Travels with Lizbeth Read online

  As I watched the vacant condos deteriorate I understood the depression stories, stories that always seemed incredible to me, of people waiting in lines for thin soup while food rotted on the docks.

  Going to California seemed to me to be something I could do, and I wanted to do something rather than to wait for the sheriff to come to put my things on the street. As I stood by the side of the road, weighing the uncertainties, I wondered whether the urge to do something had not led me to do the wrong thing.

  While I had my second thoughts about our traveling to California, Lizbeth became fascinated by the sheep.

  The eastern extreme of the Edwards plateau, where Billy had let us out, consists of small rolling limestone hills with grasses, low shrubs, and even the occasional tree. While hardly the picture of fertility, such land can support life as we know it, to wit: sheep, deer, and less-fortunate cattle.

  I walked Lizbeth to the fence. The sheep did not tarry. Nonetheless Lizbeth found many smellworthy things and I did not hurry her. I took off my heavy jacket. Billy and I had agreed that I should get an early start, but in the way such things go with Billy, it was afternoon when he dropped Lizbeth and me by the road. Although the date was January 20, 1988, the sky was bright and clear and the temperature would reach into the eighties.

  I counted the change in my pocket: less than a quarter, mostly in pennies. I smoked one of Billy’s cigarettes. I arranged the gear and tightened the straps. I knew I was overpacked. Having never been to the desert before, I discarded the three-liter plastic Coke bottle filled with water which fit nowhere because Billy had suggested it at the last moment. I did have a canteen.

  I made Lizbeth sit up on things where she could be seen. Then there was nothing to do except to begin hitchhiking. My sign read: TO L.A. WITH DOG. I did not want people to stop and then decline to take Lizbeth when they discovered her.

  The problem was to get to the interstate.

  Interstate 10, which goes to Los Angeles, runs northwest from San Antonio. We were on Highway 290, which to the east of Austin is a major highway joining the state’s largest city to its capital, but to the west, where we were, goes 143 miles to meet the interstate in the middle of nowhere. There is little traffic and most of it is local. A local in a pickup with farm plates gave us a ride of less than five miles. Lizbeth rode in the cab. We were let out on a curve, just over a rise, so anyone going our way could not see us until he was as good as past us.

  I had a large, square backpack that contained close to twenty-five pounds of dog food and some other odds and ends. Tied to the bottom of the pack was a bedroll consisting of a large comforter and several blankets wrapped around a hospital scrub suit and a large, heavy caftan that had been made for me by the former housemate who had brought Lizbeth, as a puppy, into the shack on Avenue B. The backpack would have been a load for me in any event, but the lack of a frame made it all the more unwieldy. I could only get the pack on my back by reclining on it, hooking my arms through the straps, and thrashing my limbs like a supine cockroach to right myself.

  Besides the backpack there was also a rollbag in a trendy color that I found with several like it in a Dumpster behind a gift shop, the lot having been discarded, I soon discovered, because their nylon zippers were wholly inadequate. In addition, I had hooked another, smaller bookbag through the handles of the rollbag. I had also the heavy pea jacket I had been wearing, which I laid along the length of the rollbag.

  Thus the most efficient way to move a few hundred yards was to leapfrog the various pieces of luggage a few score yards at a time until everything was past the first highway sign, which I supposed had been placed with some regard for its visibility. The move being made, it was still many hours until we got another ride. This was Wednesday and on a weekday most of the local traffic was single women, whom one never expects to stop. Late enough in the afternoon that he had already got off work in Austin, an electrician in a pickup stopped and again Lizbeth rode in the cab.

  In this part of Texas it is often difficult to distinguish unreformed hippies from country types of about the same age, and indeed they are often the same. This driver had a great bushy red beard and recalled hitchhiking with a dog in the late Sixties, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps this was the first ride Lizbeth got for us. The driver offered me a part of a tiny roach and was surprised I did not smoke marijuana.

