Night Freight by Clyde Rice (review)

Reviews 173 Albert Pike was born in 1809 and educated in New England. Instead of entering Harvard he left his Massachusetts home at the age of twenty-one to travel to Santa Fe and Taos, where he spent a year among the Mexicans and Indians. On his return trip he settled in Arkansas, where he became a suc­ cessful lawyer and later an officer in the Confederate army. The last twentyfive years of his long life were spent in Washington, D. C., where he died in 1891. His later writings include several volumes of poetry and much uncol­ lected prose, most of it journalism and reminiscences. The original edition of Prose Sketches and Poems contains two narratives of hazardous journeys across North Texas and Oklahoma between Arkansas and New Mexico; two short stories of Mexican life; and two dozen short lyrical poems—all of which are reprinted in the later editions. To understand the significance of this book one must place it in its literary context. While there are earlier accounts of travel by Americans to the Southwest, they are mostly the work of semi-literate explorers and mountain men, and none are in any sense literary. Pike was almost certainly the first “literary” man to set his work in the Santa Fe area and write it in English. When the short stories in this book were written, the only widely read American story writer was Washington Irving. Poe and Hawthorne were just beginning. So we must put Pike among the pioneers in this genre. The best of his stories, “A Mexican Tale,” is not entirely traditional. It is a love story with a thesis, attacking both the Spanish marriage customs and the corruption of the local clergy. It is likely that Pike hoped to be remembered primarily for his poetry, which does exhibit some lyrical talent. Much of it is nature poetry, obviously influenced by the English romantics and possibly by Bryant. Its only original element is to be found in its frequent New Mexican settings, which may antici­ pate the desert beauty celebrated a century later by the painters of Santa Fe and Taos. It is good to see a writer like Albert Pike rescued from obscurity by inclu­ sion in an important series put out by a major university press. ROBERT D. HARPER Estes Park, Colorado Night Freight. By Clyde Rice. (Portland: Breitenbush Books, 1987. 141 pages, $15.00.) There isa whole sub-genre of literature, peculiarly American, having to do with hobo life. So compelling a figure is this “knight of the open road” that a writer named Frederick Feied examined hobo literature in a book, No Pie in the Sky (Citadel Press, 1964), and found him to be a veritable “American 174 Western American Literature Cultural Hero” depicted strongly in works by Jack London, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. Clyde Rice, who lives on the Clackamas River in the Cascade Mountains not far from Portland, exemplifies the phrase Jack London used to describe Josiah Flynt (author of Tramping With Tramps: Studies and Sketches of the Vagabond Life, 1899) : “The real thing, blowed in the glass.” Rice, 85, hobo’d during the 1930s Great Depression. Night Freight is an autobiographical episode in which Rice has left his wife and son behind in Tiburon and gone in search of gold in northern California. Riding on a flatcar loaded with green railroad ties in the freezing wind of the Sierras, Rice’s companions in Night Freight are a gambler and alcoholic drifter named Max, a troubled, religious, teenage boy and an old man running from the conventional expectations of his family, by far the most fascinating of the group. Rice has a perfect eye, ear and touch for recreating this era and the downand -outs it produced. One who had not been there and lived it could not write such a passage as this: “It seemed strange, paying for transportation with no effort but just endurance, staring up at the sullen dirty red of the following boxcar, listening to the groans and banging of the great iron coupling, the first grip of freight cars, and never unaware of the rolling flanged wheels’ indifference as to whether they...