The Heritage Foundation

Evidently, the credits had said “This picture is based upon . . . ‘Ruidoso’ by John McPhee” while I was on the floor groping under the seat for nickels, dimes, and pennies. ♦

even failed to meet his payment for the option

Quickly, we gravitated to Bill H. Smith, of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, who was there to take on the super-rich “Texas-buckled sons of bitches” from Oklahoma, California, and the aforementioned state.

he said it again, and—in campsites as on the river—again.

It was Hartzog who took a set of plans that had been lying dormant for fifteen years and built the great arch of St. Louis. Those who know the story of the arch say that had it not been for Hartzog there would be no arch. Hartzog the ranger is a hero in St. Louis, but at this moment he is not a hero to Tony Buford. “God damn it, George, this river is a mess. There is no point fishing this God-damned river, George. The fishing is no good.”Hartzog looks at Buford for a long moment, and the expression on his face indicates affectionate pity. He says, “Tony, fishing is always good.” The essential difference between these friends is that Buford is an aggressive fisherman and Hartzog is a passive fisherman. Spread before Buford on the bow deck of his johnboat is an open, three-tiered tackle box that resembles the keyboard of a large theatre organ.

, though, surprised myself (because I am shy to the point of dread)

Richard Nixon had much to say, much of which was lost on Lyndon Johnson, seated nodding on the platform and before long so sound asleep that his mouth fell open wider than a golf ball.

Now and again, a slow black limousine overtook and passed us. Secret Service men in black suits walked beside the limos. At regular intervals along the way, red telephones stood up surreally above the ferns—landline desk telephones of the three-pound push-button vintage, unsheltered, each resting on a square redwood board supported by a redwood stake.

A sailor named Andy Chase wrote to me from the deck of a tanker, describing the grave decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine and detailing its present and historical importance. Yawn. Then he said he felt sure that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass for the fate of the Merchant Marine, but if I were to come out on the ocean with merchant mariners I would meet outspoken characters I would love to sketch. When he was ashore, I visited him at his home, in Maine, and found myself scribbling notes all day. Before long, he and I were visiting union halls in New York, Charleston, and Savannah, looking for a ship. After “Looking for a Ship” was published, a letter came from a truck driver, another complete stranger, who owned his own chemical tanker. He said, “If you can go out on the ocean with those people, you should come out on the road with us.” I wrote back, “Tell me what you do.” On a legal pad, while his tank was getting an interior wash, he wrote seven pages saying where he went with what. I corresponded with him for five years but didn’t actually meet him until a day came when I got into his truck in Bankhead, Georgia. He said, right off, “Now, this may not work out. If it doesn’t, I completely understand. Just tell me, and I’ll drop you off at an airport anywhere on my route.” I got out of his truck in Tacoma.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes.”

I can’t talk to Brower, because he’s so God-damned ridiculous. I can’t even reason with the man. I once debated with him in Chicago, and he was shaking with fear. Once, after a hearing on the Hill, I accused him of garbling facts, and he said, “Anything is fair in love and war.” For Christ’s sake. After another hearing one time, I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, and said I wished I could show him. I wished he would come with me to the Grand Canyon someday, and he said, “Well, save some of it, and maybe I will.” I had a steer out on my farm in the Shenandoah reminded me of Dave Brower. Two years running, we couldn’t get him into the truck to go to market. He was an independent bastard that nobody could corral. That son of a bitch got into that truck, busted that chute, and away he went. So I just fattened him up and butchered him right there on the farm. I shot him right in the head and butchered him myself. That’s the only way I could get rid of the bastard.

He built very big Western dams, and he was a very tough Western guy.

D

My father was a medical doctor who dealt with the injuries of Princeton University athletes. He also travelled the world as the chief physician of several United States Olympic teams. When I was very young, he spent summers as the physician at a boys’ camp in Vermont. It was called Keewaydin and was a classroom of the woods. It specialized in canoe trips and taught ecology in our modern sense when the word was still connoting the root-and-shoot relations of communal plants. Aged six to twenty, I grew up there, ending as a leader of those trips. I played basketball and tennis there, and on my high-school teams at home, with absolutely no idea that I was building the shells of future pieces of writing. I dreamed all year of the trips in the wild, not imagining, of course, that they would eventually lead to the Brooks Range, to the Yukon-Tanana suspect terrain, to the shiplike ridges of Nevada and the Laramide mountains of Wyoming, or that they would lead to the rapids of the Grand Canyon in the company of C over D.

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

A guy there

Two Americans—one of them twenty-five years old, the other twenty-four—were playing each other. One was white, the other black. One had grown up beside a playground in inner-city Richmond, the other on Wimbledon Road in Cleveland’s wealthiest suburb.

Maybe I would twice meet myself coming the other way. Or four times. Who could tell what might happen? In any case, one plus one should add up to more than two.

Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Barbra Streisand, et cetera

producibly doleful and lugubrious

In 1846, in Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he described the stages of thought through which he had conceived of and eventually written his poem “The Raven.”

That is no way to start a writing project, let me tell you.

To a bulletin board I had long since pinned a sheet of paper on which I had written, in large block letters, “ABC/D.” The letters represented the structure of a piece of writing, and when I put them on the wall I had no idea what the theme would be or who might be A or B or C, let alone the denominator D. They would be real people, certainly, and they would meet in real places, but everything else was initially abstract.

When they knocked on mine and I opened it, their faces fell dramatically as the busty Swede they expected turned into a short and bearded man.

looking down from my window on the passing scene

They massaged everything from college football players to arthritic ancients, and they didn’t give sex.

I was working in rented space on Nassau Street up a flight of stairs and over Nathan Kasrel, Optometrist. Across the street was the main library of Princeton University. Across the hall was the Swedish Massage.