Notes on Travel
by Fenris Zimmer
by Fenris Zimmer
I
Passing through the barren central stretches of America, a keen and listless eye will note thousands of oil pumps scattered over the plain. These machines plumb the arid ground, convulsing in eternal prostration to the hope of black gold. Toiling at an empty well, like the poet sucks endlessly at his cigarette; he wants to extract the world from burnt leaves; from the flora dying at his lips and blackening his lungs he wishes to procure the means to touch the gods.
II
When I first see, wading through the endless straw lorded over by rustic red-barn châteaux, the silhouetted tips of the mountains, I am always reminded of a passage in Nabokov, from the later parts of Lolita, in which he relates the mountains as old sphinxes; as creatures amused by the flirtations of time; as old faces that never change. Over the horizon emerges their black and animal gaze: nothingness without care.
III
I think of gas stations as mouth-centers, as destinations of gastronomical significance. The sexual barrenness of our century is encapsulated in the unexcited disposition of these stations’ wayward souls as they shove a fuel probe into the gaping flank of their vehicle.
IIII
Just outside of Wendover, a small gambling town which straddles the state line between Utah and Nevada, a jet black road cuts through the salt flats in an unerring straight line. For fifty miles, the ground is all white. The repelled mountains float an inch or two above the undifferentiated expanse. The hot air peels away the edges of these far shadows. In the nighttime, these flats, America’s bald spot, are occasionally assaulted by midsummer storms. Driving over the salt in a gale, you have to pass many lurching semi-trucks. Millions of them coat the arteries of our country, and their precious transports — wrangled for days on end by souls depraved and deprived in every manner, sustained only by amphetamines and whores in dirty motel rooms — inflate our stomachs, pomade our hair, wax our ears, drain our balls, and bleed out our gasping hearts. It is a tremendous thrill to approach one from the rear, to feel its turbulence thrashing your vehicle as it lumps down the highway at some ninety miles per hour. When you pass the back line of the trailer, your hands will detect an immense suction, a quivering attraction between your little skiff and the great white whale thrashing two feet from your hull. The fat thing wants to suck you under and smear you for a hundred miles across the pavement. All there is to see are ribbons of fog streaking the road like a thousand eels falling out of existence and rebirthing. This lumbering lattice of plastic-metal is weaving now, peeling itself from the seductive power of the whale, America’s white blood cell.