I See By My Outfit by Peter S. Beagle

In 1963, Peter S. Beagle, then a fresh-faced young novelist (this is several years before The Last Unicorn, even), decided to ride motor scooters across country, from New York to San Francisco (or a reasonable facsimile of each) with his good friend Phil Segunick. He wrote up the trip for Holiday magazine, and then rewrote it again for book publication.

This is that book; I See By My Outfit was published in 1965 and quickly became Beagle's rarest and oddest book.

It's really a time capsule now, full of growling, unpleasant cops -- Peter and Phil were "hippies" and looked like vagrants -- cold campsites, and unfiltered '60s idealism. Any trip across the USA today would be very different, even if it were taken by two similar young men on scooters -- the country is frightened of different things, worried about different things, obsessed by different things.

I See By My Outfit is a hard book to summarize in anything but the broadest strokes: they went across the country, they were cold most of the time, their scooters had various chronic mechanical problems, they had an easy and infectiously charming rapport, and they met a whole lot of people along the way. It's a book that takes place mostly in Beagle's head, both on the noisy road and in various rooms and campsites at night.

For all that, he never mentions the underlying reason for the trip -- sure, he often talks about his girlfriend, Enid (and there's another generational marker, one of those names you don't see attached to pretty girls in real life anymore), and how he's going to join her in Menlo Park. But he somehow fails to mention that Enid is the center of a household of two children, or that she's heavily pregnant with his child as well.

I read I See By My Outfit in a battered old Ballantine paperback -- the 1971 printing of that impressionistic cover to the immediate left. It was also reprinted last year by Centro Books, after being out of print in the US for many years -- and that cover is the big, clear one up top that looks like a generic travel narrative.

The title comes from a song -- I haven't been able to track it down, so it could have been written (or translated) by Beagle and/or Segunick -- which goes like this:

first voice: I see by my outfit what I am a cowboy
second voice: I see by my outfit what I am a cowboy, too
both, together: We see by our outfits what we was both cowboys
If you had an outfit, you could be a cowboy, too.

I See By My Outfit is a book for Beagle completests, first of all, and for students of the '60s. But, even more than that, it's a fine book for readers of Americana and general American non-fiction: it gives a portrait of large sections of the country (including what was then a tiny work camp in South Park, Colorado) from a thoughtful outside viewpoint. Even if it weren't be Beagle, it would be an important historical document -- but since it is by Beagle, it's also a great pleasure to read.