tomorrow don’t look too good either. Today is looking pretty good to me.
At Tower Records Cris buys a couple of CDs featuring Erwin to add to the memories
then Jim DaJong (this guy is Chicago’s unofficial ambassador for jazz) gives us a
rundown of jazz/blues happenings around the city. The names and addresses slip out
easily. Cris takes notes.
_ Well let me see, there’s Jimmy’s at 5401 South Ashland, The Apartment on 75th
street, the Green Mill - it used to be Al Capone’s Bar - at 4802 North Broadway, see
Dave Jemilo, mention my name they’ll kick you out, Jerry’s Palm Tavern at 47th and
T Vincent, The Velvet Lounge 2128½ South Indiana, see Fred Anderson, Andy’s for
neighborhood stuff. You know there’s a few things happening but Chicago isn’t what
it used to be. There’s a lot of empty parking lots.
There’s party at Erwin’s friend Donna’s place. She has one once a year so the
timing’s perfect. It might take a year to get over the food we ate - some hostess.
Lying on the kitchen floor a Bouvier des Flandres, recognized from the Rotterdam
madness back in 69. A Chinese girl shows a portfolio of color photographs taken in
India, Tibet and Nepal. Could easily settle into this one. The thrust and parry of
conversation as we all unwind, picking up threads in exploratory conversations,
looking for a role to play, turning probing questions onto comedy because I’d rather
be the entertainer than the sage. Then duty calls. We drag ourselves away from
fascinating company, ships passing in the night; webs of involvement left hanging in
the air, then off into the wet Chicago evening, strangers in a city that feels it could be
home.
The Villa Kula tearoom, 4518 North Lincoln, Erwin Helfer on piano. A million
dollars worth of music for the price of a cup of tea. Applause after every number.
Friends drift in - the place fills. Erwin takes time out for introductions all round and a
glass of red wine between sets. Ken Shiokawa gives the keys a tinkle; Dave Draizon
sets them on fire. The maestro winds up the evening then we drop him off back on
Magnolia. There may be empty parking lots around the city but this joint was full and
the music phenomenal.
15
27.6.99.
Heading for the Navy Pier, where Katherine Davis is due to sing, another
preconception is rectified. Lake Michigan, close up, is a surprise for me. I hadn’t
imagined it to be so clean. The Navy Pier is teaming with people - Chicago
recreational Sunday afternoon. Joe’s Bebop
Café and Jazz Emporium, the walls awash with
legends of Jazz. We grab a table next to the
stage where Katherine is talking through
arrangements with the piano player.
The
waitress homes in on us just as Erwin arrives,
carrying his bicycle seat. Quick introductions
then the band begins to play. Big, earthy
Katherine, smile a mile -wide, gospel one
number, raunchy lyrics - its tight like that - the
next. She’s the leader. There’s power in her
voice and in her makeup. She brings Erwin on
stage after the first set. He blows the walls out.
Downtown Chicago as the shadows lengthen.
Yakuza looking dudes see us to the elevator then
up to a rooftop open-air art gallery where its
party time. Upstairs downstairs out on the roof,
the place is massive, every nook and cranny
crammed with artifacts. Henry Latt’s place west of the Loop - you wouldn’t want to
change it. I notice a couple of Bumblebee Bob
Novac masterpieces, recognizing them from his
works at Elwin’s place. He’ll be around here
someplace tonight. The jukebox in the downstairs
museum come work station has a tempting
connoisseur’s selection of jazz classics but I’m
dragged away to a swing-dance lesson. The party is
starting to happen; wine, women and song in the
warm balmy evening. Laughing and stumbling
though the dance routine with Yoko Noge, a talented
Japanese live wire, who will later play that piano and
sing gruff gravel, head to one side, the foreign lisp
adding charm to blues slang lyrics spawned in old
Chicago.
A stage set among the hanging flower baskets. Detroit Junior gets the show on the
road. Blues from way back with Howlin’ Wolf, rhythm and blues grew out of it.
Black outfit, black Stetson, singing with a toothpick in his mouth as a permanent
fixture. Then for three hours non-stop a succession of Chicago’s music elite do their
thing party style, living the life as the night lights gleam on us from adjacent
skyscrapers and music tumbles down to the street below. Katherine Davis, grandchild
on the hip, brings her friend on stage and now tight like that gets real raunchy. Clark
Dean, birthday boy, wailing on soprano sax, shades of Johny Hodges, and Steve Behr
16
so tight in piano boogie brilliance till the names become meaningless and the music
washes in like the ocean. When the tide goes out, when the morning comes, the
memories at high tide-line forever captured in chromeoscopic detail through the time
slice magic of Cris’s camera.
28.6.99.
Erwin hands me a card. We’re alone in the
stilled hush of his living room. The doves
coo gently in their cages, saved from
starvation by this gentle, complex little man
as the cat was saved from ghetto tailchopped-off cruelty and stray dogs before
them and maybe me. A membership card
for Secular Humanism, typed neatly behind
it says - Humanism is a rational philosophy
informed by science, inspired by art and
motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it supports the
maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with social and
planetary responsibility. It advocates the extension of participatory democracy and
expansion of the open society, standing for human rights and social justice. Free of
supernaturalism, it recognizes human beings as a part of nature and holds that values
– be they religious, ethical, social or political – have their source in human nature,
experience, and culture. Humanism thus derives the goals of life from human need
and interest rather than from theological abstractions and asserts that humanity must
take responsibility for its own destiny.
There’s a booklet goes with it - Imagine There’s No Heaven - a collection of essays by
those chosen to impress. One does; Richard Dawkin - The Selfish Gene, The Blind
Watchmaker, River of Eden and Climbing Mount Improbable. I’ll read his essay later
for I’m so impressed by the avalanche of scientific advancement since that
monumental night in 1609 when Galileo looked through a telescope at the moons of
Jupiter and thought - What have we got here?
Sensing that Erwin is expecting a response, that in some way he’s inviting me into his
inner considerations, I reply.
_ I like the way that’s put, a rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art.
It seems to me that people have a fundamental need to believe in something, to have
an explanation of how they came here and where they’re going. And they’re prepared
to die for what they believe is true and to kill others who question that belief. The
scientific explanation is so much more fantastic than religious ones, so much harder to
comprehend and infinitely more complicated. It’s a challenge just to grasp the bare
essentials and there’s no way to keep abreast of it. I like that; the way science never
lets you assume that anything is true. A philosophy informed by science, inspired by
art, that is something any thinking person would consider. It’s fulfilling the same
basic need to believe in something. So does believing that the host of bread at a
17
Catholic Mass transubstantiates into the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of God, creator of the universe.
_ But you should always tell the truth.
_ Birds tell lies Erwin. There are birds that live in the rain forest canopy that feed
with lookouts posted to warn about predators. One in about seven warnings is a false
alarm so that the lookouts can come in for a feed. They’ve taught gorillas to sign.
Catch one up to mischief and it will sign it wasn’t me it was him. Just like a child.
Look at camouflage in the insect kingdom or in any animal environment. Isn’t that
deceiving? Isn’t that just telling lies? We tell lies all the time. We have to; it’s an
evolutionary necessity. You would not go to Baghdad and tell the Ayatollah that the
universe exploded out of nothing fifteen billion yeas ago would you? And more than
that, I think we have a conception in our heads of how we want the world to see us.
We want people to think we are smart, tough, and sexually desirable or whatever it is
we secretly want to be. In every social interaction, with every gesture, with every
nuance of conversation, we project the image of how we wish to be perceived. That’s
lying. I’m doing it now. I’m trying to make you think I’m clever when I know that
I’m a fool. All I’m doing is misquoting other people’s opinions that I half learned to
impress other people.
Then laughing at this verbal nonsense we wander off to a Mexican eating house and
stuff our faces till we can’t eat one bite more. Louis and Cris arrive back from
Aurora, clean and baggage laden, then we catch the subway down to the landing
where the boat takes us out onto Lake Michigan. Walking on these streets of once so
wild Chicago, asking directions to hear a native voice. A wide-eyed black girl laughs
at my strange dictation then points a red-nailed varnished finger.
_ South is that-a-ways.
A pit stop into Andy’s Jazz Oasis where Chuck Hedges’ Swingtet swings into action
just as we arrive. As if they had been waiting for us. As if our walking off the
muggy, vibrant, makes-you-feel-at-home street out there, into the cool relaxation of
this historic jazz spot, is the cue they need to one, two and away. Familiar tunes
presented with such easy virtuosity. Chuck lights a cigarette after every clean clarinet
solo, leaning back as vibraphone hammers flash in this dim, music-sodden
ambivalence where we sit in quiet amazement, wanting to stay and having to go. An
hour flies by in minutes where we could have stayed all night.
Is there any city in this world with such
diverse architecture in its downtown
section? For ten bucks, a cruise down
the Chicago River, a trickle through
skyscraper canyon, out onto the lake
then back again. Gliding under bridges
with inches to spare. Out onto the lake
where they made the river change
directions back into the Mississippi and
where Frank Lloyd Wright and his
18
contemporaries built a skyline that’s almost unbelievable. Right in the heart of
America. Where the Blues Highway ended after starting in Tutwiler, a few miles
north of Parchman on Highway 49. There, in 1903, William Christopher Handy heard
a man playing a guitar while holding a knife on the strings singing “Goin’ where the
Southern cross the dog.” That uniquely American art form migrated to Chicago then
spread out across the planet. Chicago: massive in size, breathtaking in perception. A
trading post in 1779, it grew to be the third greatest city in all this wide America.
Raised twelve feet by the hand of man in 1855, razed by the great fire in 1871. Sweet
Home Chicago; a billion stories from Al Capone to Michael Jordan. I’ll have to leave
here shortly or I’m never going to leave.
Chicago to the Rocky Mountains.
30.6.99.
We say goodbye, with
morning breaking, then
boogie-woogie out of
town
towards
the
Mississippi.
Erwin
Helfer and Jimmy
Walker’s Rough and
Ready on the airwaves;
CD bought at Tower
Records that first day
in Chicago. Next stop
not so cheerful, more
suited to the blues. On
the corner, North and
Kendall, outskirts of
Aurora, a tiny house
with a sign erected on the roof in memorial to the more than 7000 Afro-Americans
who died in Vietnam. Hundred of artefacts, mostly figures, busts and sculptures, glare
in silent condemnation. A chilling past staring into the hush of a warm day just
beginning. Other days of infamy recalled in artefact - Bloody Sunday March 4 1955,
August 1694 James Town Virginia, The Middle Passage – Millions Died, everywhere
reminders of the latent inhumanity that lies ever dormant in every one of us – without
exemption. The horrors we commit when acting as a group, motivated by geography,
doctrine, creed or faith. Them and us, how easy we divide ourselves. Figures hanging
from tree branches, strange fruit, figures beheaded and wired to fences. No thought
given to knocking on the door. I have to admire the industry and the artistry but
conclude the creator must be of somewhat melancholic disposition, probably with
damn good reason. Cold reflections in the warm breathless morning, then onward and
away.
Granite block with bronze plaque in place for Wild Bill Hickok. To his memory from
the State of Illinois at his Troy Grove birthplace, 1837. ‘He contributed largely in
making the west a safe place for women and children. His sterling courage was
19
always at the service of right and justice.’ Wild Bill Hickok, shot in the back, like
Jesse James, one of the real life heroes of America. On July 12 1861 he shot David
McCanles with his own rifle in circumstances which ceased to be of consequence
when the popular press glorified him, turning him into legend. He died whilst
playing cards in a saloon. Somewhere out there, maybe in Cheyenne, maybe in
Montana, I’m sure we’ll find more like him.
On the Junction of highways 88 and 6 is All Star Autos. I catch a glimpse of what I
think is a 56 Chevrolet. Cris turns back to investigate. They don’t make cars life they
used to. This is a 55 Oldsmobile, rusting away on a back block car lot, epitaph to the
golden age of American automobiles. Hope we find some restoration somewhere
down the line. Leaning on the jeep, telling the story…
_ There were heaps of old American cars in New Zealand. At one stage the mate and
me had a fleet of Chevrolets parked all down our street. The one we were after was
the 56. A bloke moved in round the corner with a 57 station wagon and you don’t see
many of them around. Anyway, one day at a swap-meet there was a 56 for sale. It
had everything; fats a mile wide, four on the floor, air shocks, wobbly cam, twin
chrome dipsticks you name it. It needed nothing. I didn’t have the money then but I
could have got it next day so I got his phone number. Next morning, on my way to
the gym where I worked, the bloke from round the corner with the 57 station wagon
pulled up in my 56. He’d done a deal after I left for his car and some cash for the
dream machine. God, I could have pulled the Maori girls with that one. He ran me to
work and I never saw him again, or the car. He must have moved out that day. That’s
the nearest I ever came to owning a 56 Chevrolet. The only time I ever rode in one
too.
At the bottom of Schuyler Street, Oquawka, Illinois, Louis and I first see the mighty
Mississippi. The river that everybody knows, the one long word that everyone can
spell, at the bottom of a street who’s name few could spell, in a town few have ever
heard of. Life can be contradictory. So wide, so silent, in the stifling afternoon,
voices from a boat half a mile away float clearly across the water. The boys go for a
feed. I stay on awhile at the water’s edge letting the mind drift onward with the
current…waiting round the bend, my Huckleberry friend…islands in the
stream…Could maybe swim across it here but how wide will it be coming eastward a
thousand miles downstream? 
The Village Hub, Salads and Soup Bar, back from the river’s edge in tiny Oquawka.
Good food and friendly service both in great abundance. They need a part time
dishwasher. It says so in the window. Could this be my calling? Susan points the
way to Lock and Dam 18 where during the great flood of 1993 400,000 cubic foot of
water passed through each second. Hard to imagine. That would make a lot of cups
of coffee. She tells us that Bald Eagles are often seen there, at the dam, in the winter.
Last time an eagle was seen in my part of the world it was on the standard of a Roman
Legion. I use her phone to call a friend in England. Just to say here we are by the
Mississippi.
20
At the Lock and Dam 18 Clarke Kent Curtis, veteran Harley rider, blue eyes
gleaming, mischief in his laughter, he remembers the dam being built in 1935. Down
the river barges loading at Toomies’ grain silo, the biggest grain distributor in all
America.
_ Toomies, I remember taking grain to Toomies when I was a kid. There were 500
grain-barns around these pasts them days. Never liked them, they didn’t give us much
of a price. But they survived. They’re the only one left around here now.
A barge slides through Lock 18, loaded
with the equivalent of nine hundred
trucks. High overhead one Bald Eagle
rides high upon the thermals. Clarke
keeps talking so the eagle goes
unnoticed with no chance to point it
out.
_ I’m taking my wife and the
grandchild to Alaska. We’ll be back in
Texas first week in August then I’m
taking the wife bike riding to New
York, we’re coming back through
Canada. Why are they banning guns in
Australia? Catch up with me when you
get to Texas and I’ll show you the
backside of Dallas, take you to some
real beer joints.
Just what he means by beer joints as
opposed to bars we can’t imagine but I
can imagine that going on the drink
with Clarke Kent Curtis is not for the
frail or faint hearted. You’d come out
the other end with a tale to tell or you wouldn’t come out at all. Big brash and
boastful, living life to the full, on the landing, by the Mississippi where the great river
slips slowly by and the barges tote the commerce of America.
Then Cris mentions Fairbury, Nebraska. That’s where we’re heading for the forth of
July. By some miracle of coincidence Clarke’s wife comes from Fairbury. Laughing
in the hot afternoon, down by the Mississippi, as she give us phone numbers of friends
and in-laws from the area and promises to phone ahead to warn them of our coming.
We halt for the night across river in Fairfield Ohio, looking for a place to sleep. First
an inquiry to a care-worn character sitting smoking on the sidewalk.
_ Is this the best hotel in town mate?
21
_ It’s the cheapest.
Dank and dark and Damon Runyon, cigarette smoke soaked into the dreams and
disappointments where a million souls have passed the night to wake or pass forever.
A massive creature lumbers to the counter to quote the rate. And while I sit there
hunched over the keyboard, Louis and Cris give the town the once over, coming back
excited, carrying poppy seed cake and conversations with the locals of some eastern
cult mumbo jumbo outfit taking over everything. It all sounds so worthwhile staying
but Cris next morning too keen to leave, perhaps for better, perhaps for worse. Who
knows? Who cares? Pattern forms from chaos under heaven.
1.7.99.
Just a shortways out of Fairfield, along highway 34, we hang a left onto route 16, back
onto the byroads away from the traffic. A pimple on the planet, an undulation where
the road rises over a railway tracks. The Grateful Dead give acoustic accompaniment.
From the rise, in every direction, the vast heartland of America rolls on to the horizon
then tumbles over it. North and south the road runs straight on to vanishing point.
The railway at right angles, a freight train rumbling by under us, miles long it seems in
each direction. For some the mountains, for me the wide open spaces with the
skyscape surrounding in all directions. A long straight empty road, telegraph poles
alongside, fading in perspective. That, for me, is America. The vastness of it! The
looking at the world’s edge in all directions, with unrestricted views of heaven when
the stars come out at night.
[Being so close to the Mexican border the ice in my bones has thawed out and the
flatness of the vast farmlands through which we work is very comforting. Imagine
being knee deep in a vast field of spring corn, stretching to the horizon in all
directions, except to the south, where, about a mile away, a low levee interrupts the
view to eternity. Along the levee a truck is driving. It leaves a cloud of white dust
behind, the only blemish against the perfect blue of a sky that could almost be Mt.
Isa.]
Since leaving Albany, forever farmland. Will it ever end? Easy to see now why they
say America feeds the world.
Alongside the Des Moines River a mangy brown dog looks up from feeding as a truck
drives crab wise down the road, its chassis twisted as the river. We stop in Bloomfield
attracted by the splendour of the town square architecture. Doug pulls up and in no
time fills us in on what’s what around here. Starting with the French Renaissance
courthouse built in 1876. Cris takes notes and soon has leads enough for us to go no
further. Tempted to stay but so early in the day decide to plod along ever westward.
On through fields so fertile it seems we can almost hear the corn growing. At a gas
station the thermometer says its eighty degrees. They have no PI-1 phone cards so
pay $12 for gas and keep on going. Have to find an Exxon, they’re sure to have them
there.
22
The green fields flowing by. How long before it hits one hundred degrees and I find
myself back home again? Then the music trick. You took the words right out of my
mouth and suddenly we’re here again in Auckland with Chili Croft singing, guitar on
her knee, and I’ll swear to God she has the smile of all time, beaming soft but street
smart at life in all its facets. Chili was never anybody’s woman but her own. And her
sisters, Drum, Black, Ruth, and there were others but time has won that battle. Such
stunning women! Such dazzling examples of that captivating Maori beauty that really
has no equal in the long march of years given to me. Louis is up there in front with
this Connecticut Yankee, taking it all in and saying nothing. But one day he’ll be
gone back home to New Zealand. Whether to go with him, that’s that question.
[I came to England in March 1997, on a journey that will last for all my lifetime. How
could it be otherwise? Born in New Zealand, raised on Bondi Beach, every childhood
memory infused with my father’s travelling stories. Mother a New Zealand Maori,
with the rhythm of the Pacific in her bearing; father a restless Lancashire lad, with an
eye ever lingering on the far horizon. My genes comprise a mixture of English
Buccaneers and Polynesian Open Ocean Voyagers who long have wandered the
world. So, as some are born to rule and others born to prosper, I was born to travel.
And I will!
Like that of every Australian generation, my history curriculum leaned heavily on
Captain Cook. His ghost seemed somehow always present. As an eleven-year old I
marvelled as the tall ships sailed into Sydney Harbour for the bicentenary celebration.
Too young to fully comprehend what was happening, I took it as being just another
manifestation of that famous mariner's all pervading influence. When high school
ended I headed north to tropical Queensland. For a year I worked in a lively country
pub, saving money to travel, and in that year won a state amateur boxing title. I’ll
never forget my time in Queensland. The womb-like warmth of the winter mornings,
the cloying smell of sugarcane hanging on the breeze, the fruit bats feeding in the
mango trees, the night sky ablaze with stars so bright they could at times cast
shadows. But mostly I dreamed of England, my origin and my roots.
Knowing I had relatives near Cook's birthplace, it was no surprise to find myself in
county Cleveland, soon after landing on England’s rainy shores. Even small English
towns, by virtue of their antiquity, convey culture, stability and historic significance.
Whitby, for a nineteen-year old Sydney refugee, was exposure to a former century, a
step over the threshold of present into an almost tangible past. History was so evident
all around me I felt I could put my arm into it - the very manifestation of my English
seafaring heritage lay spread before my feet. If ‘Endeavour’ had been in harbour I
would probably have become a stowaway. As it was, lost in daydreams, with fulmars
wheeling over Whitby Abbey, silhouetted on the cliffs above, I found reference to
Madagascar in the book I was reading and knew that one day it was where I had to be.
For as part of me is English, part of me is Polynesian and in ‘The Incredible Journey’
a fragment of my history was suddenly revealed.
That great adventurer, Tristan Jones, who wrote the book, spoke of a time at least four
hundred years before the Polynesians colonised the last uninhabited landmass, New
23
Zealand. Evidently they invaded Madagascar from Java around 400 AD. From there
they raided the African coast for centuries, seeking slaves and booty, leaving evidence
of their influence as far away as Morocco. Though Maoris may have reached New
Zealand from the Cook Islands by 800 AD, the last wave of immigrants, from which
all Maoris trace lineage, arrived from Tahiti around 1350. Having developed no
written language, much of this history lies rooted in the realm of legend. Their epic
voyages, across all the wide Pacific, in open canoes, guided only by folk-law and
knowledge of the stars, are buried in the mists of history, obscured in a cultural
mythology as real and insubstantial as the world-view that raised Stonehenge. But
upon a time before a time, before the great god Maui fished New Zealand from the
sea; my ancestors gazed eastward from Madagascar across the Indian Ocean. And one
day so will I.]
Glen Miller was born in Clarinda Ohio. There’s a Glen Miller Appreciation Society
Shop right there on the Town Square. In we go. Somehow we seem fated to discover
this spot, by accident, where such a major contributor to America’s art form hails
from. We decide to stay the night.
The Ro-Le Motel on East Washington where Doc Holiday makes us welcome then
invites us to the barbecue.
_ There’s good news and good news. It’s the motel barbecue tonight.
If this place were on the main highway he’d make a fortune but would need a gun in
the office.
_ This is the only sane place left in America. On the East Coast, on the West Coast
they’re all liberals. Any idea at all goes through like wildfire. You know what
wildfire is? It used to be all prairies here, grass high as a man. When it caught on fire
it spread with the wind, faster than a horse can gallop. That’s wildfire. Some idea
filters down here about some new kind of education, why they already tried that out in
California and it came to nothing.
Unload the bags and plug in the laptop. E-mail from my mentor says –
Joseph, I've been looking at my map and Montana shares a bit of border with British
Columbia (up in the Northwest corner). If I'm going to catch up with you anywhere
that seems to be the spot. Let me know if you have any plans to be in (say) the
Missoula area. There's a good fast road from Spokane, through Idaho, and I reckon I
could persuade Dennis to make the trip with me.
All this and heaven too. Sometime, after the South Dakota Badlands, Mount
Rushmore, the Devils Tower and the Little Big Horn, before Yellowstone, the Grand
Tetons and names to make my head swim, somewhere on a crisp Rocky Mountain
morning a car will pull up and there he’ll be.
24
2.7.99.
The thoughts come fast but it takes time to document them, to put them down, to trap
them before they migrate and are gone away forever. So I stay the evening at the
keyboard taking care of business while the boys hang in at the motel barbecue. Some
you win! Come morning Cris is so inspired by last night’s conversations, under stars,
the warmth of the company, the humour, the camaraderie, that he inserts these words
on the web page.
At the BBQ, we find eight or nine people chatting away. A former Marine, now the
town podiatrist, his wife and two Japanese fellows who are here for an extended stay
working and living in Clarinda. There was Lee, a welder and some others.
Conversation rolled into many different topics but much of is centred on Doc (who
speaks Japanese) talking and fooling around with our Japanese guests. We learn
several Japanese words and phrases that cannot be considered nice. They learn
several curse words in English. Doc sings Japanese songs and tries unsuccessfully to
get them to jump in. Lee starts singing John Prine tunes. Overall, we had a wonderful
time and finally get back to our room around 11:30pm. Joe posts our latest entry into
the diary and then this day ends.
We get our stuff together slow and easy, no rush to be out on the highway. Doc’s wife
Yuko asks we stay a while, a lady from last night’s barbecue wants to see us before
leaving. She brings a book of photographs by Winston Swift Boyer called Rediscover
American Roads to take for inspiration. That being what we are, doing what we do,
could inspire such spontaneous generosity is comforting justification for us being
here, this perfect Iowa morning, where it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing
and it don’t mean a thing if you don’t appreciate your being here. We take photos
using each other’s cameras and Doc joins in our almost tearful good-byes.
25
Heading down the highway, the three of us, each quiet in our own contentment. Cris
driving with his big Nikon 300 across his knee and another Nikon on his shoulder,
always ready for that photo. Louis turns suddenly to me, eyes shining with the vitality
of youth unfolding.
_ That lady hit a hole in one.
Then he turns back to contemplation of the old lady’s warmth and courage on the long
slow recovery from breaking her back. We’ll post the book back to her later,
somewhere down the line.
A town called Sidney, and we two non-Americans so familiar with the streets of
Sydney far away across the blue Pacific. A small brick building where the sign says
Southeast Iowa Boxing Association – courage, confidence, self esteem – E J Mullings
& Sons. Louis poses, smiling self-conscious, by the Golden Gloves sign as the
memory of that night in Queensland when he won the State Title waxes and wanes
briefly. A lady standing close by joins in our merry making.
_ He used to box in Sydney Australia so we thought we’d get a photo.
_ My husband always wanted to go there. His baggage was sent there from Nam but
he never made it.
Then off and across the wide Missouri under rain clouds and into Nebraska City
looking for breakfast. On Central Avenue the Coney Island Café looks inviting. It
could be the spot for us. Inside the door an old man seated, looking out at the
morning. Sitting by him, far enough away not to impose on his space which feels so
comfortable all around him, then asking if we can buy coffee only to discover the
place has been closed to business since 1954. We’re a little late for coffee. But better
26
late than never and he gives a friendly wave as we drive away. That wave came for
nothing and we feel the better for it.
When we stop on the red-bricked street of Syracuse, Nebraska, outside Caroline’s
Coffee Shop. The sign on the door says open but the sign in the window says closed.
Inside Alyce - must be eighty - laughs, turns the window card and says she’s getting
forgetful.
_ Aren’t we all?
She has character; the place has atmosphere. Cris passed this way in 88 and it’s
hardly changed at all. On the walls pictures of cats predominate. There are twenty. I
count them as Cris does swift justice to ham and eggs and old Alice reminisces…
_ My husband and I moved in this place 52 years ago. He’s gone now. Before that, in
the forties, we had a restaurant further down town. I only keep this place going `cause
its hard to quit. Got to keep doing something. The town hasn’t grown much. There’s
around sixteen hundred people here about but they’re building a new prison and a
chicken factory so there’ll be new folks moving in and they’ll need new houses
building.
Outside I take a photo from the street. An athletic looking bloke pauses politely in his
passing so not to block my line of vision.
_ You’re not putting Caroline’s on the map are you?
_ My buddy was here in 88, though I’d take a photo.
_ Probably still the same grease!
27
I leave my coat behind then go back for it before heading out of town.
_ Remember when I came in you said you were getting forgetful? Me too, I left my
coat.
She smiles again, reassured in absent-minded companionship, then settles in to wait
for the chicken factory and the prison - not that she needs the business.
Through the long cold winter of dreams and organisation it had seemed somehow that
Fairbury Nebraska would be the start of this adventure. That from this point on the
Oregon Trail we would sally forth, like the pioneers before us, into the great wild
yonder where the buffalo roam on the prairies. The first bit, from landing in New
York to getting to Fairbury for the fourth of July seemed insubstantial, something that
would amount to nothing, a passing through, a getting to the starting line.
We arrive in the late afternoon. Pull up at the Courthouse Square, brilliant sunshine
bouncing off the red-brick roadways, find a motel room and go for a beer. Cris so
quick to start up conversations, bar staff ever helpful and big Sid sitting there, filling
in what’s what around the district. The farmers are not happy. The price of hog is so
low that it’s cheaper to give them away or shoot them in the field than to transport
them to market for a bigger loss. The price of wheat is lower that eighty years ago.
Big Sid talks old cars and renovation. Cris makes a loose arrangement to get round to
his place for photographs tomorrow. The tourist brochure says Wild Bill Hickok shot
his first man at Rock Creek Station just outside of town. Now fancy that!
3.7.99.
A narrow road across the prairie, longhorns in the pasture, a stiff breeze rippling
through the grassland as we head for Rock Creek station where once-upon-a-time the
Pony Express rode through. On the wall a poster says Wanted, young, skinny, wiry
fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily, orphans
preferred. The first mail arrived April 4 1860 at 2.02 p.m. It had taken eighteen
hours and forty-seven minutes to get from St. Joseph Missouri. It would arrive in San
Francisco on April 14 at one in the morning. Them were the days!
28
Walking down the trail to the station a group of horse riders galloping up towards us,
swinging left away through the trees. A rider hits the deck as if shot from the saddle.
The horse runs on without him. Can’t blame Wild Bill for that one but he did shoot
unarmed David McCanles through the heart at close quarters; shot him when he came
to collect debts outstanding from the Pony Express manager leasing that station built
and owned by McCanles. He would have killed his twelve-year-old son too but the
youngster ran away. Beat the rap by pleading self-defence for when all is said and
done the mail it must go through. The mail got through for eighteen months then the
telegram put it out of business.
Big Sid is not home this red hot day unfolding so afternoon siesta in our motel room
while Cris revamps the web page to run like clockwork for the many people following
us in cyberspace while in half-dreams, close to sleep, I wonder how all this will end
4.7.99.
The town park in early morning shadow, where there for sale are the contents of a
thousand empty attics on stalls beneath the pine trees. Starting this important day with
lazy strolling around in shade. Before the rush as town folks wake for breakfast, too
early for that serious selling on which they thrive or starve upon, the stall owners are
pleased to chat and even pose for photos. Dick Tracy and his brother, wives both with
them, a million things on show - butter churns, chicken feeders, saddles, spurs, fishing
rods, photograph of Hopalong Cassidy and a poster offering $500 reward for
information leading to arrest for arson, vandalism or theft from the Oklahoma
Farmer’s Union. Jotting notes as Cris takes photos and I, so bemused by this range on
offer, ask what’s most unusual and shown a fish-bowl stand the likes of which I’ve
never seen before. Meanwhile, across the wide Atlantic, Leslie Davenport takes out
the Wimbledon ladies final. With Sampras and Aggasi on court next it will be a big
day in tennis for America.
[In the public bar, specially darkened for the occasion, at the Charring Cross Hotel, a
sizeable contingent of the Eastern Suburbs boxing team, with friends and followers,
saw Michael Moorer take the greatest prize in sport from Evander Holyfield. Just for
a moment, as I glanced around the room, I wondered, not for the first time, if a novel
made constant reference to sporting events as they occurred, would it not make the
story more realistic by placing the plot into a tangible time frame. Something to give
further consideration to when life gives me time to write.]
I buy a book, The First Circle by Solzhenitskyn, because of this paragraph, long
remembered, knowing it would be me.
' It has often been observed that our life is lived at a very uneven level of intensity.
Everyone has his special time of life when he manifests himself most fully, feels most
profoundly himself and produces the greatest effect on himself and on others. And
anything that happens afterwards, however outwardly significant, is always a decline
by comparison. What we remember and glory in, going over it again and again,
forever ringing in the changes on it, is always some episode or experience that can
29
never be repeated. For some it may be in childhood, and such people remain children
for the rest of their lives; for others it is the first love - they are the people who spread
the myth that love comes only once. But whatever it was, a time of great wealth, fame
or power – anyone who has experienced such things will never stop thinking about
them, mumbling even with the toothless gums of old age about their departed glory.'
Flicking through the pages I cannot find the passage so will have to read the book
again to check my memory. It isn’t what it used to be, of that I’m certain.
Big Sid is in his garden. He says he’ll have the car round by nine next morning. Just
up the street Cris has met Ray Hinks so there I go to say hello because he sounds a
font of information on this little town of Fairbury. Invited in to talk a while, the
feeling out with words to gauge their attitude to what’s what with total strangers. His
wife and daughter are sitting by but Ray does most the talking. Something said about
fossils rings a bell so he takes me on a tour of the surrounding countryside, starting
with an old limestone kiln and its adjacent house, now preserved by State Nebraska.
He points out a fossilised clam in a chunk of limestone resting at the kiln lip. The
limestone house, set among the trees, is a picture of rural tranquillity. Inside, the
thickness of the walls keeps out the summer heat - no need for air conditioning.
The history and geological information concerning this early cottage industry are
tastefully presented in authentic surroundings. At the kiln, limestone from the
surrounding countryside was burned for days to produce quicklime, useful then in a
myriad different ways. It must have been hard work but hard work was the norm in
those pioneering days. Nothing came easy. These days it seems a warm-hearted
hospitality has grown from the endeavours and hardships overcome by those first
settlers. We’ve been greeted with nothing but cordiality since arriving here.
On unsealed roads for about an hour, Ray Hanks and his daughter Rebecca, show me,
a person just met, the little towns and quite corners of their home county. I don’t take
notes or memorise the details. It’s quite enough to let Ray’s words wash over me,
privileged to be the recipient of this kindness. On a hilltop, scarred by limestone
quarrying, the view across Nebraska is heartrending. A lump of rock, picked up at
random, is almost a solid mass of fossilised shellfish, seventy to one hundred and fifty
million years old.
