Blue Highways (51 page)

We turned to head home. “This has been a strange part of the country,” Chisholm said. “Something around the lakes brings out the mystical in a person. These counties have been full of prophets, religious zealots, and spiritualists who had hot-lines to God. Or the dead. Joseph Smith, Jemina Wilkinson, the Fox sisters. There was a pair. They rapped to spirits in seances and got them to tap back. Under investigation later, they admitted making the noises from the other world by cracking their toe joints.”

In the moonlight, we walked over an abandoned vineyard. The posts had fallen down, and vines inched about for something to crawl up on; one had twisted around a rusting baler and another climbed a broken plow. We passed a foundation of a barn that had collapsed, a toppled chimney, and a weedy depression where an icehouse had stood. “These are all dreams we’re walking over,” I said.

Chisholm looked at me strangely and went quiet for some time. When he spoke again it was about the dogs. Afterward, I thought I understood his silence: I had undercut the stone wall we had built, our accomplishment. The wall looked enduring, and it would serve for a while, but there would come a time when it would be a pile of rock to no end. I had undercut the biggest dream of all—the one for permanence. Maybe that’s what we really felt in the stones: how man is the tool of his dreams, dreams that rise only to fall back to earth.

Wednesday afternoon I left. “Going?” Chisholm said. “You’ve got wings on your feet.” I drove up along Canandaigua Lake, past the summer houses of the company men from Kodak and Bausch & Lomb and Xerox, past houses with names like Bide-a-Wee and Summer Daze, past the Roseland amusement park of sno-cones and fudge ripple, past pink and aquamarine motels, through Canandaigua with its wide main street of brick buildings from another century.

At the top of the street, among the Greek Revival houses, stood the old Ontario County Courthouse—nearly as big as a state capitol—where Susan B. Anthony was found guilty of voting; to one side, in the same architectural style, the Masonic Lodge. Chisholm had said the similarity and proximity of the two buildings indicated something about the administration of justice here in the nineteenth century. It was western New York where, in the 1820s, a Masonic Lodge in Batavia turned down William Morgan for membership even though he claimed membership in Rochester. He threatened to reveal the highest secrets of the order. The last time a non-Mason saw him alive was in Lewiston; a few days later, Lake Ontario washed up a body that may have been Morgan’s. The issue mobilized a group into a political party called the Anti-Masons. “That,” Chisholm had said, “was the power Masons used to have here.”

J
OSEPH
Smith, an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and “unlaughing” boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra in 1827. The road is now New York 21 and the drumlin, a streamlined hump of glacially drifted soil, they call Hill Cumorah. It is not a Mount Sinai or an Ararat, but rather a much humbler thing, yet apparently of sufficient majesty for angels and God to have chosen it as the place to speak to Smith. There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the
Book of Mormon
. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the “revised” Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain.

I looked at Hill Cumorah and tried to envision it as it was in Smith’s day. The Mormons have built a shaft depicting witnesses who attested to the reality of the plates and the heavenly pronouncements, but, to my mind, the tower protested too much. Somehow monuments more entomb history than mark it. To see Bunker Hill (in fact Breed’s Hill) today rising unimposingly from the workers’ houses is to put historical imagination to the test, because Bunker Hill now belongs more to a notion of the past than to actuality.

Palmyra was a clean town of three-story brick buildings where I turned east on New York 31 and went down along the route of the Erie Canal, through villages, over fields of deep green, under blooming locust trees, and past barns collapsing next to mobile homes that looked depressingly immobile yet also impermanent. At Savannah, I found the unmarked road to Conquest (down the highway from Victory) easily enough, but staying on it was another matter. Trying to distinguish the main line from the tributaries by playing compass against the worn, yellow stripes was blue roading at its perplexing best. After some miles, I had no idea where I was. I called out to five fellows pouring something into the crankcase of a Trans-Am. These were the men who believe in the restorative power of STP as the Chinese believe in rhinoceros horn. “Is this the road to Conquest?”

