The Great Shark Hunt Part 26

Most everything I have to say, however, revolves in one way or another around questions of money. There seems to be a universal impression that I am on some sort of Divine Dole, and the theory that I often require money in order to make money has not gained wide acceptance. I trust you have sufficient background in Personal Economics to grasp the full meaning of this.

I could toss in a few hair-raising stories about what happens to poor Yanquis who eat cheap food, or the fact that I caught a bad cold to Bogota because my hotel didn't have hot water, but that would only depress us both. As it is, I am traveling at least half on gall. But in the course of these travels I have discovered that gall is not always the best currency, and there are times when I would be far better off with the other kind.

I am throwing this thing in your lap though I don't expect anyone to agree -- at a distance of several thousand miles -- with my certain knowledge that I am a paragon of wisdom, courage, decency, and visionary talent. On the other hand, I am working on my fourth case of dysentery, my stomach feels like a tree is growing in it, and I am medically forbidden to touch so much as a single beer.

Well, this is the longest letter I've written since I was in the Air Force and was sending love letters to a girl in Tallaha.s.see. I don't expect you to be altogether happy with this one, but then the girl wasn't always happy with hers, either, and we both survived.

Ah, it is noon now, check-out time, and I can hear the clang of the cash register across the patio as they rack up another $7 to Senor Thompson, the gringo with the messy room.

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR ECUADOR.

Things are not going well here, my man. I limped in Sat.u.r.day night after a spine-cracking train ride, and on Sunday discovered to my horror that the president and all the Guayaquil money men are leaving Wednesday for Was.h.i.+ngton. For this reason I am having a time seeing anyone -- or at least the right people.

Aside from that problem, I am beset by other forms of plague. One, I have not had any word from my New York secretary in two weeks so I have no idea how I stand at the bank. Thus I am afraid to cash a check. The first time I bounce one down here I might as well give up and go back to the States.

The moneyed community on this continent, which is what you have to deal with when you want to cash checks, is like Melville's circle of Genius -- which "all over the world stands hand to hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Which means, in my case, that if I bounce a check in Cali my reputation as a crook will precede me to Buenos Aires. So I have to be careful.

Optimism is a rare commodity here, and the daily hara.s.sments of life in Guayaquil are just about as much as a man should have to bear.

GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR ECUADOR.

This is to confirm my not particularly pointed observations during yesterday's phone call, which I appreciated a whale of a lot and all the more because I suspect you did it primarily to keep me from feeding myself to the giant turtles.

Now I feel better in the head, if not in the stomach. On Monday I will fly to Lima. I could go before that but Sat.u.r.day and Sunday are holidays and we just finished a five-day lull having to do with Ecuadorian history. These holidays are maddening; every time you turn around they are rolling down the store fronts and locking the offices. That, in addition to a noon to 4 p.m. lunch hour, makes work just about impossible.

I understand that while I was in Quito my secretary told you I was to Talara, Peru. I think the New York summer has affected her reason. Just for the record, I have never been near Talara and will do everything in my power to avoid it in the future.

LIMA, PERU.

I have a good peg on Peru. It may seem like heresy in Was.h.i.+ngton, but it is a fact that democracy is just about as popular here as eating live goldfish. I tell you now so you'll have time to ponder. (Some S S&?& has been throwing rocks at my window all night and if I hadn't sold my pistol I'd whip up the blinds and crank off a few rounds at his feet. As it is, all I can do is gripe to the desk.) The street outside is full of thugs, all drunk on pisco. In my weakened condition I am not about to go out there and tackle them like Joe Palooka. has been throwing rocks at my window all night and if I hadn't sold my pistol I'd whip up the blinds and crank off a few rounds at his feet. As it is, all I can do is gripe to the desk.) The street outside is full of thugs, all drunk on pisco. In my weakened condition I am not about to go out there and tackle them like Joe Palooka.

It is all I can do to swing out of bed in the mornings and stumble to the shower, which has come to be my only pleasure. I am beginning to look like the portrait of Dorian Gray; pretty soon I am going to have to have the mirrors taken out.

LIMA, PERU.

First, I want to a.s.sure you that I exist. There is at present 171 pounds of me -- down from 189 in Aruba -- and just about the same weight in luggage spread out around this room. I am barred once again from touching even a single beer, any fried foods, spices, pepper, and just about everything else except broiled meat and mineral water.

