There are writers from eighteen different countries of birth in Scraps. The second largest, after the British contingent, is from the USA. Here, four Americans describe their early or first written adventures. For Jack Kerouac it included his first time outside the USA; for Mark Twain his first long departure from home. Bill Bryson had long since left home and lived in the UK, so he was returning to the USA to write his first book. William Least Heat-Moon was travelling alone for the first time following the breakdown of his first marriage.
‘Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.’
BILL BRYSON
The Lost Continent (1989)
Bill Bryson (b. 1951) set the tone with line one of his first major travel book: ‘I come from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to’. He brought travel writing to a wider audience with humour, a challenge to the relative seriousness of the previous generations’ travel books. He went on to stretch the genre to an intergalactic scale and mix it with science in A Short History of Nearly Everything.
In the morning I drove to Wyoming, through scenery that looked like an illustration from some marvellous children’s book of Western tales – snowy peaks, pine forests, snug farms, a twisting river, a mountain vale with a comely name: Swan Valley. That is the one thing that must be said for the men and women who carved out the West. They certainly knew how to name a place. Just on this corner of the map I could see Soda Springs, Massacre Rocks, Steamboat Mountain, Wind River, Flaming Gorge, Calamity Falls – places whose very names promised adventure and excitement, even if in reality all they contained were a DX gas station and a Tastee-Freez drive-in.
Most of the early settlers in America were oddly inept at devising place-names. They either chose unimaginative, semi-recycled names – New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New England – or toadying, kiss-ass names like Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and Jamestown in a generally pitiable attempt to secure favour with some monarch or powdered aristocrat back home. Or else they just accepted the names the Indians told them, not knowing whether Squashaninsect meant ‘land of the twinkling lakes’ or ‘place where Big Chief Thunderclap paused to pass water’.
The Spanish were even worse because they gave everything religious names, so that every place in the south-west is called San this or Santa that. Driving across the south-west is like an 800-mile religious procession. The worst name on the whole continent is the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, which means the ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’. Have you ever heard of a more inane name for any geographical feature? It was only here in the real West, the land of beaver trappers and mountain men, that a dollop of romance and colour was brought to the business of giving names. And here I was about to enter one of the most beautiful and understatedly romantic of them all: Jackson Hole.
Jackson Hole isn’t really a hole at all; it’s just the name for a scenic valley that runs from north to south through the Grand Tetons, very probably the most majestic range in the Rockies. With their high white peaks and bluish-grey bases they look like some kind of exotic confection, like blueberry frappés. At the southern edge of Jackson Hole is the small town of Jackson, where I stopped now for lunch. It was a strange place, with an odd combination of bow-legged Yosemite Sams and upmarket stores like Benetton and Ralph Lauren, which are there for the benefit of the many well-heeled tenderfeet who come for the skiing in the winter and to dude ranches in the summer. Every place in town had a Wild West motif – the Antler Motel, the Silver Dollar Saloon, the Hitching Post Lodge. Even the Bank of Jackson, where I went to cash a traveller’s cheque, had a stuffed buffalo head on the wall. Yet it all seemed quite natural. Wyoming is the most fiercely Western of all the Western states. It’s still a land of cowboys and horses and wide open spaces, a place where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which on the face of it primarily consists of driving around in a pickup truck and being kind of slow. I had never seen so many people in cowboy apparel, and almost everybody owns a gun. Only a couple of weeks before, the state legislature in Cheyenne had introduced a rule that all legislators would henceforth have to check their handguns at the front desk before being allowed into the Statehouse. That’s the sort of state Wyoming is.
I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. ‘Tetons’ means ‘tits’ in French. That’s an interesting fact – a topographical titbit, so to speak – that Miss Mucus, my junior high school geography teacher, failed to share with us in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn’t button his own flies without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.
At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through north-western Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, ‘Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.’ Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as … well, as a frying-pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, except perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me.
‘You have seen something worth remembering’
MARK TWAIN
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Mark Twain (aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) has been called both ‘the father of American literature’ and ‘the greatest American humorist of his age’. He was brought up in Missouri on the Mississippi and trained as a steamboat pilot on the river. Life on the Mississippi is a travel memoir of those days, but written later. It is reputed to be the first book submitted to its publisher in typewritten form.
I had myself called with the four o’clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting.
First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself.
When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering.
We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning – scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times. Captain Poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. One night the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft. So he cut into his wife’s state-room from above with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull.
This bend is all filled up now – result of a cut-off; and the same agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers.
Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being of recent birth – Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there. We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. ‘Well,’ said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, ‘It’s a hell of a place.’ A description which was photographic for exactness. There were several rows and clusters of shabby frame houses, and a supply of mud sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once more.
‘ “My God!” he cried, slapping the wheel. “It’s the world!” ’
JACK KEROUAC
On the Road (1957)
Published in 1957, but written a few years earlier, On the Road was a rite-of-passage book for Americans of the beat generation discovering travel – the first generation that did so en masse. Kerouac was a poet and a novelist; On the Road is a travel story converted into novel form. Kerouac introduces himself as the narrator, Sal Paradise, and celebrated beat generation friends such as poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William Burroughs are also represented in the book.
