The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  JOE’S FATHER INTRODUCED HIM to Walden and Thoreau’s cabin and his pond. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. Yeah, that’s me. Thoreau loved books and he found joy in streams and forests, and owls and tadpoles. We need the tonic of wildness. We need to witness our own limits transgressed. Joe drove his car beyond the borders of Urbana, with no destination in mind. To the northwest and the southwest, aimlessly. He watched farmers using tractors to furrow the rectangles and rhombuses of land, like men writing sentences with steel styluses on blank pages of soil. One spring day he borrowed a canoe from one of his neighbors, tied it to the top of his Chevy and drove to a spot just outside town where the upper waters of the Sangamon River flowed.

  In the early-morning light, the dirty emerald liquid of the creek reflected a narrow ribbon of sky. Joe launched the canoe, and began to float, under the crowns of the trees and their trunks. He dipped a paddle into the water and gave two good strokes and the canoe moved southward, and Joe entered a space of deep and lingering silence in which the air and trees were still, and even the birds halted their songs. A sunbeam found its way through the trees and struck his bare arms, and he took off his shirt. The first drops of his sweat began a stop-and-go, serpentine drip down his chest, and he felt the primate inside his body coming to life.

  * * *

  THE SANGAMON WAS SINUOUS, steady and perpetual in its flowing, and riding upon it Joe felt connected to the time before electricity and machines. Bits of pollen rose on the air currents, cottony satellites drifting upward while he drifted southwestward, under a railroad trestle, and under a concrete highway bridge, where a passing truck blasted its horn. The river widened and the current slowed and the flat, calm water became a still and perfect plane and he felt alone and whole inside it. When dusk began to paint rust into the sky he paddled to the riverbank and lay down on his back upon the muddy soil. The branches above him were moss-covered and held leaves that were thin and fernlike, and they floated above him with the twisting geometry of constellations. Joe took several deep and satisfied breaths, and heard Thoreau whispering to him:

  Consider the trees and the sky, Mr. Sanderson. Those geese flying in formation. The purity of the natural. Understand the truth about yourself. You are meant to float to new places, the undiscovered and the distant. Find a route to follow that is as open and long as this river. Above all, follow the paths that call to you the way the pond and the woods called to me.

  Joe returned to his canoe and guided it down to another highway overcrossing, where he left it on the riverbank to retrieve later. He climbed up to the road and hitchhiked a ride back to his car with a passing farmer who revealed to Joe where he was: on State Route 32, more than halfway to Decatur.

  “I started by Urbana.”

  “Urbana? That’s forty miles, son.”

  “It didn’t seem that far.” In a car, Urbana was less than an hour away. He’d be home to taste his mother’s steak for supper.

  “That’s a long way to go in a canoe.”

  “Next time,” Joe said, “I’ll go farther.”

  4

  Kingston. Saint Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica

  AT THE DINNER TABLE JOE talked about his journey down the Sangamon, and about Thoreau. Living on a river was a goal as worthy as any you might pursue in a bank or at a university, he said. I can spend my life traveling the world from one river to the next. The Ohio, the Mississippi, the Yukon, the Amazon. A few days later Milt announced that they were going on a family vacation that summer: to Jamaica. “To collect and classify. Ants, beetles, spiders.” In June, they drove south, stopping first in the Ohio River hamlet of Elizabethtown, Illinois, then headed for Mobile, the heat growing as they entered cotton country. Finally, the nearby ocean sent a cool breeze and salty fragrance blowing through the Spanish moss, and the perfumed air led them to the Gulf of Mexico, and to Pensacola, Florida, and a beach where the waves were big and churning and foamy, and Joe and Steve swam and sand swirled into their swimsuits and around their private parts.

  They reached Miami and the low silhouette of their cruise ship, the S.S. Evangeline. Not a huge vessel; the two rooms assigned to them were not more than 7 x 7, Virginia wrote in the travel journal she was keeping. Husband and wife slept in bunks, Milt on the upper, Virginia on the lower, with Milt leaning down in the morning to make silly faces at her. It was to be Virginia’s first trip outside the United States. On the deck the first night they watched Spanish dancers and enjoyed a champagne toast with the captain, and Virginia looked at the blue-gray chop of the ocean and sensed a gathering storm and felt an echo of Kansas. A whirlpool on the sea, a dust devil on the prairie. They crossed the Tropic of Cancer, and the Evangeline entered the Windward Passage near Haiti, and the Caribbean became a bumpy, briny plain covered by a thousand tiny peaks of white stone. Their plates slipped off the table at dinner before the waiters were able to get the railings up. Everyone except Joe got seasick.

