Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
thirty miles, and then the shadelessness and heat began to get to me with a new and
surprising signal of weariness: the bottoms of my feet started to ache and burn. Twice
I stopped on the roadside, removed my shoes, stretched my toes, and massaged the cal-
lused meat of my soles, especially at the spot where my shoes had been tethered to the
pedals. There was no shield anywhere from the sun. At one point I looked up and in
the distance the colors of the boxcars of a long freight train were melting together in the
bright light.
Finally, I reached the crossroads where Highway 14 intersects with Interstate 82,
which leads back across the river to Umatilla. I'd been told there was a bike and hiking
path attached to the bridge along the interstate, but I didn't find it. The roadway over
the bridge had no bike lane, so I hitched a ride into Umatilla with a pickup truck. The
driver dropped me off at a gas station, where the attendant gawked at me as if I were
either a movie star he recognized or an alien.
All in all, it was a trying but fine ride, though maybe not an especially interesting or
dramatic one that would demand I write about it in such detail. But it's how I spent the
day my oldest friend died.
Saturday, July 30, Los Angeles
Forgive the immodesty, but I seem to have a gift for writing about the recently dead. I'm
speaking mostly about obituaries, of course, for which the idea is to muster whatever
you find out about your subjects into a form that will persuade readers that you know all
about them. You want to sound both knowledgeable and subjective. Unless you're writ-
ing about a villain of some kind—in the pages of the
Times
, I've sent of corrupt pols,
famous racists, and violent criminals—this usually involves a kind of flattery, making
the person sound not only accomplished but singular. If you're lucky you can suggest an
intimacy with the subject that you never had and with a sentence or two or a paragraph
give loved ones the comfort of a eulogy.
But a eulogy motivated by deep feeling rather than news value is something else
again. Billy's sisters have asked me to speak at the funeral, something I'm feeling as a
terrible obligation but one that I'm gratified to have on my shoulders. I've written only
two others. Here is the first, from ten years ago:
Once when I was a teenager I came downstairs for breakfast in torn jeans with frayed
bell-bottoms and a steel gray work shirt that my mother hated because, she said cor-
rectly, it was something a garbage man would wear.
I remember the occasion the way you remember a movie scene, as though I were
watching the two of us, and I can recall my mother's expression perfectly, the absolute
