BOOKS BY HOWARD FRANK MOSHER
Disappearances
Where the Rivers Flow North
Marie Blythe
A Stranger in the Kingdom
Northern Borders
North Country
The Fall of the Year
The True Account
Waiting for Teddy Williams
On Kingdom Mountain
Walking to Gatlinburg
The Great Northern Express
Copyright © 2012 by Howard Frank Mosher
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,
Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New England Press, Inc., for
permission to reprint “The Trouble with a Son,” “The Waves,” and “Senior
Year” from Star in the Shed Window: Collected Poems 1933—1988 by James
Hayford (Shelburne, VT; The New England Press, Inc., 1989).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mosher, Howard Frank.
The great northern express : a writer’s journey home / Howard Frank
Mosher.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Mosher, Howard Frank. 2. Novelists, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3563.O8844Z46 2011
813′.54—dc22
[B] 2011015302
eISBN: 978-0-307-45095-1
Jacket design by Misa Erder
Jacket photography by ICHIRO/Getty Images
v3.1
For my grandchildren,
Frank James Williamson
True Hilton Williamson
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: Faith
Chapter 1: The Trip Not Taken
Chapter 2: My MacArthur Fellowship Arrives
Chapter 3: Treatment
Chapter 4: I Decide to Hit the Road
Chapter 5: Harold Who Calls Ahead
Chapter 6: Where in the World is Kingdom County?
Chapter 7: The Christly Kingdom
Chapter 8: A Run of Hard Luck
Chapter 9: More Woes of a Touring Writer
Chapter 10: An Inauspicious Beginning
Chapter 11: An Encounter
Chapter 12: Chichester
Chapter 13: New York
Chapter 14: The Bad Boy and the Battle-ax
Chapter 15: Washington, D.C.
Chapter 16: Rescue Mission in the Land of the Blue and the Gray
Chapter 17: Five Tips for Cancer Survivors
Chapter 18: Gone Fishing
Chapter 19: Two Writing Rebels
Chapter 20: Unremaindered in the Cumberland Gap
Chapter 21: The Long Apprenticeship
Chapter 22: A Music Lesson
Chapter 23: The Dickens of Beale Street
Chapter 24: The Leonard Boys
Chapter 25: The Poet and the Deerslayer
Chapter 26: Versailles South and the [B]udget In[n]
Part II: Hope
Chapter 27: Taking Stock in Lucinda Williams Country
Chapter 28: Two Lone Star Hitchhikers
Chapter 29: Winter in the Kingdom
Chapter 30: On the Austin City Limits with the West Texas Jesus
Chapter 31: Why I Am a Cross-Country Skier, Part 1
Chapter 32: Why I Am a Cross-Country Skier, Part 2
Chapter 33: The Great Southwest
Chapter 34: Sweeping Up in El Dorado
Chapter 35: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dolt
Chapter 36: The Parable of the Reluctant Samaritan from the Apocryphal Gospel of BOB
Chapter 37: Searching for a Voice
Chapter 38: Harry and Me
Chapter 39: The Pacific Northwest
Chapter 40: The Lords of Moss
Chapter 41: Margery Moore
Chapter 42: The Howard of Moses Lake
Chapter 43: Sacagawea
Chapter 44: Spring Comes to the Kingdom, Part 1
Chapter 45: Spring Comes to the Kingdom, Part 2
Chapter 46: Big Sky Country
Chapter 47: Missoula
Part III: Love
Chapter 48: Mr. Quimby and Mr. F Nichols
Chapter 49: The Continental Divide
Chapter 50: The Great Northern Express
Chapter 51: The Great Plains
Chapter 52: Reading the Heartland
Chapter 53: Chicago
Chapter 54: Harry W. Schwartz: The Bookstore That Made Milwaukee Famous
Chapter 55: The Legacy, Part 1
Chapter 56: A Prairie Home Blockhead
Chapter 57: Iowa City
Chapter 58: Up in Michigan
Chapter 59: The Legacy, Part 2
Chapter 60: The Industrial Belt
Chapter 61: Our Town
Chapter 62: Pay Dirt
Chapter 63: Resolution
Chapter 64: Homecoming
Chapter 65: The Apocryphal Book of Harold
About the Author
Introduction
The Great Northern Express is a tale not of two cities but, give or take a few, of one hundred. Specifically, it is the story of the monumental book tour I made the summer I turned sixty-five. That journey was inspired by a much shorter trip: a walk up the street to our village’s tiny post office, where I received an unexpected letter.
This is also the story of how my wife, Phillis, and I came to settle in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It, too, began with a journey: this one when we were just twenty-one, to interview for teaching jobs in the remote mill town of Orleans, in the northern Green Mountains just south of the Canadian border, where we planned to teach for a year or two, save some money, and then move on to graduate school.
