My daily routine is set. Each morning at sunrise—I can determine time of sunrise to within a minute for my latitude and longitude—I’m up and into the shower. Then I prepare a fresh breakfast which I vary meticulously, according to a strict, weekly schedule. (In my reading on human evolution and in my studies of debilitating human disease, I have seen consistent evidence that a lack of seasonal variety brings on poor health. It predisposes one to a whole range of cancers, to chronic fatigue, and early death. My diet, therefore, is both precisely matched to change of climate at my latitude—44° North—and perfectly suited to my body, a biochemistry known to me in detail thanks to a long-term series of tests at the Scripps Clinic—for traces of heavy metals in the fingernails, seasonal fluctuation in the concentration of melanin, that sort of thing.)
So I begin each day with the very reasonable coordinate of local sunrise and, weather permitting, have my breakfast on a wide porch overlooking the Wood River, whose moods often calm me, particularly if it’s been a night of bad dreams.
My wife, a very undisciplined woman, ran off several years ago. Our children, three of them, have lives of their own but I’m in touch with them regularly. My companions are three Siamese cats—of the not-so-common Vera Cruz strain—and a purebred Akita, which I’ve raised from puppyhood and who has a pile of blue ribbons. (We run twelve miles a week.)
On the morning I wish to speak of, I entered the kitchen at a little after six and saw a large Negro standing there, a man dressed in baggy khaki shorts and a plain but rather threadbare long-sleeved shirt. Resting on the floor near him was a not-very-large leather shoulder satchel. He had his back to me at the open porch door and said without turning around, “I’ve set a second place—I hope you don’t mind.”
Well, I thought, how am I going to mind? Besides, he looked robustly healthy, even refined. The dog hadn’t barked and even now wasn’t disturbed by him. He was standing by his bowl waiting for his spring water. So I said, “No, fine. It’s fine. I can prepare two portions—but you’ll have to eat what I eat.”
He seemed uninclined to speak but in some sort of reverie, staring off into the quaking aspen and the cottonwoods. I made fresh orange juice, lightly toasted two slices of bran bread, dished out my own yogurt for each of us, and served on the porch with Kenyan coffee—none of the South or Central American beans are good for me.
We began eating in silence. His table manners were good. Why had he come in? Would he attempt to push his way further into the house now? Would he ask to use the shower? When had he entered the house? I gave away nothing of my apprehension, but wondered if I should mention, of course, my schedule, a need to be at the office by seven.
“I never lock up, you know,” I said. “Where did you come from?”
“I came from Connecticut. Greenwich. I have a business there … financial consultation.”
“But—you’re visiting here? Are you lost?”
“No, no, I’m walking. I’m taking a long walk. I walked here from Connecticut.”
“But that’s two thousand miles!”
“Yes, exactly. A very long way. I’ve been walking through the countryside most of the time, off the roads, eating fruits and nuts from orchards, garden vegetables—and depending on the hospitality of people such as yourself, for which I’m most grateful.
“I have read, in fact, some good books about ‘living off the land,’ ” he said, reaching for his satchel, “one of which is exceptional. Do you know this?” He showed me the cover. No. “I never knew anything about this sort of thing when I was growing up. I grew up in Boston, we were the black bourgeoisie, you know. My father was a lawyer. We never did anything like this.”
“Would you like another slice of toast? I make only one for myself. And I can actually, now, offer you some papaw marmalade—which I won’t use until Thursday. I keep to a strict diet—to stay fit.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“So,” I ventured, waiting for the toast to pop back. “From here you will just be on your way?”
“That’s right. Are you thinking I might steal the television?” He inclined his head toward the little seventeen-inch I use only for the news.
“It’s perhaps not quite as absurd as you think,” I countered. “Who are you, anyway? A stranger who shows up in my kitchen—large—and let’s be frank—black.” I wanted to be firm but not testy, and I was.
“About a year ago,” he answered, spreading the marmalade on his toast (but directly from the jar), “I decided I wanted to see what lay west of Connecticut. As a boy I traveled everywhere in Europe. I finished a degree in history at the Sorbonne—yes. I taught in Kinshasa for a year, a disaster that saddened me for months after. I returned to the States, finished an MBA at Penn—Wharton. A year on Wall Street—among, I must say, some of the worst people I’ve ever known: lethal, pathologically selfish. That drove me to set up private practice in Greenwich, where I’ve done well. I have a gift for investing.”
