We're on our way man out of town go hitching down that highway 99 Too cold and rainy to go out on the Sound Sitting in Ferndale drinking coffee Baxter in black, been to a funeral Raymond in Bellingham- Helena Hotel- Can't go to Mexico with that weak heart Well you boys can go south. I stay here. Fix up a shack- get a part-time job- (he disappeared later maybe found in the river) In Ferndale & Bellingham Went out on trail crews Glacier and Marblemount There we part.Tiny men with mustaches driving ox teams deep in the cedar groves wet brush, tin pants, snoose- Split-shake roof barns over berry fields white birch chicken coop Put up in Dick Meigs cabin out behind the house- Coffeecan, PA tin, rags, dirty cups, Kindling fell behind the stove, miceshit, old magazines, winter's coming in the mountains shut down the show the punks go back to school and the rest hit the road- strawberries picked, shakeblanks split fires all out and the packstrings brought down to the valleys: set loose to graze. Gray wharves and hacksaw gothic homes Shingle mills and stump farms overgrown.
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Fifty weary Indians Mount Vernon Sleep in bus station Strawberry pickers speaking Kwakiutl turn at Burlington for Skagit; Ross Dam under apple trees by the river banks of junked cars BC Riders give hitchhikers rides "The sheriff's posse stood in double rows Everett flogged the naked Wobblies down with stalks of Devil's Club; run them out of town" While shingle weavers lost their fingers in the tricky feed and take of double saws. Dried, shrimp Seattle smoked, salmon -before the war old Salish gentleman came; sold us kids rich hard-smoked Chinook from his flatbed model T Lake City, waste of trees; topsoil, beast, herb, edible roots, Indian field- farms; white men dances washed, leached, burnt out minds blunt, ug! talk twisted a night of the long poem and the mind guitar "Forming the new society within the shell of the old"
mess of tincan camps and littered roads. The Highway passes straight through every town at Matsons washing bluejeans hills and saltwater ack, the woodsmoke in my brain (high Olympics- can't go there again) East Marginal Way the hitchhike zone Boeing down across Duwamish slough and angle out; on.
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Night rain wet concrete headlights blind Tacoma salt air/ bulk cargo/ steam cycle/ AIR REDUCTION eating peanuts I don't give a damn if anybody every stops I'll walk to San Francisco what the hell "that's where you going? why you got that pack?" "well man I just don't feel right without something on my back" & this character in milkman overalls "I have to come out here every once in a while, there's a guy blows me here" way out of town. Stayed in Olympia with Dick Meigs -this was a different year; he had moved- sleep on a cot in the back yard half the night watch shooting stars These guys got babies now drink beer, come back from wars, "I'd like to save up all my money get a big new car, go down to Reno & latch onto one of those rich girls- I'd fix their little ass" - nineteen yr old North Dakota boy fixing to get married next month. To Centralia in a purple Ford Carstruck dead doe by the Skookumchuck river Fat man in a Chevrolet wants to go back to L.A. "too damned poor now" Airbrakes on the log trucks hiss and whine stand in the dark by the stoplight big fat cars tool by drink coffee, drink more coffee brush teeth back of Shell hot shoes stay on the rightside of that yellow line Mary's Corner, turn for Mt. Rainier -once caught a ride at night for Portland here. Five Mexicans ask me "chip in on the gas," I never was more broke & down. Got fired that day by the USA (the District Ranger up at Packwood thought the Wobblies had been dead for forty years but the FBI smelled treason - my read beard) That Waco Texas boy took A.G. and me through miles of snow had a chest of logger gear at the home of an Indian girl n Kelso hadn't seen since fifty-four Toledo, Castle Rock, free way four lane no stoplights and no crossings, only cars, & people walking, old hitchhikers break the laws. How do I know...the state cop told me so. Come a dozen times into Portland on the bum or hasty lover late at night.