(Now this hotel doesn't have any more mineral water -- How long, O Lord, how long?) LA PAZ PAZ, BOLIVIA BOLIVIA.

I blew in yesterday in unholy shape. This awful spate of pain and sickness puts the fear of G.o.d in a man. The latest was the sting of a poison insect in Cuzco, paralyzing my leg as if I'd been hit by a 50-pound sting-ray. Anyway, after two visits to the clinic, much cortisone, many infrared lamps, and the inevitable drink-prohibiting antibiotics I was at least able to walk with a cane fas.h.i.+oned out of one of the legs of my camera tripod. That is the state I am in now. I hobble around La Paz like a vet from the Indian wars, averaging about 100 yards an hour on the flats and more like a turtle on the hills.

At the end of this week there will be no electricity in La Paz. Now it is rationed to the point where the United States Emba.s.sy, for one, has elevator service only every other day. This means I have to go up five flights of stairs on one leg, so I have been impressed with the gravity of the situation.

They work it so that every section of the city gets a turn at having electricity. So on some days you have hot water, elevators, lights, etc., and on some days you don't. If the electricity goes off completely, however, I may have to flee. It is bad enough having to walk up the stairs on the cane, without having no lights or hot water when I get here. Or heat, I might add, and La Paz is cold at Christmas.

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL.

I've been trying to get off a letter for about a week now, but have been hopping across jungle and Matto Grosso, touring oil camps, and spending all my money on antibiotics.

I figure, though, that every week I've spent in these countries is a week I won't have to spend the next time I go back. An investment, as it were, and now that I've survived this much of the thing I think I'd be kicking myself right now if I'd just skimmed through.

I definitely mean to base here -- for a while, anyway. It is about time I lived like a human being for a change.

National Observer, December 31, 1962 December 31, 1962 What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?

KETCHUM, I IDAHO.

"That poor old man. He used to walk out there on the road in the evenings. He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarra.s.sing to see him. I was always afraid a car would hit him, and that would have been an awful way for him to go. I was tempted to go out and tell him to be careful, and I would have if it had been anyone else. But with Hemingway it was different."

The neighbor shrugged and glanced at Ernest Hemingway's empty house, a comfortable looking chalet with a big pair of elk horns over the front door. It is built on a hillside looking down on the Big Wood River, and out across the valley at the Sawtooth Mountains.

A mile or so away, in a small graveyard at the north end of town, is Hemingway's simple grave, lying in the afternoon shadow of Baldy Mountain and the Sun Valley ski runs.

Beyond Baldy are the high pastures of the Wood River National Forest, where thousands of sheep graze in the summer, tended by Basque sheepherders from the Pyrenees. All winter long the grave is covered with deep snow, but in the summer tourists come out and take pictures of each other standing beside it. Last summer there was a problem with people taking chunks of earth for souvenirs.

When news of his death made headlines in 1961 there must have been other people besides myself who were not as surprised by the suicide as by the fact that the story was date-lined Ketchum, Idaho. What was he doing living there? When had he left Cuba, where most people a.s.sumed he was working, against what he knew was his last deadline, on the long-promised Big Novel?

The newspapers never answered those questions -- not for me, at any rate -- so it was with a feeling of long-restless curiosity that I came, last week, up the long bleak road to Ketchum, over the drainage divide between the Magic and the Wood River valleys, through Shoshone and Bellevue and Hailey -- Ezra Pound's hometown -- past Jack's Rock Shop on U.S. 93, and into Ketchum itself, population 783.

Anybody who considers himself a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America's most famous writer. He had been coming here off and on since 1938, until finally, in 1960, he bought a home just outside of town, and, not incidentally a 10-minute drive from Sun Valley, which is so much a part of Ketchum that they are really one and the same.

The answers might be instructive -- not only as a key to Hemingway, but to a question he often pondered, even in print. "We do not have great writers," he explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa. Green Hills of Africa. "Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. . . You see we make our writers into something very strange. . . We destroy them in many ways." But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being "destroyed," and so he never understood how to avoid it. "Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. . . You see we make our writers into something very strange. . . We destroy them in many ways." But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being "destroyed," and so he never understood how to avoid it.

Even so, he knew something had gone wrong with both himself and his writing, and after a few days in Ketchum you get a feeling that he came here for exactly that reason. Because it was here, in the years just before and after World War II, that he came to hunt and ski and raise h.e.l.l in the local pubs with Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and all the other celebrities who came to Sun Valley when it still loomed large on cafe society's map of diversions.

Those were "the good years," and Hemingway never got over the fact that they couldn't last. He was here with his third wife in 1947, but then he settled in Cuba and 12 years went by before he came again -- a different man this time, with yet another wife, Mary, and a different view of the world he had once been able "to see clear and as a whole."

Ketchum was perhaps the only place in his world that had not changed radically since the good years. Europe had been completely transformed, Africa was in the process of drastic upheaval, and finally even Cuba blew up around him like a volcano. Castro's educators taught the people that "Mr. Way" had been exploiting them, and he was in no mood in his old age to live with any more hostility than was necessary.

Only Ketchum seemed unchanged, and it was here that he decided to dig in. But there were changes here too; Sun Valley was no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league. "People were used to him here," says Chuck Atkinson, owner of a Ketchum motel. "They didn't bother him and he was grateful for it. His favorite time was the fall. We would go down to Shoshone for the pheasant shooting, or over on the river for some ducks. He was a fine shot, even toward the end, when he was sick."

Hemingway didn't have many friends in Ketchum. Chuck Atkinson was one of them, and when I saw him one morning in his house on a peak overlooking the town, he had just received a copy of A Moveable Feast. A Moveable Feast. "Mary sent it from New York," he explained. "I read part of it after breakfast; it's good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff." "Mary sent it from New York," he explained. "I read part of it after breakfast; it's good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff."

Another friend was Taylor "Beartracks" Williams, a veteran guide who died last year and was buried near the man who gave him the original ma.n.u.script of For Whom the Bell Tolls. For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was "Beartracks" who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days when "Papa" was still a meat-hunter. It was "Beartracks" who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days when "Papa" was still a meat-hunter.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway has acquired quite a few friends since his death. "You're writing a story on Ketcb.u.m?" asked a bartender. "Why don't you do one on all the people who knew Hemingway? Sometimes I get the feeling I'm the only person in town who didn't."

Charley Mason, a wandering pianist, is one of the few people who spent much time with him, mainly listening, because "When Ernie had a few drinks he could carry on for hours with all kinds of stories. It was better than reading his books."

I met Mason in the Sawtooth Club on Main Street, when he came in to order coffee over the bar. He is off the booze these days and people who know him say he looks 10 years younger. As he talked, I had an odd feeling that he was somehow a creation of Hemingway's, that he had escaped from one of the earlier short stories.

"He was a h.e.l.l of a drinker," Mason said with a chuckle. "I remember one time over at the Tram [a local pub] just a few years ago; he was with two Cubans -- one was a great big Negro, a gun-runner he knew from the Spanish Civil War, and the other was a delicate little guy, a neurosurgeon from Havana with fine hands like a musician. That was a three-day session. They were blasted on wine the whole time and jabbering in Spanish like revolutionaries. One afternoon when I was there, Hemingway jerked the checkered cloth off the table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They'd whirl and jerk the cloth around -- it was a h.e.l.l of a sight."

On another evening, out at Sun Valley, Mason took a break on the stand and sat down for a while at Hemingway's table. In the course of the conversation Mason asked him what it took "to break in on the literary life, or anything else creative, for that matter."

"Well," said Hemingway, "there's only one thing I live by -- that's having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out." He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war.

That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Pa.s.sos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.

Today we have Mailer, Jones, and Styron, three potentially great writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway's, by the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.

It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.

Hemingway was not a political man. He did not care for movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on individuals in a world that seemed far less complex, prior to World War II, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts -- to blacks and whites, as it were, and he was not comfortable with the mult.i.tude of gray shadings that seem to be the wave of the future.

It was not Hemingway's wave, and in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says Mason, why he hadn't been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least, he had mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non-political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the pressures of a world gone mad, and "write truly" about life as he had in the past.

