Tom Dodge's Calendar

May 19:
Lowell got back from work in Taiwan, a very long commute but he is used to it by now. While he’s gone I take care of Gus and Judy, who have been together for 14 years. Judy is black and Gus is brown but both have blue tongues. When they are eating you have to watch them, otherwise Judy will gobble her food and his too. He is gentle and loving and allows her to do it. So you have to keep her at bay, otherwise he can’t keep his weight up. She snarls and makes a gurgling sound like boggawoggawogga.  This scares him—and anyone else who hears it. She’s a one-headed Cerberus, especially when food is involved.

May 22:
My best friend Tipper had suffered for too long from anal tumors and was willing to go to the doctor today. The doctor said there were too many for surgery but castration usually shrinks the tumors. I was bothered more by this remedy than Tipper seemed to be so it was done. I picked him up a few days later and he seemed much better, though a pound or two lighter in weight. His ballocks had been his ballast but he adjusted and his equilibrium soon returned to normal. A.J. said, “Papa, can Tipper run faster now?”

May 25:
Attended the Layland Museum’s 100th anniversary ceremonies for the Carnegie Library in my hometown. I was due to speak but was recovering from the flu and could say only a few words. I said that as a boy I came here to this magnificent building to do all my research—consisting mainly of poring over the National Geographic magazine’s photos to study the liberal dress code of tribal women. Rex M. read the Best Seller list of May, 1905, an idea I gave him when he told me he was planning to read “The War Prayer,” a long and cynical essay by Mark Twain. I think the Best Seller list went over better, as the former would have jeopardized his body parts in that all-American town. 

May 26:
Lunch with M.D. We met through R.D. many years ago. He’s a fan of good movies and also one of the great backgammon players in the world. He’s selling his vineyard, he said, and if things go the way he plans he’ll have enough money to make a film which he says is one of his longtime ambitions. He’s also a foreign film fan and gave me the lowdown on several he thought I’d like. For the first time we didn’t talk about R.D. who died September 30, 2003. I think it means we’re finally beginning to let him go. 

June 21:
Brenda’s dad was buried today near the town where he grew up and a dozen miles from where he met her mother. They were married 64 years and during that time were never apart, except during the times when he had jobs that didn’t allow wives to come along. They didn’t take separate vacations, I’ll put it that way. When he had his own businesses she was his bookkeeper and went to the shop with him. They enjoyed each other’s company and reminded me—sans the politics—of Ron and Nancy. He would not like that comparison despite my qualification. They lived through the depression and were lifelong democrats. The chapel was full for his service, which is rare for someone of 86. But he had lived in that area the whole time and when you do that, if you’re soft-spoken and jovial, as he was, a lot people care about you. 

June 24:
Despite Brenda’s blues, we went to Jane W.’s housewarming party. She and her husband moved to the countryside to be near her daughter. She took me immediately to her library to show me that she had Fair Warrior on display behind glass and called it a “rare” book. It was a nice thing for her to say, as I view that book as a kind of overlooked step-child. Isabel N. was there and she said she was surprised to read an irreverent review I had written about a novel by a famous Texas writer. He is in fact revered and much loved. I lodged a few irreverent observations, it’s true, but the set-up lines were numerous and I was unable to control myself. 

June 29:
Coffee with PB at Barnes & Noble, a rare event for me as he teaches all the time on several campuses. So it was enjoyable to see him and get caught up on some of the latest events in his life. It’s his 35th year teaching and he hasn’t slowed even a beat. This is an amazing accomplishment, his energy for doing it. Not only has he not slowed, he actually teaches twice as many classes as he did when we started together in 1970. I enjoyed teaching but at 55 I began to be aware of such a wide generational chasm between me and the students that I decided to light out for parts unknown. I felt old. Seven years later I went back and taught again and this time I felt irrelevant. As usual PB entertained me with new findings on secret organizations, one of his main interests. Where we sat was near the Texas section and he noted that a customer came in and picked up on of my books. “It’s like in Annie Hall,” he said, “when the college professor is pontificating about Marshal McLuen to his girlfriend and McLuen is standing beside them in line."

June 30:
Met Charles C. for breakfast. He’s hoping for a teaching job although he has no experience in that field. He’s smart though and a hard worker and earnest. His degree is in, I believe, radio and television communications. I put him in touch with some respectable participants in the educational swindle. 

An editor for a hometown magazine came for an interview and we had a great time sharing mutual disgruntlements about the government but I’m sure none of them will show up in the story. It would mean the end of her magazine, I suspect. My fellow citizens, for the most part, don’t distinguish between government and country these days—or even president and country. 

Joe H. called and asked if I would read his novel and give him my reactions. I agreed to do this if he would quid pro quo. I have one too that pleases University Press editors but wouldn’t please their buyer market, they say. Too much sin and not enough redemption. So I added that my responses to his book would be based on a zero batting average of novels published. This didn’t deter him so I guess we’re all set to exchange mutual information based on no experience at all in this field, though we have both reviewed a lot of novels. Plus, I don't think you have to be able to lay an egg in order to make one into an omelet.

July 1:
I met Rex M. for lunch and we talked about his newest project, which is to get financing for a stage version of Pure Country, a musical film he wrote a few years ago with country singer George Strait as an actor in the lead role. I gave him my script for “An Evening with O. Henry.” Before I knew it I was already booked to play it in November at the Carnegie Theatre. Oh lord. I have to memorize 17 single-spaced pages of monologue. “Just think of it as a class,” he said, “something you’re teaching that you know everything about.” I don’t think I’ll be able to dismiss the audience if I feel like it. They can dismiss me though.  

July 3:
We hosted our annual Fourth of July family party to watch the fireworks display from the football stadium just across the way. Everybody on our street hosts these parties and our neighborhood is clogged with cars and roving bands of revelers. Brenda’s mother came but was very quiet, as it was one of the first times she had gone somewhere without Pops. About a month before he died she left him to go to grandson Brad’s graduation from college. I stayed with him and he had instructions on what to do until she got back. A little before noon, he said, “You ready to go over to the Chevrolet dealership to eat barbecue?” I said, “Are you nuts? I’m not going to the Chevrolet dealership to eat barbecue. I don’t like Chevrolet dealerships, especially the kind that serves barbecue. Let’s go to Morris Neal’s Handy Hamburgers.” He said, “Okay. I didn’t want to go to the Chevrolet dealership either.” We went down to Morris Neal's and it was great. We really lived it up. He got everything he wanted. When she got back, she said immediately, “Did y’all go to the Chevrolet dealership and eat barbecue?” But I covered for him and all was well. But I’m glad she came for the fireworks and I think it was good for her to get away from her apartment for a while. 

July 4:
My old friend Geoff G., who is the mastermind behind the creativity of this web page, drove out and picked me up and took me to “The Dallas World Aquarium,” an enormous repository of endangered animals, plants, fishes, birds, frogs, and thousands of other exotic rain forest creatures. The management there treat him as a reigning raja as he has aided them a good deal with their technology. He’s liberal with his talents, and provides it for anyone involved in fighting the forces of destruction and greed. 

July 7:
E-mailed Karen and told her more of what happened on July 7th, 1962. I told her about my going AWOL from the Army to come home when she was born and then getting stopped by the traffic cop at midnight on the way to the hospital. The thought crossed my mind that I had been caught up with already and he was going to take me back. Anyway, I went back right after she was born and sneaked back into my barracks and didn't get caught. (I didn't have a pass because I didn't know for sure she was going to be born. It was just a guess. The army won't let you go home on a guess.) I came home again the next weekend, hitch-hiked as far as Mansfield and Brenda drove over and picked me up with her in the seat just a week old. Then Brenda got sick and I had to take her to the hospital. I said I didn’t remember who came and took care of her and Lyndon, as she was only a week or so old, Grandmother or Juanita, I guessed. I had a pass that time and didn't have to sneak back in. I was discharged a few weeks later. And so I wished her a happy birthday though we are so far apart. 

A.J. rode his bike over and we watched one of our favorite movies, the Errol Flynn, 1939 version of Robin Hood. This was written by the so-called black-listed writers when they were in their hey-day. The film artfully shows the consequences of an arrogant, oppressive government, something Michael Moore attempted in his clunky, heavy-handed documentary, Fahrenheit 911. In this film King John, the Sheriff of Nottingham and their assorted cronies, assassins, and lickspittles plan new oppressions as they feast on gout-inducing cuisine in their castles. The the action cuts to Sherwood Forest where Robin and his band of rag-tag democrats, I mean merry men, who are sharing their poached venison with the sick and wounded. The part we like best is when the Sheriff and his men, dressed in their finery and astride their gorgeous horses, ride into Sherwood Forest and are ambushed by Robin and the dem—merry men, who strip them of their women and fine clothes, take their gorgeous horses and send them walking barefoot back to their castle in rags. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. We love it. We’re Henry David Thoreau conservatives. 

July 15:
A.J.’s eighth birthday. Brenda gave him a party and I got him a set of paint supplies, a new drawing book, and a ukulele. I haven’t given them to him yet because he would have been uninterested in them at the party with so many toys to distract him. He is taking art lesson from Lyndon’s friend, Jimmy, who is a master portraitist. Lyndon tutors him in math, which is a gigantic mystery to him, though he is a better reader than any of the high school students he has tutored, Lyndon says.

July 21:
Jon called this morning and told me that Patrick died. Patrick was his older son. He had gained a lot of weight and developed heart problems and apnea, a respiratory ailment causing him to stop breathing during the night. He came home from work feeling tired, and lay down to take a nap. His wife
noted that he wasn’t wearing his breathing apparatus and checked on him and found that he was dead. He lived in Bryan and worked at Texas A&M. I hadn’t talked to him since last year in preparation for a
writers’ gathering he was planning through the Bryan library. He was a member of the Library board. He had been very excited about this, I recall, as John Graves would be coming. He had planned to give him an award.

