The two were welcomed with smiles and greetings by the regulars who frequented the smoky, gritty jazz club. Host Little Joe Cook began the evening with his signature “Welcome to the show, all you hamburgers and cheeseburgers!” and no matter their background, the crowd bonded over inventive moves on the dance floor and a delight in Nancy PhD and James Brown Jr. and Jose Jose, psychologists and accountants by day who masked their daytime identities and became soulful funk performers by night. But theirs was the compartmentalized sort of association that Maynard had by now come to expect. The rigid boundaries between them never opened in portals that led to deeper friendship.
Maynard and Kjiirt hummed Little Joe’s “Lady from the Beauty Shop” as they walked to the T, laughter from the Cantab growing fainter behind them, the orange moon floating fat and full over Mass Ave.
It was only on Kjiirt’s Cherry Street roof deck that the borders dissolved. His weekend barbecues drew his sister from the North End, Elias from the apartment downstairs, Jane and Ian, Hope and Lorri, and Harold, his coworker from the wine room at Martignetti’s. A disparate group to be sure, but a select group able to provide the sense of connection Maynard longed for.
While Kjiirt tended the crackling duckling on his grill, they shared updates on poems they’d written, the set of watercolors they intended to buy come Monday, the necklace they planned to fashion from beach glass and seashells. They offered advice as if confident the dreams might one day come true and, for a few hours in the company of like-minded compañeros, came to almost believe that they might.
Their stories were small chapters in the larger story, the combined tale of friends on a sunny Somerville rooftop sharing laughter and desires, the Prudential Building and the Hancock Tower hazy in the distance, Public Enemy blaring from Kjiirt’s tape deck.
I had no frame of reference for such a thing. It was this intimate setting of good food and wine and good people. Something really resonated with me on that roof. It was just cooking and eating, but it was so powerful. It was like coming home.
Maynard gamely sampled the Shirazes and Valpolicellas Kjiirt chose to accompany the meals. He wasn’t confident enough to comment on complexity or terroirs or acidity, but when Kjiirt and Harold analyzed a particularly nuanced first-growth Bordeaux, he leaned back against the deck rail and listened.
Maynard and Kjiirt had formulated their adventure in February, when spending one more evening in their snowbound apartment had become unthinkable. Returning late from Lansdowne Street, they braced themselves against the storm and recalled stories of endurance Boots Newkirk had told in his American history class. The voyageurs, they reminded each other, and the pony express riders, too, had survived far more brutal weather than this, those intrepid pioneers without even accurate maps to guide them. Halfway to Somerville, they congratulated themselves on their fortitude, their ability to press on through driving snow and rutted slush. And four miles really wasn’t that far, they realized, not nearly as far as Michigan, say. Why, if they could walk across Boston during a nor’easter, a trip to Scottville under a clear summer sky would be a cinch.
Kjiirt began his training regimen soon after moving to Cherry Street, biking each morning to Walden Pond, toning his muscles and building his stamina in preparation for ten days on the road.
Not to be outdone, Maynard resolved to forgo transportation entirely. If on some fine morning he set out from Massachusetts, put one foot in front of the other, he knew it wouldn’t take long at all to reach Scottville—a mere 800 miles away. He’d gone that far every seven months in his daily walk to and from the high school—farther if he counted his track and cross country miles. He’d give himself a head start, begin walking a few days before Kjiirt pedaled off, and meet him in Scottville in mid-August.
If they were ever to undertake such a journey, 1989 seemed the time. They’d begun to notice that summer more and more synchronicities, coincidences they called “Kashmir” moments, curious alignments that pitched them to a heightened awareness. Kjiirt’s father turned 75 that year, Mike would soon be 50, and they’d celebrated their 25th birthdays in the spring. Perhaps the patterns they recognized were only illusions, no more meaningful than the shapes that showed themselves in clouds or the grinning faces among the roses printed on the wallpaper in Grandma Gridley’s living room. But traveling home under their own power to honor such milestones just might tap into whatever energies lay deep in the mathematical symmetry of the quarter-century marks.
