Adrift in America:

Diary of a Minimalist Mariner

By Sid Leavitt

© Copyright by the author 1992

To National Sanitation Services

Long may its field survey unit

patrol the highways of America

I. A Place

Charleston, South Carolina. January 21, 1989.

As it heads north into Charleston, Route 17 narrows to a two-way highway and imposes a long series of traffic lights against motorists trying to hurry through the downtown area. I look around at drivers stopped on either side of me. Their faces are serious, anxious, frustrated. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t share their discomfort. I feel at home.

Later, parked for the night in a stand of jack pines near a small airport north of Charleston, I put the feeling into more words:

We all need a little place of our own. I have a place, and it is little, but I own it, and it seems to provide just about everything I require of a place. In fact, it provides more than any of the larger places I have owned. It can do this because it is adapted – in truth, over-adapted – to one of modern civilization’s more vulgar byproducts, a byproduct that in its vulgarity connects my place with just about every other place I have ever been or would ever want to be.

II. Two Words

Sanford, Maine. May 16, 1988.

The late morning sun beats down on King’s Shopping Plaza, warming the truck after a cold night. I open the side windows and smell it. Nearby, men are rebuilding the plaza entrance and several miles of Route 109. I walk along Route 109 and smell it. The smell is everywhere.

Bituminous concrete.

If I were at a party for a young graduate who I thought needed advice about the future, I would lean forward with a crooked grin and whisper just those two words: “Bituminous concrete.”

All right, maybe it isn’t for everybody. Maybe the future belongs to the other petroleum byproduct the other old guy whispered in just one word. But as the years go by, I find fewer redeeming qualities in plastics.

Bituminous concrete – the stuff highways and parking lots are made of, otherwise known as asphalt, blacktop, hot top, macadam, pavement, tar, tarvia or tarmac – covers tens of thousands of square miles of the United States. It is ugly, as only a sludge from decomposed dinosaurs and rotted monster ferns can be. And it is spreading.

But running along it and stretching away from it is still a lot of country.

And most of it is still free.

III. Another Beautiful Day

Zephyrhills, Florida. December 3, 1988.

The evening sky is the kind they name citrus cocktails for – orange bleeding smoothly into a blue as pale and serene as the waters around the peninsula. It has been another beautiful Florida day. I sit on the couch in a soft breeze, thinking it now smells only slightly sweet from the sewage leak, and peer through my reading glasses for the last of the thistle spines embedded in my feet. I find a flea instead and use the tweezers on him.

The thistles caught me by surprise this morning when I walked barefoot onto the dew-covered lawn behind the house in Zephyrhills where Ma, Granny and their friend Henry are spending the winter. I was halfway around the truck when I sensed it wasn’t the dew making my soles tingle. I lifted a foot and looked at the underside. Bristling with thistles. I hopped back around the truck and dove into the cabin door on my hands and knees, twisting around in the narrow doorway to get at the bottom of my feet. I thought of my cat, Bonzo. He had made dozens of trips in and out of the truck since we’d arrived the previous afternoon. Why haven’t those things bothered him?

Ah well, I grimace, plucking the last of the little balls of barbed wire from my undersurfaces, Bonzo is clearly the one creature in this truck who knows how to travel light.

Now there will be an additional complication in repairing the leaking discharge valve beneath the truck’s sewage holding tank. It is hard enough to crawl under there under the best of conditions. I will have to borrow a rubber mat from my mother to cushion my back against the thistles.

Damn, the whole sleeve will have to be replaced, and it is coated on the inside with sludge that, even when you know it’s yours, makes your eyes roll back when you put your hands in it.

There are other problems. The fanbelt keeps stretching loose, causing the engine to run hotter than it should. The bottom shelf in the clothes closet is working loose from the staples that secure it to the walls, causing the linen to sag down into the gas heater. Somewhere on the road, I have lost a rear bumper plug, and, as a result, a 10-foot collapsible sewer hose has wriggled onto the highway behind it.

For two and a half years, I have been living at a campground in Maine in this truck, unhooking it for weekend trips, trying to identify the weak spots and fortify them, trying to get whatever is going to break down to break down so I can repair it. Now, barely a week on the open road, the goddamned thing is falling apart.

Well, that’s why this has been planned as a pit stop, and soon I will be heading for Connecticut to join my wife, Diane, for the Christmas holidays, and we will settle the last details in this exciting new phase of our lives.

Evening has turned to night, and Bonzo and I convert the couch to a bed and slide into the sheets together. I can’t sleep. About midnight, I look out the window and see a thin crescent moon rising.

I sit at night and watch the skies

To see the moon in her ascent.

I sit alone and rationalize

The separated time we’ve spent.

Six weeks later, I am at a rural crossroads 60 miles north of Zephyrhills, parked beneath a live oak tree beside a row of empty vegetable stalls owned by Mr. Peoples. I have been parked here for a few hours before he drives up in a station wagon full of kids sharing his milk chocolate good looks, surveys my truck and asks if I am the new guy running the stalls. No, I say, I don’t know who the owner is. Well, he is the owner, he says, and I am welcome to stay here, but if the new guy shows up, will I please tell him Mr. Peoples – spelled the same as “peoples” – is looking for him. Mr. Peoples then drives away with the milk-chocolate-handsome kids waving.

As the afternoon sun makes its way beneath the spreading tree, I watch two other kids, lighter and pinker in tone, walking along Route 42 where it leads away east from Route 301 toward the railroad tracks. I walked there earlier, getting my exercise in the sun. The kids are walking slower.

Diane didn’t think the new phase of our lives was exciting at all. In fact, due to her father’s illness – I know, I told her, I was worried, too – due to that and other things, she said, she wouldn’t be able to join me in New Orleans during the February break from her teaching job. As for the spring break and our plans for Savannah, well, that was just too far in the future.

The kids get to the railroad crossing and turn south onto the tracks. Now they are facing directly into the sun. I continue to watch them, wondering what it would be like to have kids, as if the world actually needed any more.

Diane and I argued. I was angry and loud, shouting about why she didn’t tell me before this, anyway. She sat there sullen and disgusted, fed up with me and that stupid truck.

Well, at least the truck is running much better now. After 2,500 quick miles to Connecticut and back – Christmas ended early – the fanbelt has found its operating length, the closet shelf is holding tight beneath the screws and wires I have applied, and a new rubber bumper plug, thanks to some well-placed hammer blows, is holding fast to a new 10-foot length of sewer hose.

Even the mighty Bonzo has learned to walk on a Chihuahua-size dog harness and long piece of clothesline I have fitted him with for outdoor visits. I reel him in from the tall grass behind the vegetable stalls and stroke him into a hypnotic purr. You can never tell about women, but it looks like we’re on our own. Through the dark canopy of gnarled branches and glossy jade leaves, we can see the first stars of evening. It has been another beautiful Florida day.

IV. Tom Atwell

Portland, Maine. October 15, 1987.

“It’s great inviting Sid over for dinner,” Tom Atwell says. “He drives to your house in his house and has the dinner ready for you when he gets there.”

Tom Atwell is a redhaired, red-bearded guy with a temperament to match, especially when it confronts managers or anyone else who doesn’t help him get his job done. Actually, he never has invited me over for dinner. He just says that because we both think it is funny. I also should point out that the quote isn’t quite accurate. He rarely refers to me as Sid. He calls me El Pit, a corruption of LPIT, which is an acronym for late-person-in-training, which is what Tom dubbed me when he trained me to replace him as the newspaper’s late editor. The late editor is the last person on the news desk who gets the final morning editions out, and at the time, the last morning edition was going off the floor at 2:20 a.m. Tom was glad to get out of that slot. I am glad to be in it. I would stay in it permanently, but the managers already are suspicious of me for several reasons. First, I have voluntarily shifted from full-time reporter to part-time editor, a move they view as a loss of initiative. It is, but not for the reasons they think. When they ask me why I have done it, I say I am tired after more than 20 years as a reporter, and editing is a lot easier than reporting. Since they all consider themselves editors, I’m sure they don’t like the answer, but it happens to be true. A good reporter has to be a good editor to start with, making all the judgments an editor would make about why a story is important and what it should say, then is faced with the additional task of having to research and write it. As far as I’m concerned, my lack of initiative isn’t that I have moved from full-time to part-time – I want to be a full-time editor, and the part-time job seems to be the best way to convince them I am “qualified” as an editor. As far as I’m concerned, I tell them, the loss of initiative is that I have been willing to shift in fact from reporter to editor, a move I see as a step down toward the spiritual abyss called management.

“You can’t hold these things in, Sid,” Tom is fond of saying. “Tell us how you really feel.”

I am willing to make this move, I tell the managers, because while I am no longer able to function as a good reporter, I still need to work another six or seven years before I can hit the road in my truck. They say I have a bad attitude. Hell, I already know that. I developed it in the early 1960s when I was in the Army. What I can’t understand, I tell them, is that a company that insists on candor from everyone it deals with journalistically has such a hard time dealing with candor from its own employees.

Later, I have my last conversation with the company’s rising young assistant executive managing editor or whatever his title is. It is the last conversation not because it takes place shortly before I leave the company – I will stay on for nearly a year afterward – but because it takes place shortly before he starts using surrogates to deal with underlings who don’t agree with him. He and I have been at the company about the same length of time – a dozen years or so – but he is at least that many years younger than me. I came to the company with about a dozen years of experience on various reporting jobs. He came here from a cub editing job somewhere. I was put to work out in the bureaus chasing stories, while he worked in the main office through a succession of titles I never paid much attention to. He is the kind of guy you don’t pay much attention to until he pops up one day with a title that, even if you can’t get it straight, means he is a guy you now have to contend with. Whatever his title is – I honestly can’t remember if it’s assistant executive editor, assistant managing editor, assistant executive managing editor or whatever – it means he is the heir-apparent to the most powerful job in the editorial department, the executive editorship.

It’s funny how your physical perception of someone is related to how you feel about that person. We all know that physical appearance, especially physical attractiveness, influences the way we feel about someone, but I have learned that the converse is true: The way you feel about someone can influence whether that person looks physically attractive or unattractive to you. This guy has pale scrubbed skin and neatly clipped dark hair reminiscent of the trim swarthy features that Hitler tried to pass off as the classical Aryan look. Diane has the same combination of light skin and dark hair, and I consider her very attractive. On this guy, the combination produces a cross between a young Hitler and a young Stalin.

“Well, Sid, they tell me you’re doing a good job in the late slot. As you know, when you took that job on a temporary basis, I told you I saw no reason it wouldn’t become permanent ….”

There is a big “but” coming along somewhere, but I know this guy too well to expect him to say it. He’s attended too many management workshops to say a negative word straight out. A long pause and a change of tone will accomplish the same thing.

He takes a long pause.

“As you also know,” he continues in a voice about half an octave lower, “we have now finished the Editorial Directions project.”

Oh yes, I know about Editorial Directions – a massive study, headed by him, that solicits advice from employees, readers and public officials about how we can improve our newspapers (the company publishes afternoon and Sunday papers as well as the morning paper on which I work). There are meetings, seminars, questionnaires, surveys, even a film with background music from Vivaldi that chronicles the progress of Editorial Directions. It is a fraud, but only a few of us are willing to say that out loud, even to people we trust. The purpose of Editorial Directions is to give cover to this guy, who is next in line to run the place, to line up his own people – that is, those whose responses to Editorial Directions agree with what he has already decided to do. My response is succinct but genuinely felt: On my questionnaire, I answer none of the questions – most of them inquiring about my attitude toward my employers rather than my profession – and write simply that if they want better newspapers, they should put the employees who know how to put out better newspapers in the positions where they can do it. Who are these employees? If the managers don’t know, they should replace themselves. Too simple, I guess.

The biggest change engineered by the assistant executive managing whatever, presumably as a result of Editorial Directions, is to create a new level of management just below him and just above all the rest of us. Good insulation from those of us who might remember him in less-than-exalted terms. To pay for these new front-office positions, slots will be removed from the news desk.

“In creating these new positions, we have had to rethink our editorial structure, and the late slot will no longer be part of it,” he says. “Sorry.”

“Sorry” is a word nearly always abused. Those who are truly sorry don’t have to say it more than once. Those who are not sorry should never say it even once. Unless, of course, they get pleasure from it.

This conversation takes place three weeks before Christmas. I wonder if this guy has already chipped the coal for the neighbor kids’ stockings.

The company fills the next two full-time editing jobs by hiring two outsiders who happen to be former college chums of the assistant managing whatever. One of them, a roundish, jovial sort of guy, becomes the surrogate who deals with disgruntled underlings. A month or so before I leave, he calls me into his office to explain why I have been passed over for the latest full-time editing vacancy.

I cut him short, rising to deliver a last desperate, breathless speech: “You know, the sad thing about what you’re going to tell me is that you’re ignoring the fact that I’m a faithful employee. Sure, I bitch and moan and swear about management, but I keep it down to a dull roar. I’ve never let it get into my writing or editing, and I’ve always done what I was told. For the past 12 years, I have tried to do the best job I could because I have pride in my work and pride in these newspapers. With all due respect, these newspapers aren’t just the company that owns them or the management that runs them. They are also the people who work for them and the people who read them. They are all of us. I am part of these newspapers, and they are part of me. Loyalty has to mean something, but you guys are ignoring mine.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “The same thing happened to my father. He was with A&P for 40 years, and they dumped him.”

That’s it. End of discussion.

It seems to me his father has gotten screwed twice, once by A&P and once by having a son who emulates not him but the company that screwed him.

The third time they pass me over, it is for another outsider who, according to the announcement of his impending arrival, has distinguished himself largely in his spare time by winning awards as a furniture designer. By the time I see this announcement on the bulletin board, the handwriting beneath it is now so huge that I can’t ignore it: They aren’t hiring bad-attitude guys who spend their spare time perfecting the art of living in a truck.

My relatively new lifestyle turns out to be a wise choice. With the new full-timers – actually, the furniture maker turns out to be the best of the three, a decent editor – the company says it is up to strength and will be cutting back part-timers. I have been working four, five, sometimes six days a week. Now, I am told, I will be cut back to two, probably one, possibly no days a week. This, and winter is coming.

So goodbye, El Pit.

I have done a good job on the late desk. Tom did a good job there, too. He’s always had a knack for seeing what’s important.

V. Freedom

Portland, Maine. November 9, 1988.

I’ve always felt that Portland City Hall, a handsomely spired structure dating from the early 1900s, has been too cozily nuzzled in subsequent years by the newspaper’s three office and production buildings. The main editorial and administrative building is directly across Congress Street from city hall, and the other two sidle up on the same side of the street, all three of them done in a yellow brick usually reserved for prisons or asylums. But today, as I sit parked in the city hall 15-minute zone, I am grateful for the incestuous propinquity. It has allowed me to keep an eye on my truck from the second and fifth floors of the editorial building while I sign out of the credit union and hunt down my last pay check. Actually, the whole process takes only about 10 minutes.

I’ve thought a lot about freedom, and this is what it boils down to:

Freedom is being able to say “Fuck you” to your boss and be out of town 10 minutes later with everything you own.

Coarse, yes. Like bituminous concrete. Which is also durable.

VI. Honeymoon

Chelmsford, Massachusetts. May 24, 1986.

The first night I spend in the truck is like a honeymoon. I love this magnificent creation, and I do everything wrong.

The truck is what back in the 1950s we would have called a cherry. Talk about your little old lady from Pasadena. I bought the truck today from a little old couple from Pennsylvania who have driven it, no lie, only once – from the factory where it was assembled in Indiana to their home in northeastern Pennsylvania. The odometer shows only 650 miles, and I don’t think either husband or wife, both well into their 70s, crawled underneath to set back the mileage reading. I think their one trip in the truck was enough to convince the wife that it was too cramped for them, and I think she had trouble climbing into the loft over the cab.

I knew this truck long before I first saw it today in their driveway. I have seen larger models of the truck on dealer’s lots in Maine, and I have studied a brochure of the model I wanted in detail before I found the Pennsylvania couple with one for sale. I have done my homework so well, poring over the brochure’s schematics and interior photos, that I know before I ever see the truck precisely what size utility cabinet I can inlay beside the sink and exactly how many jars of dry goods I can fit on top of the refrigerator.

“It’s a nice-looking rig,” Mark Roberge says, sliding out from under the front end. Mark, a friend, neighbor and first-class auto repairman who has come along to give the truck a mechanical inspection, is satisfied within a few minutes that the truck is sound.

It takes me barely 30 seconds looking in the side door to be satisfied that the living area is exactly what I have seen in the brochure.

Diane kicks the tires solemnly.

The truck and I spend our first night together in a rest area off Route 495 just west of Chelmsford. The rest area is simple but scenic, a sidetrack of blacktop running off the six-lane highway onto an overlook bordered by a line of trees. By the time I pull off there at 6:30 p.m., I have been driving for nearly 12 hours in a trip that has begun at dawn in my car in southern Maine, gone to southern Connecticut to pick up Diane and then on to Pennsylvania to get the truck. Mark then drives my car straight back to Maine, challenging, I will later learn, several land-speed records for parts of the Massachusetts and Maine Turnpikes. Diane and I drive the truck back to Connecticut – well, actually, I drive the truck, dawdling and reveling through the hilly, winding roads of northeastern Pennsylvania while she lies in the loft reading a book and, with what in retrospect I will admit is reasonably good humor, tolerating the gasps and jerks of a male experimenting with his big new toy. By the time we get out of Pennsylvania, the afternoon is wearing on, so we speed on the throughway across New York State’s southern throat and on to the southern Connecticut coast and Diane’s home near New Haven. We haven’t discussed whether I will spend the night with her or go back to Maine, but by the time we get to her place, we both know without saying that I will be pushing north.

“Have a safe trip,” she says with that hint of a frown I have seen before.

I have passed this rest area on at least several hundred trips across New England, the most recent ones to connect with Diane, but I can’t remember ever stopping at it. But I am getting woozy. The late spring sun has been bright all day, and I have consumed a temperate but steady amount of beer from the two ice chests Mark and I brought along. By 6:30, the rest area is too inviting. Blue shadows have seeped out of the tree line and are blotting through the evergreens and budding hardwoods, creating an aquamarine haven that beckons me from the yellow confusion of the highway. I pull to the far curb of the rest area and shut off the engine. Across the blacktop of the rest area and a divider beyond, three lanes of traffic hurtle north at a pace that looks even more frantic against three lanes of traffic hurtling south.

There are things I have planned to do to the truck before I start living in it, but I can’t wait. I back it into a space toward the tree line, pull the ignition key and crawl through the seats into the truck’s living area.

It is the first time I have stood in the living area. Shadows have invaded the interior, obscuring all but the outlines of what is here. From the brochure and my quick inspection, I know perfectly well what the interior looks like, even the textures and glosses of the surfaces, but now I can smell it. It smells clean and new. Not the new of a new car but the new of a new apartment – new carpet, new furniture, new appliances.

I walk to the rear of the truck and sit at the aftermost end of one of the side couches. I turn on one of the lights beneath the cabinet that runs along the ceiling over the couch. The light clicks on like one of those overhead lights on a ship or plane, illuminating only what is beneath it. Through the beam of light, I look forward through the length of the truck. On my immediate left, within reach, is the refrigerator, built into a veneer casing that transforms the top of the refrigerator into a large shelf. The overhead cabinet runs forward a foot above the refrigerator and butts into the top of a narrow floor-to-ceiling clothes closet. Beyond that, although the refrigerator hides it from my vision, I know there is a floor-to-ceiling fiberglass stall that holds the toilet and shower. Across from the refrigerator, beneath a similar overhead cabinet running the other side of the ceiling, is the sink, all stainless steel and shiny. Beyond the sink, a polished white enamel stove, four small burners, a tiny oven. Wash the vegetables, steam them on the stove. Reach behind you for the wine in the refrigerator.

It is all here. A house on wheels. Not an 11-room house with 44 wooden shutters that I won’t get stripped and painted until well into the 21st century. It is a one-room house with everything I need to sustain life. Sure, the veneer paneling is fake, but with the real wood on the cabinet door facings, it is convincing enough. Sure, the heavy brown plaid upholstery and the sculptured beige carpeting that runs along the floor and up the walls are a little overdone. But hell, they are practical – carpeting for insulation, heavy plaid for stain-hiding durability, veneer in place of wood to make the truck lighter. And the appliances – stove, refrigerator, toilet, shower, sink – all shiny, new and virginal, as only a little old couple would leave them.

It is one new, clean-smelling, tight, dark, warm, friendly place.

And it is mine.

I retrieve the ice chests from the front seat and transfer the remaining cans of beer into the refrigerator. I click a small dial beneath the refrigerator to turn it on. I empty water and ice from the chests into the sink, stick a couple of beers into the drained cubes for immediate use.

I sit back down. Crack open a beer. A cold mist, like the mist from a popped champagne bottle, rises from the fliptop hole.

“Yesssss.” I clench my fists in a gesture popular these days and throw my head back to thank whoever it is up there who likes me. Through the skylight, I can see the last outlines of day etched on the high spring clouds.

I slide open the curtain behind the opposite couch. A stream of taillights is receding quietly in the northbound lanes, red spots suspended in the twilight, reflecting on the worn highway like the running lights of long ships leaving harbor.

I sit back with another beer and open Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt. The doctor of gonzo journalism will later rave about drugs, thugs, fear and loathing in Las Vegas, but in the passage where I find him, he is back in 1963 in a fairly sober trip through Central and South America, just starting to raise his voice about what the Anglos are doing to the Latinos. I share his indignation, and I’m sure the good doctor would approve of my growing inebriation this night.

I look up from the book and notice my reflection in the opposite window. The tinted glass gives an amber glow to the light cascading over my hair, brow line, nose, chin, shoulders, hand, beer can, book. I feel like a passerby, looking in on a man at home in his favorite chair, reading a book, sipping a drink, looking up to contemplate a passage he has just read. The man looks older than me, but his expression tells me he is more content. He isn’t worried about his job, his creditors, the women he has loved, the women he has lost, the women he would like to love and lose.

I have to use the toilet several times, once for both functions, and that gets a little sticky because I have used the last of the onboard water. I wish I had saved some of the water from the ice chests. No problem. Have another beer. That’ll wash it down.

Somewhere around 10 p.m., I am having trouble seeing the pages of Hunter’s book. The light seems yellow and dim. So who cares? It is still a wonderful light. I turn it off, stumble forward into the cab to turn on the truck radio and, grabbing a couple of couch cushions, crawl into the loft and go to sleep listening to romantic music from a local FM station.

I will later learn several things.

For one thing, I will learn that when the truck is stopped and not hooked to outside electricity, the refrigerator must be switched onto LP gas, not the 12V setting I have chosen. Otherwise, the refrigerator’s heavy power demand will wipe out the cabin’s auxiliary power – the 12-volt source that also runs the interior lights – in about … let’s see, 7 to 10 p.m. … yup, about three hours.

I also will learn that the cab radio is connected to the truck’s main battery – the one that starts the engine – and shouldn’t be run all night.

I also will learn that running the water pump until it is dry will at least blow a fuse – the fuse box is beneath the couch where I was sitting – and sometimes the pump itself.

And I will learn that putting waste into the sewage holding tank without much water for dilution will make a mixture that, with road shock and exhaust heat, will turn into a paste that is difficult and unpleasant to hose out. A corollary: Urinating in the sink has a different but equally unpleasant effect in the drainwater holding tank.

I know none of this when I awake the morning after, sandwiched between the couch cushions and sweating in the early sunlight streaming into the loft windows.

I am just glad the truck is still here, and, as I pull a slightly cool can of beer from the refrigerator, I think how domestic and friendly the truck looks in the morning sunshine.

What a sweet machine.

I won’t realize until later, when I learn how to run all the systems and have to clean out the holding tanks, how sweet the truck really has been, how much it has forgiven me on our honeymoon night.

I start the engine, notice the radio is on and turn it off, pull out onto the highway and take a long pull on the beer can as we get up to speed again.

“Yesssss.”

VII. My Truck

Biddeford, Maine. May 25, 1986.

This is my truck.

I love this truck. If things go right, I’m going to live in it for 20 years or 200,000 miles, whichever comes first.

VIII. Stick in the Mud

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. August 1987.

Let me get something straight. While I love my truck, I am not generally enamored of trucks. And while it has been more than a year since I have had a permanent address, I am not a compulsive traveler.

Truck worship is a phenomenon that, if it weren’t so costly, would be merely silly. We Americans seem to prefer automotion to locomotion, subsidizing highways that go anywhere rather than railroads that go on schedules, allowing tractor-trailer trucks to carry most of our goods to market, even though locomotives could handle the same volume and variety of goods with a little planning and about a third less diesel fuel. The phenomenon may have grown out of the Old West and a man’s love affair with his horse, a beast of burden that couldn’t pull as much or run as fast as a steam engine but could veer off the fixed track and carry a man to any horizon. I say ‘man’ because, while they have a certain number of female groupies, trucks still are idols served mostly by males. You still see the cowboy imagery in TV commercials for four-by-fours and long-body pickups that in one frame are carrying hay from field to barn and in the next frame are clambering over the Rockies or bouncing through Death Valley. Beneath the images, however, is a different reality. Most small trucks are sold nowadays not to haul payloads – you can see that in the shiny paint of the cargo beds – but to carry off the impression that the owners could lead a blue-collar working life if they wanted to. It’s a strange message: I’m not a commoner, I’m just pretending to be one. It seems to me that faking commonness has to be worse than faking distinction. Well, there are a few exceptions. One example of feigned stylishness that particularly annoys me is the Chevrolet Corvette, a plastic-encased car of such poor design – straight out of the Jetsons – that it can’t get out of most driveways without bottoming out. What the Corvette says to me is that General Motors, in a display of colossal arrogance and cynicism, knew there would be enough buyers too stupid to realize that the same amount of money would have gotten them any number of other sports cars that are faster, more maneuverable, more efficient, more comfortable and certainly, to anyone whose taste goes beyond food that also is encased in plastic, more stylish.

So much for vehicles that make statements.

Now for traveling.

Considering that a person standing in one spot on earth is moving at a speed up to 1,000 miles per hour, depending on latitude, as the planet rotates around its axis, and considering that this circular motion is sprung into a spiral and sped up by 66,000 miles per hour as the earth revolves around the sun, and considering that both heavenly bodies are only specks in a galaxy that is pinwheeling at god knows what speed and trajectory through the universe, I’d say it was a pretty good accomplishment just to stand in one spot on earth. I have felt this way for a long time. As evidence, I offer a cross-section of statements, as best I can paraphrase them, that I have made to various wives during the past two decades:

I’ve never understood why people who are bored with where they live will go to great effort to travel to other places where people are equally bored with where they live. – To Peggy, 1975, a car trip from our home in western New Hampshire to a seasonal home in South Carolina that friends let us use for a short vacation.

I’ve never climbed a mountain, and I’m never going to climb a mountain. Why should I punish myself climbing up a pile of rocks from which I could easily fall to my death? – To Mary, 1981, a discussion about the excitement of doing new things.

I just hope the sun is strong enough to tan the white out of my knuckles. – To Diane, 1986, while clutching the back of the seat in front of me during an eight-hour, transoceanic flight to a vacation in Barbados.

My wives, of course, have had other perspectives, and these are exact quotes:

Oh, lovey, you’re so full of shit. – Peggy, who went on to enjoy the scenic and historic highlights of Charleston while I sat in the house, drinking beer and watching South Carolina Educational Television re-enact the War Between the States. On the trip back home, she was refreshed and I was exhausted.

I swear to god, Leavitt, you are the most negative, inflexible, opinionated man I have ever met. – Mary, who liked to call me by my last name, like we were college roommates.

……! – Diane, who just browbeat me into silence with that baleful stare she used on students who got out of line in her classroom.

I think I developed my bad attitude toward traveling during one of the earliest trips I can remember, a trip I like to call the Journey from the Land of Yellow Lines to the Land of White Lines. In the 1940s, when New Hampshire and Maine were even more rural and their roads even more rudimentary, New Hampshire marked its smaller paved roads with a single centerline of yellow paint while Maine did the same in white paint. Those of us along the border could tell what state we were in by the color of the road line. In 1949, when my new stepfather loaded up his logging truck with my mother and us kids and drove off to a new life in Maine, I watched every foot of yellow line as it disappeared beneath the hood. When the line turned white, my heart dropped and I said something poetic like:

“OhMaIdonwannago, ohMaIdonwannago, ohMaIdonwannago.”

“Settle down, dear,” my mother said, hugging me in the front seat as my brother pounded gleefully on the cab roof from where he stood in the back of the truck. “You’ll come to love Maine as much as you do New Hampshire.”

She was right, of course, but it has taken nearly 40 years.

IX. Caldwell

Caldwell, Texas. March 17, 1989.

It is one fine hot day in Caldwell. I am leaning on the passenger door of the truck, waiting for my clothes to dry in the laundromat. In the side mirror, I can see my face being turned rosy by the sun, aided by a kingsize can of beer I am storing just inside the open window on the passenger seat. A few feet away, a man with chestnut arms and face, about my age, leans against a post at the laundromat entrance and sips what appears to be beer from a white coffee mug while his clothes spin around in the machines. His hat explains to whom it belongs and at the same time makes a strangely appropriate observation about the weather: The hat says, “Daddy’s Hat, Daddy’s Hot.”

He can see I’m reading his hat when I ask, “How’s it going, Daddy?”

“Fine enough, sir,” he says, although it comes out something like “Fahn enuff, suh.”

We smile at each other. I bring the can out for a sip and put it back in the truck. He takes a sip from his cup.

We smile at each other again. It is time to start a conversation.

“I was wondering, sir, if you could tell me what these trees are that I’ve been seeing along the road. They look like hardwoods, but I don’t recognize them. There’s some of them across the street, in front of that white house there.”

“What whaht house?” he asks.

“That white house,” I say, pointing.

“Poce sokes,” he says.

“Poor soaks?” I ask.

“Not poe. Poce.”

“How do you spell that?”

“Poce. P, o, s, t.”

“No, not the fence posts. The trees that are behind them.”

“Poce. Poce sokes,” he says.

“Ah, post oaks,” I say. “I guess I’ve heard of them. Small, hardy oaks that were cut for posts by the early ranchers.”

He nods his head. We smile again.

He comes closer to the truck and looks at the Maine license plate. He frowns.

No one is quite sure how the state of Maine got its name. The most common theory is that the state was named because its coast was the mainland that colonial ships followed on their way back to Europe. Or because the Gulf of Maine was the first high sea that those ships bounded over. But there is a lesser-known theory that the state was named for a rural district in France that is still called Maine.

“How you get this truck here?” Daddy asks. “You a long way from home.”

“I drove,” I say.

“Not by boat?” he asks.

“Say, just where do you think Maine is?” I ask.

“Somewhere in Europe, ain’t it?”

I look at him, and we grin at each other again. I bring out the beer can and lift it toward him, he lifts his cup toward me, and we have a drink on it.

“It might as well be, Daddy,” I say. “It might as well be.”

X. Shelter

Biddeford, Maine. April 1986.

As I sit alone in the second of two houses Peggy and I owned during our 13-year marriage, I remember a couple of comments she made about this place that now seem more meaningful and prophetic than she intended.

One comment came just after we had signed the mortgage: “Don’t feel bad, love. It will take only one of us working full-time to pay the mortgage and meet the household expenses.”

The other comment came after we had lived a year or so in the house, which is located near the heart of the mill city of Biddeford: “You know, the only thing wrong about this beautiful house is that we can’t pick it up and move it to some place that is equally beautiful.”

Humans have few real necessities. I’m not talking about amenities that make life worthwhile – wine, music, deep philosophical discussions of Kant’s categorical imperative – but about raw basics that make life possible in the first place:

1. Air.

2. Water.

3. Food.

4. Shelter, maybe.

The first three are indisputably necessities. A human can live only a few minutes without air, a few days without water, a few weeks without food. I put shelter on the list because I’m from the Northeast where, at certain times of winter, being without shelter can be deadly. In other parts of the country, shelter isn’t necessary at all.

The first three on the list have something else in common that sets them apart from shelter. Air is still fairly clean, cheap and available nearly everywhere. The same holds true for water and food, although not everywhere in the world and not through much of human history. The same technology that is fouling our air and may be doing the same to our water and food has nevertheless made those two necessities relatively inexpensive and accessible nearly everywhere in our country. We haven’t made the same progress with shelter.

We Americans spend an inordinate amount of our lives working to support a house, apartment, mobile home, motor home or some other configuration of boards, bricks, cement or sheet metal that provides only one of humanity’s four real necessities – shelter – and even that isn’t on everybody’s list. In my case, I appreciate the profundity of Peggy’s first comment when I find myself alone in the house after our divorce. By this time, there are three mortgages – a second one to repay a personal loan used as the down payment and a third one to give Peggy her share of the house’s equity – and I am working just about full time to pay them and the household expenses. I clear about $350 a week, and the three mortgages total $880 a month – about two and a half weeks of pay before I can start thinking about luxuries like utilities, taxes and food. This is why I have become very analytical about shelter.

Shelter for its own sake is a fairly simple, inexpensive proposition – a bundle of slats and a roll of tarpaper will protect you from the elements – but a shelter gets more complicated and costly when you want to use it for more activities than just hiding from the weather. Drinking and eating, for example. Now the shelter becomes a dwelling. And then there’s all the stuff you need. Not just the hat, coat and rubbers you need when you go outside, but also the glasses to drink the water from and the stove to cook the food on. Not to mention the tables and chairs and couch and bed and so on. Now the shelter is a warehouse. And by now, it is sitting on a solid foundation in a fixed location. Because now all that stuff has to be protected. So you have already made a compact with the rest of society: Look, nobody else can come walking through my place while I’m here or break in and take my stuff when I’m not here, and I in return will pay a mortgage banker or a landlord for the privilege of putting this place aside for my exclusive use.

As I sit at the kitchen table of this house in Biddeford, conscious of all three floors weighing down on me, I decide I’d better minimize my stuff – it is pretty minimal already – and find some way of moving it out of the reach of the bankers and landlords. Because, as Peggy so clairvoyantly observed, the house sure as hell isn’t going to move.

So how does someone who doesn’t particularly like trucks and hates traveling end up thinking about living in a truck designed for vacation trips? It isn’t my first choice, but I know it will take too long to develop an invisibility ray for unlimited bank withdrawals.

Truck lovers think in maximal terms. They want bigger engines, heavier payloads, more speed on the highway, more gears off the road. Being a basically negative guy, I look at it the other way around:

I need something that is barely large enough to hold my stuff, barely powerful enough to move it down the road, barely fast enough to keep ahead of the people who want to be paid for the use of their space.

XI. Paul

Kingston, New York. December 27, 1989.

The man walking toward me is so large that he blots out nearly all the light coming with him through the door from the tool shop to the service bay. In his hand, he holds a four-way tire iron that looks like a cross. The image is timely because it is only two days after Christmas, although in this man’s hand, the cross looks like something he might have torn off the top of a church.

“They told me out front to ask for Paul,” I say.

He says nothing.

“Are you Paul?” I ask.

“Mmmm hmmm, whassaproblem, mista?” he says in a slurred, ponderous voice that comes from a place as hollow as the long concrete service bay. Royal Tire Service of Kingston advertises itself in the Yellow Pages as an outfitter of all trucks, large and small, but the service bay is bare. No lifts, no jacks. Driving into it is like entering a car wash from which all the cleaning equipment has been removed.

“Left rear inside tire. Flat. Road junk,” I say, bowing to his preference for unembellished conversation.

“Hmmmm,” he says. He glowers at the left rear dual wheel, which is now supported only by the outside tire. The tire seems to sag under his gaze.

He is a mountain of a man, 300 or more pounds bulging in a work uniform that once was blue or green but now, like his skin, has become a gray blanket of fresh and faded grease. On the high promontory of his head, his black eyebrows gather in thought.

In the Christmas spirit, I think of another Paul, described by some historians as a large man of intimidating demeanor and unpredictable seizures, maybe epilepsy, maybe just the Holy Ghost, that must have inspired as much fright as faith in the wayward Gentiles.

“Whassit weigh, mista?”

In his rumbling voice, I can hear echoes of some far-off place and time. No, not biblical. Wait, could it be Memphis? Elvis?

“Whassit weigh?” he says louder.

“Huh. Oh, fifty-eight hundred.”

Is this man going to lift the truck himself?

He gestures with the tire iron toward the front office, which is where he presumably wants me to stay until his work is done.

Forty-five minutes later, I ask in the front office if I can return to the service bay. I want to tighten the lug nuts myself so I can get them loose again if I ever have to change a tire on the road. But I am worried about how Paul might take the intrusion.

“Naw, he’s OK,” the office manager says.

Paul has the rear of the truck up on a portable hydraulic jack he has slid beneath the rear axle, and the left rear wheel is on a bench in the tool room, but the tire hasn’t been replaced. The spare is still on its mounting beneath the rear of the truck.

“Couldn’t get underneath,” he says. “Gotta wait for Paul.”

“Aren’t you Paul?”

“I’m Big Paul. He’s Little Paul.”

In a few minutes, a short, slender man named Paul returns from lunch, slides beneath the truck and sets about dismounting the spare.

“Where are you from?” I ask Big Paul.

“Here,” he says.

“No, I mean born and brought up.”

“Here,” he says. “All my life.”

Kingston is the seat of Ulster County, a mostly rural county that sits on the west bank of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. The county’s pastoral fields and forested hills, which to the west and north become the Catskill Mountains, have long been attractive to refugees from both metropolitan areas – everyone from actors to gangsters, Hindus to Hutterians. In my brief sojourns as a reporter for the Kingston-based Daily Freeman, I guess I haven’t come across Big Paul’s sect.

“Done,” he says. The repaired wheel is back on the truck.

“Listen, I wanted to hand-tighten the lug nuts myself,” I say. “Just in case.”

“Won’t do you no good,” he says. “Too much weight. Never lift it on the road.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“One-ton truck. Loaded to three tons. What you got in there?”

“Everything I own,” I say.

“I guess the hell you do,” he rumbles.

“Good thing it has dual wheels,” I say. “Good thing Royal Tire Service has dual Pauls.”

He looks down at me blankly.

XII. Dwelling

Biddeford, Maine. May 31, 1986.

A corollary to the Sid Leavitt Shelter/Stuff Theorem:

The most basic characteristic of a dwelling is not the materials it is made from but the fact that they form an envelope between the occupant and the outside world.

That’s the first thing I learn after I move from an 11-room house into a four-cylinder truck that looks ridiculously small in the circular driveway of the old mansion. This house, with double-bricked walls so thick you can sit sideways in the window sills and a granite cellar that can hold a February chill prisoner until August, makes the daily changes of weather a silent phenomenon to be observed with aristocratic indifference through the panes of the heavy casements. The truck, on the other hand, turns out to be reptilian in its comforts. The air temperature inside a truck, I realize as soon as I have to think about it, is never more than a few minutes from the temperature outside, and the elements are never more than a few millimeters of steel, fiberglass or plastic from entering the cabin. You don’t appreciate just how much velocity raindrops can develop in an eight-mile plunge from thunderhead to earth until they explode in mushrooms three inches above your head as you try to crank the roof vent shut.

But that’s OK. The envelope performs its function. The fiercest rainstorm in the world is no match for a truck, which simply imposes its contour into the downpour and turns the clattering pellets of water aside in obedient rivulets. That’s just the way metals and polymers are. And I will learn in a few short months that when those materials enclose a relatively small air space, even the most insidious chill – in Maine, it likes to slither around at 20 or 30 below for a while every winter – can be banished from that space, given some simple insulation, by an electric space heater or gas stove burner in the same few minutes that it took the warmth to escape.

The envelope’s function goes beyond the physical. I can sit in a supermarket parking lot so close to people that I can hear the key sliding into the lock of their car door, yet the walls of the truck keep me as anonymous as the boy helping my temporary neighbors empty their grocery carriages. If passersby do notice me sitting at a window, they would no more intrude with as much as a stare than they would expect me to get out and slide into their back seat.

The envelope can be any size. In one sense, it can be so compact that it can be folded and put away in a pocket, provided the denominations of the currency in the billfold are large enough. A more common envelope is carried on the back and pitched at night.

Traveling south out of Denver one day, about eight months before I get my truck, I meet a guy named Steve Lutes who wears his envelope.

XIII. Steve Lutes

Denver, Colorado. September 1985.

I don’t notice him in the shadows until I have driven nearly through the underpass, so by the time I pull over to the side of the road, there is a fair distance between us. As I back up, it appears to me that he is too old and heavy to be jogging as easily as he is toward the car.

When he gets in, I can see that the heaviness of his torso doesn’t match his slender face and hands. He isn’t old, either – mid-20s at the most.

Has he been waiting long?

“Since last night,” he says.

In the warmth of the car, he starts unbuttoning his shirt – I should say shirts. Three, maybe four of them, all different plaids. Between layers two and three, he wears a broad white wrapping around his stomach and lower rib cage.

“Injury?” I ask.

“Sheet,” he says. “That’s what I slept under last night.”

It is late morning, and I ask if he is hungry.

“No,” he says, “I had a lot of breakfast. Egg McMuffins.”

There hasn’t been a fast-food place for miles. It turns out that Steve and a couple of his road buddies the previous day came across a McDonald’s dumpster just after the trash had been thrown out from the breakfast shift.

“That’s the best time of day. People order breakfast and then don’t want it. It gets thrown out in those styrofoam containers. You can see that a lot of them haven’t been touched.”

Steve and the gang gorged themselves on breakfasts, then stowed away several more of the styrofoam units for the road.

Why has he been waiting in the underpass instead of out in the open where he could be more easily seen?

“The weather,” he says. “It comes on you quick up here.”

The day is crisp and bright, the kind of day mountain resorts wait for to have their brochure photos shot.

A couple of hours later, I am ready for lunch. Steve says that will be OK with him, too. Although this is my pre-truck days, I am minimalizing even now. I am on a shakedown cruise in a 1977-78 Datsun that neighbor Mark has put together and traded to me for a small piece of abutting property. I am trying to see how far the car and I can go on a minimal amount of food and services during a vacation from my job in Maine. The car is a hatchback, and I have put down the rear seat so I can sleep in the back and, a pleasant side benefit, so my provisions will be more reachable from the front seat.

I open an Igloo cooler and begin cutting off slabs of food I have prepared for the trip. I have cooked half a ham – food writer Irma Rombauer defines eternity as a whole ham and two people – baked four loaves of sourdough bread and put in a five-pound block of cheese. As I am tearing off lettuce to put on top of all this, I notice Steve is watching this process with what appears to be trepidation.

Here’s a guy who 24 hours ago was wading through a garbage dumpster, and now he’s not sure about my sandwiches.

“Something wrong?” I ask.

“Doesn’t that use up a lot of ice? Where do you get all the ice?” he asks.

“I pick it up each time I stop for beer and wine,” I say, opening the other cooler and watching a smile spread across his face.

We make quite an excavation in the beverage cooler by nightfall.

Steve is a good-looking young man with pale features that look delicate within their frame of shaggy black hair. Given a shave, a haircut and a three-piece suit, he would fit right in on Wall Street. And that is a depressing thought. His manner of speech also is delicate – quiet, slow, deliberate – and I let him take his time.

Steve follows the seasons. Spring and summer in Denver. Fall and winter in Tucson. Since he doesn’t work in either place, his only means of transportation is his thumb. His parents live in Tucson, but they don’t like him around. Something about his being a bad influence on a younger sister. Instead, he hangs out at a church where he rakes leaves and does other chores in exchange for a bed and an occasional meal.

There is only a limited number of overland routes between Denver and Tucson, and all of them make a huge rectangular dogleg around the Rocky Mountains. Steve usually takes the simplest, the backwards L formed by Route 25 east of the Rockies and Route 10 across southern New Mexico and Arizona. In the spring, he hitchhikes to Denver for the summer. In the fall, he hitches back to Tucson for the winter.

In both places, because of his predominantly outdoor lifestyle, Steve occasionally runs into the police, who just as occasionally lock him up for the night. Although he has no church for a haven in Denver as he does in Tucson, he says he likes the police in Denver better.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“The Denver cops don’t step on your fingers.”

He turns out to be right about the weather. We are traveling along an eastern rib of the Rockies, and while the road is doing only gentle ups and downs, it isn’t so obvious that the downs are bottoming out at more than 4,000 feet. In New Hampshire, where I come from, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast at only 6,000 feet. I have no experience with weather that starts at that altitude.

We are headed up a rise between two ridges when the stars go out like someone has pulled a black sheet across the sky, and from the darkest part of it, a pitchfork of lightning comes down in three prongs. I roll down my window and stick my face into the air to see if it is cold enough to freeze. Probably not, I decide, but without much resolution. It is, after all, September, and we are in the mountains.

Now I know that lightning doesn’t always descend from sky to earth. Lightning also can rise from earth to sky. But I learn in Colorado that when the earth is in the sky to begin with, lightning can go all over the place. What has been a quiet alpine landscape turns into a drive-through electric arcade, lights flashing from every direction, long spikes of incandescence arching across the sky, touching down in bony fingers that leave faint scratches on your vision as they disappear.

I look over at Steve. He is sitting stock still, his right foot pulled to the seat so that his right knee is higher than the left, both arms straight out with the elbows bent so that his hands are lined up vertically at his face, one hand in front of the other as if he is about to give the world a solemn nose-thumbing.

“It’s a karate position,” he says secretively, his lips barely moving. “It protects you from everything.”

He looks pretty weird sitting like that with his profile etched in green light from the dashboard. But I have to admit it makes me feel safer. And we never do get hit by lightning. Or any precipitation, for that matter.

My next exposure to Steve’s karate comes the following day after a long stop in the northeastern grasslands of New Mexico – Steve suggests I borrow a bolt from an engine mount to secure an emission-control pulley that keeps whirling off, a solution I also would have thought of in, say, two or three days – when we stop for an early dinner at a restaurant near Albuquerque. It is a fancy-looking place in a plastic sort of way, and Steve is hesitant about going in, but I have found that most restaurants will admit even the most commonly dressed patrons as long as they are quiet, clean and pay their bills. We qualify on at least two of those counts.

While the hostess is taking us across an open space that appears to be a dance floor, I notice that Steve is no longer with us. The hostess and I look back, and there is Steve, stuck in his karate pose, right knee up, elbows bent, hands at his face, staring up at a large spherical glass fixture filled with multicolored lights. He stands there unmoving, like a praying stork.

“He’ll be all right in a minute,” I tell the hostess with a confidence I have no reason for. To her credit, she says simply, “Fine,” and continues leading me to a window seat. People at tables around the edge of the dance floor must notice Steve, but they never so much as glance his way.

When Steve sits down a minute later, he says, “Those lights try to control you.”

I say nothing.

“Look at those,” he says, pointing into the window. “Don’t you feel they’re trying to control you?”

“Steve, those are reflections from that globe thing over the middle of the floor.”

“Reflected lights are worse,” he says. “They’re more powerful.”

Thank god for LSD, I think – the gift that keeps on giving, the lift that keeps on living, the score that has a thousand refrains and no finale. No wonder his parents are scared.

On the morning of the third day, after a night of tossing down toasts of beer and wine to Elephant Butte, a name I found on the road atlas, and sleeping on the ground near Truth or Consequences, we watch a red sun come up over mountains that look like pipe organs as we drive into southern New Mexico. It is time for us to split, Steve west along Route 10 and I south into Mexico.

We stop for breakfast near Las Cruces at a diner that is empty except for a middle-aged waitress who looks as hard as the white formica counter. We order breakfast and try to sip coffee. Steve has to go off to the men’s room, probably to throw up. The waitress, who has spent most of the time we have been there with her back to us, looking into the window where she has placed our orders, comes over to me and says:

“Your friend’s schizophrenic, huh?”

“Huh?” I say, hearing my echo.

“Poor kid. I’ve got a son who’s just like that. Real quiet, like he’s someplace else most of the time. Hard time concentrating. Easily distracted. Gets obsessed with things.”

“Well . . . yes, that’s right.”

“I knew it when you walked in here. Poor kid. People are so cruel. I guess they’re afraid. But, my god, my son couldn’t hurt anybody. He’s hurting too much himself.”

She stands wiping an ashtray without looking at it.

When Steve returns, our breakfasts are ready. He eats silently, bent over the counter, facing down into his plate. He is an intent eater, stuffing eggs and sausage and fried potatoes into his mouth, his eyes darting from side to side as he eats.

I’ve seen dogs eat like that, and it didn’t have anything to do with schizophrenia. Somebody had hit them too much.

I leave Steve as I found him, under an underpass, this one on Route 10 west. I give him some money that I know will be gone soon and a thermal blanket that we both know he probably won’t keep beyond the first night. Too much bulk around his waist.

Steve will stick with his sheet, pulling it over himself at night, trying to keep the world outside, especially if he is in a place where he has to keep his fingers in there, too.

XIV. Bitumen

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. May 23, 1990.

You think I’m kidding about bituminous concrete, but consider this: It’s all one huge piece.

