Jubilee Hitchhiker (43 page)

In a chapter called “
Trout Fishing in America
with the FBI,” Richard described a wanted poster for Richard Lawrence Marquette he came across in the window of a store on lower Market Street. The suspect was “an avid trout fisherman.” Brautigan jotted down the information in his notebook. He described the “dodger” exactly as it appeared, both sides folded under. The arbitrarily truncated description of the fugitive is reminiscent of William Burroughs's “cut-up” experiments, begun in Paris at the same time that Brautigan started on his novel. The facsimile signature of
Trout Fishing in America
ending this chapter is in Richard Brautigan's hand.

“The Mayonnaise Chapter,” last in the novel, provides the best-known example of “found art” in
Trout Fishing in America
. Consisting in its entirety of a single letter of condolence that Ron Loewinsohn reported “the author actually found in a secondhand bookstore and reproduced verbatim—including the misspelling in the postscript: ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise [
sic
],'” the chapter is essential Richard Brautigan. Although he didn't write a word of it, Mother and Nancy's letter to Florence and Harv reflects Brautigan's easy offhand voice, his concern for average working-class people, his matter-of-fact treatment of death, and his often startling juxtaposition of wildly disparate images. When the nine-year-old letter, intended as a bookmark, fluttered from the pages of a dusty volume, Richard Brautigan made it his own.

Meandering around North Beach and hanging out in Washington Square Park, Brautigan encountered an exotic variety of eccentric individuals. A confirmed “people-watcher,” he delighted in these discoveries. Among the more curious neighborhood specimens was a legless tramp who sold pencils on Columbus Avenue near Washington Square. He propelled himself along the city sidewalks on roller-skate wheels mounted beneath a crude handmade board. Everyone on the street called him Shorty. He was a foul-mouthed unpleasant man, frequently drunk and shouting obscenities at passing schoolchildren. This abusive behavior endeared him to the local bohemians.

Ginny Brautigan and Shirley Lipsett often took their new babies to the park, “the only green spot around.” They saw Shorty there all the time, waiting for his free sandwich in front of the church. Richard “talked to him a lot,” she recalled. Ginny never spoke to Shorty. “Richard almost always found things to say to people.” Ron Loewinsohn remembered Shorty. “He was a regular character, and there were a couple of guys from New Orleans, from Pirate's Alley, who were part of that contingent who used to hang around the Benjamin Franklin statue in the afternoon drinking muscatel.”

Brautigan made ample use of the offbeat characters he observed in the park. The two “broken-down artists from New Orleans” became part of the chapter “A Walden Pond for Winos.” Richard
also recognized the comic literary possibilities of connecting Shorty, the unpleasant derelict double-amputee, with a brawling fictional character Nelson Algren named “Railroad Shorty” in “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” a short story in his collection
The Neon Wilderness
. Later, Algren recycled the story into a violent episode concluding his novel
A Walk on the Wild Side
, this time calling the truncated strong man “Legless Schmidt.” In Brautigan's recollection both characters were named “Railroad Shorty,” and he titled a chapter for his own novel in progress “The Shipping of
Trout Fishing in America
Shorty to Nelson Algren.” Richard renamed the neighborhood wino and proposed packing him in a crate and sending him to Algren in Chicago, where the old bum might become a museum exhibit.

Something essential was missing from
Trout Fishing in America
. Brautigan had written numerous chapters: nostalgic reminiscences of his boyhood in the Pacific Northwest, oddball recollections of bohemian life in North Beach, offbeat “found art” observations, all possessing an original style and a certain evocative energy, yet taken as a whole, they didn't quite add up to a book. He wasn't writing a conventional novel, but Richard still needed something to tie it all together. He needed to go on a trout fishing trip.

More than a weekend in the Sierras, Brautigan wanted an expedition lasting through most of the summer. Richard and Ginny picked Idaho as their final destination. She'd been born there and had never seen the Snake River, a favorite spot of her father's. Idaho also had the advantage of being closer to San Francisco than either Montana or Wyoming, two other remote Rocky Mountain angling citadels they briefly considered. Ginny had relatives living in Idaho, which provided another advantage. The couple suspected the roads might get worse the further they ventured northeast from California. They could visit her family and take occasional breaks from the rustic joys of camping.

