Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Four

Oregon 138 extends east from Roseburg, terminating when it runs into US 97 at Diamond Lake Junction. The distance between the two points is about eighty miles as the crow flies, but the road meanders, following rivers and creeks and finding its way through the Cascade Range, and that adds another fifteen miles.

Guthrie Wagner covered fourteen miles the first day. Some years back, when he’d been running, he’d reached the point where he was doing seven-minute miles in short races. His regular training pace was slower, between nine and ten minutes a mile, which translated into a little better than six miles an hour. He wasn’t sure what a comfortable walking pace would turn out to be, and he found out it was somewhere between three and four miles an hour. Even with a pack on his back, and without having done anything to condition himself, he seemed able to sustain that pace without effort for hours at a time.

He didn’t know this the first day because he couldn’t tell how fast he was going or how much ground he was covering. It was around four by the time he got out on the two-lane blacktop, and it was getting dark by the time he found a place to stay, a little mom-and-pop motel in Glide. But his map told him he’d covered fourteen miles, and it was ten minutes of nine when he thought to look at his watch, so he felt he could figure on managing a three-mile-an-hour pace without difficulty. Of course the going would get tougher when he started to get into the mountains, but he’d be in better shape by then.

Twenty miles a day, say. Three hours in the morning, three hours in the afternoon.

He showered off the road dust, then ran a hot tub and soaked some of the soreness out of his feet and legs. He ached a little, but in a satisfying way. He dried off and sat in a chair with his feet up, studying his map. There was a television set in the room but he didn’t think to turn it on.

Six miles to Idleyld Park, eighteen to Steamboat, sixteen to Toketee Falls. Then nineteen to Diamond Lake and twenty-two to Diamond Lake Junction. At that point he’d have to decide whether to go north or south on 97, but for the next four days or so all he had to do was keep on walking west.

It might not always be convenient to stop in the towns, and they wouldn’t all necessarily have motels, as far as that went. They were small towns, pinpoint dots on the map, little more than wide places in a narrow road.

Early June was a little cold for sleeping out. Especially when you got into the high ground of the Cascades. Especially when you didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, or even a blanket.

He stopped for lunch the next day in Idleyld Park. He ate a hamburger, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and headed on toward Steamboat. The road hugged the northern bank of the North Fork of the Umpqua River, and about ten miles out of Idleyld it entered the Umpqua National Forest.

The road was rolling and winding, with a noticeable overall upgrade. Running, he used to hate hills; walking, they were less of a hassle, but he could feel them.

Dense stands of mixed evergreens lined both sides of the road. When there was a gap in the trees, or when he reached the top of a rise and could see for some distance, he looked out over rich green forest and saw mountains still crowned with snow. At first he was taking note of each beautiful scene, clicking off mental snapshots, but after an hour or so he stopped noticing the beauty and instead let himself become one with it.

There was very little traffic on the road. He walked on the left, facing oncoming cars, and he stepped off onto the shoulder when a vehicle approached. Around the middle of the afternoon, without any conscious intent, he realized he was giving a wave to passing cars. Most of them waved back. Some of them honked.

He stayed that night at the Modoc Motel in Steamboat. The third day he woke to birdsong outside his window and got an early start. Even with the grade slowing him down he was in Toketee Falls by early afternoon. He had a thick bowl of soup and a couple of sandwiches at a lunch counter run by two women, sisters. They were members of the Worldwide Church of God and their restaurant was closed Saturdays and Sundays. You could smoke, there were ashtrays on the counter and at the three tables, but two hand-lettered signs warned against the use of profanity on the premises.

He lit a cigarette and tried to imagine Kit’s reaction to the signs. It would be verbal, he decided, and no doubt eloquent, and it would probably get the two of them thrown out of the place.

There was a motel on the western edge of Toketee Falls, and a court of tourist cabins farther on, but he didn’t really feel like stopping this early. He had the sisters pack him up a couple of sandwiches and a piece of pound cake, and he bought a candy bar and two packages of salted nuts at the Arco station.

He walked for another couple of hours, taking it slowly now, giving way to the upgrade instead of fighting it, reducing his pace and resting whenever he felt the need. While it was still light he left the road and walked fifty yards or so into the forest. He found a spot where the trees were a little farther apart — you couldn’t really call it a clearing — and he cleared the pine needles from a circle ten feet across. In the center of the circle he arranged pine needles and a few scraps of paper for tinder, then gathered twigs and heavier branches from the forest floor. He brought back several armloads of wood, more than he figured to need, because it would be difficult to replenish the supply in the dark.

The fire caught quickly and burned well. He sat cross-legged in front of it, feeding wood to it, getting half-hypnotized gazing into the flames.

