through—apparently the truck’s window wouldn’t roll up. “Just my luck,” he said gloomily, and asked Gesh for some pharmaceutical help. Gesh, who seemed to have an unlimited supply, slipped him three Quaaludes. I took two. For equilibrium. It was ten-thirty in the morning. We waited until the waitress stopped refilling our coffee cups, shrugged our shoulders and hunched out into the rain.
Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”
“Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”
Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.
The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.
“Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”
Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”
Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place—a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valleybetween cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger—our indication to swing into the next road to our right—when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.
Suddenly
Willits, the rain-blurred sign announced some fifty minutes later, had a population of 4,120 and stood at an elevation of 1,377 feet. We passed a series of diners, motels and gas stations, Al’s Redwood Room, and a Safeway market. The town seemed contained in a single strip, stretched out along Highway 101 for the convenience of tourists intent on the redwood forests to the north. It was as bleak and barren and uninspiring as an iceberg bobbing in the Bering Sea. Gesh and I caught glimpses of it through the beating windshield wipers. “For the next nine months,” I said, a trace of retardation in my voice as a result of the drug, which shifts your system down a couple of gears into a sort of prehibernatory torpor, “this is our closest urban center.”
“Urban center,” Gesh repeated, his voice as lugubrious as a noseblow. “Shee-it.”
Fifteen miles north of Willits we were to turn off on a blacktop road, follow it past a place called Shirelle’s Bum Steer and six or seven tumbledown farms, and then up a gravel drive to a gate that opened on “five point three miles of unimproved dirt road,” to quote Vogelsang’s directions. Fine. But it was raining so hard we missed the turnoff and Phil nearly slammed into my tail end when I braked to cut a U-turn. I rattled up on the shoulder, hit the emergency flasher and ran back to confer with him.
The intensity of the rain was staggering: I felt I was carrying a sack of potatoes on my back as I jogged the twenty steps to the pickup and poked my head through the open window. Rain tore at the back of my neck and sent exploratory tributaries down the collar of my jacket. A lone logging truck hissed up the highway, spewing water, and vanished in the haze. “What’s the story?” Phil mumbled, each word played out on a string like a yo-yo winding down. The sagging pompadour was flattened across his forehead and a drop of water depended from his nose.
“Vogelsang said fifteen miles from Willits. I read fifteen and a half on my odometer. The road we just passed must be it.”
Phil was shivering. The iris of his wild eye looked like an ice crystal in a cocktail glass. “Christ,” he moaned, “I hope so. All’s I want to do now is sit in front of the fire and crash for a couple hours.”
Shirelle’s Bum Steer greeted us like a shout of affirmation as we lurched across the highway and onto the presumptive road. I could hear Phil honking his joy behind me as we sped past the place—a ramshackle country bar attached to a house in need of paint. A pair of mud-streaked pickups huddled beneath the drooling oak out front, the hand-lettered sign was pitched at a drunken angle, and a single sad Coors neon glowed in the window like a candle at the shrine of a martyr. I took it in at a glance, noting bleakly that this was our nearest outpost of civilization. “The Land of the Rednecks,” Gesh muttered, and added that he felt like Lewis of Lewis and Clark, or maybe it was Clark, and then we were rattling over a raging tributary of the Eel River (in summer it would subside to a series of fetid, mosquito-breeding pools) and threading our way up a valleybetween cropped, long-faced hills that bristled with pine like so many unshaven cheeks. We were counting off tumbledown farms and scouring the left-hand side of the road for a block of stone that protruded from the ground like an admonitory finger—our indication to swing into the next road to our right—when Gesh shouted “Eureka!” and I cut hard into a dirt road that was co-incidentally the brown rippling bed of a stream.
Suddenly
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