PLACES NAMES
(1981)
Specifications for this part of the journey: A middle-aged couple in a diesel VW starting east from Portland, Oregon, at six in the morning on the seventh of June, 1981, in the rain.
I
TO THE LITTLE BIGHORN
In the gorge of the Columbia
great grey shapes of mountain coming down
coming down
to the road
rain coming down
green forest and the rain coming down
and the river coming down.
Union Pacific going west
under the lava cliffs.
Wasco County
Washington State now on a long, dry slant down to the river
and this side opening out,
getting lighter, getting dryer,
the rain a little sparser.
Suddenly the grass is yellow.
We Can Handle It. The Dalles.
Powerlines on the high bare hills.
Blank wood walls.
The dam’s open, Columbia roars out, white breakers in reverse,
a mist of water.
Washington lies in dim dun-gold levels in the rain.
It’s sagebrush now and rabbitgrass,
the lava breaking through in buttresses,
pinnacles, organpipes, paws of iron-dark enormous lions.
Washington is sphinxes’ feet.
Sherman County
under rimrock by the big grey flood.
Breakfast at Biggs Junction
at the Riviera Cafe
by the Nu-Vu Motel
Greyhound and Trailways
calling their passengers
from the bacon-haunted restrooms.
Morrow County
Cross the John Day River wide and flat
and the castles vanish:
FLAT.
Sagebrush at its intervals.
Power poles at their intervals.
Raindrops at their intervals.
Somewhere behind this
Coyote is hiding.
Umatilla County
Fred’s Melons.
High Water.
Grey sage, grey black-stemmed willows in the reedy
sloughs.
Umatilla.
Night Crawlers at the Western Auto,
a gloomy wooden cowboy twenty feet tall at the Key Buy Store.
Gulls in the rain over irrigation arcs
in the desert of Irrigon, Oregon.
ENTERING WASHINGTON
across the rainy river
foaming from MacNary Dam.
Pale colors, pale browns of plowland, fading off
and off
and off.
Palouse.
Treeless.
No trees.
Pasco: lines of morbid poplars
blue in a vast swale.
Snake meets Columbia, and we cross Columbia
for the last time this time.
And the ash begins.
Roadcuttings whitish.
Top of every rock at the roadside white.
The roadshoulder greyish-white.
The dry snow of the eighteenth of May, 1980, thirteen months ago.
As we turn from Washington 397 onto U.S. 90 I remember the radio
that morning: Highway 90 is closed on account of DARKNESS.
Now the darkness
lies white on the roadsides.
Spokane.
After the handsome city on its river the mountains
start to rise to the right hand,
westernmost Rockies,
forested, beclouded.
And IDAHO WELCOMES YOU!
A wet white horse runs in the rain
over Lake Coeur d’Alene on steep cloudy pastures.
Coeur d’Alene National Forest
pine fir spruce pine fir spruce
Fourth of July Summit three thousand and eighty-one
feet yoopee! over the top!
And we level down into parklands, lower, to a marsh
lonesome
hills and clouds on every side
and a great grey heron flops slowly south
over the lonesome marshes of the River Coeur d’Alene.
Shoshone County
Shoshone, Shoshone, Shoshone
They didn’t leave things
only names, only words
They owned very little
other than breath
a feather, a whisper
Shoshone
Smelterville.
A scruff of sheds and shacks and fences
under the steep hills;
high thin smokestacks of the mill, black,
and the black tip.
Kellogg.
Kellogg Memorial Park No Bottles in Park
but a helluva lotta litter.
Vangs Shoe Repair
on the despairing wall of which is written
WALLACE SUX
The Shoshone Humane Society
is a ten-by-twelve-foot building all alone on the river bank
between the railroad and the highway
in the Rocky Mountains.
Heaven and Earth are not humane.
Osburn, three mines, Silverton,
and Welcome to Historic Wallace Silver Capital of the World.
Somewhere in historic Wallace on a wall is written KELLOGG SUX.
But the weary traveler benighted in the mountains finds
a broasted chicken Sunday Dinner with slaw, biscuits and honey, mashed potatoes, rainbow sherbet, beer and coffee, at Andersons Hotel in the old, high dining room.
And all night in the motel in the silence of the mountains
the raingutters drummed on barrels in the alley
Rocky Mountain music.
THE NEXT DAY
Six a.m. leave Wallace
in its high grey sodden solemn fir-dark cloud-encumbered hills.