  As they approached Jamaica the sea calmed and the clouds parted, and the bluish-black silhouette of the island grew before them until it resembled a continent all its own. The Caribbean sun began to bake and burn, and Joe saw his mother squinting and frowning on the ship’s deck, like an Illinois ant under a hot lamp. Dr. Lewis, a naturalist at the Institute of Science, greeted the Sandersons at the dock in Kingston and drove them into the green and flowery city, which was crowded with animals and automobiles. Virginia felt her seasickness returning. Everyone driving on the wrong side of the road, she wrote later in her travel journal. A madhouse. Honking, yelling. Goats and burros getting out of the way. Everyone in this big island metropolis was black: A simple fact, but startling and exhilarating for Joe. The traffic policeman in the starched-white uniform and pith helmet and cream-colored gloves; the vendors in wide-brimmed straw hats; the snappy students pedaling bicycles. They talked to white people in English, but spoke to each other in an ancient, rounded-off form of the language Joe did not entirely understand. For the first time, the varied nature of the human race and the nations of the world became truly clear to him. The colorful photographs in encyclopedia entries (Jamaica: British Possession, Pop. 1,400,000) and National Geographic articles (“Jamaica: Hub of the Caribbean … Haunt of Buccaneers”) were now real places. Each spot on the globe was a separate dimension, with its own rules of speech, its own way of walking.

  In Urbana “white” was a rarely used label whose true meaning was “not black.” An obvious misnomer, given the reds and browns mixed into the Caucasian palette. Here, however, amid the blue-black faces and the russet-skinned, Joe felt his Europeanness, the genetic rope that tied him to snowy valleys where men carved furrows into the icy ground. The Sandersons reached their hotel, the Melody Guest House, and the black city disappeared behind the walls and front gate of their compound. They entered a capsule of whiteness, where the hotel guests sat in wicker chairs, under fans, drinking tea in private gardens. This was what a colony was, shut in, away from the natives. After a few days Joe set off with Steve to explore the island. They jumped on a bus to Montego Bay, and as two white boys they became the targets of startled stares and also a loud comment spoken in patois, which was followed by peals of laughter, including the high-pitched clarinet notes of a woman’s hee-hee-hee! Kingston bade them farewell from behind curtains of wandering, wild poinsettias, and their bus followed an asphalt highway into a rural greenscape where palm fronds burst skyward like fireworks, and primeval trees bore fruit the size of footballs. The driver stopped at several spots along the road where no structures could be seen, only fields and footpaths, and people got on and off the bus at these nowhere places.

  The bus thinned out and Joe took notice of a young passenger in a collared shirt. They soon fell into conversation. Claude was his name and he soon knew Joe and Steve’s story, such as it was: Professor’s kids, bug hunting on the island. Illinois. Flat. Boring. First trip to Jamaica.

  “What about you?” Joe asked.

  “I too have
a university affiliation,” Claude said. “I study history at the University of the West Indies. The mean, bloody and hidden history of this beautiful island,” Claude said, and Joe tried to imagine what that might be, though Claude did not elaborate.

  At the next stop the bus driver turned off the engine and without explanation he stepped out and walked up the hills toward a collection of huts.

  “Maybe he’s got a secret love up there,” Claude said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, a hidden history,” Joe said. Claude and the Sanderson brothers got out to stretch their legs and walked a few yards down the road to a path that led to another hut, where a woman and two boys were sitting.

  “Good country people here,” Claude said, and he shouted out a greeting as he approached them with Joe and Steve in tow. The two boys were lean and smart-eyed. Claude introduced his new “American friends” and said he wanted them to see the real Jamaica, and then he said other things in patois that Joe did not understand. The older of the two boys disappeared behind their home and returned with a piece of sugarcane and a long knife. Silently, the boy held up the cane and showed it to Joe and Steve, and without a word he took the blade and began to strip the stalk of its weathered and dry skin, and then to whittle at the white, wet flesh underneath.