They answered almost together: “Yes! Where? No! Conquest?” Then, pleased to be considered authorities on the country, they all came to my window. Each answered the question at length, and sometimes at the same moment as another. They corrected, modified, amplified, clarified, and repeated each other’s directions. At last I came to understand nothing. “All right,” one said, “here it is: run this road straight through, and you can’t help but miss it.”

Off I went, hoping Conquest would find me. In the dairy country, chewing Holsteins and Guernseys switched their tails and flicked their skins. On the other side of Johnny Cake Road lay Conquest. Then I began the game again, looking for Cato. Along the roads were cottage industries selling clothesline poles, purple martin houses, potted plants, AKC pups.

I stopped for a sandwich at an old hotel in Cato, but the only food was pickled sausage at the bar, so I had sausage with a glass of beer, and that, as it turned out, was dinner. Through the wavy panes of old windows, I could see children standing along the main street, jerking their arms up and down at trucks. Each time a driver pulled on his air horns, the children jumped and cheered. That evening in Cato, it was the only game in town.

Just after dusk I arrived in Central Square and couldn’t find a place to park for the night. I finally drove up a quiet side street. In ten minutes the police joined me. “What’s your business here?” one said.

“Got sleepy on the highway.”

He gave a lengthy explanation about recent burglaries in the neighborhood. “In other words, Missouri, better move tail along.”

“I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Get a motel.”

“I don’t want a motel. I live in the truck. I don’t like motels. You’ve got my license number. I’m not going to pull off a heist now.”

“Can you prove ownership of this vehicle?”

In irritation, I snapped open my wallet, sending credit cards flying. An older cop, a large pile of beef on the hoof, joined in.

“What’s all the jawing about?” His hands were truncheons itching to clobber something.

“He wants a place to sleep.”

“Has he got money, or do we have a vagrant here?”

“He’s got money,” I said, “but he’s not going to prove it unless you book him. He just proved his identity and ownership of his vehicle and that’s enough, considering he’s broken no law.”

“Go down to the park next to the cemetery,” the beef said. “You’ll be all right there.”

“Is the night shift going to come around and run me off?”

“We are the night shift. We’ll keep an eye on you.”

For whose protection I didn’t know, but I went to the tiny park and pulled up equidistant between homeplate and the tombstones. I’d traveled ten thousand miles and had not encountered a single hoodlum. But I’d been taken for one several times.

T
HE
menu said: “Check Our Snowmobile Weekend Package Deal.” I skipped it and ordered a standard road breakfast. The shingled cafe, Ben and Bernies, afforded a broad view of Lake Oneida. The placemats were maps of Italy, and the man beside me ate bagels and cream cheese. No question: this was the Northeast.

The Oneida shoreline road was warm—too warm—for May, although maples by the highway had opened to a cooling shade. The perpetual spring I’d been following around the country was about done. On a map Lake Oneida looks like a sperm whale, and my course that morning was down the spine, from the flukes to the snout. All along the shore, old houses, big houses, were losing to the North climate, and for miles it was a place of sag and dilapidation.

The lake once formed a twenty-mile link in the Erie Canal, and just east of Oneida, excavation for the waterway began on the Fourth of July, 1817. I stopped near the spot at an abandoned section of canal and walked down the old towpath, now a snowmobile trail. The canal, only four feet deep in its early years, had become a rank, bosky, froggy trough. But it was that forty-eight inches of water that did so much to open western New York and the Midwest to settlement and commerce. “Clinton’s Folly,” the popular name for the canal as it was being built, followed the Mohawk Valley, the only natural break at this latitude in the Appalachians.

From Lake Erie to the Hudson River (363 miles, 83 stone locks, 13 aqueducts) the canal moved people and things between the middle of the nation and the ocean; it was this watercourse, as much as anything else, that made New York City the leading Atlantic port. Travelers who had some money could take a packet boat with windows and berths, while poorer immigrants heading into the Midlands rode cheaper and drearier line boats. Ten years after Clinton’s Folly opened, the populations of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo increased three hundred percent; the canal, having paid for itself in that decade, had changed the northwest quarter of America. No paltry accomplishment for a scheme that even the visionary Thomas Jefferson saw as a little short of madness.

