The Traveling Feast by Rick Bass

The Traveling Feast by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-06-05T04:00:00+00:00


We’re up early. After a quick breakfast of toast and coffee, Gary shuffles a great stack of his books he has assembled to give us. One by one he ticks through them, asking if we’ve read them, and if not, he inscribes each one, loading us up with the bounty of his mind.

He’s got little books that few people have heard of, books of all sizes and shapes, books written about whatever he pleased. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, and The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia. He arranges the stacks like a card dealer. Two more for Erin, three more for me, another for Erin, and another. Feeling gluttonous, giddy, mortified, I ask him to sign one for Lowry, and he does that too; how I wish she was here.

Erin and I are feeling the pull of the road. Ahead of us awaits an overnight drop-in at the home of famed landscape painter Russell Chatham, in the remote, winding hills of Marin County, overlooking Tomales Bay. And following that a visit to the Oregon home of Barry Lopez and his wife, Debra Gwartney. But beyond the schedule, there’s also the code of manners, which is nearly lithified in both Erin and me: Don’t overstay your welcome.

Gary, however, has other designs. He’s warming to this idea of apprenticeship. He keeps signing books, sliding them across the table to us as if loading us up with food for our journey. I want to believe that greatness can have an element of sloth, but Gary is so neat, so precise, that he ledgers into a special notebook the date and other specifics of this gifting.

“I wish we had done this more,” he says, speaking of the old days. “I wish we’d had more of these conversations.”

This surprises me. My image of the ’50s and ’60s is of nothing but deep talk. In my mind, On the Road is a nonstop celebration of art and artists—but in the rereading, it does come across as more of a rolling drift, with an emphasis, then as now, on how to come up with money for gas and food; how to make ends meet and when the next meal will be.

Kerouac departed the world early, before he was fifty. What would he be doing today if he had avoided drinking himself to death? Could he have weathered as well as Gary? Can I imagine the two of them sitting in the shade on a hot California day, two old men playing cards and talking as the grasshoppers clack and spur past in the yellow sun? It’s hard to picture. Gary feels like the last of the last, strong and powerful into old age, ablaze now as he was in the beginning.

We’re at the car, making preliminary gestures toward leaving, when Gary asks us if we’d like to see his Zendo; as if he, too, wants to leave no stone unturned. If you are to know me, you should know this.



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