I-90 follows fast Gyro Creek past mines:
Golconda District
Compressor District
Gold Creek
tailings at Mullan
Lookout Pass, four thousand six hundred and eighty feet
hello MONTANA!
hello Rocky Mountain Time
hello Lolo
We’re doing 55 and so’s the St. Regis River in the opposite direction,
jade green on granite
Food Phone Gas Lodging
No Services
Breakfast in Superior
at the Big Sky Cafe
eggs up and square hashbrowns
Alberton
across the wide Clark Fork, way down
at night in Alberton you must hear the river rivering
and see the car lights way up on the highway passing
Missoula County
Granite County
Bearmouth
Chalet Bearmouth
The rocks are pink, tawny, tawny red, orange, violet, blond, gold, brown, purple, layered, lined, folded, striped like Roman stripe.
Drummond
under the snowy mountains
cottonwoods, church tower, wooden walls.
What do you do in Drummond?
What you do in Drummond is climb up the tall bare hill above I-90 and paint your high-school class year on the granite cliffs near the big white D for Drummond if you can find any room left the highschool class years there go back to 34 B.C.
Country Village Store 24 Miles. Gas Soup Moccasins.
That’s what it said: Gas Soup Moccasins.
Phosphate. NO SERVICES. Where do you pee in Montana?
Silver Bow County.
Anaconda.
The huge dark rusty stack and flume under mountain shoulders,
rain coming fast from the west,
our rain, we’re bringing it along,
traveling with our cloudy retinue from Oregon.
Crackerville.
High sagebrush range, red caprock, pointed cedars scattered
wide.
Come to the IT Club in Rocker, Mont.
Downtown Helena is FUN! NO SERVICES.
And after Butte under its terrific raped rich disemboweled mountain we go
UP.
Deerlodge Forest: sandstone pinnacles, I swear they are blanketed people
standing silent among the cedars
as the road goes winding fast and up
to the place where the rivers part.
Continental Divide
Homestake Pass, six thousand three
hundred and ninety-three feet.
Seabottom sandstone, ice-split, foliated, leaved by the fingers of the cold,
dun and silver-grey, red and buff, big round worn shapes, seabottom
here at the top of the continent
at the place my heart divides.
Farewell O rivers running to my sea.
Jefferson County.
Down we go and it begins to level down
rolling in hills and sweeps
and valleys and ranges and vast lovely reaches of land,
sagebrush and high grass, cedar and cottonwood,
the colors of cattle, the colors of horses.
Whitehall stop stop stop we got to stop
it’s a hundred miles
since breakfast—
In Whitehall at the gas station they won’t let you use the john unless you buy gas and they don’t have diesel O God but there’s a semi-defunct self-serve station and they don’t give a damn they’re in there busy arguing toothlessly in low sullen voices and the door of the john is propped open so it won’t lock so the builders working right outside can use it if they need to and also they can see right in and you can’t shut the door but who cares, and inside that door another traveler has written in large letters:
THANK GOD FOR THIS TOILET
Amen, amen, amen.
Three Forks: the Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin Rivers
the rivers with galloping names.
Horses, horses of Montana,
clump together in the great spaces of their life,
have pony faces, clever faces, fat bellies,
are Indian colors, colors of Rockies rocks:
buckskin, grey, roan, appaloosa, sorrel, paint.
Sweet Grass County.
The Yellowstone goes shining off among
cottonwoods and meadows
towards lovely lines of rainy hills.
Big Timber.
Frye’s Charles M. Russell Motel.
I walked in the evening in Big Timber:
a lot of trucks
spits of rain
far-off cobalt mountains streaked with white
sweet grass of Sweet Grass County
quaking aspen whispering in side yards of little wooden houses
mountain ash in bloom in June
birds whistling and whispering
columbine: faint tawny pink and gold,
color of the rocks, the Rockies’ own wild flower.
I picked up a pink rock, granite, my piece of the action.
THE THIRD DAY ON THE ROAD
Under a bright and cloudy sky we go by
Greycliff
Stillwater
Springtime
Yellowstone
Absarokee That was what they called themselves,
the ones we called the Crows.
Here by the Yellowstone lightly poised stood tall cities,
the city a circle, each house a circle,
twenty-eight lodgepoles, the door open to the east, the circle open.
Gone now. Empty.
White ranges in white clouds
above the river’s green and empty valley:
Absarokee.
A broom of light, amazing, sweeps through bluish
mists
over cliffs in a huge perspective
beyond the pewter river, the cottonwoods,
the pastures of the ghosts of the buffalo.
Big Horn County
Bighorn River
Little Bighorn River and Battlefield.
The battlefield. A middle-aged Crow Indian at the Agency sent us to the detour, patient and polite. The Crow were on Custer’s side, a lot of good it did them. The stuff at the building at the hilltop is all Custer, that vain and petty man, and uniforms, and battle diagrams. One single postcard with the faces of the warchiefs of the Sioux and the Cheyenne, heavy handsome fierce sad faces of old men, but of Crazy Horse not even a postcard. He had no pictures taken. He didn’t leave much behind. A name, a breath, a feather on the wind.
