Desperado

When my grandfather was a boy, he snuck out at night to bring food and cigars to hobos camped under a trestle outside Dana, Illinois. The impoverished migrants welcomed him to their fire, rewarding his gifts of tobacco and baked beans with tales of their travels west to rodeos in Wyoming or horse races in California: food for the body, in exchange for food for the imagination. They boiled coffee in a Hills Bros can and served it to their young benefactor in a tin cup. To this day, he swears it was the best coffee he ever tasted. He knew nothing of the Dustbowl economics that ejected these men from their homes and onto the rails, but he recognized something in them that sang to his blood: They were men of the open road, drifters with the world behind them and nothing ahead but freedom and possibility. He resolved to join their ranks, become a hobo when he grew up. That little boy’s name was Merle, and my middle name is Merle, and the genes we share go beyond poor eyesight and decent teeth.

It’s a Saturday in July, just before dawn. My eyes snap open and I jackknife out of bed, cartoonish, like the laborer from the “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence of Fantasia who overslept his alarm. I haul supplies to my car on the street, rushing like a man on the run for his life, indifferent to torrents of rain falling from a slate sky, turning gold as they pass under Chicago’s famous orange street lamps. After multiple trips back and forth my socks are soaked through and I don’t care. The same restless hunger that drove little Merle out under the stars to join the vagabonds around their fire now propels me westward on a trip to Wyoming for a week alone in the mountains, wondering what I will find.

Merle Stanley Lotz drew his first breath on August 1, 1932 in Streator, Illinois, a hardscrabble coal mining town turned “Glass Manufacturing Capital of the World.” Because he was born on the first day of the month everyone called him Little Bill, as if he were a rent check. That his father should own a grocery store explains how Merle knew when the hobos were in town. They leapt from boxcars in the afternoon and knocked on the back door (never the front) for bread and pieces of meat and cheese, which Merle’s father generously provided even though it was beyond his means. When others in the community came pleading for food to feed their families he always relented, allowing them to run up unsustainable lines of credit. His inability to say no eventually cost him the store, leaving him bankrupt and unemployed like the rest of the country. A tendency to help the disadvantaged at the expense of one’s personal well-being has persisted in the Lotz moral genetics, making it’s way down the family tree like generational trauma, only in the form of dubious virtue.

My wiper blades are getting a workout. The industrial parks of Chicago’s western suburbs give way to rows of corn convulsing under heavy sheets of rain and I wonder what it means for the sins of the father to be visited upon the children when the sin in question appears to be sin’s opposite: a self-annihilating compulsion to rescue the needy, an unregulated altruism. Some families don’t know when to stop spending, or when to stop drinking. We tend to not know when to stop helping, which can be just as bad.

The Lotz family bounced back, as hardy German stock are wont to do. His mother cut hair, his father worked in a glass factory, and teenaged Merle drove deliveries of clay from Starved Rock to Streator. After graduating high school he joined the Navy in 1950 at the onset of the Korean War. Stationed at Pearl Harbor, he circled the resting place of the U.S.S. Arizona on a patrol boat, keeping silent vigil over an underwater graveyard of fallen sailors. Sometimes at night he and his crew would kill the motor and bob quietly in the dark, listening to an eerie metal pinging sound below the surface. Somewhere in the deep currents, a broken mast or bolt knocked against the hull of the sunken battleship, dispatching its muted report to the spooked watchmen above. As a child, this story haunted and disturbed me. Judging by the look in Merle’s eyes when he tells it, he too has not been released from its spell. Another sound from the past has stayed with him: Of the hobos around the campfire he says with a faraway look, “I can still hear their voices.” We do not choose our ghosts. They follow us like shadows, clinging to the coattails of our souls, urchin-like, persistent, demanding something of us we know not what.

