Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (44 page)

We headed on, south-eastward now, into Nevada. Nevada was a cauldron, empty but for the little groups of wrecked automobiles which we called 'Nevada gardens'.

The thermometer hovered round 110 and the road was a black ribbon, a hissing of melted tar under the tyres. We measured one straight thirty-one miles long. The mountains of the atomic proving range, barren, stark grey and black and ochre, shimmered along the eastern horizon. Each lone store in the desert had its 'Nevada garden' at the back, ice-cold beer in the front, and fervidly advertised slot machines selling condoms in the men's room. In Las Vegas we found a motel away from the main drag, and in the evening ventured out to explore the Sin Capital of the U.S.A. For a couple of hours we gawked at a world so tawdry, so inane, so sheerly ox-dumb that we marvelled it could exist in the same country with Einstein, Wall Street, and the double play; but of course the genius of the nation was to provide facilities for such idiocy, so that one can come from and go to it, as through a door, when the need strikes. In the United States, another world is not across the Channel but across the street.

Next day we made a scheduled call at the Post Office to pick up mail. Susan was fine. Martin had an infected finger but was O.K. Our parents in England were fine. And, forwarded by Helen Strauss, a communication from the Southern Judicial District of New York invited me to attend at the court-house on August 9 for a final hearing on my application for United States citizenship.

It was August 4. We drove that day to Kingman, Arizona via Boulder Dam and a confrontation over Senator McCarthy. At a small cafe where we stopped off for a cold drink McCarthy was speaking on the radio. The craggy lady behind the counter said belligerently that
there
was the only man who could save America from the Red Menace. We said nothing. Citizenship was so near, but not yet... She insisted. Didn't we agree? I sighed, and said I thought McCarthy was a disgrace to Wisconsin, the U.S.A., and President Eisenhower. We exchanged sharp words, with Barbara firing from the flank. At length the angry, lady, probably baffled by our accents, cried 'Where do you come from, anyway?'

We got up. 'England and New York,' I said, 'And proud of both.' We left. But one must remember that the Grand Canyon, also, is in Arizona.

That was where we went next. It is indeed grand, as awesome for its colours as for its vast scale. It is hard to describe and harder to photograph. We spent a morning there, saying little, and then drove on, the memories fixed and stupendous in our minds.

This was a different West, high and dry and full of names and faces from an older America. We wanted to go by the goosenecks of the San Juan River, Mexican Hat, and Navajo country, but the maps warned 'Roads in bad condition, take extra water, gasoline, and tyres.' The thought of missing my appointment in New York, after all I had been through, gave me the shivers even in that heat. So we turned back to U.S. 66 at Winslow and thence east to Gallup, New Mexico. We had hoped to pass the night in Gallup, but the first three motels we asked at were full, so we had a beer in a bar full of slightly drunken Navajos, and headed north on U.S. 666. The road was straight most of the way, but only in one plane. In the other it flicked up and down over the many transverse ridges like a lashed whip. It ran up the eastern edge of the Navajo reservation and in the dusty afternoon we saw three flocks of sheep, the young girls herding them through the chaparral riding easily on horses at the back of the flocks.

Straight ahead an English perpendicular church spire pierced the skyline; but surely there were no churches like that in New Mexico? We drove ten miles and the spire seemed a little bigger, but not much. It could not be a spire, but a whole cathedral. Ten more miles... it rose darker over the intervening ridges, higher, more massive It was not a cathedral, but the peak of some far mountain. Ten miles more... the setting sun gilded the upper battlements. It was not a peak, but a city. We breasted a ridge and it burst over us, a mightier Mont St Michel, a cathedral, a mountain, a gigantic rock schooner crossing the desert, its mast piercing the sky. It was the Shiprock, the summit of its topmost crag 7,178 feet above sea level, and 1,400 feet sheer above the desert washing its base. In this ship, since turned to stone, the Ute Indians believe they came from another world, to settle here, their third incarnation as a people.

From Denver Barbara drove back to the D-Lazy-K and the children, while I flew to New York. Vyvyan, generously excited, met me with tickets for a night game next day at the Polo Grounds. She was a Jint fan, too, and we were leading the league. Willie Mays was back from army service, and we'd got a great young pitcher, Johnny Antonelli, from the Braves.