About four years after moving into the truck and driving it over more than 10,000 miles of back roads, I find myself curious about the other dimensions of that mileage. To make a linear mile of roadway, how much adjacent land is required? And how many miles of roadway have been laid? In other words, how much square area of our beautiful country has been covered by gooey black stuff? So I take a trip from my grandmother’s house in Center Ossipee, where I am spending my second summer off the road, to the University of New Hampshire library about 50 miles away in Durham.

It has been more than 25 years since I have visited the UNH campus, and I have to look at a road map to remind myself how to get to Durham. As I approach from the west and see the agricultural buildings stretched low over the fields off Madbury Road, I remember that the library is somewhere on the right beyond the railroad overpass entering town. I have forgotten how much traffic there is on Main Street. This is one of the worst times of year, the week before second-semester finals, and immediately beyond the overpass, I get into a snarl of traffic. I take a desperate right turn, the first one I can find, onto a side street that within a few hundred feet angles off into a parking lot amid a cluster of buildings. A channel of orange cones leads to the entrance of the lot. I turn into the channel before I discover not only that I will have to take a ticket from an automatic dispenser at the entrance, but that I will need the right kind of parking sticker on my vehicle to use the ticket in the first place. When I try to back out of the channel, I realize I can’t see traffic beyond the building I have just come around to enter the lot. I will need some help.

The permanent boredom on the face of the parking lot attendant, a graying man of 60-plus years, tells me he has seen everything at least twice. He steps out of the toll collection booth at the exit, walks the few feet to the entrance channel and scrutinizes my truck.

“You makin’ a service call or a delivery, mac?”

“I’ve got to go to the library. Is it around here?”

“How long ya gonna be? A few minutes? An hour?”

“Probably most of the afternoon.”

“Jeez,” he says. He puts his hands on his hips and looks out over the parking lot, squinting his eyes. I can’t see an empty space. There are no trucks, not even a large car. The lot is full of compact, collegiate-type vehicles.

“I got somethin’ for ya. Can you fit in there?” he asks. He points toward a space I can now make out between two cars beneath a tree. I nod. He moves several cones and has me drive in the wrong way through the exit. I back cleanly into the space.

He motions me back to the booth and gives me a special ticket. “I’ll tell the guy on the next shift about you. No problem. Just drive wide around the booth when you leave or you’ll take out the overhang.”

I thank him and ask his name.

“Charlie,” he says. “I’m originally from White Plains, New York, but I’ve lived up here for a lotta years. People back home say I’ve picked up a New Hampshire accent.”

“Not completely,” I say.

“Really?” he says, looking surprised.

The space he has found me is right in front of the bookstore. The library is just around the corner. Leave it to a downstate New Yorker to find you a way through a maze of bituminous concrete.

Bitumen is the mineral grit of petroleum, the nonflammable component of petroleum that remains as asphalt when everything else that easily evaporates or burns off is removed from petroleum. There is evidence that people around the Mediterranean were using asphalt from natural tar pits as binding and paving agents as early as 3800 B.C. But it wasn’t until nearly six millennia later, at the turn of the 20th century, that humans began manufacturing asphalt on an enormous scale that wasn’t so much mass production as mass byproduction. Asphalt is a byproduct of petroleum distillation. Kerosene, benzine, toluene and other volatile constituents of petroleum had found limited uses in the 19th century as lighting and cleaning fluids, but gasoline found its place in the 20th century. The automobile – the word literally means self-moving – is made mobile by a portable engine that derives its power from internal combustion, and the stuff that combusts is gasoline. The development of the automobile created a demand for gasoline that made petroleum refining a big business, but it also created a big problem: What to do with the residue, what to do with the sludge left in the bottom of the barrel after the gasoline, kerosene and other volatiles had been cooked off? An asphalt-based concrete, that’s what. Not only was there plenty of asphalt to bind together stone, crushed rock and gravel, but there were huge machines powered by internal combustion to spread the mixture around. In a sense, the gas-thirsty automobile invented the road that it rides on.

In this century, we Americans have spread bituminous concrete over nearly two million miles of public roads. It has been only natural to extend the blacktop into driveways, parking lots, shopping malls, residential subdivisions. I can’t find a reference book that will even estimate the amount of asphalt used in this off-road paving, but I’d be willing to bet it is at least half as much as the roads themselves.

If all this blacktop were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, it would cover at least 20,000 square miles. Nine of our states are smaller than that. In fact, our hypothetical conglomerate of bituminous aggregate would cover all of Maryland, Delaware and most of New Jersey.

There’s another strange sense I get from studying bituminous concrete. Unlike portland cement, the concrete made from petroleum never quite loses its fluid quality. In a way, it’s like the material of America’s first great highways – its rivers and canals. Bituminous concrete flows like water, or, more appropriately, like a glacier, taking decades before its fluidity is apparent. North America’s most sought-after natural waterway, the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, wasn’t traveled entirely by ship until 1903-05, and even then, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent most of his two-year passage locked in ice. America’s first great manmade waterway, the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, New York, was finished in 1825 but was useful less than a half century before railroads put it out of business. Building water canals required torturous excavations to depths that would accommodate boat drafts. Building bituminous concrete canals requires only superficial excavation because the fluid that is poured into them soon freezes into a surface that our internal combustion vessels can skim over, our destinations and urgencies too temporal for us to notice that our roadways too are moving. There is a modern Erie Canal, and it is called the New York Thruway. There are several modern Northwest Passages, and all of them bear interstate highway numbers.

Like one huge national canal, America’s bituminous concrete flows together. When we stand in our blacktop driveway, we are standing on one edge of a huge network of slowly flowing hydrocarbon that links us with the rest of the nation. Our driveway is connected to a street that flows into a larger road that then spills into even larger highways that branch off into smaller roads that separate into smaller streets that diffuse into other driveways – Aunt Tillie’s in Cape Cod or Uncle Ned’s in Washington State.

This huge network of bituminous concrete is a utility, like the telephone, electricity or natural gas systems, that is useful to all of us. It is especially useful to those of us whose homes are not at the back of the driveway but at the front.

I spend the night in Durham in a second parking lot, Parking Lot A, an expanse of several acres of blacktop that pushes deep into the university’s agricultural fields. Although the lot is unbarred, it is open only to residential users who have another category of parking sticker. I drive all the way to the far end of the lot, over several speed bumps, and pull off into a field where some kind of earthworks is being excavated. Again, I am the only truck on the lot. Several patrols of campus police pass me by without a second look.

XV. Planning

Biddeford, Maine. February 1986.

A trailer is out, I decide as I sit at the kitchen table and try to figure a way out of this massive, costly, lonely house. A trailer would be the cheapest, easiest and fastest way to make me and my stuff mobile, but it also has serious drawbacks. Length is one. The smallest trailer I can find with the minimal facilities I require – a toilet, small sink with hand-pump faucet, two-burner stove, small refrigerator, a place to lie down, the whole package for about $5,000 – is only eight feet long. But even that length is too long. An eight-foot trailer, with another foot or so for a hitch, added to the length of the smallest compact car – 12 to 14 feet – makes the whole linkup of car and trailer at least two to four feet longer than the longest parking spaces laid out by most municipalities and commercial areas. Security is another problem. Disconnecting a trailer and leaving it in a strange place, even for a few hours, is an invitation to someone else with a vehicle and a trailer hitch to haul it and my stuff away. So I will be driving around with a trailer that I won’t dare disconnect. Ever try backing up with a trailer? My neighbor Mark, a man with as much experience as anyone I know driving all kinds of vehicles, everything from motorcycles to diesel rigs, has acquired some basic wisdom about trailers.

“You never think about backing up until you have a trailer, and then you seem to spend all your time backing up,” he says. “Trailers are a real pain in the ass.”

The most troublesome liability of a trailer is that it is a transient vehicle and looks that way. It’s hard to park a car with a trailer anywhere for very long without attracting the attention of police or property owners or vandals and thieves.

A van? Same problem. A van is a transient vehicle that draws attention to itself. A van also is considerably more expensive than a trailer, especially if outfitted with the facilities I want. Putting appliances into a van and adding a pop-top roof extension for enough head room to use them can push the price of a basic van, currently anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000, into the $20,000 range.

No, what I need is a small truck. Sturdy enough to hold basic appliances and a limited amount of other stuff – a few clothes, books, maybe a typewriter – but small enough to park anywhere and neutral enough to be left alone for a respectable amount of time in most places.

A new truck is out. A 15- or 16-footer with a plain square box is running in the $20,000 range. I am looking for a solution to my shelter problems in the $10,000 range.

A used rental truck may be the answer. The most reliable rentals I know are Ryder trucks, and an equipment manager at the company’s district office in Portland tells me I probably can buy a used 15-footer for somewhere around $7,000. But, he says, the truck will have at least 100,000 miles on it. Rental miles are tough miles. Well, I can have a rebuilt engine put in for another $2,000 or $3,000. Then I will have to do some work on the cargo box to convert it to a living space. I make the rounds of local mobile-home and recreational-vehicle dealers to get catalogs and prices on appliances. I compile a list of what I need and what it will cost:

Refrigerator $650

Stove 350

Furnace/space heater 350

Water heater 250

Toilet 200

Auxiliary batteries 150

Water tank, pipes 100

Sink 50

—————————————

$2,100

Gasoline-powered generator 1,500

—————————————

$3,600

Then there will be wiring, plumbing, insulation. Also, I will have to cut into the cargo box to install any vents, overhead windows, maybe an extra door. Well, at least the cutting will be easier on a rental truck. Heavier commercial trucks have steel bodies, but the cargo boxes on rental trucks are usually thin aluminum that can be replaced easily after inexperienced drivers run them into overhead bridge abutments or gas station canopies.

I know enough about basic carpentry, sheet metal work and auto mechanics to do most of the work myself, but time may be a problem. My conservative estimate is that the work will take at least six months of spare time, days off and holidays, and because of my previous experience with my conservative estimates, I know the time will run more like a year. Cost also is getting to be a problem. The truck, engine and equipment are now pushing $15,000, and I figure the unforeseen nuts, bolts and widgets can blow another $5,000.

I am planning to finance this scheme with profits from selling the house. So I’ll probably wind up living in the truck, moving it from place to place, while I rebuild it.

Damn, damn, damn. I know I won’t be taking the kitchen table with me. I am poking too many holes in it with my pencil as I draft plan after plan after plan for moving onto wheels.

XVI. Jerry Walker

Ankara, Turkey. May 1964.

“Working on a geometry problem?” Jerry Walker asks, puffing on his pipe.

“More like a fantasy problem,” I say. I take off my headsets – I haven’t been listening to the dumb-ass tank maneuvers, anyway – and push the diagram across my radio console desk toward Jerry.

“Interesting,” he says, squinting at the smoke from his pipe as he leans his head down to inspect the diagram. He takes the pipe out of his mouth. We are pretty convinced that a pipe makes a man in his early 20s look like a man in his late 20s. That and a mustache. We each have one of those, too.

“That’s a diagram of what I would take with me in a 10-foot cube that could be transported anywhere back in time.”

“Oohhh?” he says, raising his eyebrows. The diagram is a tangle of lines, layer after layer superimposed on one another inside the cube.

“I’m thinking about the 12th or 13th century, probably the 13th,” I say. “That would get me well into the Middle English period. I could probably learn the language well enough beforehand to get by in it.”

“You’re going to medieval England?”

“No, probably the southern Pyrenees. Better base of operations. Warm weather. Mountains for security.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” he says, reinserting the pipe at an angle that will keep the smoke out of his face.

I’m not sure why the cube is 10 feet on a side. I think I have read somewhere that all the gold in the world could be fit into a cube of that size. I’m not planning to take gold with me.

“What are these diagonal lines across the top of the cube?”

“Rotors. After I got transported, they’d pop up out of the cube and fly the whole thing wherever I decided to locate it. They’re connected inside the cube – right here – to a small hovercraft. It would travel mostly at ground or sea level, but the rotors would lift it whenever that was necessary.”

“Uh huh, hmmm. These lines along the side of the cube?”

“Galvanized barbed wire. If the transporter dropped me into a dangerous place, I’d pump juice through the wires to serve as a perimeter until I could get out of there. I figure a mountain cave would be the best place to set up. Secure the entrance with the electric wire. Blast a skylight out of the back of the cave and use these seeds – in this box tucked into the hovercraft – to grow food hydroponically. These other boxes are dried meats, vegetables, grains that I’d live on until my cave garden started producing.”

“I take it you couldn’t come back once you were transported?”

“Nope. One-shot deal. These other containers are all books – agriculture, botany, geology, metallurgy, pharmacology, electronics, geography. I’d use the hovercraft to find the ore I needed for metal and electronic parts, and I could smelt and fabricate them in a small electric forge back in the cave.

“I’d also cruise the countryside, maybe villages and towns, for meat and vegetables I needed to supplement my diet. Anybody gives me any shit, I zap ‘em with this pneumatic dart gun. Tranquilizer tips. Knocks ‘em out but not kill ‘em. Good for game animals, too.”

“Ummm, hmmm,” Jerry says. He takes a thoughtful puff. “What about energy? How are you going to power the hovercraft, the forge and all this other stuff?”

“Well, that’s another of the ground rules. Besides getting a 10-foot cube and transportation back in time, I get a one-cubic-foot fusion reactor that pumps out unlimited electricity from a little water I put in it every now and then. The reactor would stay in the hovercraft, but I would run off wires to charge batteries that would power my cave operation.”

This is pretty sophisticated stuff for the early 1960s. Although the principle of nuclear fusion is known from the hydrogen bomb, no one has begun experimenting with controlled fusion, but we in the intelligentsia know that the experiments will start soon and that the world will have fusion reactors within, oh, no more than 20 years.

“I like it,” Jerry says. “It forces you to reduce everything to essentials, fit them together in a fixed space, figure ways to put them to multiple uses.”

He straightens up and walks back to his console, picking up the earmuff-type headsets that have been lying on the metal desk in front of the console.

“Well, back to work,” he says. “It’s about time for Sergeant Bozo to be coming through.”

Jerry clamps the headsets over his ears and reaches ahead for one of the dials on the console. Within seconds, his eyes have a glazed look that we all know means he isn’t listening to anything.

Who in hell cares what the Russians are doing.

Eight hours a day, five days a week, on a schedule that rotates ahead eight hours each week, Jerry Walker and I and several dozen other specialists-fifth-class sit in one of several long rooms in a low building on a plateau outside Ankara, listening on radios for what Soviet-bloc tank battalions might be doing in the Transcaucasian regions just north of Turkey and Iran. We dial at random through thousands of radio frequencies – our antennas are powerful enough to pick up the short-range transmitter on an individual tank hundreds of miles away – and, if we find maneuvers, we record them on reel-to-reel tape decks. These recordings are transcribed in triplicate in the original language, then translated into English, also in triplicate, and then all the paperwork is sent off to god knows where. Probably the incinerator.

Our mission presumably is to detect any large buildup in forces, presumably the first sign of a Soviet invasion into the Middle East. We presume all this, but the Army brass never tells us anything about what we are doing. It is classified.

In return, we never tell them that finding maneuvers with our super-sensitive, far-reaching equipment is about as hard as finding trees in a forest. The Soviets are always there. If you were a Soviet general in charge of a tank division, would you hold winter maneuvers in Siberia? Or pass up a chance to visit the Black Sea in the summer?

Our production of transcriptions seems to depend less on the activity of the Soviet military than on the sensitivity of the Army Security Agency to its budget. Every once in a while when things are slow, the Army brass notifies us that they expect increased activity in Transcaucasia. I’m sure on these occasions that somebody in the National Security Agency, the civilian side of the operation, has remarked at a staff meeting or cocktail party to someone in the Army Security Agency that things seem slow in the Mideast. Not so, the ASA guy will say before he gets on the teletype to the outposts, telling us to check for activity. We check for activity. Sure enough, it is still there. We fill more tapes and do more transcriptions.

Tank maneuvers make for a lot of paperwork. Individual transmissions are only a few words long, and each gets a separate line on the transcription:

“Control, this is One.”

“One, this is Control.”

“Permission to turn right?”

“Permission to turn right.”

“I am turning right.”

“You are turning right.”

“I have turned right.”

“You have turned right.”

“Control, this is Two.”

“Two, this is Control.”

And so on. The Soviets are very good at radio security, always identifying themselves only by call signs or numbers and never talking about specific locations, just their specific maneuvers. They know we are listening. Our base is covered with listening antennas that, unlike broadcast antennas, have uniquely long grids of wires that can’t be mistaken for anything else. And just in case the Soviet overflights miss those, our company commander insists that our barracks next to the antenna fields be surrounded by a West Point-type lawn – Kentucky blue grass, I think. On top of an arid plateau where the only natural growth is brown wiregrass and purple sage, the bright green square that is our lawn must be visible from the moon.

The base is run by hard-stripers like Sergeant Bozo and lifers like our company commander who know nothing about what we are doing and care even less. Sergeant Bozo – so named because his hair grows only in tufts above his ears – would be equally happy in an infantry rifle company or a special services entertainment unit. He has the same pay grade as a specialist five, but his stripes, a stack of three chevrons, give him the authority to tell spec fives what to do. He cares only that shoes are shined, uniforms are crisp and military courtesy – yes, sergeant – is maintained.

Anyone who has been in the military knows what life is like in a civilian dictatorship or a large corporation. People are stratified in a top-heavy hierarchy of authority that compels those in the lower levels to support, not question those above them. There are no ballot boxes. Nor is there much incentive to do good work.

These are the days of the draft, and while every specialist in my company theoretically is a volunteer, they chose to a man to sign up for three years as linguists – the whole first year is language training – rather than two years as draftee riflemen. Talk about bad attitudes. Those in the lower echelons spend most of their time trying to stay out of trouble while circumventing the system. Those in the upper echelons spend most of their time kissing the asses above them, trying to get into a more advantageous position.

Jerry Walker and I will work together for about two years. In the nearby barracks, we also will live together. He is a quiet, unathletic, rather soft, sandy-haired man who has studied math and German at Yale and hates the jock-type, hail-fellow life I have come from at Dartmouth. He specifically hates what he calls “crude mentality,” including but not limited to rock-and-roll, fraternity parties, drinking to the point of regurgitation, chasing women like small game that must be trapped and nailed to the wall. Jerry – that is his name, not Gerald or Jeremiah – grew up in a modest home in Kansas City with a single-parent mother whom he obviously loves deeply. I have come from similar circumstances, and eventually he gets me to confide it. We become close friends, discussing all subjects with the earnestness of people just out of college. He eventually concedes that Ray Charles is a passable folk singer, and I eventually concede that I yearn for a meaningful relationship with a woman.

I am secretly in love with Peggy, but I admit that to no one, not even myself. She is the sister of my best friend back home, and I have known her since she was 10. She is still a teenager – 19, I think, when Jerry and I get to our most serious conversations about women – while I am an older man. Twenty-three. And my best friend’s sister, for god’s sake.

Jerry loves classical music, especially the classic guitar music of Andres Segovia. Jerry is no musician, but he has brought an acoustic guitar to Turkey, and, through the two years we live together, he teaches himself from recordings to play Segovia’s rendition of “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” It is a quiet but complicated piece with difficult fingering. Hour after hour, Jerry plucks it out, over and over, in our room. I never find it irritating. I come to love that piece.

Jerry goes to work each day with a book of differential equations. The hard-stripers think it has something to do with radio frequencies. Actually, Jerry likes to solve the equations without using the formulas in the back of the book. He also brings in books of German literature because he knows that no one in authority on this foreign-language listening post can tell the difference between German and Russian script.

I have to credit the Army with one thing: They know how to teach language, probably because memorizing and repeating words and phrases around the clock, a system that only a dictatorial organization can impose, is the best way to learn language. Jerry and I were trained at the Army Language School in California, and we both speak Russian pretty well. Our knowledge of the language is rarely challenged by our work in the field. Once you get past “control,” “permission” and a few numbers, you pretty much have the job cold.

I sit at the console for hours, looking blankly at the radio dials and imagining myself at the controls of the hovercraft, bathing in the blue light of the instrument panel as the moonlit waves of the North Atlantic speed beneath the cowling. Sitting in my blue cocoon, rocking in the waves, I am comfortable and safe. Insulated from a world that will feel me only when I choose to reach out and feel it.

XVII. Doing the Math

Kansas City, Missouri. April 12, 1989.

On my Rand McNally, central Oklahoma looks surprisingly close to Kansas City. It’s surprising, all right, but not close. I have driven all night to get here, adding more than 500 miles to the odometer. But it’s a chance to look up Jerry Walker’s mother and find out what he’s doing these days.

A second miscalculation. I haven’t seen him for years, I have no idea where she lives – including whether she lives on this side of the river or in the other Kansas City on the Kansas side – and the greater Kansas City phone directory lists several hundred Walkers, almost as many as the Joneses.

Well, the weather has been nice, and fresh spring air flows through the window screens into the truck as I sit at the pop-up table and drink a cold beer, contemplating nothing in particular.

As I look around at the interior of the truck, it occurs to me that the volume of this living space – 6 by 6 by 17 feet – is a good one-third smaller than the volume of that fantasy cube.

XVIII. The Big House

Las Cruces, New Mexico. September 1985.

My envelope in the big house in Biddeford has been getting emptier for years, but I don’t really feel the emptiness until the trip to the Southwest. Somewhere on the road, the feeling takes hold. After I leave off Steve Lutes in Las Cruces, I find myself wanting to just keep going.

Driving through El Paso to the Mexican border, I think of Jack Kerouac and his friends roaring in an old Ford jalopy into Mexico, smoking marijuana the size of cigars, copulating with a harem of dark-skinned women in a small-town whorehouse, penetrating so deeply into the central Mexican jungle that they become part of it, swooning into it with their bodies caked with dead bugs and sweat, their breath mingling with the humid exhalation of trees and swamp.

I get lost in Ciudad Juarez looking for a post office to mail bullfight postcards back home. I stop a group of teenage girls to ask directions to el correo. One of them says something like, ‘Vaya por esta calle dos cuadras, luego la calle a la izquierda . . .,’ but it is hard to follow her Spanish and gaze upon her black eyes, cashmere beige skin and sparkling teeth as white as the blouse of her school uniform.

The wrong number of izquierdas later, I am sitting at the bar of a large hotel, drinking beer before noon and acknowledging that I am a dirty middle-age man getting older and no cleaner. I leaf through the postcards. Back home. What a joke. The postcards are to my co-workers, most of whom live in other towns, to an ex-wife, also in another town, and to my mother and grandmother, both in another state. Even the cats are in another town with a veterinarian who is showing them more attention than I have. There is no one back home.

I have lived in that house with three women, and all of them later confided they thought it was haunted.

After Peggy and I bought the house, I spent hours walking through it, looking at every brick, feeling every casing, treading every floorboard, getting to know every piece of the beautiful old place and planning how I would embellish it. All I got done was to tear away the top half of a kitchen wall, filling in the empty studs with shelves to the ceiling and then building what became my favorite piece of furniture – the kitchen table – by gluing together strips of heavy maple flooring, supporting them in the center by a hardwood post and anchoring the whole thing with bolts to the wall of shelves. It was a solid job – the table never swayed a millimeter – but that’s all I got done. I liked planning better than working. And something happened.

Peggy was standing at the end of that table one Sunday night when I came home from the office to announce that I, in our 13th year of marriage, was going off to live with a woman I worked with.

I thought I had struggled with my secret long enough, and I thought I was braced for what had to be done, but I wasn’t ready for the look in Peggy’s eyes. And as much as I had hoped the worst would soon be over, that announcement became more terrible to me as the years went by.

Peggy stayed in the house about a month until she could move out of a place she now despised. I moved back into the house with Sara, who was sitting at the kitchen table five months later when she informed me she was taking a new job with the company that would require her to live about 50 miles to the north. Our romance really had ended some days earlier in an adjoining room, the dining room, when we spent a candlelight dinner arguing about my sleeping with a former co-worker of hers while she was sleeping with a former co-worker of mine.

Eighteen months later, Mary, who had become my second wife nine weeks after we met, sat me down at the same dining room table, folded her little-girl hands and told me in the sweetest voice she could summon that I was picky, overbearing, critical to the point of being verbally abusive, and she needed some space for an indeterminate period of time. Our life together continued for a few more months, but it was sad and lame, and I knew she was right. Because all I could think as I sat there listening to her in the dining room was that I was being dumped by a woman who at age 35 still spoke in a teenage falsetto and found sociological meaning in words like “space.”

Diane, whom I met six months after Mary left, liked the house but wasn’t about to move in. Diane lived and worked in Connecticut, liked her life and career there and, she told me, believed in the traditional values of marriage. So did I, I said, and that’s why I didn’t want to screw up a third one. For about a year, we alternated visiting each other, but she had longer vacations and spent longer periods with me in Maine. When our second summer came around, I thought she might spend most of it at the house, but I returned from work one night and saw as I drove up that there were lights shining on all three floors. She was sitting at the piano in the first-floor living room, playing a melancholy piece by Chopin.

She too felt there were ghosts in the house, but she knew who they were.

She left after a week. A few weeks later, after I had visited her in Connecticut, she returned to Maine for another stay in the old house, but after the first night, I was sitting at the kitchen table when she emerged from the bedroom with her bags repacked. I asked her where she was going. She asked me the same thing.

She said I seemed to spend most of my time feeling sorry for myself or about myself, and I refused to make commitments, even to the house. It was 150 years old and needed attention, but I just sat there at the kitchen table or wandered around in rooms that were nearly all empty now. I was just drifting, she said, and she wasn’t going to waste any more of her life while I couldn’t seem to get any direction in mine. I sat silently at the kitchen table and watched her drive out of my view of the circular driveway.

Now I took to serious wandering. Most of the furniture had left with Peggy – it had come from her family, anyway – and I had lost other pieces through a series of moves with Sara and Mary. I was now down to less than three rooms of furniture in an 11-room house, and that was fine with me. I moved those few possessions from one part of the house to another, changing with the seasons, bumping off more edges as I moved, letting everything wear and run down together. When I wasn’t at work, I sat or wandered in the house, letting the sun go up or down as it would. I spent whole weekends without touching a light switch, walking around in the dark like the cats did, knowing every step, every turn, every stair. Where I once had been fascinated by the house, I was now being absorbed by it, dissolving into it.

I am drinking the fourth or fifth of a long list of unfamiliar Mexican beers the hotel serves when reality washes back in. I become aware that people are crowding around a television set in the lobby just through the door. I keep hearing a word that sounds strange even in my unpracticed college Spanish. Terremoto . . . terre moto . . . te rre mo to. Earthquake.

People are watching the screen with their hands at their faces. Some are weeping. Early reports are incomplete, but the immensity of the disaster is apparent. I feel like a spectator at a bad traffic accident, unable to help anyone but unwilling to leave without a long gape at the bleeding victims of the Mexico City earthquake.

I find the post office, mail the postcards, head back for El Paso.

Nature has an additional message for me when I get back to the East Coast just as Hurricane Gloria arrives. I am on a clogged parkway north of New York City when the rain gets heavy. As I drive through a long stretch of standing water, I hear the left headlight pop. I turn off for Diane’s place for shelter.

By the time I get to the top of the hill they call a mountain in southern Connecticut, the area has lost power. Diane’s father, wearing only a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts, is in the yard battening down the swimming pool. Even soaked to the skin with his black hair matted down, Norman still looks like an industry executive – in charge but charming, a tanned smile and a cordial handshake, like it hasn’t been more than a year since he has seen me.

Inside, Diane is quieter but equally nonchalant. Later, sitting in the glow of an oil lamp as the wind whistles outside, we agree to resume seeing each other. I will try to be more committed, she will try to be more patient, and we will see what happens.

Back in the house a few days later, I sit at the kitchen table and look out at the ‘77-78 Datsun in the driveway. I could have just kept going, I tell myself. I look down at Killer, a fat orange cat who twitches his tail at me in anticipation of being fed. Killer’s adopted sister, a tiny gray cat named Mouse, sits purring in my lap. How could I have left them? Bonzo is off in another room, probably in a corner, looking at the walls. He isn’t as easily won back. He knows why I am looking at that car.

That car carried nearly everything I needed for a month on the road. If only it had been bigger. But not too big.

Listen, I have to go back to work tomorrow.

OK, so what size would a vehicle have to be to contain my already meager possessions? And would I really need all of them?

I will have to think about it.

XIX. More Planning

Biddeford, Maine. March 12, 1986.

One of the stories I heard in the Army was about an old guy in the Caucasus – you know, one of those hardy people who eat only yogurt and live to age 130 in remote mountain villages that still haven’t gotten electricity – who had been consigned in life to be a goatherd but so yearned for literacy that he taught himself from the Bible how to read and write. From the moment he could write, he began dreaming of a machine that would make letters like those in the Bible. He spent the rest of his life building such a machine – a grid of buttons, one for each letter of the alphabet, that when depressed with a finger would strike the letter through an ink screen onto a piece of paper. He had invented the typewriter. Unfortunately, when he brought his invention down from the mountains, it was the early 20th century. The rest of the world had been using typewriters for more than 50 years. I don’t know how accurate this story is, but I’m sure it is based on truth.

I am making a visit today to Boucher’s RV Sales in Goodwins Mills, a village on the outskirts of Biddeford. I am trying to look like a potential buyer, but all I want is free information and brochures on mobile appliances, specifically an LP gas furnace I am researching for the truck I want to buy and renovate as a home on the road. After months of planning, I have decided on a 16-foot, over-the-cab truck body, probably a used rental truck if I can’t find a private sale in the want ads. I have drawn the truck body’s shape on a proportional grid and have cut out proportional outlines of the appliances I need to fit into the space. After shuffling the cutouts through endless combinations, I have found what I think is the best arrangement for everything but an LP gas furnace that comes in several sizes.

I am getting excited about the plans because I have just gotten a firm offer on the house. I still have reservations about living in a truck while renovating it as a dwelling, but what the hell. The possibility is no longer hypothetical. The money will soon be available. It will soon be now or never.

At Boucher’s, a personable young salesman named Steve Bennett tells me a furnace similar to the one I am considering has heated the small mobile home his company uses as an office for about $20 a month. I am impressed, but he has no brochures for the furnace.

“Hey, c’mere, I got something I want to show you,” Steve says, walking toward one of the motor homes on the lot.

I’m not in the market for an RV, but out of courtesy, I step into the vehicle, a model called a Rader TK micro-mini with a loft over the cab. Well, the interior has all the appliances and equipment I have studied, but they are laid out all wrong. Too much wasted space.

“Whaddaya think?” Steve asks as we step outside.

“Too long. That thing looks like it runs 24 feet.”

“Nope. Twenty-one. Look at that undercarriage.”

The chassis is sturdy. The cabin is mounted on hollow-beam steel joists the size and shape of two-by-fours. The engine block will rust out before those things do.

“The truck is a four-cylinder Toyota. Good gas mileage,” Steve says.

“Yeah, but it’s so damned long. The ass end hangs out way too far over the rear wheels. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

The truck is a 1983 model with about 25,000 miles on it. Steve is asking $16,700.

“They make a smaller model,” Steve says. “Same undercarriage, but the cabin is four feet shorter.”

“Oh? Let’s look at one of those.”

“Don’t have one. It’s called a Monterey, but I haven’t seen many of them. I don’t think they make many of them. Most people want something bigger.”

He does find a brochure that he lets me have.

I take the brochure home. I make a phone call to the manufacturer in Indiana. Where can I get a used Monterey? The sales manager doesn’t have one. The only one he knows of on the East Coast belongs to a couple in northeastern Pennsylvania, but he has heard they find the model too small. He wishes me luck in bargaining with them because he is anxious to sell them something bigger. I have a funny feeling I won’t need any luck.

The Pennsylvania couple paid $18,500 for an ‘85 model, less than a year old, but the wife lets slip in our first phone conversation that her husband is willing to sell for $15,000. When I call the husband later, he is annoyed that his wife has mentioned that price, but he eventually agrees to it. He has to. For one thing, I tell him, it is all the money I will have from the sale of the house. Paying off all the mortgages and my other debts will leave just about $15,000. For another thing, I know but don’t tell him, there is something else at work.

I’m sure fate will be kind to Harold and Martha Mang of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, who will undoubtedly find a motor home that provides their every comfort. I’m equally sure fate will be just as kind to Steve Bennett, who no doubt will make many sales to compensate for the day I walk off his lot with only the brochure in my fidgeting hand.

Because, Jesus, there it is. When I open that brochure, after months of planning and drafting, there is the truck I have been designing. The overhead schematic, but for a foot of length and six inches of width, has the appliances, toilet, table, couch and storage space in virtually the same order I have laid out on the grid. I have invented a 1985 Sunrader Monterey before I realize there already is one.

XX. Greenville

Greenville, Mississippi. April 16, 1989.

I am walking along Route 82 south of Greenville on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The air is clear and dry, and the roadside vegetation is bright with the pea-green glow of shoots and buds, drawing vitality from soil enriched by thousands of years of flooding from the nearby Mississippi River. Grasshoppers click and whir at my feet. It would be beautiful if I could stand back far enough not to see the litter. In Greenville’s case, I guess, that would have to be about a thousand feet above the median strip of the highway.

Which isn’t too bad. I walk nearly 700 miles a year for exercise, most of it along roads, and as a self-appointed sanitation field surveyor, I conclude as I pass the first buildings on the outskirts of Greenville that its roadside litter is about average for a community of 40,000. The inventory of discarded items seems typical – beer and soda bottles and cans, plastic oil jugs and loose pieces of automobiles, styrofoam cups and food containers.

Styrofoam isn’t all bad. I have a grandmother who is kept healthier because of the styrofoam that makes it possible to package and handle hot food inexpensively in the Meals on Wheels program. That one meal delivered each midday helps Granny, who is entering her 90s, to remain independent in her own home. My mother is often there, too, but she also is retired and living within the strict limits of Social Security. I once cooked for my grandmother for a few weeks and found out something about the old lady that shocked me: She hates vegetables. Meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes, that’s what my Granny calls for. For Christ’s sake, grandmothers are supposed to get you to eat your vegetables, not hate them. Maybe her attitude is a result of living too many of her years among the rural poor where meat was scarce, potatoes often blistered and rotted, and vegetables were the only things you had to eat to get through the winter. Well, between Ma and me and Meals on Wheels, Granny’s been getting her vegetables again. And besides generally approving of the Meals on Wheels menu – well, not the stuffed peppers, but she peels off the pepper and eats the hamburg stuffing – she finds the styrofoam containers just the thing to perk up a sputtering fire in the woodstove.

Other trash isn’t all bad, either. On this particular day in Greenville – it is, in fact, the day before the deadline for filing personal tax returns – I find a letter alongside Route 82 that tells me something about the addressee, Patricia R. Baker of 2606 Old Leland Road, Greenville. The envelope, its top edge torn, contains Patricia’s W-2 forms from Jimmy D. Beaty of PJ’s Truck Stop, 2824 East Alexander, same city. In the previous year, according to the quadruplicate form, Jimmy paid Patricia $14.00 in wages, minus $1.05 for Social Security, no federal tax withheld. Patricia apparently has decided not to file. Nothing illegal about that in the $14.00 bracket, but a little sad. Also intriguing. I hope Patricia and Jimmy are still friends. Or maybe they never were.

As the city draws nearer, the brush gives way to grass spreading around small businesses and middle-class homes, and the litter grows heavier. There are more bottles, cans, auto parts, styrofoam and now a champagne bottle, a baby bottle, a shit bag from the portable toilet of a truck or van, a hypodermic needle (you see a surprising number of those along the highways of America), a small blue plastic sign with engraved white letters that might have hung on a hospital room or department, an air syringe, maybe for enemas. Near the city line, a low brick house set far back on a large lawn of closely clipped grass is being invaded by trash that has crept in nearly a hundred feet from the road.

A few minutes later, I come across two men and a boy hunkering over a large old car they have been hauling behind an equally old pickup truck that is now parked on the outside shoulder of the two oncoming lanes. The men, both swarthy and mean-looking, are cursing a rear wheel rim of the car as they try to jack it up and put on a worn spare tire. The boy, a chubby teenager with thatchy blond hair and cutoff jeans that crimp his thighs, is balancing a shredded tire on the edge of the shoulder. He kicks the tire with disgust, turning away from it as it rolls down the shoulder and falls over in a shallow pool of water at the brush line.

As I walk past the vehicles, I stare at the tire lying amidst other litter in the pool. The men and the boy are too busy with the car to notice me.

On my return trip to the rest area where I have left my truck, I am on the opposite side of the highway when I pass the place where the pickup, car and their crew have been. They are gone now, and with four lanes of road and a median strip between me and the shredded tire, it looks less ugly in the water.

XXI. National Sanitation Services

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. June 1988.

So just what is this National Sanitation Services? In a word, camouflage.

Although tiny by motor-home standards, a 1985 Sunrader Monterey as it comes out of the factory still looks like something people take vacations in. In many places I want to visit, the authorities are wary of such vehicles, fearing that they will, without warning, disgorge a couple of adults, at least as many children, a family dog or two, and that this crowd, already half mad from the joy of vacationing, will quickly strip the local vegetation of twigs and branches, build a bonfire, break out the styrofoam and cellophane junk food, crack open the beer and soda and then, just as quickly as the horde descended, leave the area in a smouldering, littered ruin, punctuated by piles of turds flapping toilet paper streamers. That’s an extreme case, but such things do seem to happen now and then. More common but equally squalid, litter will show up as a piece or two at first, then in an increasing flow as succeeding groups of litterers see that their predecessors didn’t care. Sometimes the damage begins innocently – a bag of food waste left in a roadside container is an invitation to animals to strew the trash around – and then the other stuff follows. Besides this legitimate concern about litter and damage, the authorities in many places I want to visit also seem to believe that tourists should be kept out of the way of all local folks except those who plan to milk them in rows of restaurants, motels, gift shops, bars and other points of interest where people can be lined up and squeezed. Also a legitimate goal, I suppose, but it doesn’t fit into my budget.

So I plan to travel quietly and cleanly.

That’s why National Sanitation Services seems like such a natural idea. Nobody objects to sanitation – we claim to put it next to godliness – but nobody is likely to be attracted to a sanitation truck, either. A perfect cover, dead neutral.

But it does take some time to think of. At first, as I sit in this campground in Maine figuring out how I can get away with a new life on the road, I think of trying real camouflage – you know, two shades of green and one of brown in blotches. If only it were that simple. I soon realize that forest and lawn green would stand out like an oasis if I were parked in a desert and that sand colors would glow like neon if I happened to be stopped in a forest. Besides, traditional camouflage would be too military. The truck would be a target for people looking for guns – or a target for people with guns.

No, I need some kind of commercial look that will fit in anywhere. How about a security company? National Security Services? Well, that would fit into a security-conscious residential neighborhood but would look strange in a rural area. Also, too much of a challenge to crooks who feel nothing has a right to be secure in their presence.

Maybe something meaningless. My first thought here is National Geodesic Survey, sort of a tribute to Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, but it is too technical-sounding. Thieves would be breaking in for transits and sextants.

Something less attractive. A sewage company. Too gross, but close.

National Sanitation Services. Just right. It has a clean sound, and it is official enough to discourage all but serious inquiry, yet vague enough to be construed as anything from a government sewer agency to a private diaper service. To add one more small touch of meaninglessness, I will call the truck a “field survey unit,” a perfect excuse for being anywhere.

Even the words “national,” “sanitation” and “services” are about the same length, making it easy to bank them over one another in a block on the front door panels. I do the lettering myself – before I got into the newspaper business, I once apprenticed as a sign painter – and this probably saves me a few hundred bucks in professional fees, even though some of the lettering is a little shaky if you look at it up close.

First, I have to strip off all the red, orange and gold stripes and brand names that seem to come on all recreational vehicles. Most of the names allude to winds, cruises or escapes, but mine, Sunrader, seems almost aggressive, like a solar stormtrooper. Stripped of its sunrise colors, the truck looks more like a pregnant ice cream van.

To choose a color for the lettering, I take a paint-store color chart to the Biddeford Post Office parking lot and match the blue of the lettering on postal trucks. I do my own lettering with non-stick tape, a stencil knife and spray paint. Besides the door panels, I letter the front across the prow of the loft and the back above and below the rear window. The letters are simple, straightforward, understated. But I can’t resist making up a logotype – an oval with the mythical company name around the rim, surrounding an outline of the United States with a glitter burst over the state of Maine – that I center in white areas on either side of the exterior cabin walls just forward of the side windows.

All this dovetails nicely with some changes I have to make to the truck’s configuration for practical reasons. To carry extra water for the road, I install a railing around the loft roof to hold four 10-gallon tanks equipped with small wheels. Designed to collect drain water, the tanks are ideal for taking on fresh water because the wheels make them manageable on the ground – 10 gallons of water weighs 80 pounds, a hard load to carry from a service station tap to a waiting truck – and easier to pull up the side of the truck onto the roof. The tanks, made of polystyrene, come only in a light blue similar to the color I have chosen for the lettering.

To help trundle these tanks up the side of the truck, I need a stepladder, so I strap one to the rear bumper, giving the truck a workman-like look. Also attached along the passenger side of the roof are some aluminum poles and a large mylar sheet that I have fashioned into an inexpensive canopy for the campground. The poles and plastic look like something you might use in sanitation.

On the rear bumper, I have installed a 3,000-watt gasoline-powered generator for those long hauls without house current, and with road reflectors plastered over it, the generator case takes on a businesslike look.

Even the strips of velcro I have glued to the truck to hold a homemade mylar weather skirting and a half dozen insulation patches for the appliance vents help dispel the vehicle’s recreational look.

All in all, it’s very official-looking. So official-looking that somebody asks me if it is legal to put a fake name and logotype on a vehicle. I don’t know. Worse yet, I don’t know whether there really is a National Sanitation Services out there somewhere.

Whatever the legalities, I soon find that the disguise works.

The water tanks are the last addition to the truck, and I have already started driving it to work before the tanks are installed. I am sitting by myself in the office one Sunday when one of the press operators comes through on his way to the composing room.

“You know, I wondered about that lettering on your truck until today I finally noticed the tanks on the top,” he says. “You must be pretty busy with that sanitation job and this one.”

He isn’t kidding. So I don’t, either. I tell him I have been pretty busy.

A few weeks before I leave Maine, I am parked outside a convenience store near the campground one night when a car full of young men pulls up. They seem to have been celebrating and run short of supplies.

“Well, well, sanitation services,” one of the young men says as he walks toward the truck on his way to the store. “What do you have in the truck, sanitation man, a lotta garbage?”

No, I say, just a little toxic waste, not too radioactive.

He looks at me, not sure if I am joking. He takes a wide path around the truck.

XXII. Slocomb

Slocomb, Alabama. February 22, 1989.

“You livin’ in this ve-hicle, are ya, Mistuh Lea-vitt?”

James Tew, assistant police chief of Slocomb, is reaching a conclusion that other people have a hard time accepting, too.

“Well, actually, I’m just sort of traveling through,” I tell him. “I’m a retired newspaper editor, and I’m . . . well, seeing the country.”

It isn’t a lie as much as it is a convenient synthesis of truths. I did that work for a couple of years when I couldn’t think of anything better to do, and my employer decided I shouldn’t do even that any more, and that is like being retired. And while I have been moving the truck only enough each day to stay out of trouble, I have been seeing the country in the process. I don’t want to have to tell Assistant Police Chief Tew that I am an unemployed itinerant because people in small towns have another word for that: bum.

He sits in his cruiser with the rear of my truck in his headlights, and he is trying to make out the lettering across the back of the truck in the glare cast back by the white fiberglass truck body and the mylar-and-velcro skirting I have put around it for the night. He remarks about my television antenna, an airfoil V of aluminum that cranks up and down and rotates by hand from the inside, a pretty impressive device for $125 and you-install-it.

“When I saw you parked here by the tower, I thought maybe you were working on it,” he says, stressing the last word so it sounds like “ee-it.”

“No, I just pulled up here because it was off the main road and there wasn’t anybody around,” I say.

He asks me for “some documents I could look at,” and I have to go into the truck for them. Bonzo is standing with his front paws on the back of the couch, peeking through a curtain at the blinding light outside.

When I return to the cruiser, Assistant Police Chief Tew still hasn’t gotten out. He reaches over and unlocks the passenger door to the front seat.

“You wanna sit in here for a minute, Sidney,” he says. I wince. Nobody has called me Sidney since I was in elementary school 40 years ago, but that’s what my driver’s license says, and I’m not going to argue with an armed, heavy-set law enforcement officer on a rural road in a small town in Alabama in the middle of the night.

He lights a cigarette, and I can see that his reddish wavy hair is streaked with white across the right temple. The police radio blares. I guess he already has called in my registration plate numbers. Wind in the high wiregrass is making waves that spread away from the road through a chainlink fence and, about a hundred yards beyond, lap against the base of a tall metal tower that holds several satellite receiver dishes to the sky.

Does Assistant Police Chief Tew figure me for a foreign agent who is planning to sabotage the tower – a single incendiary device at the base of one of the legs would do the job – and thus deprive a significant section of southeastern Alabama of its cable TV service?

“What kinda power you use in that rig?” he asks. I tell him 12-volt batteries. Do I have an isolator between the engine and cabin batteries, he asks. I do, I say.

I’ll be damned, he wants to talk batteries. Besides being Slocomb’s second most prominent police officer, James Tew also is a knowledgeable hobbyist in radio and electronics, and he wants to tell me how I can install a second auxiliary battery with a toggle switch that will allow me to take cabin power from either source.

Ten minutes later, he lets me out of the cruiser.

“Nice talkin’ to ya, Sidney. Now if somebody else notices you out here, I’ll be able to tell ‘em who y’are.”

It is comforting to know that even if the Russians knock out all our satellites, the oldest network in the world – the good old boys – is still working fine in Slocomb, Alabama.

With his thumb and forefinger, he flips the cigarette out into the wiregrass and points to the truck.

“That’s what I wanna do someday,” he says and drives off.

I search the grass for a long time in the area where I last saw the red glow of that cigarette. I never do find it, but there is no fire.

XXIII. Byl Tam

Monterey, California. April 1962.

His name is William Thomas, but he likes it when I call him Byl Tam, a complicated pun that only he and I and a few others understand. It is based on a double nickname, a tortured Russian-English homophony and a somewhat obscure graffito, and I guess I should explain it. The Russian word “tam,” meaning “there,” is pronounced about the same way a New Jerseyite like Bill would say “Tom.” The Russian word “byl,” pronounced somewhat like “Bill,” means “was.” By the early 1960s, when Bill and I meet, not everyone remembers the wall drawing of an egghead face and droopy nose known as Kilroy, supposedly a World War II soldier who drew his caricature on the walls of every liberated town he passed through, a signature to let posterity know that “Kilroy was here.” Early in our Russian training at the Army Language School, our class is repeating simple sentences when the elderly Russian emigre who is our instructor comes to “Ya byl tam,” meaning “I was there.” “Nyet, nyet,” Bill tells the instructor, “ya byl tam.” The instructor doesn’t understand. “Ya,” Bill says, pointing to himself, “Byl . . . Tam.” The instructor sort of gets it – Bill is making a pun on his name – and smiles weakly. Then Bill shows the drawing he has made, a sketch of Kilroy drooping his nose over a wall. “Ya byl tam,” Bill says again, and now the instructor gets it. “Ho, ho, ho, you, Byl Tam, vere dere,” the instructor guffaws. I laugh, too, but the other half dozen students in the class only groan. Most of them are younger than Bill and me. Maybe they don’t remember Kilroy.

It is only natural that a couple of college guys like Bill and me would fall in together, share the same barracks cubicle for a year and then take the most memorable road trip I will have experienced to this point in my life.

We do fall in naturally.

In fact, the first thing I notice about Bill is not that he is what polite society in the 1960s still calls a Negro, although I do notice that. He is, after all, the first Negro I will know personally. No, the first thing I notice about him is his blue-green eyes, deep, clear eyes that seem at home in a face the color of well-brewed tea that has been lightened with milk and freckled with honey. It is an engaging combination, as is his personality. The first thing I notice about that is his sense of humor – well, considering the Byl Tam business, a better word would be silliness – and a gentle, conciliatory manner. That and the fact that he drinks what he calls a “Poor Man’s Bloody Mary” – tomato juice and beer.

Bill and I meet on our first day at the language school. Somehow, we have both wandered through the school grounds, a series of barracks rising up a hillside in the military presidio at Monterey, and found the same crowded bar just outside the rear gate.

‘Asseys-toi,’ he says, motioning me to sit across from him in the small booth. Even though it is only a word of French, he has flipped it off in an accent much better than the crude Franglais I picked up as a teenager in a Franco-American mill city. Well, this is the Army Language School, and we are anxious to test each other’s abilities.

‘Merci, mon ami,’ I say, faking a rolled ‘r’ that nobody in Rochester, New Hampshire, ever uses. So much for French.

‘Que tomas?’ I ask, inquiring in my college Spanish about what he is drinking.

‘Si, Tomas,’ he smiles. ‘Guillermo Tomas.’

‘No, no, mi amigo William Thomas,’ I laugh. ‘Yo quiero saber, que bebes de bebida?’

“Sangria Maria,” he says, pouring more beer from a bar bottle into his water glass of tomato juice. Now we are both laughing. “Sangria Maria del Pobre, I guess you’d call it.”

