Chapter One, Journey to "A Pathless Land" (standard:Psychological fiction, 5440 words)
Author: Joe E.	Added: Jun 24 2005	Views/Reads: 3457/2616	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Chapter One, Journey to "A Pathless Land" tells the story of three youngsters who set out on an adventure and a spiritual journey

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

sleep and hit the employment office first thing in the morning. When 
the waitress offers us free refills, and explains that all the places 
out West do this, I take it a good omen. 

"Christ, do you know how many times we had a burger and coffee at
Barrett's. Did they ever offer us a free cup?" I ask Vance. "Did we eve 
get a warm up at the Post Dinner?" I ask Anne. 

"I told you, Daley. The West is different. Man, this is gonna be a lead
pipe cinch. You know, I was thinking. Remember that hilly field we saw 
on the edge of town. That'd be a good place to set up camp. We could 
park on the other side of the hill. No one would see us from the road." 


"It might be private property," Anne cautions. "Well, we don't want to
get in no trouble with the local fuzz. Why don't we check with the cops 
and find out where it's legal to camp?" Vance suggests. 

"Listen," Vance says as we follow the waitress's directions to police
headquarters. "If we don't find anything at the employment office, 
tomorrow night you and me better hit some of the local bars, Daley. Get 
in with some of the ranch hands or construction workers. Get a lead on 
something...." 

"Yea, I guess so," I answer peeking out at several bars on Main, and
wonder what Anne will be doing while Vance and I are skipping in and 
out of the pubs. 

The Shelby Police Station is dark except for a glass windowed basement
door. Inside, we are greeted by an elderly gray haired man in kaki 
pants and shirt. He looks out at us through extra thick glasses and 
tells us he's in charge of policing in Shelby after six P. M. Vance 
explains our situation. "You folks are in luck," the watchman says. 
"Wheat harvest is just getting started. Ranchers hire out'a the 
employment office. Always looking for strong backs during harvest. 

"Your sister might get something, too. Shelby Fair opens up Friday. Lots
a places take on extra help during fair week, " he adds focusing his 
eyes on me. 

"Let me tell you, Chief, we really appreciate your help. Good to know
they're hiring. By the way, sir, we're thinking of camping on that 
little knoll that you see just as you come into town," Vance says 
pointing north. We were wondering if that would be all right." 

"Why sure it'll be all right. You can camp anywhere's you like so long
as it's not fenced or posted," the watchman tells us. The three of us 
thank him, and wave good-bye. 

"Have a good sleep," he calls after us. 

At the edge of town, Vance drives to the top of the knoll, and parks on
the rear down slope. "No sense breaking out the tent. Warm as it is we 
can just roll up in our sleeping bags," he tells us. 

"You guys can sleep out under the stars. I'll be just as comfortable
under a blanket in the back seat," Anne laughs. 

"Why don't you set the alarm for seven. We wanna be the first ones
there," Vance says as he gets out and begins to untie the tarp. 

"Will you be alright?" I ask Anne as she slips into my arms. 

"Sure. You guys will be right outside, and I'll have the doors locked,"
Anne answers pressing closer. 

In red Bermuda shorts and a white cotton blouse, her long brown hair
flowing down her back, she was pure woman with no pretense or mask. 
Totally in love, opening our souls to each other, the hardest thing we 
had to do was part for even a second. In our physical love, we had 
found our exact sexual counter parts. And, in our spiritual love, we 
found complete union and trust.  Although we were not yet capable of 
conscious love, our love was making us more conscious 

As I run my fingers down her back, all worries about finding a job
tomorrow vanish. I slowly savor the taste of her mouth, and complete 
surrender follows for a minute or so until Anne pushes me back. “We 
better, not....We have to get a good night's sleep. If we don't find 
work tomorrow we might have to turn back," she tells me. 

"Don't worry. It looks like we hit Shelby at just the right time," I
answer, and pull her towards me for one last kiss. 

Carrying my sleeping bag across the yellowing grass, I feel the cool
breeze from across the border. Brilliant stars dance overhead. More 
stars than I have ever seen in my entire life. More stars than I even 
thought existed. I drop my bag next to Vance and stand in awe for 
several minutes. "Man, that sky is something else." 

"You ain't lying, Daley. I'm telling ya, man, this is the way man was
meant to live. Sleeping under the stars. This God dammed sky is worth 
the whole trip...." 

"It is, man. It is...." I answer as I drop to my knees and roll out my
bag.  I take off my three dollar white sneakers, stuff my socks into 
them, and crawl into my bag still wearing my white T shirt and light 
kaki pants. "Can you imagine being a working cowboy and spending your 
whole life out here?  Shit, shouldn't we get a fire going?" 

