Part 5 (2/2)

MUCH about this parched interior landscape seems familiar. I've never been here before, but staring through the winds.h.i.+eld at the empty desert, I realize I've been seeing it all my adult life, in the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank.

I reach back into the rubble of the back seat and lift out the camera.

”Want me to stop?” Wayne asks.

”No,” I say. ”I'll just roll down my window.”

In the latter half of the Thirties, the Farm Security Administration hired some of the best photographers of the day-Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Walker Evans-to roam the country, doc.u.menting the devastation wrought by the drought. The photographers were sent out with detailed shooting scripts: ”Crowded cars going out on the open road. Gas station attendant filling tank of open touring and convertible cars.” The kind of pictures I like to take.

Walker Evans had already compiled his own list of picture categories, which rivals Jefferson's directive to Lewis and Clark in ambition and scope. It's a useful list for any traveller out to understand a country: People, all cla.s.ses, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out Automobiles and the automobile landscape Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, clubs, the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women's clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay The movies Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amus.e.m.e.nt, do for relaxation and not get it s.e.x Advertising A lot else, you see what I mean.

But Dorothea Lange is the photographer I a.s.sociate with this dry corner of America. It wasn't far from where we turned east off the I-5 that Lange took her iconic portrait, ”Migrant Mother.” It's 1936. A woman sits surrounded by her children, one in her arms, one leaning against her shoulder, another huddled at her back. She is thirty-two, a mother of seven, one of the dest.i.tute pea pickers who flocked to the Central Valley after the land they worked in the Midwest simply blew away.

In Lange's photographs of the pea pickers, the cotton pickers, and the rest of the environmental refugees flooding west, the people are all but indistinguishable from the land: their skin is just as creased and parched. In ”Jobless on Edge of Pea Field, Imperial Valley, California,” a man crouches on his haunches, bone-thin and desperate, though his eyes are still sharp, his chin jutting into the breeze. Hope has vanished altogether from ”Man Beside Wheelbarrow.” He buries his head in his hands, his back against a brick wall that fills the frame, as if it goes on forever.

To me, though, the most desolate, the most hopeless of Lange's photographs is ”The Road West.” The top third of the picture is a strip of scoured sky bisected by the narrow end of a funnelling highway, the asphalt widening as it approaches the viewer until it takes up the entire bottom of the frame. I've made it sound as if the road were coming toward you, which it could be, but when confronted with the photograph, what you see is a road receding into an endless, pointless distance. There are no people. No cars. Nothing is coming. Or going. Beside the photograph in Lange's book An American Exodus is a quote from someone Lange met on the road: ”Do you reckon I'd be out on the highway if I had it good at home?” This is Tom Joad's road west, ”silent, looking into the distance ahead, along the road, along the white road that waved gently, like a ground swell.”

It's the heat that turns a road into an undulating river. But in December, what lies before us is flat and grey as a roadkill snake.

Twenty years after Lange shot ”The Road West,” Robert Frank took a similar picture in the New Mexico desert between Taos and Santa Fe. It was 1955, and he and Walker Evans, funded by a Guggenheim Fellows.h.i.+p, were on a road trip to doc.u.ment America. They wanted to show how the nation had changed since Lange and Evans had photographed it in the Thirties, to doc.u.ment ”the kind of civilization born here and spreading everywhere.” As Geoff Dyer points out in The Ongoing Moment, a masterful extended riff on photography in the United States, ”America was becoming a place to be seen from a car, a country that could be seen without stopping.”

In Frank's road picture, the horizon is still flatlining, the road still swelling, but in the distance, a small black car approaches. The image no longer feels hopeless-someone is coming!-though the night is still empty and bleak. Kerouac mentions this picture in his introduction to Frank's book The Americans (which, wouldn't you know it, was released first in France): ”Long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America.”

Only twenty years separates those two pictures, yet they are a world apart. As Dyer notes, Lange's photo ”is about distance, remoteness; Frank's is about covering ground.” It's been fifty years since Frank was here. There's not one car on the horizon; there are hundreds. A wall-to-wall highway of cars. Covering ground is still what it's all about: getting there fast, and first.

Wayne and I have covered a lot of ground today. Hours ago, we spoke to a fireman at the Starbucks in Sacramento who told us the Grand Canyon was a good twelve-hour drive away.

”You can do it in a day,” he said, ”but it's a push.”

We've been driving ever since. Now and then I lift the camera to the window, taking pictures of the wind turbines lazily turning on the hills above the desert, the sunset over the Mojave, signs that tell us how far we have yet to go. I stare down at the images, clicking through them, giving my eyes a rest from the endless desert, stalling our progress for a while. The soul walks, they say. I give it a bit of a breather.

We imagined we'd find a quaint and quirky place to stay in the desert, dreamed of getting up to do a little birdwatching on Christmas morning, but there are no towns, not even the ones named on the map. When Simone de Beauvoir went by bus from California to the Grand Canyon fifty years ago, she saw rustic shacks selling curios, wagon wheels propped against walls, ghost towns and diners and tourist inns. All traces of that past have been obliterated, the motels boarded up or knocked down when the interstate sucked the traffic through without stopping. Gone are the solitary ghost towns with their mouldy wooden shacks, their old theatres with faded posters. In the half century since de Beauvoir was here, another layer of history has crumbled to dust, asphalt laid like a gravestone in its place. Only the landscape never changes.

