The Jehovah’s Witness Who Knew Too Much
How Alfred Hitchcock saved me from a cult, sent me on an epic road trip and helped me learn how to die.
“[Some] people are unaware that catastrophe surrounds us all. But I believe that when catastrophe does come, when people rise to the occasion, they are all right…. People can be strong when they face up to the situation.”
— Alfred Hitchcock
Until 12 years ago, I believed I’d never die.
It was 1969. The summer of love and the Hell’s Angels. The original moonwalk and the Stonewall riots. I was three. My mother, Helen, had been juggling a career ladder, three preteen kids and one ex-husband when a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on her door, peddling the Truth book and a promise of life everlasting on a paradise earth. Without hesitation, she commenced herding us to Kingdom Hall meetings in a ritzier section of working-class North Portland. It was there that she saw Carroll Gunz , a 30-year-old part-time father of two who’d dropped out of med school and become a postman. Though they’d been low-level vibing for years, fresh sparks flew. Like her, he was not yet a full convert, but he was fully available. Dating ensued. My mom and Jehovah formed a side deal: Carroll would have to accept them as a two-fer. His leeriness about the religion was no match for her intense brown eyes and passing resemblance to a busty version of Audrey Hepburn. That summer, they got baptized and then got married.
While they were on their honeymoon, members of the Manson Family cult slashed their way into Roman Polanski’s home and butchered pregnant Sharon Tate and four others. Elsewhere that year, the Children of God were prophesying that, any day, an earthquake would shrug California off into the sea. Anton LaVey was publishing the Satanic Bible and Hal Lindsey was double checking his math predicting the appearance of the Antichrist for his novel The Late Great Planet Earth. Apocalypse was in the air. We began preparing for the worst too, because come October, 1975, Jehovah was going to plant hooks in the jaws of the nations and lead them to the Battle of Armageddon, whooshing our makeshift family into a second chance at prosperity in a millennium of theocratic rule. With six years to get ready, we had a lot to do. Some of our friends sold their houses to go preach in faraway lands. Witness youths dropped out of school to devote their remaining time in this old world to the ministry. Yet others treated themselves to spendy vacations, because—why not?—their credit card debt would soon be up in smoke. I drifted to sleep with thoughts of hair-raising cataclysms and pet tigers to come.
1975 came and went. Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned members abandoned the Witness membership rolls. We, however, remained on perpetual doomsday alert. After all, we were part of a unique, non-holiday-celebrating “great crowd” of true Christians who would yet survive God’s Day of Vengeance and never taste death (provided we remained morally pure).
Not that I had any choice to believe otherwise. When my older sister, Lynnda, started acting like a typical hormonal teenager, she was abruptly shunned by the congregation. Not a greeting on the street or a visit from mom when she fell ill and landed in the hospital. She was 18. According to official Witness newspeak, disfellowshipping is a “loving provision”; after seeing how the ordeal left her permanently wrecked, I wisely steered clear.
In spite of a schedule of total immersion in mental sanitation — thrice-weekly meetings, family Bible study, personal study and weekly ministry — when I turned twelve, all urges dark and oedipal manifested themselves right on time. John Carpenter and Stephen King were off limits, so I settled for PG-rated thrills from the Master, Alfred Hitchcock, geeking out on his films, interviews, biographies and whatever else I could get my hands on. I compensated for those worldly interests by immersing myself in the black-and-white morality of the Watchtower and its fabulized history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I tried obsessively to reconcile the two, soothing the cognitive dissonance with marathon bouts of masturbation followed by panic attacks: my dirty secret was going to disqualify me from the paradise—or worse, if my mother ever found out. Shame is, by far, the heaviest form of egocentricity.
From Hitch (as he insisted his friends call him), I learned that no one is that good or evil. Mankind, like the San Francisco of Vertigo, is best viewed through a spiritually ambiguating fog filter, and even a sicko like Norman Bates has his finer qualities. Hitch’s films inoculated me against the judgmentalism that surrounded me and, although I put in my 10,000 hours in the door-to-door ministry, in three decades I never made a single convert. Perhaps my Bible students saw in my eyes my struggle — and failure — to square my belief with my ambivalence. Not that it did me any good at first. I grew up and got married to a fellow believer. Cultism being a communicable disease, we had two children and raised them to expect an imminent Armageddon.