It was a good game, with a typical Polo Grounds crowd, about a third of us Negro, good tempered, partisan, drinking Cokes, eating hot-dogs, and yelling our lungs out for Willie and Monte and Don and Whitey and Captain Alvin and even Leo the Lip. But Willie made one of his fantastic catches, and completed the double play by throwing a runner out at home, throwing while still about six feet up the centrefield wall and 450 feet from the plate; and the team looked so good that I made up my mind we were going to win the pennant,
and
the World Series; and there and then I chose an October date for a party to celebrate the victory. That night I took Vyvyan and her cousin Eugenie Huckel to some splendidly expensive Gotham hash-house, and we drank Romanee-Conti and Vyvyan wept a little because after all the struggling and begging and introducing and arm-twisting and vouching, I had arrived. If there was anything to be proud of, she shared in it.

Next day, in the vast barrack on Foley Square which is the U.S. Court House, it seemed particularly appropriate, since Willie Mays had been an inspiration at the start and at the end of the long journey, that the man sitting next to me on the pew-like benches should be a Jamaican Negro, chauffeur to a Long Island millionaire. The millionaire was there, too, to see that George, who did not have much education, was not finally conned out of his citizenship by the bureaucracy; but when I said I would look after George, as I knew the ropes (by God, did I know the ropes!), the millionaire went off to take care of his money. George and I sat through an hour or so of preliminaries, and at last,
en masse,
swore allegiance to the United States, its flag and constitution, and promised to forgo all other kings, princes and potentates. I could almost hear the words'... till death us do part,' and felt oddly as though the Jamaican and I were being married; which, in a way, We were. After we had filed up to receive our certificates of naturalization we found a bar, had a couple of drinks together, shook hands, wished each other all good luck in our new country, and parted.

Next day I was purring down into Jackson Hole airport on a Frontier Airlines Convair from Salt Lake City. There below was the Grand Teton, Mount Moran, Jenny Lake... nearly all the snow gone from Alaska Basin now: we would be able to explore it without danger... the airport, and Barbara with the car. (She would become a citizen six months later)... the D-Lazy-K, and the children running out to greet us, only Martin had thought it proper to mount his horse for the ceremony. He galumphed up on this animal, roughly the height of a giraffe and the girth of a hippopotamus, bounced to a stop, and chirped 'Howdy!' His infected finger was quite bad, and neither of them seemed to have washed for a month, but they were walking volcanoes of information on moose-hunting, horse-grooming, calf-roping, and flapjack-making.

After a few days with the children, during which time we mailed out fifty invitations to our October party to celebrate the Giants' world championship (including to our parents in England); and a promised excursion to Yellowstone (full of wonders, indeed, but also of people) — we headed up once more into the Tetons, this time hiring a wrangler and pack-horse to carry up our kit.

We pitched camp on Fox Creek Pass, on the boundary between Wyoming and Idaho. A drift of snow lingered still under a north-facing bank, and there we buried our bacon, butter, and other perishables, well secured in tins. If bears found them, we'd be out of luck, but we had seen none, nor signs of any, during our previous spell. This time we made two or three excursions into the Alaska Basin, photographing the wild flowers that were just bursting out, so late, from where the snow had lain. For three days we saw no one, but on the third evening, lying in the sheltered tent, we heard a dog barking and then a voice calling... in Spanish. We tumbled out and found a horseman herding a big flock of sheep up from the Idaho side. He was a young Catalan — a city boy from Barcelona, but all Spaniards are born shepherds — doing this lonely work, which sheep ranchers can't find Americans willing to do, however much pay they offer. We sat late round our camp fire that evening talking nostalgically of the Ramblas, the Diagonal (which no one has ever called the Avenida Generalissimo Franco), the beer in the Plaza Real, and the seafood in Barceloneta.

Cold, wet days followed and we decided to go back down. But the wrangler was not due to pick us up for another three days, so we would have to carry all our gear ourselves. This meant two trips. The first spell, we reached the trees at the head of Death Valley, dumped our loads and climbed back up to the pass for the rest. As we again reached the dump, the rain returned. We pitched camp on the spot, stowed everything away, made ourselves warm and comfortable, and went to sleep.

