One Long Sunday Afternoon of Oblivion
Vanessa Blakeslee
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Dust kicked up from beneath the tires as the unmarked utility van before me abruptly veered to the right, down the gravel lane toward the Scenic Overlook. At first, the many utility and moving vans that kept pulling off of Highway 101 down the Oregon coast had me taken aback, until I pulled up next to one and a thirtysomething age couple jumped out and wielded their camera propped upon a selfie-stick; this was June 2021, and the rental car shortage at the height of summer travel season had those desperate for wilderness borrowing any vehicle they could find—including small moving vans and trucks. But I had planned this trip for some time, one that would mark my first big adventure following the Covid-19 outbreak and restrictions. I trailed the van’s dust cloud in my red Kia; despite the car’s squirrely steering and cramped interior, I felt lucky indeed to have any rental car at all.
The first part of the trip I had spent alone in a cabin for two weeks on the Olympic Peninsula, where I had written and explored by myself the wonders of Olympic National Park: the Hoh Rainforest, dripping with ancient moss, and the vast views atop Hurricane Ridge. Near sunset I stopped at Ruby Beach and wandered the sands alone, among others who also walked alone, many in surgical masks, silently wandering among the craggy rocks and debris. The Pacific winds tugged at the flimsy masks, and few made eye contact, but strode before the sea stacks taking photos and selfies, as glaringly adrift as the great logs strewn around us, the eerie scene like something out of a strange dream. A few days afterward I left the cabin, and my partner Mark flew across the country and met me for the rest of the road trip. I warned him that the adventure had already been a strange one, especially coming from Florida, where we had experienced few restrictions since 2020, and where residents easily exchanged smiles and laughter, especially outdoors, where mask-wearing was nearly unheard of.
But the strange sights and encounters were only just beginning.
We exited the car, strolled down beneath the coolness of Sitka spruce to the overlook, framed by shrubs in brightly colored bloom. Far below, sunlight glistened atop the waves, the whitecaps breaking against the half-dozen sea stacks. Gulls and other seabirds screamed, swooping up and down the cliffs; their cries echoed, muffled amidst the ocean’s din. We stepped closer, patiently waiting for the couple before us, retiree-aged, to move along. If not for the Samuel H. Boardman Scenic Corridor and the foresight of its namesake decades ago, the twelve miles of this majestic coastal wilderness would likely have never been preserved. Neither Mark nor I spoke but drank in the splendor before us in silence.
“You know what would make this even more perfect?” the man before us abruptly said, gazing out. He wrapped an arm around the woman beside him. “I’d build us a big house, right here on the cliff. Just imagine—a great big house, and that view would be all ours.”
“I wish,” she said with a gush. “We can dream, can’t we?”
They left, and not until we reached the privacy of our car did I let loose the flood of thoughts I’d had following the inadvertent eavesdropping. Why did humans obsess over owning everything—when would some people learn that one could never own a view? That truly magnificent views were best shared by everyone, rather than tied up as one individual’s private property? Did the man ever pause to consider that could he build some McMansion upon the cliffs—not so different from the crowded development we’d just left on Highway 101 south of Lincoln City, the coastline obscured by a smattering of cookie-cutter vacation rentals—that after a short time he’d grow tired of his view, glorious though it was? Because inevitably what had struck him as glorious would fade to the familiar, and his attempt to capture and hold such beauty would thereby destroy it. Our most precious places are a gift to be conserved, not exploited.
Mark’s sentiments were similar—and yet we knew our views to be in the minority. To think different people could experience the same splendid place, and yet come away with such different perspectives stunned me. Before making the trip, I’d been thinking about Jack Kerouac and his writings from the Pacific Northwest, and I thought of him again now, what he might think of our encroachment and environmental destruction—would he have been shocked, dismayed? Or rather have expected our continuous barreling toward the emptiness of modernity and industrialization’s tragic end. “Everything’ll be all right, desolation is desolation everywhere and desolation is all we got and desolation ain’t so bad,” he wrote in his journal in 1956, atop Mt. Hozomeen in the North Cascades—one of his last “on the road” adventures.
Weeks earlier, Jack Kerouac and his Pacific Northwest travels had come to mind as I sat in the stifling nighttime heat on the back porch of the bungalow he’d once occupied—albeit briefly—in the College Park neighborhood of Orlando, Florida. I’d long been a volunteer with the nonprofit who had acquired the house and turned it into the Jack Kerouac Writers-in-Residence Project over two decades ago; inside, we’d just finished hosting the Farewell Reading for the Spring Resident. A poster depicting the iconic black-and-white shot of Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, arm-in-arm, hangs over the fireplace in the living room where the readings take place. Behind where I sat on the porch steps remain the small rooms where Kerouac composed what many consider to be his strongest work, The Dharma Bums, in a frenzied outpouring in 1957; much of that book he’d gathered from his time spent in Northern California and the Cascades. The modest house on 1418 Clouser Ave. is where Kerouac was living when his novel On the Road was published to both critical and popular acclaim.