I have changed the names of a few of the people I have written about. In two or three cases I combined characters to further conceal actual identities. Like Henry David Thoreau, who in fact spent slightly more than two years at Walden Pond, which he compressed into one calendar year in Walden, I have also occasionally used experiences from earlier or later times in my life.
The Great Northern Express is the story of how, as I traveled from coast to coast and border to border in the summer of my sixty-fifth year, two journeys seemed to meld into the narrative of one writer’s search, in his life and work, for the true meaning of home.
1
The Trip Not Taken
My first home was a ghost town. Hidden away in a remote hollow of the Catskill Mountains, the company-owned hamlet of Chichester went bankrupt in 1939, three years before I was born. A few families, ours included, hung on for several more years. But without its once-prosperous furniture factory, which reopened a couple of times in my early boyhood only to shut down a few months later, Chichester was just another dying upstate mill town. By the time I turned five, the place was on its last legs, and loo
ked it.
While many of my happiest memories date from those years in the Catskills—I caught my first trout in the stream behind our house when I was four, shagged foul balls for older kids at the overgrown diamond on the village green—from the fall when I entered first grade until my first year of high school, my family moved, by my count, ten times. My dad, a schoolteacher, had itchy feet, like Pa Ingalls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. After leaving Chichester, we Moshers would strike out for new territory every year or so. And although I never wanted to leave any of the towns where we temporarily alighted, I don’t recall thinking there was anything unusual about pulling up stakes at the end of every school year and relocating. In those days I was a ballplaying, daydreaming, reading little guy with a slew of imaginary companions, mostly from the books I devoured—Huck Finn, Treasure Island’s Jim Hawkins, David Copperfield. So long as our family stayed together and I could find a nearby trout brook, a ball field, and a steady supply of books to read, I didn’t care how often we moved.
Still, I have always regarded Chichester as my hometown. If asked for a favorite early memory, I’d recall sitting between my dad and Reg Bennett in the front seat of Dad’s old, battleship-gray DeSoto on the mountaintop behind our house, trying to dial in the Yankees–Red Sox game on the car radio. As the house lights of the town below began to wink on in the twilight, and Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy waxed poetic about the Bronx Bombers or the boys from Beantown, Reg and Dad would talk baseball. Reg—my father’s best friend, fishing partner, and teaching colleague—was a second father and honorary uncle to me. In temperament, Dad and Reg were as different from each other as lifelong friends can be. My father was a big, outgoing, nonjudgmental man, comfortable with himself and others. A natural leader, he caught for the Chichester town baseball team, as he had for his high school nine. Reg was slighter in build and was several inches shorter. He was combative and, if wronged, quick to pick a fight. He pitched for the Chichester team. Over the years he had perfected a hard-breaking curve, which he could and frequently did use to brush aggressive hitters back from the plate or knock them down. Like my grandfather Mosher, my father had a romantic outlook on life, which I have inherited. Reg, for his part, was a realist, with an ironical turn of mind and a dry sense of humor that I loved.
Reg loved to argue. My father did not. Sooner or later, though, Dad would be drawn into a debate, amicable enough at first, often over the relative merits of their two favorite players. Dad, a true-blue Yankee fan, was a Joe DiMaggio man. Reg was a devotee of Ted Williams. As the evening wore on and the game became heated—as Yankee–Red Sox games are wont to do—the baseball arguments between my father and uncle intensified. Soon they’d both get mad, stop addressing each other directly, and begin arguing by proxy, through me.
“Howard Frank,” my uncle said—as a boy, I was often addressed by both names to distinguish me from my father, Howard Hudson—“Howard Frank, I am here to tell you that Ted Williams is the greatest pure hitter in the history of the game.”
“Maybe so, Howard Frank,” my father shot back. “But you have my permission to inform your uncle that Joe DiMaggio is the most complete all-around player in the history of the game.”
I usually said nothing. For one thing, I was only four. Also, though I already had a keen appreciation for my relatives’ many eccentricities, I didn’t like arguments any more than Dad did. Fortunately, about the time full darkness settled in, we would lose the radio broadcast altogether. Then I would ask my uncle to tell me a story.
“Tell me a story” was my mantra, and Reg knew scores of good ones. Stories of the old bear hunters, ginseng gatherers, mountain guides, hermits, witches, and pioneer families who had settled Chichester. Like the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont when Phillis and I first arrived in the mid-1960s, Chichester in the ’40s and ’50s was a gold mine of stories. My feisty uncle was its Homer, as well as my first storytelling mentor. Reg was working on an anecdotal history of Chichester, and sometimes he would read aloud to me from the manuscript.
