Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (58 page)

The next morning, under the rock doorstop was another message: “The story’s yours if you want it. Maybe it can help somehow. But wait till I’m gone.”

Did he mean
move on
or
die?
I went to his cabin. He’d moved on. Over the next several years I found no place for his story, but sometime later I phoned the ranch to get a lead on him. A woman said, “He checked out not long ago.” I asked if he left an address. “I mean,” she said, “he checked out for good. Cashed in feet first. I heard he’s buried over west in the Bighorns.”

4

Querencia

O
N A FINE AUTUMNAL MORNING,
Q and I left the Occidental Hotel to take up a wandering route into the Thunder Basin National Grasslands and on beyond. I was counting pronghorn as they appeared here and there, and she was turning in her mind legal aspects of Max Dwightman’s life. She said, “I admire his goal of wanting to educate children in ways so many of them are missing out on now, but, I’ll tell you, his method of raising money troubled me until I decided his means weren’t
malum in se
 — like murder, robbery, rape, arson, you know. They were closer to
malum prohibitum
 — jaywalking, an uncut lawn, an overdue library-book.” Raising her finger as if before a jury, she added, “By his testimony, he deceived nobody, and all activity was both consensual and mutually beneficial. So maybe it’s just the unorthodoxy that bothered me.”

She interrupted herself to point out a pronghorn on her side of the road. “How many does that make?” she said. Seventy-seven. “Their bodies seem too heavy for those skinny legs.” They do indeed, but those bony gams, carved by generations of wolves’ teeth, under a three-day-old pronghorn, can outrun the fastest human on earth. I told her what I’d read in the Occidental library: prior to the arrival of whites, there may have been forty-five-million of them, but by 1924 there were about fourteen thousand. Today, the estimate is a half million.

“I have a question about Max,” Q said. “What did he mean when he told you maybe his story might help in some way?” I said I didn’t know, but I was sure the answer had more to do with educating children than ministering to widows.

Bill, Wyoming, despite its highly excellent name, could serve as a lexicographer’s illustrative definition of either
windblown
or
godforsaken
(the only “town” within four-thousand square-miles), although the lone store/tavern/café there did put together a good sandwich. North of Bill, Q asked, “What’s it like to be a classic Don’t-Blink-or-You’ll-Miss-It?” (Story of my life.)

We entered the Thunder Basin and came upon gigantically awesome coal pits, one of them three-miles long and deep enough to bury a twenty-storey building without having to tip it over. We stopped alongside a railroad to watch two miles of coal hoppers roll past, trains so lengthy they frequently go uphill and downhill at the same time. One large power-generation plant in Georgia burned up two-thousand miles of coal every year, or to say it another way, that plant — five days distant — would consume ten-thousand linear-feet of sixty-million-year-old Wyoming in only eight hours. Over a year, that was thirty-four-thousand miles of Wyoming to be paid for not just in quick dollars but also in promissory notes for a warming climate generating violent weathers, rising oceans, and mass extinctions.

Along the road, I often try to visualize a landscape as it appeared a century or an aeon or a cataclysm ago, but in watching the coal move past us in almost morsel-sized pieces (if they were chops, a couple on a plate would make supper), I just couldn’t imagine the ancient ferns and cycads and other Paleocene boscage they once were. I couldn’t see their past. What I
did
see rolling along was the end of a current era: not ancient carboniferous Wyoming but rather chances measured in expiring time to reconfigure an economy — a way of life — not foreordained by its own principles to collapse.

[
TO READER OF THE FUTURE — IF YOU’RE THERE:
Let no one tell you otherwise — the word was out. We knew what we were doing, and as a society we went ahead and did it anyway. When it came to whistling past graveyards, we were talented.]