All along his route that day he had passed areas specifically set aside for public camping. For a couple of dollars you got a place to pitch your tent, a barbecue pit with firewood cut and stacked for you, and access to running water and indoor plumbing. Pitching camp on his own like this was probably against regulations, and he was certain he risked a stiff fine with his fire.

He was unworried. He knew he wasn’t going to set the woods on fire, and no one would be able to see flames or smoke from the road.

He ate the food he’d brought, putting aside half a sandwich and a Clark Bar for breakfast. He would have liked coffee, but the spring water in his canteen was no hardship. He tended his fire and breathed fresh air tinged with wood smoke while the sky darkened and the birds quieted down around him.

For perhaps two hours he did nothing but feed branches to the fire and listen to the night sounds of the forest. His mind was still. He barely thought. When his eyelids started to droop he wrapped a spare shirt around his extra pair of jeans for a pillow and stretched out alongside the fire.

When he awoke the sky was light and his fire was cold ashes. He packed up, stomped the ashes to make sure there wasn’t an ember still alive, shouldered his pack and made his way back to the road.

There were several motels in Diamond Lake and he stayed at one called the Fair Harbor Inn. There was a coin-operated washer and dryer alongside the Coke and ice machines, and after he’d taken a long hot shower he got change at the desk and did a load of wash. He sat in a redwood lounge chair beside the pool while each machine in turn went through its cycle.

When he’d put his laundry away he returned to the office and asked the round-shouldered owner where he could get a decent meal. “You don’t have a car,” the man said.

“No.”

“Well, the Blue Bonnet’s real good if you like plain cooking, but it’s about half a mile down the road.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“If you like chili,” the man said, “I’d have to say you can’t go wrong there.”

The chili wasn’t bad. It was a little mild for his taste, but the girl brought him a bottle of Tabasco and that gave it a little more authority. He drank a beer with it and had a second beer for dessert, and it was while he was drinking the second beer that he realized he hadn’t had a cigarette since morning. He’d reached the top of a rise around nine-thirty and had taken a few minutes to check out the view, referring to his map to determine what mountains he was looking at. Mount Bailey, Mount Thielsen, Black Rock Mountain, Pig Iron Mountain — there were great names and imposing mountains, but he wasn’t confident he was matching them up correctly. Nor did he suppose it mattered much.

And, looking at the mountains, he’d lit the first cigarette of the day. And it had thus far been the last cigarette of the day, and that was strange.

In fact, he’d hardly been smoking at all since he left Roseburg. He’d started out with a carton in his backpack and three loose packs, one of them about half gone when he set out. This was his fourth day on the road, and he hadn’t touched the carton, and he had an unopened pack in his jacket and another pack in his shirt pocket with, let’s see, three cigarettes left in it. Which meant he’d smoked something like a pack and a half in the past four days, and he normally smoked close to twice that much in a day. Two to three packs a day, that’s what he’d been smoking for nearly twenty years.

That he should reduce his cigarette consumption so dramatically was remarkable. When he was running he had several times tried to quit, and he’d managed to cut down some, but at the best of times he never got much under a pack a day. But what was astonishing was that he’d cut down without even knowing it. Except cut down didn’t really say it. Why, he’d virtually stopped altogether.

He took a cigarette and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It felt funny in his hand. He put it in his mouth, took it out, put it back, shrugged, and lit it. He took a puff, inhaled, blew out the smoke and watched it rise to the ceiling.

It tasted all right, but he didn’t seem to want to finish it. He started to force himself to take another puff, then changed his mind and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

Back at the Fair Harbor Inn the owner emerged from the office as Guthrie was heading up the graveled drive. He said, “Well, did you have that chili?”

“I did, and it was real good.”

“They do all right by you,” the man said. “You want to stop by for a minute? I just made some coffee, if you could do with a cup.”

The motel office had a pair of wooden armchairs with vinyl cushions flanking a console television. A drama about a Los Angeles law firm was playing, the sound pitched almost inaudibly low. Guthrie took his coffee black; the owner, whose name was McLemore, stirred in a powdered creamer and two sugars. His wife was in Grants Pass, he said, spending a few days visiting her mother.

“She has Alzheimer’s,” he said. “By God, that’s an awful way to end up. Here’s a woman who never did any harm her whole life and she finished up like that. You read about that man, I think he was down in Florida, his wife had Alzheimer’s and he shot her?”

“Didn’t he go to jail?”

“Isn’t that terrible? You got the scum of the earth walking around free and that man has to go to jail. I’ll tell you, if my wife got like that, I’d put her down. What kind of man wouldn’t do for his wife what he’d do for a dog? And I’ll tell you something else, I don’t believe people around here would convict you. I don’t know what kind of people live in Florida, but we’re not like that here.”

The coffee wasn’t bad. It could have been stronger, but it wasn’t bad.

