Blue Highways (49 page)

Ten thousand miles of blue highways had wearied me, especially after driving the last three hundred of them in rain. I wasn’t tired of traveling, and I had no reason to go home, but I wanted to put the wheel aside, to get off striped pavement for a few days. Near Canandaigua Lake, a friend I hadn’t seen in several years had built a log cabin in the woods. Whether he would be home I didn’t know, but that’s where I headed.

With what remained of the light, I followed the Niagara River toward Lake Ontario, then picked up New York 93: through Warrens Corners (next to Wrights Corners), through Lockport (an old Erie Canal town and former home of Merchant’s Gargling Oil, “Good for Man or Beast”), through the old Heinz 57 Varieties vegetable farms, onto state 5 and into Batavia (where the Old Snake Den Inn of the early 1800s advertised beds with “clean sheets only slept in a few times since new”), to Le Roy (former home of J-E-L-L-O), and on through darkness to the west edge of Canandaigua Lake.

I knew the road name where my friend lived and nothing more, so I stopped at a farm on route 21 for directions. The farmer got me to the road and the road took me to the house, which was lighted from top to bottom with no one around but the dogs. I went back to my bunk. Later, when trees obscured the moon, there was an uproar of metallic banging against the Ghost.

“Hey in there! Dammit! Open up this sardine can!”

It was my friend.

Scott Chisholm said, “I’m not going to wake you up by asking why you’re sleeping in my woods. I’m only going to ask if you want to sleep inside.”

“Too tired to move.”

“All right, breakfast it is then. I’ll tell you only this: I won’t be able to sleep knowing you’re here.”

“I’m quite harmless.”

A
T
breakfast, Linda, Chisholm’s wife, told me he had slept like a fallen log. “I knew he would,” I said, “but I liked thinking he thought he wouldn’t.”

Scott Chisholm, a Canadian citizen of Ojibway and Scotch descent, had lived in this country longer than in Canada and liked the United States but wouldn’t admit it for fear of having to pay off bets he made years earlier when he first “came over” that the U.S. is a place no Canadian could ever love. He was a teacher in the Empire State College system.

In 1975 he built a two-story log house in the hills west of Canandaigua Lake, the “thumb” of the Finger Lakes. Chisholm drilled a well and hit sweet water at thirty-five feet. It produced six gallons a minute. Even though a human being needs only a pint of water a day to survive, Chisholm decided his family couldn’t live on 8,640 gallons a day. So he drilled to sixty-eight feet and got fourteen gallons a minute—fourteen gallons of gassy, sulphurous stuff. Probably the most American thing he ever did.

He and Linda and their two children, Sean and Caitlin, shared the house with a three-legged dog named Teddy, a four-legged dog that had lost its fur named Chops, and Murray, a plump guinea pig that had just cut a foot and left red fleur-de-lis rodent prints all over the
New York Times
in the bottom of its cage. The family also had two cats. They were complete and unimpaired.

Chisholm fixed breakfast: a large mound of “secret ingredient” (forgot what went in) scrambled eggs, link sausage, muffins, melon, milk. The fellow talks or he doesn’t talk—that is, he talks intensely or is intensely silent. He is the noisiest silent man I’ve ever known. That morning Chisholm was talking, something he does well (he planned to become a Mormon preacher before he lost the call).

“I’m writing a film treatment for a Western about Asa T. Soule, a man who gave Rochester a baseball team,” he said. “In his day, Soule was to Rochester Kodak and Xerox combined. He manufactured patent medicines. The big seller was Hop Bitters, which he claimed to be, I’m quoting, ‘the Greatest Blood Purifier, Liver Regulator, and Life and Health Restoring Agent on Earth.’ He also made the Indian Cough Cure, Autumn Leaf Extract for Females, Ocean Weed Heart Remedy, and Swamp Root. Became preposterously rich. Some people even got well taking Soule’s concoctions. Be all that as it may, what do you want to do?”

“Don’t entertain me.”

“I have to build my stone retaining wall.”

“Let’s build it then.”

