Blue Highways (47 page)

At the ferry slip I checked the schedule. I didn’t want a night crossing, but I could take one at noon the next day. On a breakwater near where Father Marquette celebrated a mass in the seventeenth century, I ate a sandwich as killdeer made long glides down along the beach. I was quite alone.

T
HERE’S
something to be said for banal conversation. After paying the grocery clerk for the yogurt, I commented, “It’s a fine day.”

She smiled. “Anything else?”

“That’s it, thanks. I’m taking the ferry today.”

With a nod, she went back to stamping prices on aspirin bottles. I walked to the breakwater to eat breakfast. A man was fishing. “Any luck?”

“None.”

“What’re you fishing for?”

“Perch.”

“What’s your bait?”

“Minnows.”

And so on. When I ran out of questions, the exchange was over. Across the central North, conversations had been difficult to strike up. The people were polite but reserved; often they seemed afraid of appearing too inquisitive, while at other times they were simply too taciturn to exchange the banalities and clichés necessary to find a base for conversation.

When I walked the North towns, people, wondering who the outsider was, would look at me; but as soon as I nodded they looked down, up, left, right, or turned around as if summoned by an invisible caller. “Stranger,” Whitman says, “if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?” I even tried my old stratagem of taking a picture of a blank wall just to give a passerby an excuse to stop and ask what I could possibly be photographing. Nothing breaks down suspicion about a stranger better than curiosity—except in the North; whatever works better there, I didn’t discover. The effect on me was that I felt more alone than I ever had in the desert. I wished for the South where any topic is worth at least a brief exchange. And so I went across the central North, seeing many people, but not often learning where our lives crossed common ground.

At noon the ferry rocked Kewaunee with her air horns and pulled into the slip just as one had done since 1892. She was the three-hundred-sixty-foot
Viking,
built in 1925 and converted from steam to diesel-electric in 1965. The boat swallowed a batch of boxcars, a few automobiles, then Ghost Dancing, small against the big steel wheels of the railway cars. Pivoting like a compass needle, the
Viking
made a ninety-degree turn in the harbor, sailed past the stubby lighthouse, and cut a straight line over the smooth water toward Elberta, Michigan. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the water changed from occluded green to indigo.

No one is pulling three-hundred-pound sturgeon out of Lake Michigan as the Indians once did, but municipal pollution and industrial contaminants have been reduced significantly since the sixties, and sport fishing is coming back; yet, levels of insecticides, PCB’s, and mercury are still too high to allow a resumption of commercial fishing.

On the aft deck I took a seat and watched Wisconsin get smaller. I had long wondered whether all shorelines disappear on a clear day in the middle of Lake Michigan (the name means “big water”). I would soon find out. When the ferry had loaded at Kewaunee, an infestation of gnats and midges had swarmed in and with maddening accuracy whizzed into eyes and ears. But, once we were under way, thumb-sized flycatchers flew aboard and hopped and flitted and ran down the bugs. One bird alighted on the arm of my chair, cocked an eye at me, nipped a midge, wiggled its minuscule mustache, peeped, and flew to the next chair. I was guessing the number of gnats it took to fill a flycatcher’s belly, an organ that can’t be any larger than a pinto bean, when a man at the rail pulled an unshelled peanut from his pocket and set it on the deck to lure another bird.

“The peanut’s almost as big as the bird,” I said.

He just looked at me, his brown eyes shining like pocket-worn chestnuts, his head a creased, leathery bag that might have been dug from a Danish peat bog. The man took a seat and explained that flycatchers followed the ferry from shore to shore. “The peanut is a joke.” He lived in Muskegon and had been visiting a daughter in Menominee. Born in Bavaria, he immigrated to Detroit with his mother in the thirties. For a number of years he had operated a double-crank-toggle-fender-stamping press at Chrysler Motors. “She push a million pounds against steel to make the fenders. But the boom-boom-boom damage the hears.” He pulled his large, Buddha ears.

There came a terrible clanging from below, and I said I hoped the boxcars hadn’t crushed my van. His eyes widened, and he said, “Boxcars? I tell you boxcars.” There followed a long, entangled tale, full of details about the old German rail system and about trout fishing.

The essence, as I understood it, was this: Karl (he so called himself), a boy of fourteen, went fishing with a comrade. They caught four trout, but it took all day to do it. In the growing dusk, they chose to use the railway tracks as a shortcut home. The comrade had heard the route was easy if you weren’t frightened of trestles over four deep gorges. The boys soon came to the first bridge; hoping not to meet a train at mid-bridge they crossed as fast as they could. It was terrifying to look between the ties.

“On the bridges,” he said, “was no place to go if train is coming.”

Trying not to look down, they crossed the second one; the tracks went into the forest and came out again to the third gorge, deeper than the second; they crossed quickly and again went into the forest and out to the last bridge. By that time it was too dark to see even their feet.

“We hold hands and feeled our way. Across almost, a big light blind us.”

It was a locomotive rounding a curve. The boys turned and started back, but they couldn’t hop from tie to tie quickly enough in the dark. Only one thing to do: laying poles and fish across the timbers, they slipped between the ties and hung by their arms. The engine, roaring above, knocked cinders in their eyes and nearly shook them loose. The cars kept coming, coming. Then the last clacked over. They started to pull up, but their arms were too tired.

“We can only hang like chickens at market.”

The comrade tried to swing his feet up, but nearly lost his grip, so they hung and argued whether to drop in hopes of hitting the river.

“When we cross, we are not afraid to take a chance to die, but when we hang, we become afraid to take chance to live. Life is so.”

“How long can a boy hang by his arms?”

“When it is all things you hang for? Who can answer?”

