Blue Highways (44 page)

Then the future came wearing shoes cut out of cows and pants woven on a machine. It found bison a nuisance. The beasts took valuable grass from cattle, stampeded crops, interrupted trains, knocked over telegraph lines. And so the American bison, a symbol to both red and white, disappeared even faster than the way of life it engendered.

I put my mug away as the unsexed Hereford steers chewed blankly in the grasses where once buffalo bulls, shaggy pizzles almost touching the ground, red eyes glaring over their females, had roamed. I remembered reading that one out of nine beef cows ends up in a McDonald’s hamburger. The sky had been cloudy all day, and now I’d just heard a discouraging word.

Again to the
pock-pocking
. The road shook and pounded me, the seat slammed my spine, the steering wheel rattled my knuckles. I felt like a watch in a Timex commercial; I could hear John Cameron Swayze: “We strapped this man in a truck on a Montana highway for two days. He took a licking, but…” etc. I turned on the radio. Amidst the crackles, a revivalist was at work on a sermon shot through with real thunderbolts. Between heavenly interferences, I heard his amazing-grace voice: “Thou knowest, O Lord, we shall pass this way but once.” Amen.

Darkness came early. At Wolf Point, a lightning storm struck the benchland, rain dropped in noisy assaults, and I took refuge in town. Dim houses, bound in by nothing but the Missouri River on the south, huddled each to the other, and streets were slick with mud and full of brown pools.

I had to go back to the highway for dinner at a truck stop. Something moved in there—I couldn’t say what. Six people sat in the cafe, in the light and warmth, almost assured by the jukebox, and filled their stomachs; yet there was an edge to the voices, to the faces. From a thousand feet up, the prairie storm, pouring cold water on the little cafe glowing in the blackness, held us all. Even as we ate our soup and steak and eggs, we felt the sky.

Again into town. A foot of oily water swirled in a railroad underpass where two cars had collided. A police light twisted, turning raindrops crimson, and a man’s still face pressed against the window. I slipped past and found a street for the night. The rain, hostile and forbidding, thundered on the steel roof. Unable to see anything in the deep black, I crawled into the sleeping bag and listened to the tumult.

One November in another century, before Wolf Point had a name, the citizens complained of wolves. They got together and set out poison, and the varmints died all over the prairie, and townsmen stacked a thousand frozen carcasses into high mounds that stood all winter. When spring came, the mounds thawed and rotted. One man thought the stink drove away the remaining wolves. Whatever it was, nobody saw a wolf alive, and nobody since has seen one here. On my night in Wolf Point, Montana, I couldn’t imagine man or beast contending for the place.

I
N
Poplar, Montana, where Sitting Bull surrendered six years after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, I stopped for groceries. Having resisted a chewing hunger for five days—before meals, after meals, in moments of half-sleep—I gave in to it east of Wolf Point and bought a pound of raisins, a pound of peanuts, a pound of chocolate nibs and mixed them together. By the time I got across North Dakota, the bag was empty, the hunger gone.

U.S. 2 followed the Missouri River for miles. At the High-line town of Culbertson I turned north toward treeless Plentywood, Montana, then went east again down forsaken blue highway 5, a road virtually on the forty-ninth parallel, which is the Canadian border in North Dakota. In a small flourish of hills, the last I was to see for hundreds of miles, on an upthrusted lump sat a cube of concrete with an Air Force radar antenna sweeping the long horizon for untoward blips. A Martello tower of the twentieth century. Below the installation, in the Ice Age land, lay a fine, clear lake. Fingerlings whisked the marsh weed, coots twittered on the surface, and at bankside a muskrat munched greens. It seemed as if I were standing between two worlds. But they were one: a few permutations of life going on about themselves, each thing trying to continue its way.

East of Fortuna, North Dakota, just eight miles south of Saskatchewan, the high moraine wheat fields took up the whole landscape. There was nothing else, except piles of stones like Viking burial mounds at the verges of tracts and big rock-pickers running steely fingers through the glacial soil to glean stone that freezes had heaved to the surface; behind the machines, the fields looked vacuumed. At a filling station, a man who long had farmed the moraine said the great ice sheets had gone away only to get more rock. “They’ll be back. They always come back. What’s to stop them?”

The country gave up the glacial hills and flattened to perfection. The road went on, on, on. Straight and straight. Ahead and behind, it ran through me like an arrow. North Dakota up here was a curveless place; not just roads but land, people too, and the flight of birds. Things were angular: fenceposts against the sky, the line of a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops.

The highway, oh, the highway. No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited. The Great Plains, showing so many miles in an immodest exposure of itself, wearied my eyes; the openness was overdrawn. The only mitigation came from potholes ice sheets had gouged out; there, margins and water were full of stilt-legged birds—godwits, sandpipers, plovers, dowitchers, avocets, yellowlegs—and paddling birds—coots, mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, blue-winged teals, pintails, shovelers, scaups, mergansers, eared grebes, widgeons, Canada geese. Whenever the drone of tread against pavement began to overcome me, I’d stop and shake the drowsiness among the birds.

You’d think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding its straightness to nature. If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside—a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

Onward across the appallingly featureless yonder of North Dakota where towns, like the poor verse of Burma-Shave signs, came and went quickly; on across fields where farmers planted wheat, rye, barley, and flax, their tractors sowing close to fences marking off missile silos that held Minutemen waiting in the dark underground like seeds of another sort. As daylight went, the men, racing rain and the short growing season, switched on headlights to keep the International Harvesters moving over cropland that the miracles of land-grant colleges (cross-pollinated hybrids resistant to everything but growth and petrochemicals) had changed forever. The farmer’s enemy wasn’t a radar blip—it was the wild oat.

