people who once lived here, hearing their voices and laughter. On the floors lies the detritus of their lives left behind, a child’s crayon drawing . . . a bald one-armed doll . . . last year’s Montgomery Ward catalog with the corners of some of the pages so hopefully turned down . . . an empty whiskey bottle . . . a foreclosure notice from the bank. Earlier, while I still had enough light, I set up my camera and tripod and made some negatives of the interior of the house, half expecting that when I print them, the family will materialize like ghosts in the photographs . . . as I once believed that my parents would magically reappear on earth.
They’ve left their kitchen cookstove behind, probably it was too heavy for them to transport, and as the nights are cold, I’ve built a fire in the grate, gathering scrap wood from the collapsed chicken coop out back and branches from a dead elm tree in the yard. I found a discarded chair on the porch and an old bench to use as a table. I tidied the place up just as if I were the new tenant, sweeping the mouse droppings away with a broken-handled broom. I spread my bedroll on the floor and lit my kerosene lantern.
I had to learn to cook a little after my mother got sick. Pop was hopeless in the kitchen and it was that or a steady diet of baloney sandwiches. I travel with a kitchen box that contains a cast-iron skillet and pot, a tin coffeepot, plate and coffee cup, basic utensils, and a few staples such as salt, sugar, flour, and coffee—everything I need. A pot of beans simmers on the stove and I bought a thin steak at a butcher shop in Portales this morning. I’ll fry it up with onions and eat it with the beans and some fresh tortillas that I bought from a Mexican lady there. I have a single precious tomato that I bought in the general store and which I’ll chop up over the steak. It’s really not much of a tomato, small and wrinkled, but still it looks so brilliantly red against this gray winter scene.
And so I’ve made myself right at home here. The cookstove warms the kitchen nicely and it’s kind of cozy. But I can hear the winter wind moving around through the house like another restless traveler, and outside the window the big empty country lies lonesome in the dusk.
4 APRIL, 1932
Douglas, Arizona
Today is my seventeenth birthday and I have arrived at last at my destination. I make this entry parked along the side of Main Street in Douglas, Arizona. The high desert air is cool and still, one of those limbo days that seems neither winter any longer nor quite yet spring. The sun is low on the western horizon, lighting the pale mountains to the east with soft color but without warmth. The town itself has that feeling of semiabandonment which has become so familiar to me in my travels, a scruffy, down-at-the-heels border town with empty storefronts, broken windows, and deserted streets.
It’s been over two months since I left Chicago, and now that I’m here I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely and homesick in my life. The desert I’ve been driving across these past few hundred miles seems harsh and alien. I am a stranger here in strange country. Away to the south, across the border into Mexico, I can see the high jagged peaks of the Sierra Madre Mountains, rising like monsters above the plains. In the late-afternoon light they seem a far less romantic place than I had imagined; they seem only hard and rocky and inhospitable . . .
I am scared. There, I’ve said it. I’m thinking about turning the Roadster right around and heading back to Chicago. But everything that is familiar to me there is gone . . . my parents, my house, my room. I have nothing to go back to. So I’m just going to sit here for a while and try to regain my courage. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. The sun is setting and the cold desert air seems to be falling down upon me like stones from the sky above. I wish Mom and Pop were still alive. I wish I could
They’ve left their kitchen cookstove behind, probably it was too heavy for them to transport, and as the nights are cold, I’ve built a fire in the grate, gathering scrap wood from the collapsed chicken coop out back and branches from a dead elm tree in the yard. I found a discarded chair on the porch and an old bench to use as a table. I tidied the place up just as if I were the new tenant, sweeping the mouse droppings away with a broken-handled broom. I spread my bedroll on the floor and lit my kerosene lantern.
I had to learn to cook a little after my mother got sick. Pop was hopeless in the kitchen and it was that or a steady diet of baloney sandwiches. I travel with a kitchen box that contains a cast-iron skillet and pot, a tin coffeepot, plate and coffee cup, basic utensils, and a few staples such as salt, sugar, flour, and coffee—everything I need. A pot of beans simmers on the stove and I bought a thin steak at a butcher shop in Portales this morning. I’ll fry it up with onions and eat it with the beans and some fresh tortillas that I bought from a Mexican lady there. I have a single precious tomato that I bought in the general store and which I’ll chop up over the steak. It’s really not much of a tomato, small and wrinkled, but still it looks so brilliantly red against this gray winter scene.
And so I’ve made myself right at home here. The cookstove warms the kitchen nicely and it’s kind of cozy. But I can hear the winter wind moving around through the house like another restless traveler, and outside the window the big empty country lies lonesome in the dusk.
4 APRIL, 1932
Douglas, Arizona
Today is my seventeenth birthday and I have arrived at last at my destination. I make this entry parked along the side of Main Street in Douglas, Arizona. The high desert air is cool and still, one of those limbo days that seems neither winter any longer nor quite yet spring. The sun is low on the western horizon, lighting the pale mountains to the east with soft color but without warmth. The town itself has that feeling of semiabandonment which has become so familiar to me in my travels, a scruffy, down-at-the-heels border town with empty storefronts, broken windows, and deserted streets.
It’s been over two months since I left Chicago, and now that I’m here I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lonely and homesick in my life. The desert I’ve been driving across these past few hundred miles seems harsh and alien. I am a stranger here in strange country. Away to the south, across the border into Mexico, I can see the high jagged peaks of the Sierra Madre Mountains, rising like monsters above the plains. In the late-afternoon light they seem a far less romantic place than I had imagined; they seem only hard and rocky and inhospitable . . .
I am scared. There, I’ve said it. I’m thinking about turning the Roadster right around and heading back to Chicago. But everything that is familiar to me there is gone . . . my parents, my house, my room. I have nothing to go back to. So I’m just going to sit here for a while and try to regain my courage. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. The sun is setting and the cold desert air seems to be falling down upon me like stones from the sky above. I wish Mom and Pop were still alive. I wish I could
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