Edge of the Continent

Leaning back against a eucalyptus tree, I extended my bum knee in front of me and looked out over San Francisco Bay.  Duke sat in the dirt next to me, panting from having chased a jackrabbit.  I reflected that, in a sense, the trip was over.  I had anticipated that this moment would be accompanied by revelation, a moment of clarity in which the mists of history would be swept away by the ocean breeze, the attainment of an enlightened state in which the motivations of the Walker Expedition and their relevance to the modern world would be laid bare before me.  I had expected to understand what those men did, why the historians had gotten it wrong, and what those errors revealed about American mythologizing.  At the very least I had expected to have some good idea or novel insight.  Duke looked at me and panted in my face.  I reflected that I had never gotten around to brushing his teeth.

So I stopped trying to think like a writer and sat under the tree like a normal person.  It was a huge tree, standing by itself on a golden-grassed hillside, with mammoth branches hanging low over the ground.  The bay breeze rattled its brittle leaves as the sun sank toward the horizon.  I picked up a twig and shucked off the bark at one end so I could chew on it.  Seagulls cavorted over the shoreline, whirling and screaming.  A long raft of small black birds floated like pepper grains just beyond the breakers.  Joseph Walker and I had both run out of continent, I thought.  What a shame.  I lifted the twig to my mouth, but Duke snagged it midway.  I patted him on the head and picked up another stick for me.

About thirty minutes’ drive east was Joseph Walker’s grave.  The sky was bright blue and the air pleasantly brisk, so Duke and I had parked in downtown Martinez, CA and walked to the cemetery.  But the cemetery was fenced and the gate padlocked, and from the fence hung a sign forbidding entry without the permission of the Martinez police department, so I called the station.  The police said if I came on down to the station they’d loan me the key.  I went, signed my name, and, key in hand, returned to the cemetery.  The well-oiled lock popped free and strolled around the cemetery until I found Walker’s grave.

There were signs near his tombstone, the bulletin-board type of signs where the signmaker affixes a sheet of paper to a board, then bolts a sheet of plexiglass over the board.  But most of the papers had fallen down inside the plexiglass where they lay in a curled and yellowing heap.  I pushed aside some overhanging tree limbs to read the few typed sheets that remained in place.  They were wrinkled and liberally interspersed with errors, some typographical and some factual.  I grinned.  The notion of perpetual fame is illusory anyway.

So I sat on a bench and looked at Walker’s tombstone.  Black lettering on white stone.  Walker had been all over the west; the expedition I was following was but one of his many pathbreaking trips.  His tombstone read, “Emigrated to Mo. 1819 / to New Mexico 1820 / Rocky Mountains 1832 / California 1833 / Camped at Yosemite Nov. 13, 1833.”  I knew from my reading that he’d traveled a lot more than his tombstone reflected.  Walker was apparently an adherent of the one-page résumé rule.  I wondered what might one day be written on my tombstone, and realized quickly that the one-page rule would probably suit me too.

The sun, now setting, glinted orange off the choppy waves of the bay.  Sooner or later, we all stop wandering.  I chewed on my eucalyptus twig.  Zenas Leonard stopped roving not long after the Walker Expedition returned to the Rockies.  He hitched his horse and went back to Pennsylvania, where he wrote the journal I’ve been studying.  Joe Meek had been a particularly wild member of the expedition – he got so drunk at rendezvous that he passed out outside his tent and, when awakened in the morning, was told that a rabid wolf had passed through the camp the night before.  Another man had been bitten and was deathly ill.  Meek commented only that if the wolf had bitten him, it would have died of alcohol poisoning.  But Meek, too, quit wandering and, in middle age, became a sheriff in Oregon.  Joe Walker wandered until he was too old for the nomadic life – some would say he wandered a little bit longer – before finally settling in California.  Other mountain men quit wandering only when they died on the trail.

For most wanderers, I think, there come definable moments when you have to choose.  Times when one trail ends and before another begins.  Times when you have to choose between another adventure and those aspects of life with which wandering is incompatible.  Because a wanderer cannot build.  If you want to build – a profession, a network, an estate, a family – you have got to stop.  I walked down to the beach and lit my pipe.  Waves rolled in from further than I could see and crashed to a stop against the beach.