Brown: The Last Discovery of America Page 15

  Morning, Eddie.

  Chris and I found a diner on Lexington Avenue. A Greek waiter threw down two wet plastic menus. I opened mine with the satisfaction of having achieved my American novel. At the top, under Good Morning—cock-a-doodle-do and the rising sun—I read: SACRAMENTO TOMATO JUICE.

  Several seasons ago Ralph Lauren produced fashion layouts of high WASP nostalgia that were also confused parables of Original Sin. Bored, beautiful children pose upon the blue lawns of Long Island, together with their scented, shriven parents. All are washed in the Blood of the Lamb. The parents have rewon Eden for the sake of the children. The knowing children, however, have found a disused apple under the hedge and have shared it.

  Mr. Lauren’s later work attempted a less complicated innocence; he had himself photographed astride a horse. The mise-en-scène became the American West. According to W magazine, in real life (as we say, allowing for variance), whenever Mr. Lauren wants to escape the rag trade in New York, he repairs to his Double RL Ranch, a 14,000-acre spread outside Telluride, Colorado.

  On a meadow within that reserve, Mr. Lauren has constructed a Plains Indian teepee, inside which he has placed club chairs from London and Navajo rugs, electrical outlets, phones, CDs—“stuff an Indian never dreamed of,” one ranch hand remarks.

  I do not intend to mock Mr. Lauren’s Trianon sauvage. It may represent an authentic instinct for survival, like the family-built nuclear shelters of the 1950s. Leaving all that alone, I should confess I have not made my own peace with wilderness, never liking to be more than two miles from restaurants and theaters. From an air-conditioned car, I often regret suburban sprawl. That is an aesthetic regret. As a Westerner, I must approve the human domination of Nature.

  I have been to Telluride only once, for the film festival. Often enough of late I have visited those chic little towns that nestle in the mountain states of the West. Lynn’s wedding in Idaho, most recently—the guests had flown in from L.A. and London. On the Saturday morning, nearly everyone rode into the foothills on horseback.

  Whereas I trudged one mile, perhaps two, in the direction of loneliness. A noise stopped me. A crackle or something; a pinecone dropping; a blue jay. I think I did discover an anxiety the pioneers could have known in these same woods a century ago. Injuns? Well, but I am an Indian, and my shoes were getting scuffed. Maybe the woods were dangerously settled? Snow White and her Seven Militiamen? And then a prospect far more unsettling: The forest was empty. I turned and quickly walked back to the lodge, where Ella Fitzgerald’s voice flitted through speakers in the eaves of the lobby.

  Mr. Lauren, quoted in W, speaks in oracular puffs from beneath designer blankets: “I’m just borrowing the land.” (. . .) “You can never really own it.” (. . .) The W article notes, however, that the Double RL Ranch is circumscribed by fifteen miles of white fence.

  Wisdom and a necessary humility inform the environmental movement, but there is an arrogant self-hatred, too, in the idea that we can create landscapes vacant of human will. In fact, protection is human intrusion. The ultimate domestication of Nature is the ability to say: Rage on here, but not elsewhere!

  In nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of the American West, the land is the dropped rind from a transcendently fresh sky. Time is evident; centuries have bleached the landscape. There is no evidence of history, except the presence of the camera. The camera is debris; the pristine image “taken” is contamination. The camera can only look backward; our appraisal of the photograph is pure and naïvely fond. To see the future we must look through Ray-Bans darkly.

  Puritan theology predisposed pioneers to receive this land as the happy providence of God. The gift must have inspired exhilaration, for settlers damned the waters, leveled mountains, broke their backs to build our regret.

  An acquaintance in his eighties recently had pits of cancer dug out of the side of his nose. My friend lamented his disfiguring fate in the present tense: “I use sunscreen; never go out without a hat.” The young doctor’s prognosis harkened to a pristine West: “This damage was done a long time ago, when you were a little boy and stayed too long in the sun.”

  I believe those weathered Westerners who tell me over the roar of their air conditioners that the wilderness is no friend. They seem to have at least as true a knowledge of the West as the Sierra Club church. A friend, an ex-New Yorker, now a Californian, tells me she was saved from a panic attack, driving one night through New Mexico, by a sudden blaze of writing in the sky: Best Western.