And yet, despite my years-long devotion to volunteering for the residency, I had struggled to connect with Kerouac. Somehow, I’d missed reading his books in my own defiant and itinerant youth, even during my backpacking trips to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe; when I finally picked up On the Road in my early thirties, the main characters and their preoccupations struck me as filled with youthful narcissism, overwhelmingly sexist despite the occasional flashes of lyrical brilliance in the prose. Might a three-weeks-long trip to the Pacific Northwest finally help me to somehow connect with Kerouac—if not the man, so deeply troubled, then his writing? I decided to read The Dharma Bums in preparation, wondering how his observations and impressions of that landscape might resonate now, as we hit peak industrialization, ecological overshoot, and collapse.
Once Mark joined me mid-June, we visited Mt. Rainier, then headed for the North Cascades along Route 20, past Diablo Dam and Ross Lake, into the territory where Kerouac had spent those sixty-three days in a fire tower in the summer of 1956, which later formed much of his 1965 work, Desolation Angels. Mark had read the book; I had not. Mark had read much of Kerouac’s work, including On the Road and Dharma Bums, and was one of those young men upon whom Kerouac had made an ardent impression, the latter having inspired his own road trip into the Black Mountains of the Carolinas circa 1980. In an environment rapidly changing, such great peaks and vistas can offer solace, as Kerouac recalls in Desolation Angels,
…when I look at my panoramic photographs of the Desolation area and see the old mules
and wiry roans of 1935… I marvel that the mountains look the same in 1935 (Old Jack
Mtn to an exact degree w/the same snow arrangement) as they do in 1956 so that the
oldness of the earth strikes me recalling primordially that it was the same, they (the
mountains) looked the same too in 584 B.C.
The Skagit River dams had already been built by 1956 and still operate today, but instead of the mules one might pass a few determined cyclists pedaling hard against the grade as we did, as we pulled into the overlooks. Far off to the north lay Canada, and below, the deep blue green of Ross Lake mesmerized. The views must not have changed much since Kerouac’s summer in the nearby fire tower—perhaps the snowpacks had changed, but I couldn’t tell. At those elevations, the peaks ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet, the temperatures dropped cool enough for us to don hats and zip up our jackets. A relieving chill we’d long for, soon enough.
We spent that night in the small town of Chelan, then headed west and south, for the Pacific Coast and Highway 101, where we had our run-in with the Boomer couple and their dream-home fetish. We were heading for the Redwoods, a wonder I had longed to see since childhood, and the stuffy afternoons spent belting out, “This Land is Your Land,” in elementary school music class. Along the way, we found a free audiobook version of The Dharma Bums, an old recording read by none other than the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in his high-pitched, nasally twang—somewhat distracting, but we listened anyway. Our first Northern California stop was to the towering, shady picnic grove of the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in Crescent City, and nothing could have prepared me for the immensity of the trees, how the cool silence amongst those trunks, so broad and robust, ranked among the holiest of chapels I’d ever visited. Within this extraordinary grove we quietly ate our ham-and-cheese sandwiches, between bites, looking up as if our surroundings might magically disappear. The redwoods are the cousins to the bald cypress of Florida, but of which only a few remain; Corkscrew Swamp in southwest Florida contains the last remaining virgin bald cypress forest in the world, a mere seven hundred acres. In the nineteenth century, loggers had so heavily deforested Florida of the bald cypress that their near annihilation drove John Muir and others in their vows to protect the coastal Redwoods. Yet the Redwoods contained a serenity apart from the bald cypresses, with their sprawling roots and lushly dense, often noisy, swamp life that surrounds.
Had Jack Kerouac ever traveled to this part of coastal California, immersed among the Redwoods? I’m not sure, but I found myself recounting his words the following day, which we spent on the Lady Bird Johnson Grove Trail, and later, the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Crowds were few; passersby spoke in hushed voices. Mark and I walked for long stretches in the coolness beneath the towering giants by ourselves. Now and then I took a seat upon one of the benches scattered throughout the groves. Sunlight broke through upon the vast carpets of ferns, and the birds twittering and swooping among the mega-trunks made for an otherworldly landscape—a haven from civilization, its electronic pings and breathless pace. How precious is stillness, may we never forget. And yet this way of being still in the woods—even these majestic woods wholly new to me—felt ancient, not unknown. In one poignant, evocative passage in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes,
The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a
long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across
the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and
all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago
and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome
familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden
remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in
the grass.