But the event fell through virtually at the last minute. I didn’t know why. I later heard that other board members didn’t want to pay the writers mileage and Patrick canceled it on principle. But I was sorry it did, as I had looked forward to it and I don’t think anyone would have refused to come. Writers can
travel a long way on ego. Patrick was a literary guy and struggled to make his dad proud of him. He came out with a book on Bonnie and Clyde a few years ago that was a big success, may even have outsold his father’s books. Jon was certainly proud of him for that.

July 24
Thurber is a tiny village on Interstate 20 about 80 miles west of Fort Worth. Brenda’s grandmother was born there in 1900 when it was a booming coal-mining town. Her father, Brenda’s great-grandfather, Henry Maples Long, is buried there. So we went down with Brenda’s sister and her husband and Brenda’s mother to try to find his grave. His was literally the first
grave inside the gate and to the right. John found it almost immediately. Its monument stands alone, as he died young, at 28, and was the only member of his family to be buried there. He died in a mine explosion. The inscription was badly eroded but by rubbing it onto paper we could read it. He was born
March 5, 1876 and died June 3, 1904. He had over 500 descendents.

Ironically I had an Army buddy buried in that cemetery. We drove around and I hoped to see his monument. Nut I wasn’t too hopeful as there are a lot of graves there. But, again, eagle-eye John saw it. His name was David Hopper and I remembered that he said he was from the nearby town of Gordon. I was with him for a while at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, in 1959. I met him on the first day of processing. He was a gawky, skinny guy with floppy ears and poochy, unanimated lips that seldom showed a smile or a frown (except for an occasion I’ll relate later). I saw him struggling with his duffel bag as we got off the bus. It weighed more than he did and he was dragging it.

The sergeant was screaming at him. His helmet liner kept falling down over his eyes. He was staggering
around, going in circles. So I carried it for him on the fairly long route-stepping march to the company area. During the next six weeks he had a rough time of it. He was unable to keep up physically or mentally with the training. The sergeants yelled at him constantly. They didn’t understand why he couldn’t take his rifle apart and put all the pieces back together in one minute. He couldn’t do it one year. He couldn’t even loosen the sling on it. Nevertheless they allowed him to go on the rifle range with live
ammunition. He fired a few rounds into the dirt about ten feet in front of where we were lying. Everyone
started yelling. A sergeant nearby ran over and took the rifle away from him. They released him after that.

It’s good they did, as he was totally unsuited for military life. He should never have been drafted. But he was classified 1-A, was 21, and so there he was, firing into the dirt. The other soldiers pestered him and teased him ceaselessly. Once, they had a mock arm-wrestling contest. They all let him win, cried out in agony as he slammed their arms down. They fell to the floor, holding their shoulders. Then they declared
him the champion.

He believed it and was jubilant. He jumped up and down and preened and flexed his bony biceps. Of course, the others could have easily beaten him if they had tried. But he believed he won. And so he did win, but what he won was based on a hoax. It was only in his mind. So, even though he was the arm-wrestling champion of Second Platoon, he was also the weakest soldier in the company. In hand-to-hand combat, though, his belief would have gotten him killed.

July 27
Getting anywhere by eight in the morning is hard for me but getting to downtown Dallas during going-to-work traffic was about the worst. There’s usually wreck somewhere between Marsalis and downtown that stops traffic so Lowell told me another way. Go left on Polk, he said, and stay on it until it turns into Sylvan. Follow it around until you get to Fort Worth Avenue and turn right. This becomes Commerce and goes directly to the Earl Cabell Federal Building. It was perfect. Thirty-five minutes and no delays. I parked across the street. The other potential jury members sat and stood together, all looking alienated and lost. A few made small talk. Others read books. I brought the Sunday crossword I had saved for the occasion. Then we were herded into elevators and dumped onto another floor to be checked for weapons.

There was the usual rush to get to the front of the line even though the payoff was only going through the
metal detector before someone else. As soon as we had all filed through we were sent back the way we came,
onto the elevators and to another floor where we fill in papers and waited. After a long wait our names were called and we were herded into various courtrooms. Our case concerned Korean business owners charged with hiring illegal workers and fudging on their taxes. I was shocked. Shocked! During the Q/A session I was surprised to learn that so many people have deeply emotional beliefs about this problem. I was indifferent to it, I said, except that I believe immigrants have built America and are still doing it.

If the middle classes want to continue to have their shopping malls, schools, highways and roads, bridges, and freeways built, their wars fought, their houses, roofed, yards mowed, floors mopped, food cooked, clothes starched and ironed, then they should shut up and enjoy having it done at a relatively low cost. Otherwise they should insist that their children compete for these jobs so that America will, for the
first time in its history, not be reliant on foreign workers. I was asked what I write about and I said,
“How it feels to be alive on the planet.” I wasn’t selected though I would have been open-minded on the subject, as I believed that all should pay their fair share of tax. I was selected once for a federal jury,
October 3, 1983, and was, I think a fair juror. I wrote about it and included the piece, “Making a
Federal Case,” in Tom Dodge Talks About Texas.

July 29
Drove to Bryan for Patrick’s funeral. It was delayed a week because his daughter’s wedding had been set for
the Saturday after his death. Jon said the family had a tough decision but in the end took the logical route. It was better to delay the funeral than the wedding. There was an enormous turnout at his funeral as he had lived there most of his life and was well liked. Jon said Patrick had done all the research for his
master’s thesis but hadn’t written it yet. So the professors decided to use his book as his thesis, since it was such a good one, and award the degree to him posthumously. I had a student once who fell from the
top of Reunion Tower during the semester. He was a good student and I liked him. When the final grade sheets came, instead of an incomplete, I gave him an A.

August 1
Cheryl was one of the 140 or more Dallas Morning News employees who lost their jobs there last November. She was the Books Editor. These jobs are disappearing in a society obsessed with television. So she had to go to Alaska to get one, at the Anchorage Daily News. Maybe they don’t have good TV reception there.

August 6
Lowell returned from Taiwan on time but it was uncertain for
a while because a typhoon narrowly missed Taiwan before skirting
north toward Japan at the last minute. We stayed in contact by instant messaging. He said he and James had to go to a lot of meetings where interpreters were needed. I told him to bring his laptop to the meeting and type what he wanted to convey into an e-mail and let Google translate it into Chinese, then send it to the Taiwanese guy sitting next to him. That way he could check the translator's accuracy--or maybe not even need one.

August 8
Beth and her friend Erin came yesterday. They're 13 and Erin was homesick immediately for her mom back in Virginia. She cried a lot and called her mom a lot. So her mom paid $275 for her to come home early. Brenda takes her to the airport in the morning. I don't think Beth understood her pain. As Karen told me in an e-mail, homesickness is unbearable for those afflicted with it. I've had it, lots of times. It's worse at night. I think it's a lot like "Sundowner's Syndrome," a malady usually affecting old people. My mother used to become uncontrollable at night. 

Bob C. is meeting us for breakfast. He's a bit--a lot--worried and very sad to see Cheryl go. He was her boss at the Morning news for eight years and she took over as Books editor when he retired in 1997. 

Last night I dreamed that I had arrived at school late for classes on the first day of the semester. I didn't know my schedule or room numbers, a recurring dream.
 

MISSION: ALASKA

Prologue:

After Cheryl Chapman learned that she was the new International News Editor at the Anchorage Daily News
there was one problem that popped up.  How do you move to Alaska?

Everyone had suggestions, including myself, about her relocation. She could ship her household belongings and fly but this would mean that she would have to leave her 14-year-old dog and 18-year-old cat behind. When I volunteered to drive the rented truck she thought about it for a few days and decided to take me up on it. So I called Lennie in Florida. “Want to take a five thousand mile drive? To Alaska?”

He drove the 1300 miles and was at my house on the evening of August 9th. When we got to Cheryl’s house the next morning at eight, ready to head out to Anchorage, I saw the moving truck for the first time. The largest truck I had ever driven was an Army “deuce and a half,” a two-and-a-half ton truck a third the size of this 26-ft.-long behemoth.  Lennie was elated. Going to Alaska was his dream—and he likes driving. He’s a compulsive traveler, actually, sometimes driving seven thousand miles alone just for the excitement of it. He reveres truck drivers and except for the schedule they’re forced to keep, would like to be one, I think.

I like the excitement of driving too. But this time it’s a mission. I’m responsible for the welfare of the truck, filled with Cheryl’s household furnishings including her grandmother’s Chinaware. But was I the right person for this responsibility? I’m leaving Brenda alone to help care for grandson Andrew, eight years old. Also grand daughters Beth 13, and Haylee, 20, are visiting, separately, from Virginia. Younger son Lowell, who had just returned from Taiwan the previous Saturday, will be leaving for Italy in three days. Older son Lyndon’s health has not been good. So Brenda has it all pretty much by herself.

I’m prone to homesickness when Brenda’s not with me, and feel terribly alienated, as a rule, in motels. My homesickness strikes only at night but I can get very crabby. And when I’m tired and homesick I’m less able to withstand Lennie’s pathological optimism. I’ve always known there’s good Lennie and bad Lennie. Good Lennie is upbeat, hospitable, helpful, and dependable. On many prior trips I’ve seen bad Lennie too. I’ve survived his delusions of self-perfection, repetitious wool-gathering stories, talking while chewing his food, smacking, snoring, farting, introducing me to complete strangers desperate to escape his bullshit, and the maddening non-sequiturs he uses in answer to almost everything I say to him.

But these trips lasted for but a few days. This one would take two weeks just to get there—the two of us together in the cab of this truck. Yet I believed we could handle anything that came up. He’s 78 now but in extraordinary physical condition, about five and a half feet tall, 135 lbs. But while he can still ride his bicycle 40 miles a day, hang from his heels like a bat to keep his spine aligned, and swim non-stop for three hours every day, his emotional mechanisms, I’ve noted over the past few years, have taken a turn toward Bedlam. Except for his art, which he does compulsively, he devotes his life to his physical well being. He apparently doesn’t spend any time at all thinking about his psychic misfiring. We’ve been friends for 35 years. This trip tested that friendship.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005, Day 1:

Cheryl meets us in her front yard looking apologetic. The house is a mess, she tells us. The loaders didn’t finish. There’s still a lot to be packed and boxed, and the house has to be cleaned. Before all this can even be started, though, we go to the Cracker Barrel nearby. Bob Compton, who is saddened by her leaving and anxiety-ridden, is seeing us off with a breakfast farewell. He was her boss and the books editor before retiring. After breakfast we go back and get the truck and drive to St. Frances Catholic Church parking lot where a priest and friends of Cheryl are waiting to say farewell to her. The priest blesses us and the truck and all its contents, and flicks holy water on it. Lennie tells me later that he’s afraid the holy water may be no match for the Alaska Highway.

