Look Westward, Angel
Eighty-two years ago, after handing a million-plus word manuscript to his editor, Thomas Wolfe was ready to get out of New York City. He had been offered $300 to speak at a literary banquet at Purdue University in Indiana. He confided to his host, “I am afraid my delivery . . . is very bad, but for three hundred dollars . . . I could put on a spirited exhibition of some sort, and produce any variety of strange sounds, some of which, I trust, may be mistaken for eloquence.”
After the lecture, on May 19th, Wolfe left Purdue for Chicago, and from there he boarded a train to visit friends in Denver. He spent a week. He traveled to Cheyenne, Wyoming before continuing north to Idaho. By June 7th, he had arrived in Portland, Oregon. There he was introduced to Edward Miller, the Sunday Editor of the Oregonian, and Raymond Conway of the Oregon State Motor Association. The two men planned a trip to demonstrate the accessibility and cost effectiveness of visiting the western US National Parks by automobile. They invited Wolfe to join them for the two-week 4,500 mile journey.
On June 20th, the three men left Portland. Having never learned to drive, Wolfe occupied the backseat of the white four-door Ford sedan. Although a decent-sized vehicle for the day, Wolfe’s 6 ft. 6 in. frame surely felt constrained during their long stays in the car. Miller and Conway took turns at the wheel. In a 300-page 5 x 8 in. notebook, Wolfe jotted down each day’s activities. The crew first headed south toward Crater Lake National Park, then on to Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in California. In the first two days they had travelled nearly 940 miles. They toured the Mojave Desert, and reached the Grand Canyon on their fourth day. Here, Wolfe dubbed the massive chasm the “Big Gorgooby.” Wolfe and Miller started to grow weary of Conway’s rapid pace. Conway complained, “If you two would spend more time sleeping and less time drinking beer, you’d feel better in the mornings.”
They turned north after Arizona and arrived at Yellowstone National Park on the ninth day. Wolfe described the “. . . boiling waters, sinister, grotesque, carved, like a rhinoceros imbedded moving through hot oatmeal.” While at the Sapphire Pool, he heard a man tell his son, “don’t lean over that, I’ll have a parboiled boy.” By June 30th, they had passed through Glacier National Park, and into a portion of Idaho. Wolfe noted an overlap of their route with the “route of Lewis and Clark, whose ghosts have haunted us and this country.” By the end of the day on the 30th, they had made their way into Washington, the final state on their journey. Aside from the darkness of the trees, he called the Washington State line “almost Appalachian” in appearance.
On July 2nd, the final day of the trip, the trio rose at the Sunrise Lodge at Mount Rainer National Park, and then set out toward Tacoma ending the trip at Seattle. But Wolfe continued to wander. He wrote, “and so, at last, farewell. They are gone, and a curiously hollow feeling is in me as I stand there on the streets of Olympia and watch the white Ford flash away.” He traveled alone to Vancouver where he took ill with a cold. Back in Seattle, his cold progressed to pneumonia. Afraid of hospitals, Wolfe went to Firlawn Sanitarium just outside the city for rest. A month later he was finally hospitalized in Seattle. X-rays revealed an old tubercular lesion in his lung. Suffering from a high fever and terrible headaches, he was transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Major surgery on September 12 showed numerous tubercles on Wolfe’s brain. He died days after the surgery on September 15, 1938- just 18 days shy of his thirty-eighth birthday. The notebook he had kept during his last great expedition was found among his possessions- simply titled “A Western Journey.”
To read the publication of Wolfe’s Western Journey from 1939 in VQR magazine, visit: https://www.vqronline.org/essay/western-journey