We began. There was nothing but an eroded bank, and the stones were still in the creek, on the hills, in the woods. We rolled, pushed, shoved, and piled rocks along the road, then loaded them into the back of his Fiat wagon. It was hot and tent caterpillars swarmed the ground like the Chinese army and bees hummed in the horse chestnut blossoms. While we worked, Chisholm talked: a friend who collected and drove nothing but Studebakers got rear-ended by a man admiring the old car; Harold Outhouse had a dog that could pull a bull down by the nose; a black family once moved out here and began building a home before being run off—although the area had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

17. Scott Chisholm near Cheshire, New York

A young woman rammed past in her Dodge, covering us with dust, and I asked what the hell was going on. “She’s been living hidden away up this little road all her life. She’s judgmental and vicious and has it in for what she doesn’t understand, which is almost everything.”

The pulling and hoisting and sweating stretched out the kinks of sitting behind a steering wheel. I couldn’t recall labor feeling so good. Chisholm rolled a fat, round stone out of the trees. I grabbed and pulled. I was capable of lifting it, but it was so close to the limits of my strength, I didn’t want to try. Working with someone I knew less well, I would have picked it up, but with this old friend I could concede my limit and let the boulder take my measure. Nothing showed our friendship better than that rock I walked away from. Chisholm picked it up, tottered, and bounced it in the Fiat. Then he dragged an even bigger hunk out of the creek. He was getting curious about what size stone he could lift. This one was too risky. “Don’t pull that Atlas routine again. Let me help.” But he bent around the granite like a question mark and put it in.

We dumped the stones in front of the embankment, then quit for lunch. There was little talk; mostly we poured down ice tea and hung in our chairs like damp rags. At two o’clock we started again. Laying the stones was easier. Then a strange thing began to happen. We could feel an urging in the rocks, a behest to be put in just so, to be set where they would hold against the shifts of the earth, against the twists of the roots. They fit one way and not other ways. It was as if the stones were, as Indians believed, alive. The rocks were moving us. “Are you a determinist?” I said.

“How could a man live in this country and be a determinist?”

“Neither am I, but this wall is proof if you ever change your mind. It knows where it has to go. We aren’t the ones making the decisions.”

Chisholm stopped. “I’ve felt it too.”

We just followed the will of the wall, whatever came from the stones, and the raw, eroded bank began to pull its cover of rock over. We worked like men possessed—Chisholm with a fever, I more slowly as I paused to watch him, to watch the sweat bead and drip through his beard. The dust stuck to us, and we smelled more of soil than men. We couldn’t quit. My legs were turning to noodles, my hands cramping, and we began to drop stones, but we worked on. When the light came in low under the trees, we straightened to look. No more granite. We had laid twenty feet.

Chisholm wanted to wash the stones, to clean them, to set them, and he should have. It was his wall. He had worked harder. But I, an opportunist, got the hose first. Grit and dust flushed from the rocks, the round ones shining like men’s skulls, the flat ones like their tombstones. The wall would be there until other men came, and, with effort, moved it. Maybe nothing else he or I had done or would do would last as long as that wall.

In the evening, fireflies switched on and off, crickets tweetled, and Caitlin lay next to Murray and held a sterling spoon to a bruise on her leg to take out the tenderness. We sat on the pine porch, Chisholm’s cigar glowing in the dark. We felt full. It was as if we had done something.

Later, lying in bed, I was glad I’d stopped to see him. I had needed work and familiar faces around a dinner table; I needed stories that embarrass because they are undeniable, stories that only old friends can tell because only they know them. And it appeared then as though I wouldn’t have been able to travel another mile had it not been for these people. I suppose that wasn’t true, but it seemed so.

P
ETE
Marvin was also Pierangelo Masucci—they were one and the same. Well, almost the same. He said he thought more like an Italian when people called him Masucci, but that didn’t happen often now. His brother had changed the name in the late thirties when, as a schoolboy, he tired of teachers fumbling Masucci and kids laughing. Pete said, “If nobody can speak the name, you got no name.”