  I had shaved closely that morning and had been given for the trip an excellent short haircut by a former companion who was a professional hairdresser. Perhaps anyone of my obvious age and station was to be presumed to smoke marijuana. I had forced myself to smoke it for a number of years, but I always found it dysphoric and at last learned to refuse it in spite of the social consequences. The driver went a few miles out of his way to leave us in Johnson City.

  We were let out at a Circle K, one of a chain of convenience stores found throughout the Southwest. The clerk let me water Lizbeth from the tap at the side of the building. I refreshed myself at the same time.

  Eventually a semitrailer stopped and I gathered up my gear, but the driver meant only to go into the store. Having got the gear together, I decided to walk to the outskirts of town. Sunset was approaching and several carloads of local youth had already yelled insults at me. I could see from the increasing speed-limit signs that I was near the edge of town. I hoped to find an inconspicuous spot to lay out the bedroll.

  We had gone only a few blocks when a young couple in an old car offered us a ride. They whispered among themselves as if there were some reason besides ordinary etiquette not to invite me to join the party. From the way the male spoke, hardly able to pack enough words into a sentence, I would guess the reason was methamphetamines.

  They are popular drugs in Central Texas and the labs are often located in the country because the synthesis is very smelly. However that may be, this ride put Lizbeth and me far enough out in the country that I might lay out the bedroll without fear of being disturbed. I sat on the gear and wrote a postcard in the last moments of twilight.

  Then Lizbeth got us the first ride I am sure she was responsible for. A man, perhaps in his fifties, said he had passed us and seen the dog and come back for us. He drove us to his home in Fredricksburg. His wife, he told me, worked in a veterinary clinic in Austin and they both rather fancied dogs. This last I might have concluded for myself. They had, it turned out, four house dogs of various sizes and many yard dogs.

  Lizbeth does not suffer other dogs to come near me, but this problem was evidently not new to my hosts for they had an improvised system of runs and gates so that Lizbeth could be accommodated and fed by herself.

  This couple lived with the aged female parent of one of them. She reminded me of all the wives of my granduncles in that it was impossible to tell whether she was becoming senile or simply had always been a nitwit. My granduncles, I have always supposed, chose fluff-brained flappers in reaction to my grandaunts-by-blood, who were intelligent and levelheaded, if not domineering and obstinate. I was given dinner of chicken à la king of a sort, based on Miracle Whip. I remarked on how beautiful Fredricksburg is, speaking from memory because I had hardly seen any of it in the dark. I related the story of my grandmother’s Germans.

  In the first part of the nineteenth century, an association of German princes in hopes of eliminating poverty deported large numbers of poor people, some of them to the Texas coast. Although this was supposed to be colonization, in fact the people were more or less dumped on the shore, sometimes by shipwreck, but inadequately provisioned at best. Malaria was then very common on the Texas coast and the immigrant population was decimated many times over. The Germans moved inland and settled in various parts of Central Texas. Fredricksburg was one of these settlements. This much of the story any native knows. Few, however, know of the orphan colony. A large band of children removed afoot from the coast to Fredricksburg, but there is no historical record of how they made their way.

  The research was done before I could remember, but a central
fact of my childhood, aside from the boxes of bond paper, typewriter erasers, eraser shields, and the upright Underwood, was my grandmother’s composition of her book-length narrative poem that told how the children may have made it and then followed them up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Grandmother was no hearts-and-flowers old-lady poet, and some parts of her work were thought too racy for me when I was younger. I never read the manuscript when I was older. But I became perfectly familiar with the historic bones of the plot.

  I should say this was my maternal grandmother, who, so far as I know, had no particular reason to choose this subject except that it seemed to her a good one. My own surname, if it is German, has no Texas connection.

  Unfortunately my hosts, although they listened to my story patiently enough, were not natives and could not amplify any of the details. They agreed that Fredricksburg is beautiful—the oldest stone buildings being picturesque and pristine not so much for restoration as for maintenance. The gentleman agreed to drive us to the interstate. By the time we left, Lizbeth was frantic. She had never been away from her puppyhood home before and the separation from me and the presence of all the other dogs left her in a dither. She jumped from the backseat into my lap and licked me wherever she could reach until we were let out.

