Wild Bill Hickok
FROM AN AMERICAN STORY:
“We drove down Highway One past the pine forests that grew in Point Lobos; then the trees cleared, and the road paralleled the ocean, shortly to start a steep climb winding up the mountain. The hills were brown, dried by the summer sun.
Mountain lions still lived there, I was told. Streams ran down the hills, collecting at places into pools. Redwood groves grew in the canyons. In the sky, hawks circled endlessly. Out the car window, I could see waves crashing against the rocks below. As the evening approached, the sky took on a pink cast and the waters of the ocean turned a darker blue. The sun was low and the sunset had turned orange by the time we reached Nepenthe, a restaurant perched above the Pacific. There we sat outside on the restaurant’s deck in front of an open fire, and gazed down the coastline that stretched twenty miles before us. Greek music played over a loudspeaker.
We were joined by people who lived in Big Sur: Caryl, who was a poet; Al, a jazz guitarist, who played with Nina Simone; LaVerne, an older woman draped in a shawl who wore purple lipstick and ran an art gallery farther down the Coast. Later in the evening, sitting inside around a wooden table, next to another fire, I looked up and in the dim light saw a dark-haired woman arrive, carrying a baby on her hip, followed by a man with a drooping mustache and chestnut hair that grew to his shoulders. I looked over at Richard, whom I still called “Mr. Osborne,” to see if he noticed. Then I looked back. The stranger nodded to the people he knew and stayed at the edge of the crowd, gazing into the fire. He looked to me like “Wild Bill” Hickok, a living icon of the American past. In a way I couldn’t explain I felt completely identified with how the man looked, as if there were more reality in his distillation of the past than in the whole world I’d grown up in. I said nothing at the time, but it sparked in me an attraction. I would go down the Coast again and again, seeking out people who were artists, who were different…./”
(From ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY )
