The Great Northern Express (15 page)

Like the Bay Area of San Francisco, the “golden triangle” of Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill, and much of New England, the Pacific Northwest is prime book territory. The first Oregon indie on my itinerary was celebrating what was billed as Harry Potter's last hurrah tonight with a gala evening-long costume party, complete with a live owl, prizes, and discounts galore. In fact, the Harry Potter extravaganza had been cited as the main reason they couldn't host a Harold Who event this time around. Okay. I'd gladly defer to the likeable kid magician. After all, the income from his sales was helping to keep bookstores going so they could sell geezers like me.

Now let me emphasize that I am a huge Harry Potter supporter. Sure, the old schoolmaster within—the one I'd no doubt have turned into if I'd had the moral fortitude and common sense to remain in teaching—the schoolteacher within, I say,
might
hope
that reading Harry at the age of eight or nine could lead J. K. Rowling's young acolytes to read
The Wind in the Willows
and the
Little House
books at ten and eleven. But most of the booksellers, librarians, and teachers I knew seemed to feel that
any
books that stimulated kids to read were worthwhile, and I agreed. For that matter, since leaving home, I'd seen a number of well-dressed grownups in bookstore cafés sipping lattes and poring over the latest Harry Potter as if it were the stock market report in the
Wall Street Journal
. And the more or less life-sized, scholarly looking, cardboard cut-out of Harry had met me at the door of nearly every bookstore I'd visited since Vermont—like a young Walmart greeter in a black gown. I'd read two or three of the books with considerable enjoyment myself. Harry is living, or almost living, proof that if you sit down and write a good, old-fashioned story well enough, readers, like the spectral ballplayers in
Field of Dreams
and the beneficent aliens in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, will come. J.K. did not need to attend Oxford's equivalent of an MFA program to learn that.

Parking downtown on this night of nights was a challenge. Right in the middle of the town square was a gaggle of celebrants—teenage girls in black lipstick, with hair the color of cotton candy striped as green as the outfield grass at Fenway Park, and guys loaded down with more chains than the ghost of Jacob Marley. Evidently they were forming up for a parade. The bookstore was just a few blocks away.

So Pa Kettle from Vermont sallies blithely up to a fifteen-year-old with a mostly shaven head crowned by a violet Mohawk and says, “Hi, there. Where are the owls?”

Blankness.

“The Harry Potter owls?” I said to the child nihilist. “You're here for the Harry Potter celebration, right?”

“Who the fuck is Harry Potter?”

With some degree of horror, I realized that this was
not
an innocent cavalcade of customers forgathering in honor of J.K.'s boy wonder. No. These were doped-up, disaffected street people, Goths, vagabonds of just the stamp I had been enjoined not to give my spare change to back in the New England college and resort town. Anyone else in the world except, perhaps, another writer, would have known as much at a glance.

Still, I was tempted to take a little impromptu exit poll, as I hurriedly made my own exit, to see how many of my anarchic young friends had read a Harry book. I'd bet at least half of them had.

The bookstore was jammed with kids and grown-ups, most of them in costume, even the adults. It looked like a set for the latest Harry movie. Or Halloween at Hogwarts. No, it looked like a Harry Potter party, nothing else. Dead-on Harry look-alikes, as humorless as little automatons, Hermiones by the dozen (though none of the masqueraders had quite captured the mildly androgynous affect of Rowling's young hero and heroine), bemused soccer moms in tall witches hats, warlocks and wizards, a little girl carrying a stuffed tabby cat with square markings around its eyes—that would be Professor McGonagall in her transmuted, feline form. And yes, dear God, a single live, rather bedraggled-looking great horned owl perched, untethered, on its handler's wrist near the door, regarding the goings-on with huge, enraged yellow eyes. The little girl thrust her stuffed cat at the owl, which spread its wings and hissed. “Wouldn't do that if I was you,” the bird's handler said, with a leer. Wearing a shirt made from an American flag, he looked as though he'd just come off a twenty-four-hour shift as a ride operator at a traveling carnival about to go bust. The owl hissed loudly as the kid jabbed the pretend kittycat at it again. This bird was not the affable,
reliable Hedwig from
The Goblet of Fire
. This was a deeply world-weary, irascible old raptor who, understandably, would rather have been anywhere else in the universe but here.

I slunk over to the fiction section for a shameless peek at the “M” shelf. No Howard Frank Mosher novels, but hey, this was Harry's day, not mine. Sidling up to our lad's cardboard likeness, I said, out of the corner of my mouth, “Congratulations. I guess you're selling a lot of books today.”

“
She
is anyway,” Harry replied.

“Just let me get this down,” I said, going for my notebook.

The talking Harry nodded with the grim satisfaction of the chronically aggrieved. “That's right,” he said, “and now she's up and killing me off. This isn't a book party. It's an execution.”

“Why?”
the little Hermione with the stuffed cat chanted, shoving the cloth feline at the agitated owl.
“Why why why?”

“Why,
what
, Madison?” the mom in the witch's hat said.

“Why is that awful old man with the notebook
talking
to Harry?”

I looked around to see who little Madison might be referring to. Surely she could not mean—

At that moment, the beleaguered owl lifted off its perch, seized Madison's cat in its talons, and swooped out the door and down the street. After Hedwig ran its carnie handler, with a bevy of begowned, skirling, shrieking Harrys, Hermiones, Snipeses, and Dumbledores hot on his heels. The roustabout handler finally caught up with Hedwig, who was mantling over the limp cloth cat on the village square. Madison screamed. Her mom struck out at the bird with her handbag. The flag-wearing owl-man swore savagely. Unconcerned, perhaps unaware of the surrounding pandemonium, the Gothic street citizens passed bent little joints from hand to hand and reflected on the great void without and within.

“Look around,” Harry said to me when I returned to the store with the other partygoers. “Look around and tell me one thing. Is this really what you want for yourself?”

I looked at the madding, book-buying crowd. I looked at the bustling young clerks (one of whom had told me, a few months before, when I phoned to try to set up an event, to use e-mail because it was, I kid you not, “much cleaner”—then of course never responded when I did). I looked at the feverish exchange of books, bills, and ringing coins. I looked at the soaring stacks of J.K.'s latest and at the kids with their bespectacled Harry and Hermione noses already buried deep in their purchases. Finally I looked back at Harry.

“Yeah, gov'nor,” I said, “it is.”

From a telephone conversation later that evening:

Back when hundreds of thousands of salmon a day would swim up the Columbia River past Portland in the spring, when the city was the stomping ground for a thousand roistering lumberjacks, it was known as Stumptown. Today the stumps are gone and roses grow everywhere. On my dawn run the next day, I found them twining up the sides of libraries and university buildings, leaning against rough riverfront taverns—pink, yellow, white, red as the sunrise, scenting entire neighborhoods. The orange blossoms of a clove-scented, twelve-foot-high climber adorning the sign of a concrete-block bail bond agency (
EASY IN, EASY OUT
) were as big around as a catcher's mitt.

Now that the stumps have been supplanted by American Beauties, Portland is also a city of books. Powell's City of Books happens to be the name of Portland's largest bookstore, which happens to be the largest independent bookstore in the
country. Later that morning Bruce Burkhardt gave me a tour of this literary metropolis, where new and used books, hardcover and paperback, are shelved together by author, an arrangement that I, for one, like. He showed me the carved Oregon sandstone “pillar of books” that supports one of the store's entrances. Also the four-story-high skylight pouring sunshine down onto a shiny elevation marker set in the floor—55.31 feet above sea level. Oh, and a manhole cover inscribed with a rose, beneath which, Bruce likes to tell rambunctious middle-school kids visiting the store, are three unruly thirteen-year-olds from a previous tour, still waiting for their parents to come get them.

Up in the coastal mountains of Washington I was struck by the strongest sense of being, well, at home. Of course, these mountains are two to three times as tall as ours, with snow on top year-round, but the maple trees and daisies and paintbrush, the fast, clear trout streams, and the lovely little off-the-beaten-track villages all reminded me of Vermont. And as the sun dipped into the Pacific and night settled over the vast landmass to the east:

Like many another touring author, I never feel that a West Coast swing is complete without a visit to Village Books, Chuck and Dee Robinson's oceanside emporium of literature, ideas, and good fellowship in Bellingham, Washington. I love working cities, which Bellingham very much is, with a going fishery and wood-product industries. Also it's a jumping-off place, via ferry, for southern Alaska. Tonight I was slated to talk to a large (thank you, Village Books) group of readers about
my
corner of the country, three thousand miles away. And who's this? An early arriver, a dapper, self-possessed, middle-aged gentleman, his countenance fairly shining with anticipation. He was making for me with a very purposeful stride, waving—dear Jesus, no—that most dreaded of all documents a writer can receive, short of a subpoena from the grim reaper himself.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You're a writer with a manuscript of a novel you'd like me to read.”

“Wrong!” he gleefully shouted. “My name's Mosher, too. You're my long-lost relative!”

So, like that fabled little girl in the nursery rhyme, the one with the pretty little curl right in the middle of her forehead, when the Great American Book Tour is good, it's very, very good. And when it's bad—but no, that way lies cynicism. Suffice to say that it's not unusual for touring authors to encounter people sharing their last name, laden with genealogical charts and documents so deadly dull that by comparison an unpublished manuscript reads like
War and Peace
.

In the event, I got off pretty easily. Moshers, my newfound kinsman told me, are descended from Huguenots in Alsace-Lorraine. Inverted, the name Mosher means “Herr Moss” or “Lords of the Moss.” In other words, my ancestors probably mucked around for centuries in the peat bogs of Europe. For all I know, the first Mosher scrabbled on all fours
out
of the peat bogs, having been spontaneously generated in the depths of the fen. But would Mr. Herr Moss, of the mossy-haired Moshers of Bellingham, Washington, perhaps like to stay for my event? Not tonight, thank you. Tonight Herr Moss must get home to his genealogical research. If, however, I happened to have a box of complimentary copies of my new book in the car … Oh, soon enough, Cousin Moss, soon enough, the remainder bins would be overfl—. But let us not venture there tonight, when, absent Herr Moss, I have a full house at a great bookstore and am about to turn the corner and head east toward home and the love of my life—Mrs. Herr Moss? Frau Moss?

The winter of 1964–65 was a rough one in the mountains of northern Vermont. The Kingdom was hit with record snowfalls and then week after week when the temperature rarely rose above zero. One morning our outdoor thermometer read 50 degrees below.

One day in late January a thaw set in, melting the snow a little, but that night the temperature plummeted again. By the following morning the drifts in Verna's driveway had frozen solid, marooning us and our car with no way to get in or out. What's more, we were running low on kerosene, our sole source of heat.