The Great Northern Express (11 page)

Hope, on the other hand, strikes me as a more modest sentiment. For me, hope has little to do with metaphysics and a lot to do with the here and now. It is the day-to-day credo of farmers, teachers, doctors, writers, and baseball players who, even when they're on a tear, are probably going to make at least two outs for
every clean base hit—but look forward to each upcoming at-bat with optimism and excitement.

On the evening after my interlude in the [B]udget In[n], I took inventory over the phone with Phillis from my motel in Beaumont, Texas. The practical purpose of an author's tour, of course, is to sell the author's latest book. How many of mine had I sold thus far? Well, several thousand more than I would have had I used my fellowship period to stay at home in Vermont and REST. I'd met dozens of marvelously independent and knowledgeable booksellers, augmented my personal library with thirty or so great new (and old) titles, weathered an attack review, and had a chance to tell my audiences about the roller-coaster ride of our first year in Vermont, when it often seemed that we were living on hope and hope alone.

Certainly that was the case when it came to my hope to write the stories of the Kingdom.

Phillis and I were busier than we'd ever been in our lives. Besides teaching, we attended covered-dish suppers, put on pageants with the Sunday school, and drove over the Green Mountains to Burlington many nights and weekends to take graduate courses. I showed my new friend and colleague Jim Hayford a draft of my master's-thesis proposal on Shakespeare's villains. “This is all well and fine,” Jim told me. “Just don't neglect your
own
stories.”

Sometimes in the evening we'd slip away from grading stacks of papers, cut across the footbridge over the river by the mill we'd been enjoined to
keep the kids out of
, and climb the hill to 5 Cliff Street for a cup of tea and a restorative visit with the Hayfords. Those evenings remain some of the best of our lives. We'd talk about everything under the sun, coax Jim and Helen
into telling us Northeast Kingdom ghost stories, and listen to Jim read aloud from
The Life of Samuel Johnson
.

As a child, Jim had been quite frail. In the thirty years I knew him, I was never able to talk him into going trout fishing with me. He was the best speaker I'd ever heard, but he shied away from large groups. Otherwise the most skeptical of Northeast Kingdom Vermonters, Jim was utterly persuaded that the plays of Shakespeare, which he knew and loved as much as if he'd written them himself, had been composed not by the glover's son from Stratford-on-Avon but by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. I took the more conventional side, and we amiably debated the question for the rest of Jim's life.

Best of all, Jim and Helen Hayford, who were keenly interested in local history, introduced us to the stories of the Northeast Kingdom in ways no one else could. One evening they took us on a picnic to the Brownington Stone House, a four-story former boarding school a few miles north of Orleans. The Stone House was built in 1835 by the Reverend Alexander Twilight, whom Middlebury College claims as the first African American college graduate. Perched on a hilltop overlooking much of the northern Kingdom, it is a great mystery. To this day no one knows exactly where its beautifully cut granite blocks came from or how Twilight, working with a team of oxen, constructed the building. We loved sitting with the Hayfords atop Prospect Hill, overlooking the Kingdom from the Willoughby Gap in the east to Jay Peak in the west, to Lake Memphremagog, stretching north deep into the mountains of Canada, and to the Cold Hollow Mountains in the south. Jim pointed out Allen Hill, a few miles to the west, granted to General Ira Allen, Ethan's brother, for his service in the Revolutionary War. And Lake Willoughby, the setting of Robert Frost's terrifying poem of madness and isolation, “A Servant to Servants.”

From Prospect Hill the Hayfords traced out for us the route followed by the Bayley-Hazen Military Road, built during the Revolutionary War by a crew of bold Vermont hearties with the modest intention of invading and annexing Canada. And just west of Jay Peak, in 1856, a band of Irish Fenians mounted their own grand invasion of Quebec. (They were promptly driven back over the border by a few angry local farmers armed with muskets and pitchforks.) Some miles to the north, in the flat farming country of the St. Lawrence River Valley, Dr. William Henry Drummond had written his popular French Canadian dialect poems “The Habitant” and “The Voyageur,” and as dusk settled over the mountains, Jim recited passages from them. History and literature had never seemed this immediate to me before. How could it be that no one had written fiction about this wondrous kingdom without a king?