In the tiny town of Powel Ray points out a car rusting in the bushes. The name is
unfamiliar.
_ It was too far ahead of its time so it never took off.
At Alexandria he reverses the van to show the spot where a spring bubbles into to the
lake then indicates the fishing spot for bluegill. He drives up a side-road to watch a
combine harvester in action, spewing dust and wheat stalks out behind it. The driver
waves a hand as he rumbles by.
_ We got one on our farm two people can sit in if you fancy it.
Pointing out wild marijuana growing by the roadside.
30
_ It grows wild round here. Good stuff too it’s supposed to be. Never had much time
for it myself.
A car parked as we cross the Little Blue River.
_ See his number plate? He’s come a hundred miles to catch a catfish.
I’ve come five thousand miles to catch a memory.
He drives content in choice of hometown, telling non-stop stories, accrued across a
lifetime, of the people, places and happenings that make Fairbury what it is.
I’m just another stranger passing along the Oregon Trail.
5.7.99.
We’re in a cinema in Lincoln Nebraska, killing time as Cris’ chromes are being
processed. After dropping the films off he’d taken us around the University of
Nebraska and explained how football is integrated into the social and economic fabric
there. It’s perplexing to an outsider but obviously it works well. Sounds like fun too.
It may well have reached one hundred degrees today. Out in the sun it seemed that
way. We went into the nearest cinema just to get away from the heat; with three hours
to kill the air-conditioning seemed inviting. The movie is, unfortunately, diabolical.
That such drivel can seriously be presented to the public as entertainment, in
immediate proximity to a noted centre of further education, in part financed by
football, makes me realise I’m getting old and cynical.
For a period in my life I was employed in the off-shore oil construction industry. Off
what was once Borneo, on the island of Labuan where the butterflies are as big as
birds, an Irish deep-sea captain with a philosophical bent taught me this formula - Life
equals Paradox times Cannibalism times Communication over time. It comes back to
me today in this cinema.
This morning Big Sid’s 54 Pontiac Coupe was parked outside his place. He came to
the door all smiles with a tiny kitten following. The Pontiac was in good condition,
obviously well cared for - two-tone, green-tinted windows, compatible to the red
bricked street beneath it. Under the bonnet the flat eight-cylinder motor that preceded
the soon-to-be-standard V-eight. They used to build cars to last. He’s owned this car
for years and it’s never let him down.
We chatted about cars for a while. He reckoned the car Ray Hinks had pointed out
yesterday was a Kaiser or maybe a Fraser. I’ll have to go back and take a closer look.
Under wraps in his yard Sid had another treasure from the golden age. A 36
Terraplane that he bought twenty years ago. There aren’t too many around these days.
Perhaps there never was.
31
_ Hudson bought Terraplane out way back. There’s a guy in Wilcox Nebraska, a
schoolteacher, owns about forty of them. He has every modal Hudson brought out in
56. This one of mine has a fluid clutch. It rolled back a bit too much when we were
getting it in here and we bent the taillight.
It seems a pity that imported cars caught on in America. Sure it costs less to run one
of these plastic things that melt in the sun but it’s cheaper to live in a tent than a house
too. Not many chose to do so. There’s nothing quite like cruising the open road with
a big V-eight burbling under the bonnet. They were cars to be proud of. Sid said as
much as we left him.
_ Time was I could tell the year, make and modal of every car on the road. These last
fifteen years I can hardly tell one car from another
6.7.99.
Back there on the banks of the Mississippi, Clarke Kent Curtis’ wife had given us the
phone number of a sister married to a farmer somewhere close to Fairbury. True to
her word she phoned ahead to prepare the way. So we pull up in the farmyard soon
after eight thirty already expected. It’s a particularly good morning for farmers after a
million-dollar rain the night before.
_ That was our paycheck for the year not that it’ll be a big one.
Calvin Weichel’s laugh leaves me doubting he really means it. There is no sign of
abject poverty anywhere in evidence. We’re just making small talk. The introductory
conversation gets round to football as his brother-in-law Jack Holtmeier and his son
Kirk pull up in a pickup. They lean back against the truck and join in the football talk.
Calvin is telling Cris about the Cornhuskers’ new coach.
32
_ Frank Solage wasn’t all that popular to start with but neither was Tom Osborne
when he first started. But give ‘em time and you learn to love them.
With weather and football out of the way we get down to business. These men have
work to do. We just want to tag along. Along the way we hope to get some insight
into the running of this average size family farm of about eighteen hundred acres.
Hogs are what we’ve arrived expecting to see so Jack and Kirk lead the way.
_ Just follow this old truck around. If it breaks down we’ll jump in with you.
They’ll start the day checking water gauges around the property then on to service the
hog barns. Calvin will be over at the grain silo if we want to catch him later.
Jack Holtmeier is an energetic man. He moves, thinks and talks quickly. You soon
realise there is no nonsense about him and his mind always two steps ahead of what
he’s doing at that moment. There’s no fat on the man. He is lean, broad shouldered
and well balanced. He explains things as we go along, quickly and practically. Kirk
is taller than is father and looks athletically capable. He’s equally obliging in telling
how the farm works, if slightly more economical with his words.
_ That was laying barn we just passed. They take a semi load of eggs out of there
every other day.
The gauges are showing about an inch and a half of rain has fallen the night before.
That means there’s no need to irrigate the crops. If the soil had been dry the water to
irrigate them would be pumped out of the gravel beds lying at various depths beneath
the topsoil and out through the irrigators circling on their pivots. That gravel bed
replenishes itself even after a dry season’s requirements have lowered the water table
by up to five feet. Many a farmer worldwide would give his left arm for that situation.
The hog barns are way out among the cornfields. The only house in sight is at least
half a mile away. I was brought up next door to a hog farm and the first thing I notice
is the lack of smell. That surprises me. What surprises me more is that two men are
able to minister to the needs of close to two thousand hogs in about forty-five minutes.
If we hadn’t been under their feet it would have been done quicker. Hog farming has
come a long way since I was a child.
The barns, which contain the pens in which the hogs are raised, are well ventilated. If
the inside temperature falls below or rises above a specified level sensors trigger a
warning system. The food is automatically conveyed from outside silos. The waste
falls through slats in the floor, is diluted, then pumped out to a lagoon. From there it
is piped to an irrigation pivot and sprayed onto the crops. There is no wastage. The
feeders are checked daily in case of blockage and the livestock scrutinised for ill
health or other disorders. The hogs are genetically chosen to meet current consumer
demand and when they reach optimum size they are taken off to market. In a nutshell
that’s how it works. The rest, like any business, is a matter of applied economics.
33
There’s a pleasant country smell in the air after the rain. The creeks are flowing but
doing no damage to the crops. They’ll be back down again in a day or two.
Genetically modified food was a big media issue as we left England so as Jack shows
us where a field of Soya beans have been replanted after storm damage I ask if the
Soya is genetically modified to resist pesticide.
_ It has to be. The only way I can prevent soil erosion is to spray the grass with
Roundup. That way I don’t need to plough. If the land is ploughed the storms wash
the soil away. I want there to be soil here for my son to farm and for his sons.
Neighbours pull up and pass the time of day. We are in an area where strangers are
soon noticed. Cris outlines our intended route, out through the Sand Hills to Dakota,
Montana, Wyoming and beyond. I still have the feeling we are only at this trip’s
starting point. The land may be flat but I can’t see the Rockies from here.
At the next water gauge the corn is man-high and in perfect condition. The tassels are
forming and soon the pollen will be cascading down, fertilising the silk fibres
protruding from the ears and then the kernels will develop on the corncobs. They will
be ready for harvest around October. Jack strokes the shining green leaves, proud of
his handiwork, secure in his philosophy.
_ This is like being in heaven when you’re a farmer.
The Tri-County Bank sign in the tiny town of Swanton informs us it’s 11.38 and 84
degrees Fahrenheit. Kirk sits on the step of the Swanton Library for a photo. It might
just be the smallest library anywhere. My guess is about twelve feet square.
Somewhere I read that the Lenin Library in Moscow held six million books. If they
ship them to Swanton they will have to build an annex.
34
_ Bet they don’t have a book in there that mentions Swanton Library. When our book
gets published I’ll send them one.
Calvin’s parents invite us inside their home. There are grain silos behind the house
and a semi trailer parked beside them with Weichel displayed on the cab door. The
elder Weichel has striking grey hair. He talks with calm authority while his wife
laughs often in knowing good humour. He walks me round the garden, tells me how
the grain silos function, tells me how he met a German on a Canadian trailer park who
traced his relatives back in the old country for him.
_ Not two weeks later I got a letter from a second cousin. I went over there to visit.
They showed me where my ancestors worked as carpenters and the church with beams
they made for it. You know we may complain at times but there’s nowhere else I’d
rather be than here. We have such amazing freedoms in America.
Our last stop is the Long Bar Saloon for lunch. It’s an old store of some sorts
converted into a bar and diner. The floors are creaky, the walls uneven, the
atmosphere terrific and the food far more than adequate. I finish my plate but it takes
an effort. A sweet is out of the question. Kirk’s fiancée arrives as we finish eating.
They are getting married shortly and she claims him from an afternoon’s fishing with
his father. Things have to be done and that’s the end of it. Kirk doesn’t seem too
reluctant. Jack sees us on our way then roars off in the pickup. He’s done the all farm
chores and attended to the journalists by lunchtime. Now he’s off fishing. My bet is
he’ll catch a few. We take off the opposite direction. We came to Fairbury to assess
how farming in the American Midwest stands in this last summer of the millennium.
It looks pretty good on the surface. But there are undercurrents. There’s uncertainty
and disquiet about the future as if it’s all somehow coming to an end.
7.7.99.
Fairbury has treated us well, no doubt about it. To ice the cake the first batch of Cris’s
photos come through the phone wire in the early dark before we leave. We download
them for later scrutiny. Somewhere down the line this evening the web page gets its
sparkle. The tiny digital camera, a bicycle against the Nikon Cadillacs, can rest in
peace tonight.
West into morning, the sun on our shoulders, gradually the topography starts to alter.
A subtle change, the introduction of an occasional hillside and a field not under crop.
A fifth of wide Nebraska is covered by sand hills and they are reaching out to meet us.
A plane flies overhead dusting crops, yellow against the blue of morning. Cris pulls
up, telephoto lens soon in action and just as soon a truck pulls up beside us. A one
word question, laden with hidden connotation.
_ Trouble?
35
The land more prone to pasture, the rolling hills predominate. Cattle look our way in
passing, so few vehicles upon the highway that we’re a curiosity. Farmhouses
occasionally nestled under hillsides with dark green dots of planted pine in contrast to
the grasslands. The hills roll on before us. How they must have rolled on and on
before those pioneers, walking by their wagons into a new tomorrow.
At the Wagon Wheel Bar and Café in Stapleton, we are the only customers. I ask for
tea in public school English with many a please and thank you. The waitress turns to
Cris for translation. He speaks one word.
_ Tea.
This she understands.
Then down a one-lane side road, into isolation so total that I mentally calculate water
rations in case we break down. The CB will not help us if we do. The heart of the
Sand Hills, in we go. Not a sound, not a vehicle, not a person stirring - only us. Wind
pumps turning, water lying in the hollows, so there must be bedrock underneath to
hold it, but the endless dunes, grass covered in the main part, swallow every rain drop.
There are no streams.
We reach a milestone – three thousand miles since we left Connecticut. Cris sets up a
tripod and with time delayed camera take photos of us three together. The parked jeep
blocks the roadway but we feel no need to hurry. I’d be less surprised to see an
elephant than a truck right where we are, in the middle of the Nebraska Sand Hills and
twelve thousand miles to go.
36
8.7.99.
There are some strange sights along the highway. There’s a full-size replica of
Stonehenge, made from old cars. As I wait in the car park, while Cris and Louis
wander through the artworks, a lady, about to mount her motorcycle, feels obliged to
pass a comment.
_ They must have long winters here about.
We cross into South Dakota, past the Sioux Nation Trading Post, where signs say
President Clinton was here just yesterday. Then turning left off highway 18 to
Wounded Knee a large green memorial to Crazy Horse, 1840-1877, in countryside
where apparently not too much has changed. There’s a barbed wire fence strung out
along the roadside and the occasional abandoned hulk of some rusting agricultural
machinery. Otherwise the grasslands reach out to far horizons, as they must have
done for centuries.
Wounded Knee is such a tiny settlement that we pass through in minutes, not seeing
any sign to lead us to a monument where the last massacre occurred. The town itself
seems as if it wants to be left alone. There are no obvious enticements to linger here,
just a few wooden houses brooding by the highway. We carry on to the White River
Visitors’ Centre for information pamphlets on the Badlands National Park.
Along the aptly named Pine Ridge road, we enter into a landscape where alternate
heavy rains and long periods of drought have eroded the soft, unconsolidated rock into
fantastic shapes and valleys as if almost from a dream. Turning left off the highway
into four-wheel drive country, acres of wild flowers bloom, blue and yellow, with a
red-winged blackbird perched on a thistle like the announcing angle of evolution
among the blasted white phantasmagoria of the Badlands. The road winds ever
upwards. Soon we reach a plateau where tall yellow plants bend over as if in homage
to some unseen presence, their heads all pointing in the same direction.
We pull up beside another jeep where two Indians are standing on the lip of a canyon.
Down below, the valleys twist away into infinity. The sign on our windshield
announcing Cris as an ex-marine sergeant is recognised by the younger. As we go
through the handshake ritual, the elder of these two says that yesterday he shook the
hand of Bill Clinton. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to the President.
They lead us on deeper into this almost mystic wonderland, stopping where the track
looks down into valley floors below with walls so strangely formed as to beggar all
description. Then finally to a high point where the road can go no further where we
sit in contemplation, somewhat lost in awe. Somehow an hour passes. In that hour
we get a glimpse of another world. It’s a world of deepest spirituality, tempered by
long grief and brief glory, touched with soft love of the earth in all it’s wonder,
hardened by a determination to fight, until the world ends, for what they know is
theirs.
37
Mike speaks softly; his voice is a voice elected to represent his tribe. Sean, his
nephew, ever respectful to his uncle’s age and wisdom, is shorter in his sentences,
quicker with his views. The three of them there on the canyon rim among the cypress
sharing a beer, Cris and these two Oglala Sioux, the paradox of this bewildering
America while we two homeless drifters sit outside and look on.
_ We have listened to the words the government speaks since they fist came to take
our country. Now we hear but we do not listen. We need not listen for our hearts are
strong. I could perhaps rest easy if those all those settlers out there knew that they and
their families have their lives because they live on our land. When the whites came to
this country they were pitiful. We gave them land and help so that they might live. In
return they have tried to wipe us out, to take everything. I do not like that and I shall
never like it till I go to my grave.
When they learn that we missed the burial site at Wounded Knee they offer to take us.
Leading down the trail to flats below where a herd of Appalachian ponies watch us
passing. Cris rides up ahead with Mike and Sean while Louis and I follow through a
landscape now softened by the golden light of late afternoon. The country has a
beauty that’s almost painful: the scent of wild flowers hanging in the air, the silence
and the shadows and the deep blue open sky.
We stop at Mike’s place for coffee; a low wooden house tucked in the undulating
grasslands just off the empty highway. Inside the house is spotless, the wooden floors
polished, the wall adorned with tasteful works of art. The view outside the window is
a magnificent open vista, inviting contemplation and long considered thought. Then,
as if sharing his home and spirit were not enough, Mike gives Cris a hand-woven quilt
on which the sacred white buffalo is portrayed.
_ We are taught to give and take nothing in return.
38
A live recording of the group Takoja plays softly in the background. To the rhythms
of drums and chanting Mike tells the history of his people, his eyes upon me, dark and
very penetrating, gauging my response. He tells of the attrition, broken promises and
continuing legal chicanery that have left his people with little else beyond their deeprooted cultural legacy and a staunch determination to fight until the end. He tells how
the young are named at adulthood, how Sean’s son was named for the shadow that
follows lightning and deep religious significance of the ceremony. He shows me his
identity card showing the proportions of his ethnic background. He tells the story of
the sacred white buffalo and the giving of the pipe.
_ If you speak Lakota and know the Lakota philosophy any pipe will do.
His words come from a deep well of suffering, yet are poignant with compassion and
understanding. It is both humbling and a privilege to hear them spoken, to be there in
that moment, framed by eternity in this passing through.
At the cemetery at Wounded Knee where the bodies of between one hundred and fifty
and three hundred and seventy Sioux man women and children lie buried, he points to
a name No Ears on the monolith.
_ I wish that were my name.
He points to the low hillsides from where the Hotchkiss guns opened fire and the
valleys where survivors fled the massacre. There is the shell of a building not far
from the gravesite.
_ I was raised there as a child. Then all this had no significance for me. Now I
wonder if it matters, if it has any significance. Now I wonder if people will ever have
respect for each other.
We say goodbye at Wounded Knee. How many hearts lie buried there?
39
9.7.99.
Entering the Black Hills National Park we know we’ve finally hit the Big West by
passing a warning not to approach buffalo. No buffalo are to be seen, but dozens of
Prairie Dogs stand guard over
burrows as Cris creeps closer
with the telephoto lens. Now
granite peaks appear, covered
in evergreens and the
temperature is dropping as we
climb ever higher into the
heart of these hills of great
legend, on our way to see a
miracle in the making.
As work on the Mount
Rushmore Memorial was
coming to an end in 1939,
Chief Standing Bear wrote to sculptor Korczsk Ziolkowski saying that he and his
fellow chiefs would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too.
Ziolkowski had just won first prize for sculpture at the New York World Fair.
Perhaps in reading that letter the self-taught artist experienced a moment of supreme
enlightenment when inspiration dropped from heaven. Perhaps it came later.
Certainly he visited Mount Rushmore and assisted Gutzon Borglum for a short while.
Then he went to the Pine Ridge Reservation to meet Standing Bear. But somewhere
in the mind of the man, between the arrival of that fateful letter and the choosing of
site in 1946, he must have visualised the final product and been stunned by it’s
immensity. He is dead now, buried at the work site of what will one day become the
largest sculpture the world has ever known.
Robb DeWall is a short, no-nonsense-tolerated type of guy who has worked on the
Crazy Horse project for twenty years. He seems not overly impressed at meeting me
but since he met Bill Clinton the day before that’s understandable. So once again I
shake hands with the man who shook hands with The Man then we go find Cris
outside taking shots of the Native Dancers. Cris and Robb speak the same language,
they are both photographers. With common ground established Robb opens up and
for twenty minutes of his valuable time he gives us a run down on the project.
The President impressed Robb DeWall. He was on the site for over two hours and
knew it in far greater detail than could reasonably be expected. Robb impresses me.
He’s a dedicated man who, like Ziolkowski, will die long before the job is finished.
It’s hard to pin him down on a completion date. He gives the standard cliché about
funds and weather but judging from what has been achieved in the first fifty years it
will have to take another two hundred.
The dimensions are staggering. When the day comes, and come it will, the completed
statue of Crazy Horse, war chief of the Oglala Sioux, will stand 563 feet tall and 641
40
feet long. The head alone stands 87 feet six inches. All four heads at Mount
Rushmore would fit inside it. The completed statue will dwarf the town below and
will be visible for miles. But it isn’t the dimensions that most impress me, it’s the
vision and the way it’s reaching fruition steadily over the course of years. This
project, this immense undertaking, that will one day overshadow the Colossus of
Rhodes and St. Paul’s Basilica, is entirely self funded as Ziolkowski intended it to be.
Offered Federal funding of ten million dollars has twice been politely refused.
Donations and visitors fees taken at the gate finance the entire project, so immense in
its grandeur that it is hardly imaginable. It could only happen in America. Where else
could you get the chance to put five bucks into what will one day be America’s
Pyramid?
Robb and Cris run through the techniques of long exposure photography then he finds
us a press kit and sends us on our way with his blessing. It’s a sobering experience.
What we are trying to achieve in three months against what he is working on doesn’t
stand comparison. We drive deeper into the Black Hills looking for a campsite. Louis
here beside us saw Halley’s Comet as a six-year old so just might see it twice in his
one lifetime. He will not see Crazy Horse finished in all its glory but his descendants
might. Then there’ll be a connection.
10.7.99.
Fanning the still glowing embers soon gets last night’s campfire burning then we sit
there, waiting for the sun to rise on Lake Sheridan, as squirrels start the day’s foraging
and the soft wind stirs the pines. A hillside on the western shoreline obscures the
sunrise. The first bright shafts of morning turn distant mist above the water flamingo41
pink, while here on this shore sombre shadow lingers. Wood-smoke rises. Silent is
the forest as the day begins to break.
Swimming out in the morning, lying back in this lake among the Black Hills takes me
back to Canada years before…
[Nightfall finds me five hundred miles down the track at the hostel at Sault St Marie.
There I bump into two Australians, Jeff and Wain, who I had met at Big Jim Duthie's
home-brew sessions in the back yard at King Street West. That same night Jeff
happens upon Al who is looking for passengers to split gas almost all the way to
Vancouver, three thousand miles or so away. By the hostel there’s a lake, warm and
clean, surrounded by forest. In the yellow moonlight I swim maybe half a mile to its
centre, then turn on my back to gaze at the stars as my legs slowly sink from
horizontal to vertical. There goes another nano-second in this lazy galactic year.]
Louis comes down to the water edge then in he dives. Back onshore now, drying in
the sunshine, he’s out of sight. Silence beneath the pine trees, with me blinded by
sunlight reflected from the water. I am running through the consequences of his lying
on the cold lake-bottom when his whistle echoes from the cliff side half a mile away.
Coming back, he’s swimming overhand, the faint splashes of his progress are just
visible in the distance.
A parade in Hill City, where Cris posts off his slides before it happens, as drivers
polish Freightliners by the sidewalk, gleaming like diamonds in the early morning sun.
The First Western Bank announces 9.44 in the morning and 71 degrees. People
gathering along the sidewalks, some with chairs, some with food, some just standing
where there’s shadow, all in a burble of anticipation outside the Mangy Moose
Saloon, Buffalo Bob’s, Black Mountain Gold, the Rushmore Brewing Company monumental food and drink. Just time to cross the road as at ten-o-clock the parade
gets under way.
Up the main street come ambulances with sirens wailing and passengers throwing
candies to kids with plastic bags just ready for the filling as military police come close
behind throwing more candies by the hand full. Different buildings seen from this
side of the street with western names predominating - Call of the Wild Museum and
Gifts, Warrior’s World Studio and Gallery - as floats pass by, the Lions then the
Masons and Carol Maxifield the mayor. ‘Good on ya Carol’ someone shouts so she
gives an extra wave.
Next the trucks, those mammoths of the freeway, Miss Gold Discovery Days - that
first step perhaps to Hollywood, the 1927 Stoughton Fire Truck, hot-rods engines
roaring, and the Naja Clowns from Rapid City. An antique John Deere tractor sports a
sign Not to be used for Political Gain, the Mistletoe Ranch wishes us an early Happy
Christmas, Kick 104 FM in a stretch limo, a 1940 Canz Bulldog tractor then a posse
of horse riders, one of whom throws me a candy. So I eat it and now realise why
they’re thrown away.
42
And still the floats and old cars passing as candies rain from all directions then a
model T-Rex from the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research to add
counterpoint to frivolity - America, Love it and Log it says the First Western Bank.
Finally a 66 Mustang convertible brings up the rear. It’s all been fun and no harm
done and the kids have heaps of candies, no rain on this parade and wood chopping
still to follow.
Off to Mount Rushmore, among the most picturesque hills of granite that we’ve
passed through. Just round a corner and there it is in all its majesty. Four presidents
looking down, us mortals looking up, this scene might be repeated till this world has
passed away. Started in 1927, finished in 1941. It is a truly awesome experience, just
being there before art and vision on such a magnitude. Just under Jefferson’s image a
crow flies from a treetop, black against the near white backdrop. I wonder if it feels
the eyes upon it, caught in the concerted gaze of a thousand down below.
Back at the Rushmore Brewery Company for the soccer final, Dragon Throne against
Hollywood for the Woman’s World Cup. Bill Clinton is there for that one too, my
word he gets around. ‘Who’s he rooting for?’ someone asks which makes some laugh
and makes some wonder. Either way he must have been excited.
Twenty minutes into it and the pattern set. America’s girls more flair, more creative,
the Chinese girls more disciplined in defence. Up front the Chinese have a superstar,
the Americas control the midfield, the teams a perfect match. For ninety minutes both
sides run themselves into the ground but no score. In the first period of extra time Sun
Wen strikes and the ball cleared off the line with the goalkeeper beaten. In the second
period of extra time the American goalkeeper takes the ball off the toes of a certain
goal coming and its all down to a penalty shoot-out to end the game.
43
Five shots each; China wins the toss and takes first option. One-nil to China. One
goal each. Two-one to China. Two goals each. Then like a panther, adrenaline
supercharged, the black girl drops left in pure reaction and deflects a ball wide to
break the deadlock. Two goals to China three to the USA. Three goals to China, four
to the USA. Four goals to China then with ninety thousand, one hundred and eighty
five in the stadium and millions watching live throughout the world, Brandi Christan
blasts a left foot shot home into the side netting and the World Cup comes to America
in one of the best contests ever played.
Back to the campsite by the lake. Evening gathers in as Louis drops me off to walk
three hours along the Flume Trail in the lopsided rhapsody of cliff and forest, stream
and lake, then picks me up as pre-arranged and back to camp as two little girls find
Cris’s beer cooling at the lake’s edge. Their shouts of glee to daddy ‘look what we’ve
found’ and his response ‘that’s my girls’ - too much for Cris to spoil it. He lets them
go with the goodies so we all have a day long to be remembered. I’d better find a
phone line or I’ll never keep the web page updated with events.
11.7.99.
Pulling out from Lake Sheridan at 7.31 with 3545 miles on the clock and wind chill a
factor to be reckoned with in the open jeep, speeding down the highway, past our first
sight of buffalo grazing by the roadside. Dropping down into the quiet warmth of
Deadwood City fifty-five minutes later. The town asleep, so famous in story, where
Wild Bill got it in the back and Calamity Jane lies buried by his side. And since we
stumbled on his birth place memorial and were at Rock Creek where his legend began
it seems most appropriate to visit now the grave site before leaving the Black Hills
behind.
44
Out onto the high planes of Wyoming where a sign says there’s no place like it as a
Harley-Davidson roars by at one hundred miles an hour, eighteen miles from
Sundance, heading for the Devil’s Tower.
Not hard to imagine why the place evokes such interest, standing so strange and so
prominent above the plains. A vast volcanic plug all that’s left now standing after
millions of years erosion from wind and the Belle Fourche River stripped its flanks.
Roosevelt made it the nation’s first national monument in 1906, now it brings rock
climbers to tackle its fluted sides. Looking up from below we spot a climber half way
up to what must be a view well worth the effort. The view from down below was
worth the ride.
Cutting the corner of Northeast Wyoming, heading north on 112, alone on this empty
highway, suddenly, like an ice cube on my spine, the premonition that in all this world
so wide there is nothing but the hills and space and us. Perhaps that’s just this corner
of Wyoming. Frontier Days in Cheyenne will be a contrast. Now on to Alzada and
Montana then north-west to Miles City where we hope to stay the night.
12.6.99.
Cruising through Miles City, Montana, cow capital of the world, looking for a place to
stay. The Historic Olive Hotel seems the spot for us. It has that look about it. Wild
Bill, leaning on the counter, helps the owner sell a room.
_ Stay outside town in one of them places and you get done for DWI (driving while
intoxicated) on the way back. Cost you one hundred dollars so you might as well stay
here. Cheapest beer in town too.
Then he drags me to the piano where in a case the book ‘Lonesome Dove’ sits
enshrined in glass.
45
_ It ends here, in this hotel, how about that? You know Wild Bill Hickok? Calamity
Jane had a whorehouse right down the road from here. Not many people know about
that.
All it takes in any town is a friendly soul to point the way. Of those there’s been no
shortage as we’ve come across America. Every turn we’ve made has seemed a path of
right coincidence. We feel this town will suit us and are all too pleased to stay.
Catching up from two nights without writing as Cris comes upstairs to tell me he’s
been talking to the mayor. Wild Bill has made the introduction downstairs drinking in
the bar. This mayor has been in office thirteen years so if anyone can put us on the
right path he has to be that man.
Breakfast at the 600 Café, easy atmosphere, and decent food. We’re in a town where
wearing a hat is normal. It’s those who do not wear one that are somehow out of
place. The ‘Cowboy Cobbler’, silver spurs, the smell of leather, a poster in his
window says the Horse Whisperer is in town tomorrow. Now won’t that be a thing!
Back to the Historic Olive Hotel where George and Peg Kurkowski have come to
arrange the day, over lunch. Sitting back listening to the social interchanges one can
see that George can listen as well as any. Perhaps that’s half his secret in being so
long a mayor. He’s a font of information too. He is one half of a team; his wife is the
other. It’s good to be in a couple’s company when so obviously it works.
On the way to Rosebud he points out the browning landscape that could almost be
Australia.
_ Three weeks ago all those hills were green.
Big Montana spreading out in all directions, the world’s largest strip mine sixty miles
away. The wheat fields, gently swaying, will be ripe for harvest one week to ten days
from today. The road runs by the Yellowstone River, the only major tributary or river
in all this land to have no manmade dam or other obstacle interrupting its natural flow.
Fort Alexander where Custer’s troops disembarked then marched four days along
Rosebud Creek to the Little Bighorn one hundred miles away. Forsyth, Rosebud
County, named after one of Custer’s generals, where George and Peg have planned
their retirement, close to the ranch where soon we’ll all be heading. Chaps hanging in
the garage. Outside it’s ninety-six degrees.
_ I was cajoled and flattered into writing a book about this area for the bi-centenary
but I didn’t have the time for proper research so I composed an Atlas of historic
information instead.
Heading for the ranch in two vehicles, George, Cris and I in the Dodge truck, Louis
and Peg behind in the car. He stops beside a grave where the remains of an unknown
trooper, recently discovered, lie buried. Did he die going to the Little Bighorn or did
he escape the carnage then perish coming back? Then again we pause beside a marker
46
where, on June 22 1876, the Seventh Cavalry first made camp, three days away from
oblivion and immortality.
Rosebud Creek, along whose course Custer’s men rode to that fateful day of
reckoning, runs through the 20 Ranch. Out in fields George’s brother Joe is bailing
hay. Turning off the road into the pasture, to avoid stray boulders, we pass through
clouds of grasshoppers, some clinging to the windshield, some scattering like smoke
before the wheels.
_ They don’t cause us too much grief with hay but they can cause a lot of damage for
the grain farmers.
The ranch house burned down and gone. The bunkhouse and stables, no longer
needed, are left fading in the sun. In the ranch yard a change of vehicles. The car is
left behind and George takes the truck used to bring in the bales of hay. This process
is new for me. When I last helped with getting in the hay we used pitchforks. Now
two bails, weighing between twelve and eighteen hundred pounds, are picked up
mechanically in minutes. It seems so simple, as good ideas often do. What is not so
simple is how this ranch ticks over. The rhythm to which the passing seasons walk is
escaping me; I’m listening for the beat but can’t quite hear it. It’s there before me but
slightly out of reach.
A line of trees, swaying in the hot breath of Montana summer, marks the course of
Rosebud Creek and more familiar ground. A place to day dream. A place to let the
mind stray. Then, from the dry creek bed, heat dancing to the wind’s voice in the
treetops, muffled hoofs beat on the prairie. Ghosts are riding by. Perhaps I’m getting
too much sun.
Joe Kurkowski climbs down from the
tractor. His handshake is like a question
mark - is this really worth the effort? The
face, a silent seventy-year-old legacy to
long hours of work in solitude, with eyes as
if a surface film covers a deep well of long
considered thought.
His few short
sentences, nothing wasted, nothing left
unsaid, reveal the mystery, show me how
the farm works. The creek floods in
season, each time the banks get higher,
holding over-spilled water longer on the
fields. The hay is not a cash crop as I had
at first imagined. It’s for feeding cattle
through the winter. Alfalfa grass has more
food value but when snow is on the ground
they’re not too fussy. Stocking enough hay
to last two winters is insurance against a
dry season but those with irrigation will
always have hay to sell if called for. Three
47
hundred head of cattle are grazing in the foothills. They should produce two hundred
and seventy calves. At round-up time the heifers and calves are separated, branded
and some calves retained to replace lost stock. Profit and loss is a matter of applied
economics, providence and the weather. None of those are entirely in the farmer’s
control. Is might be why there’s more religion in the country.
Alone with Peg Kurkowski driving back to town she quietly tells her story. She does
it easily and without rancour, leaving me feeling privileged to be hearing it. It’s so
hard to say to somebody, even somebody you know well, how you really feel, what
you really think with complete honesty. You have to trust them. You have to know a
lot about yourself before you can say anything near the truth. It’s not easy to do and it
takes a lot out of you. If you can manage it you’re communicating and what better to
communicate than love?
In each of us there’s a story worth the telling. In some of us that story is a warning; in
some of us that story is a lesson. You do not go through war, marriage, triumph and
tragedy without gaining from the experience. You do not educate yourself and raise a
family without denial and true support. You do not spend thirty-four years in public
service and make no friends of real and lasting consequence. Your peers do not
repeatedly elect you to public office if you’re shallow and uncaring in their
perception. They do it because you’re worth it and you’ve proved that on the way.
Back in the Historic Olive, cool as a cave, winding down from the day’s exertions,
looking for words to capture the moment, Garth Brooks is singing in the background.
A dream is like a river ever changing as it flows
And a dreamer just a vessel that must follow where it goes
Trying to learn from what's behind us and never knowing what's in store
Makes each day a constant battle just to stay between the shores.
And I will sail my best until the river runs dry
Like a bird upon the wing, these waters are my sky
I'll never reach my destination if I never try
So I will sail my best till the river runs dry.
