Blue Highways (37 page)

U.S. 30 bent where the Columbia bent, but for much of the way, hills blocked any view of the water. On occasion I could see sandbars, where in times gone, old horses from the Portland streetcars and fire wagons walked belly deep, pulling thousand-foot seines filled with the silver violence of salmon. Now horse seining is illegal.

St. Helens, Oregon, high above the river, was remarkable that day for splendidly clear views of the white summits of four great volcanoes: Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams northward across the river in Washington, and Mount Hood southeast in Oregon. Each has its distinction: Hood is the most notable American mountain named after an enemy military leader (Admiral Samuel Hood, second in command of the British fleet during the Revolutionary War); Mount Rainier, even after blasting away two thousand feet of summit, is still the highest volcano in the country; Mount St. Helens (Lord St. Helens was an English ambassador to Spain), youngest of the peaks, was quiet again but perking; Klickitat Indians have a better name for St. Helens: Tawonlatkla, “Fire Mountain.” And there’s Mount Adams; poor Adams, second in height only to Rainier. Easily as imposing as the others the way it rises so separately from the land, it remains the greatest unknown American mountain. The anonymity, if you ask me, results from the name (after the second President). They might as well have called it Mount Jones or Schwartz Peak.

To citizens of St. Helens, the names were insignificant anyway. I asked three people to confirm which mountain was which; while all agreed on the location of Hood, they argued over the peaks in Washington. To live so uninformed before such grandeur is the hallmark of a true native son.

B
UT
for the flip of a coin, Portland, Oregon, would be Boston, Oregon. Asa Lovejoy of Massachusetts and Francis Pettygrove of Maine, owners of land along the Willamette River, each wanted the name of their new town to honor the leading city of their home states, so they tossed a coin. A man told me: “Two Portlands cause confusion, yes, but nobody here complains. We could have ended up living in Lovejoy, Oregon.”

The river road came off the hills into the industrial bottoms of Portland and left no way but through the city; once committed to it, I went looking for oysters downtown in the area where drinking (Erickson’s Saloon formerly had a bar running nearly eight hundred feet), whoring, and shanghaiing sailors were the main after-dark endeavors a century ago. It was here that five-foot-tall Bunco Kelly kidnapped, by his own count, a thousand lubbers through his standard method of knockout drops, although his easiest haul was eight tramps he found drinking formaldehyde in an undertaker’s basement; Kelly gathered them up and got them aboard ship by passing the dying men off as intoxicated.

In Kelly’s time, the wharf area of Portland was known as Skidroad, a logger’s term for a timber track to drag logs over. Forgetting the history and thinking the word referred to rundown buildings and men on the skids, people began calling the squalid section “skid row.”

Portland, working now to eradicate the skid-row image, calls the area “Old Town,” even though many businesses are new. But Louie’s Oyster Bar was one of those rare things in America: a restaurant serving the same menu in the same building on the same location for more than a generation. If you wanted a private table, you waited in line on Ankeny Street; or, if you would take one of the long, ship’s mess tables, you could be seated immediately. The communal tables were, of course, more fun, more companionable, but not many customers wanted community with strangers.

The menu, shaped like an oyster, said “Eat ’em Alive,” but I took my Yaquina Bay oysters panfried on the recommendation of a student from Lewis and Clark College who sat across from me. His face, smooth as a new glove, sported a beard of eleven perfectly groomed whiskers. On weekends and days he had no classes, he picked up spending money by returning rental cars to Boise, Idaho, a nine-hour drive one way. “That cuts into the education a little,” I said.

“Got to have the money. Car payments, clothes, my girl. You know. I need fifty bucks a week above Pop’s money just to hold steady.”

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve heard on this trip. How old are you?”

“Twenty. What trip?”

His eyes burned with wanderlust and the fever of adventure as I recounted the journey with the narrative flourish of the Ancient Mariner. Undermining routine and consumerism at the source. He listened intently. I had him.

“God, I wish Pop was here,” he said. “I wish he could hear this.”

“Don’t be afraid of Pop’s disapproval.”

