The man who met me at the Lexington airport was driving a new diesel truck with two chainsaws and some firewood in the bed. He was talking on his cell phone and when he finished he apologized and said he was a tree contractor just finishing his work day. He didn’t look like an arborist; his clothes were clean and his hands were soft. “I just run crews now,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a comfortable job. And I don’t miss being in the tree.” I believed him. He had a placid way of talking, like someone who had come to a still point after a lot of turbulence. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it now.
We drove along and didn’t actually talk about the reason I had come, to retrieve the Volkswagen van I had bought from him on the internet. The plane ticket had been a pot sweetener, an incentive to get more money for his vehicle. “I must confess,” he said, “I thought I’d get more for it. But my son said ebay was the way to go.”
I got the feeling that selling the van was about more than money. It can be that way when one has lived out of a Volkswagen for awhile. So I told him I planned to drive the van down to Tennessee, to an old commune where midwives would deliver my child, that it would be our first home of sorts.
He nodded a bit but said nothing, and I watched the edges of Lexington slip past the window. As we got further from the city, the country became filled with horse farms, and the horse farms were often bordered along the road by old stone fences. We came to a turn and he pointed to the stacked limestone and said, “Those were built by Scottish immigrants. They didn’t use any mortar. A couple of years ago, some people came all the way from Scotland and were able to tell us where the builders had immigrated from, which area they came from, because each had a different style.” He stared at the stacked wall in silence, and I did too. It is the kind of moment that happens in the South, the kind where the past asserts itself.
After the turn, there were huge pastures, a few horses in the dappled winter light, and it made me think of bourbon labels. There seemed to be an impossible number of horse farms, and I was relieved when the man’s house turned out not to be one. It was old though, a narrow two story colonial with peeling paint, surrounded by a yard of very big trees and a barn that looked like it could have been a livery. The house was small but fronted with an enormous columned facade, the way it was done on plantations.
The man explained that he was part of a barter co-op, a group of people who traded their labor for scrip with which to trade for other people’s labor. He had cashed in some of his scrip to have the van detailed for me. A crew of young guys with buzz cuts was still blasting away with a pressure washer. So we went inside to sign papers.
When we were done we looked the van over but I was reluctant to get inside or open the hood. It seemed the man did not want to be drawn into the details, the mechanics of the thing. But when we opened the sliding door, he nodded at the stove and said, “I cooked a lot of good meals in there, the year I lived in the van.” He shook his head, “I saw a lot of things that year. A lot of things.”
We opened beers and he told me that he had bought the van when had gotten divorced. He had sold everything he owned, and bought it from a nurse. His kids, everyone really, had thought he had come unhinged. He had installed an expensive stereo, packed up some food, and headed west to see the national parks. “Sitting at night, eating the same old spaghetti at that stove. It was just always that much better with the top up and the wind coming in. I saw some things, I really did.”
I asked him where his favorite place had been, and he said, “I went to Big Sur and ended up living there for awhile.”
I told him I was from that area, that I knew Big Sur well and he had probably met people I knew. He became animated, nodding his head with recollection. He leaned close to me and asked, “Do you know Partington Ridge?”
I told him I did. How one could be there and see the coast stretching out like a curtain along the sea. And how Jaime DeAngulo had danced around there naked and my friend Roland had tried to live up there without money and mostly succeeded. The man couldn’t get over the fact that I knew this place where he had lived in the van. There were tears in his eyes.
His cell phone rang and he took it in the kitchen. It was his girlfriend and he told her, “I can’t believe it. The guy who came for the van knows Big Sur. I know, I know, it’s amazing.”
We drank more beer and waited for his girlfriend to arrive. After awhile, she called back and he made baby talk to her in the kitchen. I felt like an intruder and told him I was anxious to get on the road back to Oregon anyway. I took a long look at his old house, with its heart pine floors and warped window panes, got in the van, and drove away.
Before I was out of horse country, I pulled over to have a look at what I had driven off with. It was a cold evening and already the water from the detailers had frozen into one of the door locks and shorted the yellow check engine light on. But I felt it would be a good vehicle anyway.
I could see a section of rock wall in the sweep of the headlights. The top row of stones was stacked diagonally and pointed up like dragon’s teeth. I made a note to find out whether my own family had come from somewhere in Scotland that was known for its masonry.
So I looked it up when I got home to Oregon. Evidently the Scottish and Irish first brought the style of masonry to Lexington. But most accounts I read quietly noted the fences had mostly been built by slaves.
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