Too many times we stand aside and let the waters slip away
Till what we put off till tomorrow has now become today
So don't you stand upon the shoreline and say you’re satisfied
Choose to chance the rapids, dare to dance the tide.
Back on the ranch Joe puts in a fifteen-hour day. This e-mail just arrived from
Bozeman, out there by the Rockies.
Most of the mountainous terrain and best rivers in the state are between Miles City
and Missoula, so telling you exactly where to go would be like trying to tell you where
the highlights are in Europe between Paris and Zurich. Depends on whether you take
the southern or northern or central routes. Although they take longer, the most scenic
and interesting places are on the backroads, in the more remote areas, and small
48
towns. There are some nice hot springs in White Sulfur Springs, a great bar in
Ringling and a pretty canyon between Great Falls and Helena called Deep Creek, in
central Montana. The southern route pretty much requires you to take I-90 to Billings,
then I would recommend that you head south to Red Lodge funky old mining town
turned tourist area, then to Cooke City via the Beartooth Highway, which may well be
the most scenic drive in the US. I am not kidding. It goes above 10,000 feet,
switcbacking above the town of Red Lodge. Not for the faint of heart; people have
been known to be afraid to drive it! Then it goes along a ridge-top past Wilderness,
then drops back into the forest and into Yellowstone Park past Cooke City. I don't
know what you are driving, but if you have a car you are willing to take on a dirt
road, the side trip to Daisy Pass, just outside of Cooke City, will take you to an old
gold mine that was recently rescued from more extraction by Clinton. If you get out
and walk around you can still see the acidic water trickling down from the mined
area. They were going to put in a cyanide leaching system and build ponds for the
cyanide waste. That would burst eventually, flow down the Stillwater drainage and
pollute the Yellowstone River. You really should spend a day in Yellowstone, as it is
our nation's first National Park! If you leave the park through West Yellowstone, near
Old Faithful, you can drive north on 191 toward Bozeman through the canyon that I
was bragging about when we met. Then either take the interstate through Butte,
stopping to see the Pit, then go toward Missoula, or alternatively you can follow the
Missouri River (Lewis and Clark) and go toward Helena and then up toward Polson
and Glacier Park areas. Our National Parks are set aside for a reason and they all
have something unique to offer. Unfortunately, they are also full of tourists this time of
year. The northern route I am less familiar with, but it is pretty much rolling dry hot
hills with huge ranches, little towns and lots of cows until you reach Glacier Park.
Did someone say there’s no rest for the wicked?
13.7.99.
Horses figure somewhere in most of our lives, usually on the periphery. My uncle
used to take me race meetings when I was a kid. Draft horses were still used on some
farms in my early childhood and that’s as near as I got to horses. For the most part
horses are something people gamble on, tiny men in coloured silks, cursed and
cheered by men in pubs, a thing concerned with money. Not many of us actually
work with horses anymore, a progress thing. It depends where you’re from of course.
If you’re from Miles City, Montana, it’s a different story. Just down the road from the
Historic Olive there’s a stockyard. Today there’s a cattle sale so we go along to see it.
It’s the first time that I’ve ever seen working horses. There’s a first time for
everything and this was it.
The cattle pens are a system of gates and passageways. As the cattle arrive they are
unloaded from trailers in though a gate and then three riders move the cattle around to
allocated pens and positions around the stockyard. Over the pens there’s a gantry.
From this gantry people like me, who don’t know what they’re doing, can view the
livestock without getting in the way. The riders work as team, going into pens,
separating some beasts from the rest for whatever reason and moving them through
the gates to wherever they’re needed. It’s looks like a smooth operation. To someone
49
who has never thrown a leg across a saddle the horsemanship is quite impressive. I
stay an hour then leave them to it. It’s getting hot and not a lot is happening.
The poster in the window at the Cowboy Cobbler advertises a Colt Starting Exhibition
by Curt Pate. Not too long ago I’d read the novel Horse Whisperer. My niece gave it
to my father and I ended up with it. So this all seems to fit in and if Curt Pate is
anything like the bloke in the book I want to see him.
We get down to the Fair Grounds by two-o-clock when the show is due to start.
Inside a huge tin building, with open doors and huge fans blasting, a small crowd is
gathering. In the round pen stand two horses, one an unbroken brown colt. Curt is
easy to spot. A tall good-looking young man in chaps and a black cowboy hat. (If he
handles the girls as well as he handles horses I’d bet he’s cut a good one out). Some
of the posters have advertised a three-o-clock start so he kills time for a while by
talking about what he’s doing. He has one of those portable microphones fastened to
him and speaks quickly, as someone who knows what they are talking about tends to
do.
He points out, at some length, that he as doing things his way, not trying to say it was
the best way, just his way - take it or leave it. That sounds fair enough but as I have
no idea what he’s talking about it all goes over my head. Then he gets the show under
way. It all takes about two hours and is simply amazing. He never stops talking but
he talks to the crowd not the colt or his own horse. He controls the colt with body
movements, being in the right place at the right time, and by knowing how it will react
to his coaxing. He says it reminded him of a big ol’ gangly kid who hadn’t got life
figured out yet. For an hour it was seems to going easily, almost too easily, then
suddenly it all changes and he has to use his strength for a while. But he is always in
control. The colt is unsure about having the saddle on him and resists.
50
_ He wants to do good but he don’t know how.
Then he slips the saddle on as if putting on his coat and walks away with the colt
standing in the arena knowing it’s the thing to do. It all becomes like a teacher giving
a lesson to a pupil; a kindly knowing teacher and a willing eager pupil - a give and
take affair. The audience is very quiet, almost captivated and these are horse people,
not outsiders such as I.
When it was all over the crowd applauds, reserved but not begrudging. Curt has
ridden the colt and reckons he could probably take him out and round up a few cows.
No doubt he could. He ends by saying that horses don’t get much of a deal out of life,
they mostly give and get little in return. He says that if he comes back as a horse he’d
want to be a bronco and have some fun too.
Back at the Historic Olive Wild Bill introduces me to someone who dose know about
horses. Doug Wall started breaking horses at thirteen and is still on the rodeo circuit
forty-three years later. So I ask about Curt Pate and learn how they did it in the old
days and a lot more beside. Then Doug’s friend, Art Larson, comes in. Art is sixtyseven and has been raising horses all his life. Before long they are talking horses so I
just sit there taking in what I can. Some things stick, some things don’t but I learn that
young Curt Pate throws a lariat like no one these two have ever seen. They think he’s
smart too. They tell a story about how Curt was set up on a horse that would have
kicked him when he got off it but a commotion in the crowd distracted the horse and
he was off it like a flash.
At my age I’ll probably never ride a horse. There are many other things I’ll never do
as well. But I’ll never forget the way that man controlled that animal and the way his
doing so captivated the audience, leaving everyone present with new thoughts of their
own.
14.7.99.
Kiwi Pete walks into the lobby, Historic Olive, early morning, in his work clothes never a dressy race these Kiwis - his accent takes me back to many a memory in that
land of the long white cloud where my children saw first daylight - one of them still
there. Then grabbing Louis in a beat-up work truck we head out to where he’s
working. There’s Banjo Ron, his mate and partner, cleaning up with a tiny bobcat,
then the four of us drive off in convoy, two wagons and two pickup trucks, these
mechanical equivalents to ninety year old men. Sitting in shade as Pete and Ron drop
the tree inch-perfect in the very spot they want it then whack it up in handy segments,
chain saw buzzing in the middle of this reminiscing morning. For three of us New
Zealand once was home.
From a tiny town, Ashburton, South Island of New Zealand, to the continent of
America. It takes all kinds and all the better for it. Into Los Angeles; now fifteen
years later, the many miles behind him, lumberjacking his way from Alaska to where
the road might take him till eight years ago where here the stone stopped rolling.
51
Banjo Ron from Roanoak Virginia, Shanandoah Valley, Blue Ridge Mountains,
Appalachians, these names roll of the tongue like honey. Sold his twenty-two to buy a
banjo. How could he not play Bluegrass? His wife became a lawyer and he her first
case, so he hit the road with two suitcases and a banjo for a new life in Montana.
Cutting trees with Kiwi Pete and both are doing fine.
Then out to see a client but she’s not home and on her ranch an irate ostrich routs five
men, scattering us like children over fences; one big and deadly chicken. Safer by the
river, a king snake slides away.
Yellowstone River, still flowing fast after June Rise (the snowmelt) still needing much
respect so strong is the current. Ron and I talk fishing, of northern pike and sturgeon,
small-mouth bass, walleye, ling, sauger, goldeneye and catfish, how to catch them,
what they taste like, perhaps one day together. Wouldn’t that be fine?
As lazy evening falls on Miles City, wide Montana, I walk with Louis to the Elks
Club, sit outside on warm stone steps a bit nonplused by inside somber splendor
where both of us are strangers never seen. Then Ron arrives and starts to tune up, the
banjo sound so focal, like the trumpet, stands out above ensembles and always has to
lead. Girls walk through the dimming hall with elks’ heads looking downwards, one
asks Ron what’s he up to.
_ Just picking and a grinning, waiting for a woman. They keep circling. Maybe one
will land.
The band kicks off, these four the Sagegrass Ramblers, as thunderclouds roll in above
the heat besmitten town. The night, in balance, could yet be a disaster or an
overwhelming success more likely. Kiwi Pete gets up, as George the mayor will not
52
take no for an answer, and sings for us all Waltzing Matilda as couples waltz and us
few that know the words join in. Outside the lightening light show flashes like nature
is providing a stroboscope for just this very evening. A Bluegrass band in cowboy
land, a Kiwi singing that wonderful Australian ballad as thunder rolls in
accompaniment and the mayor dancing with his wife so happy; we’re all together in
the melting pot. Then George the mayor, first time in all his forty-five years of
marriage, sings with the band and Art Larson Mountain Dew from the heart and don’t
they know about it. Art had warned about Ron’s Moonshine, so very deadly, early in
the night.
Sitting on the steps, facing the post office, and looking right, as if down a gun barrel,
to the street’s end in small perspective where The Bison Bar red neon sign is
gleaming. Half way down the street a Stars and Stripes is cracking in the stiffening
wind. A girl walks by, laughing, bare footed, splashing though rain rivers by the
sidewalk. A country girl, she knows the rain’s so precious - her long black hair
bedraggled, her clothes wringing wet and she not caring. The sky above is plumb blue
and gray moldy apricots as the rainstorm blows away.
15.7.99.
Passing a gas station without filling up on Highway 59 North is not a smart idea.
Federal agents made that mistake during the Freeman incident and those that pulled
into Art Larson’s ranch got petrol if little sympathy. Jordan, where the stand-off took
place, is forty miles away.
_ I made a business trip around the country soon after that whole sorry mess and
because of where I’m from people always asked me about the Freemen. And it’s a
funny thing; right around the country everyone was in sympathy with the Freemen and
nobody, and I mean nobody, had any sympathy with the federal agents. It came
across how little confidence many people all around this country have in the federal
government. That surprised me.
I’m surprised by how articulate the old rancher is. His grasp of the agricultural
position, world-wide as well as domestic, is to be expected. At sixty-seven, born to
ranching, it’s his business to know. He’s seen the lot and had time to think it through.
His dialogue is full of intricate detail; he quotes dates, prices, percentages and
quotations as if reading from a script but there is no script. All he needs is the
memory of a lifetime on the land. But it isn’t just on agriculture that he speaks about
with such clear authority. It’s everything. Producing food is being close to life’s most
fundamental requirement. Perhaps that puts him closer to life’s real meaning. And if
he needs a detail, perhaps the year of a certain snowstorm, his wife would let him have
it as she prepares lunch, saying little but assimilating everything.
The meal is a huge affair of good farm food and plenty of it. With five to do it justice
there was lots left over and I for one will not eat again that day. Then Art takes us
with him to check the livestock and as he drives he speaks of a lifestyle slowly dying,
the lifestyle that’s the very essence of America.
53
_ The average age of working farmers is sixty-one and growing. It’s too hard for
youngsters these days. To work on a ranch you need to be able to do everything. You
have to able to ride and handle horses. You have to be able to fix anything that goes
wrong because there is nobody else to do it. There are no hours because when there’s
work to be done you have to do it. And when times are hardest then you’re needed
most. If its blowing a blizzard in the middle of the night and a cow is calving you
can’t just stay in bed you have to get out there and take care of it. You have to know
too much and work too hard for too little for youngsters to do it these days. You can’t
blame them either. Why should they do it?
He’s looking ahead, checking where his stock is grazing in all this vast openness
running to the sky. He doesn’t see the lights in Louis’s eyes, sitting there behind him.
This boy so silent, so mature for his few years, absorbing every detail and passing no
opinion, his mind, perhaps, running forward to the day he strikes out in life alone.
_ When I was ten I used to ride out and bring the horses in for work each morning and
they had to be in not much after sunrise. There were no fences then. This was all
open range, the horses could be anywhere but you could generally depend on them
being near water or good grazing. The hardest part was finding the right herd. There
would be lots of horses out there but you just didn’t bring in the wrong workhorses. I
mean you just didn’t. These days that would be child abuse or exploitation or
something but I didn’t think I was being abused or my father and grandfather were
taking advantage of me. I just did it ‘cause that’s what you did. It was the way it was.
I never even thought about it. I bet there’s not one child in all America who could do
that now - not one.
He comes across a neighbour’s horses straying on his land. They gather round the
truck looking for food as he gets on the car-phone for his wife to relay the message.
On the car-phone his neighbour is out of range. As far as the eye could see in every
54
direction there is nothing but the fertile, rich ochre earth spawning soft green
meadows of swaying hay, the distant lowing of cattle the only sound.
The ranch house low and long, clinging to the prairie. Around it barns, corrals and
bunkhouses, cutting horses looking over fences. Inside the Larsons are playing
traditional Country and Western classics, Art on a Fender Stratocaster, Nancy on
different violins. She’s a classical violinist who plays with a quartet when time
allows. They play about ten numbers then put the strings away.
I’m trying to grasp the position of American agriculture in this last summer of the
millennium. From Albany to the Sand Hills it has seemed one endless succession of
cultivated crops. From Alliance, Nebraska, to where we are now siting, it’s all been
ranch land except for the National Parks. The underlying current of concern I’ve
noticed is that farmers are losing any semblance of anonymity as options to sell their
product are concentrated in fewer hands. Giant corporations are controlling them,
and, collectively or individually, the power to make changes is out of their hands.
There are too few now involved in agriculture to warrant concern at the ballot box,
perhaps two percent of the American population. This helplessness and the drift away
by the younger generation is leaving a vacuum that none can see filling. Yet it seems
so paradoxical if America is feeding the world. What happens if the system
implodes? Art Larson puts me straight on that one.
_ I’ve come to think it would not matter if the entire industry collapsed. There is land
in South America, in Central America, in Australia, in New Zealand. None of it is
being maximised. They could step up production two, three, ten times if they wanted
to. It could all be produced cheaper because labour is cheaper there. The corporations
control the whole thing anyway. They don’t take over production here directly
because they would have to pay awards and benefits, so it’s easier for them to let us
do it for now. It can’t last and the truth of the matter is that nobody cares. How many
youngsters have you come across in all your travels that are making a career out of
farming?
Then he finds a couple of gallons to get us to the gas station and we drive off down
the road.
The Mountains.
16.7.99.
Lingering look at Fort Keogh as we leave Miles City. Captain Keogh’s horse,
Comanche, long survived him. It was the only thing that did survive that day now
known in legend as Custer’s last Stand. Keogh perished but his name lives on. Nor
have we time to visit the museum as we head out west across the prairies, on towards
the mountains. One mile short of Worden, the country rises. Outriders of the
Rockies, the Absaroka Range, are looking down as we crawl towards them, maybe
seventy miles away.
55
At Red Lodge, elevation 5555 feet, the first high peaks are peeping through the cloud
cover. A last fill up with petrol before the Bear Tooth Pass then we are in there
amongst those mountains we’ve come so far to see. The road winds upward round
hairpin bends, ever climbing, demanding silent homage to the majesty unfolding.
Then after many false declarations we’re finally at the top. The marker proclaims
elevation 10,947 feet, the air like penicillin with the wind mumbling like a distant
express train. Out there, north and west, the mountains run on forever. We’re only on
the doorstep looking in.
The roadway not so steep dropping down from the summit through pine-clad valleys,
trout streams, wild flowers and mountain tops above. Then into Yellowstone National
Park, trying to absorb so much scenery with the wide strong river flowing through
gravel bars and hopeful fishermen dotted on its margins. It’s all too much to come to
grips with and been described before with better words. Out of the north entrance
after a forty-mile drive across the park’s top corner then on to Bozeman where we rest
up for the night.
17.7.99.
Starting early heading west and north to Missoula through range upon range of
scattered hills and mountains, leaving twenty rolls of film to be processed before
turning south down 93 across the Clark Fork River, log jammed in the centre, kids
floating slow on tyres, through Lola into Bitterroot Valley. High above and to the
west Mount Lolo capped with snow, guarding where the Nez Perce and rain clouds
come from, over endless hills to the great and wide Pacific. Between the Sapphire and
Bitterroot Mountains this valley was once underwater, a lake 200 miles long and
1,200 feet deep. Back on the edge of imagination, twelve to fifteen thousand years
ago, the ice barrier holding in mighty Lake Missoula crumbles. A three hundred-foot
deluge sweeps across Idaho, Oregon and Washington, heading for the sea.
56
In late afternoon’s lengthening shadow, creeping down from up above the tree-line,
we climb a winding track two miles up into the timber to where we’re made most
welcome by a smiling gal Eileen. Her husband Stan out playing golf, her home a
timber palace, her laugh infectious, her mind, so obviously saturated with history and
geography, leaves me anticipating conversations coming. The walls display trips to
Russia, Paris and London. A photo of her grandfather, a newspaperman, by his Plains
Ledger printing press in Hugo Colorado. Another of her father; he owned a
newspaper at age thirteen. Her descendant, General Nelson Miles, harried Chief
Joseph of the Nez Perce on the long retreat to surrender 30 miles short of Canada and
safety. Miles City is named after him so that completes a loop.
The home on eighteen acres, llamas in the paddock, a teepee nestled in amongst the
pines trees, the balcony overlooks the valley far below. Stan comes home from
golfing. Takes us up to see his neighbour’s place, built deep into the hillside. A 51
M211 GMC all wheel drive, automatic transmission, ex-military model truck parked
behind is fair indication of the tidy mind that conceived this unique dwelling, so well
insulated that the all year round inside temperature is between 60 and 65 degrees.
Downstairs in the playroom there’s a swimming pool, bar, pool table and Jacuzzi.
Pine trees grow through the patio. Louis lets the grandson win at pool.
Alone at night, by campfire in the teepee, potatoes roast in the embers, through the
smoke-hole bright stars gleam up above. Sunrise, east across the valley, waiting there
for when tomorrow comes.
18 & 19.7.99.
Sunrise over the Sapphire Mountains, ten miles across the valley, paints clouds pastel
orange against the soft blue of the sky. Humming birds are drinking on the wing in
the tiny waterfall, squirrels bouncing through the branches, a red fox slipping quietly
through the trees. It was time to stay put awhile. Cris had too many films to be
processed for us to go any further. He dropped twenty rolls off on in Missoula Friday
afternoon leaving us with a weekend free till Monday pick up time. Time to recharge
the batteries, to catch up with e-mail, to do the laundry - little things like that.
Stan and Eileen travelled all fifty states before retiring to this spot in West Montana.
Down below and to the south a few more houses dot the valley floor but it’s
essentially a remote location. Few unexpected people would ever arrive on their
doorstep. It’s not that kind of place. With good neighbours and a beautiful home
there’s not a lot more to ask for. I wonder if the next generation can expect to retire in
similar circumstances or are they caught in same gradual quicksand of rich get richer
poor get poorer that as America’s agricultural sector slowly drowning. Time will tell.
So we marked time for a couple of days. Though it seemed somewhat silly I slept out
in the tepee, sensing there might never come a time in all my life to do the same again.
At night the stars filled all the wide horizon, Vega and Deneb sparkling eastward,
57
Antares further south. And tucked beneath the Milky Way the great Andromeda
nebula on the very edge of sight. On the valley floor, away southwards, dotted lights
that could have been the campfires of Kootenai or Blackfoot before the white man
came.
Things had gone astray for my old friend John up there in Vancouver so he could not
make the meeting. Somewhere in the diminishing future I’ll have to arrange a return
to Canada to sit with him awhile and cogitate the wandering lives we’ve followed,
him the teacher, me the pupil; someday I need to submit my thesis. I think he’ll grade
me well.
Stan barbecued antelope burgers for us on the veranda; Eileen baked a rhubarb pie and
their friends Mike and Pat wandered down from that home carved into the hillside. A
deer walked by through the pine trees just below us, and two bald eagles circled
slowly overhead. In three hours of friendly conversation, pictures of life in these
mountains crystallised and fragmented as the shadows crept down the hills behind us
and nature’s easy peace drew in the closing day.
_ In winter we get up to thirty elk in our garden and there’s usually a herd of about
three hundred out there by the highway.
The waterfall by the pool tinkled softly in the darkness but the road was tugging
gently; it was time to slip away.
20.7.99.
South and away down the Bitterroot Valley where llamas graze with horses on wide
meadows under snow capped mountains and eagles soar on aerial patrol. The valley
wide, perhaps ten miles, highway 93 crosses the river meandering through the fields.
At Darby the mountains on either side come together, squeezing road and river
alongside each other as rain begins to fall. Cris dispatches seven hundred slides back
to Connecticut having spent the day before sorting and editing. There’s no way for us
to speed up this process until we get another laptop. That will happen somewhere
down the line. The road and river run together through a combination of trees and
stream as picturesque as any yet encountered, fifteen miles to go to Idaho.
The long climb upward that began somewhere back in central Montana finally ends at
the Continental Divide and over the top we go into Idaho. Down the other steeper
side, the Scenic Salmon River Highway. It seems that we could knock the jeep out of
gear and free wheel all the way to the sea. As the elevation drops the temperature
begins to rise – noticeably! Filling up with gas in Salmon the sun drives me to the
shade. Sitting there, shaded by a gas pump, an overwhelming feeling of contentment
leaves me trying to work out why I feel at home is such strange places. Perhaps I’ll
never have a home.
Turning left down highway 28, as we cross the forty-fifth latitude, half way between
the equator and the pole, a gust of wind almost blows us off the road. This is the most
deserted stretch of highway we’ve encountered since highway 112 in north-east
58
Wyoming. It’s the most spectacular mountain scenery we’ve encountered all the way!
To the west the Lemhi Range rises higher than the Beaverhead Mountains to the east.
Pine forests below snow capped peak after snow capped peak marching slowly
southward. At the mountains’ feet wide prairie grasslands, cut with canyons, through
which Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce on the long retreat. Occasionally we pass a sign
saying no fireworks; seemingly out of place as there are no people. Leadore boasts a
population of seventy-four. Other than a store, Lone Pine seems to have no
population at all.
The mountains end on the Snake River Plain, a flat, lava-blasted wilderness on which
the road vanishes from sight long before the horizon. This area was considered to be
the most dangerous on the Oregon Trail due to Indian attacks and few of those
original emigrants settled here. It still looks inhospitable. Signs along the highway
advertise the area as the Idaho National Environmental Engineering Laboratory. It’s
a nuclear power research centre. Over at Acro they are developing nuclear fission.
No motel is obvious as we pass through Mud Lake. No mud either. A quick run
down Interstate 15 to Idaho Falls is far enough for this evening. The motel
receptionist comes in with a price so low it leaves us stuck for adequate rejoinder,
tongue tied, unable to barter. We thank her kindly, take the key and turn in for the
night.
21.7.99.
This morning an unexpected e-mail from a friend in Australia. I have just got back
from Pakistan and the carpet business. Briefly, this involves my Pakistani partner
buying carpets from the Afghan middlemen, sending them by container back to
Sydney, where I then wholesale them to shops. This trip we managed to get into
Afghanistan by driving the tribal pick-up to Kabul and back, which was educational,
to put it mildly. Hopefully we can now buy at source. In the longer term we are
trying to set up our own factory in the Tribal Area and register it as a charity,
whereupon we enter the wonderful world of government subsidies. At the moment
though it's just paying for airfares, which is all I'm interested in. Don't think you’re
missing out on anything in Bondi. The closure of the back bar only accelerated an
existing trend. After 30 years of rolling around on the bar room floor, most of the
chaps are starting to slow up a bit. There are some exemptions. Bondi is now getting
so expensive that, at this rate, everyone will have to move to Maroubra. Most of the
Maoris have already gone. Hope your American venture is working out.
It’s a world made cosier by modern communications. A lady from New Jersey has
this to say. The books I have been reading lately and your travel diary seem to have
awakened the wanderlust spirit within. I found myself rummaging through my old
photos and revisiting my camping experiences. It has been years since I have been
"on the road" myself. Almost forgot how beautiful this country is. The television
news says there’s been a tornado not forty miles from where we’re sitting. Here a
deep blue sky is patterned with white herringbone clouds, a great day in the making.
Bob Marley sings don’t worry about a thing so we take his advice and hit the road.
59
This country has so much natural beauty that it’s easy to take it for granted. After
several hours of driving even nature at it’s most picturesque might sometimes become
monotonous. But in early morning light, heading south-west on highway 26, the view
towards the Caribou Range is breathtaking. A patchwork quilt of greens and gold
before a backdrop of rugged mountains with here and there the dampening mist from
revolving irrigation pivots catching the sun, creating rainbows. Then the highway
crosses the Snake River, rushing down from Yellowstone Park, over the Shoshone
Falls, across Idaho to become the boundary between Idaho and Oregon before joining
the mighty Columbia River a thousand miles away.
We turn into Wyoming for the third time this trip at Alpine. At the Swan Valley
entrance good-looking female construction workers waving flags make roadwork
delays quite bearable - nothing wrong with progress - we’re all for women’s lib.
Hemmed in by the valley the Snake runs swiftly, yells of white water rafters echo
from the cliff faces like ricocheting gun-fire. Old pine forest clings to granite
pinnacles and the boom of the river far below.
At Hoback Junction we turn right down Highway 191 towards Pinedale, through the
Bridger-Teton National Forest. The Hoback River, running alongside the road, looks
so full of fish I can almost smell them. With the Gros Ventre Range to the East and
the Wyoming Range to the West it’s hard to imagine, where the valley opens out onto
a plateau, that we are still seven thousand feet above the sea.
Turning south, after tanking up at Pinedale, the plateau widens. We cross the Green
River, flowing from the Wind River Range away to the East. Tucked somewhere in
those great mountains is Gannett Peak, the highest in all Wyoming. The plateau must
be a least fifty miles wide as we cross the Big Sandy River, mile upon mile of sagebush, greasewood and saltbush; mountains at the very edge of sight. At Farson the
elevation is six and a half thousand feet. Finally, we cross the lip of a ridge and drop
swiftly into Rock Springs. Looking back the way we’ve come the ridge looks
imposing but we’re still a mile or more above sea level on the Great Divide Basin. An
early stop gives Cris time to put thirty new photos on the web page. Tomorrow we’ll
slip down into Colorado to get it all together for Cheyenne’s Frontier Days.
22.7.99.
Before we leave Rock Springs Cris gets chance to upload another batch of photos to
the web site. People out there were probably beginning to think he hasn’t come along.
The manageress thanks us for staying then gives hazy directions to highway 430, the
back way out of Wyoming. That same steep ridge down which we rolled into town is
out to our right as we say goodbye to civilisation for a few hours. Highway 430 is not
a busy road.
Salt Wells Creek holds no water nor does it seem to have done so for quite some time.
Close by the road a rugged ridge towers high above us, it’s layers of strata exposed as
if by the cut of some gigantic knife. We’re looking at the entrails of the planet as if
we’ve just disturbed some curious cosmological surgeon performing an autopsy on the
Earth.
60
Up the road, a junction to Hiawatha and Powder Wash. As we weigh up options the
only sound is the tick of metal cooling from the jeep. A couple of miles down this
side road and tar-seal ends. The metal road takes us through a shallow canyon. Those
canyon walls suggest a flow of rapid water, in it’s season, but now Vermillion Creek
is a river of gritty sand.
We plan to get a coffee at Hiawatha but a couple of deserted sheds, a vulture on a
carcass and a Pronghorn trotting out of bow-range are all the life we see. The road
winds on through splendid desolation to a far horizon. The sense of overwhelming
solitude is almost overpowering. At Powder Wash one building may be occupied.
Beware of the dog on a high wire fence suggests a tenancy of sorts. No coffee-stop
here either. On we go.
We are now some miles into Colorado, tracking through a wilderness more remote
than anything we’ve encountered since the Sand Hills of Nebraska. We are crossing a
vast plateau, high in the Rocky Mountains, where vegetation struggles in sparse
topsoil and countless years of wind erosion have stripped the Earth down to its very
bones. Not until we cross the Little Snake River and see the Elkhead Mountains rising
in the distance is there any indication that we’re still in the middle of a vast mountain
range, two thousand miles long, with more than fifty peaks over fourteen thousand
feet just in Colorado. It’s hard to come to grips with until you’re in there amongst
them. Even then it isn’t easy. The magnitude somehow dwarfs the dreams of men.
Beyond the Little Snake the first signs of human habitation; a power line strung on
telegraph poles and occasional cattle sitting by the roadside. At Great Divide there’s
little more than a pile of rusting cars from demolition derbies, stacked behind a
padlocked gate. Great Divide, like the cars, has seen better days but why the padlock?
Then back onto the tar seal, a few small farms and we join highway 40 near the town
of Craig.
Heading east, Highway 40 runs through richer land, stands of trees shading the
roadside, fishing boats gliding down the Yampa River. Beyond Hayden, elevation
6300, the road climbs into Steamboat Springs, a ski resort with houses tucked into the
hillsides like those in distant Switzerland. A prosperous town, flower baskets hanging
on the lamp posts, resting in the sunshine, waiting for the snow to come.
An ear-popping climb through Routt National Forest, up eight and a half thousand feet
through Rabbit Ears Pass, tall timber country, wide fields of wild flowers, yellow, red
and white. A large flying insect splatters on the windshield like a snotty snowball. I
can not name the insect, the wild flowers or the trees. Not knowing pine from spruce,
fir, juniper or aspen is part of being a stranger here. To know a country you need to
know the stars at night; you need to know which direction the wind comes from, the
fishes in the streams, the flowers by the waysides. Here I’m like a parrot escaped
from an aviary, enjoying the freedom, hoping to survive. We pass a sign saying
Welcome to Grand County - nice to be here, thank you kindly.
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A thousand foot decent through Arapaho National Forest, on to Kremmling where a
combination of rain and sunshine baths a distant mountain in an almost otherworldly
glow. So different is this phenomenon, this trick of light beaming down through cloud
cover, that we almost expect the mountain to disappear, sucked from sight by alien
interests. On through the Byres Canyon where the infant Colorado River flows. The
longest river west of the Rockies, it flows fifteen hundred miles to the Pacific, carving
the Grand Canyon on its way. The road begins to climb. Hot Sulpher Springs at
seven thousand six hundred feet, Granby at seven thousand nine. Over to the northeast, in the Rocky Mountain National Park, a dark rain cloud looms above the
mountains like a vast volcanic plume. Still climbing into Fraser, eight thousand three
hundred feet, where we learn the road through to Rollinsville has been closed for five
years due to a tunnel collapse. On the edge of town partly constructed hotel
developments indicate business in the ski fields is doing fine. No option now but to
continue on highway 40, under darkening skies, over the Berthoud Pass.
Into the Arapaho National Forest then up around tight hairpin bends, temperature
dropping, until we are level with patches of snow still hanging on from winter. Into
cloud and rain at the eleven thousand three hundred foot summit then over the top,
crawling down a road that looks as if a heavy rain could wash it down the
mountainside. Down to Empire, eight thousand six hundred feet, where we turn east
on Highway 70. Then, just as it seemed the scenery could not get better, we turn into
the Clear Creek Canyon for the last headlong plunge out of the Rocky Mountains.
Clear Creek hurtles through a narrow twisting canyon. Where the road cannot follow
the river it plunges through tunnels carved in the living rock. It’s as if some
philanthropic spirit of the mountains has saved the best till last. At Golden we turn
north up highway 93, past the Coors Brewery, heading for Boulder and a place to rest
the night. Out to the east, as far as the eye can see, stretch the Great Plains of
America, rising gently from four thousand feet above sea level at the distant Kansas
border. We’re travelling north along the very edge of the Rocky Mountains. To the
west the first ragged peaks climb like teeth from the gums of the earth, under a sombre
sky.
Cheyenne to Los Angeles
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With the sun still low over the eastern horizon we cross into Wyoming for the fourth
time on this trip. We came into the north-east corner from South Dakota, the northwest corner from Montana, the south-west corner from Idaho and today, having
surrounded the place, we come straight up into the middle from Colorado. It takes
about ninety minutes to drive up from Boulder, a cosmopolitan university town,
tucked under the mountains, where we are based for a while with Cris’s ex-college
room mate.
Frontier Days is a big event for Cheyenne. It’s a big event for America. As far as
rodeos go it’s the ‘Daddy of ‘em All.’ We’ve been planning to be here for about eight
months. If there is any place to see the cowboy tradition in action, this world famous
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ten-day festival is it. Approximately 1,250 contestants will compete in Bull Riding,
Saddle Bronc Riding, Bareback Riding, Steer Roping, Barrel Riding and other events
for a total in prize money of about $600,000.
We pull up outside the commemorative statue to Lane Frost, killed by a bull here in
1989. It takes a little time to get our press credentials sorted then we walk round the
arena. The stadium is impressive. ZZ Top are testing their sound equipment before
the grandstand and the volume is making the seats vibrate. They will be playing first
night of the rodeo. Reba McEntire will close the show next Saturday.