Back at the house, he focuses on the truck keys. We need to get duplicates made. With all we have to do, this irritates me but he’s on a mission. Cheryl gives him directions to an Ace Hardware in Lakewood and he sets out by himself. I know for a fact that he’ll get lost because he never remembers directions. We stand in the yard and watch him miss the first turn. Bob and I go to find him. Her neighborhood is a labyrinth. We decide to go to the hardware store, hoping he somehow made it there. We see him on Abrams Road, heading in the wrong direction. Soon, though, the key obsession is ended and I’m happy to admit that he was right. By both of us having keys we are insured against being stranded without a key and constantly asking each other for the key. There’s meaning in his compulsions.

Bob and Cheryl say goodbye and then we turn to the work of finishing loading the truck. Her dog Charlie Bill, and Pink the cat, are mystified and full of apprehension by the empty house and the two strangers who are loading all their things in the truck.  Cheryl gives us a package of books and maps that she has gone to great lengths to find for our trip. At seven p.m. we load the final box and go to a nice neighborhood restaurant for supper. At eight we finally leave for Alaska.

We make only a few blocks though before stopping to fill the vehicles up with gas. The place where we stop is apparently where Cheryl is used to filling up, but on this evening it’s a tangle of cars, drivers fighting over the pumps.  Behemoth is hard to maneuver and my nerves are already shot because of the stress. Ordinarily I avoid all such dealings with humanity. I search out the crappiest-looking station with the highest prices to avoid jockeying for places at the pump, then waiting in line to pay behind humanity stocking up on cigarettes, Dr Pepper, and lottery tickets.  But this time I stick it out and eventually get the gas. I feel a bump as I pull out of the gas lane and wonder if I ran over the guy on the motorcycle. Apparently not, so we start out again, with a hundred dollars worth of gas.

Leaving Dallas we are following Cheryl and I watch as she takes the east exit onto I-20 by mistake. I wonder if this is an omen. I catch up and pass her and lead her to the first crossover and head back in the other direction. But somehow I get disoriented too and think I’m going in the wrong direction. I stop at a station in deep south Dallas and Lennie goes in to ask. A panhandler comes up. I’m in the wrong mood to be charitable to a guy in a red workout suit who dangles a cheap watch under my nose. “Get back,” I tell him. He says he isn’t begging. I say go away. He stands there arguing that he somehow represents God. Lennie shows up with the good news that we are in fact going in the right direction. The guy in the red workout suit is still here. “I’m working for the king,” he says. I tell him I’m tired and in no mood for royalty, that “I have five thousand miles to go and I’m the last guy on earth you ought to be frigging with right now.”

“You got problems, all right,” he tells me. “You ought to get right with the king.”

“Shit,” I say, and drive away. Our Alaska trip seems not be making a lot of progress. At one a.m. we stop for rest at an Abilene motel.

August 11, Thursday, Day 2:

I wake up at four a.m. as Lennie slips out the door for some reason. So I get up and dress and make coffee. He doesn’t drink coffee in the mornings first thing so I use both coffee packages to make mine double strength. At six I go down to the lobby and find Lennie eating fruit and drinking juice. I make the mistake of telling him I’m unable to figure out how to call Brenda on my new cell phone. He takes it and asks a family at a nearby table, “Anybody know how to use a cell phone!”

I vanish.

I do this because I know that if I don’t he’ll introduce me to these victims and include me in their torture. When he comes back into the room he says, “You’re just like my brother. Walk away every time I start talking to somebody.” He wasn’t angry, only peeved, but it’s a sign of bigger storms to come.

Waiting for Cheryl to get ready I finally figure out how to use the cell phone and call Brenda. I underplay my homesickness and tell her everything is great. I look out and see Cheryl carrying the cat carrier and the big boxes and sacks of pet food. She wants to do this on her own despite Lennie’s insistence on helping her. We get back on the road at 11:30.

On the way Lennie tells me about his recent rancorous trip he took with his Florida friends, Joe and Joan.  He told them he could take them to great places he had been. So they loaded up and left, with tour guide Lennie in charge—in their van and at their expense. He thought he liked her but things began to unravel in Michigan, as he tells it. By the time they got to South Dakota, all hell broke loose. She came up and interrupted a conversation between him and a forest ranger. She asserted herself as the one in charge. She began taking control of everything, criticizing him, the food he ordered, and, since all three slept in the same room, criticizing him for getting up early. The knockout punch came when she got angry because he went swimming without telling her. (I don’t understand this but let it go.) He bawled her out and concluded by asking her to perform sex with herself and asked Joe to take him to the bus station. Joe tried to talk him out of leaving but it was no use.

It took five days to get home on the bus but he had a lot of fun, talking to people on the way.  When he got home he wrote her a letter telling her off.

We drive 500 miles through the desert and arrive at Las Cruces, NM, that night, where we stay. I didn’t sleep very well because of a barbecue sandwich we ate along the way that made me sick. I thought it was good but I guess I liked it better than it liked me.

August 12, Friday, Day 3:

At breakfast Cheryl asks us what was our favorite thing so far. Lennie says it was a nice kid at a gas station and some dark clouds in the desert after the rain.  I say it was the feeling I had of overcoming my fear of embarking on a 5000-thousand mile journey in a 26 ft., fully-loaded truck with the vast unknown looming out at me like a hideous face in a fisheye lens. Cheryl says for her it was the desert.

She informs me that my phone is not taking a charge and that I should call Cingular and tell them that the Wireless Depot in Cedar Hill store sold me a phone with a defective battery. I do this though I stay on hold for a long time before I can get through to anyone. The customer service woman tells me to go to a Cingular store anywhere and my proof of purchase would get me another phone. I call Brenda on Cheryl’s phone.

We forge on northwestward. The story about the woman on the trip that so infuriated Lennie interested me. It was one I hadn’t heard before so I offered him a challenge. This will be a long trip. We can make it interesting by telling only stories we’ve never told. He rebels. He thinks I mean stories he’s told me. “How am I supposed to remember what I’ve told you and what I haven’t?” I explain again that I mean only new stories, stories we’ve never told anybody. He rejects this idea. So then I suggest that we avoid meaningless gabbiness by only asking questions of the other person.  He says this also is a stupid thing. Finally I tell him that his stories are just reminiscences. They are usually told and retold to the point that if there was ever a reason for telling them it has been lost. And except for the woman on the trip, Joan, and the wife of a New York friend he told me about once, everybody he knows is flawless, perfect in every way. Would Freud even understand this? He gets very angry and starts going off like fireworks. Oh boy. I say, “Ronnie told me once that he didn’t even want to meet me because you had built me up to be so sickeningly perfect.” I try to prove this to him by asking him to tell me about somebody in his life, that he knows personally, that he does not like. He sits there in silence for a long time. After a long time of thinking about it he says there was a foreman he had once in Oregon that was a “hard ass.”

This tactic doesn’t work so I try another one. “Okay. Everywhere you’ve ever lived has been perfect—New Mexico, west Texas, Florida. Of these three, which was better?”

“Damn. Why are you doing this?”

“I want to see a small window of perspective here that I can peep through to find some point to your stories. If all your friends and everything else in your life is perfect, then nothing is.”

Finally he says that one summer in the Adirondack Mountains was the best.

I decide to give up.

We stop at a Dairy Queen that we see in the middle of the desert.  Lots of cars and trucks parked everywhere. Gas is $3.09 a gallon, the highest we’ve seen. It’s the busiest DQ I’ve ever seen, here in the middle of the Mojave. It’s very hot and so Cheryl leaves her car running with the A/C on so the pets will stay cool. Since Lennie is always bugging her to allow him to help her, she says, “Lennie, would you stay and watch the car while I go in for a minute?”  Oh boy. I see his whole being kind of sag. It couldn’t be funnier. He’s the dog-hating champion of North American, or would be if there were such a title. So here he is, always trying to ingratiate himself to people, especially women, and when Cheryl finally asks him to do something for her, it isn’t something easy like lying down over a puddle of toxic waste slime and letting her use his body for a footbridge. She asks him to keep company in the desert with a dog, while we’re lolligagging inside where it’s cool—and probably talking about things he’s missing out on! Oh the abnegation! The ignominy!

So we go in.  While she’s in there she decides to get something to eat and gets in a long line.

Since we left Las Cruces so late, we appear to be on time to hit Phoenix at rush hour. I’ve done that once before and don’t want to do it again. So we stop at a truck stop about 50 miles out and gas up and wait.  Cheryl parks around back in the shade and walks the dog. It’s about 5:00 and the sun is beating down. Lennie and I decide to go inside and eat. It’s a busy place so we sit down in the section reserved for truckers. They’re all sucking up huge platefuls of chicken fried steak and potatoes and glutinous, oleaginous, gravy-like shit. Lennie loves sitting here and listens carefully to what they’re saying. Eventually he chimes in as if he’s one of them. “They think we're truckers,” he says.

I say, “Lennie, they know we’re not truckers. We’re eating salads!”

Outside, a norther has blown in and it’s suddenly very cool. We sit inside the cab and plan our route north from Phoenix to Kingman, and then to Barstow, California. Suddenly it occurs to me that if we had gone the way AAA recommended we would be in Billings, Montana, right now, a lot nearer to the Canadian border. Almost since leaving Dallas I’ve found myself looking ahead to the trip back home, planning the best way to get back. Counter-productive.