On down the highway to Rome, New York. From its appearance, it could have been London in 1946: the central section gutted but for a few old brownstone churches, a new shopping mall with triple-tier parking lot, and the National Park Service reconstruction of eighteenth-century Fort Stanwix covering several blocks on the east side. While the palisaded fort had been elaborately rebuilt, it did not turn Rome back into a city, and while ribbon development along the highways gave an economic life, it didn’t give Rome a center. The place looked as if it had died of heart rot—from the inside out.

I went up into the Adirondacks at a point where they form a virtual wall, and Ghost Dancing labored making the ascent. No sun in the forest and twelve degrees cooler. The ancient Adirondack Mountains are much older than the old Appalachians they merge with; consequently, they tend toward roundness with few sharp outcroppings. Adirondack (“bark eaters”) was a contemptuous epithet Mohawks gave to some degenerated tribe so poor it had to eat trees.

I bought gas in Alder Creek and asked the pumpman what winter was like in the mountains. “This,” he said and held up the stump of a little finger. “Frostbite. Snowfall of a hundred forty-two inches last year, forty-five below, wind chill seventy below. That’s what we call winter.”

The forest became heavier, sky darker, mountains higher, settlements farther apart. What few people were here the black flies and weather kept indoors that day. Low clouds sailed around under a high overcast and broke up like schooners on the summits. Although moose and caribou disappeared long ago, I was at the heart of a great wilderness second only to the Northwoods of Maine in the eastern United States. An occasional woodsy gift shop or burger stand built like a chalet did not prevent the forest from being pervasive, ominous, and forbidding; nor did they quiet the strange cries of birds from the dark hemlock. Then a cold rain blew down, turned to hail, then eased to a drizzly fog. It was early afternoon, yet headlights vanished after twenty yards as if the damp extinguished the beams. Birch, alder, conifers—nothing but trees and water and fog for miles.

East of the village of Blue Mountain Lake, dominated by a bluish hump of the Adirondacks, the road descended to a small building—part house, part tavern—snugged against a wooded hill and surrounded by vaporous mountains. The mist glowed orange from a neon beer sign. The building, white clapboard trimmed in red with a silvery corrugated tin roof, was the Forest House Lodge. In fact, it wasn’t a lodge, but something even better: an antique roadhouse. The roadhouse—institution and word—has nearly disappeared from America.

I ate a ham and cheese sandwich and drank Genesee Cream Ale. The pallid barmaid talked quietly to an old woman; when there would come a deep rumble of thunder, the women paused in conversation. There were no other sounds, no others about. The room was almost entirely of pine—immaculately scrubbed, hand-polished pine gleaming like lacquerware. Each table top, each wall, every stool and bench shone warmly in the soft incandescent light, and bottles of rum and brandy and whiskey glowed from within. It was as if the faded woman had given her life to buffing everything to a soft lustre and, in doing so, lost her own. Across from a photograph of an awakened hibernating bear hung an 1885 picture of the first Forest House Lodge when it was a stage stop. The present building, dating from the thirties, seemed to have absorbed the continuum of history.

Every so often a logging truck hissed wetly down the highway and rolled the mists before they settled in once more against the polished windows. I sat a long time in an event of no significance beyond simple joy. It lacked only the dimension of sharing.

A young man and woman came in carrying a tension as though an unexploded grenade had just dropped between them. He was a swelling of veins across the forehead and his speech a gnashing of teeth, but she was a light and airy woman, one who would move easily in loving. I was grateful for the company and forced a conversation about the Adirondacks that I ended up turning into an Izaak Walton League lecture.

The man said, “Wilderness! It’s all a crock now. I rafted the Blue Nile in Ethiopia three years ago. After a couple of days, we got into country where the natives dressed like the old pictures you see—men almost naked, carrying spears. Women bare from the waist up. You know, darkest Africa. I was taking pictures when a girl wearing a necklace made out of the cap of a BIC pen held out her arm. She had a broken Timex on. She said, ‘No
teek-teek
.’ That almost ruined the trip. It’s the same here—a bootprint on every square yard of Adirondacks.”