The comrade was in favor of dropping, but he couldn’t get the nerve to go first. They settled on a course of yelling alternately every several minutes. They hung and they hung. The train had shaken the stringer of trout through the ties, and four dead fish dangled in their faces. “If we move, the fishes kisses us.” They kept hanging. The next locomotive would shake them loose.

“I tell my comrade, ‘Soon we will be dying.’”

The boys whimpered and Karl wished he had been a better son to his poor mother and had not lied so often to the priests. He promised God he would change his ways. Then a beam from under the bridge played over them.

“‘
Schnell,
’ we call, and a voice say, ‘What’s this happening here?’ I see big eyes looking into mine. Eyes blink and I see a man’s face and it say, ‘What are you stupid boys doing?’ We look down and see his boots. He is standing in marsh. We was hanging with our fishes ten inches off the ground.”

Whether the man’s story was truth or tale, it had held me, and I had forgotten to see about the shore disappearing from view. I jumped up. We were almost across. It would remain a mystery. When I turned around, the old fellow was gone.

The sandy dunes of Michigan glowed pink in the late sun, and at the mouth of the Elberta harbor, there was a marvelous sight: little slivers of silver jigged on their tails over the blue water. They were alewives looking for all the world like dancing spoons. These were the fish that had washed ashore to foul beaches in the days of high pollution.

The
Viking
let loose with her horns, the crew tied up and sprinted across the dock and into cars and roared off to supper, and I wished the
Viking
were sailing all the way to the Atlantic.

S
OME
evenings on the road were like this one:

East of Elberta, across the Betsie River, and down route 115, I got choosy about where to spend the night. Looking for a town whose primary business was not tourism, I drove on through stands of birch girdled for souvenirs by sightseers, through a countryside of motels and sewer-hook-up campgrounds. Nothing satisfactory. In an hour, I was unexpectedly on U.S. 27, a limited-access highway. Insisting on multi-access roads and resisting controlled-access living, I had driven right onto a no-U-turn, minimum speed, tractors-with-lugs-prohibited mainline. I was irritated, but things were to get worse.

Through the oilfields of middle Michigan and into Mount Pleasant with the last drop of light, and onto the campus of Central Michigan University. I opened the cooler and found a butt end of bread, a wrinkled orange, and the can of chopped liver. Off I went for a calendared cafe serving Michigan pasties and ended up at an assembly-line sandwich hut.

I stood with the other ambulatory digestive tubes reading the wall-mounted, internally lighted menu showing full-color photographic representations of hamburgers and French fries twelve times life size. A slice of potato big enough to lay steel track over did not look appealing. All prices ended in nine. I ordered, and the cash register hummed, spun its mechanism, glared a red number, and an agent pushed me my texturized substitute in its polystyrene sarcophagus. I joined the other diners, some of whose gizzards had already begun wrestling hamburgers named for their weight.

Sticky from the heat, I faced another warm night in the truck. I went back to the campus and stopped at an old stone dormitory. Although spring term had ended and summer session hadn’t begun, somebody was living in the building. No one around. I heard a noise from a shower room, so I went in and started to call out when I noticed a tampon dispenser. T
RESPASSER
J
AILED
. Backing out quickly and quietly, I turned and bumped into a nude body. “What’s going on?” A young man’s voice.

“The person,” I fumbled. “The resident assistant. Looking for him.”

“He’s out. What do you need?”

“Wanted to buy a shower.”

“Help yourself.”

“Isn’t this a women’s dormitory?”

“Usually. Right now it’s for some businessmen taking a seminar.”

When I came out of the shower, the student offered a vacant room. It would be cooler. I was almost asleep when the light went on, and in walked a man, about forty, wearing a baby-blue terrycloth hat—the kind you can wipe a sweating face with—and a blinking, multimode, programmable, digital chronograph that gave him a continuous readout on what microsecond, second, minute, hour, day, and month he was currently in, as well as his lap time, split time, and whether he was in first or second place. He set down two monogrammed suitcases, looked at me, said nothing, opened a case, undressed, wrapped a personalized towel around his looseness, locked the suitcase, stuck his billfold in his towel six-shooter style, and walked out, leaving the light on. After ten minutes I got up and turned it off.

He came back smelling of baby powder, turned the light on, studied his fret of a face in the mirror, got his shaving kit, and walked out, leaving the light on. After five minutes, I got up and turned it off. He came back, turned the light on, sat down, belched, wiped his tasseled shoes, lighted a Vantage Menthol, took out a
Consumer Reports, Penthouse,
and a plastic binder with North Central Assurance Group or something like that embossed on it. A man laughed in the hallway, and he walked out again.

“Larry,” a voice said. “You fly in?”

“Drove the stationwagon. Say, who’s the creep in my room?”

“The jigaboo?”

“No. Tonto.”

“Don’t know.”

I got up and turned off the light. I was almost asleep when the door banged open and a flashlight blinded me. That was it. I jumped up.

“What the hell is this? Get that light out of my eyes.”

“What’s your name, buddy?”

“Sparkle Plenty. What the hell’s going on?”

“Are you registered?”

“I’m not a Communist. What is this?”

A blinking readout reached over and switched on the light. Larry had brought a watchman. I explained the student’s invitation, but the watchman didn’t believe it and told me to get out. I pulled on clothes and rolled up my sheet. As slowly as possible. As I left, I said to Larry, “Be sure you call Sam Spade here if those two beds aren’t big enough for your fat ass.”

“Shut your own ass, you freak.”

The watchman interrupted the exchange, and I went to the hot truck and lay down in a cold anger. I couldn’t get to sleep so I wrote out a little report. When I finished, I went back and pinned it to the door:

A
CROSS
her T-shirt was
SKI
. She leafed through
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
in the college bookstore. I was in the middle of Michigan and looking for a place to go next, so I asked whether she lived in Mount Pleasant, but she didn’t look up. I tapped her arm.