Afterward, and quickly, the spell was broken when we pulled out of Lady Bird Grove and headed back down the mountain, only to have a logging truck pull out in front of us, its diesel fumes choking the fresh air and shiny logs shimmying in the flatbed with each bump, a gut-wrenching sight after the moments just spent in the magical grove. I wouldn’t read Desolation Angels until after the trip, but when I did, back home in Florida, I came upon another of Kerouac’s passages about the woods, this one railing against the “so-called Forest service…a front for the lumber interests” and “people all over the world are wiping their ass with the beautiful trees.” He wasn’t wrong, I thought, although I fervently pray trees as majestic as the Redwoods aren’t being cut down for toilet paper.
Up until now the temperatures had remained tolerable, in the 80s Fahrenheit. But now as we left Arcata and Humbolt County and took the remote and winding Rt. 96 through Klamath National Forest, back up to Oregon and Crater Lake, we found ourselves trapped beneath an ever-encroaching heat dome. The National Forests along Rt. 96 appeared more brown than green, the outside temperatures hitting the high 90s and the heat index over a hundred. As we approached Crater Lake from the south and along either side of the highway, great swathes of charred hillsides greeted us, the dead trees like blackened skeletons, and occasionally, the ashen shell of a burned down house. We hear of one another’s disasters in different regions, but the aftereffects strike you differently up close—seeing the body, as it were. To bear witness is a noble act in the face of powerlessness, for what can anyone do to stop Nature’s fury, once unleashed? Nature bats last, as the saying goes. Surely Kerouac in his fire tower would have been kept busy by those raging today; even back in 1956, he notes in his journal, “I couldn’t understand how the top of a mountain in the North could be so hot.”
Crater Lake was indeed hot, despite the melting snowpack and pressing crowds, but this stop, our last National Park of the trip, turned out to be our final respite. The heat dome pressed at our backs as we sped our sporty red Kia north, past Newberry National Volcanic Monument and through Bend. Outside Madras, just north of Bend, chunks of dried earth blew across the road, the flat fields on either side of the road barren. We passed small farm after small farm for sale; one handwritten sign along the road read: “NO WATER, NO FARMS, NO FOOD”—eerie and reminiscent of the Dust Bowl. Those words in their scrawl forever burned into my brain, and their stark, terrifying truth.
We spent that night at The Dalles, and by now the temperature was reading 105F but the heat index climbed to another ten or fifteen degrees. The Columbia River Gorge was not a verdant green as I had seen from past photos and expected, but a sickly pale brown. To this outsider the California desert was plainly expanding north, into the Pacific Northwest. The agricultural days of this region appear to be numbered. And what are we to do, in a predicament that has no solution? For I don’t share the views that I’d stumbled upon one afternoon at the very beginning of my trip, when I ventured to Port Townsend, an episode I’d since shared with Mark. I’d been hiking by myself in Fort Worden Historic State Park, near the lighthouse, and paused to take some pictures when I overheard a small group of cyclists nearby loudly talking about our planetary crises—specifically, global warming and crop failures. One man said emphatically, “No need to worry, Bill’s going to save us” (referring to nearby Seattle resident and billionaire, Bill Gates). “He’s poured a lot of money into lab-grown meat—they’re rolling out those products soon. That’s the future. It’s going to be great.” Without hesitation the others chimed in, one woman in particular enthusiastic about the prospect of lab-grown meat.
The breeze swept off the water; a chill crept up my back. Silently, I turned away, eyes wide. She couldn’t wait—for lab-grown meat? The stuff of sci-fi movies and nightmares? Didn’t we have enough health problems from fake food already? More science and technology, to try to solve the problems caused by science and technology. Even if there are answers—and I don’t believe there are, at least not at our level of human awareness—fake meat and lab-engineered food is not a world I intend to be part of.
Mark laughed and rolled his eyes at my dramatic recollection of the tech-worshippers adulation of Bill Gates. “A billionaire monopolist is the last sort of person you want trying to ‘save the world,’” he said.
