E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

I got out of bed and rolled my clothes and shoes into a bundle. I grabbed the money from the bureau. I unlatched the door quietly and closed it behind me. There were no other guests at the Pine Grove Motor Court. A thin frost lay on the window of her car. The wind blew.

I threw the bills into the wind.

I found a privy up the hill behind the cabins and next to it an outdoor shower, the kind you pumped the water for yourself. I stood in the shower of cold spring water and looked up at the swaying tops of the pine trees and I watched the sky turning gray and heard through the water and the toneless wind the sounds of the first bird waking.

I dried myself as best I could and put on my clothes. Shivering, stipple-skinned, I struck off through the woods. I had no idea where I was going. It didn’t matter. I ran to get warm. I ran into the woods as to another world.

All morning I went up and down the hills of timber. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of a truck or a car and it would shock me. I’d veer off to get as deep in the woods as possible. It was difficult to keep my sense of direction, difficult to put life behind me. I’d come along into a clearing and find the remains of a fire or an empty wine bottle. Traces of human life everywhere: stone fences, old trails, dirt roads grown over. I found a busted inner tube, yellowed sheets of newspaper with dates on them from the early summer.

But I saw no one: any stiff in his right mind would get out of the Adirondacks before autumn.

By the late morning I was so hungry I changed course and went downhill till I found a paved road. I walked along the tree line for several miles and came to a country store with a gas pump and some chickens in a coop. Stood in the trees and waited to see a black Model A or perhaps a carney truck or even a state police car. The odds were against it, but I was not thinking odds. The carney was a territory in my mind. It loomed out further than I had gone or maybe could go.

There were no cars. I slid down the embankment of loose earth behind the store and went around front and stepped in the door like any customer. I had my savings of the summer, twenty-six dollars, in my shoes; in my wallet I carried three dollars more. I bought a loaf of wax-papered bread, some slices of baloney, a bottle of Grade A milk and a package of Luckies. The store lady, short and wide and with thick dirty eyeglasses, treated me as if it were the most normal thing in the world for someone to come along from nowhere, as maybe it was.

I went down the road till it curved out of sight of the store, and then I ran back up into the woods and found a tree in a spot of sun and sat there and made my lunch. Then I went to sleep for a while, while the woods were still warm, but it was a mistake because I suffered terrible dreams of indistinct shapes and shadows and awful sounds of violence. Someone was crying, sobbing, and it turned out to be me. I jumped up and got going again.

I went deeper and deeper into the woods and sometime at the height of the afternoon wandered into a stand of ancient pine with a porous forest floor of brown pine needles that was so soft you couldn’t hear your own footsteps. It was dark in here, there was an umber twilight in lieu of the day, and there seemed to be no usual busy life at all, no birds, no insects, just this dark place of unnatural quiet. Looking up, I could hardly find anything green. Yet it was not threatening, the solitude was so complete, the stillness so perfect that I felt as if I had come into some vast, hushed cathedral of peace. Not even a Father. I stopped walking and stood very still and listened for I don’t know what. And then, right in my tracks I sat down and for a while was as still as everything else.

I thought of Fanny the Fat Lady’s warm hand on the small of my back.

By early afternoon I was traveling again on roads, only jumping off to the side when I heard a car coming, or taking to the woods in order to skirt a town. I went along that day with no destination in mind, no plan of action except to follow the rise, and go for the altitude. I had no food left and did not feel I needed any. I came out to a broad plateau and looking out ahead of me realized I had gone past the region of towns and now, for my arrogance, had no hope of supper unless I found a farmhouse somewhere.

The open ground was uncultivated, mile after mile. I was on a crumbling two-lane road with grass growing in the cracks and this suggested to me the unlikelihood of a ride coming along. Still I kept going.

And then with the sun turning red as it dropped toward the evening, I saw to my left, perhaps fifty yards into an open space of tall weed and tangled brush, a single-track railroad embankment. Behind the embankment was a curved outcropping of shiny flaked rock. I got up on the embankment for a professional survey: I had happened upon a one-track spur line of some sort. I figured that as it curved in an arc around the rock hill, there was a fair chance it would be going slowly enough to hop. Coming down from the roadbed, I found a bare patch of ground spotted with oil. And beside the charred remains of a fire I saw a flask of clear glass and a lady’s shoe with the heel torn off. So others had stopped here in their great study of the outdoors — it was a station of sorts.

I gathered a great bundle of kindling, but I was too tired to build a fire. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head and I watched the sky. The sun had gone down but the sky was still blue, a very pale blue, with a few high clouds still golden with sunlight. Soon I was lying in the dusk and feeling the chill of the evening but the sky was sunlit and blue and so far away in its warmth that I felt I was looking at it from a grave.

—

I fell asleep that way and sometime during the night was aroused by a train whistle. I lay there listening for it again in case I had only been dreaming. Again I heard it, this time somewhat closer. I stood up and tried to pound some circulation into my stiff hulk. The train was coming without question now. I had no idea what time it was, the sky was black, starless. I thought I could hear the locomotive. I moved toward the embankment and waited. I could hear the engine clearly now and knew it was moving at a slow speed. The first I saw of it was a diffuse paling of the darkness along the curve of the embankment. Suddenly I was blinded by a powerful light, as if I had looked into the sun. I dropped to my knees. The beam swung away from me in a transverse arc and a long conical ray of light illuminated the entire rock outcropping, every silvery vein of schist glittering as bright as a mirror, every fern and evergreen flaring for a moment as if torched. I rubbed my eyes and looked for the train behind the glare. It was passing from my left to my right. The locomotive and tender were blacker than the night, a massive movement forward of shadow, but there was a passenger car behind them and it was all lit up inside. I saw a porter in a white jacket serving drinks to three men sitting at a table. I saw dark wood paneling, a lamp with a fringed shade, and shelves of books in leather bindings. Then two women sitting talking at a group of wing chairs that looked textured, as if needle-pointed. Then a bright bedroom with frosted-glass wall lamps and a canopied bed and standing naked in front of a mirror was a blond girl and she was holding up for her examination a white dress on a hanger.

Oh my lords and ladies and then the train had passed through the clearing and I was watching the red light disappear around the bend. I hadn’t moved from the moment the light had dazzled my eyes. I’d heard of private railroad cars but was not prepared. I was under the impression I would see it again if I waited. I waited. I heard it going down the track and listened until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Into my vacated mind flowed all the English I never knew I’d learned at Paterson Latin High School. Grammar slammed into my brain. In an instant this vision of incandescent splendor had left me more alone and terrified than I knew it was possible to be.