The Great Northern Express Read online

  BOOKS BY HOWARD FRANK MOSHER

  Disappearances

  Where the Rivers Flow North

  Marie Blythe

  A Stranger in the Kingdom

  Northern Borders

  North Country

  The Fall of the Year

  The True Account

  Waiting for Teddy Williams

  On Kingdom Mountain

  Walking to Gatlinburg

  The Great Northern Express

  Copyright © 2012 by Howard Frank Mosher

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,

  Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New England Press, Inc., for

  permission to reprint “The Trouble with a Son,” “The Waves,” and “Senior

  Year” from Star in the Shed Window: Collected Poems 1933—1988 by James

  Hayford (Shelburne, VT; The New England Press, Inc., 1989).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mosher, Howard Frank.

  The great northern express : a writer’s journey home / Howard Frank

  Mosher.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Mosher, Howard Frank. 2. Novelists, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3563.O8844Z46 2011

  813′.54—dc22

  [B] 2011015302

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45095-1

  Jacket design by Misa Erder

  Jacket photography by ICHIRO/Getty Images

  v3.1

  For my grandchildren,

  Frank James Williamson

  and

  True Hilton Williamson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part I: Faith

  Chapter 1: The Trip Not Taken

  Chapter 2: My MacArthur Fellowship Arrives

  Chapter 3: Treatment

  Chapter 4: I Decide to Hit the Road

  Chapter 5: Harold Who Calls Ahead

  Chapter 6: Where in the World is Kingdom County?

  Chapter 7: The Christly Kingdom

  Chapter 8: A Run of Hard Luck

  Chapter 9: More Woes of a Touring Writer

  Chapter 10: An Inauspicious Beginning

  Chapter 11: An Encounter

  Chapter 12: Chichester

  Chapter 13: New York

  Chapter 14: The Bad Boy and the Battle-ax

  Chapter 15: Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 16: Rescue Mission in the Land of the Blue and the Gray

  Chapter 17: Five Tips for Cancer Survivors

  Chapter 18: Gone Fishing

  Chapter 19: Two Writing Rebels

  Chapter 20: Unremaindered in the Cumberland Gap

  Chapter 21: The Long Apprenticeship

  Chapter 22: A Music Lesson

  Chapter 23: The Dickens of Beale Street

  Chapter 24: The Leonard Boys

  Chapter 25: The Poet and the Deerslayer

  Chapter 26: Versailles South and the [B]udget In[n]

  Part II: Hope

  Chapter 27: Taking Stock in Lucinda Williams Country

  Chapter 28: Two Lone Star Hitchhikers

  Chapter 29: Winter in the Kingdom

  Chapter 30: On the Austin City Limits with the West Texas Jesus

  Chapter 31: Why I Am a Cross-Country Skier, Part 1

  Chapter 32: Why I Am a Cross-Country Skier, Part 2

  Chapter 33: The Great Southwest

  Chapter 34: Sweeping Up in El Dorado

  Chapter 35: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dolt

  Chapter 36: The Parable of the Reluctant Samaritan from the Apocryphal Gospel of BOB

  Chapter 37: Searching for a Voice

  Chapter 38: Harry and Me

  Chapter 39: The Pacific Northwest

  Chapter 40: The Lords of Moss

  Chapter 41: Margery Moore

  Chapter 42: The Howard of Moses Lake

  Chapter 43: Sacagawea

  Chapter 44: Spring Comes to the Kingdom, Part 1

  Chapter 45: Spring Comes to the Kingdom, Part 2

  Chapter 46: Big Sky Country

  Chapter 47: Missoula

  Part III: Love

  Chapter 48: Mr. Quimby and Mr. F Nichols

  Chapter 49: The Continental Divide

  Chapter 50: The Great Northern Express

  Chapter 51: The Great Plains

  Chapter 52: Reading the Heartland

  Chapter 53: Chicago

  Chapter 54: Harry W. Schwartz: The Bookstore That Made Milwaukee Famous

  Chapter 55: The Legacy, Part 1

  Chapter 56: A Prairie Home Blockhead

  Chapter 57: Iowa City

  Chapter 58: Up in Michigan

  Chapter 59: The Legacy, Part 2

  Chapter 60: The Industrial Belt

  Chapter 61: Our Town

  Chapter 62: Pay Dirt

  Chapter 63: Resolution

  Chapter 64: Homecoming

  Chapter 65: The Apocryphal Book of Harold

  About the Author

  Introduction

  The Great Northern Express is a tale not of two cities but, give or take a few, of one hundred. Specifically, it is the story of the monumental book tour I made the summer I turned sixty-five. That journey was inspired by a much shorter trip: a walk up the street to our village’s tiny post office, where I received an unexpected letter.

  This is also the story of how my wife, Phillis, and I came to settle in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It, too, began with a journey: this one when we were just twenty-one, to interview for teaching jobs in the remote mill town of Orleans, in the northern Green Mountains just south of the Canadian border, where we planned to teach for a year or two, save some money, and then move on to graduate school.

