Eric Green: Poetics, risk, and a last road trip
In 1989, a preacher, mildly senile at 84, escaped from a nursing home in Maryland and drove the car north, still wearing his pajamas, crashing the vehicle into a guard rail on Interstate 91 in Saint Johnsbury, Vermont. The car was collected by a garage owner known as the Wizard and towed to Railroad Street Mobil while the escapee was returned to the home. Had his desire been Canada or to forestall the clamp of approaching death, no one will ever know.
A week later I received a phone call from the Wizard, a nickname earned through his remarkable abilities with machinery.
“Eric, would you know anyone who might need a car that doesn’t look so great, but runs perfectly?”
He had pulled the main dent out of the body and realigned the front end.
“Should run fine for a lot of miles,” he added.
The Wizard was known for understatement.
No idea it was about to become a legend, the car was a bicentennial Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale Holiday Coupe, and after my friend Ben paid $200 for it that same month, it ran with only one (rather clairvoyant) stutter for an additional 100,000 miles until it exploded into an oily fire one morning in Santa Cruz, the Wizard’s prophecy holding true.
Ben left Maine for California that fall in the Preacher — the obvious nickname. I painted a small flowing arrow on the door for good luck and can still see his taillights heading west. Little did I know that afternoon that Ben would not return to his childhood home for the next 26 years.
In 1991, I flew to Los Angeles, met Ben, and after a day’s work with screen and Bondo we closed over an elongated rust hole around the rear window that allowed water into the trunk of the Preacher, changed the engine oil, pinned a photo of Jimi Hendrix to the dash, and began our three-state voyage north. This was a road trip, without air-conditioning, before GPS, no set route, no sleeping in motels, just a willingness to experience whatever happened. We had been invited to a wedding in Seattle, but that was the only mark on the map or calendar.
Leaving the smog of L. A. behind, we motored toward Death Valley, sweet desert air swirling through the open windows. It was in Baker that the Preacher showed its clairvoyant side. Baker is one of those places that everyone who has visited seems to dislike. I am no exception. We had stopped to stock up on supplies before our descent into the Valley, finding exorbitant prices on everything everywhere in town, even water. But Baker was a monopoly and knew they had you.
After some grumbling, we paid and exited, only to find a large green puddle under the Preacher. I can attest that replacing a water pump (almost $100 but at least they had one) in 107 degree heat and blazing sunshine is a misery, the tools burning my fingers.
To be rolling again, ice cold beer soothing in hand, evening cooling, desert sunset glowing red at the horizon, is the kind of contrast that makes the open road wonderful and memorable. Each moment has a way of being charged by emotion of one kind or another. For me, it was also the first time I wasn’t behind the wheel; my consistent role since 1975 had always been as the driver. Ben decided he wanted to helm the entire trip himself, which was unarguable since it was his vehicle. (There is something about the road that inspires the concept of the hero.)
At Zabriskie Point we stopped in the 100-degree darkness and wandered about. Suddenly the entire area was lit in blinding light as if a massive strobe had been switched on from the sky. I was so startled I was knocked to the ground. Looking up I saw the acid green tail of a meteor flash across the heavens.
We continued west through the heart of Death Valley, the sole vehicle, pulling over occasionally to allow the antifreeze to stop boiling — that new water pump was coming in rather handy. At the deserted visitor center, we washed from a hose off a spigot and experienced another oddity in our ignorance. We were both instantly freezing, actually shivering uncontrollably. We jumped into the Preacher, turned on the heater and attempted to warm up — in 95-degree dryness. The rapidly evaporating wash water had plummeted our core temperatures dangerously.
As we rose in elevation, the outside air cooled, and once we entered a reasonable sleeping climate, we took a few hours rest. During that summer, I was obsessed with my first novel, which I had just finished. I realize now that it was just awful, but at the time I was excited and wanted to live out some of the things my protagonist had done in the book. One of these was buying a cowboy hat in Lone Pine.
Once we reached Route 395, the highway seemed to claim us. No, we didn’t gamble in Reno. We did swim in Mono Lake, by far the most brackish water I’ve ever been in, not to mention being nibbled by myriad tiny shrimp as we gazed at tapered monoliths that could’ve inspired Gaudi. This wonderful place was bizarrely deserted. I think Mainers imagine California to be crowded, but I discovered, at least during that era, how empty parts of it actually were.
After crossing over miles and miles of untouched tundra, we motored into Alturas, which would become the hometown of one of my later fictional characters. There was a lumbering hotel out of another century, a classic barber shop across the street where Ben got a haircut, the whole place feeling like a Western movie from the 1950s in early Technicolor. A bit farther up the road, not even sure why, we stopped at a roadside jumble store run by two lesbians. When I bought a blanket, they told us about a secret hot springs stream over the Oregon border.
I still dream about that stretch of road. It ran through an antelope reserve, a simple paved swath without shoulders ambling through empty tufted grasslands. During a long hour, the only vehicle we saw was a ramshackle pickup driven by a weathered native who waved calmly in passing. One antelope, skittish until we slowed to a crawl, actually leapt across our path as soft clouds meandered in the distance.
We found the secret place, and just as described, incomprehensibly hot water flowed in and out of bubbling pools in the middle of an enormous flat field of rough grass.
Strange things happen on a road trip. I called Ben yesterday and asked him if I could relay this one.
“Why not?” he said. “It’s part of the story. It shows how the stress of travel can build up over time.”
What Ben did was lock the keys in the running car, parked many miles down a dirt road pretty far from anywhere. No cell phones in 1991.
I stared at the idling Preacher — every window closed, every door and the trunk with the tools locked, and I said the wrong thing: “What did you do that for?”
I said this because I honestly thought Ben might have intended it as a conceptual art piece. After all, he’d once handed me a flaming sheet of paper in my parlor that read, “I rage.”
Ben kind of lost it as I examined the car. He yelled and cursed me. I ignored him; after all, the situation needed to be solved quickly. I realize now I could’ve placed something over the exhaust pipe to at least choke the engine and save fuel.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult to force down the power-window glass and snap up the lock, maybe 15 minutes.
That night under a modest moon, we lay in our separate hot-spring pools, steam rising as the air turned chill in a world so silent as to almost have a sound. Since there were no flying bugs, I slept on the trunk to avoid ants and other night crawlies, while Ben slept inside the Preacher.
There can be a true poetry to travel. For me, it began when I was young, began as a longing and then an overwhelming desire generated from reading books by Stevenson about going to sea, or the treks of Basho through feudal Japan, or Guthrie and London riding freight trains, or Kerouac and Cassady driving automobiles across America.
What I’m wondering now in my housebound mindset — what makes a road trip poetic? Taking risks? Being close to nature? Eschewing a planned regime? What are the requirements, the key elements? Is a Club Med style jaunt or cruise-ship outing poetic? If a travel agency orchestrates every detail of a five-star European vacation, is it poetic? Can it be? Would an honest column written about those trips be touching or compelling? I can’t answer these questions definitively, but I would be curious to hear any readers’ input.
Next month I will continue the road trip to Seattle and the return to San Francisco, and tell the bizarre outcome of our attendance at the wedding: my two best friends from high school were the groom and best man, one was marrying the other’s sister....
Eric Green lives in Belfast.
More Penobscot Falcon:
Fathers, wing foils and model contests
Black Jaw, my wife and the legend of Scarback
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