7.

The Teacher

CONSORT, ALBERTA—1,858 MILES TO GO

September 27, 2012

Just after dawn, I was lying in a ditch positioning moleskin on my blistered toes and the tops of my burning feet. A storm of blackbirds descended on the field next to me, roosting and gregariously cawing on a golden bale of hay.

My feet were burning with a prickly pain that grew more unbearable by the minute. When I ran out of moleskin, I wrapped my toes with the tiny roll of duct tape I’d brought, which did nothing for the pain, but made them look like metallic Tin Man toes.

I staggered into the town of Consort (pop. 689), where I wandered into a farm-and-ranch-supply store. Six older men were sitting in a circle of folding chairs drinking coffee. I asked where I could find a pharmacy, and they directed me to the center of town. The pharmacist explained that my problem wasn’t chafing exactly, which I’d assumed, but a fungus. He recommended two creams for thirty dollars.

Since I was in town, I figured that I’d check my e-mail at the local library, which was located in the town’s high school. A teacher named Harold, young and dapper with blond hair, excitedly asked what I was doing with my big pack and trekking poles, and if I’d like to have dinner with his family that evening, which I enthusiastically agreed to.

Meanwhile, I sat on a toilet in the boys’ restroom, carefully applying the creams. My feet were a mess. I ran my fingers over crusted red scars rubbed raw across my toe knuckles and the tops of my feet. Underneath most of my toes were blisters. I might as well have been walking on coals.

The principal asked if I wanted to talk to her history class and speak to the school assembly the next morning, the latter of which was canceled because, Harold told me later on, someone was worried that I might say something “radical.”

“This is an oil town,” Harold reminded me.

I walked into the principal’s class of eight seniors—mostly young men who managed to look comfortable slouched in their hard metal chairs. As the principal introduced me, I took a close look at each of the students, wondering if any of them had been part of the previous night’s shooting spree.

To the class, it probably seemed as if the principal had just dragged in a bum off the highway for show-and-tell. I hadn’t shaved since my trip began and hadn’t showered since a Fort McMurray truck stop. Far from the swashbuckling romantic I was a week before, I now looked more like a tramp who’d steal a chicken from your backyard.

Normally, I’d be too timid to speak in front of an audience, but the hike had already instilled in me a “sure, what the hell?” attitude that made me feel carefree about pretty much anything.

I told them about my college years, my student debt, how I used to work up in Alaska, and how I lived in a van to afford grad school, but I was met with blank stares, a wall of apathy, and the realization that I was gradually becoming an Old Guy.

“Ken, do you want to tell the class why you’ve gone on this hike?” asked the principal, trying to steer the conversation in a more interesting direction.

“Why am I on this hike?” I asked myself aloud, buying myself time to dream up an answer.

Part of my reasoning was that I wanted to bring awareness to the Keystone XL and start a movement against the pipe and then grandiosely spark a revolution that would more or less bring down the entire fossil-fuel industry. But part of me wasn’t exactly sure why I was out here. All I really knew was that I’d wanted to go on this hike more than anything. I guess I felt strangely drawn to the XL and the plains.

“I suppose I just wanted to go on a long walk” were the first words of my noble crusade. Sadly, they were pretty much my last, as the bell, to my relief, rang, announcing the end of the school day.

•   •   •

I knocked on the door at Harold’s house. He wasn’t home yet from school, and his pretty wife had no idea who I was, but she took my word and didn’t seem at all perturbed with my giant backpack, dusty clothes, or the prospect of a complete stranger entering her house. There were eight beautiful blond children in the house, who all spoke to me with an unsettling courteousness and lack of irony. Unknown to Harold, two Mormon missionaries from Idaho had previously been invited to dinner, so it was a surprisingly large gathering for all.

I ate a plate of biscuits and a bowl of chicken potpie, always keeping my arms tight against my sides so the kids to either side of me wouldn’t be bothered by any escaping odors. One of the Mormon missionaries said he’d been a rancher all his life, so I was eager to get a second opinion on my cow worries.

“Now a bull,” he said, “he’ll try to knock you down with his head and trample you.”

“Well,” I said, in need of a silver lining, “at least I don’t have to worry about the female cows . . .”