Almost overnight, Richard Brautigan became an amateur cartographer, studying atlases and road maps, following the enticing blue lines flowing between remote mountain ranges with faraway-sounding names: Sawtooth, Lost River, Pioneer, Bitterroot. So many great names. Richard fell in love with the names. He began a list of streams as yet unseen, picking those that sounded the most poetic: Lost Creek, Little Word River, Big Smoky Creek, Silver Creek. Brautigan's projected journey took shape like a poem in his imagination.

A letter arrived from E. V. Griffith, editor of
Hearse
. He apologized for his long delay in responding to the poetry Brautigan submitted. Out of the batch, Griffith was keeping only “The Rain” for the next issue. Under separate cover, he sent a copy of
Promotion
, his new publication, which contained a review of
Lay the Marble Tea
and reprinted two of the editor's “favorites” as a Brautigan sampler. “Hope there is no objection on your part,” Griffith concluded.

Richard did object. He learned that E. V. Griffith had already reprinted his poetry in earlier issues without prior permission. “The Rain” was Brautigan's final appearance in
Hearse
(no. 9, 1961). It was also the last time he published his work in “little” magazines for several years. Small presses paid nothing, aside from an implied hipness-by-inclusion. After his success with Carp Press, Brautigan knew he was much better off self-publishing his poetry. Also, he had other things on his mind. He was going fishing.

During the winter and spring of 1961, the Brautigans focused their thoughts on the adventure planned for the coming summer. They “discovered Schedule C,” the self-employment form of the federal income tax, and received a $350 refund. With this windfall they bought a rattletrap
ten-year-old Plymouth station wagon that embodied the notion of a moving violation. Stan Fullerton came to the rescue. A can-do sort of guy, practical in the many mechanical ways where Richard was all thumbs, Stan took the jalopy over to an automobile graveyard and bought replacement parts from the best of the rusting junkers abandoned there. These included “a new tailgate and lights all around.” Fullerton installed the parts “on the spot,” trading in what he removed as partial payment on the “new” junk.

Richard required minimal fishing equipment. Preferring to wade wet, he owned neither hip boots nor chest waders. He had no use for a fancy vest to store his flies, leaders, and other tackle. His fly rod was an RA Special #240. Priced at $14.99, the two-piece seven-foot fiberglass rod was a purely utilitarian “smoke pole.” With a Japanese Olympus reel and a spool of cheap floating fly line, it was all the gear Brautigan needed for catching trout.

Secondhand camping gear scrounged from friends and scored for discount prices in Army surplus stores transformed the Brautigans' apartment into a makeshift bivouac area. They acquired a tent and sleeping bags, pots, pans, skillets, and a two-burner Coleman white gas camp stove, all previously trail-broke. A Coleman lantern (a necessity for a couple who liked to read late into the night) was the only brand-new piece of equipment that Richard and Ginny purchased, a shopping experience Brautigan transformed into a chapter (“A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America”) in
Trout Fishing in America.

The Brautigans gave Jake, their surviving black cat, to their former roommate, Kenn Davis. Boaz met an unfortunate end months earlier. She crawled through an opening in the wooden cover of an unused backyard laundry sink and was unable to climb back out again. No one heard her desperate crying, and she died, like a creature from a Poe story, entombed in the tub.

By June, Richard, Ginny, and Ianthe were ready to hit the road. After storing their few possessions with friends, they vacated the Greenwich Street apartment and loaded the station wagon with all the camping stuff and baby things, along with two orange crates stuffed with books (“Rimbaud, Thoreau, Whitman”) and a Royal portable typewriter (the Smith-Corona Price Dunn gave Richard had succumbed to mechanical problems) loaned by Ray Lopez, a barber with a shop in the green-copper-clad Columbus Tower building at Kearny and Columbus where Brautigan got his hair cut. He no longer wore bangs, parting his pale blond hair on the right. Richard also shaved off his beard, but kept the drooping mustache. With high hopes, they headed east across the Bay Bridge in the Plymouth, destined for new possibilities.