Bill also speaks German – a smattering, he says, but it sounds better than my French. He says he wants to do well in Russian class because the top students get their choice of overseas assignments, and he wants to go to Germany. It isn’t much of a wish. Nearly all the Russian-trained soldiers these days are being sent to Germany.

Bill has gone to college in Wheaton, Illinois, where he majored in Bible studies. Although I wouldn’t have guessed that from his sometimes-scatological vocabulary, I come to learn that he has a charity toward others that even the most antiseptic church leaders call the greatest Christian virtue. Bill never criticizes anyone, present or absent, not even Army types. Of course, that may be due to the fact that I fire off my mouth enough for both of us. Bill’s fiancee, also a Bible student, is a year behind him at Wheaton. By the time she finishes school, he will be in Europe, where she will join him and they will marry. He shows me a snapshot of her. It isn’t a good photograph. It’s fuzzy, and she’s standing a distance from the camera. She appears to have nondescript straight hair, a face a little on the plump side and features so plain that I quickly forget them. When he looks at the photo, I can tell from his eyes that he sees a fountainhead of womanly charms.

The Presidio of Monterey, despite the austerity of the barracks and the rest of the military installation, is like a college campus. The Army Language School offers several dozen languages, most of them taught by native speakers, so there are always people in saris, turbans and Afros walking around. The city of Monterey also is cosmopolitan, a picturesque seaport ringed with rich, worldly people.

The “nigger” stuff comes up only once.

“Hey, there’s Leavitt, our resident nigger-lover,” John Clay says after he snaps on the light at the end of the corridor, sending angular shadows into the cubicles. At first, I don’t know what is going on when the light hits the top of my bed. It is about 10 o’clock on a Friday night, and the barracks are nearly empty. I have been memorizing a few verbs and am just drifting to sleep when the light goes on. John is returning early from the troops’ customary Friday night immersion at the Monterey watering holes.

“Ha ha ha ha ha, aarrgghh,” John chortles, staggering to his bed a few cubicles down on the other side of the corridor. “Oh, Leavitt, you do love them niggers, don’t you?”

He begins tossing off his clothes and piles into bed, still half-dressed. “Say, Sid, ole boy, ole buddy, has any of that charcoal rubbed off on you yet? Hahahahaha ….”

“Clay, shut the fuck up,” Bill says. He says it softly, not stirring in his bed, hidden by the shadow in our cubicle.

Silence. A long, uncomfortable one. Then we hear John snoring. I get up and turn out the light, and we go to sleep.

John Clay is a blond young man from Dallas, Texas, quite handsome but also quite short, barely 5-foot-3. He often brags about his father being a wheeler-dealer who makes and loses a lot of money and apparently does the same with women. He also is a wild drinker. John amuses his friends by doing impersonations of the old man in various drunken escapades. When John is drinking, the impersonation becomes real.

On our way to class the next morning, John apologizes to Bill. Bill tells him to forget it.

I come from a part of the country that is theoretically free of racial prejudice because it is theoretically free of any other race but our own. Still, we northern New Englanders know what Negroes are – slow, humorous people like Amos ‘n’ Andy – and we tell and appreciate nigger jokes. Not as often as we tell mick, kike, limey, wop and frog jokes, because there are plenty of those people around. Being libertarians, we believe the various ethnic groups exist in the first place because they are happier keeping to themselves. I remember a high school English debate in the mid-1950s when the federal government was challenging the separate-but-equal policy of segregation in the South. I happened to argue for segregation. I was one of the better debaters and had been rewarded with that side of the argument. Segregation was the preferred position. We were convinced the Negroes favored it, too. Even by the early 1960s, a lot of us Blancoes still feel that way.

When our year of Russian studies comes to an end, Bill and I wind up at the top of our section of two dozen students. I choose the slot in Ankara. Somebody else takes the other slots considered good choices, northern Turkey and Iran. John Clay finishes the course near the bottom of the section. I’m not sure, but I hear he has been assigned to one of the slots on the outermost island of the Aleutians off the coast of Alaska. Bill, of course, gets Germany.

We are excited because our assignments to Europe and beyond mean we both will leave the United States on commercial flights out of New York, a connection that will get both of us back near our homes on the East Coast at the Army’s expense. Better still, since we have leave time coming, the Army gives us first-class air fare from California to New York and leaves it to us to book those flights at our convenience. Naturally, we pocket the air fare and make more modest cross-country arrangements through a drive-away agency, a company that delivers cars from coast to coast using travelers like Bill and me as drivers, requiring us to make only a small security deposit and pay for the gas and oil we use. Bill knows of an agency in San Francisco, and he says a friend there will make the arrangements for us. We take a bus to San Francisco and spend a night with the friend, a short, chubby man with a bushy brown beard and a penchant for reading poetry aloud between meaningful slurps of wine from a large-bowled glass. When he is reading, his wife, a slender woman with long, thin hair and a glazed smile, snaps her fingers. I tell Bill’s friend that we shouldn’t have any trouble at the agency. I’ve always had such an honest face, used-car dealers would let me take cars for weekend test drives before I ever had a driver’s license. And then there’s Bill, the most gentle-looking guy you’d ever want to meet. No, Bill’s friend says, he will take care of it. Some beatnik. He sounds too responsible to me.

We don’t do badly. The agency has a car in Salt Lake City that has to be driven back to Pittsburgh. Bill isn’t going all the way to the East Coast right away. He plans to visit for a while with his fiancee in Chicago, so I will drop him there and finish the last third of the trip by myself. Bill hasn’t seen his fiancee for more than a year, and he rhapsodizes about the prospect of a reunion as we ride the bus again, this time from northern California to Salt Lake City.

I don’t like Salt Lake City. It reminds me of a place that I came to dislike during my teenage years in Rochester – a well-landscaped tract off South Main Street where the United Methodist Church and the First National Bank stood side by side. I don’t think my mother and stepfather ever qualified for a loan at that bank, not judging from the finance company envelopes I used to see in our mail, but those same bankers were always alongside the ministers in the handshaking line after Sunday services at the church. My mother, a hardworking, good-humored, resilient woman, would become so flustered and obsequious in the presence of those people that it pained me to watch. I think the reason she pressured my older brother and me to go to church with her every Sunday was so she would have a couple of husky six-footers flanking her tiny frame. My stepfather, on the other hand, wouldn’t have been caught on the same 40 acres with a church. That was one of the things I liked about him. Incidentally, one of the other topics I gave a speech on in high school English class was a comparison of Soviet and American power structures. They were the same, I argued. In America, government was public and business was private, while in the Soviet Union, business was public and government was private. Since the Soviet government did everything and the American government seemed to get nothing done, I concluded, the only real power in either place was wielded by private interests. Salt Lake City, with its rows of temples and banks, the buildings indistinguishable but for their nameplates, reminds me of that humorless, uncharitable, unholy alliance of money and religion on South Main Street, Rochester, multiplied a thousand times.

We find the drive-away agency on a side street. When we see the car, we look at each other with gaping eyes – a 1959 Plymouth station wagon owned by a mining company that has left camping equipment in the back seat, oh Jesus hallelujah and son of a bitch, we can even camp out – but we take a panic grip on our joy. The agent in charge, a man with glasses and an accountant’s face, sweats us out in the office, looking us over carefully. He wants the deposit from me, the person who will be handing over the car in Pittsburgh, but I don’t recall telling him Bill isn’t going all the way.

Bill drives out of Salt Lake City like he’s at the wheel of a getaway car, hands clenched on the steering wheel, eyes snapping to and from the rear view mirror, giving the car increasingly more gas until we sail over the Wyoming border less than an hour later. We stop at the first grocery store with a beer sign in the window. We get out of opposite sides of the car, meet at the hood ornament, shake hands and laugh maniacally as we walk into the store.

We fill the back seat with your six basic food groups – beer, baloney, cheese, bread, potato chips and, of course, tomato juice – and enjoy a mellow trip across southern Wyoming, remarking with increasing frequency about how high the sky looks.

Laramie and Cheyenne even in these days are no longer major cattle towns, so they already are puffing the spurs-and-Stetson western look that probably never existed in the Old West. I want to get out and play cowboy, but Bill isn’t enthusiastic. Instead, we stop east of Cheyenne and sit on a grassy slope where we drink beer, have another baloney sandwich and look down into Nebraska. I feel uneasy, like the big-hatted ranchers and farmers passing us in their pickup trucks are staring.

Nebraska, we discover through a night and a morning, goes on forever. We talk away the hours – hopes, dreams, sexual escapades, families. Bill doesn’t say much about his family other than that they are farmers in southern New Jersey. I suspect they are of modest means. I grew up in a family of farmers and loggers, and none of them ever had much money.

Iowa looks smaller on the map, but we are running out of energy. Our plan to alternate sleeping in the back seat while the other drives has been a failure. Too much to look at. By the time we get to Davenport, we are too stupefied to realize that the rooming house on the outskirts of the city probably won’t rent a room just for one night. But the landlady does. Her American Gothic face wears a stunned expression as she leads us to a room with a linoleum floor and a metal shower and takes some money from us, a few dollars. We shower and fall into the creaky metal bed together.

It is morning when we awake, but Bill still looks edgy. We are within a few hours’ drive of Chicago. Clean and smelling of aftershave, we drive to a small town south of Chicago where an aunt of his lives. He will stay with her and commute to and from Wheaton during his reunion with his fiancee.

“Nice town,” I say as we drive into the small suburban community.

“Not so nice on the other side of the tracks,” he says.

“Other side of the tracks?”

“That’s the way it is,” he says.

“Huh?”

“That’s the way it is,” he says.

“Oh. You mean . . . it’s that way . . . even here? In Illinois? In the North?”

“That’s the way it is everywhere, man.”

I look at him. I have never heard him call anybody “man,” let alone me. He is peering straight ahead at the road, but his eyes look funny. Glistening. Like he is about to cry. Or get very angry.

He pulls into the driveway of a small, plain house in a row of small, plain houses. He yanks the emergency brake. I sit there awkwardly, stunned by what, after a year of studying and living and goofing around together, has been our first conversation about race. He gets out of the car and goes to the front door of the house. A dark-skinned woman opens the screen door halfway and lets him in. I sit there. A quarter hour goes by. I look at the crocheted curtains in the front windows of the house. I wonder if the sofa and chairs inside the house are covered with crocheted doilies like my mother’s. I wonder if the upholstery still gets stained with hair oil and sweat, like ours do. For a cruel moment, I wonder if the oil and sweat are darker.

After a half hour, Bill comes out of the house, smiling and waving at the woman and a small child, similarly dark, who has joined her at the half-opened screen door.

“Sorry,” Bill says as he gets into the car. His face is softer. He seems to be his old self again. We drive to Chicago, where Bill’s fiancee is waiting for him at a friend’s place. I sit silently watching the pavement grow wider as northbound commuter lanes join the highway one after another. I meet Bill’s fiancee briefly at the street corner in Chicago where Bill gets off to join her.

I drive away alone, watching the highway become narrower as the commuter lanes peel off to the suburbs. Holy shit, if that’s the way it is in the North, what kind of future are Bill and his fiancee going to have? Now that she is no longer a vague photograph, I know Bill’s fiancee is clearly white.

I drive through Indiana and Ohio, stopping only every three or four hours to sleep a few minutes, and I won’t remember anything about either state. I do remember figuring out that Bill’s aunt didn’t want to see me that morning any more than she thought I wanted to see her. Sadly, she might have been right.

I will never see Bill again. I will call him on the phone once when I am in Frankfurt, Germany, for a few days toward the end of my hitch in Turkey. He won’t be able to get away right then, and I will tell him I don’t think I can stay around long enough to make it to his apartment for dinner with him and his wife that night. But I tell him I will try, and he gives me directions.

He also tells me he is planning to re-enlist in the Army.

“Re-up? Aw, come on, Bill. We used to laugh at that idea.”

“I know, I know. But it’s just too hard back in the States. This way, we can stay in Europe.”

“Oh, Bill, Byl Tam.”

“Yeah, I know, man, but what can you do?”

As it turns out, I do have time that day to visit Bill and his wife. But I don’t. I get drunk and forget the directions and the commitment. I forget the most important thing. That he was there.

XXIV. The Bible

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. June 1986.

Anyone who has had even a casual Christian upbringing – to me, the Methodists seemed casual after the hellfire-breathing Baptists got done with my early life – has by adulthood either read or heard read more than a few parts of the Bible. Unfortunately, the passages usually have come in a scattergun delivery that not only doesn’t weave a fabric of faith but shoots holes in any that may have been there to start with.

That’s one of the reasons I resolve after I have given up most of my worldly possessions and moved into a truck that I will read the Bible from beginning to end. And so I do that. Putting aside as much free time from work as I can and reading in long periods as long as my comprehension will allow, I start at Genesis and go through the Old Testament, then the New Testament, then, for good measure, nine of the 14 books of the Apocrypha between the two testaments, all of it accompanied by research into the history and literature of the times in which the Bible was written. Then I start over at a more leisurely pace, and since then, I will read the Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament several more times. I am here to report that the Bible still reads like a many-colored coat that has been blasted by birdshot.

But I don’t care. After all, the oldest parts of the Bible were written nearly 3,000 years ago – scholars date its various writings from about 950 B.C. to about 150 A.D. – and the entire work, even discounting the early mythology, spans at least 2,000 years of history of two major world religions – from Abraham and the roots of Judaism, about 1900 B.C., to Paul, the last of the original Christian apostles, who died probably in 64 A.D. If only for its antiquity and scope, the Bible is worth reading.

And there’s another reason. Over the years, I have become increasingly annoyed by people who call themselves Christians in a way that implies that I am not and then barrage me with chapter and verse to prove my status as an infidel. The most annoying of this breed are those who insist that the Bible is an infallible, literal, self-evident proof that their form of religion is the only correct one. You have only to read the Bible “literally,” without “interpretation,” and you too will be led to their fold, they say. They don’t want to hear that you have already read the Bible and found it literally a ragged, confusing, contradictory mess that proves only that life in biblical times wasn’t much more holy or sin-ridden than it is now. Alas, they say with sympathetic patience, you have not understood the literal meaning of the Bible, but they will be happy to explain it to you. Hell, you say, if I had joined your group in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to read the Bible – just listen to you guys. Exactly, they say. Get away from me, you say. It is these people – the ones with the “inerrant” Bibles – who often go on TV to become not only your literary advisers but your bankers as well. Echoes of South Main Street, Rochester, and Salt Lake City. I recommend reading the Bible if only for self-defense. Then you can hold it up like a cross to keep these vampires away.

Yes, I’m angry at these people. But I’m even angrier at myself. Because in the years when I should have been reading the Bible on my own, I wasn’t. I had let these people convince me that the Bible read the same way they talked. And it doesn’t. It’s the more beautiful for the raggedness, confusion and contradictions. Like all great literature, the Bible embodies life with all its universal questions and conflicting answers. And I had allowed a group of people who had mortified their flesh only from the neck up to steal the Bible from me.

How I wish I had read about Paul before the Army sent me to live where he lived.

One of the most momentous events in the spread of early Christianity is recorded almost offhandedly in a short section of the Acts that I’ve never heard discussed in a church. After his first missionary trip, a meander of several hundred miles along the eastern Mediterranean coasts of modern Syria and Turkey, Paul set out in the year 49 on a more ambitious journey into southern and central Turkey, eventually turning north into the ancient province of Galatia and reaching just west of Ancyra, now Ankara.

Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and

the region of Galatia, (they) were forbidden of

the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia,

After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go

into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not.

And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas (Troy).

– Acts 16: 6-8

Whatever the circumstances – neither they nor the exact location are clear from the Bible – Paul and his entourage got somewhere on the Anatolian plateau and found themselves faced with the classic traveler’s dilemma: Which way to turn, east or west?

I remember sitting in the barracks and watching camel caravans thread their way through our antenna field without realizing they were trespassing on a nerve center of the world’s mightiest forces. Even if they had realized it, what could they care? They were following a trail older than the Bible itself, an east-west path that had linked the mighty forces of Mediterranea with those of the Orient since unrecorded time. That path was invisible to those of us who walked through it every day from the barracks to the operations buildings, but it seemed clearly marked to the next caravan that would invariably follow the same route, either east or west.

The spirit moved Paul to choose west. Biblical scholars like to speculate about how Christianity would have evolved, if at all, if Paul had gone east into Asia. Paul, whose activities and thoughts occupy so much of the New Testament that it becomes as much a chronicle of him as of Jesus, could have disappeared into Persia, Mesopotamia and the Orient without ever proselytizing the Greeks and Romans who would later give Christianity the institutional strength that would carry it through the centuries.

Our military outpost was a day’s journey from Troy on Turkey’s west coast, and I visited the ancient city once. What made it impressive was not the moldering walls and battlements but my memory of having read Homer’s account of the Trojan War in The Iliad. Within two days’ journey of our post were Ephesus and most of Galatia as well as Colossae, Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. Their names were familiar, but I missed them all.

What I really missed was standing in that antenna field on the Anatolian heights and looking into the distances with the knowledge that within my eyesight, a little over 1,900 years earlier, Paul and his party had made their momentous choice.

That decision probably was made after a few lively words were exchanged by Paul and his fellow traveler Silas. Whatever Paul’s shortcomings – I don’t particularly like his prudishness about women and unbelievers, an attitude apparently not shared by Jesus – no one can say Paul lacked contentiousness. That journey to Anatolia began with such a heated argument between him and Barnabas that they left Antioch in separate directions, Paul with Silas to the north, Barnabas with Mark to the west. After a third journey, Paul was put under imperial house arrest, and still the crusty apostle had to argue with the centurion who was in charge of the ship that was to take the prisoner to Rome. The ship had gotten to Crete, where Paul warned the centurion to put in for the winter or face the wrath of the dreaded north wind that the Greeks called Euroclydon. The centurion told the captain to push on west. After a frightening voyage in the teeth of Euroclydon, the captain managed to crash the ship into the northern shore of Malta so that Paul, still trying to tell the crew what to do, and the other passengers could make their way to dry land.

I took another type of ship – an airship – out of Galatia over virtually the same route, and it too was frightening. The standard humor on our outpost in those days was that whoever was finishing his hitch would have lived through two years on the arid plateau, counting the days, only to crash on the plane that was taking him home. A grimmer version of the joke, depending on how foul the people staying behind were feeling, was that the plane would crash before it ever got out of Turkey. Mine didn’t, and I’m sure the turbulence I felt from Ankara to Athens was made worse by the gallows humor I had been subjected to. The clouds cleared over the Ionian Sea, and as the flight turned north for Rome, I could clearly see the Sicilian strait where Homer’s Odysseus dodged the rock and the whirlpool:

All that night I drifted,

and in the sunrise, sure enough, I lay

off Scylla mountain and Charybdis deep.

There, as the whirlpool drank the tide, a billow

tossed me, and I sprang for the great fig tree,

catching on like a bat under a bough . . .

Now I let go with hands and feet, plunging

straight into the foam beside the timbers,

pulled astride, and rowed hard with my hands

to pass by Scylla.

– The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

All very heroic. But how I wish at the same time I had turned my eyes farther south and known of a more sympathetic traveler who was saved in a less spectacular way:

But the centurion, willing to save Paul, . . .

commanded that they which could swim should

cast themselves into the sea and get to land:

And the rest, some on boards, and some on broken

pieces of ship. And so it came to pass, that they

escaped all safe to land.

– Acts 27: 43-44

Paul went on to Rome, as did I, another vassal of the imperial forces. In the last biblical account of him, Paul was living in his own house in Rome, still under imperial custody but still disputing with the authorities and preaching to anyone who would listen. If it cost him his life, Paul was willing to pay the price. He was a willing captive. Some scholars believe he later visited Spain and possibly returned to Crete and Asia Minor. But tradition has it that Paul never got out of Rome and was decapitated in the circus on the same day that Peter in the same arena asked to be crucified upside down, both willing victims of Nero’s rage after the great fire of the year 64.

In 1964, I stood in the airport in Rome and stretched my legs, unaware that those events probably had taken place a few miles away, exactly 1,900 earthly cycles before.

I went on to New York and got out of the Army. No arguments. No persecution. I grabbed my honorable discharge and ran home to New Hampshire.

What the hell, I tell myself, opening the book for another review of Romans, you can’t carry parallels too far.

XXV. Wind

Lubbock, Texas. April 1989.

I think I am learning something about wind as I drive across the Texas panhandle toward southwestern Oklahoma on my first big NatSanSer field survey. I have been visiting my older brother and his wife in Lubbock, and while I was there, I looked at a map to see what direction I would take on a return trip back East that has no particular itinerary or, for that matter, timetable. As an early stop, I have picked out Eldorado, Oklahoma, not so much for its geography as for its mythology. El Dorado – the Golden Kingdom, where everything, maybe even the king himself, was made of gold – was a legend that drew early Spanish explorers to the New World and spurred them to conquests of vast territories and civilizations on two continents. The conquistadors never found the Golden Kingdom, but about a dozen communities across the southern United States now bear the name El Dorado or Eldorado.

Getting out of Lubbock is tough, partly because my week with Wendell and Connie has been comfortable and partly because the westerly winds I fought to get here have now freshened and shifted to the north. Texas could be a laboratory for wind. The state is swept by wind that is nearly as constant an element as the sun, streaming from directions that, like the sun, seem to depend as much on the time of year as on local weather conditions. Steady velocities of 15 to 30 miles per hour are so commonplace that most Texans don’t discuss the wind unless it has died out completely or blown up into a storm. I literally blew into Texas on the face of an east wind that also seemed to have brought in flurries of trash from the less-than-tidy roadsides of southwestern Louisiana. Texans are serious about highway litter – “Don’t Mess with Texas,” the road signs say – and the trash disappeared two or three miles over the border, leaving the wind a cleaner sweep at the land and its people. By the time I got to central Texas a week later, the wind had shifted through the south to the west. Three weeks later, when it was time for me to leave Lubbock, the wind, like the late spring sun, had climbed high on the compass. Unfortunately, north is now one of the directions I have to negotiate to get to Eldorado.

To hell with it, blow you winds, I decide with the resolve of a man who controls the power of more than a hundred horses and can go any damned where he wants. Mother Nature isn’t impressed, bowing my steeds with a steady 20- to 25-mile-an-hour wind that makes north seem uphill as I round the southern leg of the six-lane highway loop around Lubbock. I know my exit, Routes 62/82, veers off to the northeast, and that should make the wind a little easier to handle before those routes take a due-east course that I imagine will be even easier. The northeast leg in fact does give some relief from the wind, but when I turn full east, the truck again has to strain to keep its speed. I am convinced the wind has shifted to the east, so I stay on Route 62 when it separates from 82 at Ralls to take a north-northeasterly course to Floydada. That is a little easier again, but I am confounded when I stop at Floydada to stretch my legs and discover that the wind, as the weather forecasters in Lubbock promised, is still blowing steadily out of the north.

As a rule, I don’t drive fast – 50 to 55 miles per hour, tops – and the truck at those speeds will usually average 15 miles to a gallon. In the days when I drove only cars, I never paid attention to speed and mileage, but when I got the truck, I learned to keep track of such things: Truck repairs can be expensive, and lower gas mileage is often a tipoff that the engine needs an oil change or some other maintenance I can do myself if I catch it soon enough.

I also learned early in my trucking days that wind indeed can be a factor in gas mileage. Driving straight into the wind can reduce the truck’s mileage to 12 or sometimes as little as 11 miles per gallon. Driving away from the wind at any angle will increase gas mileage. In fact, catching the full force of a strong tailwind can boost the truck’s performance to 17 or 18 miles per gallon. But it’s not always easy to gauge wind direction when you’re roaring along in a truck. My truck has a tight-sprung, hollow-beam undercarriage that absorbs road shock by transferring it directly to the driver’s undercarriage. The truck’s topside contours have all the aerodynamic qualities of a Moseler safe. When I’m groaning along on the road in this unforgiving, unstreamlined, laboriously automotive mechanism, the worst wind I usually have to deal with is the one created by the truck itself – in effect, a 50- to 55-mile-an-hour wind in air that isn’t moving at all.

I top off the gas tank at Floydada – 3.6 gallons, a little more than the truck usually would require for 52 miles, but only a fraction under 15 miles per gallon. I continue on Route 62, now combined with Route 70, as they both head due east. Hard traveling again. Again, I could swear the wind has shifted east.

East. North. Winds. Mileage. My attention drifts into the scenery that is rolling past my windows. Spreading away from the road in gentle waves is a pale land that in its fallow stretches supports only clumps of brown grass and twisted mesquite trees but reveals a richer, redder nature in places where cotton farmers have plowed it into bright vermillion rectangles. The ruddiness of the soil also is implied by distances that, as they stretch away, take on red-based tones of orange and eventually purple. The clustered sedges, weatherbeaten brush and lavender horizons remind me of the two years I lived on the Anatolian plateau. In the Northeast, distances run toward varying shades of gray and blue, and it wasn’t until I got to the arid reaches of Asia Minor that I saw distant mountains turn bronze soils into royal hues. It has been more than 25 years since I have seen those purple distances of Turkey, and it strikes me as odd that I would find a connection between newly seen landscapes of West Texas and nearly forgotten landscapes of the Middle East. I crack open a cold beer from a six-pack I have stashed behind the passenger’s seat and find more connections. In the Middle Ages, much of Europe was overrun by Islamic invaders who established one of their strongest holds on the Spanish-Portuguese peninsula, blending their blood lines and culture with the Roman and Gothic peoples they found there. The Spaniards later came to the New World, and they, like their Iberian and Arabic forebears, mixed inevitably with the natives they found here. That means not only the Hispanics but most of the native Americans I have seen in the Southwest have distant cousins in the Middle East. The Middle East lives on in the Southwest, and I in my reverie have rediscovered it. An additional irony: Those golden-skinned natives were the only El Dorado the Spanish explorers ever found, but they never conquered it because they never recognized it. They may have subdued its population and politics of the day, but as they dwelled unaware in the Golden Kingdom, it entwined and conquered them in a more passive but more enduring way, a conquest ratified in each new generation of their progeny.

I stop at Paducah, 57 miles from Floydada. As soon as I step out of the truck, I can feel again that the wind hasn’t shifted east. It is still strong out of the north. The day is a Sunday, and I have stopped at a small gas station/grocery store that seems to be the only business open on Paducah’s sun-drenched, windswept main street. The man behind the register in the store has a furrowed face, white hair and rimless glasses that reveal only reflected brightness from the windows. He doesn’t seem old, just bleached and dried, like a spike of ripe wheat. We exchange words without content as I pay for the gas I have pumped. The truck has taken 4.4 gallons, this time barely 13 miles per gallon. Screw it, I pull off near a football stadium and spend the night in Paducah.

The next day, the wind really has shifted to the east. That’s what the weather report says, and that’s what I observe standing in the wind, which is still blowing 20 to 25 miles an hour. Damn, it is as if nature is trying to block both directions to Eldorado, north and east. Unable to decide between the two, I choose the shortest route, a farm-to-market road, FM 104, that goes northeast to Eldorado. Not bad traveling. It is 52 miles between Paducah and Eldorado, exactly the same distance as from Lubbock to Floydada. Topping off the tank this time takes only 3.4 gallons, a little better than 15 miles per gallon.

This is puzzling. I look at the map again. If the weather reports and my own stationary observations about the wind are correct, my truck seems to get better gas mileage angling into the wind than going across it.

From sailing a few times in small boats, I know something about tacking into the wind, but I wouldn’t have guessed that angling a truck into the wind would be more gas-efficient than crossing it. I don’t entirely trust my observations – different gas pumps, wind fluctuations, rolling topography, varying road surfaces. But in years to come, I will be convinced I notice the same effect on other roads in other winds.

I will discuss this phenomenon with my sister, Elizabeth. She is an experienced sailor whose word on this subject I respect. For one thing, she’s my little sister, and a sweeter, more honest person you won’t find. For another thing, Elizabeth and her husband, Steve, aren’t rich, but they sail, anyway. They’re blue-collar sailors who know what they’re doing because they spend their time in the boat instead of the boat club.

Elizabeth tells me that a small boat actually can make better speed tacking into the wind than running directly away from it. A small boat – a single-masted boat with only a mainsail and no other specialized canvas except maybe a jib up front – can angle as much as 45 degrees into the wind if its mainsail is close-hauled – that is, the boom tied close into the boat so that the sail runs in about the same direction as the boat. In this configuration, the sail acts as an air foil as pressure builds on the windward side, billowing the canvas and causing air passing over its opposite or leeward side to run faster, reducing the pressure there. Like an airplane wing, the sail produces a sideways lift that is converted to forward motion by the boat’s keel and centerboard. But when a small boat runs away from the wind, its mainsail has to be set at 90 degrees away from the boat’s centerline to catch the wind, and this configuration defeats the air foil effect. For that reason and for safety considerations – a sudden shift in a trailing wind can cause the boom to whip across the boat, taking out crew and mast alike – most sailors try to avoid running small boats with the wind. Actually, a small boat makes its best speed running across the wind, in this case with the mainsail set at 45 degrees downwind. This configuration allows the sail to billow to its fullest without losing the air foil effect.

This doesn’t seem to explain the effect I have noticed on my truck. But then we consider the following: There are two main aerodynamic differences between my truck and a sailboat, Elizabeth and I agree. The truck has four sides while a sailboat in effect has only two – it is designed specifically to show no face to the wind and usually has no rear to speak of, either. However – and this is the tricky part – a sailboat can change its face to the wind by swinging out its boom and sail, but the truck is unalterably bound in four rigid sides. Angling into the wind, the truck still would get some tacking effect because pressure would build on the windward side while air running the longer distance around the front and leeward side would cause lower pressure there. Running away from the wind, the truck actually would have an advantage on a sailboat because the truck’s rear would become a sail without any of its attendant instability. But running crosswind would be a problem for the truck because it would have no contour that could be angled downwind. Running in what sailors call a beam wind, the truck would be like a sailboat that is close-hauled, its boom and sail pulled tightly into the boat. That’s a hard way to sail across the wind, Elizabeth says. A close-hauled boat on a beam reach would heel or tip onto its downwind side. A well-designed boat would tip just so far and survive, she says. Unless, she adds, the wind were too strong.

I concede that these theories may be mostly wind and no effect, the product of a mind that spends too much time thinking about things that don’t matter. But it’s interesting to think of a truck as a small boat.

And here’s what my lengthy, detail-ridden ruminations have taught me about wind: If it’s blowing strong enough to be a problem, don’t try to cross it. It will just try to blow you over. Instead, you can tighten your grip and tack into it, using its force to draw you forward. Or you can loosen your grip and let it take you away in sometimes unpredictable pulses that, like the trade winds carrying the conquistadors, or the Euroclydon blasts that couldn’t intimidate Paul, may lead to new and captivating places.

XXVI. RVs

Savannah, Georgia. January 19, 1989.

I am stopping for the night off Route 17 in a ride-share parking lot that serves downtown Savannah about a dozen miles away. I want to park at the far end of the lot so my truck will be as inconspicuous as possible, but the only other vehicle in the lot, a Winnebago motor home that looks at least 40 feet long, is parked across both facing spaces there. It’s not a serious problem. I suspect the owner isn’t planning to spend the night.

Sure enough, as soon as I park, I spot a heavy-set man beneath the Winnebago, getting the back of his white shirt dirty. He pulls himself out to talk with a woman who has emerged from the vehicle’s side door. They talk with folded arms for a while, looking down at the vehicle’s undercarriage, then she goes back in the door, and he throws some tools into a built-in cargo box and gets into the driver’s seat. The vehicle pulls out of the lot, no doubt headed for an RV park.

I knew they weren’t staying here.

I used to think RV parks were built for RVs. What I have come to appreciate since I have owned a recreational vehicle is that the relationship generally works the other way around.

By and large, recreational vehicles are created neither for recreation nor for vehicular travel. Most RVs are planned and built for RV parks. And whatever mileage may lie between them.

A recreational vehicle is enough of a vehicle to get you to the next RV park, where you hook up to enough utilities to convert the vehicle into a passable living space that you then use as a base from which you can start looking for recreation. And, of course, the next RV park.

A day or two on the road. That’s all most RVs will give you before they start yearning for those hookups.

However, any RV, especially a small one, can be adapted to road use.

The three basic utilities provided by most RV parks are 120-volt AC electricity (standard house current), pressurized fresh water and some kind of waste water facility, either a sewer system or a dumping station. Although my 1985 Sunrader Monterey is considered a mini-motor home, it is typical of most motor homes and RVs, and here’s how I have gotten my vehicle to compensate for those basic utilities when it’s on the road:

Electricity. Like most factory-assembled RVs, my truck has a clever 12-volt DC system that kicks in and supplies the cabin with power when the 120-volt alternating current is cut off. The direct-current system, built around an auxiliary battery, recharges itself automatically when AC power is restored or when the truck engine is running and its DC system feeds power back into the auxiliary system. When fully charged, the DC auxiliary reserve will last from 24 to 48 hours under ordinary demand. Ordinary demand, I learned early in my life on the road, does not include the refrigerator, which can drain even a fully charged auxiliary battery in less than three hours. The 12V setting on a three-way refrigerator is only a travel setting designed to keep the appliance running when the vehicle is moving and the engine is feeding power back to the auxiliary battery. The refrigerator also has an AC setting for use when house current is available. It is the third setting, LP gas, usually with an automatic remote that starts the LP-driven condenser, that must be used on the refrigerator when the vehicle is stopped and not hooked to outside power. Then, with the refrigerator off the 12-volt system, ordinary demand on the auxiliary battery becomes a matter of an interior light or two, occasional use of the water pump for the sink or toilet and perhaps an appliance like a DC mixer, fan or solid-state TV set. The only appliance I use with any regularity is a small radio-television that draws barely 12 watts. I have further reduced the demand on my auxiliary power system by using kerosene lanterns wherever possible instead of the 3- to 5-watt bulbs in the DC lighting system and by heating whenever possible with a passive stovetop heater rather than the built-in gas furnace that has a 12-volt electric blower. There are auxiliary battery systems larger and more powerful than mine, but they are usually on larger vehicles with more appliances and more occupants to use them. The power supply usually runs down just as quickly – within one or two days.

Of all the utilities, however, electricity is the only one that can replenish itself on the road. My auxiliary DC system is boosted back to full power when the truck is driven – or the engine idled – for about a half hour, although this boost is good for only about 24 hours. To get a good, deep charge that will last up to 48 hours requires several hours of engine time. That’s fine if I’m driving several hours a day, but idling the engine even a half hour a day can be hazardous to the catalytic converter – it can overheat and catch fire – and is bad for hoses and other radiator parts that tend to cook when the engine is running but the truck isn’t.

For these reasons, some larger RVs come equipped with their own built-in power generators that run on separate fuels like bottled LP gas or on diesel or gasoline from the vehicle’s fuel tank. My RV is too small for a built-in generator, so I had to compromise. The only place where there was enough room on my truck for a generator was on the rear bumper, so I had a unit installed there. The generator runs off unleaded gasoline from the truck’s fuel tank, and the controls are remotely wired to switches inside the cabin. But like most stand-alone units, the generator requires a good jolt of power to start, usually more than my 12-volt auxiliary system can muster by itself, especially when it’s partially drained. So I have to reach forward into the cab to start the truck engine to feed the auxiliary system for enough power to get the generator to kick in. Then I can turn the engine off.

Despite this jury-rigging, my generator has one big advantage: It produces much more power than my tiny electrical system needs – a husky 3,000 watts of AC – and can deliver such a load to the auxiliary battery that it is fully recharged, enough for two days, within 20 minutes. Not even the generators on motor homes twice the size of mine produce much more than 3,000 watts. Because its capacity is never challenged by the electrical demand it is filling, my generator barely idles when it is recharging the auxiliary battery. In the 20 minutes it takes for a recharge, the generator uses only a fraction of a gallon of gasoline, even less than an idling truck engine would. Also, if I choose to put a little more demand on the generator, I can use those 20 minutes of recharging time to run AC appliances in the cabin – a small vacuum cleaner, an electric drill or other power tools I need from time to time. With minimal wear on the generator – the unit requires maintenance only every 50 hours – I can supply my own electricity indefinitely.

Fresh water. My truck carries 16 gallons inside the cabin. That’s less than a two-day supply for most people, although I’ve learned to get along on less than six gallons a day. I’ve also installed those four 10-gallon tanks on the loft roof. Although the tanks are outside the truck, the water can be brought in easily by running a small siphon hose from one of the tanks to the water-fill intake spout several feet lower on the side of the truck, letting gravity do the job. To avoid a tank rupture in a freeze (ice takes up about 20 percent more space than water), I fill each tank only to eight gallons. That still gives me a total fresh-water capacity of 48 gallons, or more than eight days on the road before I have to tap into a service station faucet or clean-running stream.

Larger RVs have larger in-board water capacity, but again, their occupants generally use the water faster.

Waste water. My truck has minimal holding tanks for drain water and sewage. The drain or “gray water” tank holds only nine gallons, the sewage or “black water” tank is only seven gallons. Well, they add up to 16, which matches the in-board fresh water capacity, so at least the truck is designed to hold what it flushes. Seven gallons of sewage, with the water-saving toilets in most RVs, is 15 to 25 flushes, depending on what gets stuck on the bowl. But since the shower also drains into the black water tank and since a shower uses three to five gallons, you get a choice on the second day of holding of either another shower or a few more flushes.

I’ve learned to flush less. And to hold none of it very long. First, with a little basic PVC plumbing, I connected the gray and black water drains so they both feed into the black water holding tank. Then I learned to cut down on gray water by taking sink baths with hot towels, storing the water I wring out of the towels to flush the toilet later. I also started saving the rinse water from dishwashing either to start the next batch of dishes or to flush the toilet some more. Most important, I figured out how to use the toilet only for liquid wastes, separating out the solid wastes with an old camp-toilet technique that I’ll discuss later. The purpose of plumbing both the gray and black water drains together is to dilute the liquid toilet wastes – urine – in the holding tank. Of the six gallons of used water that goes into my combined holding tank each day, only a quart or so is urine. With that kind of dilution – at least 20 to 1 – the tank can be flushed on roadside grass or gravel without offending anyone’s nose. I know this practice may be unseemly and in many places is illegal, but my limited liquid deposits can be no worse that a car full of beer drinkers relieving themselves on the roadside. And I can drain my holding tank more discreetly than a group of drunks flashing the passing traffic. Actually, when you think about it, you can consider dilute urine a mild defoliant that retards roadside vegetation in a more natural, healthy way than the salt or other chemicals that highway departments use to keep back the brush.

Larger RVs have larger holding tanks – common capacities go up to 38 gallons, which, with double tanks, allows a big RV to hold 76 gallons of waste water. But people in big RVs usually flush all their wastes down the toilet – solids, liquids, toilet paper, even sanitary napkins – and that makes for a holding tank cargo that, even if you don’t care about the law, you don’t want to try dumping on a public roadside. There’s nothing discreet about 600 pounds of raw sewage.

So it’s frequent trips back to the RV parks for the big rigs. Actually, it’s hard to park them anywhere else.

I pull into one of the two spaces that were occupied by the Winnebago. Because my truck is only 17 feet long and seven feet wide, I can easily back it in and maneuver it so the combined drain outlet is positioned over a strip of grass that runs between the last spaces on the lot and a guardrail that keeps vehicles out of an adjacent ditch. The grass looks a little dry this time of year, but I’ll water it tonight.

XXVII. Slocomb Sequel

Slocomb, Alabama. February 23, 1989.

The day after I meet Assistant Police Chief James Tew, the dawn breaks clear, but the wind is still blowing, and the temperature at 7 a.m. is only 24 degrees. It has gotten colder since I started out from Florida last month, but the weather still beats February in Maine by a good 30 degrees.

The cabin temperature isn’t too bad as Bonzo and I sit up in bed – 60 degrees near the ceiling, 40 degrees at the floor. My press-on plastic skirting has done its job through the night, holding enough heat beneath the truck to keep the water storage tank under the sink and the pipes along the edges of the floor from freezing. The only source of heat through the night has been the flame of one of the gas stove burners. The manufacturer warns against using the stove as a source of cabin heat because the open flame can burn too much oxygen in an enclosed space, but I run such a burner just high enough to keep it lit. To prevent it from being blown out by a sudden movement of air (or cat) and then pumping lethal gas into the cabin while I’m sleeping, I keep the burner covered with a flue cap, a sheet-metal cylinder with a little conical roof that ordinarily is used to keep wind from blowing into a chimney. Three bucks at a hardware store. And then, of course, is the LP gas detector and alarm, a small device I have mounted near the base of the stove. Forty bucks at a hardware store.

As we sit in bed, we see the beginning of the CBS morning news on a five-inch television set that hangs above our heads on a furniture strap attached to the underside of a one-by-eight pine board I bolted between the overhead cabinets across the back of the truck, just above the rear window, to serve as a bookshelf. We turn off the TV set. It has been on during the night as Bonzo and I dozed through the CBS Nightwatch program. The program’s host, Charlie Rose, has been a familiar face and voice on a cold, windswept night in unfamiliar territory.

I put the TV set where it stays during the day, on the driver’s side of the loft with the typewriter in one of several clothes boxes I made from quarter-inch cedar-veneer plywood with brass handles on the front so the boxes can be easily pulled or lifted.

While Bonzo nibbles at his dishes beneath the front lip of the refrigerator, I strip the bed. I fold the thermal blanket and put it in a bedding box, same construction as the clothes box, that slides beneath the bed. The folded sheets and pillowcase go into the linen section of the clothes closet. I lift out one of the bed cushions and put it in its daytime position as a bolster for the couch. I turn the aftermost bed slat on its side, pinning it to the back wall by pushing the remaining bed cushion and its slat backward on the aluminum channels that run along the top edges of the floor cabinets. Voila, instant couch.

Coffee. I open the oven door and retrieve the tea kettle from its perch on top of three non-stick skillets – an eight-incher sitting in a nine-incher sitting in a 12-incher, all separated by paper towels to keep them from rattling on the road. The skillets can nest inside one another because their handles have been removed – a perfect substitute for the handles is a small pair of vise-grip pliers that can be quickly clamped on or off the metal stub left on the pan after its stock handle has been removed.

The tea kettle fills quickly with water from the faucet, which tells me that the 12-volt power supply running the water pump hasn’t been seriously diminished by a night of TV (the set runs on 120-volt house current, 12-volt battery power or its own bank of 1.5-volt flashlight batteries – black and white, made in Korea, 55 bucks at Zayre). However, I notice from peeking under the sink that the water tank is low. (Have to refill it when I go for my walk.)

As the water heats on the stove, I take a funnel and a wire strainer from their hooks on the wall behind the stove and sink. I put the funnel into the mouth of a thermos bottle, put a coffee filter in the strainer (handle removed for compactness, of course), then set the strainer in the funnel and fill the filter with ground coffee from one of 15 one-quart jars that fit exactly on top of the refrigerator. The jars, which are glass with all-plastic screw tops that don’t rust or require unsanitary cardboard liners, once held a generic brand of mustard that I came to loathe as I used it on everything – meats, salads, sauces, even doughnuts – to empty the jars.

Next, I unhook and bring down the table for breakfast. The table issued by the factory was an enormous 30-by-30 inches and snapped down against the rear wall, but I replaced that table with one I built that is half as wide, collapses into three hinged sections that fold into an upside-down J and hangs out of the way – it looks like a sleeping bat – when the bottom of the table’s center-support leg is hooked to the metal frame of an overhead light fixture.

The tea kettle is whistling, so I pour hot water down through the coffee in the strainer, and having filled the thermos, get it out of the way by hanging it by its handle over the kitchen counter on an S hook attached to the overhead cabinet.

Breakfast. I pour rolled oats and Grapenuts into one of a half dozen Rubbermaid one-pint food containers that nest in a stack in the overhead cabinet. A little sugar from one of the ex-mustard jars on the refrigerator, then into the refrigerator for milk, just enough to wet the cereal. I sip coffee while the cereal softens. Then a little more milk to float the top kernels. Yum, the cereal is good. I rinse the container, put it back in the cupboard. I rinse the spoon, put it back in the drawer of a kitchen cabinet/counter I built, same cedar plywood, a little bigger than the clothes and bedding boxes, open-faced in the front for a utensil drawer at the top and a small plastic trash container at the bottom.

Time for personal comforts. I take the two and a half steps and the left turn to the toilet, step in with only one foot, putting the sole on a reinforced edge running along the rear of the toilet/shower compartment, lift the top two covers of the toilet and, maintaining careful aim, relieve myself. (Stepping in with both feet puts undue stress on the floor of the compartment, which is one piece of fiberglass shaped into a rectangular bubble open at the front. For functions that require sitting, the stool spreads the body’s weight over the floor without cracking it.)

I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink, heat another kettle of water, shave, take a towel bath. Total water use: one and a half quarts.

After breakfast, I decide to make a worksheet and type notes for the 1988 tax return I am about to send to the Internal Revenue Service, just in case they question it (“Mind telling us what this ‘National Sanitation Services’ is, Mr. Leavitt?”).

Back to the loft, slide out clothes box, lift out typewriter case, snap open case, remove typewriter, bring to table. To make more desk space for notes, pull out utensil drawer, pull detachable cutting board forward over drawer, secure cutting board with wooden peg whittled from cedar splint to fit beneath sink lip and top of kitchen cabinet/counter. Reach overhead to bookshelf for typing paper, reach overhead again into file cupboard for tax envelopes, pull out 1988 envelope, type worksheet and notes, file them in tax envelope, return envelope overhead. Remove peg, slide back cutting board, close drawer, return typewriter to case in loft, put case back into clothes box, slide box back into its space. Return table to fetal bat position.

Time for exercise. With table retracted, floor measures 30 inches wide, 84 inches long, just right for 5-foot-11 male to lie on back with hands behind neck, elbows out to side, to do situps, runner stretches, flip over and do pushups, stand up for more stretches (sorry, no jumping jacks – ceiling only six feet high).

Outside into chill for walk. Before leave, climb onto truck by rear handrails, crawl forward to water holding tanks (loft heat just enough to keep them from freezing overnight), insert plastic hose into top of full tank, crawl back down, suck on other end of hose to start water siphoning into water-fill intake spout on side of truck. Go for walk. When back, remove now-empty hose from intake spout, climb truck, remove hose from now-empty holding tank, climb down from truck, close intake spout, climb into cabin, rub face pink from wind with hands blue from handling water . . . .

*     *     *

A 1985 Toyota one-ton truck, converted by a company in Elkhart, Indiana, into a Sunrader Monterey motor home, casts about the same noonday shadow and stands barely a foot higher than a mid-size station wagon. If you were looking at a 1985 Sunrader Monterey from the outside, you wouldn’t be thinking about living in it. Especially if you knew you had to share the inside space with a refrigerator, four-burner stove with oven, sink, toilet, shower, 16-gallon water storage tank and sleeping accommodations for four.

Not enough room for yourself, let alone for the possessions you consider necessary to your life.

You wouldn’t be wrong. Unless . . . .

Let’s face it, there are people who can’t fit their necessary possessions into a three-bedroom house, full basement and two-bay garage on five acres of land. Some people couldn’t fit all the possessions they would like to make necessary to their lives into the state of Rhode Island.

Yes, everyone needs a certain amount of space and a certain number of things, but if you have to carry those things around with you, you find you can get along with a surprisingly small number of things in a surprisingly small space.

Crowding in an RV is reduced by technology that was developed primarily for boats by a marine industry that needed small, lightweight appliances capable of operating on stand-alone power at sea. My stove measures only 19 by 16 inches on top and stands only 16 inches deep, yet it has four surface burners and an oven in which I bake bread. The refrigerator measures only 20 by 23 by 33, including all the gear that allows it to operate on 120, 12-volt or LP gas, and still holds – right now – two trays of ice cubes, four bags of frozen vegetables, a two-pound ham, a head of cabbage, three stalks of celery, three pounds of cream cheese and cottage cheese, a stick of butter, a quart of milk, a jar of mayonnaise, a half dozen eggs, a two-quart container of chopped fruit, five 12-ounce cans of soda and three six-packs of 16-ounce cans of beer.

Yes, living in a truck is tight, cumbersome and busy, but most functions required in daily life can go on in a crowded space like a 1985 Sunrader Monterey motor home.

How can anybody do it for very long? It doesn’t hurt to be obsessive about detail, impervious to boredom.

The 288 ounces of beer doesn’t hurt, either.

XXVIII. Weigel

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. July 1989.

The world record for living in the smallest vehicle may not belong outright to an elusive former student at the University of New Hampshire named Weigel, but he has to be among the top contenders.

Now if only I could find him to give him his trophy.

I don’t know Weigel’s first name, and I’m not 100 percent sure he spells his last name Weigel – it could be Weigle or Weigl – but I do know about the car because I have met two auto mechanics who used to do maintenance work on it in the early 1970s, Richard Hastings and Ted Russell.