  I was driving myself to the sea on a twisting wilderness road. Each mountain turn revealed new curtailed vistas, kliegs of sunlight, rocks spilled at the side of the road. Then another turn and, in a clearing, a bungalow, a lawn, a coiled hose, a satellite dish. What an absurdity, thought Goldilocks, to plant Pasadena here.

  Something in the heart of the Westerner must glory in the clamor of hammers, the squealing of saws, the rattle of marbles in aerosol cans. Something in the heart of the Westerner must yearn for lost wilderness, once wilderness has been routed. That in us which is most and least human—I mean the soul—cannot live at ease with oblivious nature. Nor do we live easily with what we have made. We hate both the world without us and the world we create. (Bad suburban architecture hints at good Augustinian theology—we are meant for some other world.) So we mythologize. Ralph Lauren has built roads, sunk ponds, cleared pastures. “My goal is to keep and preserve the West.”

  Lauren’s teepee of “commercially farmed buffalo hides” was painted by a “local mountain man” with figures representing Mr. and Mrs. Lauren and their three children.

  Once the shopping center is up and the meadows are paved over and the fries are under the heat lamp, we park in a slot, take our bearings, and proceed to the Cineplex to watch Pocahontas’s hair commune with the Great Conditioner. We feel ourselves very sympathetic with the Indian, a sympathy we extend only to the dead Indian. Weeping Conscience has become the patron saint of an environmental movement largely made up of the descendants of pioneers. More curiously, the dead Indian has come to represent pristine Nature in an argument made by some environmentalists against “overpopulation” (the fact that so many live Indians in Latin America are having so many babies and are advancing north).

  That part of me I will always name western first thrilled at the West in VistaVision at the Alhambra Theater in Sacramento, in those last years before the Alhambra was torn down for a Safeway. In the KOOL summer dark, I took the cowboy’s side. Now the odds have shifted. All over the West, Indians have opened casinos where the white man might test the odds.

  Another summer day, late in the 1960s: I was driving a delivery truck for the Holbrecht Light Company to a construction site at the edge of Sacramento. Making a sharp right turn, I saw a gray snake keeling through the mirage of water upon the asphalt. I make no apology for that snake. It is no literary device I conjure to make a theological point. It was really there in the delivery truck’s path on that summer afternoon for the same reason that Wyoming sunsets resemble bad paintings.

  I hadn’t time enough to swerve or to stop. Bump. Bump. Front wheels; back wheels. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw the snake writhing, an intaglio of pain. I drove on.

  Eventually, I found the empty new house where I made my delivery. After a few minutes, I returned to my truck, retraced my way out of the maze. Only then did I remember the snake and look for it, where I had run over it.

  Several construction workers were standing alongside a sandwich truck, drinking sodas. One man, a dark Mexican, shirtless, had draped the snake I killed over his shoulders—an idea that had not yet occurred to Ralph Lauren who, at that time, was just beginning to be preoccupied with high WASP nostalgia.

  Here in San Francisco, in summer, sleeping revelers incorporate an aching horn into the narratives of their dreaming. Coast Guard officials tried a few years ago replacing foghorns with more efficient sonar, but the citizenry wouldn’t hear of it. After a hundred years, we demanded our accustomed meteorologic lull
aby. Foghorns were reinstalled at taxpayers’ expense, and worth every penny, for those accustomed to being awakened know it is the horn that makes fog—whimsically and at concupiscent intervals—manufactures fog to puff it under the bridge or pump it down the hills to swill about the wharves. Bellows atop poles broadcast the agnostic alarm with a basso blast—Boris Godunov in H2O.

  You are alive, you are alone, tomorrow is not yet dry, go back to sleep.

  Except for the sound of a horn, fog never enters a room. Or swirls about an opened door, as in B-movies. Even when you are engulfed by it, fog remains distance—not even as tangible as regret. There is nothing to be done, nothing to cancel or celebrate—picnics, plane flights, executions will all take place—nothing but to note the conditional. The unclear. The tarnished. You are alive. You wake up staring. Turn away from the parted curtain. Another foggy day.

