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In Memoriam, J-L. I. The other day, setting out once more on the long journey to France, we flew over Newfoundland. No, not that rocky, lake-studded island to the east of Quebec. This Newfoundland, rising up like some ghost ship off the floor of the Great Salt Lake Desert, is very different from that one. Rocky enough surely, and an island too in its way, but the notion of a lake upon that dry, lonely ridge of mountains seems too absurd to contemplate. For this is another country, a lunar landscape-sometimes, it seems, almost a dream. I have never been to Newfoundland, nor do I expect to go. But I have seen it many times, watched its ragged outlines taking shape in the distance, seeming to hover shimmering in the air, as I passed on the desert highway, now Interstate 80. There lying some thirty miles off to the north, it has always seemed a bit unreal, a kind of portentous hallucination, a mirage. Long before I knew its name, I felt its presence in my bones. That day, looking down from the air at that slowly-passing web of canyons and ridges, I felt it more strongly than ever. For it was Jean-Leon who had told me of Newfoundland, taught me its name, its meaning. And Jean-Leon, amazingly, was now no more. I had heard the news in late May, not three weeks earlier. Setting out on that highway as I had so many times before, headed for the little house at the edge of the Utah desert where my blind old uncle, last of those giants, sat waiting, I had stopped for the night as usual at the Winnemucca Hotel. Mike the proprietor, coming in to chat while I finished my dinner, had just let it drop-how sad it was. And then the questions, the lingering disbelief-but he assured me, and Mike is not the sort of person to play cruel tricks. How I had failed to hear in the six months which had intervened I could not begin to imagine, but when at last I returned to San Francisco and could ask a few more questions, it became all too clear. Astonishing as it seemed, as it was, Jean-Leon was gone. Almost twenty years have passed now since that first luncheon meeting of ours. We had met three years before, introduced by other friends who knew that I was going with my family to live in the village where he was born and raised-but now I was back in San Francisco, thinking about writing a novel with a Basque sheepherder as protagonist, set against the Nevada landscape. I knew that Jean-Leon, a successful businessman by this time, had begun in just this way, and so I called him. Characteristically, he was only too willing to help. I shall never forget it, that meeting--even if I should forget all the others which followed. The little French restaurant in West Portal, the little table at the rear--I can still hear that quiet voice, heavy with the accents of one who learned his English in a sheepcamp, but vastly intelligent all the same, patiently responding to my awkward questions, describing how it was. And I can hear his gentle laugh as he recalled it, remembering with the telling. I took my notes, or a few at least, waiting until later to write up what I could remember. He was surprised, I think, even flattered that I might wish to know about these things. He was a very good teacher. And yes it was then, that first time, that he told me of Newfoundland. For I had asked about the schedule, the herder’s calendar and he explained it as he had lived it-spring lambing and shearing on Promontory Point, summer and fall in the mountains and hills above Brigham City, late fall and early winter again at Promontory, and then the deepest, darkest winter...on Newfoundland. And suddenly that desert mirage had come alive, for it was in fact a real place, as Jean-Leon knew only too well. And so he told it. Trailing across the desert, they had arrived there just after Christmas, set up housekeeping in one of the little houses, and spent the next three months moving the sheep from place to place on that rocky spine. It was lonely, very lonely, although they had each other, living in twos, and sometimes in the evening... But wait, I have already written that, long ago, somewhere in that amorphous shape of words which even now will not be still. Let those old, ragged words tell it then. Let them speak in their own voice this last sad, astonished goodbye. “Many were the things on which he allowed himself to dwell. His winter passage to America, over thirty years past now, often that returned--the towering gray-green swells, terrifying in their grandeur, seeming to express the outrage of the elements themselves against his solemn act of desertion. The early years with the sheep--these too came back as of their own will, until sometimes he seemed again caught up in that dreary acclimatization to loneliness, that painful accommodation of his young spirit to the vastness in which he had found himself. Again and again, the stark shape of the place they called Newfoundland, looming up before him as a dreadful reminder: Newfoundland, that great stone outcropping, neither new nor newly-found, which lay on the salt-mud bed of the ancient inland sea like an enormous beached whale, on whose steep sides he and the three others had for seven years wintered eight thousand sheep; Newfoundland, where sometimes in the early evenings he would mount a high ridge and, while the horse struggled to catch its breath, look long and long about him, long and long--to the broad, low shadow of Pilot Peak, the dark beacon toward which the early emigrants had steered, lying far across the barren flats to the west...to the faintly moving lights, twenty-five miles to the south, which marked the desert highway...to the three-fingered mountain range which reached up from the southeast to touch the remaining waters, that briny residue which bore the accurate yet faintly inappropriate name of Great Salt Lake...then finally to the north, to the gentle peaks of Promontory, where late in March the sheep, gathered up from these stony canyons, would once more be driven for shearing and the birth of lambs-looking long and long until at last he seemed again to hear the sound of it, the gentle lapping of the ancient waves against the sides of his island fortress, until far, far in the distance he seemed to see the great waters rolling in the moonlight, from Pilot to the snowy Wasatch, and the peaks of Promontory had become a starry archipelago...” (Written in memory of Jean-Leon Iribarren) Richard Stookey 17 August 1993 |
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