Next day, August 2nd, it was snowing. The loads had been very heavy — we were counting on that pack-horse — and we agreed that we couldn't go on this way. One of us must go and get a horse from the nearest dude ranch. Barbara declined to be left alone at the head of Death Valley in a small blizzard, so it was she who had to go. The snow was turning to rain as she set off near nine o'clock for an eight-mile hike down the ill-marked trail, keeping a sharp lookout for mountain lion and grizzlies. She saw neither, but soon noticed large soup-plate size indentations in the soft mud of the trail. They were moose tracks, going the same way, and they were full of water, at first. But as she hurried on through the dripping forest the tracks became only half full, and filling... then nearly new, water just trickling in. She was closing up on the beast. A bull moose standing about ten feet at the shoulder, she imagined. With horns spreading the width of a house. Black, and in an extremely bad temper. Weighing 2,000 pounds... 4,000... 6,000... Could run faster than a racehouse. Knock down a redwood by leaning on it. The bull was furious. His wife had run away with a travelling wapiti... The huge footprints were now dry. She was on the animal's heels. Barbara stopped, huddled herself into shelter under a tree, and smoked two cigarettes; and a third. Then she started gingerly on, whistling and singing, which was to say
Please get off the path, sir.
The moose must have been a gentleman, and he also must have been very close; for she had barely gone a hundred yards when the hoofprints turned off and were lost in the heavy timber. Barbara broke into a trot and reached the White Grass Ranch in a muck sweat. There the dudes, mainly from Philadelphia, were having pre-lunch Martinis in the warm and elegant ranch room, wearing their stretch pants, western shirts, and turquoise jewellery As Barbara clumped in, dripping wet and covered in mud, her hair like the Medusa's, a silence fell; but once they found that she knew what Martinis were, and indeed actually drank them (west of the Susquehanna, like most mixed drinks, they are often regarded as effete eastern medicines, fit only for interior decorators) she was much feted and cosseted.

Meanwhile, back at the dump, I slept, watched the rain change to snow and back again a few times, ate cold bully beef, drank bourbon, and waited. At last I heard the creak and jingle of saddlery and up the trail through the snow came... my God, came America! The wrangler was six feet four, the build of a rail, long face tanned mahogany under a high Wyoming hat, short blue denim jacket, check wool shirt, silk kerchief, work-worn chaps. With him rode a tall girl, also in full cowboy costume, leading a riding-horse and two pack-horses. They came on, the horses trotting heavily on the muddy trail, snow mantling the riders' hats and shoulders and big gauntlets. They stopped a few feet from me, where I had crawled out of the tent and waited to greet them.

'Howdye,' the man drawled, dismounting in a long, easy swing. I'm Jim.'

'I say, how do you do?' the girl said. I'm Betty Featherstone.'

She was English, working a summer as a cowgirl at the White Grass. The wrangler was from Ely, Nevada. We loaded up the gear, I mounted the riding-horse, and we set off.

A couple of days later we went to the D-Lazy-K to pick up the children. The owner told us they were great kids, which we already suspected. Susan, he had noticed, was turning more to books and less into relationships with other people, but she was a highly efficient and indeed dominating young person, organizing everyone in sight, when she chose to be. Martin was highly competitive, and had done well in riflery, though his real passion was fishing. From everyone's angle it had been a worth-while summer, we thought, as we set off on the last phase of it, a circular trip to look for a suitable site for my railroad research.

We headed, first, towards South Dakota, to examine the Chicago and North Western, and the Milwaukee Road. As we drove we found that the kids had learned other things beside horsemanship at the D-Lazy-K. Martin chanted Baptist hymns and reprimanded me for using the name of the Lord in vain. Susan kept asking us if we realized the enormity of our sin in drinking whisky; we would not be saved, she insisted, we were hurting the Lord's feelings and flying clear in the face of the Good Jesus. We turned their attention to the numerous domesticated beasts on the prairie around us, and set them to playing Animal Euchre. If a man isn't safe from salvation in his own car, where is he?

Finding nothing to suit me, we headed back south towards Laramie and the Union Pacific. The children had collected some huge elk horns while at the ranch, and these they insisted on taking home. As there was no other place we arranged them on the back seat, and the children travelled curled up inside them, as though in singularly uncomfortable chairs designed by a mad Scots laird.