Education of a Wandering Man Page 7

  Beckoning signs invited me down all sorts of roads. The signs to Randsburg made me hesitate. Was it close? But when I got there I would still be far from Barstow, where my payoff awaited me. Of course, I might hitch a ride into Barstow. Yet the only road I knew and the only one I could be sure of was the one I was following.

  Now, having spent much time in the Mohave and Colorado Deserts, I know what my options were, yet given the circumstances, I probably did the right thing. At the moment I could not be sure.

  Shouldering my small pack, I set out along the dim trail that should intersect with the road I needed, and roughly two hours later, it did.

  If I recalled correctly, and I had learned to pay attention, the road that lay ahead was not only straight but flat, hard-packed sand for the most part, and at least ten miles to Garlic Spring. With luck I could make it during the cool hours of the night. By day that road would be pure hell. Temperatures in September often soared as high as 120 degrees, and down there on the desert flat where my feet were, it would be even hotter. Already that day I had walked farther at one stretch than ever before in my life, although days would come when I would walk much farther.

  When I reached the main trail and started south for Garlic, a lot of the spring had gone from my step. The sun dropped from sight beyond the western mountains and the air grew cool. I walked steadily, only at a slower pace.

  The stars appeared, incredibly bright in that clear, cloudless desert air. Constantly I looked for some rock large enough to sit down upon, but saw nothing. Getting up from the ground would not be easy, so I hesitated, at that time, to attempt it. I was very much afraid that if I sat down I would not have the strength to get up.

  On I walked. Occasionally I sang, which was enough to protect me from anything predatory. The only persons who ever enjoyed my singing were myself and my kids, before they became old enough to know better.

  Crossing an old desert road that came in from out of nowhere, I came upon a collection of broken wood that might have been the tailgate of a truck. There was other debris around, too, and so I stopped, gathered sticks together, and built a fire. What the hour was I no longer remember, but it was probably about 2:00 A.M. It was cold—cold as only the desert can be where there is nothing to hold the heat of the day. I dug out a hollow for my hips and settled down beside my small fire to rest, and sleep.

  Wind rustled the brush, stirring mysteriously in the smaller plants, rattling seedpods still clinging from another year. I did not remove my boots. If my feet should swell, as they almost surely would, I would not get my boots on again.

  In the first faint blue light of dawn, with stars still hanging in the sky, I awakened, shaking with chill. My small supply of fuel was gone, so I tightened my bootlaces and started walking myself warm.

  It actually felt good to be moving, but I was worried. The terrain ahead was flat and offered no promise of shelter from the sun when day came. Yet there was a black shadow ahead and slightly to my left, and I remembered that near Garlic Spring were the Tiefort Mountains, such as they were, so there might be a chance of some hole I could crawl into out of the sun.

  At Garlic Spring, I opened my can of pears. They were half pears and I took them into my mouth, holding them as long as I could before they gradually almost melted away. I sat on the ground, resting and taking my time with the pears.

  A good third of the can was juice, for which I was grateful, and I took my time with that, too, and carried the empty can with me when I walked away. A sign near the spring warned me it was more than thirty-five miles to Barstow. Before leaving the spring I filled the can with water. It was difficult to carry but might help a little, yet when I had walked only a short distance I saw among the scattered rocks two that had fallen together to make a small cave, open on both sides. Carrying my can of water, I went down over the rocks and crawled in out of the sun.

  It was early to stop, yet thirty-five miles without more water than I had, on the open desert, was insanity. I would simply wait out the day and try to make most of that distance during the night to come.

  Hunched in my small shelter I leaned a shoulder against the brown rock and tried to sleep. From time to time I sipped water from the pear can.

  The cool hours of morning slipped easily away and it became hot. Suddenly, my eye detected movement. At the back opening of my shelter was a stretch of baked white earth and crossing it toward me was a good-sized desert rattler, obviously heading for the shade I occupied. He was still some distance off, so I gathered a handful of sand and threw it at him.

  He stopped, head up, tongue flicking. I threw another handful and he coiled but did not rattle. It was still not hot enough to kill him out there, but soon would be, and a rattlesnake cannot stand long exposure to the hot sun.

  I threw another handful with some larger rocks this time, and he came out of his coil and started to crawl away. Satisfied that he was no longer planning to share my shade, I let him go.

  Nothing else stirred. It was a long, slow morning and afternoon. I dozed, awakened, dozed again. My ears were always attuned to the hoped-for sound of a motor, but luck failed me, as it often has. In the distance, down the way I would go, but probably farther out, I could see a brief shower falling, a rarity at that time of year. Several times I saw dust-devils, those miniature desert whirlwinds that spring up suddenly, travel briefly, then die.

  Somewhere along the line I fell asleep and slept as if drugged, awakened only when the coolness began to come. It was after 5:00 P.M. when I refilled my can at the spring and started once again. The water at Garlic Spring had not been particularly good, but it was water. The only other water I knew of was Paradise Spring, which the old man had mentioned, and it was more than a mile off the road, which meant perhaps three miles extra added to my hike.

  Was it worth it? I did not know.