Or perhaps I wasn’t so different in my sentiments as those who had come before, and perhaps humans have been grappling with our destruction ever since we’d gained awareness of death, our own and of the species around us. For I found myself turning over thoughts like Kerouac’s as I explored this terrain he had known and loved, all these decades later, and to my surprise, would come to highlight in my now-flagged copies of his books: “As for lightening and fires, who, what American individual loses, when a forest burns, and what did Nature do about it for a million years up until now?—And in that mood I lie on my bunk in the moonlit night on my stomach and contemplate the bottomless horror of the world…”
Horror—from that there is no escape, but part of life. Yet what of our arrogance? For us, that is perhaps the greatest horror of them all.
From Columbia River Gorge, we raced back to Seattle to return the red Kia—now mud-splattered and several thousand miles worn—but first we pulled into the Sleep Inn by the airport where I’d booked a hotel room with a free shuttle for our early morning flight the next day. But the near-empty lot—was the hotel closed? Here and there, unkempt-looking single men leaned out of open windows. A police car stood parked out front, and the cop rolled down his window. I told him we had reservations. “Don’t you know? You’ve been moved down the street,” he said. “Comfort Inn. Someone should have called you.”
“Why? I made this reservation three months ago.”
“City of Seattle has declared this a sanctuary hotel for the homeless,” the officer said. “All reservations have been moved elsewhere. Where are you from?”
Florida, I said. Stunned, I checked my voicemail to find the hotel had indeed left a message that our reservation had been moved, and in the rush to get back, I had missed it. Even so, I had specifically chosen that Sleep Inn for its cost, proximity, and free shuttle, and being sent elsewhere last minute was unexpected. As I circled the lot, irritated, a grungy-haired fellow called out from one of the rooms, “Hey, where’re you from? Florida? Whatca doing here, huh?”
I peeled out of the lot. Amidst all the highs and lows of the trip over the past three weeks, nothing could have prepared me for the economic destruction I’d seen in the Pacific Northwest, post-Covid shutdowns. In Florida, most businesses had stayed open, and the economy remained intact—in fact, was booming, with an energetic upswing in the air. Staff and patrons easily exchanged smiles and small talk, and by June 2021, most residents had returned to regular activities. In Seattle, Mark woke up early one morning and couldn’t find a single place open to buy a coffee, so many businesses had shuttered; homeless residents staggered at nearly every street corner. He passed a homeless man who stood staring up at the sky, screaming and cursing. The Pacific Northwest had paid a stiff economic price for its long shutdowns and restrictions. And yet the hollowing out of America has been happening for a long time; the events of 2020 just hastened the collapse in places such as Seattle, especially cities that had already become unaffordable to vast swathes of working- and middle-class residents and where Kerouac, had he been alive today, would hardly have been able to find a cheap room to rent, as he and the renegade writers of his generation had done, even in the biggest cities—New York, Denver, San Francisco, and many others.
The sacred silence of the Redwoods, the rugged, captivating coastline of Oregon, the haunting atmosphere of Crater Lake—the past three weeks had made for an exhilarating and inspiring adventure, not unlike trips of the past, and yet nowhere could we escape the daunting strangeness of the outside world coming undone. The incident at the hotel-turned-sanctuary by Seattle officials marked the final bizarre turn of that inaugural post-pandemic road trip—no more or less peculiar than overhearing a retiree’s wish to build a dream house upon an untouched wilderness preserve, or speeding to escape the descent of a 115F heat dome through valleys charred black from wildfires, or bumping into wide-eyed worshippers of Bill Gates, eager to proclaim their faith in a billionaire’s quest to “save humanity,” however dubious the motives or outcome, or lone individuals staggering across a barren beach wearing face masks. How much had Jack Kerouac foreseen of America’s long emergency and decline, as a young man “on the road,” decades ago? Likely he didn’t know in the summer of 1956 that his travels were winding to a close. Yesterday’s great trip may always be our last, but even more so in troubled times.
Back at home a few weeks later, air conditioning blasting, I found signs that he had glimpsed our fate. In one passage in Desolation Angels, his attentive, lyrically rendered observations resonate prophetically through time, as he thinks of, “workers’ cars left in the lot during the week…the sticks and cans and rags of debris, the commute local passing by with pale blank faces of Sunday Travelers—presaging the ghostly day when industrial America shall be abandoned and left to rust in one long Sunday Afternoon of Oblivion.”
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Vanessa Blakeslee’s latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories won the Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for the Short Story (2018). Blakeslee is also the author of Train Shots: stories and Juventud, a novel, both of which received prizes and accolades. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Joyland, The Smart Set, and many other places. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, The Banff Centre, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and many more. Blakeslee has taught for the MFA in writing programs at Goddard College and the City University of Hong Kong, and currently teaches at the University of Central Florida.
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