  I have divided The Great Northern Express into three parts: Faith, Hope, and Love. Certainly, faith, hope, and love are what sustained me during a sojourn I feared might be my last. The sixty-five chapters here suggest how, upon reaching an age when many people think about retiring, or already have, I set out to rededicate myself to what has been my profession for more than four decades. Since I am, by both trade and personal inclination, a storyteller, each chapter tells a story.

  I have changed the names of a few of the people I have written about. In two or three cases I combined characters to further conceal actual identities. Like Henry David Thoreau, who in fact spent slightly more than two years at Walden Pond, which he compressed into one calendar year in Walden, I have also occasionally used experiences from earlier or later times in my life.

  The Great Northern Express is the story of how, as I traveled from coast to coast and border to border in the summer of my sixty-fifth year, two journeys seemed to meld into the narrative of one writer’s search, in his life and work, for the true meaning of home.

  1

  The Trip Not Taken

  My first home was a ghost town. Hidden away in a remote hollow of the Catskill Mountains, the company-owned hamlet of Chichester went bankrupt in 1939, three years before I was born. A few families, ours included, hung on for several more years. But without its once-prosperous furniture factory, which reopened a couple of times in my early boyhood only to shut down a few months later, Chichester was just another dying upstate mill town. By the time I turned five, the place was on its last legs, and loo
ked it.

  While many of my happiest memories date from those years in the Catskills—I caught my first trout in the stream behind our house when I was four, shagged foul balls for older kids at the overgrown diamond on the village green—from the fall when I entered first grade until my first year of high school, my family moved, by my count, ten times. My dad, a schoolteacher, had itchy feet, like Pa Ingalls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. After leaving Chichester, we Moshers would strike out for new territory every year or so. And although I never wanted to leave any of the towns where we temporarily alighted, I don’t recall thinking there was anything unusual about pulling up stakes at the end of every school year and relocating. In those days I was a ballplaying, daydreaming, reading little guy with a slew of imaginary companions, mostly from the books I devoured—Huck Finn, Treasure Island’s Jim Hawkins, David Copperfield. So long as our family stayed together and I could find a nearby trout brook, a ball field, and a steady supply of books to read, I didn’t care how often we moved.

  Still, I have always regarded Chichester as my hometown. If asked for a favorite early memory, I’d recall sitting between my dad and Reg Bennett in the front seat of Dad’s old, battleship-gray DeSoto on the mountaintop behind our house, trying to dial in the Yankees–Red Sox game on the car radio. As the house lights of the town below began to wink on in the twilight, and Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy waxed poetic about the Bronx Bombers or the boys from Beantown, Reg and Dad would talk baseball. Reg—my father’s best friend, fishing partner, and teaching colleague—was a second father and honorary uncle to me. In temperament, Dad and Reg were as different from each other as lifelong friends can be. My father was a big, outgoing, nonjudgmental man, comfortable with himself and others. A natural leader, he caught for the Chichester town baseball team, as he had for his high school nine. Reg was slighter in build and was several inches shorter. He was combative and, if wronged, quick to pick a fight. He pitched for the Chichester team. Over the years he had perfected a hard-breaking curve, which he could and frequently did use to brush aggressive hitters back from the plate or knock them down. Like my grandfather Mosher, my father had a romantic outlook on life, which I have inherited. Reg, for his part, was a realist, with an ironical turn of mind and a dry sense of humor that I loved.

  Reg loved to argue. My father did not. Sooner or later, though, Dad would be drawn into a debate, amicable enough at first, often over the relative merits of their two favorite players. Dad, a true-blue Yankee fan, was a Joe DiMaggio man. Reg was a devotee of Ted Williams. As the evening wore on and the game became heated—as Yankee–Red Sox games are wont to do—the baseball arguments between my father and uncle intensified. Soon they’d both get mad, stop addressing each other directly, and begin arguing by proxy, through me.

  “Howard Frank,” my uncle said—as a boy, I was often addressed by both names to distinguish me from my father, Howard Hudson—“Howard Frank, I am here to tell you that Ted Williams is the greatest pure hitter in the history of the game.”

  “Maybe so, Howard Frank,” my father shot back. “But you have my permission to inform your uncle that Joe DiMaggio is the most complete all-around player in the history of the game.”

  I usually said nothing. For one thing, I was only four. Also, though I already had a keen appreciation for my relatives’ many eccentricities, I didn’t like arguments any more than Dad did. Fortunately, about the time full darkness settled in, we would lose the radio broadcast altogether. Then I would ask my uncle to tell me a story.

  “Tell me a story” was my mantra, and Reg knew scores of good ones. Stories of the old bear hunters, ginseng gatherers, mountain guides, hermits, witches, and pioneer families who had settled Chichester. Like the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont when Phillis and I first arrived in the mid-1960s, Chichester in the ’40s and ’50s was a gold mine of stories. My feisty uncle was its Homer, as well as my first storytelling mentor. Reg was working on an anecdotal history of Chichester, and sometimes he would read aloud to me from the manuscript.

