5.

The Gunmen

HARDISTY, ALBERTA—1,915 MILES TO GO

September 24, 2012

Hardisty didn’t seem at all like one of North America’s major pipeline hubs, but in addition to being the potential fountainhead of the Keystone XL, Hardisty, population 639, was, in fact, the crossroads of a number of other pipelines that ran beneath the ground. On its outskirts was an oil depot of white holding tanks, known as a “tank farm.”

Hardisty may have a hard industrial exterior, but there is also a soft inner core of simple homes and an endearing Main Street lined down the middle with pots overflowing with purple flowers. The library was closed, so I sat behind it, pilfering Internet access to put up a blog entry and charging up my camera with an outdoor electrical socket. Meanwhile, I took everything out of my pack to let the contents dry from the morning dew, repacking everything carefully, placing items so that the weight was distributed equally on both sides. I put a few handy items toward the top, including my rain suit and a day’s worth of snacks, so that they could be retrieved with ease. I walked to the town’s convenience store so I could use the bathroom.

“No pack!” yelled the Asian storeowner. “You leave pack outside.”

I didn’t want to begin my trip flustered and frantic for a bathroom, though I had no choice but to leave the store, extend my trekking poles (which made me feel awfully self-conscious), and head off down the road in search of an increasingly rare cluster of trees.

I was again mystified by how I was going to pull this off. The farther south I went, the fewer trees I saw, and finding hidden camping spots was getting harder and harder. It reminded me of that hauntingly dry and desolate hay-and-cow landscape I’d seen in Montana. The landscape was now almost entirely prairie: cow pasture, hay fields, grasslands. There were just a few pockets of woods here and there, mostly around creeks and lakes.

Where will I sleep? Where will I get my water? Will landowners shoot me for trespassing on their property? One step at a time, man! I thought. One step at a time . . .

•   •   •

I suppose now’s as good a time as any to draw a self-portrait of the author. He stands five feet eight-and-a-half inches tall (rounded up to five nine, he tells himself, for purposes of “simplification”) and weighs in at one eighty, cutting a mostly normal, if forgettable, figure. He has a few uncombed locks of brown hair and green eyes, one of which has a scar above it. (As a teen, in baseball practice, I was so mesmerized with the twirling laces of a fly ball that I forgot to try to catch it with my glove.)

When in society, the author makes a point to attend to all the standards of hygiene and appearance, but when left to himself, he gladly foregoes the rituals of bathing and changing his underwear, as well as shaving his beard, which, when left unperturbed, bears wisps of every imaginable hair color in homage to his blended European ancestry.

Athletically, his modest frame prohibits him from ever dreaming of dunking a basketball or maneuvering past an NFL lineman, but he was endowed with a sturdy, well-proportioned averageness: good for carrying weight, tolerating cold, and enduring hours of drudgery. (He hails from a family of Scots coal miners and probably would have functioned well as one if he’d been born in a less fortunate age.)

The author lacks talents in all arts, is master of no skills, jack of no trades, but claims an expertise in loafing, staring into space, binge-watching Netflix TV shows, and taking catnaps. He walks with a straightened back in public, slouches in private, and when he’s up reading at night, he has the bad habit of pinching out bouquets of nose hairs for no clear reason. While most anyone who’s met him would consider him a “nice young man,” he knows that’s not always true (as he’s predisposed to quietly wallowing in misanthropy and judging others—personal traits, the author wants to assure the reader, he’s working on).

Except for his being unaffiliated with any Christian church, he thought his being a white, straight, American male would prove to be an advantageous demographical makeup for a trek through the Great Plains states—a region that does not have a reputation for ethnic and cultural diversity—as horrible as all that sounds.

•   •   •

The Keystone XL had yet to be placed in the ground, so there was no clear path for me to follow. I’d have to rely almost entirely on my compass needle and topographic maps for navigation. For much of the Canadian leg of my journey, though, the XL would parallel preexisting pipelines. Having once lived next to the Alaska pipeline, which stretches eight hundred miles from Alaska’s northern coast to its southern, I figured this would mean I’d have a big aboveground pipe to follow and a crunchy gravel road next to it on which I’d walk. But here in Alberta, even though there are many pipelines, it’s almost impossible to tell where these pipes are since they had all been buried underground. (I didn’t know this at the time, but there are 150,000 miles of oil pipelines in the United States alone. Add gas pipelines, and we have more than 1.7 million miles of pipes. These are our veiled veins, silently moving fossil fuels beneath the ground like blood beneath skin.)