  The boys spoke to Joe and Steve slowly, in single words, as if Joe and Steve were children and the boys had something to teach them, some basic thing they wanted them to understand. Eat, the younger boy gestured, with his fingers and his mouth. And when the older boy bit the stalk and broke off a piece, the younger boy said, “Look! Look how him bite. Have it.” And the younger boy bit off a chunk of the stalk, and took it from his mouth to show Joe and Steve how to suck the juice from it. He gave the cane to Joe and gestured for him to have a bite too, and Joe did.

  “That’s sweet,” Joe said.

  “Buccra tas’e cane an’ he say it sweet, but him no know how hard you work for it,” Claude said, remembering a poem he’d once read. The woman joined him in a soft, bittersweet laugh.

  The boy cut another piece of cane for Joe, and gestured at the nearby June plum tree and the dogs, and spoke faster and deeper in his own language, so that Joe understood very little and finally nothing at all. Being down here in this verdant place amid the sugary plants and the amorous locals, Joe believed he was somehow closer to touching the essence of the world, the unfathomable fullness of the Earth, of its people and all its living things. He felt a sudden, strange, inexplicable sense of belonging.

  “I see the driver coming back from his love shack,” Steve said. “Guess he’s done.”

  As they returned to the bus, Joe turned to Claude. “Good country people.”

  “Good people. My people. It’s like this: ‘We are darkness shining in the brightness. Which the brightness can’t comprehend.’ One of our poets said that. Or some poet of the world.”

  * * *

  WHILE STEVE AND JOE EXPLORED THE ISLAND, Milt conducted his fieldwork with Dr. Lewis, driving out into the countryside to collect millipedes, cayenne ticks, turtle ants and Valentine ants with protruding, heart-shaped abdomens. When Virginia joined her husband on these journeys she saw the soil was a deep red and rich, more fertile than the loamiest patch of the Great Plains. As fertile as sin, like the soil that gave the apples that Eve plucked and gave to Adam.

  Milt took Joe and Steve on one final collecting expedition in Dr. Lewis’s Chevy, to the Blue Mountains, driving along the edges of river gorges, and they stopped by glades and creek bends where men fished and held their catches on strings. They camped for the night near the top of a canyon, and the next morning they continued their ascent on narrow foot trails, with Dr. Lewis filling the time by talking to Milt and his sons about Jamaican politics. Dr. Lewis said he was concerned about a new movement called the Rastafarians, led by men who grew their hair long, lived in mountain camps and smoked marijuana. They reached a ridge that offered a view of the vast, open Caribbean and Dr. Lewis pointed to the horizon. “See that shadow? That’s Cuba.” They were looking at the faint outline of the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range. A rebel army was camped up there, Dr. Lewis explained, fighting a war against a dictator.

  Back in Kingston, at the Melody Guest House, Joe met a British adventurer who had spent a year traveling solo around the world—on buses, bicycles, boats and trains. He had an envelope filled with clippings of newspaper stories that were written about him as he passed through. An idea popped into Joe’s head: He could be like this Brit and wander around the world and have the locals write about him. Maybe he would start by visiting those black rebels in the hills, the Rastafarians. Or maybe those Cuban guerrillas. He didn’t know how and when he would do this, since his mother and father wanted him to go to college. But in Jamaica the idea grabbed Joe, and it never let him go.

  The Sandersons returned home separately. The boys and Virginia traveled by air, via Chicago. Milt stayed in Jamaica longer, and drove back from Miami, where he spotted a front-page headline in the Miami Herald: “Palace Aid Kills Guatemala President.” Castillo Armas, the military ruler installed by the United States, had been shot by one of his bodyguards. A new dictator was swiftly appointed. Not long afterward, a group of disaffected army officers with leftist sympathies rose up against the dictatorship—they were unsuccessful, but from their ranks the first Marxist guerrilla army in Central America was born. The news of the revolt in Guatemala later appeared on page nine of the Courier, buried beneath stories of nonfatal traffic accidents, the activities of the 4-H Club, and an advertisement for Purex, “the gentle laundry bleach.”

