Not that a frontier mentality makes a better corps of citizens — even today there are places out here that don’t have to fake, as Vegas does, that they’ve never seen the likes of Aunt Sally. There are places so removed from any civilizing germ that when you enter them for the first time you lose your own perspective, drop, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a history so much deeper than your own that your existence is too meager to make any mark in the historical record. The first time I drove out here on my own the land began to suck me under as if it were quicksand and the sky came down and whomped me. I’d come over to Canada from London on a job and I got the bright idea to drive south from Regina, Saskatchewan, to the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge in South Dakota, because Curtis had been there and because I needed to see an American Indian reservation for myself if I was going to write about him and the people that he photographed. On a map the drive looks like a simple thing to do because you can run your finger down the page from Regina in Saskatchewan, through Montana, straight through North and most of South Dakota to Pine Ridge on a perfect north/south plumb line. But on any given map of land the one thing you don’t see is sky. I started out from Regina as the sky was lightening in pre-dawn and in about a half an hour I had left the civilizing confines of that western Canadian railroad town and was out on open land, looking south at a flat unbroken foreground toward unseen Montana just beyond the straight line of the horizon. The sky was crystal, clean, a deceptive non-menacing blue but it was crowding in, encroaching everywhere, flooding on the land and toward my throat, level to my neck, and if I couldn’t keep my head beneath it I would cut loose from the steering wheel and spin untethered into obliterating space. All around me there was nothing but uninterrupted space for as far as I could see, this single thread of road tethering me to what I knew, to where I’d been, where I was going. I pulled off the road to catch my breath and calm my heart from racing. I was the only human being on the scene. The only being, period. Except for a sky so vigilant and present it assumed all Being all itself, capital be. I got out and walked around the car and opened the passenger-side door and sat down in the door well and put my head between my knees. I am fairly robust, pride myself in my adaptability to foreign places, but for the first time in my life place was threatening to make me sick. Wind was an element of sky as it tore over the earth, no impediment to slow it down, to stand against its shapelessness and say THIS IS YOUR LIMIT. This is where you stop; and start. This is what you are. Be it for good or evil we are referential creatures, we need defining points, civilizing points of reference, and existence without antecedents panics us. Panicked me, at least. I realized I was having an unprecedented attack — a kind of agoraphobia. Fear of open spaces. I stood up and kicked around the grass beside the road, tried to find an insect or any living critter, any living thing, but there was nothing out there. Nothing. Not even birdsong. Not even a single bird to follow in the sky. I tried taking full deep breaths, then clambered up the trunk and stood on the roof of the car. What was it Archimedes boasted—? Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth. If I was higher, I could see a longer distance, I figured. See a human, maybe. See a barn. See something. Something to enforce the myth of I, the myth of who I thought I was that day, the myth of day, itself; the recurring human myth of time. If you’re going to light out, there has to be a something you are lighting from. From’s a given; from’s a certain. To is out there, in our minds, uncertain. No one can promise us a to. No one ever gives a certain future to us in our hands, that we can hold. If they allege that they can guarantee the future — if we believe they can — they are charlatans and we are party to their lies. And when you stand there in a place as immense as our own continental west with not another creature in your sight for miles and miles and miles around, you realize you are standing in the jaws of your existence. That the journey that you make through time — where you light out to — is the only meaning you can claim. Our lives are our individual claims on the combined experience — our lives are not our names or our professions — and somewhere there’s a big rig driver who may or may not have ever told the story of how he was hauling ass one morning years ago south out of Canada toward Montana when out in the middle of nowhere there was this woman standing on the rooftop of her car waving a giant crazy Hello!! at him as he barreled by, so he opened up the air horn and boomed her one, and how she hung back but kept behind him for at least an hour, ’til he turned off on Route 2 toward the West. By then, the geology had changed, Montana’s seismology had kicked in, there were other intermittent passing vehicles and train tracks beside the road to ease my panic, but what I remember most about that big rig coming up behind me is that I hadn’t heard it coming, what with all the wind, until it was on top of me and how I turned around and gave the driver a thumbs-up to let him know I didn’t need assistance and how he set that air horn off out there in the middle of the continent.
How the sound bent, as it passed.
It sounded like a train.
And it made me feel safe.