“They’re even worse!” he exclaimed. “Especially if you get between her and her calf. Now the bulls will run at you and close their eyes at the last second. You can get away from them. But the females, they keep their eyes open. You just better run.”

I shuddered, and when our meal concluded, I accepted the family’s offer to spend the night.

I took a hot shower and threw my clothes in Harold’s washer, accidentally saturating a notepad I’d forgotten to remove from a pants pocket. For half an hour, I picked out sodden pieces of paper stuck to the washer’s inner walls.

Harold and his wife asked if I wanted to watch a show before I went to sleep, and we watched an episode of The Unit, a CBS series that kicked the bucket in 2009 after four years. It was about a counterterrorism unit of commandoes who did the government’s dirty work overseas. In this episode, an assassination was called off too late, and each member of the team had to find his way back home. Meanwhile, the sergeant major had problems of his own back in America when his daughter returned home from college early. I thought it was pretty tame stuff (even with an allusion to a homosexual dalliance), but in the morning, Harold felt compelled to apologize about the show, adding, “I didn’t know it was going to be that . . . risqué.”

That morning, Harold played the piano while his wife made me and all the kids pancakes. We all took turns reading the Book of Mormon before the kids walked to school.

This was the first time I’d ever spent more than a passing moment in a small town, and I had to admit that life never seemed so innocent and charming. After a shower, a good night’s rest, a warm meal, and friendly conversation, I felt both heartwarmed by the kindness of strangers and hopeful that I could rely on the goodwill of others in the future if my body chose not to cooperate again.

I took off down the road and walked only a couple of miles, stopping to camp at the nearest cluster of trees. My feet were as bad as ever, so I took off my shoes, cleaned my wounds, generously applied creams, and sprawled out in a glade for the next twelve hours reading The Lord of the Rings. After a day spent walking on feet blistered and rubbed raw, I had little energy to suffer through depressing books on environmental history and energy policy, which I also had on my iPad. Rather, I looked forward to walking through fictional lands on a journey far more perilous than my own. Without the Internet or any distractions to speak of—except for maybe the groan of a distant pump jack or the nearby rustle of a deer mouse—I could read. I mean really read. Instead of checking my e-mail every half hour and falling victim to the unstoppable cycle of YouTube videos of cats falling off dressers, I’d read for hours straight. Each evening, with all this peace and silence, the stories and characters came to life.

•   •   •

In the early hours of the morning, there was a thick fog that settled over the prairie. Towering above the fog, sprouting from an ocean of mist, were birch trees bearing leaves on only their uppermost branches, which made them look almost tropical. The prairie, during these early mornings in Alberta, was no longer a homogenous grassland but a Jurassic savannah. A cow mooed from the fog and I imagined a brontosaur.

My feet were feeling much better. I hopped a fence and started trespassing again, following another pipeline that the Keystone XL would parallel in these parts. It was impossible to see where the pipeline had been placed in the ground, but there were roadside markers, and on the aboveground electrical wires there were big red balls indicating where the pipeline ran beneath the road, all of which, along with my compass, were useful navigational aids that kept me on a tight southeasterly course.

I walked the XL’s path over prairie, occasionally coming upon an abandoned home on a gravel road overgrown with weeds and surrounded by ramshackle farming equipment that was slowly sinking into the ground. I approached one such home and yelled hello, hoping to find someone to ask for water. A dog, terrified, sprinted from the porch into the tall weeds, but I didn’t hear anyone call back. With the overcast clouds, the prairie felt eerie and haunted, the land’s color tinting into a dour black and white. For most of the day, I could see no roads, homes, or even planes in the sky—just a power line in the distance stretching to nowhere.

I eventually hiked to a road and ambled over to a small farm. A man on an ATV rolled up and asked what I was doing.

“I’m on a long walk,” I said. “I’m headed to Texas.”

“That does sound like a long walk,” said the man, whose name was Carl. “Any reason why Texas?”

“Well, I’m following the proposed Keystone XL route,” I said, looking behind him to see that the original Keystone pipeline, built in 2010, ran through his land.

“That pipeline there is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he said.

Before the oil company laid the pipeline in his land, Carl and several other farmers got together and persuaded the pipeline company to increase their compensation thirty times the original offer.

“It’s a big boost to the local economy,” he said.