Behind the main arena horses and bulls graze quietly in their paddocks. They won’t
be so placid when the action starts. The fair ground is just swinging into gear.
Everywhere there’s an air of quiet expectation. It’s the time of year when the citizens
of Cheyenne are proud to display the tradition of the West. This is the 103rd running
of Frontier Days. Something tells me it’s gonna be a boomer.
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A policeman at the crossroads, arms waving, whistle blowing, lets a horse-riding
cowgirl across the highway. She’s just one of thousands swirling into Frontier Park.
The car parks are already at bursting point but co-ordinated attendants direct us to a
parking spot with minimal fuss. Already the organisation is impressive. In the public
relations office press kits are waiting, the bar well stocked, the cooler full of soft
drinks, complimentary issues of American Cowboy magazine on display. We clip on
our press badges and walk into the stadium through a side gate, past the stock pens, to
be swallowed by the crowd.
Under the grandstand the heroes are loosening up in the Cowboy Ready area. Out in
the main arena, a huge elongated oval of soft, elaborately raked dirt, the Pine Creek
Rangerettes Drill Team put their horses through a tight routine to country music. The
surrounding grandstands are filling quickly. A girl in blue jeans with a splendid set of
lungs takes the microphone out there in bright sunshine. The crowd sings along with
her, clapping hands, getting in the groove.
When I die I may not go to heaven. I don’t know if they let cowboys in.
If they don’t then let me go to Texas. Texas is the closest that I’ve bin.
Next the formal announcements, the MC whipping up the crowd’s excitement as girls
ride round the arena carrying the sponsor’s flags. To God Bless America a girl rides
into centre stage carrying the Stars and Stripes. The crowd all standing, hats in hands,
at the singing of the nation anthem. Emotion choked, a tear creeps down my face;
perhaps the melody, perhaps just being here, perhaps the memories of a thousand title
fights when to this very tune excitement built to breaking point. Let’s get it on! A
bull bursts through the gate, kicking and twisting till the rider crashes to the dirt. Then
another with the same result. But Casey stays onboard for the full eight seconds, falls
laughing and scrambling, with the wild bull almost on him, the clown diverts the
bull’s attention just in time, as the crowd roars in approval. It’s rodeo time in old
Cheyenne and a great day underway.
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The events follow in quick succession: Calf Roping, Barrel Racing, Fancy Riding
displays, Chuck Wagon Racing. Steer Roping seems as difficult as Bull Riding seems
dangerous. Bareback Riding is an explosion of organised lunacy, riders limping from
the stadium, horses freed from riders running wild, attendants chasing. An Australian
entrant stays aboard for the required eight seconds then crashes face-first into the dirt.
I’ll have to try to find him so far away from home. Steer Wrestling almost brings
disaster as the steer swerves beneath the hazer’s horse and all three somersault in a
tangled heap. They all emerge undamaged, a certain item for the evening’s television
news.
Under the grandstand Scott Johnson, an Australian Saddle Bronc rider, takes time to
talk about the business. He’s just ridden a 78. The riders get two rides each then the
fifteen with the best aggregate score get another ride. The best total score is the
winner. At this stage Scott is lying third. I ask if he’ll win it.
_ Depends which horse they give me.
We exchange a few words, establish where we’re from, that kind of thing. He tells me
there are three Australians here for the rodeo. Two I’ve seen. One rides a bull later in
the week. It’s all a gamble, motivated by the love of the game and perhaps the
adulation. There’s no appearance money for the riders. If they don’t win prize
money, they don’t get paid.
Scot has his wife and at least two small children with him. He has things to do so I
leave him to it. His handshake is strong from the needs of his profession. Now I’ve
someone to cheer for and name to follow. As he walks away, an Australian
contribution to the great America West, this poem by Banjo Paterson springs to mind.
I had written him a letter, which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow"
And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar)
Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
"Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
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Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.
Back to the press box to see the wildest event of all – The Wild Horse Race. It’s a
team event. The fifteen teams entered have to get a saddle on a two or three-year-old
unbroken colt then one of the team has to ride the thing round the racetrack circling
the stadium. The horses have no reigns, just the saddle if they get it on, so the rider
has little or no control over the animal, which is basically just running for its life.
Anything can happen and usually does. The noise of the crowd can turn a leading
horse back the other direction. I’m not sure how the horses feel about it but the crowd
loves it and so do I. A mad, exciting finish to an unforgettable day’s entertainment.
A couple of cold ones in the public relations office trying to get our breaths back. The
car park starts to empty. Later on tonight, Brooks and Dunn in live performance.
Over by the stock pens the gentle whinny of horses at the end of a working day.
25.7.99.
Cris’s college roommate, Frank, lives with his girlfriend, Liz, in Boulder, Colorado.
They intend getting married next June at the amphitheater on Flagstaff Mountain.
Today they took us there to take a look and give the dog, Abbey, a run in the country.
If Abbey had known what was coming she might have stayed at home.
It’s possible to drive all the way up or walk a trail that crosses the roadway several
times before the top. We parked at the foot of the trail that winds for a mile and half
up the mountainside and rises more than a thousand feet. It’s a trail best suited to
solitude, to ruminate on past and present as if in a waking dream. Altitude has
something to do with that. It gets to you after a while. Before too long, by silent
mutual consent, we were spread apart, climbing upwards, with the only sound the fall
of one’s own footsteps. The trail climbs steeply to the north-west, under pines, past
shrubs and flowering cacti where yellow butterflies flit silently through the glades.
In such thin air it’s wise not to hurry, to pace yourself and drink water at regular
intervals. Abbey, with a thick black coat, seemed to feel the heat more than the
humans do. Liz gave her water from a cupped had and she battled on bravely, with
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many a doleful look across her shoulder, back the way we’d come. Halfway up, a
sign gave instructions on what to do if a Mountain Lion attacks. Maybe Abbey could
smell one. It said not to run. By then I wouldn’t have been able to. But eventually I
reached the top, took a wrong turn, and as I waited for the others a couple from
Minnesota asked if I was Australian.
_ Nearly but not quite.
The view out east is nothing short of spectacular. Looking down, the red bricked
University of Colorado lay tucked up under the mountain at the very edge of the
Plains. Water, from a hand-pump, tastes of earth and forest but cools the dog down
nicely before we head back down.
26.7.99.
Anticipating parking problems we get to Frontier Park a couple of hours earlier to give
ourselves chance to look around. I want to talk with a cowboy, to find out if all this
risk is worth the money. Cris is looking for shots of competitors before and after
events - the human side, the day-to-day-life-of-it-all sort of thing, the trapping of time,
like bugs in amber back in Petrified Creatures Museum. Louis is just enjoying
himself, letting life happen, not forcing the pace. But given chance to ride a bull he’d
be on one like a flash.
On our way to the Indian village we see the bull to end all bulls, the biggest bull in the
world. An eleven-foot long, eleven-foot round, three thousand pound freak of nature,
rather like a seven foot man. Cody Young, the eighteen-year-old Alabama boy
running the side-show, takes the money at shows like this one and then goes fishing –
what a life!
_ Lake Eufaula is one of the best bass lakes in the USA.
For a moment his eyes shine and he’s away from the boredom, back by the water,
hunting bass. The giant bull just sits there in his pen waiting for dinner.
Most of the Indian dancers are Arapaho, on the pow-wow trail the announcer calls it, a
colourful curiosity, like the bull. The dances are relics from an earlier explanation of
the world and what is in it. The jingle dress dance has a story of how a sick child was
restored to health. The grass dance stems from more practical considerations – the
warriors stamping the grass flat for a new camping ground. The hoop dance is
technically more difficult. Twelve hoops representing the months of the year are
spaced in wide circle and the dancer picks them up with his feet. As more hoops are
collected they’re used to weave intricate patterns around the dancer’s body. The final
dance is performed to commemorate a recent tragedy. The crowd joins in, shuffling
slowly round the dance ground. The drums throb out a pulse beat to a culture still
surviving - a symbiotic blend of past and present for the mutual convenience of both.
After the show, the dancers pose for photos. Louis walks up to one.
_ G’day cuz, how you doing?
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That dancer does not realise how close they are to being cousins.
If Saturday’s bull riding looked dangerous today’s looks even more so. Rider after
rider is dispensed into the dirt. Then just as it seems no one can last eight seconds
Darren Tipton stays on as if he grew there, then lands lightly on his feet like a
gymnast coming off a vault. His score of 89 puts him in the lead. Now I’ve figured
out the scoring system, a check on the Australians’ standing shows they’re all three
hanging in there; Greg Potter third in bull riding after winning his round, Darren
Clarke joint fifth in bareback riding and Scott Johnson joint sixth in the saddle bronc
event.
Under the stand in the Cowboy Ready pen Tom Boyle from Texas fills me in. He
knows the score. Ten years competing and now working for a stock contractor he’s
seen it all, it’s in his blood, he’s a part of this great machine called rodeo, the
definitive expression of Americana as this century turns. That’s what makes rodeo
more meaningful than a sporting event. The spectators are taking part in a celebration
of their own heritage.
Tom explains the life in crisp, articulate phrases, keeping one eye on the short circuit
television screens all around the area.
_ You’re living off your credit card, sharing rooms, eating pork and beans. You might
give them a check for your entrance fee knowing it’ll bounce if you don’t get in the
money. You blow all of your money then it’s back to work to get a bankroll so you
can get back in the game. In ninety-six I scored 85 in Dallas. The bull did everything
right and the crowd was right there behind me. I came in with nothing and walked out
with ten grand in my jeans. It’s not the money; it’s being part of it.
It’s a life that’s getting more competitive. Selective breeding programs are producing
better stock. The bulls and broncos are getting harder to ride and the riders train like
athletes to have any chance at all.
_ I get a kick out of teaching young fellows how to ride a bull, to keep away from
drugs and alcohol. If you’re not totally devoted, mentally and physically, you never
make the grade. Take a walk round the trailer park after the show is over and you’ll
see any of the guys roping here practicing with the lariat. A lot of the guys are into
martial arts to keep them limber. You have to run, you have to work out, you have to
train like a boxer.
Then he points out a slightly built cowboy, my guess is a welterweight, looking up at
the monitor, a thick moustache, black hat pulled low across his eyebrows.
_ You should speak to that guy over there. He’s Scott Breding, one of the great bull
riders and a real good Christian man. He’d be glad to give you an interview. He’s
one of the very best, he got chance to ride Bodacious.
There goes that trick again, those tiny inputs that switch your mind back into another
place and time. Now I’m back on Ken Marbach’s ranch in south-west Texas, last
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August, with a Sri Lankan, an English engineer and Louis; home made sausage
boiling with the sweet corn, rodeo on television, Ken talking about that bull.
In such a moment time and space merge to become an end in itself, to experience such
a moment of pure bliss, of pure awareness, is the end-all and be-all. It is the moment
of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced. (Henry Miller)
Scott Breding walks by. Tom
nods in his direction, indicating
that it will cause no offence to
speak to the bearer of his great
respect. I memorise the face to
try that later, not doubting it will
happen. Fate is in control and
now I need a beer.
Under the grandstand, show over
for the day, the cowboys
relaxing, vendors walking round
peddling ice-cold beer, Scott
Breding speaks quietly, his voice
somewhere between the twilight
and the dawn.
_ A young man pointed you out
to me earlier. He said you’re one
of the more experienced bull
riders and he had a great deal of
respect for you. I’ll mention that
in what I’m writing and I’d like
to get the details of your career
right.
_ Well, I was a college champion in ’82 and rookie of the year in ’85. I made the
nationals in ’94, ’95, ’96 and ’97 so I guess I’ve paid my dues.
_ He said you rode a famous bull.
_ There were two. I rode a bull in Canada called Sugar Ray. It’s only been ridden
three times and I was two of those. I rode a ’97 on him and that’s still a Canadian
record. The other was Bodacious. After he’d finished with me they retired him.
There’s no need to ask him more. He’s given me far more than an interview.
Somehow I feel he knows that as I walk away.
27.8.99.
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With the new laptop due by midday and Cris’s brother due by nightfall, there’s a day
of doing little now ahead. A long walk with Abby to kick the day off. Manicured
paths along a fettered river, dogs on leads and the grass well mowed. A couple of
hours in the swimming pool, lazy lengths taking me back to other places. My shadow
follows slowly along the bottom of the pool.
[At a time when I should be concentrating on other criteria, I am obsessed with
swimming butterfly. My friend was once in the Commonwealth Games squad. His
coach taught him techniques that my coach, back in the murk of industrial North
England, had no access to. I vaguely remember my surprise upon discovering that the
world record for women, held by an Australian schoolgirl, was half the time I could
cover the same distance. Now, thirty odd years on, I am attempting to make amends.
So as the sun comes up every morning I plough the pool; the chlorine taste giving me
flash backs to when I was the best swimmer at my Grammar School for Boys.]
Frank sits at his computer console writing medical software. Looking over his
shoulder, trying to follow what he’s doing, I feel like an airline passenger watching
the pilot through an open cabin door. Downloading e-mail, before settling in to write
up the web page, I notice an item by Deborah Frazier, reprinted in my boxing mailing
list from the Rocky Mountain News.
In an era of tarnished heroes, a new bronze statue of one of the good guys,
heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, will stand all the taller in Manassa, his
birthplace. The tiny southern Colorado town of 988 will dedicate a life-size statue to
their hometown hero, a legendary fighter who battled up from $1-a-bout matches in
mining camps to the world heavyweight championship in 1919. He reigned as "the
Manassa Mauler" until 1926, putting the town on the map. "He always praised his
opponents and helped them up after knockouts," said Bob Booth, a Manassa art
teacher and sculptor who spent two years researching Dempsey before crafting the
bronze work in Dempsey's honour. One of 11 children of an impoverished miner,
Dempsey trained the hard way, slathering his face and fists with brine to toughen his
skin and chewing pine tar to strengthen his jaw. He worked out in chicken coops,
using a feed sack as a punching bag. His was born William Harrison Dempsey but
chose Jack as his fighting name, explaining he was a "jack" or unfaithful Mormon.
He quit school in the early grades, but credited a Mormon schoolteacher for his
sportsmanship. He worked in the mines hauling ore, practising his footwork for the
ring as he worked. During his 81-bout career, Dempsey had 60 wins, 49 by knockout.
He won the world title in a David and Goliath match against Jess Willard. Dempsey
at 180 pounds scored a third-round knockout against Willard at 245. Facing French
war hero Georges Carpentier in 1921, Dempsey was portrayed in the media as a
"slacker" for not serving in World War I. He knocked out Carpentier in the fourth
round, then took the military service issue to court, where he proved that working in
the mines was a legitimate military deferment. In World War II, Dempsey served as a
lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard. After he married actress Estelle Taylor in
1925, he had an operation to straighten out his fist-flattened nose and starred with her
in the movie "Manhattan Madness." He also appeared in the Broadway hit "The
Fight." He married three other times. In 1926, Dempsey lost his title to Gene Tunney
in a brutal 10-round decision. At the end, with his eyes swollen shut, he asked to be
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led to the new champion so he could shake his hand. He lost again in 1927 in what is
known in sports history as the "long count." Dempsey knocked Tunney down, but
didn't follow a new rule about returning to his corner. The referee stopped counting
to order Dempsey back to his corner, then resumed the count, giving Tunney time to
clear his head, get back on his feet and go on to win. "He always said he was fighting
people that were better than him," Booth said. Dempsey died in 1983, but never
forgot Manassa, to which he returned frequently to visit and fish. He returned in 1968
to dedicate the log cabin museum that honours him. The new statue will stand in front
of the museum. Booth is donating the $25,000 work with the hope of deferring the
cost by selling 50 small models. "Every family has a Dempsey story," Booth said.
"Dempsey was my dad's hero."
Frank sits at his keyboard not three feet away. No longer am I the passenger looking
in at the pilot. Black and white images from a flickering newsreel film are floating
through my mind. In the screaming cauldron of Madison Square Gardens, Jack
Dempsey is pushed back into the ring by the ringside press after Louis Firpo, the Wild
Bull of the Pampas, smashed him through the ropes, onto the reporters’ typewriters.
Back in the ring, Dempsey takes care of business in the most dramatic heavyweight
title fight ever seen. Mentally I start to rehearse my lines, putting the case forward for
a trip to Dempsey Land.
28.7.99.
Frank comes out to the jeep to say goodbye as we set off for Manassa. Another item
on my boxing mailing list this morning announces congress approval of a bill to
reform boxing. There seems some kind of poetic justice that such long overdue
legislation should be announced as we set off for the birth place of the man who, more
than any other, put American boxing on the map. Dempsey, the two-fisted barroom
brawler who spread the giant Willard across the ring like an imported Italian rug and
forever showed that it’s not the size of the man in the fight that counts but the size of
the fight in the man. Dempsey, from a hobo riding the freight trains of America,
fighting in bars and side-shows, to champion of the world and married to a Hollywood
film star. Dempsey, the legend, the icon, who proved there’s light at the end of the
tunnel and if you have to will to reach it then all the world is yours.
Cruising south on highway 93 past Flagstaff Mountain and on to Golden, the towers
of downtown Denver poking through the haze. Cris swings the jeep right up Foothill
Road until outside number 1946 on that street he stops, pointing out his bedroom
window twenty-eight years ago. The blue spruce in the garden is now thirty feet taller
than in those now gone days, sledding down the street in winter, climbing Lookout
Mountain where Buffalo Bill lies buried, and the memories of childhood springing
fresh across the years.
We all wanted to be Buffalo Bill when I was a kid. His name slipped off the tongue
better than those other cowboy heroes and because of that seemed somehow better in
the budding imaginations of us urchins, playing with our plastic guns. He certainly
chose a good place to be buried; Lookout Mountain, back against the Rocky
Mountains, overlooking the Great Plains of America with Denver down below. Cris
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points out a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house, featured in Woody Alan’s movie
‘Sleeper’, as we join Interstate 70, winding west back into the heart of the mountains.
The highway sweeps through Georgetown, nestled in a spectacular valley, then starts
the long climb upwards over the Loveland Pass. Empty ski lifts festoon the hillsides
as the temperature drops noticeably a mile below the pass. At the summit the road
plunges through the Eisenhower Tunnel then down the other side to Keystone by the
lake. We turn south on highway 9 through the ski resort of Breckenridge, Blue River
at ten thousand feet, then over the Hoosier Pass where we are level with the snow. A
single peal of thunder rings out across the mountains like an artillery barrage.
At the junction of 285 and 24, as we cross the Arkansas River, a great electric storm is
being dragged like a shroud across the landscape. The division between pitch black
and bright sunlight is a straight line down the skyscape, extenuated by lightning bolts
probing for the earth. For a while it seems we are heading into the maelstrom till the
road bends away and slips us safely by, on to Poncha Springs, through a stand of
silver birch trees and out into the San Luis Valley with the Sangre De Chirsto
Mountains marching southward to our left. The road runs straight as a stretched guitar
string though a valley forty miles wide, seven thousand feet above the sea, on to
Almosa and the mighty Rio Grande.
Manassa is signposted by a white ‘M’ etched into the hillside where Jack and his
brother chased wild jackasses. Manassa is surrounded by hills and distant mountains
on a flat plateau seven and a half thousand feet above the sea. It’s a small place,
population less than a thousand, and the small museum is closed as we pull up outside
like pilgrims coming to Mecca. Across the street in the Manassa Video and Pizza
outlet, the lady behind the counter tell us that Bob Booth is away water skiing for the
day. Her husband likes to talk about Dempsey and he will be arriving in a few
minutes. I buy an ice cream and walk up the street. At the Manassa Market, just up
from the museum, Steve Zeterquist is talking local politics by the cold meats counter.
_ Jack is this town’s claim to fame. He was born here but the family left when he was
eleven and he didn’t come back much after that.
On the door of the town hall a notice advertises for curator for museum. The position
is unpaid. Louis says that it would be a good job for Ani, his half sister back in New
Zealand. She started work for the government this year after graduating in law. She’d
gone through a spell of uncertainty about a career in law and expressed an ambition to
be a curator for a museum.
[Babe. If you still want to be curator then I've got a job for you. I just this minute saw
an ad for curator of the Jack Dempsey Memorial Museum in that famous fighter's
birth place, Manassa, Colorado (elevation 7600 feet population 998). Bring your
mother and you make that 1,000. It's an unpaid position but you have to start
somewhere honey. Look at me, I'm here starting. The bloke to call is Chris
Blinzinger and the number USA 719 - 843 5562. I bet if you phone right now, you'd
get the job. You can use me - the famous Australian boxing correspondent in town to
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do a story on the bloke who made the new statue outside the museum - as a reference.
Be quick Ani - time waits for no one. Joseph]
Wayne Thomas has arrived at the video shop. He is talking wrestling with a female
customer. When she leaves, with an armful of pizzas, he comes across and sits down.
Soon we are deep in Dempsey lore as Cris snaps photos and the day’s last rays of
sunshine catch the bronze image of Dempsey across the street.
29.7.99.
Bob Booth arrives at the Dempsey Museum soon after ten in the morning. His wife
Terry has the same Choctaw Irish ancestry as
the champ. He would have been the first to
admit she’s a lot better looking. Bob is tall,
quietly spoken and unassuming in his
knowledge and his skill. He’s given up a
teaching career to concentrate on art. For an
hour or so we chat about Jack Dempsey, how
the statue was conceived, what having such a
famous native means to the town. Steve
Zeterquist joins us and says he is going to
change the name of his store from Manassa
Market to Manassa Mall so that he becomes
the Manassa Maller. He has the shoulders of
a fighter and the same balanced easy gait.
The museum is built as Dempsey
remembered the cabin he was born in, a
block or so away. Came the day when a
travelling book salesman knocked on that
cabin door and asked for a glass of milk. Seeing how poor the inhabitants were he
wanted to pay for the milk but Mrs. Dempsey would not hear of it. So he gave her a
book. That book was about J L Sullivan, the last off the great bare-knuckle fighters
and first to be recognised as world champion under the Queensbury rules. Cot death
and infant mortality were not uncommon those days. When her son grew into a strong
and healthy child she told him he would be champion of the world like John L
Sullivan. Maybe that seed took root in the mind of the child in the cabin under the
mountains. Maybe some future child will see that statue of Jack Dempsey and be
likewise inspired. Louis takes his shirt off and poses with the statue. Through a
father’s imagination they could almost be twins.
The Milagros Café - working to prevent hunger and homelessness - in Alamosa has a
four point mission statement on the toilet wall. To support Puente House by operating
profitably; to consistently provide simple, healthy, delicious foods and beverages; to
provide a welcoming, comfortable, inclusive environment that leads to greater
awareness of hunger and homelessness; to provide an exceptional work environment
that expands personal growth and job satisfaction. I can remember seeing less
encouraging statements on other toilet walls. Louis and I go off to find Puente House,
72
leaving Cris working on his new laptop in the easy atmosphere of the café where you
might choose to meet your friends if you lived in this town.
Puente House, on State Street, is a refuge with a seemingly young clientele. There are
youngsters chatting in the sunshine outside on the porch and teenagers coming and
going inside the building. The office phone is in constant demand. It takes me back
to the Norman Andrews House in Roscoe Street, Bondi Beach, Australia and the ethos
that we are all our brother’s keeper though some may shirk the duty. That duty is not
shirked at Puente House. Nine and a half thousand nights of emergency shelter to
over nine hundred people including over one hundred families are provided annually.
Thirty five thousand meals were served in 1998. The Gleaning Project, noted on the
table at Milagros Café, recovered thirty five thousand pounds of produce from the
fields after harvest to be distributed to low-income families. As the worker politely
answers my questions, the certain knowledge that America is, at heart, a decent, Godfearing nation is quietly reinforced.
At the Booth’s Ranch young Craig expecting us so we sit outside talking about the
Skyhigh Stampede where he will be roping with his father tomorrow. He’s a quick,
intelligent fourteen-year-old who has no difficulty talking with adults. Ky, his threeyears younger cousin, says little, his bright eyes shining in the shade of his baseball
cap. Across the range Mount Blanco is framed in the uprights and cross bar of the
ranch entrance, the welded images of a steer and rider silhouetted against an azure
sky. A vehicle arrives. Bob and Terry check on the kids then Bob takes us over to his
studio. Craig takes Louis and my digital camera for more energetic introductions.
Inside the door, on a stand mounted by the wall, eight saddles sit in two racks of four,
surrounded by bridles, bits and the other essentials of horse transportation. A buffalo
head is mounted on the wall above a gun cabinet full of rifles. This is not a Parisian
studio. Under a spotlight the clay model of a steer wrestler is almost completed. The
steer and cowboy blend together in swirl of motion that seems about to continue and
the steer crash into the dust.
_ I thought of having the steer completely off the ground but wondered, if a child
climbing onto the back end of a life size statue, might cause it too much stress. I think
it would be best either mirrored over still water or surrounded with small fountains to
represent the dust.
He talks about other ideas for depicting cowboy images; a rope going thick and thin to
depict the whip as the cowboy flicks the lariat to give slack to the steer. He has in
mind a bull-riding figurine inside a coil of spring steel to evoke the twisting of a bull.
Cris asks if his concepts evolve over time or are inspired complete, needing time to
transcribe into solid images. I know the answer to that one.
[By now I felt I had seen enough to attempt a novel. The difficulty was finding time.
There never seemed enough hours in the day as it was without adding authorship to an
already hectic program. 'It’s a Long Way from Nordpol to Fantasio', 'The Crooked
Wheel Move' and 'The Hod Carrier's Ball' were completed novels inside my head. It
73
only needed the time for them to pour down my fingers onto paper. Being in a foreign
country for so long had given me a conception of style. The obscure words learned
from either H. G. Ainscough, that maestro of the English language, or from the dusty
shelves of Wigan reference library, were utterly useless in Germany, except with
Lore, whose English was better than mine. Once, anything I wrote would necessitate
the use of the Oxford Dictionary every five words - not now. My books would be in a
language simple enough for a self-respecting wire-haired fox terrier to understand; the
message, not the medium.]
But the Dempsey project is the main topic of conversation. I’ve told Bob that I want
to write an article for The Fist magazine and in creating the statue he has studied the
great man’s history in detail. He talks us through the mould making process,
intermingling technical details with anecdotes from Dempsey’s life. Suddenly, as an
afterthought, he asks if I know Gene Fullmer. His three titanic battles with Dick Tiger
sweep across my memory from the black and white screen of early television when
meeting Gene Fullmer was less likely than sliding down the rings of Saturn.
_ Of course I know Gene Fullmer. I have a friend in New Zealand who named one of
his sons after Gene Fullmer.
_ If you’re going through Salt Lake City I can get you an interview. He wanted to
come to the memorial dedication but could not make it. Perhaps you can be the link.
I’m sure he would be pleased to talk to you.
Fractured images of present and future vie for attention: Salt Lake City; the Mormon
genetic data bank, where I might unearth a clue to my American relatives; Gene
Fullmer; and out there one of the five sacred mountains of the North Americans
Natives rises, clad in snow, fourteen thousand feet. The kids come back with the
camera and we download images of them upside down above a trampoline, on a
snowboard and an adapted bicycle, laughing and fearless with the confidence of
youth. The afternoon is waning; it’s getting time to leave.
We leave Colorado by highway 285 as the afternoon light turns golden, surrounded by
panoramic skyscapes that differ in all directions; black clouds, water laden, interlaced
with grey altocumulus, white cirrocumulus and giant cumulonimbus clouds tinted by
the sun. Across a patch of clear blue sky the vapour trail of a high-flying aeroplane.
It’s the first I’ve seen since leaving Connecticut, six thousand seven hundred and
twenty five miles ago, as we cross into New Mexico somewhere between the Tusas
Mountains and the Rio Grande.
Perhaps elated by the day’s events, perhaps overcome by the natural beauty through
which we are passing, it seems that a stretch of highway, just south of Tres Piedras in
the Carson National Forest, is more beautiful that any scene depicted in Rediscover
American Roads - that book lent to us in Clarinda, Ohio, twenty-eight days ago. The
view as we approach Santa Fe is almost otherworldly. Giant clouds climb over three
successive mountain ranges behind the city spread below. A shaft of sunlight paints a
strip of bright orange across a tableau through which buildings appear as white spots
on a backdrop of every shade of green. It looks more like the cover of a Science
74
Fiction book than the actuality of New Mexico: adobe architecture, red rock cliffs,
thousand year old pueblos and the first atomic bomb.
The motels, along what must have once been the main highway through Santa Fe,
show effects of three decades of cheap paint jobs but are overpriced none-the-less in
their slow, economic decay. We settle for a fifty-buck job rather than a forty-buck-nophone-in-the-room place up the road. You get what you pay for but we can’t see what
it is. Cris and Louis go looking for somewhere to eat. Boxing on the television has
me e-mailing Australia. Cris will update the web page so I settle in to see the fight.
30.7.99.
From Santa Fe we take Interstate 25 south as far as Albuquerque then strike west on
Interstate 40 heading for Arizona with no particular plan beyond finding a cheap
motel in the early afternoon to give us time to catch up the workload. Cris has a pile
of photographs to edit and I’m a day adrift with documenting our trip. Our next
definite stop will be in Huntington Beach, Los Angeles, for a few days. Cris’s wife,
Mariann, will fly out from Hartford on August 5 for a week. We plan to get there at
least one day in front of her. To be on the safe side we decide to travel through
Arizona, southern Nevada then on to Los Angeles rather than via Salt Lake City,
Nevada, San Francisco and the Coast Road. The Grand Canyon, Hover Dam and Las
Vegas are on the agenda. No doubt something will happen along the way.
The Spanish entered New Mexico in
1536, looking for gold but found only
souls to convert. By the end of the
century Juan de Onate had claimed the
land for Spain. The Pueblo Rebellion in
1680 gave the natives a respite until Don
Diego de Varges returned with a
vengeance in 1692 but the country
remained
isolated
throughout
the
seventeen hundreds. New Mexico is a
long way from Spain. When the Spanish
empire collapsed, in the early eighteen
hundreds, settlers started coming down
the Santa Fe Trail. After the MexicanAmerican War, 1846-48, New Mexico
officially became a United States territory
in 1850 and the 47th state of the Union in
1912. Billy the Kid was involved in the
Lincoln County War in 1878. The first
atomic bomb test occurred in New
Mexico in 1945.
It’s a state with
magnificent landscapes and a colourful
past. Driving through it, the doings of man are trivialised by the obvious evidence of
millions of years of wind and rain erosion that have shaped canyons and mesas,
75
leaving layers of sedimentary rock in open view. It is as if the earth is going on with
its business, knowing that the buildings of man will crumble to dust; to be blown away
by the wind and forgotten.
At Gallup, beyond the Red Rock State Park, we find a motel room for $28 all in, and
don’t bother with the bartering. The Hacienda Motel was once on route 66, the main
road of America. The name Gallup is part of the song.
It goes from St. Louie down to Missouri; Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty.
You'll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona don't forget
Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino
From 1936, when route 66 was paved from end to end, until 1985, when it was
decommissioned, travelling route 66 was one of the great adventures of America.
Who knows the stories this room could tell; how many adventurers, lovers, losers,
dreamers and fractured souls have spent a night here before drifting onward with the
dawn. Cris and Louis head off downtown. I get comfortable for a session at the
keyboard. I’ll get my money’s worth if I have to type all night.
31.7.99.
Packing our gear into the jeep, my roll of French bread drops to the concrete with the
sound of plastic piping. The prisoner’s breakfast, dry bread and water, to start the
day. It’s going to get eaten. One step up from a dingo’s breakfast; expel rather than
drink water and take a look around. Cruising old 66 looking for an Exxon station, a
boulevard of broken business since the heady days of motorised romance. Side-byside are faded motels and Indian gift shops, fast food outlets and cut price stores. We
pay up-front to get our tank filled then motor south on highway 601 with a full moon
hanging in the sky.
The southern tip of the Navajo Reservation,
occasional humble dwellings in the vast
expanse of green and sandstone outcrops.
Where are the two hundred millions of
America? The sheer size of the country is
almost overwhelming.
I came here
expecting it to be somewhat densely
populated but it seems to be hardly
populated at all. From the intersection with
highway 53 to Fence Lake we meet two
vehicles in sixty miles. From Fence Lake
through to highway 60, forty miles at least, we meet no vehicles at all. Travelling on a
metal road the silence presses down on us like a vast, invisible hand. On top of a rise
we can see fifty miles in all directions, a vast expanse of sagebrush, stunted trees and
shrubs, cliffs and gullies, with mountaintops towards the far horizons. Cris and Louis
explore a cliff base, returning with hands full of fossilised coral and shellfish. In the
76
silence and the stillness of what was once an ocean bed, we sit as temporary
witnesses, between two beats in a bar of nature’s eternal symphony. And high above
a bright sun blazes that will one day claim it all.
We turn off the metal at an unmarked crossroads and guess the way ahead. There is
no signpost. On the dirt the ride is smoother, occasional water by the roadside
showing signs of previous rains. Cattle start to appear by the wayside, the smell of
them sharp against sage in the still, clear air. We pass two rundown ranch houses that
are almost as they built them, with hardly a day’s repair. Take away the satellite dish
and the pickup trucks and it could be 1850. The dirt road narrows. A day of heavy
rain and we wouldn’t get through this way. Then through a gap in the hills, away to
the right, a glimpse of power-poles on the horizon indicates a highway. Round a few
more bends and down below the sunlight, gleaming off a windshield, betrays a tarsealed trail across this mighty wilderness. We turn right and west on highway 60,
thirteen miles from Arizona.
A long drop down, from something I didn’t know we were on top of, into
Springerville, still at six thousand nine hundred feet. What did America collide with
to push the earth up so high? Outside a gas station we plan our assault on the Salt
River Canyon which, Cris assures us, is more scenic than anything we’ve come
through yet. His photographer’s preoccupation for optimum light conditions suggests
we hit this spot early morning, so we hole up for the day in Show Low, ready for an
early start.