We miss much of the Phoenix traffic and head north to Flagstaff, arriving there late, after a long, roller-coaster ride of winding our way up and down and around mountains that I never knew existed. They’re very steep and scary to deal with in pitch night, but Lennie does it very well after finally catching on to how to use the downshift. “Now I get it!” he says. Since we arrive late Cheryl doesn’t get a motel on first try. It’s a college town and it’s also Friday night. Plus she has to find one that will accept pets. Finally, after three turndowns at other motels, she gets the Ramada Inn, a very nice one. The system we’ve developed for getting motels is for us to park Behemoth in a central location and wait for her to go find one and then come back and get us. We don’t like maneuvering it around in the dark in city traffic. I always have to be concerned about where I’m going to park it. We’re 5000 feet in the mountains and it’s very nice and cool. It’s in the hundreds back home, Brenda says. I call her before realizing it’s one a.m. there.

August 13, Saturday, day 4:

This morning he gets up at his usual time and starts complaining about the late start we’re getting every day. He says it’s all about the dog. I remember how Charlie Bill had lain on the floor at his house on the day we left and watched the packing and loading with great anxiety, and Pink had curled up on a tiny scrap of remaining material left from her old world. Cheryl’s tiny car is packed with large bags of cat litter and dog and cat food. The dog is tall and thin and in very good physical condition. When Lennie heard the kind of dog food that he eats he said, “Where do you get that dog food? I want to get some of that for myself.” The dog easily jumps into the back of the Toyota, then lies in his area behind the driver’s seat. The cat’s carrier is in the corner of the trunk area.  “Why did she ask me to stay with the dog?” he says. “Why not you? Why me? It was hot and I was outside and the dog was in there with cold air blowing up his ass. `Where is Tom?’ I kept saying. `What’s keeping them?’ She’s the Mother Theresa of Dogs!”

So I call Cheryl on the phone and she agrees to start leaving earlier. She would let Lennie help her carry her pet necessaries in and out of the room. He was overjoyed. “She wants me to do it from now on!”  So we get an early start from Flagstaff that morning.

I notice that he’s beginning to cough.

At the California border we’re ordered to pull to the side and raise the hatch for inspection.  It’s hot, the afternoon sun is blasting down, and big, hot semis rumble up beside us, their enormous diesel engines clattering and blowing more heat and dust and noise on us before pulling away, only to be replaced by another one. Lennie and I labor to get the heavy door to roll up. The severe border inspector glares at us. When we get it rolled up, Cheryl’s grandmother’s china cups fly out at us. I catch two and the border guard catches two. Several others tumble harmlessly down into the cracks between the boxes. The officer is flabbergasted, standing there holding several of grandma’s teacups to his chest while we use duct tape to secure the boxes that had fallen forward as we traversed the rough washboard highways. When we eventually finish he is gone. We guess he wasn’t up to the task of rummaging through our cargo after all.

Back on the road to Barstow as we pass through the flat terrain of the Mojave, Lennie says, “You ever see that movie, Hud?  I suspect the terrain reminds him of west Texas, east of Lubbock, where he lived for ten years after his divorce. But instead of saying this, he says, “I thought Melvyn Douglas did a good job in that movie.”

You get it? Not Paul Newman. Not Patricia Neal. No, Melvyn Douglas did a good job.

Now this is what he does to drive people nuts. Most of the time when he dredges up some obscure person that he idolizes it’s just to display his disdain for the herd mentality. If the herd adores Paul Newman he extols Melvyn Douglas. Muhammad Ali was just a draft-dodger and a braggart. Marciano would have whipped his ass. Marilyn Monroe? She looks like a sludge barge cook compared to Angie Dickinson. Frank Sinatra? He couldn’t sing for shit. Al Martino, now there’s a singer! And, besides, Sinatra punctured his own eardrum so he wouldn’t have to go to World War II. Everybody in his neighborhood knew that.

This kind of thing. But this time I remembered that he told me once that his father was abusive to him and Harold. So I say, “Well, I didn’t like that old man Bannon. He favored one son over the other one. And when the favored son died in the car that Hud wrecked because he was drunk the old man treated him like shit for the rest of his life. When Hud remarked that the old man never forgave him for his brother’s death the old man said, `No, Hud. I was sick of you for a long time before that.’ A parent never has a right to say something like that to a child.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Lennie says. “I just meant his acting.”

“You told me once that your mother preferred Harold over you.”

“She called me her tsouris, her trouble-maker.” He goes on to detail his life with her and angry dad in the Bronx. Lennie wanted only to be an athlete, cared about nothing else. His dad was a Russian immigrant and spoke several languages but his English was not so fluent. So he said to Lennie, “You don’t be sports boy.” He had been reading that the future lay in electricity so he said to Lennie, “you don’t be sports boy. You be electric boy!”  (When I told this story to Cheryl later she said, “He did become electric boy.”)

He said his mother finally got a job keeping house and the old man was Mr. Mom. On the first day he beat Lennie and Harold with the buckle of a belt and when his mother came home from work, she learned what happened and told him to get out. They divorced and he went out into the country and built a house by himself and burned it down for the insurance. Then he took the money and went to Florida and built another one.

So, with Lennie, you have to approach his real meaning from various perspectives. Anyway, I have no story as good as that one and decide not to tell him about an episode I had many years ago on the way into Barstow. Brenda and I were young and decided on a whim to drive to California and take my grandparents to see their two sons and their families. We had Lyndon and Karen with us too. He was six and she was four. In the desert nearing Barstow, at night, our lights started blinking on and off. I drove for several miles in the dark, by shining a flashlight on the center line, to get to a motel.

I try to forget about this story and ask Lennie about his cough. I’m paranoid about the possibility of us getting sick on this trip. If I get a cold there’s no way I’ll be able to drive. “It’s nothing,” he says. “I’m almost over it now. Forget worrying about getting my cold and just worry about what we’re going to get into when we get on the Alcan Highway.” Moments after saying this, he sneezes.

August 14, Sunday, day 5, Barstow California:

I wake up at 5:30 and Lennie is gone. I part the curtains and see from our second-floor window several trains passing by in just a few minutes of one another and the mountains in the distance. Barstow has always been one of the Santa Fe’s biggest locations. I think that in the old days Barstow was a major refueling and water-loading stop for trains crossing to desert. In any case it occurs to me that I’d like to board one right now going southeast.

Instead I go down to the lobby and find Lennie talking to the receptionist. I return to the room in a big hurry and write in my tablet. He comes in a bit later and bawls me out for walking away. “I found out a lot of things from that girl!” (He says all this in a very loud voice.)  “She’s married to a black guy and they were holding hands in the Capitol building in Baton Rouge and a guard came over and told them they couldn’t hold hands in the building. `You mean nobody can hold hands in this building?’ she said, and he said, `No, just you two.’ Well, that’s when they left there and came here to live. They were going to live there but not after that happened. You made me mad by walking away. You’re not going to change me. You’re not going to make me stop doing that. I learn. You don’t learn anything by walking away. You’re a writer. You could learn lots of things to write about by talking to people. I learned also that she works on that old beat-up car (a 1938 Chevrolet) herself. She wants to go to the community college in Victorville but can’t afford it. The college here is shit, she said. So I learn. You walk away.”

I tell him I’m sorry, that it was rude to do that. I’ll try to get better.

It’s eight a.m. and Cheryl is walking Charlie Bill. We’re making progress. So, in fact we are. We leave at ten. From Barstow we pass through Bakersfield, Tulare, Fresno, Madera (where we stop at the Pistachio Farm for lots of fresh goodies), Merced, Modesto, Sacramento, and on to Williams where we stop for the night. On the way as he drives I’m unable to write in the cab due to the washboard effect along these California highways—except around Sacramento, of course, where the politicians are.

On the way we pass Bishop, the home of one of his boyhood friends, a “Coopnik,” as he calls his friends who lived there.  He’s Seymour Assofsay, and Lennie says he’s a great engineer, was interviewed by Howard Hughes for a job in his aircraft factory. He thought he insulted Hughes by his radical ideas when Hughes said, “Get out! . . . and report for work tomorrow.”

*I’m inserting something extra here about Lennie’s life in the Coops and how wonderful those years were and how important such a system could be today for people if the government had not degenerated to the point where such a system is no longer a possibility. Readers interested only in how it feels to drive to Alaska with Lennie may easily skip on to the next entry.

The brothers Stan inherited their hardy natures from their Russian father. In Odessa, on the Black Sea, he killed a man in self-defense and was sentenced to life in prison. He escaped from the gulag and walked across Siberia to Hong Kong, where he caught a steamer to Australia. Later, he made his way to New York, met a Jewish girl and they got married. During the worst part of the Depression they survived by taking the boys and moving into the United Workers Cooperative Colony, or the “Coops.”

The six buildings of the Coops covered two city blocks and were located across the street from Bronx Park East. They were five storeys high and contained 750 apartments and 2,000 rooms. The buildings were designed so that each apartment had at least one window overlooking immaculate gardens of flowers, trees, and hedge wheedled out of New York’s Botanical Gardens by a resident gardener who worked there. Each apartment also had one window that faced the sun. Workers might have to work all day in windowless environments but at least they could have some sunshine at home. Though the tenants were mostly Jewish or eastern European immigrants, all races and nationalities were welcome so long as they were workers or small-business owners. Many were in the needle trades but just about all the trades were represented. During the depth of the Depression tenants who could not pay their rent were allowed to borrow from the emergency fund, made up of a minimum of a dollar a year from everyone, though some contributed as much as eight hundred dollars. These loans were repaid with no interest. Some shared their apartments with boarders for extra money and others opened them up free to strikers who had nowhere else to go.

Lennie’s father was one of the unemployed. “Every day my mother would underline the job possibilities in the New York Times classifieds,” he said, “and fix my father a lunch and send him out to look for work. Every evening he came home without a job. One day she gave me a dime for the subway and told me to follow him and see where he went. I followed him and he went straight to the New York Public Library, straight into the reading room where he read all the papers. Then he ate his lunch, read more papers until it got late, then got on the subway and came back home.”