It was an exceptionally hot and sunny fall day, so I generously applied sunscreen and lip balm as I ambled along Highway 13. The back of my shirt became soaked in sweat, and I ran out of water within a couple of hours. What few water sources I found didn’t appear to be remotely potable, so I determined to ask for water at the next house. But out here on the barren prairie, there were miles between homes. At the first one I came across, horses trotted over and slung their heads over a wooden horizontal fence beam. When I went to touch their soft nostrils, they pulled their heads back coyly. A sheepdog with hackles and a low growl peered at me fearfully as I approached the house. I called out, “Hello!” A middle-aged woman in a flannel shirt came out and pulled up on the well lever, pouring the first gush of tepid water into a couple of buckets so that I could get the “cool stuff.”

Her father came out, and he asked me where I was going. I said I was walking to Texas and that today was my first day.

“How about that,” he said.

I’d been confounded with the absence of trees, so at the next house I asked the homeowner, “Are there any more woods south of here?”

He snickered to himself and, despite my apparent concern, reported with relish, “From here on down, there ain’t nothin’ but cold-ass prairie.”

On the road, the muscles in my right buttock felt as if they’d tied themselves into a hideous knot. I carried a heaviness there, a lump of coal that was mostly tolerable except for a hot spasm every few minutes. My hip belt on my backpack rubbed my hips a raw pink so, in consideration of all of my first-day ailments, I decided to call it a night when I saw a scattering of maples up ahead, just short of the town of Amisk. Thirteen miles on my first day, I calculated. Not bad.

•   •   •

The next day, I kept on walking in the same southeasterly direction, except now I was on a railroad track, taking shorter steps so my feet could comfortably fall on the wooden planks rather than the loose gravel. I walked along the edge of Shorncliffe Lake, still on the tracks, and a few cows spotted me from behind a barbed-wire fence and took off in a panic, triggering a hundred-strong pell-mell stampede into the woods. A train thundered from behind me, so I scampered into the woods, where I watched it roll past.

I camped in woods south of a town called Czar. After Czar, the highway turned straight south, so to continue my southeasterly direction I’d have to finally get off the road system and venture out into open country. I’d have to trespass.

I walked south on the highway for a bit, looking for just the right place to climb over the barbed-wire fence (which was about four feet high). When no houses were visible and when no trucks were passing, doing my best not to get caught, I hopped the fence and walked a good distance from the road as quickly as I could.

I was walking over a wide, hilly grassland. The grass was still moist from the morning dew, so my shoes and socks quickly became saturated, as did my pants up to my knees. But I didn’t mind. Now that I was off the hard asphalt and onto soft ground, there was a knee-happy bounce to my step.

Suddenly, I figured that I was going to be okay. Why had I worried myself sick about trespassing? The plains are so wide open, so big, so barren. I’m not going to get shot out here. This is grassland, not swampland. These are cows, not bison. This is twenty-first-century North America. The wild animals—the cougars, the grizzlies, the wolves—have been gone for more than a century.

I walked up and down rolling country. The mounds of earth weren’t big enough to be called hills, but they formed a smooth, never-flat, gently sloping terrain. So long as I didn’t conspicuously stand on top of any of these hills, I knew I could travel in between the hill crests, where I’d probably go unnoticed. Ahead was a cluster of spruce and hardwoods, and as I got closer, I saw the dark-brown rump of a horse. The presence of a horse in this rolling grass country didn’t seem all that unusual, so I kept up my pace and intended to pass it by, imagining myself courteously nodding to it in midstride.

It heard my approaching footsteps and broke through the woods, the leaves shuddering as the trees rocked violently to each side. It lumbered out into the open and eyed me from its side. It had antlers that looked like an upside-down set of chandeliers and a low hanging dewlap, a kingly double chin. The horse, which turned out to be a bull moose, was standing perfectly still.

Having lived up in Alaska, I knew that spotting a moose was no reason to get alarmed. I kept my distance, snapped a quick photo, and took a detour to the right alongside another set of woods. Then there was another explosion in the woods: splitting bark, trampled logs, the forest rattling with alarm. I’d unknowingly spooked a cow moose—a female moose—which thrashed through the woods. The sight of the fleeing animal had upset the bull moose, which was now running toward me, its gargantuan gray-brown body lurching over the grass.

It was holding its head high, armored with a pointy rack, and coming at me not quite at a sprint but at a cocky, testosterone-fueled trot, which was just as scary.

There’s probably only one reasonable thing you could do when you’re unarmed and a thousand-pound mammal is charging at you—especially when that animal has the option of either trampling you with its bone-shattering hooves or knocking you senseless with its helmet of baseball bats. And that one reasonable thing is to run for your life as fast you can in a completely unironic, unabashed, uncaring-if-footage-of-this-is-going-to-end-up-on-YouTube sort of way.

So I ran. I ran as fast as I could, which, honestly, wasn’t all that fast with my forty-pound pack. So I shuffled forward toward another set of trees, where I hoped some long-lost “my ancestors were monkeys” tree-climbing instincts would instantaneously kick in. My buttock spasmed, sending an arrowhead of pain through my hindquarter. I raced on but now felt as if some invisible tether were yanking me to the ground at the worst possible second.

