It's advice I have tried to remember. Even when I've betrayed it.
3
Alone I drove to Crescent, Utah. Twenty-five hundred miles.
It was estimated that my father might live another three or four weeks; I was in terror of flying to him; not of the flight itself (though I'd never flown in an airliner before) but of getting too quickly to my destination.
I would spend days (and nights) on interstate highways in a Volkswagen bought for $535 the previous year, with faulty brakes, a faulty muffler, a noisy motor; a stick shift that operated with some resistance; unless I kept most of the windows rolled down at all times, an odor of carbon monoxide wafted from beneath the dashboard. Except: what you can detect, isn't the poison. Fresh air dispels it! It was a 1959 Volkswagen with no heat or air-conditioning, of course; what "heat" there was blew in through vents from the motor onto my legs. Yet I loved this, my first car; I was naive enough to love its very smallness and economy; its hunched-beetle shape; unless it was a fetal-shape; originally plum-colored but now weathered and rusted to no single hue. There was a spiderweb crack in the windshield in front of the passenger's seat as if a luckless ghost-passenger had been catapulted into the glass, striking headfirst.
In the secondhand Volkswagen I would drive the width of New York State (for I'd been staying in northern Vermont when Hendrick's call came) and I would pass within fifty miles of Strykersville; I would continue west driving along the southern edge of Lake Erie and through Ohio and through Indiana and through Illinois and through northern Missouri and through Kansas and through Colorado and so at last into eastern Utah, on I-70 to the small town of Crescent, Utah, population 1,620. This, the journey of my life. I will get there on time! In New York, in Illinois, and in Colorado I'd telephoned the soft-spoken woman known to me only as Hildie Pomeroy, to ask after my father and to learn that he was in "stable condition" and "waiting for you." To save money, often I slept in the car; not at night but mornings or late afternoons in convivial roadside rest areas and parking lots of restaurants; not in the backseat (for a stranger might drift by to stare in at me open-mouthed and vulnerable in sleep as an infant); it was one of the haunting notions of my life, about which I'd tried to write, except not knowing how to seize the notion, the image, the riddle in order to write about it coherently, how we never see ourselves sleeping; we never see ourselves open-mouthed, vulnerable as a baby in sleep; in just such a way we never see ourselves, at all; we have no clear idea of ourselves; our mirror reflections reflect only what we wish to see, or can bear to see, or punish ourselves by seeing. Nor can we trust others to see us either. For they too see what they wish to see, with their imperfect eyes. In my car, often I remained in the driver's seat when I slept, my hands in a pretense of gripping the wheel so that (though deeply unconscious, head lolling like a stroke victim's against the seatback) I was primed for immediate action, escape. In public rest rooms I managed to wash myself, even my sweaty-sticky windblown hair; I didn't eat often in restaurants, but bought packaged food in stores because it was cheaper, and I filled paper cups with drinking water to take with me; I'd allotted myself a certain amount of money to take me from Vermont to Utah, and begrudged spending money on myself and not on gas, oil, services for my car. Already on the first day of driving, nearly eight hours, I'd become hypnotized; my eyelids drooped with a wish to sleep, unless it was a wish to dream without the interference of sleep; the Volkswagen was so small that it quavered in the wake of larger vehicles that passed in hissing contempt; even other Volkswagens sailed past me, though their drivers often waved or honked in a gesture of camaraderie. My car shuddered if driven at a speed beyond fifty-five miles an hour and there was such a maelstrom of winds whipping my head, I came to think that the Volkswagen was somehow myself; or, in its woundedness, my father. Amid traffic, I was less susceptible to irrational notions and hypnagogic images; on the open highway, median stripes to the left of my vision, gravel shoulder to my right, open countryside, empty sky, I began to sink into that seductive and treacherous state of mind that precedes sleep; I felt a pang of hurt, that Hendrick had refused to accompany me; I seemed to recall that I'd actually asked him, and he'd said no. He hadn't called me back; I told