One more anniversary added another dimension to the geometric precision. The year marked Scottville’s centennial, 100 years since its incorporation as a village and a coin toss between lumberman Hiram Scott and banker Charles Blain had given the town its name.
In late July, Maynard’s friends gathered to toast his departure in longneck Buds at the Cantab, where he added his name to the open mic sign-up sheet. He jammed his hands in the pockets of his bib overalls and took his turn on the small stage. It had been a long time since he’d sung in public, but only a few words into “King of the Road,” the old confidence returned, and with it the familiar wish that the music might continue long after closing time.
His friends looked from one to the other in stunned silence, then at the Cantab regulars who leaned forward expectantly as he began his encore, “Margaritaville.” Kjiirt knew of Maynard’s talents of course, but Ian and Jane and Sarah and Elias were astonished by his strong, sure tenor, his control, his inventive nuances. “I didn’t know anything about his Grand Rapids bands,” Steele would recall. “I’d never heard him sing in the apartment and had no idea he had any interest in music at all.”
His birds and fish in the safe care of friends, Maynard set out not long after for South Station, accompanied by Sarah, his send-off committee of one. He carried in his backpack the essentials—plenty of extra socks, a wallet of American Express traveler’s checks, a road atlas, his Walkman, a tent, and a bedroll. Only a few early risers stood at the bay in the Peter Pan terminal, tickets in hand and awaiting the first bus of the morning that would take them to Pittsfield, the westernmost stop in Massachusetts.
Just before he boarded, Sarah pressed into his hand a fat paperback, its cover a colorful collage of angular topiary and arced rainbows and spiraled nautilus shells, its title a bright block of flourished Edwardian capitals. “Take this,” she said. “Open it only after you start walking.”
When he reached Pittsfield, the sun was high in the sky, the mild day ideal for a stroll, but one that would not begin, he realized with a sudden panic, as he’d planned. Pedestrians, he was told, were barred from the route he’d chosen, the interstate marked in a thick green line in his Rand McNally. He ran his finger along the narrower red line that represented the secondary highway running parallel. Traffic would be light here, the locals in family sedans and pickup trucks in no hurry to reach Albany or Syracuse or Buffalo. The detour might mean more time on the road, but it might be more pleasant, he reasoned, and he adjusted the straps of his pack over his shoulders and stepped across the border.
Ahead lay the whole of New York, Ontario, southern Michigan, Scottville—a trip one could make in 14 hours if one drove straight through, but one that would take him two weeks, one tuft of windblown blue chicory after the next, one night under the open sky after one more sun-splashed day. The map showed a long, straight stretch ahead, and, confident of his immediate course, he turned his eyes from the road, opened Little, Big, and began to read.
On a certain day in June, 19—, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.
The book’s cadence drew him into John Crowley’s tale just as his steps carried him forward along the graveled shoulder. Edgewood or Scottville, the destinations
blurred as Smoky’s story merged with his own. It seemed that Crowley described the very road Maynard walked, the maple groves he passed, the insect-buzzing fields, the spicy scent of hawkweed and Danish carrots along the highway’s edge. He walked on, buoyed by the sense that others had walked here before him.
By that evening, Maynard suspected that his undertaking might be more grueling than he’d bargained for. His legs cramped when he stopped to rest, and his insteps tingled where his shoelaces crossed over them. Twenty miles behind him and 780 yet to travel, and he feared he’d assumed a challenge he might not after all be up for.
A challenge, yes, but not a chore. His father had explained the difference in the echoing halls of the high school while the wrestling team ran practice laps up and down, up and down. His course might be longer than the one he’d run with the cross country team, but the rules were the same: Sprint quickly when the road opened clear and easy, fall into a relaxed amble in hilly terrain or when he grew tired.
