A Wanderer Forever in the Streets of Men

Ever since I discovered him by playing book roulette at the local library, Loren Eisley has been one of my favorite writers. An anthropologist and nature writer, Eisley was “discovered” by Ray Bradbury, who read one of Eisley’s essays in a science magazine and wrote him, saying, “You need to write a book.” Eisley took Bradbury’s advice, and I’m grateful he did. Eisley’s brooding prose saturates my mind every time I pick up one of his books.

My favorite of his works is his guarded, haunting autobiography All The Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (1975, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, NY). I want to share a portion of it here so that you can see the power of Eisley’s writing, and also in order to give you a glimpse of how tormented I sometimes am when I contemplate certain realities.

This selection is taken from the first section of the autobiography (“Days of a Drifter”) and from the sixth chapter, “Toads and Men.” In his young years, before he finally settled into college in his thirties, Eisley rode the rails as a drifter, a hobo. The experiences in this era of his life shaped the scientist and writer he was to become.  Eisley was a haunted man, tormented by his childhood and his family and the personality he was issued when he reported for duty in this life.

In this section, Eisley describes how he carried a horned toad in a gunny sack on one part of his journeys on a certain train line, just to have a companion. Let’s pick it up there.

On the car roof I crouched a moment. Then I went down into the empty ice compartment and the toad and I were alone in the lunging, hurrying blackness. I let him go in the morning, in some sand along the right-of-way. It was the best I could do for him, and I hope he made out. His trip was ended, but I had a longer one to make, though in the end I suppose I saw no more than any tramp may see by the mechanical swinging light that greets one at lonely crossings.

I was nearly home but I hesitated. Maybe that midnight ride down the plains had hurried me too much. Maybe I wanted time to think. Maybe the life of the road was slowly winning me over as it did many men in that time so long ago. Maybe I was just perverse and, nearing the town of my birth, wished, because of old and bitter memories of childhood, to swerve aside.

Suddenly from speed I turned to lethargy. I dropped the train. I dawdled about. I slept in an abandoned freight car on a siding and made friends with a stray mongrel I knew I would be forced to abandon. One should never do this, but I found him a little food and shared it for a day or so. I still feel the pain.

Thoughts of home, school — little by little they were drifting away again. Without will, without intent, I was wandering slowly westward again into the wheat. I had reversed directions…

Still, I dawdled. I moved, yes; one had to move to live. I hit the little bakeries. I lived, but in a wilderness of slow freights and sunflowers. Sometime, I knew, winter would come. In the meantime I was content to bob about in the shallows. If there is any truth about these deceptive shallows, which I doubt, I was finally among them. I was as lost as the mongrel pup I’d been forced to abandon.

If anyone taught me anything about love, it was that dog. It is almost fifty years since I last saw him running desperately beside the freight to which I clung. I didn’t even have a name for him. I wish we might meet somewhere. I hope, like my tilting, fatuous toad, that he survived. But I know better. I am almost seventy. I have lived a rough life. I know that neither of those two made out. I know also that I will never see that dog again. I may have given him his last meal.

Let men beat men, if they will, but why do they have to beat and starve small things? Why? — Why? I will never forget that dog’s eyes, nor the eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca. Nor the drowning one I once fished out of an irrigation ditch in California, only to see him limp away with his ribs showing as mine once showed in that cabin long ago in Manitou. This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men, a wanderer in mind, and, in these matters, a creature of desperate impulse. [pp 60-63]

Every time I read that section, I can see the mongrel’s eyes, and I can see his little body hurtling along the track, looking up at his friend on the side of the boxcar, wondering why his friend is leaving, wondering why he can’t go with him, wondering…

I think also of the toad, plucked from a desert because a young man was lonely and needed a companion for a while, then deposited hundreds of miles away along a bleak railway. And of the nearly-drowned dog with the visible ribs, glancing back at his rescuer as if to shrug and say, “This is the way of the world…have faith.”

I live in an unsettled twilight world, pulled between my hypersensitivity to animals and the natural world at one end of the rope, and my quick temper and positive taste for violence on the other. When I am walking behind Jinx through a field of high grass, watching his gunslinger hips sway with the rhythm of embedded eons, laughing at his facial expressions and antics, looking up at the watching trees and the soaring hawks beyond with the stars above us all, the faraway suns concealed in the blue fabric of daytime, I want nothing more than to sit right down where I am, cross-legged and arthritic and scowling, to sift dust through my fingers and pluck rocks from where I find them and peg them over at the nodding heads of garlic mustard stalks, to think my tumbling thoughts and let the hours comb over me, forgotten and intentionally alone. But when I think of the world of men, the world I must return to every weekday morning, I am ready to take offense, watching each sullen face for the trigger that tells me This Is The Moment for what might be my last battle, my fingers curling, my eyes watching for the quick exit and my mind composing that frantic phone call to my wife, the call that tells her that we have to grab cash and needful things and leave now, leave now, leave the hell NOW.