Despite my best efforts to avoid it, in 2003, I was finally disfellowshipped for confessing to my dirty little secret. Curiously, the more I faced my shame, the more it shrank. The shunning gave me some much-needed critical distance. Soon I was questioning my beliefs wholesale. Do I believe in the Watchtower? In God? In the Bible? In my intelligence? Who am I? What am I? Am I Straight? Am I gay? Am I human? What’s a human? One day, as I was standing under a walnut tree lifting a bag of groceries out of the trunk of my car, it hit me: I’m going to die. The realization landed with unmitigated force.
But mortality wasn’t my native language. As my hair thinned and more grey crept in, I refused to see what it was leading to. Literally. I shaved my head.
And then, this year, I turned 50—time for a proper midlife crisis. I decided to skip the enforced frivolity of a birthday party to take a closer look at this new-to-me concept of mortality. I loaded up my car with camping gear, bottled water, a cooler-full of sandwich makings and a few favorite books and hit the road for a week to explore the wilderness of the Old West and of my own heart. Like anyone going on an adventure, I embarked on this trip with a mix of high hopes and cold feet. I had only a vague idea of where I was going and just enough money for gas and food. I left my razor at home.
Day One — “He may be slow in starting, but there’s nobody faster down the home stretch.”
On my first day out, however, I’d gotten a late start and it was too cold to pitch a tent. Though I hadn’t budgeted for hotel lodging, I decided to rest for the night in Biggs Junction, home to two gas stations and two motels, two hours east of Portland and situated at the intersection of two highways — Interstate 85 and Highway 97. (If there were any more doubles in this place, I’d have to grant it honorary Hitchcock movie plot status.)
As far as I can tell, nobody actually lives in Biggs Junction except its East Indian motel operators. There’s nothing to do here except sleep, fill your gas tank and choose one of its four roads out of town. Almost boastful of its lack of any non-utilitarian features, the village caters to blue collar professional travelers, such as truckers and vending machine technicians, its nicked and travel-worn pragmatism a part of its charm, like a pro musician’s road case. The first time I shacked up at the Biggs NU-VU Motel was with my now-ex-wife when, on a lark (as is this trip), we’d hit the road to retrace the steps of our honeymoon. Since then I’ve stayed here several times more, sometimes alone, sometimes with a woman.
Biggs knows its place, that it’s built for passing through, not as a full-stop destination. Still, over the years, it’s become like an acquaintance who never rose to the level of friend, but with whom you once shared a secret ordeal, like jury duty or a dorm room. For me, it’s connected to memories both sweet and regrettable, along with some I’d rather forget and others I’d best not forget.
It seemed right to spend my first night here. I set my Jet-Boil up on the Formica countertop, snarfed a pouch of freeze-dried chili mac that I’d plundered from my girlfriend’s backpacking stash and washed it down with a few swallows of cheap merlot, from the bottle. In the morning, I packed my car and continued east along I-84.
Day Two—“In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only the expedient exaggeration.”
For about 11 months of the year, the East Columbia River Gorge is dusty and ochre, enlivened only by scattered smudges of pale green deer sage. I was lucky to have timed it right. The highway followed along the great river’s slate expanse, flanked by vast grass-covered hills that were flecked with yellow balsamroot, purple lupines, orange poppies, white daisies and salmon-colored desert parsley. I sped by orderly green vineyards bordered by rows of upthrusting, gently swaying poplars. Sentinels against the relentless Gorge winds. As a little boy, I imagined those gorge mountains to be sleeping dinosaurs, and now, studded like acupuncture patients with hundreds of massive, skeletal white wind turbines, they looked even more alien.
The further east I drove, the deeper I traveled into the mythical West, as town after town eagerly reminded me. My next stop: Pendleton. (Motto: “The Real West.”) Famous for its annual rodeo and cattle roundup where livestock are gathered for inspection and branding, Pendleton is undergoing another kind of brand renaissance. It now has an official men’s cologne called Let ‘Er Buck (tagline: “Spray Responsibly”), so named for the roundup’s slogan, which offers “citrus top notes with alluring spices and warm, soft woods” and goes for $69 a 3.4-ounce pop. Pendleton Woolen Mills, once famed for its anti-fashion fashions is now rejiggering itself as a “lifestyle brand” and forging partnerships with such giants as Nike to create the Pendleton Collection.