1.8.99.
Out of Show Low, the rising sun behind us, straight up Duce of Clubs Avenue. It got
its name from the same card game that named the town. Two ranchers deciding to
spit up, played cards for the ranch and all the cattle. In the deciding game one said
show low and take the ranch. His mate turned up the duce of clubs and there’s the
story - one hell of a game of cards. The road west through Apache country, somber
forest then into the Salt River Canyon. The sun is just over one side and the moon
above the other.
77
Down below, the chocolate coloured river digging deeper into the earth. The canyon
sides immense and multi-layered with every epoch represented, into the depths of
time. The road winds deep into the canyon, a bridge across the river, then up the other
side where better light for photos means we sit a while reflecting on what the Grand
Canyon must be like. This one hardly gets a mention in the tourist book.
We start the long decline,
through the mining town of
Globe, then on down highway 60
until we emerge out of the
Gonzales Pass into our first real
taste of desert. A vast expanse of
cactus - giant saguaro, organ
pipe, prickly pear and chollo.
Away to the north the Mazatzal
Mountains, drenched in sunlight,
dry as bone. We are in the frying
pan. The heat is almost a living
thing, fighting with the plant life
for moisture, giving the wind a
bite like sandpaper. Out there, on foot, without water, it would not take long to die.
Houses start to sprout like tiny white mushrooms, one here, one there, scattered at first
but gradually getting denser. Phoenix is spreading out to meet us. The traffic flow
intensifies and the highway branches like a river delta. Suddenly we are in the city,
the screech of cicadas competing with the sound of traffic at an intersection on the
ring road. I’d been wondering where America’s millions were hiding, well a million
of them are here. It takes us half an hour to drive around them, scurrying about their
business in the baking noonday sun.
The long drive to Kingman, on route 66, passes like a dream, through Joshua trees
simmering in the heat haze, across dry riverbeds and a terrain no one would walk
across by choice, if at all. We stop for gas and water. Sitting in the shade of the
storefront overhang, looking out at the distant mountains, just visible in the blinding
solar glare, it’s obvious that this landscape is best appreciated with the sun is low in
the sky. We’re in no hurry but the heat somehow drives us onward, as if we can get
out from beneath it if we carry on.
Kingman reappears from yesterday’s daydream, to the tune of that famous song,
echoing around inside my heat stressed imagination. Once again I pass it by.
[In the book I was reading after leaving Las Vegas I came across the following: The
canoes are actual evidence of Polynesian influence in Africa. They first appeared in
Madagascar when a great invasion took place from Java about the year AD. 400. The
invaders conquered Madagascar, then for centuries raided the African coast for
slaves and booty. They even penetrated inland and several years ago evidence of
Polynesian influence was found as far away as Morocco. From this it appears that
these ancient navigators were by no means short of the knowledge of how to get from
one part of the world to another. The outrigger was unknown to Europe or Asia when
78
it arrived in Africa. I noted the page, sixty-six, then looked up to see a sign for
Kingman, which straggles the famous route sixty-six. Round my neck I had a
Polynesian carving. Jung would have called that synchronicity. I was just astounded
and carried on reading.]
Down the long slope into Bullhead City. The temperature of the wind howling
through the open jeep has risen until we seem to be diving into a dragon’s throat.
Then suddenly a bright blue glint of the Colorado River, five hundred feet above sea
level, like the fluttering blue flag of paradise awaiting. We turn southwards with the
river’s flow, six thousand feet lower than where we started the day. Across the other
side, in gambling Nevada, the towers of Laughlin rise like Heaven’s Oasis. A billion
dollar, neon lighted entertainment extravaganza where a room in the Colorado Belle
Casino costs us twenty-seven dollars for the night.
Wash the grime off, change of clothing, then downstairs five floors to scout the joint’s
terrain. Inside the casino lobby a phone card call to a Kiwi friend in the high dessert
above Los Angeles.
_ Hello there mate, hasn’t it been a while?
[On the way back, on a neon ribbon of light slicing the black American night, with the
full moon rising above the eastern mountains and the western sky retaining a last
vestige of purple an hour after sun-set, it suddenly seemed as if the bike was stationary
and the world was turning under the wheels at eighty five miles per hour. A magic
moment. We had just passed the world's largest thermometer. It was one hundred and
eight degrees.]
Cris and Louis are somewhere inside this building, built like a giant Mississippi
Paddle Steamer. Over to west the New York Mountains are silhouetted against an
azure sky. We’re by the Colorado River, between Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon,
as the evening shadows lengthen. The bright lights are calling and now it’s party
time.
2.8.99.
Louis skimming stones on the Colorado River, under a cloudy sky. Searching rays of
sunlight touch the earth like God’s fingers reaching down from heaven, the
phenomenon that, for me, will always be Damien Courtney’s epitaph. To have lived
with haemophilia, then AIDS, yet possessing such a lust for life that he inspired all
those around him. The mighty Damien, subject of his father Bryce Courtney’s book
April Fool’s Day and living so close in Bondi yet me never knowing, but his memory
is written in this Arizona dawning. Behind the hum of the hotel air-conditioning and
across the river, the morning traffic is mounting as light airplanes take off for
somewhere, then disappear through the clouds.
79
We meet Cris’s in-laws, Joe and Lorraine, for breakfast, at the Golden Nugget (one
dollar ninety-nine for ham or steak with all the trimmings) but before we eat they say
a prayer, hands joined around the table. As they pray I wonder if the Harvard
professor of Astronomy likewise seeks God’s blessing.
[After an initial request to Dr. Dave Dooling at NASA Steve Maran of the American
Astronomical Society, via Tim Tyson and Donald L Savage, referred me to you from
the Office of Space Science. From July through September I will be part of
photography/writing team collecting material for a book on America and its people at
the turn of the century. I have a layman’s fascination with Cosmology/Astronomy and
most things scientific. Thinking about the theme of the popular science book 'The
Third Culture' by John Brockman - he postulates the hypothesis that, as science
replaces traditional religion, people are now turning to scientists for answers to
fundamental questions rather than classical academics. I would like to speak to a few
scientists about that idea and how they see their branch of science impacting on the
next century. Towards that end would it be possible to speak with you for a short time
around the end of September.]
The waiter sells keno tickets to make the meal exciting. We drop coins in a slot
machine on our way out of the door. After saying goodbye outside the Golden Nugget
we walk through the Colorado Belle to collect our baggage. It’s a another stunning
manifestation of the creative mind of man; Toulouse-Lautrec on the walls, live
pythons in glass cages, Japanese goldfish swimming in the moat, Dolly Parton’s voice
hanging on the air waves, a phantasmagoria flowering in the desert where the
Colorado river passes by. A lady wins one thousand dollars on a slot machine, just a
part of what makes it possible in a way I can’t define.
Climbing back, out of Laughlin towards Kingman, into mountains silhouetted against
the sky as jagged as the line traced on a seismograph scroll, the radio plays an oldie I’m a travelling man, made a lot of stops, all over the world. Turning left on highway
93 we are ninety-seven miles from Las Vegas. A right towards Dolan Springs puts us
forty-nine miles short of the Grand Canyon. The road runs north-westerly, through
desert, onto Dolan Springs, a collection of mobile homes among Joshua Trees and
cactus, under Mount Tippton. Among the Cerbat Mountains, running south back to
Kingman, some peaks retain a mantle of softer, unconsolidated rock. Others have
fully emerged in all their rugged splendour, freed by wind and rain as the statue of
David emerged from a block of marble, freed by Michelangelo’s chisel.
Beyond Dolan Springs, a Joshua Tree forest, then the sealed road ends. We crawl
across the hard dirt ridges; conscious of every vibration, knowing one hard jolt could
crash the computers’ hard drives. As we reach the point seven thousand, seven
hundred and seventy seven point seven miles from our departure in Connecticut, Kris
Krisofferson sings Me and Bobby McGee on the radio. The song puts me back into
the Gastown Inn, Vancouver, after hitching across Canada in ’71. My last lift brought
me all the way from Sault St Marie to deposit me at the door. The waiter brings a beer
to the table. Shafts of sunlight illuminate cigarette smoke above the jukebox on which
Janis Joplin sings Bobby McGee.
80
Above and all around us the majestic Grand Wash Cliffs, multi-layered outriders to
the canyon-to-end-all-canyons on this planet Earth.
Just as through a series of accidental events, atoms of carbon, and nitrogen and
oxygen and hydrogen joined together to form primitive forms of life that later evolved
into protozoa and fishes and people, in the same manner our way of looking at the
universe has gradually evolved through a natural selection of ideas. Through
countless false starts, we have had it instilled into us that nature is a certain way, and
we have grown to look at the way that nature is as beautiful. Steven Weinberg.
The Grand Canyon may well just be the encapsulation of the idea that nature is
beautiful, the result of six million years of erosion by the Colorado River through nine
separate layers of limestone, shale sandstone and schist; sedimentary layers deposited
up to a billion years ago. Where once the sea for countless aeons held sway, now four
million visitors a year come to gaze in wonder into this chasm, two hundred and
seventy seven miles long, eighteen miles wide and a mile deep. I know it’s beyond
my power to describe the indescribable as we slowly drive away.
Back on highway 93 heading north-west, within a great southern loop in the Colorado
River, through the Mojave Desert, the driest and hottest in America, away to the east
the sunlight glints off Lake Mead. A sight so abrupt in this lip cracking dryness, like a
pulled tooth in a glass of champagne. Ten miles short of the Hoover Dam, dropping
into Black Canyon, the Colorado River now flowing down below, the traffic slows to
a crawl around the hairpins until we finally ease out gingerly across the Hoover Dam.
To our right more than two hundred square miles of Lake Mead held back by a seven
hundred and twenty-six feet dam. On the CB radio a driver wonders what would
happen if an earthquake hits as we are crossing. Louis takes the digital camera and
jogs barefooted along the sidewalk, taking pictures looking down over the dam wall.
Up the other side and on through the Mojave, dragged along in a river of traffic into
the heart of Las Vegas where we pull up and phone round looking for a place to stay
the night.
Walking down the Strip in the hot Las Vegas night. A billion neon stars in an electric
stratosphere, charged with excitement, loaded with expectation of a fortune within
reach. Outside the Bellagio Hotel an explosion of symphony music and a thousand
fountains weave in water ballet before crowds of gob smacked spectators silhouetted
in defused light. Nothing plain will do for Vegas where the Eiffel Tower elbows for
space with the statue of Liberty and the Pyramid. The crowds parade the sidewalks
bedazzled by a million temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Lord of the Dance,
until, unable or unwilling to resist, they are drawn inside the maze of slot machine and
blackjack table, lulled by the tinkling waterfall of a million falling coins.
Walking back to the motel, foot weary, soul downtrodden, pocket empty, seeking
consolation in the fact that I’m perhaps the fifty millionth mug this week to make the
journey to a show that goes on forever. Tomorrow’s another day. Cris asleep in
darkness of the motel room, the tiny green light of the laptop recharging by his bed
like an escaped refugee from unreality of the neon splattered universe outside.
81
3.8.99.
Fill the water bottle, break out a clean tee shirt and get back on the road. The morning
news informs us about corruption on the International Olympic Committee, that for
the first time in forty years flights to Cuba from America will be sanctioned and that
the entire farming community is on the verge of bankruptcy. In the world outside life
moves on but in Vegas the day-night cycle is just a slow pulse in an eternal
stroboscope as airplanes queue on the flight path into McCarren International Airport
bringing more blood to the vampire, more grist to the money mill.
Heading south-west on Interstate 15, the Mojave Freeway, a long slow climb up the
Mountain Pass at four thousand seven hundred feet, the cool wind blowing through
the open jeep. A military plane, practicing low altitude flying, sweeps before us then
climbs above a mountain peak at the farthest edge of sight. We begin a seventeenmile decent into a blast furnace of rock, sand and dancing dust devils. The top pops
off the water bottle long before high noon. In Baker, gateway to Death Valley, the
world’s largest thermometer reads one hundred and two degrees. Last time I passed
this way it read one hundred and eight.
Up ahead a mighty city makes it’s presence felt. The highway traffic is being drawn
in like electrons in the solar wind to the magnetic pole of Los Angeles, one hundred
miles away. In gleaming chrome polished hubcaps of eighteen wheel big rigs,
thundering down the freeway, the jeep’s bright red reflection fits in perfect
composition. Cris matches speed alongside as I try to take the photograph my heat
inspired imagination supposes will put me on the front of Life magazine. There’s
more chance of winning the lottery. The Mojave River is just a brown trickle across
the sand, gasping for the sea.
Mike arrives back from work and throws his arms around me. We’ve been together
twice in nineteen years. The garage full of motor bikes, punch bag swinging from the
framework, the house built round a drifter who’s finally found a home. Maggie
arrives back from work and soon she and Cris are deep in conversations based on
common background, as with Mike and I, sitting at the table as Louis flicks through
albums of their travels on the Harley Davidson - half a million miles or more. Mike
decides to take a day off work.
4.8.99.
With two days left before they leave for the Sturgess bike rally Mike is having
nightmares with a brake disk for the Harley. We drive out to Phelan, under the San
Gabriel Mountains, where it’s politically incorrect to call the high school Phelan High.
Another biker, wide as a barn door, chats about his life in the navy and the adventures
he experienced but snaps to attention when his wife calls from the car. It takes ten
minutes to drill the brake plate and costs ten bucks. A week of false trails over for my
buddy as we head back home. Louis helps Mike fit the back wheel on the bike. It’s a
job Mike has probably done a thousand times before but a first for Louis, young and
listening, learning from a new experience. As they work together I’m conscious of the
82
way accrued knowledge is passed down the generations - the transfer thing that seems
to have a life of its own.
Down the El Cajon Pass, a cork swept along in a growing six-lane river of traffic,
flowing at seventy-five miles an hour. The temperature begins to drop. The towns’
names change but it’s really one great metropolitan area divided into convenient
segments by lines on a map; San Bernardino, Riverside, Corona, Yorba Linda,
Orange, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Costa Mesa and finally Newport Beach. I’ve been
preoccupied with elevation, as we’ve crawled across the continent, trying to picture, in
my mind, our position relative to the sea. It’s been an anchor, a means of coping with
the immensity of the landscape, a way of relating our insignificance to the
comparative insignificance of a continent, floating on the molten core of a tiny planet
bombarded by radiation coming from the sun. Now we’ve reached ground zero;
where a gentle ocean laps the beach and all the wide Pacific lies before us in the haze.
5.8.99.
After Cris goes off to meet his wife at the airport, it takes a while for Louis and I to
find where Charlie Gergen trains. We quickly find the night-club but fail to see the
boxing ring tucked in by the wall of the large undercover car park onto which the back
door of the club opens. Expecting to find Charlie there I’ve left his telephone number
on the laptop – clever me. The number listed in the phone book proves to belong to
someone else. It’s getting complicated, not helped by Louis’s silent disapproval of
my temporary inability to orchestrate the moment. After hanging around for an hour
or so we eventually get Charlie’s number from the club owner, but as they’ve trained
some place else that day we arrange to meet later in the afternoon. We hang around
the beachfront, killing time, then go back to the car park until Charlie comes.
Hector Lopez, leans out of the passenger’s side as the car slides by, street-smart eyes
gleaming, missing nothing. Charlie Gergen drives into the car park, pulls up by the
boxing ring, gets out, shakes my hand, introduces us to Hector and his sparring partner
and makes us feel at home. I give him the photo I took of him eighteen years before
in Auckland to establish my credentials, but as this is the first time I’ve spoken
directly to him it will take a little more that that. He takes us down to the Shark’s
Cove in Hermosa Beach where we sit outside on the sidewalk with a group of fight
fans listening to the banter. Nick and Charlie sit together, talking quietly as the
younger generation laugh and wisecrack, pausing briefly as the girls walk by. The
fighters eat then Charlie takes us back to his place in Redondo Beach. The walls are
covered with boxing photographs, a tribute to a lifetime in the game. His scrapbooks
are so full of famous boxing faces that it’s immediately obvious that few Australian
trainers have been involved with as many top caliber fighters as Charlie ‘Dundee’
Gergen. And not a lot of American ones either. He’s fifty-nine and still gets in the
ring with all his fighters, expecting nothing from them that he cannot do himself. To
prove the point he picks up a steel spring exercise bar and bends it one hundred times
in quick repetitions. Louis does it seventy times then calls it quits, wise enough not to
do one hundred and one.
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_ I’ve been here eleven years and never been sick once.
Then he opens a cupboard full of vitamin supplements that would almost stock a
pharmacy. His eyes are very blue and penetrating. He laughs a lot and mostly at
himself. This little legend of Australian boxing, by the power of his personality and
commitment, has earned respect enough in America boxing to be up there with the
best. I love the life I live and I live the life I love! It could have been written for
Charlie.
Hector Lopez, just out of prison, won Olympic silver in ’84 when he was seventeen
years old. At twenty-one he was paid one hundred thousand dollars for just one fight.
In a few weeks he will fight for a version of the world junior welterweight title. As
Charlie tells me stories, Hector talks quietly with Louis, telling him about being in
jail. He points to a carpet.
_ When you’re in solitary your cell is about that size. It’s your whole house –
everything. It has your bed, your toilet your table and you’re in there twenty-four
hours a day with no human contact. They bring your meals to you and push them
through the door.
Charlie goes to a bedroom and brings out a photo for Hector to sign as a souvenir. We
arrange to meet next day then leave the museum/art gallery/boarding house/training
camp overlooking Redondo Beach and hit the freeway racetrack back to Huntington
Beach.
6.8.99.
Hector spars lightly with his sparing partner for a few rounds then Charlie takes him
through the punches. Most trainers use pads for this standard operation but the
unorthodox Australian prefers jab and hook gloves. When I first saw this routine,
back in Auckland eighteen years ago, I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He’d
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brought the great Aboriginal fighter, Tony Mundine, over from Australia to fight the
American Jessie Burnett. Too inexperienced to feel confident in such illustrious
company I’d stayed on the periphery, letting the senior trainer, Jack Stuart, do the
talking. Charley had been full of stories back then. He told Jack about the crowd
overturning the car taking Mundine and himself back from the stadium after losing the
title shot against Carlos Monzon in Argentina.
_ It’s a good job we lost mate. If we’d knocked him out they would probably have
lynched us.
They lost in Auckland too. Burnett won a disputed decision on points; I sold five
thousand dollars worth of tickets, at twenty percent my way, and went into the corner
for the first time with an amateur from our gym. A fighter who had supposedly had
one fight - one fight in New Zealand but forty fights in Samoa - knocked him out in
the first round. Our bloke was so dazed after the fight he did not know he’d been in
with a southpaw. It was an evening of mixed blessings, a night to be remembered and
Charley Gergen is a big part of those memories. Now he’s making memories for my
boy. I can see what Charley is doing as he takes Hector through the punches, the
experience thing. It comes to all of us. The sound of leather landing echoes round the
almost empty parking lot. It’s cool inside in the shade. Bright sunlight bounces off
the roofs of cars passing by in the street outside. The breeze has a faint taste of salt, as
it did in Auckland all those years ago, and I can picture Charlie laughing and talking
with Jack Stuart, across the world, two decades previous to this afternoon in wide Los
Angeles.
[There are more people involved in the noble art than fighters, trainers managers and
promoters. On the periphery we find the gamblers, groupies, ex-pugs, criminals,
critics, the curious, and all sorts of weird and wonderful characters who make the fight
game what it is. One of these colourful individuals is The Boxing Brain, Reg Fletcher,
often referred to as Gene Autry.
The Boxing Brain title comes from his amazing memory. Three times in seven years
he won the Springbok Radio Quiz in his South African days. On a local New Zealand
radio program he correctly answered 200 out of 200 questions on world championship
boxing, then, for variety, correctly answered 176 questions out of 176 on The Holy
Bible. The Gene Autry handle he earned because, since he first appeared on the
Auckland scene, only a surgical operation could remove him from his fawn, dated,
velvet collared suit, with matching high heel boots. A classical example of mutton
dressed as lamb.
Boxing is as full of tall stories as fishing, so the reader may attribute what ever degree
of authenticity he chooses to the following, after hearing the story from both sides as
related to me.
When Charlie Gergen and Tony Mundine came over for the Jessie Burnett fight, Gene
Autry ran around telling everyone who would listen that Gergen and Mundine were
gangsters and it would be best to have nothing what so ever to do with them.
According to Gene, Charlie had previously tried to extort $2000 from him. When the
85
bucks were not forthcoming, Mundine and a couple of heavies came round to visit.
They put such a scare into Gene's landlord that the poor old man died of a heart attack.
Of course there are two sides to every story. When Charlie and Tony had finished a
pre fight training session, local trainers Jack Stuart and 'Liquid' Sammy Lawrence
tackled Charlie about Gene Autry's allegations. According to Charlie Gergen (who
was disqualified more than any other fighter in history), Gene arrived in Sydney from
South Africa claiming to be an ex-Australian featherweight champion with 26 wins
from 31 fights, but no one around at the time had ever heard of him. Next, The
Boxing Brain put the touch on Charlie for $2000. Evidently a hit man was after him.
He needed the two grand to have someone knock the hit man off. Charlie suspected
that Gene wanted the money to shoot through to South Africa, so decided to put him
to the test.
One night, at a Kings Cross nightclub, Charlie walked in with a broken nosed ex pug,
dressed in a long leather coat and a fedora. He introduced this character to The
Boxing Brain as a hit man, ready to rub out the hood dogging Gene Autry's footsteps.
Feigning a foreign accent the ex pug said
"You hava leettle beezness, a contract fora me yes?"
"No, no, it doesn’t matter, it’s all been sorted out.
"Whata you mean. Isa here now. Ita matter much. I think I takea your watch anda
your cloths for zee expenses no?"
At this point Gene Autry left the club at ninety, arriving a couple of days later in New
Zealand.
As I said before, boxing stories and fishing stories are close relatives. However a
couple of nights ago, at the 'El Cortez', boxing writers Johnny Hanks, and Hugo
Wilson, were drinking with Jack Stuart when Reg Fletcher, complete with velvet
collar and high heel boots, came over to the table and, referring to another incident he
attributed to Jack Stuart, asked
"Who likes playing practical jokes on me?"
Quick as a flash, Hugo Wilson replied
"Charlie Gergen."
To which he received a blank look and no reply.]
When he’s finished with his professionals Charlie gives Louis a work out then cracks
a tin of Guinness, purely for medicinal purposes, sweating and laughing, a man totally
content with his lot. We talk about Louis’s chances of making the Olympics, slim to
non-existent, a timing thing. He offers to put Louis up at his place and to train him if
he wants to come back after this trip to fight in America. There are those who would
86
ban boxing. An hour with Charlie Gergen just might change their minds. It would
certainly polarise their opinion.
7.8.99.
Rick Ley answers the door without a great deal of enthusiasm. We could be door to
door salesmen. Not too sure of ourselves, in the Los Angeles traffic, we’ve set out in
good time and arrived early. Once he’s assured we are not selling toothbrushes, Rick
directs us to the boxing office and leaves us looking over posters from amateur
tournaments all over America. It’s a working room, divided from the rest of the house
by a bookshelf of almost library dimensions, filled with science fiction and fantasy.
Lord of the Rings and the other Tolkien works are conveniently placed near the end of
the middle shelf. On the wall, immediately facing the front door, a collection of
Unicorn depictions surround a cabinet filled with Unicorn figurines. On top of the
cabinet several books on the Unicorn topic are held together by Unicorn bookends.
Melanie Ley is upstairs, getting ready to leave for a local show in Chino. She and
Rick are officials for the Southern California Amateur Boxing Association. There are
at least two local shows a week. It keeps them busy.
We all pile into the jeep. There’s no sense using two vehicles when one will do the
job. Without a car in southern California you might as well be homeless. A fortyminute drive through the freeway network brings us to Chino where the boxing is
scheduled to start at one thirty. A carnival atmosphere impregnates the park in gentle
midday sunshine. Does it really never rain in southern California? The smell from a
dozen barbecues drifting on the breeze and the snarl of v-eight motors as a parade of
classic muscle cars pull onto the car park, stir long remembered dreams of yesterday.
Louis, Rick and I are dragged over by the lure of burning rubber and the gleam of
polished chrome. For me it’s a glimpse into Aladdin’s cave. For Rick it’s a window
to his hay-day.
_ They’re all owned by
middle aged white men.
They can remember
when cars were cars.
We wander round a
million dollars of classic
American
machinery,
here a ’54 Studebaker,
there a ’58 Corevette, a
’67 Camaro, a ’70 Z28
Camaro, a ’65 Malibu
SS. Louis pauses by the
’56 Chevrolet that I’ll
buy him when I win the
lottery. In the shade of a
tree the same ’52 Chevrolet in which his mother rode beside me with the bull terrier
87
sleeping on the back seat. Those intoxicating New Zealand days well up briefly as I
place a forefinger on the mudguard of the Chevy, visions from the irretrievable past
and the unattainable future float by, then a band kicks off somewhere at the other side
of the park. Louis buys a sack of popcorn and we amble back to see the fights.
At the entrance to the boxing hall Dave Smith, an expatriate West Ham supporter
from foggy London, introduces us to Mark Kaylor, a former British middleweight
champion and participant in a particular memorable ring war, the tape of which is
somewhere on the shelf behind my father’s armchair. Seeing him, content and athletic
in the California sunshine, brings back an entire epoch of life in Australia, the
memories of hundreds of amateur boxing tournaments and images of Louis playing
pool in the back bar of the Bondi Hotel when he could hardly see over the table. I’d
linked a video recorder to the hotel’s satellite television receiver so that I could pirate
boxing classics for my video collection. One of those classic fights featured Mark
Kaylor. He’s happily settled in Chino, training kids in the amateur boxing program,
his softly spoken words giving no clue to the havoc that he unleashed in the ring. He
puts his arm around Louis for a photograph and I mentally file a memo to dig out that
videotape when we get back across the Atlantic.
Amateur boxing is a family affair with friends and relatives there to support the
boxers, kids running wild, girl friends strutting their stuff to keep the boys edgy and
officials keeping the show on the road. The girl on the door picks up on our foreign
accents.
_ You guys from Australia? Jerry Lewis is over there. I know, because my sister
bodyguards his daughter.
Impressively produced anti-drug pamphlets have been placed on the seats. Louis
sticks a badge on his shirt saying I can say no for when they introduce him in the ring.
Twelve good contests constitute the program. The bi-lingual ring announcer makes
the Spanish names ring like hymns echoing round a cathedral. Rick and Melanie are
busy working as judging officials with Rick doubling up as referee. Various city
officials and boxing personalities get up into the ring between contests to present
trophies. One of those personalities is Mike Weaver, former holder of the
heavyweight crown. Louis and I are introduced as Australian visitors and are pleased
to make a small contribution, giving an international flavour to a truly international
sport. Dave Smith’s boy comes from behind, using better boxing skills to steal a
decision from a stronger opponent. Mark Kaylor drifts over for a chat about Australia.
The cheers ring round the hall, arms raised, condolences given, outside the fast food
stalls start packing as the afternoon draws to a close.
Back at Rick and Melanie’s place we chat for a while about boxing politics, about the
corruption in the world governing body and how things are set up in the States. Rick
sits back in a comfortable armchair, occasionally turning his head in our direction.
Melanie supplies the information, precise in her comments, penetrating in her views.
She flicks though magazines, digging out statistics. Louis thinks ahead to future
contests, having spent most of the day wanting to get back into the ring. We say
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goodbye, reluctant to leave. The day has been a return to something left behind, but
not too far behind. There’s a long road to travel still before us.
8.8.99.
Cris’s parents’ home is part of a gated town house development in Huntington Beach.
The marine at the gatehouse is serving in the same battalion of which Cris’s father
was commanding officer when he retired in 1985. By then he was a colonel who had
seen action in the Second World War and Korea. He is a tall man. His manner is
formal and correct but I would never have picked him as an ex-military commander.
There’s a gentle edge to his bearing. His voice imparts kindness rather than authority
and his sentences are punctuated with soft chuckles. He seems to looking for the
comical in every situation. When he finds it he laughs as if surprised at the discovery.
His wife, Leatrice, is also tall. Her framed photograph on the wall is reminiscent of the
young Rita Hayworth.
The house is divided into three levels. The basement garage houses a ’92 Corvette, a
’97 Mercedes C280 and a ’98 Chevrolet Tahoe. Two ten-speed bicycles stand in the
corner. The Yarboroughs aren’t short of transport. They live in a town where you
can’t afford to be.
_ When I saw that Australian poem you put up on the web page it reminded me of a
song called the cowboy’s lament. It invokes the same nostalgia for the great outdoors.
Would you like to hear it?
He finds the track on a long-playing record, performed by Jerry Jeff Walker and
written by Mike Burton.
While I was out a ridin'
A grave yard shift, midnight 'til dawn
The moon was as bright as a readin' light
For a letter from an ole' friend back home
And he asked me
Why do you ride for your money?
Tell me why do you rope for short pay?
You ain't gettin' no where
An you're loosin' your share
Boy, you must have gone crazy out there
He tells me last night I run on to Jenny
She's married and has a good life
Ah you shore missed the track
When you never come back
She's a perfect professional's wife
She asked me
Why does he ride for his money?
Tell me why does he rope for short pay?
89
He ain't gettin' no where
An he's loosin' his share
He must have gone crazy out there
Then they never seen the Northern Lights
They never seen the hawk on the wing
They never seen the spring hit the Great Divide
They never heard ole' camp cookie sing
Well I read up the last of my letter
I tore off the stamp for Black Jim
When Billy rode up to relive me
Just looked at my letter and grinned
He said now
Why do they ride for their money?
Why do they rope for short pay?
They ain't gettin' no where
An they loosin' their share
Son, they all must be crazy out there
Then they never seen the Northern Lights
They never seen the hawk on the wing
They never seen the spring hit the Great Divide
They never heard ole' camp cookie sing
The day’s last sea breeze brings a small wave onto the beach at a forty-five degree
angle to the tide-line. There are a couple of boogie-board riders out there catching a
wave but Louis is the only person body surfing. When the surf dumps him in the
shallows he runs back into knee-deep waters and turns a clumsy forward somersault.
The sea sparkles on his deep brown skin, extenuating his muscle tone. Occasionally
he pulls up his knee length water laden shorts. Suddenly conscious that the
intervening years have reversed our roles, leaving me sitting on the sand watching him
in the water, a line by Solzhenitsyn floats to the surface like a confrontation with
incriminating evidence.
At forty, men sometimes have a fresh burst of vitality, especially when their surplus
physical energy is not spent making children, but is transformed, in some mysterious
way, into intellectual force.
I can’t recall my fortieth birthday but this literary prod of memory puts me back in the
bedroom of a small flat in Sydney on my fiftieth birthday. Louis mother gives me a
whalebone pendent on a leather thong, carved into a Maori rendition of a bone
fishhook. It represents the legend of the Polynesian god Maui fishing New Zealand
from the sea. Eventually the thong rotted, probably from to much exposure to sun and
sea. One day, in Texas, the whalebone was not there anymore. Neither was she.
Around Louis’s neck he wears a Maori Greenstone pendent, a twenty-first birthday
present gift from his mother. Mild concern about the cord breaking makes it’s
90
presence felt then as he catches a wave the difference in our years becomes a feeling
seeking words. He’s there, I’m here. I’ve been there, I hope he gets here. He’s
thirty-two years of living to negotiate before he makes it.
9.8.99.
From the balcony, looking north, a short squat peer juts out into the Pacific like a
defiant chin into calm waters behind the breakwater. Lazy waves break almost on the
shoreline beneath a flotilla of kites hanging motionless in the light sea breeze. The
balcony is festooned with
boxing gloves, bandages,
sweat
suits
and
other
paraphernalia, drying in the
sun.
Charlie is preparing
dinner. He likes to cook. To
the south the tiny white dots
of boat sails are dwarfed
beneath the high cliffs of
Palos Verdes Point. To the
north-east the Santa Monica
Mountains are just visible
through the haze. Louis sits
quietly with his back to the
wall, gazing out at the ocean, savouring the privilege of having been in the ring with a
world class professional.
Cris brought his cameras to the ring in the car park and because Hector’s regular
sparring partner was otherwise engaged, Charlie let Louis spar three four-minute
rounds. Those rounds probably felt like eternity. Hector Lopez has twice fought for
world titles and is in serious training for a third attempt. A warm up fight is only
twelve days away. Louis won a minor state amateur title two years ago. He has
trained only spasmodically since then. The difference between them in the ring is
enormous; comparative to Louis helping Mike fit the back wheel on the Harley
Davidson. It’s a novice learning from an expert who could take him out as quick as a
blink. But he doesn’t. He pushes him to the edge of his capability but no further.
After three rounds the youngster is exhausted. Hector hasn’t raised a sweat.
Nick wanders over from the nightclub, run by his sons, as Cris takes photos and
Charlie gets into the ring.
_ I met Charlie seven years ago when he came to train fighters at my son’s gym. We
got on well together straight away. I love the guy. I have a lot of fun with him and
he’s so honest. He reads the bible every day, asks for a blessing before a meal and
swears like a trooper. He’s real big on vitamins you know. Look how fit he is for
fifty-nine.
A couple of construction workers wander over to watch Hector going through the
punches. Nick talks with them about the upcoming fight. Cris lies on his back at the
91
edge of the ring taking worm’s eye view shots. Charlie pushes Hector around inside
it. They both laugh when Hector pops him on the nose. Louis shadow boxes in the
background, getting his breath back, composing himself after an experience he will
remember all his life.
As Charlie fusses over the cooking pots, adding herbs, adjusting seasoning, Cris and I
study the framed articles and photographs that cover the apartment walls. The phone
rings. An Australian friend has read that the fight had been moved from Las Vegas to
Miami. I’d received e-mail with the same rumour before leaving Huntington Beach.