Later Kerouac wrote: ‘Dean and I were embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man’. Then, with a cultural frisson, they also found abroad, which for them was the nearest abroad they could find, Mexico. ‘It’s the world!’
Then we turned our faces to Mexico with bashfulness and wonder as those dozens of Mexican cats watched us from under their secret hatbrims in the night. Beyond were music and all-night restaurants with smoke pouring out of the door. ‘Whee,’ whispered Dean very softly.
‘Thassall!’ A Mexican official grinned. ‘You boys all set. Go ahead. Welcome Mehico. Have good time. Watch you money. Watch you driving. I say this to you personal, I’m Red, everybody call me Red. Ask for Red. Eat good. Don’t worry. Everything fine. Is not hard enjoin yourself in Mehico.’
‘Yes!’ shuddered Dean and off we went across the street into Mexico on soft feet. We left the car parked, and all three of us abreast went down the Spanish street into the middle of the dull brown lights. Old men sat on chairs in the night and looked like Oriental junkies and oracles. No one was actually looking at us, yet everybody was aware of everything we did. We turned sharp left into the smoky lunchroom and went in to music of campo guitars on an American ’thirties jukebox. Shirt-sleeved Mexican cabdrivers and straw-hatted Mexican hipsters sat at stools, devouring shapeless messes of tortillas, beans, tacos, whatnot. We bought three bottles of cold beer – cerveza was the name of beer – for about thirty Mexican cents or ten American cents each. We bought packs of Mexican cigarettes for six cents each. We gazed and gazed at our wonderful Mexican money that went so far, and played with it and looked around and smiled at everyone. Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic. ‘Think of these cats staying up all hours of the night,’ whispered Dean. ‘And think of this big continent ahead of us with those enormous Sierra Madre mountains we saw in the movies, and the jungles all the way down and a whole desert plateau as big as ours and reaching clear down to Guatemala and God knows where, whoo! What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move!’ We got out and went back to the car. One last glimpse of America across the hot lights of the Rio Grande bridge, and we turned our back and fender to it and roared off.
Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn’t a light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just then dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began to see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organpipe on all sides. ‘What a wild country!’ I yelped. Dean and I were completely awake. In Laredo we’d been half dead. Stan, who’d been to foreign countries before, just calmly slept in the back seat. Dean and I had the whole of Mexico before us.
‘Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks – and now this! So that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us – they were here, weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.’
‘This road,’ I told him, ‘is also the route of old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you’ll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making his lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you’ll see further …’
‘It’s the world,’ said Dean. ‘My God!’ he cried, slapping the wheel. ‘It’s the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!’ We rushed on. The dawn spread immediately and we began to see the white sand of the desert and occasional huts in the distance off the road. Dean slowed down to peer at them. ‘Real beat huts, man, the kind you only find in Death Valley and much worse. These people don’t bother with appearances.’ The first town ahead that had any consequence on the map was called Sabinas Hidalgo. We looked forward to it eagerly. ‘And the road don’t look any different than the American road,’ cried Dean, ‘except one mad thing and if you’ll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City. See, it’s the only city in the entire land, everything points to it.’ There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers the figure was over a thousand. ‘Damn! I gotta go!’ cried Dean. For a while I closed my eyes in utter exhaustion and kept hearing Dean pound the wheel with his fists and say, ‘Damn,’ and ‘What kicks!’ and ‘Oh, what a land!’ and ‘Yes!’ We arrived at Sabinas Hidalgo, across the desert, at about seven o’clock in the morning. We slowed down completely to see this. We woke up Stan in the back seat. We sat up straight to dig. The main street was muddy and full of holes. On each side were dirty broken-down adobe fronts. Burros walked in the street with packs. Barefoot women watched us from dark doorways. The street was completely crowded with people on foot beginning a new day in the Mexican countryside. Old men with handlebar mustaches stared at us. The sight of three bearded, bedraggled American youths instead of the usual well-dressed tourists was of unusual interest to them. We bounced along over Main Street at ten miles an hour, taking everything in. A group of girls walked directly in front of us. As we bounced by, one of them said, ‘Where you going, man?’
I turned to Dean, amazed. ‘Did you hear what she said?’
Dean was so astounded he kept on driving slowly and saying, ‘Yes, I heard what she said, I certainly damn well did, oh me, oh my, I don’t know what to do I’m so excited and sweetened in this morning world. We’ve finally got to heaven. It couldn’t be cooler, it couldn’t be grander, it couldn’t be anything.’