There’s also Pendleton Whisky—actually made in Canada, cue sad trombone. Upon arriving in town, I stepped into its hundred-and-twenty-something-year-old saloon, the Rainbow Cafe and ordered a shot. Because here I needed to let something go. Following my disfellowshipping from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and consequent divorce, I became enmeshed in a professional relationship with a psychotherapist, an urban cowboy transplanted from Idaho, who has family ties to Pendleton. In a breach of ethics, he pulled me into his personal and professional life until we became business partners, where he used my professional services full time for two years, mostly without pay. I sued. We settled. And that’s why I stopped by: to raise a toast to him and let the resentment go. I’d really like to tell you about the closure I obtained. How open-hearted and forgiving I was. But I can’t. I’ll never get those two years of my life back. Kum-bay-fucking-ya.
I jumped back on the highway, in search of the real real west. I was sure I’d know it by its town motto. I passed through La Grande (“Hub of Northeast Oregon”), Baker City (“On the Historic Oregon Trail”), Ontario (“Where Oregon Begins,” but where, for me, it ended) and into Idaho, where I criss-crossed over the Snake River canyon several times (now I know where it gets its name), without stopping for 346 miles, cruising in places at 110 miles an hour, just to see what my VW Jetta could do. I pulled into Twin Falls, Idaho.
In the movies, road trips always feature, at some point, a place where you face your fears. Take, for example, the underrated Fandango (1985), where Kevin Costner and his college buds go parachuting with an acid-freak daredevil stunt pilot. But as I’ve gotten closer to my fiftieth year I’ve become more sanely risk averse. After a lifetime of thinking deeply about Hitchcock movies that climax at the top of Mt. Rushmore and other taxpayer-protected precipices, I have a healthy respect for heights.
While taking in the view of the Snake River Canyon at Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, I met a team of BASE jumpers prepping to make their leap. They’d been on the bridge for an hour so looking over the side, checking their watches and squinting at a tiny flag planted 500 feet below in a grassy area to see if it would go limp, signaling that it was safe to jump. Just a few miles downriver, Evel Knievel made his famous Skycycle jump in 1974. The Perrine Bridge is reportedly the only man-made structure in the United States where BASE jumping is legally permitted year-round. Befitting the insanity of this most extreme sport, BASE jumpers even look crazy, their wingsuits a fruity knockoff of the Batsuit. The sort of costume you might see on a sugary breakfast cereal’s cartoon spokeshero. Think parachuting is risky? BASE jumping is 100 times more so.
Ultimately, the flag never dropped. The wind was too unpredictable, so the team called it a day. No loss. The thrill for me was seeing that they might do it. As Hitch’s famous formula suspense puts it, “there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
If you’re wondering where to find the upper limit of salmon migration on the Snake River, Shoshone Falls, a.k.a. Twin Falls, is it. Even without the dam choking it off, the salmon could never make the climb up the falls to keep going further. Also known as the “Niagara of the West,” the falls were named for the Native American Lemhi Shoshone people who depended on its salmon runs that were once so plentiful, they hardly had to aim their spear into the water to make a catch. After the Bear River Massacre in 1863, however, the surviving Shoshone either converted to Mormonism or got hauled off to reservations. Today, the town of Twin Falls is a flatline of low-roofed ranch houses spiked with Mormon church steeples. At its edge, a big-box shopping mall sits on the precipice of the Snake River canyon. Commerce has no time for pretty vistas: its windows face inward, toward a parking lot buzzing with a mix of blond, blue-eyed Mormons and ruddy Native Americans with their long, black braids. They’ve achieved a truce of sorts, apparently based on the principle of Things Best Left Undiscussed.
Day Three — “I, uh… I’m just seeing some friends off”
The highway into Pocatello, Idaho (motto: “Gateway to the Northwest”) runs along the rail line, which is noteworthy because I know exactly two things about this town, the first being that it was founded as a rail hub. The second is that this is where Sandy E., the first Witness girl I ever fell head-over-heels in love with, was born and raised. We met while working in the food service department at a Witness convention in Corvallis, Oregon, dispensing hoagy sandwiches and Swiss Miss pudding cups to the attendees. She wore a periwinkle blue cotton dress and her blonde hair was pulled back in a french braid. Her family had recently moved to the outskirts of Portland. She hated her suburban existence and was miserable and homesick.