“I’m an investment counselor, right here in Sun Valley. That’s exactly what I do. I’m a whiz at it, too.”
“But I had never been off for any length of time in the country—not wilderness, not suburbia or exurbia but the countryside. I should have been curious, you know, about inner-city blacks, even guilt-ridden perhaps; but I wasn’t. About five years ago—just try to imagine this—I started reading popular books about American Indians: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The Man Who Killed the Deer. Black Elk Speaks. I thought it was all a bit strange—out of touch, you know. But the more I read the more I got caught up in something. I don’t know how to describe what happened. I felt exhilaration. Transcendence. I felt suddenly reconnected.”
“Let me make you some more coffee.”
“Thank you. So I went to Kenya. My ancestors were Kikuyu, hauled out to Zanzibar by Arabs in the 1840s. I looked into that history—Myungu, Songoro in Mwanza, Simba in the Congo. The names probably mean nothing to you, but these people were ferocious fighters, dreaded by every Arab slaver. I admired them terrifically; but whatever it was I was after in Africa—the famous roots, a sense of identity—I never found it. I went home. I decided this African direction was unprofitable for me. The place I loved, the place I was truly part of, was so obviously the Connecticut River Valley. I had known this as a boy—my parents had a house there. My own children—I have two, a boy nine, a girl twelve—love that place. My wife as well. Why was I trying to find some place in Africa?”
“I don’t actually have to leave for work. Do you mind, I might have another toast?”
“Certainly.”
From where I was standing in the kitchen I could just see my visitor’s head above the countertop, past the French doors. His index fingers were braced against his pursed lips. He moved his hands beautifully. I wondered if he had been successful in sports.
“I’m quite taken with this story of yours,” I declared, sitting back down and studying for a moment the way light was shimmering on the surface of the river.
“You’re interested. But you don’t know what to make of it. An educated black, an income probably comparable to your own. Probably even a politics not much different from your own. Disturbing.”
“Well, whatever you’re doing out there in the woods, you seem determined to make something of yourself. That’s admirable.”
“My life was handed to me.” He caught my eye. “True for you?” I didn’t answer. “I went to good schools, I met no resistance getting what I wanted. In France I was even less frequently confronted by racism. But that was not enough. All I had read about Indians before I went to Africa stayed with me. I started in again, my strange attraction; only this time it struck me in a very different way. I wanted to become an African-American indigene.”
“And what is that?”
“A black man who identifies with the American landscape, who fractures the immorality of his heritage in this country so completely that he finally gains a consoling intimacy with the place, the very place that for so long had been unapproachable. I had always imagined the hills, the rivers, the sky regarding us the way the whites did, as interlopers. Because I thought whites owned the land, that they were the same. We were strangers, whose inquiries, whose desire for companionship, were not welcome.”
I reached blindly for my Peterson’s Field Guide on the window ledge. “That small bird that just flew by—excuse me—I need to identify it. I have only nine birds to go, then I will have seen every one that lives in this valley. And yes … please, yes, I am listening—but here it is: Solitary vireo. Wonderful. Go ahead. Wonderful.”
“I needed to see the breadth of the land. To be in it. To hold it and be held by it.”
“Yes. I see. You may not think this relates to what you’re doing, but I grew up in Bel Air and I needed to see the land, which is why I built this house.”
“So, about seven months ago, I left Connecticut and started walking toward the Pacific. I stayed far away from cities, lived as much as I could off the land, wild land and domesticated land. I could, right now, walk into those aspens, take one of those stones there by the river, cut a shaft, harden it, and put venison on your table before noon. I can do that—but in no way am I adverse to this delicious yogurt, to your bread and oranges. This is Kenyan, isn’t it?” I nodded yes.
“My desire,” he continued, “took this focus: to travel intimately across the country, to flow beautifully over the land, making very little disturbance, until I stood on the rim of the Pacific. I’ve taught myself all sorts of things in this process. I can now go three or four days without food. I can imitate the songs of almost two hundred birds—that was a female Ruby-crowned kinglet, by the way, not a Solitary vireo—”
“Damn, I’ve got that.”
“—and travel nearly as fast in the dark as I can in daylight. I set myself the task, for example, of crossing Iowa in just ten days, traveling more than thirty miles a night, without being seen. Not so much as one dog barked. In Wyoming, I stayed for a short time with the Crow, a very interesting kind of people. Custer had Crow scouts, you know. They and the Arikara were the only tribes in the West who decided it was pointless to fight white people. When my boy is older, I’m going to send him to live with the Crow.”