  Of all Reg’s stories, my favorite was the one that hadn’t yet happened. That was his description of the road trip he and I would take the summer I turned twenty-one. We’d start out in Robert Frost’s New England, then head for New York City, where my uncle’s favorite New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell, had chronicled the lives of his beloved gypsies, street preachers, and fish vendors. We’d visit the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-first Street, with its two stone lions guarding the main entrance. Next we’d strike out for the Great Smokies, Thomas Wolfe country—my uncle loved You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel. We’d drop by Oxford, Mississippi, and have a gander at Faulkner’s home, slope down to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s (The Yearling) Florida. Then we’d head for the American West—Reg, a huge fan of Zane Grey, would read me Grey’s Westerns by the hour. We’d walk the streets of Raymond Chandler’s LA and Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco, check out James T. Farrell’s Chicago (with a side visit to the Windy City’s great bookstore, Brentano’s,) take a look at Hemingway’s upper Michigan and Aldo Leopold’s Wisconsin. We’d eat at greasy spoons and roadside custard stands, stay at motor courts and tourist cabins. Throw our fly rods and baseball gloves in the backseat and see a ball game in every town that had a team.

  Our long-planned trip was no pipe dream, but my uncle and I never got to take that literary odyssey. By the time I turned twenty-one and graduated from college, Reg’s wife, my aunt Elsie, wasn’t well, and I’d gotten married and taken a teaching job in northern Vermont. Writing my way from book to book and decade to decade, I set most of my own fiction in my adopted Northeast Kingdom. I turned fifty. Then sixty. Approaching my sixty-fifth birthday, with regrets for the trip not taken, I began to feel that I had to do it now or never.

  Then, in the late autumn of my sixty-fifth year, came the walk to the post office that would change my life forever.

  2

  My MacArthur Fellowship Arrives

  MacArthur Fellowships are designed for talented individuals who have shown exceptional originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.

  —GUIDELINES OF THE JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP

  In this era of instant text messaging and walk-around cell phones clamped to our ears like alien appendages, most news, good and otherwise, arrives quickly. Still, I am certain that when my MacArthur Fellowship arrives, it will do so the old-fashioned way, by U.S. mail. One morning I will set out on my regular six-days-a-week walk to the post office, and there the notification will be. Likely it will come in a cream-colored envelope constructed of the highest-grade linen. My full name will appear on the front, perhaps with an “Esquire” tacked on in deference to a soon-to-be-Fellow. The foundation’s return address will be stamped in a discreet but stately font across the sealed flap on the back.

  Some years ago I heard that the MacArthur Fellowship carried a stipend of $350,000. Recently, someone told me they’d gone up to half a mil.

  “That ought to cover the gas for our cross-country trip,” I said on my way to the post office to pick up my grant that fateful fall morning.

  You see, I still like to talk out loud to myself. And to the gallery of companions that my mother tells me I’ve had since I was two. I will rattle along for hours on end to relatives living and deceased, friends and adversaries, other writers, even some favorite fictional characters, like rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove. This morning I was conversing with my storytelling mentor, Uncle Reg, who had passed away fifteen years before.

  Suddenly, an onrushing eighteen-wheeler blasted its air horn. Preoccupied by my conversation with Reg, I’d come within half a step of launching myself into the path of a log truck.

  “That was close,” the postmaster said to me.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You seemed to be talking to someone.”

  “Yes. I was … practicing. For an upcoming interview.”


  As I had expected—expected for the last twenty-five years, or so—here was the long-awaited cream-colored envelope. Why prolong the suspense? I tore the thing open with trembling fingers. But wait. So far from a “Dear Mr. Mosher, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is delighted to inform you that you have been awarded …,” so far from a notification that if I so chose, I could spend the rest of my life crisscrossing the United States in commemoration of the trip my uncle and I never made, what I found myself scanning was a notice from my physician informing me that the prostate count from my annual bloodwork was high. Anything over 4.0 can indicate cancerous activity. “See me immediately,” she had scrawled beside the 5.9 reading.

  “There it is, at long last,” said my uncle.

  “There is what?” I said.

  “Your MacArthur Fellowship,” he said. Then, “You need to have that taken care of right away, Howard Frank. Prostate cancer kills thirty thousand men a year in this country.”

  3

  Treatment

  Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer, as did my dad’s younger sister. My mother—now ninety-six and living on her own, just up the street from our house—has survived both breast and bladder cancer. But right here and now, I want to tell you that this is not a medical memoir. Nor is it, believe you me, an inspirational memoir extolling how, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a breakthrough procedure in radiation therapy, and a supportive family, I licked prostate cancer. Though in fact, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a remarkable new development in medical technology, and a very loving family, I may have done just that.

  In the grand old Mosher family tradition of high-spirited hopefulness, combined with what a book critic once called a “lunatic sense of humor,” I immediately began referring to my disorder, and to the treatment that followed, as my personal MacArthur Fellowship. The euphemism struck me as delightfully ghoulish, along the lines of the ancient Greeks referring to their gods’ dreaded and relentless agents of revenge as the “gentle” Furies.