As if he'd read my thoughts, Jim, with his kind eyes and long, ascetic scholar's face, said to me, “About ten years ago I worked up the courage to read one of my poems aloud to Robert Frost. We were sitting on the front porch of his cottage at Breadloaf. ‘Well, Hayford,' he said when I finished, ‘I wouldn't say that the way you do. But I have to remember that you need to go at things your way. You've found your way. You've found your own voice.' ”

Jim looked off at the miles of mountains, purple in the fall dusk. With a flicker of a smile he said, “It had taken me nineteen years to find that voice. I guess waiting for it is what hope is all about. Maybe you'll find yours quicker. It all comes down to application, you know. Application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

I hoped so. But now, as I talked with Phillis from my rundown motel on the Louisiana-Texas state line where I had just discovered five black-as-night, deadly poisonous toadstools as
big around as dessert saucers growing beside the empty in-room bar (shades of the [B]udget In[n]!), what I really hoped was that those two 24-karat-gold staples that Dr. Marshall had fired into my ailing prostate to help minimize damage to the adjacent plumbing critical to one's, ah, romantic capabilities, had done the trick.

Pray Jesus, no
, I thought, trying not to look at those toadstools, an image that I feared might have the same long-term effect. I was sorely tempted to jump into the Loser Cruiser and head straight home to the love of my life in Vermont.

“I'm sure your romantic capabilities will be fine, hon,” Phillis reassured me. “And think of the stories you'll have to tell me from the rest of your tour.”

True. Still, as we said goodbye, Phillis from Kingdom County and I from the Toadstool Motel two thousand miles away, I could not have envisaged all that lay ahead of me in the next month or who I would meet along the way.

At Houston's “premier literary marketplace,” as the
New York Times
has called Brazos Bookstore, I bought a copy of Oliver Sacks's latest book. The following morning, at a McDonald's on the eastern fringe of San Antonio, I read a chapter. Sacks, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
, probably knows more about certain kinds of savantism than any other man or woman alive. He searches out the most idiosyncratic geniuses of our times, real-life counterparts of the Don Quixotes of literature, and, with respect and affection, he celebrates their individualism, their nearly superhuman abilities, and their dignity. He is also a wonderful writer and, by crikey, there in the parking lot of Mickey D's, thumbing a ride up to the Alamo, was the great man himself.

“So, Dr. Sacks,” I said, pulling back onto I-10 and coaxing the Loser Cruiser up to its maximum nonshimmying speed of 58.5 mph. “I've wanted to meet you for a long time.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mosher. And I you.”

Oh?

Hurrying on, “I mean, Doctor, I love, absolutely
love
, your stuff. Great reads … transformative experience … funny …” Fiddlesticks. I didn't have the faintest notion what to say to an author I admired.

The gracious Dr. Sacks seemed genuinely pleased. “Why, that's very kind of you to say so.”

“I wonder if you might be willing to …” Extending my copy of his new book toward him. “I don't know where you usually like to sign your—”

“Of course,” he said, opening the book to the title page and inscribing, very neatly, under his printed name, “To my fellow author, Howard Mosher, with great interest, Oliver Sacks.”

With great interest? Good Jesus. Dr. Sacks had not appeared out of nowhere just to bum a ride over to the Alamo. No. He had traveled—traveled a very great distance—to
examine
me.

What a kindly gentleman was the learned Oliver. I felt I could tell the famous alienist anything.

“Ever since I was a small boy, Dr. Sacks, I've imagined myself carrying on conversations with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Roderick Usher from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher' and sometimes David Copperfield …”

Out popped Dr. Sacks's notepad. “This is most intriguing. You actually
hear
their voices talking to you?”

