Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

“Was it the lightning or the lover?” she was sometimes heard to muse.

It was one of those mellow October days that seem concocted from a mixture of sage, polished brass and peach brandy.

This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

He awakened in Amanda's consciousness the image of the monarch, the far-ranging, high-flying black-and-orange butterfly that is one of our most familiar insects. He reminded her that the monarch's nickname is “storm king.” That it is always most active before a storm. She had seen them, hadn't she? Sailing in the electrified air, beating head-on into the gusty thunderclouds, reveling in the boisterous winds. And did she not know that monarchs usually emerge from their cocoons just prior to thundershowers? The first sound they hear is likely the rumble of thunder. They are literally born of the storm. No other creature is so susceptible to the tense vibrations of a summer squall. A butterfly. Somewhere in its minute mechanism is a device that responds to and perhaps assimilates the gestalt of storm. If there were some psychological or physiological link between Amanda and this butterfly, some unusual rapport . .

They modified each other by their looking.

consciousness that more simple men call the “supernatural.” The mystery of migrating butterflies, the mystery of gravity and dreams are but operating arms of the Great Mystery, the perpetuation of which sustains us all.

Amanda sang for him the seven peyote hymns of the Arapaho, gave him the scarab out of her navel, told him her secret name and said, “Of course.”

“This joker would go through Andy or Fred like thin shit through a tall Swede,”

The day was an Indian summer showpiece. In the sunny calm, the canyon seemed a gallery of bronzes and jades.

ALONG THEIR MIGRATORY routes, monarch butterflies stay nights in certain trees. The “butterfly trees,” as they are called, are carefully chosen—although the criteria exercised in their selection are not known. Species is unimportant, obviously, for at one stopover the roosting tree may be a eucalyptus, at another a cedar or an elm. But, and this is what is interesting, they are always the same trees. Year after year, whether moving south or returning north, monarchs will paper with their myriad wings at twilight a single tree that has served as a monarch motel a thousand times before. Memory? If so, it is genetic. For you see, the butterflies who journey south are not the ones who come back. Monarchs lay their eggs in sunny climes. Then they die. The hordes who flutter northward in spring are a succeeding generation. Yet, without hesitation, they roost in the same trees as did their ancestors. Scientists have examined butterfly trees and found them chemically and physically identical to the trees surrounding them. Yet no other tree will do. Investigators have camouflaged a tree's color, altered its scent. The monarchs were not fooled. Another of nature's mysterious constants. A butterfly always knows when it is there.

In the center ring, a collection of paradoxes was exhibited. Déjà vu displays. Infinity chambers. Firecrackers. Chants. Cave paintings. Symbologies. Obscurities. Meditations. Inscrutabilities. Zen Yo-Yos. Kabuki kut-outs. Visions from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Nuclear Phyllis roaring her scooter in and out among the blues chords looking for the peace that passeth all understanding. And so forth.

“Jimmy, my ringmaster, do you think it an accident, a mere coincidence, that LSD became available to the public, was thrust into the consciousness of the West, at precisely the time of the invasion of Tibet?”

Off the Pacific shore of Washington State the Japanese Current—a mammoth river of tropical water—zooms close by the coast on a southernly turn. Its warmth is released in the form of billows of tepid vapor, which the prevailing winds drive inland. When, a few miles in, the warm vapor bangs head-on into the Olympic Mountain Range, it is abruptly pushed upward and outward, cooling as it rises and condensing into rain. In the emerald area that lies between the Olympics (the coastal range) and the Cascade Range some ninety miles to the east, temperatures are mild and even. But during the autumn and winter months it is not unusual for precipitation to fall on five of every seven days. And when it is not raining, still the gray is pervasive; the sun a little boiled potato in a stew of dirty dumplings; the fire and light and energy of the cosmos trapped somewhere far behind that impenetrable slugbelly sky.

The Skagit River, which formed the valley, begins up in British Columbia, leaps and splashes southwestward through the high Cascade wilderness, absorbing glaciers and sipping alpine lakes, running two hundred miles in total before all fish-green, driftwood-cluttered and silty, it spreads its double mouth like suckers against the upper body of Puget Sound.