We walked down that long hill. Down from the building
a small invisible voice led us,
a voice in the grass of the battlefield
beside the path, always just a couple of steps ahead
chirk
chirruk!
leading us on
invisible, a bird, a voice, a sweet, indifferent guide.
All around the battlefield
(which stank of rotting bodies for weeks so that no sane man would go within a mile)
all around the battlefield between hilltop and river
larks trill and chirk in the long sweet grass and the sage,
the holy sage, that purifies.
Crickets. Cloudshadows.
Marble gravestones for the white men. Officers have their names carved in the marble. Enlisted men do not.
As for the others, they aren’t there. The ones who won the battle and lost the war. No stones to weigh their feather spirits down.
Wild roses
prickly pear
a lily like the mariposa
bluebells
tall milkweed stars
and all the grass in bloom, long spiked or soft
or ruffled green
dipped in blood.
II
INDIANA AND POINTS EAST
We’re doing 55 on Indiana 65.
Jasper County.
Flooded fields.
Iroquois River spread way out, wide and brown as a Hershey bar.
Distances in this glacier-flattened planed-down ground-level ground
aren’t blue, but whitish, and the sky is whitish-blue.
It’s in the eighties at 9:30 in the morning, the air is soft and humid,
and the wind darkens the flooded fields between rows of oaks.
Watch Your Speed—We Are.
Severely clean white farmhouses inside square white fences painted by
Tom Sawyer yesterday produce
a smell of dung. A rich and heavy smell of dung on the southwest wind.
Can shit be heady?
La merde majestueuse.
This is the “Old Northwest.”
Not very old, not very north, not very west. And in Indiana
there are no Indians.
Wabash River
right up to the road and the oaks are standing
ten feet out in the brown shadowmottled flood,
but the man at the diesel station just says:
You should of seen her yesterday.
The essence is motion being in motion moving on not resting at a point:
and so by catching at points and letting them go again without recurrence
or rhyme or rhythm I attempt to suggest or imitate that essence
the essence of which is that you cannot catch it.
Of course there are continuities:
the other aspect of the essence of moving on.
The county courthouses.
Kids on bikes.
White frame houses with high sashed windows.
Dipping telephone wires, telephone poles.
The names of the dispossessed.
The redwing blackbird singing to you from fencepost to fencepost.
Dave and Shelley singing “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma” on the radio.
The yellow weedy clover by the road.
The flowering gra
sses.
And the crow, not the Indian, the bird, you seen one crow you seen ’em all,
kronk kronk.
CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO
TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST
on an old plank barn, the letters half worn off, and that’s a continuity, not only in space but time: my California in the thirties, & I at six years old would read the sign and imagine a Pony Express rider at full gallop eating a candy cigarette.
Lafayette
Greencastle
And the roadsign points: Left to Indianapolis
Right to Brazil.
Now there’s some choice.
ANOTHER DAY
Ohio, south Ohio, Clermont County.
Cloudpuffs repeat roundtop treeshapes.
Under the grass you see the limestone layers, as if you drove on the ramparts
of a fallen castle the size of Clermont County.
Ohio 50, following Stonelick Creek.
Daylilies dayglow orange in dark roadside woods
Brick farmhouses painted white, small, solid, far between.
Owensville founded 1839
Monterey
Milford
Marathon Little towns beads on a string
Brown County
Vera Cruz A Spaniard in the works?
Fayetteville founded 1818 by Cornelion
MacGroarty
on the Little Miami River
Nite Crawlers 65 cents a dozen
There’s a continuity, though the prices change:
Nite Crawlers crawling clear across the continent.
Highland County
Dodsonville
Allenburg The road dips up and down in great swells like the sea
Hoagland
The Mad River, about one and one-half foot wide
Hillsboro, home of Eliza Jane Thompson, Early Temperance Crusader
Clearcreek
Boston
Rainsboro
Ross County
Bainbridge
Paint Creek
Seip—
But Seip is older than Eliza Jane, and older than Ohio.
Seip is a village twenty centuries old.
Posts mark the postholes of the houses within the encircling wall; all walls are air, now; you rebuild them in your mind. Beyond the little houses stands the long, steepsided mound, silent in the sunlight, except for the bumblebee of a power mower circling it, performing the clockwise spiral rites of the god Technology, the god that cuts the grass; the long, sweet grass on the enormous, ancient altar. A church half the age of Stonehenge and twice the age of Chartres. A country church.
Onward past Bourneville, Slate Mill, North Fork Farm, to Chillicothe.