I meet Hastings first through an indirect series of events that life often seems to prefer. I am parked for the summer at my grandmother’s place in Center Ossipee after my first six months on the road. Summer is the worst time of year to live on the road because everyone’s traveling and it’s hot nearly everywhere. I know in the first few days that I have chosen the right place to cool it beneath the pines in Granny’s front yard as I plot my next big field survey, a 10-month meandering route through the center of the country and perhaps the Pacific Northwest. I happen to be reading the section of my Bible devoted to the Psalms when I come across the 107th Psalm about “them that go down to the sea in ships” and after storms and tribulations are brought to a place that is “quiet . . . their desired haven.” Granny, a self-taught artist, years ago lettered a small white sign that still hangs from a large white pine at a front corner of her property: “Peaceful Haven.” After 25 weeks of adjusting to a new and sometimes difficult life on wheels, I find Granny’s place, a modest but picturesque four-room cottage on a small lot lined with trees, indeed a peaceful haven.

Hastings’ wife, Armida, a longtime acquaintance of my grandmother, comes to visit one day and notices my truck. Granny tells her I am living in it, and Armida says her husband once knew a man who lived in considerably tighter quarters.

“It was a 1968 Volkswagen beetle,” Richard Hastings says later as we sit in the kitchen of his farmhouse in nearby Union, New Hampshire. Hastings, a career Marine non-com and flight engineer, worked for a few years after retiring from military service at a Volkswagen garage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

“I first met Weigel in the fall of 1970 or the spring of 1971. As I recall, he was very quiet, always polite, maybe 35, blond hair, clean-shaven, glasses. He was tall and slender, maybe six feet or more, the kind of guy you’d never figure for living in a Volkswagen beetle.

“He was living in it, no question. To get into the car, you had to adjust the seat, move the socks out of the way – you couldn’t find the emergency brake because it was buried under the debris – clothes, slippers, food, books, magazines, cooking utensils. No kidding, there was a spatula with the egg still stuck on it. It was a real quagmire.”

Russell, who through another of life’s twists turns out to be a former next-door neighbor I haven’t seen since the 1950s when I lived in Rochester, New Hampshire, tells me in a separate interview that he remembers Weigel’s appliances – “a toaster he could plug into the cigarette lighter, a propane stove he used for cooking and heat, a stovepipe he could stick out of one of the rear windows.”

“He was a perpetual student, and he lived in Parking Lot B of the University of New Hampshire. That’s what he told us,” Russell says. “From looking at that car, I believed him.”

Hastings says Weigel had a portable bathtub: “It was a flexible rubber thing like one of those basinettes you use on infants, but it was a lot bigger, and he had it so he could stretch out in there, fore and aft, and fill it with water and roll right into it.”

Hastings and Russell recall a salesman at the garage once offering Weigel a good deal on a used VW bus.

“Oh no, thumbs down,” Hastings says. “He didn’t want anything to do with a bigger vehicle. Because it would be more obvious that he’d be living in it.

“He made it known that he wanted to be able to pull off the side of the road anywhere without anyone hindering him. People would just say, ‘Hey, it’s another parked car.’”

Neither Hastings nor Russell has seen Weigel since the early 1970s. The university’s data resources department has listings for a Weigel, a Weigle and a Weigl for that period, but no record of where any of them might be today. Hastings recalls that Weigel also worked summers at the Cog Railway in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, but a woman there says the company’s ownership has changed several times since the early 1970s and, besides, “corporations don’t usually keep records beyond seven years.” Hastings also remembers Weigel’s vanity license plates – WEIGL – but the state motor vehicle registry tells me it keeps listings only of current plates, and WEIGL is no longer current. I find only two similar names in telephone directories for southeastern New Hampshire, and neither family knows of the former UNH student.

I can’t find a trace of him. Somehow, I think that’s the way he would have wanted it.

XXIX. Names

Portland, Maine. May 25, 1985.

I don’t remember exactly when I started noticing it, but today is the first time I ask another journalist if all the names he sees look familiar. It is a Saturday, and Steve Riley and I are punching graduation lists into video display terminals in the main office in Portland.

Ah yes, among those graduating from Biddeford High School . . . Susan Lariviere (isn’t she the daughter of a fire commissioner?) . . . William Larrabie (isn’t that the name of my boyhood acquaintance Pete Larrabie’s father?) . . . John Laverriere (haven’t I seen his name on a Biddeford Tigers football roster?) . . . Josephine Laverriere (cousin of Susan, daughter of the guy who runs the market on Oak Street?)

From York High School, on the fringe of our circulation area . . . James Hawkins (a political pamphleteer I have read somewhere?) . . . Priscilla Hodge (mother of same name on the school board?) . . . Irina Holtz (Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz’ wife?) . . . William Innis (author of Innis-Beakins Immigration Act?)

“Hey, Steve, ever get the feeling that every name you see, you’ve seen before?”

“Ummmm,” he says, running his hand over his head. The gesture is no doubt a holdover from the days when he actually had hair. I think he still may have a few hairs, but he shaves them to make the baldness unanimous. Because of his position – managing editor, second in command to the executive editor – his glossy pate inspires a few obvious nicknames.

“Look at this. Even on the list from York, where I hardly know anybody. Wasn’t there a James Hawkins who wrote political broadsides? And isn’t there a Priscilla Hodge on the school board there? And isn’t Irina . . . .”

“Punch, goddammit, punch. Don’t read ‘em, Leavitt, punch ‘em.”

I have to hand it to old Chrome Dome. He is the only one in the newsroom who feels it is important that we run these names in the newspaper. And he is the only one willing to help me get them into the typesetting computer.

It has been years since the newspaper has run more than a paragraph or two on a high school graduation outside Portland, and even if space is available for the fact that some big shot has addressed a graduating class of X number of students at East Podunk High, there certainly isn’t space for their names. Too unimportant.

“Unimportant?” I sputter in a telephone conversation the previous day with the state editor. “For most of the kids in our circulation area, graduating from high school will be one of the few accomplishments of their lives. We’re quick to run their names when they’re arrested for crimes or mashed up in auto accidents. And we eventually list them in the obituaries. So we shouldn’t ignore those few positive things they can get their names in the paper for. Like high school graduation. Or getting married. And the way our Sunday paper looks at such things now, it won’t be long before we do away with the wedding pages, too.”

I work out of a bureau covering York County, the state’s southernmost county. Most visitors to Maine come through this wedge of coastal plain on their way to the harbors, rocks and spruce trees that most out-of-staters associate with Maine. Not all these visitors keep on going. Increasing numbers are deciding to stop and acquire a second or sometimes principal home in York County, making it the fastest-growing county in the state and our edition the fastest growing of the newspaper’s five editions. The new residents are upwardly mobile professionals, well-to-do retirees and other people of influence who have been attracted to the simplicity of Maine and its people but aren’t always willing to settle for that simplicity once they have arrived. They still long for the sophisticated ways and attitudes of the city. Our newspapers are only too willing to satisfy this worldly taste, reshaping their own image in projects like Editorial Directions and at the same time reshaping the image of Maine. Certain stories that have been traditionally covered by the newspapers – municipal meetings, daily police logs, high school graduations, personal items – now become too commonplace for our readers. We begin working instead on more general stories about trends, lifestyles, attitudes and personality features like those of the large metropolitan newspapers. The Sunday newspaper, which once devoted entire sections to Maine’s annual town meetings, now concentrates on the form rather than the substance of those unique exercises in self-government. Coverage of each town is reduced to a paragraph or two, and these items are interspersed among large photographs that zoom in on various rustic-looking townspeople peering at the moderator or gesturing to make a point or knitting a sweater while the debate goes on. Another dominant graphic element is a block of headline-size quotes of some of the more quaint or humorous things that are said at town meetings. What once was coverage of each town’s political and financial decisions for the coming year is now a feature spread about how colorful Maine people can be. To satisfy the preconceptions of the influential newcomers, native Mainers have been colorized.

In spite of the new money and the mythology that accompanies it, most Mainers are from ordinary, uncolorful, working families where most of the young people don’t go on to college and, in fact, consider themselves lucky to get jobs in budget-strapped shipyards, a restricted fishing fleet or dwindling textile and footwear industries. For most of these young people, the future will be serving others at minimum wage in growing retail malls, hotels and fast-food chains.

I’m not trying to reverse the trend, just restore high school graduation coverage in one of our edition areas, York County.

“No, no,” the state editor says. “Too much space. We’d have to do it for everybody.”

Ah, the domino theory. Do it for one, and everyone else will be toppled against your door, begging for the same treatment. The whole state of Maine this year can’t have more than 20,000 kids of graduating age, fewer than 15,000 of them still in school and half of them outside our circulation area. If we ran all 7,500 names in smaller agate type – the kind the sports pages use for statistics – we could get the entire circulation area’s graduates, if they all rushed to get their diplomas on the same day, in a page and a half of type. The sports pages run that much agate every day on such important data as race track results, minor league batting averages and pro bowling scores.

“We have a policy against running agate in the news columns,” the state editor says. “Besides, Monday’s paper is a single edition.”

There is a theory among daily newspapers that news is slower on weekends than on weekdays. That’s why Monday papers are usually the smallest of the week and why our newspaper runs only one instead of five editions on Monday. The fact is, there is just as much news on weekends as on weekdays – more, in fact, because there are two weekend days competing for Monday’s news hole – but the people who have positions rather than jobs on daily newspapers don’t work weekends. They like to 9-to-5 it from Monday through Friday, sitting in comfortable chairs around a conference table each afternoon, long before that night’s deadline, and deciding what will go in the following day’s newspaper. They leave orders for the night editors. Without orders, the people with jobs might have to choose the news themselves. As for Mondays, the positioned people leave a standing order Friday for the weekend editors: We foresee nothing important. One edition. Then it’s cocktail time and TGIF.

“I know, I know, I know,” I tell the weekend city editor as he is about to repeat the policies to me. He is trying to get some work done, and I am casting a shadow on his layout sheets.

“What are you doing here? Go back to the Biddeford office.”

“Look, just run two editions Monday, one for York County and one for everybody else as usual. I’ve got all the graduation lists here. I’ll sit down right here and punch the names into the system ahead of time so you can measure how much space they’ll take. Then I’ll come back Sunday night and top off each list with our standard two or three grafs of fresh story. And I’ll bring photos, each shot both horizontally and vertically so they’ll fit any layout you choose in the meantime. Run the photos and stories like regular copy, tack on the names in agate and plead ignorance if anybody in the front office complains about mixing agate with news. Better yet, plead insanity. My insanity. Tell them that nut from the York County bureau came in here and told you he’d already cleared it with them.”

I hear my name come from one of the terminals in another part of the newsroom. Shit, it is Riley. He has heard everything – the arguments, the cajolery and, more to the point, the connivance.

“Let’s go,” he says, waving me over to him. “Let’s have one of those lists. Let’s get those names into the system.”

I hand him three lists. I don’t think he expected that many. It isn’t my fault that seven of York County’s nine high schools have decided to graduate this weekend.

“I dunno, Steve,” I say about 500 names later. “They just all look familiar, like I’ve seen ‘em all before.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, not looking up from his keyboard.

“So you do know. It isn’t just me, is it?”

“It isn’t just you,” he says.

“When did it start with you?”

He lifts one hand from the keyboard for the second it takes to run the fingers over his head, then goes back to punching. He doesn’t answer my question.

Steve has been an editor for years, probably most of the 35 or more years he has worked in the newspaper business. I don’t know how he handles himself at the daily editorial conferences, but I suspect he has the abilities necessary to survive at those gatherings – look intelligent, act within the authority of your position, speak with the confidence of the position just above you. That’s how you get to be second in command. With me, however, it isn’t his authority that keeps me from pushing the question about names any further.

I have guessed from the tone of his voice that he’s seen not only all the names but all the stories and photos too many times, too.

I won’t see Steve much in my latter years with the newspaper. About two years before I leave, he will get shuffled sideways to one of the company’s smaller newspapers up north. He will be succeeded in Portland by the young man who has been editor of the Sunday newspaper, a young man who doesn’t care about names. Just a title – assistant executive managing editor, or whatever it is.

XXX. Louie

Portland, Maine. October 20, 1986.

The first name of the assistant executive managing editor or whatever his title is is Louis, pronounced Lewis, but I call him Louie. Back in 1942 in the movie “Casablanca,” nightclub owner Humphrey Bogart tells police prefect Claude Rains to “drop the gun, Louie,” an expression that became popular across the country and apparently caught on with my stepfather, although I didn’t know him then. From the first time we were together six years later, he took to calling one of us kids Louie. First it was my brother, then me, then our sister. Before my stepfather died, the title had moved on through my sister’s three sons, then to her youngest, her daughter. You know, I have to stop and think for a moment to remember my niece’s real first name, Linda. She is still called Louie, even by her husband. But familial affection is far from the reason I call Louis Louie. He is an impeccable young man with crispy white shirts and a crispy white mind that is far too solemn and ponderous for his years and our business. I mean, I believe in the serious purposes of journalism, too, but let’s face it, folks, it isn’t life. It’s squiggly little lines on paper. No, I call Louis Louie just to loosen him up a little. And, yes, maybe to piss him off.

Louie also has impeccable manners and won’t say words like “piss” when he is talking to you in his courteous way. I say this about courtesy: Fuck courtesy. It’s just words. Louie would rather drop dead than say the ‘f’ word, but when he gets done talking to you in that crispy white way of his, you have the feeling that, while he doesn’t smoke, of course, he wants to reach for a cigarette. It has been that good for him.

XXXI. Peg

Rochester, New Hampshire. November 1964.

Peggy is the only woman I will ever know who can turn my knees to jelly. And although I will love other women in other desperate ways, there will always be at least one time each fall, when the night air is crisp and lonely, that my knees will feel a residue of that delicate weakness as my other senses remember the fragrance of her hair, the crumple of her sweater against mine, the blur of her lowered eyelashes and the shock and sweetness of our first kiss.

We are standing at one of the couches near the fireplace in her family’s living room, and the only reason I stay vertical is that one of my legs is pinned solidly against the face of the couch and my shoes are planted deep in the pile carpet. We stand hip to hip, as if we have just finished a waltz and are waiting for the music to resume. Her brother, John, and her best friend, Candy, return from the kitchen with the drinks – martinis, of course.

“We’d better sit down,” Peggy says quietly.

I am stunned by what I have just done. We big boys have just taken the little girls out for a thrill during their Thanksgiving holiday from school – a couple of beers at a collegiate-type hangout in the next town. Well, we big boys are really young men of 24, and the little girls aren’t so little any more. They are young women of 20.

Peggy has grown taller and slimmer, shedding a chubbiness that kept her a tomboy during the years that I, as John’s best friend, either teased or tolerated her as he did. But now, the blue jeans and plaid shirts are gone. Gone are the metal braces on her teeth. Now before me is a young woman with a pearl-like smile, a heart-shaped face, a finely proportioned nose with just a hint of uplift at the tip, long tresses of bittersweet chocolate hair flowing over a slender neck and graceful shoulders draped in a chartreuse sweater that reflects the hazel in her eyes and accentuates the charcoal brown skirt from which her legs curve demurely together as she sits beside me on the couch.

She is an autumn valentine, an earth-tone image of lovely, fertile things to come, a pulse of womanhood approaching the seasons of blossom and fruit.

I have just come back from two years on the arid plateau where I often fantasized about Peggy – her transfiguration had begun by the time I last saw her in her last year of high school – and spent hours remaking the reel-to-reel tape messages I sent to John, not to correct anything I said to him but to get exactly the right tone at the end when I said hello to Peggy and her younger sister, Betsy. I should have known then. Well, I guess I did know, but I should have admitted to myself then that I had a big crush on Peggy.

The years on the plateau were spiritually harsh but physically kind. In the monastic atmosphere of our outpost, many of us spent our free time in some kind of physical exercise. I chose calisthenics and running, sweating out the loneliness during long hours in the dry heat. The sun has turned my pink skin as bronze as it ever can be and my hair, an ashy brown when I went into the Army, to an ashy silver. I have been out of the Army only three weeks when John phones me and asks if I want to help “take out a couple of thirsty babes.”

I sit there stunned, looking at Peggy’s serious face. I am thinking of excuses. We are both young, healthy adults, she alluring and I lonely. The autumn night has been bracing, the fire in the fireplace hypnotic. The kiss has been inevitable. A mistake of the moment.

She takes out a cigarette. I do the same – ah, adulthood, we celebrate it these days with smoke – and strike a match to give us both a light. As I hold the flame to the end of her cigarette, I can see in the dim light that her hand is shaking as badly as mine.

She isn’t angry. She is as stunned and lost as I am. What in hell are we going to tell John?

That turns out not to be a problem. To John, our romance seems only to prove that he has good taste in both best friends and younger sisters. As for the rest of the family, Betsy considers us all equally old and stodgy. John’s older brother, David, considers us all equally young and foolish. Their mother, who was kind and gracious to me when I was just John’s best friend, is equally magnanimous about the prospect that I am headed for an even more intimate relationship with her first-born daughter.

In fact, when our romance strikes, it seems natural to practically everyone except Peggy and me. We are nervous courters, floating through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays on a crest of martinis to steady our shaky hands. The romance is intense but not sexual, intimate but not confident. We dare not talk about it, afraid to break the spell. We see one another only from time to time, but even the intensity of this is too much. Finally, in the spring, we stop seeing each other. Too serious, we decide. But when the next fall rolls around, we are back together, a little steadier this time. Two autumns later, in September 1967, we are married.

If ever a marriage had everything going for it, it is ours. I love not only Peggy but her family, whom I have known for years. My family loves Peggy, whom they have known for years. My family loves her family, and her family loves mine. In fact, my family not only loves but reveres her family for a reason that predates even my friendship with John. Peggy’s father, who brought his family from New York to small-town New Hampshire after World War II to become our town’s first ophthalmologist, saved my brother’s eyesight in the early 1950s with a delicate operation that removed a shard of glass that Wendell had blown into his eye with a firecracker. The doctor, an imposingly large man with ham-like hands that made his intricate surgery even more unbelievable, was a subject of reverence from everyone who knew him. When he died in 1963, my family was among many who wondered if they had thanked him enough. I think Peggy’s mother was embarrassed by the adulation she inherited fully after his death and has been grateful that some of us treat her like a normal, approachable human being. To me, she has long been an adopted mother, and I’d be dishonest to deny that her attributes are some part of the attraction I feel for Peggy. The physical resemblance is striking – I once mistook a photograph of her mother in her 20s for a photo of Peggy – and there is an inner grace that Peggy also has inherited from her mother. There’s an adage that the daughter’s future is the mother’s present. The last time I will see Peggy’s mother, she will be in her 70s and still radiating beauty, both from without and from within.

Still, marriage is hard, and Peggy and I have some lessons to learn. She teaches me the first one on the Monday following the Saturday we are married. I have just gotten into the newspaper business, and she is taking courses at the University of New Hampshire to supplement a four-year nursing degree she received this summer in Boston. We are living in an apartment in Dover, New Hampshire, near the UNH campus. At 6:30 the first weekday morning of our marriage, I get up for work and roll her out of bed, too.

“What? What?” she says sleepily. “I don’t have a class until 11 o’clock.”

“Yeah, but I’ve got to be at work by 8, and you’ve got to make my breakfast.”

Working wordlessly, she fries two strips of bacon to the shape and color of licorice. In the burned fat, she fries two eggs to brown rubber discs. The toast gets an extra plunge in the toaster, somewhere beyond ‘incinerate.’ This plateful of charcoal comes to me with a thud on the table.

“I’ve made your breakfast,” she says, padding back to the bedroom, “and that’s as good as it’s ever going to get. If you want better, you make your breakfast.”

Although I already know the basics of cooking, I will over the years learn a lot more from Peggy. I will become a good cook, and I will always owe that to Peggy.

I will also learn something from Peggy over the years about being less demanding and more tolerant. Not everything, but something. And she will learn something from me over the years about self-confidence. From a young woman convinced she had no head for mathematics and organization – I tell her that is male propaganda and this is the 1960s when women are no longer obliged to believe such bullshit – she progresses during our marriage through a number of statistics and business management courses on her way to a second four-year degree, this one from the University of Vermont, as well as several master’s degrees and eventually a doctorate, this one from Columbia, in nursing administration. Wow.

I work hard in my early years as a reporter – long hours, little sleep, even less exercise. In the three years we court, I put on 30 pounds, but I am an ex-jock convinced that the extra weight is just neglected muscle that will spring back into shape when I make the effort. To prove it, I spend one autumn of our courtship playing on a semi-pro football team, gasping and wheezing through four quarters of defensive line play once a week. But three or four years into our marriage, I have given up trying to prove physical prowess and am concentrating instead on journalistic excellence. I am going to prove that a small group of clever, talented people in northern New Hampshire can put out their own daily newspaper. It lasts 36 days, which is about six days longer than our cleverness, talent and energy last. I quickly take a job as a traveling editor for a chain of area weekly newspapers. Now 60 pounds overweight, smoking heavily, drinking unwisely and sleeping even less than before, I find myself in the car one hot July afternoon, unable to remember how I got there or where I am headed.

Peggy, by now an experienced cardiopulmonary nurse, looks worried when she takes me to the hospital. A world record for high blood pressure in somebody who’s still alive, the doctor says. I get put into bed, and then the gigantic weight descends on me. An overwhelmingly heavy sadness and an unbearable anxiety. I feel like I am dying.

But I don’t. Instead, I cling to Peggy. She keeps me quiet, makes sure I take the right pills, feeds me the right foods. She shares the diet with me, quits smoking with me, swears off alcohol with me, exercises with me. Six months of care and a lot of drug-induced sleep later, I am 60 pounds lighter and about five years healthier. I am in the same physical shape as when I left the Army. But I don’t feel the same.

Three months back on my traveling job, I am hustling a pink-cheeked, blonde young thing who works for one of the weeklies. God, I am good. She falls over at my first advance. A month later, I am horrified at what I am doing. I break off the affair and swear it will never happen again.

At home, Peggy and I grow more comfortable. Our jobs are going well, we both put on a little weight again, we fall into a pattern of being married.

Children? Too complicated. We have purposely avoided having children for the first five years of our marriage so that we can become established in our professions. Now, during the next five years, we decide that we like our independence and mobility and that the world already has enough children. What it needs is someone to care for them.

As the months and years go by, I come to realize more and more about the future. I come to know where we are going to be and what we will be doing in the months and years to come. I can see my life unrolling in front of me, like a comfortable carpet.

Finally, it starts again. A co-worker, a girlfriend of the co-worker, then a woman who is neither. Then Sara, the youngest of them all. I am approaching 40, she is barely 25. By now, I am working for the Portland newspapers, and she is with a competing newspaper. She gets a job with us, working in the same office with me.

The only shred of decency I have left tells me that Peggy is too fine a woman to be subjected to this.

“I don’t want to be ‘too fine a woman,’” she tells me during one of our last meetings. “I don’t want to be on a pedestal. I want to be your wife.”

She is right. But it doesn’t change anything. I can’t make it any more. I owe my life to Peggy, and I can’t give it back to her.

She puts it another way at our last meeting: “The only way I can get through this is to think of you as if you had died.”

She is right. After all the promising autumns of our romance, I have died in the first winter. I can’t make it to the seasons of blossom and fruit.

XXXII. Walking

El Dorado, Arkansas. April 15, 1989.

El Dorado, Arkansas, is going to be different from Eldorado, Oklahoma, and I hope my legs are up to it. I step carefully out of the truck into the parking lot beside Howard’s News Stand. The weather is sunny and dry, but the mid-morning temperature still hasn’t gotten out of the 50s, and I am a little stiff as I start negotiating the potholes, curbs and inclines of downtown El Dorado.

When I was in my teens and 20s, exercise was mostly contact sports and strength training. Power and speed. By the time I was in my 30s and thought I needed to exercise, it was running and eventually jogging. Stamina. By the time I got to 40, I was tired of being chased by dogs and honked at by motorists, so I shifted indoors to calisthenics and running in place. By my mid-40s, I was back outdoors, this time walking. It’s easier on the knees, and, although walking takes longer than running, you save time on changing into special exercise clothes. You can walk in street clothes and not even be suspected of exercising. Dogs no longer consider you a fleeing prey. And now that I’m near 50, I’m not as interested in speed, power or even stamina. I’ll settle every day for just plain movement.

Eldorado, Oklahoma, was an easy walk. Like most of the southwestern part of the state, the town is flat and regular, and its one highway, Route 6, has level shoulders that are kind to the feet and ankles. In three or four miles, you can walk around Eldorado literally – all four sides – and then pass through it a few times with distance to spare. It is a quiet little town of brick and sandstone storefronts and a wide main street where people leave their pickups right in the middle, straddling the yellow line, if they feel like it. The architecture is a mixture of Hispanic and Indian, as were many of the people I saw wandering the streets or riding the Southwest Transit shuttle buses, although those who own and run things seemed to be of northern European heritage. It was the local postmaster, B.W. “Bo” Boaldin, a tanned man in his mid-40s with a Jimmy Carter smile, who told me about the dozen Eldorados and El Dorados in the United States. He looked in his ZIP code book. Yep, about a dozen, he said.

From Howard’s, I head up a rise toward what appears to be the Arkansas El Dorado’s government and commercial center. The incline of the sidewalk isn’t severe, but it taxes my breath and legs, and, as my body begins to loosen up, an occasional pitch or roll in the pavement keeps me unsteady. At the top of the rise, my sense of balance is further challenged by angles of sunlight intersecting with angular buildings.

Ah, middle age. No matter how much I have stretched in the truck, it will still take me at least a quarter mile to get into the rhythm of walking. I listen to my breath – inhale one step, exhale one step, inhale more deeply through three steps, exhale slowly through five steps, then begin again, inhale one, exhale one, inhale three, exhale five. When the cadence becomes regular, I lengthen my stride.

Driving into Arkansas the previous day, I suddenly felt it was spring. I had spent six weeks in the brown flatness of southern Louisiana, central and west Texas, parts of Kansas and Missouri and southern Oklahoma. Abruptly, the budding rises of southeastern Oklahoma had become the burgeoning hills of Arkansas, putting new twists and yaws in a road now crowded by spring foliage. Waking up this morning in El Dorado, I noticed for the first time in weeks that my clock looked right. For an easterner, going west is a trip back in time as the sun’s course across the sky is postponed each day by increments that are tiny but not imperceptible. The soot and crowds of the East also have been postponed in much of the West, but they’ll get there, they’ll get there.

I am now walking slightly uphill, out of town on a one-way boulevard lined with retail storefronts, heading for what I know will be the inevitable shopping plazas. I turn off toward El Dorado High School. Beyond a lilac-and-white billboard that tells me of the school’s 1985 and 1986 conference titles, I find a professional-looking football stadium with a well-kept field and a quarter-mile track around it. I’ve come only a mile or so, so I walk a few laps around the track.

What a pleasure it can be to walk. As the body becomes accustomed to daily walks, the muscles of the legs, torso and arms learn to do a counterbalanced ballet that has each side of the body alternating between reaching and pushing as the head moves steadily forward without bobbing. It’s a wonderful dance – the original human dance – and a wonderful way to travel. The mind soon forgets about the body and drifts into other observations. Roadside objects a mile away are in view for 15 minutes as they grow to full size and pass behind your field of vision. To a car at highway speed, the same mile of objects would be grown and gone in only a minute.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. I think of da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle. One of the man’s legs, turned sideways and extended, is intersected by the circle at the bottom of the foot. Another part of the circle intersects the hands on extended arms. The radiuses are the same, and the drawing makes it clear not only that a stride is physically similar to a reach, but also that both are the same length and that each is just about half the man’s height. Every two strides (a pace), a person travels his or her height, a ratio I have found to be strikingly accurate. I have walked a measured mile and found it takes me 900 full paces, give or take a stride or two. If I were an inch taller, six feet, I’ll bet I would need only 880 paces to cover a mile. The other half of this ratio – that a person’s height equals the distance he or she can reach with both arms extended sideways – has been used for centuries by sailors. When the ancient mariner wanted to know if the water was over his head, he threw a full reach of rope on a weight over the side. If the water was deeper than the length of rope, it was over the sailor’s head. Eventually, a six-foot reach of rope became a fathom. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. As my legs and arms reach, they are measuring fathoms. Walk to fathom. Walk to fathom, fathom.

As I am leaving the stadium, I turn to look at the hind quarters of a young woman bounding onto the track and see a sign warning walkers to stay on the track’s outside lane. Hell, I’ve been walking the inside lane. Well, it was the only way to measure whether the track really was a quarter mile.

On the way back to Howard’s, I notice:

– A four-wheel-drive International sprayed in camouflage blotches on sale by its owner at a gas station. For the next war, your own stealth jeep.

– At a side street leading into the boulevard, a young man in a white shirt and tie pulls his shiny car up to a stop sign and, looking left into oncoming traffic, makes a right turn that nearly runs over my foot. The first time he sees me is in his rear view mirror as I am giving him a round of applause. I used to give people the finger, but clapping at them seems more effective: It’s politer, which gets their attention, and at the same time more ironic.

– At another side street I am about to cross, an older man driving a light blue van toward me on the boulevard clicks on his right directional signal with no traffic behind him. I stay on the curb and bow to him for having given me, a pedestrian, a turn signal. He smiles and waves as he passes.

– At a converted residence, Dr. E. Wayne Looney, a dentist, has hung out a wooden sign with wooden nail-on letters. On the uphill side of the sign, someone has twisted the letters of the doctor’s last name at random angles.

A metaphor for life. No matter how tidy and analytical you try to be, life comes along and shuffles your notes. In the good doctor’s case, I think what he is dealing with is not an anarchist but a punster.

Maybe we all are.

XXXIII. A Hitchhiker

Eunice, Louisiana. March 9, 1989.

The air is drier and crisper than I imagine it is at other times of the year in southern Louisiana. The late winter sun is at 3 o’clock in the southwestern sky, and I am driving west on Route 190 outside the city of Eunice, just beyond where the highway shifts from four lanes to two and the traffic slows down as the landscape pushes closer to the road. In the sharp air and oblique shadows, the grass stands out in distinct blades, the trees in distinct buds and, in front of a furrowed oak, a man in a distinctly ribbed tweed jacket and combed gray whiskers.

He stands erect, right forearm extended from his waist, like an English butler holding a calling card rather than a thumb to the road. His eyes maintain a discreet elevation, looking over the thumb and the olive-drab duffel bag leaning against his leg. Without moving his head, he scans the lettering on my truck, then glances away as I pass, my time to do the honorable thing having elapsed.

Damn, why didn’t I stop? As many rides as I thumbed in my youth, I still behave badly as a motorist approaching a hitchhiker. I struggle between doubt, although I have little basis for it, and guilt, because I know the doubt is probably baseless. In the 10 years between the time I was old enough to be on the road and the time I finally got a car, I hitchhiked on summer adventures, I hitchhiked to and from college, I hitchhiked across several countries in the Army, I hitchhiked to and from college again when I got out of the Army. Most of my friends hitchhiked. None of us terrorized motorists who gave us rides. In fact, the only danger I recall was an occasional bad driver. But even in the 1950s and 60s, there were horror stories about hitchhikers or their hosts ending up dead. And I hear more of them today. Was this harmless-looking gentleman the one in a thousand, or today perhaps the one in a hundred, who would be trouble? Even at only 45 miles an hour, the 15-second debate takes me nearly a quarter mile down the road.

It is another quarter mile before I can find a place to turn around. By the time I get back to where I have seen him, he is gone.

I see fewer hitchhikers today. In five years and two major field surveys for National Sanitation Services – undertakings that have covered nearly 20,000 miles of America’s smaller roads – I have seen only four hitchhikers. The other three were all together, a trio of teenage males looking scruffy and forlorn at an intersection in southern Mississippi. Sorry, boys, that wouldn’t have gotten you a ride even in the 1950s.

Maybe the foot travelers have migrated to the interstate highways – that’s where I found Steve Lutes – but even there, I am told, hitchhikers are becoming less common. Maybe they’re just less visible. Maybe the rides are coming easier now than when I hitchhiked. I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

XXXIV. The Camp

Conway, New Hampshire. June 1949.

It won’t be until long after I have moved into my own road-adapted home that I will think about the first time I live in a dwelling built for the road. It is 1949, as third grade is ending and summer is about to begin in Conway, that the man who would become my stepfather takes my mother and me on our first trip into Maine in his logging truck. It is a warmup trip for the permanent move we will make at the end of the summer, but I don’t know about that yet. This time, there isn’t room on the back of the truck for my brother, but he has been farmed out to Granny’s place in western Maine for the summer. My sister in these days is still living with my other grandparents, my father’s parents in Rochester, New Hampshire, who nursed her for a year after her difficult birth and then found it hard to give her up in their advanced years. It isn’t uncommon in these times, especially among people of little means, for a third, fourth or fifth child to be raised by relatives who have more room and better circumstances. It also is common in these days for loggers to live near their work in the woods in small stick-built camps designed to be carried on the back of a truck on rollers and slid off, like a stack of lumber, onto a makeshift timber footing.

We are in white-line country when my stepfather-to-be pulls the old Ford truck down a dirt road that eventually opens onto a pond. He drives into a grove of pines a few hundred yards from shore where a low cradle of six-by-six timbers is waiting. He loosens the chains holding the camp and backs the truck toward the six-by-sixes. A touch on the brakes and the camp rolls off the truck bed and onto the timbers.

“This is summer camp,” he says, grinning at my mother and me.

We won’t stay at Kennebunk Pond more than a month or so, but this summer will be a whole new lifetime for me. Like most lifetimes, it will vary between good and bad.

We are the only people within miles. My stepfather-to-be is working for a local lumber company that is clearing out timber that has burned in a big fire two years ago. Our grove along the pond is one of the few stands untouched by the Great Fire of ‘47, and our evergreen shroud increases my sense of isolation.

I spend hours at the edge of the pond. The bottom is murky, not a good place to swim. Instead, I watch colonies of frogs that have taken refuge in the shady water. I get to know the big bullfrogs who keep watch for their clans, splashing off backwards to sound the alarm when the 8-year-old human gets too close. I imagine after a while that I recognize some of the frogs, and I talk to them sometimes.

I also spend many hours learning to read from newspapers and comic books. The comic books come in bunches with ample supplies of chewing gum from my stepfather-to-be, who is using these treats to bribe me. It works. He wins me over with the first delivery of Superman and Double Bubble. When the comic books get dog-eared, I start on the Portland Press Heralds he brings back every day. Unlike the only other newspaper I’ve ever looked at, the Conway weekly, the Portland paper also has comics. And pages of stuff about another of my growing interests, sports. And when the comics and sports pages are dog-eared, I look elsewhere in the newspaper, which is filled with little stories about a lot of people I don’t know. Mr. and Mrs. Smith traveled to Cumberland. Mr. and Mrs. Jones had a baby. Young Jimmy Johnson won a spelling bee.

I learn what the word ‘determine’ means before I can pronounce it. In one of the comic books, Superman has determined what the evil Lex Luthor is plotting on the same day that the Portland newspaper reports that a woman’s death has been determined to be accidental.

I know ‘accidental’ from two summers ago when I saw it in the first newspaper story I ever looked at. The Conway Reporter said my father, a lineman for the local power company, had been killed accidentally. My brother read me the story, but I looked at it. I recognized my father’s name and a few other words like our address and ‘died’ and ‘accidental.’ The word ‘electrocution’ was in there, too, because my brother read it.

This summer on Kennebunk Pond, I can read that and a lot of other words, even though I don’t always say them right. Lex Luthor is hatching some plot involving Electra-City. I know that because Superman has debtor-mined it.

I also learn something about trees. My stepfather-to-be knows a lot about trees. Once he gets me to recognize evergreens from hardwoods, he starts showing me the different kinds of evergreens – pines and spruces, firs and hemlocks. Balsam fir is a good Christmas tree, he says, while hemlock is good for nothing. Too many limbs, all of them hard on an axe. It is good to learn from a professional.

My mother has had at least one other professional suitor in the preceding year – a state trooper who started showing up at the house not many weeks after my father’s death. The trooper was a nice enough guy, but he was too serious for comic books and chewing gum, and his gun, while it fascinated me, also scared me. Besides, I think he was already married. Later on, the logger who was to become my stepfather shows up. All rugged and tanned and charming. Like the woodsman in the fairy tale.

His camp measures eight by 12 – the same size as the truck bed – and has no amenities but the smell of fresh pine from which it is built. Cooking and lighting are done by kerosene. Food has to be stored dry or canned. Drinking water comes in a large bucket with a cover and a dipper. A smaller covered bucket serves as a night toilet. The daytime toilet is, my stepfather-to-be says, “the 40 acres around the camp.” All in all, the kind of place an 8-year-old can love.

I don’t regard the camp as crowded, although I have heard the grownups say that. I sleep on a cot that serves in the daytime as a couch. My mother and stepfather-to-be are even luckier – they get to sleep on the floor. One hot night when the mosquitoes and moonlight wake me up, I can see the outlines of the two grownups embracing energetically beneath their sheet on the floor. The activity is hardly interesting. I already know they like to hug each other a lot. I go back to sleep.

*     *     *

In the summer of 1965, I help my folks build the only home they will own in more than 26 years of marriage, a small cape on the outskirts of Rochester. I’m working nights, so I have time during the day to work as a mason’s tender for the old guy who is laying the cinderblock foundation for the house. Ben Hersom is a wonderful old reprobate who is well past retirement age – he looks like John Wayne, only about 20 years older – and he can still drink beer for beer with me and lay straight blocks while I’m on the verge of falling into the mortar pan. Ben will die a few years later, but the empty beer bottles he and I stuff into the holes in the cinderblocks will be his – and my – hidden monuments for decades to come.

The mortar is being mixed next to the well hole at the north end of the small foundation, within an arm’s overhead reach of what will become the white oak flooring in my folks’ bedroom, a small room where I will stand 11 years later and help my mother pick out underwear and socks for my stepfather.

*     *     *

He was in the yard, bending down for a scrap of lumber for furnace wood, when he fell over from a stroke. The best the doctors could tell, that was the last thing he knew – reaching for a piece of wood. He died several days later.

My mother already has his only suit – a blue gabardine – lying in plastic on the bed and his only dress shoes – black and polished – sitting in an open grocery bag beside the suit. The undertakers want a complete set of clothes. My mother has found a suitable pair of white cotton briefs in the bureau, but she says she’ll have to buy a new white T-shirt to go with them. Now she is going through the black socks, trying to find two without holes.

“Oh, Ma, it . . .” I want to say, “doesn’t make any difference,” but neither my tears nor hers will allow it.

And it does make a difference. There will be no holes in the last change of clothes for a man whose embraces and kindnesses for more than a quarter of a century have transformed sex with a woman into love for a family.

XXXV. Raccoon

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. July 15, 1990.

In the apron of the southbound lane of New Hampshire Route 16, just south of the overpass spanning old Route 16 in Center Ossipee, lies a dead raccoon, his neck bent at an unsurvivable angle, a string of blood dried to his rectum. In the same lane just to the north lies a half-chewed hamburger bun.

“Jimmy, what did you throw out of the car?” a mother might have said to her child in the back seat with the window down.

“What?” the child probably said.

“I saw you throw out that bun,” the mother might have said.

“What?” the child probably said.

“You can’t eat the burger and throw the bun away,” the mother might have said.

“What?” the child probably said.

Oh well, the mother might have thought, although maybe not, at least the bun is biodegradable.

It is mid-July, with daily highs in the humid 80s. The raccoon will soon be gone. He also is biodegradable.

So are the mother and child.

Not so the chrome spoked hubcap, green wine cooler bottle, twin Coors Silver Bullet cans, plastic department store bag and empty styrofoam burger box that lie within sight of the dead raccoon.

I am soaked with sweat when I get back from my walk. The pines in front of my grandmother’s place have kept the truck in the shade all day, but when night comes, it is still too hot for sleep.

XXXVI. Death

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. March 15, 1987.

I awake with a start. There has been a terrible cry, a low moan like someone being stabbed in the stomach, then an angry shout, “GOD DAMN IT, oh, god damn it.”

It has, of course, been me.

I blink at the fake veneer on the side of the refrigerator. I am still alive.

The cabin is cold and damp.

I look at my left hand, which is poised motionless at the end of the arm lying beneath my head. How graceful the hand is. An intricate machine of flesh and bone that with its thousands of nerves and muscles has learned to grasp a breast, clutch a bottle, catch a ball, leaf through a book, play a piano, drive a car. The hand and arm are asleep, separated by their numbness from the rest of me. What my waking shout has acknowledged is that in not too many years, the rest of me will be equally dead. In such a short time, I will be dead permanently and forever. A million years will go by, and I will be dead. Five billion years will go by, the sun will swell up into a red giant and envelop the earth, and I will be dead. When time ends, I will still be dead.

What a goddamned, crying shame.

The clock tells me it is just after 3 in the morning. I turn and prop myself up on the dead arm, rubbing and squeezing it with my right hand. I turn off the overhead light and pull back the curtain. The window is covered with moisture.

A morbid preoccupation with death? I used to think it was morbid until I had enough years to observe the aging process. Life carries with it a knowledge of death. That’s what aging is. A pattern carried in the very mechanism of life that, no matter how vivacious an organism is, will assure that it eventually must die to make room for more of its kind. It’s not a pleasant knowledge, but it permeates every living cell. And occasionally it surfaces into human consciousness.

I have been waking this way for months. It started in the house when I was living there alone. Before the truck plans began.

I rub the moisture and look out in the campground. The matted pine spills are buttered with wet snow. Fog from nearby Old Orchard Beach glows in spheres around the streetlights. I look at mist-dripping rows of motor homes and trailers and imagine that their occupants all sleep peacefully, with smiles on their faces.

Lack of sleep never has been a problem with me, but I don’t sleep at regular hours under regular conditions. The idea of putting a bed aside in a separate room where you must enter at a certain time each night, change into special clothes, draw the curtains, turn out all the lights and then lie in wait for sleep has long been repugnant – maybe even creepy – to me. I prefer to let sleep take me while I’m doing something – watching television, reading, listening to the radio, remaking the bed so that the foot and head are reversed. I understand from the experts that this is the worst way to get to sleep, but I still get six to eight hours a night. Or day.

Sleep is one of the few functions you can’t control. I make a ritual of eating and of preparing the food to eat. I drink most beverages in a stemmed glass – everything from water to wine – and make a ritual of observing their taste, temperature and appearance. I make a ritual of exercise, a routine of stretches and calisthenics sandwiched around long, determined walks that I record in a daily log to assure that I do enough. But you can eat, drink or exercise any time you want. You can’t force yourself to sleep. Any more than you can move your bowels at will. It comes when it’s ready, not when you are.

Sleep may be an excretory function. The sleeping body frees itself from waste fluids and solids that are usually ready to move when you have awakened. From what I read, the sleeping mind may do the same, juggling images and feelings from preceding hours, perhaps even preceding days, months and years, until it decides which to store in memory and which to discard in forgetfulness. In a way, sleep is a temporary form of death as the organism breaks itself down into components and then reassembles them for another day of life. Finally, even if it has dodged all the open manholes and speeding beer trucks, the organism loses its ability to reassemble itself, and life steps in to break it down in death, sending its components to other parts of the living world where they can do some good.

It is a healthy renewal process, but it has taken me half a lifetime to accept it in my brain. It seems to be taking longer to accept it in my stomach.

I pull on my gum rubber boots and yellow slicker and go out into the cold dampness for a walk through rows of motor homes and trailers silhouetted by spherical lights.

XXXVII. North Carolina

Raleigh, North Carolina. February 6, 1989.

“First in Flight,” the North Carolina license plate proclaims from the car in front of me, but I am at least second in the flight line as I truck down Route 50 toward Raleigh this bleak winter day. I am fleeing south from weather that started this morning in Bullock just inside the North Carolina-Virginia border at 1 degree above freezing with intermittent rain and hasn’t changed by early afternoon.

The cold, weeping mist has turned the roadside pines and ground cover into a spring green that seems desperate in its intensity. Spring is still six weeks away, but the roadside vegetation seems to be trying to bloom and produce seeds before it is cut away by earthmovers that have turned up a broad swath of soil along the city’s outskirts, leaving mounds of clay that the rain has turned the color of overripe pumpkins. At the city limits, most of the roadside foliage is gone, surrendered to the asphalt of shopping centers and the mortar and bricks of colonial apartment rows. Route 50 becomes wider, adding arteries to feed this ring of growth around the city, throwing up clay gore that mixes with the rain and clots on my windshield.

I take the beltway around the city. I have no desire to see downtown Raleigh. The easiest way to kill a tree is to girdle it, and even Andy Griffith would cry in the bleeding February rain.

I head off on the first road where I can see trailers and wooden shacks. I wind up parking for the night on an old roadbed paralleling Route 64 on the west side of the Haw River bridge.

The following morning, the temperature has risen to 50 degrees but the rain is steadier. It is time for Bonzo and me to regroup. He feels it, too. Bonzo is a longhaired white cat who can walk through fresh manure and come out clean as a Q-tip, but even he can’t tolerate the wet outdoors of this day. When I let him out on his rope, he stands only a moment on the saturated ground and jumps back into the truck, stretching a rear foot backward in an attempt to shake off the red paste that has soaked into the hair clumps of his footpads. He jumps on the couch, licks his feet clean and goes to sleep. For the next 48 hours, he will sleep sphinxlike on the couch beside me as I read beneath the kerosene lantern or watch satellite evangelism programs on television, breaking his slumber only to nibble at his dishes or take a whiz in the litter box I keep in the toilet/shower compartment for him. As far as Bonzo is concerned, it is better that he stays inside to use the litter box and I go out in the rain to scrape the wet litter out of the box, making sure it will be clean for his next visit.

I venture out the first day in my boots and slicker, walking three or four miles along the old and new Routes 64 and the Haw River that pays no attention to either of them. I hang the slicker over Bonzo’s litter box and leave the boots at the door, but they are still wet the next day when I go out again.

The religious TV programs have an extra local appeal because, while they are the same God Shows I have seen since the early 1970s when they were first beamed up to New Hampshire, our route through North Carolina is headed for Charlotte, home of the original satellite proselytizers, Jimm and Tammy Bakker. From what I have been able to gather over the years, Jimm and Tammy’s message is that the world is beset by devils – basically, anyone who questions them, notably the IRS – but they can cast off these devils if viewers will send them money. Sending money to people who beg to stay on television so they can ask for more money isn’t an activity I’m likely to participate in. When Oral Roberts told his viewers that God was going to yank him off to heaven if he didn’t raise $13 million, I sent him a letter asking him to send me money.

Oh, what the hell, I tell Bonzo, bringing him temporarily out of his torpor, if it makes people feel more secure in this losing proposition called life, why should I begrudge them their comfort? He yawns and snoozes again, needing no theology for his comfort.

The following day is colder but clearer. We are feeling better. We motor west into the Uwharrie National Forest, home of another of America’s Eldorados, not to mention the nearby towns of Ether, Candor and Star. By the time we get to Albemarle, the skies have cleared, and the afternoon sun makes the brick residences lining the downtown area look clean and friendly in their squares of well-kept grass. I stop at a bank parking lot for the night.

I am warming up the engine at about 8 the next morning, admiring the clean skies over Albemarle, when there is a knock on the side door of the truck, spooking Bonzo into the loft. I open the door.

“Hi there,” says a bespectacled gentleman with a checkered wool sport coat, color-coordinated slacks and a long cigarette held tight in the corner of his mouth. “I was about to open the bank when I noticed your truck here, and I was checking to see if you were all right.”

He is polite enough, but it is clear that he would rather not have a sanitation truck in his parking lot when the bank’s first customers come in.

“Just leaving, sir. Thank you for checking.”

“My pleasure,” he says, softening the final ‘r’ to an ‘uh.’

Driving out of town, I observe rows of small industrial buildings that look as clean and prosperous as the residences in town. But there is no area along the road that would be even remotely inviting to a transient who wanted to stop and stay for a while. The only roadside table I find on Routes 24/27 is seven miles out of Albemarle. The table sits on a tiny patch of crushed stone that looks like it might have fallen out of a highway department truck by mistake.

On the outskirts of Charlotte, another cambium layer. Large sections of green space cut away for progress. A new shopping area. A new residential development with its own elementary school. A new church that is the strangest sight I have seen in miles.

The new Calvary Church is being built of pastel materials that swoop and spire into the skies, an edifice of glass and flutes and towers that looks as if an enormous box of blue and pink and peach Crayolas had been melted in the heavens and poured earthward to harden as they would on the landscape. A nightmare from the Magic Kingdom.

Ah yes, I muse. All being done with our tax dollars – well, with dollars that our taxes will have to replace in the federal treasury. All being done to create another in the fast-god franchise that will bring in more security-hungry souls who will part with more of their tax-exempt dollars.

I stop south of Charlotte at the McMullen Creek Shopping Plaza, a sprawling complex of bricks and angles that is surrounded by equally angular, bricky condominiums named for parts of the landscape that either never existed or have been obscured by the plaza and its condos. I wander for several miles around the plaza, but I never find a creek. Just bricks and angles.