“Now you’re doing some hiking,” McLemore said. “I’ll tell you, it’s not every day someone comes in here on foot. Where’d you walk from?”

“Roseburg.”

“Roseburg! Why, that’s got to be seventy-five miles.”

“Just about.”

“How long you been walking?”

“Today was the fourth day.”

“Four days. So you’re making pretty close to twenty miles a day. Where you headed? Crater Lake, I guess?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No? You ought to see it if you never have, as close as you are to it now.”

“I was there a couple of years ago. I think I’ll pass this time around.”

“And just head on back to Roseburg? Least you’ll be going downhill on the way back.”

“No, I think I’ll keep going for a while.”

“Headed where?”

“East, I think.”

“East!”

“I think so.”

“How far you gonna go? You thinking to cross the whole country?”

“I might.”

“Your shoes holding up?”

“So far.”

“How ’bout your feet?”

“They’re all right.”

“By God,” McLemore said. “Twenty miles a day, well, yes, you just about could find places to stay, couldn’t you? Where’d you put up last night in Toketee? His cabins aren’t worth a damn, and the motel’s not a whole lot better.”

“Well,” he said, “actually, last night I camped out. I got a few miles past Toketee and just walked off the road into the woods and spent the night there.”

“You probably weren’t a lot worse off than in one of those cabins, from what I hear about ’em.” McLemore frowned in thought. “None of my business, but I could have sworn you weren’t carrying but a little knapsack when you checked in.”

“That’s right.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you could fit a sleeping bag in there.”

“I don’t have one. I slept in my clothes.”

“In your clothes. You mean what you’re wearing now?”

“Well, a different shirt and my other jeans. And I put on an extra pair of socks.”

“And that little windbreaker, I guess.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s all?” McLemore stared at him. “Weren’t you cold?”

“A little, but it wasn’t bad. I had a fire.”

“A fire.”

“A campfire, I let it burn down when I went to sleep. I suppose it was against the law, but—”

“Forget the law. You slept out in the open last night in your clothes. No tent, no sleeping bag, no blanket. Mister, are you telling me a story?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you parked down the road. Maybe you drove here from Roseburg.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Don’t ask me. Maybe you’re one of those psychological liars, or maybe you don’t want anybody seeing your car. Or maybe you just want to see if you can make a fool out of a person.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what the temperature got down to last night, mister? The low forties, and it wouldn’t have been any warmer closer to Toketee. You sleep without cover on a night like that and you’d wake up chilled to the bone, providing you woke up at all. A man’d freeze to death, likely as not, sleeping out like you said you did.”

Guthrie looked at him.

“You expect me to believe you, mister?”

He stood up. “You can believe whatever you want,” he said. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. Thanks for the coffee.” He walked to the door, opened it. “It didn’t seem all that cold,” he said.

South of Diamond Lake the road forked, with 138 swinging to the right and heading east along the northern border of Crater Lake National Park. There was a little more traffic on this part of the road, and it would be heavier in July and August, when the tourists came.

The Fair Harbor Inn gave you complimentary coffee and doughnuts in the morning, but he hadn’t wanted to deal with McLemore at that hour, so he’d stopped for breakfast on his way out of town. He stopped again at an Amoco station for a Coke around eleven and realized he hadn’t had a cigarette since the one he’d taken a puff of after dinner the previous night.

He thought about that, and about having slept out on a cold night without having much felt the cold. Maybe the two phenomena went together, maybe nicotine withdrawal generated heat.

Did he want a cigarette now?

No, he decided. He didn’t. He seemed to have lost the habit, as if he had walked out from under it just as he’d walked out from under all the encumbrances of his life. His apartment, his job, his car, his friends, his books, his records, his furniture, most of his clothes, he’d walked away from them all, sloughing them off like a snake shedding its skin.

The image, he decided, was an apt one. He was walking away from all the parts of himself that he had outgrown. Somehow, evidently, he had outgrown the need for tobacco, because God knew he’d never had the intention of quitting. He hadn’t quit. Quitting had simply happened to him.

And the night in the woods?

Maybe McLemore had been wrong about the temperature. Maybe it had indeed been warmer closer to Toketee Falls. Maybe the trees, besides breaking the wind, had served to hold in the heat from the campfire.

One of these nights he’d have to try it again, and see what happened.

But not that night. Diamond Lake Junction wasn’t much more than a crossroads, but there were a couple of motels positioned to catch tourists en route to Crater Lake. He stayed in one that got WTBS on cable, and he watched the Braves shut out the Dodgers in L.A. During commercials he kept looking at the map, and in the morning he looked at it again. He could go north on US 97 toward Bend, or he could go south to Klamath Falls. He looked at the map, and he tried to calculate the best route to, well, to wherever he was going.