“Disapproval? You’re doing what he’d give a nut to do. He goes on all the time about selling the house and quitting his job and traveling around the country. Or going back to school. He’s seriously proposed I take over the house and run it for two years while he and my mother go off to school. No lie! His theory is I need to learn what he knows and he needs to learn what he says I’m throwing away. He claims if I had his life for a year I’d know what the ballgame’s about. I’d do it, but my mother won’t approve because she knows I’d move my girl in.”

“You’d trade lives with a middle-aged couple? Your parents of all people?”

“With their buying power, sure. The economy’s about to hit bottom.”

“Don’t you know kids are supposed to rebel against their parents’ values?”

“I am. They hate their life.”

“You don’t want to take off for England or Japan? How about a little warm-up trip to Yonkers?”

“Maybe—if I had enough money, but I’d lose my girl if I did.”

“Oh, my god.”

“What’s wrong? The oysters?”

A
FTER
breakfast at Lewis and Clark College, I felt like Paleolithic man. It wasn’t anything I ate—it was what I heard from students. The only sensible thing for me, it seemed, was to take my ancient Black Elk and old Whitman and give up on the times. Student conversations had one theme: Grab! Time was running out on the good grabbing; you had only to look at the dollar, resources, the world, the country. The students believed in a gospel of surfeit and followed two rules: (a) anything less than more than enough was not enough; and (b) anything not taxable was of dubious use: community, insight, and so on. Goodbye, Portland.

I headed for Vancouver, Washington, once the Hudson’s Bay Company’s major outpost in the Northwest with lines of commerce reaching to Russian Alaska and Spanish California. In spite of a headstart, the old town had not been able to keep up with the new settlement across the river that got named by a coin toss. In Vancouver I lost the highway, found it again, and drove east on state 14 to follow the Columbia upriver until it made the great turn north. I could have accomplished a similar goal by taking I-80N on the south side of the river and driving the famous Columbia Gorge Highway (“Kodak As You Go,” the old slogan said, and even Meriwether Lewis wished he’d carried a camera obscura to capture the beauty); but I would have had to breathe truck fumes. Instead, on blue highway 14, I breathed a fresh odor of something like human excrement. Near Camas, I stopped where a farmer had pulled his tractor to the field edge to reload a planter. “What’s that terrible smell?” I said.

“What smell?”

“Like raw sewage.”

“That’s the Crown-Zellerbach papermill.”

“How do you stand to work in it?”

“I don’t work there.”

That answered my question. Running the steeply buckled land, the highway curved up and down again and again, giving horizon to horizon views of river and mountains. The strength of the Columbia shows in the deep, wide gorge it has cut through the massive uplift; river bottom here lies two hundred feet below sea level, yet the Columbia keeps out the Pacific. Although mountains stretch away north and south from the riverbanks here for hundreds of miles, nowhere else in the Cascades is there an opening like this one.

At Skamania the road climbed so far above the river valley that barns looked like Monopoly hotels and speedboats were less than whirligigs. East stood Beacon Rock, a monumental nine-hundred-foot fluted monolith of solidified lava. Lewis and Clark camped here both going and returning. In Portland, I had bought De Voto’s abridged edition of their journals so I could follow that singular expedition of men and one woman, white, red, and black, upriver. Readers who see a declining literate expression in America will find further evidence in the journals. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark presented their permanently important historical and anthropological record clearly and poignantly, often writing under trying and dangerous conditions. In our time, who of the many astronauts has written anything to compare in significance or force of language?

Volcanic bluffs along the highway were flittering with cliff swallows, their sharp wings somehow keeping them airborne. High ridges came down transverse to the Columbia in long-fingered projections perforated by narrow tunnels, some with arched windows opening to the river. Above each tunnel the same date: 1936. To drive state 14 in the snow would be a terror, but on a clear day it was good to find road not so safe as to be dull; it was good to ride highway Americans wouldn’t build today.

At North Bonneville, the first of the immense dams that the Corps of Engineers has built on the Columbia at about fifty-mile intervals, thereby turning one of the greatest rivers of the hemisphere into staircase lakes buzzing with outboards. Unlike the lower river, Lewis and Clark would not recognize the Columbia above Bonneville. Rapids and falls where Indians once speared fish lay under sedimented muck; sandbars and chutes, whirlpools, eddies, and sucks were gone, and the turmoil of waters—current against stone—that ancient voice of the river, silenced.