Before long, the moose relented. I stood on top of a grassy hill and watched it canter back into the woods, holding up its head with an undisguised impertinence, clearly satisfied with how events had played out even if his goriest longings had gone unquenched.

Anyone who has scared away, outwitted, or outrun a wild animal bigger than they are surely has had the urge to belt out a barbarian roar in the victorious wake of all that suspense. I held in my roar to preserve my stealth, but I was no less exhilarated. Yet I still couldn’t help but again question the feasibility of my hike. I’d only been trespassing for an hour and I had already been charged by a prehistoric beast. An hour! I still had like four months to go!

•   •   •

I was now in cow and bull country. There were gangs of cows everywhere. They were the sort of cows with black or brown bodies whose perfectly white faces were worn like demonic masks. Some were in large groups of twenty or more, each with their heads lowered munching on grass and looking as if they had a thick fifth limb. There were other cows all by themselves, and mothers with calves by their sides.

I deliberately walked alongside a fence so that I’d be able to jump to the other side if I was attacked. From about a hundred yards behind me, a horde of about twenty cows was slowly making its way toward me. I picked up my pace, eventually outwalking them. I tossed my pack over a fence and climbed the wire with my feet, bracing my arm against the wooden fence post before finally leaping over the fence down onto the ground and strapping the pack onto my back again. Soon, a group of about six cows with two calves was paralleling me. I was out in the open now.

When I stopped, they stopped. When I walked, they walked. What did they have in mind? What are they doing?

“Go away, cows!” I yelled. “Go away!”

That didn’t work so I changed my tone. “You’re a bunch of sweethearts. You’re going to leave me alone now, okay?”

They continued to parallel me until their attention was drawn to an especially lush patch of grass.

I walked through woods, occasionally hearing thuds of frightened hooves or seeing the movement of some black shadow behind layers of trees. I studied every noise nervously. I felt as if I could be blindsided any second. These weren’t just cows, but cunning velociraptors hunting me from my blind spots.

I broke through the stand of woods, and ahead of me was a small lake, so I had to make a decision about which way to go around it. I went to the left, but a gang of bulls, feeling comfort in numbers, began to amble my way. I changed direction and, without any option, walked toward another group of cows standing still and watching me with an unflinching and disturbing curiosity. I walked directly toward them. These cows continued to stare until finally, as if stung by wasps, they clumsily swung their heads around and took off in the opposite direction at a respectable gallop.

I was sweating profusely again, and I’d drunk all of my water so, without any better idea, I dropped my pack by the lake and pulled out my three collapsible one-liter water bottles. The edge of the lake was muddy and gouged by cow hooves. I quickly dipped my bottles into the lake and poured my chlorine dioxide mix in to purify the water. Twenty cows from the opposite wooded shore unleashed deep guttural moans. The deepness of a cow’s moan seems only partly audible: We’re blasted by the rich full-throated bass, some of which is processed by our ears, but the rest can only be felt reverberating through our bowels.

The more I walked, the wilder the terrain got. There were fewer fences, no roads, no trails, not even a footstep or tire track. I walked alongside another lake, and to the right of me a light-gray wolf—or a giant coyote, I wasn’t sure which—broke out from the bush, ran in front of me, and stormed across the prairie at a speed that didn’t slow for as long as I watched it.

My heart couldn’t take it anymore. It was as if it had been stabbed by surprise over and over in just a matter of hours. I looked into the thick of the woods, and without realizing what I was doing, I pulled out my jackknife and, while gripping it firmly in one hand, screamed—as if to the whole animal kingdom—“C’MON! C’MON!” My fear had been transfigured into a blood-curdling, full-throated berserker rage. “Bring it on!” I yelled lustily, prepared to pierce the next charging ungulate or canine with four inches of cool, razor-sharp steel.

I continued on, the tops of my feet beginning to feel uncomfortably hot and prickly. I still had two hours of daylight so I pushed on. All the other parts of my body—my back, hips, and shoulders—were in good shape. I was now out in the open, walking up and over gentle mounds covered in the shaggy wildness of countless species of grass, weed, and flower, none of which I could name. I felt safer out in the open where I could see all around me, so I was determined to stay away from the woods.

What hills! The Alberta prairie was not the oppressively flat landscape I’d envisioned. The prairie, I could see, could be hilly, contoured with gently undulating mounds of grassy earth, as unimposing as the chocolatey soil turned by a farmer’s plow. Thick but narrow forests adjoined neighboring hills, and scattered everywhere were ponds, each receding with the ongoing drought, revealing a rime of salt along the edges.

I climbed the tallest hill, swirled in a slow 360, and didn’t see one house or farm or road. The land everywhere was the color of butterscotch.