"A fire would be right....” Vance says while the silence takes hold of
us for a long minute or two. 

“I'll tell you, Daley. That girl of yours ain't so fucking dumb. I mean,
I wouldn't mind sleeping behind those safe locked doors myself. You 
know if anyone comes fucking around up here, they're gonna get us 
first." 

"What the fuck you expect, injins or something?" 

"I got your fucking Indians, Daley.  Listen, man, we got to be really on
top of it tomorrow. Let them farmers know we are anxious to work, and 
willing to learn." 

"It'd be nice if the two of us got on together, huh?" 

"Together. Christ, man, some of them big spreads hire a dozen men at a
time for harvest. We'll fucking do it, Daley. We'll show them all, show 
them all...." 

We chat back and forth for a couple minutes and then Vance falls silent.
Except for the wind, not a sound reaches us. No highway sound, no 
distant radio, no city chatter, or factory noise, just the silence. In 
the dark and quiet, I can feel a hundred little fears rise to the 
surface. I tightly close my eyes imagining I'm not sure what. Did I 
really see three teenaged cowboys drinking beer at the edge of town? Am 
I afraid that they might follow us up here? 

Fear had touched me several times since our trip began. On our very
first stop for fuel outside of Lancaster, some time after midnight, I 
saw these two guys eyeing up Anne. Seeing me staring at them, they 
flipped me off and drove away. For miles, I watched for them in the 
rear view mirror. When the good front tire that I had traded my leather 
jacket for blew out before we were even out of Pennsylvania, I took it 
for a sign of bad luck. Then there was a tree branch that got stuck 
under the axle during a rest stop. Hearing the noise it made, I was 
certain that the transmission or rear was going out. 

Little fears, but even back then, as I lay under the stars, I knew they
were projections of much deeper fears. And, didn't I have every reason 
in the world to be afraid? There I was making a complete break with my 
past, setting off to seek fame, and fortune.... Of course, I realize, 
now, some forty years later, that it wasn't a complete break. Didn't I 
still carry all of my past inside of me? Though it would be years and 
years before I would discover that we are our past, that our every 
action from thought and feeling is an act conditioned by the past, 
though I still acted from the past; to be out on my own for the first 
time ever was a mighty awesome step. And, the very fear that breaking 
with the past brings on creates an energy that helps to free us from 
conditioning. 

When I think about it now, I wonder how I couldn't see that Anne and
Vance must have felt just as much fear as I. Though Vance joked about 
the safety of the car, I never dreamed that he experienced the same 
fear. Anne had told me she was not afraid. I never even thought of the 
fears that must lurk inside her. How could they not be afraid? Aren't 
we all scared to death every time we stray the least bit from the 
beaten path. 

Anne had most of all to fear though she never let on once that she was
concerned. They had checked her passport at the border. If we got hung 
up in Canada, she stood a good chance of being deported. There she was 
in 1961 traveling across a foreign country with two philosophical beats 
that she had only known for some six months. 

Her real break had come a couple years earlier when she left her home in
Glasgow to seek her fortune in America. Though her best friend backed 
out at the last moment, Anne took a job as nanny for a doctor's two 
little girls. She stayed the required year, and then got on with an 
insurance company. She had planned to return home the very month we 
left for the North Country. 

Vance and I began our break right around the time of the Triv. or maybe
a little earlier. Didn't my break, my questioning, really begin a year 
or so after high school? Riding alone on River Road after dark, 
listening to a jazz station out'a Philadelphia, playing like James 
Dean, I switch the dial and discover Jean Shepherd out'a W.O.R.  New 
York. "Hello out there in radio land.... Hello.... Hello.... Is there 
anybody out there?" he'd ask in a panic stricken voice. 

"Come, sit upon my knee, and I will tell you a bedtime story," he'd say
and go into a long tale about his first blind date back in Indiana. "It 
is going to be a great year for radishes!!!" he'd shout and go into a 
long sinister laugh. And, somehow, I knew he was talking directly to 
me. After all, didn't he confess that he never had more than two or 
three listeners and that was on a good night? "It's up to my blooming 
knickers! Trouble is, it's up to everyone's' blooming knickers !!!" 

"Trivia here, baby...  I mean we deal only with the trivia of life....
Oh yea, oh yea.... But, it is going to be O.K. It is going to be 
OOOOoooo. Kkkkkkkkaaaa." 

