Somewhere Down the Crazy River

Black Book 110, April 6, 2022

I’m thinking of all the strange places I’ve spent the night: On a deer stand in northern Michigan. In the primitive wooden press box of a high school football field on Indian Reservation land in South Dakota, miles from the closest town. In a rusting poutine trailer behind an abandoned automobile garage somewhere in Quebec. In a teepee in the middle of a junkyard outside Buffalo, Wyoming. In the carport of a burned-out house on the Natchez Trace. Aboard a retired freight engine in an industrial scrapyard on the outskirts of Helena, Montana. In the bed of a pick-up truck on the top deck of a Burlington Northern car carrier going down the Mississippi River. In the bowels of a dry-docked and thoroughly ransacked trawler somewhere way north in Norway. In a gutted telephone booth at a long-closed truck stop in the Yukon (I was stuck there while hitchhiking, and was trying to get out of the rain).

In all the years I spent restlessly traveling back and forth across the U.S. and Canada, I was always looking for a certain feeling—or, really, a torrent of feelings—and I knew that if I had any hope of finding that feeling I had to push myself outside of Minnesota and the discomfort zone of my life there.

In a nutshell, I’d describe what I was looking for as a “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” feeling. Or a Robert Aickman, film noir (“Out of the Past”), “Anthology of American Folk Music” feeling. For years I carried a copy of the original edition of Richard Ford’s Rock Springs in my backpack, because the cover photo (and the stories in the book) somehow captured exactly what I was after.

For decades I found that feeling all over the South, especially down in the Mississippi Delta, the Florida Panhandle, and up and down the Apalachicola River. I’ve found it in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Upstate New York, and in small towns all over the West, throughout the Rocky Mountains, and in New Mexico and Texas.

I learned I couldn’t find that feeling unless I got off the interstate highways and into the American bush country along the state and county roads.

I always thought of that feeling as an American feeling, but I’ve also found it in little towns and villages all over Canada, Europe, and Scandinavia. You can also, of course, find it very easily in Mexico.

Most of the stories and books and movies that really resonate with me have something of this feeling as well. It’s a feeling, really, of being lost or disoriented in the best possible way, and for a long, long time I could count on being able to access that feeling, in concentrated doses, at least a handful of times a year. Finding it was always the goal behind all of my wanderlust. Wandering and getting lost has always fueled my creativity, stirred up inspiring ideas and images, and rekindled my faith in the pure possibilities of America. How could I ever find myself if I didn’t first get good and truly lost?

I remember following voices or laughter or music down an otherwise dark and empty street somewhere unfamiliar and stumbling across a basement bar, pool hall, boxing gym, or a poker game in the cramped office of a grain elevator. Driving through impenetrable fog and discovering a crossroads juke joint where a raucous shrimp boil was under way. Stopping at a throwback gas station in the quiet middle of nowhere and encountering a dwarf stretched out facedown on the counter and receiving a massive tattoo of the Last Supper across the pronounced hump at the top of his spine. Waiting to use the phone booth outside a convenience store in west Texas while a half-naked woman sitting on a metal stool outside the booth was simultaneously engaged in a loud and contentious telephone conversation and shearing a large poodle with an electric razor.

Or driving into a small town in northeastern Montana, very late at night, and sensing that the entire place was uninhabited, no signs of life or light anywhere, until I finally got a guy to answer the phone at the town’s only listed motel.

“We’re not really open,” he said, “but come on over and I’ll set you up with a room.”

I then drove around and around the little town until I finally found the place, a one-story cinderblock strip motel practically hidden in a scrub lot full of weeds and garbage. The sign out front looked like it was in the process of being dismantled for scrap. The clerk—or owner, or whatever—was sitting in a dark room off the lobby, watching “Sunset Boulevard” on VHS, and I ended up sitting up with him and watching the entire movie, drinking beer, eating a frozen pizza, and shooting the shit.

There was also the time I drove for hours in the darkness trying to find a place to sleep—where the hell was I?—and I finally stopped to ask a guy who I saw working by lamplight in his garage, and he said my dog and I could spend the night in a trailer parked just up the road at an abandoned drive-in theater. “It’s clean,” he said. “I just had it out at the lake a couple weekends ago. The electricity’s hooked up as well.”

He gave us a key and sent us on our way, and it was glorious, sitting out there under a planetarium sky and staring at that huge empty screen all night.

Another night, somewhere in southern Colorado, I stayed at a throwback park-at-your-door motel right next to a lot where a ragged carnival had set up shop. I ended up spending almost a week there, and it was a party every night, carnies, road crews, prostitutes, and drunks from the local Air Force base coming and going at all hours. It was a straight-up film noir set.

Over the years I met so many people who were drinking and grilling right outside the doors of their motel rooms, and had so many fascinating and unhinged conversations with those people. I once played parking lot Wiffle Ball long into the gloaming with a bunch of kids who were living in the Section 8 rooms of a motel in Greenwood, Mississippi, and later that night two local kids—Wink and Dizza—who were out cruising around took me out into the dark countryside to visit Robert Johnson’s grave at the Little Mount Zion church cemetery.

Perhaps most memorably, back in my serious drinking days I once spent a night in a motel where the Flying Wallendas were also staying. This was shortly after they had staged a highwire walk across some waterfall. It was a long night (I stayed up late drinking with members of the Wallenda entourage, one of whom I now, for some reason, recall was named Hayglow), and when I poked my head out of my room in the morning, a cafe across the street was on fire (no connection, I'm pretty sure, to the Flying Wallendas). At some point in that night there was a lively and drunken conversation about cradle-fighting hyenas, and another story about a guy who once got so drunk that he ate the air freshener in his car. I also remember that the old patriarch of the Wallenda family spent the entire evening sitting silently in a chair outside his motel room, and sometimes appeared to have dozed off. This was, I believe, the same man who once uttered the quote that I kept in my wallet for many years: "Life is on the wire. The rest is just waiting."

It saddens me that I have such a hard time even imagining that fierce and reckless younger version of myself, and that I now have an even more difficult time tapping into that strange and beautiful version of America, but at least a couple times a year I can still push myself enough to discover that it’s still out there, waiting for some wild-eyed kid to discover it.