At last the horizon ruptured at the long hump of Turtle Mountain, obscurely scrubby against the sky, and a pair of silent owls (Indians called them “hush wings”) swooped the dusk to look for telltale movements in the fields.

I needed a hot shower. In Rolla, on the edge of the Turtle Mountain reservation, I stopped at an old house rebuilt into a small hotel. Despite a snarl of a clerk, it looked pleasant; but the floors smelled of disinfectant and the shower was a rusting box at the end of the hall. The nozzle sent one stinging jet of water into my eye, another up my nose, two others over the shower curtain, while most of the water washed down the side to stand icily in the plugged bottom. I lost my temper and banged the shower head. The Neanderthal remedy.

In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.

E
AST
of Rolla. After breakfast in the city park at Langdon, a Nordic town of swept streets and tidy pastel houses with pastel shutters at the picture windows, a town with the crack of Little League bats in the clear Saturday air, a town of blond babies and mothers wearing one hundred percent acrylics and of husbands washing pastel cars to kill time before the major league Game of the Week, this happened:

In the park, a man walking with a child saw me staring at a “retired” Spartan missile that now apparently served the same function as courthouse lawn fieldpieces with little pyramids of cannonballs once did. The white Spartan, a skeletal finger pointing into the beyond, was undefaced by initials, lovers’ notations, graduating class years, or spray-can anarchy. The only blemishes were a smudgy ring of handprints from children who had tested the reality of the thing and, penciled small near the bottom as if to hide it, this:

WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED

THAT SMOKING ICBM’S ARE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

“She’s a nuke,” the father said with proprietary pride. His shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and he carried a full complement of ballpoint pens in a plastic pocket protector above his heart. “We’re lucky to have her here. Came from a silo down at Nekoma. Air Force selected our town.”

“I’ve seen a lot of missile installations along the highway.”

“Make you feel good, don’t they? Proud and taken care of, like.”

“Taken care of—that’s it.”

“From a distance, in the right light, this bird looks like a church steeple. And I promise you, if these things ever start flying, she’ll be the mother we’ll be praying to.”

“Our Lady of the Unholy Boom?”

He ignored me. “I don’t mean these old Spartans, of course. I’m talking about the new Minutemen. Or the MX when it gets approved—and it will. Ten nuke warheads on the MX.”

His daughter fell in the grass. Without a drop of irony, he cautioned her to be careful.

“Do you believe they’ll be used?” I asked.

“This one’s deactivated, of course. But I promise you we’re ready for the Soviets up here. That border is only seventeen miles away. You ask if they’ll ever be fired. As long as Moscow is insane for conquest, don’t bet against it.” He waited for a response, then flagged his arm to the northeast. “Wahalla’s the next town over, and you know what that is.”

“What is it?”

“The home of warriors slain in battle. The place the Valkyrie carry heroes to. We’re ready here on the perimeter.”

“The Air Force is ready, you mean.”

“I don’t tell tales out of school, but some of us are personally equipped.”

“With what?”

“Let’s just say we have basements stocked for whoever crosses that border.”

“I hope you don’t have the other cast-off ICBM’s in your rumpus rooms.”

“Everybody worries about ICBM’s. We live on top of them up here. We grow the bread you
and
the Russians eat right over the missiles. You want to worry? Worry about IBM. Worry about bug bombs. But with what the generals got over there in the Ukraine—those ICBM’s that carry ten times the kilotons of our biggest—don’t fret yourself about this baby.” Parentally patting the Spartan, he dislodged the ballpoints in his pocket protector, then repositioned them precisely to make sure he would reach the aftermath free of ink stains.

T
HERE
was something stretched about the landscape as if all dimension but length had been pulled from it. It seemed incapable of hiding anything. That may be why I was surprised when route 5 dropped sharply off the Drift Plains into another dimension of the tree-filled valley of the Tongue River. The buffy western soil was now the color of hazelnuts, and I knew I was nearly across the prairie.

The nickname of North Dakota is the “Flickertail State.” That morning I saw why. Mile after mile, the small ground squirrels stood at attention along the highway. As my truck approached one, the little rodent would make a madcap, high-tailed dash for the other side, only to stop a couple of feet from the shoulder before turning around and making a last-ditch dive for the side it had started from. Again and again it happened. It looked like some sort of crazy game in which the losers were mashed clots of fur. Over many of the flattened rodents, a second one stood; I thought they mourned, but someone later told me flickertails have a keen tooth for flickertail flesh.

A sign pointed north to Backoo. Backoo, North Dakota, may not be the only town in America named after an Australian river (the Barcoo), but then again, maybe it is. I went to see it, or, as it turned out, to see what was left, which was: the Burlington Northern tracks, a grain elevator, grocery, boarded-up school, church, and a thimble of a post office. The town had closed for Saturday, so I started back to the highway when the smell of gasoline stopped me. I lifted the hood. The fuel line below the gas filter had split and was arcing a fine jet of no-lead into the sunlight. I tried to wire it closed, but it didn’t work.

I made for Cavalier, the nearest town. Had I not gone to Backoo, the line would have ruptured
in
Cavalier instead of miles up the road. So logic would dictate. The fact is, engine malfunctions happen only in places like Backoo, North Dakota. Axiom of the blue road. The gauge—visibly—dropped toward E, and the long miles went on. Damn, did they go on.

I couldn’t remember how much money I had left, but I did know strangers with stalled vehicles get soaked in isolated towns. Axiom of the blue road. That two-inch plastic gas line, of course, should cost no more than a quarter, but in the realm of high technology you don’t figure the simplicity or inexpense of an element, you calculate availability.