Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (43 page)

In the East the Fourth of July is a formless exercise in nostalgia and patriotism, the patriotism muted by the nostalgia for an America that has gone from those parts. But the East is not good at parades, regarding them as rather hick, slightly embarrassing. Everyone sees everyone else twice a day without benefit of parades, and would rather be home having a wienie roast. So, on the Fourth, a few veterans shamble down Main Street to an out-of-tune band, watched by a handful of thinly clapping spectators. At the war memorial a politician makes a speech and everyone thankfully goes home, or to a little league game, or to the old swimming hole, if it hasn't been filled in for a housing development. In the evening the town board organizes fireworks at a central place, which cuts down on accidents but loses the excitement of the old spontaneous eruptions.

In the West the past is very close. In many places, it still believes it's the present. The West has no self-consciousness about parades, and it has thousands of the prime necessity for a parade — horses. The people who came to Red Lodge for the celebration probably lived over an area of 10,000 square miles, and this was one of the few times when they would see each other in the year. The sun was not damp-hot or sullen, but plain
hot,
dry, burning, Western hot. Main Street was paved, but fine dust blew across it from the unpaved side streets and the bare mountain slope beyond. All morning cars and pick-ups poured into town, and by eleven the sidewalks were jammed. Then up from the south, on a great white horse rode the marshal, wearing new levis and chaps and a white ten-gallon hat, sitting straight, the American flag set in his stirrup snapping out in the wind. All down the street we fell silent as he passed, and took off our hats. Then the high school bands strutted by, not bored but proud of the day and their part in it; and old men in flag-hung buggies, who might have seen Custer pass; girls, stunning girls in full western rig, a-glitter with silver and spurs, wide, flat, curly-brimmed hats on their curls, their behinds tight stretched, their thighs astride fiery quarter horses. And Indians... I wondered that they should celebrate this day, but they were here, the names of the tribes as proud as the Stars and Stripes ahead. I was glad to see them.

In the afternoon we repaired to the rodeo grounds up the hill. We got good seats in the miniature grandstand and tried to keep Susan and Martin on the seats and with dry jeans, forcibly carting them off to the toilets from time to time, for their excitement at the bronco riding, bull riding, dogie roping and the rest could not be contained. Across a narrow valley light planes kept landing and taking off from the town airstrip, and then we'd see the dust of a car racing the mile or so from there to the rodeo grounds. It turned out there was another rodeo at Cody, Wyoming, that same time. Many of the cowboys were competing in both; the light plane shuttles carried them fifty miles back and forth from one to the other.

Next morning we crossed the Beartooth Pass in the first light — a stunning view of the Bitterroots to the west and headed for the Yellowstone Park. It is about half the size of Wales and full of wonders; but we would be seeing it later, and drove through without stopping, to come an hour later upon one of the most dramatic views in the world the Teton wall from across Jackson Lake.
Teton
is French for 'breast', and the mountains were so named by the early French
voyageurs,
who must have had some singularly spiky girl friends; for there is nothing swelling or woman-soft about these mountains. The chain is not long — barely forty miles miles from north to south and twenty across — but it is of granite, a jagged frieze of towers and spires standing up more than 6,500 feet above the valley. Firs clothe and darken the lower slopes and surround the lake. Above, the rock is light and shining; snow daubs and banks and streaks the summit walls; and all is reflected in the ten-mile lake.

In a Jackson bar we began to get the distinctive feel of Wyoming. On the wall behind the barman, among the ranked bottles, there hung a plaque decorated with red-hot-poker work. The picture showed a huge Western hat sitting on top of a pair of Western boots. The caption below read:
Portrait of a Texan after an enema.
It was pretty funny in its own right, but what made it special was that Wyoming depended largely on Texan tourist money for its existence, particularly in the autumn hunting season.