“He’s a weirdo,” said one of my coworkers about me a few years ago. And guilty as charged, yes, ma’am. She spends weekends watching reruns of “The Walking Dead” and riding around with her tattooed forearms wrapped around her boozy, bleary, and bloated husband on their motorcycle, living out her fantasy as a Daughter of Anarchy, with her four children and their twenty jail sentences and their mismatched and misanthropic grandchildren careening through criminal and drug-numbed life in their small town, but I’m the weirdo because I hold myself aloof, and I feed the crows every day, and I reach up and touch the leave and talk to the tree beneath which I park and I spend my lunch hour reading books instead of electronic screens. May I despise her and her kind? May I flirt with the shadowy thoughts that pluck, more and more, at my sleeve?

And may I share one more bit of Eisley with you? I love the man, and hope to talk to him someday in a place where the firewood never runs low and the coffee is never bitter and the wolves sit with us, not up in the high darkness, watching us.

This is from the same book as before, from pages 148-150 The chapter is titled “A Small Death:”

In elaborating this background, however, I have neglected a dog whose plight actually affected me more than the turmoil that swept around me. It was a small death in that war now long since done. I do not know why I remember it with such pain, but yes, yes, I do. I remember it with an uncertain guilt, just as I remember my last glimpse of the desperately running mongrel beside the train in the cruel days of the Depression. As I chanced, I was assisting one of my medical superiors in a cadaver dissection. He was a kind and able teacher, but a researcher hardened to the bitter necessities of his profession. He took the notion that a living demonstration of the venous flow through certain of the abdominal veins would be desirable. “Come with me to the animal house,” he said. “We’ll get a dog for the purpose.” I followed him reluctantly.

We entered. My colleague was humane. He carried a hypodermic, but whatever dog he selected would be dead in an hour. Now dogs kept penned together, I rapidly began to see, were like men in a concentration camp, who one after the other see that something unspeakable is going to happen to them. As we entered this place of doleful barks and howlings, a brisk-footed, intelligent-looking mongrel of big terrier affinities, began to trot rapidly about. I stood white-gowned in the background trying to be professional, while my stomach twisted.

My medical friend (and he was and is my friend and is infinitely kind to patients) cornered the dog. The dog, judging from his restless reactions, had seen all this happen before. Perhaps because I stood in the background, perhaps because in some intuitive way he read my eyes, perhaps — oh, who knows what goes on among the miserable of the world? — he started to approach me. At that instant my associate seized him. The hypodermic shot home. A few more paces and it was over. The dog staggered, dropped, and was asleep. The dose was kindly intended to be a lethal one. He would be totally unconscious throughout the demonstration. He would never wake again. We carried him away to the dissecting room. My professional friend performed his task. A few, a very few, out of that large class, crowded around closely enough to see.

The light was pushing toward evening. The dog was going; this had been his last day. He was gone. The medical students attended to their cadavers and filed out. I still stood by the window trying to see the last sun for him. I had been commanded. I knew that, even if I had not been in the animal house, the same thing would have happened that day or another. But he had looked at me with that unutterable expression. “I do not know why I am here. Save me. I have seen other dogs fall and be carried away. Why do you do this? Why?”

He did not struggle, he did not bite, even when seized.  Man was a god. It had been bred into this creature’s bones never to harm the gods. They were immortal and when they touched one kindly it was an ecstasy whose creation their generations had never understood, because for them there was only one single generation, their own…

Just one more day, those beseeching eyes continued to haunt me. They do still. I have stood since in some of the cleanest, most hygienic laboratories in the world. I have also watched dirty, homeless dogs or cats trot on to what must have been for most of them starvation, disease, or death by accident. I have never called a humane society because I, too, am an ex-wanderer who would have begged for one more hour of light, however dismal. Rarely among those many thousands have I been able to protect, save, or help. This day I have recounted is gone from the minds of everyone….

One more hour of light. That’s what we are looking for, my dog and my trees and my wife and my family and the crowding clouds of living things all around me every hour. One more hour of light.

~ S.K. Orr