Children attended nearby PS 96, which was built after Coops residents demonstrated at City Hall. The teachers there were politically biased against Coops children, Lennie says, but discrimination was such a part of Coops residents’ lives that they became used to it. At their May Day parades, “the cops would beat the crap out of us,” he said. “They would turn their horses around and stick their rear ends in our faces.”

After public school Coops kids went to Schule, where Jewish (and Gentile) children learned Jewish culture, though not religion, in both Yiddish and English. Over 250 attended, ages six to twelve, and after graduation they went to Mittel Schule on Friday nights and Saturdays.

It was an enormous urban family. Everyone felt responsible for everyone else, Lennie says. Parents could leave their young children in the nursery care center or, for short trips to the market, the security guard would keep an eye on them. There was no thievery or crime of any kind, and chastity was strictly practiced. (Lennie knows.)

Parents kept the youth in constant motion with study and organized activities and clubs of all kinds. They had their own library and book and film clubs. Banquets, bake sales, craft sales and such by the residents raised enough money to pay the teachers for the schools and for the nursery. There were contests of fiction and poetry competition judged gratis by famous New York authors. Sports and social clubs, dances, and beauty contests (one beauty, Harriet Shapiro, changed her name to Susan Cabot and became a well-known “B” movie actress in the 1950s).

These activities went on all the time but always with a social purpose. Uniforms, shirts or banners supported social causes such as that of the Scottsboro Boys and other political prisoners. Fun was important but causes took precedence. Some of the kids at PS 96 had looked forward to a school trip to see the Yankees play but when the ushers went on strike the Coops kids stayed at school rather than cross a picket line. Residents had such a fearsome reputation due to their participation in political rallies, demonstrations, and parades that they were outrageously gerrymandered by City Hall so that their voting bloc was divided in half. “The FBI came around from time to time, talking to the kids,” Lennie says, “asking questions, like if we’d seen (labor leaders) Earl Browder and Gus Hall around lately. They didn’t tell us they were FBI men but it wasn’t very hard to tell. We always told them we didn’t know anybody by those names.”

Gus Hall later became an unflagging candidate for President, never receiving as much as one percent of the vote. He last ran in 1984 and died in 2000 at the age of ninety.

During World War II over three hundred Coops boys volunteered, including Lennie. Harold was too young but was in the Drum and Bugle Corps. He enlisted after the war. Many were captured and wounded, and twelve were killed. Coops residents bought War Bonds, and volunteered at Red Cross Centers collecting blood and making bandages. They put out a newsletter with news and photos of Coops boys in the war.

As a teacher, Lennie never told his students about the social activism of his upbringing in the Coops. “I talked about the Coops in general, he said, but left out the left-wing politics of it. Someone would have talked about it at home, and it would have been blown out of proportion, and I might have been fired. So I just told them about the closeness of the family life, the clubs and athletics and other activities we had.”

Lennie and Harold are tight with their Coops friends who are still living and they all get together as often as possible. There was a Coops reunion a few years ago. Most are nearing eighty now and are retired. Most of them graduated from college and were successful in one way or another, within an economic system their parents had worked so hard to ameliorate. Their work had little effect on the overall character of the economic system but because of their good work as parents, success was easier for the children. Their parents couldn’t afford to buy stocks on Wall Street but the early foundation of books and learning they gave their children was an investment that always appreciates, is forever splitting and multiplying, and doesn’t have to be sold in order for its value to be appreciated.

We make it to Williams, California, 475 miles, our best day so far. It’s a small town of less than 3,000 but looks interesting and after we get settled in the motel I ask Cheryl and Lennie if they want to walk down to the business part of town and look around. Lennie wants to go swimming instead and Cheryl says she’s too tired.  So I stay in my room and write in my log and read a bit in “Flood Summer,” the novel I’m reviewing. I regret now that we didn’t go up the coast highway as if we had we would be in redwood country right now—and Lennie could have visited his Eden, which would be Gilroy, California, the Garlic Capital of the World. So now, no redwoods, no garlic ice cream.

His cold hasn’t improved and he’s outside swimming in the pool. It’s cool here, maybe in the middle 60s. Why doesn’t he feel bad? He refuses to take medications, saying it has a “deleterious effect.”  He agrees to take only the Eucalyptus (all natural) tablets that Cheryl brought along. Maybe they’re helping him. She suggested I take them, too, for prevention.

Because he’s exhausted from the long swim and his cold he sleeps late, until 6:30.  He dresses and goes to the lobby for the Continental Breakfast and to talk to people.  When he comes back he says he talked to a guy whose sister had lived in Anchorage and knew something about the route and the distance. He says the Alcan Highway has lots of gravel and is very slow going. But it’s only 1800 miles more to go. I thought it was 3,000 but wanted to believe him and so I did.

August 15, Monday, day 6

Passing through Weed, in northern California, I remember that this town was where Steinbeck’s Lennie (in Of Mice and Men) got into trouble by petting a girl as if she were a puppy. George had to get him out of there in a big hurry, only to have him do it again, only worse, at the next place. Our Lennie is capable of mischief but so far nobody has died. Anyway, I radio Cheryl that I want to stop and get a photo of the town marker.

Before I can do this I need one of those throwaway cameras as my digital camera has a full chip. So I walk across the street to a drug store and buy one for $4.99. It is not a CVS or any other chain store. It looks like a drug store out of the 1950s except without a soda fountain. It is run by blond women. The one in the pharmacy is probably the mother. The young girl at the register is one daughter and the other one who sells me the camera is the sister, all three very blond and very beautiful. Not even one brunette for social diversity. Lennie should have come with me. He missed it.

Cheryl wants to eat at the “Hungry Moose” down on the main street (she is uncanny for finding the best places to eat and to stay), so we do and it is tasty food. Lennie and I have half a sandwich and soup and Cheryl has the meat loaf. I ask Cheryl if I can have her garlic bread since she is evidently not going to eat it. I know Lennie wants it too but would never in a million years ask. He won’t even take it if offered no matter how hungry he is—unless he sees you’re leaving it. In the motel in Flagstaff I brought him an extra apple from the lobby and he refused to take it. So as we were leaving I pitched it onto the bed. I could see him almost imperceptibly lurch toward it involuntarily. “You’re gonna leave that?” he said.

“Why not?” I said. “You don’t want it.” Of course he grabbed it and was eating it as we were loading up.

As we leave the Hungry Moose, Cheryl points out the postcards and so I buy three, for the only ones I know who would know the town’s tie with Steinbeck, Jim Lee, Paul Benson, and Lyndon Dodge.

Twenty miles from Eugene, Oregon, Lennie is coughing more, sneezing, and blowing his nose on a hand towel he swiped from the motel. It’s about 7:30 on Monday and my back hurts, I’m tired, and I’m homesick. “I feel great!” says Lennie.  “ACHEW!”

Mountains, mountains, mountains. Right now I don’t care if I never see another one. Up and down, through and around, they seem never to end. Oregon has some doozies. At a seven percent grade I have to use third gear most of the time. Miles and more miles of mountains. When the terrain levels out Lennie takes over. He starts passing other trucks. He says he can’t stand to look at the backs of trucks. But I believe part of it is due to his ego.

His ego is a formidable force of its own. It does not allow him to be wrong. He loves to correct my diction. “Big is incorrect. I don’t like big. Large is correct.” A person gets a wild hair, he says, not a wild hare. A wild hare would be ridiculous.  And so on.  He reminds me of my Uncle Wayne. Uncle Wayne always said, “I’m very careful about my pronounciation!”

My back begins to hurt and my right leg aches. At a rest stop I find a shady table and try to lie down on the bench. At first I can’t straighten out. It is like I’m frozen in a sitting position. After a while I begin to relax enough to lie flat. Cheryl sits down with a map and wants to plan the route. Lennie says, “Did I ever tell you the story about the time a skunk got under our house?”

I cut him off. “Lennie, I hate it when you start a sentence with `Did I ever tell you about . . .’” But it doesn’t stop him. Nothing ever does. So I say, “And this story applies to something we’re doing here?”

“Well, you asked Cheryl about the dog and I was gonna tie that in with the skunk.”

“Lennie, I’m exhausted. I’m 2000 miles from home, my back hurts, and my leg aches. Can this story wait?”

Cheryl is uncomfortable with the way I’m rude to him, I think, but doesn’t say anything. She does say, however that she would like to get a motel somewhere past Eugene in order to be past the rush hour traffic in the morning. But when we get there I pass the exits to motels accidentally but she radios us to press on—even though she and I don’t like driving at night. Lennie, of course, loves it, he says, and goes immediately to sleep. He has slept most of the day, due to the effects of his cold, I think. After another 20 miles we see more motels but she rejects them on sight. Near Salem, the capital, she sees a Comfort Inn sign on the highway for exit 252. I take it but don’t know which way to turn. It’s very dark. So I turn—the wrong way, of course. Lennie is asleep. We go a mile in the wrong direction before finding what we think is a turnaround. It doesn’t circle back to the street where I made the wrong turn. It is a turnaround to the Twilight Zone.

I go under a bridge and turn left onto a lonely lane. Cheryl radios to tell me that we’re fine, that we have to come out somewhere. But it’s so dark, will I recognize somewhere when I get there? We go on another mile down lonely lane, stop at a stop sign, and turn left, for no particular reason. Can you be wrong every time? This road passes over a highway but I have no idea which one. I’m driving a 26-ft. truck fully loaded, 40,000 pounds in pitch darkness, and I’m lost. Lennie is snoring.

We finally find “somewhere.” I turn right. We come to a street that looks like the one we exited off the highway onto when I turned the wrong way. It isn’t. But I turn left anyway and go across I-5 again. At least I recognize that. After a mile I stop at a convenience store and the guy inside speaks English!  And he actually lives in the town where he works! It’s like America of the 1950s! He says get back on the street and go right, the way we were going. Pass through seven lights and turn left on Market Street. Pass under the I-5 bridge and we will see lots of motels on both sides of Market.

