I also knew I’d be spending plenty of time in the wilderness, the high desert there around Windchime and the forests as they reach into Idaho and the world beyond. I know now that, yes, landscape did have a clear effect on the development of Ray Bold, the broad clean vistas of Nevada, the residual chill those first few April nights, and the sharp chunk of flint I selected to inscribe my name on a stock tank near Popknock. That first Ray showed many clues about the alphabet to come: the R (and the R is very dear to me, of course) made in a single stroke (the stem bolder than the tail); the small case a, unclosed; and the capital Y, which resembles an X. These earmarks of early Ray Bold would be repeated again and again in my travels—the single stroke, the open letter, the imprecise armature. To me they all say one thing: energy.
I made that Ray just about nightfall the second night, and I was fairly sure the shepherd might have seen me cross open ground from a rocky bluff to the tank, and so, writing there in the near dark on the heavily oxidized old steel tank while I knelt on the sharp stones and breathed hard from the run (I’d had little exercise at Windchime), I was scared and happy at once, which as anyone knows are the perfect conditions under which to write your name. Ray. It was a beginning.
“Why do it?” they say. “You want to be famous?” It is a question so wrongheaded that it kind of hurts. Because what I do, I do for myself. Most of the time you’re out there in some dumpster behind the Royal Food in Triplet or you’re sitting in a culvert in Marvin or in a boxcar on a siding in Old Delphi (all places I’ve been) and what you make, you better make for yourself. There aren’t a whole lot of people going to come along and appreciate the understated loop on your g or the precision of any of your descenders. I mean, that’s the way I figured it. When I fell into that dumpster in Triplet I was scratched and bleeding from hurrying with a barbed-wire fence, and I sat there on the old produce looking at the metal side of that bin, and then after I’d pried a tenpenny nail from a wooden melon crate I made my Ray, the best I knew how, knowing only I would see it. And in poor light. I made it for myself. It existed for a moment and then I heard the dogs and I was on the run again.
There was once a week later when I took that gray LeBaron in Marvin and it ran out of gas almost immediately, midtown, right opposite the Blue Ribbon Hardware, and I could see the town cop cruising up behind, and I took off on foot. And I can run when there’s a reason, but as I run I always think, as I was thinking that day: where would I make my Ray. The two are linked with me: to run is to write. That day after about half a mile, I crawled into a canal duct, a square cement tube with about four inches of water running through the bottom. And with a round rock as big as a grapefruit sitting in that cold irrigation water, I did it there: Ray. It wasn’t for the critics and it wasn’t for the press. They wouldn’t be along this way. It was for me. And it was as pure a Ray as I’ve ever done. I couldn’t find that place today with a compass.
At times like that when you’re in the heat of creation, making your mark, you don’t think about hanging a hairline serif on the Y. It seems pretty plainly what it is: an indulgence. Form should fit function, the man said, and I’m with him.
After Marvin, that night in the water, I got sick and slept two or three days in hayfields near there. As everyone knows I moved from there to that Tuffshed I lived in near Shutout for a week getting my strength back. The reports had me eating dog food, and I’ll just say to that I ate some dog food, dry food, I think it was Yumpup, but there were also lots of nuts and berries in the vicinity and I enjoyed them as well.
Everyone also knows about the three families I met and traveled with briefly. The German couple’s story just appeared in Der Spielplotz and so most of Germany and Austria are familiar with me and my typeface. I hope that their tale doesn’t prevent other Europeans from visiting Yellowstone and talking with Americans at the photo-vistas. I’m still amused that they thought I was a university professor (because I talked a little about my work), but on a three-state, five-month run from the law you’re bound to be misunderstood. The two American families seemed to have no difficulty believing they’d fallen into the hands of an escaped felon, and though I did interrupt their vacations, I thought we all had a fine time, and I returned all of their equipment except the one blue windbreaker in good condition.
THOUGH I HAVE decided to tell my story, I don’t see how it is going to help them catch the next guy. Because those last five weeks were not typical in the least. Fortunately, by the time I arrived in Sanction, Idaho, Ray Bold was mostly complete, for I lost interest in it for a while.