The Panic Hole

I am on the road for reasons unshared by Jack Kerouac and Charles Kuralt, Charlie Starkweather and William Least Heat Moon. A movie, Revenge, that I had had a modest part in by writing the novella and a few drafts of the script, was on the eve of coming out, and I felt raw, exhausted, and, worst of all, vulnerable. What is thought of as success meant only that absolute strangers bothered you in restaurants or on the street in resort towns. Success tends to make you think backward, where you rehearse the steps that brought you the check, an event that caused good feelings at the time. People use cocaine to feel successful, which means there are dubious aspects to the emotion. Anyway, I was feeling put-upon, a close second to self-pity as a destructive state. On the way home from the bar, I suddenly wanted to drive a Butternut Bread truck and eat a hasty meal of fish sticks and coleslaw before going bowling.

So I got out of town. One of my favorite authors, the great Gerald Vizenor, said that “the present is a wild season, not a ruse.” As you get older, it occurs to you that “the present” is in increasingly short supply. The virtue of spending a couple of weeks stuck in a dentist's chair is less apparent than it used to be. The notion of “taking your medicine” like a sick dog poised before the phone is morose and Calvinistic when all you have to do is disappear. “Vamoose. Sayonara, motherfucker,” as we used to say in high school. Man is not an answering machine.

Vizenor developed a saving idea called a panic hole in his novel The Trickster of Liberty. Panic hole is defined as a place where you go physically or mentally or both when the life is being squeezed out of you or when you think it is, which is the same thing. A panic hole is a place where you flee to get back the present as a wild season rather than a ruse. For the time being, my panic hole is an enormous, red Toyota Land Cruiser. A mile from my home, which has a bull's-eye painted on its roof, I felt a whole lot better, the oppressiveness slipping out the window and discoloring the 185 inches of snow we had received thus far.

For reasons that are obscure, perhaps genetic, I headed even farther north than my own frozen landscape. White snow and black trees are soothing and more anguish-absorbent than the obvious tropics, where the foreign heat bubbles your skin and brain. The tropics tend to distract you rather than empty you out. In the north it can be a really big day when you see three crows. And there are times when three crows more than equal a girl in a bikini, the Gulf Stream, and conch fritters.

Curiously, my first stop was Escanaba, at the House of Ludington, where I began this column two years ago. It was then that I announced my belief that small portions are for small and inactive people and that cuisine minceur was the moral equivalent of the fox-trot. Life was too short for me to approach with the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute. My idea was to eat well and not die from it—for the simple reason that that would be the end of my eating.

I succeeded in not thinking about the time in between by using a few mail-order secrets on how to give up your name. After twelve hours of sleep, I took a long dawn walk far out on the ice, where I glassed three ravens feeding on a fish. What luck! I lay on the ice to make myself less obtrusive and listened to the vast nothingness of Lake Michigan. The landscape was empty except for the lump of me and three ravens watching one another across a hundred yards of blinding white.

This sort of epiphany goads the appetite savaged by sixteen months of work. Other than during bird season I had become so picky that I had lost a few pounds. At the hotel's Sunday brunch, I got a “tsk-tsk” from the waitress when 1 failed to polish off the plate of fruit and basket of breads, the platter of eggs, bacon, ham, real beef hash, and chicken livers, which was followed by an assortment of desserts, including a whipped-cream-stuffed pastry swan. My error was in reading during the meal—Bernard Heinrich's Ravens in Winter, from which I learned that in the late forties in Illinois 100,000 crows were destroyed in a single night by hand grenades. This was the American version of Cortés burning the aviaries of Montezuma, and it put me off my feed.

My spirits were revived at the Chippewa midwinter powwow that afternoon. On entering, I watched a very old man dancing in a full bearskin cape, his skull encased in the bear's head. He gracefully shook his war club at the gymnasium ceiling. A little later, fifty young girls in native costume did the crow dance so convincingly that I shivered, then, not surprisingly, wept. One day out and I was getting a long way from show business.

