Sumbitch

Okay, I’ve been gardening. Haven’t stopped to plagiarize any good authors for a few days. But today I did find one more travelogue to share. This one “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat Moon. In 1978, unemployed, separated from his wife and about to be divorced, Heat Moon (That’s how he signs his books. Lillian and I had the good fortune to have supper with him a few years ago and shamelessly dumped all our books on the table. He signed them.) jumped into his Ford Econoline van and circumnavigated the United States, traveling on mostly paved back roads, those which were colored blue in the Rand McNally Atlas. When he finally reached North Dakota, he headed east across the state on Highway 5, which runs from Montana to Minnesota in the extreme northern tier of North Dakota counties. (Personal note: it is also my favorite highway in North Dakota.)

Here, in two excerpts (one just a bit too introspective for me, but worth sharing because it has his famous line about shooting a gun down the middle of the highway, a line which has since been stolen by many other writers, often without crediting its origin, and the other one of the funniest things ever written about North Dakota) he writes about the road east of Fortuna and an encounter in Cavalier, on opposite ends of the state.

The country gave up the glacial hills and flattened to perfection. The road went on, on, on. Straight and straight. Ahead and behind, it ran through me like an arrow. North Dakota up here was a curveless place; not just road, but land, people too, and the flight of birds. Things were angular: fenceposts against the sky, the line of a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops . . .

You’d think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding straightness to nature. If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside—a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

See what I mean? But his Cavalier experience, looking for a place to get a gas line leak fixed, makes up for it.

I couldn’t remember how much money I had left, but I did know strangers with stalled vehicles get soaked in isolated towns. Axiom of the blue road. That two-inch plastic gas line, of course, should cost no more than a quarter, but in the realm of high technology you don’t figure the simplicity or inexpense of an element, you calculate availability.

At Cavalier I pulled into the first garage I saw, and a teenaged boy with the belly of a man came out and stared. People don’t just throw words around in the North. I lifted the hood to show him the line. I didn’t speak either.

“Sumbitch’s likely to catch fire!” he said.

“I know that. Can you fix it?”

“Pull the sumbitch in the bay fast and shut her down. Goddamit!” He backed off a safe distance as I drove in.

“Have you got that hose?” Here it comes, I thought.

He pointed toward a big coil of hose hanging on the greasy wall. “Fix every sumbitch in the state if we had to.” The boy’s blackened hands grappled with the connection. He struggled, cut himself, cursed, and took off on an analgesic tour of the grease pit, blood seeping from his oily finger. I picked up the pliers and tried to free the clamp. My hand slipped as the connection popped loose, and I cut my finger. The boy sliced a piece of hose off the coil and clamped it in place. “That’ll take care of the sumbitch,” he said.

“Very speedy service. What do I owe you?” Here we go.

“A dime for the hose and two bucks for labor—that’ll take care of the leak. But it won’t do nothing about the real problem under your hood.” Here it comes for sure. “Water pump’s about to go.” He grabbed the fan blades and pulled them back and forth. “Shouldn’t be no play in the fan. When those bearings give, fan’s coming through your radiator and that’ll be all she wrote.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”

“How long’s it been like that?”

“About nine thousand miles, I guess.”

He slapped his forehead to indicate my stupidity. “Summmbitch!”

“Trying to buy a little time.”

“You’re gonna buy a lot more than time when that sumbitch goes. I wouldn’t even drive the sumbitch to Hoople.”

“How far’s Hoople.”

“Eighteen miles.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Wouldn’t try. Take the sumbitch to the Ford dealer.”

So I did. The service man said, “Can’t get parts on Saturday. In fact, I couldn’t get a pump before Monday afternoon—if then. All of our parts come out of Grand Forks, so you might a well drive down there yourself.”

“Can I make it?” For nine thousand miles I hadn’t worried, but now I worried about seventy.

“Quien sabe, podnah? You know? Maybe you make it home. Then again, maybe you won’t make it to Hoople.”

I went down state 18 toward Grand Forks and wondered what this Hoople place was that figured as a basic guide to distance in Pembina County, North Dakota. I couldn’t get to Grand Forks before five o’clock, so I drove slowly, relaxed in my fate. The truck had carried me to the Atlantic Ocean and then to the Pacific and halfway back to the Atlantic. But now, of course, the sumbitch might not make it to Hoople.

Heat Moon writes abut North Dakota again in “River Horse,” his attempt at grabbing a share of the popularity of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial by taking a boat on inland waterways from the Atlantic to the Pacific (sort of—he had a little problem with Missouri River dams and the Rocky Mountains). But it’s fun to read because Heat Moon is an entertaining writer. The North Dakota section is hilarious. His best work, I think, is PrairieErth. Ken Rogers turned me on to it when I was recovering from surgery many years ago and it got me through recuperation. If you haven’t read any Heat Moon, start with that one.