Reading and the Road

I am stationed somewhere along the coast of northern California, a late September snow having stolen any glimpse of Crater Lake, pushing me on down the line sooner than anticipated to meander the winding, stomach-churning forest roads running deep through the shadows of towering Redwoods. At a scenic overlook perched above a picturesque beach, I’d taken to a secluded spot of pavement at the far end of the lot. The van had been backed up tight to the concrete barrier, a hefty glass of red wine poured, doors swung open, bench seat flipped down, and pillows organized to provide suitable comfort. It was then when I’d gotten to work. The town of Salinas sits no more than a handful of hours to the south from here. I glide over the final few pages of Steinbeck’s classic while lifting my head to sneak intrepid gazes of a burning sun as it falls into slumber beyond the horizontal clip of the Pacific. There is significant recognition as to how my eyes are feasting upon a similar scene and story to so many of those who’ve come before me. To the author himself. To the cast of characters. How all of them had either, in the flesh or on account of their creation, watched this same star crash into this very ocean.

I’d first opened East of Eden while sloped in a chair tucked close to a morning campfire back in Banff National Park. Snow had made an early entrance onto the ground that day as well. These five-hundred-or-so pages have served trusted ally since those AM hours, following me from the banks of Lake Louise to the city streets of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. From campgrounds in Hood River and Whidbey Island, to backcountry sites high in the hills of British Columbia or the thick emerald vegetation of the Cascades; I’d taken chapters here and there while interrupting the classic with other works of literature. I’d known early on, from those first few chapters, how these pages were meant to be savored. It sat on the countertop like an expensive bottle of scotch you pull from the cupboard every now and again; you have a glass, bask in its essence, really taste what it offers, and then you put it back for another time. It is not table wine meant to be gulped. There is no urgency to reach conclusion. I had not desired it to end, and yet there I sat, the tide pulling away from me and the light running low to the beat of diminishing words, trying to make a lifetime out of the final few paragraphs.

Cars pulled in only to remove themselves from the parking lot, always seeming to be in a hurry. The edge of the world had been set ablaze to the tone of an orange hue. Water peeled back over the sand as it were giving chase to the sun. All these idling automobiles housing interior lords steady in their habit of staying put for no more than a tick, a glimpse, the allotted amount of time for a photograph to be seized before shifting their carriages in reverse and scooting on to the next thing. I could find no benefit to my presence in this alleged real world, this one composed of sticks and plastic and metal surrounding my flesh here. It contained nothing more exquisite than what the ink and paper kept hidden between the covers held tight in my hand did. Not one reality is destined to live more real than another, this being a general rule of feeling alive.

“His eyes closed and he slept.” I mouthed the words and then folded up shop, another journey to have met its finality.

There holds a certain affinity in me between books and the open road. Printed words to be placed in my hands and beneath my nose, classics unfolded calmly in my lap while the majestic undertaking of sprawled-out vistas remain pasted to the windshield. They stretch off in the distance to culminate in snow-capped peaks urging their postcard worthy appearance ever closer to my eyes, mile after skipping mile. My wife’s hands remain in loose grasp of the steering wheel. Her eyes are focused, the radio off, and our mouths have turned quiet. She is lost in deliberate thought while I’m captured inside the durability of pages. When our destination is reached, the obsessive well will only run deeper. There is a distinct connection between the majesty of nature and the soothing touch of a worn-in paperback.

“I could sit out here for weeks and just read,” I explain. It’s not always the pleasant vote of confidence to her company she prefers, yet she holds thorough understanding of the moment. Dinner, campfire, and conversation are coming. She knows what sits on deck. Yet, for now I’ll continue to be embedded in the throes of a fictional world as if it were paramount to my own existence.

Whenever I’m out here, plotted about the wilderness, taking in the solitude of bristlecone pines or the shade of a wall of aspens, you will find a book or three inside my pack. Whether I’m lost along the peaceful stroll of a meandering river or the surreal complexion of an alpine lake, I tend to ingest books with a prowess unseen within the caging walls of home. It is no different if I am alone or part of a group, tranquility has a habit of seeping in and defeating the onslaught of distractions which tend to consume my normal state of the everyday.

The everyday. Oh, this infuriating madness of the ‘everydayness’. The Moviegoer had served company throughout the rugged trek over the south rim of the Chiso Mountains. Binx and Kate had been sworn in as roommates below a blanket of burning stars lighting up the Big Bend night as I waited for the ghosts of Spanish soldiers to intersect my campsite. For the next few days, I’d flipped pages while staring out ‘The Window’, eyes vested in the endless path of earth sprawled out beyond a narrow focus, or below ‘Balance Rock’, contemplating the careful nature of stability, or durability, our human lives are sanctioned by.

Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye) is pressing through the Museum of Natural History as I’m fixated on the Yellowstone River. It continues its roll via tumultuous form, raging over boulders stuck below the surface, nearly everything hidden from the easy pleasure of being presented in plain view. I sit upon the bank, still, silent, just removed from the trail, watching dimples in the water dance between paragraphs. These rocks show off their caps in sporadic nature, right here just before the lower falls, if you so happen to catch the moving liquid in a lull. It is a combination of violence and beauty worthy of contemplation. It is always changing but it never changes. Glimpses are captured and cataloged as I flip through the entirety of this classic for the umpteenth time without removing myself from this view. Do we become less and less human beings as we grow old? Does each passing year pull us further from our inherent nature, making us more products of society than ourselves?

Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse Five) has become unstuck in time, transcending the molecular structure of life as we know it while I sit perched on a cliffside above the Zion narrows watching troves of people escape the summer Utah heat. They are everywhere. This is a waterpark for children presented amongst spectacular surroundings. I place the Vonnegut classic back neatly in my pack and move on, heading upriver well past the point of tourists corralled like cattle, splitting down Orderville Canyon to regroup in silence and solitude. Jealousy grows rampant in my heart upon the character’s ability to ‘visit’ with each passing paragraph. There is something to the trappings of time which stems a paralytic pause to my being as I feel the pages absorb into me.

