Believe it or not, I actually had someone say that to me once and today's thoughts relate to that. In the summer of 1968, with my childhood friend Steve Hatsis, we started out for Northern California in my sister Cynthia's Sunbeam Alpine in late July. I don't remember exactly what we intended, but as we made our way West on the old Interstate 80 the world seemed young and filled with possibilities. In those days, the Interstate, at least in Nevada, ended just before you got to a town, and then started back up at the other end of town. This meant that you actually had to go through each town. I am sure we had the top down, and the car was pretty windy inside and you really couldn't go that fast. I think we intended to go to at least Reno the first day and I do remember vividly, going through the old tunnel West of Elko. The reason I remember this is that years later I would read, that just above the tunnel, or the tunnel itself, marked the place where two tectonic plates meet. I think we also picked up some food to eat and something to drink in Elko.
At Battle Mountain, with its giant BM on the mountainside, which I remember laughing about as a young kid on a road trip to San Francisco years before, we got gas and I checked the oil. All was fine. Then as I was driving along about 15-20 miles west of Battle Mountain, the engine blew with the tell tell noise that only a bad cylinder produces. I coasted off the highway and into a run down service station. Next door there was a café as well, and a small post office and the most dilapidated Motel I have ever seen, including third world countries. Steve worked in a service station and new a lot more about engines then I did. He thought it was a bad rod. The engine was still running, but not well. Here I am, a just turned 18-year-old kid and it seemed like the world had ended.
I went into the café and asked about a mechanic, etc. and got no real response. I then asked about when the bus stopped on its way back to Salt Lake, etc. That's when the scary waitress said the line about the bus not stopping. I was in a panic about what to do next, and called my parent's back in Salt Lake. After the first call, I then went over to the Post Office which was next door but part of the complex in Valmy Nevada. It was run, as was the service station and the café by a man named Gene. The Cafe was called Genes Golden Grill. About two decades later, on NBC Nightly news they would feature a little segment about Valmy and Gene who owned it all, ran the Post Office and drove the local school bus. A man for all seasons. He quickly told me that he could make a call, but probably the best he could do for us, would be to get us on the first bus back to Salt Lake City, sometime the next morning. Also, for some strange reason I remember that we had to pre-pay to him the bus fare back . I called my parents back and told them what the game plan was and that with luck in the late afternoon of the following day we would be back and we would figure out what to do about the car.
Here it was, just a little after 1:00 PM in the afternoon, Pacific time and we were stuck in this place with nothing to do. We were too young to drink and I am not sure they served alcohol, although they did sell beer in the general store. There was a broken down pickup at the side of the station and Gene told us we could put our sleeping bags in the back of the pickup and sleep there or rent one of the rooms. We choose the pick-up.
We then went back to where the car was parked, got some of our stuff and tried to figure out what to do until morning. Time slowed more than it ever has for anything I have ever done, I was convinced the hours had passed and I would look at my watch and it was fifteen minutes from my last check.
Steve, since he worked in a service station back in Salt Lake City, spoke the language of service stations and this scary sounding guy, who was probably only in his early twenties, but all ready seemed burned out started talking with us. To this day, I remember him telling us that if we ever found ourselves in this certain part of Sacramento, it was Rio Linda, to use his name, which I have forgotten, ever since then, I have never felt very comfortable in Sacramento as a result of the fact that he kept saying about this particular area, “It's easy to get in, but hard to get out”. What ended up happening was that we got the bus the next morning and arrived in Salt Lake fairly late in the afternoon. We took my father's car, which had a trailer hitch down to the service station where Steve worked and borrowed a tow bar that hooked to a car with chains on the front bumper. I wanted to leave that night for the trek back to the car, but Louise would not hear of it. Steve did not even let his parents know what had happened.
The next morning we left at O-dark-thirty as we say on motorcycle trips drove out, got the car and came back in one marathon day. In the meantime, Louise had got us airline tickets on Western Airlines for early afternoon of the next day to LA.
Steve and I ended up spending about a week in Southern California, besides swimming in the ocean, eating all of our meals at Taco Bell, where you could get 5 tacos for a buck, we attended the Newport Pop festival August 3rd and 4th, 1968 and saw Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and The Animals. I can still remember hearing “Born to be Wild”. This was one of the first festivals to have over 100,000 people show up. The smell of grass permeated the air before, during and after the concert.
Talk about country bumpkins, it was a real eye opener and it is also really the only time in my life I have done any serious hitchhiking which was pretty scary. We hitched down to San Diego and when we were ready to come home, and probably almost broke, we took a bus back up to the Los Angeles airport for the flight home.
The episode in Valmy stuck with me and in my creative writing class at East High School one day I wrote a story called “The Bus Don't Stop Here Anymore, Hardly Ever” that drew a bit on the real events but much more on some perceptions from the experience. Remember in the spring of 1968 the assassination of Martin Luther King and in June Bobby Kennedy. I then typed the story up and gave it to Jack Christensen, who was a great and gifted teacher. I thought he was going to tell me that it was the best thing I had ever written, instead in his handwriting it said “Nice Plot, NOW WRITE THE STORY.”