There was, of course, a new voice: the rumble of dynamos. The Columbia and its tributaries account for one-third of all hydroelectric power generated in the United States. The dams also provide other things, the Corps says: irrigation, flood control, backwash lakes for navigation and recreation. But they say nothing about turbines maiming and killing ten percent of the young salmon swimming downstream or about mature fish returning from Alaska and Russia to spawn and suffering burst blood vessels in the eyes and ulcerated blisters under the skin from a high nitrogen content spillways put into the deep pools. Dams are necessary, the Corps maintains, and you can’t argue necessity; nevertheless, I don’t think Lewis or Clark or the old Chinooks would care much for Bonneville. But then, like the wild river, they are dead.

During lunch in White Salmon, I noticed the map showed a town up on the northern plateau almost in the shadow of Mount Adams called Liberty Bond. No question about where to go next. The highway had no number, and, after several miles, no pavement either. Elevation and trees got higher, but the land began looking like the desert, and the road remained a dusty, lonely thing.

I tried to get directions in Appleton, a fading place of three or four fading houses and a fading school. Had anything else been there, it would have been fading too. No one about. I started on. Then a sudden clatter of hooves and a long “Hallooo!” A horse whickered as a woman reined up at my window. “What are you looking for?” she said.

“I’m looking for Liberty Bond.”

“Who?”

“Not who—where. A town. Liberty Bond.”

She had long, black hair loose over her shoulders. Muscular and pretty. About thirty-five. Very pretty.

“I thought you said ‘Liberty Bond,’ but I didn’t figure you could know about it. Only a few of us up here know about Liberty Bond.”

“What’s the secret? It’s right here in the Rand McNally.”

“You’re joking.”

“See for yourself.” I passed the atlas. She certainly was pretty. Skin smooth and polished and dark like a butt-worn saddle.

“That’s something all right,” she said. “Very strange.”

It was taking some time to get simple directions. Thank heavens.

“Why is that something?”

“Liberty Bond doesn’t exist.”

“You knew about it.”

“It’s gone. Fallen down. Looks like Joshua went up there with his horn. All picked over and not a doorknob left. Even carried off the keyholes. Anything they didn’t swipe has evaporated. Things don’t rot on this side of the Cascades—they evaporate. I know, our ranch is just over the hill.”

“How long’s it been gone?”

“Years. Years and years. What’d you want up there?”

“Just wanted to see what goes on in a place called Liberty Bond.”

“Afraid you’re too late for that one.” She flicked the reins and the horse walked off. I drove alongside. With neither brazenness nor incivility, she was a woman capable of returning a man’s direct gaze.

“How about taking me home to the ranch?”

She laughed. “What’ve you got in mind?” For a moment I saw a ranch-house parlor, low light through shades, the glow of whiskey in tumblers, a deep cleave and merge of thigh. She smiled. “Too late there too.”

“You don’t look evaporated.”

“Might as well be.” She snapped the horse to a trot.

“Tell me one thing, then. Will this east road get me to highway fourteen?”

“If you’re patient and don’t make any wrong turns.” She cracked the reins and the horse bolted across a meadow. Black hair to the wind, she waved without looking around.

Where in hell were the old men who sit on porches and whittle, the ones you’re supposed to get directions from when you’re in the back of beyond? Since Salt Creek, I’d been working to keep the loneliness down. Now I’d lost my grip. The girl in Tennessee was right: if you’re going to run away from home, take a dog along. Even a German woman would be better than this.

I
WAS
low. The loneliness of the long distance traveler. Try to forget it. Look at the land; it too is medicine. Here were firs shrinking as the desert neared, here open hills of sage and rabbit brush and purple lupine. Then a deep break in the highlands, where far below lay a blue-green strip of the Klickitat River coming down from a glacier on Mount Adams.

Something darkened the windshield just as I came to the edge of the high slope. I ducked, braked hard, and leaned out to see what it was. Should have guessed. A man had just jumped off the mountain in a hang-glider.