I was an 18-year-old jazz-loving, Hitch-geeking urbanite. Life in a small town out in the middle of nowhere seemed to me like exile. But Pocatello is a lovely, self-contained college community whose Old Town hearkens back to its randier former days with well-preserved saloons and a movie house with a giant neon Indian in full feathered dress for a marquee. Sitting at this confluence of railways, highways, education and, now, the Internet, it has good curb appeal. And when I woke up and saw the sun coming in over the low mountain peaks that form a semicircle around the town, I instantly recognized what I’d seen in that girl and fell in love with: her deep blues eyes were born and bred to gaze upon Eastern Idaho’s distant and vast horizon. She knew exactly where she was from and all she ever wanted was to go back. I envied that certainty. And here I was, still trying to figure out where — or even what — home is. My beard was growing in nicely though.
Day Four — “You’d better go, before the police run out of redcaps.”
When I arrived in Riverton, Wyoming (pop. 10,615), hometown of Darrell Winfrey, the original Marlboro Man, it was snowing sideways, so I ducked into a Hampton Inn lobby to decide whether to wait it out or cut bait. There was one other refugee from the weather, an African-American man, in purple head-to-toe LA Lakers fangear, Skyping his wife or girlfriend and explaining that he would be home later than planned. Neither one of us wanted to spend one minute longer in this town than we had to, but for very different reasons. Driving through Idaho, which has more Mormon temples than Starbucks (oops, they don’t drink coffee), and Wyoming, which is practically stitched together with American flags, I sensed a defiance in the flamboyant patriotism of these ranching states, an implied provocation that the next generation will have to pry from their cold, dead hands what the great Black author James Baldwin calls “the very last white country the world will ever see.” I hoped this fellow traveler was able to get a decent meal and a place to stay. I checked into a Rodeway Inn.
It was my fourth night on the road and, because it had been colder than I predicted, I’d been moteling it the whole way. Each leg of my trip was taking me farther east. I was a long, snowy way from Portland and my cash reserves were drying up fast. I called my credit card company and paid my bill, overdrawing my bank account, but adding a few hundred dollars to my available credit: poor man’s arbitrage. I was buying time so I could keep chasing my MacGuffin.
With a break in the weather and an afternoon to kill, I explored Riverton’s Main Street and discovered the Brown Sugar Coffee Roastery. Between the wet snow and fresh roasted espresso, I could have been in any college town in the Northwest, which put me in a literary/contrarian mood. I pulled a copy of James Baldwin’s poetry from my backpack. In “A Lover’s Question,” riffing on the 50s Clyde McPhatter hit, Baldwin speaks to white America as if he were a lover spurned. Here’s an excerpt:
“I
do not ask you why
you have spurned,
despised my love
as something beneath you….
No man can have a harlot
for a lover
nor stay in bed forever
with a lie.
He must rise up
and face the morning sky
and himself, in the mirror
of his lover’s eye. …
Of rope you fashioned,
usefully,
enough hangs from
your hanging tree
to carry you
where you sent me.
And, then, false lover,
you will know
what love has managed
here below.”
As Baldwin suggests, to be Black in America is to be rejected, as if by a “false lover.” To be told “you’re all right, baby” by a white liberal establishment — and then returned to a psychic apartheid. Just another kind of shunning. Rejected by one group, yet uneasy in the greater world, cult survivors often feel as if we’re refugees. It would be presumptuous to say that I understand what it’s like to be Black in America. But “A Lover’s Question” I do get, and through it, Baldwin helps me rejoin the human race.
Like Biggs, Riverton’s raison is to serve passers-through. Nicknamed “The Rendezvous City,” it sits at the junction of two highways, provisioning surrounding towns with rowdy sports bars and low-cost goods from its Wal-Mart Supercenter. As such, it turned out to be a good place to pause after passing over the Continental Divide, and to take a personal inventory upon crossing the great divide of middle age. (Please tell me you saw that one coming.)
Born on April 21, I’m a Taurus just off the cusp. Spring cleaning season. I think there’s some magic in that. If the first half of your life is spent accumulating stuff, friends, family, more stuff, ideas, ideologies and opinions, the second half is spent letting that go. For me, the Great Purge occurred when I left the Witnesses. 2003 will forever be the Great Divide of my life. It was followed by another decade forging new connections and pursuing false starts and dead ends. The dating. The breaking up. The subsequent finding out who my true friends are. The unromantic gruntwork of rummaging through the closets of my heart to sort the keepers from the throwbacks. Or discovering that I myself am a throwback. Life always cuts both ways.
