“A person’s life, Lester.”
“What were these fellows looking for, do you think?”
By “fellows” I guess he means Curtis and Edwards.
But he may also mean my father.
“I don’t know. Are you going to try to tell me they were searching for the Truth?”
He shakes his head.
“I think it’s impossible to know another person’s motives. Practically impossible to really know our own,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” he concedes. “When you come to my place I’ll take you to see the Lands. And then you’ll make a Vision Quest.”
“That is something that I promise we will do,” I pledge.
He sets a bundle wrapped in newsprint on the seat beside me.
“Medicine smoke. Branches from the land I live on. Find some place on your journey home and stop. And set these leaves on fire. Some place where you can be reminded of your friend. And of our friendship.”
The packet has already perfumed my car with piñon, sage and mesquite, and as I head out for the road I’m enveloped in an incense that evokes a certain kind of West, high desert, the West made famous by the movies — Red Rock, Monument Valley — Navajo Land.
It’s a land best wedded to the buffalo, not cattle, where sheep and goats can scratch a bare subsistence from the scrappy brush but where man’s soul is better fed than his stomach. In parts, the wind can rip a person into shreds and finding shelter from one element can only leave you open to another — lightning, hail, snake, bear, sun, vulture, cougar. The Navajo named their clans for what could kill them.
And the only terrorists they knew wore hats, rode horses.
Safety was in numbers, the Navajo larger than the populations of the tribes around them, but safety came with ritual, as well, in knowing one was part of a cohering pattern, part of something greater than oneself. A renegade was truly that, a broken thread, an anomaly outside the unifying fabric. Each man would leave the tribe on his vision quest at the beginning of adulthood, only to return, again, as part of the tribe, once he had experienced the vision, specific to himself, of his spiritual identity. Armed with nothing but his wits and pride and a crude weapon, a boy began the journey that could last a week, a month or half a year. When he returned, he was a man. Or so Legend has it, because whether you were living before 1492 or after the atomic bomb, if you’re going to understand your part in the fabric of Earth’s life, then you have to take your quest for understanding to the source and live on earth as if your life depended on it — on its air, its water, its futurity.
CURTIS EDWARDS DIED THIS MORNING IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS SON.
That’s why Lester gave these branches to me — to perform a ritual, the ritual of cleansing fire, the spirit medicine of smoke.
And there are plenty of places on this route out of Nevada — there’s nothing here but place — where I could pull off down a dusty road to find a quiet spot, but as I head West for California on the highway running next to the Union Pacific tracks, it occurs to me that, for a good portion of his life, before that fateful morning in the Shenandoah National Park, Curtis Edwards was a porter, working for The Road, riding rails. He was a train man.
Head for Barstow, I tell myself.
If he had been working the transcontinental passenger line, chances are he would have passed through Barstow one way or another, it would have been a place he would have known.
I don’t stop at Baker, don’t stop at The Mad Greek, press on another hundred miles and exit I-15 at Route 66. The sun has just passed its apogee, tilting toward the West and there are hardly any shadows on the desolate Main Street to soften its appearance of stark and blasted bankruptcy.
A couple bars and resale stores are open but most buildings are vacant, either out of business or going and the feeling on this stretch of 66 down to the railroad yard is one of failure and foreclosure.
A trainyard without moving trains is certainly a sad and haunting place and I realize as I park the car that what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places. A train at rest is just another big machine but a train moving through a landscape is a process, and it carries with it all the mystery of journey, like a promise.
There are a couple stranded engines on the sidings, but instead of moving trains what the Barstow station has this afternoon are buses, two of them with Mojave Sun Country Tours written on their sides, disgorging tourists of the most obsessive kind, the ones who’ll go to any length to photograph a Harvey House or a red caboose.
There are too many people here for me to carry out a ritual so I leave the packet on the seat and make my way around the tourists on the platform, down, onto the tracks.
When I’m out in the Dakotas or in places like Marathon, Texas, where the main streets of the towns have only one side and the train tracks run like a parallel street past the buildings, my favorite two games to play are Fry the Penny and Catch the Vanishing. I don’t know whether it’s the heat, the weight or the speed of the passing train that fries the penny I put down on the track but that damn coin comes out looking like it’s been to hell and back. Catch the Vanishing is an exercise of hide and seek, and one I can do anywhere with a flat unbroken view of the horizon, but it’s at its best on a train track because of the illusion that the vanishing point — toward which one can walk forever but never catch—is the point of union where two lines come together, join, as if the past might unite, somewhere, with the future. I look West down the long rail now to a point where it seems to disappear and think of Curtis Edwards, and of Edward Curtis, too. Edward Curtis thought the Indians were vanishing — he called them The Vanishing Race. He based most of his conclusions on that error of fact and photographed them with a false solemnity appropriate to his belief that they were expiring in front of him. That’s part of why he made them look so beautiful — it was his funerary legacy to them. We think today that his accomplishment was to have captured all their faces in the midst of life, but, really, he believed that he was making images of people on the brink of their extinction, capturing them in death, at a moment when they were passing from one way of being to non-.
As the Colonel watched his father pass this morning.
For reasons that only a bureaucratic mind could understand, both he and I, as the deputed closest living relative on record, had to sign the hospital paperwork after Curtis Edwards died.
We waited in the corridor together.
“Can I ask you something—?” I began. “Do you ever dream you’re flying?”
“—doesn’t everybody?”
“—no, I mean: you really fly. So I wonder if your dreams are different from, say, someone else’s. Your father, for instance. Do you think your father ever dreamed that he was flying?”
He stared at me.
“That’s not what you want to know.”
“—it is. Because sometimes I dream I’m flying in across the whole United States…”
“That’s not what you want to know,” he said again. “You don’t want to know if I dream of flying.”
“—no, I really do, I—”
“Your father hung himself. You want to know what he was dreaming, when he jumped.”
When the papers came for us to sign I watched the Colonel tick the box for CREMATION on the form that designated where the hospital should send the body.
“I think that’s best, under the circumstances, don’t you?” he asked.