  And what had happened to the old man? Suppose he had died? Would I ever get paid?

  The night was cool, and I walked steadily. I was very tired, and occasionally I stumbled. The road turned left down a wash and followed it for a short distance. It was an effort to climb out. I sipped a little of my water and decided I had to make the side trip to Paradise Spring. It was in a box, he’d said, set down in a patch of grass.

  Finishing the little water I carried, I refilled at Paradise Spring, but by the time I got back to the road I was dead tired. I sat down on a low bank of sand piled by the wind around some brush. How long I sat there I do not know, but the realization that I must get as far as possible before the sun came up got me started.

  My mouth was dry, my lips cracked. My face felt hot despite the coolness of the night. As I had on several previous occasions, I put a pebble in my mouth to ease my thirst.

  A few miles farther along I finished the little water in the can and must have dropped it. That I do not remember. I do remember sipping some milky water from a rut in the road, probably left by that brief shower I had seen from a distance.

  The town was suddenly there, and I remember crossing a bridge into town and walking up the street to a café. I dropped down on a stool and asked for a Coke.

  The waitress said, “Man, you look like you’ve been through it. What happened?”

  The Coke bottle felt cold and wonderful in my hand and there was ice in the glass. “I just walked in from Death Valley,” I said.

  A man on a stool near me turned and stared. “You walked in? You got to be crazy.”

  When I found him, the old man was ill, sick in bed, but his daughter paid me the $150.

  “Sorry, boy, I’m real sorry. Planned on pickin’ you up.”

  I explained about the car. “Well, she’s no loss. Never was much account, anyway.”

  My next stop was Los Angeles, and then San Pedro and a ship.

  *

  An idea upon which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself.

  —CHARLES BAUDOUIN

  *

  WHEN FIRST I arrived in Los Angeles, I was h
itchhiking a ride on a truck. By the time I bought a suit of clothes and other necessaries, there was not too much money left. No doubt I should have begun hunting a job at once, but I was hungry for books, anxious to be learning, so I rented a room in a small hotel close to the library and divided my time between it and the shelves of secondhand bookstores close by.

  In those days one could buy a meal ticket, which was punched out as you ate, and I bought two. First, I attempted to get a job on a newspaper, but I had no experience and had not graduated from any school, so I got nowhere. A few attempts in other directions were equally unsuccessful. Many commented that they were laying off help rather than hiring.

  Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy, dipping into a book here, another there, tasting, savoring, learning. Many books I would not read for years I first examined at this time.

  On the Death Valley claim I had read Byrne’s Messer Marco Polo, a very pleasant little book but not at all what I wanted. It was years later that I found it, and years more before I owned it, but what I really wanted was the two-volume work on Polo with notes by Cordier and Yule, which far surpassed anything else in the field. That book was to lead me to Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither, which was a real joy.

  It would be impossible for me to explain my early fascination with Asia, although it could well have sprung from reading a child’s version of The Arabian Nights. Years later, when I acquired the full set in the Sir Richard Burton translation, I was content that I had the best. Burton’s knowledge of the Arabic language, of the customs and mores of Near Eastern and African peoples, made his comments and notes a rich entertainment and an introduction to many aspects of the life not touched upon elsewhere. The only comparable collection, of similar but different stories, is The Ocean of Story in the Penzer and Tawney edition.

  Although known as the “Arabian Nights,” the stories largely originated in India or farther east, as did those in The Ocean of Story. Many of the places can readily be identified by anyone with a sailing knowledge of Asiatic waters. No matter what the content of the stories, the locales were invariably actual places, just as in my own stories.

  We in the Western world have been so involved with seafaring in the Mediterranean and Atlantic that we have almost ignored what was happening on the other side of the world, when much longer voyages were being made and another part of the world explored.

  When Vasco da Gama arrived in the harbors of India after his long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, he found those harbors crowded with shipping.

  Almost two thousand years earlier, when Nearchus, Alexander the Great’s admiral, was looking for a pilot for the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, he had no trouble at all in finding one. Ships from China had come to Babylon in the time of Nabonidus, and before Columbus discovered America, Cheng Ho had sailed back from Africa with a giraffe for the Emperor’s zoo.

  Ships were sailing from the south of India for Madagascar and Africa over an open ocean of more than two thousand miles. The area now known as Indonesia had been explored and colonies established, at least one in Borneo, by the ninth century.

  It was about this time that I read Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott and Ivory Apes and Peacocks by James Huneker, and followed it with Iconoclasts by the same author.

  I was in the habit of listing books read, even then, but often lost the lists, so the only ones intact are from periods after 1930.

  At the end of a week in Los Angeles, I gathered my gear and headed for San Pedro and the sea again.

  Arriving at San Pedro, I registered at the Marine Service Bureau for a ship, discovering it might be as much as three months before my number came up. At that time the West Coast ships were unionized but East Coast ships were not, and conditions aboard ship were drastically different. On the West Coast the food was better, the fo’c’sles cleaner, and conditions generally much better. As a result, many seamen wanted to ship off the West Coast, and at the time I arrived it was said there were seven hundred seamen “on the beach” in San Pedro.