The rain has stopped. Or I have simply driven out from beneath the hemorrhaging nimbostratus, depending on how you look at it. “The People of Iowa Welcome You.” I hear on the radio that nuclear tensions are again rising between the US and North Korea. I think to myself, How silly if it should all end this way.

After building airstrips in the Philippines and “getting some R&R in Japan” (read: meeting girls), Merle was stationed on the U.S.S. Tawakoni in the Bikini Islands where the United States conducted a series of nuclear tests. On the morning of March 1, 1954 he saw a bright flash followed by report so forceful he and his crew mates instinctively hit the deck, cheek to metal. A mushroom cloud bloomed on the horizon as the the captain frantically ordered the sailors to take cover. Scientists had miscalculated the yield of Castle Bravo, inadvertently making history by detonating a thermonuclear weapon one thousand times more powerful than each of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is said those who witnessed the explosion “looked into the face of armageddon.” It stripped the Marshall Islands of vegetation, sickened servicemen, natives and Japanese fishermen, and launched an international debate about the dangers of nuclear testing. To this day the Marshellese remain in exile, unable to return to their islands due to lingering contamination. To Merle, all it meant at the time was fifteen days huddled below deck while the Tawakoni chugged back to Pearl Harbor, pumping salt water over its exterior to rinse off radioactive fallout from the scorched heavens. This is the way of the middle class. Geopolitical dramas unfold above our heads with apocalyptic implications we cannot comprehend because we’re too busy showing up for work, sometimes as cogs in the war machine itself. The trajectory of history can turn irreversibly on a fulcrum of atomic innovation so calamitous as to call the perpetuation of the planet itself into question and there we crouch in the dark, pressed against other dripping bodies in the heat, powerless and oblivious, wondering if we’ll make it home.

At the end of Merle’s service in the military, his commanding officer took him aside and said, “My parents own a ranch in Wyoming, I can guarantee you a job there. You’re a good worker, they’d be lucky to have you.” All his life Merle had dreamed of The West. The hobos first gave him a mythic impression of Wyoming’s rugged allure around the fire, and his attraction to its vistas and wild horses had not faded. But the gravitational pull of home and familiarity proved stronger. Merle returned to Illinois where he met my grandmother in a cornfield.

Lucille Chalus was bringing cookies and lemonade to workers in a field adjacent to her father’s farm on a hot day and there, leaning against a seed truck smoking a cigarette, was the man with whom she’d spend the rest of her life. That they should meet in a field places them squarely in the tradition of Biblical lovers: Isaac was meditating in a field at sunset when Rebekah rode up on a camel, Jacob met Rachel when she was tending sheep near “a well in the field.” Boaz first spotted Ruth while she gleaned ears of grain in his field. Grain-themed love at first sight stories gradually receded from history until their last known iteration was half-hearted and vague: Prince Charles and Diana met while sitting on a hay bale at a polo match in 1977.

Merle and Lucille were engaged on Christmas Eve and moved to Chicago after the wedding. He drove a Greyhound bus, she worked for an optometrist on Michigan Avenue, and the two rarely saw one another. Urban life was a puzzle for the young couple. They despaired of not knowing their neighbors, of seeing doors to other apartments on either side of their own but never knowing the character or stories of the souls that dwelt behind them. They soon moved back to central Illinois and had their first child, my mother.