The next morning before I left, I called the Swedish Pantry to check out its soups. “We always have the same soups,” I was told, the phone voice informed with what passes for mystery among the Swedes. It was, however, the best pea soup I had ever eaten, and, accompanied by limpa bread and a side of herring, it was a fine load of fuel for the drive to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I visited my daughter at her college. That evening a peculiar thing happened at a restaurant with the equally peculiar name of Hobnobbin’. The gizmo used to clamp an escargot backfired and shot the snail directly into my chest, spraying its freight of garlic-laden butter all over my expensive suede sport coat. For some reason, I thought this was very funny. I had a fine chat with my daughter and went on to eat an enormous slab of heart-smart rare roast beef, something that I rarely order but found utterly delicious in this restaurant.

There were moments of backsliding in the Midway Motor Lodge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, quarters I shared with a group called the Young Farmers and another named the Tri-County Breeders (presumably of cattle). A phone call, naturally, told me that the fish-wrap technocrats of the movie arts didn't care for Revenge. Sad that they'll never realize their fond dreams of being slammed in the butt by Don Johnson's speedboat, I thought, and went for a long walk during which I saw three bald eagles feeding on dead shad on the partially frozen Mississippi River. This was not a “sign” of anything except that three bald eagles were hungry.

That evening I dined on pork and beef ribs at Piggy's in downtown La Crosse on the river, a restaurant that had recently won the National Pork Producers Restaurant of the Year Award, no mean feat. The ribs were well cooked and the locally brewed Heileman's Export was delicious, though I am not a beer drinker. Piggy's should add a hot sauce as an alternative to its regular offering. My dinner was disturbed by the gradual evolution of an idea, the pinpointing of a grave threat to America. I slept on the idea, deeming it not yet ready for the man on the street.

The next morning, at the beginning of my long drive to Lincoln, Nebraska, I could not contain myself and delivered a speech through the wind-shield to the subzero landscape: “Who are these WASP eco-yuppies? They are afraid of blacks and ignore them. They think Native Americans are hopelessly messy. They scorn all cowboys, hate ranchers, loathe hunters, fishermen, and trappers (I agree on this one), won't eat beef or pork or drink hard liquor. These folks are thinking about their life-styles and missing the point: the bitterest of struggles against business, industry, and government, which are using the environment, as always, as a cheap toilet. The struggle is against a nation that will always spit in its grandchildren's faces for immediate profit. As Vizenor would say, ‘Their Mother Earth is a blond.’ “

In Lincoln I checked into the Cornhusker Hotel, another of my panic holes. They know what they're doing at the Cornhusker, and they mean to be normal, with food and service nearly the equivalent of those in a deluxe hotel in New York for less than one-third the price. But then one of the main reasons I like Lincoln is that it is not Manhattan. On your first visit you will sense a haunting boredom that, on following trips, you will recognize as Life herself without rabid hype. In Lincoln I eat relentlessly at the Bistro, where there is a surcharge of thirty-five cents if you want a Caesar salad rather than a tossed salad. At lunch I have red beans and rice the equal of any of the dozen versions I've had in New Orleans. At dinner I enjoy the spinach gnocchi and Italian sausage. One night for dinner, John Carter, a folklorist and historian, took me to the Steakhouse, where we had a delicate appetizer of several pounds of fried chicken gizzards followed by wonderful porterhouses and Geyser Peak Cabernet. During the day I looked at nineteenth-century photographs at the Nebraska State Historical Society.

After four days at the Cornhusker, I've become prelapsarian Adam and am ready for a slow drive home by the identical route. I want to see the same landscape from the opposite direction. And at dawn I do the same thing I've done for years, a not-so-banal trick 1 learned from the Navajo. You bow deeply to the six directions. That way you know where you are on earth—at least for the time being. Much earlier in this century, an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news, you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home for dinner—and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.

A few weeks ago, while preparing roast quail stuffed with leeks and sweetbreads (served on a polenta pancake with a heavily truffled woodcock sauce), I realized that it was far too late for me to cooperate politically or artistically with a modern sensibility that so apparently demands the cutest forms of science fiction for its soul food. After dinner, I floundered in the drifts, looking at the full moon up through the blizzard. The moon had somehow ignored the destruction of the middle class, the most recent fall of Europe, the Trump split, and the release of dozens of movies and books. It was the same moon I had rowed toward in a wooden boat as a child, my dog and a pet crow in the backseat. This winter moon was a cold but splendid comfort.

1990