The Great Northern Express (4 page)

“Hey!” he called out. “That sign is there for a reason.”

“What's the reason?” I said.

“Read the sign. We've got an author coming this afternoon. That place is reserved.”

I pretended to study the sign. “I'll get right out of here,” I said.

“Well, you'd better,” said the Scourge of the Steppes. “Can't you read?”

I hopped back into my thundering car, pulled out of my designated parking spot, flashed the chain-store manager a thumbs-up, and drove around behind the mall, parking beside a large green Dumpster.

“I'm not telling you what to do, Howard,” said Uncle Reg. “But I can tell you what
I'd
do in this situation.”

I was sure I knew exactly what he would do in this situation, and it would not be pretty. Then again, I wasn't my uncle. I removed my baseball cap and jacket and made my way on foot around to the front of the store, where the child Genghis was worriedly looking at his watch.

“He isn't here yet?” I said. “Your author?”

The guy shook his head. “Sometimes they don't show up at all. You wouldn't believe how high-handed some of these writers are.”

I realized that not only did my corporate friend not recognize me as his author—he hadn't even connected me with the poor apparitional dummy in the Loser Cruiser.

I gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “I imagine your writer will be here any minute,” I said, and headed in to do my event at the first and last chain bookstore on my itinerary. This was starting to be fun, and I wasn't even out of New England yet.

I paused and peered over my teacher's copy of
Moby-Dick
at twenty bewildered students. “What do you think Herman Melville means when he writes that true places can't be found on a map?”

?

Then, from Bill, who I'd been told was something of a teenage genius, “What do
you
think he means, Mr. Mosher?”

Aha! The night before, preparing my first-ever set of teaching lessons, I had underlined the phrase “true places” and had written in the margin, “Discuss!” Not six months earlier, my own American literature professor had explicated this grand and mysterious passage, which had stimulated all kinds of compelling—and certainly a few not so compelling—discussions in lit courses, graduate-level seminars, and Great Books reading
groups. Fifteen seconds into my new profession, here was my chance to shine. Thank you, Bill.

There was just one problem. At the moment, I couldn't recall a single word of what my professor had said about
Moby-Dick
or any other book. Truth to tell, I didn't have the faintest notion what Herman Melville was talking about. What's more, it was on the tip of my tongue to say so. At least I might get a laugh out of these solemn Vermont kids.

Then came salvation. Sort of.

“Mr. Mosher?”

“Yes, Bill?”

“You know Cody? The kid you loaned your car to right before class? Who said he had an emergency at home?”

“Yes?”

This yes was more tentative. Already I was wondering how I could have done anything so dumb. Tossing my car keys to a kid who, just as Bill had been lauded as the class star, had been pointed out to me as a born troublemaker.

Bill craned his neck to look out the window. “He's driving by the school in your station wagon at about sixty miles an hour.”

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, running to the window to see. The whole class was up and making for the window.

As I stumbled over a desk, Bill, peering down onto School Street, nodded admiringly and said, “In reverse.”

Some forty-three years later, posting toward my last New England event before heading, like Melville's Ishmael, into uncharted waters, I had to admit that the first weeks of my trip had not been an unqualified success. True, I had signed, and even sold, a fair number of books. All over New England, I had met some of the most knowledgeable and dedicated independent booksellers anywhere. They were not only keeping writers like Harold Who going, but they very well might be keeping “the book” itself, as we knew it, alive. At the same time, I had lost a gas tank, been pilloried as a madman in an important early review, and kicked the hell out of my own parking space at a bookstore that looked like a Walmart. I couldn't help wondering whether any other MacArthur recipient
had gotten a fellowship period off to such an unpropitious start.

Encouragingly, my event that evening in Vermont at the excellent Norwich Bookstore was standing room only, and I had a whole day to get to my next engagement, in New York City. Why not celebrate the end of my saturation tour of New England by treating myself to a cholesterol-saturated breakfast at the McDonald's in White River Junction? Defiantly, I ordered a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and a large cup of Newman's Own with two creams, to go. Breakfast in hand, I started back across the vacant lot separating the restaurant from the Comfort Inn—a misnomer if there ever was one—where I'd bivouacked the night before. As I dawdled along, nattering pleasantly to my many invisible friends, a large bus painted a violent lavender hue and adorned with foot-high scarlet Chinese characters pulled up to the entrance of the motel. Fifty or so tourists with luggage milled around, preparing to board the bus for a day of sightseeing.

At that moment, out of the June mist hanging over the lot stepped a gigantic cow moose, with a wobbly spring calf in tow. The mama moose gave a displeased snort. Harold Who stood stock-still, looking at her over his steaming coffee.

“Hello, moose.”

This salutation did not cut much ice with Madame
L'orignal
, as the early French explorers named our good friend the North American moose. She snorted again, louder this time. Except for the low, burbling sound of the idling lavender bus and the whining of the long-distance semis on I-91, a few hundred yards away, this little tableau of me, moose, and tourists was unfolding in complete silence. The mother animal began angling my way.

I edged backward. But now the moose-child took it into its outsized head to get between me and the McDonald's, cutting off my only avenue of retreat from the increasingly agitated
mère
. When it comes to
l'orignals
, one never wishes to be in this particular situation: trapped between mother and offspring. In the meantime, some of the Chinese tourists had begun videotaping this bucolic Vermont scene.

