Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Author:Tom Robbins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Feminism, Contemporary, Humour, Adult
ISBN: 9780553897890
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1976-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

59.

HE HEADED FOR THE PROVERBIAL HILLS. The Cascade Mountains lay to the west, across twenty or more miles of lava beds. The lava felt sharply familiar. Each rip in his shoes brought him closer to his childhood. All night, he jogged, walked, rested, jogged. At sunrise, Mt. Shasta, a cone of diamond ice cream, a volcano on a sabbatical, adorned (like the whooping cranes) with the power of white, was waiting. Encouraging him. An hour after dawn he was in tree-cover.

His plan was to follow the crest trail through the Cascades, down the full length of the Sierra Nevada and into Mexico. In the spring, perhaps, he would wetback into the U.S. again and work the crops. There weren't many farmers who could distinguish a Nip from a Spic, not under a straw hat, not with spine bent to the rutabagas. Alas, Mexico was a thousand miles away, the month was November, there was already snow at the higher altitudes, flop flap was the song of his shoes.

Fortunately, the Chink knew which plants to chomp, which nuts and mushrooms to toast over tiny minimum-smoke fires. As best he could he patched his shoes with bark. His journey went well for a week or more. Then, out of the mysterious dwelling place of weather, there rode an abrupt and burly storm. For a while it toyed with him, blowing in his ears, aging his normally black hair, hanging flakes artfully from the tip of his nose. But the storm was on serious business, and soon the Chink, crouched though he was in the lee of a cliff, realized that, by comparison, the passion of this storm to storm made puny his own desire to reach Mexico. Snow snow snow snow snow snow. The last thing a person sees before he dies he will be obliged to carry with him through all the baggage rooms of lasting death. The Chink strained to squint a sequoia or at least a huckleberry bush, but all his freezing eyes saw was snow. And the snow wanted to lie atop him as badly as any male ever wanted to lie on female.

The storm had its way with him. He lost consciousness trying to think of God, but thinking instead of a radiant woman cooking yams.

Of course, he was rescued. He was rescued by the only people who possibly could have rescued him. He was discovered, hauled in, bedded down and thawed out by members of an American Indian culture that, for several reasons, cannot be identified beyond this fanciful description: the Clock People.

It is not easy, perhaps, to accept the fact of the Clock People's existence. You might read through every issue of National Geographic since the Year One and not find an exact parallel to the Clock People's particular distinctions. However, if you think about it for a while—the way Sissy did, the way the author has—it becomes obvious that the civilizing process has left pockets of vacuum that only Clock People could have filled.

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