The Shadow Catcher

It’s a land best wedded to the buffalo, not cattle, where sheep and goats can scratch a bare subsistence from the scrappy brush but where man’s soul is better fed than his stomach. In parts, the wind can rip a person into shreds and finding shelter from one element can only leave you open to another — lightning, hail, snake, bear, sun, vulture, cougar. The Navajo named their clans for what could kill them.

And the only terrorists they knew wore hats, rode horses.

Safety was in numbers, the Navajo larger than the populations of the tribes around them, but safety came with ritual, as well, in knowing one was part of a cohering pattern, part of something greater than oneself. A renegade was truly that, a broken thread, an anomaly outside the unifying fabric. Each man would leave the tribe on his vision quest at the beginning of adulthood, only to return, again, as part of the tribe, once he had experienced the vision, specific to himself, of his spiritual identity. Armed with nothing but his wits and pride and a crude weapon, a boy began the journey that could last a week, a month or half a year. When he returned, he was a man. Or so Legend has it, because whether you were living before 1492 or after the atomic bomb, if you’re going to understand your part in the fabric of Earth’s life, then you have to take your quest for understanding to the source and live on earth as if your life depended on it — on its air, its water, its futurity.

CURTIS EDWARDS DIED THIS MORNING IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS SON.

That’s why Lester gave these branches to me — to perform a ritual, the ritual of cleansing fire, the spirit medicine of smoke.

And there are plenty of places on this route out of Nevada — there’s nothing here but place — where I could pull off down a dusty road to find a quiet spot, but as I head West for California on the highway running next to the Union Pacific tracks, it occurs to me that, for a good portion of his life, before that fateful morning in the Shenandoah National Park, Curtis Edwards was a porter, working for The Road, riding rails. He was a train man.

Head for Barstow, I tell myself.

If he had been working the transcontinental passenger line, chances are he would have passed through Barstow one way or another, it would have been a place he would have known.

I don’t stop at Baker, don’t stop at The Mad Greek, press on another hundred miles and exit I-15 at Route 66. The sun has just passed its apogee, tilting toward the West and there are hardly any shadows on the desolate Main Street to soften its appearance of stark and blasted bankruptcy.

A couple bars and resale stores are open but most buildings are vacant, either out of business or going and the feeling on this stretch of 66 down to the railroad yard is one of failure and foreclosure.

A trainyard without moving trains is certainly a sad and haunting place and I realize as I park the car that what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places. A train at rest is just another big machine but a train moving through a landscape is a process, and it carries with it all the mystery of journey, like a promise.

There are a couple stranded engines on the sidings, but instead of moving trains what the Barstow station has this afternoon are buses, two of them with Mojave Sun Country Tours written on their sides, disgorging tourists of the most obsessive kind, the ones who’ll go to any length to photograph a Harvey House or a red caboose.

There are too many people here for me to carry out a ritual so I leave the packet on the seat and make my way around the tourists on the platform, down, onto the tracks.