The toddler gamboled a few steps toward me. On came its mother, not gamboling. I took a last gulp of Newman's shade-grown java and held out my half-consumed biscuit toward the angry adult animal, now pawing the daisies and paintbrush in the meadow.

I put my head down and made a break for the motel. Some of the tourists applauded as I sprinted past the bus. Others were busy filming my dash for life. Glancing over my shoulder, I was relieved to see the moose mother and her child galumphing off toward the scrubby woods at the far edge of the field.

“I see it all from right here,” the ancient desk clerk said. “You shouldn't fool with them animals.”

“I wasn't fooling with them. I was trying to get away from them.”

Some of the tourists had drifted back inside the lobby. A smiling young man began videoing the exchange between me and the clerk.

“He trying to get away,” the cameraman said, staunchly taking up my part. “Trying to get away from big deer small deer.”

“You're lucky to be alive, bud,” the clerk told me.

“Very fortunate to be alive,” the Beijing filmmaker agreed.

One of his compatriots said something in Chinese. “He ask, what you do for work,” my videotaping friend said.

“I'm a writer. On a book tour.”

My interlocutor turned to our growing gallery and translated my reply. The man who had inquired about my occupation said something funny. At least I judged it was funny because several of the other tourists laughed.

“He say,” my personal translator told me, “now you go hotel room write all about being chase by big deer small deer.”

Whereupon the desk clerk favored me with a baleful grin.

“No,” I said, “I don't think so. I think that now I'm going to get in my car and head straight home. End of the book tour. End of the writing career. QED. Time to go fishing.”

In the event, of course, it wasn't that easy. After more good-natured laughing, photo opportunities, and handshaking all around, after returning to my room and showering and shaving, after checking out of the goddamn Comfort Inn in White River Junction, I discovered, somewhat to my relief, that the Loser Cruiser simply refused to take me home.

As the Cruiser and I huffed, chuffed, and, every time we hit 58.5 miles an hour, shimmied our way south, I was ashamed of my wavering. Rejuvenated, I stopped at a rest area outside Albany and jotted down the following lines, my first ever attempt at something like haiku:

“Not bad for a beginner,” I said after reading my haiku aloud to my uncle in the catbird seat.

“Stick to fiction,” he said. “Let's roll the wagons.”

Heading south on the New York State Thruway toward my evening engagement in New York City, I found myself glancing off to the west at the hazy blue Catskills and thinking again of my hometown and its chronicler, my uncle Reginald Bennett. A trim, athletic man with dark hair and the brightest china-blue eyes I've ever seen, Reg grew up in Chichester and worked at the factory as a young man. Though he never attended high school, he began teaching at the village's one-room school when he was sixteen. Years later he put himself through college and graduate school at Albany State—now SUNY Albany—and became the local superintendent of schools, with a couple of dozen tiny mountain schoolhouses to visit and staff. In the early 1950s he led a lengthy, acrimonious battle for regionalization and was the driving force behind the Onteora Central School. On several
occasions his life was threatened by opponents of the new school. Once, in a Phoenicia grocery store, he defended himself against a belligerent taxpayer with the nearest weapon at hand—a can of corn!

In fact, Reg Bennett was much loved in Chichester and beyond as a man of unswerving integrity, wry humor, and profound generosity. He was meticulous in every aspect of his life, from his dress and appearance to the way he transplanted a white birch tree or a yellow rosebush or introduced a particularly colorful river stone to his rock garden. A wide and deep reader, his favorite novelists were the elegant, hard-boiled detective writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; he also loved the lyrical prose of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whom he affectionately referred to as Hem and Scott, as if they were neighbors or old fishing friends. His extensive private library included first editions of
The Sun Also Rises
,
The Great Gatsby
, and Thomas Wolfe's
You Can't Go Home Again
—a phrase he loved to cite because, after a stint in the navy, he'd made his own journey home and stayed there. He revered Ty Cobb and Ted Williams, renowned scrappers, like the mountain folks who made their way into his unpublished history of Chichester,
The Mountains Look Down
. Sadly, when Reg died, his Chichester memoir went missing. Its mysterious disappearance was one of the keenest disappointments of my life.

Suddenly I had an idea. It seemed highly unlikely that I would ever locate the missing Chichester manuscript—I'd searched for it for a decade and a half with no luck—but why not slope over to the Catskills this afternoon and revisit my hometown? Like the Sabbath and mankind in the parable, book tours were made for authors, I told myself, not the other way around. Which is how, an hour later, I found myself standing
beside the little stream high on the mountainside where my father and uncle and I had once gone to listen to the Yankee–Red Sox games, looking down at the town where I'd been born.

“Tell me a story,” I mused out loud to my road-bud uncle.

“I'll tell you a story,” said a sharp female voice. “You're trespassing. I want you and that—that
vehicle
of yours—off my property immediately.”

Good heavens! The woman glaring down from the bank above bore a fearsome resemblance to my junior-high English teacher, Mrs. Earla “Battle-ax” Armstrong. Could she possibly be the long-deceased Battle-ax, come back from the other side to give me one more comeuppance? This woman was wearing expensive hiking shoes and wielding a hefty blackthorn walking stick. Otherwise, the likeness was uncanny.

“How many more of you are down there?” the Battle-ax said.

“More of me?”

“Who were you talking to a minute ago?”

“Oh, that was just—me.”

I couldn't help myself. Just like my smart-aleck twelve-year-old self back in Mrs. Armstrong's class, I began to laugh.