  At the time the most important place to many seamen on the beach was the Seaman’s Church Institute, a place where one could pick up mail, where there was a game room, a small reading room and library, and a place where one could shower, shave, and clean up. They also had a dormitory where clean beds were available. I’ve forgotten the price, which I rarely had, but it was fifty cents or a dollar.

  On Wednesday nights there was entertainment in the game room, offered by some amateur or semiprofessional group, followed by volunteer acts from among the seamen, which was invariably the best part.

  A surprising number of seafaring men have at one time or another worked in some phase of the theater. Some were not good enough for the big time and for one reason or another dropped out and went to sea. Others had become alcoholics or gotten themselves in trouble otherwise.

  Several men I knew had played the vaudeville circuits, but movies were replacing them in many theaters and the sea no doubt seemed an escape. In any event, during my short time in San Pedro, I saw some very entertaining acts.

  Of course, it was to the reading room that I went. They had three or four hundred books, if I recall correctly, varied in quality but all interesting. Perhaps a third of them were nonfiction.

  Finding work was almost out of the question with so many skilled seamen standing by and ready to work, yet occasionally there was something. My first dollar was earned helping a man unload a truck. A week later I picked up two days of rough-painting in the shipyards, and that job got me into a couple of days bucking rivets.

  What money I earned was necessary for eating. I slept in empty boxcars, on piles of lumber, anywhere out of the rain and wind. By day, when not working, or during the evenings, I read.

  The first book, a real delight, was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett. I had heard of Smollett but this was the first book of his that I’d read, and I enjoyed every line. I also read The Bar Sinister by Richard Harding Davids, a story about a dog, and a good yarn. Another great dog story was The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

  There was a copy of Knight on Seamanship in the library and I studied it when I could get my hands on it, as several others were reading it too.

  It was a rough time on the waterfront. The Pacific fleet was located at San Pedro then and the town swarmed with sailors ashore, most of whom went on to Los Angeles on the big red cars of the Pacific Electric. Under a trestle of the P.E., the longshoremen had a crap game going almost continually.

  With the mixture of nationalities that made up the American Merchant Marine, there was sure to be friction. Rough-and-tumble fights were common. As long as the watching crowd did not block traffic and no local citizen was involved, the police rarely interfered, enjoying the fight as much as any other spectators. When Fitzgerald, a Liverpool-Irish oiler, whipped Frisco Brady on the corner of Front and Fourth, there were at least four policemen among the spectators. The fight, a brutal, battering match, lasted upwards of forty minutes.

  Waterfront fighting has nothing to do with rules or sportsmanship, only with winning. Dead Man’s Island, which at the time still marked the entrance to the ship channel, caught the drifting body of more than one loser. However, that was not the reason for its name. Various stories are told but the one sure to be true was told by Hugo Reid, who probably knew as much about what was happening in Southern California as anyone.

  Captain William Mervine, with a party of sailors, attacked Captain Flores and a party of “insurgents” on the Dominguez rancho. Six men were killed, six wounded. Mervine buried the American sailors on the lonely little island in San Pedro Bay. The battle had taken place on October 8, 1846, as the United States was in the process of acquiring California.

  Dead Man’s Island was finally removed as a menace to navigation.

  Today, a collection of shops and restaurants in San Pedro is known as Ports o’ Call, and it occupies the site of the old E. K. Wood Lumber Dock, where lumber
schooners from Aberdeen, Coos Bay, and other points on the Northwest Coast used to discharge their cargoes of raw lumber for the building of Los Angeles. There were several slips and each one was usually occupied by such a vessel. They were old and battered, built only for the carrying of lumber. Their crews were usually Swedes or Norwegians, big, husky men who worked cargo as well as working as seamen.

  The discharged lumber was usually piled on the dock awaiting shipment by train, and the rails ran right up to the dock. Perhaps they ran out on the docks—I do not clearly remember.

  However, what was important to me was that often, in piling great stacks of planks, there would be spaces left like caves where a man could crawl in out of the rain. If he was thoughtful enough to provide himself with a newspaper he could wrap around his body under his coat, he might sleep there out of the rain and in reasonable comfort. I use the last term in a relative sense. What is comfort to some is cruel hardship to others.

  This might be a good place to add that I had a family, including two brothers and a sister, but they were living their own lives, with problems of their own. I was going the way I had chosen, with no intention of leaning upon anyone for sustenance. My parents knew where I was but not how I was surviving.

  It was at this time that I read Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., without doubt one of the greatest biographies in the English language. It was a book I read slowly, often returning to reread parts of it. I could not accept the generally believed idea that Boswell was merely someone who followed the great man about, duly noting his comments and ideas. The writing was too good, the appreciation of his subject too great. History was, of course, to bear me out, but many of the Boswell papers had not yet come to light or been published. I now have the complete set in my own library and have drawn upon them from time to time when picturing the London taverns and inns of the period. Samuel Pepys has proved another good source on the life of English public houses. Their periods of history are separated by just enough time to give one a fairly adequate picture of where men were going and what was happening in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England.