We headed back up the Snake River to locate the D-Lazy-K Ranch, where the children were to spend a month. The dudes (paying guests) at this ranch were children only, and the owners undertook to give them a taste for and some skill in the Western way of life. We eventually found it, tucked under a hill not far from the Snake, and introduced the children to their temporary foster-parents. The place seemed well organized, though primitive — but that was what we wanted Susan and Martin to experience. We could have no idea whether the owner or the wranglers or the cook or the resident nurse (who seemed about 108) knew their business. As far as previous investigation and inquiry could guide us, they did. The rest would have to be left to chance. We stayed two days at the ranch, settling the children in, then organized ourselves for the mountains. Carrying one small bivouac tent to sleep in and another to store food supplies, we set off on foot up the Cascade trail to make camp behind the Grand Teton. It took us two trips to carry up food and supplies for the ten days we intended to spend there.

The ten days passed in solitude, hiking, photographing powers, fishing. We saw no one except a park ranger; a burly Mormon with a 100-lb. pack, who'd already covered ten miles by breakfast; and a great many marmots. These beasts still owe us a beautiful ten-gallon white hat, for Barbara left the one she'd bought in Billings under a tree while we tried to climb up through the snow banks to reach the Alaska Basin. When we returned — no sign of the hat. The marmots, locally called fishers, had eaten it for the sweat in the band and, presumably, the tastiness of the felt.
[Scanner's Footnote:
The name must be
very
local or more likely plain British confusion of marmots with martens. In all my sources, formal or informal, the fisher is a North American marten, related to the weasel; marmots are rodents, and might well treat a hat in such a fashion.
]

When we came down we first paid a brief visit to the D-Lazy-K to see how the children were getting along. We found them suntanned and fit, but were not so happy to learn that they swam their horses across the Snake without any wrangler or adult present. The Snake was wide, deep, and fast there. Martin looked like a pea on a drum on top of his horse, and any suggestion that he was controlling it would have been purely complimentary. The children also looked strangely at our whisky bottle in the evening and glanced at each other with a superior expression; but they said they were happy, and they looked it. Susan was already a good and confident rider, and Martin was on the way to becoming a Marksman of the National Rifle Association, with a .22 rifle. So Barbara and I set off on Stage 2 of our summer.

This was combined work and pleasure. I had an idea for a book: the theme of the death of craftsmanship, the end of art, the sacrifice of skill to convenience. I had not tried to define it more closely. All the way west, when there was opportunity, we watched trains — mainly Great Northern and Northern Pacific, with occasional glimpses of the Milwaukee Road. I looked hungrily at the big black engines hauling the huge loads, for I knew what work was being done, what skill being used, up there on the high footplate, what art there was to controlling a steam engine, always having as much power as you needed, never more (for that was a waste of fuel), remembering every up and down of the road, the weight behind the tender, how long the steam already in the boiler would last, when more water would be needed (turn on the injectors well ahead of time to heat it before it passed into the boiler), where to use sand, when to run on the throttle and when on the cut-off... Then a four-unit diesel would grind past, or a Milwaukee electric. How much easier, simpler, cleaner! But what had been lost? Picturesqueness, certainly; the steam engine, almost alone of inanimate things, can transmit a sense of power, of movement, of effort. But what mattered, surely, was a loss of skill. The diesels and the electrics were push-button affairs. What happened to a man when his skill, the source of his pride, suddenly became worthless? What was going on in the spirits of those grizzled men who had spent twenty or thirty years learning the art of the steam engine, to find it useless? 'The same applied everywhere. What was happening to women, who did not have to learn how to make pastry any more because they could buy excellent mixes? Where were the new sources of pride, of self-identification, to come from?

This was my theme. Although the areas in which the theme could be worked out were endless — woman's life was particularly interesting — I knew that if I were to write it, I would base it in railroading. So we were looking for a railroad centre to which I could return later this year, or next, and spend two or three weeks riding the cabs, living with the engineers and firemen, absorbing their ways of thinking and acting. We examined Livingstone and Paradise, both on the Northern Pacific, and Three Forks, where the Milwaukee Road crosses the N.P. on the level, but none of them was right, so we decided to get on with our trip and examine the Union Pacific later.