Bleak thoughts, and now we're travelling at a snail's pace. Construction on the I-40 has reduced it to one lane.

”How about getting off onto the National Old Trails Road for a while?” I suggest. Wayne must be tired of the interstate, too. I watch him spin through his mental mathematics.

”Okay,” he says. ”It can't be any slower than this.”

We veer south onto the loop of narrow road. Here, surely, we'll stumble upon a cla.s.sic motel with a diner off one side selling hamburgers and cherry c.o.kes. But there is nothing. No cars. Not even a road sign. For a hundred miles in all directions, the map on my lap is alarmingly blank, save a few spa.r.s.e labels: Bristol Lake (Dry). Cadiz Lake (Dry). Danby Lake (Dry). Calico (Ghost Town). Soda Lake (Dry). Only desert, as far as the eye can see.

WINDOWS down, driving at night, I feel the desert cascade into the car, hitting us in all five senses at once: I am falling in love with the desert. The mineral scent of cooling sand; the play of stars above an intuited horizon; the roar of an unfathomed emptiness, as though we're following the lip of a bottomless canyon; hair beating against my ear, and the hydraulic hum of the tires on rough pavement; the cyanide taste of almonds.

It feels good to be off the I-40. ”I hate how those interstates bulldoze through hills and fill hollows with gravel trucked in from as far away as economically possible,” I say to Merilyn, ”don't you?”

”Why are your thoughts always so negative?” Merilyn asks. ”My mother used to say, 'When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.' But when you hear hoofbeats, you don't think horses or zebras, do you?”

She's right. Occam's razor: the law of parsimony. The most obvious answer is usually the right one. I don't seem to be able to think parsimoniously.

”You think the Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse, don't you?”

”I guess so,” I say, using an Americanism. All Americans in British novels say ”I guess so” and ”You bet.”

But I do respond to the parsimony of this desert. After the thoroughfares of the West Coast and the lush but artificial landscape of the Central Valley, this desert is my first taste of the real America, the unspoiled landscape I hadn't been prepared for, and I like it. It's so un-American. Deserts always surprise me, the way they look dead but are actually teeming with secret life. I have always loved them, the way their lack of clutter forces you into yourself, strips away inessentials like ego and even history. Deserts as antimatter. I once spent two months digging fossils in the Gobi Desert, and I remember lying awake at night looking out into the darkness, watching the desert surface ignite into a billion tiny explosions as grains of sand were bombarded against one another by the constant wind, like particles in a proton accelerator, and marvelling at the soft violence that surrounds all living things. It was the same in the High Arctic, another desert, where I would stare across the ice for hours, happily giving myself to its pure immensity. ”The desert is a vast world,” Edward Abbey wrote, ”an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea.”

Nothing bad has happened. No one has bonked us on the head and stolen our hubcaps or shot at us. I knew a violinist from Nova Scotia who said she'd moved back home from California, where she'd played with the Los Angeles Symphony, because as she was coming out of a grocery store one day a bullet had bounced off the roof of her car. ”I left that day,” she said. ”I still had the groceries in the car when I got to Cape Breton.” Nothing like that has happened to us.

”Do you hear that?” asks Merilyn quietly.

”Yes,” I say. ”Coyotes.”

Desert peoples refer to coyotes as G.o.d's dog, perhaps because the animals seem to have appeared out of nowhere. I pull over and we get out. From somewhere off in the darkness comes a faint, discordant yipping, a plaintive sound that carries no threat, like the sound of a train whistle diminis.h.i.+ng in the night. I consider answering their call, but I don't, not wanting to identify myself as an interloper from a foreign pack. If I can't belong here, I can at least sneak through undetected.

”It's beautiful, isn't it?” Merilyn says, leaning against me, looking up into the sky.

”It's beautiful everywhere,” I say, wanting to believe it, rea.s.sessing it all-the soaring Douglas-fir forest; the placid Pacific; the brotherly mountains and now the desert. ”We've seen a lot in just four days. It will take us a while to a.s.similate it.”

”By which time we'll have seen a lot more.”

”We're really into it now, aren't we?”

”No going back,” Merilyn says. ”Shall we go on?”

”You bet.”

She gets back into the car and I linger behind, beyond the glow of the tail lights. Let the coyotes smell my mark.

MY thrill on clear winter nights is to douse the headlights and drive down our road with only the moon on the snow to guide the way.

”Let's drive blind,” I say now, and Wayne switches off the lights.

The sand glows like December drifts. Far to the south a pale light twinkles. If it's a car, it will take hours to reach us. But maybe it's a star.

Something glows on the road in front of us, too.

We're over it before we can see what it was, something painted on the road surface. Then another one. Wayne stops and turns on the lights.

”Route 66” is stencilled in white paint on the black asphalt, the numbers tucked inside their old, curvaceous, police-badge frame.

No statues here: they've branded the road itself, like a steer they're afraid will run away.

”People must steal the signs,” Wayne says.

What people?

We get out, leaving the car parked in the middle of the highway, lights off. There's nothing coming, not from any direction. We stand under the dome of stars. I wonder if they're the same stars we'd see if we were at home.

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