  This summer I am mordant enough to name the last summer of my youth (it is the afternoon of my fiftieth birthday), I have come to Point Reyes, a promontory from which one can see for miles along the coast of California, north and south. The ocean, seen from this height, is tarpaulin.

  Just below the lighthouse, warning signs have been posted by the National Park Service. There are photographs of nineteenth-century shipwrecks. Cautions to swimmers. Illustrations of the physics of undertow. Charts of species of shark. Beware, beware . . .

  Whales pass by here.

  I descend to the water’s edge. Appropriate for a middle-aged man to turn up his collar, roll his cuffs, and play at the edge. The ocean is young—unraveling and then snatching back its grays and pinks, celadons, and the occasional bonny blue. The relentless flirtation of it loses charm.

  Adam and Eve were driven by the Angel of the Fiery Sword to a land east of Eden, there to assume the burden of time, which is work and death. All photosynthetic beings on earth live in thrall to the movement of the sun, from east to west. Most babies are born in the early morning; most old people die at sunset, at least in novels of large theme. We know our chariot sun is only one of many such hissing baubles juggled about, according to immutable laws.

  Fuck immutable laws. Fuck mutability, for that matter. I just had my face peeled. I go to the gym daily. I run. I swallow fistfuls of vitamins. I resort to scruffing lotions and toners. Anywhere else in the world I could pass for what-would-you-say? In California, I look fifty.

  Besides. The older I become, the further I feel myself from death. It is the young who are dying. A few days before her death, Lynn and I came to this beach. She wore a red baseball cap over her bald head. Lynn regretted the impression our bodies left in the tall grass over there. She took off her sunglasses to face the brightening scrim with burnt-out eyes. I wondered, at the time, if she was forcing herself to remember this place for eternity or if she was consigning herself to Nature (the motion of the sea intent upon erasure).

  I remain unreconciled to the logic of an alleged Nature. I am unnatural. As a boy, I read Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. What I remember is the furious storm as the ship tossed about the Horn, all Nature pitched against us. My Dana was not the Dana whom D. H. Lawrence mocked for returning to Boston, to Harvard, to a clerk’s position, a clerk’s fizzing kettle. My Dana was a white-throated, red-lipped romantic who sailed away.

  Odd the convergence of loss and rescue at one place. A few years before, Lynn met a malign shade here. She had been picnicking with a friend from New York when the shadow of a rifle trespassed upon their blanket. Pick up your things! In the guise of gathering, Lynn slammed a purple-spilling bottle against the shadow’s skull, then kicked its softer groin. The two women ran through the tall grass, across the parking lot, to safety.

  Around the rock where I am sitting now, seabirds gather to rotate their silly heads; zoom unblinking lenses toward my fists, patient for the manna I might be concealing there. It is the last day of July, the feast of St. Ignatius. The wind is picking up and the waves come pounding in from the gray towers of Asia.

  This morning I had been studying an illustration on perspective in the encyclopedia because I was interested to understand the vanishing point. Might not the vanishing point allow for another, an inverted vision, an opposite vertical angle? If lines of perspective cross at one point, might they not continue after that point to open up again? This is the same day I read in the paper that the universe is flat; that the universe is expanding outward, rather than gathering to a foamy flush as those galactic photographs suggest. I begin to imagine pagodas and lanterns, gardens of spice, that lie beyond this scrim.

  Imagine how California must have appeared to those first Europeans—the Spaniards, the English, the Russians—who saw the writing of the continent in reverse, from the perspective of Asia, adjusting their view of the coast through a glass, silent and as predatory as these birds.

  The little person in the encyclopedia illustration of perspective is me. A little man wearing a suit. He is fifty. Little dotted lines travel from his eyes out to the horizon (which we shall call the Pacific) to stop at the vanishing point. The dotted lines are tears. That much we know. But where is Lynn? That is the question confounding all perspective.

  Lynn again: “What if . . . ?” As we toured an exhibition of Japanese armor, Lynn marked the similarity of Samurai head-dresses to American Indian war bonnets, buffalo heads, horns, plumage. “What if the Americas had been discovered by Japan, rather than Spain?”