‘Well, let’s go back and pick em up!’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Dean and drove right on at five miles an hour. He was knocked out, he didn’t have to do the usual things he would have done in America. ‘There’s millions of them all along the road!’ he said. Nevertheless he U-turned and came by the girls again. They were headed for work in the fields; they smiled at us. Dean stared at them with rocky eyes. ‘Damn,’ he said under his breath. ‘Oh! This is too great to be true. Gurls, gurls. And particularly right now in my stage and condition, Sal, I am digging the interiors of these homes as we pass them – these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, their thoughts congealing from the empty mind of sleep, their selves rising, and the mother’s cooking up breakfast in iron pots, and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the sleeping gringo and all that crap – and crap about greasers and so on – and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bull. I’m so amazed by this.’ Schooled in the raw road night, Dean was come into the world to see it. He bent over the wheel and looked both ways and rolled along slowly. We stopped for gas the other side of Sabinas Hidalgo. Here a congregation of local straw-hatted ranchers with handlebar mustaches growled and joked in front of antique gas-pumps. Across the fields an old man plodded with a burro in front of his switch stick. The sun rose pure on pure and ancient activities of human life.
‘I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind’
Born (more prosaically) William Lewis Trogdon in Kansas City in 1939, Heat-Moon’s name derives from his native Indian Osage heritage, Least indicating his position in the family after his brother Little Heat-Moon. In 1982–3, Blue Highways spent an unprecedented, for a travel book, forty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It chronicles the three months and 13,000 miles that Heat-Moon covered on the back roads (blue roads on the map) of Middle America following his separation from his first wife.
In Poplar, Montana, where Sitting Bull surrendered six years after the battle of the Little Big Horn, I stopped for groceries. Having resisted a chewing hunger for five days – before meals, after meals, in moments of half-sleep – I gave in to it east of Wolf Point and bought a pound of raisins, a pound of peanuts, and a pound of chocolate nibs and mixed them together. By the time I got across North Dakota the bag was empty, the hunger gone.
U.S. 2 followed the Missouri River for miles. At the High-line town of Culbertson I turned north toward treeless Plentywood, Montana, then went east again down forsaken highway 5, a road virtually on the forty-ninth parallel, which is the Canadian border in North Dakota. In a small flourish of hills, the last I was to see for hundreds of miles, on an upthrusted lump sat a cube of concrete with an Air Force radar antenna sweeping the long horizon for untoward blips. A Martello tower of the twentieth century. Below the installation, in the Ice Age land, lay a fine, clear lake. Fingerlings whisked the marsh weed, coots twittered on the surface, and at bankside a muskrat munched greens. It seemed as if I were standing between two worlds. But they were one: a few permutations of life going on about themselves, each thing trying to continue its way.
East of Fortuna, North Dakota, just eight miles south of Saskatchewan, the high moraine wheat fields took up the whole landscape. There was nothing else, except piles of stones like Viking burial mounds at the verges of tracts and big rock-pickers running steely fingers through the glacial soil of glean stone that freezes had heaved to the surface; behind the machines, the fields looked vacuumed. At a filling station, a man who had farmed the moraine said the great ice sheets had gone away only to get more rock. ‘They’ll be back. They always come back. What’s to stop them?’
The country gave up the glacier hills and flattened to perfection. The road went on, on, on. Straight and straight. Ahead and behind, it ran through me like an arrow. North Dakota up here was a curveless place: not just roads but land, people too, and the flight of birds. Things were angular: fenceposts against the sky, the line if a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops.
The highway, oh, the highway. No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only in the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while I found my perception limited. The Great Plains, showing so many miles in an immodest exposure of itself, wearied my eyes; the openness was overdrawn. The only mitigation came from potholes, ice sheets had gouged out; there, margins and water were full of stilt-legged birds – godwits, sandpipers, plovers, dowitchers, avocets, yellowlegs – and paddling birds – coots, mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, blue-winged teals, pintails, shovelers, scaups, mergansers, eared grebes, widgeons, Canada geese. Whenever the drone of tread against the pavement began to overcome me, I’d stop and shake the drowsiness among the birds.
You’d think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding its straightness to nature. If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.
Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: ‘In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.’ The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside – a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.
Onward across the appallingly fearless yonder of North Dakota where towns, like the poor verse of Burma Shave signs, came and went quickly; on across fields where farmers planted wheat, rye, barley, and flax, their tractors sowing close to fences marking off missile silos that held Minutemen waiting in the dark underground like seeds of another sort. As daylight went, the men, racing rain and the short growing season, switched on headlights to keep the International Harvesters moving over cropland that miracles of land-grant colleges (cross-pollinated hybrids resistant to everything but growth and petrochemicals) had changed forever. The farmer’s enemy wasn’t a radar blip – it was the wild oat.
At last the horizon ruptured at the long hump of Turtle Mountain, obscurely scrubby against the sky, and a pair of silent owls (Indians called them ‘hushwings’) swooped the dusk to look for telltale movements in the fields.
I needed a hot shower. In Rolla, on the edge of the Turtle Mountain reservation, I stopped at an old house rebuilt into a small hotel. Despite a snarl of a clerk, it looked pleasant; but the floors smelled of disinfectant and the shower was a rusting box at the end of the hall. The nozzle sent one stinging jet of water into my eye, another up my nose, two others over the shower curtain, while most of the water washed down the side to stand icily in the plugged bottom. I lost my temper and banged the shower head. The Neathanderthal remedy.
In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.