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil
for gold."  Shep read from Robert W. Service with some bad piano blues 
in the background. "Yea. Yea....” he'd add giving off a wicked laugh 
and explaining that there were mighty strange things done in the noon 
day sun by the men who moil for gold right here in New York City. 

I recall one little story where Shep describes a typical New Yorker in
business suit, button down collar, and tie. Hurrying down a side 
street, he's wondering how he could have let himself stray so far from 
his own respectable neighborhood. A black haired chick in a trench coat 
steps out of an alley. She slips our hero in gray flannel a note and 
disappears back into the darkness. Under a street lamp he reads, 
"Follow me. Be quick. I need help!"  Does our hero rush to her rescue? 
Does he opt for adventure down the dark side street?  You bet your 
sweet bippie he doesn't. He hails down a cab. Rushes home. Double locks 
the door. Turns on the T.V. and tries to erase those dark streets from 
his mind. 

"So come along, baby.... Follow me down the dark side alleys where
behind closed doors people laugh and sing and holler WHOOPIE!!!" Shep 
would say and turn up the volume on the Blind Lemon Jefferson album. 

After I had grooved on Shep for a year or so, I was ready to sign up for
night classes at T. J. C. My first reading assignment, Hemingway's "The 
Killers," completely blows me away. I gave up my dream of becoming a 
jet fighter pilot and began to dream about becoming a writer. In the 
same English class, I discovered Dostoevsky. The Brother's Karamozav 
was difficult reading for me, but I read it over and over. "We are all 
responsible for all.... I am a scoundrel... a scoundrel...."  was 
etched on my brain. 

Later, I read Crime and Punishment and began to think of the difference
between Ordinary Man and Extraordinary Man. And, even though I couldn't 
appreciate the full significance of Dostoyevsky at the time, I felt a 
spiritual awakening from his work that I couldn't even talk about. 

It was right around this time that Vance got kicked out of State
Teacher's College after he and a couple of his Yardley roommates were 
caught siphoning gas in the faculty parking lot. I was surprised when a 
"college kid" asked if I want to share rides to T. J. C. We took Doc 
Pritchett's Western Civilization class together. On our trips back and 
forth, we discovered that we were kindred souls; both listening to 
Shep, starting to read, dissatisfied with things as they were. 
Pritchett gave us a little historical perspective. Added a little fuel 
to our discontent. We began to spend more and more time together.  In 
late night sessions over cheap red wine, we began to question all the 
values that held us in place. (My foster mother told me that anyone 
that stays out to two A. M. can't be up to much good.) 

In different ways, Vance and I began to see more and more the
contradictions in our every day existence. Vance drew from his own 
family, hard working lower class Italians who had made it to the upper 
middle class. "All my old man lives for is that fucking house of his. 
Every week he's got another project. For Christ's sake, Daley, there's 
got to be more to life than jacking up the price of your house and 
raising a God dammed family. He tells me it's time I grow up. Finish 
school, get a teaching job, make something of my self.... I'm telling 
you, there's got to be something more...." 

I didn't talk about my family. My parents had never made it out of the
lower class. I was ashamed of them, and felt that somehow they were 
responsible for their meager existence. Everything I had learned 
reinforced my belief that it is a sin to be poor. Growing up in the 
inner city for a long time I didn't realize that we were poor. Though, 
I did get a little bit suspicious when I compared the tree-lined 
streets of Dick and Jane with the garbage lined streets that I strolled 
with my black skinned classmates. The color of their skin also puzzled 
me a little.  When I saw that we couldn't afford the same things as the 
other kids at church and Sunday school, that some kids dressed better, 
that I had hole in my shoes, I began to get a little suspicious. 

My brother, C.C. and I never once talked about being poor though we were
best friends and did everything together. As we explored the inner city 
streets in ever increasing circles starting out at the alley behind our 
apartment house, then to the grocery store on Camac, and on past the 
shoe makers, the watermelon stand, the ice man's, all the way to the 
railroad tracks on Sixth; I'm not sure what we talked about. Mostly, we 
just played games, or reenacted scenes from the latest movie. I don't 
even know that I thought about it. Living in the inner city was 
adventure enough. There wasn't time for any thinking. Things felt 
pretty good most of the time. And, when they didn't feel so good, I 
could pretend they were different. 

My mother's drinking reinforced my father's gambling. And, of course,
she only drank because he gambled. "It's just one of those unfortunate 
things," my father told me when he moved out to a Mid City hotel. A 
couple years later, my brothers and sisters and I split up for foster 
homes. 

I ended up on a hundred acre farm in Bucks County with foster parents
who were tenant farmers eking out a living in a disappearing facet of 
American life. Being a foster child separated me from the other kids at 
school, but I did see more and more of what the middle class owns. 