Day Five — “What’s the idea of chasing ME all over the map?”
The next morning, the snow was sliding off my car in wet glops and the Yahoo weather app predicted reasonably warm, albeit rainy, weather for my drive east. Up till then, much of my drive had been spent in relative silence, just the hum of the tires, lost in my own thoughts. But now I loaded my CD changer with Marvin Gaye, Tower of Power, Hip Hatchet, the Shins and Curtis Mayfield. I was headed for South Dakota’s Black Hills and, according to Google Maps, it was going to be a five hour and forty-nine-minute drive. I was a pilgrim zooming toward an important rendezvous at a very important location for Hitchcock geeks, if not all film geeks. An appointment with destiny (or, at least, with a powerful and personal metaphor thereof).
My name really shouldn’t be Joel Gunz. The Gunz part came later, when Carroll came on the scene and, while it’s got a useful rock and roll street vibe, it doesn’t quite fit. I was born Joel Larimer, an English-Scottish name indicating that my ancestors made spurs and other metal bits related to harness and tackle. Gunz, on the other hand, is Swiss, or perhaps Austrian, and nobody’s sure what it means. (I’ve got a fair amount of Irish in the mix, too, and on my mother’s side, French and Portugee.) Now, whatever you believe about the inheritability of personality traits, I’m no Teuton: I’ve never had a reputation for punctuality or great banking skills. I love a story well told, especially if it’s accompanied by good whisky. My relationship with the IRS is best described as on-again, off-again. Such was also the case with my biodad, Jerry Larimer. By the time I was about ten, so my mother’s story goes, he’d gotten so far behind on his child support payments that he offered to pay for my sisters’ and my adoption if she would release him from his debt. Heroically, she seized the moment and, one day, we went down to the Multnomah County Courthouse and met with a judge in her chambers. From that day forward, I referred to Carroll as my “real” father, as if, like Pinocchio, I’d magically become a real Gunz. I led people to believe that we were blood relatives. I still meet people who are surprised to find out that we aren’t.
Obviously, there’s a huge difference between rewriting my birth certificate and claiming to be a for-real Gunz. It was a riddle. I tried to solve it by searching for a common ancestral link with Carroll. ThisGunz family genealogy obsession turned into a stepfather-stepson project, tooling around the Northwest, snapping pictures of mossy tombstones and interviewing relatives I’d never met before. Amateur sleuths, we visited the Austrian consulate in NW Portland and wrote letters to bureaucratic agencies in Germany. We pencilled names next to tintypes in decaying family albums and collected photostats of birth certificates of long-dead relatives, clanking away at updates to the family tree on an antique Underwood typewriter. Our collection of ephemera would have made an excellent TV detective’s crazy wall.
I believed that if I dug far enough, I’d be able to reverse-engineer the truth. But, of course, it was an unsolvable puzzle. You’d think my parents would have tried to suss out what was going on in the head and heart of a young boy obsessed with his stepfather’s — not his own — genealogy. But they liked what they saw: I was trying really, really hard to be a Gunz, and they happily sent me on my snipe hunt.
To answer a logical next question: why yes, I do have first hand experience with imposter syndrome.
No, really, by 2003, I had no fucking idea who I was.
I’d been disfellowshipped and had separated from my wife. Friends — all gone, along with many of my business contacts. The following year I was divorced and my ex-wife and the Witness community went to work on our children to turn them from me as well.
I fell into the kind of depression that was so ego-collapsing that I would spend hours roaming the grocery store, unable to form a point of view about that night’s dinner.
That sucked. But, if you’re trying to rebuild yourself from the ground up, there’s no better place than America, the land of false starts (e.g. Silicon Valley), not to mention fresh starts (e.g. every political campaign slogan). So maybe my story makes me especially American. One thing’s for sure: crossing and recrossing the Snake River, gobbling up miles through the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and Wyoming’s grasslands puts you in mind of the promise of this country at its best. I started to fall in love with America all over again, which is to say, with myself.
Finally, after winding through the Ponderosa forests of South Dakota’s Black Hills and stepping back 100 million years in its Jewel Caves, I arrived at my destination — Mt. Rushmore.