Even now, in the dark, on my way to Vegas, I keep the window down, hoping I will hear one in the distance. Hear a train. And see one. In the dark they’re scary, moving toward you, that impending headlight hanging in the distance, seeming not to move, until you figure out oh, there must be train tracks over there. In the daylight driving east on this route I see them all the time, usually seeing the first one here, in the Cajon Pass, where the land rises to a sudden 5,000 feet from sea level where the Pacific Plate whacked into the American one. The San Andreas fault runs through here, as do two pipelines, four power lines, Route 15, itself, Route 66, and three separate rail lines. In the daylight I can catch a Burlington Northern Santa Fe toiling uphill here on two engines, dragging several dozen containers from China and Taiwan reading COSCO and HAN JIN into the inland empire from their point of entry at Long Beach or the Port of Los Angeles. Tonight the pass is a necklace of descending headlights trailing toward me, but in daylight this climb is a thriller, the drama of colliding plates strewn across the surface in huge blocks of Pelona schist as big as ship containers, as if the earth, itself, had engineered a train wreck. Here at the Cajon Pass I always feel I’ve really left Los Angeles — after this, the land feels like The West. After this comes the Victorville plateau. After this, it’s Barstow; and the desert. In daylight I like to stop in Barstow, not because, as the sign proclaims on Main Street, it’s the CROSSROADS OF OPPORTUNITY, but because, unlike Las Vegas and a lot of other newly manufactured western towns, Barstow has a past. Barstow has a history. It has ghosts. And many many miles of tracks. It takes its name — like Seligman and Kingman, Arizona, do — from a train man, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe still operates its main RR Classification Yard there. Route 66 is the Main Street, now both alarmingly tough and despairingly shabby, and there’s a railroad museum tucked beside the tracks, but the real roadside attraction in Barstow is the surviving Fred Harvey House built into the depot. Curtis was back and forth through Barstow on his way into the desert to photograph the Mojave, Walapai and Havasupai tribes, and he must have stood beside the tracks in front of the Harvey House a dozen times. The restaurant’s a National Historic site now, not open to the public, but I like to stand there and look through the windows. There were a lot of days, writing this novel about Curtis, when I couldn’t understand him, couldn’t bring what I knew about him, his self-generated myth, the few true scattered facts, into a coherent whole. I’d think about jettisoning the project altogether on those days, to take up the heroic tale of Fred Harvey, instead, who seemed like a genuinely nice guy and whose business had as large an impact on Western tribes as Curtis’s. The Harvey Houses were like missions on the Santa Fe Railroad’s camino real—familiar places in the wild, places where travelers could disembark in desolate and unknown territory and feel immediately at home. It was Fred Harvey’s brainstorm to feature Indians along the tracks, in front of Harvey Houses, sitting nonthreateningly on blankets, selling baskets and turquoise trinkets to the passengers as they stopped along the way in Lamy, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. Fred would feed you Blue Point oysters, iceberg lettuce and vanilla ice cream at some one-hundred-degrees-in-the-shade outpost in Arizona or New Mexico, courtesy of his contract with the Santa Fe to take delivery of refrigerated goods for free, and you would practically expire on the spot not from the heat but from the miracle. Then Fred’s Harvey Girls would lead you out into the blasting sun and point you toward some Indians sitting on the platforms — point you toward some Zuni beadwork or a handy Hopi feathered headdress or an Apache bow-and-arrow set which would look so good hanging on your wall back in Cambridge, Skokie or the Bronx. It was Fred Harvey’s idea to transform people on train journeys into consuming entities, into packets of consumption: Johns and Marys into tourists. Nothing wrong with tourism, I’m a tourist here, myself, I stop and poke around a lot when I’m en route because I think that’s the point of travel. I picked up the habit of stopping to investigate roadside attractions from my father on those early trips. I once followed a sign back in Virginia to a little white wayside building by a scenic pine wood where Stonewall Jackson had died. There was no one there (again) but me. And a sign with a green button on it that read PRESS TO LEARN. The voice of a U.S. National Parks Ranger came out of a hidden speaker when I pressed the button and told me the story of how Stonewall Jackson had been shot accidentally by a member of his own corps, brought to this little cabin where his arm had been amputated, where his wife had been summoned and where he had taken his last breath. I stood there with the talking hidden speaker until the recording of the ranger’s voice stopped, and then, when it stopped, the world was suddenly much quieter than it had been all that morning. From that silence, right there, there was delivered to me, whole, a story I called “Stonewall Jackson’s Wife,” and the whole story arrived, start to finish, the way a train arrives; connected, in a logical sequence; complete, in and of itself. That’s the only time in my life a story has produced itself for me like that out of a roadside attraction, but: you never know. I’ve stopped at a lot of roadside attractions, and it’s the same as waiting for a photograph to assemble: you just never know when, or where, or how, or if the thing will happen. Nine times out of ten — no: nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand — no miracle occurs, no eighteen wheeler thunders past you on the road, blasting out a noise that reminds you of the sound your nation makes: but, still, I stop because it’s worth the gamble.