She selects the Red Lion, a very fancy, enormous motel. The huge parking lot is full and I park alongside the street while she goes in and makes arrangements. She comes out and tells me the desk clerk says to park the truck in back. In the dark I turn into what looks like a through street behind the motel. It isn’t. It is a driveway for what looks like a boarding house. I am barely able to turn Behemoth around in the small space and go back out. I go on one more street, turn left, go one block, turn right and another right and onto the hotel parking lot. I wake up Lennie.

“Are we in Albany?” he says.

August 16, Tuesday, day 7

Salem, Oregon.  Lennie is up at 4:30, dresses and heads for the lobby in search of victims. All victims are asleep so he gets a paper and comes back to the room. I wake up when he comes in. It’s 5:30. His cold seems better. He says he’s on his way to find a laundromat, so while he’s gone I use a tissue to pick up his used Kleenexes and towels and pitch them in the trash. I’m paranoid about getting his cold. When Cheryl gets her chores done we meet in the motel restaurant for breakfast. Lennie takes time out from washing clothes to eat with us. Back in the room he comes in with all our clothes, clean and folded.

It’s cool here and Salem and Portland are lush and the air is relatively clean. And of course there’s the mighty Columbia. We cross it at Portland on a high suspension bridge and another river on a drawbridge. Seattle is clogged with rush hour cars. Cheryl says it has little in common with the Seattle of her college days here.

From there we drive to Bellingham, Washington, where we will soon cross the border into Canada. We can see Victoria across the bay.  From Salem it has been only eight hours, a short day of driving for us, less than 400 miles. Lewis and Clark, when they came through here some time ago, made only six miles a day.

Bellingham is a slow-paced town. We stay in a nice motel, the first one with computer privileges.  Cheryl isn’t hungry so Lennie and I walk down the street to a little greasy spoon burger joint for salads, just about the worst I’ve ever chewed on. I get tired of chewing before I get full so we give up and go back through the cold night air to the room. Lennie’s cold is getting worse but he refuses to wear a jacket. He can’t give in to adversity. The next morning I get up early and go down to the lobby and use the computer to read my e-mail. There’s a large number of messages from TIL council members trying to agree on a meeting date.  I vote for September 17, the latest date available, though I’m still not sure I’ll be home in time to make that.

Then, Lennie comes in and says there’s a crisis. Remember the white package of materials Cheryl gave us to keep back in Dallas? Well, good, because neither of us remembers it. Where is it? A search of the truck turns up nothing. Then we realize we don’t even know what we’re looking for. She says it was the “Trip-Tik” or something like that, the chug-hole by chug-hole map of the Alaska Highway to Anchorage given to her by AAA. Oh, that package. Now I think I vaguely remember something on that order. Lennie is obsessed with pleasing her so he rushes inside the lobby and begins frantically to make out his own version of a Trip-Tik, Lennie style.  I swing into action as well. I call AAA on my handy cell phone, a new one I got in Flagstaff, which miraculously works, and I’m told to come on down, about ten blocks, and they’ll make us another one. Cheryl has called too and so we start out.

All turns out well, even better than the first time. Someone here tells Cheryl that the route she had before had some bad roads on it and that the one she has now has all good roads. The heat is off and so are we pretty soon, onward, into Canada.

Of course we go the wrong way, this time about 15 miles in the wrong direction. Cheryl, whose road instincts are better than ours, decides we should cut across through the countryside in order to get back to the highway. We’re all glad we do, because it’s lovely farming country with neat rural homes along the roadside. We pass through little villages, one named Lynden, before eventually coming out, as Cheryl predicted, at Interstate-5.

At the border, a severe Customs official in the booth quizzes me and we have to show our drivers licenses and birth certificates. I tell her we’re with the woman behind us in the green car. We’re bringing her household goods to Anchorage where she will work there at the Anchorage Daily News as the International News Editor. At the Dallas Morning News she had been the Books Editor and I was one of her reviewers. This Customs woman is colder than lime sherbet in Amarillo. In December. But she allows us to go through without a search. Lennie calls her “Ilsa Koch.”

Our highway through British Columbia starts out as a tollway, costing $20 Canadian ($14 American) for Behemoth. It’s a long winding drive through the mountains, always the mountains, we have to have mountains. We gas up in a small town and while Lennie takes care of it I trot across the parking lot in search of a urinal. A department store has one and on the way out I see a wonderful set of  three jazz CDs for six dollars on a sale table. That’s about $4.20 back home. What a bargain! Next we repair to a McDonalds and eat a sandwich while Cheryl goes to change her American dollars into Canadian. (She’s spending three to four hundred dollars a day on gas and you can get a better rate at the bank than at the pump.) Lennie says we don’t have to do this so we don’t. We go next door, past the Edward Jones office, to a little market and get some fresh fruit.

Back on the road Lennie drives and I keep him awake by irritating him. As always, I try, unsuccessfully, to breach his highly fortified wall of protection against the world’s unwillingness to allow him to be its ruler. We pass through Hope, Merritt, Kamloops, and many tiny roadside villages before arriving at Cache Creek, where we stay the night, at the Bonaparte Motel. It’s located on Highway 97. When I come in the room after calling Brenda, Lennie is sitting in front of the TV. He had already complained to Tom, the proprietor, who is a Japanese guy, telling him that the TV remote in our room isn’t working. So Tom says to Lennie, “You sit close in front of TV. You use buttons on front.” So that is why he was sitting that way.

Lennie is fascinated with him. “He’s frugal,” Lennie says. “I bet he has no employees. I bet he does all the work around here himself.” But Tom is not fascinated with Lennie. “I went over there to the office and I saw him peep through the window blinds, and when he saw me coming he ducked back inside and wouldn’t come out,” Lennie says. He pitches my log book and novel onto the bed and tells me I left it in the office.

I curse myself for being so forgetful. Later I say to Lennie, “Maybe he expects that you’re coming to complain about something else.” But I really don’t know. I think he’s just mystified, confused about Lennie, doesn’t understand his New York attempts at humor.

After that cat and mouse incident Lennie starts referring to him as “Yamamoto.”

When Tom learns we’re heading to Anchorage he tells us it is 1800 miles and very rough going, that we ought to take the ferry at Port Rupert. Later we walk a block up the highway to eat at a little place called Chums. I tell Cheryl what Tom suggested.

Lennie and I get up at four a.m. and go across the highway to the A&W for coffee. Truckers are coming in for breakfast. We go back to the room and Lennie goes back to sleep. His cold is about the same. He sneezes more and when he laughs he goes into a spasm of coughing.

I sit and think about this 1800 mile problem. The man in Williams, California, told Lennie it was 1800 miles to Anchorage. So we drive 1200 miles north to Cache Creek, B.C., and the proprietor of the motel tells us it’s still 1800 miles to Anchorage. At the B&W I asked the guy at the register for a mileage chart and it said 2,200 miles to Anchorage from Cache Creek. In the U.S. a traveler can gain mileage by driving consistently toward his destination. In Canada, apparently, that traveler loses mileage and sometimes at an astonishing rate. How does one lose 400 miles simply by remaining stationary overnight? Is it the metric system? Has the earth’s rotation shifted somehow like the time zones? Are there mileage zones? Have we somehow passed the center of the earth and are now traveling in the opposite direction? Travel books seem to omit this phenomenon.

Lennie doesn’t care how many miles we lose. Unlike myself, he is able to enjoy the moment. He does not look toward the end. He does not plan for the return trip home. He likes being here in Canada. He likes the “frugality” of it. He suspects that since it is not so rich a country as the U.S the people are not as wasteful. Restaurants give you only one napkin and sometimes you have to ask for it. At the rest stops along the highway the toilets have no plumbing. Tom cut Lennie’s coffee off at half a cup. When Lennie tried to take the local newspaper, Tom said, “You read here!” People here can’t afford to be wasteful, Lennie says. Products are hard to come by. Newspapers in many places are dropped from planes. Lennie abhors the wastefulness in America, as I do, and Cheryl, too.

August 17, Wednesday, day 8

I talk to Cheryl about my remarks last night regarding the ferry. I explain to her about my “Sundowner’s Syndrome” problem I have and for her not to pay any attention to what I say after the sun goes down. She says she understands and thought it was a good idea, in fact. She called about it and was told that pets can travel by ferry but must stay in the car, in the hold, and can be visited for only fifteen minutes a day. Of course she rejected this but said she learned that she could have packaged her goods in a pod or something and sent them all by rail or truck to Bellingham where they would be loaded onto the ferry for the rest of the trip to Anchorage. She could have driven with Charley Bill and Pink. But I tell her it is morning now and I’m feeling fine and ready to get back on the trail, that I’m happy she did it this way. But I do look forward to passing the point where the laws of forward motion are no longer operating in reverse.

But my good cheer turns out to be of short duration. Near Quesnel, Lennie is telling me about his girlfriend’s family history when I ask him how he knows all this information. Suddenly he explodes. I’ve never seen or heard such a rant. I’m questioning his integrity, he says. He’s like Mount St. Helens and I’m a happy lark choosing the wrong time to fly over its crater. I try to explain that I’m not suggesting he’s lying or that she’s lying. I just wondered whether she volunteered this autobiography or he solicited it. Though I have to interview people occasionally, I go on, they never tell me such detailed stories about themselves. He settles down but I don’t think he believes me. He should have been a reporter instead of a teacher, I think.  In any case, about the time I get the volcano cooled down, he falls asleep driving. All that boiling lava takes energy, I guess. I must have dozed off myself while reading as the last thing I remember is trying to read my book and then hearing,

“LENNIE! LENNIE! WAKE UP LENNIE! WAKE UP!

I look over and see that we’re on the wrong side of the highway. I instinctively reach for the wheel and he pushes my hand away and starts yelling again. He quickly drives back onto his side of the highway. It was Cheryl screaming into the radio. Mount St. Lennie erupts again. He’s sick of me and will be renting a car at the next stop and heading back on his own and how dare I tell him he can’t go see his own ex-wife. And now I’m to have a sexual encounter with my own self.