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tyc.o.o.n Last Tyc.o.o.n was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him. was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years. Aside from the brute beauty of the mountains, he must have recognized an atavistic distinctness in the people that piqued his sense of dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village, especially in the off season with neither winter skiers nor summer fishermen to dilute the image. Only the main street is paved; most of the others are no more than dirt and gravel tracks that seem at times to run right through front yards.

From such a vantage point a man tends to feel it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole. Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid -- like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.

Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him -- not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

National Observer, May 25, 1964 May 25, 1964 Living in the Time of Alger, Greeley, Debs Old-Time Boomers Still Stomp the West, but Air Conditioning's Better PIERRE, S.D. S.D.

I had met the tramp digger the night before. And because he was broke and I wasn't, I bought him a hotel room so he wouldn't have to sleep in the gra.s.s beside the road to Spokane. But instead of traveling the next day, he took what was left of his cash and sat by himself on a stool at the Thunderbird Bar in downtown Missoula, sullenly nursing his drinks as he had the night before, and putting his change in the juke box, which can be a very expensive machine for those who need steady noise to keep from thinking.

It was four in the morning when he knocked on the door of my hotel room. "Sorry to bother you, pard," he said. "I heard your typewriter going, but I just got lonely, you know -- I had to talk to somebody."

"Well," I said, not really surprised to find him still in town, "I guess we could both use some coffee. Let's go to the Oxford, it's open all night." We went down the stairs of the silent hotel and through the lobby where a sleepy desk clerk looked up and wondered, with that bailiff s leer that desk clerks have been cultivating since the beginning of time, just what sort of a journalist I was if it was necessary to have vagrants calling on me at this rude hour on a chill Montana morning.

Which may be a valid question. But then somebody else might ask what sort of a journalist would spend six weeks traveling around the West and not write about Bobby Cleary, the tramp digger with no home and a downhill run to a guaranteed early grave; Bob Barnes, the half-deaf wildcat trucker who never understood that his life was a desperate game of muscial chairs; or the lean, stuttering redhead from Pennsylvania who said his name was Ray and had hitchhiked West to find a place "where a man can still make an honest living."

You will find them along the highways, in the all-night diners, and in the old bra.s.s-rail bars that still serve 10-cent beer -- a motley, varied, and always talkative legion of men who fit no pattern except that they all seem like holdovers from the days of the Great Depression. You will not find them any place where men wear suits and ties or work at steady jobs. These are the boomers, the drifters, the hard travelers, and the tramp diggers who roam the long highways of the West as regularly and as stoically as other men ride the subways of New York City. Their work is where they find it, their luggage is rarely more than one small suitcase or a paper sack, and their view of the future is every bit as grim as it is limited.

These are the people who never got the message that rugged individualism has made some drastic adjustments in these hyper-organized times. They are still living in the era of Horace Greeley, Horatio Alger and in some cases, Eugene Debs. They want no part of "city living," but they have neither the education nor the interest to understand why it is ever more difficult for them to make a living "out here in the open." The demise of the easy-living, independent West has made them bitter and sometimes desperate. In the old days a man with abnormal variety of skills could roll into any Western hamlet or junction and find an odd job or two that would pay his way and usually provide a little margin to spend with the local sports.

Today it takes a union card before you can talk turkey with most construction foremen, and many of the big companies have a hard core of regulars who move from one project to another. You see them on the highways in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas, caravans of pickups pulling house trailers, flat-beds hauling bulldozers, and hard-faced men from California and Texas with their families in the cab and their automobiles riding high in the beds of big dump trucks en route from an interstate highway job in Montana, for instance, to a dam-building project in Colorado.

This is the well-paid elite of the transient construction industry that is getting fat on Federal projects that more and more Western states are coming to view as economic necessities.

Some people accuse Western governors, senators, and representatives of dipping into the "pork barrel," but others say these projects are no more than prudent allocations of the taxpayers' money for necessary construction that Western states either cannot or will not afford. At any rate it is a big industry in the West, a money tree for a lot of people including the foremen and the skilled heavy-equipment operators who make up the construction elite -- and a ma.s.sive source of both hope and frustration to the boomers, drifters, and other free-lance laborers who go high on the hog when they get hired, and live like hobos when they don't.