  I thought we were let out at the junction of Highway 290 and I-10, sixty-three miles to the west of Fredricksburg. But in fact we had been taken twenty-three miles due south where I-10 passes through Comfort, Texas. The difference on I-10 was one mile more than the Pythagorean sixty-seven miles, but at least we had made it to the road that went right through to L.A. We might even get a ride all the way. But not that night.

  No cars were using the entrance ramp. We walked along the ramp, but when we reached the highway there were no lights and the night was dark and moonless. We could not be seen. I was tired. I had not slept much the night before. The frontage road was above our heads and on it was a well-lit auto dealership. Beyond that was darkness and perhaps a place to sleep. With some difficulty Lizbeth and I scaled the grassy incline to the frontage road. Here was a guard rail. Lizbeth would not go under it, nor could she jump over it. To lift her over the rail I had to remove the backpack or else its weight would have dumped me over.

  Past the auto dealership on the frontage road we found a curious little grassy spot. Even in the morning I could not make out what it was. It was landscaped. A gravel road looped around it but did not go off anywhere. I did not really care what it was except that it seemed unlikely we would be disturbed there for the rest of the night. I laid out the bedroll, put on the heavy caftan, and crawled in.

  Naturally Lizbeth crawled into the bedroll too, but she found it too cold at her usual station behind my knees. She got under the caftan and wiggled up until her nose just stuck out of the neckhole. This might have been cozy enough except that she detected the security guard at the auto dealership whenever he made his rounds. She barked.

  As concealment seemed to me the most logical first strategy in providing for our safety, I was concerned that I could hardly control Lizbeth, although the guard never came closer to us than a couple of hundred yards. Discovery where we were might not have been so bad, but I thought surely we would come to times that our survival would depend upon Lizbeth’s not giving away our position. I got little sleep. We were up at first light. After the burst of hope and energy that comes with dawn, my mood sharply declined. Getting the pack on my back had been a struggle when I first tried it. Now moving at all was becoming difficult.

  Lizbeth would not eat. I dumped most of her food. Twenty-five pounds was more than she would eat in a month. Of course she would not eat that morning because she had gorged herself the night before in Fredricksburg—our hosts had mixed meat in with her food. She would not be hungry enough to eat plain, dry dog food for a day or two, although she would be happy to have any little scrap of human food she could get. I knew her eating habits as well then as I know them now. But at the time I took her refusal to eat as a vote of no confidence. I do not think I was mistaken in perceiving a number of quizzical looks from her quarter.

  I discarded my boots next. Although I walked a great deal in town and the boots were broken in perfectly well, they were not the thing for the road. Everyone advises the traveler to wear sensible shoes, and I have not found a better piece of advice.

  We were in Comfort for most of the day. Several other hitchhikers appeared and got rides. I got a short ride late in the afternoon and made five dollars in the process. The driver offered to let me out at a rest stop or to drive me a few miles farther. As I did not then know the advantages of hitchhiking from a rest area, I asked to be driven the few miles farther.

  We were let off at a crossover near the little town of Mountain Home. Here the median of the interstate expanded to several hundred yards and there were several shady trees. I left our gear under a tree and Lizbeth and I walked over the crossover to a store the last driver had said would be there.

  It was a little country store with sparsely stocked, unfinished wood shelves. They were discontinuing cigarettes and had only a few stale packs of unfiltered Camels. I bought two packs and a Big Red, a caffeine-laced cream soda popular in Oklahoma and Texas, and I watered Lizbeth from the hose outside. Thursday afternoon had become very warm.

  We returned to the tree where I had stashed our gear and I drank the Big Red and wrote a letter to Billy. Then I tried thumbing until dark, but it was useless.