He lived on a seventy-five-acre farm high on the glacial hills above Canandaigua Lake. In his garage workshop he was tinkering with a new Buick he’d just bought for a good figure because the front end had been damaged in a test drive. While barn swallows slid in and out, Pete chewed Winter’s Cigar Clippings and worked on the car. There had been trouble with the dealer in the transaction and Pete had asked Chisholm, his neighbor, to write a letter of complaint for him. Chisholm had gone into Rochester and turned the project over to me. “Language-wise,” Pete said, “if it’s writing, I’m not so good.” He gave me a pad and pencil.

“Who’s the letter to?” I asked.

“Ralph Nader.”

It wasn’t a joke, so together we wrote the letter—a hot, fuming thing as Pete wanted. Then we talked and drank lemonade.

He and his wife, Pauline, were born in Rochester; Pete in 1910, she in 1914. His mother, Filomena, was born in Naples, Italy, in 1884. The three lived in a one-hundred-five-year-old farmhouse. Pete and Pauline had moved from Rochester to the New York vineyard country between Cheshire and Naples in the late forties and rebuilt the big house over the years—tearing down a shed to build a kitchen, installing heat and plumbing. It was an accomplishment, the more so because Pete had walked with crutches since he was a small boy. The carpentry required Pauline to lift, climb, and hold; Pete measured, cut, and drilled holes for her to drive the nails home. But when he put a new roof on the big garage, she would have none of it, and he crawled up and shingled it alone.

At the suggestion of his brother-in-law, Pete had moved the family to the farm for a go at raising chicken broilers. “What did I know about chickens?” He bent a thumb and finger to say zero. “So you learn what you want to do.” He went to the library to find out how to build a rain shelter for poultry. “Jeez, the first year the price was two dollars a chicken. Good money. I thought we had it made. But the buyers came out and took the best stock and left me the junk. We fed the hell out of the others, fattened them, and sold them door to door for about three-fifty and made a little money. So I bought seven hundred more. The next year, the price hit bottom. I finally said shit on chickens.”

In those early years of farming, he and Pauline took jobs in Canandaigua factories to meet the mortgage payments. First they worked at the Veloking plant making tricycles for Sears, Roebuck. Then they worked at the F. A. Smith Company making electric motors. But Pete didn’t like working inside, and he couldn’t get the noise of punch presses out of his ears. Even in the fields, he heard the presses.

In the early fifties, they quit the factory jobs and began farming full-time. They put in a garden and vineyard and grew blackberries and grapes and built up a herd of fourteen dairy cows. They stayed with the Holsteins until the sixties.

“The government started coming around making you put in equipment if you sold your milk. New techniques like keeping the milk away from the air. You had to tube the milk from tits to tank. We couldn’t afford nothing like that. We couldn’t get a herd big enough to make bulk-making pay. Couldn’t keep up with regulations. You remember that Butz, that Secretary of Agriculture? He said, ‘Get big or get out.’ We got out. I finally said shit on cows.”

Pete cursed the Buick. “Engineers. Fifty thousand bucks a year to make things lousy and five years in college to learn how to do it. I had a ’twenty-seven Chevy coupe—old, busted thing with a cracked block. You think we had money to get it welded? We pulled the engine and set it on the kitchen table and filled the crack with solder. Drove it five more years. They engineered then.”

He gave up on the Buick for a while and closed the hood.

“We tried blackberries, but picking was too hard on the old people and kids horsed around. We paid pickers a dime a quart and sold for twelve cents. Is that profit? A blackberry bush lasted three or four years after it started bearing. I finally said shit on blackberries.”

“You’re down to grapes.”

“Grapes we picked by hand. Now they have a mechanical picker that shakes them off. Five or six acres of grapes in them days gave you a living. Six hundred plants to an acre. You can’t live off them today unless you got a hundred acres. Sixty thousand plants to support a man. My fields have gone back wild like a lot of the other old vineyards. We planted Concords by the thousands. Growers around here used to dig the holes by hand. I couldn’t do that, so I used a posthole digger on the back of the tractor. You know what? People got word of it and they said, ‘This Pete’s got an idea!’ Did I ever get any money for it? Shit. But that’s how they plant grapes today.”