It is a landscape in a minor key. A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-green blur. Great islands of craggy rock arch abruptly up out of the flats, and at sunrise and moonrise these outcroppings are frequently tangled in mist. Eagles nest on the island crowns and blue herons flap through the veils from slough to slough. It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections. The effect is distinctly Chinese. A visitor experiences the feeling that he has been pulled into a Sung dynasty painting, perhaps before the intense wisps of mineral pigment have dried upon the silk. From almost any vantage point, there are expanses of monochrome worthy of the brushes of Mi Fei or Kuo Hsi.

Of the five thousand varieties of mushrooms that grow in the United States, approximately twenty-five hundred are found in western Washington. “I find those odds charming,” said Amanda, salivating and lacing her boots.

The United States Navy felt that Plucky had the makings of an officer and a gentleman despite the notoriety that surrounded his Mexican vacation.

Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act.

pored over his maps and charts, mingled her beauty and force with his,

The spiritual man's beef against beef is the result of a classic distortion.

It was peaceful in the spruce. The breeze about her was buttery; tropical in texture if not in temperature. A Canadian goose flapped over so close she could have reached up and grasped its honk—over the sloughs she'd fly, hanging on to the dark arch of that primordial noise as a subway passenger holds to a strap.

he attended to his maps, charting a course with feathers and inks and wooden calipers. Unlike poor Rand McNally, Ziller was not obliged to limit his cartograms to representations of the earth's familiar surface; no, his maps could and did indulge in languorous luxuriation, in psycho-cosmic ornament that may or may not be helpful to motorists seeking the most convenient route from there to here. If, with appropriate geographical symbols, they indicated the presence of mountain ranges, forests and bodies of water, they seemed also to indicate psychological nuances, regional flavors, genito-urinary reactions and extrasensory phenomena—those “other dimensions” of voyage so well known to the aware traveler.

Jesus, I don't mean to get poetic about it. That's what I get, Ziller, fraternizing with cats like you. I heard this intellectual theatrical dude rapping at a loft party one night in New York and he said that when Nora slammed the door to walk out on her old man in the last scene of A Doll's House, that slam reverberated throughout the whole spectrum of Western drama and that it caused taboos to fall in the theater—and in male-female relations—just as a slammed door might cause a picture to fall from a wall; only it was a permanent alteration. Well, when that monastery gate clinks behind me, I feel that it had permanently altered the theater of Plucky Purcell, that my own little short-run drama, my stiff-kneed dance of life, has been transformed.

Thus the days marched across November serenely, almost ecstatically. And then the rains came. And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the Sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller.

History is a discipline of aggregate bias. A history may emphasize social events, or cultural or political or economic or scientific or military or agricultural or artistic or philosophical.

That there is still potency in their imagery, fascination in their naive promise of magic, exotica and unknown quantities, is evident in the proliferation of roadside attractions. Today, the tawdry wonders do not come to us, we go to them. Stop. Ahead. Five hundred yards. See. Camera bugs welcome. Fur Seal Caves. Rocks of Mystery. Frontier Village. Jungle Land. Reptile Farm (see them milk the diamond-backs). Indian Burial Mounds. Alligator Gardens. Swamp Creatures. Big Game Country. Little Africa. Bibletown. Old West Museum. Wild Animal Ranch (see rare white deer). The smell of gasoline and fatty hamburgers mingles with the shabby odors of half-starved mistreated animals. Milkshake blenders whine and jukeboxes jingle-jangle and toilets flush. Stop. The tourists stop, happy for an excuse to pull off the dangerous hot highways; a place for mommie and the kids to pee, a place to stretch the legs, reload the Kodak, mail postcards, buy cigarettes, drink a Coke, see. See. See something they've never seen before. Gila monster. King cobra. Billy the Kid's shootin' iron. Masturbating monkeys. Humpty Dumpty in papier mache. Or, in the case of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, a flea circus and the meaning of meaning.

"There are three mental states that interest me,” said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. “These are : one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy." She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water-lily pollen. “Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is—and still not caring.”

Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for “making poetry” is the same as the verb “to breathe."

For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it simmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book and roust out those facts which seem necessary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision.