A Stalker in the Night
Wednesday night was creepy.
After my duties were done in Sacramento I drove north through the center of a wide geographical corridor whose walls were distant mountains. The fields that lay between the ranges were patched with bright green crops, hemmed by fences and torn by brush lined creeks. Except for the mountains, it looked like parts of Kansas I have seen.
I had no place to be until about four o’clock the next day, and I was in (for me) uncharted territory. I’ve been to all fifty of our United States, and can easily recall distinctive impressions of each of them—Maine in winter with its sharp blue skies and numbing wind at the Portland Head lighthouse, where a man with a bagpipe played his mournful, majestic tune for the Atlantic; the rattlesnake coiled up on the trail in Albequerque; a field of soybeans in Indiana at dusk, swarming with so many fireflies you could almost drive without the headlights on; a hitchhiker who wanted to be dropped off on the shoulder of the interstate at the border of Tennessee and Alabama, where he said the woods were full of clean streams and thick old trees where a man could live quite happily for the rest of his life.
So now it was time to see what Northern California had to say. I had no hotel reservation, no advice from the locals as to what to avoid and what to seek out. The corridor of cultured land ended and my little rental car had no choice but to climb into the green backed mountains. The sun was setting. The towns grew sparser, and fewer exits boasted food or lodging. I started to imagine sleeping in the car, which wouldn’t have been that bad of an option except that I failed to bring my Swiss Army knife on this trip so I wouldn’t have any way to defend myself against the monsters of the wood, human or otherwise.
I pulled over at an exit with a motel called the Neu Lodge. “Neu” is fancier than “new”, I suppose. Right next door was a restaurant incongruously named Brewster’s Mexican Café. I rang the buzzer at the olde screene doore and listened. A lady in hair curlers with a cigarette between two fingers poked her head out of the back room, where an equivalent of Donahue prattled from the television set.
I asked for a room. She told me the price. I winced. It was about twice as much as I had expected, so I said no thanks. She asked what I had planned to pay. I told her, and she said, “Cash?” All I had was a credit card, so she waved me on, saying that the credit card fees were too high.
About thirty more miles up the road was a town called Dunsmuir, where, according to the welcome sign, a traveler like myself could find the best water in the world. I passed a Travelodge, then drove on through the little town to see what there was to see. A few empty bars, a few teenagers trying to look natural while smoking cigarettes in front of the vacant pizza joint, but other than that the streets were empty. It was barren as a ghost town. The town is situated on the side of a mountain, hunkered several hundred yards below the interstate and several hundred yards above whatever river it is that provides that impeccable water. It’s an in-between town. A town in stasis, mocked by the always moving rivers above it and below, the traffic and the water, forever going somewhere while poor Dunsmuir languishes.
I decided to stay. The town at night was so odd and quiet that I thought I might check in to the motel and go for a walk before going to sleep. That’s where this tale gets creepy.
Around ten thirty I made sure my key card was safe in my back pocket, lit my pipe, and went for a walk, during which I planned to pray, to think, and to work out some song ideas that have recently formed. The main street of the town is bordered by houses for several blocks (much like the mountains that bordered the plains near Sacramento). The blinds were open in many of the windows, and I could see people sitting on couches, silhouetted by light from their televisions. I could hear snippets of conversations. Then, only a block or so down from the hotel, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.
A little boy. A toddler wearing nothing but his diaper, standing on the sidewalk, alone, at night. He saw me. I looked up and down the street, hoping to see a parent nearby, but there was no one. “Where’s your mommy and daddy?” I called. He shrugged and pointed down the street. “Where do you live?” He shrugged again. I crossed to the center of street, speaking loudly to him so that anyone nearby would know I wasn’t being sneaky. Finally, from a nearby house, I heard a woman call for the boy. She emerged from the house, marched down the long steps to the street, and swooped him into her arms. “Everything okay?” I asked. “Yeah,” was all she said, and the screen door clapped behind her.
I walked down the hill, past the residences and to the town proper. The businesses were asleep for the night, but the prowlers of Dunsmuir were not. A two big Ford pickups blatted by, turned the corner, and disappeared. A white Volkswagen Bus puttered past in the opposite direction, looking for trouble, or love, wondering how it ended up so far from the California beaches where it belonged. The teenagers driving these vehicles slouched in their seats, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that unless they did something drastic they would grow old and die in this little town.
I reached the end of the town, still unsettled by the sight of that little boy, and decided to head back. It was at this point that I realized what a Hitchcockian scenario I was in. A traveler, alone, choosing a motel in this purportedly quaint little town for the night, unaware that he would never, ever leave. Suddenly my room at the Travelodge seemed the only safe place in the universe. About halfway back I heard voices. Two drunk men, staggering down the main street calling for someone, or something. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it sounded like a pig call: “Soueeeee!” In broad daylight it might have been funny, but now, echoing through the barren streets, it was unpleasant and even a little frightening. I wondered if I should’ve woken up Jamie to tell her where I was. The drunks staggered on and turned down a steep street that went to the dark river below. The Volkswagen passed me again.
A woman appeared, walking toward me and talking to herself. She passed me without a word, without acknowledging me with even a glance, making me wonder if perhaps I was invisible—had any of the town’s residents paid a lick of attention to me? I remembered the mother of the little boy. She had answered me. Good. I wasn’t a ghost, then. When the woman passed, I could smell in her wake marijuana smoke still clinging to her clothes and hair. Then I heard two cats fighting in the distance, an inhuman, garbling screech. Behind me, in one of the dark houses, a baby screamed, and screamed, and the sounds of the cats and the child grated against one another and against my ears, and made the world seem for a moment like it was very near its end.
I sped up. I could see the Travelodge sign a few blocks ahead. Then I saw something that once again stopped me in my tracks. Across the street, in a gravelly, abandoned parking lot, something was staring at me. I was not alone. I was being studied. A deer, a buck with a fine crown of antlers nodded its head as if in greeting. He took a few steps nearer, so that he stood on the opposite sidewalk, watching me curiously, as if he expected me to pull a sugar cube from my pocket and offer it to him. One of the giant pickup trucks rumbled by, passing directly between the buck and me. The driver looked neither left nor right, oblivious of the encounter playing out on the streets of his town. We were both ghosts, the deer and I. The sound of the truck faded, and still we stood, regarding each other. The deer trotted across the street at an angle away from me, his hooves making hardly a sound on the asphalt, and disappeared between two houses.
I lit my pipe again and strolled back to the motel, thankful for beauty, and for grace, and the way they prowl and glide the dark streets of lonely towns, even those tucked deep in the mountains, dispelling fear and worry, blessing the traveler with the assurance that there is yet a Great Good in the world, unstoppable, unquenchable, lithe as wind and bold as light.
Have no fear.
By the way, I had a fine omelet at a café in Dunsmuir the next morning. The town was charming, and the water was delicious.
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
You are a brave man. Why is it that reality is more thrilling than fiction? I guess it has more to do with consequences…
perfect, in every which way. perfect.
I am once again thoroughly impressed by your ability to tell a great story.
…and that’s why we keep coming back.
Waiting to hear this song…
This story is great, and had my attention, Andrew. Also, nice to hear of a fellow pipe smoker, thanks for sharing.
come to think of it, i’d like an entire book of this sort, please-and-thank-you. why don’t you get right on that.
Yes, indeed. While Bill Bryson’s approach to small-town America makes me laugh until I cry, I think I could do with someone else’s approach that might make me cry until I laugh.
I second the book request. After the Igiby’s have made their particular Shire a safe haven again, of course.
I think if you wrote the phone book I’d be enthralled. What a story teller you are! Yes, yes on the book! Oddly, I was born in Sacremento, but know nothing of the region-now I have some amazing mental pics. Thanks Andrew!
Yes. Yes to the story. Yes to a book. Yes to a song. We’ll try not to be greedy: you can choose which!
I saw that you were in Yreka, but I did not know you were in Sacramento (I live there). Was it a concert? Something at a local church? Or private event? I would love to attend one of your concerts! I love your music. I have driven by Dunsmir lots of times when I go up North on vacation. Never stopped though. Now next time I will have to. Your writing is captivating.
With the picture you posted with your story, I think I can see Guy Noir walking up to you just as the deer crossed the street.
Or perhaps Robert Stack…
Some of these descripts are fantastic. Thanks for writing this out man…
Great stuff! I felt like October 31st had come early there for a second…
You know the Merchant Man must have been silently watching the whole thing.
Nice narrative. I can’t believe you mentioned the soybeans! I just had the same experience in Indiana a few weeks ago. Fireflies over the soybeans at dusk. I was so moved by it I swore I had to put it into a song, but perhaps you’ll beat me to it.
Anyone ever mention that you should be a writer?
Really enjoyed this.
Becky
Barliman…excellent tale lad. I did some work in Northern CA many moons ago (Placerville, CA the county seat of El Dorado County) and had a similar creepy experience. Something about being “the stranger in town” that makes everything more strange that it really is. Of course it being dark and late at night just adds to the tension of the moment.
Also, I find it generous for a town to promote the purity of its water in a land that is usually in a drought.
Great stuff, AP. I’m glad you survived. (You did survive, didn’t you? Now I’m really weirded out.)
Forget Sufjan Stephens. YOU should write an album about each of the fifty states. Or at least a book, like some folks above mentioned. I think a book would even be better.
I’d buy it.
Oh, and what I loved about your story was that when you were alone and a bit creeped out, the one thing you saw was a deer. A Christ figure, you know. The antlers. Resurrection and rebirth. I find that part of the tale strangely comforting. Reassurance through an unlikely symbol. You were not alone. Providence.
And that is why Southern Californians refer to Northern California as… Southern Oregon.
Glad you survived and glad for the tale.
Augh! They ought to pass laws regulating the production and promulgation of writing as good as this.
Andrew - Great tale! Dunsmuir is one of my favoritest towns in Siskiyou County as far as charm goes! But, like many towns up here the charm is in the daytime and the night can be “dark”.
I’m so happy we got to see you in Yreka!!! Thank you for taking the time to play for us! It was just wonderful!
Blessings to you!
Did you say you smoke a pipe? You are in trouble now!
Interesting…
Are you sure you weren’t a ghost man for that night? Or possibly in a different dimension allowing you to see with “spiritual eyes?”
Just a thought…