After three or four years separation, my mother and father were back
together again in the same rented house, but in separate bedrooms. By 
the time I finished high school, I began to make brief monthly visits. 
I couldn't get away fast enough, especially after I began to hang out 
with Vance and his college friends. The contrast was so great, and I 
believed that my family situation was unique. I didn't realize that 
there was a whole class of people who were labeled "poor." 

I remember, unrecognized shame permeating to my very bones as I sat in
the narrow front room so thankful for the Philly's game on the new T.V. 
I had been in my family's presence for less than a half hour and we had 
run out of things to say. Eddie, the landlord, had just finished a 
fifteen-minute monologue on the batting averages of each player on both 
teams. C.C. sat staring at the screen giving a nudge every once in a 
while and saying, "Did you see dat?  Did you see dat?” 

"I'd better take a look at the meat loaf," my mother said rising from
the coach beside me. Her worried eyes looked out at me from a pinched 
face. "Are you sure you just can't wait to taste my potato salad, 
Jackie darling," she asked is a soft hurried voice. 

"I can't wait," I answered forcing a smile and wondering if she wouldn't
grab a little nip while she was in the kitchen. 

My father came downstairs in a white tank top undershirt, the muscles of
his arms and shoulders bulging. "Just catching a little nap, Jackie. I 
thought I heard you come in," he said. At the train station after 
dinner, he told me, "Wid love.... Ed. signed her birthday card, wid 
love.... He was nothing but a second rate amateur.... I could'a knocked 
him out in the first round. I should'a never brought him around in the 
first place...." He talked in the extra loud voice that he hard of 
hearing have. I winced in shame wondering what the other commuters must 
be thinking. 

Looking back, I realize that my parents fed me almost the same truths
that Vance's parents laid on him. "It's not how much you earn, Jackie, 
it's what you put in the bank," my father said when C.C. and I walked 
to his Hotel room at Eighteenth and Arch. "One thing they can never 
take away from you is an education... Save your money, go to school, 
make something of yourself...." he told us on our foster parent's farm. 


"Everything happens for the best, Jackie. God loves you. He knows what
he's doing. God loves all his children. Be a good little boy, Jackie. 
God loves you when you're good. Listen to your teachers. They know 
what's right for you. You have to obey those who are in charge. They 
wouldn't be in charge if they didn't know what's best for you...." my 
mother told me. 

Little truths our parents fed us that regulate our lives even today.
Truth is just common sense, getting ahead and General Motors, buying a 
home and making something of yourself. Truth is not taking chances, 
staying within the law, having respect for those who know better. Truth 
is making your voice heard at the polling place, earning a good credit 
rating, being a credit to your race. But, there is truth words, and 
truth in deeds. 

"I'm telling you, Daley, nobody out there knows a God dammed thing. We
got'a get out there and find out for ourselves. We got'a do it." Vance 
kept telling me. 

"You ain't wrong, man. You ain't wrong...." I was answering. 

Hemingway's novels I read on my own after Vance returned to State
Teacher's, and I crashed through Barrett's liquor store window and 
dropped out of T. J. C. The dream of far away places and adventure was 
strengthened with every page. How many nights did I fall asleep with a 
machine gun in one hand, and a dark haired Senorita in the other? Vance 
and I were taken up with the news of the Castro gorillas in the green 
hills of Cuba. Many a night we talked about joining in the fight 
against the Batista dictatorship. 

It was the little Martian, Mark, who turned me on to Philip Wylie after
Vance and I opened our coffee house. In Wylie I discovered that 
discontent with Mom and Apple Pie is not out right blasphemy. Vance's 
good pal, Frank, got on as night copy boy at the Trenton Times. With 
his key, we snuck into the book reviewer's office, and pawed over the 
paperbacks. It became cool to have a book in your back pocket, to pull 
it out over coffee. A writer from the Times gave me a copy of Michner's 
Fires of Spring. I thought how the protagonist gave up his chance for a 
teaching fellowship to go on the road with a troupe of Broadway 
Players. Christ, I don't have nothing to give up, I told myself. 

Through I read little of the Beat literature that was making the rounds,
Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac permeated the very air we breathed 
behind the Trivia counter. There, in 1959, everyone was Beat, writing 
poetry and stream of consciousness novels, or at least dreaming about 
doing so. 

On Tuesday nights, some of the lesser poets came down from the Village.
"The moon shines on stormy beach. And two lovers lay on the beach 
making love.... And the moon.... The moon was angry because he could 
not make love. THE MOON SHINE ON STORMY BEACH...." 