"Bud," the broad-shouldered, pot-bellied cat driver, was not unhappy with life when I met him in a big dance hall in Jackson, Wyo. He was wearing an expensive gray Stetson and a pair of fancy cowboy boots that had not made much of a dent in his $200-a-week salary on the road-building job outside of town. In the course of an hour he asked about 30 girls to dance, got turned down by at least 25, and spent the rest of his time posing regally at the bar, dispensing wisdom and humor in every direction. At one point he let his gaze flash over the crowd and p.r.o.nounced in the manner of a man long-skilled in the squandering of vast sums: "These d.a.m.n silly tourists think they're big spenders! Ha! We'll see." At that, he swept his change off the bar and disappeared.

The tramp digger in Missoula had not been so lucky. He wore a cheap, frayed windbreaker that was all but useless in the bitter nights of a late Rocky Mountain spring. He was tall, with the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a man who works with his back, but his eyes were dull in a slack face, and he walked with a weary shuffle that made him seem like an old man at 26.

As we walked along the deserted sidewalks of Higgins Avenue I asked him what plans he had. "I don't know, pard," he said with a shrug and a half smile, "maybe California, maybe Utah, it's all the same. I'll just hit the road when it gets light. There's always work for a good hard-rock digger."

Bobby Cleary was a specialist of sorts; as a tramp digger he is a body for hire in any kind of dangerous, underground work. He had come over from b.u.t.te where he said he was black-listed in the mines because he had quit too often. There was no work in Missoula, he was stone broke, and his prospects for the immediate future were not real bright. Now he looked up at the sky that was already getting gray, took the b.u.t.t of an old cigaret from behind his ear, lit it, and recited what seemed to be his motto: "That's the way it goes -- first your money, then your clothes."

He had said it several times the night before, when we had struck up a conversation in the Thunderbird after he had frightened everybody else at the bar with a loud diatribe on "justice for the working man, by Jesus. My old man fought for the union and one of these days I'm gonna write it all down like Jack London. By Jesus he cared. He knew what it was like, and how about another whisky here, fella, for a no-count tramp digger!"

In the Oxford Cafe -- or "The Ox," as it is called by its generally unemployed and often homeless habitues -- I ordered coffee, and Cleary asked for "a bowl of beans." He looked at me and grinned: "I figure you're buyin', pard. Otherwise I'd have ordered a gla.s.s of water and crackers," he nodded. "Starch and water, it fills the belly."

I reached in the pocket of my leather sheepherder's jacket, pulled out a black, pa.s.sport-sized wallet, and put two dollars on the counter. In the dreary dawn of a hobo's breakfast at the Oxford Cafe, that wallet seemed as out of place as a diplomatic pouch or a pair of cashmere Levi's.

It was a week or so later when the wallet embarra.s.sed me again. I had picked up an elderly hitchhiker named Bob Barnes on Interstate 90 near the cattle town of Miles City, Mont. We stopped for gas at the North Dakota line, and I left the wallet on the dashboard while I wired up a defective m.u.f.fler. When I got back in the car he said very quietly: "That's a real nice wallet; where did you get it?"

"Buenos Aires," I said, then immediately added, "Things are cheap down there." But I had not been quick enough and it showed in his face; here was a young punk with a fat black wallet, idly pulling rank on an old man who felt himself going down and out, for some reason that was either senseless or cruel, or both.

Bob Barnes was an ex-truck driver, who looked like an aging school-teacher. He was too old now for any chance of a job with the big hauling companies, but still able to work as a "wildcatter," which is like saying a pitcher cut loose by the Yankees might still catch on with the Mets. He had borrowed some money to come out from Minneapolis to Great Falls, Mont., where he had an old friend who owned a small trucking firm and would give him a job. But the friend had moved to California and nothing else was available -- at least not before his money ran out, and when that happened he began riding his thumb back to Minneapolis with not even a toothbrush or a pack of cigarets for luggage, and not a dime in his pocket.

When I picked him up around noon on Sat.u.r.day, he had not eaten since Friday morning. "Every time I walked past one of those highway restaurants I thought about going in and asking if I could wash dishes for a meal," he said, "but I just couldn't do it. I'm not a b.u.m and I don't know how to act like one."

We were together all afternoon, a long hot drive across the plains and the badlands to Bismark, but it was late in the day before he finally got around to admitting that his trip was not a lark of some kind.