We drove north and west through Montana, past Flathead Lake (it was like the Lake of Geneva, complete with Swiss chalets, but lonely and wild instead of manicured and tame). We camped and walked in Glacier National Park (we trudged through a July blizzard from Going-to-the-Sun Highway to the Hanging Gardens, and saw a pair of foxes); then west by Spokane and the Washington desert, across the Columbia, and up through the apple orchards of Wenatchee and the little Cascade Range towns with names like Skykomish and Snohomish; through Seattle without stopping, to an attempted walk in the Olympic peninsula. We climbed up a little way through an immense silent army of Douglas firs but where the firs ended, suddenly, at less than 5,000 feet, there was deep snow, a blinding intensity of light — and we had not thought to bring our snow goggles. Well, back at the base area the hot sulphur bath was an exciting experience, too.

We drove on down the Pacific coast, past Humptulips and Hoquiam, to Portland, Oregon. There were several smoke houses on the north bank of the Columbia here, where we again enjoyed excellent smoked fish; but the man we bought from said that his business, and the Columbia salmon, were being ruined by the timber companies. 'Every tree they cut down up there,' he said angrily, jerking his head at the forested slope behind him, 'they kill five salmon in the river.'

We returned to the coast and held southwards on U.S. 101. If the smokehouse man was right, the salmon were certainly being killed off at a great rate, for the winding road, very beautiful and with superb views over the Pacific, was murderous to drive owing to the continual stream of huge and hugely loaded timber trucks. Some of the Oregon beaches looked like Japanese prints, with the surf like lace and a sea mist half veiling, half revealing grey rocks and silver sand. We camped among redwoods near Garberville, California; and next day ran over the Golden Gate, through San Francisco and over the Bay Bridge, and on without stopping. It was an exciting town on the water, people said, with good restaurants; but we had one like that at home, just down the Hudson, and we were getting impatient for the mountains and the cool air. We ran on, like thirsty dogs, across the San Joaquin valley with the temperature over 100, and at last reached sanctuary among the pines, the granite, and the running water of Tuolumne Meadows at the upper end of Yosemite National Park. Here we set up camp, carefully hanging our food from tree branches out of the reach of bears. The bears here, as in most places where man has come, soon learn to search the tents and garbage cans, as being the easier way. One thing we never did was leave food in the car. RK 1403 was a convertible, and there would have been nothing easier for a bear, once he had an idea there was food inside, than to tear open the top with his claws.

There was good walking from Tuolumne, and the weather stayed hot, dry, and clear. The Yosemite granite is a very pale grey, flecked with black and red mica. From a distance the high ridges glittered like snow and twice we had to walk right up to one to assure ourselves that it was indeed rock and not ice that we were seeing. This granite does not wear away like softer rocks, so there are cascades where the water runs down in a wide sheet an inch deep over the sloping rock, and has done so for millions of years. It is an unexpected and oddly eerie sight, when one is so used to water gouging out a channel, to see it apparently wandering where it will. The most spectacular of these 'flat falls' that we saw was at the head of the Merced Valley, where we were looking down from the high sierra, the shining cliff of Half Dome on the right and El Capitan beyond.

The Yosemite Curry Company ran (and still runs) six-day horseback trips from the valley to the sierra and back, stopping off at five tented camps where they had simple accommodation, bedding, and restaurants permanently set up. At Tuolumne we were already on the high sierra so we did half the route the wrong way round, and on foot, spending nights out at Vogelsang and Merced Lake camps in both directions. At Merced Lake we met one of the horseback tours, and its members exclaimed mightily over our arrival on foot; but when they heard our accents they ceased to be surprised. We were not native-born Americans and could therefore walk without being suspected of treason. (This is a rather cheap and inaccurate gibe: in our travels and hikes we had come to the conclusion that the native-born fell into two classes as far as walking was concerned: either they didn't walk at all, or they walked enormous distances carrying unnecessarily large loads. A closer knowledge of the country was teaching us that for the real cross-country walker the loads were not excessive, because the distances between supply points were great. There were no villages, and no village pubs, in any of the huge tracts we had walked in.)