Mistaken for an American spy, North by Northwest’s Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) travels by car, train and bus to chase down his apparent double. The only way out is to assume the identity of the spy, named George Kaplan. But the joke’s on Thornhill: Kaplan doesn’t exist, except on paper. He’s a decoy, a work of fiction. What does that say about Thornhill — an ad man defined by his grey silk suit and the wry joke that his middle initial “O” stands for nothing? He faces an existential crisis that could only happen in a Magritte painting or the Uncanny Valley of a Hitchcock movie: an empty suit encountering its non-existent doppleganger. In effect, Thornhill asks: “If my double isn’t real, what am I?” His pursuit leads to a final showdown at Mt. Rushmore. Only by looking death — and a giant carving of Teddy Roosevelt — in the eye can Thornhill find himself.
North by Northwest might be Hitch’s greatest testament to identities—real, manufactured and mistaken—and source of my subtitles in this article. Roger Thornhill found himself by shedding his his identity, hitting the road and trading that bespoke grey suit for some ill-fitting duds. His quest led him to the stone faces scraped into South Dakota’s Black Hills. The idea might be too clever by half, but I thought I’d do something similar. Mt. Rushmore was my MacGuffin.
Well, “Who am I?” I’ve been wondering that all my life. About 20 years ago, Jerry, my biodad, developed lung cancer. One night, I had a particularly vivid dream about him. The following morning, I got the call that he’d passed. I went numb. Then I stepped into the shower and sobbed. He may or may not have been much of a man. I’ll never know. But one thing is true: he was the only father I had. Knowing him would have helped me to know myself better.
As irony would have it, after driving 1200 miles, I arrived at Mt. Rushmore only to find it socked in with clouds and snowfall. Naturally. My view turned out to be a big nothing. Not the climax I was looking for. Dismayed, I booked a room at the Alex Johnson Hotel, 30 miles away, in Rapid City.
Alert Hitchcock geeks will recall that this hotel was the place where George Kaplan had been scheduled to stay in the movie as part of that elaborate spycraft ruse. In real life, it’s where Hitch, Alma and the stars of the film stayed while they were shooting on location in the area. I’m sure the director savored the delicious triple irony of roosting in a very real hotel purported to be occupied by a nonexistent character written into a work of fiction. (Which prompts the philosophical question: can film bear a double negative? Yes. It’s called a print.) With its Native American memorabilia and exposed timbers, the Alex Johnson is a grand old hotel, the kind that they don’t make anymore, the perfect place for me and other George Kaplans of the world to hole up for the night.
Day Six—
Eve: “You’re supposed to be critically wounded.”
Roger: “I never felt more alive.”
In the morning I went back to the monument to try my luck with the cloud cover. This time I got a break long enough to glimpse the silent stone masks I’d traveled so far to see:
It was beautiful. Majestic, even. Like the Mona Lisa, the Rushmore faces are so familiar that, in many ways, we no longer see them. The stone visages, their silence magnified by the altitude and their lifeless granite crag are as devoid of meaning for me as Roger’s middle initial. It’s all surface. Masks — as, I suspect, Hitch might have noted as well. I hung around a while, snapped a few photos, picked up some fridge magnets from the souvenir shop and left. One of America’s great pilgrimages proving the rule that it’s about the journey, not the destination.
For my return trip, I merged onto Highway 90 and headed north-northwest (seriously), driving past Sturgis to stop in at Deadwood, followed by a detour at Devil’s Tower, one the first National Parks in the country.
I drove across seeming limitless expanses of green pasture toward the mountains of Northwest Montana.
Days Seven, Eight and Nine—
Letting the land speak to me, everywhere I turned I found advice and cautionary tales.
Here are six lessons I learned.
1. Don’t settle.
Montana’s National Bison Range pens 350 or so of America’s national mammal. Once forced to near extinction, theirs is now a preservation success story, sort of. This symbol of our frontier now numbers about half a million—but mostly as mixed-breed livestock. (Only 12,000–15,000 pure stock remains in the world.) That’s what the American outback has become: a wilderness tamed by barbed wire, Wal-Mart, dude ranches catering to team building retreats and the bureaucratic interventions of the Fed’s National Parks system. The Old West isn’t gone, it’s just older, corralled. The settlers have settled. A tempting choice, I admit.