Merle never did make it to Wyoming, not even once. I follow the braided, meandering Platte River through Nebraska and begin to wonder if I too will never reach Wyoming. The Platte is so indecisive that it cuts across Interstate 80 multiple times, giving one the feeling of driving in circles. After crossing the same river for the ninth time in an hour, a kind of circuitous despair sets in. But upon reaching the border anything resembling despair evaporates, snuffed out by the sheer force of Wyoming’s assertiveness. Some State lines mark an inconspicuous transition, a political formality imperceptible without the welcome sign. But the moment you pass into Wyoming, you know. The sky opens up, rock formations puncture the earth like talons of dead gods reaching up from the underworld, and civilization itself dwindles away (Wyoming is the least populous State in the Union), bidding the intrepid traveler good luck with foreboding signs: “Next Service 30 Miles.” One grips the wheel tighter. Pumpjacks oscillate on the horizon like tired raptors bending to kiss the ground, rote participants in our national cult of oil-worship. Big horn cattle with unkempt bangs stare from behind gnarled fences, daring you to keep driving. Rust-encrusted carcasses of mid-century tractors lie toppled and splayed out like the casualties of some long-forgotten war. Red deserts give way to fertile river valleys situated with postcard-ready ranches and orchards before reverting back to howling wastelands flecked with tumbleweed and tar pits, an eye-popping theme park ride through the Deuteronomic promises of blessing and curse. And everywhere, always, horses. Dappled, dun, and strawberry roan. Palomino, paint and appaloosa. Bronco, broomtail and warmblood, flaxen manes billowing in the wind like dancers in a Beyoncé video. The picture books do not lie: Wyoming boasts the highest number of horses per capita in the country. I round a bend in the Arapaho Indian Reservation to behold yet another troop of mares spilling diagonally down a slope like marbles emptied from a divine jar, and it is then I am glad Merle never saw Wyoming. He would have never left.

A 1946 factory newsletter caption reads: “If there’s anything about horses that you want to know, talk with Merle Lotz, 14. Merle is the equestrian son of Bill Lotz, corrugated department, and has won a good share of show ribbons for his abilities. His collection of wins includes over 42 ribbons, with the top being won at the Illinois State Fair.” In photographs from childhood to middle age, Merle is usually astride a horse, in what may be considered his most natural state. In 1967 he purchased a ramshackle homestead on the Vermillion River and transformed it into a Kentucky-style horse farm with white fences and a red stable with white trim. For income, Merle drove a 7 UP truck. For joy and self-assertion he raised and wrangled horses, ten of them at peak, mostly purebred Arabians with exotic (for Illinois) names like Ahmed and Zarafa.

Anyone who’s every known or loved a “horse person” knows the condition is congenital. One imagines infant Merle emerging from the womb reaching for a bridle and brush. But I think horses are simply the most primitive (and therefore first) iteration of his broader enthusiasm for all things that bear a man forward through time and space with power and magnificence. He loved boats, motorcycles, planes, trains, trucks, tractors, and jet skis. This disposition is often considered standard-issue for his gender, but Merle took it a step further. He didn’t just “like” horses; he owned ten and won State awards by the showing of them. He wasn’t merely captivated by trains; he built an intricate railway universe in his basement complete with mechanical turnouts, electric headlights, bridges and stockyards. It filled an entire room. His career as a salesman always involved the open road as a way of life. Transportation wasn’t merely functional, it was a mode of being. Today he is 85 and legally blind, but the man will not be confined. He cruises the streets of his retirement community at 5 mph in a golf cart, greeted with joyful exclamations by neighbors and friends who know he shouldn’t be driving, but who love an octogenarian rebel in their midst.

Rebel would suit him if there was way to expunge some of the angst from the word. For some years in my twenties, alcohol was not served at holidays. Merle and I (the two Merles) would duck behind the Christmas tree to take nips of Scotch from a tartan flask, a delighted spark in his eye, still the fugitive boy running rations out to hobos under cover of night. He had a lifelong flare for harmless mischief, forever cooking up simple pranks, parlor tricks, gags and teases. The stereotype of grandpa as a sour old curmudgeon is foreign to me, unthinkable, even. Better yet, he achieved the high wire act of presenting outwardly as a reckless desperado badass while in reality being a responsible, self-controlled family man, rather than the terrible inverse. Flipping through photos, you might mistake him for a composite of young Johnny Cash, healthful Elvis and much-mended James Dean: white tee shirt and leather jacket, sunglasses, jet black hair slicked back and shining, one arm slung around Lucille or one leg slung over a motorcycle. My mother told me that in high school other girls were embarrassed of their dads but she was always proud because he was so handsome and cool.