  5

  Chicago. Mexico City

  CHICAGO ROSE OVER THE TAMED RIVER at its center, with soaring glass and steel constructions whose purpose was to eat the sky. With the Caribbean still fresh and alive and sea-breezy and sand-filled in his memory, Joe found that Chicago’s concrete and its vertical ambition felt cruel and otherworldly. The last traces of the mellow island vibe inside his brain were obliterated by the sight of men marching this way and that way, obediently following the straight lines drawn by T-square-toting architects, creators of parallel lines and ninety-degree angles ad nauseam. Chicago’s office stiffs wore pressed wool and mirrory leather shoes, and the sheeny black-and-starchy-white armor of insurance companies and finance firms. They took rigid strides, their shoes beating evenly and quickly on the sidewalk. Metronome men. Chicago was monochromatic and perpendicular, a grid stretching across conquered prairies, while Jamaica was color and curves, dead ends and winding byways. Jamaica was improvised and free, and Joe missed it even more as another series of straight lines took him out of the city, on the railroads that followed flat farmland into the heart of downstate Illinois.

  His late-summer job in Urbana was at the Crystal Lake pool, before the sun-reddening swimmers and waders. He wore red shorts with a white Red Cross patch. Lifeguard. In a chair over a rectangle of cloudy water evaporating into a chlorine mist. His mission was to protect the swimming youth of Champaign-Urbana, but they were protected in so many other ways. I can see this now. By their American citizenship. By the black door of the vault at Champaign County Bank and Trust, and by the ledgers his mother kept there, added sums and simple interest accruing on behalf of Illinois families who learned to save during long-ago times of hunger, war and drought. This was what it meant to be worldly. I travel and I know a fuller truth. In the water, the boys and girls wore new rubber sandals, new swimsuits. Only a few kids were wearing cutoff jeans, or treading water in their underwear, like that boy over there; he looks like he just got here from Kentucky. Three Negro kids were dressed in new Sears-Roebuck summer wear. Joe pushed back the sunglasses over his nose. His job? To jump into this pool and open the epiglottis of a drowning victim, an act of Sanderson heroism, should the need arise.

  After they’d returned from Jamaica, Joe’s mother had asked him to stand against the doorframe to be measured, and he understood this as a kind of confirmation of their American good fortune. Beef-fed boys, stre
tching and stretching. “No, Mom,” he told her. “I stopped growing already.” He was a respectable five foot eleven, and at the pool he felt the eyes of females drawn to him. Girls fourteen, eighteen, working on their Coppertone tans; they took in his hairy and breaststroke-buffed torso, and looked away. But the girl who caught his eye did not stare at him. She was sitting in a chair far beyond the splashing at the pool’s edge, reading. When his shift was over, he walked over to her. Up close, she was not especially striking. A brunette with a rounded nose and round cheeks.

  “That’s a big book you’re reading,” he said.

  “The Naked and the Dead,” she said.

  “Is it any good?”

  “It’s very male,” she said with a sparkle in her eye.

  “Male? What does that mean? Are there only men in it?”

  “Well, for starters, yes. But it’s more than that. It’s sort of like Hemingway without the romance. And it’s very bloody. It’s about a war.”

  “War is bloody.”

  “Sadly.”

  “I’m a bit of a pacifist myself,” Joe said. “Ever since I read Thoreau.”

  “I love Walden.”

  Her name was Karen Thomas. She and Joe began to talk about Thoreau, and with each observation she made about the writer and his times, about the Mexican War and the Massachusetts countryside, he was more entranced. They promised to meet again, and did so, and they took long walks through Urbana in those last days of summer, underneath maple trees that pulsed with the electric rattles and whistles of cicadas. And during the school year, in the afternoons, when Steinbeck occupied their discussions and the maples burst into sunset colors. The first snow of December fell, with flakes following paths down between naked elms, and they strolled holding hands and talking about Emily Dickinson. In the spring when those elms gave leaves, and the scent of first hay drifted from the fields outside town, she told him about a French writer, Albert Camus, whose small volume The Stranger he read at her insistence.