Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [42]
7
Doctor day today. Ed took me to Nevada City in the pickup. Not that I really need any medical care. I know as much about my condition as that overworked, unimaginative general practitioner does. I don’t need him to tell me that aspirin is best for the pain, and that hot baths help, and that bourbon in moderation is good for body and soul. I go every month because I want it on the record that I look after myself. When Rodman feeds his data into the computer I want it to tell him, in its punch-card jargon, that I am medically motivated. It’s no great bother, and it’s the least I can do for Rodman’s peace of mind. The whole trip takes hardly an hour, and it gives me a change of scene. Today, for a bonus, it gave me a queer little encounter with my old school acquaintance Al Sutton.
Ed left me in the doctor’s office and went on to his tire shop. I said I would come down there by myself when I was through. It took me maybe twenty minutes to agree with the doctor that there was no need of further X rays until fall, and then I wheeled into the elevator and went down to the street level and out into the noon crowd.
It is not the Nevada City I knew as a boy. Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. Nevada City is in process of changing from old to new. Up the hill, on the steep side streets, a lot of the old flavor remains in gabled houses and second-story balconies, and even the main street has an occasional old brick building with iron shutters, left over from the 1850s and 1860s. But mostly it is Main Street, Anywhere, a set used over and over in a hundred B movies, a stroboscopic image pulsing to reassure us by subliminal tricks that though we are nowhere, we are at home. All the clues are there, some in Gold Rush type: Chevron. General Electric. Electrolux. The all-seeing eye of the I.O.O.F. Weekend Specials. That Good Gulf. Ruth’s Burgers and Steaks.
The Nevada City that I remember died quietly, along with Grass Valley, when the quartz mines closed down. The Zodiac, the Empire, the North Star, the Idaho-Maryland, the Bullion, the Spring Hill, shut off their pumps (most of which were built to a design invented by my grandfather), and let the water rise and drown all those miles of deep workings.
My father, who was superintendent of the Zodiac to the end, stayed on, and moldered away with the towns. He did not live to see their partial rejuvenation by the urbanoids who in the ’50s and ’60s bought up pineland and filled the hills with picture windows. I myself was away during all the years of decline and renewal, and when I came back I came not to the changed towns but to the almost unchanged house of my grandparents in these secluded twelve acres. I dislike what the towns have become, especially since the freeway, and I go through them deliberately not noticing anything, like a machine set on automatic pilot. People clear a path for me, and though their heads turn to watch the freak bore by, mine wouldn’t turn if it could. Rodman would probably say that in my fixation on history and my dislike for the present I display a bad case of tunnel vision. Actually, I feel a certain anticipation every time I go to town, but the minute I get there I can’t wait to get home. I don’t like the smog and the crowded sidewalks, and I don’t expect to see anyone I know.
Then I ran into Al Sutton, or almost did.
There was this skinny man with a little pot belly and a sagging pants’ seat and glasses pushed up on his forehead, standing in front of the Peerless Laundromat looking away from me across the street. Behind him, blocking the wall side, was a crated Bendix; coming the other way, along the curb, were a woman and child. I stopped, and the skinny man heard me and turned. Unmistakable. Forty years hadn’t been able to modify those nostrils that opened straight outward—we used