2. Not me. Not yet. Not ever.
I saw town after town bruised by the circumventions of Eisenhower’s superhighway system, bullied by Big Agriculture and doomed by global warming. Even now they’re just cobwebs, clinging to whatever meager revenue they can derive from speed traps and gas station hot dogs; whole villages available at yard sale prices. Driving through as quickly as I legally could, I didn’t want to know what goes on behind the aluminum doors of those no-longer-mobile homes — I just thanked Google Maps that I didn’t need to stop and ask directions. This isn’t even settling. It’s just admitting defeat.
3. Give yourself a little credit from time to time.
Somewhere in Montana, there’s a three-hundred-acre plot of land that my stepdad owns, an inheritance originating with his great-grandfather, who’d been suckered into a real estate scam sometime around the turn of the century. That sounds like a lot of property, until someone points out that it’s surrounded by a small—by Montana standards — 15,000 acre ranch that pays him $100 a year for cattle grazing. He owns the mineral rights, but if that ever pays off it will probably involve fracking. Come to think of it, he inherited his ancestor’s foolishness too, investing his lifesavings in a future paradisaic theocracy. Glad I sold my shares when I did.
4. Remember where you came from. If you’ve forgotten, stop what you’re doing and go look.
My biodad, on the other hand, was a cowboy. A hunting/fishing/smoking kind of dude with a hardworking pickup truck and a toothpick in his lips. I only remember him saying two words — “Jesus Christ” — spoken, not as a profanity, but as an inverted euphemism for “gee whiz.” He would have loved it out here, I’m sure. Tooling around these roads, I got a clearer bead on the parts of me that are of him. The love of the open road. The need to abandon the city and find the most remote spot possible. The untamed parts and hot-and-cold relationship with bosses and day jobs, parenthood and smoking, the latter of which I’m trying to quit, not because I want to, but because I fear I’ve inherited his cancer-prone lungs. There’s more of him in me than you might notice at first glance. Jesus Christ.
5. Use your budget. That’s what it’s there for.
My Jetta gets about 35 miles per gallon—but only when I drive it at 60 miles per hour. Crank it up and it’ll soon get about half that. Covering 2,000 miles at an average cruising speed of 100 MPH I destroyed my travel budget. In fact I had to cheat the bank to get as far as I did. By the time I got to Kennewick, Washington, three and a half hours east of Portland, I was out of money and credit. I calculated that I had just enough gas to get home—if I kept my speed at 60. It felt like a crawl, but I pulled into my driveway with one-eighth of a tank of gas. And that’s how you end a trip. Come to think of it, that’s how I’d like to end my life, too.
6. Be open to believing in magic.
I’m an atheist, though not a very good one. After decades of praying my knees off in vain, I know not to expect any postcards from the cosmos. Still—and maybe it’s because I was looking for them, or maybe it was coincidence (though I am open to the universe straight up talking to me in the King’s English, because, what the hell, why not? maybe it’s all just one big computer simulation!)—between the happenstance encounters that bore personal witness to my life throughout the trip and actual messages, reproduced next to this paragraph, that reminded me to keep my focus on the things that really matter, it seemed as if the Universe (or whatever) was giving me very clear marching orders for the second half of my life: to keep taking risks, avoid complacency, live wild and keep loving. All I had to do was listen. Or, at least, be willing to listen. In fact, I believe that all it takes is the willingness to be willing.
A peaceful kind of logic
Still, you can have all the epiphanies in the world, but you have to wake up with yourself. The Birds was an apocalyptic film, yet it ends enigmatically, the final frames signaling either doom or salvation. Hitch himself was cautiously hopeful, noting that “catastrophe surrounds us all. But I believe that when catastrophe does come, when people rise to the occasion, they are all right.” This is why I no longer fear Armageddons — biblical, military or environmental. Things may suck for a while, but we’ll be all right. It’s a fragile hope, certainly more realistic than the one I was fed as a kid. You worship your nonexistent gods your way, I’ll revere my corpulent heroes mine.
The man who dealt in onscreen death all his life did not himself go gently. When Ingrid Bergman came to visit Hitch in his final days, he was distraught. “He took both my hands,” she recalled, “and tears streamed down his face and he said, ‘Ingrid, I'm going to die,’ and I said, ‘but of course you are going to die sometime, Hitch, we are all going to die.’… And for a moment the logic of that seemed to make him more peaceful.”
And so, upon returning to Portland, sporting a full grey beard and head of balding, greying hair, off I went, back to work. Or as they say Out West, back in the saddle again.
Let’s stay in touch.
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