I could have moved into one of the still-existing plains towns along the route of the XL, or I could have driven the roads of the prairie, but I wanted to slow myself to a steady march and go only where my legs could take me. A sort of “traveling idler,” the walker is able—unlike the cyclist, motorist, and aviator—to stop and examine, mull and ponder, photograph and reflect, all at the slightest provocation. And—barring unfordable rivers and unscalable mountains—he can go wherever he damn well pleases.

Between the autumn colors and the sepia twilight cast onto the hills by rays of the setting sun, I could momentarily forget my day’s many scares and feel a tired thankfulness—a reminder that despite whatever trials lay ahead I got to be struck dumb every day by sights that felt like they’d been made for me, each color, each texture, each arrangement of tree and grass and pond a composition that was mine during that moment, and for those few that would etch themselves into the tablet of my memory, mine forever. I get to walk over this every day? I thought.

I wanted to keep walking, but my toes got sorer as the evening wore on. I set up my tent behind a cluster of trees that was tightly packed with bushes and immature hardwoods, leaving little room for a tent. I figured sleeping out in the open wouldn’t be a big deal in a land so empty of people.

I spread out my tent on the ground, driving stakes in with a rock at the head and foot of the tent. Then I stuck one of my trekking poles beneath the tent roof, stretched out one side of the tent, and hammered another stake into the ground. I did the same on the opposite end, and I finally had my small, ultralight, and so-far-trusty one-person tent all set up.

I got in and immediately took off my socks and shoes to examine what was happening to my feet. The tops of my feet and toes were a bright pink, as if the topmost layer of skin had been rubbed away. They were covered in dirt and specks of green wool from my socks. I pulled out my med kit, found a few packets of rubbing-alcohol towelettes, and rubbed my wounds clean in a vaguely enjoyable, wrinkly faced pain. I kept my feet propped up on my backpack to let them air out while I turned on my iPad to resume reading The Lord of the Rings, which I’d started a few nights before.

I heard a distant rumbling behind me and it was getting louder and louder. That isn’t what I think it is, is it? It was a truck. My tent, on this side of the woods, was in full view. Here I am, in practically the middle of nowhere, and I’ve picked a camping spot right next to one of the very few gravel roads in the area! I hadn’t seen the road because I was camped in a depressed hollow, and the road was clearly up atop a nearby ridge line just twenty yards away that I hadn’t inspected.

I heard the car doors open, slam shut, and then the swishy crunch of feet on gravel.

I quietly reached over and gripped my jackknife and bear spray.

“Whew-hoo! I’m gonna shoot up everything that moves!” proclaimed a young man. “Where’s my shotgun?”

“Got your twelve-gauge, Randy?” asked another.

I listened to a group of young men, probably in their late teens or early twenties, discussing the respective merits of their guns with an ardor I thought inappropriate for anything other than a lover. The conversation struck me as preposterously stereotypical—the sort of mindless gun-loving jabber that city folk imagine country hicks engage in.

I thought about calling out hello and introducing myself, but when I heard a barrage of gunfire overhead, I knew I had no option but to lie still with my eyes tightly sealed.

Gunshots, loud booming gunshots, whistled overhead.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

What could I do at that point? Could I bellow hello above the din of exploding shells? Or should I remain quiet? If I yelled, I worried that after their successful discharge of arms, in the very midst of their orgasm of masculinity, they might very well thoughtlessly mow me down as if I were nothing more than a jumble of video-game pixels. I chose to remain still.

They fired a few more shots and, much to my relief, got back into the truck and sped away. I scurried out of the tent and tore it down for fear that they’d spot it on their drive back. I crawled along the ground into the brush, dragging the tent and all its contents behind me as if it were an animal carcass. My feet, which I’d just carefully cleaned, were once again covered in dirt. I lay flat on my back, taking cover among a few low bushes.

Until I was sure they were gone for good, I promised myself I wouldn’t budge an inch. I waited ten minutes, then thirty, then an hour. In the distance I could hear the putt-putt of their rifles and shotguns. And closer by, I could hear the gentle rustle of the few mice and birds that lived in this tiny glade, and felt a rare sense of kinship as I, too, was hunkered down, hiding, and scared for my life.

Eventually, the young men came back and got out of their truck at the same spot. I couldn’t see them, and I knew not to show the slightest movement. Fear of getting shot was more than outweighing my desire to catch a glimpse of them.

There wasn’t much talk this time except from someone who was likely a mentally challenged member of the party, who called out, “Let’s go home! I’m hungry for some supper!” It was then that I realized that they were probably sweet people, taking their slower brother out to shoot with them.

When they took off down the road again, it was sufficiently dark, so I set up my tent again, this time in the bushes. I lay awake, struggling to fall asleep, thinking of moose and cows and coyotes and shooting galleries and cold-ass prairie. The Great Plains.

What is this place?