His mind kept juggling possibilities. Klamath Falls was closer, but from Bend he could proceed more directly east. Then too, the first dot on the map south of Diamond Lake Junction was forty miles away, while if he headed north there were towns spaced at fairly frequent intervals. On the other hand, he’d probably find places to stay whether or not there were dots on the map, and he could always sleep in the woods again and find out if he froze to death this time. On the other hand—

North.

Not a voice in his head this time, but something close to it. Counsel from some source within or without him. Go north, it gave him to understand. Don’t work things out, don’t try to think your way through it. Just listen, and you’ll always know where to go.

He hadn’t shaved since leaving Roseburg, which seemed to indicate that he was growing his beard back. Now, after the better part of a week, there was enough there to trim up a little. He didn’t like the way it felt on his neck, and he didn’t like the way the whiskers grew almost to his eyes.

He lathered his neck and shaved it, and he shaved around his cheekbones, and then he said the hell with it and shaved the rest of it, too.

He seemed to have given up deciding things, he realized. It looked as though the only way for him to find out what he was going to do was to wait and see what he did.

Earlier he’d had remarkably good weather. It had rained some since he left Roseburg, but never while he was out in it. It rained evenings while he was inside, and the other day he’d waited out a brief downpour in a service station, but he’d managed the trick of getting across the Cascades without once getting caught in the rain. Rain was still a possibility on this side of the mountains — he was a long ways yet from the state’s eastern desert — but it was less likely, and it wasn’t something he had to worry about this particular day.

Because the weather was perfect, with the sun bright and warm in a startlingly blue sky, and only a few puffs of cloud high overhead. He walked along, keeping a fairly brisk pace with no effort, the pack riding easily on his shoulders.

Two hours out of Diamond Lake Junction, and perhaps that many miles past a clutch of houses and stores called Beaver Marsh, he heard a horn sound on the other side of the road. He turned to see a dark blue Datsun pickup, the window rolled down on the driver’s side and a man’s face looking at him. The man was motioning for him to come over.

There was no traffic in either direction. He crossed the road, and the fellow said, “Hey, hop in. Toss your gear in the back and come on around.”

“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m walking.”

“Well, I can see that, hoss. If you was driving, I wouldn’t have stopped for you.”

“I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t really want a ride.”

“Something wrong with my truck?”

“Not that I can see. I’m just out for a walk, that’s all.” The fellow scratched his head. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a lot of strawberry blond hair and an inch-wide strip of beard the same color running down along the edge of the jawline. His upper lip was shaved clean, as were his cheeks and neck. He was thick in the chest and big in the arms, and he had a tattoo on his left forearm showing a spider in its web. He was wearing an Olympia Beer gimme cap and a red T-shirt with nothing written on it.

He said, “Just out for a walk.”

“That’s right.”

“I always figure why walk when you can ride, but you can suit yourself, I guess. Where you headed?”

“East.”

The fellow grinned, showing crooked teeth. “Well, shit,” he said. “Where you’re goin’s north.”

“I know. I’m going north as far as Bend, and then—”

“You’re walking to Bend?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re kidding. That must be eighty fucking miles!”

“More like seventy, I think.”

“Seventy miles. You’re planning on walking seventy miles?”

“Not all today.”

“Not all today. Well, shit, I just hope not. Where’d you come from?”

“Diamond Lake Junction.”

“Just down the road? You live there?”

“No, I stayed there last night. I live in Roseburg.”

“You mean to say you walked all the way from Roseburg? You know what you did, hoss? You walked across a fucking mountain range.” He snorted. “I never heard of anybody doing that before. And I sure as shit never heard of anybody walking to Bend.”

“Well—”

“How far you planning to go today?”

“That depends. Maybe all the way to Crescent, maybe just to where the cutoff to Eugene is.”

“That’s 58, runs to Eugene. Hop in and I’ll run you to Crescent. Not that there’s anything in Crescent. Hell, I’ll run you clear to Bend, save you three or four days if you want. That’s where I’m headed.”

“Thanks, but—”

The fellow squinted, focusing pale blue eyes at Guthrie. “You got a real thing about walking,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“I guess I do.”

“Say it was raining. You’d take a ride then, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I don’t think so, but I can’t really say for sure.”

“Might depend how hard it was coming down.”

“It might.”

“Well, hell, I won’t keep you. You got a lot of ground to cover. I got to go to Bend, take care of my business, then turn the truck around and go back home to Klamath. Maybe I’ll see you again on the way back.”

“Give a honk if you do.”

“Well, I’ll do that.”

“And thanks for the offer. It was decent of you.” He waited while some cars passed, then crossed to the other side of the road. The fellow in the truck pulled off the shoulder onto the road, honked twice, and headed off to the north.