It’s news to Charlie, but in boxing nothing’s certain until the bell rings, so he serves
up dinner and leaves the promotion to the promoter.
_ I work for Don King. I get on with him. He treats me right. Some guys think they
can run up expenses, take their girlfriend along, run up phone bills. I always pay my
own phone bill and I never stay on in a hotel if I don’t need to.
We flick through his scrapbooks together as Cris takes advantage of mid afternoon
sunlight streaming through the window. Louis stays behind to run with Hector, later,
when the sun goes down. We’ll pick him up tomorrow at the gym.
10.8.99.
The city is a kaleidoscope, continually mixing lives into intricate, ever-changing
patterns. The city is a spider, weaving webs of involvement until they are beyond
escape - unless you cut and run for it. Pass through quickly and maybe, just maybe,
your passing will cause no ripples, invoke no quick response. The city is a pinball
machine with a million humans inside, ricocheting like coffee beans in a grinder. The
city is the certainty that something unplanned for is about to happen. It’s the hand
thrust in a raffle bag with all life’s possibilities waiting to be claimed. It’s the wolf at
the threshold, the pot of gold at the rainbow's end.
Barkley B Yarborough makes an appointment for golf on the car phone in the green
Corvette on our way for coffee. I just want to ride in the car, a memory thing. It had
been twenty-five years since I rode in one.
[I caught a four-pound snapper, one of the better eating species of New Zealand fish.
Afterwards, as arranged, I phoned Jim, the Canadian photographer, who collected me
in his Corvette Stingray.]
The coffee shop is where his friends meet in the mornings to solve the world’s
problems. Some mornings there may be a dozen or more. Today there’s just the four
of us. Coffee on the sidewalk, Huntington Beach early morning, keeping any eye out
for the parking meter inspector as another day unfolds.
_ There’s a whole community of English people living up behind Santa Monica. They
come over on a two-year work visa then they can extend that once they are here.
92
So that gets filed away for future reference in case Louis wants to come back for a
longer stay. The conversation turns around to digital cameras. I take a few shots so
that, over tomorrow’s coffee convention, Cris’s father can produce an eye-opener as
agenda item number one. Back at the house Cris helps his father manipulate the
images in his photo shop program then prints a magazine quality page of photographs,
complete with script and coffee shop logo. The three us giggle like a bunch of
delighted computer nerds.
Cris and I cruising down the freeway, casting an eye to the future, trying to plot a
course. We decide not to focus on Hector’s upcoming fight in case it doesn’t happen.
By keeping in touch with Charlie we can always apply for press clearance when the
event is finalised. In the mean time it’s time to blow town. We decide to leave
Thursday morning, after dropping his wife at the airport, then head for Salt Lake City
before swinging back south through Texas. With that settled we weave through the
traffic into Hermosa Beach. The drive is almost becoming monotonous.
Round the ring more action than usual, maybe ten people are coming and going as
Hector warms up. Nick is such an easy guy to listen to that I gravitate in his direction,
drawn in by his affable personality, and soon he’s telling me about a night in a bar
with his father that ended more peacefully than it might have. Charlie is bandaging
Louis’s hands as a cop car pulls up and one of Nick’s three sons gets out, gun on his
hip, built like a tank. He leans on the prowl car, which has somehow become the
ringside pavilion, and chats with a couple of guys making deliveries to the night-club.
A casual get together is happening spontaneously, a pattern forming, a city thing. I’m
thinking about the story Nick has just told me as easy conversation echoes in the car
park. Then as if the city has decided to take an interest in us before we leave, Charlie
turns to me and asks if we want to come to a training camp tomorrow.
_ It’s Joe Sayatovich’s place out by San Deago. He and King are real close. We’re
going for a couple of days. Cris will get some good photos. Terry Norris will be
there.
The departure from Los Angeles moves forward one day with no hesitation on Cris’s
behalf. The key to photography is access and access like this may never happen
again. Charlie spends over an hour in the ring, guiding, coaxing, doing his thing.
Hector looks good, at peace with himself, in that last furlong to his physical peak.
Louis is revelling in the opportunity of being in Hector’s company but decides to
come back to Huntington beach to say goodbye to Cris’s parents rather than stay with
at Charlie’s for the night. Nick shakes my hand as we scatter in all directions; his
craggy face lined with laughter creases under the peak of his baseball cap. If it all
comes together for Hector Lopez, Nick’s the guy I want to be sitting next to when
they raise Hector’s hand.
93
Los Angeles to Connecticut.
11.8.99.
Leaving Los Angeles is a drive down a long thin funnel, starting on a six-lane
highway, ending on a dirt road too narrow for two vehicles to pass in comfort. On the
way south we pass Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps Base, where Cris, and his
father before him, did their military training. It’s a vast expanse of prime real estate
that will no doubt one day be a city. Out there in the economic atmosphere the doves
are patiently waiting for the hawks to roost. Beyond the base, the blue Pacific is
streaked with paler current lines, haphazardly criss-crossing the sea. A strangely
moving vessel appears, at first, to be a hovercraft. It turns out to be landing craft after
turning inshore towards the base. The smell of tomatoes hangs over acres of greenery,
standing in ordered lines along the highway. Before us the hills of San Diego emerge
from the dazzling haze.
Turning east we follow Charlie’s directions to the office of a construction business
where Joe Sayatovich says hello before hurrying off to collect supplies. Charlie hasn’t
arrived. As we wait the lady in the office talks about Don King. She could be Mrs.
Sayatovich. I get no chance to clarify the point.
_ He has always done what he says he will do and never let us down. He is always
polite and easy to speak to. To us he’s a really good friend. I can’t understand how
people can speak badly of him. I think they just resent his success and his money.
Not long ago a team of federal agents just walked into his offices and ordered
everyone out while they started looking for incriminating documents. As if anyone
with any brains would leave things like that around even if they had something to
hide. They’ve been trying to pin stuff on him for years and they haven’t been able to
prove a thing.
Charlie arrives and goes into a I wish I was twenty years younger routine with her then
we all take off for the training camp, high in the hills above Alpine. We turn off the
two-lane highway onto two way Buckman Springs Road then onto the dirt to where
the funnel ends at First Fighters’ Squadron Training Camp, at four thousand feet
among the mountains. The only sound is the wind in the trees.
The city has brought us here, to this mountain top retreat, with a loveable Australian
extrovert and a dark-eyed Mexican prize-fighter of immense ability. That great
interweaving of intangibles that deals a hand to be played or forfeited, to get off the
platform or go along for the ride. The ride went south, away from Salt Lake City. I’ll
never know where that path would have taken us. Now the city plays a trick, it lets us
know we’re fools to play the game. Joe Sayatovich tells Charlie that Hector’s fight
has been postponed until September the sixth. For a moment it seems as if time stands
still in the silence that ensues as this news sinks in. The consequences are different
for each one of us. Such an unlikely course of events brought six diverse personalities
from the corners of the globe to this remote spot, in the dust and the sun, as the golden
light of late afternoon paints the valley. Fifty miles to the west lies the great city of
94
San Diego. Fifty miles east lies the Anza Borrego Desert. The wind blows softly
from the valley and whispers like laughter through the trees.
Joe, Hector’s manager, is pouring oil on troubled waters. It comes with the job. He
sits in a hard-backed chair by the empty boxing ring talking about one of his fighters.
Charlie stand beside him, arms folded across his chest. Hector sits on the floor by a
corner post, looking up into Joe’s blue eyes. Joe has been unable to contact Terry
Norris, the five times former world champion who handed out a career ending beating
to Sugar Ray Leonard. So there’ll be no sparring. The day is winding down to a
disappointing end but hasn’t quite got there yet.
_ So he buys a brand new Corvette and two weeks later he sails off the 405 going a
hundred and twenty miles an hour. He flies one hundred yards through the air, lands
in a construction yard and goes through three sets of chain link fences. The fences
slow him down like on an aircraft carrier. He lands so hard the wheels fly off and
they never find two of them, they end up so far away. Then what does he do? He
buys another Corvette, sails off the 405 again and kills his best mate and his best
mate’s girlfriend. This time they stick him in jail.
Hector adds a comment from the floor.
_ He used to go his own way inside then he got into trouble, a gang thing, and I helped
him out. After that he used to stick by me. His story was that his girlfriend pulled the
wheel.
_ Well, the jury didn’t buy that. A witness testified that he came out of the club
drunk, that his girlfriend demanded the keys from him so she could drive. She hadn’t
drunk a drop. Give me them keys, she says, you’re drunk, let me drive. So what does
he do? He hauled off and punched her, threw her in the car and took off out of there
with wheels spinning. The prosecution could have produced two more witnesses but
the judge said it wasn’t necessary.
The ring is on the top story of a large Dutch Barn. A boxing poster is peeling off the
wall and the punch bags hang motionless in a pleasant breeze drifting in from an open
window. Down a spiral stair, the ground floor is filled with weight training machines,
covered with a thin film of dust. Charlie and Joe drift off to discuss business, Hector
talks about sparring with Julio Caesar Chavez.
_ I was just out of the Olympics so I was pretty fast then. He liked to fight inside but I
kept moving and stayed on the outside. He invited me to go out with him but I had to
see my grandmother first. He waited for me in the bar. He’s a good guy.
I bring up an image of Kostya Tszyu on the laptop, taken in the same Sydney gym
where Hector trained in Australia. Hector was the first to take Tszyu the distance
when the adoring Australian public thought the little Russian was unbeatable.
[Hernandez was billed as the last hurdle between Tszyu and a tilt at a world title. He
came with good credentials, having lost only one of forty-two bouts and that to the
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great Julio Cesar Chavez. There was a little concern among Kostya's fans that his last
outing with Hector Lopez had shown him to be vulnerable in the latter stages of a hard
contest. As he landed, after his customary vault over the top rope, Tszyu stumbled.
Has anyone considered the consequences of him twisting an ankle performing this
stunt?]
Now both of them are caught up in the machinations that are going on behind the
scenes of the upcoming fight between Tszyu and Miguel Angel Gonzalez. The fight
was originally set for August 21 in Los Vegas. Hector was to fight on the undercard.
Then the program was moved to Miami, which is better for Gonzalez. Now Hector’s
bout has been taken off that program and moved to Los Vegas. Charlie and Hector’s
presence might have been a tiny edge in Tszyu’s favour. At the very top level it’s the
tiny edges that make the difference. It looks to me that Tszyu better win by
knockout1. The forces gathering around him don’t want him to win.
Hector stands in the shade of a tree, waiting for Charlie, shrugging his shoulders,
loosening his muscles, talking about the past and considering the future.
_ When I was young I was hard to handle. I was twenty-one and knocking everybody
out so why should I have listened. The managers and promoters were probably a bit
intimidated by me and that didn’t help. I was rated number one with all three
sanctioning bodies but I never got a title fight. They kept saying you have to beat this
guy then you get a title fight, so I beat the guy and then I don’t get a title shot. I was
born in Mexico City so I’ve always been in the gangs. So I went back to the
neighbourhood and got into trouble. I’ve been in the ratings since 1986 and that’s
unusual. But I just been inside for nine months so I have to have a warm-up fight to
1
Kostya Tszyu took matter into his own hands. He stopped Gonzalez in the tenth round.
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get back in the ratings. I’ve been staying with Charlie since I came out so it’s been a
year almost since I’ve been with my family.
Joe Sayatovich and Charlie Gergen walk out of the ranch house towards us, talking
and laughing as they approach. They are the same height and build, about 120 pounds
in my estimation and about the same age. Maybe Charlie is just the senior. It’s hard
to tell. They are both so fit that the years have enhanced their appearances, moulding
them into better packages, as time improves and matures the taste of wine. For a split
second I’m reminded of the Iban Dyaks in far away Borneo and how hard it was to
guess their age.
Joe’s a conversationalist. He asks Cris about the things we are doing then, taking a
cue from Louis’s Australian connection, drops into a story about riding down a
kangaroo in the Snowy Mountains to prove that he could have roped it. He’s a
volcano of stories, a natural storyteller, one of those people who’s lived a life so full
that they can keep an audience enthralled without ever having to repeat themselves.
The pity is we won’t get chance to hear them.
The change of schedule means that Hector and
Charlie will go back to Los Angeles. We decide to
drive east and find a motel for the night. This new
September date means that we’ll miss the fight in
Vegas. By then we’ll be over on the East Coast,
getting ready to depart. Now it’s time depart from
this spot in the mountains. If it’s another twenty
years before I see Charlie Gergen again I know he’ll
still be doing what he’s doing now. He re-affirms
the invitation for Louis to come back to live and
train with him then we drive off down the dirt road
into the sunset. It’s the last time we’ll see it set into
our faces. Henceforth we’ll be heading east.
Dropping down through the mountaintops, some like piles of broken boulders, some
smooth as peaks on a meringue. The elevation drops from four, to three, to two, to
one thousand feet. Then out into the Anza Borrego Desert - sand, rock and dust
devils. Thirty-three miles from Calexico a sign warns that strong winds are possible
for the next sixteen miles. There is a strong wind in Salt Lake City. A twister touches
down near the Mormon Human Resource Data Bank, where we could well be if not
for these little tricks of fate. Jack Kerouac’s spirit came along for the ride and he’s
looking after us. With the sun behind us, five thirty in the evening, the heat we left
behind on top of the El Cajon Pass slips back into the jeep like the prodigal son
returning. We know it won’t be cool again for quite a while.
The last few miles before El Centro are somewhat paradoxical. The heat suggests that
only vegetation with the constitution of cactus could flourish but the fields are green
and flowering. Then we cross an irrigation canal and a sign announcing the food
grows where water flows. A week in the city has made me blind to the obvious. On a
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row of dilapidated motels we find the cheapest then talk the price down a couple of
bucks. It shouldn’t take too long to get back into the groove.
12.8.99.
Getting basic supplies before leaving town, a snowstorm of tiny white midges, small
enough to breathe, barely visible, swirling like dust in a sunbeam in a dimly lit room.
As we leave town Cris asks if either Louis or I recognise the classical music he’s just
put on the CD player. I might as well ask him the names and addresses of the
spectators at the second Dempsey Tunney fight. No, that’s not quite right. I’ve had
more exposure to classical music than he to boxing, but I don’t recognise the piece.
I’ve never heard it before. After a few minutes I guess at Rachmaninoff. Louis passes
back the cover. It’s Victory at Sea by Richard Rodgers, written for the television
series of the same name, which first went to air in 1952 and ran for 26 weeks. When
finished it was the longest piece of symphonic work ever written.
There’s a victory evident on land through the open window of the moving jeep. Crops
don’t sprout in the desert without a deal of innovation, application and struggle. We
are about forty miles from Yuma. Irrigation channels flowing through the arid
landscape have accomplished what would otherwise be impossible. But beyond the
network of man-made streams, the vegetation soon reverts back to those plants
adapted to little rainfall. We are travelling through an area where one single species
dominates. Nothing else grows except this shrub, not even a single blade of grass.
There are millions of identical plants, in all directions; each spaced as if planted by
some cosmic agronomist engaged in a research project whose purpose is still
unfolding. The shrub grows straight up from the desert in a series of vertical
branches. At a certain stage in its growth the outer branches start to curl downwards
until they reach the sand. Under this canopy the sand starts to gather until it seems
that the shrub is growing out of a small sand dune. Then, after passing miles of desert
dominated by this single species, another plant starts to make an appearance. This
shrub is greener and with denser foliage. It takes over the small dunes formed under
the drooping branches of the host plant and obliterates it. It’s as if I’m witnessing
time lapse photography of the way sand dunes develop. If only I knew the names of
the shrubs. If my sister, so knowledgeable in biology, would use the computer,
instead of believing it to be beyond her, I could take a digital photo, e-mail it to her
and know in a few hours. Mentally I rehearse a conversation, trying to frame the
words so that she is persuaded to overcome her reluctance to enter the twentieth
century. It’s not too late. There will still be three months left of it after this trip.
Sixteen miles before Yuma the sand takes over. Rolling sand dunes fill the landscape
between ranges of mountains, jutting through the sand like arms waving through the
bars of a prison. Border Patrol vehicles cruise the access road beside the freeway.
Helicopters patrol the mountains. We overtake a convoy of Marine trucks. The dark
eyes of a black kid look down from the shade of his combat helmet. We cross the
Colorado River into Arizona just after ten in the morning. Victory at Sea reaches a
crescendo. The temperature rises up a notch or two. It’s a hot day in the making.
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Up and over the Gila Mountains and into the Lechuguilla Desert. At a rest station in
the Mohawk Valley a display of Arizona landscapes highlight what we see around us.
We drive off in the actuality of a scenic splendour comprising desert, sky and
mountain in a blend that is uniquely Arizona. Out on the sand the occasional giant
saguaro cactus starts to gather brethren until, approaching the Macriopa Mountains,
this species becomes the predominant feature.
We are passing through a series of desert flatlands interspersed between mountain
ranges: the Gila Mountains, the Lechugilla Desert, the Cabeza Mountains, the Tule
Desert, the Mohwak Valley, the Mohawk Mountains, the Granite, Growler, Sauceda,
Sand Tank and Maricopa Mountains, all dissecting the Sentinel Plain. Interstate
Highway 8 runs east through this vast uncrowded openness, then turns south-east
towards Eloy and Tucson, past rugged Picacho Peak and a fleet of Boeing 747s parked
in the desert at the Pinal Air Park near Red Rock. At Tucson a quick stop for coffee
then on in softening three-in-the-afternoon light into Cochise County. We skip
Tombstone and the OK Corral. Long descent into Benson, white clouds piled up
behind the mountains, across the San Pedro River, two hundred and sixty-nine miles
to El Paso. We won’t make Texas tonight.
Up into the Texas Canyon, piles of limestone boulders looking down at the winding
road, we hook onto a cattle truck, passing in a hurry, to be dragged along in the
slipstream for forty miles. The smell of cattle reminds us of that Miles City stockyard,
way back in wide Montana, and Wild Bill’s friendly banter five thousand miles
behind.
The San Simon Valley is a vast panorama, mountains near, mountains far, yellow
wildflowers under the Joshua trees, the temperature so suited to the open jeep that we
could drive this way forever, all across America and on into the sea. Instead we pull
off the highway at Lordsburg, just inside New Mexico, having covered more ground
in one day than at any stage since the long drive into Cleveland, fifty-one days ago.
Two and a half miles south-west of Lordsburg lies the tiny ghost town of Shakespeare.
From a small settlement on the emigrant trail to California, it grew to be populated by
three thousand in 1870 after silver was discovered. What really helped swell the
population was a diamond swindle. When it was discovered that the diamonds had
been planted the population dwindled to about fifty determined miners. Then it was
called Ralston City. They changed the name to Shakespeare in 1879. A town that
never had a church, a newspaper or any local law, it probably has a few stories to tell
if the walls could talk. There are probably a few stories that are best forgotten.
People died and people prospered, then events left the town stranded in time. The
same could happen to Lordsburg. Just a street on what was once the main highway,
the buildings on one side of the road, the railway on the other. Away in the distance
the mountains peep over the horizon. Four thousand people call Lordsburg home.
When the copper plant closes four hundred jobs will go with it. Our motel has a huge
indoor swimming pool, kiddies’ playground and a restaurant. It costs us just $28 a
night for the three of us. It could be part of a slow decay.
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13.8.99.
A short drive from Lordsburg into wide-open spaces with hardly another vehicle on
the road. It’s hard to imagine a better way to start the morning. The breeze blowing
through the open jeep, good music on the airwaves and an all-round panoramic
landscape with not a living soul in sight. We take an easy drive to Deming then turn
south on route 11 towards Columbus, just above the Mexican border. It is not a busy
road. It winds through open land, sometimes under cultivation, with the Florida
Mountains away to the east. On the western side of the highway, three almost
identical peaks dominate the skyline like the Gaza Pyramids. Up ahead lies the
Pancho Villa State Park.
Columbus is mostly mobile homes and a water tank. A sun-bleached historic marker
mentions Pancho Villa attacking the settlement. The date, and perhaps the memory,
has faded. We turn east on an empty by-road, into the wastelands, all the way to El
Paso. Traversing an area of undulating sand dunes it seems as if, over the next rise,
the sea will lie before us but this is not the case. Instead, a vast expanse of green
wilderness, with patches of red sand peeping though the undergrowth, stretches as far
as the eye can see south into Mexico. For sixty miles we travel a virtually empty
highway, meeting perhaps a dozen vehicles, half of which are Border Patrol.
El Paso lies under a barren mountain ridge, sweltering in the midday heat. We try to
skirt around the place but all roads lead to the Interstate and the Interstate runs right
thought the heart of the city. We cross the deep brown Rio Grade then make a mad
dash through the oven at 112 degrees. A sign says that August 13 is Ozone
Awareness Day. I don’t notice too much of that stuff around. Could be I’m not
aware. Interstate 10 twists through the city centre then out into Texas. It’s the fourth
time I’ve been here in the last two years. Soon the traffic lessens, heading south-east.
The mountain ranges seem to be getting higher. Perhaps that’s just the Texas factor.
We pass the Finlay Mountains away to the north-east then the highway intersects the
Quitman Mountains before bending east towards Sierra Blanca.
Still heading east, the imposing crags of the Eagle Mountains are to the south while to
the north a volcanic plug dominates the mesas. We are in a country dominated by
mountain ranges. Some display layers of strata twisted almost perpendicular by
Earth’s internal forces. Others have layer upon layer lying parallel to the earth. The
sun is falling down the sky behind us. We are seventy miles from Van Horn where
we’ll have to rest the night. High in the Sierra Diablo we cross into the Central Time
Zone. We’ve covered almost ten thousand miles since leaving Terryville and the great
state of Texas lies before us. In some recess of my memory it feels like coming home.
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14.8.99.
Leaving Van Horn on the quiet Highway 90 beside a single railway track, the hills in
lazy curves like cresting waves. It’s as if the sheer vastness of the surrounding
countryside has daunted the aspirations of the pioneering spirits who came here,
leaving the road and the railway track as relics of their unfilled dreams. Valentine has
a population of 207. A few empty buildings with empty windows looking out at the
cactus.
Beyond Valentine the hills recede as if the surface of the Earth has been stretched like
a sheet of rubber, leaving wide flat grassland, dotted with livestock, between hills now
just visible a the very edge of sight. Before we get to Marfa, the next town down the
road, reaching a point ten thousand miles from Cris’s driveway in Connecticut, we
pull up to take photographs to mark the spot. The only witnesses are a few dead
moths pinned to the radiator and two swallows resting on the telephone line.
Marfa is a quiet little town resting in the sun, still remembering its heyday when
James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor came to town to make the movie
Giant.
The pastel-pink El Cheapo Liquor Store makes a fine photographic backdrop for Cris
leaning on the wall. With a couple of day’s growth on his chin he fits in as if he grew
there. The road continues south and east towards Alpine with sunlight flashing off
oncoming windshields with the Del Norte Mountains blocking our passage twentyfive miles ahead. As we reach these mountains, the evidence of Earth’s long history is
everywhere obvious. How I long to be able to read this history with the eye of a
geologist, to see, in the exposed layers of sedimentary rock, the long progression of
remorseless change that left us humans here, trying to comprehend. Education is
holy; ignorance is sin.
Alpine announces itself with a signpost proclaiming a population of 5,637. Low white
houses with fire-red tiles and the smell of barbecues exude a welcome as the town
opens out into pastel shaded buildings and tidy well-kept streets. We cruise the town
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in both directions, looking for the tourist centre, conscious that it’s a good place to
stay a few days. There’s a lot we could learn in this town, where a feel of genuine
western ambience is set against high mountains of incredible natural beauty.
Bill Hully is the softly spoken informative caretaker at the Big Bend Museum, the
descendant of two Dutch brothers who came to the New World in the 1860’s. He
points out at the distant hillsides.
_ It doesn’t usually look so green. It’s rained more these last three months than the
previous five years. We’ve had just about ten years of drought but hopefully that
might be over. Before they built the dam you could see right down to the foundations
of the Pecos River Bridge. Then the dam raised the water level seventy feet or more.
That made a whole lot of difference to thousands of square miles round here. The
ranchers didn’t have to buy hay anymore. They could grow their own. Now the water
level is right down again and you can see the foundations when you cross the bridge.
On the wall is the wing of a Texas Pterosaur, reconstructed from fossilised bones
found in the area. It may be the largest creature ever to fly. Bill lives in an area
known as the Solitario. He points it out on a contour map, a circular feature in a
rugged landscape. Sometime, way back when, a volcano exploded leaving a crater.
_ There are shark’s teeth all over the place. I found a fossilised Sea Lion this big indicating with his hands like a fisherman - they don’t grow that size anymore.
Now he’s telling Cris about Sul Ross, the youngest ever general of the confederate
army. Bill is more interesting than the exhibits in the museum. We learn that the
official elevation of Alpine is 4,481 feet, taken at the airport, as it always is - if there
is an airport. Where elevation is taken if a town has no airport remains a mystery.
We’ve been versed with just a fraction of Bill Hully’s knowledge as we drive off
further east.
Marathon is a picturesque collection of adobe building, needing just a horse nodding
at the hitching rail to put us back into the Wild West. It was once at the centre of the
Comanche War Trail. The entire ride through northwest Texas is a constant
perspective of shifting historic pageants, sometimes back to the dawn of creation,
sometimes to the dawn of civilisation. It’s the not the Texas I’ve come to know from
visits farther south, near Corpus Christi. There the land is flat and cultivated. Here
rugged mountain ranges break from parched, dry, barren wilderness. A high ridge up
ahead has layers of sedimentary rock laid out like a pile of carpets. It’s part of the
Ouachita Rock Belt; uplifted from the seabed between 275 and 299 million year ago,
about the time the Appalachian Mountains were forming. A more recent layer of
rock, lying on top, was uplifted about 135 million years ago, about the time the Rocky
Mountains were forming. The entire area is a vivid lesson in geology. This leg of the
journey is about to become a lesson in survival.
We cross a corner of Pecos County then into Terrell County before entering the
Sanderson Canyon. There isn’t another vehicle on the road. The temperature is
steadily increasing as we wind though the canyon then out onto a wilderness so total it
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seems devoid of life. The sky fills the world in all directions, the heat roaring down
onto a vast plateau as if the very atmosphere has been stripped by pitiless radiation
spewing from the maw of the sun. The road ahead shimmers with mirages. A
temporary respite from a world devoid of features as we limp through the Plama and
the Lozier Canyons then back into the microwave. Where the highway cuts through
the occasional hump in the plateau’s surface the sedimentary layers are revealed as
neatly as the carefully placed stones in a Roman wall.
It’s a relief to get to Langtry where the famous Judge Roy Bean proclaimed himself to
be the Law West of the Pecos. In actuality the law west of the Pecos was the United
States Army. A few old buildings still remain from a tiny town where a colourful
character made himself a legend with his unconventional brand of justice and his
fascination with Lillie Langtry. The famous actress eventually came to visit in 1904, a
few months after the old Judge died. It must have been a primitive land where nature
ruled harshly and only the toughest survived. There was even a world title prize-fight
held here in 1896. Bob Fitzsimmons dispensed with Peter Maher in one round. The
roofs are collapsing on the old adobe buildings. There’s a space at the end of a dusty
unpaved street before a canyon. Perhaps that’s where the fight took place. There isn’t
even a breeze to make a sound. But ghostly echoes of the imagination reverberate
with wild cheers and gunfire as they must have done, in this very spot, when the west
was at its wildest. A buzzard eyes us carefully as we drive back out of town.
Cris pulls up just before the Pecos River Bridge. Walking out into the single span
above the famous river an immediate sense of vertigo unsteadies my equilibrium. The
bridge seems to sway in a stiff wind blowing up the canyon. Through drainage holes,
cut into the concrete, the river is just a narrow ribbon three hundred feet below. A
buzzard glides effortlessly under the bridge. I’m sure it’s the same one that gave us a
knowing look back in Langtry. I start to walk quickly to the other side, unnerved, too
far in to turn back. Cris picks me up half way across. It’s a relief to finally get across
to the other side.
Somehow Del Rio fails to strike the right cord. Maybe it’s the mouldy smell of one
cheap motel room, maybe the indifferent attitude in the manager of another, maybe
the long day driving through the baking heat. Acting suddenly, on impulse, Cris snaps
into another gear to drive all the way to San Antonio. Almost as suddenly the
landscape changes. We’re back in the Texas I’ve come to know and love – well-kept
streets in tidy towns and between the townships cattle grazing in waist-deep grass.
There’s richness about the place, a sense of proprietary and order. The fields are
green with sprinklers rotating on their pivots. The heat blasted world of rock and
canyon is now a dream passed in the morning. Ulvade passes by in lengthening
shadows. Hondo shows its neon as the sun slips out of sight. At Castroville a band
plays gospel music in the gathering twilight. A smiling man walks over to the jeep
and hands me a message. If your living life upside down, if you’re lonely, having
problems, or just searching for more out of life…come worship the one true living
God and he’ll put your life right side up again. His face is lit with inner sincerity.
Then the million lights of San Antonio are in the sky before us as we sweep along the
freeway like a pigeon coming home. We take a random turn off the busy ring road
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then down a narrow tunnel filled with light and shadow until a motel sign arrests us
and we stop to ask the rate.
From behind a two-way mirror a voice dribbles from a slot. Cris walks back to the
jeep without a second though. If that’s the way they do business then we’d rather
walk the streets. We end up at a gas station, near the heart of San Antonio, unable to
find a room, but a can of ice-cold beer gives us second wind. Drinking from brown
paper bags like hobos, we laugh at our predicament as the desert dust gets washed
away. We fly around the ring road to be ejected by the centrifugal force of the city
down highway 87 towards Victoria. The Milky Way is a strip of whitewash, from
which Scorpius is crawling, low in the south. Antares and Mars compete for depth of
redness. A shooting star arcs slowly down the sky. No room at Stockdale or Pandora.
No room at Nixon so we drink another beer, sitting at the gas station, as the young
bloods of yet another Saturday night strut and vie for attention before the night
swallows up their vanity. Finally, at Cuero, we find a room at two in the morning.
We’ve been on the road for over sixteen hours. It’s been our hottest and our longest
day, both rolled into one.
15.8.99.
We just beat the midday deadline though we’ve time to phone Ken Marbatch before
we leave the motel. He tells us to come around. On the short drive to Victoria we
pass though Thomaston, where Cris’s great grandfather worked as a blacksmith. The
smithy and any relatives have long since gone their way. It’s enough for Cris to pass
though, knowing now he’s been there. How far the family has scattered since those
days - how typically American! As we make our way through Victoria it’s the first
time on this entire journey that Louis and I are crossing familiar ground. We guide
Cris out on route 59 to the Linden Hill Motel, where we lived for a few weeks,
thirteen months before. There have been renovations. The low white buildings,
between the highway and the railway track, are resplendent with new paintwork. The
sunlight filters though the linden trees. A Sunday afternoon silence envelops the
complex, broken by the sound of an occasional passing truck. No response at the
office doorbell so we head off down highway 77. It takes about fifteen minutes to
find Ken’s place. Out in the front pasture the season’s last bales of hay are being
collected. It’s been one hundred degrees for the last nineteen days but the storms are
not too far away.
Ken is waiting by the barn. His laugh comes easy as we drift through the bits and bats
of common interests, catching up on how our mutual acquaintances are faring in the
year we’ve been apart. Then we pile into his truck to grab lunch in the tiny town of
Tivolli, about fifteen miles away. Memories come flooding back as we pass familiar
landmarks. Louis tells the story of the last day on the job when we worked across a
mile of cloying gumbo soil. No type of vehicle can cross this stuff when it’s wet. It is
all but impossible to walk on. It sticks to your boots and you cannot get if off. By the
time you have gone twenty yards there are twenty pounds additional on each foot and
you are six inches taller. Once started there is no place to go but onward. On that
afternoon, a year before, it was at least ninety degrees with a great brooding
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thunderstorm coming up from behind. The other engineer and I had debated even
trying it. Louis, brash with younger self-assurance, urged us to complete the job.
Really he was challenging us. He was implying that he was fit enough to do it and
that maybe we were not. So having no answer to his logic, Simon and I set out across
the quagmire with the electronic survey equipment. Crossing the field was a
nightmare. When we finished we were too exhausted to move for some time. We just
collapsed in the grass, oblivious to the falling rain. Then Louis had to follow in our
footsteps, collecting up the thin copper wire strand that played out behind us as we
surveyed the earth’s resistivity to electronic fields. We watched him stagger across
the gumbo, with a mile of copper wire collecting on his forearm, as lightning struck
earth behind him and thunder filled the heavens. We wondered if he’d make it or
vanish in a cloud of smoke. So did he! He was out there in no-man’s land and
nowhere else to go. When he made firm ground, just behind Tivolli, he collapsed,
laughing at himself, hardly able to move. Simon and I were composed by then. We
got up and walked away as if, for us, it had been no effort. We nearly killed ourselves
but that exertion finished the job.
So, as we polish off our Mexican food we chat about things that happened, reaffirming the relationship, establishing the common ground. Ken tells Cris about
finding horned toads. Fire ants have all but wiped the species out but Ken found one,
out there on the pipeline, in an endless expanse of grassland where Louis skinned a
dead rattlesnake for a hatband. Rattlesnakes were common but horned toads were not.
We took photos with my digital camera on that day’s newspaper to prove that they
weren’t totally extinct. But Ken wouldn’t tell the local paper that printed the photos
where he’d found them so maybe they’re still out there, blinking in the sun. I pull out
my laptop and scroll through those photos, the horned toad, mouth agape in
threatening posture, Ken leaning on the six-wheel amphibious vehicle, the blue Texas
sky as a background. The waitress refills our beakers with iced tea for the third time.
Ken insists on paying then we head back to his ranch.
