We waited on a couch while the manager vanished upstairs to do something unknown to our room. The hotel lobby was a dark, derelict room, narrow as a corridor, and seemingly without air. I watched the landscape innocently, like a fool, like a diver in the rapture of the deep who plays on the bottom while his air runs out. As we lost altitude, the snows disappeared our ears popped the trees changed, and in the trees were strange birds. We drove through the avalanche tunnel, crossed the pass, and descended several thousand feet into central Washington and the broad Yakima valley, about which we knew only that it was orchard country. With two-by-fours and walls of plywood, they erected a one-way, roofed tunnel through the avalanche. We waited as highway crews bulldozed a passage through the avalanche. This highway was the only winter road over the mountains. Had the avalanche buried any cars that morning? We could not learn. When we tried to cross the Cascades range, an avalanche had blocked the pass.Ī slope’s worth of snow blocked the road traffic backed up. To put ourselves in the path of the total eclipse, that day we had driven five hours inland from the Washington coast, where we lived. The clown print was framed in gilt and glassed. His thin, joyful lips were red chili peppers between his lips were wet rows of human teeth and a suggestion of a real tongue.
The crinkled shadows around his eyes were string beans. The clown’s glance was like the glance of Rembrandt in some of the self-portraits: lively, knowing, deep, and loving. Inset in his white clown makeup, and in his cabbage skull, were his small and laughing human eyes. Actually, he wore a clown’s tight rubber wig, painted white this stretched over the top of his skull, which was a cabbage. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember-but I have not forgotten that clown painting or its lunatic setting in the old hotel. Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go. It was a painting of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. It was a print of a detailed and lifelike painting of a smiling clown’s head, made out of vegetables. I lay in bed and looked at the painting on the hotel room wall. This article is adapted from Dillard’s recent book.
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