“We had Indians in my family. My mother was one-eighth Comanche. I’m one-sixteenth.”
“Only a few hundred miles to go now. Another few weeks and I’ll reach the Pacific. I want to taste western salmon, learn to discriminate if I can among the flesh of silver, chinook, sockeye, and pink salmon. See if the nuts from chinquapin trees are bitter.”
“What do you do for money?”
“I said, an investor.”
“No, now.”
“I don’t need money now. Not much. At the start I was apprehensive, traveling without cash, no credit cards. But after a while, really, the whole issue faded.”
“Because I want to give you a hundred dollars. Two hundred, actually, just in case.”
“It’s very kind of you but—”
“No, no. I admire what you’re doing. I want to support it.”
He searched my face. “Have you ever thought, yourself,” he said, “of going out there? Of just walking away from this house, your business?”
“I do. Every winter. I go to Eleuthera in the Bahamas. I have a house. I dive. I know all the species of fish.”
“Think about this—I know you can see this: the white man’s jobs kept most blacks in the cities. He closed Indians up on the reservations. He wasn’t comfortable with either of us traveling around. He believed blacks had some sort of bush voodoo, and that Indians had another sort of voodoo, and it would be best if Indians just stayed on the reservations and if blacks just worked hard in the factories, making cars and cotton sheets. We have lived apart from all that. You know when I run—those hours on end across the fields in Iowa—I recite the Aeneid to myself? Yes. I love that story. Sic fatur lacrimans, classique immittit habenas … that’s the beginning of the sixth book, the middle of the story. Or the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Do you believe that? I glide the land, the river bottoms, the mountain parks, with that music in my head.”
“I have thought about leaving, just throwing it all in.”
“You must find something that really drives you. It has to be more than just an idea.”
“A commitment.”
“Deeper.”
“Binding contract.”
“A contract, yes—but with your heart, not your head.”
“Quite the step.”
“Exhilarating!”
“Did you find it hard, memorizing all the birdsongs?”
“The birdsongs? Yes. That was hard, but each task you will find is very sweet, sweet to recall.”
“I see. Sweet to recall … I’m—so, do you just take off now? Can I give you a lift? Should I even offer to give you a lift?”
“Very kind, and thank you, but no.” He straightened the silverware on his plate. “See those cottonwoods? I’m going to go over there now and just disappear in them. Make for Galena Pass, then over into Stanley Basin tonight.”
“How do you find the places to sleep?”
“Some things remain a mystery, even to me.”
“Those Nike crosstrainers. They’re good?”
“My shoes? These shoes? Why, yes, they’re good.”
“If I went, do you think I should run to the Atlantic? What are you going to do when you reach the Pacific?”
“The Pacific?” He looked at me closely, a long look. Perhaps he was sizing me up as a traveling companion. “I might wonder, really, whether I’d earned it.”
“Earned it? Of course you have!” How could he doubt it?
He pushed his chair back. “Let me do these,” he said.
When he stood up to take the dishes, I was surprised, again, by his size. He reminded me of a professional basketball player whose name I couldn’t then think of.
I pointed him to the guest bathroom on my way past the sink, then went to my bedroom and took two hundred dollars out of my wallet and returned to the kitchen. He was rinsing the dishes and setting them on the drainboard, where they shone in the sunlight.
I handed him the two hundred-dollar bills. He accepted them but with a peculiar smile. I asked him if he wanted any food. He led us out through the French doors and leaned over the table to take a nectarine from a large bowl of fruit.
“Will I see you again?”
“No, I doubt we will meet again.”
I knew he wanted to leave, but I didn’t want the conversation to end. I’d never had such a long conversation with a Negro before.
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “whoever heard of coming into the kitchen one morning and finding a huge black man standing there, someone who just ran out of the woods and wanted breakfast and then ran off again, like an Indian?”
“It’s probably happened before, and it will likely happen again.”
He reached down to pat the dog, who the whole time had been sleeping in the sun on the porch, very unlike himself. And then he waved and was just down the stairs, wading the strong, shallow river and gone into the woods.
I stood at the porch railing for a long time. I grew annoyed. I got my binoculars and put on another cup of coffee, which I never do after breakfast, and got down Arthur Cleveland Bent’s Thrushes, Kinglets, and Their Allies and began reading the paragraphs on the Ruby-crowned kinglet.