The following day breaks so cold – 17 degrees – that it takes the sun three hours to thaw my water lines. I have neglected to put the velcro-mylar skirt around the truck for the night. Cursing my stupidity, I walk to the Winn-Dixie supermarket to cash a traveler’s check. I want to do some grocery shopping, I tell the clerk at the service counter. She stamps the back of the check with an ID form and returns it to me. Besides asking my name, license, state and date of birth, the stamped questionnaire has a space where I am to fill in my race. I look at my chilled hand and put ‘BP’ for bluish pink. She takes the check without looking at it again and hands me $100 in cash. I leave the store without shopping. If that check bounces, they will have to find me before the day gets warmer and my race changes to ‘P.’

As I turn onto Interstate 77 south and hit the gas for the border, I am tempted to say, “Fuck North Carolina.” But the sunshine is too nice, and I realize it hasn’t been North Carolina’s fault.

When I entered the state six days ago, I was drawn by the name Bullock. Had the area been settled by some young colonial stud? No, it was a family name, a group of oldtimers told me in a small store just north of town. At the small settlement that was Bullock proper, I pulled into the driveway of a vacant gas station and put the skirting around the truck. Bonzo and I watched a growing mist turn to freezing rain that coated the brush and trees with ice.

The next morning, a Sunday, the settlement and the roads leading from it were still covered by ice. About 4 p.m., a white pickup pulled into the gas station, and a tall, slender man in work clothes got out. He didn’t seem to notice my truck, although it would have been hard for him not to, and was heading for a door of the station when I stepped outside into the freezing mist.

“I assume you’re the owner of this property,” I said.

He nodded his head yes, looking at his boots.

“I pulled in last night. Foul traveling. I wonder if you’d mind if I spent another night here,” I said.

“Nope,” he said, his eyes still on his boots.

“It was so close to freezing last night that the roads were icing up, so I pulled in here because I was worried about the traveling,” I said.

“Stay,” he said.

“Do you have to use the building tomorrow, Monday, because I could be on my way by early in the morning.”

“Stay,” he said.

“Gee, I really appreciate it. I was worried about traveling because I didn’t know whether this ice . . . .”

“If you had a drop cord,” he interrupted, “I could hook you up to electricity.”

No need, I said. His inspection of his boots complete, he turned away, went into the station, came back out a few minutes later and drove away.

Wordless hospitality.

Before I left the next day for Raleigh and points south, I stopped in at the general store run by George Shotwell. He said he had noticed me at the old gas station and figured I was taking shelter from the weather. His cap said, “What the lord giveth, the IRS taketh away.” It will occur to me after Charlotte, as I head for Bullock Creek, South Carolina, to see if there is any connection between these two places, that the reverse also seems to be true: What the IRS giveth, the lord according to Jimm and Tammy taketh away.

The last thing I talked to George Shotwell about was the broken asphalt shingles he had strewn around the gas pumps and parking apron in front of his store. When the weather got hot, he explained, he was going to cover the shingles with No. 2 diesel oil. But that, I said, would turn the shingles to . . . .

“Hot top,” he smiled.

It was good to meet a man who knew his bituminous concrete.

No, I decide as I spot the South Carolina border coming up in the distance, I can’t tell anybody to fuck North Carolina. If I had started in Charlotte and ended in Bullock instead of the other way around, I would be leaving the state with a good taste in my mouth. There is nothing wrong with North Carolina. I have just traveled it in the wrong direction.

XXXVIII. A Reciprocal Equation

Biddeford, Maine. September 4, 1985.

It isn’t just that the names and stories have begun to look all the same to me. I also have to work for a company . . . well, let’s put it this way: The first guy I worked for at the company kept calling me “boy” until I was nearly 40. This stopped not because his attitude changed but because he retired. His successor, although younger in years, is no less retrograde in outlook.

Today, this guy says to me, dead serious, “I would rather incinerate the world than live under the jackboot of communism.”

Now I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to find a few million twisted people in the United States who would utter words like that, but this guy is a newspaper editor – supposedly a servant of free thought and enlightenment. Unfortunately, he also claims to be a conservative, a word often abused by bad political theorists to give greed and intolerance a respectable name.

It is one of my required daily phone calls to him, and we have been discussing a story about a school board trying to decide whether to fire a teacher who has admitted to being homosexual. My editor says he doesn’t want his children in a classroom taught by a “practicing” homosexual. I say I wouldn’t want a heterosexual practicing in the classroom, either, but the distinction isn’t apparent to my editor. He says my willingness to let a homosexual teach school is another example of my liberal, socialist view of the world. I know the Russians are about to come up, so I try to head it off by saying they don’t seem too keen about homosexuality, either, and isn’t it funny how much they have in common with the right-wingers in this country.

“Hmmph, at least they have some things straight,” he says.

This is the pre-Gorbachev days, but even now, I don’t find the Soviets to be my kind of socialists – too vulnerable to their suspicions, too devoted to their arsenals, too willing to blow up the world. Sound like anybody I’ve mentioned? Anyway, I tell this guy that my favorite communist is the same person embraced by evangelists who go on TV to sell God as a capitalist, freedom as the right to do business without restriction and morality as a code based largely on the reproductive organs, although it does allow you to screw someone other than your spouse as long as it is in the marketplace. Yes, my favorite communist, I say, is that selfsame messiah, Jesus Christ, who championed the lowliest of humans, no matter how raunchy their appearance or thoughts, had an open disdain for moneylenders, advocated sharing rather than hoarding wealth and had such a gentle nature toward other living organisms that he was at once the archetypal environmentalist and pacifist.

That’s when my editor drops the “jackboot” on me.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, this time not as a dialectic reference but as a reaction to being caught beneath this airburst of mind-numbing jingoism. My expletive is more powerful than my arguments have been. Because the conversation ends. Some weeks earlier, my editor instructed me not to take the name of his Lord and Savior in vain. Not the Lord and Savior but his Lord and Savior. I recall wanting to ask him when he had closed escrow and taken title to the deity, but I let it drop. What would be the point?

As offensive as I find this guy personally, his presence on the newspaper should make me suspicious of the company and of the newspaper itself. But I’ve always dismissed management as indolent, therefore irrelevant and, no matter how benighted its views, basically harmless to a newspaper’s integrity.

I’ve never known managers in any walk of life to be interested in doing much beyond establishing themselves as “superiors” so they can ride on the backs of the rest of us (I think that’s where the word “rest” comes from: “everyone else on whom you can lie as a sofa”). The pattern in newspapers is fairly typical: There are people who work a few months or years at being reporters and then, having discovered that being a good reporter involves frustration, self-doubt and a few other things that really suck, are conveniently converted to an ideology of doing something “higher” in the business – say, wait a minute, how about management? Then, instead of agonizing at the difficulty of sorting out real people and real events in a real world, they can go to endless meetings with others of their kind and fret over such things as budgets, demographics, awards (bestowed, of course, by other managers) and lists of ideas for stories that come mostly from real reporters who already have done them.

That’s OK with me. I don’t begrudge managers their paychecks. As a good socialist, I’ve always believed society should support those who, whether by physical, mental or spiritual deficit, are unfit to work.

So screw this guy, I decide. He should be as easy to ignore as all the others have been.

I don’t know exactly when I first started thinking about it, but it is now, a little after my 20th anniversary as a reporter, that I realize there is a reverse side to this business of relevance that is even darker than its obverse.

Where are all these people like my editor coming from? Journalism for more than two decades has been undergoing a revolution. Along with other changes that started in the 1960s, journalists have come to see that the notion of “objectivity” – the idea that there are certain indisputable facts, a certain indisputable body of truth that all journalists should seek and that their readership should embrace – is nothing but a myth, nothing but a smokescreen for their prejudices. “Facts,” like statistics, can be chosen and arranged to suit any purpose, even when no purpose is consciously in mind. The most fundamental and often least conscious decisions a journalist makes about a story – what general approach to take, what sources to use, even which word goes first – are the ones that are most subtly influenced by his or her attitudes about how things should be. A new generation of reporters has learned that all observation and description are subjective, and so we have to strive harder not for some mythical “objectivity” but for qualities that have always been more important in journalism – impartiality and fairness. This means we have to present more points of view, pushing back the bounds of official censorship and an even more pernicious obstacle, journalism’s own sense of propriety, to make room for these new ideas. We hope a new diversity of viewpoints and angles will eliminate shadows and more clearly show society as it is. This clearer picture of the ways things are, we assume, will help people choose more wisely the way things will be. It has been all very high-minded, and with television joining print journalism in the effort, we have undertaken our task of mass enlightenment with enthusiasm and conscientiousness, and the last two decades have seen an explosion of information and introspection. We are becoming the best-informed, most-in-touch-with-ourselves society in history, and my editor is no exception. He reads our newspaper at least as assiduously as I do. He reads other newspapers, magazines, books, and he keeps current with television, movies, lectures, public forums. He bristles with information. So why is he such an asshole?

Oh, I know I always have worked for assholes. In the 1960s, they were the forces of reactionism. In the 1970s, they were the remnants of the forces of reactionism. In the 1980s, they are . . . well, they are getting harder to explain. And frankly, I have to admit that I didn’t start calling them assholes until they started getting younger than me.

My editor couldn’t have been but a teenager in the mid-1960s when America got serious about exploring its institutions and discovered that nobody had made good on Lincoln’s promise, that women were bound by more than brassieres and girdles, that war really wasn’t all that glamorous and that the earth for some time had been making muffled cries at us for mindlessly overrunning and smothering it. My editor’s “superior,” as those with a vertical view of society like to put it, is even younger, even more educated and even less enlightened. This young man who loves his title – assistant executive managing editor or whatever it is – is twisted not by biblical mythology but by sociological mythology. He believes people really do occupy different altitudes in society – some positioned higher, some positioned lower, as if any of us were more than six feet above being soil again – and he likes to draw pyramids of boxes and put people’s names in them, his own, not surprisingly, always coming out in the solitary box at the top. In my later years with the company, after I move into the main office as a copy editor, I will look at these diagrams on the bulletin board before I start my night’s work. I will work in the only way any work ever really gets done – knowing the people you work with, learning who knows how to do things and who gets things done, going to those people and finding some arrangement by which you can work together, yielding to them according to the amount of respect you have for their abilities and nature. If there is someone in your organization you can’t reach or negotiate with, chances are that person doesn’t contribute to the product or service you are turning out and is there instead for the sake of the company, which is a theoretical structure – like the pyramid diagram – that has a life of its own and sort of goes on endlessly, like a fungus. It’s the modern aristocracy, irrelevant but there anyway, or, looked at another way, a high-bracket welfare system. Hey, like I said, that’s OK with me, I believe in welfare systems. Of course, the recipients in this one expect the contributors to be grateful to them and aren’t likely to acknowledge a more realistic, horizontal view of society, and that’s too bad. One of the messages of the 1960s was that social systems are not mythological blueprints for what people should do but are reflections of what people actually do and should be subject to change, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals involved and what choices they decide to make. That’s little enough for the productive members of society to expect, considering the managers and other dead weight they will still have to carry around as they do the only work that ever really gets done.

In fact, if anybody had told me as the 1960s were ending that our economic, social, sexual and ecological mores hadn’t been shaken loose permanently by our new sources of information and introspection, I would have scoffed. Yet a decade and a half later, I am finding our morality still dominated by people who are more concerned about unborn children than they are about starving children, who are sending more money to evangelists to save souls for Christ than they are to environmentalists to save endangered species, who are horrified at the sexual practices of those who by virtue of those practices can’t reproduce but are ignoring the strain put on our planet by those who can’t seem to stop reproducing, who are looking upward for superior entities and in the process are overlooking the creatures with whom they share the past and future.

For more than 20 years, I have been holding a mirror up to society, and it now appears that society doesn’t really like what it sees, so it sees only what it likes.

Our society keeps producing people like my editor, a person who may be irrelevant to the newspaper, but I now understand the frightening reciprocity of the equation: The newspaper – all this information, all these viewpoints, all this enlightenment – is irrelevant to him.

So what is the point of any of it?

It isn’t long before I am sitting in my kitchen and measuring off distances around me, wondering just how few possessions I will need for the rest of my life and just how little space they will require.

XXXIX. Ken and Joe

Port Barre, Louisiana. March 7, 1989.

Just why Ken Spay hasn’t disappeared in a golden ball of flame . . . well, I shouldn’t say that. It may not be long before he does just that, but I hope not.

I will meet Ken today in Port Barre, a small town in the western backwaters of Baton Rouge where Bayou Courtableu, according to a marker at the edge of the creek, gives birth to Bayou Teche. Courtableu – what a splendid name for a small river, evoking in the imagination of someone whose French is as rudimentary as his Spanish an image of a crisp blue that is fleeting, transient, shimmering. The name, of course, has nothing to do with the creek. Reading further on the marker, I learn that Jacque Guillaume Courtableu was the first commander of a French colonial fort at nearby Opelousas and in 1765 sold 8,800 arpents – about 7,400 acres – to an enterprising settler named Charles Barre. Because of its access to the two bayous, the settlement of Port Barre became a busy place during the steamboat era. In recent years, the town has fallen on more modest times, but Bayou Courtableu continues its ancient pace, burdened more by topsoil than by history as it flows brown and sluggish beneath Route 190 at the edge of town.

I have pulled off the Route 190 bridge into a small picnic area along the creek just before midday, hoping to find a place to stay the day and night. Across the road, a local fishmonger with a richly Franco-American voice and an incongruously Anglo name, Robert Hayes, tells me that the local police pay no attention to overnight parkers at the picnic area. The parking lot, a small section of sand and grass beside the picnic area, is used mostly by local workers who leave their vehicles there while they catch rides to out-of-town jobs, some of them construction jobs that may last days or weeks. So, Hayes says, the occasional overnight tourist is welcome, too.

The picnic area is small and plain but pleasant. A few hundred feet of the creek’s west bank has been grassed and terraced, and along each terrace sits a row of wooden picnic tables covered with white oilcloth. In a month or so when the weather gets warmer, I imagine, residents and travelers will sit together at those tables at twilight and chat among themselves as they barbecue fish and meat and swat mosquitos that regard them all as an evening repast.

I walk west along Route 190 as it becomes Port Barre’s main street. The houses are modest, wood-frame structures that have been worn by the elements. A feed store and an equipment supply building are larger but just as plain. Near the center of town lie the ruins of a restaurant that has burned. The ashes are cold and compacted, like no one is in a hurry to clean them up. Among the charred rubble are stainless steel fryers and other pieces of kitchen equipment that look like they were fairly new before the fire. Maybe it was a fast-food restaurant. Maybe somebody burned it down. The houses in town are no architectural masterpieces, but among their plain, weatherbeaten faces, a pair of plastic arches would look tawdry.

On the way back to the parking area, I notice that a narrow side yard of one house has been filled with old bathroom sinks lying at awkward angles on their truncated pipes. No ‘for sale’ or ‘used plumbing’ signs. Just a collection of old porcelain and enamel that now drain only rainwater.

The picnic area is the prettiest area of town.

Toward evening, a mauve-and-gray pickup truck with rust on the rocker panels, a spare tire on the cab roof and a small sportsman’s camper in the cargo bed pulls into the parking area and sidles up a respectable distance from National Sanitation Services. Two slender men emerge from the cab and walk around to the rear. One of them, a hatchet-faced teenager with a frightened shock of dusky hair that resembles a crewcut, opens the tailgate and, with a businesslike scowl, makes several trips between the cab and tailgate with a backpack, a bundle of clothes and several plastic jugs of Everest-brand drinking water that he puts into the rear of the truck. His companion, an older man with a graying beard, takes a covered bucket by its handle from the rear of the truck and, noticing me sitting on my door stoop, gives me a smiling nod before he disappears beneath the bridge abutment. He returns with the bucket a few minutes later, and the two men climb into the tailgate and close it behind them. Soon I can see what appears to be lantern light peeking out of the crevices of the camper top. Twilight turns to darkness, and the light goes out.

It isn’t until 4:30 the next morning, after a night of shallow sleep, that I learn that the younger man I have taken for no older than 15 or 16 is in fact 55-year-old Ken Spay.

I have been up since 4, sitting under my own kerosene lantern and sipping coffee as I watch out a side window at the pickup truck and wonder just what their story is. About 4:15, I notice dark movements and then a rocking motion in the cab of the pickup, like somebody thrashing with increasing vigor beneath a sleeping bag. They must have moved up front after the light went out. Well shit, I know what their story is – older man with a friendly way, younger man with a world-weariness beyond his years. I can only guess what keeps this thrashing pair together, but I am prepared to encounter anything on the road. I just hope this is a fairly straightforward proposition, no whips and chains or anything.

When the bearded man rolls out of the cab alone, I get an inkling that I may have missed something here. As he walks toward the back of the truck, the tailgate door opens and the covered bucket comes out at the end of an arm. The bearded man takes the bucket by the handle and makes the trip to the river again. His breath and the bucket are trailing vapor. I look at the predawn sky. It is overcast. The temperature is barely above freezing. Without my stovetop heater, I guess I might have tossed beneath the covers, too. Maybe these guys could use some coffee, I decide sheepishly. They must be freezing.

I hail the bearded man on his return from the river and tell him I have nearly a full thermos of fresh black coffee I’d like to share with him and his companion. He accepts the offer with his second smile at me, a simple, naïve smile that makes me ashamed and at the same time absolves me of the foul thoughts that have just flushed through my mind.

“Hell, yes, come on in,” the still-unseen Ken Spay says to the bearded Joe Fargo waiting outside the tailgate with me and the thermos of coffee. “Climb on in. There’s always room if you can find it.”

The only reason I’m not more surprised at Ken Spay’s real age is that I am stunned first by the temperature in the back of his truck. It is blazing – a wall of heat that causes my eyes to narrow as I climb through the tailgate. There sits Ken, jabbing a thumb furiously into the primer button of a two-burner camp stove just inside the tailgate, pumping the righthand burner into a blue-white frenzy.

“Whenever it gets cold, I fire it up for a few minutes,” he says through the smoke of a cigarette dangling from his lips, looking more like he is about to vulcanize his tires than heat up his living space.

The superheated air is thick with cigarette smoke and stove fumes.

Between the radiance of the stove and the light from a nearby Coleman lantern, Ken’s face reveals the effects of five and a half decades of not protecting it from the world. Years of natural weathering and a cigarette habit that obviously has accompanied most of those years have cured his face into a fine cobweb patina. Whatever age lines he has inherited from his family are minor vertical creases that give his face a veneer of solemnity rather than longevity. That and a hairstyle that looks like his hair has been yanked up and lopped off by a machete gives him the appearance of a perpetually serious teenager who shows his age only under fire and light.

“Pull up a piece of bed,” he says, turning off the stove. “You don’t mind dogs, do you? There’s one in there somewhere, but he’ll make room.”

Ken is sitting on one end of a rumpled mattress that stretches across the forward half of the camper. Twisted among the bedding is a small beige animal of curly-haired heritage that Ken calls Wobbles. After a snort and a wiggle, no doubt the origin of his name, Wobbles goes back to sleep.

“I left home this time the first of November,” Ken says, as if I am an old friend who knows about his previous excursions.

“I ran into him outside Phoenix,” he says, nodding at Joe, who is crouched just inside the tailgate door. “I was heading back to Indiana, but I got to hearing about all the cold weather up there . . . and then I saw him along the road.”

“I didn’t have much money – 65 cents – but I threw it into the pot,” Joe says. “We got to Abilene and saw snow there. He handed me a map and said, ‘Find me a warmer spot.’”

“Florida,” Ken says. “I thought I’d try Florida again. I got hassled in Florida once before, but I haven’t been down there for five or six years.”

“It was pretty warm there this winter,” I say. “I was there a few months ago, and now I’m heading west, probably to where you’ve just come from.”

He pauses to light the stove again, and I take a look around. The mattress fills nearly all the forward half of the camper. In the after quarters on the driver’s side, several of those skeletal plastic boxes used for delivering milk have been wired together to make a table for pots, pans and utensils and a shelf for the camp stove. The ceiling of the camper top has been lined lengthwise with two strips of wall paneling spliced together along the centerline with duct tape that is barely doing its job. The section of panel over the rear driver’s side is sagging ominously toward the stove. A narrow stretch of floor between the mattress and tailgate has been lined with Igloo cooler tops, good insulation between bare feet and a metal truck bed. On the passenger’s side of the after quarters, a double bureau overflows with unfolded shirts, sweaters, trousers, socks and underwear, and they share one drawer with giant-sized jars and cans of coffee, both freeze-dried and regular, enough to keep the fleet awake through all the watches. Leaning against the bureau are a fly rod and fishing tackle. On top of the bureau is an assortment of paperback books, most of them Westerns or crime novels that seem strangely quaint in this era of explicit sex magazines.

“You’ve got a lot of stuff in here,” I say.

“Everything a man could want or need,” he says. His cigarette-softened voice has taken on a down-home cadence that makes the words sound like a line from one of those breathy talking country records by Tex Ritter (“Blooood on the Saddle”) or Red Sovine (“My Little Teddy Bear”).

“Yes, I’ve been out on this here road a long, long time,” he says, as if reciting the lyrics to some song I don’t know.

Ken is, I suspect, an old-fashioned kind of traveler with a sense of the tradition and drama of the road, and he is warming up to share it.

“I’ve hitchhiked from coast to coast – north, east, south and west. I’ve freighted, rode the rails.

“Years ago, you had to ride the rods, beneath the boxcars – a pretty damned scary, goddamned nasty business – but nowadays, you find a flatcar or a piggyback carrying cars and trucks. You find one with a car or truck open, and you just get right in and ride comfortable.

“You still have to watch out for bulls.”

Bulls? I know he isn’t talking about bovines, and the other meaning strikes me as so dated, I say the word after him.

“Bulls,” he repeats. “You know, railroad dicks.”

“Cops,” Joe says. He is now sitting crosslegged at the tailgate door, resting his beard in his hands, listening to Ken.

Ken is what experts in itineracy would call a tramp, a humble but respectable calling that draws its name from a humble but respectable Middle English verb, trampen. The old word meant about the same as its modern English counterpart – to walk or march with heavy steps, as if on a mission beyond normal endurance. I’m sure Ken knows nothing of the origin of the word, but he proudly admits to the practice. He calls himself a “rubber tramp,” a 20th century class of wanderer who has traded in his bundle on a stick for a gearshift on a stick, usually attached to a well-aged vehicle.

“I’ve always had some kind of old clunker,” he says, lighting another filter-tip. “My dad kicked me out of the house when I was 16, and that was over some damned old car. My uncle called me one night to come pick him up somewhere. I set out in the car to give him a lift, but I was late getting back home, and I made the old man late for his night-shift job. He whipped my ass with a rubber hose and said, ‘Pack your clothes and be gone when I get back in the morning.’ I took him at his word.

“I’ve been on the road off and on ever since.”

His latest vehicle, a 1976 Chevrolet Custom Cab 10 with mileage that depends on how many times the odometer has passed all zeros, came into his possession last year in exchange for $800 and an old Chevette. He likes the pickup, especially the camper top because it is small but sufficient.

“I had me a full-equipped camper once – a cab-over and everything – but I got rid of the son of a bitch. Too much equipment and gadgets to worry about.”

His previous vehicle, the old Chevette, had served him well, as had an old bus he drove before that.

“I had that bus when I got Wobbles. I took off for Texas that time, too. I think that was seven years ago . . . let’s see, either seven or eight, I think.” Computing calendar years is hard for a man who logs his life in terms of trucks, trips and dogs.

That could explain why he’s had difficulty keeping a wife.

“I’ve been married five times,” he says. The words shake the cigarette between his lips, sending the ash tumbling down his red plaid shirt and industrial-weight jeans. Near his feet stand a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots, cream yellow and still unscuffed. They have been set aside again this morning for the plain leather shoes with foam rubber soles that rest comfortably around his feet.

“And divorced five times,” Joe says.

Ken’s latest road adventure involves his latest wife, but the chronology and itinerary are a little too confusing for me to follow. Maybe for him, too.

“Hell, we weren’t married three or four days, I don’t think. An annulment. She wanted to get married, and I fooled around and finally decided we’d get married. We made a trip to Tennessee and got married. We weren’t back two days, I don’t think, when she called her dad and he come after her. She got her an annulment.”

“Was she too young?” I ask.

“Hell no, she was 44,” he says. “Forty-four years old and let her dad tell her what to do.”

“Well, they don’t grow up until they’re about 35,” I offer.

“They don’t grow up,” he says.

Ken has been on the road since November not only because of that woman but also because of another one back home in Indiana, and she was enough to make a man sputter.

“My friggin’ landlady,” he says. “I got me an apartment there at home last summer. But the goddamned rent was so friggin’ high. That old gal I rented off . . . she was money-goddamned-crazy. My rent was supposed to be 150. There’s two other people, and I’m payin’ half the water bill, but they’re always bitchin’ about the water. She’d run my rent one way or another to where I was payin’ 200, 260, 280. I said, ‘Bullshit, this money-hoggin’ son of a bitch knows how much I draw every month, and she’s gonna get it.’”

When you look at it that way, Ken got out of town just in time.

The town is Tipton, Indiana, a small county seat just north of Indianapolis. Ken grew up there, the oldest of two boys and two girls. His brother, Tom, is still back in Tipton, still working for the water company on the first and only job he ever had. Ken doesn’t wonder about that. That’s just the way Tom is.

Just for the record, a tramp should in no case be confused with a bum, another form of itineracy also based on a Middle English word, bom, meaning buttocks, which is where bums presumably like to apply their weight. Again, the etymology might escape Ken, but he knows the ethic involved. It is the old-fashioned work ethic, and he would like to think he has one. Of course, his work history, like his marital history, is more complicated than most.

Somehow he managed to serve a four-year hitch in the Air Force and a three-year hitch in the Army before leaving the military with a disability that still helps put $537 in his pocket the first of every month. He also worked 18 years in one place – Gillette, Wyoming, where he was a welder in an oil patch – but that ended in 1978 with open-heart surgery in a Denver hospital. In between these periods of occupational stability ending in medical collapse were many other jobs.

“I’ve been a welder, a plumber, done machine setup and repair, worked in gas stations, washed dishes, worked on a ranch. Any line of work you’ve done, you may have done a lot of it, but I’ve done a little.”

That helps him find odd jobs on the road, and Ken believes any tramp – even one with the certainty of $537 deposited automatically each month in a hometown bank that can wire money to him anywhere – should be willing to work on the road. He might not be able to find a widow woman with wood to chop, but there’s always a restaurant willing to trade something to eat for some odd job to be done. Perhaps not coincidentally, Ken has found some restaurants willing to give him the food first and then not require him to stay around for the odd job.

Churches and police stations also are good places to find help, he says. Churches will usually provide a few dollars for the road, and the police are generally good for enough gas to get to the next town, or at least out of theirs.

But these rules of the road don’t apply everywhere, he says.

“Cities are bad. Those social agencies in them are bad. The Salvation Army, for example – piss poor. All they want is the body count and the money that goes along with it. They get the bodies, all right. That money draws ‘em like flies. Bums, hanging around for the next handout. Most of ‘em dope addicts.

“You’ve got to watch those city bums. They’re so goddamned lazy, why, if you put ‘em in a pie factory and handed ‘em the crust, they wouldn’t pour in the filling.

“They’re mean, too. I’ll tell you something. I never used to carry nothing at all . . . nothing, all my life,” he says. He reaches beneath the blanket and pulls out a nickel-plated .22 automatic pistol.

“I went to a pawn shop and got it the first of the month. I was held up last month. It happened in Phoenix – some hitchhiker I’d picked up in Texas. I guess he lived around Phoenix somewhere. I woke up and he was holding a knife against my throat and ordering me to drive somewhere. We wrassled around, and Wobbles and I got out of the truck and went for the cops. By the time we got back, he was gone – along with my road lamp, my CB radio, the stove I used to have, a butcher knife, even my shaving gear. He didn’t take the truck, but I don’t think he could drive, anyway. He was crazy. He’d been drinking Lysol all night.”

“Lysol?” I ask.

“Canned heat, Sterno,” Ken says. He pulls an unused can of the flammable gel from his makeshift pantry.

“I knew I shouldn’t have stopped in Phoenix,” he says.

“But wasn’t that where you picked up Joe?”

“Yeah, just outside the city. But I knew he was all right. I could tell when I saw him on the road, all bundled up and cold.”

Joe Fargo is a different story, but in a converse way, his physical appearance has been as deceptive as Ken’s. The beard that has made Joe look older from a distance becomes a contradiction up close to his youthful face, making it look even younger. He is 49, six years younger than Ken, but his skin looks half that age – smooth, polished, pulled tightly across his face as if he had undergone a cosmetic peel. He would be almost pretty if he wasn’t missing a front tooth, a dental void that gives his grin an equally vacant expression.

Joe is a product of cities – born and raised in Cleveland, a resident in recent years of Las Vegas. Like Ken, he is an Army veteran. He did a tour in Vietnam in the medical corps. Unlike Ken, he was mustered out just short of 20 years, leaving him without retirement benefits, a nasty Army trick I heard about when I did my hitch. Joe says he is suing the Army to get some kind of pension benefits. Meanwhile, he supports himself by doing odd jobs, selling his blood, sometimes as often as twice a week, and getting handouts from relatives scattered across the country. For transportation, he has to depend on people like Ken. Joe has never driven a vehicle in his life.

“I’ve walked plenty,” he says, turning up a sole of one of his hiking boots. “One day last week, I walked 26 miles before I got a ride.”

Like the cities, the interstate highways are getting more dangerous, Joe says.

“I don’t see many people on the road nowadays,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to get a ride. The truckers really can’t pick you up no more because of the insurance. There’s a lot of RVs and motor homes with older people who don’t like to pick you up because they’ve heard bad things about hitchhikers, and they’re scared. Some of it is true.”

“A lot of it is true,” Ken says, lighting another smoke. “That’s one of the reasons I don’t like interstates. Another reason is too much traffic. Too damned complicated.”

Ken and Joe were traveling Interstate 20 through north-central Texas before they ran into the snow in Abilene. Then they veered off south at Dallas-Fort Worth for the warmer temperatures of Interstate 10 that goes past the Texas coast before entering Louisiana.

“We turned off on Route 190 because Ken likes smaller roads,” Joe says. “I’m beginning to like them, too. I went over the the Gulf station across the road last night to buy some cigarettes for him, and the people in there were so friendly. When I got back, I told him, ‘Hey, you’ve got me on the back roads now, and you ain’t gonna get me off the back roads.’”

Route 190 isn’t exactly a back road, but it is a local one that goes through rather than past the towns along its way. Ken has never driven the road before. He chose it out of desperation.

“We were peeling off five to seven hundred miles a day,” he says, squinting over the cigarette. “I don’t know why in hell I do that. I ain’t got no fuckin’ reason. I’ve gotta slow down. I’m gonna slow down. I’ve been in a hurry all my goddamned life and never got nowhere.”

Another resolution Ken has made is to cut down on his smoking. His heart has been OK since the ‘78 surgery, but the doctors tell him now he is getting into the advanced stages of emphysema, a medical conclusion that doesn’t surprise me now that I have listened to him for an hour or so. He says he has cut down to a pack a day. I’m not sure how he will stay within that limit today unless Joe bought him one enormous pack of cigarettes at the Gulf station or he is planning to go to bed by noon.

The camper goes silent as Ken attacks the stove again. I read through the titles of his small library and find The Twelve Steps, one of the bibles of Alcoholics Anonymous. The pages are worn, and parts of the text are underlined.

“I haven’t had a drink in five years,” Ken says, “and he’s been off the stuff for six months.”

“We talked last night about booze,” Joe says, smiling, “and he wanted to talk again this morning. He really had to shake the truck to wake me up.”

Hmmm. Wait long enough and you get the answers to life’s questions. Some of them, anyway.

What do they plan for today?

“This looks like a pretty nice old town,” Ken says. “I thought maybe I’d just gym around, look things over.”

Gym around? Jim around? I like the former. I’ve never heard the expression before, but it’s a good one. I picture a kid swinging monkey-like through a jungle gym.

“I might have a coffee, maybe find a mission, get a shower, shave, clean up. Keep a low profile. Look for an AA meeting.”

The conversation has been interesting, but I’m getting woozy. The heat and coffee make me feel like I’ve been in a sauna, drinking wine. The stove fumes also are getting to me, and I mention them to Ken as I prepare to leave.

“Oh, it’s just that damned gasoline,” he says.

Gasoline? In a stove? I start to explain about gasoline having a dangerously low flash point that makes it a poor candidate for stove fuel, but he waves off the subject.

“When the Good Lord says you’re going, you’re going,” he says.

I just hope the Good Lord doesn’t call you by stove, I think as I climb out the tailgate with a certain sense of relief.

As I drive along Route 190, covering the same ground where I walked yesterday, I think about Ken and Joe, especially Ken. He is what my stepfather would have called a character. My stepfather was a character, but he wasn’t half the old Yankee he portrayed when he thought his audience expected it. He was a character, and he knew it, and he could turn it up when he wanted. I suspect Ken is the same way.

I don’t believe everything he’s told me. In fact, I’m not sure I believe any of it, but belief is a sense that years of journalism have withered in me. What people have told me for news stories, I have written and attributed to them, then counterbalanced it with what other people have told me, also with attribution. If it’s a personality feature with no news issues involved, what the hell . . . let ‘em talk. In either case, it isn’t my belief that counts but the reader’s, and I have learned over the years that readers generally approach their newspaper with their boots on and cuffs hiked up.

So here’s Ken, a stereotype of the road. A rough-living, tough-talking, hard-driving man who nevertheless has the generosity and trust to pick up a hitchhiker in the same town where another hitchhiker has just threatened and robbed him. A prince in a pickup.

How much of the stereotype is mine because I think I know the kind of person he is and that has colored the way I see him? How much of the stereotype also is mine because he has embellished it for my benefit? And how much of the stereotype is his because he has embellished it for his own benefit, his own sense of importance?

Looked at another way, he is a sad case – a 55-year-old man with little money, no job, no prospects, no family, a patched-up heart, an alcohol problem that could reclaim him in a day and a tobacco habit that is doing a pretty good job of killing him without the booze. He is a man whose best years are gone, driving a truck whose best miles are past.

I drive past the yard full of sinks, then the burned-out restaurant. There is something about this town, something appropriate about the fact that I have run into Ken here. Both man and place are down-and-out, past their best years, yet still willing to share the best of what they have left with strangers.

XL. Space-age plastics

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. October 16, 1986.

God bless velcro, mylar and Krazy Glue.

I’m no great fan of plastics, but I have to admit a grudging admiration for these three space-age polymers.

With the first two, plus a few other materials of more traditional cut, you can fabricate any number of accessories that make life on the road more comfortable.

The third example of humanity’s ability to twist molecules into different weights and properties, Krazy Glue, I put on the list only because I never would have believed that a product with such a stupid name could be so handy – in some cases, unequalled – for making quick and permanent repairs.

Velcro . . . I’m sure the word is a trademark registered by someone who would insist it be capitalized as a proper noun. I use it as a common noun, uncapitalized, only because I can’t think of any other brief generic term for mated polyester fabrics, one faced with microscopic barbs and the other with microscopic loops, that adhere to one another physically without bonding chemically. As intricate and complicated as the physical mechanics are, velcro makes living in a truck a lot simpler.

That’s why I’ve gone out today and bought about 75 linear feet of velcro. Look for the kind that comes in three-quarter-inch-wide sticky-back rolls. Most fabric shops carry them. About a buck a linear foot.

With my five rolls of velcro, I have made mountings for a six-section mylar skirt that insulates the underside of the truck and for seven fiberglass patches that insulate vents on the side of the truck. I still have several feet of velcro tape left over for various applications inside the truck.

Mylar is no doubt another trademark word that otherwise translates as flexible, transparent, extruded polyethylene sheet fabric. To me, it’s plain old uncapitalized mylar. How can anybody own a word and tell us how to use it? I can understand a manufacturer insisting that a trade name not be used on a competing generic equivalent, but why get pushy with the rest of us? After all, the trademark word got into common use in the first place because we all asked for and bought the product by name. So make some more millions, trademarkers. Sorry about putting your words in common use, but your products do have a lot of them.

Anyway, four-mil-thick mylar is great stuff for weather shielding because it insulates well, is easy to tailor and handle, is easy to store when not in use and is cheap enough to replace if damaged or lost. Two 10-by-25-foot rolls – about 12 bucks – have been enough for a double-layered skirt that encircles the perimeter of my truck.

The purpose of the skirt is simply to keep air from moving beneath the truck. I learned early in my truck dwelling life that it takes so little heat to warm the cabin, I would be nearly as well off sealing the cabin’s envelope against convection loss by putting up a thin, inexpensive barrier against air movement as I would by trying to prevent radiant heat loss with a heavy, expensive jacket of insulation. That assumption turns out to be correct. I will learn in the coming winter that the skirt keeps the floor of the cabin at least 20 degrees warmer than the outside temperature. An unexpected advantage, I will find, is that the skirt’s transparency captures heat on sunny winter days and pushes the underside 30 to 40 degrees higher than the outside temperature, usually enough to melt any ice or snow that has collected on the skirt, unfreezing it for easy removal.

Making the skirt is fairly straightforward, but it does involve some tricky parts that take time, so I’ve described the process – and the simple technology for using the same materials to create a truckside canopy as well as some vent covers and an interior insulated curtain – in an appendix with the same name as this chapter heading.

And now, let’s talk about repairs. What common materials like duct tape and staples won’t hold, Krazy Glue will. This product, which the label tells me is made in Japan and distributed in the U.S. by Jadow & Sons of New York, has several perfectly useful generic names – acrylic glue, cyanic glue or, if you’re feeling wordy, cyanoacrylic glue. But I’m stuck, so to speak, on the brand name. Because the first time I heard of Krazy Glue, it was the only two words of English in a TV ad I was watching on the one Franco-Canadian station carried by the Biddeford cable company. ‘Cherchez le Krazy Glue,’ the announcer said as a guy in a hardhat glued it to a steel girder that a crane then whisked into the sky, stretching my neck as much as his. “What in hell will they try to sell us next?” I clucked. The next time I was looking for acrylic glue, of course, I bought the green-and-white cylinder of . . . well, you know the name.

In my early years of road living, I will Krazy Glue a loose bolt on the deck ladder to the roof of the truck, a broken cap on a wheel lug nut, a snapped bow on my cheap TV set’s earphones, a gnarled rubber welcome mat that I run over while mowing my grandmother’s lawn, a blowout in the bladder of my sphygmomanometer. I will Krazy Glue cracks in my gum rubber boots. I will get an extra year’s walking from athletic shoes that I Krazy Glue after the hard foam sole tears away from its leather upper. Perhaps the most unexpected repair will come the night I am typing a letter and hear the ‘r’ flip off the end of its striker arm inside the typewriter. A spot of Krazy Glue inside the matrix attachment literally saves my ‘r’s.

Whether the materials are space-age or common, I have found that if you think long enough, you can find uncommonly cheap and easy solutions to problems that traditional technology hasn’t had to face.

It’s easy enough to insulate a conventional house that sits on a conventional foundation or even a motor home that will be parked for the offseason in an RV campground, but without a velcro-and-mylar skirt, it’s virtually impossible to insulate a dwelling that sits on wheels and is likely to move every day.

I’d manufacture and market the skirts myself, but each has to be tailored to the vehicle it insulates. And somebody already has trademarked the materials involved. So I offer the simple technology I have developed with these materials to the world, free of charge, in the name of the geniuses who invented velcro, mylar and, just because I like their style, Krazy Glue.

XLI. Zen

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. August 24, 1986.

There was a zen to my stepfather, but I don’t recognize it until today, a few months after the 10th anniversary of his death. Today is my 46th birthday, and I have had a few beers at lunch with some old friends in Biddeford to celebrate the occasion. I am making a left turn off Saco Avenue into the campground at Old Orchard Beach when I see his hands on my steering wheel.

Years of working in the woods made my stepfather’s hands thick and rough, but they held a steering wheel with the grace of a violist’s hands on the neck of his instrument, turning the wheel delicately, as if seeking a harmony in it.

I don’t know if my stepfather had always driven that way. By the time I first knew him, he was nearly as old as I am when I discover myself driving my truck the same way he did his. Now it is my hands that are thicker and rougher – age takes nearly as great a toll as work – and they are turning the wheel with the same soft deliberation I saw in his hands.

He drove everything like that – trucks, cars, horses. He worked most of his years in the woods with horses. There was always a pair, if he was working for himself, sometimes several teams if he was working for a lumber company. They were usually big muscular geldings of Belgian, Clydesdale and Percheron bloodlines with monosyllabic names like Bob, Dick or Tom.

Whether the horses were his or someone else’s, my stepfather treated them the same – like partners. No, more than that. More like champion athletes whose necks and shoulders had to be stroked when they were at rest, their hind quarters massaged and pushed when the load was heavy, their movements anticipated to ward off danger to horses and teamster as they withdrew logs from the forest on wood-and-metal skids.

Logging is dangerous work involving cumbersome weights and intricate entanglements. Without subtlety as well as strength, a logging operation can leave ugly scars on both loggers and forest. I know it sounds fanciful, but trees give themselves up more easily to some people than to others. As much as I worked in the woods as a young man, I remember the struggle of dropping and cutting up a tree, sweating and swearing as I tried to remove the pieces from the forest while branches whipped my face and twigs grabbed my feet. It was different with my stepfather. He and his horses moved through the woods with solicitude and respect, leaving the ground untorn, the limbs and brush in neat piles, the remaining trees in air and sunlight that would nourish their growth in years to come.

I think it must have been the same kind of stewardship that kept some of his old trucks running. Like his horses, they were partners in a difficult work. And when the models of trucks and eventually cars got newer and more reliable, the habit must have been set. He continued to treat them kindly.

He treated my mother and us kids kindly. He never tried to replace my father in either affection or authority. I think my stepfather would have been even more uncomfortable than us kids if we had tried to call him by anything but his first name. Nor did he try to discipline us except in whatever measures my mother imposed, and none of those ever involved physical discipline. He did strike me once, only once, a slap across the face. It happened about a year after he had come into our lives. We were at a county fair watching a horse-pulling contest one hot day, and he took a sip out of my soda bottle without asking. I called him a son of a bitch. I don’t know what came over me – I never talked to adults that way – unless it was some kind of test of him. That slap, even though it produced more noise than pain, taught me for the rest of my life never to misinterpret kindliness for weakness. It also was immediately apparent that my stepfather felt as bad about the slap as I did. We both sat there terribly embarrassed.

My stepfather preferred to keep us kids in line with a gentle sort of humor that sometimes chided but rarely insulted. I remember as a 10-year-old learning how to play a plastic ukelele someone had given me. I don’t think the gift had been my stepfather’s idea. After one particularly long session of plucking and twanging, he came in from the next room: “You’re getting pretty good at that, Louie. There’s a lot of people outdoors who’ve been asking to hear you play.”

Sometimes the humor made difficult situations more tolerable. We once lived for a few months in a huge old house that was so dilapidated, the ceilings in several rear rooms had collapsed through their floors. My stepfather took one look at the rambling old place and called it “Big George.” We kids loved it. And although we had to carry drinking water from a spring and use an outhouse for a toilet, Wendell and I still laugh about how great it was to live in the house with a nickname.

There was wisdom, too, although I wouldn’t understand some of it until years later.

A few years after Big George, when we had moved from Maine back into New Hampshire, I got up for my newspaper route one morning and noticed that the weather was cold and blustery, although not harsh enough to keep my stepfather and his crew from going into the woods and certainly not harsh enough to keep newspapers from being delivered.

“You know, life ain’t so complicated,” my stepfather told me as he headed for the outdoors. “It’s just damned hard sometimes.”

One of the pithiest lessons he taught me was how to split wood with an axe: “You throw the axehead where you want it,” he said. That was it. No fancy stuff about arcs and angles and axe handles. Oh sure, there was the advice about keeping the axe sharp and my feet out of the way, but what he wanted me to understand was that only two things mattered in splitting wood – the wood and the thing that split it. Concentrate on putting them together, and it will happen. By god, it worked. As long as my mind saw the axehead going into the wood where I wanted, my body knew how to do it.

I didn’t always appreciate my stepfather’s wisdom or humor. In our first summer together on Kennebunk Pond, I told him I wanted to grow up to be a logger, just like him. “No,” he said, “the only kind of wood you want to push around is the stuff they put in pencils.” As an 8-year-old, I thought that was terribly funny. But four years later, when I was entering junior high school in Rochester, New Hampshire, and had developed a considerable talent for pencil pushing, I had forgotten the joke and now thought my stepfather was funny in a different way. Not humorous but peculiar. And terribly unsophisticated. Especially that nickname, Louie. It was embarrassing in front of my young colleagues, and I would try to avoid him and my mother when they visited the school for parent-teacher events.

I eventually grew out of this attitude. I think the turning point was when I was at that Ivy League college on a full scholarship and saw how my fellow undergraduates regarded the local townspeople. “Emmetts,” the young noblemen called the native New Hampshire peasantry. Despite my good grades, enviable beer-drinking capacity and acquired collegiate accent, I was still an Emmett, born and bred, and a scholarship student at that. Once I understood and accepted that I was not to be in that privileged caste – a matter of a few years – my admiration for my stepfather returned. In the years that followed, he and I pretended that I had never been ashamed of him. And he rarely called me Louie again. I was no longer a child.

I will find out years later that we moved to Rochester at the urging of an aunt who lived there. This aunt, one of my father’s sisters, was concerned that Wendell and I weren’t receiving a good education in the one- and two-room schoolhouses we attended in western Maine, and she went so far as to rent our family an apartment in Rochester before my stepfather even knew she had been talking to my mother about the move. When my mother tells me about this years later, she says she knew my stepfather was at first angry and then hurt at the implication that he wasn’t taking good care of her and her children. But he said nothing about it. Instead, he went along quietly with the move. In fact, in all our years in Rochester to come, I never saw my stepfather treat my aunt in any but a friendly way.

By the way, I would argue today that those small Maine schoolhouses provided as good an education as I have ever received, although the larger high school in Rochester gave me a better chance at getting into college and being in Rochester eventually brought Elizabeth back into our family after the grandparents who had raised her there were gone.

There are many things I haven’t appreciated about my stepfather until I think about them years later, after I am as old as he was when I first knew him, after I have seen his hands on my steering wheel.

Today in Old Orchard Beach, I think about how he drove a truck and how I have come to do it the same way. Carefully and gently, to ward off danger in a world of cumbersome weights and intricate entanglements.

Each time I see Elizabeth in the years ahead, I will think about my stepfather’s love for her children, who in his later years became his constant companions, taking turns to spend the weekend with Grandpa, inheriting in turn the nickname Louie as he helped them grow and become not too serious about themselves.

I will split wood for my grandmother one day and think about the zen archer, his bow drawn and his face turned away from the target, knowing not in his eyes but in his mind, perhaps in his soul, where the arrow must go.

XLII. Idabel

Idabel, Oklahoma. April 14, 1989.

“I’ll have to charge you a dollar for cashing this, you know.”

This slender young bank officer, whose pale gray suit makes his skin look even paler and grayer, is only the latest unpleasantry I have experienced in a 24-hour period in Idabel, Oklahoma.

Driving into town the previous day, my vision catches only a gray blur rising from a field on the opposite side of the road before I hear a thump on the grille, see a blur flash over the hood and hear another thump on the loft. Through a side mirror, I see a crumpled mass of what appears to be a large bird going down in the road behind me. I pull off and run back to try to help. I can’t find the bird. Instead, I find an opossum, previously mashed, who is rotting into the roadside, a once-timid creature whose fangs are now bared viciously by the decay of death. It starts to rain. I push on to Idabel and stop for gas. I am unscrewing my gas cap when a red pickup lurches to a stop on the other side of the pump. A young man lurches from the cab with a cigarette between his lips and a stream of angry words for his girlfriend in the passenger seat. He jerks the nozzle from the pump, shoves it into the side of his truck and continues to fume at the girlfriend while his cigarette smoke mixes with vapors from the nozzle. I quietly replace my cap and leave the station without gas. I find a parking place behind a row of empty brick buildings in the industrial end of town. I take a walk through town and continue along a four-lane commercial strip that stretches out of town to the east. Idabel sits in southeastern Oklahoma among rolling fields and forests that I never imagined existed in any part of the state. The town is small – the 1989 Rand McNally lists Idabel’s population as 7,622 – but I’ve rarely seen traffic outside throughways or metropolitan areas that is as driven as the traffic on this strip. People are barreling through like somebody on the other side of the hills is handing out happiness. At a complicated intersection of several shopping areas and no lights, a slender black dog keeps running on and off the road to get to something he is trying to chew off the middle of the pavement. I try to call him off the road, but he is oblivious. I continue walking, looking back nervously as he dodges vehicles. A half mile down the road, I knew it, there is a yelp. I turn again and see him down on his back legs in the road. I run back to try to help but lose sight of him in the traffic. Several vehicles swerve, none slows down. By the time I get to where he should be, the dog has disappeared. Maybe crawled off somewhere. I walk back to my parking place among the vacant brick buildings. On one of them, I notice a spray-painted message: GENT’S RULE. The writer may have been a fan of the Gents, a new wave rock group from South Africa, but I doubt it. It’s far more likely that in a town of 7,622, I have chosen to spend the night in an area claimed as turf by a street gang, probably violent, certainly grammatically challenged. I am too tired to drive somewhere else. I lock myself into the truck for the night, taking some comfort in the fact that I can crawl forward to the driver’s seat without unlocking a door. If a Gent comes visiting in the night, I don’t want to have to explain the difference between a possessive and a plural. The next day, I am back on the commercial strip, driving out of town. I slow in the left lane of the two outbound lanes to let someone from the right lane cross into a shopping area. A car behind me begins tooting furiously. I start to pull to the right. More tooting, more fury. The car, a small red compact, pulls alongside me on the right. The driver, a husky man of about 40 with a dark mustache, salon-frizzed hair and a young woman passenger, is giving me the finger and hollering into his closed window at me. One of the words I can read on his lips is “motherfucker.” I slow and pull behind him, then turn off at the bank. I notice Idabel National Bank has a four-lane drive-through section, but I’m not interested in trying to thread more lanes.

