Read Online Hold the Enlightenment by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tim Cahill
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well-reviewed tomes: essays, poetry, novels. No writing down to the lowest common denominator for these folks: because they are partially funded by teaching, they have the luxury to produce literature.
Those of us who live on the arid, east side of the mountains, however, make our livings—such as they are—directly from the sales of our books or articles. When our friends from the west accuse us of pandering to the masses, as they habitually do, the usual and purposely ungrammatical reply (attributed, I believe, to Tom McGuane), goes something like this: “I done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of, but I never taught no goddamned creative writing.” Well, I can’t say that anymore. I teach one or two creative-writing courses a year, and they are all about travel and/or adventure.
I was just returning home from the Book Passage Travel Writers’ Conference in Corte Madera, California. The drive took me through northern Nevada then up into southeast Oregon, and I was looking for a story. Something about travel. Or adventure. Whatever.
In Winnemucca, I glanced at the local paper, as I still advise students in search of a story to do, and found a free lecture to be given that night by “a popular short wave radio personality.” I would learn “things not taught in school.” The address given turned out to be in a church basement, and only about half a dozen people arrived to learn things they hadn’t been taught in school. We discovered that September 9, 1999—9/9/99—was pretty much going tobe doomsday. It would start with computer crashes—early computer code used four 9’s to signal that the program had ended and was to be terminated. Stoplights wouldn’t work. Cars would stall on the interstate, miles from anywhere. Banks would fail. People in the know—which now included the half dozen of us in the church basement—should take our money out of the bank, stock up on both food and weapons, and then begin digging out a bomb shelter. We only had three more days.
Was there a story in the end of the world as we know it? Could be, but I wasn’t inspired, and drove north, into the parched cowboy country of southeastern Oregon, specifically to Harney County, a land of high-desert sage flats and sparsely timbered mountains; of fleet herds of antelope and cattle ranches. Harney extends over 10,228 square miles, which makes it the largest county in America. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined. A mere seven thousand people are privileged to call Harney County home, so there is less than one person per square mile. A good place, I figured, to wait out the end of the world, now just two days hence.
I had what might be the last chocolate malt of my life at the café in Fields, Oregon, because a sign on the wall said the concoctions were “world famous,” and I didn’t want to die with a bad taste in my mouth. Fields is located at the southwestern edge of Steens Mountain, locally called the Steens. The mountain, a checkerboard of Bureau of Land Management, state, and private land, is a 30-mile-long fault block that rises gently from the west to a height of 9,773 feet, and then drops off precipitously, in what amounts to a sheer cliff face. From a distance, it looks like a giant wedge rising up out of the sagebrush.
This great block of land was thrust a mile above the surrounding land by pressures created in the mists of geological time when the earth’s crust cooled. Millions of years later, glaciers formed near the summit of the Steens, and they slid down the western slope of the mountain, carving out verdant U-shaped valleys and deep rocky gorges so elaborately sculpted they seemed the monumental work of some mad and alien culture.
On the day the world was to end, I drove east, up the Oregon Scenic Byway, which leads to the summit of the Steens. Sage-litteredantelope country gave way to juniper, and, at the higher elevations along the Blitzen River, aspen groves shivered
Those of us who live on the arid, east side of the mountains, however, make our livings—such as they are—directly from the sales of our books or articles. When our friends from the west accuse us of pandering to the masses, as they habitually do, the usual and purposely ungrammatical reply (attributed, I believe, to Tom McGuane), goes something like this: “I done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of, but I never taught no goddamned creative writing.” Well, I can’t say that anymore. I teach one or two creative-writing courses a year, and they are all about travel and/or adventure.
I was just returning home from the Book Passage Travel Writers’ Conference in Corte Madera, California. The drive took me through northern Nevada then up into southeast Oregon, and I was looking for a story. Something about travel. Or adventure. Whatever.
In Winnemucca, I glanced at the local paper, as I still advise students in search of a story to do, and found a free lecture to be given that night by “a popular short wave radio personality.” I would learn “things not taught in school.” The address given turned out to be in a church basement, and only about half a dozen people arrived to learn things they hadn’t been taught in school. We discovered that September 9, 1999—9/9/99—was pretty much going tobe doomsday. It would start with computer crashes—early computer code used four 9’s to signal that the program had ended and was to be terminated. Stoplights wouldn’t work. Cars would stall on the interstate, miles from anywhere. Banks would fail. People in the know—which now included the half dozen of us in the church basement—should take our money out of the bank, stock up on both food and weapons, and then begin digging out a bomb shelter. We only had three more days.
Was there a story in the end of the world as we know it? Could be, but I wasn’t inspired, and drove north, into the parched cowboy country of southeastern Oregon, specifically to Harney County, a land of high-desert sage flats and sparsely timbered mountains; of fleet herds of antelope and cattle ranches. Harney extends over 10,228 square miles, which makes it the largest county in America. It is bigger than Rhode Island and Massachusetts combined. A mere seven thousand people are privileged to call Harney County home, so there is less than one person per square mile. A good place, I figured, to wait out the end of the world, now just two days hence.
I had what might be the last chocolate malt of my life at the café in Fields, Oregon, because a sign on the wall said the concoctions were “world famous,” and I didn’t want to die with a bad taste in my mouth. Fields is located at the southwestern edge of Steens Mountain, locally called the Steens. The mountain, a checkerboard of Bureau of Land Management, state, and private land, is a 30-mile-long fault block that rises gently from the west to a height of 9,773 feet, and then drops off precipitously, in what amounts to a sheer cliff face. From a distance, it looks like a giant wedge rising up out of the sagebrush.
This great block of land was thrust a mile above the surrounding land by pressures created in the mists of geological time when the earth’s crust cooled. Millions of years later, glaciers formed near the summit of the Steens, and they slid down the western slope of the mountain, carving out verdant U-shaped valleys and deep rocky gorges so elaborately sculpted they seemed the monumental work of some mad and alien culture.
On the day the world was to end, I drove east, up the Oregon Scenic Byway, which leads to the summit of the Steens. Sage-litteredantelope country gave way to juniper, and, at the higher elevations along the Blitzen River, aspen groves shivered
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