"Do you see that man over there? That man is my father. I only wish you
could have known him before his trouble started. He was weak when he 
should'a been strong...." 

"Oh look the way he stands his station. You'd never guess he suffered
from constipation. Yea, man that's it. Plenty of words and no shit!!!!" 


"Oh look!!! It's coming straight down MacDougal Street...." 

We had our own home grown poets who read to the beat of Councho's drum.
"I was walking down the street last night and this black cat crossed my 
path. Unlucky for me. Two white cats jumped us...." 

"Hey little black boy, don't cry because you can't go to school with
your playmate. Marry his sister, or keep her around for a lay mate.... 
And, hey little white boy, don't cry because you can't go to school 
with your playmate. Marry his sister, or keep her around for a lay 
mate...." 

"I want a one way ticket to Endsville!!!!" 

Some of our homegrown poets recited from the Beats as if they were
reading their own. "I have seen the best minds of my generation walking 
down a Negro street at dawn looking for an angry fix...." 

"Holy!!!! Holy!!!! Holy!!!! Holy is the cock on the farmer in
Kansas...." 

"Christ climbed down from his cross one day...." 

"Johnny Nolan had a patch on his ass. Kids chased him through screen
door summers...." 

"There are no girls in Tiger Town. Tiger Town is falling down. Escape!
Escape! Escape!!!!" 

"If only I could write like that," I told Sally. More than the Beats, I
was turned on by Robert W. Service, Sandburg, Frost, and John Ciardi. 
And, especially the poem, “Don'ts" by D.H. Lawrence. "Don't be a good 
little good little boy being as good as you can. Fight your little 
fight my boy, fight it and be a man...." 

After the judge took away my driver's license, I carried Lady
Chatterley's Lover in my back pocket pulling it out on the bus, the 
train, and while I was hitching. When I worked swing at North 
Philadelphia Airport, I'd reach the Triv. right around one A.M. Just in 
time to lock the door and gather with the regulars around the big table 
up front. I remember, a little Dave Brubeck in the background, Frank 
and Joanne finishing up dishes. I'm making an espresso on our New York 
bought machine, just a candle or two reflecting off the high glossy 
wall.  Mark is standing at the door in his long black cape. "How the 
fuck long you been standing there?" Vance asks as he unlocks the door 
and escorts him to the table. Mark pulls his copy of Durrell's The 
Black Book from under his arm. For the next hour or so, we listen to 
his critique. Around three A.M. Sol Weinstein comes in from The Times 
and keeps us all in stitches until sun rise. 

And, how many all night conversations did I sneak out on around two A.
M.? How much did I miss while I caught forty winks on the single bed in 
our side office? The office that could be used for more intimate 
conversations. No desk, just a couple chairs and the table on which sat 
our stereo receiver, telephone, and the drawing  "Jack Be Quick" that 
Sally gave me. Forty winks. Up at five A. M. to dump our garbage in the 
river. I pass my foster father on the stairs as he comes down to make 
ready for work. "Going to bed when you should be getting up. You turn 
the night into day," he whispers. 

After we go bust at the Triv. and I get laid off from my airport job; I
pick up a copy of The Intimate Henry Miller. Here at last is truth in 
words that I can understand. If only I had known that Henry Miller, 
too, sold encyclopedias how much happier I might have been about my 
little sortie into the world of the white-collar confidence game. 
Instead, I fail as a salesman, and getting hired at Mercer County 
Airport go back to pumping aviation gas. But, I didn't let it bother me 
too much. After all, didn't Miller say that earning a living has 
nothing to do with living? More than anyone else, Miller reinforced my 
feeling that there is something more to life that getting ahead. From 
his writing, I get a whole new view of the world of spirit. I also see 
that maybe it's not just me that's fucked up. Maybe it's the whole 
world. 

"What's it all about, man?” Is the question that Vance and I were asking
when we took off on our great adventure. As innocent as we were back 
then, we knew we would have to search the world to find ourselves. So, 
off to Alaska, to South America. And, if we gain fame and fortune on 
our search, so much the better. 

For Anne and I, truth was being in each other's arms. As soon as I told
her about my plans for a jaunt to the land of the midnight sun, she 
said, "Why don't I go with you?" To be apart would be a lie. Nothing to 
fear as long as we're together.... 

I laid in my sleeping bag beneath the Montana sky with my eyes tightly
closed. In my mind, I pictured the teenage cowboys finishing their beer 
and looking for some action. Fear so strong that even though I 
struggled to open my eyes and take just one more peek at the light show 
overhead, I couldn't do it. 


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