Elsewhere in the Summer, and an Elk Head

FRED AND I rolled out of York, Pa, on Friday the 13th. Fred's van, Irene--his grandmother had just given it to him--sure looked sweet. With only 493 miles on her she was still practically a virgin, but driving to Ketchum Sun Valley, Idaho would open her up some--about 2400 miles passed between her well-tempered hubs before we called our trip quits. But that wasn't til Tuesday morning when all was grey and cold and clammy and out rotting elk head lashed to the front of the van stunk of urine and flung in our grimy, dog-tired faces chunks of what little flesh remained on its fly-picked skull. Friday was wide and sun-strung. We headed for interstate 80. We made good time and crossed the country.

Before we had passed out of the Bicentennial State, Fred came upon one of his artsy ideas: the interstate system should plunge through this country at sea level, so as to give the traveler an idea of the pitch of the land. It was impractical, I replied, Kids would probably chuck pennies down on the cars--like from on top of the Empire State Building--causing certain havoc. Fred agreed and abandoned his scheme, but the further we drove, the more the language seemed pregnant with his notion. The road grew from the soil, was entrenched in it and ever spawned by it. The countryside was a vast shoulder to run on to when fatigue became insistent, and the miles only brought darkness and more miles and heavy air and weighted silences til finally we were entrenched in America and swimming through its four-wheeled overflow, in its high-rolling, garbage consuming intestinal tract.

So the seamless interstate zipper did plunge to the American root. That what-ever-it-is that winked from under hooded flaps of hot-rolled steel and pierced numb-screaming into the pitch of the flesh-ringed blackness; that fired in ringing engines and hung grey-eyed in their dribbling wake. For a day and a half, Fred and I raced through the tidal hours in his bronze-bodied van, but the American whatever stayed with us always. Caught in its plastic envelope like marbles in a dime-store package, we pressed never-ward with eight cylinders and 287 horsepower, spinning down white-aisled roads, waiting to be torn free.

Across the fertile heartland of America, the van plummeted. Yellow images welled into its bugsmirched windshield--car chrome rendered gassy, half-tone faces in an air-conditioned pickle, blind voices whimpering in dying voids. Stubbed fingers of headlights scratched across closecropped weeds and into gritty caverns of trucked roar. And through the smoky sheen of translucent film, through the captive atmosphere of this worn, pummeled bag. America swelled in disembodied waves.

A blue sedan is parked on the inside shoulder of the eastbound lane of the Ohio turnpike. The driver makes lusty love to a red-shirted girl lying on a blanket on the median strip. Lush-Ohio grass, bent about a subtle flex of asphalt, spinning through the onrush of high-revving machines, hollowed to catch the sky's seed, pulls through their pressing embrace. Coupled in time and stasis, the lovers arch to the Indianapolis sounds of the cars, rising and fading in perpetually lost motions.

Night cracks day in Indiana; the sky explodes in Illinois. Chicago passes--a straining of the eye through the white glare of churned downpour. The Mississippi folds under a sheet-white concrete bridge with the decorum of 1 a.m. silence. Iowa flows through the early morning on the wave-crackling radio.

Fred and I drive in about 200 mile shifts. The road yawns in the windshield; the radio whips about the driver's seat. Pegging the van at a straight 65 mph cramps the calf muscles of my legs on the accelerator, so every hour I shift legs and sit cross-ways to the road. When tired I flay my head out against the air til blond rams my ears and road light blend into National Geographic nightscapes. Cultivating this weariness. I drive on.

Then we lick across the broadness of Nebraska--a monolonous, wide-butted stretch of sod. Smiling, broad curves traced in speed fling us onward, out between trucks that grind the air to a pulp and spit a back on us with 14 gears of churning cunning. Plunging to the depth of America--not East and not West, but vastly in between, we seem perched here forever-about nine hours.

Nebraska absorbs the country; we sweat over its cornhusking fields and gas up at a service station cum grocery store cum library. The attendant is corn-fed chunky and straw-haired and even voiced. He can only pump regular gas, and when a lady from Taos. New Mexico in an Aubrey Beardsley tee-shirt asks for High Test, he mumbles an incoherent reply. Eyes in the till. Billy Graham manuals--step by step guides to the appreciation of the middle life--coexist side by side on the book racks with Reinhold Niebuhr tomes on something or other profound. Fred buys How To Get Out of Your Depression. I pick up five pieces of Super bubble bubblegum.

But Wyoming threw us off the back of the land. She erupts in wide wings of earth, shucking off the road like a peel of plastic on an orange juice can. A bent, black ziptop on the unyielding earth. Bare and mute. Wyoming swells to dwarf the trucks hard-panting up her hills. In rust hues the sky descended upon her forlorn tracts, swallowing puny hamlets: a cafe, a grocery store, a gas station, a truckstop, a few shacks, 200 people--all in white; and blistering vacant roads. Over the endless, straight, dust-heaped earth, the van torches at 95 mph, slowing up every 15 minutes or so for an oncoming car. At 9:30 p.m. we catch the night at Lander and sleep.

