THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 13, Number 4 REVIEW Fall 2011 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer TRAVELS It didn’t take more than a year for David to become a well-known figure in whatever counter-culture strait-laced To- ronto could muster (and tolerate). He grew his brown-gray hair long and sometimes A State of wore a headband, he wrote columns for local weeklies and he was on the board of Rochdale College, an ill-fated attempt Liquid Gold to build a quasi-educational community that mixed hippies, students and others in a highrise building. He was also part Alexa Mergen of a network of people that in various ways helped Americans who had come to Canada rather than participate in the war ike all who go westering, my first in Vietnam. glimpse of California was from the I published a few of David’s short Least. As a child I stayed summers stories in WRIT. He told me he’d written a with my grandmother Helen in southern novel in Louisville some years before and Nevada. This was the 1970s and early asked me if I wanted to read the manu- 80s, before outdoor recreation brought so script. I said no, because it was finished; many to the deserts for hiking, rock climb- and because on one hand I had no way to ing and camping. There were fewer people help him get it published, and on the other everywhere: it was possible to drive from hand if I didn’t like it I would have to say Henderson to Reno, and through Reno, so, and that would be discouraging. without traffic, aside from occasional big I went off to spend a year in Norway rigs barreling along unflappable as buf- in 1972-73, and while I was away, David falo. sent me a copy of Awakenings, by Oliver My visits provided an excuse for my Sacks, which had just been published; grandmother’s companion, M. J. Miles, to having read Sacks’s columns in the New fire up his white Ford Mustang. I climbed England Journal of Medicine, David was in the back seat with a book, the black the first to alert me to the work of this sheepdog panting beside me. My grand- VIGELIUS KARL physician-writer, work that he greatly mother sat in the passenger seat wearing admired. And then he wrote to say The sunglasses that covered her cheeks as well Mending Man was being published by as her eyes, purse beside her on the floor. Coach House Press. He sent me a copy When I was 12 they took me to Reno so One of a Kind when it came out. The first thing I did I could see where my parents met and after I read it was read it again! Then I married. We drove the 440 miles straight David M. Collins and his singular novel wrote him and told him I thought it was through, stopping along Highway 95 in terrific and unlike anything I’d ever read. Tonopah for grilled cheese sandwiches, Here is how it starts: fries and ice water. We visited the Mizpah Roger Greenwald “It is six o’clock in the morning on the Hotel, newly refurbished in the glow of 366th day and now they have given me the city’s second boom as molybdenum avid M. Collins, who passed Jeanette, and their daughter, Elizabeth, paper and pencil and I can begin. They and silver and gold mines hummed again. away on 13 April 2009 at the who was then about four years old. (He say if I am good they will let me out in In Reno we drove under “The Big- age of 82, was the author of had two sons and a daughter from his eight more months, which is 243 more gest Little City in the World” sign to St. an extraordinary novel, The first marriage, which had ended in an days but I do not believe in ifs and I do Thomas Aquinas Church where my par- Mending Man, which was acrimonious divorce.) They lived simply not know what they mean by good so I ents exchanged vows. Aquinas believed Dwritten in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late in a one-bedroom apartment at the corner will assume that I must stay here seven beauty can be seen everywhere, if you 1960s, was published in Toronto, Canada, of St. George Street and Bernard Avenue, more years which is 2556 more days look, and would have appreciated how in 1972, and has long been out of print. in a neighborhood known as the Annex. including two extra days for leap years. light illuminated the stained-glass window I think it deserves to find a niche in the They maintained a sort of open house. Even so, that doesn’t matter because I will of Friar Ray F. Garces exploring the Colo- American canon, even if as what people I lived just down St. George and would only write for 99 days. I will write every rado River in a raft. Sunrays shine behind call a “minor classic” (often because the often go over there in the evening. I didn’t morning from six o’clock until seven the friar and mountains of water push him author lacks the large body of work that need to call ahead. o’clock which is when we go to breakfast forward as he navigates with a long pole. critics prefer). I’ve compared it to Na- We discovered some odd coincidences. and in 99 hours I will tell you everything. Helen, Miles and I walked though the thanael West’s The Day of the Locust—in David’s father had attended Cooper Union Everything I need to say. shady university campus. We stopped part because it is equally penetrating about around the same time as my paternal “First, I say I believe in Numbers. That for milkshakes at the Peppermill Casino the American psyche (especially on the grandfather had; it was possible, given is evident because I have only written for and paid homage to the trickling Truckee topic of “health,” which is still very much the very small student bodies back then, five minutes and already I have used 6 River. Just then it hosted plastic bags and with us), and in part because it seems to that they had known each other. David – 366 – 8 – 243 – 7 – 2556 – 2 – 99 – 6 a grocery cart. me a short novel of equally high quality. had grown up in northern Manhattan, – 7 – 99 – 5. Which totals 3404, which “We ought to go to California,” Miles But aside from that, the two books are not near Fort Tryon and Inwood Hill Parks. is a very nice number because it adds up said. similar; there are very few books that bear He had played as a boy on a high set of to eleven. As you can see, I believe in “All right,” Helen nodded. any similarity to The Mending Man. stone steps (of a kind common in New Numbers, the science being called Nu- We roared onto Interstate 80 west. I sat I first met David Collins in the fall of York, with iron pipes as banisters) that merology. That is one thing I do believe up in the deep seat to peer out the small 1969, when I was in graduate school at the I glimpsed each day decades later as the in. Numbers tell whether things are good pop-out side window at wagon-sized University of Toronto, had just started an Broadway local carried me past Dyckman or bad, and also teach you discipline, granite boulders. Through the curved rear open writers workshop, and was planning Street on my way from the Bronx to the because you have to learn how to handle window I watched the desert recede. With the first issue of a literary annual (WRIT City College of New York. I liked the idea them.” elevation gain, conifers grew thickly, Magazine). David showed up for the that, unknown to me, a ghost of the young and at the other side of Donner Summit workshop: 6-foot-4, with powerful arms, David had been on those steps as my train he Mending Man is thoroughly we dropped into forests of green. I knew a deep voice and a large laugh. He was passed them. TAmerican in its subjects, its settings green jungles of the Potomac watershed a physician, doing a Diploma in Public and characters, its speech patterns, yet is and forests of West Virginia. Here, wel- Health at the university, and would soon exceptional in its breadth of vision, its comed into California by a sign painted become the doctor (“Doctor Dave”) at Collins uses the transcendence of American myths and with an orange poppy, the topaz sky made a free street clinic. He would have been strange vision of his values, of American ways of seeing. It is a green glow brilliantly. I had seen Geor- about 42 then, the oldest person in the book that not only sees irony and tolerates gia O’Keeffe’s paintings: now I had an workshop and a little worried about how narrator to confront ambiguity, but embraces paradox. inkling of her inspiration. I leaned forward he might be seen on that account, but The Mending Man (the book’s nar- between the seats, mindful not to crowd I told him no one else paid his age any America and some rator) clearly suffers certain mental the driver.