“Where’s everyone hurrying?” I ask a young woman behind a teller’s station inside the bank.

“Well, it’s Friday, and Fridays are busy,” she says.

“Doesn’t anybody out there ever slow down and look around?” I ask.

“Look around?” she asks.

“The country around here is very pretty,” I say.

She looks at me like she has swallowed something unpleasant. That’s when the young man approaches from my side of the teller’s station.

“You just want cash?” he asks, looking at the $100 traveler’s check I have already signed for the young woman. Then he explains about the $1 charge. I explain that I have cashed more than a dozen of these checks at gas stations and mom-and-pop grocery stores and that none of them has charged me for it.

“Well, we have to,” he says. “Actually, we’re not even supposed to cash them at all.”

“Oh really? Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have an account with us.”

“Of course not. I’m not from around here. I’m a traveler. That’s why I have traveler’s checks.”

“Well, it’s our policy.”

“Oh, I see, you are going to charge me a dollar to cash a check that a bank back home has already charged me 50 cents to issue. I think I understand.”

“Thank you,” he says, counting out $99.

I sit for a while in the truck, writing caustic notes about the transaction. As I pull out of the parking lot, I spot the young man at the window with an older man in a lighter suit, both watching the truck. I put the back of my hand beneath my chin and give them a New York City salute.

I know where all these people are speeding, I decide as I drive out of town. They are racing to exchange currency with one another. There seems to be money in it.

I remember the gas situation and pull into a Conoco station at the end of the strip. I have already started pumping no-lead when a solemn young man in olive-drab clothes approaches me with his hand out for the nozzle.

“I’ll be glad to do it,” I say.

“No sir, I’ll be glad to do it,” he says soberly, his hand insisting that it be given the nozzle. I regard him for a moment. His wispy blond mustache and beard give him a boyish look, but his hands and body are tough and wiry, and his clothes are of military camouflage design. Probably a young survivalist, carrying a gun. I hand him the nozzle.

“Thank you, sir,” he says, breaking into a smile. “That’s why we call this a service station.”

Now I feel foolish.

“I just paid a bank a dollar to cash a traveler’s check,” I grumble.

“A dollar to cash a check,” he says, shaking his head and looking away.

“A buck to cash a fucking check that another bank already charged me 50 cents for,” I fume.

We watch the numbers rise on the gas pump. At $13.90, I say, “Looks like $14.”

His hand isn’t quick enough.

“How about $14.10,” he asks tentatively. I look at him. He looks a little scared.

“Don’t worry,” I laugh. “I don’t go nuts everywhere. Just banks. I’ll get the dime from the cab.”

He accepts the bills and the coin. “I don’t like banks, either, sir. They take advantage of you.”

I look at him again. He is only in his 20s, but he looks like he has spent most of those years working hard. I have a feeling he comes from a long line of Oklahomans who have worked hard and know plenty about banks.

“Have a nice day, sir,” he says, “even though it got off to a bad start a while ago.”

XLIII. Sara

Bath, Maine. April 25, 1981.

My stepfather liked to tell a story about walking down the street and seeing a man he knew. The man was approaching at a distance on the opposite side of the street, so the story goes, when my stepfather smiled and waved at him. The man stopped, smiled and waved back, then crossed to my stepfather’s side of the street. The two men continued walking toward one another, smiling and waving. Within a minute or two, they were face to face, and the smiles were gone. “I looked at him, and he looked at me,” my stepfather would say with a serious expression, “and come to find out, it wasn’t either one of us.”

That in a nutshell summarizes my relationship with Sara.

To me, Sara represents simplicity, femininity and, not least of all, professional kinship. She is a solid journalist. She knows how to identify what issues are basic to a story and how to use interviews, research and straightforward writing to bring out these issues. And although she is not a seasoned journalist when I first meet her, she already has a quality that most journalists acquire only with experience – the flexibility to recognize and follow a story when it goes in an unexpected direction. She may have inherited this trait from her father, a small-town Midwestern lawyer who runs a weekly newspaper on the side. Sara says she chased a lot of fire trucks and set a lot of type before she went off to journalism school. I admire her abilities in my chosen profession, and I think this mutual interest is a strong part of the attraction between us.

But yes, she also is feminine. She is tall and slender and sturdy and strong in a Midwestern sort of way. Square-shouldered, narrow-waisted, square-hipped, long-legged, with ashy brown hair that has a grain to it like stained oak and ample breasts that are matched in lushness only by the full lips that part around her square-cornered, corn-fed smile. All in all, a handsome woman who could have stood in the prow of a Viking boat as it pierced the waters of the Great Lakes on its way to, say, Toledo.

Sara has a calm, even temperament that makes her easy to get along with, and she has a straightforward attitude toward sex, which is an early part of our relationship. I like the easy way we fall in together, especially the way we fall into bed together, and this simplicity of our personal and professional rapport seems ideal to me at first.

But I am to find that Sara is anything but a simple woman.

I’m not sure what she sees in me. I am 14 years older than her – not unattractive but definitely grayhaired and heading toward 40, the hill of middle age we all must go over – unless that is it. She has a weakness for authority figures. As an only child, she is strongly attached to her father, and I get the feeling from the few times I have met her family that Sara and her mother, a handsome woman herself, compete for the father’s affections. When I meet her, Sara is married to an Air Force officer. After she and I split up, she goes on to marry a police officer. How I fit into this spectrum is not quite clear to me. I resent most authority, especially the kind that wears uniforms, and I have spent most of my life trying to avoid situations where I am “responsible” for the behavior or performance of others. People over 21 are responsible for themselves, and although they have the right to give up part or all of this responsibility, it shouldn’t be taken away from them by anyone else’s dictate. However, I also have spent most of my life trying to be very definite about things. Like my opinions. Or theories, which Peggy once observed I have about, oh god, everything. Not always correct. But always very definite. And this is what Sara may interpret as authority.

Well, I will learn that I am just as wrong about her. As simple and straightforward as she seems, there is, I discover after our first six months together, a complexity deep within her that I cannot understand. Nor does she want me to understand it. It is as if she has a wall deep within her that, no matter how easily I can enter the outer layers of her being, she refuses to let down for anyone.

Maybe everyone has this wall, but I have never experienced this feeling before. I know the wall exists with Sara because I see it crack one day in a bizarre episode of fury. It is the day our romance ends at the candlelight dinner in the dining room of the house in Biddeford. Despite the amorous setting, the dinner quickly turns into an unlovely, sordid catharsis. I have known from our early days together that Sara has been through several affairs in her marriage, and she knows I have. And our affair has been off and on for months before we decide to try to make it permanent. This evening in the dining room, we are clearing the air about who we have slept with during some of our off periods. Not a good subject for a candlelight dinner and, as it turns out, a mostly one-sided exchange. I suspect she has been to bed with at least one of my former co-workers at the Portland newspaper as well as with a former co-worker from years earlier in New Hampshire, a man she met through me on a weekend visit there. She confirms my suspicions on both counts. She suspects I have slept with a former co-worker of hers, and this also is true, but the irony is that I was missing her so badly that night that all I could do was, in fact, sleep – just sleep – with the other woman. I’m not sure Sara believes I didn’t have sex with the other woman, or maybe she does and it doesn’t make any difference. After we finish our mutual confession, I feel as if I have been punched in the stomach, but there is also a sense of relief. As I rise from the table to stretch out that punched-in-the-stomach feeling, I never see the real thing coming. Sara has wound up one of those slender, sturdy arms of hers and delivered a haymaker that lands on the side of my head. My knees buckle, and for a second, I am out on my feet. When I regain my senses, I am holding her against the wall to keep from getting hit again. She is wild. She tears away from me and punches out a dozen window panes in the kitchen and side entryway, ending the rampage on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, sobbing. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her cry. I try to console her as I bandage her bloody knuckles and put her to bed. In the morning, she wakes up calm and even-tempered again. She apologizes for the damage, and we never explore the subject again.

We try to patch things up, and I eventually go to live with her in an apartment she has rented in Bath, Maine, north of Portland, for a new assignment she has taken there with the company.

Which brings me to tonight, a balmy spring night about a year into our romance. The windows of the apartment are open, and I can hear the chain clanking against the tall metal flagpole that rises above Bath Iron Works, a large shipyard that sits just across the street. The clanking sound is like a bell tolling. While Sara sleeps, I get up and dress, collect my things and pack them into my car – a box of kitchen utensils on the passenger seat, two boxes of kitchen utensils and two boxes of clothes in the back seat, a chest of drawers and a chair on top of the car – and drive slowly back to Biddeford. I have rented the house there to three college students, so I take up residence in a storage room at the rear of the newspaper’s Biddeford office where I work. I will live in this tiny space until I meet Mary four weeks later.

I don’t know what Sara was like in her first marriage. I know I haven’t been the same with her as I was with Peggy. Sara has never known me as the blustering young male who had his sails slackened by a woman who had known him most of his life. With Sara, I could be as attentive and understanding as Peggy was with me, and Sara would never know I had been otherwise. She represented the simplicity of a new beginning, a new life in which I could look like I knew everything and had never made a mistake.

But our romance has died. I am, after all, still a needy, insecure person against whom any barrier is suspicious. And maybe she is, after all, so needy and insecure that she never wanted even to examine me for barriers.

In the end, though, our romance has died not because of how she and I are or what we have done while we’ve been together. Our romance has died because it was fatally wounded from the beginning. It began when we were both committed legally and spiritually to other people with whom we had taken oaths of trust. If we have broken their trust, how can we be sure we won’t do the same to each other?

Maybe Sara knows this. Maybe she cares, too.

XLIV. B&B

Hawley, Texas. March 26, 1989.

It’s a long, dry stretch from Abilene to Lubbock, dry in several respects, but there is an oasis or two. One of them is the B&B liquor store.

My Rand McNally’s map of West Texas tells me there are only 167 miles between the two cities. I don’t know how many additional miles I will travel on back roads, some of them several times, but the trip will wind up taking five days. Mostly because I will do a pitiful amount of zigzagging in the desert in a quest for beer.

I say pitiful not because I choose to look for an alcoholic beverage but because I refuse to go without something that isn’t there in a convenient supply. I like to carry one to two sixpacks of cold beer, but I also carry a ready supply of other provisions in and on top of the refrigerator– a crisper full of fresh produce, a half dozen cans of seafood, two or three jars of dried rice. I have never carried horse turds, but if someone in Abilene tells me I can’t have horse turds until I get to Lubbock, you can bet I will spend the next 167 miles looking for road apples.

The thirst for beer starts in Hawley, a small town just north of Abilene. I have driven through Abilene the previous night and am glad of it. Any time you put more than 100,000 people together, you see what happens when asphalt grows beyond its utility and takes over the landscape. It’s a sad consequence, and Abilene is one of the sadder examples. After I have driven through the city and observed its dim wasteland of pavement and potholes, I soothe my sorrow with a few more beers than usual.

The sun rises as red as my eyes this morning in Hawley. The temperature at daybreak is in the mid-60s and certain on this late March day in the desert to rise another 20 or 30 degrees by mid-afternoon. I brush the fuzz off my teeth and notice as I go to the refrigerator for milk that the beer supply is down to the back row – three kingsize cans – plus a half-finished can in the door rack. I pass up the milk and put the half-dead soldier out of its misery. Then I go outside to look around the area where I have parked on the north bank of the Clear Fork, a branch of the Brazos River. The river is littered with eroded trees that look like steer bones and skulls. The water is running green and foamy. I go back in the truck and take a long nap. I am awakened at 9 p.m. by a wind and lightning storm that thunders and blows and flashes but gives up no rain.

The weather is still hot and unsettled the next morning. I take a walk into town and stop at a convenience store called Skinny’s. A woman behind the register whose physique doesn’t match the store’s name tells me the town is dry, as are the next two stops north on Route 83, Anson and Hamlin. I’ll have to go “quite a ways north” to find beer, she says. A dilemma: Abilene is 15 miles to the south, straight into a south wind that is blowing a steady 30 miles an hour. To hell with it, I decide, the wind and my itinerary are headed north, and if this trip doesn’t want me to drink, so be it.

I secretly resolve to drive as far north as it takes to find beer.

Before I leave Hawley, I talk with a highway worker who says he remembers buying beer somewhere near Hamlin. Of course, he also thinks Maine is next to Philadelphia, but I hope his Texas geography is better. With the one I’ll be drinking on the road, I will be down to two cans of beer. Even Hamlin is only a quarter of the way to Lubbock, and there’s a lot of high, dry plain beyond Hamlin.

I let the hot wind blow me through Anson. There is no reason to stop and look for beer in a place where the Town Hall and the First United Methodist Church are built of the same brick. North of Anson, the cotton fields that have bracketed the road since Hawley now stretch as far as the eye can see. I am in the cotton-picking Bible Belt, and I can feel what a mean-spirited bunch of bastards those early cotton barons must have been. If ever anyone deserved a drink, it had to have been the workers who were shackled to those fields while the profits of their sweat and blood were used to build town halls and churches that would conspire to keep souls in chains as well. In that hell on earth, there would be no drinking. The zealots who ran the inferno believed that anything that felt good must be bad. And that was the only spirit they served.

Just south of Hamlin, I pull off the road and open the next-to-last beer. I stand in old cotton bolls clinging like lint to the roadside gravel and hoist a cold one to those who labored on this anvil-like flatness. I hope they are resting well.

Then back to the hotness of the truck and a sweaty decision over the map. Which way to beer? To the west, Rotan looks too isolated. To the east, Stamford is among a cluster of towns. Not all can be dry. It turns out that both choices are right. I buy the last two sixpacks of Miller Lite kingsize cans at Mike’s Place just outside Stamford, then reverse direction to Rotan, where I find more beer signs and a refreshing rainstorm. I have traveled 60 miles to get 20 miles west. That’s the way it is when you’re wandering in the desert, looking for inspiration.

Clairmont, on the high plain north and west of Rotan, has a different kind of dryness. The faded Coca-Cola sign on Clairmont’s only cafe says only that, ‘Cafe.’ Everybody for miles around knows the place is owned by Margie Hart, and she runs the cafe as part of her home. When I walk in, she and a half dozen other people are sitting around a large formica table in the middle of the room. Like an uninvited guest, I stand there uncomfortably until one of the gents in the tall stockman’s hats spills his coffee into his lap. Everyone laughs, and I say I hope I haven’t brought bad luck to town. “Not less’n you got here afore I did,” the man says, setting off another laugh as he wipes his lap.

Margie is a spare, tanned woman of indeterminate age and a pleasant expression that I suspect has been on her face for a long time. There is no beer in town, she says, but I am welcome to have a cup of coffee and a puzzle. I sit in an overstuffed chair near the end of the formica table and puzzle over a ring captured between two horseshoes, a washer captured on a nut-and-bolt, a set of wooden chunks that somehow assemble into a cube and an array of flat metal pieces that only Margie can put together into a large capital T. The only one I figure out is the washer. The nut is welded to the bolt, but it is the bolthead that unscrews on hidden threads, freeing the washer from the unexpected end.

“If you cain’t enjoy life, what is life?” Margie muses.

She has an additional riddle for me the next day. I come back from walking the highway through Clairmont and ask about the clusters of eggs I have seen along the roadside.

“Rattlesnake eggs,” she says.

I laugh.

“Why did you laugh?” she asks.

“Those eggs are way too big for rattlesnakes,” I say.

“No, that’s not why you laughed,” she says.

“No?”

“No,” she says. “You laughed because you know rattlesnakes are viviparous.”

This last word, describing creatures that bear live offspring, has come out of her mouth with the crispness of a zoologist. She is smiling at me. No, she says, she knows I know those egg clusters are wild turkey nests. I laugh again. Wild turkeys make a lot more sense, but she is still smiling that pleasant, puzzling smile. I haven’t been dry-shucked like this since I was a kid among oldtimers in a Yankee general store, reveling in the light touch that knows the difference between a tickle and a prod.

I would stay in Clairmont another day, but my beer supply is getting low again.

By the time I get to Post, a small city about three-quarters of the way from Abilene to Lubbock, I have a second question in mind. Besides the now-familiar, “Where’s the beer,” I am curious about the low, spherical clumps of spearlike grass I have seen in increasing numbers as I drive higher into the desert. On a side street in Post, I spot B&B, a small, modern-looking store that sells beer and spirits, and think I may find both answers there.

“I suppose I should know, but I don’t,” the young woman behind the counter says. She is wearing a blouse, sweater and skirt that are Junior League correct with her highlighted blonde hair and Walt Disney blue eyes. She turns to her husband, a tall, rangy man straightening liquor bottles on a shelf above his head with gracefully strong hands that might once have caught footballs for somebody’s A&M. He doesn’t know what those plants are, either.

“You live someplace for a long time, and still you don’t notice the things around you,” the woman says.

There is no one else in the store, and the air conditioner keeps my two sixpacks cool on the counter while we go on to talk of other things – the weather, the litter, the East, the West and eventually, because it makes stores like theirs so hard to find, the Bible Belt.

“I’m writing a book on the Bible,” the woman says.

“A graduate dissertation,” I say in a telepathic moment.

“No,” she says. “It’s a personal revelation.”

My telepathesis is telepathetic. I feel my eyes glazing out of focus as I ask a perfunctory question about how many hours a day her Bible studies consume.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t read much of the Bible,” she says. “Very little, in fact.”

The conversation becomes refreshing again.

“What I have done is to retranslate the words on the front page of the Bible, the introductory page to the Book of Matthew. I used a dictionary to find synonyms for all the words, and I have found a whole new meaning in them.”

“What is that meaning?” I ask.

“That is the subject of the book,” she says.

I don’t want to pry further. For one thing, it is a work in progress. For another, I know from having looked at several different Bibles that the frontispages have been written not by the apostles but by the publishers. I don’t want to have to disappoint this woman with the color of sky in her eyes.

“It’s a personal revelation from God,” she says. “Before I had it, God was always my preacher’s god, my church’s god, someone else’s god. Now it’s my God. I have my own personal relationship with God, and I don’t have to depend on anyone else to tell me about Him now. That’s what religion is.”

I don’t think she has to read much more of the Bible. For a desert dweller who can’t identify what I later find out are young yucca plants, this woman seems to have discovered on a page passed over by everyone else – a cover leaf that precedes the first page of her Bible – the New Testament’s entire meaning.

“Right on, sister,” I say, cradling the two sixpacks beneath my arm as I reach for the door. “Keep selling the beer, no matter what Falwell and the other antichrists say.”

“Be careful,” she says.

“I will,” I smile. “I always drive carefully.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “Be careful not to judge. Only God can do that.”

XLV. Cycles

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. December 1986.

I have a memory that is more cyclical than chronological, and this is never more apparent than when the seasons change. On the first thaw of spring, my memory doesn’t go back to the previous day when there was ice on the ground but back through a series of first thaws to the spring of 1948, when I splash home from grade school in my gum rubber boots and see the sand breaking out of the ice soft and clean. In a few months, I know, the sand will be dry and warm, and I will stand again in it barefoot, as I stood in the warm sand of the previous summer when somebody told me my father was dead, killed on a utility pole when he touched the wrong wire. Summer will be back. Daddy won’t, but the memory of him will. At the first barbecue of summer, I don’t think of the previous day when it was too cold to cook outside but of previous first barbecues of the year ranging back to 1966, a year before Peggy and I are married, when the two of us sneak off for a weekend at a tourist cottage just outside the city of Keene in western New Hampshire. We buy pork chops and beef ribs and cook them on a wood-fired grill next to a stream that runs past the row of cottages. It is early in the summer, too early for tourists, and we have the glade to ourselves. Peggy’s father has died only a few years earlier, but as a song of the time says, she has me and I have her. We drink wine and eat meat dripping with juice before we fall together greasy into the cottage’s squeaky-springed metal bed. On the first crisp day of autumn, my mind drifts back not to the previous day’s heat but to previous crisp days of autumn. Like watching the first leaves of 1981 drift into the yard around the big house in Biddeford as I wait for Mary to get home from work, understanding for the first time since I have known her that she isn’t just someone attractive who keeps me from missing Sara but someone real, someone with whom I am falling in love.

The campground at Old Orchard Beach is cut into one of the best remaining stands of white pines on the southern coast of Maine. Near the front gate, the place is ugly – a plaza of asphalt connecting the office with a series of metal utility buildings and a concrete swimming pool that seems out of place so close to the ocean. But a hundred feet or so into the campground, the tall trees form a thick canopy of shade that makes the tightly spaced camp lots seem larger and more private. This is where most of the summer tourists spend their season. In the late fall, when the seasonal crowd has gone, those of us foolhardy enough to want to spend the winter move deeper into the campground where the water and sewer systems have been buried below the frost line and where hardwoods creep into the thinning evergreens. Except for my truck and a few small travel trailers seeking shelter for the winter, this part of the campground is occupied by full-size trailers and double-wide modular homes. As it is up front, the ugliest part of the rear of the campground is what we have brought here – rectangular shells of metal and polymer to live in, tubes of twisted aluminum and nylon to sit or swing on, occasionally a fluorescent casting of a tropical bird feeding in this plastic-dotted paradise.

But it all changes with the first snow of the season. I am taking my daily walk along the roads around the perimeter of the campground when it starts, an icy snow that comes down in tiny pellets that rattle through the trees and bounce like rock salt in my path. I crunch through this new ground cover, leaving footprints in the road where my weight has melted the granules. By the time I have made another circuit around the campground, the grains have changed to flakes that are sticking to the trees and the angular metals and plastic beneath them. Roads that have been freshly bulldozed at the deep end of the woods become soft channels of white that look smooth and worn, and the torn vegetation along them rests more comfortably in its new shroud of snow. As evening advances and lights go on, the ground begins to glow with reflections. I return to the truck and go inside without turning the lights on. I watch through the windows as the flakes grow fatter and begin floating like snow in a Currier & Ives print. This isn’t the campground of yesterday, when the trees were gray and bare and the trailers were ugly. It is more like the house in Biddeford after the first snow has powdered the brickwork and shrubbery. Or like the first house Peggy and I owned, a two-story cape in Hurley, New York, after the gables and hedges have been frosted. It is a new campground, a wintry sylvan place, and I want to share this unexpected beauty with Diane. But she is in Connecticut. She is making fewer trips to Maine these days. I will be spending the Christmas holidays at her place, but we are missing this first day of the season. She says the truck makes her feel claustrophobic.

The brochure for my 1985 Sunrader Monterey shows sleeping accommodations for four. Perhaps that would work comfortably for a family of four from Tokyo, or among U.S. adults, maybe four very, very good friends. But while four adults theoretically can lie down at the same time in a 1985 Sunrader Monterey mini-motor home, getting them all vertical is a more difficult problem.

I understand how Diane feels. To her, my home is the rear of a small truck. It is to me sometimes, too. Especially when I return from a long walk. Sighting the truck from a distance is always a contradiction to what I am doing, returning home. Do I really live in this vehicular-shaped, absurdly small place? Yes, but strangely enough, the contours and dimensions change once I am inside.

Home isn’t so much a place as it is a feeling. When I sit on the couch in the rear of the cabin of my truck, I don’t feel as if I am sitting in a conglomeration of furniture, appliances and possessions that have been contorted into the bowels of the ridiculously small white ice cream truck that I see each day from the outside. Instead, I see the clean lines and angles of wood, carpet and metal that in their regularity protect me from the chaos of the outside world and make me more comfortable as they hold within easy reach all the goods and utilities I consider necessary to my life. Safety, order, comfort and convenience. This is my home, and this is the home I see in my mind when I am away from it. Even when I am in the front of the truck, driving away from a place where I have been parked for a day, I feel as if I am driving away from home, even though my home is following me only a few feet behind. And I will have this away-from-home feeling until I have stopped at another place and am sitting in the place that I see as much in my mind as in my rear view mirror.

In this sense, my home on wheels is connected with all the other homes I have occupied in more conventional structures. Which may help explain the feeling I have two months after the first snowfall in the campground, the day the first blizzard comes. As the powdery snow swirls over the wheel wells, obscuring even the top edge of the skirting, I wonder when I will be free to get to the main road, to the interstate highway and eventually to Connecticut again. As a child in the winter of 1946, I wonder whether the snow drifting against our house will cover the second-story windows as it has the first. In storms like this, when your breath is taken away by driving wind and dusty snow, you wonder if it will ever stop. Only your memory assures you it will.

Life is not chronology but cycles, not straight lines but circles. This is why our clocks keep coming back to the same hours, our calendars to the same days.

XLVI. Mary

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. September 19, 1989.

As my first summer off the road ends, it has been nearly seven years since I have seen Mary, and it may be some strange inversion of the seven-year itch that makes me want to see her again. I have to get started south and west on my second big national field survey, but maybe I can swing east a few miles through Portland to see her. Maybe just one last time. Maybe so I can take leave of her with more dignity than I showed the last few times we were together.

I have talked with her on the phone only once since then – she called me, and I was surly and uncommunicative – so I have a certain expectation when I call her today. Today is her birthday, and if I show her I have remembered, she may suggest we get together for a visit.

That part of the plan works. We agree to meet at her place at the end of next week.

Now I have some preparations to make.

When it comes to Mary, I become a sarcastic, whining, groveling, raging asshole. It isn’t her fault. She never promised she would be anything but a superficial twerp.

See what I mean?

In the 11 days between the day I call her and the day we are to visit, I rehearse every possible way the reunion can go. Maybe she will be hostile. Or maybe she will be intimate. Or maybe – and this is what I think most likely – she will be cordial, perhaps even friendly, but still distant enough to reproach me without having to come out and say anything directly negative. She always told me it is better to say nothing than to say anything “bad” to someone. So instead, she will talk about oblique subjects that she knows will annoy me – her fashionably unfashionable attitudes such as a disdain for balancing checkbooks, a contempt for seatbelts, a love of motorcycle gangs. All with the most purposely innocent sweetness. But I’m not going to get into it this time. No knee-jerk reactions. I will be as amiable and civilized as I can for as long as I can. If those old annoyances threaten to emerge in harsh words, I will exit politely and gracefully.

The day before we are to visit, I drive to Portland and spend the night in the old company parking lot, reacquainting myself with the downtown area. On the appointed day, a sunny Saturday in late September, I drive to her neighborhood, locate her apartment building, then park several blocks away so I can walk around the neighborhood. It is on Portland’s upscale Eastern Promenade, where a number of old, stately buildings have been renovated into apartments for the trendy. Mary’s building, which sits a half dozen streets back from Portland Harbor, is a three-story brick structure that for years was an elementary school. Now, so upper-floor residents can have their own narrow view of the ocean, redwood balconies have been cut into the Victorian roof. Hip roofs with ranch-style balconies. Nice, sensitive touch. Hey, like take a pill and settle down, dude. You live in a truck, OK?

I return to the truck and drive it to the street just below the rear of the building. I recompose myself. As I mount the long set of steps to the old schoolhouse, I am prepared for anything.

Except the way she looks. Damn, the moment she opens the door, I am caught off guard. She looks exactly the way I knew she would. It isn’t the way she looked seven years ago. No, she looks seven years older – eyelids a little more creased, chin a little heavier, hair a little coarser – but it is the way she has looked in the imaginary scenarios I have been running through my head in the last two weeks. She has aged in my mind just about the way she has aged in real life. And I don’t realize this until I see the reality of her standing here in the doorway.

Mary has the kind of physical beauty that defies age. Her body is petite and boyishly slender, and she keeps it that way with diet and exercise that sometimes border on self-torture. She keeps her pale vanilla skin scrubbed soft and rosy, and its pink undertone accentuates her strawberry blonde hair, lovely, rich hair that returns to a natural wave when she isn’t pestering it with fuzzy coiffures. The oval of her face is naturally uplifted by high, full cheeks and a small, upturned nose that will never droop with the flesh of age. Her teeth are straight, white and flawless like those on a dentist’s wall chart, and her lips are a cupid’s bow that will only grow fuller and more shapely as the years go by. Even her liabilities are assets. Eyes that are hopelessly myopic without glasses become glistening brown pools that seem to reflect some distant dream.

Her voice, a lilting, melodious thing with a startling number of overtones for such a small person, can be high and thin, often bordering on juvenile, when she’s being rebellious and outlandish, a style she seems to prefer when dealing with people she doesn’t know, especially men. When more relaxed, her voice takes on lower, more breathy tones that resonate in an engaging, sometimes compelling way. It took me a while at first to hear this breathy voice. It took me a while after we were married to realize that I was hearing it less and less.

When I first met her at her brother’s house in the spring of 1981, Mary was playing the vintage high-pitched eccentric, and I was unsettled at the spectacle. I say spectacle advisedly because this teenage-like woman was dressed in a loose-fitting Hindu garment of red and gold swirls over a black, full-length body stocking that covered everything but her face, neck and hands. The colors and fabrics went well together, although they left me no clue about her physique, and I was convinced when we sat down, pig that I was, that she was middle-aged plump. Then I saw her ballet slippers. Quite lovely, really, poised as they were at the end of gracefully tapered legs and ankles. But the color. A pink so fluorescent that it clashed even with itself. It was like a jungle mating flourish. Well, in a fashion sense, I guessed, 95 percent of the outfit worked. And the other 5 percent worked, too, but in a different sense. It was oddly reassuring for me to know that 5 percent of this woman was unbolted.

I could sense that she was bemused by me, too. I, like her brother, preferred corduroy or tweed jackets, dark wool trousers and wingtip shoes, straight out of the 1950s. She was only a few years younger than us, and I found her puzzling. She seemed to find both me and my befuddlement entertaining.

She was anything but what I expected. Her brother, a fellow journalist and co-worker, had described someone else when he insisted I come to meet his sister. Consider the following: After years in northern Maine, where she had worked as an X-ray technician, she had recently moved back to her native Portland after a relationship with a doctor went bad. Some years earlier, she had been in a bad marriage that took a long time to break up. And only a year or so ago, she had lost her only child. He had died after fighting for most of his young life against leukemia. My god, it sounded dismal. Frankly, I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t refuse a friend’s request to help his bereaved sister find a new social life.

She didn’t need my help. She was ditzily dancing her way through life, and I have to admit that the pure superficiality of it all was tempting. I had been so preoccupied with missing Sara that playing with a mid-30ish cheerleader for a while would be diverting.

Mary and I were perfect in our superficiality. But when I began insisting on more reality – like calling me by my first name instead of my last name, or any other acknowledgement that we were more than benchmates on some pickup drinking-and-screwing team – she couldn’t do it. She persisted in her portrayal of the slightly annuated pom-pom girl, a two-dimensional caricature that tired and frustrated me. It became a life with a cardboard cutout. Beneath the facade, I kept catching glimpses and echoes of a real person, but I wasn’t smart enough or patient enough for her to emerge. All I could think of was how that thin, high-pitched, ditzy voice was making me crazy.

The last day we lived together, I literally groveled at her feet – grabbed those lovely legs as she sat on the couch – and begged her to stay. She couldn’t, and I guess I knew it. But that didn’t help. I couldn’t accept it with dignity. The next-to-last time I saw her, I went to pick her up at a different new apartment for an evening at a restaurant, but I had to turn around after a few minutes on the road and take her back. I had been concentrating so much on not groveling that I wasn’t prepared for the quiet agony – a mixture of anger, sadness and desperate longing – that overtook me. I drove back silently. I had to say good night from the darkness of the car so that she wouldn’t see my face. The last time I saw her, a few months later when I thought I could keep my composure, I went to visit her in yet another apartment. By the time I got there, I was half dopey from drinking wine, and she was so sick with the flu that she didn’t notice. After the two of us had shared some more wine, we were both in such a blithering state that we spent the rest of the evening facing each other in rocking chairs in her living room, muttering at each other like inmates in a nursing home. I got back home that night, but with little memory. What a feeble, graceless farewell.

Damn, she looks pretty standing in the doorway. Prettier than seven years ago. Her manner is friendly and bright, but I can see an unsettled look in her eyes, too. It strikes me that I never saw that in the old days. Then something else strikes me.

It is her dog. A big, gruff-looking German shepherd that has come blustering to the door and crashes into me. I can see instantly that he is a fraud, the kind of dog that softens up his victims by inducing a jellifying terror before he licks them to death. I grab a couple of handfuls of his furry sideburns, and we hug and lap and glom around as Mary introduces him as Reuben. When I first met Diane, she had a German shepherd named Reuben. Same type. A big fraud. The latest Reuben and I are now leaning together in a friendly manner, but Mary is still keeping her distance, so I guess there will be no hugs or pecks to acknowledge our reunion. I follow her down a bright but narrow corridor with a urethaned wood floor that leads to a similarly shiny-floored living room with scatter rugs and macrame hangings and coarsely upholstered wood furniture.

I feel a twinge each time I recognize something from the old place – an antique maple table, a worn silver pot filled with worn silver tableware, a photograph of her son with his strawberry blond hair trimmed in a crewcut and his oval face broadened by a white smile as he bounces on an all-terrain vehicle somewhere in northern Maine. All things I never knew before I met her, now set in a place that I will never know in the future.

She has told me on the phone that her roommate is a woman, and I can see that from a brief tour of the apartment. The woman has gone somewhere for the day, and Mary and I sit in the living room and talk. Somewhere in the conversation, she mentions that she has a friend in Kennebunkport, “a very good friend,” she adds. It reminds me of an early conversation I had with her, just after I’d moved into her old apartment. We were celebrating at a sportsman’s bar in downtown Portland, and she was reminiscing about her days as a student in Boston. She and a roommate had gone to a party at a Boston University athletic fraternity for the express purpose of getting laid. She said she picked out the biggest, blackest guy she could find – so big that he couldn’t lie on her and instead had to hold her around the waist and pump her up and down on him. I told her I didn’t care if she had fucked the entire BU male population. If she was trying to shock me, it wasn’t working, but I told her I was annoyed that she was trying and would she kindly stop. I’m not interested in inquiring about her latest “very good friend,” either.

I ask her if she wants to go outside and visit Bonzo. He was originally her cat, a refugee from an animal shelter in Westbrook. When we split up, Mary took her dog but let Bonzo stay with me and several other cats we had acquired – in one of our nicer moments, she told me that anyone who cared for animals as much as I did couldn’t be all bad – and I’ve always been grateful to her for that.

I have left Bonzo all spruced up in the truck. Mary and I walk down the steps to the truck. She takes a quick look at the truck and peeks in the window at Bonzo lying on the couch in the sunlight, but she doesn’t want to go inside. He is wearing his shoulder harness, and maybe she finds that sad. One of the few criticisms she ever expressed to me directly was that I was obsessed with neatness and order, and maybe she doesn’t want to see Bonzo so much under control. Of course, if there weren’t some way to keep Bonzo around the truck on his long rope, he might end up under something else – a set of screeching tires.

We stop in at a cafe on Portland’s once-crusty, now-chic waterfront where the biggest fights are now between the condominium dwellers and the working fishermen who keep waking them up with the sounds of tackle. The cafe has one of those hand-carved, gilded signs done in letters that resemble runes – you know, those old medieval letters that no one knows how to read any more, like the ‘y’ rune for ‘th,’ which we all pronounce as ‘ye.’ Somehow, you’d expect more from a crowd that should know the difference between a peace symbol and a Mercedes hood ornament.

We order from a long list of domestic and foreign beers. The late afternoon sun is shining through the cafe window onto our table, and I am reminded of the place where we decided to get married. Within a few weeks after we met, I moved my possessions from the back room of the office in Biddeford to her apartment in Portland. My few boxes included a complete set of kitchen utensils. I threw out the few limp vegetables and half-empty cans of tuna that were the only contents of her refrigerator, restocked the shelves and took over the cooking. She surrendered with amusement. Then, one late spring day at a restaurant in Saco, I was looking through two wine glasses burning crimson in the low afternoon sunlight and found myself asking her to marry me. She said yes. We both laughed with surprise. Now the glasses are heavier, and we are more solemn. The illuminated beer is pale. Like the gilding on the sign.

I tell her she looks good. She says she feels good. The years have made her son’s death a little easier to live with, she says, and she is grateful to her first husband for his help in recent years in what she calls her “recovery.”

That one hurts. The same guy she once disliked discussing with me because he was a pig and a swine is now a friend who has helped her “recover.” The implication is that the time we spent together was part of the sickness, but we don’t discuss that. She never liked to discuss “us.”

What really hurts is that she is right.

Near the end of the 16 months between the time we met and the time we split up, I subjected her to a lot of ranting and raving. It couldn’t have been pleasant, and I’m damned sure I wouldn’t want to have listened to all that bitching. In my dull-edged way – god, we males can grow up so stupid on a diet of toy guns, athletics and preconceived notions – I wanted to argue and scream and holler with her. Argue and scream and holler until we got it all out. She wanted quiet. It occurred to me months later, long after we had split up, that she may have felt if she got it all out, there would be nothing left of her.

I know my angry blustering frightened Mary. The first time she moved out, we were living at the house in Biddeford about six months into our marriage. I had been particularly loud and bellicose, and she left a note saying she was afraid for her physical safety. The situation was frightening me, too, but because of something Mary never believed – that physical violence makes me ill.

I concede that words can hurt and that the hurt can be sharp and deep. But anyone who really believes that words can hit like fists has never been hit by a fist. Or done any hitting with one. As a kid, I fought with my fists, sometimes against my brother, later against opponents on a baseball or football field, and I even showed up at a few sessions of my high school’s boxing club. But the older I got, the sicker it made me. Sick to my stomach. Besides the fact that it hurts like hell, win or lose, physical violence engenders the worst kind of fear and anger, not just in the abused but in the abuser as well, a fear and anger than even in a disciplined boxer can abruptly escalate into mayhem and death.

There was an irony about Mary’s fear for her safety. While she wasn’t very good at expressing her anger at me in words, she had a habit of showing her annoyance by grabbing my hand by the little finger and twisting it sideways, a move that always buckled my knees. I finally had to plead with her not to do it any more. I still don’t think she understood how queasy it made me feel – the kind of fright-or-fight adrenaline reaction that I had come to hate as a kid. It was a strange combination – the big man fighting with words, the little woman fighting with hand-wrestling maneuvers.

Near the end of our marriage, I had to carry dimes in my pocket so that when I inevitably had to leave the house rather than continue raving or pleading at someone who wouldn’t respond in words, I could call her from a pay phone to let her know where I was and when I would be home. I once got so angry and exasperated that I called her from three successive phones, each more distant from the house, until I was nearly four miles away in the neighboring city of Saco. One night in South Portland at her brother’s house, I got angry and, without announcing my departure, walked home to Biddeford, 13 miles away, in an ice storm.

What a sad mess. I couldn’t accept her the way she was. And she didn’t understand me the way I was. All bluster and no bite. Like her dog.

We leave the trendy cafe and walk back to her apartment. On the way, she tells me about a Harley-Davidson convention she recently attended somewhere. She doesn’t have a motorcycle. Never did. Somehow I also have learned from the conversation that she still doesn’t wear seatbelts. Back at her place, she gets a phone call. A half hour later, one of her women friends shows up and hangs around. The three of us stand on the balcony, peeking around the edge of the roof at the ocean, and exchange idle conversation. Somewhere in it, Mary and her friend manage to discuss a mountain hiking trip they are planning for tomorrow. That’s right, I tell Mary in my mind, I still think mountain climbing is stupid. I also get the other message. Your friend is hanging around for your protection. Like I’m going to get violent and do you bodily harm. Nice touch.

It’s hopeless. I can’t be around this woman without becoming an asshole. I finish my coffee quickly and make my apologies. I have to go. She acts mildly surprised but says it’s been fun. Fun? We exchange awkward smiles at the door, and I leave.

As I walk down the stairs, the anger and frustration that have been building inside me slowly give way to relief that I have been able to make it three and a half hours with her without doing or saying anything sarcastic, whining, groveling or otherwise gracelessly humiliating. Outside, I walk down oversized granite and concrete steps leading to the lower street, and they remind me of other heavy stones:

We were in Bangor on one of Mary’s regular visits to her son’s grave. I left her sitting there alone for a while, then went to lie down beside her on the grass. She lay down facing me and propped herself up on an elbow.

“I never stop thinking about what he would look like now,” she said.

“That’s right, he would be, what, 14 or 15 by now,” I said. “I’m sure he would be a handsome young man.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“You mean, what he actually . . . I mean, right now . . .?”

Her face was turned to the ground.

He was in there decomposing. She was in there, too. Doing what she could. Helping him, if only by her contemplation, through this latest stage of his being.

I think she knew what he looked like.

Love is like that.

XLVII. Pride

Portland, Maine. September 30, 1988.

“It’s a truck. A trailer is something you haul behind a truck.”

“I’m sorry, I should have called it an RV.”

“It’s a truck. There’s nothing recreational about living in a vehicle that’s only 17 feet long.”

“Then it’s a camper?”

“It’s a truck. A camper is something you mount on the back of a truck. There is a similarity, but this came all built together – no way to separate the living quarters from the driving quarters.”

“Motor home?”

“Well, it has a motor, and it is my home. But really, Elaine, it’s just a truck.”

My co-worker turns back to her keyboard, having failed to help me describe my new abode in the most dignified terms possible.

When you live in a truck, the first piece of excess baggage to be jettisoned is your pride. That keeps the load level, so to speak. Otherwise, you have to keep adding length, width, height and axles as you decide your life isn’t worthwhile without the big color television set, the air conditioner, the microwave oven, the shower that’s separate from the toilet, the bed that can stay out all day in its own room. Pretty soon, you’ve got a house on wheels – one of those creaking, swaying monstrosities with fuel pumps like oil rigs and road profiles that obliterate the view of everyone behind them.

I’ve seen motor homes on the road that are 60 feet long – more than three times the length of my truck. It is not adequate, I think, to describe these vehicles simply as motor homes. They are road ranches. If they could have, they would have pulled the lawn and the fence posts right along with them.

This isn’t to say I don’t have necessities that not everyone would consider necessary. Besides those essential things like water, food and facilities to store, prepare, consume and eliminate them, plus a few clothes and a place to sit, my on-road gear includes: a machine for making pasta, a videocassette recorder, two sets of crystal stemmed glassware and, hanging in the closet of the truck even as we speak, a tuxedo.

Still, with all these items, the controlling rule is that whatever goes on board must be more important than anything of equal size or weight that I couldn’t fit in or hang off a living space of 10 by seven by six feet and still move it down the road without tipping over or sinking into the pavement. And in the case of appliances, since trucks can’t regularly be hooked up to 120-volt house current – you’ve got to keep rolling away from the mortgage and rent collectors – any electrical device has to operate on alternate power. Given all these conditions, my pasta machine is the old-fashioned kind that has to be cranked by hand, the VCR operates on 12-volt battery power and tucks away in an odd-shaped space left under the stove where the gasoline fill pipe goes through, and the two sets of crystal glassware are actually just the two rows of three each that can hang by their stems under the cabinet over the sink. The tuxedo . . . well, it doesn’t make any concessions. It may, in fact, be a luxury.

In the last few months I work before beginning a life on the road, I get rid of my car and begin driving the truck to the office. Although some of my co-workers know I have been living in a truck for two years, they are surprised to discover how small it is. The truck begins to draw comments at the windows overlooking the parking lot.

“I see you drove your house to work again today.”

“Isn’t it getting cold in there?”

“Naw, he just throws another log in the fireplace.”

A few co-workers come out to sit and have a beer with me after work. One guy loves the truck, but he is fairly warped, anyway – he likes to go camping and sleep on the ground. Several others are surprised at how much I have been able to put into a small space and still move around with relative ease, and they say they like the truck, but I know they say this mostly because they like me. In their smiling eyes, I can see a tinge of sadness at what wreckage of a human being I have become.

The tuxedo may be my one pure concession to luxury in a life that also has to fit into a truck that isn’t an adjunct to the family car, the suburban runabout, the house in the country and the condo at the shore. My truck is it – my material ledger, my earthly possession, the present by which men know me.

XLVIII. Mass Pike

Worcester, Massachusetts. October 2, 1989.

The weather grows colder and wetter as I drive west toward the Massachusetts Turnpike on my way to New York State and beyond. I will stop tonight in Kingston and meet tomorrow with some old friends at the daily newspaper there to try to arrange an editing job starting next September. The meeting shouldn’t take long, and then I’ll be free for another 11 months. The second big national field survey.

I feel good about having seen Mary but bad about how it all turned out. After all that emotion and strife, I seem still to have left her frightened and angry at me. What a legacy.

An attendant hands me a ticket at the Route 290 entrance to the Mass Pike, and I unhitch my seatbelt for the moments it takes to fish my back pockets for the money I will need at the other end of the pike. I click the seatbelt back in. Seatbelts. That was the longest standing argument Mary and I had. I nagged her for not wearing them. She needled me for my belief in them. Beneath it all, I was angry at her for being so careless about life, the life of someone I loved. She was contemptuous of me, I think, for clinging too dearly to both.

Even without all the special circumstances Mary and I had been through before we met, I think there still would have been a basic hostility between us. Superficially, we were compatible. Underneath, we weren’t.

Well, what the hell, hostility can be a good stimulant. It has kept her alive in my thoughts for the past seven years, and she hasn’t done badly there – pretty close to real life, I’d say. And 16 months of fear and loathing, if it was all that, and I’d like to think most of it wasn’t, had to have been better than 16 months of sinking out of sight into a grave.

But now there is a price to pay. Now that I have said goodbye with as much dignity as I can muster, not only on behalf of what is left of mine but hers as well, the only way I have left to show any kind of love for her is to leave her alone.

And share her sadness.

As laughter is infectious, so is sadness. Some of the sadness I now feel, I am sure, is some of the sadness she was carrying around when we met. Sadness is a toxin that spreads and spreads and spreads until it is diluted among so many people that each can survive it.

Unfortunately, we seem to want to survive it alone.

The truck begins straining up a long incline leading to a rest area off the turnpike. I turn on the wipers to clear the mist from the windshield. In front of me is a square-bodied truck also straining up the incline. I remember October is county fair season. On the back of the truck, huge red capital letters issue a warning to trailing motorists:

CAUTION.

GIANT PIG.

XLIX. Shit

Washington, Georgia. February 16, 1989.

Let’s talk about shit. I know, I know, it’s not an appetizing subject, but as a friend of mine once said, no matter how much we try to get away from it, there’s always a trail of it behind us.

Today I think I have solved the long-nagging problem of what to do with this inevitable trail. The solution seems to be simple paper bags. The kind I had as a school kid to carry my lunch.

The need for some better method of solid waste disposal is evident to me as I walk past the garbage dumpster at one end of the shopping plaza in the northeastern Georgia town of Washington where I have been parked since last night. I am more than 50 feet beyond the dumpster before I can no longer smell the bag of garbage I threw into it last night. Lord, you would think three layers of space-age plastic bags, two of them closed off in a knot and the other ziplocked – would muffle the smell of a simple pile of shit. Not so. In today’s unseasonable warmth – 86 degrees at 11 a.m. – the dumpster reeks of fecal matter. Some sanitation man.

In my defense, my current method of sewage disposal tries to make concessions to the aesthetics of the natural roadside. In most cases, my system – diverting the unsightly solids from sewage into waste receptacles that keep them out of public view until they are buried or burned – works pretty well. Today is an example of when it doesn’t.

Separating out the solids, however, is the only way to make my tiny sewage holding tank a tolerable size for road use. With both toilet and shower draining into it, the holding tank has a design capacity, even with only one occupant, of only one day’s storage on the road. Even when the shower isn’t used and even though seven gallons of storage capacity is theoretically 28 flushes, I find myself on the road having to empty the holding tank at least once every two days. And let’s be realistic. I’m not going to have to be looking for a dumping station every day or so on the road. The alternatives are (1) spend most of your days in a campground or RV park with a sewer hookup, which is what most people do, or (2) dump the shit alongside the road, which is what some people do. I don’t do either.

It took only my maiden trip in the truck to get me thinking about eliminating solids from the sewage holding tank. Let’s face it, the contents of most sewage holding tanks – shit, piss and toilet paper – are hard enough to countenance under the best of conditions. However, the constant vibration of travel – not to mention the heat that my truck radiates into the tank because the manifold exhaust passes right beneath the toilet – quickly turns those three ingredients into a kind of fudge that not even a scatologist could face.