At Merle and Lucille’s 60th anniversary last year the guests wore western attire. For his own ensemble Grandpa cobbled together something in the vein of stately retired outlaw: black desperado hat with a gambler crown and silver conchos, white Gene Autry shirt with shotgun cuffs, black piping, pearl snaps, smile pockets and a Kentucky Colonel Bowtie. He was resplendent. Lucille wore white cowgirl boots and a blue dress with white fringe, as if she’d just strolled off the set of Annie Get Your Gun. To Merle’s delight, the neighbors rode horses into the yard to join the party, I played banjo, we ate ice cream from a gutter, drank beer and line-danced on the driveway to Billy Ray Cyrus. I suppose the only thing that could have made it more American would be some form of religious expression, which soon followed. When it came time to link hands in an unbroken circle for the dinner prayer, I chanced to be standing next to Grandpa. To hold his hand in the silence and stillness of prayer is to experience the blunt realities of his age and health. He labored to breathe and his hands trembled involuntarily. I thought to myself that soon, very soon, I will be The Merle With the Shaking Hands. Our days pass like a shadow.

Stopping for fuel and food in small towns that dot the way from Chicago to the mountains, one begins to wonder if the American experiment has failed. Boarded up strip malls, businesses shuttered on main street, obesity, signs of addiction and a protracted sense of cultural melancholy pockmark the journey. I roll into a former uranium mining boomtown in Central Wyoming searching for gas, delighted and a little unsettled to find my deliverance in single pump outside a ghastly shed whose exterior wounds have been dressed with plywood and scrap metal. I love ghost towns. They are the gravest indicting symbol of American hubris and insatiable materialism, of our relentless plundering of the earth for riches, only to abandon and leave things in shambles at the first hint of opportunity elsewhere, like wolves catching a fresh scent on the wind and leaving the carcass behind. Ghost towns irrefutably announce to the world that every earthly thing depletes. That every boom ends in a bust, every summer in winter. That every virile whooping cowboy becomes the worn out desperado with the ragged breath and shaking hands during the family prayer, hoping to hang on to dear life for another year.

I step into the shed to ask for a bathroom. A man and woman pop up from behind a computer the size of a small refrigerator, mouths slightly agape, as if startled to see a human being. They direct me through a wide door curtained with — I’m not making this up — industrial plastic strips favored of slaughterhouse coolers. I’m disoriented to find the adjacent room is a small dive bar floored with duct-taped squares of cardboard. I step over a sleeping dog who rolls an eye open and blinks at me, recognizing “just another road tripper, likely from the city, judging by the TOMS.” Sensing my presence, a row of six cattlemen at the bar wearing Wranglers and matching ridge top hats swivel their heads toward me in unison, register my existence without expression, then rotate their heads back to the TV displaying Fox News with marvelous synchronization as if linked by a system of pulleys and levers. Smiling as I latch the bathroom door closed, I think to myself that if America is indeed in a state of irreversible dissipation, it will not be without poetry. It will go down to hell rumbling with the gothic rhymes of wise old dogs and choreographed cowpokes in lonesome ghost towns possibly plotting to murder the feckless urban millennial traveler in the bathroom out of sheer boredom. Wyoming is the kind of place where a guy could disappear.