Beyond the Thunder Basin coalfields, we came into the shallow valley of the Little Powder River rolling, as were we, toward Montana. At a distance, the grasslands were beautiful with the buffy colors of fall, but a closer look showed mile after mile of Wyoming chewed by cattle down to dust and broken rock. When the shoulder of a highway looks more naturally abundant than a thousand acres beyond, something is out of whack. Anyone who may have doubts that cattle-raising is an extractive industry — at least as it’s widely practiced in eastern Wyoming by corporations, some of them foreign — should consider a little tour along Route 59. A popular chamber-of-commerce slogan at that time was “Wyoming — Open for Business!” (The Administration of intellectually incapable George W. Bush and his Wyoming-raised Vice President had recently proposed selling public lands to underwrite “deficit reduction”: to pay for its corporation enrichments and its calamitously ill-conceived Mesopotamian war.) A more accurate slogan — should I say epitaph? — might have been “Wyoming — For Sale!”

Crossing into Montana changed things. There the land was less eaten up, and the state flat-out looked less molested than Wyoming, cursed with its rich basement of combustibles. Montana didn’t often need a soft-focus lens to make its high plains beautiful.

A family van with an Illinois license plate overtook us at a good clip, the face of the driver scowlingly tense. “The GPS must have gone on the blink,” Q said. “Maybe that’s why Mom’s on her cell phone.” Two of the three children in the rear were attached to wires: a boy bobbed his head to some MP3 beat, a girl stared up at an overhead DVD screen, and the other child — of indeterminate gender — was bent over what I took for an electronic game. Clearly, there were enough virtual realities available in that vehicle to entertain a small ship’s crew for months.

As all old travelers know, inventors of whizz-bizzles (Gus Kubitzki’s word for electronic parts — transistors, diodes, silicon chips) are not at fault for such disconnections. The blame for such youthful electronic translocations lies with farmers who, years ago, ceased putting colored-glass-ball lightning rods on their houses and barns for traveling children to tally; and it lies with Burma-Shave for giving up on roadside doggerel to keep tykes chanting for miles; and also with highway engineers for cutting down all those road humps called kiss-me-quicks that gave a child a chance to watch the roll of the land in order to urge a driver to take the next KMQ faster: “Come on, Pop! Get her airborne!” You geezers out there from the twentieth century can add to this list.

Only the retro-minded side of my brain would venture to suggest that passing time — one’s days — in a place other than where one
actually
is at a particular moment can have disjunctive spiritual consequences reaching beyond the individual. For me to say so could also be hypocritical, given the hours (although not in an auto) I’ve spent reading literature and history and even some science, all of which require entering realms other than one of the moment. Such retro-notions remind me of Vivian Woodmiller — her mortal coil long ago shuffled off — a beloved librarian who once said to me, “When I see nine-year-olds, I envy them. Not for their youth but for their chance to read for the first time
Treasure Island
or
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
or
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
 — maybe even old miser Silas Marner with his gold coins. I remember the first time sixty years ago I heard a teacher read aloud ‘The Raven.’ How beautiful a virgin mind in the world of books!”

Poor retrorse Miss Woodmiller. She surely would have raised the question whether an electronically driven virtual-world can ever create the same response as an imagined realm. Presuming to speak for her, I think she would argue that imagination — the supreme requisite for reading good books — can allow transforming ideas to arise. With voltage-powered entertainments, imagination is taken care of for you. On a screen, your Long John Silver looks precisely like mine, and my Alice wears the same pinafore as yours because it
is
the same one.

The Illinois van had added a conversational dimension to a few miles of Montana for Q and me, but for that to happen, of course, we first had to
see
the family in the van. Q said, “Those plugged-in kids remind me of little P.C. and your scheme to rewire him and cure his videosis.” P.C. — his actual initials and the name he went by — had come to spend time with me a few years earlier. He was nine years old, skinny, small for his age but mentally quick, of sweet disposition, possessed of the gift of gab, and still uneasy in the dark, especially in a strange house surrounded by woods. At that time he was engaged in writing a novel about a sleight-of-hand magician — not a wizard but just an ordinary boy much like himself for whom a thick woods held unknowns better left to themselves. He’d gotten his manuscript to page three.