The road. The mountains. The desert. The ocean. The natural ambiance of intrinsic sounds let loose to flood the scenery, steering a person to the proper point by which pensive reflection and severe introspection becomes quest and not ordeal. Reading DeLillo’s 'White Noise' while sipping rum punch on the beach of a Caribbean resort will make you feel the fullest part of being manipulated. Molded. Issued cue cards and a map as to ascertain a level of happiness. I can see the smoke looming over me, and yet the ocean looks like refuge from here. I need to take breaks for a swim, be it from the heat or the nagging gravity.

Hal Incadenza (Infinite Jest) is ‘kertwanging’ tennis balls as I stare up at a mess of tailings running down from the not-quite-peak of Mt. Tallac. It is all rocks of a similar size and fate with a modest single-track zigging and zagging the steep face in intimidating form. After the eventual reach of my summit, Don Gately is yet pressing on himself, front and center to my infatuation with the story, and I know that the PGOAT (Prettiest Girl of All Time) sits lonely somewhere far below my elevation as I stare out with a sheepish grin over South Lake Tahoe to see humanity as if it were constructed of children’s blocks. Technology. Addiction. Pleasure. It all plays out more vivid in this landscape. I become lost in this urgent rush of feeling alive before heading back down to the surface of society. It is the only book I’ve ever preferred not to cart around in physical form, and I’m happy because my pack feels heavy, and my legs are losing strength.

‘Kertwang’, now there is a word! It means something ‘is sent curtailing immediately in another direction’, something like a tennis ball, or hell, even existence.

Distraction. Authenticity. The power of the mind, for better or worse. How it can clear your conscience or render you worthless upon the angle from which you decide to see it. All of everything is a battle within, all of it an arrangement of understanding. It’s the power of perspective which comes to us from books, from exercising our minds, struggling to inform us through strenuous trails of endless syllables and vocabulary outside the general scope of daily usage.

There is little difference between hiking and reading in my opinion. Grueling treks of supreme beauty, steps and pages fought through for the glimpse of something spectacular and grandiose. The destination is the end, the view, the final words, yes, but every stumble upon that path held graphic effect to how you end up seeing the full picture. Fiction and nature are both pleasurable encounters of interpretation imposed upon the face of the same coin.

The early letters of Hunter S. Thompson occupies my grip deep in the backcountry of Grand Staircase-Escalante, unrest and a vital understanding of the world keeping my mind leery of the outside influences teaming up to tame me. ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was to be finished not far from the town of Bozeman. I felt as if I could look out the window and watch it occur, see all the nuances of an account as it drifted in the air beyond my body.

Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’, the outright recipient of the ‘Best Book I’ve Ever Read’ award, was done so primarily in the shadows of the Tetons, on the shore of Jackson Lake and a few, scattered picnic tables in Signal Mountain campground. Morning campfires and instant coffee serving as company for our early morning rendezvouses before the masses zipped open tent doors or fired up generators.

These works of literature have become like friends, like family, and each supply their own unique backdrop to a memory, a window for my escape or a doorway into what the world just might have been or might become. They are persistent measures to the complexity of existence, bound up and delivered from one mind to another, their goal being to produce a profound effect on a complete stranger.

I felt that way about Christopher McCandless as I read ‘Into the Wild’ in a series of afternoons as I held reign over an empty bar, devouring the book between split shifts the autumn after I graduated college. I’d always had this feeling inside me which didn’t make much sense, and it was almost cathartic to lose the loneliness of that secret.

'White Teeth' belongs in Yosemite.

'Brave New World' is Sedona.

Jonathon Franzen’s 'Freedom' sits in the southern reaches of New Mexico.

'A Confederacy of Dunces' meets the rough, coastal waves of Maine.

Our puppy, Charley, a blue Doberman with endless energy abound, is, you’ve guessed it, taken right from the pages of 'Travels with Charley'.

During the month of June, Oedipa Maas (Cyring of Lot 49) will always sit with me just east of Aspen. We’d been stationed at Difficult campground, perched high upon a mess of boulders overlooking the sparse, miniature tents, these colorful dots of tough nylon breaking through the coverage of summer leaves. The roar of a river overloaded with snowmelt played in the background while I pressed through pages. Independence Pass sat just uphill, and the whole ensemble seemed one of those ironic encounters the universe throws together just for the thrill of it. Difficult. Independence. Oedipa’s search.

It just all feels too fitting. Madly, us humans are searching for our ‘trystero’ with the passing of each mile and every sunset. With the closing of each book and the opening of the next. But it is this willingness to search which ultimately leads to what matters most.

The experience is our new vow to ourselves. To read. To write. To discover. To ingest the world with the sense it will one day be taken from us, because it will. One day we will inevitably lose the ability to enjoy it, the final word will get internally whispered and the back cover will be summoned shut on our own time.

And at the time, we want to be able to affirm to ourselves in convincing fashion who we’d made the most of our blank pages, that we were a book well-worth reading.

Today, I am taking a short break from DeLillo’s 'Underworld' to write this. The van is backed up to the edge of piles of a snow-sand mixture running out over the frozen entry to Lake Michigan. I am only a few blocks from my home and I’m yearning for spring, for warmer weather, for the promise of the road, left dreaming of summer days on mountainsides with a book in my hand and a stream hitting my ears. But I remind myself of all the memories, of all the sights and books gone through my history, and I know in a few years I’ll count this combination in the exact manner as the others. There is no rush, no hurry to breeze through the quiet moments of this life.