When he finally began talking about himself, I wished he hadn't. His wife had been killed two years earlier in an automobile accident. Since then he had been a drifter, but it was a hard dollar for a man in his 50s, and this wild stab at a job in Montana was his last real idea what to do with himself. When he got back to Minneapolis he thought he could "arrange a loan until things get better."

Unlike the other boomers I met, Bob Barnes has gone the whole route and found it pretty barren in the homestretch. He has pushed big timber trucks through blizzards in northern Minnesota and driven straight through from Florida to Chicago with a load of tomatoes that would spoil if he stopped to sleep. He has driven every kind of rig on every major highway in the nation. He knows the names of waitresses in truck stops in Virginia and Texas and Oregon. And he can tell you how to get from New York to Los Angeles with a heavyweight load by taking back roads and avoiding the truck scales; there is only one route left, and only a few veteran wildcatters know it.

I dropped him at the Salvation Army in Bismarck, where he could get a bowl of soup and a cot for the night before striking out again in the morning for Minneapolis. We shook hands and wished each other good luck. I felt like a pious hypocrite and drove off rapidly, without looking back.

Several days later, on the flat black ribbon that runs from Bismarck down the prairie to Pierre, I picked up a young, happy-go-lucky type from Pennsylvania. He had just quit a hay-hauling job in North Dakota and was on his way to Los Angeles, where he felt sure of getting a job.

Maybe so, I thought, but I hope I don't have to pick you up in 10 years when they've really tightened the screws, because the day of the boomer is rapidly coming to an end. In the age of automation and job security, a touch of the wanderl.u.s.t is the kiss of death. In any count of the chronically unemployed the boomers will be very prominent; they have never sought security, but only work; they have never saved, but only earned and spent -- partic.i.p.ating, as it were, in an increasingly technological economy that has less and less room for their sort with every pa.s.sing year.

When we got to Pierre I dropped the young optimist and his blue plastic suitcase on the south side of town. He got out in the middle of a small dust storm and pointed his thumb toward Los Angeles.

I returned to the Holiday Inn -- where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms -- to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminis.h.i.+ng band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

National Observer, July 13, 1964 July 13, 1964

Marlon Brando and the Indian Fish-In OLYMPIA, W WASH.

"As an actor, he's not much of a field general." That was the consensus here last week after Marlon Brando's well-publicized but futile and disorganized attempt to help local Indians "regain" fis.h.i.+ng rights granted them more than 100 years ago under treaties with the U.S. Government.

The old Governor Hotel, just down the street from the State Capitol, was almost taken over by Indians who came from every corner of the nation to protest "encroachment" on their historic treaty rights. The show was billed as the turning point for the American Indian in this century. Said one of the leaders: "Up to now we've always been on the defensive, but now we've reached a point where it's life or death for the Indian culture, and we've decided to take the offensive."

Early rumors had it that not only Mr. Brando, but Paul Newman, James Baldwin, and Eugene Burd.i.c.k would be on hand to offer moral support and draw publicity. But of the four only Mr. Brando showed up, along with writers Kay Boyle and Paul Jacobs from San Francisco, and the Rev. John J. Yaryan, canon precenter of San Francisco Grace Cathedral. The canon arrived with a white bucket marked "bait," and the blessing of his bishop, James A. Pike. The idea was to stage a "fish-in" for the Indian cause.

More than 50 tribes were represented by some 500 Indians at the gathering, and one of the leaders said happily that it was the first time Indians had demonstrated any unity since the battle of Little Big Horn.

This time, though, things didn't go so well for the red man. Mr. Brando led the Indians in three separate a.s.saults against "the forces of injustice," and they lost all three. By week's end, the show had fizzled out and Mr. Brando was off in the wilderness of the northwest Olympic Peninsula, trying to get himself arrested again and prove some point that had long since been lost in the chaos that characterized the affair from beginning to end.

Even so, the thing was a qualified success almost in spite of itself. Among the important results were: -- A new feeling of unity among Indians, where previously there had been none.

-- Plenty of publicity for the Indian cause, thanks largely to Mr. Brando's presence.

-- The emergence of a new, dynamic leaders.h.i.+p in the form of the National Indian Youth Council.

-- Emergence of the fact that the Indian wants no part of the Negro civil-rights cause and will make every effort to detach himself from it.