One night in bed, after my train ride, our mother said to her husband, “He hung on to that train all the way to Sawmill. Seven miles in freezing cold. Then got off and walked home. At night. A ten-year-old boy. Who would you say is dogged now, Joe?”

Joe Lightcap stared through the moonlit gloom at the ceiling and thought about it. After a while he said, “Lorrie, there’s dogged and there’s stupid. Will is dogged.”

“I see.”

Joe lay back and thought some more. “Henry ain’t stupid though. That’s what worries me. He’s in for a life of lots of complicated complications.”

My mother smiled to herself. “At least it won’t be a dull life.”

A pause. “Just what do you mean by that, Lorrie?”

Another pause. “Only what I said.”

Hallelujah on the Bum

IN THE SUMMER of 1944, the year before the year I fell in love, I hitchhiked from Pennsylvania to Seattle by way of Chicago and Yellowstone National Park; from Seattle down the coast to San Francisco; and from there by way of Barstow and Needles via boxcar, thumb and bus through the Southwest back home to the old farm, three months later. I started out with twenty dollars in my pocket and a piece of advice, cryptic I’d say, from my old man: “Don’t let anybody take you for a punk.” I didn’t know what he meant. I was seventeen: wise, brown, ugly, shy, poetical; a bold, stupid, sun-dazzled kid, out to see the country before giving his life in the war against Japan. A kind of hero, by God! Terrified but willing.

Chicago. A good truck driver took me through the core of the city, right through the Loop, and even in the summer it seemed to me the bleakest, hardest, coldest town I’d ever seen; I’ve never been back. In Minnesota I was picked up by a kindly middle-aged shoe salesman who tried to seduce me; I didn’t understand what he wanted and resisted his timid advances. I was so innocent, so ignorant, I had never even heard of homosexuality. Maybe that is what saved me. Meantime I was scribbling, scribbling, keeping a log all the way, suffering already the first pangs of the making of books.

From The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West (1977)

South Dakota. Broke. I stacked wheat for ten days under the summer sun, huge sheaves heavy with dew, and got sick drinking the hard artesian water. In a little town named Pierre I stopped in a drugstore near the capitol for a thin wartime vanilla milkshake. A group of giant plainsmen in gabardine suits and big hats sat near me drinking coffee, talking politics. One introduced himself to me, said he was the governor of South Dakota. I believed him. He was.

Through the Badlands. Another milkshake at Wall’s. On to Wyoming, where near Greybull I saw for the first time something I had dreamed of seeing for ten years. There on the western horizon, under a hot, clear sky, sixty miles away, crowned with snow (in July), was a magical vision, a legend come true: the front range of the Rocky Mountains. An impossible beauty, like a boy’s first sight of an undressed girl, the image of those mountains struck a fundamental chord in my imagination that has sounded ever since.