He’d vowed he would walk, and walk he would. He kept an eye on his watch, determined to spend more time on foot than in the cars of friendly strangers, and in the end, hitchhiked no more than a half-dozen times, and then only when weather or weariness trumped his need to meet the one condition he’d placed upon himself.
I soon recognized that the kind of person who is going to pull over and pick me up is probably a fuckin’ mess. Even if they’re not going to kill me, they’re going to make me feel pretty uncomfortable, because they’re probably a weirdo to begin with if they’re willing to pick up a stranger. It’s not like they’re just being a good Samaritan. As much as I wanted to be engaging with these strangers, I had to be 100 percent on my guard.
One time, a guy picked me up and it got weird pretty quickly. He resembled the guy driving the car in Repo Man with the weird sunglasses and aliens in the trunk. That gets your Spidey senses not tingling, but going off like a fire alarm.
He kept wanting to stop for pie. “Pie? No, no. I’m good.” I’d noticed a couple of motels up the road, and that’s how I got away from him. I went, “OK. Just drop me off at this motel,” and as soon as he dropped me off, I went to the other one a half a mile back and stayed there so he wouldn’t find me.
I never told people I was sleeping in a tent, because I didn’t have a locked door between me and the fuckin’ cuckoo-bird Pie Guys.
“The trip wasn’t about survival or endurance or foraging for food,” Maynard would later explain. “The whole point was to walk as much as I could, and that was the fun part. It was about being outside my element.”
He soon came to understand the rhythm of the road, the distant hills dotted with red barns and spotted Holsteins, the Optimist and Lions Club signs that meant the next tidy town was just ahead. Then came the clusters of low white motels, the Sleepy Hollow and the Bird’s Nest and so many named the Starlite that he soon lost count, portals on the way from here to there where strangers paused for a night and then moved on in the morning to wherever it was they traveled.
When the road ahead extended long and straight, he read. He waited out sudden and brief cloudbursts in the old diners that replicated themselves all along Route 20, Jack’s and Leo’s and Burger World, their fading billboards boasting the bottomless coffee cup and homemade lemon meringue pie. Perched on a revolving red stool, he lingered over his meat loaf and rice pudding, Little, Big open on the Formica counter beside his plate.
“As I read, I thought the book might just be a metaphor of me walking from Massachusetts to Michigan,” he said. “But on some other level, I knew it was about my journey toward something even larger.”
It was certainly unlike any book he’d read before, a tale of worlds within worlds, its many-layered plot mirroring the house Smoky came to live in, its stairways and hallways and porticos branching and circling in an infinite progression of ascending forms. The story diverted like a trout stream, forking off into sidebars and tangents and vignettes, in the end regaining its course as it spiraled in an ever-widening, ever-rising pattern of repetition.
He turned often to the family tree printed opposite the title page, struggling to keep straight the generations of characters as he read of their paths, their step-by-step contributions—however insignificant—to the story’s outcome.
When evening came, Maynard pitched his tent just off the highway and consulted his map. The course he’d begun in Pittsfield had, if not reached its end, grown noticeably shorter, and, content, he lay back in the weedy undergrowth until it grew too dark to read. To the south, he knew, Kjiirt made his parallel journey beside Pennsylvania rivers and past the busy industrial centers of Ohio.
Maynard gazed at the moon he knew Kjiirt saw too, the moon nightly more round in the summer sky. Crickets chirped from the tall grasses, their song a chant-like chorus filling the silences between his Swans and Joni Mitchell, and he drifted, bone-tired, to sleep.
He dreamed then of whorls and turnings, expanding designs like the ones he’d created long ago with his Spirograph, their seemingly random curves and rays and loops determined nonetheless by some unseen laws of geometry embedded in the toy’s plastic rings and gears and templates.
According to plan, they rendezvoused on Darr Road, their schedules coordinated even in those times before GPS and smartphones. Mike’s gardens were lush with August, buzzing with bees and dragonflies, and Maynard and Kjiirt walked among the sculpted shrubbery and day lilies and compared adventures. Their stories overlapped in a spill of words and laughter until Jan called them in for breakfast.