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Portland Dust kicking up behind the trucks- night rides-
Who waits in the coffee stop night highway 99 Sokei-an met an old man on the banks of the Columbia growing potatoes & living all alone, Sokei- an asked him the reason why he lived there, he said, Boy, no one ever asked me the reason why, I like to be alone. I am an old man. I have forgotten how to speak human words. All night freezing in the back of a truck dawn at Smith River battering on in loggers' pickups prunes for lunch The next night, Siuslaw. Portland sawdust down town Buttermilk corner all you want for a nickel (now a dime) -Sujata gave Gautama buttermilk. (No doubt! says Sokei-an, that's all it was: plain buttermilk) rim of mountains, pulp bark chewed snag papermill tugboom in the river -used to lean on bridge rails dreaming up eruptions and quakes- Slept under juniper in the Siskiyou Yreka a sleeping bag, a foot of snow black rolled umbrella ice slick asphalt Caught a ride the only car come by at seven in the morning chewing froze salami riding with a passed-out L.A. whore glove compartment full of booze, the driver a rider, nobody cowboy, sometime hood, Like me picked up to drive, & drive the blues away. We drank to Portland and we treated that girl good. I split my last two bucks with him in town when out to Carol & Billy's in the woods. Foggy morning in Newport housetrailers under the fir.
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An old book on Japan at the Goodwill unfurled umbrella in the sailing snow sat back in black wood barber college chair, a shave On Second street in Portland. What elegance. What a life. Bust my belly with a quart of buttermilk & five dry heels of French bread from the market cheap clean shaved, dry feet, We're on our way man out of town Go hitching down that highway 99.
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Oil pump broken, motor burning out Salem Ex-logger selling skidder cable wants to get to San Francisco, fed and drunk Eugene Guy just back from Alaska- don't like the States now- too much law Sutherlin A woman with a kid & two bales of hay Roseburg Sawmill worker, young guy thinking of going to Eureka for redwood logging later in the year Dillard Two Assembly of God Pentecostal boys from a holy-roller high school. One had spoken in tongues Canyonville (LASME Lost Angeles-Seattle Motor Express) place on highway 20 LITTLE ELK badger & badger South of Yoncalla burn the engine run out of oil (a different car) (Six great highways; so far only one) Jumpoff Joe Creek & a man carrying nothing, walking sort of stiff legged along, blue jeans & denim jacket wrinkled face, just north of Louse Creek -Abandon really means it the network womb stretched loose all things slip through Dreaming on a bench under newspapers I woke covered with rhododendron blooms alone in a State Park in Oregon.
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"I had a girl in Oakland who worked for a doctor, she was a nurse, she let him eat her. She died of tuberculosis & I drove back that night to Portland nonstop, crying all the way" Grants Pass "I picked up a young mother with two children once, their house had just burned down" "I picked up an Italian tree-surgeon in Port Angeles once, he had all his saws and tools all screwed & bolted on a beat up bike." Oxyoke, Wolf Creek, a guy Coming off a five-day binge to Phoenix An ex-bartender from Lebanon to Redding Man & wife on a drinking spree, to Anderson Snow on the pines & firs around Lake Shasta -Chinese scene of winter hills and trees us "little travelers" in the bitter cold six-lane highway slash & D-9 Cats- bridge building squat earth movers -yellow bugs I speak for hawks. Creating "Shasta" as I go- The road that's followed goes forever; in half a minute crossed and left behind. Out of the snow and into red-dirt plains blossoming plums Each time you go that road it gets more straight curves across the mountain lost in fill towns you had to slow down all four lanes Azalea, Myrtle Creek watch out for deer. At Project City Indian hitcher Standing under single tarpole lamp nobody stoped we walked four miles to an oak fire left by the road crew, shivered the night away.
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Going to San Francisco Yeah San Francisco Yeah we came from Seattle Even farther north Yeah we been working in the mountains in the spring in the autumn I always go this highway 99-"I was working in a mill three weeks there then it burned down & the guy didn't even pay us off- but I can do anything- I'll go to San Francisco- tend bar-" Sixteen speeds forward windows open Stopped at the edge of Willows fro a bite grass shoots on the edge of drained rice plains -where are the Sierras-
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standing in the night in the world-end winds by the overpass bridge junction US 40 and highway 99 trucks, trucks, roll by kicking up dust dead flowers level, dry, Highway 99 turns west. Miles gone, speed still pass through lower hills heat drying toward Vallejo gray on the salt baywater brown grass ridge buckbrush blue. Herons in the tideflats have no thought for States of Cars -I'm sick of car exhaust City gleaming far away we make it into town tonight get clean and drink some wine- SAN FRANCISCO NO body gives a shit man who you are or what's your car there IS no 99
Poem: "Night Highway 99" by Gary Snyder from his 1996 collection "Mountains and Rivers Without End" (typography changed)
Print: Shepard Fairey
Print: Shepard Fairey
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