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an excerpt from
We Are All of Us Passing Through*
I came through Monarch Pass in Colorado, fifteen thousand feet high and fourteen miles out of the nearest town—I came through on a 650cc Triumph motorcycle about dusk dark in late September of 1958. It was snowing lightly. I was freezing. I had been on the road for a little over a year, driven there by what you call your higher educational system.
I have never cared what horse a man was riding, only how he rode him. Because that is the pretty and human thing. I got out of the Marine Corps in 1956, and went to the University of Florida and found it full of granite men riding granite horses. Deliver me from men who are without doubt. Doubt makes a man decent. My most steadfast conviction is that every man ought to doubt everything he holds dearest. Not all the time, but now and then. Sometime. With rare exceptions, though, professors treat their disciplines as closed subjects, as though nothing had been written or discovered or reevaluated about their disciplines since the day they were awarded their PhDs. Consequently, universities have become communities of men with answers instead of—as they should be—communities of men with questions.
Anyway, I couldn’t bear it after my sophomore year. There didn’t seem to me to be any difference at all between, say, a professor of history and a sergeant in the Marine Corps. Both men’s worlds were carefully proscribed; both men knew exactly what you ought to do and say, and where you ought to squeeze your juice. So one fine spring day I got on a Triumph motorcycle and left. Eighteen months later I limped back into the University of Florida purified and holy, ready to continue with what society expected of me.
But that evening coming through Monarch Pass, freezing, I was still being tried and purged. I was not pure, and even though I was hurt bad, I had not yet developed the limp by which every saint is known. About every two miles I had been getting off the bike, going around behind the machine and holding on to the twin exhausts with my gloved hands. My fingers were numb, had been numb for the last twenty miles. Coming from Georgia, I knew something about frostbite, and I thought that was what was in my fingers. It scared me. I kept thinking of myself handless. So I stopped the Triumph every two miles until it got so cold that when I stopped I couldn’t get off. I literally could not swing my leg over the seat. A freezing, driving wind was roaring right into my face and eventually it simply benumbed me to the point that when I tried to talk to myself (you know the kind of thing: “Come on now! Not much further. Don’t be such a pussy, suck it up and go!”) I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t feel my lips. I could make sounds, but not words.
There was no place to stop. It was straight down off the mountain toward the little town whose lights I could already see. But like everything else it did end, and when I got down into the town, it was much warmer, though it must have been snowing for days because snow was banked on the trees and against buildings and over the curbs. I cruised through that warm place feeling good.
You have to be on the road seventeen hours with no place to stop to know what it means to drive between neon-lit storefronts and see houses, side by side and permanent as taxes, to realize how warm images can make you. Never mind what the weather was; this was where people lived—you see their windows, see their cars parked in carports and driveways. I tooled around for probably an hour, feeling good just knowing I wasn’t going to die, frozen in some Midwest wilderness.
I didn’t know exactly where I was going. I had a sleeping bag and a coffeepot rolled behind me on the bike. But I wasn’t about to risk myself in that snow again. I was in an alien land, and I was scared. I wanted to go where it was safe. I could go to a hotel, but that cost money, and I was headed for Mexico with the little score I’ d made working for Hunt’s Foods Inc. in Hayward, California, which is right down the road from Oakland, which is right down the road from San Francisco. I didn’t want to spend any more than I had to. There were missions, but I had unpleasant memories of all the missions I had stayed in, because they made you pray for your breakfast. I mean you didn’t have to pray, but you did unless you wanted to hurt some religious freak’s feelings. And since I have never been a basically cruel person, I’ve always shown whatever respect I could muster when the old lady (sometimes an ancient gentleman, but for some unknowable reason usually an old, old lady in some sort of uniform you did not recognize) would get you together in the morning—whiskey drunks, winos, pill heads, runaways, syphilitic wanderers, retards, and whatever else had wandered in during the night—and make you go through obsequious, cowardly, belly-crawling rituals where you told Jesus that you hated yourself and would gladly kill yourself, stamp out the vermin of your life with knife, gas, long fall (anything above the tenth floor) if only it was not a sin against His Holy Person.
That left the YMCA. . . .
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*From “Take 38,” an unpublished collection of Harry Crews’s autobiographical writings in the Harry Crews Collection, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia. Published by permission of the author.
See our special Crews feature in Winter 2007.
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