Travels with Charley in Search of America (4 page)

“No need to pay,” he said. “The land’s not working. But I would like to look at that rig you’ve got there.”

I said, “Let me find a level place and put it in order, then come down for a cup of coffee—or something.”

I backed and filled until I found a level place where I could hear the eager stream rattling; it was almost dark. Charley had said “Ftt” several times, meaning this time that he was hungry. I opened Rocinante’s door, turned on the light, and found utter chaos inside. I have stowed a boat very often against roll and pitch, but the quick stops and starts of a truck are a different hazard. The floor was littered with books and papers. My typewriter roosted uncomfortably on a pile of plastic dishes, a rifle had fallen down and nudged itself against the stove, and one entire ream of paper, five hundred sheets, had drifted like snow to cover the whole place. I lighted the gas mantle lamp, stuffed the debris in a little closet, and put on water for coffee. In the morning I would have to reorganize my cargo. No one can tell how to do it. The technique must be learned the way I learned it, by failures. The moment it was dark it became bitterly cold, but the lamp and the gas burners of the stove warmed my little house cozily. Charley ate his supper, did his tour of duty, and retired into a carpeted corner under the table which was to be his for the next three months.

There are so many modern designs for easy living. On my boat I had discovered the aluminum, disposable cooking utensils, frying pans and deep dishes. You fry a fish and throw the pan overboard. I was well equipped with these things. I opened a can of corned-beef hash and patted it into a disposable dish and set it on an asbestos pad over a low flame, to heat very slowly. The coffee was barely ready when Charley let out his lion roar. I can’t say how comforting it is to be told that someone is approaching in the dark. And if the approacher happened to have evil in his heart, that great voice would give him pause if he did not know Charley’s basically pacific and diplomatic nature.

The farm owner knocked on my door and I invited him in.

“You’ve got it nice in here,” he said. “Yes, sir, you’ve got it nice.”

He slipped in the seat beside the table. This table can be lowered at night and the cushions can be converted to make a double bed. “Nice,” he said again.

I poured him a cup of coffee. It seems to me that coffee smells even better when the frost is in. “A little something on the side?” I asked. “Something to give it authority?”

“No—this is fine. This is nice.”

“Not a touch of applejack? I’m tired from driving, I’d like a spot myself.”

He looked at me with the contained amusement that is considered taciturnity by non-Yankees. “Would you have one if I didn’t?”

“No, I guess not.”

“I wouldn’t rob you then—just a spoonful.”

So I poured each of us a good dollop of twenty-one-year-old applejack and slipped in on my side of the table. Charley moved over to make room and put his chin down on my feet.

There’s a gentility on the road. A direct or personal question is out of bounds. But this is simple good manners anywhere in the world. He did not ask my name nor I his, but I had seen his quick eyes go to the firearms in their rubber slings, to the fishing rods pinioned against the wall.

Krushchev was at the United Nations, one of the few reasons I would have liked to be in New York. I asked, “Have you listened to the radio today?”

“Five-o’clock report.”

“What happened at the U.N.? I forgot to listen.”

“You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Mr. K. took off his shoe and pounded the table.”

“What for?”

“Didn’t like what was being said.”

“Seems a strange way to protest.”

“Well, it got attention. That’s about all the news talked about.”

“They should give him a gavel so he could keep his shoes on.”

“That’s a good idea. Maybe it could be in the shape of a shoe so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.” He sipped the applejack with a deep appreciation. “That’s pretty nice,” he said.

“How do folks around here feel about all this talking back to the Russians?”

“I don’t know about other people. But I think if you’re talking back it’s kind of like a rear-guard action. I’d like to see us do something so they had to talk back to us.”

“You’ve got something there.”

“Seems to me we’re always defending ourselves.”

I refilled the coffee cups and poured a little more applejack for both of us. “You think we should attack?”

“I think we should at least take the ball sometimes.”

“I’m not taking a poll, but how does the election seem to be going around here?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “People aren’t talking. I think this might be the secretest election we ever had. People just won’t put out an opinion.”

“Could it be they haven’t got one?”

“Maybe, or maybe they just don’t want to tell. I remember other elections when there would be pretty peppery arguments. I haven’t heard even one.”

And that’s what I found all over the country—no arguments, no discussion.

“Is it the same—other places?” He must have seen my license plates, but he would not mention that.

“That seems right to me. Do you think people are scared to have an opinion?”

“Maybe some. But I know some that don’t scare, and they don’t say, either.”

“That’s been my experience,” I said. “But I don’t know, really.”

“I don’t either. Maybe it’s all part of the same thing. No thanks, no more. I can smell your supper’s nearly ready. I’ll step along.”

“Part of what same thing?”

“Well, you take my grandfather and his father—he was still alive until I was twelve. They knew some things they were sure about. They were pretty sure give a little line and then what
might
happen. But now—what might happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows. What good’s an opinion if you don’t know? My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard. I don’t even know what happened yesterday, let alone tomorrow. He knew what it was that makes a rock or a table. I don’t even understand the formula that says nobody knows. We’ve got nothing to go on—got no way to think about things. I’ll step along. Will I see you in the morning?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to start early. I want to get clear across Maine to Deer Isle.”

“Say, that’s a pretty place isn’t it?”

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t been there.”

“Well, it’s nice. You’ll like it. Thanks for the—coffee. Good night.”

