Journeys Afoot in North America
Part I, Early Walks
In the summer of 1968 I hopped freights to Colorado to meet my son for mountain climbing. On Capitol Peak, whose knife edge was too dangerous for him at thirteen, a golden brown alpine ferret followed me a long way down. My son nearly got to see it where he waited.
Our next objective, Grizzly Peak, was hard to reach; we were grateful that friends in Denver had loaned a truck. He got discouraged on Grizzly, my veteran, hardly believing when I said, "Honest, only ten feet more and you're up." I remembered his first insistent climb with me, when at six years old he was so light we had tied a short rope between us to keep the wind from taking him away. Now he was heavy for it but made up in heart what he lacked in strength.
We helped the San Juan range celebrate its wettest July in thirty years. It could have been the Pacific Northwest, or Scotland; after El Diente I was so cold with exhaustion that my son put me in his warmer sleeping bag. He had stayed back on this one too, at a high pass with old shack still standing, because of a grim foreboding that had come to me at sunset the evening before.
Near Mount Wilson a miner welcomed us to his trim cabin. There was a box out in the brook for refrigerator and a black stove inside to ward off chill. This cheerful man taught us the navy method to wash dishes: always rinse with a final kettle of scalding water. On a peg hung his dark beret. Perhaps by now he has found the lode; we had a clear gold sunrise from his ridge before walking and driving away.
Then my son had to go home. After returning the truck I walked toward the Sioux country to see Crazy Horse's statue and to visit Little Big Horn where, for once, the Indians had beaten the cavalry.
As fall berries ripened I started west on roads close to the route of Lewis and Clark. In a bend of Marias River who should visit my camp but an aroused group of men with guns? It seemed a ranchwife had sworn to seeing some giant who shouldered his bundle and fled up a slope. Soon reassured they left with embarrassed grins, but it was disquieting for me to see a fable born, since mine were the only tracks in that dirt.
In Browning. a man named Shoe spoke with pride of how his firefighting team of Blackfeet had beaten the Zuñis. A trucker hauling hard wheat took me just under Glacier Park into western Montana. He said the wheat would go overseas, too good for Americans.
After Libby I left the truck to cut south on a state road through the Cabinet Mountains. This allowed a camp under the magnificent cedars of Ross Creek. You'd need a sequoia alongside to believe any tree could be bigger. Is anything quieter than a quiet wood? The fronds drape on a young western cedar like the folds of a woman's dress. But these were nearly out of sight overhead.
Waking from a cedar sleep, I continued south to Noxon, then backtracked up the Clark Fork to Missoula, where the Lewis and Clark route could be rejoined over Lolo Pass.
Another trucker offered a ride, and pointed out the sign warning that there'd be no more gas stations for 60 miles. Even roads along the huge Selway–Bitterroot Wilderness share its remoteness. The Clearwater flowed into the Snake, some miles after the latter's nearly 8,000-foot Hell Canyon, North America's deepest. Where the Snake meets the Columbia there is a little park which was my camp. One river peacefully roiled the other.
In eastern Oregon a welldigger, who had sheltered me with his family, accepted as a parting present serviceberries gathered along the Clearwater. They would "eat some and plant some." At Hood River I stopped a few weeks to pick apples. The rising sun was ruddy on Mount Hood in the morning and Mount Adams could be seen across the Columbia. No question of my getting wealthy; they said for that one had to pick more than he ate.
The rich apples hung down as you walked under trees; another picker, ex-Navy man who hated Marines, would take revenge by punching out apples. "Take that, Gyrene!" Indians, hoboes, drunks getting straightened out, grass—runners on the lam, black—hatted Hutterites, even a team of Japanese participated in the orchard democracy. The Japs were best; when the stentorian call rang out, "trac—TOR, trac—TOR", we knew they'd filled another bin.
As I continued toward Portland, two kids offered a seat in their car next to a bale of hay being carried in honor of a girl they loved. She was referred to as Horseface, in tones so reverent as to belie the epithet. Hay makes a bristly car companion. When on a beach of Columbia River sand the bale was burned as a sacrifice to their friend, I watched the tall flame cast a molten path far out into the water. I liked that aspect of punk style.
They then took me on to Portland where I offered my own hopeless sacrifice of a yellow rose, not even finding out if the barefoot one had made something of herself. At Fort Clatsop the Lewis and Clark route ended; now rides came lucky for a return to Denver, where I wintered.