Toilet paper was the easiest solid to keep out of the sewage tank. I started folding my used toilet paper into tiny balls and saving them in a small plastic bag that, when full, I tied off and threw in with my regular trash. However, I soon noticed, even hooked to the sewer system at the Old Orchard Beach campground, that the remaining ingredients going into the holding tank were forming a sludge along the bottom of the tank, and this would build up enough so I would have to hose it out every week or so. As unpleasant as that was, I shuddered to think how bad the problem would be on the road, where I wouldn’t have access to unlimited amounts of pressurized water and a sewer system to drain it into. At some point, it occurred to me that my water-saving, high-tech toilet wasn’t much better than one of those old folding camp toilets that do little more than hold your ass off the ground so you can crap into a detachable bag.

As I walk around the perimeter of the shopping plaza in Washington, Georgia, for my daily exercise, I ponder our waste.

Walking around the edge of a shopping plaza is a good way to exercise in a crowded place and still keep an eye on your truck. When I stop in a shopping plaza for the night, I try to choose a visible spot somewhere near the center. That way, the truck doesn’t look as suspicious to cops or as inviting to crooks, who prefer to do their night work in dark peripheries. The next day, the truck is easier to watch as I make my exercise circuits. By the way, most small shopping plazas seem to be about a quarter mile around the edge. I don’t know why.

A circuit around a shopping plaza can be an eye-opening experience because about a third of it is around the back where you find at the same time the plaza’s most beautiful and most unsightly aspects – the natural landscape that the plaza has invaded and the waves of trash that it creates.

I walk past the dumpster again – woof, the smell has not diminished – and continue behind the long connected plaza building. A tsunami of trash has tumbled into a row of scraggly white pines that are barely holding their own in the soft red soil that the plaza is trying to leach away from them.

I walk to fathom, walk to fathom, fathom. The problem with my camp-toilet technique is that a plastic bag is necessary to collect the waste in the first place. A biodegradable paper bag would be ideal, but the paper would disintegrate in the toilet water. And a plastic sandwich bag is necessary to ziplock away the odor, and not always very well at that. Then the third plastic bag for the general trash. Three plastic bags, down the dumpster.

Well, the toilet bag and the trash bag are the same size – both four-gallon small white garbage bags, 30 to a box. How can I recycle the toilet bag, maybe reuse it as a trash bag? Simple, really. Find a way to intercept the solids before they fall into the toilet bag.

I go to the plaza’s supermarket and find a package of 50 flat-bottom paper lunch bags. I go back to the truck and experiment. Now that I think about it, the technique suggests itself.

At this point, however, I must defer again to an appendix. Some of the people who reviewed this manuscript said they didn’t share my enthusiasm for the details of this subject. Those who are curious I refer to the second appendix, titled the same as this chapter.

With my latest lunch-bag technology, the trash I put in the dumpster today will not contain the unusually fragrant constituents of yesterday’s, still reeking there. Because this time, I have the solid waste wrapped in biodegradable paper. I walk again behind the plaza and pick out the saddest looking of those pine trees. With the toe of my shoe, I kick a hole in the red soil at the base of the tree as deep as I can. The paper bag drops in. I scuff soil over the top of the hole and tamp it down with my toe. Job’s Plant Spikes, say hello to Sid’s.

I take a final look at the tree. Take advantage of my good nutrition, old buddy. This ex-lunch is on me.

L. Cities

Baltimore, Maryland. November 29, 1988.

God, I hate big cities. You can’t park anything in them safely, not even an unattractive sanitation truck. And driving anywhere near a big city is hazardous even in a small car with windows on all four sides for visibility. In a pregnant ice cream truck with only extended door mirrors to watch three sides of the vehicle, big city driving can be a nervous, lurching experience.

Like it is today as Granny and I drive through Baltimore.

I am taking Granny to Florida in the truck. My mother and her friend Henry drove down in October. Usually the three of them fly to Florida for the winter, but Henry wanted to take a car he could leave permanently at the house in Zephyrhills that he shares with my mother and, as a consequence of that relationship, with my grandmother. But Granny said she wasn’t keen about riding in a car all those miles with her arthritis – I don’t know if she’s arthritic or not, but she’s been making that claim for years – so she will fly down after Thanksgiving from Boston to Tampa, where Ma and Henry will meet her. Meanwhile, I am supposed to be spending the eight weeks from Election Day to New Year’s Day with Diane in Connecticut, then leave on my first big national field survey. But things get a little tense with Diane even before Thanksgiving, and I suddenly remember that Granny might like some company on turkey day. So on the weekend before Thanksgiving, National Sanitation Services pulls in beneath her pines.

Granny is delighted. She’s already planned to have Thanksgiving with one of her sons who lives in the area, but she is happy to have someone living right in the dooryard who can help her with other meals and share the increasingly long autumn evenings. This same uncle of mine is planning to drive her to Boston for the flight to Tampa, but I – and my truck – represent yet a third alternative. Granny isn’t too keen about flying, either. How much better it would be to drive to Florida slowly in a vehicle that would give her room to sit and read with her feet up, or lie down for a nap, or walk around a bit, maybe even get a snack from the refrigerator, all while the vehicle is moving her to her destination. I think it is a great idea, too. I am already loaded with provisions for the big road trip, and it is headed in the same general direction – down the East Coast and then along the Gulf into the Southwest. I’ll just have to dip a little deeper into Florida to drop off Granny. As long as she doesn’t mind my driving. Or stopping along the road for meals I will cook. Or sleeping in whatever rest areas, fields or woods I can find for the night. Not at all, she says. It will be like the old days on the train, where you could move around while traveling and have your own sleeping compartment at night.

My grandmother is not a tall or heavy woman, but, unlike my petite mother, Granny is broad-shouldered, large-breasted and, despite the shrinkage of age, still imposing. She has a square face and an aquiline nose that she inherited from her father, a farmer who loved to read and wore whiskers that made him look a good deal like his favorite author, Samuel Clemens. My great-grandfather also bequeathed to his only daughter a rock-ribbed sense of Republicanism – old Bill Sanborn may have died as much from the rebirth of FDR liberalism in 1960 as from his 80-plus years – and that legacy has kept Granny a lifelong subscriber to one of the nation’s most right-wing newspapers, the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader.

Granny loves Reagan. We would argue about this more, but Granny over the years has undergone a progressive loss of hearing that for more than a decade has left her practically deaf. I’m not sure this is an inherited trait, but it does run in the family. My mother and I are developing a hearing loss from hollering at Granny to make ourselves understood.

“Do we have to go through that damned tunnel?” Granny asks as I am heating her prune juice in a northern Maryland service area during our first breakfast on the road. Granny has never been through Baltimore’s Harbor Tunnel, but a car trip years earlier through Boston’s Sumner Tunnel convinced her she never wanted to drive underground again.

“No, the truck isn’t allowed in the tunnel because of the propane tanks,” I say, throwing a piece of bread into one of the flat handleless pans that has been heating on another burner. Once the bread is cooked into toast, I will fill the pan with water that will at the same time clean the pan and poach an egg for Granny’s breakfast. “We’ll have to go around the tunnel and cross the harbor at the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

“Do we have to go through that tunnel?” she asks.

I am being inconsiderate. I turn toward Granny at the table so she can see my lips and expression as I speak.

“No, we’ll be going instead over the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

“What bridge?”

“Francis Scott Key,” I say louder, waving my hand like a flag. “You know, the guy who wrote ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’”

“Oh,” she nods.

I am having only coffee for breakfast. That will keep me awake from the beer I know I am going to drink before we hit downtown Baltimore. I have already stashed two 16-ounce cans behind the passenger seat.

The gas furnace kept Granny warm through the night beneath her three blankets on the couch/bed at the rear of the truck. I slept in the loft over the cab behind a privacy curtain that couldn’t stop most of the furnace heat from being trapped there. I slept in a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and no covers. Shorts and T-shirt are also my driving clothes. To keep Granny warm during the first day we traveled, I ran the cab heater full blast with all the blower vents aimed over the seats so the hot air could circulate through the back of the truck. The system worked pretty well, but the cab got pretty hot. Within a few minutes on the road, I had to peel off my T-shirt.

When you drive toward a large city, two things seem to happen to the highway: It gets wider as more lanes are added, and then, when there is no more room but more lanes are needed, the existing lanes get narrower. On this late November day as we approach Baltimore, a third thing happens: Construction signs warn me to watch for “unusual” traffic patterns.

Oh oh, here we go. The four southbound lanes lurch to the left to avoid a bridge being rebuilt. The four lanes become eight as southbound and northbound traffic squeeze together on the bridge’s mate. Now we lurch right as the process reverses itself. I reach for a beer. A huge truck whooshes past, pulling my steering wheel into its wake. The guy in the car behind the huge truck honks to keep me out of his trajectory. The road narrows and lurches left again. The mid-morning sun is blinding. The heat in the cab is blazing. Sweat is running down my bare chest, soaking into my shorts. No, I am crushing the beer can between my thighs.

A voice behind me.

“It’s time to stop for tea,” my grandmother says. Somehow, in the midst of all the lurching, she has made her way up the aisle and is leaning against the screen panel between the cab and the cabin.

“We’re on a beltway,” I holler, not daring to take my eyes off the road. “If we stop, we’ll be killed.”

“Top of the hill?” she hollers.

“KILLED. We’ll all be KILLED,” I scream.

“OK, good,” she says. In the rear view mirror, I watch her pad back down the aisle, holding on to various counters and appliances, to her seat just out of my view behind the refrigerator.

Fifteen minutes later, we are about to enter the Key Bridge, a high span with a long elevated approach that threads through the Baltimore waterfront. The beer has calmed me, and I am feeling guilty about having screamed at my grandmother.

“Hey, Granny, we’re going onto the Key Bridge,” I holler. In the rear view mirror, I watch her get up and pad again to the screen behind me.

“What’s that?”

“We’re going onto the Key Bridge. Look, there’s the harbor.”

“Sorry, I can’t understand you,” she says.

My temperature is rising again.

“Francis Scott Key. Francis Scott Key,” I holler, swerving left toward a small car that is keeping pace in the next lane.

“What?” my grandmother says.

“WE’RE GOING OVER THE FRANCIS SCOTT KEY,” I scream. A male passenger in the car, his window also closed, must have been startled by my voice. He looks up at me. His surprise turns to fright. An apparently nude man is at the wheel of a sanitation truck, screaming at the top of his lungs. The car backs off.

“Going to stop for tea?” my grandmother says.

“FRANCIS SCOTT KEY. FRANCIS SCOTT KEY.”

She pads back to her seat. This time, I see her slippered feet go up on the couch.

Granny is a regular woman. Breakfast at 7. Tea and maybe cake at 9:30. Lunch at noon. Juice or fruit at 2:30. Dinner at 5 p.m. It’s been that way with her for years. But not this day on the Baltimore Beltway. The heat, sunlight and swaying are too much for her routine. She is fast asleep when I finally pull over nearly two hours later near Quantico, Virginia. She has sauteed chicken and rice with a side dish of steamed peas for lunch. I have another beer.

She loves the trip. Five months later, after a couple of quick side trips back up the coast and finally the big, slow swing along the Gulf into the Southwest, I loop back into Florida to visit the folks before they head north for the summer. Granny is ready to go trucking again. Ma and Henry are flying back, but Granny wants to return the way she came.

No cities this time, I say. No cities, she says. Back roads all the way, I say. Back roads, she nods.

This time I decide to streamline my meal plan. Before we leave, I debone a fresh chicken, shell a bunch of fresh shrimp, shave an eye-of-the-round roast and put double portions of these ready-to-cook meats into plastic ziplock bags. I do the same with precut vegetables, chopped onions, sliced mushrooms. Granny likes hot-cooked meals, and meeting that five-squares-a-day schedule with scratch cooking was a little too much challenge for me on the trip down.

When we leave Florida, the weather is dry, sunny and in the mid-70s. By Jesup, Georgia, when we pull into a swamp just beyond the Altamaha River for dinner, the air is humid and 15 degrees warmer.

“Are you sure you want your last meal of the day at 5 o’clock?” I say. My T-shirt is damp against my chest.

“Five o’clock,” she says, looking at her watch. “That’s what I’ve got, too.”

“You and Reagan,” I mutter, tossing pans and the tea kettle onto the stove. “God forbid anything like reality should break into your rules.”

I fire up all four burners. Tea. Sauteed beef. Braised potatoes. Steamed broccoli. In the pan after the beef, sautee onions and flour to make a deglazed sherry sauce. Stack the beef and the sauce on the broccoli pot to keep them warm. Sautee peaches for dessert. Put them aside and deglaze the pan with cream and sugar to make a sweet topping.

Everything ready, we sit down for dinner. We eat slowly through the courses, sparing nothing. The cabin is like a furnace. It has to be the hottest meal she has ever had.

As we sip tea afterward, I start to feel cooler as evening air moves into the cabin and brushes against my wet clothes and body. Granny looks drowsy.

“Twilight sleep,” she says. “I don’t know what it was, but the doctor called it twilight sleep. It was the night Harlan was born. We were living up at the old Stuart Place, and the doctor gave me twilight sleep.

“That old place was terrible. In the winter, the wind never hit a thing from the time it left Mount Washington until it got to that hill. Albert would leave me and the kids out there for a week at a time while he went off to look for work.

“Before Harlan was born, Albert brought his mother to stay with us. The old lady was no help at all. Besides taking care of your mother and Hester, I had to wait on Albert’s mother, too.

“The night Harlan was born, the doctor gave me twilight sleep. I was in the downstairs bedroom. Albert was sleeping in the living room. His mother was in the bedroom upstairs. I couldn’t speak loud enough to wake any of them. Harlan was born, and I had to lie in that mess until morning.”

Her voice drifts.

“I don’t know why there’s all this uproar over abortion. I had eight kids and two miscarriages. I had to put the twins up for adoption because we couldn’t feed them. Your mother’s brother Neil died when he was 18 months. If we’d had an abortion law back then, maybe I wouldn’t have had to have all those kids.”

We are sitting in darkness by now. I want to drive a couple more hours. I make the bed in the rear of the truck. She can sit and doze until she feels like going to bed.

I stop for the night three hours later in the Four Hole Swamp near Santee, South Carolina. Granny is asleep in bed beneath an open book. I turn off the light over her and turn on the one over the stove. I heat a kettle of water and pour it over a towel in the sink. I take off my T-shirt and run the hot towel over my head and torso.

“You’ve got nice shoulders,” I hear her say in a sleepy voice. “That runs in the family.”

I look around. She smiles and goes back to sleep. I turn off the light and climb into the loft.

If I live to be 88, I think, I want to get there with enough lust for life to be interested in the cut of a 48-year-old woman’s shoulders, even if she is related to me.

During the remainder of the trip, we stay overnight in two more swamps. Granny will talk for the rest of her life about the last one, Dismal Swamp in eastern Virginia. We stay there before we cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a 17-mile span that is about half underwater tunnel. Granny sits up front in the passenger seat. She loves both the bridge and its tunnels.

We skirt Washington and Baltimore by going up the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. We skirt New York City by taking the Garden State and Palisades Parkways to upstate New York, then angle across western Massachusetts into Vermont and New Hampshire.

Turns out Granny doesn’t like big cities any more than I do.

LI. Nannette

Sumter County, Alabama. April 18, 1989.

A woman’s voice.

“Hello. Hello in there.”

I am standing, as they say in this part of the country, buck naked in the middle of the truck after taking a sink bath to relieve myself of this sticky Alabama heat.

“Hello. Hello-oo. Anybody in there?”

It is a young woman’s voice.

“Hold on,” I say, crouching behind the stove while I speak through the screen door. “I am just getting dressed.”

It is early evening, and I am glad I haven’t yet turned on the lights.

“Oh, OK,” the young womanly voice says in an increasingly evident Southern accent. “Oh, hello, Mr. Cat. I see you under there.”

Well, she has found Bonzo, too. From experience, I know he is just as far under the truck as his rope will allow.

I pull on fresh shorts, T-shirt and trousers, and they wilt when they hit the sweat of my body.

I go to the door and there meet Nannette Steedley, a true flower of the South – mid-20s, a slender 5-foot-7, maybe 135 pounds, light brown hair, blue-hazel eyes, skin like peach brandy in cream.

She is quite startling in her full camouflage outfit.

“I was out in the fields doing some turkey hunting when I saw your truck parked here,” she says, standing with her weight on one boot and her hands on her hips. “I was just curious . . . nosy, I guess you’d say.”

“Well, you have found a turkey,” I say.

She smiles at the joke and shifts her weight. I invite her into the truck. Bonzo comes out of his hiding place and asks to come in, too. He likes women, but he has to recognize them first.

Nannette is wearing a loose cotton hat that seems to be standard Marine issue, a full jacket that looks like tree bark and trousers that remind me of tiger stripes, all in brown, green and olive drab. She is covered with enough camouflage fabric to get her through a Viet Cong skirmish line, but her pretty face is as dry as powder. I in my light cottons, on the other hand, am sweating like a pig.

“I’ve just been out for a long walk south along this road,” I say, partly to explain the humid appearance of my middle-aged Northern body. She stands quietly taking in the interior of the truck, looking as cool as a cucumber sandwich.

“I was planning to head out south this evening,” I continue, “but I found a sign down there that says the bridge is out.”

“Oh, you want the new Route 28. This is the old 28,” she says matter-of-factly. “Everybody around here knows that, but I guess it doesn’t show on the tourist maps.

“So, anyway, tell me about this National Sanitation Services,” she says. “I have a bachelor of science degree in wildlife management and biology from Auburn, and now I’m working on a master’s in environmental science.”

Oh oh, someone has finally taken my camouflage seriously.

As quickly as I can, I explain that for about five months, I have been traveling slowly down the Atlantic and along the Gulf Coast and am now looping farther back inland, that I have been trying to live on the road rather than in campgrounds or motels and that National Sanitation Services, when you get right down to it, is a fraud.

“It’s something you made up?” she asks.

Yup, I say.

She laughs, and I join in. It turns out, she has actually done field survey work as part of her environmental studies, and she has had to go out with as many as a dozen other students in only vans and jeeps and had to sleep on the ground.

“It was nothing like this,” she says, scanning the truck’s interior again.

I am parked near a pile of loose asphalt, probably road scrapings, just off Route 80 where I thought I was getting onto the Route 28 shown on my map. I explain to Nannette that I got onto Route 80 in eastern Mississippi and was thinking about continuing east through Selma and Montgomery, but the Alabama heat intervened and convinced me to turn south for the breezy Gulf again.

I’m disappointed to be skipping Selma. This year is the 25th anniversary of the federal Civil Rights Act, a measure that didn’t have much meaning until activists began insisting on its practice in places like Selma the following year. In fact, the two marches launched in Selma by Martin Luther King Jr. led to the second major piece of federal civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

I’ve never been in Selma, but I read plenty about it as a young man just getting into the newspaper business, a move I imagined I was making for the same reason King and his marchers faced club-wielding mounted troopers and snarling police dogs – to make the world a better place. More recently, I have read William Least Heat Moon Trogdon’s book, Blue Highways, in which he devotes three chapters to visiting Selma 11 years after the marches.

I ask Nannette if she has read Blue Highways.

“No,” she says. “Is it a travel book?”

“Sort of. But what it really is,” I say, “is a long piece of poetry about America.”

“You read a lot of poetry?”

“No, and this doesn’t look like poetry until you read it and realize that the better prose and poetry are written, the narrower the gap is between them.”

I think I have run the conversation into a corner, and we fall silent.

“Say, do you have time for me to show you something?” she says with new animation. “I want to show you the hunting club where I hang out.”

She leads me to her car, a gun-metal gray Datsun loaded with a .20-gauge Browning shotgun, cartridges of birdshot and other hunting gear, and we tool off north and west on Route 28, back across Route 80, toward the university town of Livingston where she is doing her graduate studies. Holding the wheel with one hand, she demonstrates her new Lynch’s Foolproof, a wooden turkey-calling box.

“This is a cluck,” she says, blowing a short, clipped sound. Then a squawking sound. “That’s a yip.”

I’m afraid to show my lack of sophistication in such matters by asking for a gobble. Besides, that just wouldn’t sound right.

“I’m so excited,” she says. “I got a hen to talk to me today.”

“If she had come out in the open, would you have shot her?”

“Oh, no.”

Ah, a tender heart, I conclude.

“No,” she says, “you can only shoot bearded turkeys.”

“Then if it was a tom, you would’ve shot him?

“Oh yes, I would’ve.”

What a puzzle this young woman is. Educated, inquisitive, obviously well-bred and well-mannered, quite pretty, on the other hand rather unorthodox and apparently a little hard-hearted.

Somewhere on the way to Livingston, we pull off onto a long wooded road that leads to an oversized stone-and-timber building. It is the headquarters of Southern Sportsman, a hunting club whose 312 members come from as far away as Pennsylvania to roam over 23,000 acres. That’s roughly the same area – about 36 square miles – that the king of England would grant to one of his friends to establish a town in colonial America.

Inside the lodge are stone floors, hewn wooden walls and ceilings, a huge copper hood over a huge open fireplace. Plain, rustic, but sort of corporate, too. Like some architect had been commissioned to design an office building in the woods using only available materials.

Nannette, in fact, says she is here on a corporate membership, but she doesn’t say what corporation. She doesn’t have to say she is one of the few, maybe the only, young female members. The other members I see are more my age, vintage and gender – men who are gray on top, soft around the middle.

On the walls of the lodge are maps of the club’s territory with octagonal flags showing where members are currently hunting, a system intended to keep them out of each other’s sights. Also prominently displayed are lists of deer kills.

Nannette is in her second year as a member. She hasn’t gotten a deer yet this year, but last year, she got two. Where I come from, one of those would have been illegal. I ask her what the season limit is. She doesn’t know about the season, but the limit, she says, is one deer a day. One a day per hunter?

The lodge manager, a pleasant, plaid-encased man named George, takes me on a tour with Nannette. I admire one of the club’s two bunkhouses. Plain wood floors, uncluttered, but I notice that all the wooden dressers, despite natural variances in grain, are matched in their detailing right down to the same brass drawer pulls. The club also has its own trailer park, two stocked lakes, a hanging shed, a skinning shed, a cutting and processing room and a walk-in freezer 24 feet square. A regular Auschwitz for game animals.

I come from a hunting family, but we’ve reached a truce on the subject. During World War II when meat was rationed, I along with the rest of my family ate venison, rabbit and other small game, sometimes bear meat, and was glad to have it. But in the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, some of us began questioning the practice of continuing to mow down wild animals, now almost exclusively with high-powered, scope-guided rifles, no longer out of need but in the name of sport. Not to mention the danger that the proliferation of firearms poses to the rest of us who don’t have them. Many of my uncles, cousins and in-laws still love to hunt. Some of us don’t. We still all love each other, so we don’t discuss hunting or gun control.

I broach the subject gently with Nannette by asking if she is familiar with the Massachusetts gun law, the first in the nation to make possession of unregistered handguns a mandatory prison offense. She is, and she hates it.

“No law can keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” she says. “If someone wants a gun, they’re gonna get it.”

Enough said. We jump into the car again and head off to a local restaurant where Nannette also likes to hang out. For some reason, I now notice she is wearing a seatbelt, and it seems incongruous.

As we slow down for the more congested streets of Livingston University, I notice some Afro-American faces among the students passing the car, although most seem to be of European stock. The question is inevitable, so I ask it.

“Yes, the blacks have been accepted by the whites here, but there are some differences,” she says. “I don’t want to sound prejudiced, but the blacks have drug down education. The statistics show it.”

I have recently had a similar conversation with my brother, who is a college professor. He takes a more egalitarian view. He’s convinced students of all colors are getting stupider.

“Well, don’t forget,” I expostulate, much as I have expostulated with Wendell, “the statistics reflect a larger body of students, including some who in the old days wouldn’t have been educated at all. Would you rather have higher test averages for a smaller group of students or be willing to accept temporarily lower scores while a larger number of students, from a broader cross-section of society, becomes better educated?”

I have again run the conversation into a corner.

I take a new tack on the same subject: “I don’t mean to offend you with a Northern question about race, but it seems that only in the South have I openly heard . . . .”

She intercepts the question: “Yes, we talk about . . . niggers,” she says, pronouncing the last word delicately, like “neegers.” “But I tell you what. There’s more prejudice and trouble between the races in the North, I believe, than there is here in the South.”

Thinking about the last 20 years in Boston, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, I have to admit she has a point.

“I kind of guard my tongue when I’m around . . .,” she pauses, but I hear “Yankees” in the silence, “. . . uh, people I don’t know,” she says. “There are some fantastic black folks around here . . . and some sorry ones. We also have some white trash . . . white niggers. In my book, a nigger can be either white or black.”

Now I feel like I’m in a corner. But I’m not about to argue that the word “nigger” comes from the Latin word for black and that calling a bad white person black isn’t exactly a compliment to blacks.

We stop at the restaurant, a homey-looking place called the Ranch House, which seems to be filled with her friends and acquaintances. She introduces me as a friend of the family, “just to make things simpler.”

Who is this woman? Why is she being so friendly and candid? Is this the new Southern womanhood . . . the good old girls?

We drink iced tea, and Nannette tells me more about herself. Her father, a former professional football player and coach, is now superintendent of schools in a county about a hundred miles to the north. Although now tied to a desk, he still is an avid outdoorsman, not attracted so much by hunting and fishing any more as by “contemplation of nature,” Nannette says.

I catch the reflection of the two of us in one of the restaurant’s curtained windows. She looks very young. I look very old. Her father must be about my age, I figure. He and I have a few other things in common – contemplation of nature, interest in sports, even pro football, although I played in an inferior league that barely qualified as semipro – 10 bucks a game and a free bus ride to and from the stadium.

Nannette is the older of two sisters, but the younger is a full nine years younger. There are no brothers.

“I was an only child for nine years,” Nannette says. “I was my Daddy’s shadow. I guess I still am.”

She is engaged to a young man who is a property manager in Montgomery, a young, jovial man who loves hunting and fishing so much, “I mean, he breaks out in a sweat.” His first name is, in fact, Hunter.

“That’s also my mother’s maiden name, Hunter,” Nannette says.

There’s some metaphysics, maybe karma, working here.

Nannette and Hunter were supposed to be married this coming June, but in October, she put off the wedding plans to an indefinite date.

“He demands a lot of attention, and I got this smothered feeling,” she says. “Just ’cause you’re engaged doesn’t mean you have to get married.”

Still, she says, she loves him dearly. “He’s very inquisitive, very sensitive.”

Her voice trails off. I think for a few moments. I can’t think of two virtues more human than the ones she has just mentioned. Curiosity, compassion.

The tour continues. She drives a short distance to her apartment, a two-room suite in a building that is a cross between a dormitory and a motel. As I walk in, the first thing I see is a hardwood tree limb. Not a potted tree but a medium-size limb, broken off at the bottom, leaning into a corner. On one of the branches, something moves.

“Oh, that’s BS,” she says, retrieving a tiny gray squirrel from the branch. She gives him a peanut, and, although hardly a month old, he tears expertly at the shell.

“I got him last month at a veterinary clinic after he fell out of a tree. He was like 10 days old, and he had his eyes all shut like a little nasty rat. I had to feed him from a bottle every two to four hours. BS stands for Baby Squirrel, and I’m Mother Squirrel.”

The peanut is part of the weaning process. The limb is vocational training for BS before he goes back into the wild.

“He still falls out now and then, but he’s getting better,” she says.

Nearby is a large cage where BS takes refuge when the door is open to the other room, home of the apartment’s other pet, a black-and-yellow speckled king snake. Nannette found the snake on a field trip in Dallas County near Selma.

“My mother would absolutely die,” she says.

We drive back to the truck and split a beer. I mention somewhere in the conversation that I’m glad she wears a seatbelt. She says she started wearing one about seven years ago after she was driving along on a farm road and her car skidded over an embankment, throwing her into the windshield. As a result of the crash, she has undergone reconstruction of her jaw and several series of cosmetic facial surgeries.

The surgeons have done their work flawlessly. She is picture pretty.

“Men worry about death,” she says. “Women worry about ugliness.”

Maybe I could have gotten Mary to wear a seatbelt if I had dumped the statistical safety lecture and suggested instead how ugly the bandages would look.

Before she leaves, Nannette talks of another kind of beauty, the beauty of the outdoors that both she and her father revere.

“It is sacred holy ground. I feel like I’m more in God’s house when I’m out in the woods than when I’m in church. The church has its doctrine, but I have my beliefs. Being outside in nature, seeing how things stay in balance, you know there’s a God out there, and it all works.”

The new South. A synthesis of the good old boys and the new-age woman. I have a renewed curiosity about what’s going on these days in Selma.

LII. Diane

Biddeford, Maine. March 20, 1983.

When I first met her four months ago, Diane was neither beautiful nor ugly. She looked plain. She was wearing a corduroy jacket, heavy slacks, blouse buttoned to the neck, black hair curled tightly to her head. She was wearing lipstick, but she kept her lips pressed thinly together, like a high school librarian facing a study hall class on the first day of school. This morning, as I sit beside her on the edge of the bed, her hair is loose and her lips are full and wet. Tears push at the rims of her pale blue eyes. She is heartbreakingly beautiful.

“If that’s the way it is . . . .,” she says. She keeps her face turned away as she reaches for her clothes.

I have just told her that she shouldn’t expect too much of me, that I am still in love with Mary. That if Mary needed me, I’d be gone in a minute.

Diane dresses and goes into the bathroom. When she emerges, her face and hair are again under control. She repacks her bags quietly, deliberately, and stands them at the door. She looks at me with a steely expression.

“What time can I expect you next weekend?” she asks.

God, she is tough.

I knew before I met her that she was tough. Her younger sister, a co-worker, told me so. Although we were good friends, Debby was serious about both journalism and marriage, having only recently gotten into them both, and she wasn’t impressed with my love life. In less than two years, she had seen me in three serious relationships – Peggy, Sara, Mary – and I got the feeling she didn’t approve of the way I had dealt with any of them. So I was a little surprised when she offered to introduce me to her older sister. Debby wasn’t worried. She showed me a photo of Diane standing with her horse. The horse was an Arabian stallion with a mean look in his eyes, but Diane looked equal to him. Although she was smiling, she was holding the horse’s face toward the camera with an arm that, although not unfeminine, was hard with muscle. The way the light hit her pullover jersey and English riding britches, it was obvious that the rest of her physique was equally well-conditioned.

“You ought to see her dog. He’s just as mean as the horse,” Debby said. “She likes men the same way – hard to handle. She works on them until they wimp out, then she dumps them.”

Debby said one man kept coming to the house after Diane had tired of him, and she would leave him there with her mother, father or younger brother while she went off to ride or play golf.

The weekend we met, Diane kept looking at me soberly, like she was sizing me up. The first night, a Friday, she watched me in the kitchen as she and I and Debby and her husband cooked dinner together. I deep-fried mushrooms and broccoli in egg wash and bread crumbs. I knew Diane probably wasn’t the fried-food type, but I argued that egg wash – egg and milk beaten together – cooks instantly in hot oil, sealing off and steaming whatever is inside in its own moisture without a hint of oil. She ate them without comment. On Saturday, when I asked what she wanted to do, she chose raquetball. I gave her a good match – at times, a flat-out game with wicked volleys – but she beat me pretty convincingly. I enjoyed playing against her, and I told her so. She gave me a quizzical look. On Sunday, she wanted to walk along the Maine coast. The weather was raw – a November wind blowing rain straight sideways – and she said she’d like to try to row a longboat into the surf. I told her she’d have to do it by herself because I thought the idea was nuts. She smiled, and we walked on.

I had a secret weapon. I really was still in love with Mary, and I had lost her, so I had nothing else to lose. Whether Diane approved of me or not, I just didn’t care.

The more I saw Diane, the more attractive I found her. I had never known a woman so physically fit. Sinewy arms and shoulders. Washboard stomach. Viselike thighs. English saddle may look like an effete sport, but the riders beneath those funny-looking bowler hats are in damned good shape.

She also had a genetic asset. While her features were nothing out of the ordinary – regular nose, slightly thin lips, a rather roundish face – she had inherited a striking combination of brunette hair so dark that it had blue highlights and blue eyes so light that they looked like they had been matched to her hair.

This reinforced another of her qualities I found attractive – an almost icy composure that kept her words measured and her responses analytical. Just the sort of reserve you’d expect in a person who spent much of her professional life keeping young people quiet.

Diane was 31, never married, still at home with her parents. Although her official educational title was media specialist, she was in fact a librarian. Sound spinsterish? I admit the word occurred to me. Not to mention the word lesbian. She soon disabused me of both stereotypes.

Diane was a juxtaposition of opposites. Warm, when you come in from the cold, feels hot. Hot, experienced in the presence of Diane, could be sizzling.

But there was a stereotype here, too. While she didn’t do anything to discourage her image as an ice queen, it wasn’t true. She was, I would learn, a normal, healthy woman who over the years had gone through a number of normal, healthy relationships with men but hadn’t found, or been found by, any of them worth making a permanent change in lifestyle. As the years passed, I think her natural reserve turned into something cooler as she began to resent what society concludes about single women past 30 still living at home. And there were her parents. She was the oldest of four children, and while the youngest, her brother, was still at home, he would be leaving home about the same time her father reached retirement age. Diane felt an obligation to be there for her parents if they needed her.

A lot of what I first took as an easy stereotype was in fact a complex outgrowth of fidelity to herself and loyalty to others. Maintained by a spiritual strength that was no less daunting than her physical strength.

Besides the physical attraction, my respect for her also was deepening.

Which is why this morning, as we face the gray light of day, I am compelled to tell her the truth about my feelings.

After I tell her the truth, of course, it no longer is completely the truth. Seeing the effect of it on her has an effect on me. As her toughness softens in that brief misty-eyed moment, I sense the depth of vulnerability beneath it. And I realize how beautiful she is.

In the months that follow, I try to convince her to move to Maine and live with me. She says she won’t give up her job of 10 years and move away from Connecticut unless we get married. I offer to move to Connecticut so we can live together there. She says we can’t live unmarried in her family’s house. And she won’t move out to someplace nearby and live with me unmarried, either.

“My family wouldn’t approve,” she says. “They’re traditional about marriage, and I guess I am, too.”

“God, I wish you’d been married before,” I say. “Then you’d realize that what’s important is being together, not being married.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Being married changes being together.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I know. That’s because you haven’t been married before.”

I have a thought: “Why don’t we get married, get divorced, and then we’d be on equal footing. Then we could live together unmarried.”

“No,” she says.

By November, a year after we have met, she makes it clear to me that she has never spent much longer than a year in a static relationship. I don’t ask how much longer she is planning to spend with me. The next month, at Christmas, I give her a locket containing a tiny note that says in even tinier letters, “I love you.”

“It’s the best I can do right now,” I tell her. “Give it a chance to grow.”

She says she will.

By the following summer, more than 18 months have gone by. As I sit at the kitchen table, she tells me I am going nowhere. She drives back to Connecticut, and, true to her style, she neither calls nor writes. I am out of her life. I have wimped out, and she has dumped me.

LIII. Selma

Selma, Alabama. April 20, 1989.

On downtown Water Avenue, about midway between Brown’s Chapel and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Alabama Historical Commission has erected a plaque that explains the importance of Water Avenue and Selma. The avenue, described as one of the finest surviving examples of 19th century riverfront development, was the most important commercial artery of one of central Alabama’s most important commercial centers in those years, the plaque says. Besides Selma’s mercantile prominence, the plaque says, the city also was the Confederacy’s chief military depot in the lower South during the War Between the States. In 1865, the plaque says, federal forces occupied the city and burned its war industries, but a cotton boom brought reconstruction in 1870-90. The plaque’s last line commemorates the avenue’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

So that’s the importance of Water Avenue and Selma. I look past the plaque at two cream-colored women sipping drinks on the wrought-iron veranda of a large brick mall that might once have been a cotton warehouse and pier. The fashions are different, but there is a certain antebellum style to the ladies and their surroundings.

In the other direction, east on Water Avenue, I spot four coffee-colored youngsters riding their bicycles around the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Street. As they approach, I wave them to a stop.

“Is this Water Avenue?” I ask.

“Uh huh,” they nod.

“Is that Martin Luther King Jr. Street?” I ask.

They nod again.

“Do any of you know why these streets are important?”

“Yeah,” the tallest boy says.

“Why?”

“This is where they marched,” the smallest boy says.

“Who?”

“Martin Luther King and them,” he says.

The tallest boy points to Martin Luther King Jr. Street: “They came from the chapel down there and along here, and then they went to the bridge.”

“How do you guys know all this?”

They shrug. The smallest boy says, “My grandmother told me.” The other three nod, and they all ride off. I continue walking toward Brown’s Chapel.

It has been two generations since the Selma marches. Still, it apparently hasn’t been long enough for the marches to sink into the consciousness of Alabama’s official historians.

Driving into Selma yesterday, I noticed an historical marker much larger than the plaque on Water Avenue – an enormous billboard near the Wal-Mart Plaza telling me that the city this weekend would be reenacting the Battle of Selma. I was driving south along the city’s main boulevard, Broad Street, toward the Pettus Bridge and the Alabama River when I spotted a smaller sign and arrows pointing the way to the mock battlefield. I followed the arrows west on Water Avenue.

Where Riverview Avenue couldn’t get any closer to the river, I came to the end of the line, a chainlink fence beyond which I could see rolling fields, heavy vehicles and earthworks. Hanging on the gate, a sign in white-on-green highway department letters warned me against trespassing and promised that “voliators” would be “proscueted.” I didn’t think I had ever voliated, although it sounded dirty and fun and I might have done it once without knowing it, and the penalty sounded like getting turned into an Italian ham. So what the hell, I drove right in.

James Hammonds, a mid-30ish man wearing a Kiwanis hat and a Battle of Selma T-shirt, was busy moving his late-model pickup from the path of a road grader. Now my truck was in the way. I knew he must be in charge when he looked at my Maine plates and NatSanSer markings with the confused stare of a man who had seen too many vehicles he wasn’t told about only two days before the big event.

He looked relieved when I told him I was just traveling through on my way to a sanitation job in Florida when I saw the signs and dropped in. I’d be leaving tomorrow, a day before the battle was scheduled to begin, but I was wondering if I could hang around this afternoon as long as I parked out of the way. Being raised a Yankee and all, I felt I didn’t know as much as I should about the War Between the States.

He waved me through. The battleground was an impressive project. Trenches, revetments, routed wooden signs showing various encampments and events, a large new grandstand built into a freshly graded mound of earth. I followed a sign toward the “Federal Camp,” parked among some blackjack oaks on the riverbank and walked back to talk more with James Hammonds.

This was James’ third year of work on the annual project, and it was coming along well, although this year’s reenactment wouldn’t be taking place until nearly three weeks after the anniversary of the actual battle.

“It actually happened on April 2, 1865, just before Lee surrendered,” James said. “Although everybody knew the war was just about over, there was this Yankee general, James Wilson, who wanted to capture the Selma arsenal and weapons foundries, just to make a name for himself.”

“James Wilson. The name doesn’t ring a bell with me,” I said. “I wonder if he could have known that the only people who would remember his name would be those he fought.”

“Well,” James said, “he also burned the Episcopal Church.”

“Yeah, that’ll get you into the local history books,” I said.

James pointed out the progress under way this year in making the battleground a permanent facility. He said organizers hoped eventually to expand the 40-acre site by annexing nearby Block Park.

“Well, I have to admit that I don’t know much about this Battle of Selma,” I said, “but I do know about the more recent one.”

He looked at me and let the remark pass without comment.

“Listen, can you tell me how to get to Brown’s Chapel?” I asked.

“That’s the other side of Broad Street,” he said. He looked like he wanted to get back to work, so I thanked him and took my leave.

I spent the afternoon among the oaks. By twilight, James and nearly everyone else had left. I drove the truck without lights to a large sycamore in a more remote section of the riverbank and spent the night listening to peepers in the hazy river.

I tried to get out early this morning, but by the time I was driving through the gate, James was there, directing heavy equipment to various parts of the battleground. I hollered my thanks and waved at him as I left. He didn’t look happy.

On the east side of Water Avenue, I found Martin Luther King Jr. Street and parked just beyond Brown’s Chapel. I once knew King’s route from reading newspaper accounts of the marches, and William Trogdon’s book had refreshed my memory of the details. The street now honoring King was known in 1965 as Sylvan Street. I walked the 700 yards along it from the chapel to Water Avenue, then a right turn and 550 yards along Water Avenue to Broad Street, trying to imagine how the route must have looked to the marchers. Easy enough so far. The left turn south on Broad Street brought me almost immediately to the bridge, and the bridge abruptly began a steep incline to make its high arch over the river. Not so easy any more. At the top of the bridge, I had walked less than a mile – not yet a quarter of my usual daily exercise walk – and was breathing heavily. Not a good state in which to meet mounted police bearing clubs and tear gas.

I walked back down the bridge. I headed for a cluster of offices and cafes at the Broad Street-Water Avenue intersection, hoping to find someone who might have been working or dining there at the time and witnessed one of the marches. I was astonished when the first person I buttonholed, a 50ish-looking man hurrying across Broad Street with a sheaf of documents, turned out to be J.L. Chestnut Jr., a local attorney who was one of the original marchers. My luck didn’t hold. He was in a rush and could talk to me only a few minutes:

“There were 350 or 400 of us. We got over the bridge and about two blocks down when the troopers met us. They were lined up across the highway, saying, ‘No further. There will be no march.’ John Lewis, who is a congressman now, said, ‘Let us pray.’ Some began to kneel, and all of a sudden, we saw the tear gas. Then they charged on those horses . . . .”

J.L. noticed me taking notes. He asked if I was a reporter. I used to be, I said, but . . ..

“Then I really can’t talk to you any more,” he said. “My problem is . . . well, this is the subject of a book I’m working on with an editorial writer from the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s taken a year off to do the project, and there’s a publisher waiting. Sort of an exclusive, so I wouldn’t want to see anything else in print.”

He hurried off.

I’m back at Brown’s Chapel now. I step into the truck to have a quick lunch before I take a closer look at the place. After lunch, I walk from the truck toward the chapel, a half-finished cup of tea in my hand, when I see a woman coming toward me with a bunch of twigs in one hand and the front cowling of an electric fan in the other. She says hello.

Beulah Davis is the first person in Selma to say anything to me without being asked. And she has thrown in a friendly smile to boot.

Beulah, a short, round woman with a small nose, big glasses and a pretty face, lives two doors away from Brown’s Chapel in a row-type apartment building that is part of a sprawling federally subsidized housing project. Beulah and her husband, Willie, have been doing some spring cleaning and yard work around their apartment.

I tell her I have come to look at the chapel. She invites me to finish my tea on her porch. I sit in the sun against a metal rail that supports a bush of pink roses glowing incarnadine against the dark red bricks of the apartment building.

Beulah was 29 when the two marches were held, but she wasn’t in either of them. She got involved later, some years after King’s assassination, when a bronze bust of him was erected in front of the chapel.

“When they erected him there, me and my friend girl were the ones for the unwrapping,” Beulah says. I take this to mean she and her girlfriend helped unveil the bust. She nods.

“I used to live on Green Street – that’s one street over from here – but 15 years ago, Willie and me moved in here. It’s been a special place to live. Lots of peoples come by to look at the chapel. Both black and white.”

“Is that why you were so friendly to me? Did I look like a tourist?”

“No, when I saw you coming, you had a smile on your face. You didn’t look prittish like some of them do. I can tell when I’m around someone who don’t want to be bothered. They look at you, and they look off.”

Willie, an older man wearing blue work clothes and white socks with leather thongs over them, sits on the periphery of the conversation, punctuating his wife’s words with smiles that lead to deep, quiet laughs.

“Oh yes, they do that. Oh my,” he chortles.

“I never been what you’d call mistreated by white people,” Beulah says. “Now sometimes, people can say hard words to you, but if you take it like a Christian, you can accept what anybody give you.”

“I guess nobody proved that better than Martin Luther King,” I say.

“That’s right,” she says. “That’s what made him such a great man. He was a great Christian. He saw good in everybody. Now you take George Wallace. He was against the marches, but he’s done some good things, too. He built this college out here (George Corley Wallace Community College) so’s colored people could go.”

“Yes, things get better, oh my goodness, yes,” Willie says. He points to three young people walking by. “You see, one white, two black. They’s friends. They work together. Still have rotten eggs in the nest, still have rotten eggs, oh my. But things get better.”

He chortles off inside the apartment.

“I’ve always had friends,” Beulah says. “White friends, colored friends, never has been a problem.”

“I don’t mean to offend you,” I say, “but I’ve noticed several times you’ve used the word ‘colored.’ It occurs to me as we sit here that you’re the color of this tea, your husband is the color of chocolate, and I’m the color of these roses. We’re all colored.”

“That’s true,” she says, nodding.

“’Course, ‘colored’s’ always been a polite word to me,” she says. “That and ‘Negro.’ When I was coming up, the only thing they used to ration was ‘nigger.’ Even us childrens they called ‘nigger.’”

“Don’t you hate that word?” I ask.

“Some people don’t know nothin’ but cuss and fight and drink and call you different names,” she says. “The way I feel about it, anybody can be a nigger – white or black. Depends on how you act.”

I’ve heard this conversation before.

“The way I figure it,” she says, “if you tend to your own business for five or six days of the week and go to church on the seventh, you ain’t got time to cause nobody no trouble. Nor get into no trouble yourself.”

When William Trogdon visited Selma in 1978, thirteen years after the marches, the first person he met was a snarling redneck in a downtown bar that, while not segregated by law, was in fact patronized only by Euro-Americans. The second person Trogdon met was a young Afro-American resident of the housing project who only recently had been discharged from the Air Force and was embittered that life back home was not much different for him than it had been for his parents and grandparents.

A year after Trogdon’s visit, in 1979, the bust of King and a plaque were erected in front of Brown’s Chapel. The plaque apparently is the only public marker in Selma commemorating – or even acknowledging – the 1965 marches. It was erected by the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association.

The two marches, separated by two weeks, were both important. The first one, March 7, drew national media attention to the marchers being clubbed and gassed on the bridge by the mounted policemen. Although the marchers had to withdraw to the chapel, they had a fall-back plan: They applied for and got a march permit and, more important, got protection from federal troops called out by Washington. On March 21, the procession not only got over the bridge without incident but continued on to the state capital at Montgomery 50 miles away. This time the march was a good-news event, and the momentum it built in the media rolled through Congress a few months later in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the marches to the law or the law to the nation and world. According to the plaque, in the 10 years following the law, Afro-Americans in the South increased their voter registration from 1.4 to 3.8 million and their elected officials from 72 to 2,568. In the 14 succeeding years, I’m sure, the numbers have risen further. More important, the voting law, which was the first practical application of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has led to other applications in other parts of America and – thinking of South Africa and the Soviet Union, to name two recent examples – the world.

Brown’s Chapel is a beautiful old place, but as I stand looking at it, I feel a sense of irony. The chapel is built of sturdy brown brick that rises to double towers separated by an S-curve facade. The edges and cornices of the building are trimmed in white, and the towers are capped with white cupolas. What strikes me is that the chapel is a metaphor for Selma – brown carrying most of the weight, white occupying the most prominent, uppermost positions.

A worse irony is that the city that has helped change the nation and world is lagging behind in its own change. When he visited 11 years ago, Trogdon concluded that things may be changing in Selma, but not very fast. For different reasons, I have come to the same conclusion.

My visit to Selma hasn’t shown me the unreconstructed racist or the unappeasable victim. But what I have seen is just as sad. I have met a Euro-American man who not only won’t acknowledge a 1965 struggle of worldwide significance but is bent on refighting a battle that was of little consequence a hundred years earlier. I have met an Afro-American man who helped win the modern Battle of Selma but now, despite the fact that he is in a good-paying profession, hesitates to share his battlefield experiences unless there is a price tag attached. Saddest of all, I have met a good Christian woman, Afro-American in heritage, who thinks there still is a respectable use for the word “nigger.”

The last irony: From what I can see, Selma’s best hope for the future may lie in that sad attitude – ignore the insults and deprivations and find something good in everyone. Otherwise, the battles will never end.

LIV. Colors

Comanche, Texas. March 22, 1989.

According to some geographers, the Great American Desert begins on the west bank of the Mississippi River, but it isn’t until today, as I chug along Route 36 toward Comanche, that I see the first true buttes on my westward journey into Texas. As I admire their precipitously craggy sides and flat tops, trying to imagine how a receding glacier could have done all this, I spot another harbinger of the desert, a roadrunner crossing the pavement with better speed than my truck’s. In today’s wind, this isn’t much of an accomplishment, and the roadrunner isn’t straining.

I have spent a good part of this morning pondering a familiar question: What in hell am I doing? Me, the original stay-at-home, the consummate stick-in-the-mud, the quintessential curmudgeon about pointless consumption of energy, pushing an overloaded truck higher into the Great American Desert.

Gene and Lorraine Stanton know why they’re doing it.

The Stantons are the only customers in Comanche’s only coin-operated laundry when I pull in with my dirty duds. The only vehicle in front of the laundromat is a 1979 Ford 460 long-body outfitted with a Coachman camper and, from the sound of it, a very large, very unhappy dog inside.