Now Fred and I are in the West. Here the road is dispensible, not inbred as in the East. People are few and anecdotal; the land is hard-staring and unrelenting. Our trip is over; we have only to find its end. We rise early the next morning and putter up to Yellowstone, across the Wyoming desert. Between the sear, hard-sapped breasts of the Wind River Indian Reservation we tourist, listening to the sweet harmonies of Judith Collins over the sagebrush-bearded grandmother's chest of the land. Black pumps tap reservoir's of crude, titting the dinosaur-jawed, stone-ribbed poundings of the earth. A few junkyards--abundant with rotting cars--decorated the roadside, but no Indians.

The land is richer through the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, euphimisms for preserves for recreational vehicles. Fecund beasts, they spill across the blacktop in strained, sluggish twists, painting darkly on the snow-rimmed shoulders.

By late afternoon the sky sours--all grey tension and flat light. Pulling into Tower Junction, we look for 6-10, a Park Ranger who went to school with Fred. The Park Service people live in a ratty cove of mobile homes parked on a patch of mud and gravel. Out of a faded beige unit, Briggs, Fred's exroommate and my future roommate in Ketchum, steps. He's broken up with his girlfriend so he hitched up from Ketchum--about seven hours away--to do some fishing. The streams are high and muddy, and the trout few, 6-10 gets off patrol at midnight; we drive to a hot spring near Mammoth. Over the thermal source hangs a blind light. The sky presses high and clear; the Milky Way lighting out like the veins on a drunkard's nose, delicate filigree work on an ever-widening expanse of blackness. A couple of hundred yards downstream from the thermal we slip into the runoff. The current is scalding and strong. Briggs talks of Charles Manson. The night is black and steamy and lost--except for the blind light and the scissoring beams of cars lurking on the road a half mile away.

6-10 directs us over to Gardiner for a beer before heading back to Tower. The saloon's a wooden affair with a long, running mirror behind the bar, a couple of pool tables, and two poker tables in the rear. The dance hall is locked. Only a dozen people are in the joint. All are kids: a blurry-faced, rumpled Italian from Boston; a buck shouldered mama in a Porsche tee-shirt giving a two-handed thigh clasp to slit-eyed tough with TKO'ed reflexes; a plump little blonde in a too-tight girdle and high, cut jeans who's loosing her battle for the shag-cut brown-haired, fishy-moustached, brown-oiled, flat-faced stud in the bleach spotted blue sweatshirt who passes God-knowing glances to the skinny, tight-asses, thin-featured queen of the joint. The Oly tastes pretty good here in 1975 doubleknit cowboy heaven with pinball and Pong and ethnic diversity at a reasonable price.

Next morning 6-10 tells Fred of a present he's got cached for him: an elk head with full rack he's ripped off a carcass. Fred's real artsy and thinks it might go well with the decor in his new apartment. Briggs and I tell Fred he can sit in the back with his honey when we pull out.

It's illegal to take anything out of the park, so we have to sneak it into the van, 6-10's already closed the road off of which the head is hidden--there are some birds mating near it, he explains--and once the main road is clear, he hauls it down to the van, holding it before him by its rack, like the handlebars of a bike. The eyeballs have fallen out of their sockets, but the head is still covered with fur, and is brown and runny inside, 6-10 and Fred put it into two plastic garbage bags.

The head has a rich sweet fragrance to it. Fat flies buzz inside its filmy bag. We leave 6-10 and head for West Yellowstone. By the time we get there, all the windows and air vents in the van are open. The elk's stench lies softly. At a fishing cabin Briggs rented last summer, we repack the van. In its bag, the head is baleful and timid, and I fondle it while unloading. Out of its bag, the head smells like a 2 a.m. urinal with broken plumbing and I kick dust over it. Briggs and I load it on the front of the van, between the bikes on the bike rack. Thick, greasy and matted, the hair on the skull sticks out like a crown's wig. Twisted slightly down and to the right, the head leers out before us as we drive back to West, blowing long streamers of iridescent bubbles into the Big Sky Country, our windshield catching chunks of rotting flesh and hair.

After three pitchers of beer, Briggs and I drive to Ketchum that night. Fred sleeps in the back. It is a long, desert road. Cars are few and I trace their rear lights back to nothing in the sideview mirror, where they are but a pin-pricked rupture in the great sack of night, a bleeding stream of fleeting electricity. I push the van to 95 in the soundless onrush of blackness, while the flourescent stakes by the roadside teeter rearward and empty lights hang nowhere out in the desert, some mystery of some nuclear facility.

We glide past the Craters of the Moon in a dazed sprawl of too little sleep and empty night and headlights that beam vaguely, duskily across the spread of road and desert that lap across each other here, where the march of flourescent poles has not yet reached. Catching our headlights in smoothflowing creaminess, the antlers pierce mutely our forward fall: motionless, steady in their chrome cage, at the fore of our seamless void, too strong, too immutable in their decay for our quick-lipped, easy spun gasp of time.

At 4 a.m. we arrived at Briggs' and my shack in Ketchum. The day dawned rainy and grey in Sun Valley. For the next five days it stayed rainy and grey. In a field in front of Fred's apartment, the elk head lies as Fred ponders how to cure it.