  I still do not know whether it is better to have a sign or not, if it is worth the effort of standing all the while, whether to look as presentable as possible or to try to appear down on my luck. I think perhaps none of that matters. Many, many people still pass by.

  I was not so discouraged that night when I decided it was time to lie down. I was better off than when the day had started. I had smokes and some change in my pocket.

  About dark we walked back on a little rise through which the road cut. When we were about sixteen feet above the road I decided to stop. I dropped the gear, left Lizbeth strapped to the gear, and raced another twenty or thirty yards.

  When you live out of Dumpsters, dysentery is an occasional fact of life, although it is less frequent in cool weather. I had eaten nothing save the chicken à la king since we left Austin, but the day before that I had eaten some suspicious Dumpster pizza. In the middle of nowhere the result was inconvenient. In the city, as I had yet to discover, intestinal distress and the dearth of truly public rest rooms provide a number of unpretty options.

  I had a magazine-premium battery-powered radio. From it I got enough of a weather report to hear that a low of twenty-eight degrees was expected somewhere, but the station faded before I learned its location. Suddenly Lizbeth broke loose from her moorings and ran across the rise. A white tail disappeared over a fence. Lizbeth had discovered deer.

  * * *

  FRIDAY MORNING WAS overcast with high clouds. The grass was very dewy and, in patches, frosty. Because I was bigger and stronger I eventually dislodged Lizbeth from the bedroll. As we were up at first light, I believe I had packed and we were down at the road before sunrise. Very many semitrailers passed us. I tipped my cap or waved at most of them and a few of them sounded their horns. So far as I know, no trucker has ever done me any good in my travels, but I had heard it was a good idea to be friendly toward the truckers, so I was. Lizbeth curled up on the gear and shivered. I hate it when she shivers.

  Quite soon, although at the time it seemed not so soon, we got another ride. I did not notice him until he had passed us and stopped and honked his horn.

  The old pickup was very battered, mostly lime green, with a Florida license plate taped in the rear window of the cab. It sat on the shoulder under the crossover some two or three hundred yards beyond us. As fast as I could move with all the gear was hardly more than a brisk walk, even with Lizbeth towing me as hard she was able. The truck did not pull away as sometimes happens in these situations. The cab was nearly full of gear and delicately balanced arrangeme
nts for brewing coffee with power from the cigarette lighter. The bed of the pickup was loaded with exactly what all I never discovered, but Lizbeth would have to ride there.

  Lizbeth is a fool. Off her leash she cannot be trusted not to dart out into traffic. In the last couple of days she had ridden more than she had in her whole life before and she had never been in the back of a pickup alone. I tied her leash to the hub of a loose spare tire in the bed of the pickup.

  It was far from clear that she could not hang herself by jumping overboard or be lost over the side by slipping her collar. There was not room for me to ride with her. I worried about her constantly for she rode standing on various objects and precariously balanced. The worst was when we would overtake a livestock truck. She clearly appreciated only the very slight relative motion of the vehicles and gave every appearance of being willing to dash herself against the slats of the livestock trucks, just as she might jump against a stationary fence.

  The driver’s story was that he had been a couple of years in Florida with a girlfriend, but the relationship had gone sour. So he was returning to Tucson, his hometown, and a previous girlfriend.

  To Tucson seemed quite a ways and I was very much encouraged. I had pored over the map without absorbing many facts of geography. I thought, for example, that the continental divide was somewhere in California, rather near the San Gabriel Mountains. I was not entirely sure how far I would have got when I reached Tucson, but from the mile markers I could see this ride would put at least five hundred miles of Texas behind me.

  We stopped fairly soon at a rest stop. I scraped a razor over my face, washed my neck and forearms, and since I had a ride already, changed into my most ragged jeans. The driver wanted to be sure that Lizbeth was walked. She seldom wants walking more than twice a day. But I welcomed the chance to lash her to the tire again, this time with much less slack. Nonetheless, she managed to get up and about and to keep my heart in my throat for the rest of the ride.