slacks; shirts; wearing photo vest. Okay. Anything else he could buy on the road if he had forgotten it.
Kincaid wore faded Levi’s, well-used Red Wing field boots, a khaki shirt, and orange suspenders. On his wide leather belt was fastened a Swiss Army knife in its own case.
He looked at his watch: eight-seventeen. The truck started on the second try, and he backed out, shifted gears, and moved slowly down the alley under hazy sun. Through the streets of Bellingham he went, heading south on Washington 11, running along the coast of Puget Sound for a few miles, then following the highway as it swung east a little before meeting U.S. Route 20.
Turning into the sun, he began the long, winding drive through the Cascades. He liked this country and felt unpressed, stopping now and then to make notes about interesting possibilities for future expeditions or to shoot what he called “memory snapshots.” The purpose of these cursory photographs was to remind him of places he might want to visit again and approach more seriously. In late afternoon he turned north at Spokane, picking up U.S. Route 2, which would take him halfway across the northern United States to Duluth, Minnesota.
He wished for the thousandth time in his life that he had a dog, a golden retriever, maybe, for travels like this and to keep him company at home. But he was frequently away, overseas much of the time, and it would not be fair to the animal. Still, he thought about it anyway. In a few years he would be getting too old for the hard fieldwork. “I might get a dog then,” he said to the coniferous green rolling by his truck window.
Drives like this always put him into a taking-stock mood. The dog was part of it. Robert Kincaid was as alone as it’s possible to be—an only child, parents both dead, distant relatives who had lost track of him and he of them, no close friends.
He knew the names of the man who owned the corner market in Bellingham and the proprietor of the photographic store where he bought his supplies. He also had formal, professional relationships with several magazine editors. Other than that, he knew scarcely anyone well, nor they him. Gypsies make difficult friends for ordinary people, and he was something of a gypsy.
He thought about Marian. She had left him nine years ago after five years of marriage. He was fifty-two now; that would make her just under forty. Marian had dreams of becoming a musician, a folksinger. She knew all of the Weavers’ songs and sang them pretty well in the coffeehouses of Seattle. When he was home in the old days, he drove her to gigs and sat in the audience while she sang.
His long absences—two or three months sometimes—were hard on the marriage. He knew that. She was aware of what he did when they decided to get married, and each of them had a vague sense that it could all be handled somehow. It couldn’t. When he came home from photographing a story in Iceland, she was gone. The note read: “Robert, it didn’t work out. I left you the Harmony guitar. Stay in touch.”
He didn’t stay in touch. Neither did she. He signed the divorce papers when they arrived a year later and caught a plane for Australia the next day. She had asked for nothing except her freedom.
At Kalispell, Montana, he stopped for the night, late. The Cozy Inn looked inexpensive, and was. He carried his gear into a room containing two table lamps, one of which had a burned-out bulb. Lying in bed, reading The Green Hills of Africa and drinking a beer, he could smell the paper mills of Kalispell. In the morning he jogged for forty minutes, did fifty push-ups, and used his cameras as small hand weights to complete the routine.
Across the top of Montana he drove, into North Dakota and the spare, flat country he found as fascinating as the mountains or the sea. There was a kind of austere beauty to this place, and he stopped several times, set up a tripod, and shot some black-and-whites of old farm buildings. This landscape appealed to his minimalist leanings. The Indian reservations were depressing, for all of the reasons everybody knows and ignores. Those kinds of settlements were no better in northwestern Washington, though, or anywhere else he had seen them.
On the morning of August 14, two hours out of Duluth, he sliced northeast and took a back road up to Hibbing and the iron mines. Red dust floated in the air, and there were big machines and trains specially designed to haul the ore to freighters at Two Harbors on Lake Superior. He spent an afternoon looking around Hibbing and found it not to his liking, even if Bob Zimmerman-Dylan was from there originally.
The only song of Dylan’s he had ever really cared for was “Girl from the North Country.” He could play and sing that one, and he hummed the words to himself as he left behind the place with giant red holes in the earth. Marian had shown him some chords and how to handle basic arpeggios to accompany himself. “She left me with more than I left her,” he said once to a boozy riverboat pilot in a place called McElroy’s Bar, somewhere in the Amazon basin. And it was true.
The Superior National Forest was nice, real nice. Voyageur country. When he was young, he’d wished the old voyageur days were not over so he could become one. He drove by meadows, saw three moose, a red fox, and lots of deer. At a pond he stopped and shot some reflections on the water made by an odd-shaped tree branch. When he finished he sat on the running board of his truck, drinking coffee, smoking a Camel, and listening to the wind in the birch trees.
“It would be good to have someone, a woman,” he thought, watching the smoke from his cigarette blow out over the pond. “Getting older puts you in that frame of mind.” But with him gone so much, it would be tough on the one left at home. He’d already learned that.
When he was home in Bellingham, he occasionally dated the creative director for a Seattle advertising agency. He had met her while doing a corporate job. She was forty-two, bright, and a nice person, but he didn’t love her, would never love her.
Sometimes they both got a little lonely, though, and would spend an evening together, going to a movie, having a few beers, and making pretty decent love later on. She’d been around—two marriages, worked as a waitress in several bars while attending college. Invariably, after they’d completed their lovemaking and were lying together, she’d tell him, “You’re the best, Robert, no competition, nobody even close.”
He supposed that was a good thing for a man to hear, but he was not all that experienced and had no way of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth anyway. But she did say something one time that haunted him: “Robert, there’s a creature inside of you that I’m not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you’ve been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you’ve dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you’re gentle with me. If I didn’t fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back.”
He knew in an obscure way what she was talking about. But he couldn’t get his hands on it himself. He’d had these drifting kinds of thoughts, a wistful sense of the tragic combined with intense physical and intellectual power, even as a young boy growing up in a small Ohio town. When other kids were singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” he was learning the melody and English words to a French cabaret song.
He liked words and images. “Blue” was one of his favorite words. He liked the feeling it made on his lips and tongue when he said it. Words have physical feeling, not just meaning, he remembered thinking when he was young. He liked other words, such as “distant,” “woodsmoke,” “highway,” “ancient,” “passage,” “voyageur,” and “India” for how they sounded, how they tasted, and what they conjured up in his mind. He kept lists of words he liked posted in his room.
Then he joined the words into phrases and posted those as well:
Too close to the fire.
I came from the East with a small band of travelers.
The constant chirping of those who would save me and those who would sell me.
Talisman, Talisman, show me your secrets. Helmsman, Helmsman, turn me for home.
Lying naked where blue whales swim.
She wished him steaming trains that left from winter stations.
Before I became a man, I was an arrow—long time ago.
Then there were the places whose names he liked: the Somali Current, the Big Hatchet Mountains, the Malacca Strait, and a long list of others. The sheets of paper with words and phrases and places eventually covered the walls of his room.
Even his mother noticed something different about him. He never spoke a word until he was three, then began talking in complete sentences, and he could read extremely well by five. In school he was an indifferent student, frustrating the teachers.
They looked at his IQ scores and talked to him about achievement, about doing what he was capable of
