Magdalena Mountain. Robert Michael Pyle
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of these fine big banana slugs, or the purple urchins or lavender and orange sea stars that plaster the rocks offshore—if I could emulate Doc in Cannery Row, financing my beer and pickling fluid with the proceeds from harvesting the tide pools—then I’d be in business.
But no, my customers want butterflies. Even the Olympic Mountains won’t help, as they’re just about all in the national park, where amateurs (read: professionals without degrees, like me) cannot collect. Maybe it’s time to start heading for the Rockies. One of the beach survivalists shot a gull the other day and didn’t even try to eat it. I asked him why he did it. “Just practicin’ my survival skills, man,” is what he said. Easy riding, gull.
December 3. Slow hitching along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Passenger cars whizzed on by without a second look; can’t blame them. I probably wouldn’t pick me up. Fortunately, I had chestnut-backed chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets for company. Finally, a crabber gave me a lift and a couple of Dungeness crabs that I cooked in a driftwood fire at the eponymous Dungeness Spit. Then a bird-watcher took me down Hood Canal and all the way to Tacoma. I told him about the motorbiked murres, and he told me of an oil spill he’d recently been in on. “A murre with a broken neck would have been lucky,” he said. “We had dozens of them all gummed up in crude.” This was offshore. “We’re waiting for the big one in Puget Sound,” he told me, “with a governor who wants to let supertankers in. One of these days there’s going to be a really giant spill in one of the bays—Puget Sound, Barkley Sound, maybe up in Prince William Sound where they still have sea otters—and then we’ll see how oil and water mix.” If it’s down here, he told me, we can just about say goodbye to rhinoceros auklets, and marbled murrelets too—“even if they still have any big trees left to nest in.” He was verging on gloomy, so I bought him an Oly at the tavern near the Tacoma railyards where he dropped me off. We drank to the birds, the trees, Robinson Jeffers, and all the other sad misanthropes like ourselves.
December 5. Caught a freight east, but the bull kicked me off at Wishram—an old-time hobo junction outside a has-been railroad town deep inside the Columbia Gorge. Hoboes don’t like Dungeness crab, at least these didn’t, nor did they much like me. Anyway, I didn’t feel like waking up splayed, even if it had been warm enough to sleep, which it wasn’t with the infamous Gorge wind screaming through like just another train. It may have been an old-time ’bo camp, but these weren’t old-time ’boes. I’ve never known a genuine gentleman of the road to be unwelcoming around his fire. These guys were younger, harder—guys back from Vietnam with incredulous looks in their eyes, guys on drugs or wishing they were. I walked up the long grade to Highway 14 and tried the asphalt road instead. God bless that onion-truck driver! Now I sit in an all-night truck stop outside Walla Walla, a dusty dawn coming on. Will I ever get out of here, or will I become an onion grunt in the spring (as the driver suggested), planting Walla Walla sweets, maybe even sticking around to pull them up in the summer?
Waitress figures I’ll never get out of here. Gum-chewing siren in a coral uniform, she saw me writing and asked me what. “Just traveler’s tales,” I told her.
“Not romances?” she asked, clearly disappointed. When I convinced her I was no novelist, just a vagrant making chicken scratches while waiting for a ride, and no, I couldn’t write her life story for her, though I was sure it was every bit as fascinating and “weird” as she said, she told me I’d never get a ride. Coreen pouted for a while, but I was her only company, so she broke down and gave me another cup of coffee and a slice of peach pie, at the cost of also accepting a slice of her plenty-weird story. Then the morning trade began to butt in, demanding Coreen’s attention and aborting the saga, which I was quite enjoying, as it made my life sound easy. Why am I writing this crap? Just to stay awake.