P.C. was largely schooled in his home by his grandmother who thought a few days in a distant place with his “uncle” in Missouri would be of benefit. My plan was to take him on the road, open territory new to him, walk him through my woods, show him the dark sinkhole and tell him a tale of the man trapped down in it; I would lay before him my hand-drawn, 1950 map of two Kansas City blocks centered around 74th and Flora Avenue, illustrating every fruit tree and grape arbor planted by an earlier generation and ignored by postwar supermarketing neighbors. I’d try to demonstrate how cherries or a pear picked and eaten while perched like a bird
in the tree
was fruit sweeter than any from a grocery. I’d give a recounting of Hellcats and Messerschmitts and Zeros built of balsa and tissue paper that, sooner or later, would be taken up to an attic window, a match put to them, and set off on a flaming glide to earth. World War II redux. I, a Svengali, would open worlds young P.C. hadn’t found on any screen and therefore couldn’t imagine.

On our road trip, as I pointed out quoz of the territory, he dutifully would raise his head from his handheld electronic-game to look out the window and say “Oh,” and then return to his screen to vaporize into a digital ether various fell creatures — some furry, others well-muscled, and still others deranged machinery, but all intent on mayhem. To travel his world, he didn’t need two legs — a pair of agile thumbs would do. So we gave up the road to try another approach: hands-on construction.

I bought a 176-piece Erector Set with directions for eight possible models of “Super Flyers.” P.C. chose the ultralight — a small, quirky, one-pilot aircraft a nine-year-old (or sixty-year-old) might wondrously fly in his sleep. A winged dream-machine. I set him up at a table. An hour later I returned to find two pieces bolted together and P.C. thumbing away at his video screen. The ultralight directions were entirely in pictures requiring close examination to interpret, so I sat beside him as counsel. After all, it was his first airplane. Three or four bolts later, he slipped away to the bathroom. When he didn’t soon return, I went to see about him; from behind the door I heard a tattoo of highly pitched beeps and blips and “Polly Wolly Doodle” played on what sounded like a tiny, tinny carousel.

The solution
(thought I)
is to let him see a finished plane to inspire him.
So I took up the bolts and nuts of a size a nine-year-old can see, and over the rest of the afternoon squintingly assembled the plane, down to its spinning propeller and cockpit where P.C. might imagine himself piloting safely above a perilous reach of dark woods and over deep sinkholes lying just beyond his bed. As he looked at it blankly, I, knowing the allure of dismantling to a nine-year-old male brain (especially one dedicated to amusements in which things must be etherized before they get you), suggested he take the ultralight apart to make another model, maybe the biplane or crop duster. He said, “That’s a lot of work.”

During his visit, all I accomplished was a return to my own ninth year, and I altered not at all his progress toward his eventual study of computeristics leading to improved games he hoped to design. Q said, “Maybe a raft trip with a GPS would’ve made a less radical transition.” Erector Sets, I said, are now radical?

The truth is, I should have minded my own business, but then, of course, I wouldn’t have that swell little ultralight sitting on a bookshelf and continually reminding me how I’d like to fly a bigger one treetop high across America to see how the surface fits together. Might be a book there. Maybe a transforming idea.

To love children must also be to love their future, and any future that impoverishes connections to the grand dominion of the natural world is endangered even before it’s born. It may also prove to be a future impossible not to produce but to sustain. To tolerate separation from spiritual links to the imperium of nature is to hang on the edge and wait for cataclysm. Any religion or science — the two priestcrafts most often posing that ultimate question
Why is there not nothing?
 — unwilling to embrace and enhance spiritual ties to the mysterious and miraculous existence of all Being can only hinder human fulfillment and its very continuance.

I know a woman in Connecticut who served as navigator on her honeymoon. Her duty was to watch the dashboard GPS screen and to listen for the electronic voice and match its bidding with exit signs along I-95 all the way to Florida. Her groom was a man for whom the heart of navigation was not territory but time. The briefest travel was the best travel. Over their fourteen-hundred miles, she performed admirably, keeping them en route flawlessly, with never a sarcastic word from him about a missed turn, and they arrived in Fort Lauderdale almost on the dot of his ETA, their marriage well-begun. She said, “My image of South Carolina or North Carolina — oh hell, the whole way down — is a little glowing screen on the dashboard and a thousand, green exit signs. I told him, the next time, either we get on a jet or you watch the GPS.”