  What if ? What if you are not a clump of sea grass, my darling? What if your pleased soul rides a lantern-rigged gondola through the Catholic arrondissement?

  By the time he returned to the East Coast, Richard Henry Dana was about the same age I was when I moved to Los Angeles. I was determined to throw off all clerkishness. Only to become a writer. Twenty-five years ago in L.A., one sensed anxiety over some coming “change” of history, having to do with finitude and recurrence.

  Rereading Dana, I am struck by the obvious. Dana saw California as an extension of Latin America. Santa Barbara, Mon terey, San Francisco—these were Mexican ports of call. Dana would not be surprised, I think, to find Los Angeles today a Third World capital teeming with Aztec and Maya. He would not be surprised to see that California has become what it already was in the 1830s.

  From its American occupation, Los Angeles took its reflection from the sea, rather than the desert. Imagined itself a Riviera. Knowledge of the desert would have been akin to a confession of Original Sin—land connection to Mexico was a connection to a culture of death. Los Angeles was preoccupied with juvenescence.

  More than aridity, America fears fecundity. Perhaps as early as the 1950s’ film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, nightmare images of pregnant pods and displacing aliens converge. Fecundity is death. (To manufacture life is to proliferate death.) Who’s going to pay for fecundity? The question reminds us of scarcity, for we live at the edge of the sea. What is scarce is water. Metaphors Californians summon today to describe the fear of the South are, appropriately, fluid. Waves of people coming. Tides of immigrants. Floods of illegals. Sand, the primordial image of barrenness, uncivilization, becomes an image of unchecked fertility.

  The reflection of the sea has its perils, too. One Sunday in December 1941, Hawaii became the point on the map Americans would remember as our vulnerability to Asia. After the war, Hawaii began our boast: The Pacific is ours.

  Nineteenth-century California resisted the Asian approach. Though coolie labor built much of the American West, Chinese laborers were persecuted by California for coming at the continent from the fishy side. Celestials, we called them, had a devilish language of crossed sticks and broken banjo strings. The custody they exercised over their eyes inferred they had discovered evil here but they were keeping the knowledge to themselves. Inscrutable, we said at the time.

  Now Californians complain that Asians are taking all the desks at the University of California.

  Coming upon the continent from the Atlantic, English Puritans imagined the land as prehistoric; themselves cast onto
Eden. The Indian they named Savage, rather than Innocent, keeping innocence for themselves. The Atlantic myth of Genesis worked so powerfully on the first non-native imaginations that future generations of Americans retained the assumption of innocence—a remarkably resilient psychic cherry. Every generation of Americans since has had to reenact the loss of our innocence. Smog over L.A. was the loss of our innocence. Vietnam was the loss of our innocence. Gettysburg was the loss of our innocence. Ingrid Bergman’s baby was the loss of our innocence. Oklahoma City was the loss of our innocence. The World Trade Center was the loss of our innocence. Other nations are cynical. America has preferred the child’s game of “discovering” evil—Europe’s or Asia’s, her grandfather’s, even her own.

  The east-west dialectic in American history reasserted man’s license to dominate Nature—the right endeavor of innocence. Railroad tracks binding the continent are vestigial stitches of the smoke-belching Judeo-Christian engine, Primacy o’ Man. Having achieved the Pacific Coast, settlers turned to regret the loss of Nature. That is where the West begins.

  Twice a year, along this coast, crowds gather to watch the epic migration of whales, north to south, south to north. The route of the whale holds great allure for postmodern Californians, because it is prehistoric, therefore anti-historical (as we will ourselves to be), free of all we disapprove in human history. The Pacific totem pole might be an emblem for a New Age, marking the primacy of Nature over man—a new ani mistic north-south dialectic that follows a biological, solstitial, rather than a historical, imperative.

  The old east-west dialectic in America moved between city and country, the settled and the unsettled. The plaid-suited city slicker disembarked at the western terminus of the nineteenth century to find himself an innocent amidst the etiolated foliage, the overwhelming light, the thicker blood, the conversations in Spanish. Today’s children, children of the suburbs, hitch between tundra and desert, Alaska and Baja, cold and hot—versions of extremity beyond which unpolluted Nature lies or oblivion or God.