December 13. I’ve read that Friday the 13th was a lucky day in the old religions, turned around by the latecomers, just like All Hallows’ itself. Anyway, the goblins smiled, and I landed from a ride with a rancher just outside Boise, Idaho. It’s a dreadful cold night, and any reasonable person might consider this bad fortune. But I recognized from the topography, at a spot way down the Snake this morning, the likelihood of a Nez Percé arrowhead manufactory. By midafternoon I had gathered 47 flint, chert, and obsidian points and some excellent shards. I traded a spearpoint with the manager of a motel for two nights’ lodging and four home-cooked meals. Tomorrow, I ought to make a week’s wages selling the points in Nampa, Boise, or Burley.
The manager, an amateur collector, told me he’s heard rumblings about new federal regulations that will ban the collecting of artifacts on public lands altogether. My first reaction, like his, was what the hell are so-called public lands for? But then, though I didn’t tell him this, I remembered feeling qualms about digging into that midden today. Seems a hard world where a ranch kid couldn’t pick up an arrowhead without being a crook. But maybe those times are going; maybe there won’t be any more ranch kids. Maybe there will be pothunters swarming all over the public lands, not just a few like me. And maybe such a law is inevitable. All I know is it’s a bloody cold gale out there. The sage is struggling to keep its roots in the ground. Where would I be spending the night without those arrowheads? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
December 15. I made nearly twice what I expected, all from people who have spent their lives in the area and have never found a single point. “Where did you pick these up?” inquires a potential buyer. “Far from here, over by White Swan,” I lie. If he knew they were from his own backyard, he might not buy. Or else he’d say I stole them. But they don’t search. What’s the matter with people who never look beyond their own noses? Or is the matter with me, always a poke-about, sticking my snout here and there, in other people’s backyards and business, always in danger of freezing it off?
End of self-examination. I feel so flush, I might even catch a ’Hound to Jackson instead of hitchhiking across Antarctica. I hate to do it since that last lockout strike. Someday the drivers are really going to bite back. If labor even survives. Teamsters these days, they think Workers World is a theme park. Maybe that’s why an old leftie like me can’t get a job, or keep one . . . I’d rather scrabble for arrowheads in a frigid gale for a decent wage than sell my sore back to the man just to keep it warm a little longer.
Christmas Day. I had two options: spend Yule with the other derelicts in the mission at Pocatello, or drink beer with a Nez Percé/Shoshone friend on the reservation. Since his ancestors were the source of my current largesse, I chose the latter. When I arrived with a turkey and a case of Rainier Ale, my intentions were misunderstood. A tribal official asked if I thought they wanted charity. “Not at all,” I said. “Just looking for a place to spend Christmas out of the cold—I used to have some friends here.” He’d never heard of my old pal.
“You’d better go to the mission in Pocatello with the other paleface bums,” he said. “They’d eat your turkey. In fact, so will we. You can’t take beer there, so you’d best leave that here too. You can keep a couple for the road.” I thanked him and split. Chief Joseph got a little of his own back this Christmas. I spent the winter feast in an all-night Denny’s at a freeway interchange, where three people thought they were cute for asking if I was Santa Claus. The dishwasher said, “Hell no, he’s Jerry Garcia!” which was better. His boss called me a shiftless hippie and invited me to depart into the bleak predawn (“On your way, longhair,” were his actual words). Charged and convicted as a honky and a hippie on the same day—Merry Christmas!
December 26. Am I missing something? All I want for Christmas is a Magdalena. Oh, how I’d like to see my Maggie flying free and high, until I get hold of her. But I’m afraid she’ll be a long time coming. Meanwhile, my heart hurts. This bus is all the home I’ve got, these bus people all the company I need, and a little extra. The mere thought of Magdalena seems surreal in this overheated winter canister. I guess I’ll start the year in Jackson, and see what happens. Do mountain men still rendezvous there? Or mountain women? Can Magdalena be that far behind?
Mead closed the thick weather-beaten diary and rubbed his eyes. “He seems to have been some sort of a gypsy beachcomber,” he said aloud, “or a fly-by-night scavenger, ever ready to turn his little