LITMIR.BIZ

      

FROM BOSTON TO MOOSE JUNCTION

      It was merely a few months past my nineteenth birthday, during the late winter of 1956-1957, when I decided to ride my thumb to Alaska, four thousand miles and more.

      Who knows how, or where, such desires take root, from what long-hidden seeds they sprout. Are they stirred in from the genetic soup of grandparents who left the Old World for the New? Are they remembered from whispered words of stories or lullabies heard near the dawn of life? Are they lessons learned in school and at the movies, of Boone and Crockett, of Huck Finn, and, later, of Shane?

      I have a scratchy eight millimeter old home movie film: the family at a picnic in the woods of the lower Hudson Valley. All, except one, are gathered around the wooden table. Then, out from among the trees, knobby knees striding under short pants, a crude walking stick waving, comes three-year-old me, unmistakable joy on my face and in my heart. If I had been old enough, I undoubtedly would have been whistling. Could I have known then that the archetypal American myth is that of the lone wanderer, the one who rides in and then rides on, looking always only for the next mountain, and again and again pushed over the hill and far away by the sight of a neighbor’s chimney smoke? Call me Ishmael?

      Later, in early adolescence, it was Western dime novels (though they indeed cost twenty-five, and sometimes thirty-five cents even in those long-ago days). In compulsive ritual, every Friday after school I would pedal my bike the three miles to a favored cigar store, spend what seemed like hours choosing from among the books on the racks, and pedal home again. What fantasies galloped along with that two-wheeled and many-spoked magic steed, pushing across the suburban prairie, carrying the precious mail by Pony Express! Once home, I would read the week’s treasure as slowly as possible, making it last, obsessively, until the next Friday. With Max Brand, Evan Evans, Peter Field, Luke Short, and a score of other authors, I stole horses from around Kiowa campfires, drove long-horned, half-wild cattle across the Cimarron, rescued the widow’s ranch from the banker who wore the black string tie, held out against all odds at Fort Apache, and most, most of all, lived as a Free Trapper in the 1830s Shining Mountains.

      With the zany compulsiveness of adolescence, I held my treasures in a special, separate bookcase, arranged alphabetically by author, nested within unique sections by publisher: Pocket Books, Signet Books, Bantam Books, and the new, ‘expensive’ Ballantines. Dreams were filled with the contents of that bookcase. The Black Hills, the Arizona Territory, Texas to Wyoming, the endless grass of Montana, and, striding north to south across my paradise, what we call the Rockies, and what the earliest white men who saw them called the Shining Mountains. At school, I drew maps, both accurate and fictional ones, of that country of the heart, hiding my work behind a bent head close to a propped-up schoolbook. I memorized the illustrations in the Encyclopedia Britannica that chronicled the westward march of Manifest Destiny.

      I roamed, with my Daisy Red Ryder Carbine BB-gun, the shrinking woods and weeded lots of my suburban town, shooting (I blush to say) robins and squirrels, seeing in my mind’s eye the tall grass prairie and the bison, the mountain forests and the elk. By twelve or thirteen, I had prevailed upon my father to purchase for me three antiques: a 45 caliber Sharps buffalo gun, an 1874 Springfield military carbine, and an old Stevens pump 22. All were non-functional, at least to everyone but me. They rested in a rack on my bedroom wall, and every night, just before sleep, I would take them down one by one, check that they were cleaned and oiled (they always were), and aim them at the invisible targets of my imagination: loaded, cocked, sighted-in, and trigger-pulled.

      In my nineteenth year I was a sophomore at an excellent college: a “grind” pre-med in a decade when the one phrase defined the other. I was a pretty good, and very aggressive, athlete, an A-student with little fundamental comprehension of the relevance and significance of what I was learning, and, not by choice, a virgin (my knowledge of detailed female anatomy and physiology mostly gleaned from what was then known as “heavy petting” and, upon rare occasions, reciprocal digital stimulation).

      Most importantly, I felt the world closing in upon me, rather than opening out before me. I could see a clear road ahead, but narrowing, narrowing. As has perhaps been true forever for young males who don’t quite feel that they fit, I yearned to break free, to measure myself by my own,

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