If the struggling hinterlands are a reminder of mortality, nothing bespeaks the promise of resurrection so irrefutably as the Tetons. Other mountain ranges rise gradually, preluded by foothills. But the Tetons, because of an ancient and confounding geological process, spring up sharply without warning from a green flatland, surging heavenward with ascendent frosted peaks that point to eternity, a transcendent shock to the viewer approaching from the east. Seemingly sculpted by the baton of an enraptured orchestra conductor convulsing in the throes of a finale, their elevation profile tumbles and swoops upward, only to curl down and lurch back up in a series topographical crescendoes and jagged staccatos. I make this exalted world of wildflower-strewn valleys and snowy ridges my home for five unmolested days. At the peak of one strenuous climb I go for a swim in a glacial mountain lake with a pair of locals who ask, wide-eyed, if I am ever afraid I will get shot, living in Chicago. I ask if they are ever afraid they will get shot, living in Wyoming. They laugh, but a dark truth is embedded in the exchange: Maybe the only thing left that unites America is living with the all-too-real possibility of being gunned down at school, church, or a country music concert. We lay on our backs on a giant slab of gneiss to air dry in the afternoon sun, eyes closed, listening to the wind cut between the sharp teeth of the spiked gray summits watching over us from above. Reluctantly slipping back into their clothes, the locals remark they are headed to work bussing tables in Jackson Hole. I marvel silently at what it would be like to live in a place where I could stop by the Tetons for a hike and a swim “on my way to work.” They warn me not to fall asleep on this rock; it’s not safe at this altitude, I could wake up near dark and not have enough time to get down the mountain. We’re really are all “just walking each other home.”

Merle has regrets. Never trust someone who tells you, Sinatra-like, that he has none. He wishes he would have become a farmer instead of a salesman. He wishes he would have continued flight school despite the tragedy that caused him to stop — His best friend Bobby died landing his own plane, killing himself and his two daughters. Something about the accident left Merle uneasy about pilot lessons, but today he wishes he would have pushed through that unease. He wishes he wouldn’t have approved three of his daughters’ choices of husbands, but really, who doesn’t? This is America. From the Depression to the present, he has assumed the mythic archetype suitable to his age: Twinkly-Eyed Dreamer at the Hobo Fire. Sailor. Cowboy. Man of the Open Road. Cool Dad. August Patriarch of a Family Gone a Little Bit Haywire. Like Wyoming itself, the Lotz family of which he is the head is a haggard landscape of dreams upended and roads not taken, of creek beds run dry abutted on lush mountain panoramas of authentic joy. The bizarre coexistence of uncontrollable laughter, substantial trauma (one grandson gone to an early grave after a long battle with addiction), ominous ambiguity, and madcap delight is the bittersweet cocktail we’ve all learned to drink at Lotz gatherings. It is a family held together by love, dusting ourselves off and moving forward together, uncertain though the terrain may be, grateful to be alive and in each other’s arms, no matter the circumstance. Merle presides over it all with a dignity and grace uncommon to mortal man. During a lull in the action at a recent holiday I caught a glimpse of him in his chair, holding a cup of coffee (which undoubtedly paled in comparison to what the hobos served, brewed with boiled creek water). He was wearing the contented resting face he always has when not engaged in conversation: a faint smile with kind eyes that seem to be looking through people and walls and trees and on to something far away that no one but him can see. It’s the look of someone beholding something beautiful in the distance.

I return to Chicago in one piece, having not drowned, fallen off a cliff, or been eaten by a bear, as so many vociferously feared I would. Like young Merle dragging himself back to the civility of his proper rectangular bed in a dim room, a far cry from the wayfaring vagabonds with their dirty faces and wild eyes glinting in the firelight, I re-enter the urban grid of straight lines, cubes, and orderly crosswalk signals. A lifelong insomniac, Merle has always risen in the middle of the night to work on projects in his shop, content to pass restless hours tooling leather, building wooden jewelry boxes for his daughters, and most recently, constructing lanterns. A few months ago he told me his current routine is to sleep until 11:00pm, get up to build lanterns for two hours, then return to bed at 1:00am. In my Chicago life I often find myself awake after midnight also, alone in the back of a cab, returning from some bar or some show. I lean my forehead against the cold glass of the window to watch the city lights fly by, and take strange comfort knowing that somewhere south of here, he too is awake at this moment, hunched over a workbench in a drafty garage, making lanterns in the night.