“Yes, yes! Dead authors, in my head. Lots of them. Sometimes they all natter away at the same time.”

What had come over me? That business about the voices
jabbering all at once, like a scene from
The Exorcist
, was a boldfaced lie.

“Is hearing voices bad?” I inquired, with the sly sidelong smile of the perfectly mad.

“Not necessarily,” the doctor said. He was writing rapidly now. “Not as long as the voices don't tell you to do bad things.”

And suddenly, despite my long training as a prevaricating novelist, the truth spilled out. “I'm afraid,” I said, “that they told me to be a writer.”

The doctor's pen paused mid-word: “Patient reports full-blown audio hallucin—” His face looked very, very grave.

“Not,” Dr. Sacks said, “a
writer
?”

I nodded.

Oliver flipped his notepad shut and tucked it into the breast pocket of his white coat. “In that case, Mr. Mosher,” he said quietly, “I'm afraid that there's nothing I can do for you.”

There's no better place to begin a tour of an American city than the regional history and literature section of its independent bookstore. At San Antonio's fine independent, The Twig, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a modern-day Alamo, I discovered a whole shelf devoted exclusively to the works of the Texas author John Graves. I snapped up a copy of
Goodbye to a River
, Graves's account of a 1950s canoe trip down a stretch of the upper Brazos that was about to be dammed. An hour later, ambling along San Antonio's downtown river walk, I wondered how many of the hundreds of tourists who take this stroll each day know anything about the history of Graves's beautiful river and the Conquistadors who ventured up it in their “dented armor” but “didn't stick.”

WATCH YOUR STEP. NATIVE TEXAS LANDSCAPE
. The discreet sign peeking out of the sky-blue bluebells at the rest area between San Antonio and Austin gave me pause. It was as pithy as Gus McCrae's
WE DON'T RENT PIGS
sign in
Lonesome Dove
. But what did it mean? Was it an injunction, Lone Star–style, not to step on the wildflowers? Or a heads-up to watch out for a stray sidewinder? Whichever, I liked the sign a lot. I whipped out my notebook, and when I looked up again, there he was. One beat-up cowboy boot cocked against the
WATCH YOUR STEP
sign. His once-white cowboy hat raked back on his brow. A face the color and texture of a hundred-year-old Mexican saddle. Looking right straight at me. A Corona in one hand, in the other a cardboard sign:
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. AMARILLO OR BUST
.

Big as life. Right out of the blue southwestern sky and Harold Who's perfervid imagination. The West Texas Jesus.

“Tell me about those Vermont winters,” the West Texas Jesus was saying, opening another Corona and settling into the catbird seat like a man easing onto a stool at his favorite neighborhood bar. “Are they really as long and cold as I've heard?”

“Longer and colder,” I said in the grim tone Vermonters reserve for discussions concerning inclement weather and obituaries in the local weekly. And with that I was off and running on our first winter in the Kingdom.

Once the leaves have fallen in northern New England, I told my new traveling partner, you can see the true lay of the land, the bones of the country, and, if you search for it, an astonishing array of wildlife. Over our Thanksgiving break, while skiing up Irasburg Mountain, Phillis and I came across a perfect imprint of a great horned owl. The bird had evidently dived into the snow,
talons first, wings outspread, after a mouse or vole. Every feather was as distinct as a photographic negative, and the wingspan was wider than my outstretched arms. Later that day we discovered the remains of a barred owl and a goshawk, their talons gripped in mortal combat. Neither bird had been willing to release its hold on the other, so they had plunged to the ground and died like two battling deer locked by their antlers. Near a frozen beaver pond we watched, helpless, as a mink and a muskrat fought to the death. The mink had a death hold on the muskrat's neck, but the rat had chewed one of its adversary's hind feet almost completely off. When I tried to separate the combatants with my ski pole, they tumbled onto the ice on the pond and broke through. Even in the frigid water, they continued to fight.