Richard and Ginny drove over the Sierras on U.S. 40, passing through Reno, where they tied the knot four years earlier. Somewhere in the Nevada desert, they pulled off the highway and wound down a narrow dirt road into a broad basin fronted by an earthen dam. They made camp on the level surface of a dry lake bed and feasted that night after dinner on a large watermelon bought from a roadside grocery. The watermelon may have provided their salvation. Richard got up to relieve himself in the middle of the night and noticed huge thunderclouds roiling in the dark sky overhead. It was about to rain. A flash flood would inundate their campsite.

Richard woke Ginny, and they set to work striking camp on the double. “We almost killed ourselves,” Ginny recalled. “We had all this stuff. We had to cram it in, really fast.” If there was no danger of drowning, the possibility of having water up over their hubcaps and getting stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere seemed very real as the skies opened up above them. The raindrops
came down the size of silver dollars. By the time the tent was folded and packed into the Plymouth, along with their books and all the other gear, it was a deluge.

Ginny was terrified. It rained so hard she couldn't see to drive even with the lights on. Richard ran backwards up the road, waving his arms to show her where to turn as the station wagon slid around the slippery curves. Once they gained the paved highway and knew everything would be okay, the whole nasty experience became something they could laugh about, their big trip almost over before it had barely begun.

The Brautigans turned north for Idaho on U.S. 93 at Wells, a tiny truck stop fifty miles east of Elko. Ginny did all the driving. Richard sat, sometimes holding the baby on his lap, staring out at the vast open country. All along the way, he sang a tuneless song of his own invention. “Oh, my Orofino Rose,” he crooned, repeating the single line of his simple ditty over and over. (Their trip never took them as far as Orofino.) Pushing on past Twin Falls, they set up camp on Silver Creek, near the tiny town of Picabo, Idaho. Brautigan rigged his rod and set out after trout.

Richard sloshed into the chill mountain water in his blue jeans. During his first week in Idaho, Brautigan fished in Silver and Copper creeks, and on the Little Wood River. He bought a new twenty-five-cent Key brand spiral-bound notebook and began a list that he headed “Names of places where I caught trout, in order of appearance, 1961—Idaho, a travel song, a ghost song.” Silver Creek topped the list, followed in short order by the Little Wood River and Copper Creek. Compiling such catalogs became one of Richard's lifelong preoccupations.

The list grew as the summer unfolded. The Brautigans headed next for the Sawtooth National Forest, to a network of narrow valleys between the Smoky Mountains and the Soldier Mountains. They settled in at a campground on Big Smoky Creek, stream number 4 in the notebook. Several other prime fishing sites in the surrounding area were added in quick succession: Paradise, Salt, Little Smoky, and Carrie creeks.

The weather stayed hot and humid, and it frequently rained. During the midday hours when fishing proved unproductive, Richard set up the portable Royal and worked on his novel. The high mountain meadows provided excellent grazing, and many bands of sheep had been herded up to summer pasturage. Brautigan wrote of several woolly ungulate encounters (“Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek [. . .]”) and of giving a bottle of beer to a shepherd “who looked like Adolf Hitler.”

Large concentrations of lamb on the hoof invariably attracted predators, and Richard listened to the mournful calling of coyotes in the rain. He captured their howls in his singular prose. (“Their voices are a creek, running down the mountain, over the bones of sheep, living and dead.”) Salt Creek had been kind to Brautigan. He once caught “seven trout in fifteen minutes,” and later eased a beautiful bejeweled Dolly Varden from its swift-moving water.

Richard disliked the printed signs he saw warning of explosive cyanide capsules set out to kill coyotes. He wrote down a mock version of the government warning and had Ginny translate it into Spanish. Both appear in the chapter “The Salt Creek Coyotes,” where Brautigan, troubled by what an old-timer in a local bar had told him of the lethal lures, compared the cyanide capsules to the gas chamber at San Quentin.

Richard and Ginny headed west, winding along narrow Big Smoky Road and Shake Creek Road to Featherville, where they turned north through Rocky Bar on James Creek Road to an isolated campground at the edge of the wilderness area beneath East Warrior Peak. Here, Richard
fished the Middle Fork of the Boise River and the Queens River, catching trout in both places. Taking a break from camping in the rain, the Brautigans followed the Middle Fork down past Twin Springs and cut through Boise and its expensive motels on their way to McCall, where Ginny had relatives.