This time the explosion is so great and the lava flowing so violently that I decide not to say anything, not even that I couldn’t possibly be responsible for this eruption, as I was asleep. Suddenly he gets on the radio and tells Cheryl that he wasn’t asleep, that he was “straightening out the curve,” apparently an old New York driving method to save wear and tear on tires. I don’t know. What I do know is that three seconds after Cheryl screamed into the radio, a truck came around the curve and would have met us head-on. “This is why I like to travel alone and live alone,” he says.  Now he says he’s really going to get that rental car.

We travel on through many villages, including Clinton, Williams Lake, Quesnel, and Prince George. Finally, we stop at a town called Chetwynn, 60 miles south of Dawson Creek, for the night. I make a phone call to Dawson Creek and set Lennie up with a rental car there. I write down the telephone number and address and give it to him. I tell him I hope he changes his mind, that I don’t want to go on without him but if he’s dead-set on doing it then he should. The Alcan begins at Dawson Creek and I’ll be in the truck alone. Oh man. Bumps and gravel. High mountains. Glacial peaks.

We eat at the Chinese restaurant next door. I think it’s pretty good but Cheryl doesn’t and Lennie says it is awful. I’m not a judge of food. I don’t tell Cheryl anything about Mount. St. Lennie.

August 18, Thursday, day 9

This morning I overhear a geezer yapping to the motel receptionist about New Jersey and so introduce him to Lennie, as being from New York. I vanish and when I come back the geezer is gone. “He just wanted to play oneupmanship,” Lennie says. The geezer sees me and comes back and I find myself doing the talking. Lennie is suddenly Harpo Marx. The geezer’s name is Emil Heck and he’s a retired professor of ecology at some college in New Jersey. He and the wife are visiting their son who works in Chetwynn with a chemical company. I wonder how this occupation fits in with the old man’s views on ecology. Anyway, again, the two don’t make a love connection. It has something to do with physics, I think.

At Dawson Creek I pull over and go back to her car and tell her that Lennie will be parting company with us here, that I had promised him we’d be in Anchorage on August 18th and we’re still a four days away. I say he has plans to see his children. I still don’t tell her about Mount St. Lennie. They talk and I vanish. When he gets back in the cab he says they reached an agreement about the dog. She would find a vet and get some sedating pills so I could drive her car and they could ride together in the truck, a plan to separate us—and give her some relief from driving--and thereby solve all his problems. A good idea, and fine with me. I think all he wanted was for her to ask him not to leave.

As I write this Lennie and I are waiting at a gas station-convenience store waiting for her to return from the vet. He has befriended a trucker, Alan, who is also headed for Anchorage and will be there on Sunday night. He tells Lennie that the Alcan is a tough road, that long strips of it are treacherous and curvy. Oh god. Yet, I’m naturally skeptical of things I hear from people. In matters of this nature I always remember the Iceland-Greenland story. When the Vikings (not the football team) discovered these two bodies of land in the Arctic Ocean they decided to give them deceptive names. The one covered with icebergs and glaciers, they called Greenland. The other, which is a wonderland of lush greenery and hot springs bubbling out of the earth, they named Iceland. So I’m beginning to suspect that Alaskans don’t want any more influxers.

In any case, “Al,” as Lennie now calls his new best friend, has said he may need some help with his apparatus, tightening the chains on his cargo or something, “and said he’d call me if he needed me but maybe he’s afraid I don’t really want to help.” He comes back after a while and is excited about this wonderful Japanese restaurant in Anchorage that Al has just told him about that you just have to experience to believe it. It’s costly, fifty dollars a person, but your have your own Japanese chef right there at your feet cooking your own personal Japanese meal. It’s fifty dollars but the meal of a lifetime! An unforgettable dining experience!

I don’t tell Lennie this but when it comes to eating out I can’t think of anything worse.  But there’s something I can visualize: another breakdown in Anchorage when I finally have to tell him I’m not too keen on taking truckers’ recommendations on fine dining.

Cheryl arrives soon with the medication and asks us to give her 30 minutes for the medication to take effect and then we can begin the new regime. Lennie is in a good mood after all this. The dog is tranquilized, Cheryl is riding in the cab with him, and he’s grooving on his visions of a Japanese chef at his feet with “Al” smiling beatifically somewhere in Truckerland. He’s in such a good mood that he volunteers to drive the Toyota at the next rest stop. I have a sudden vision of my own, that of this huge dog coming out of his stupor and biting Lennie in the back of the neck.  But this doesn’t happen and we continue on our way up the Alcan Highway, happy travelers once more, on to Fort Nelson.

Along this stretch the Alcan is straight and flat, and we make good time. Here Lennie asks if I’m ready to get in with the sedated dog and I say okay. So I get in and he looks at me drowsily and lies back down. He doesn’t reappear but once, when I burp, and he gets up and looks around. Nothing at all from Pink, though I try to get her attention when we pass Pink Mountain. She’s playing the quiet game.

August 19, Friday, day 10

Fort Nelson. I’m sitting in the cab of the truck at 6:30 a.m. writing this before I’ve even had coffee. We’re at a Ramada Inn. Lennie and Cheryl are in the lobby having the Continental breakfast, muffins and coffee.  I’m cutting back on the coffee because of the morning pit stops I have to make repeatedly, slowing the operation down. That’s hard on me, too, because I like coffee in the morning, with lots of cream. I like it better than almost anything. But we have to reach White Horse, 600 miles, by tonight, “experts say,” as there’s nowhere else to spend the night. This may be true but I don’t believe much of what people along the way say. The infamous Alcan Highway, at least the first few hundred of its 1,422 miles, have been the best we’ve had so far. I was happy to see that it was straight and very smooth, smooth compared, say, to Interstate-5 in California.

Cheryl comes out to the truck and tells me she was kept awake all night by rowdy teenagers threatening to break into the rooms and into the truck. I saw some teenagers last night who were partying in the room next to ours but they seemed nice enough. There were lots of them out having their equivalent of fun. It was Friday night. Lennie and I had gone down the street, which is the Alcan Highway, to eat and see what’s what. There was only a convenience store-gas station and a Chinese-American food joint to choose from so we took the joint.  We were the only ones in there except for a table of roughnecks. Fort Nelson is known for its gas and oil fields, and has the largest gas processing plant in Canada.

On the way back to the motel we passed by the local teen hangout. They were being their natural, frenetic, adolescent selves, oblivious to the world outside their cocoon. A high wind bringing dust from the countryside came out of nowhere and barreled down the alleyways between the buildings, and no one noted the two old men hurrying to shelter to escape it.

I get out of the cab and go inside where Lennie is talking to people. He introduces me to them. He is saying something about a particular news story and the proprietor, a red-faced, blustery man, says he would shoot the lying media in the head if they came to his motel asking questions. I get some coffee and go outside to the picnic bench to drink it.

I think this man is an exception in Canada and, after all, we are in the outlands, the middle of nowhere. One man told me the other day that people out here are generally misfits, escaping from the world. I told him that description pretty well fits me, too, though I was only escaping for a couple of weeks. But the people I’ve seen so far along the Alcan are agreeable and helpful. They have to be. It’s remote and people need one anther to survive. Instead of road rage you’ll see road aid, as, sooner or later, if you drive on the Alcan long enough, I’m told, you’ll need help. In 1947, five years after the highway was begun, the temperature dropped to a record low, to –81 degrees, near Beaver Creek. Cars, and people, break down at these temperatures. It was built by the military, for military purposes during World War II to connect the mainland U.S. to Alaska. It was dedicated in 1996 as one of the engineering marvels of the modern world. I love the Alcan. For the entire length of it there are no billboards, no endless strips of look-alike chain stores and shopping malls, no drivers talking on cell phones, and there’s a virtual absence of all the other routine vulgarities of urban life. Cell phones don’t work out here, and neither do car radios. And, except for short strips through villages, there are no intersections.

By 5:30 p.m., after 300 miles, we are into Yukon, just past Watson Lake. Here begins the storied Yukon, storied because Jack London and Robert W. Service made it into stories. One of my favorite radio shows as a boy was “Challenge of the Yukon” with Sgt. Preston of the Northwest Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his faithful dog Yukon King. Sgt. Preston outdid other radio heroes because he and King tracked down wrongdoers and brought them to justice while at the same time braving blizzards, snowstorms, and howling sub-zero winds. But I’m sorry to report that in August there are no blizzards in Yukon, not even Dairy Queen Blizzards—there are no Dairy Queens. I have seen no Mounties.

What I do see are glassine lakes, snow-topped mountains, glaciers, elk, moose, mountain goats, and caribou hanging around the highway. Two bears come down the mountainside to cross the highway to fish in the river but scramble away and disappear into the timber when they see my camera aimed at them. Yukon is more than twice the size of Great Britain and larger than all the New England states combined but has a population of only 30,000. For someone like myself, whose little town has been smothered by influxers, I can think of no greater place to be right now.

Along this scenic stretch of highway lies Muncho Lake, considered to be one of the most beautiful in the world. It has a unique tint attributed to the copper oxide that seeps into it.

Beyond Fort Nelson the Alcan changed slightly from straight and flat to hilly and twisting grades and deep river valleys all the way to Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain is enormous and virtually free of vegetation. Driving toward it you get the impression that you’re going directly into it and that it will block the highway. There is also the illusion that it is ever receding as you approach it. The land up here is gigantic and the proportions are gigantic. Mountains seem to grow larger as you go north and rivers grow wider and whiter. Rivers are silvery and seem to rush ever onward endless optimism, like the people who live in this remote land. Other than the trigger-happy motel proprietor (who was, again, an aberration) people here seem actually sunny though they get very little direct sunlight. They also get very little television reception. Maybe this has a bearing on their well being. It occurs to me that they remind me of us in the U.S in the 1990s. I actually saw bumper stickers stating, “CLINTON LIED.”

There are lots of new lies coming out of Washington to catch up on, it seems to me. But they’re probably better off not knowing what they are.

