Finding "North"

About 31 pages into Roads, by Larry McMurtry, I hated the book, for reasons of a difference in preferential geography.  He is a man of the Texas plains, and a need for big sky. On page 31, he begins very simply with “I don’t generally like northern places”(31) and continues for much of the book to intermittently bash my beloved New England. 

To his credit, he does later on state that we all have our own particular geography we are attached to – his own preference for plains, or Hemingway’s attraction to northern Michigan, generally an attraction formed in our youth and stays as a certain vantage point.  I’ll give it to him.

The other difficulty I had was his intention of just looking at roads.  He specifically cited William Least Heat Moon’s books as the antithesis of what he wanted to do.  He didn’t want to meet people at all, and prided himself on saying a grand total of 14 words to three other people during an entire day trip.  His aim was to travel only interstates – end to end of the big roads that exist primarily to get people from point A to point B.  Charles Kurault once said the unfortunateness of the interstate system is the ability to drive from coast to coast and not see a damn thing.  McMurtry’s intention, at first, seems to be a book-long treatise on proving not only that Kurault was right, but that it wasn’t in fact a bad thing.

“I want to drive them…just to see what I see.”(23)

My own favorite road trips don’t involve the road itself, but involve the stops along the way, and it is the same with my favorite travel books as well.  So having this as a central premise was a bit off-putting.  However, I kept at it, and I’m glad that I did.

First, McMurtry is a rare-book dealer, and going through his narrative I came across titles I had never heard of, and would have unlikely cause to ever hear of.  Some I may never be able to put my hands on, but some of his journeys and rare sales make for some interesting combinations of thought that I never would have put together.  West Virginia and Milton, for example.  (He knows of someone who has a rare first edition of Paradise Lost with an intact title page out on one of his trips.)

He has a few choice words for Hemingway, travelling to northern Michigan to specifically view the geography of Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories.  Travelling to Hemingway’s house in Key West, he is horrified by the furniture, notes that the Key West house was purchased after he did his best work, and wants to know which of his later wives was responsible for the furniture.  Best not to know too much about our favorite writers, so as not to have issues between personality and art.

The purpose for the travels doesn’t really come into play until the later part of the book, as he is travelling west from Washington, D.C., where he lived for 20 years as a rare-book dealer.  Following heart surgery, he suffered a profound depression that took years to return to a functional state of mind. 

“I don’t really expect my old personality to be waiting for me at a rest stop in Tennessee, or a Waffle House in Arkansas, but I am still listening for chords I haven’t heard in a while, wondering if a passage in a book or a place I once liked along the road will cause them to sound again.” (164)

He goes back to Proust over and over, “looking not for lost time, but lost feelings”.  It’s a taking stock book in a lot of ways. He spends a lot of time on growing up on the plains, looking at Highway 281, which he claims as “his river”, not having the mighty Mississippi of Twain and so many others.

The book comes to an end when McMurtry reaches the T of Route 2 and 281 in North Dakota, the northernmost point of 281.  He always wondered, as a boy, where 281 went as it went north.  (He knew the southern tip – no mystery there.)  His grandfather told him “Oklahoma”, not having been much of a traveler himself.

And it is at the top of 281 that he reaches an epiphany, and ceases his desire to wander, at least for a time.  He remembers a book by the cowboy Teddy Blue called We Pointed Them North, where a young and less-than worldly cowpoke thought that North was an actual place, a real destination or town.  And at the head of 281, McMurtry found his “North” – a mystical place along the lines of Shangri-La, Xanadu, and Home, that place one can never return to.

McMurtry laments that the problem with roads is one he realized several years ago with women – there are too many nice ones, and that means you are going to miss some.  It’s a simple fact of life.  “One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who, for whatever accident of timing or attraction, simply slips by and recedes, to return only in a dream.” (204)

He ends with summation of fiction primarily asking the questions of “Where does the road go?  And how is one to marry?”(206)  Possibly too simplistic, but essential questions of Life, to be sure.

I am glad McMurtry found his “North”, though it seems to be more of an internal sense rather than an actual place.  On reflection, “North” is always that – be it Shangri-La, Xanadu, or Home – an idea, a state of resting the wandering mind, drinking from Frost’s grail in “Directive”. 

“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” (Frost, Directive)

  Drink deep, my friends.  In this summer of my 40^th year, I aim to spend a lot of time drinking to resolve my confusion.  (Metaphorically, of course – it’s been my experience that literal tends to add to the confusion rather than resolve it.)  With any luck, I’ve got a few years on this road, and I aim to make them count.  J