After Ken loads his horses into the trailer we follow him north on 77 to where his
partner, Bobby Schroeder, is waiting by the roping arena. A fresh wind is blowing
from the south but it’s still too hot to sit out of the shade by choice. The arena is
similar to that in Cheyenne but on a smaller scale; an oval expanse of carefully raked
dirt surrounded by metal fencing. At one end a corral leads into a system of narrow
pens into which the steers will be herded before release, one by one, into the arena. At
the opposite end another corral into which the steers will be driven after roping.
About twenty head are in there now, looking up as if they know what’s coming. A
narrow passage connects the corrals at either end of the arena. It’s all set out like a
field of dreams. Out in the pasture a few head of cattle graze with their backs to the
wind. Ken’s children, Amanda and Lucas, help Ken unload the trailer, then he leads
his new horse, like a dog on a lead, over to the shade of a building where we all sit in
the shadows as Cris’s Leica starts to click.
Bobby and Ken are team roping the weekend coming. To both their surprises alcohol
has been barred from the event. Bobby finds the schedule with the no drink notice
printed at the head.
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_ I don’t know how they are going to enforce it. I can take it or leave it myself but the
only reason some folks go to a rodeo is to have a beer.
Other trailers start to arrive. Amanda rides off to drive the steers from the bottom
corral up to the holding pens. They don’t want to go, turning back at slightest
opportunity. Ken leads a saddled horse into the arena. Louis climbs on for his firstever ride. It takes off at a canter but he gains control before reaching the other end.
Lucas rides around as if the horse was part of him, swinging his lariat around his head.
As the sun begins to set the wind drops. More people arrive and without fuss or hurry,
everybody knowing what they are doing, the show gets under way.
At the end of the next two hours I’m beginning to realise just how difficult this thing
called rodeo is. Though all too complicated to grasp any finer details, it soon becomes
obvious that you have to grow up with it to have any chance at all. More than a sport,
it’s the manifestation of a way of rural life. Sitting on the fence, watching as the
steers charge down the arena, just trying to fathom how the rope gets round the beast’s
back legs is more that I can manage. Conversations about the nuances of horse
behaviour go right above my head. But ignorant or otherwise it’s exiting to watch and
a privilege to be there. As the steer runs for freedom Bobby rides in from its left to
rope it round the horns. Then Ken has to get the noose around both back legs, coming
in from the other side. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t. The dust and
the creak of leather, the smell of horses and the thunder of hoofs, the clang of the pen
gate rising, the yells of the cowboys; it’s a celebration of tradition made possible by
acquiring skills few can master. As Ken Marbach says _ It sure is fun.
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When all the steers are back in the coral at the
other end they’re driven back for another session.
It’s all about practice and it needs a lot of it. In
between runs a girl, who looks about eighteen,
practices barrel riding on her own horse then
takes Ken’s new horse though the pattern. To me
she looks like an expert. Her father gives advice
as she goes along. A seven-year old rides round
the barrels with grim determination. Her father
acknowledges that pretty soon he will be hauling
her round the state each weekend. He doesn’t
seem as reluctant about it as he’s making out to
be.
The shadows lengthen across the pasture.
Floodlights go on around the arena. The smell of
sizzling meat from a king-sized barbecue adds its contribution to the closure of the
day. With all the horses fed and watered we sprawl by the fence, in the warmth of
early evening, telling stories, drinking in the easy ambience of this perfect Texas
Sunday as the everlasting stars begin to shine.
16.8.99.
There were two definite items on my agenda back in June as we crossed the wide
Atlantic. The first was to try my damnedest to make the trip worthwhile for Cris.
Eight months of correspondence had given me insights. Even though I’d never met
the man I already liked him. Our only real regrets are the risks we never take in life.
He’d taken a risk. He’d quit a good job as head photographer for a New England
newspaper and put all he had into this enterprise. If we could produce material fit for
publication then it might open doors. It might get him established as a freelance travel
photographer. I was determined to do my part, to produce sufficient edited text, to go
with a portfolio of his photographs, for him to demonstrate his worth to prospective
publishers. Not only that, I wanted to have it finished before we left America. That
was item one.
The second involved Louis. Feeling the death watch beetle of oncoming old age in
my bones, coupled to his advancing years, I wanted to take him travelling one more
time in case I never get the chance again. I want him to see, with his own eyes, as
much of life as possible so that when the time comes to choose his own path he
understands that there are always choices. It’s a matter of making the right one and
that can only come from him. He already knows he can live in New Zealand,
Australia and England as he chooses but I want him to experience as many countries
as possible. Though far more mature than I was at the same age, non-the-less the
more he knows, the better able to assess life; and what better teacher than America? It
would broaden his horizons. I rather wanted to see it myself.
There were two other little personal things I hoped might happen. For one I wanted a
picture of Louis in the ring at Madison Square Gardens. It’s the name really, not the
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building. The present building is the fourth to carry the name synonymous with
boxing. It was at the third version of the gardens that the real action took place. In
consecutive decades, from the twenties to the fifties, Jack Dempsey, Henry
Armstrong, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano thrilled the crowds there. As far as boxing
goes it was the only place to be.
[My father woke me in that unfamiliar dark when the world sleeps, then together we
listened to the fight on the old valve radio. Indestructible Rocky Marciano, legend in
the making, champion of the world; he battered a brave, blown-up middleweight, Don
Cockle, to submission over eight pitiless rounds. A contest with the sporting finesse
of bull baiting and as one sided as a lynching. It was my first heavyweight
championship experience. After the fight Marciano was interviewed in the ring. The
unreality of that never before visited pre-dawn hour, whilst listening to a contest for
the greatest prize in sport; that made a lasting impression, but not the biggest
impression. It was the voice. That alluring voice of America with all its promise,
beckoning yet remote as the moons of Jupiter.]
Sugar Ray Robinson won his first title at Madison Square Gardens. Ali fought there
nine times and Joe Louis defended the title there eight. There’s a lot connected to the
name. I’d like to tell my father that we’d been there.
The other thing I wanted was to see an Alligator Gar. That was a childhood dream as
well. I’d been brought-up fishing. My father had me at it from the age of five. By
ten I was deeply into American fishing magazines. In one of those I read about
Alligator Gar. The story was called Those Acrobatical Alligators. It made an
impression so vivid on my imagination that I can see the pictures in my mind as
clearly as I did those forty years ago. One was of a man standing between two razortoothed torpedoes larger that he was. The other was a blur of action as a Gar cleared
the water in a flurry of flying spray. I’ll always see those black and white
photographs at the corner of my fantasy as I’ll always hear Marciano’s voice and the
strange way he pronounced Cock el. When I called Ken Marbatch from Cheyenne,
after hearing mention of the bull, Bodacious, I asked if he knew where I could find a
guide to take us fishing for Alligator Gar. He told me they were in the river just down
the road from his place, to come on down and he’d take us. It felt as if I was dreaming
at the time.
Cris has things to do in town so he drops us off at Ken’s place just before three thirty.
Urgent family business means Ken will have to be back home by six-o-clock. It might
not look so promising as we’ll only be on the water for about one hour but few
participants in any field of human endeavour chase dreams with the diligence
displayed by fishermen, nor with such quiet confidence. A lifetime can be cheerfully
dedicated to the pursuit of specimen fish. Fishing is, in its quintessence, the
considered plan, the winning strategy, the successful hunt, the capture of a dream. It’s
taken forty years to get here and nothing is going to spoil it now.
We load Ken’s rods into the pickup. He drives back towards Tivolli then hangs a left
down a dirt road. In a few minutes we see the San Antonio River running through
what looks like a construction site. Bulldozers are working on the riverside. Two
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large excavators are shaping the banks after the river’s been blocked for months by a
huge logjam. The water is filthy. Debris is floating downstream through what looks
like a World War One front line trench after a downpour. On a bend, just downstream
from the bulldozers, three boats are anchored tight under the bank. There’s a stand of
trees providing shelter but the bank is at least ten feet straight down into the river. It’s
a good place to party but not the best for fishing. We bait our hooks with chunks of
liver and settle down to wait - but not for long. As Ken and I lounge on the riverbank,
under the trees, we notice Louis, further upstream, is fighting a fish. He’s said
nothing, waiting till he has it beaten before letting us know. After a couple of minutes
the fish clears the water. Ken confirms it’s a Gar. What else could it have been?
Two minutes later he has it on the bank.
17.8.99.
That night-drive from San Antonio has stirred up something inside all of us. None of
us speak about it. We just let it lie. Cris has combed Victoria, looking for a place to
process his film. He hasn’t found one. We’ve tried to get press clearance for the fight
in Miami but that hasn’t happened either. Partly that’s due to us never having a
number to be called back on. We are forever on the move. It seems best to drive
straight to Houston, drop the film off, and then find a motel early in the day. There
we can plan ahead a little. At the moment we don’t have a plan.
Highway 59 to Houston is just a couple of hours of motoring that passes in a daze. In
the vast open spaces left behind us we always knew where we were going.
Surrounded in the crowded city centre we’ve somehow lost our way. A gentle shower
cools the air for just a moment then turns it into a sauna. Learning that the processing
will only take two hours there seems no point doing much but wait, so we find a
bookstore to escape the stifling heat. It’s hot and very humid outside. Midday in a
city centre; the steady hum of traffic penetrates the walls.
Cool inside the bookstore, we sit at a coffee table, wondering what to do. Without
even knowing it we’re lusting for the road. Not the quiet by-ways devoid of traffic,
but that great mainstream of traffic that is the lifeblood of America. Interstate City,
with its language and its culture, that somehow is a world unto itself. Where eighteenwheel big rigs are senior citizens and four-wheelers are impetuous adolescents. In less
than twenty seconds we decide to drive all the way back to Connecticut and start this
thing again.
Louisiana is a world of swamp beyond a highway dotted with seafood restaurants.
Some times we are passing over water on a concrete ribbon raised on pillars, with
green, dank, brooding woodlands pressing all around. Sometimes the open stretch of
an estuary reveals paddle steamers close into the shore. The roar of wind and traffic is
punctuated by the static from the CB radio and the never-ending dialogue between
truck drivers who spend their lives in this nether world of motion to and fro.
Billboards grow along the highway. Clusters of motel signs climb above the
billboards like rain-forest trees bursting through the canopy. And all along, the green
backed highway signs, with towns and turnoffs clearly marked in white. A headlong
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flight across Louisiana, an occasional stop for gas, then ever onward. The outside
scenery glides by with little change until we cross the mighty Mississippi River, once
again, at Baton Rouge. Oquawka, Illinois, seems so many miles behind. This time
there’s no walking on the riverbank. This time only the jeep’s tyres touch the ground.
A vehicle without a CB radio is deaf mute in a concert, a blind man in a museum, a
stranger in a foreign country. There’s a constant interchange of information going on
that expands a driver’s consciousness far beyond the range of vision. A CB radio lets
you know the weather ahead, where the traffic cops are waiting, when a girl showing
her legs is coming up behind. It tells us that there’s a traffic hold-up at the junction of
Interstate 10 and Interstate 12 so we cross the Mississippi River then turn north on 110
for a short stretch before turning back east on 190. For a while we are back in normal
diving conditions, with traffic lights and intersections, through Denham Springs,
Walker, Livingston and Albany then we’re back in Interstate City, heading east until
we turn the corner north on 59. The sun will neither rise not set in our faces again on
the long journey ahead through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia,
West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. Freed from
schedule, uncluttered with obligation, draft or deadlines, intoxicated by a growing
inner urge to keep on moving, we aim to do the trip in just two days.
18.8.99.
Hattiesburg shakes itself from sleep with the coming of the dawn. A red-haired lady
in an all night gas station asks me where I’m from.
_ As soon as you spoke I knew you weren’t from Mississippi.
Then we’re heading north again though avenues of trees. The rising sun casts
shadows across both lanes of highway. Passing time is indicated by shadows edging
eastward, sunlight slowly creeping across first the southbound and then the
northbound lanes. We see no towns. The trees are sometimes momentarily cut by
slowly flowing rivers but soon close in again. It’s a silent world out there. The
sunlight creeps across the southbound highway in inaudible resonance to the digital
clock on the dashboard. At Meridian Airport helicopters squat on the runway like
olive dragonflies. The trees are ever-present sentinels, an unbroken line of green
tranquillity, until a sign announces Alabama the Beautiful. Mississippi is just a
memory, somewhere behind.
Since early morning I’ve been pre-occupied with trees. Quite suddenly, on this side of
the state border, they are smaller, only just planted, as if some agronomic experiment
is being copied from the Neighbour State, fifty miles back down the track. The road
swings over the wide Tombigbee River. A large fish turns on the flat calm surface,
causing ripples to spread outwards, the only movement discernible of on each side of
the bridge. Now we are back in tall timber though the southbound lane is still
completely free of shadow. We cross the Black Warrior River, loop around
Birmingham, then continue on through endless forest from which an occasional
billboard peeps. The land is flat, cut here and there at right angles by small valleys
through which runs a railway or perhaps a road.
110
By midday we are fifty miles away from Chattanooga, entering the southern reaches
of the Appalachian Mountains. Now there are no shadows on the highway. We start
to feel the heat. Across the north-west corner of Georgia before entering Tennessee,
around a great sweep in the river with the same name. Chattanooga was once
Cherokee country. They were forcibly removed in 1838. A quarter of them died on
the Trail of Tears, which started here, as did General Sherman’s march though
Georgia. Up on those heights, in 1863, a seventeen year old, Arthur MacArthur,
planted the flag of the Wisconsin 24th on Missionary Ridge after one the most
remarkable battles of the Civil War. His son would become America’s most famous
general. The boy’s ancestors hailed from Scotland’s Loch Awe, back in the mists of
history. My nephew Peter fishes that loch regularly. In perceptive half asleep,
induced by hours of travel, when the mind accepts the endless flow and falls back into
itself, a chaffinch hops along the edge of Loch Awe, onto my foot, then perches on my
bait tin where it fearlessly starts to feed. Steady drizzle mottles the loch’s cold
surface. From the misty mountainside above the shoreline the plaintive bleat of a
sheep carries far across the water.
The scenery has been changing subtly, like a child you don’t notice growing before
your eyes. So has the vegetation. We are running alongside the Great Smoky
Mountains, climbing, steadily upwards, past trees with the odd touch of yellow
contrasting the sombre olive of kudzu vines. Fields of corn are still green before
harvest. The few remaining stands of Texan corn clothed in a rusty chestnut brown.
Gradually, sitting in the seventy miles an hour wind buffing the back seat of the jeep,
the hours, miles and freeway traffic merge into a blur, where time has no meaning,
marked only by the ever-deepening shades of the gathering afternoon.
Beyond Knoxville we are no longer skirting the mountains but running up their length,
through them, all the while slowly gaining altitude. The Appalachians are older than
the Rocky Mountains and not so hostile. In a way they remind me of Europe. The
relationship between man and nature is more amenable, as if each has adapted to the
other and altered in small degrees to augment the partnership. As if nature itself has
accepted that it depends on humanity for its survival, there is a submissive, even
gentle, feel to the very hills and valleys. It’s the difference between a Wolf and a
Wolfhound, between a wild and a domesticated animal. The reason why so many
easterners are attracted to the west is laid out before me as images of Jack Kerouac’s
and Buffalo Bill’s resting-places hover in my brain. We cross in Virginia at five
fifteen and, knowing one more day will do it, stretch our legs at Abingdon then rest up
for the night.
19.8.99.
The morning chill is soon dispensed with scalding coffee. A rising sun tints the
eastern horizon, dew sparkles on tobacco leaves as we hit the Interstate for the last
drive home. Immediately we are going down a hill that never seems to end. Place
names flash by; Marion, Wytheville, Chistianburg and Roanoke, but still a downward
motion that has me wondering if I’m still asleep. On either side the Appalachians roll
111
by sedately, clad in forest, silent in the morning. Each time the terrain levels briefly it
seems to drop again until I’d swear we’ve gone downhill for two hundred miles.
We cross a ten-mile corner of Maryland then into Pennsylvania, now edging down the
eastern side of the mountain range. Beyond Harrisburg the Interstate divides. We
take the left fork on 81 up to Scranton then turn east on 84. The place names are
becoming meaningless. The scenery passes by unheeded, like clouds floating by the
window of a house in which the affairs of daily life consume all attention until after
night-time falls. The highway is everything. A narrow strip, endless in both
directions, drawing us ever onwards towards a journey’s end. All our attention is
focused on reaching a point, rapidly approaching, somewhere out before us. We are
immersed in a world of perpetual motion, rushing wind and a ceaseless stream of
comment from the CB radio. Interstate City becomes more crowded with every
passing mile.
We curve around New York City, cross the Hudson River, then enter Connecticut for
the final furlong home. Cris turns off the CB radio as we leave the Interstate at
Waterbury to head north on Highway 8. The same heart beats within the caterpillar
and the butterfly. We are still in the same vehicle but a fundamental difference has
occurred. It’s as if we’ve stepped out of one reality into another: as if we walked into
a room in Texas then out though another door in Connecticut, where the entire Eastern
Seaboard lies unexplored. The last two quiet country miles into Terryville are spent
blinking like children awaking from sleep, trying to cling on a disappearing dream that
has so far lasted thirteen thousand miles.
Cape Cod to Kentucky.
25.8.99.
As the afternoon shadows lengthen across Baldwin Park the Bristol Old Tyme
Fiddlers Club winds down from a foot-tapping polka. A ripple of applause from an
appreciative audience as a man in a straw hat introduces the first soloist. Uncle Willie
rises unsteadily to his feet clutching his fiddle. He points a finger across the street,
beyond the oaks and maples shading this small New England community from early
autumn sunlight.
_ When I played here in 1937 there was a schoolhouse over there.
Then he dispenses with the verbal and lets the bow slide over the strings as if it has a
life of its own. The tune comes out right and the crowd claps along. A few guitars, a
couple of banjos, a piano accordion, a mouth organ, a set of drums and three rows of
violinists give the old man backing. Maybe two hundred spectators in self-arranged
rows of folding chairs are helping keep another branch of folk music alive just by
being there. The band members are mostly dedicated amateurs, playing for the love of
music. One by one they get to their feet for a solo. Some introduce themselves and
say a few words.
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_ Two days ago I was In Los Angeles and you could hardly see across the street for
the haze. It sure is good to be back in New England.
Lee Murphy, a ninety-two year old, plays his solo then sits back down again. He
looks younger than Uncle Willie and probably is. Next young Jeff, aged seven; snake
skin boots, black Stetson hat and a bootlace tie – a petunia in the cabbage patch. He
shows he’s well on the way, a star in the making. Maybe one day he, like Uncle
Willie, will tell a crowd, not yet born, that he played here in Terryville in 1999;
remembering though association the shadows of the past.
But the past is also the rhythm of the soul in one moment.
Cris’s mother and father-in-law, Patti and George Kensiski, are sat some way behind
me. I move position to join them as a lady on violin begins a duo with a banjo player.
To me they seem the most accomplished of the musicians yet to play. So I turn to
George for an informed opinion. He would know. He was a musician for forty-six
years. He started playing trumpet in 1943 at the age of eight, was a member of the
high school band, good enough to sit in with the visiting Navy band at age fifteen. He
played with the University of Connecticut Marching Band and after marriage, at
twenty-two, formed his own band. They performed at dances and weddings
throughout the state until the band broke up in 1989.
_ I had some good times with my trumpet.
Leroy Anderson composed Trumpeter’s Lullaby in 1949. He gave the sheet music to
a conductor friend, asking him to play the piece in public so he might listen to it.
George was then a freshman, playing with the high school band. At a concert,
conducted by Anderson’s friend, he became the first person to play Trumpeter’s
Lullaby in public - the right man in right place at right time. The concert was recorded
and the piece used as a radio-show theme-tune for years.
He agrees that the duo comprises the best performers yet. Patti takes the notepad off
my knee but can’t decipher the scribble. A fire engine’s siren turns our heads as it
races down South Main Street where Cris and his in-laws live. It takes me about five
minutes to confirm that both houses are still standing. The sounds of violins are
reaching from the park, carried on a breeze that shakes the apple trees, firmly enough
to cause the fruit to fall.
26.8.99.
Cris makes such good time getting to New Bedford that we arrive twenty minutes
early for our ten-o-clock appointment. The smell of sea spray hangs on the air. The
cry of seagulls announces our nearness to the grey Atlantic. Above the sky is also
grey, another noticeable contrast to that barren wilderness, west of the Pecos, where
we almost fried twelve days ago. The town has an immediate feel of the historic, as if
things of consequence have taken place here, conveyed in the dignity of numerous old
buildings. We are parked by a statue of a man, stripped to the waist, about to hurl a
harpoon from the prow of a whaleboat. The city hall, across the street, has the look of
113
middle-aged athlete - still performing well but past its heyday. Within the door a
mural of a sperm-whale hunt covers half a wall. Inside an office, assigned for the
mayor’s visitors, oil paintings, depicting city scenes, give the room a museum-like
atmosphere. An antique wall-clock ticks loudly, almost like a kettledrum, marking off
the minutes as we wait.
Frederick M Klaisz, the mayor, is a busy man. Public office makes his time a
precious commodity. Though he gives no indication of that fact, it is obvious from
the activity all around him. Cris asks an occasional question as a contribution to
conversation but really there’s no need. Fred has all the facts at his fingertips. In
seconds he knows exactly what we’re looking for, anticipating all our requirements
before we ask. After summarising New Bedford in explicit, engaging sentences he
takes us for a walk around Johnny Cake Hill. He’s a short man, barely up to Cris’s
shoulder, a cousin to Cris’s wife though this is the first time the two of them have met.
They walk ahead, Frederick pointing out things of interest, as fluently as a tourist
guide: here a statue of Lewis Tempa who invented the toggle harpoon, there the oldest
customhouse in America. Soon we are on cobblestones, inside an area declared the
New Bedford Whaling National Park in 1966. At the Seamen’s Bethel, just down the
street, Herman Melville attended services, in 1841, before shipping out for the South
Seas on the whaler Acushnet. Ten years later he published Moby Dick.
Outside the Fisherman’s Pension Trust Building, complete with Ionic columns, Marty
Manley joins us to take over from the mayor. He has a firm handshake and the rolling
gait of a seaman. Twinkling blue eyes belie his sixty-six years. We turn into a low
wooden building where a whaleboat is under construction.
An attractive young woman, who looks Mediterranean and is probably Portuguese,
explains that the boat is based on a style evolved in the Azores. Cris clicks away with
his camera. The mayor departs. Marty - at sea at sixteen and a skipper at twenty asks knowing questions about draught and keel. He seems comfortable with the girl.
He’s probably known a few in his time. Louis runs a hand along the boat’s sleek
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profile, dreaming of other conquests, of the far-flung corner of the globe and the long
life of adventure still before him.
New Bedford is old by American standards. It was settled around 1640 but grew to
prominence as a whaling town after 1760. By 1820 it was the great whaling port of
the world. By 1860 the boom was over. Cotton came next. In the early twentieth
century New Bedford was an important textile centre. As that industry declined
fishing took its place of prominence. Fishing is still a major enterprise. Martin S
Manly is a sea captain. So are his four sons. For 12 years he’s been a director on
the Harbour Development Commission and, since 1993, manager of the Pope’s
Island Marina. It keeps him busier than a one-armed paperhanger. There will be
times when he wishes he were still at sea.
_ There were those who said there would never be a marina in New Bedford, and I
was one of them. But times have changed. Coexistence is going to work well round
here. There’s room for commercial fishing, there’s room for recreational boats and
there’s room for tourists. The spin-off from tourism could be tremendous.
We are taking a boat tour of the dockside with Captain Jeff Pontiff. Marty provides
a running commentary. There are two kinds of fishing vessels anchored in the
harbour. The draggers are easily distinguished from the scallopers by the huge
cable drum on the stern. The boats vary from 60-110 feet long. Since the 1980’s
most are constructed from steel. Rianda and her sister ship, Dolphin, both at least
thirty years old, display the oak planking that once dominated the fishing-boat
industry. A life-long fisherman himself, Marty is well versed on the debate caused
by government regulations, introduced as a response to overfishing. He knows
every nuance of it. Those regulations curtailed the fishing industry so severely that
change had to occur. Part of the response is the development along the waterfront.
New Bedford is definitely a city on the move, due in part to its current
administration.
_ This mayor has been really aggressive where getting funding is concerned. His
predecessors were content to let thing drift, - we were all making money - but he’s
got vision and the energy to make things happen.
We are passing a huge brick building in the centre of the harbour foreshore,
delegated as an Aquarium, right in the middle of a working waterfront.
_ Come back in five years and you won’t recognise the place.
After Hurricane Carol devastated New Bedford in 1954, a hurricane barrier,
completed in 1967, was built across the port, leaving an entrance 150 feet wide,
which can be closed when conditions demand it. Millions of tons of local rock were
used in the construction. The total cost was $25million.
_ Imagine what it would cost these days, even it you could get the stone.
Just inside the Hurricane Barrier is the small Palmer Island Lighthouse, from which
the keeper and his wife were swept in the 1938 hurricane. By some miracle the
keeper survived. His wife perished. Miracles occur at sea, so does tragedy. There
won’t be many New Bedford families who haven’t had their share of both. It goes
with the territory. Then among the fishing boats, anchored inside the barrier, Marty
115
points out his own scalloper Mary Anne. There’s a shamrock stencilled on the
funnel, unusual in a port where eighty five percent of those crewing vessels are
Portuguese. His parents came from County Mayo and he’s quick to show it.
_ It cost me $970,000 to build her in 1981. There’s a lot of money tied up it this
industry. You can’t afford to have huge investments standing around doing nothing.
We were getting the wrong information so we all chipped in and got the scientists to
have a real good look at fish stocks. We knew the product was out there. Letting
twenty percent die off is just crazy.
For a while he is silent, wondering if he should speak more about fishing politics.
He decides against it, lifting his eyes to a line of yachts bobbing on their moorings.
_ Look at the lines on Jeff’s boat over there. It’s a Friendship Sloop, named after
Friendship Bay where they use them for lobsters.
Now we’re gliding by Pope’s Island Marina where all 198 slips are occupied. It was
built at a cost of $3million thanks to a state government loan in 1993. Among the
yachts I see the occasional sleek lines of a game boat and wonder if, out there in the
grey Atlantic, can marlin be their prey? Now Marty is talking about seafood. He
belongs to an industry where he gets plenty chance to try it.
_ The mayor asked me to drop you off at Davey’s Locker. If people want seafood
that’s the place I always take them. I’m there so often they know what I want
without me having to order. Thursday is a good time to go there. On Fridays it’s
hard to get a seat. Around here it’s a tradition to eat fish on Fridays but I eat it five
days a week.
After saying goodbye to Captain Jeff he drops us off at Davey’s Locker, a low
wooden building overlooking the empty sea-lanes of Buzzards Bay. From outside it
looks inviting. Inside it has that blend of not too cheap - not too expensive that
keeps a restaurant busy if the food is right. This place is packed and it isn’t Friday.
English fish and chips, Cajun style, is a mixed metaphor I can’t resist - just for the
experience. Louis stays traditional, Cris decides on clams. The plates are plied so
high we just can’t finish them.
27.8.99.
A few hours sleep at the Moby Dick motel then back to the marina with the sunrise.
On the office wall a photograph of Mary Anne covered in ice hangs in silent
testimony to the hardships of a fisherman’s existence. Coffee and donuts as Marty
makes his phone calls then off though the early morning traffic to the waterfront.
We pull up round the back of Atlantic Coast Seafoods where silent men wrapped in
plastic are hosing down the jetty. Despite a stiff breeze blowing from the ocean the
air retains the unmistakable smell of rotting fish. Inside the building Marty leaves us
to find the owner. We stand conspicuous under the silent gaze of small Guatemalan
men with large knives. One comes over to ask what we are doing. Strangers with
cameras are not welcome inside an industry rife with paranoia.
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Marty comes back
with plastic hats to
cover our hair then
we get the guided
tour. Dogfish come
in at one end of a
factory line and
boxed fillets come
off the other. Fillet
is separated from
skin, head, guts and
backbone in a blur of
flashing knife blades.
These are not a crew to get into a bar fight with. They can process 200,000 pounds
of fish a day. How that translates into a yearly harvest is something I won’t find out
about. The clash between fisherman and conservationist is too entrenched for
sensitive statistics to be tossed around carelessly.
In other parts of the plant, shellfish are snap frozen and packed for world-wide
distribution, vats distil fish oil from the entrails, cartilage is powdered for use in
cancer research. Nothing is wasted that has any economic value. Cris walks around
snapping photos on the assembly line then we leave. It’s a different world from
leaning on the rail of a game boat as, away to the west, the sun slips behind rainforest
clad mountains and the sky deepens from flamingo pink to crimson while the sea turns
slowly gold.
Our last stop in New Bedford is at the fishing wharf. The entire area is seething with
activity. Cris gets onboard a scalloper as the crew prepares the nets. It inspires him the colour and the clamour, the danger and romance. In his mind he formulates a sixmonth project to capture, on film, the life of deep-sea fishermen. Marty says there’ll
be no problem getting him on board a fishing boat for a trip out on the sea.
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31.8.99.
Two of the stolen records that Jim McGillivary has never been able to replace are
Collaboration, The Modern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almedia and Voices by Stan
Getz. There were lots more taken but those were the two I remembered and asked
about, back in Germany, five months ago. The first record his name had ever
appeared on had also been stolen. That really was irreplaceable - almost. Four of
my own records had survived the years. That was one of them - Jim, Cliff and
Bernie backing Lore’s husband, Gunter Boas. Being able to return that record to
him was worthwhile beyond expression. Since then I’ve been to a lot of car-boot
sales, worked long unprofitable hours at them and always looked through the longplaying record collections for those two recordings for Jim. Rarely has there been
any jazz; sometimes mass-produced audiotapes for a couple of dollars, but nothing
on wax of any significance. As for those two particular records, the chances of
finding them seem about as probable as finding my lost relatives - even less really.
I’ve made some effort to trace my relations but, by the time we get back to
Connecticut, thoughts about those records have diminished. They weren’t at Tower
Records when we spoke to Jim DaJong, back in Chicago. Erwin Helfer did not have
them. They weren’t at the Thanksgiving Day flea market at Fairbury, Nebraska
either. After that I’d almost forgotten about them.
Hiring a car is a problem as we had no credit cards but eventually they
condescendingly settle for cash. With Cris unable to make the journey Louis takes
over as driver and we make it to Cape Cod in about three hours. The sun is just
setting as we crossed the Sagemore Bridge, the first attention-grabbing panorama
since leaving Terryville. Then nightfall sets in. By the time we pull, up in Skipper’s
Drive, darkness envelops everything. The house is in shadows, under the trees; the
slam of car doors starts a dog barking. Roxanne, the Basset Hound, is old but still
attentive.
Jack’s first concern is where we’ll sleep the night. It’s no concern to us.
_ We’ve got sleeping bags, tents, and there are motels everywhere but we’ll sleep
anywhere Jack. In the car, under a tree, we’re a little bit rough around the edges
mate so don’t concern yourself with us.
He likes that. He’s a bit rough around the edges himself. But inside he’s a diamond.
Later that night he shows us into a lumber-room. Two beds are buried beneath a
mountain of what only a hoarder could accumulate, down a creaky stairs, in a cellar
annex where ten thousand 78s are carefully catalogued on sagging shelves. It’s like
the secret inner vault of American music.
_ You can sleep there if you can make room.
_ It’s a bit too posh for us mate.
That convinces him that we’re OK.
The house is busting at the seams with carefully arranged chaos. Sitting with our
backs to the window Louis and I are facing a wall of LP records. Jack is settled
deep within an armchair in the space between the records and another room jammed
with jazz memorabilia. We are in a museum where the curators don’t go home at
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night. They squeeze a bed somewhere in among the exhibits. Nancy is sitting to our
right with her back to another wall of records. She makes us a cup of Earl Grey tea
as acknowledgement to our foreignness then settles into making us feel at home.
Jack reads through the Erwin Helfer press kit as I talk about our trip, starting at
Kerouac’s grave, and how it unfolds to this moment in time that we all share but
approach from different directions; the feeling out process. Lore, our mutual friend,
is the pivot. She would not have put people together that were not compatible.
[Every day I dropped the band off at 'Brain' to rehearse, unless something was out of
the ordinary, then walked down the road to the telephone box to call Lore. It took a
while but I got the knack of holding conversations by phone. Too well, because
eventually I would notice hostile faces outside, probably having been kept waiting for
half an hour or more. On weekends I would drive over to her place and we would talk
about art, books, poetry, people and music; mostly music. As far back as she could
gather, Lore's family had been involved with music. Her father had been a cellist in
the Dusseldorf Symphony orchestra; her great grandfather had walked for days to see
Paganini play. She played cello and other stringed instruments, including bajo in the
style of balalaika, which almost got her into the most serious of trouble when, towards
the end of the war, she was one of the children seconded to assist the war effort by
working in factories. There she came into contact with Russian prisoners and having
the gift of languages, soon learned their folk songs and how to sing them. She was
warned about this, but being a child, did not realise the consequences. Later she was
to learn that the Gestapo where about to take her away when the war ended. Gunter,
her husband to be, was not so fortunate. Being from a middle class background, he
was anti Hitler before the danger of being so was apparent and ended up in a
concentration camp from which he was fortunate to survive. He was the best blues
pianist in Europe and a record collector. Amongst his collection of five thousand or
so blues and jazz classics was every recording that Fats Wallar ever made. If I could
have stayed with Lore for twenty years I may have learned most of what she knew
about music because I was so desperately keen to learn, or had time to listen to all the
records at least once]
So I tell Jack how I met her and soon we are into music, me telling how I went to the
Vancouver Bayshore Hotel because Howard Hughes was there and ended up sitting
ten feet away from Earl Hines playing piano. Among other jazz related events
welling up in my memory because of a chance meeting, back in Germany, when
Champion Jack Dupree failed to show, I’m watching Buddy Rich live in a North
England Workingman’s Club.