One is that global warming does not exist. Anyone not believing this should come here. The thawing of the permafrost and the glaciers is obvious to any traveler. Also the spruce beetles, which thrive in warmer climates, have ravaged millions of acres of timber in Canada and Alaska, and are moving north all the way to Greenland. For miles and miles along the highway we see the effects of their voracious appetite, the withering corpses of spruces numbering in the millions.

August 20, Saturday, day 11

Although we didn’t quite make White Horse we found a nice motel last night in Teslin, a village of about 500.  Next door is a quaint grocery store, with most anything you might need. Local teenagers congregate here and sit at tables in the front of the store and drink soft drinks and chat. I needed some things, batteries for the walkie-talkies, and a few things to munch on. Lennie stayed in the room and tried to get C-Span, an impossibility. So we ended up watching a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, which we agreed is really a comedy. I fell asleep listening to Lennie laughing through spasms of coughing.

This morning we gas up and depart for our next destination, passing through White Horse after about 120 miles. There are lots of things for tourists to enjoy in White Horse, including hot springs, and even a book store, but we’re not tourists. We’re on a mission. It is the largest town in Yukon, 23,000 population, more than two-thirds the population of the entire province. Much of the way here, we followed the shores of Teslin Lake and crossed the Teslin River at Johnson’s Crossing. Along the way we pulled over and stopped, as I felt a compulsion to go down and wash my face in the Teslin’s frigid waters. The best way I know of to get a taste of Yukon.

We pass Mt. Logan, Canada’s highest, near Haines Junction, and can’t stop gazing at the ice fields, the world’s most expansive outside the polar regions. They look like enormous lakes of ice that have spilled down from the mountaintops and flowed out from the foothills. Tiny villages along the highway come and go, like Destruction Bay on the shore of Kluane Lake. It acquired its name from a storm that destroyed most of the military buildings here during the highway’s construction.

Onward through Beaver Creek to the American border 20 miles away—Alaska! Yeehah! We’re driving in miles now and don’t have to extrapolate kilometers.

The Customs officer here is cordial, proving that you don’t have to behave like Ilsa Koch just because you wear a uniform.

We stop at the first American store we see and bask in the sight of prices in American dollars.

We soon arrive in Tok, after our best day of mileage, 577 miles. So much for the anecdotal stores about the bad highway. Here we eat supper at an enormous log restaurant and I call Brenda, Cheryl now has a cell phone signal. She tells us that she called her realtor and learned that she has an apartment! All this time she feared she’d have to store her goods and stay in a hotel. Afterwards, she goes and finds us a motel, this time behind a liquor store.

August 21, Sunday, day 13 

We return to the log restaurant for breakfast and on the way out of town stop at the Burnt Paw and Cabins Outback to see the sled-dog sale and rental outfit. It’s run by Bill Arpino, who says he’s out of dogs right now. He say he deals only in dogs that want to work, that he cares little for their eye color or shape of their tail. He has no use for dogs that are “hell-bent on roamin’, divin’, diggin’, and duckin’.”  (A good description of my father, I whisper to Cheryl.)

Then on toward Anchorage. Within minutes Mount St. Lennie erupts again. Outside of Tok we come to an intersection. Right goes to Fairbanks. Left goes to a town I don’t recognize but I know it’s south that we want to go but since the sign doesn’t specifically state Anchorage I stop for a powwow. Lennie and Cheryl are talking and I pull away before they had “consummated their conversation,” as he put it. So, Kablooey! More lava. And this time debris is thrown about and I am to once again have sex with myself. I apologize profusely and egregiously, and after awhile it’s all over.

It’s a scenic stretch of highway but with many miles of twisty, narrow turns through the mountains. Glaciers cover many of the mighty peaks but some have melted, leaving scars gouged into the mountainside as they slid down into the valleys. At Grand View Lodge, near Glennallen, we see another magnificent log restaurant. We stop for gas and food. The “grand view” refers to the magnificent glaciers all around. Tourists view them through telescopes provided by the restaurant. Lennie flummoxes Cheryl by acting out a story in which he finds it necessary to stand and give the Nazi salute and say, “Heil Hitler!”  Others in the room forget about the glaciers and look our way.

We make several scenic stops, one at which I buy a Modern Library edition of the Selected Works of Sigmund Freud for 25 cents. It lay inexplicably on a table filled with religious books for sale. I hope to use it to give Lennie some help.

At around seven p.m. we arrive in Anchorage.  Cheryl leads us to the newspaper offices and gives us a happy, celebratory hug on the parking lot. We go in and meet her new boss and tour the offices. Then, it’s on to the motel she has arranged. We’re exhausted. 

Monday, August 22, day 14, 8:00 a.m. 

I find an outfit in the telephone directory called Fly4Less and make a reservation to fly home tomorrow on Frontier, leaving at 11:10 p.m. Lennie thinks he will take the ferry back. I give him the phone number for the ferry and also for Avis in case he wants to drive. I’m writing this in my log as I sit in the truck outside Cheryl’s apartment waiting for three men to unload all the stuff inside. I’m trying to stay out of their way, and hers, as she’s very focused on this job. I’m lucky to be writing in my log at all as I left it again. When we got to the restaurant this morning for breakfast, I realized I had left it behind in the motel room. Cheryl said for me to order her pancakes and she’d go back and get it. Lennie suggested “we wait until a more convenient time.”

“There is no more convenient time,” I said. After she left, he said, “I can’t believe she went back after that.”

After a while she came back with the logbook, also “Flood Summer,” my review book, and my Freud anthology.  It had come close to being a terrible loss.

It’s raining softly and the wind is blustery and very cool, maybe 50 degrees. After the unloaders have finished, we prepare to leave for downtown where Cheryl has arranged for us to check into the plush Cook Hotel.  She’s rearranging her truck space, putting the seat back up when I see the dog in my rearview mirror. He’s come down the steps of the apartment and is heading toward the great Alaskan wilderness that lies beyond her back yard. She panics and approaches the world’s sprint record time as she gets back there in a flash and restrains him somehow.  Lennie’s statement that Alaska is a long way to bring him just to be eaten by a pack of wolves almost comes true on the first day.

The hotel is much too nice for us but I suspect Cheryl wanted to show us her gratitude for helping her. I won’t be staying here tonight but Lennie will enjoy it.

For dinner we go to a seafood restaurant, The Sourdough Mining Company, recommended by her boss. It is huge. The parking lot is filled but I don’t care, as I don’t have to worry about parking Behemoth. We turned it in this morning. We order Alaska sockeye salmon and what a treat! I’m not a great seafood fan but I like this. Lennie soon learns that at an adjacent table there is a family on vacation from Carrollton. The dad, Jacob Marshall, is a lawyer. Of course he gives us his card.

Our tab is $91.00, including celebratory beer, and Lennie insists on paying. Since he’s so expansive I leave a $20 tip.  I’m going home.

Since I have to be at the airport before ten we have to hurry. I stop in at the hotel art galleries to pick out something nice for Brenda and by the time I get through it’s time to go. Before leaving, though, I learn that Lennie’s ferry idea has fallen through. It doesn’t sail for several more days. And the car rental plan is also kaput, since no one will rent a car to take that far. So he asks me to help him get a flight.  The only one that leaves on the next day is to Seattle on United, leaving at midnight. He takes this one for $365, the same cost as mine to Dallas. He grouses a bit but wants it anyway in order to get a car in Seattle and drive to Albuquerque to see his daughter, Cassandra, and then to Austin where his son Jonah lives. I tell him goodbye and we shake hands, still friends after all these miles. I know he’ll call me when he gets back to help him get his Pathfinder at Cheryl’s house. We’re friends. I accept his rage though no one else will, other than his brother and maybe his children, because that’s his only way of being honest. He accepts my hard counter-punches (passive attacks?) though hardly anyone else will, for the same reason--it’s nice to know someone who doesn’t judge you by your worst traits.

I say goodbye to Cheryl at the airport and she thanks me again and wishes me a good flight. I wish her good luck on her new job. I say I think she will like Alaska. It’s a good place for people like her who are tolerant of others who are not in the mainstream, maybe even in the undertow—like me and Lennie, for example. Alaska is a good place for those who want only to live and let live. She quotes Bill Arpino, the dog sled man back in Tok. “We don’t care if the dog’s got floppy ears, brown eyes, and six toes. It’s just her performance that matters.”

From the plane I look down into the blackness, no city lights anywhere to be seen. I think about all the many times I’ve studied the map and wondered about all these little settlements out in the middle of nowhere with no highways going to them. Who lives out there and what do they do? Who are these people? How do they live? Why are they there? Now I know. They’re spirited people who cherish this land’s abundance of all things natural, including individual freedom. They’re in no hurry. They give the impression they don’t want to be celebrities, or anyone other than themselves. In storefronts they sit to gossip and tell stories the way we used to do on our front porches. Gas field roughnecks, fishermen, motorcyclists, teenagers, old people, Aleuts, together, seemingly in real community.

In six hours I’ll be in Denver, where I’ll make connections to Dallas. An hour and a half after that I’ll be at DFW Airport. I don’t fly much and am still in awe of the speed of these big jets. Going through the detectors, I get zapped. I think it’s because I have a one-way ticket but it turns out to be more serious. They go over me pretty intimately with the divining rod and turn up nothing. Then a severe-looking functionary approaches me with a can of WD-40. “This was in your carry-on,” he says.

“Oh shit.” I say this in a very low register. Lennie strikes again. That’s the can of WD-40 we’d been looking for back in Cache Creek. Lennie had stuffed it in my bag and forgot about it. So now I’m a dangerous character. Then I begin to worry that he had also dropped in the duct tape from back in Needles. I guess not, as they seem to be willing to take a chance and allow me to board.

So I feel lucky to be sitting in my seat. That’s why I don’t complain when the young guy sitting in the aisle seat beside me takes off his shoes and socks and picks at his toes. Then he props them up on the seat in front of him. The steward asks him to desist in this behavior and the kid argues with him. The steward looks at me as if to elicit my help. I close my eyes and fade away. I don’t care if the guy takes off his pants and underwear.

I’m going home.

Tom Dodge Books
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