Fast forward to the fall of 1972, I am finishing up my academic work at Prescott College and am meeting with my faculty adviser. His name was Dr. A. Wilber Stevens and over my years at Prescott I had taken classes from him, had done many independent study projects with him and been to many dinner parties at his house and was even on a first name basis with his wife Marjorie. He was also for a time the Provost of Prescott College. We use to also make jokes about Wilber and pronounced it like the horse in the television show Mister Ed. WILLBUUR!
What we were discussing was the thesis I needed to do to full fill my graduation requirement. I thought about doing a major paper on some completely academic subject such as Taoist and Buddhist thought in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, (paralyzed force, gesture without motion,) or something along that line, but what I really wanted to do was to write a short Novel or Novella as we say in French, not that I speak French, although I wish that I could read French. Wow, that's a lot for very few words. My major was English Literature, almost a standard in my family, and my minor was Chinese History and I had even taken a year and a half of Mandarin. I also read hundreds of Novels of every description and would stay up late at night debating whether based on Aristotle's definition of tragedy, modern tragedy was possible or if Ezra Pound should receive a pardon for his war-time speeches. Since Prescott College was not a big school. (less than 400 Students in those days,) It was sometimes hard to find anyone else who had read the Magic Mountain or Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, and I could only discuss them with Professors and I have really only met a couple of women who enjoyed talking about Hans Castorp and his seven years on the mountain. To get credit for the Magic Mountain, all Dr. Stevens asked me to do was to sum up in as few words as possible what I had gleaned from the Magic Mountain. What I ended up quoting in a short paper was a couple of thoughts from a section or chapter of the book entitled “Snow.” I used these same quotes at the graveside service we had for Bob in December 1974. “ Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they. Man is more aristocratic than death, too aristocratic for death,, that is the freedom of his mind. Man is more aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and this is the piety in his heart. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.”
I ended up writing one section of the proposed thesis that fall, also I took a last class in Asian History and a class called Stable Management, where I learned about bits and bidding and how to age a horse and other useful things. The draft of the segment I gave him, met with his approval, it was somewhat based on a desert outing in my dune buggy during my second year of college, and the only thing he said when I left for the Christmas break, was that he needed my finished manuscript by about April 15th, to give him time to read it before the graduation ceremony in mid May. This meant that since I had finished all the necessary classes, the only added fee due to Prescott was about $150.00 for the reading of the thesis and that I had effectively finished college in 3.5 years. This pleased my father very much.
I ended up writing a short novella that I was not entirely pleased with and the ending seemed forced and it was, because I ran out of time. I found that without the day-to-day accountability that school provided I was fairly lazy, I still am, and I was also very involved with some projects with Bob having to do with cows, and real estate.
When I got down to Prescott a few days before graduation, I discussed my thesis with Dr. Stevens. I was quite surprised when he told me that he had accepted a new Professorship at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and was leaving Prescott at the end of May, and had not had time to really write-up anything for me, and promised that he would, but that he had shown the thesis to several other professors at Prescott and that I was going to get an Honors mark for it. At graduation, with no advanced warning I was also awarded the first, and to my knowledge the only Prescott College Award in Literature, which was really just a copy of ANNALS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1475-1950 with an inscription documenting the award.
I never did receive any of the promised written feed back about the thesis. I did hear from Dr. Stevens about his new life in Las Vegas and about show girls coming to class straight from performance; presumably with their pasties still attached, to talk about Chaucer, but he never sent me anything. I should have written him and asked and I am not sure why I never did. He ended up retiring from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and for many years he was the drama critic for one of the Vegas Papers and is in the hall of fame of Nevada Poets. I read about all this in his obituary.
I thought that I had lost the manuscript of this several years ago, I had a draft copy and had thought about trying to recreate it, but several months ago I found a copy of my submission from 1973. I have given it a new name and have made some minor changes. The main idea stems from the episode from 1968 in Valmy, Nevada. I wish that I had also given a copy of this to Jack Christensen.
I first read about this new division of Amazon, (Create-space) in the Wall Street Journal several months ago. I have also given some thought to writing the other half of this story, but have decided that since I am not the same person that I was back then, or am I, it would be somewhat contrived. And maybe there really is not any more to say. For any of you who may be interested, this can be ordered through the following link at createspace and Amazon directly and The Kindle Store.
So for what it may be worth. I present for men, women and precocious children of all ages, The Valmy Diaries! The following quote comes from the original short story I wrote in the fall of 1968.
“ THE DREAMING OF A YOUNG MAN, LIKE THE RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD ONE, INCOHERENT AND UNRELATED, BUT PART OF A LARGER PATTERN, FORMULATED, LATER ABANDONED, THE MAJESTY OF IT ALL”
www.createspace.com/3479183
