Like Stout Cortez

Scientists may some day figure out why some things you read stick forever and others are washed away. Then they could tell us how to keep the things we think we want. In one of the first books I loved, Louis Untermeyer's The Book of Living Verse, I read

In the course of 70 years or so, the men have disappeared and what stayed was "like stout Cortez, silent upon a peak in Darien" with a mental footnote that he was seeing the Pacific Ocean after a long hike. I have read since that no one can see the Pacific from wherever Keats located Darien, and Cortez probably never saw it from anywhere. This is immaterial. The words stay.

Mary Ellen Chase, a great English teacher at Smith, told us one day that we would endure the trials of measles and child raising in general if we could hear in our heads " the nightingales of Heraclitus still sing on." When I thanked her for this years later, she had forgotten saying it. While the scientists are figuring out how she could have predicted these words would stick, they can go further and figure out how many of the 300 people listening that day, remembered hearing it. Teachers would be very interested in their results.

Cortez was with me when I headed west for the Middleman's wedding in Denver. I had some days to spare and decided to check off a few places I had always wanted to see. Salt Lake City was next. Walking toward the temple I passed a long line of lions and tigers in cages. One comes to expect everything if one wanders enough, so I was only mildly surprised. Actually, they were being kept in the shade awaiting circus performance time, outside a very hot building. I reached the Tabernacle just in time to hear the last note from the choir. Going back to hear them from start to finish is still on my list.

I set up my tent in a campground in the city, listened to the traffic passing close by, pulled up stakes and left to see about a campground in the Wasatch mountains. After a few hair pin turns in the dark, I pulled off onto a turnout and slept on the tail gate. [ Years later I searched the house to find even one left over hair pin to send to the last grandson after his first trip in the Rockies. He could see what a hair pin turn was but had no idea where it got its name.]

I still had some spare days. In a diner next morning I asked the man next to me, " How are the roads west of here?" He said, "I don't really know ma'am. I've never been west." I said."Do you mean to tell me I'm in Salt Lake City and I'm still not west?" He said," Oh, no, ma'am. You're not west until you get to Nevada." I said, " I am going west until I see the Pacific Ocean and then nobody can tell me I haven't really been west."

So I drove along the Great Salt Lake, came to the big sign at Winnemucca that says " Where the West begins", raced another station wagon across a stretch of Nevada, for the only road race of my life, dropped out at 95 MPH, and kept on.

I took care of Reno, and was appalled at the sight of working people on their way home from work carrying bags of nickels to feed to the slots. I had assumed that slots were supported by people like me who chose to waste a certain amount of vacation money and then move on. Now that we are inured to casinos in New Jersey I know even more about how wrong I was.

My brother had told me sometime that I must see Lassen Volcanic Park, and he was right, but when you go, get someone else to drive so you can look at the incredible landscape, and don't go at twilight when all the campgrounds are full and you really need to get off the road before dark.

I love to study maps, but I didn't open one on this trip. After all, if you go west long enough, you are bound to find the Pacific, and I did. I was too far north to try swimming, but I made a tiny fire on the beach and toasted a marshmallow, and picked up some sand-polished bits of drift wood. Atlantic beaches have polished shells and stones and king crab shells, and noisier waves. The Jersey shore has no offshore islands, so you can look straight across the water to Spain. My Pacific had a rock island, just like the pictures, and a strange sound came from it. For once I had the binoculars at hand at the right moment, and there in clear sight were countless sea lions.

I don't know what stout Cortez ate on his trip, and I don't remember eating a thing on my trip, except the huckleberry pie on the hydrofoil boat ride up the Klamath river. Food is not very important when you see the Pacific for the first time, and discover your own forest of immense trees.