[Early evening, blackbirds singing in the background and petals of cherry blossom
starting to tint the roadways. On the tapedeck a black girl, Etta James, sings beautiful
country blues such that any woman in the world would identify with it. I'll take this
tape to America. McGillivray made it up for me. Half way through a second reading
of 'the Story of the Blues' by Paul Oliver I have no firm stance on our 'last pure art
form' conundrum. Certainly this author never advances that proposition. However in 'Jazz Masters of the 30s' there is constant reference to 'America's art form.' For now
I will leave the jury out on this one. I am going to savour long slow research to an
eventual conclusion. Spending time with my old mate made me think that somewhere,
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sometime came the day the music died. Now it’s alive again, so no rush. Certain jazz
musicians set standards - almost milestones. Others who follow have to go through
because they cannot go round them. Gene Kruper was such and Buddy Rich went
through and beyond him. Seeing him live was special - special for the quality of
musicianship and for other associations.]
Suddenly those missing records of McGillivary click into focus.
Jack take us to another room with record laden shelves, from floor to ceiling, so
closely placed together there is hardly room to move between them. As he moves
among those records, confident as a clerk searching for incriminating evidence in the
vaults of the KGB, I wish that Cris were here to take photos. A minute later Jack
has Collaboration, The Modern Jazz Quartet with Laurindo Almedia in one hand
and an album of three CDs with Kerouac reciting his own compositions in the other.
I am, quite frankly, flabbergasted; overwhelmed by the sheer volume of silent music
all around me, such that were I to listen till the day I died I’d never hear the half of
it. It’s like looking at the stars at night, or out into the vast open spaces of America
into which all the population could fit with ease yet there’s hardly a living soul.
_ I don’t have Voices by Stan Getz but how about this one?
He passes Stan Getz with Laurindo Almedia just to underline my complete
bewilderment.
The computer screen glows bright in the subtle shadows of this Cape Cod room that
could be Lore’s home in far off Germany or Erwin’s place in Chicago by cold Lake
Michigan. Nancy and Jack have disappeared somewhere among the shadows and
Louis is snug amidst the clutter and piled-up boxes in the basement. Roxanne is
curled content in Jack’s armchair. Milt Jackson’s vibraphone is softly tinkling from a
speaker at my elbow as a line of German prose floats to the surface of an overworked
imagination - 'On the woods the night God strums his evening song.' I am trying to
write but it’s all to no avail.
Jack has left two magazine articles about himself on the table. Uncertain if he intends
that I should keep them, I skim through both to better come to grips with where I am.
From an article by George A Borgman in the April 1993 edition of The Mississippi
Rag I read the following.
He was Louis Armstrong’s photographer, Bobby Hackett’s manager and Erroll
Garner’s road manager. He has been a jazz writer, booking agent, night-club
manager, disk jockey, concert and jazz festival producer, lecturer, consultant and
guest on radio and televisions shows. He founded two jazz societies - one in New
York, one on Cape Cod – and has also served on the board of directors for the
Brandeis University’s Louis Armstrong Scholarship Fund, and was a long-time
member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
In this semi-conscious state, names leap from the article like shooting stars appearing
from the silent vaults of space; Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Red Allan,
Buster Bailey, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden and Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith.
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Behind the names the enormity of his music background takes shape, built upon a
chance encounter forty years before. A girlfriend introduced him to Louis Armstrong
after Jack had left the navy. From that meeting all else followed, that being in the
right place at the right time, the pebble over the cliff that becomes an avalanche, as
improbably and as irreversibly as when a Serb nationalist shot the Archduke
Ferdinand and triggered the First World War. Jack had grabbed the moment and been
there with his camera, fired by his love of jazz and love of the life unfolding before
him. He’d been Louis Armstrong’s friend and confidant from 1959 until the great
man died in 1971. Trying to come to grips with it all, the experiences embodied
within this human being, the history of music contained beneath this roof, suddenly
his photograph of a young black woman on the wall of the back kitchen needs closer
scrutiny. It’s the expression that has caused me not to recognise her, she whose
legend is always cloaked in tragedy. But from a wall, in the half-light of this Cape
Cod kitchen, her face alight with joy and expectation, without the gardenia and
without the kiss of death upon her forehead, an inner shining spirit making her
beautiful beyond description, Lady Day herself smiles ever down.
At the bottom of the cellar stair two spotlights create shadow and highlight in a
surrealistic manifestation of what opening Tutankhamen’s tomb must have felt like
for Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922. Running a hand along the spines of
record albums, dating back to the very beginning of recorded music, the Rosetta
Stone of America’s art form is at my fingertips. Wriggling into my sleeping bag like
a pilot into a cockpit I know that sleep will come but won’t last very long.
1.9.99.
Early morning chill on the back veranda; squirrels in the treetops, Blue Jays bathing in
the birdbath. Roxanne the Basset Hound, old and stately, ambles out to greet me,
toenails tapping on the wooden boards like a black and white movie of a vaudeville
act run in slow motion. She deigns to pose for a photograph before shuffling back
inside. The sun gets up. The temperature begins to rise. Nancy and Jack make their
appearance, amused at my apparent lack of sleep. Photos scrolling by on my laptop
screen have Jack asking questions about resolution and the wisdom of putting pictures
on the Internet. He has more photographs of Louis Armstrong than any man alive so
copyright is an issue. But somehow I get the feeling that the computer age will slip by
Jack Bradley. Nancy, three years from retirement after a lifetime teaching, feels no
inclination to be part of the information revolution either. Just as well because there
isn’t room in the house for another teacup. Anything put down anywhere will soon
prove hard to find. Breakfast at some café whose name I don’t take note of. Not the
sort of place I feel at ease in but Jack and Nancy make it comfortable with easy
humour as the table fills with plates until there’s hardly room to eat.
_ A bit posh for us this place mate. We’re not used to tablecloths.
He laughs because he knows I mean it. More food is left behind than I normally eat
most days. Louis takes advantage and eats until he bursts.
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The water in Saquatucket Harbour Marina is as flat as a millpond. At her mooring,
Jubilee, Jack’s twenty-two foot catboat, lies motionless. She is half as wide as she is
long with a shallow draught, a twenty-five foot mast and a ten horsepower inboard
motor. She is surveyed to take six passengers out on Nantucket Sound. Doing that
and supplying record collectors around the world keep Jack busy - but not too busy.
He’s struck the balance between knowing what he wants and doing what he needs to
get it. Sometimes he gets an overnight charter to Nantucket Island. Once clear of the
heads a slight south-easterly breeze is enough to push us leisurely along under sail.
Jack sits at the tiller gazing at the horizon. Schools of bluefish occasionally break the
water but trolling a plastic squid produces no result. Louis dives over the side then he
lets the yacht pull him along for a couple of miles. Jack and I chat placidly, as men
our age will do, lulled in and out of quiet contemplation by gentle rhythm of the sea.
Disregarding ferryboats, this is my first time on the water in two and a half years. It
feels like coming home. As we glide along, the last sentiment expressed in the
Mississippi Rag article comes to mind. I never made much money, but I never wanted
much. His house is paid for and he does not owe a cent. We are so alike in outlook,
but have arrived at the same point by completely different routes. He’ll die on Cape
Cod owning fifty thousand records plus a million happy memories; I’ll die on a park
bench, owning nothing, with a million and one.
While Jack takes care of a four-o-clock charter, Louis and I spend a couple of quiet
hours with Nancy whose manner is so pleasant that we’d rather be with her than
explore the Cape. The rental car stands outside idle. She tells us about the American
education system from A to Z. It’s a revelation because I’ve no idea quite how
comprehensive the procedure is, in some ways more of a social system than
educational one. Having teachers in the family I’ve listened in on enough discussions
about the administrative side of education to be able to ask an occasional prompting
question. But she is talking about more than education. Though my questions keep
American education within the perimeters of the discussion, she is answering Louis’s
unasked questions about life in general at the same time. For two hours she displays
the ultimate dexterity in refining the lessons life has taught him so far, presenting a
case that brooks no contradiction because no discussion is taking place. It is one of
the ablest displays of verbal communication that I have ever encountered, almost
subliminal in delivery, like advertisements flashed on a television screen so quickly
that the mind doesn’t know it has just received a message. As we leave her to see the
sunset I’m wondering if those two hours with Nancy Bradley will prove to be, for me,
the most rewarding of this entire odyssey.
An hour before sunset the beach still has a few sunbathers resting on the sand. Some
are collecting their towels and leaving at the closure of the day. The sun is low in the
western sky, to the right of the south-facing beach. Walking east along the tide-line
the high-water mark is littered with dead king crabs among the seaweed, like the
disregarded helmets of an army put to rout. At the eastern end of the beach a low
harbour breakwater curves lazily out to sea. Osprey’s nest on the channel light. A
couple of fishermen are casting silver spinners into the ocean side off the blue rock
structure. The lines cut tiny ripples into the glass-like surface.
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The same species of fish can have different names in different places. I want to know
if bluefish is a species that I know by another name. So walking slowly up to the
nearest fisherman I go through the conversational opening gambits that have been
used by spectators to fishermen since time began. When I mention Australia he tells
us that he was in the first batch of American troops drafted to Australia in World War
Two. He was stationed in Townsville. When he discovers that Louis and I lived there
he is beside himself. Soon we are working our way through the streets and pubs of his
memory. When he say’s he’s eighty-four we are both amazed. For twenty minutes
his enthusiasm is so intense that he creates Australia vividly, as it was in 1941, so I
could almost reach out and touch it. Behind his words, so pregnant with fond
memories, I can smell the cigarette smoke, can feel the excitement when a barrel of
beer arrives at the local pub as Yank and Aussie drink arm in arm under the Southern
Cross, comrades in defiance of the Rising Sun.
_ Please have dinner with me before you leave. Come and have a beer for an hour or
so. I loved Australia. I’d go back there tomorrow if someone would go with me.
How can we refuse? Tomorrow we’ll be leaving so it has to be now. Louis explains
that we will have to go back to the place where we’re staying to let our hostess know
what’s happening.
_ Where are you staying?
_ Skippers Drive.
_ I have a real good friend lives in Skippers Drive called Jack Bradley. He is a real
good guy, a jazzman. He takes folks out in his boat from the harbour here. Look,
there he is.
Right on cue Jubilee sails by with a cargo of tourists. The sun, now low in the
western sky, is turning the world into a sublime crimson coincidence. We head off for
an hour of quiet reminiscing, feeling, in some way deeper than explanation, that the
entire world is one.
6.9.99.
Following a protracted string of vague improbabilities we cross the Ohio River in
Cincinnati looking for a BP sign at the first set of lights. Soon after two-thirty in the
morning Patrick pulls onto the gas station and the long journey to this meeting is over.
Louis has just driven, non-stop, for fourteen hours. The journey goes back further
than that however. We’ve been corresponding, via the Internet, for the last six
months, initiated by my inquires about Alligator Gar. Patrick knows all about
Alligator Gar. He knows how to build a log cabin. He knows that Samuel Kenton ran
the gauntlet seven times and survived to run two hundred miles in a day to warn Fort
Boonesboro about an impending Indian attack. He knows all about Davy Crockett
and Daniel Boon and a lot more frontier history besides.
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[Let’s start by telling some about myself. I live in Kentucky. I'm 29 years old, have a
four-year-old daughter and a baby due on April 4 this year. I’ve been hunting and
fishing for over 19 years and have a vast of knowledge on either subject. I’ve hunted
in Canada for bear and fished for Northern Pike there. I hunt deer in Virginia, West
Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana and I'm supposed to be hunting Bear and fishing
for salmon in Alaska this year. I work as a machinist and started my Taxidermy
business last year. My love for the outdoors cannot be adequately expressed. I was
once told by an old Alaskan guide that he had never seen a fire in a man’s eyes that
burned as bright as mine for the outdoors. I often believe that I was born 150 years to
late. I have always wanted to write a book about our lost hunting and fishing heritage.
It means so much more that catching a fish or downing your game. People today have
become too lazy and dependent on other people in order to live. I believe that if more
people took their sons and daughters hunting or fishing, this country would be so
much better off. It is good that the article about Alligator Gar touched you so much
that you remember it after all these years. Like I said earlier, if I may not be able to
live my dream, I hope I can help you live yours. I ask nothing in return. Maybe I can
meet you guys somewhere. I have a lot of good old fishing stories and hunting stories
to tell. I wish you luck. Your friend Patrick.]
Impressed by his enthusiasm for the great outdoors I soon resolve to meet him. That
resolve intensifies as time goes by. As he shakes my hand, in the wee small hours of
this Kentucky morning, a line from one of his letters springs to mind.
‘It was once said of Townsend Whelen, an important man in American history, that at
24 he went into the wilderness and he never really came back. I use that line to
describe myself.’
I climb into the ’87 Pathfinder beside Patrick. Louis follows behind as we disappear
into gathering darkness, down small county lanes, hemmed in with over-hanging trees.
He slows, almost to a standstill, then turns to illuminate a hillside in the headlights. A
dozen or more deer are sitting, ears cocked, behind a field of soybeans. Before too
long I’m going to know more than I know now about deer. Long into the night we
talk about Alaska. Future campfire lights are burning in Louis’s eyes.
In the dark before dawn Orion the Hunter dominates the south-east sky with Sirius,
the Dog Star, trailing at his heels. The sun rises. Away to the right a woodpecker
drums the morning roll call, drowning out, for a few moments, the delicate, higherpitched hum of crickets. Two peahens scratch expectantly at the hard-packed earth,
keeping a wary eye in my direction. Ducks quack softly in a tiny pen, no doubt
waiting for breakfast. Soft breezes sway the slender, leaf-clad branches causing
shadows to weave on the lawn as it sweeps down to the empty roadway below. The
A-Frame house at my back stands in silence; all the occupants are still asleep. My
first impression of Kentucky in daylight is of gently rolling hills and yellowing trees
beyond number, of nature gently stirring at the coming of the morn.
By 1890 the whitetail deer was close to extinction, west of the Mississippi, even
though subsistence farmers, dependent on game for meat, made little impact on their
numbers. Settlers and logging-camp hunters likewise took relatively few deer. They
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were not sportsmen. They went hunting for the same reason we go to the
supermarket. The coming of the railroads, however, brought the market hunter into
the equation. From that point on it was all downhill. Venison brought a good price in
the cities. They slaughtered bucks, does and fawns by the million, taking only hams,
hides and saddles. The remainder was left to rot in the woods. Like the passenger
pigeon before it, the days of the deer were numbered. That it didn’t happen was
chiefly due to the pressure that sport hunters were able to put on American legislators.
Hunters saved the deer, not conservationists. Only the soldier can put an end to war.
In the early nineteen hundreds deer were scare in the woods of America. Now the
reverse situation is in effect. In 1907 only 200 deer were shot in all Pennsylvania. By
1980 the herd was estimated to be 750,000. A combination of several factors,
including the availability of cultivated fodder and the decline of natural predators,
means that there may be more deer in America than when Europeans first stepped
ashore from the Mayflower - certainly there are now more elk. License fees, tax on
guns and ammunition together with voluntary contributions have largely financed this
amazing conservation achievement. The paradox is that without hunters there would
be nothing to hunt. Following this line of argument, as I skim through the Deer
Hunter’s Yearbook of 1989, I’m reminded of a conversation in Australia about the
suffering domestic animals go through before slaughter. Packed into trucks and
transported for miles; dogs snapping at their heels, jabbed along with electric prods,
then subjected to the final terror on a production line of slaughter. Is that better than
an uncomprehending kangaroo, blinking in a spotlight, with a bullet coming from the
darkness to end it all?
A late breakfast with Patrick and his wife Donita; Desiree the four year old silently
weighing up the strangers, six month old Brittany cooing like a pigeon. Patrick is a
waterfall of information about the natural history of the surrounding countryside and
early American history.
_ Newport used to be full of speakeasies. Every time they demolish a building they
find more hidden rooms. My grandfather was running bootleg whiskey for Al
Capone. He got caught and did twelve years for it. One of my great uncles was killed
at the last shoot-out with John Dillinger.
The books of Allan W Eckert are piled by the doorway. Alongside books on the Civil
War by various authors there’s a twenty-four-volume encyclopaedia, The Old West.
He has editions of Field & Stream dating back to1977. Hunting is his passion. His
dream is to spend a winter in Alaska, living off the land.
Underneath the house is his taxidermy business; the low hum of freezers, mounted
heads, the plastic moulds awaiting treated skins before adorning another hunter’s wall.
His hunting guns are a bolt action Ruger 270 and a Marlin 1895 SS 45/70. One of his
hunting bows is so powerful that Louis can’t pull the string.
_ My uncle started me off hunting when I was eight years old. For the past eighteen
years we’ve been spending the first weekend of hunting season back on his farm.
That’s a big tradition round here.
125
For a moment he remains thoughtful, silently nodding his head.
Along the tree lined byroads, oak, cedar, locus, teak, white birch, poplar and chestnut,
through the tiny town of Silver Grove - named for the silver maple - onto the banks of
the Ohio River as darkness starts to fall. The river glides through hardwood forest,
round a great sweeping bend, slow and wide, a dozen people fishing by the water’s
edge. Along these banks, in 1755, Mary Ingles walked to freedom, one of the most
amazing endurance feats in the annals of American history.
Captured by the Shawnee in a raid on the Virginia pioneer settlements in July 1775,
Mary Ingles and her two young sons were among other prisoners led on foot into the
wilderness. She quickly realised that if they could not keep up they would be killed so
she set about making herself useful round the camp-sites, preparing food and packing
horses. By doing this she gained a mount for herself and her children. On the night of
her third day of capture she gave birth to a daughter. Next morning she climbed back
onto the horse with the baby in her arms. There really was no option. The route
followed the Kanawha River, until it reached the Ohio River near present day Point
Pleasant in West Virginia, then on to a large Shawnee village, situated on either
riverbank. There she was separated from her children. It would be thirteen years
before she was reunited with the only surviving child.
For the next two months she remained in the village, making herself useful and
waiting for the chance to escape. Several times she went with Indian women across
the Ohio River into what is now Kentucky. Eventually she became recognised as the
first white woman ever to step foot in that state. It’s a distinction she could well have
done without. Her life was one little different to that of a slave. But she survived by
virtue of her own industry and ingenuity. Eventually she was taken, with two dozen
warriors, three Frenchmen and assorted squaws and children, one hundred and sixty
miles down stream to Big Bone Licks in Kentucky, to manufacture salt. It was
October. The woods were in the early flush of autumn. Together with another captive
white woman Mary walked off into the wilderness and followed the Ohio River for six
weeks until she finally made it back to Virginia. Her companion went mad along the
way and tried to kill her. Mary found a canoe. She kept the river between them on
the later stages of a journey that made her a household name in that era. She lived to
be 84.
Darkness falls along the Ohio River. A flight of duck skims low above the water.
Patrick silently notes their passing, dark eyes absorbing tiny details, part of a heritage
remembered above us in the poetry of gently whispering leaves.
Cincinnati ablaze with colour, searchlights probing the night-sky, helicopters circling
overhead. For half an hour the Labour Day firework display transforms reality into a
phantasmagoria of exploding brilliance, lighting the upturned faces of a million
spectators every hue and shade imaginable as music rolls like thunder, punctuated by
the dull boom of imaginary cannons echoing from the sky. For children this is the
literal confirmation of their furthest flight of fantasy. For adults there’s a
metaphysical suggestion of life itself, blooming and fading like fireworks in the night.
126
Louis separates himself from us somehow in the crowds. Having no phone number,
address, or any means of finding Patrick’s place, we have to find him. The vehicle is
a complicated half a mile walk away. He’s waiting by it when we get there, as I know
he will be.
On the way back home we call by the video shop for The Ghost and The Darkness, the
story of two man-eating lions that terrorised bridge construction workers at Tsavo in
Africa at the turn of the century. Among their victims was Charles Remington, a Civil
War veteran who became one of Africa’s foremost white hunters. He came to Tsavo
to kill the lions but they killed him instead. They killed over one hundred and fifty
workers at the bridge-site as well, dragging them off and dumping the bodies in a
cave. Lions do not kill for sport, but these did. It’s an extraordinary story, almost
beyond the realms of credibility. Just as unlikely is that Patrick’s cousin has seen
those lions. They’re mounted in Chicago’s Field Museum.
7.9.99.
Big Bone Lick State Park, from where Mary Inglis began her long walk to freedom;
four-year-old Desiree steers the men around in timeless replay of human behaviour
that’s been going on since nomadic Indians wiped out the mastodons here eleven
thousand years ago. Twenty thousand years ago the encroaching ice sheets halted just
short of the Ohio Valley. Salt and mineral springs in the swamps, now known as Big
Bone Lick, attracted the mammoths, giant sloths and other prehistoric animals driven
south by the last ice age of the Pleistocene period. Many of them perished in the
quagmires surrounding the swamps and sulphur springs. Then the ice receded and the
climate changed. When French troops, under Charles Le Moyne, came down from
Canada in 1739 the swamps had all but been replace by grasslands. The salt springs
still bubbled. Fossilised bones of long gone megafauna lay scattered all around.
Many were collected and sent back to France as curios. In 1744 a French
cartographer, Jacques Nicolas Bollin, published a map with the area marked as the
place they found elephant bones in 1739. It is probably one of the best examples of its
kind in America. Desiree is more interested in the living bison than the bones of their
predecessors. The heat has them sheltering deep in the shadows of the trees.
The quiet country byroads of Boon County are flanked with ripening crops and gentle
woodlands. Browning leaves of drying tobacco are hanging in open-sided tobacco
barns. In the golden light of late afternoon the meadows by the Ohio River portray a
picture almost sublime. The tiny hamlet of Rabbit Hash is an open-air museum, as if
the clock had just been turned back two hundred years. Desiree is soon rocked to sleep
by the motion of the vehicle. Patrick points out the house where he and Donita set up
their first home before the babies came.
Patrick’s mother, Linda, has the same intense dark eyes. Thoughts flicker at their
surface before she speaks. She likes things English. She’s web master of the EnglishDreams mailing list whose members have made me see old England through different
eyes. We sometimes take the familiar too much for granted. What’s more familiar
than environment that spawned us? The contributors to Linda’s mailing list have
inspired me to take a second look at mine. Asking about Alligator Gar, via this
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medium, has brought Louis and I to this point in time, in a splendid Kentucky
afternoon, as outside the leaves fade yellow at the coming of the fall. Linda
reminisces about London, York and Edinburgh, about chips and fish, Cornish pasties
and shepherd’s pie - a trip that captured her imagination. I realise that before long
before I’ll be reminiscing about America, which in many ways has captured mine.
[Came a time in 1997 when I, an expatriate Englishman, climbed onto a Greyhound
bus and set off across America. I travelled 6,500 miles; from the Southeast corner of
Texas, to the Northwest corner of Washington, over into Canada then back again. The
first stage of this trip was along the Mexican border, through San Antonio and El
Paso, across New Mexico and Arizona via Phoenix, then into Nevada and Las Vegas.
There I met up with a New Zealand friend I had not seen for seventeen years. Las
Vegas, what a town; fast, gaudy, outrageous, non stop action, twenty-four hours a day
- an island of intrigue baking in a sea of money. So it being Las Vegas, we did the
casinos then went to see a fight - what a night! Then we jumped onto the HarleyDavidson and blasted through the desert to Los Angeles.
Within all of us born this century, no matter where, somewhere lies America. Radio,
cinema and television have seen to that. My first conscious experience of a cinema
screen was Super Man. From Davy Crockett to Mohammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Al
Capone, good-bye Norma Jean, JFK, Neil Armstrong and that one giant step for
mankind; from Geronimo to the Mississippi, the Black Hills of Dakota, Madison
Square Gardens, Martin Luther King, Walt Disney and the gun fight at the OK Coral,
American culture is such an integral slice of all our backgrounds. No matter where
life takes me now I can honestly say I've been there, yet I hardly know the place. At
the earliest opportunity I’m going back.]
America, a continent of seemingly limitless space and awesome vistas, has exceeded
all my expectations. The sheer physical beauty of the country is close to
overwhelming. From the undulating woodlands of Vermont to the arid sun scorched
plateau of south-west Texas, nature, in all its manifestations, displays itself with a
grandeur that’s simply heartrending. Sometimes it’s all too much to take it in. I’d
expected it to be crowded but it isn’t. Away from the freeways America’s millions are
thinly scattered; across plain and prairie, dessert and mountain range, under open skies
that seem to stretch for ever. Its people are amiable and polite, their manners almost
old fashioned compared to the other English speaking nationalities. Much of the
world holds a distorted conception of Americans. It’s a view absorbed from
Hollywood and an international media machine that emphasises the purely negative.
Negative news is the only news that sells. Foreigners, who have never been to
America, expect rampant criminality. In my experience it simply isn’t true. That
Americans are the same decent, god-fearing, open-hearted race that the world
perceived them to be fifty years ago is, to my mind, beyond question. On a journey
lasting twelve weeks through thirty states we’ve encountered nothing but courtesy and
consideration every step along the way. No doubt the circumstances of our mission
played a part in that. No doubt our being foreigners helped as well. We’ve spent
most of our time away from the cities but Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles posed
no problems; quite the contrary. We were made as welcome in those cities as in the
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country. I’ve not yet traced a family branch that has lived for at least five generations
in America. But given one wish granted that will happen.
Late afternoon by the Ohio River; on either bank the undersides of silver maple leaves
flash conspicuous against the deeper green of oak and poplar, stirred by the breeze on
a long lazy bend in the wide slow river. At the water’s edge Donita sits in a camp
chair, watching that the setting sun doesn’t shine in her baby’s eyes nor that flies settle
on her face. Desiree and her cousin DJ play kid’s games in the pebbles, wanting to
throw stones into the water. Patrick does the fishing, letting the children wind in the
catch when he hooks one. The hunter and his family; it’s a scene stretching back to
when it first became safe to take kids down to the river without something in the water
hunting them.
10.9.99.
As we pull up at the astrophysics department in this sedate suburb of Boston, a steady
rain is falling. Maple trees in full foliage bracket a white church steeple as two
squirrels chase each other round the car park. The first thing we need is parking
clearance. Dr. Gingerich’s secretary sees to that.
Inside his study there’s just enough room for Louis and I each to squeeze a chair
between the desk and the bookshelves. Dr. Owen Gingerich is both Professor of
Astronomy and Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. His room reflects his calling. Floor to ceiling bookshelves occupy
every inch of wall space except for the window and the door. He asks if I want to
record the interview. I decline. He asks to be reminded how he came to be referred to
us. I explain how NASA has recommended that I speak to him.
He laughs then asks exactly who in NASA had made the reference. I tell him I’ve
forgotten and he leaves it at that.
Owen Gingerich has lived though a golden age of astronomical discovery. He was
born in 1930, the same year that Pluto was discovered, eight years before the
American physicist Hans Bethe first advanced the theory that the sun’s energy is
produced by nuclear fusion. Edwin Hubble, who more than any person established
the theory of the expanding universe, died in 1953. Quasars were discovered in the
fifties, pulsars in the sixties. Cosmic background radiation, that ultimate supporting
evidence to the Big Bang theory, was discovered in 1965. I have a layman's
fascination with cosmology and astronomy, prompted by an uncle showing me the
giant red star Betelgeuse through a home made reflecting telescope. He explains that
one day our sun will swell, like Betelgeuse, to engulf the Earth - heady stuff for a tenyear-old. Now I’m with my son in the presence of a man who has encompassed
monumental scientific breakthroughs within his interpretation of a reality which,
driven by science itself, is expanding almost exponentially.
He directs most of his conversation at Louis, allowing me to observe rather than
participate, explaining that a modern astronomer spends most of his time at a
computer screen, analysing data. The rest of his time is taken up with administration,
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the allocation of observing time and committee meetings. The Harvard Astrophysics
Department, he informs us, has two hundred PhD graduates out of a staff of nine
hundred. Paul Davies will be one the international guests attending a brainstorming
session in two weeks to explore ways of enlisting support from the religious
community to secure government investment in space exploration and the colonisation
of Mars. The government likes the Space Station, which is big in engineering but slim
on science.
The preamble dealt with, I ask my questions. His answers comprise a brief synopsis
from such extensive knowledge that each takes about twenty minutes. It’s as if he’s
taking diverse scraps of information that have accumulated in the remote corners of
my self-education and constructing from them a blueprint for future reference.
[I have been reading books on astrophysics by two authors, Paul Davies and Stephen
Hawking. Sitting back, considering the implications, I am pleased by the effort. As
science replaced religion we were left with a feeling of insignificance. Being
relegated from the centre of the universe to having no apparent purpose has crippled
the human psyche. In many ways science is less accessible and harder to grasp than
religion ever was. However - it seems there is a tendency for nature to arrange itself
into more complex systems. This tendency is evident in many demonstrable ways.
Following laws we comprehend, energy arranged itself into matter, which arranged
itself into galaxies, stars and planets. On this planet the combination of forces and
matter arranged themselves into ever more complex systems until life evolved. Life
evolved until comprehension - ‘mind’ - evolved. It was the inevitable consequence of
the tendency for systems to arrange themselves into more complex systems with
higher functions.
The mind can comprehend abstract mathematics.
That
comprehension allows us to deduce, from the seemingly chaotic natural events that
surround us, the underlying laws that nature has followed to arrive at the point of
understanding. If nature did not follow these laws we would not be here. We are not
insignificant. We are the end product of nature following its own laws for 15 billion
years. The slightest variation from these laws and we would never have existed. It is
as if we were meant to be. We are the ability of the universe to understand itself.]
Gauging the limited extent of my education he never introduces a topic that I’m
unfamiliar with or a name I do not recognise. Not feeling the need to be on mental
guard for lapses into apparent ignorance I’m able to view the pictures forming in my
mind against the background of his commentary. For a while I’m back in Queensland
with a Paul Davies book, Superforce, in my hand, reading these lines.
It is one of the great tragedies of our society that from fear, poor teaching, or lack of
motivation the vast majority of people have shut themselves off from the mathematical
poetry and music of nature. They may delight over the scent of a rose or the colour of
a sunset, but a whole dimension of aesthetic experience is foreclosed to them.
Then I’m on the front door step, as nine-year-old, gazing at the moon. My father asks
if I think men will ever get there. My response is that if God had meant us to be on
the moon we would already be there. For a moment I’m back in this room in Boston,
then back to 1986 on the cliff tops above Bondi Beach, Australia. Waves are breaking
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on the rocks below. Louis, just eight years old, follows my pointing finger to where
Halley’s Comet is hanging in the sky. I tell him that he may just live to see it twice,
next time with his grandson, and if that happens to remember this night. Is any faith
stronger than a child’s belief that its father knows everything?
On our odyssey around America the evidence of Christianity is everywhere obvious far more so than in the other English speaking country that I’ve been through.
America also offers more access to higher education. These two facts sit together
uncomfortably for me but not for Dr. Gingerich. He concludes a discussion on that
topic, in a paper entitled Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Biblical
Creation, with a quote from the seventeenth-century virtuoso Thomas Browne. The
wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about,
and with a gross rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnifie him whose
judicious enquiry into his acts and deliberate research into his creatures returne the
duty of a devout and learned admiration. He draws that conclusion from observing
that, under close scrutiny, the circumstances of nature seem impossible to comprehend
without a supernatural design.
This wise and elderly man, so accommodating, so considerate, giving us his time and
his knowledge. He talks and we listen, more fascinated by his presence than the
content of his words. Louis’s eyes are gleaming, hanging on to every word. Perhaps
he feels, as I do, that he may never again be in close proximity to one so learned. I’m
interested in how science contributes to the way we view the world, wondering what
discoveries are likely and how they might influence the way we think. It’s the last
topic I raise because his time is so valuable it’s better spent with others. He thinks
that maybe in the next twenty-five years it may be feasible to show, perhaps with an
innovation in spectrometry, that life exists throughout our galaxy and therefore
throughout the universe. Should that happen, he speculates it might give us a different
perspective on the way we view ourselves. I rather imagine it would. Perhaps I’ll live
to see it!
Not content with speaking to us for an hour he shows us around the original
observatory, which was for ten years a twin to the largest refracting telescope in the
world. It is a wonderful mechanism, a gleaming brass conglomeration of cog and
pivot, gear and cantilever, built in 1840. Now it’s a relic, perfectly preserved, a victim
to discoveries and advancements it, in some ways, made possible. The first
photographic plate of a star was exposed through its lens, in 1850, revealing far more
detail than ever could be captured by the human eye. With that image, visual viewing
became forevermore a luxury. Within this narrow, circular building, its domed roof
closed to the heavens, it’s as if we are immersed in a silent well of time. What
wonders were first revealed within this building? No sound penetrates the walls to
disturb the echoes of a long line of scientific luminaries, the last of which is now
bidding us good-bye.
Winding our way down Massachusetts Avenue, creeping through the traffic. A girl
walking a spaniel in steady Boston rain, bareheaded and without a coat, is a graphic
reminder of England soon to come. The spaniel looks up at her, eyes adoring. She
tosses her head, flinging raindrops from blond tresses, smiling with an inner serenity
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beyond my means to fathom. As she walks away, through the greying afternoon, the
realisation comes upon me that now this trip is over, as final and inexorable as a
judgement handed down. Jack Kerouac’s spirit leaves the car to tag along behind the
girl. His grave lies maybe twenty-five miles to the Northwest as the crow files.
He’s been a lasting inspiration for fifteen thousand miles.
******
Note: Special thanks go to Helen Kirsopp and Elayne Sheppard for editing this manuscript as
it was written so that I was able to give Cris Yarborough a finished version on disk before
leaving the USA. It was Elayne who suggested that I use square brackets to indicate random
thoughts.
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