Charley looked after him and sighed and went back to sleep. I ate my corned-beef hash, then made down my bed and dug out Shirer’s
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
But I found I couldn’t read, and when the light was off I couldn’t sleep. The clattering stream on the rocks was a good reposeful sound, but the conversation of the farmer stayed with me—a thoughtful, articulate man he was. I couldn’t hope to find many like him. And maybe he had put his finger on it. Humans had perhaps a million years to get used to fire as a thing and as an idea. Between the time a man got his fingers burned on a lightning-struck tree until another man carried some inside a cave and found it kept him warm, maybe a hundred thousand years, and from there to the blast furnaces of Detroit—how long?

And now a force was in hand how much more strong, and we hadn’t had time to develop the means to think, for man has to have feelings and then words before he can come close to thought and, in the past at least, that has taken a long time.

Roosters were crowing before I went to sleep. And I felt at last that my journey was started. I think I hadn’t really believed in it before.

Charley likes to get up early, and he likes me to get up early too. And why shouldn’t he? Right after his breakfast he goes back to sleep. Over the years he has developed a number of innocent-appearing ways to get me up. He can shake himself and his collar loud enough to wake the dead. If that doesn’t work he gets a sneezing fit. But perhaps his most irritating method is to sit quietly beside the bed and stare into my face with a sweet and forgiving look on his face; I come out of deep sleep with the feeling of being looked at. But I have learned to keep my eyes tight shut. If I even blink he sneezes and stretches, and that night’s sleep is over for me. Often the war of wills goes on for quite a time, I squinching my eyes shut and he forgiving me, but he nearly always wins. He liked traveling so much he wanted to get started early, and early for Charley is the first tempering of darkness with the dawn.

I soon discovered that if a wayfaring stranger wishes to eavesdrop on a local population the places for him to slip in and hold his peace are bars and churches. But some New England towns don’t have bars, and church is only on Sunday. A good alternative is the roadside restaurant where men gather for breakfast before going to work or going hunting. To find these places inhabited, one must get up very early. And there is a drawback even to this. Early-rising men not only do not talk much to strangers, they barely talk to one another. Breakfast conversation is limited to a series of laconic grunts. The natural New England taciturnity reaches its glorious perfection at breakfast.

I fed Charley, gave him a limited promenade, and hit the road. An icy mist covered the hills and froze on my windshield. I am not normally a breakfast eater, but here I had to be or I wouldn’t see anybody unless I stopped for gas. At the first lighted roadside restaurant I pulled in and took my seat at a counter. The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns. A normal conversation is as follows:

Waitress: “Same?”

Customer: “Yep.”

Waitress: “Cold enough for you?”

Customer: “Yep.”

(Ten minutes.)

Waitress: “Refill?”

Customer: “Yep.”

This is a really talkative customer. Some reduce it to “Burp” and others do not answer at all. An early-morning waitress in New England leads a lonely life, but I soon learned that if I tried to inject life and gaiety into her job with a blithe remark she dropped her eyes and answered “Yep” or “Umph.” Still, I did feel that there was some kind of communication, but I can’t say what it was.

The best of learning came on the morning radio, which I learned to love. Every town of a few thousand people has its station, and it takes the place of the old local newspaper. Bargains and trades are announced, social doings, prices of commodities, messages. The records played are the same all over the country. If “Teen-Age Angel” is top of the list in Maine, it is top of the list in Montana. In the course of a day you may hear “Teen-Age Angel” thirty or forty times. But in addition to local news and chronicles, some foreign advertising creeps in. As I went farther and farther north and it got colder I was aware of more and more advertising for Florida real estate and, with the approach of the long and bitter winter, I could see why “Florida” is a golden word. As I went along I found that more and more people lusted toward Florida and that thousands had moved there and more thousands wanted to and would. The advertising, with a side look at Federal Communications, made few claims except for the fact that the land they were selling was in Florida. Some of them went out on a limb and promised that it was above tide level. But that didn’t matter; the very name Florida carried the message of warmth and ease and comfort. It was irresistible.

I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. In Cuernavaca, Mexico, where I once lived, and where the climate is as near to perfect as is conceivable, I have found that when people leave there they usually go to Alaska. I’d like to see how long an Aroostook County man can stand Florida. The trouble is that with his savings moved and invested there, he can’t very well go back. His dice are rolled and can’t be picked up again. But I do wonder if a down-Easter, sitting on a nylon-and-aluminum chair out on a changelessly green lawn slapping mosquitoes in the evening of a Florida October—I do wonder if the stab of memory doesn’t strike him high in the stomach just below the ribs where it hurts. And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

I drove as slowly as custom and the impatient law permitted. That’s the only way to see anything. Every few miles the states provided places of rest off the roads, sheltered places sometimes near dark streams. There were painted oil drums for garbage, and picnic tables, and sometimes fireplaces or barbecue pits. At intervals I drove Rocinante off the road and let Charley out to smell over the register of previous guests. Then I would heat my coffee and sit comfortably on my back step and contemplate wood and water and the quick-rising mountains with crowns of conifers and the fir trees high up, dusted with snow. Long ago at Easter I had a looking-egg. Peering in a little porthole at the end, I saw a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest. I regarded this as a fairy-tale farm as surely imagined as gnomes sitting under toadstools. And then in Denmark I saw that farm or its brother, and it was true, just as it had been in the looking-egg. And in Salinas, California, where I grew up, although we had some frost the climate was cool and foggy. When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn’t believe it. In school we memorized “Snowbound” and little poems about Old Jack Frost and his paintbrush, but the only thing Jack Frost did for us was put a thin skin of ice on the watering trough, and that rarely. To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can’t even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. “It is a glory,” she said, “and can’t be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise.”