myself that I hadn't expected him to call back; I had no number for him, and so could not call him; nor did my brothers Dietrich and Fritz call me; I told myself that I hadn't expected them to call; I was not disappointed, and I was not hurt. To them, he's dead. They can't love a dead man as I can. I fell into the habit of speaking aloud in the car for the noise of the wind and the motor was such I could barely hear myself, this exempted me from embarrassment or blame. The soliloquy of the self, plotting what's to come. For what is life, its myriad surprises, except what's to come. I seemed to see my father as he'd been at my high school graduation except he was in the old farmhouse, in the kitchen where so often he'd sat, smoking cigarettes and drinking late into the night; he was willing to look at me, and to speak with me, and I could ask him any question I wished; but suddenly I was frightened, and could not speak. For what do you ask your father, if you have but one question? I might have asked, earnestly Is any future preferable to any past? Do we live only in time? I tried to recall what Vernor Matheius had said once about time but I could not retain both Vernor Matheius and my father simultaneously; I would not have wished Vernor to have met my father, or even to have seen him; nor would I have wished my father to have met Vernor, or even to have seen him; and so Vernor Matheius faded. Midway through the endless state of Kansas I began to hallucinate flat-land even in my sleep; my hallucinations and the landscape were identical; I could not escape the one without being swallowed up into the other; I would sink, I would drown, I would die. Midway through the endless state of Colorado I began to hallucinate mountains far ahead at the horizon; mirage-mountains delicate as watercolor mountains in a Japanese print; yet these mountains weren't mirages, they didn't fade but deepened; they didn't retreat with the horizon, but drew nearer; and suddenly it was evident that the mountains at the horizon were moving toward me; I was moving toward them along the highway; suddenly it was evident that the mountains would enclose me, in time; I would gaze out on all sides and see mountains on all sides; I smiled at the revelation-"The Rocky Mountains! They're real."
More jagged the horizon became. The interminable midwestern plains of farmland and dull-grazing cattle had fallen away behind me, now a different and more vigorous-seeming cattle were grazing in a different, harsher landscape; here the landscape was sepia-colored as if bleached by a harsher sun; in the distance, a lunar landscape of hills strewn with boulders, strange rock formations, mountains topped with streaks of white like paint. Here, you are made to realize that a landscape is a living thing; a landscape exerts life; a landscape enters through the eyes, and breathes into you; in the West, I could no longer be the young woman I'd been in the East; in Crescent, Utah, a place unknown to me, a young woman impatiently awaited me who was myself, yet altered; in Crescent, Utah, I was determined to be this young woman. My father's daughter. The temptation in such landscapes is to believe that beauty exists in a profound and secret relationship to you. The temptation is to believe that you are the first to have fully seen. I saw that the high-desert landscape shifted continuously in hue and texture with the rapid, skittish movement of light in the enormous sky; unlike the East, where the sky was diminished by treelines, and sometimes obscured completely. My eyes, accustomed to the foreshortened landscapes and horizons of the East, squinted at so much space in the West; impossible to see such vast space without seeing time; vast reaches of time before human history, human speech, the human effort to name such mute phenomena as mountains, rivers, canyons, plateaus, glacial troughs. Such mute phenomena as rock, sand, salt flats, buttes, mesas, bluffs, badlands. Crossing the Colorado River, driving into the Grand River Valley and westward into Utah I saw a world of desolation and beauty open up before me, and my heart quickened with hope; I'd forgotten that my mission was to sit at the bedside of a man dying of cancer; I would pay for such forgetfulness, but not immediately. In my little car that vibrated with excitement. Place-names romantic and exotic to my ear as poetry. Roan Cliffs, San Rafael Valley, Sand River, Dirty Devil River, Green River, Sego Canyon, Dimes Canyon, Death Hollow, Hell's Backbone, Calf Creek Falls, China Meadows, Desolation Canyon, Dead Horse Point, Islands in the Sky.