Just before noon, they completed the final leg of their journey. Maynard strode beside Kjiirt as he pedaled across the Pere Marquette River bridge, among streets named 100 years before—Elm and Main and Crowley—then over the railroad tracks and past the livestock barn at the edge of the parking lot.
They arrived tanned and glowing and grinning at the Scottville Café, where they found awaiting them a small group of family and friends and a somewhat bewildered reporter sent by the Ludington Daily News.
Their welcoming committee was oddly silent, as if unsure just what questions to ask about this unusual journey. Most of them couldn’t fathom walking the 60 miles from Grand Rapids, much less Massachusetts, or why Ian and Jane and Kjiirt’s sister had traveled—albeit by the more conventional plane and car—all the way from Boston to celebrate their feat.
Maynard knew they’d be most interested in hearing of the eccentric characters he’d ridden with, mishaps he might have encountered, where in the world he’d slept when it rained. On the one hand, he was bursting to share the wondrous independence and freedom he’d felt along the road, the pitched pure reliance on his own intuition mile after mile. But unless they’d done what he had—looked up into the wash of stars outside some nameless village, watched for weeks the earth’s curve roll toward him at the horizon and then walked on, not precisely sure where his steps would take him—they’d never quite understand.
“I let go of the need to translate these experiences to people,” he would recall. “Kjiirt and I ultimately did this for ourselves.”
The Daily News photographer snapped their picture as Scottville’s mayor ceremoniously presented them with commemorative centennial T-shirts, and the reporter dutifully asked what had inspired their journey. “I think it was the night we learned they put strawberry filling in Twinkies,” Kjiirt answered, resorting to his signature humor and sarcasm. “We decided if they can actually improve perfection, we can do anything.”1
Maynard and Kjiirt had set a goal and reached it. The secret to their success was as simple as that, and when the reporter turned to Maynard, he said, “I did it because I could walk and have the feet to walk with.”2
If you have your sight and your speech and your hearing and you’re able to move and walk, you’re able to grab things, if you don’t take advantage of that, it’s probably because you haven’t watched somebody lose it. I’d witnessed people t
hat can’t do that—or were able to do that and then became unable to do that, and that instilled in me a sense of responsibility to use my talents, not bury them.
He’d return to Boston with renewed belief that his way would reveal itself there as it had along the road to Michigan. But not before he curled on his old bed at Mike’s house, his window open to the familiar sounds of night birds and tree frogs in the woods outside, and finished reading Little, Big.
It was in the end a story of hope despite its heartbreaking turns of events. Maynard’s walk had changed him in ways he couldn’t yet articulate, and whether he realized it or not, Little, Big had, too. Its characters had contributed what they must to the plot, then vanished in the next chapter to far hills or tenement apartments, just as the farmers and truckers and short-order cooks had appeared throughout his walk and done their part in the day’s unfolding. They’d passed as briefly through his life as he through theirs, and there was no telling what idle conversation, which nod across which restaurant counter, would be the word or gesture they’d remember forever.
The road that Smoky walked at the book’s beginning had become by the last chapter a winding path that led inevitably to another turning and another, the way the New York highway had opened to Maynard around each shadowed bend. He remembered gazing at night into the vastness of the galaxy and feeling not insignificant, but secure, crucial. As crucial as any minor trump in the tarot spreads that fanned through Little, Big, each card altering the reading and creating one more dimension to the story.
He and Kjiirt would carry their experience back to Boston, sustain the heightened consciousness they’d relied upon during their long journey, keep a watchful eye trained for the opportunities and challenges that surely awaited them there.
“That’s how it was that summer,” Kjiirt would later recall. “Between work and the beach and the Cantab and cookouts on my deck and the Michigan trip, we burned the candle at both ends 24 hours a day. We seemed to have tapped into a strange confluence of energy, the belief that anything was possible. What could get in our way?”
A Perfect Union of Contrary Things Page 13