Of all Reg’s stories, my favorite was the one that hadn’t yet happened. That was his description of the road trip he and I would take the summer I turned twenty-one. We’d start out in Robert Frost’s New England, then head for New York City, where my uncle’s favorite New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell, had chronicled the lives of his beloved gypsies, street preachers, and fish vendors. We’d visit the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-first Street, with its two stone lions guarding the main entrance. Next we’d strike out for the Great Smokies, Thomas Wolfe country—my uncle loved You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel. We’d drop by Oxford, Mississippi, and have a gander at Faulkner’s home, slope down to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s (The Yearling) Florida. Then we’d head for the American West—Reg, a huge fan of Zane Grey, would read me Grey’s Westerns by the hour. We’d walk the streets of Raymond Chandler’s LA and Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco, check out James T. Farrell’s Chicago (with a side visit to the Windy City’s great bookstore, Brentano’s,) take a look at Hemingway’s upper Michigan and Aldo Leopold’s Wisconsin. We’d eat at greasy spoons and roadside custard stands, stay at motor courts and tourist cabins. Throw our fly rods and baseball gloves in the backseat and see a ball game in every town that had a team.
Our long-planned trip was no pipe dream, but my uncle and I never got to take that literary odyssey. By the time I turned twenty-one and graduated from college, Reg’s wife, my aunt Elsie, wasn’t well, and I’d gotten married and taken a teaching job in northern Vermont. Writing my way from book to book and decade to decade, I set most of my own fiction in my adopted Northeast Kingdom. I turned fifty. Then sixty. Approaching my sixty-fifth birthday, with regrets for the trip not taken, I began to feel that I had to do it now or never.
Then, in the late autumn of my sixty-fifth year, came the walk to the post office that would change my life forever.
2
My MacArthur Fellowship Arrives
MacArthur Fellowships are designed for talented individuals who have shown exceptional originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.
—GUIDELINES OF THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP
In this era of instant text messaging and walk-around cell phones clamped to our ears like alien appendages, most news, good and otherwise, arrives quickly. Still, I am certain that when my MacArthur Fellowship arrives, it will do so the old-fashioned way, by U.S. mail. One morning I will set out on my regular six-days-a-week walk to the post office, and there the notification will be. Likely it will come in a cream-colored envelope constructed of the highest-grade linen. My full name will appear on the front, perhaps with an “Esquire” tacked on in deference to a soon-to-be-Fellow. The foundation’s return address will be stamped in a discreet but stately font across the sealed flap on the back.
Some years ago I heard that the MacArthur Fellowship carried a stipend of $350,000. Recently, someone told me they’d gone up to half a mil.
“That ought to cover the gas for our cross-country trip,” I said on my way to the post office to pick up my grant that fateful fall morning.
You see, I still like to talk out loud to myself. And to the gallery of companions that my mother tells me I’ve had since I was two. I will rattle along for hours on end to relatives living and deceased, friends and adversaries, other writers, even some favorite fictional characters, like rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove. This morning I was conversing with my storytelling mentor, Uncle Reg, who had passed away fifteen years before.
Suddenly, an onrushing eighteen-wheeler blasted its air horn. Preoccupied by my conversation with Reg, I’d come within half a step of launching myself into the path of a log truck.
“That was close,” the postmaster said to me.
“I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You seemed to be talking to someone.”
“Yes. I was … practicing. For an upcoming interview.”
As I had expected—expected for the last twenty-five years, or so—here was the long-awaited cream-colored envelope. Why prolong the suspense? I tore the thing open with trembling fingers. But wait. So far from a “Dear Mr. Mosher, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is delighted to inform you that you have been awarded …,” so far from a notification that if I so chose, I could spend the rest of my life crisscrossing the United States in commemoration of the trip my uncle and I never made, what I found myself scanning was a notice from my physician informing me that the prostate count from my annual bloodwork was high. Anything over 4.0 can indicate cancerous activity. “See me immediately,” she had scrawled beside the 5.9 reading.
“There it is, at long last,” said my uncle.
“There is what?” I said.
“Your MacArthur Fellowship,” he said. Then, “You need to have that taken care of right away, Howard Frank. Prostate cancer kills thirty thousand men a year in this country.”
3
Treatment
Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer, as did my dad’s younger sister. My mother—now ninety-six and living on her own, just up the street from our house—has survived both breast and bladder cancer. But right here and now, I want to tell you that this is not a medical memoir. Nor is it, believe you me, an inspirational memoir extolling how, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a breakthrough procedure in radiation therapy, and a supportive family, I licked prostate cancer. Though in fact, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a remarkable new development in medical technology, and a very loving family, I may have done just that.
In the grand old Mosher family tradition of high-spirited hopefulness, combined with what a book critic once called a “lunatic sense of humor,” I immediately began referring to my disorder, and to the treatment that followed, as my personal MacArthur Fellowship. The euphemism struck me as delightfully ghoulish, along the lines of the ancient Greeks referring to their gods’ dreaded and relentless agents of revenge as the “gentle” Furies.