“That’s our dog, Heather,” Gene says. “She’s pretty good about traveling, but she doesn’t like to be left alone. Good watchdog, though. She’s a German shepherd, about a hundred pounds.”

The Stantons have been on the road about three weeks on a rambling route from Colorado to California and back to Texas, where they are headed to visit relatives in Amarillo. Gene, a slender, white-haired man in his early 60s, is a lumber retailer and farmer who retired two years ago. Lorraine, a pink-skinned, blue-eyed mother of four in her late 50s, still serves as a nursing home activities director back in Cable, Wisconsin, where the couple moved after giving up their farm in Iowa.

The Ford 460 is their third camper, Gene says. “When we got our first one, we used to go 500 miles a day for 10 days and come back exhausted.”

“Then we started camping,” Lorraine says. “The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, the Minnesota National Forest. We still enjoy national forest campgrounds, but now, we sometimes stay in camping areas, sometimes just off the road if we find a place we like.”

I tell them I stay exclusively in the just-off-the-road places.

“If you’re not hurting anyone, why not get out and do what you want,” Gene says. “My father worked in the retail lumber business all his life. He worked hard, and he died at 51. When I turned 51, I started thinking about retirement.”

“I’ve been thinking about retirement for years, and I’m only 48,” I say.

“I don’t blame you,” he says. “I was in the lumber business for 38 years. Then we bought a farm, got into a beef herd and raised hogs, all along with our regular jobs. Finally, we got to the point 10 years ago where we decided to sell all the livestock and cash-rent the ground out.”

“Pretty deep roots to be pulling up,” I say.

Lorraine raises her eyebrows and nods. Gene thinks for a moment.

“I guess what we finally decided,” he says, “is that our time was being consumed rather than used.”

Stanton isn’t that common a name, and for some reason as I am leaving the laundromat, I ask Gene if Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, was an ancestor of his. Turns out the old boy was Gene’s great-great-great-uncle, and this occupies my thoughts as I head west out of town. Edwin M. Stanton isn’t exactly a household name, but even I know that he was a pretty heavy hitter – a jurist and high official of both the Buchanan and Lincoln administrations, just the kind of guy whose respectability sends roots of influence through several succeeding generations of his family. Gene and his hardworking father seem to have been worthy scions of the family tree. But now the plant is growing wild again.

That’s a good thing in botany. Breaking away and hybridizing is what gives the new plants their vigor.

I’ve got a family name that isn’t that common, either. And I’ve got family members who know all the genealogy. In fact, there is a National Association of Leavitt Families for descendants of John and Thomas Leavitt, two English brothers who emigrated to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the 17th century. It sounds terribly proper until you realize that one of the brothers died in the Portsmouth brig and the other became progenitor of the family only because he was able to break out of the brig and, apparently, screw everything that walked. Or something like that.

On the other side of the family are the Sanborns, a more common name but, in northern New England at least, just as ready to hold an annual reunion. I’ve been to a couple with Granny. She gets a big charge out of them. I do, too. The most noticeable thing to me is that there are several hundred, sometimes several thousand people at these reunions with the same last or middle name, and there isn’t a bit of family resemblance among any of the branches.

In my own branch of the family, most of us have pink skin and blue eyes, but then there’s Granny’s mother. Etta Wiggin Sanborn was such a wonderful great-grandmother – she used to plant big wet kisses on my young face – that it wasn’t until years after her death that I noticed in photos of her that she had straight black hair and coppery, high-cheeked features, including one blue and one hazel eye, that fit neither the Sanborn nor the Wiggin mold. Granny has no explanation, although she suspects Indians. I’d guess either that or Africans. Frankly, high cheekbones and large teeth look pretty on my mother, and I’m comfortable with them, too.

The point is, genealogies are generally a crock of shit. And not just historically. Tracing any family through one name becomes genetically pointless after a few generations. If I’m a descendant of Thomas Leavitt (or was it John?) and if there are 15 generations between us (that’s 300 years at 20 years per generation), I’m not just carrying the genes of Thomas and 15 other guys. I’ve also got to count my mother, her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on and my father’s mother and her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. In three centuries, the number comes out to 32,768 ancestors. That’s a small city. And if I can find an ancestor only three generations back who’s an unusual color, I can only imagine those who jumped into the genetic pool before color photography was invented.

This color business bothers me, and not just because of my liberal, socialist view of the world. I’m not white, I’m pink. And I’ve never known any black people, although I’ve met many shades of brown, including some that were lighter than my pink.

If we have to categorize people in this country of immigrants, it makes more sense to do it by place of ancestral origin. The easiest seems to be by continent. Euro-American, Afro-American, Asian-American. Anything that fits two syllables before “American.” If we have to do it at all. If we insist on genealogies.

Actually, we could do it by color. But we’d have to get a lot better at identifying colors. In one of his more brain-damaging speeches, Ronald Reagan promised that his administration was dedicated to having a color-blind society. Frankly, that’s not the solution. That’s the problem. We’ve been color-blind for centuries, and it has hurt a lot of people.

Any junior high school science student learns the optics of color. White is all colors. Black is no color. And yet we go out into a society where we are expected to see no color in white and the deepest of color in black.

We’ve got a lot of problems in this country, and many of them begin with the fact that we colored people consider some of us black and some of us white.

LV. Bonzo

Comanche, Texas. March 23, 1989.

I awake at 4:30 in the morning after less than four hours sleep, and the small movements I make as I fret between getting up or getting back to sleep have been an invitation to Bonzo, who out of nowhere is suddenly standing on the bed, looking me straight in the face.

Bonzo isn’t an ordinary cat. Of course, it was Bonzo who taught me that there are no ordinary cats, just people with ordinary perceptions of cats. Before I met Bonzo, I confess I could hardly tell one cat from another, even when they were different sizes, patterns and colors. I was a dog lover, and I still love dogs. But Bonzo came with Mary, and I had an incentive to get to know him and the other cats Mary would bring home in the months ahead. By the time Mary and I split, I had a Ph.D. in cats. I was as snagged as a claw in a sweater. The cats stayed with me. All the rest – five in all – have good homes elsewhere now, either on earth or in cat heaven. And Bonzo still has a good home, motorized though it may be, with me.

Bonzo is the only truly white creature I know, and even he has a smudge of charcoal gray on top of his head. Beneath his long white fur, I know, his skin is at least pink and black in different places. So far, though, he hasn’t let me make a complete inspection.

Bonzo is a tall, slender-faced, handsome ex-gentleman – all our cats were neutered to keep the rest of the stray population down – although his rangy body looks horridly skinny when he is wet. Giving Bonzo a bath makes me feel guilty of cat abuse. Is he eating enough? Of course he is, and when he is dry, his fluffed-up coat, trailed by a bushy white tail, makes him look brawny and intimidating again. Even at 9 years old, his wiry, quick physique allows him to back up this image. He is afraid of nothing.

He nearly always enjoys being petted, but never without twitches of the tail that in their frequency signal when it’s time to quit. Another of his pleasures is crawling into dark places – “hidey holes,” my grandmother calls them – and a favorite is bed covers that are held up tentlike on a cold morning such as this one.

Bonzo crawls in with me as I lie fretting. He chews a few moments on the chrome top of the ballpoint pen I keep in the breast pocket of whatever shirt I wear to bed, then pushes his front feet into my face, forcing me to hold his paws while he flexes his claws. Then he dozes off to his 16th or whatever hour of sleep he has come to through the night.

Cats sleep with the same motionlessness that they use to calm a stalked prey. Humans do not . . . .

I am on a chiropractor’s table, face down, with four people in white coats holding my arms and feet, each pulling away from the table until every joint in my body pops, bringing me a wonderful sense of relief and freedom from the little pains and stiffnesses I have felt increasingly in recent years. Alas, my muscles pull my bones back together, and they slip into the old, worn, crooked places that bring back the pain and stiffness . . . .

I drift awake. My right shoulder aches from too much sleep on that side. Bonzo has nailed me to this position with his motionless body. I gently ease him out of bed and roll onto my left side, facing the plaid upholstery I have stapled to the walls as insulation . . . .

A fuzzy white dough-man pulls himself out of a black sewer hole on a beige street. Behind his head, a bright light causes his contour to shrink. “To hell with theories about optical effect and photographic spillover,” I shout at a convention of scientists. “I am here to tell you that light curves into a shadow . . . .”

I awaken to find it is 8 a.m. The dough-man has faded back into a slit of sunlight glaring on a white stripe in the wall plaid.

I get the television set, hang it beneath the bookshelf over the bed, vow that daytime programming will either knock me out or get me going.

Donahue: A group of young men talk about their sexual exploits. One of them says he tries to be sensitive and moderate about sex, unless he sees “something good” in the classroom. I wonder how the “something” usually feels about that.

Card Sharks: A pregnant woman, barely 20, claims to be a “fourth-generation Californian, which is something rare.” Gee, that would put her Golden State roots back to, my god, the late 1920s. I wonder if she knows any Hispanics, whose ancestors came to California in the 1600s. Or anyone from more than a hundred Indian tribes who were already there when the Hispanics arrived. Anyway, host Bob Eubanks coos at the woman’s pregnancy, apparently excited at the prospect of a fifth-generation Californian.

Concentration: The board shows a ham, a blank, a balloon with the letters GRR, a blank, the letters FR and a blank. Both contestants are stumped. They can’t see a common phrase in HAM ___ GRR ___ FR ___. Of course, they don’t have the advantage of seeing the board through a snowy five-inch screen. Give that man a hamburger and fries.

The Price Is Right: A man whose belly hangs over his polyester pants is faced with five grocery items he must price. “Oh no,” he moans, “my wife takes care of that.” After 40 or 50 years on this planet, he doesn’t have a clue about what five items he uses every day cost.

Password: The clues are “sneaky,” “wild,” “west,” “horse” and “thief.” One contestant, who says she’s always dreamed of “working with Betty White,” guesses “Sneaky Pete.” Her celebrity partner, Christopher Hewitt, who can be excused because he’s a Brit, guesses, “Horse thief?” The other contestant passes. His celebrity partner – who is, in fact, Betty White, who must be tickled to be working with any of them – solves the puzzle as diplomatically as she can: “Is it ‘rustler’? she says. Why YESSSS, the host screams.

Family Feud: A mother and daughter from New York City are in the lightning round. On one of the questions, “Name a beautiful wood,” the mother passes. The daughter says, “Pine.”

Jesus Christ, what a day this is going to be.

I roll down the covers. Materializing out of nowhere again, Bonzo is beneath the covers, lying upside down in the crook of my arm. The sunlight strikes him in the face, and his half-closed eyes twinkle with affection as he looks up at me.

We go outside to inspect the picnic area where we parked last night about 10 miles west of Comanche. The area is carpeted with grass and shaded by post oaks (thank you, Daddy) and mesquite. Bonzo walks adroitly up an oak tree without snaring his harness, leaving me holding a rope that rises into a cluster of leaves and branches, like my balloon has been caught there. A family of very plump people arrive in a black sedan to stretch their legs. Bonzo hides deeper in the branches. My new neighbors look at the rope disappearing up into nowhere. “Just walking my cat,” I say.

They soon depart, and Bonzo comes down and sits beside me at a picnic table while I read. The sky is high blue and the temperature ideal for a Yankee – 60 degrees with a light breeze. A mourning dove repeats soft hoots from somewhere in the trees.

Bonzo goes back in the truck, and I walk a couple of miles west on Route 36. On the way back, I reach into a roadside bramble to retrieve a piece of litter when I see a pair of eyes looking at me from the other side of the brush. They belong to a small to medium-size canine, shaggy yellow, probably a coyote. I pretend not to see it. It doesn’t move. I move on. I walk with the excitement of not knowing if it is following me.

Nearly back at the truck, I find in the roadside litter a single red rose still in its cellophane wrapper. The petals haven’t opened. Back at the truck, I cut the stem and put the flower in a fluted wine glass of water and honey. By late afternoon, the rose has opened and filled the truck with its fragrance.

As we drive west in the sunset toward the next town, Rising Star, the sky looks like a watercolor palette bleeding between lavender and coral. Television may be a vast wasteland, but the Great American Desert is not.

LVI. Yards

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. June 20, 1986.

When your house is a truck, your yard can be immense. Or miniscule. And, at all points between the extremes, confusing.

The inside of a truck, like the inside of a house, never changes significantly. The furnishings, accessories and temporary supplies may be in different configurations from day to day, but the built-in goods like appliances and plumbing stay in the same place. Especially in a truck. The sink and the refrigerator are still on opposite sides of the aisle and the bed and the loft are still at opposite ends of the truck every day. What I have learned today is that all these fixtures can look – and feel – different on the inside of the truck depending on where and how the truck is situated in the outside world.

The difference isn’t always immediately apparent, and that’s where the confusion arises.

I awake this morning thinking I have overslept several hours. I look out the rear curtain and recognize nothing. Where am I? The answer, as soon as I am fully awake, is simple: I am turned around 180 degrees. I am looking at the wooden fence at the rear of my lot in the campground, and the sun is coming over the fence into the rear windows of the truck, not into the loft windows at the front of the truck. The clock reads 9 a.m. I woke up thinking 3 p.m.

How strange that we humans who think we depend on clocks already have one built into us – our consciousness, maybe our subconsciousness, of the sun. Nine a.m. is 3 p.m. when you flip the clock around 180 degrees. I still have six hours before I have to leave for work.

I walk to the toilet, but I have to catch my balance when I step into the stall. Maybe it is just the difference in light angles, but the floor doesn’t seem to be sitting the same as it was yesterday.

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t sitting quite the same.

When I moved in here at the first of the month, I drove the truck straight into the lot with the front end against the fence so that when I returned to the house to retrieve my car, I could pull it in behind the truck and still be off the road. There were trailers on either side of me, but neither was occupied. Yesterday, the occupants of the trailer on the south side showed up for the summer. There’s only 20 feet or so between my truck and their trailer, and my side door opened directly opposite their main door. The woman of the trailer looked bitchy. My lot was empty all last summer, and she wasn’t pleased to be losing the extra space where she used to park her car. In fact, when I returned from shopping, I found her car parked behind my truck. I had to ask her to move her car to her own lot. I pulled the truck out and turned it around, backing it against the fence. Then I pulled my car in, now against the front of the truck. This didn’t solve the problem of the woman next door, but it repositioned my side door so I didn’t have to look at her when I entered or exited the truck. Now my door opened toward a still-empty trailer on the other side of the truck.

Those two steps out of the truck are steep, and they don’t feel quite the same today. Now that I have thought about it, it’s not confusing. The lot is fairly level, but whatever slope exists has now been reversed – in effect doubling the difference between yesterday’s slope and normal, now in the opposite direction – and that affects my sense of balance on a surface that has become familiar the other way around.

I soon notice something else: What I have gained in access I have lost in vista. With the rear of the truck against the fence, a tall fence that screens the campground from conventional houses next to it, my view from the couch/bed is now limited to weathered fence boards in the double rear window or the back of trailers in the side windows. The only way I can see into the pine-canopied expanse of the campground is to climb into the loft and lie on my stomach to look out of the tiny windows there.

In a week, I am parked beneath the pines at Granny’s place in Center Ossipee, New Hampshire, visiting for a few days. At noon on this particular day, it is 70 degrees in the shade with a dry breeze sifting through the trees. The sky is a transparent blue, the clouds a billowy white and the lawn, as it rises away from the truck to the cottage, so green that the wild strawberries woven among its blades twinkle like miniature red Christmas lights. On the other side of a post-and-rail fence about midway up the lawn, Bonzo is taking a lazy walk around the cottage. In the brilliant sunlight, he melts in and out of the whitewashed fence. He reaches the shade of the apple tree and stretches out among the potted violets, geraniums and fuchsia that Ma has left there until she can plant them along the fence. The scene vibrates with color. It is a beautiful lawn. It is Granny’s lawn. Today, it is also my lawn. From my truck windows, my yard is the world.

Five months later, I will push the vastness of my yard to its extreme. Ever since I have gotten the truck, I have thought of parking it overnight at a place in Biddeford Pool, a peninsula along the coast of Biddeford where the Saco River meets the Atlantic Ocean and hundreds of wealthy people spend their summers. By November, most of them have migrated to warmer capes and keys. Where the main road in Biddeford Pool comes out to the ocean and wraps back along the coast toward the neck of sand from whence it came, there is a bird sanctuary and a convention center. By November, both of them are deserted, as is a small section of gravel across the road where a natural jetty of rocks cuts into the ocean. As an afternoon wind blows seabirds and rain droplets in a swirl around the rocks, I back out onto the jetty as far as I can. I settle in the cabin with the kerosene lamp, prepared to go to bed early. Twilight this day will come early, but the weather report says the sky will clear overnight.

When I awake the next morning and look out the rear window, I am dazzled by the view. A sun-drenched blue as far as I can see. The ocean is a blue savannah of liquid hummocks that undulate gently toward the truck and disappear somewhere beneath me. In the sky, the undulations become increasingly blue arches rising above the water. At the source of these waves, far on the horizon, the sun burns blue-white. I have lost touch with the earth. The truck floats in blueness that fills the side and rear windows.

I used to have the same feeling when I awoke in the second-floor bedroom of the small cottage Peggy and I rented at the neck of Biddeford Pool for the off-season, our first winter after moving to Maine. The bedroom was high enough so that we couldn’t see the ground when we looked out the front windows as we lay in bed. The view made the house into a houseboat that floated through sea and sky. Those were good days. Before the trouble came out in the open. Before I died on Peggy.

I can’t get enough of the view, which changes by the hour as the sun travels over the truck and sends back shadows from the peninsula. I stay in the truck, watching the slow solar procession like a man in a time machine.

At dusk, the lantern comes back out. The dim light fills the cabin, and I sit with Bonzo, who has crowded closer to me as the air gets colder. I cover us with a blanket and lie propped against a side wall, drinking beer.

The lamp is still burning dimly when I awake. It is dark outside. I have no idea where I am. It is cold, the windows are covered with droplets, and I hear the low rumble of water. My mind is fuzzy, and I am thinking of Peggy. Where am I? When am I? Slowly, I piece together the day just past and the memories it has raised. I realize I have had too much to drink, and I know what this will mean. Unsteadiness, shakiness, gloom. How can a six-pack do this to me? Because you haven’t had anything to eat, you idiot. And now you’re too sick to eat.

Oh god, I feel bad. I’m tired, nauseous, shaky. My pulse is running fast. Taking it makes it run faster. I feel dizzy, confused. The outdoors is gone, and I am trapped in this tiny space that I can hardly see in the dim light. Oh god, oh god. My breath comes faster. My pulse runs faster. I am dying.

The first panic attack I ever had was when I was entering puberty and didn’t understand the craziness that my new hormones were creating. I spent the next year or so trying to avoid these attacks. Naturally, that made them worse. I finally figured it out, though. The consequence of a panic attack, if it got totally out of control, wouldn’t be death. You would just faint, relax for a while in your unconscious state and then wake up. Besides, I was getting so desperately tired of trying to avoid panic attacks that I finally said fuck it, if you’re going to get me, death, come on and get me. Because I’m too exhausted to worry about it any more. The result, of course, wasn’t even a faint. It was a rush of relaxation that cleansed my mind and muscles of their tension. I had broken the cycle of stress feeding on itself. And that was pretty much the end of the panic attacks, except for one every few years or so when I got overconfident, overtired and unwilling to face the threat of the cycle again until I realized I had to in order not to fall prey to it again.

Living in a truck can sometimes do that. It compresses you in on yourself, magnifying whatever problems you may be trying to avoid, forcing you to face them. Then, when you have done so, it expands you out into a world where your yard can be as big as the world itself.

The eastern sky is growing light. The inside of the truck grows lighter and familiar again. I watch the horizon until a shaft of sunlight pierces it.

I feel as if I have been compressed into a molecule, then expanded into the universe. I feel like I have been pulled through a black hole.

When you think about it, haven’t we all.

LVII. Amazing Grazing

Hamburg, Arkansas. April 15, 1989.

This town does have a fast-food quality to it. It is a potentially beautiful town with wooded vistas and a few old buildings and churches that were constructed in a time before aesthetics gave way to efficiency. But these few structures with their pilasters and cornices have no latter-day counterparts. Most of the other houses along Route 82 through town are low, eaveless rectangles with the front door in the front, the back door in the back and the driveway straight alongside. The commercial buildings are sheathed in metal, plastic and fake masonry that follow low, straight lines intended to disturb neither eye nor mind. Both homes and businesses reflect a fast-in, fast-out philosophy that someday will have turned this town’s main roadside into an asphalt-and-neon strip dominated by drive-through hamburgers.

I guess there is an aesthetic to it after all – a belief that simplicity of function means cheap and fast. It does, I guess, if you don’t think about a future of crowded landscapes where clean air and earth will be scarce, dear and slow to redeem.

This burg, like our burger society, has become a monument to cheap, fast and thoughtless. Words to consume by. Stuff it in, grunt it out, throw a quick one into the old lady. Life is fat. And, since our arteries become the same, short.

Ad orem ex ano. In Latin, the motto sounds almost respectable. The last of Hamburg passes by the side windows, and I crack open another cool, artery-cleansing beer, humming my translation of “in the mouth, out the ass.”

“Ad orem ex ano, ad orem ex ano,” I chant. An Arkansas accent helps: “Ad ‘dore ‘em. Ah ‘dore ‘em wrecks Ah know.”

The afternoon is sunny and bright, and after a while, I notice I am driving even slower than usual. I am in good voice, however, and my new country-and-western song has brought Bonzo to the back of the screen. He hangs there like velcro until I pull off the road and let him join me up front.

He sniffs at the open vent window while I recline across the passenger’s seat to drink beer and sing:

Give me a razor on my back

And a circular track

And a stock car that can go.

Ah’ll give the tires a burn

And take ‘em in the turn

‘Til Ah’m in the front row.

Ah’ll whap ‘em in the balls

And slap ‘em in the walls.

Ah ‘dore them wrecks, Ah know, you know.

Ah ‘dore them wrecks, Ah know.

The sun and the beer are making us hot. I reach around the corner of the screen for Bonzo’s rope so I can snap it on his harness and roll down the windows without fear of losing him. I lie down again with the back of my head out of the passenger’s window, and Bonzo walks up on my chest to sniff the new surge of fresh air. I watch his face as he looks out above mine. He looks to the right, then to the left, staring for a moment. He walks forward and puts a front paw on my mouth, then the other on my forehead. He is gone, and I am looking upside down at a rope stretching away in an upward curve to an upside-down cat.

The story of Isaac Newton and the apple never made much sense to me until a college math professor explained it. Newton wasn’t hit on the head with the apple. He was lying out of range, looking up over his head at the apple tree upside down, the professor said. When the apple fell, Newton didn’t see it merely as an apple coming down to earth. What he saw was a tiny sphere being drawn up to an enormous one. When he thought about it, the professor said, Newton realized there wasn’t anything magical about up and down, but there was something universal about spheres of disparate masses and the attraction between them. This universal quality Newton eventually described in laws of motion, acceleration and gravity.

What I see beyond Bonzo is equally amazing. A half dozen cows are attached upside down to an enormous green-felted sphere in the sky. Their necks and legs curve upward like hands in an offering to the heavens. I sit upright in the seat and look at the animals again. Now their necks and legs curve downward in the usual way, but now that I have seen it, I cannot again fail to see in their peaceful grazing the quality of worship. It is the most profound type of worship – natural and unselfconscious. They take their nourishment from the earth, green and rich, and return a nourishment that is brown and rich. They complete this cycle with every living cell, unmindful of their dependence on and their contribution to its regeneration. They are, in an ecclesiastical sense, in a state of grace.

LVIII. Ram Dass

Buckholts, Texas. March 18, 1989.

Go figure the odds. Today, for the second time in as many months, I will see on my tiny television set an interview with Baba Ram Dass. In January, parked among the orange and grapefruit trees of Zephyrhills, Florida, I saw the first interview, and it was the first time I had ever seen or heard Ram Dass talk, although over the years I had read about him, heard about him and once, but for the vagaries of our lives, almost met him in the most unlikely of places, Franklin, New Hampshire.

Buckholts, Texas, isn’t the most likely place, either. I’ve had a feeling ever since I got here yesterday that Buckholts isn’t typical of the scraggly cattle and cotton towns that are strung like barbed wire between Dallas and Austin. On the other hand, in the week I’ve been in Texas, I haven’t seen much that does qualify as typical.

I’m parked beside an octagonal wooden building with a sign identifying it as the Svornost Jihu, whatever that means, although I’m fairly sure the language is eastern European. When I pulled in last night, I guessed the place was either a church or a social club, and since there was no one around on a Friday night, I figured I’d probably be left alone until Sunday morning.

I am awakened this morning at 7:30, a little earlier than usual, by the pressure of Bonzo standing on my chest. There is a strange sound outside, like the squeak of heavy tracked equipment all around the truck, and this may have awakened Bonzo. Without getting up, I reach back over my head and slide the curtain open to get some light in the truck. The light has an electric effect on Bonzo. He flattens his ears, crouches into my chest and peers over the bottom edge of the window with what can only be described as a do-I-shit-or-go-blind expression on his face. I prop myself up and look out. A mist is rising from the grass, which is now covered with an overnight dew, and as far as I can see in the haze, the ground is covered with grackles. It is like a scene from Hitchcock – an endless swarm of viridescent black birds chirping and squawking as they lunge at insects and worms brought up by the moisture.

For a cat, I think, this must be like having your ship come in. But I’m afraid it is a little too much for Bonzo. I hook him to his rope and open the door to let him out, but he heads in the other direction, pulling the rope as far as it will come into the truck. The way Bonzo must see it, there is a whole fleet of ships out there, and they are all armed.

As soon as I go outside, the birds pull back a respectful distance from the truck. Bonzo is now willing to come out on his rope, but when I untie the other end from its slipknot on the door handle, he walks with me only under protest, slinking like a rustler being brought back through town by a posse.

If the Svornost Jihu is a church, they must have some hellacious social events, judging from the size of the barbecue pit I can now identify in the daylight. When I came in last night in the darkness, the structure looked like a covered porch set off a distance from the building. If its heavy iron grates were removed, the pit would be large enough for a dozen people – or a few good-sized steers – to walk into. I assume, although I realize this can be foolhardy in this state, that Texas has outlawed human sacrifice.

There is a Russian word, sbor, that means gathering or assembly. When it becomes an adjective, the word takes on an ‘n’ plus vowels to change into forms like sborniy or sbornaya. There is no word sbornost in Russian, although nost is a common noun ending – glasnost, for example – and appears in several Slavic languages. I’m guessing Svornost Jihu is either Czech or Slovak and means something like the Assembly of Jesus. Of course, considering the strange people who have inhabited southeastern Europe, the name could just as well mean the Gathering of Holy Islamic Warriors.

The boys downtown straighten me out. The name is Czech, all right – Bohemian, to be exact – but the Svornost Jihu isn’t a church. It is a dance hall and social club that grew out of an agrarian insurance society. This doesn’t seem unusual to me. Many northern New Englanders are familiar with the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal organization that originated as a lumberman’s insurance society.

Societies change according to circumstances and need, and so do downtown communities. Main Street, Buckholts, used to be part of the main highway, Route 36. But a few years back, Route 36 was rebuilt and shifted a block away from Main Street, so downtown businesses that depended on drive-through traffic had to shift with the highway or slide farther back into the obscurity of a town that, while it appears on the Rand McNally map, still doesn’t have enough population to be listed in the index.

My information about the town comes at the only watering hole I can find among the dusty, dried-out storefronts on Main Street. Dink’s Bar & Grocery is mostly bar – hold the dry goods – where people like Denson Fuchs often come to refresh themselves.

“Now, my father is German and my mother Czech. How’s that for Bohemian?” Fuchs says, quaffing his beer out of the bottle.

Bohemia is a province of western Czechoslovakia that has a long history of upheaval and competing interests, particularly those of Germans who over the centuries had a habit of subduing the province and dispersing its citizens. Some Bohemians went to Paris and took up weird, creative lifestyles from whence the familiar adjective comes. Others came to places like south-central Texas and took up farming and ranching.

“You still hear a lot of Czech words around here,” says Fuchs, a husky six-footer with red hair and a white beard. “Kleba, that’s bread. Pivo, that’s beer.”

I tell him that the Russian words are about the same and that one can do quite well in any society with a good supply of just those two commodities.

He smiles, and we admire an elaborate coat of arms behind the bar for Lone Star Lite, which advertises itself as the National Beer of Texas.

By late afternoon, the temperature has dropped from the low 80s to the low 60s, and the sky is darkening. I return to the truck to be with Bonzo. I turn on the television set and lie down with another beer. When I awaken, I feel a little fuzzy, like the signal I am seeing on Austin’s public television station. Through the snow, Baba Ram Dass is being interviewed.

Buckholts, Texas, may be the only small prairie town I’ve ever visited where average citizens are geopolitically knowledgeable about Bohemia, but Franklin, New Hampshire, is the only small mill town I’ve ever visited where average citizens ask if you know the local guru.

That’s the effect of Richard Alpert, a tall, waspishly handsome Bostonian who spurned his father’s railroad fortune and turned the family’s summer estate in Franklin into a Hindu ashram. Alpert, like fellow professor Timothy Leary, dropped out of the Harvard faculty during the 1960s. Unlike Leary and the drug culture he helped spawn, Alpert got high on Indian religion and practiced it in both India and America in his new incarnation, Baba Ram Dass.

He was running the ashram in Franklin when I worked briefly on a weekly newspaper there in the early 1970s.

People in bars there talked about the Red Sox in Boston, the textile industry in town and Baba Ram Dass out there on the family estate, converting young minds to Hindu serenity.

“You don’t know Ram Dass?” was the question posed to strangers by local bar patrons sucking beer out of the bottle.

I left town – the newspaper folded – before I got a chance to meet him.

Ram Dass appeared on my TV screen in Florida under circumstances similar to today’s. I had been dozing the afternoon away in the bright winter sunshine when his face appeared on the Tampa PBS channel, again frosted with snow, which apparently is an intrinsic characteristic of public television signals.

The Florida interviewer was talking about American domestic and foreign policy, including the Reagan administration’s attention to military hardware and inattention to energy conservation. Ram Dass pointed out that the two were connected. Since the signal and my attention were shaky, I can only paraphrase what he said:

A military policy is in fact an energy policy, since armaments help us control the Middle East, which is where most of the oil is. But the policy hasn’t come just from the Reagan administration. It has come from us. When we drive down the highway using petroleum products, Ram Dass said, and here I remember the exact words, “we’re inviting Caspar Weinberger to do what he does . . . . It’s not him. It’s us. He is us.”

The subject is different today, and my attention is numbed by the chill in the cabin and the effect of an afternoon at Dink’s Bar & Grocery. But I get the drift of what Ram Dass is telling me, and it’s the same message:

The idea of civilization is not simply to love our neighbor as ourselves but to recognize that our neighbor is us. We are our neighbor. And then the question becomes: Do we love ourselves?

The next morning, I need supplies. Since I already know Dink’s forte isn’t groceries, I head for the local convenience store, which is located, of course, on the new Route 36. As I walk in, clerk Bill Vickers is counting out change to a customer in Spanish.

When Vickers gets to me, I ask him in Spanish if many people in town speak Spanish. He gives me a quick “No” that sounds a lot like “Whoa.” I think he caught only the “speak Spanish” and thought I meant him.

“No, I speak only as much as I have to,” says Vickers, a darkhaired, somber man wearing a black T-shirt that says Nashville on it. “You have to speak a little bit of everything around here.”

“I know about the Bohemians,” I say. “I’ve been parked over at the Svornost Jihu since Friday night. Pretty interesting place.”

“It sure is,” he says. “They have some great dances there. I’m a musician, and I’d like to play that hall, but I’ve got to get this fixed first.”

He is holding his upper lip between his thumb and forefinger.

“You’ve got to get your lips fixed?”

“Naw, I’ve got to get a tooth fixed. It busted.”

“Broke a cap?”

“The whole danged tooth,” he says. He breaks into a smile that is interrupted by the absence of an entire top front incisor.

“I had a root canal, but it failed.”

Bad luck, I say.

“’Course, you still got some of the older people who speak Czech,” he says, returning to his original point. “The name of the town, I would guess, is German. And then you’ve got the Hispanics.”

“And in the Southwest,” I say, “Hispanic often means Indian as well.”

He nods. “And then you’ve got the people like me. I’m a little Irish and a little Welsh. And whatever else I don’t know about.”

“You’ve got a lot of strange people around here,” I say.

“Yep, we’ve got a lot of strange people around here. In Buckholts, we don’t say anything bad about ‘hunkies’ or ‘honkies’ or anybody else, for that matter.”

LIX. Hygiene

Hurley, New York. December 23, 1989.

The temperature has been below freezing for nearly two weeks, the drain pipe has been frozen for nearly a week, and the thermometer at 8 this morning reads 8 degrees. The weather is closing in, and in its frosty clouds, it is hard to see the ice crystals as a silver lining. Still, it hasn’t been all bad.

For one thing, when the morning mist rises from Tom Sior’s campground on Hurley Mountain, the clear air makes the Catskill Mountains to the north look like a crisp Renaissance landscape.

For another thing, the recent cold wave has forced me into a regimen that has further reduced my use of water and LP gas. As ordinary as this may seem in a world of ethereal mountain vistas, I find a certain aesthetic pleasure in using less of worldly substances. They travel farther that way.

With solid ice in the PVC pipe that connects the gray water tank to the black water tank, the sink hasn’t been of much use since the beginning of the week. Fortunately, the sink is the same size as the Rubbermaid pan I use for dishes. So the dishpan has been in the sink since Tuesday, preventing any more gray water from freezing in the trap beneath the sink and backing up as murky ice water that is a bitch to bail out with a measuring cup.

This never was a problem in Maine because I had a car for daily travel and could leave the truck parked at the campsite with the gas hot water heater running. When cold weather came, a trickle of hot water in the sink kept the drain pipe from freezing overnight. But when I got rid of the car and hit the road in the truck, I had to shut off and relight the water heater so often that I simply left it off most of the time and heated whatever water I needed on the stove. When I came here in October, I was still using the truck every day, so I continued using the stove to provide most of my hot water. It’s not as convenient as having a ready tank of hot water, but it takes a lot less gas. When I was using the water heater along with the other gas appliances – the stove and, when I was away from the campground’s AC electricity, the refrigerator – the truck’s 32-pound LP gas tank had to be refilled every three weeks. But I have found this winter that without the water heater, the gas storage tank will supply the other uses – cooking, occasional operation of the refrigerator and stovetop hot water – for nearly three months. That water heater, with a constant pilot light and frequent recycling in cold weather to keep the water tank hot, uses a surprising amount of gas. If it weren’t for the hot showers that are so refreshing in warmer weather, I would have stripped out the water heater and junked it a long time ago. One of these days, maybe I can get used to cold showers.

In cold weather, I prefer hot towel baths. I heat a two-quart tea kettle of water on the stove, wet a small bath towel in the dishpan with a little cold water from the tap, then pour on enough hot water to get the towel steaming. I wring the towel out and rub it on my body, first on the face, arms, torso and legs. Then the tougher parts – armpits, groin, feet. Between each section of anatomy, I soak the towel in the dishpan and wring it out again, emptying the dishpan and starting again with new water. This double rinse keeps the towel clean without using much new water. Two quarts of hot water will steam the towel at least a half dozen times, with enough clean water left over for a shave and shampoo. I don’t recommend this bathing procedure for everyone, especially those with oily skin, but it works for dry-skinned people like me. In fact, soapless hot water, rubbed on gently with a towel, is the only way some of us pink people can keep clean in the winter without having our skin flake off in tiny blizzards that drift into our shirtwaists and shoes.

I have long been saving the rinse water from dishwashing to use toward the next load of dishes or to flush the toilet. But this week, with the dishpan in the sink, I’ve been saving all the gray water. I once was able to save all the usable gray water in a second dishpan that, with a Rubbermaid rack, serves as a draining rack for wet dishes. When more dirty dishes had to soak, I would put them in the gray water beneath the rack. If I needed to flush the toilet, the rack would keep the soaking dishes from spilling out while I poured off some of the water into the toilet bowl. This week, I added two new containers to keep up with the gray water surplus – two one-gallon plastic milk jugs with the tops cut off just above the handles. One jug hangs from an S hook just above the dish rack. The other sits in the toilet compartment, jammed in beside the cat litter box to keep the jug from overturning. Despite this compartmentalization, I still have excess gray water. This necessity has led to another invention that my mother would love – an on-board laundry, sort of. Here’s how it works:

I now have a pair of plastic two-gallon water buckets with handles, one of which stays in the linen closet, the other beneath the couch/bed with the handle secured in an S hook on the underside of a bed slat to keep the bucket from tipping over. Dirty laundry goes into the bucket in the linen closet. When the bucket is full, it is switched with the bucket beneath the couch and filled with gray water into which a squirt of liquid detergent has been added. The laundry soaks for a day, then is wrung out. The dirty water is either used in the toilet or thrown out the door. Then fresh water is put in the bucket to soak the clothes for another day. Soaking clothes for a day or two seems to clean them as well as a few minutes of agitation in a machine. Depending on how much I drive – the weekday commute to Kingston takes at least six miles over bumpy Route 28 – the road vibration seems to help as well. I can’t take credit for this observation – John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley described washing his clothes in a covered garbage pail that vibrated while he drove. What I have discovered is that the bucket doesn’t have to be covered. A minimal amount of water, about a gallon, will fill a two-gallon bucket of clothes and wash or rinse them thoroughly while they keep the water from sloshing. Then the clothes are wrung out again and hung up on a rope either outdoors or along the edge of the cabin ceiling. The latter is what I’ve done this week, and it’s a pain in the ass. On the other hand, the two batches of laundry I’ve done this week have kept up with my dirty clothes and saved me a trip to the laundromat, where I usually manage to blow four or five bucks on the machines. The air-dried clothes, although less fluffy than the ones that come out of the machines, have a fresh air smell to them. Besides that, the soapy water I throw out the door helps cut down the snow pile that has built up over the last few snowstorms.

When not in use, the laundry buckets are ideal for carrying fresh water. The two buckets hold four gallons, which is now roughly my daily requirement of fresh water, and since the buckets are lipped, they easily pour into the water intake spout on the side of the truck. There is a fresh water spigot on my campsite, but I haven’t hooked up to it because I move the truck every day and don’t want to be bothered with the connect-disconnect routine. The same applies to the sewer hookup. In frigid weather, sewer connections also involve a lot of ice, and it usually is brown or yellow.

The toilet still hasn’t frozen. The black water holding tank sits directly beneath the toilet, and the warm liquids dropping through have managed to keep the outside drain clear of ice. This alone is enough reason to keep solids out of the sewer waste. The liquid waste seeps into the crushed stone beneath the truck and freezes in the ground. When the spring thaw comes, I’m fairly sure the mountain will be swept by fresh breezes. God, I hope so.

The water- and gas-saving measures I have adopted this winter will probably become part of my warmer-weather lifestyle as well. If there is no longer any compelling reason to use the sink drain, I just may strip out and junk the gray water holding tank and the drain pipe that connects it to the black water tank. Maybe I’ll do it the same weekend that I tear out the water heater.

I haven’t thought of how I might use the extra space left by the removal of these tanks and their plumbing. You know, the longer I live in this truck, the larger it looks to me.

LX. Trees

Seymour, Connecticut. February 12, 1990.

A week of unseasonable warmth has brought the hardwood trees on the hills around Diane’s home to a fuzzy verge, but the buds won’t come out for another month. I have walked these hills and looked at these trees many times in the past seven years, but today, for the first time, I don’t know why the hell I am here.

I know what brought me here: I came at Diane’s invitation, an invitation she wrote at the end of a note she sent me three months ago on a World Wildlife Fund card showing two tigers lying in tall grass, looking with curiosity at a honeybee. The invitation is still as enigmatic to me as the bee is to the tigers.

Walk to fathom, walk to fathom, fathom.

The hills around Diane’s home seem sparsely populated to anyone who doesn’t notice trees. They are the majority landholders here, although they avoid looking predominant because they don’t make a lot of sudden moves, at least most of the time.

I have loved trees for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t know this until I moved into a truck and started living among them again. Then I remembered living in my stepfather’s road-adapted logging camp, surrounded by trees, letting them soothe me of the sadness of being alone.

Trees are a truck’s best friends, provided it doesn’t scrape their bark or break their overhanging branches. In return, they provide shade, protection, camouflage. They also drip sap, drop twigs and powder their canopied guests with pollen, but this is of concern only to those who think metal, rubber and plastic must be scrubbed each Saturday in the driveway.

Diane sent the card to Granny’s place in Center Ossipee, New Hampshire, and Granny forwarded it to me. Diane didn’t know at the time that I was in Kingston, just beyond the Connecticut-New York border, barely an hour west of her home. I was living closer to her than I ever had before, but we were never farther apart.

“How are you, where are you, what are you doing?” she wrote. “Are you starting yet to relax or find any kind of peace or happiness with yourself?”

I was surprised to hear from her. The last time I had talked to her was in a phone call I made to her last summer after I got a letter from her lawyer telling me a divorce was being processed. I told her I didn’t care one way or the other about the divorce, but I did care about what was going on between us. She said the two were one and the same. The divorce went through in January.

I also was surprised at the invitation to visit her during her February vacation. Her parents would be in Florida, she said, “so you wouldn’t have to worry about being uncomfortable seeing them. It might even be fun.”

This morning, I sat at the breakfast table, watching her press blouses at an ironing board a few feet away and wondering just what the hell I was doing here. I had spent last night in the downstairs guest room. When I got here yesterday, we drank a few glasses of wine, but we didn’t talk much. Mostly, she showed me the new pieces of art glass she had cut in her father’s workshop in the basement. In the past few years, glass-working had taken an increasing share of her spare time, and she now had her own corner of the workshop. In a side window of my truck hangs one of her early works, a circular blue sun-catcher etched with a snowflake design that she gave me three years ago. When a ray of sunlight hits the heavy leaded glass, it fills the cabin with cobalt brilliance.

She was talking this morning about meetings she had to attend this week as part of her new duties as a teacher’s union representative. One of the meetings was Wednesday in Hartford. I didn’t want to say Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, which I thought might have something to do with why I was here this week, so I asked instead if the meeting would take the entire day. No, she said, she would have some “unscheduled time” afterwards.

Unscheduled time. This expression was either a redundancy or a contradiction in terms, but I couldn’t decide which. The only thing I knew was that I felt both superfluous and oxymoronic.

She also had a meeting somewhere Thursday, and she said her parents were returning early from Florida, probably sometime Friday.

Trees are perhaps the most civilized of earth’s species. Trees stand with their arms outstretched, open to the world, able to defend themselves only with a beauty, majesty and serenity that soothes the frenzy with which other species would smother the planet.

Trees never lose their dignity, even when they are called on to take our waste products from earth and air and turn them into sustenance again. They do this with gravity and solemnity, treating us as sacred essences whose very waste is worthy of regeneration.

In one of the apocalyptic paintings of the Renaissance, a human skull is shown with a tree root growing through the eye socket. I once considered this image frightening, and then I helped my mother choose my stepfather’s coffin. The funeral directors politely but firmly steered us to the metal caskets – shiny, swooping, detailed in chrome like Lincoln Continentals, and about the same price. The least expensive casket in the showroom was the only wooden one. It was made of burled maple that my stepfather would have loved, and so we chose it as his final resting place. In the years since, I have thought about what that coffin looked like underground. I have always pictured a shoot springing up from that wood through my stepfather’s remains, bringing part of him up into the air again in a sprig of maple.

Trees inspire us. They do this literally, turning our spent exhalations into the air we breathe, and figuratively, giving us an example to emulate. They stand silently and proudly, asking us with open arms to live in peace with them.

I think Diane wants to live in peace with me. But in peace with me, not with me. I think the purpose of this week is to take one last look at me before saying goodbye.

“Are you starting yet to relax or find any kind of peace or happiness with yourself?”

What a surprising question. In the seven years we have known each other, she has never said or even implied that she didn’t think I was relaxed or happy or at peace with myself.

I have no answer. Except that I seem to be turning into a Druid.

LXI. Drifting

Monterey, California. May 1, 1962.

On the Monterey Peninsula’s north shore, four miles north and a few light-years away from Seventeen-Mile Drive and Pebble Beach, I like to come to Cannery Row and look at the fishing boats at their moorings.

It is a Tuesday evening, and I should be studying, but some sort of May Day activity seems appropriate. After all, I am learning the language of the country that has given new meaning to May Day by transforming the festival of flowers into a festival of labor. So I have come to the only place on the Monterey Peninsula where, despite the recent flourish of gentry around Fisherman’s Wharf, I know there is still hard labor being done.

By this hour, most of the working boats have long finished their day. In fact, they are only a few hours from having to start a new day, going out again in the predawn darkness to throw their hooks and nets at what blossoms in the sea. But now they rest, drifting in the tide, and my mind drifts with them.

My life has been drifting for a while. When I was in high school, I had so much drive and direction that I managed to be both a good scholar and a good athlete, and I went to college on a dual academic-athletic scholarship. But when I got to college, I lost my nerve. I didn’t think I was capable of continuing to do both. So I dropped out of football my freshman year. The coach who had recruited me was angry. He said the athletic department had already spent enough money on me to buy his wife a fur coat. I’m sorry for any cold-weather discomfort I may have caused her, but I don’t think the decision was a bad one. I was a good high school tackle, but I wasn’t big enough to play that position in college, and no amount of training would have made me quick enough to move down to guard. The trouble was, once I let go of athletics, I didn’t know how to hold on to academics. By my sophomore year, I had gone from the top of my class to near the bottom. And by midyear, when I smashed up a dormitory mate’s car trying to have sex with a fraternity brother’s date, my descent was complete. I was out of school.

This language school is the best thing that’s happened to me in the past two years, but, to mix a metaphor, I don’t think the Army is a mooring to which I would like to tether myself. When they recruited me, they had a lot more demands than the athletic department did, and they’ve got guns to back them up.

At twilight, a harbor of boats moves like a field of animals. In the dusk, the mooring lines disappear and the vessels revolve in the current, milling on the water in an order that is no longer apparent.

Exactly 17 years and the width of a continent later, I will sit in Dock Square in Kennebunkport, Maine, and think similar thoughts.

May Day 1979 also is a Tuesday, and I have a Biddeford City Council meeting to cover tonight, but it seems more important right now to watch the boats moored in the Kennebunk River.

For the past 12 years, Peggy has been my anchor. She was the reason I got into the newspaper business. As a college dropout and apparent misfit – I was running a beer joint when we decided to get married – I chose journalism as the fastest respectable profession I could get into. She said it wouldn’t have made any difference to her if I had stayed in the beer business. She also interrupted her college studies and went back to work full-time so I could return to college and finish my degree. And she stood by me when I was sick. All of this more than I could have wished for.

But now I seem to be adrift again. Despite my resolution five years ago that I would never again be unfaithful, I have been committing breaches of trust with several women in recent months. I think my reason for having several affairs at once is to make it appear that none of them is serious. But the latest one has me worried. I met Sara two months ago when we were both covering the same town meeting. We met again at other assignments, then started drinking beer together and, when she switched employers, ended up working together. This past weekend, while Peggy was away at a nursing convention, I took Sara back to our apartment. I had never done that with another woman before. I’m drifting too far downstream.

In the river, a rowboat waits for its owner to return in his lobster boat. In the past hour, I have watched the small boat twist and turn in the river current and tide. If I didn’t know it was belayed to a mooring beneath the surface, I would think the dory was loose.

In little more than a year, Peggy and I will be divorced, and she will take an apartment on Dock Square. From her second-floor window, she also will be able to see the boats milling on the water.

LXII. Winter of Discontent

Barrington, New Hampshire. March 13, 1991.

“How are you?” Elizabeth asks as she sets her purse and lunch cooler on the kitchen table.

The question is innocent enough. In our society, we ask each other how we are so often that no one pays attention to either the answer or the question. But when your favorite and only sister asks it, and when you have spent the last three months grousing to her about vague health problems, you know she asks the question fully prepared to listen to the answer, god bless her.

“Astonishingly enough,” I say, rapping on the edge of the maple table, “better.”

She smiles and puts the kettle on for coffee, then heads for the living room and sorts the mail onto her desk, then passes back through the kitchen on her way to start a load of laundry while she listens to me speculate about the faint ringing in my ears, the new sensitivity to light in my eyes, the nebulous feeling of disequilibrium in my head that has been pestering me since last summer.

I tell Elizabeth that I’m glad I went back to see my doctor in Maine and that he’s taken a series of tests a step at a time to rule out serious possibilities, leaving him and me fairly sure it isn’t anything life-threatening.

“So guess where he’s sending me now?”

“Back to an ear-nose-and-throat specialist,” she says. She knows as much about my medical condition as my doctor does. We laugh. She is right.

It is the kind of day for laughter. The temperature is in the mid-60s, and the sky is crystal clear over Barrington, a rural town near New Hampshire’s brief Atlantic coastline where Elizabeth and her husband, Steve, have raised four children. The youngest left home a few years ago, but Steve and Liz are still hard at it, Steve as an equipment manager for a concrete company, Liz as a specia