I filled up a water bottle and downed it in one swift, hearty gulp. He invited me in for supper. While his wife cooked hamburgers, I asked him what the flag he had run up his flagpole represented, which was a mostly red one with a British symbol in an upper corner. He told me it was the Canadian flag used in World War II. “Then the liberals came into power in the sixties and changed it to what it is today,” he said, adding with a smile, “Around here, we shoot liberals.” I wasn’t at all worried about getting shot by Carl, who was clearly a kind man. Rather, I felt an odd sense of comfort knowing that it’s not just we Americans who casually threaten to shoot people for their political affiliation. We’re more alike than different, I thought fuzzily.

We talked for hours about his daughters, who’d all moved to Saskatchewan; his love for flying; and the pros and cons of organic farming. “Ninety-nine percent of farmers want to be good stewards of the land,” he said. “We care about the bees and bugs, and we don’t like to see them go. But we have to make a living, too.” He explained that pipelines are a huge part of the local and provincial economies, providing thousands of jobs and thousands of dollars in compensation for poor farmers.

Carl, to me, hardly seemed like a sellout for allowing a pipeline to cross his land. Rather, he was just a normal guy who could have used a few more bucks. Nor did any of the workers whom I’d met up in Fort McMurray strike me as “bad.” They were people who, more often than not, simply wanted to provide for their families. From behind the protection of my laptop screen, it was easy to disparage those who played a part in the tar-sands economy, but now that I was breaking bread with one of them, it wasn’t so easy.

Carl offered me his RV for the night, from which I listened to their golden retriever, Lou, harass prowling coyotes.

The next morning, I continued south along Highway 41, choosing not to walk through dewy fields, as I wanted to keep my feet dry while they were recovering. An illness, though, began to overtake me. The back of my throat became sore, I had a hoarse cough, and pints of green mucus gushed from my nose every hour. In an A&W bathroom the next day, I blew my nose into a sink and an adder of blood oozed out.

•   •   •

The next day, I broke out over prairie, and for the first time, I was caught red-handed by property owners. A man and a woman on an ATV, seeking a few sick calves in their herd, saw me and drove over. I had my map and compass in hand and my walking sticks in the crook of my arm, so I thought I at least looked like a hiker. “I’m sorry if I’m walking on your land,” I said to them.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the man said with a smile. I asked him where I might find water, and he said not until the Red Deer River, which was ten miles away. He offered to go back to his house, four miles away, and get me some, but I didn’t want him to go through the trouble. I said I’d make do with the liter of water I had.

I asked them what the next ten miles looked like, and they said it was all rangeland.

“You’ll be fine,” the husband said.

“But what will the cows do, Steve?” the wife wondered aloud.

Indeed, what will the cows do, Steve? I thought.

The husband was pensive for a moment but snapped out of it and said something reassuring.

I climbed the tallest hill with my blistered toes, swirled around on top, and didn’t see one house or farm or road, only an endless rolling field of grass, the strands lazily bending with the heavier gusts of a mild breeze. The plains—except for the odd, still-standing, oil-based boomtown here and there—are mostly uninhabited, with, in some areas, one family taking care of as many as sixty thousand acres of hay fields and cattle ranges (each bigger than the city of Seattle).

There may be no finer ground to walk on than prairie. The terrain, though rolling, provides a good flat landing spot for each footfall. There are few thorns and briars, few snakes (though there are said to be rattlesnakes), few mosquitoes (at least at this time of year), and neither swamp nor talus slope to slow one’s pace. Apart from the rare cactus plant (hardly bigger than a compact disc) and the mysterious and potentially leg-breaking “prairie hole” (which are gopher holes that hungry badgers have widened to about a foot in diameter), I could not ask for better ground to walk on.

I walked until I reached the Red Deer River, a sluggish river that was wide and ultimately uncrossable. I knew there was no way I could walk or swim across it with my gear, so I took a long detour off my pipeline path to walk over a bridge near the town of Bindloss, several miles to the east.

The sand hills came out of nowhere. One second I was walking over prairie, startling a pair of coyotes; the next, I was walking amid a hidden wonder of the world.

The Sand Hills are steep furry pyramids of grass that glow pink red in the dusk light. They are round, bulbous gumdrops, geographic Napoleon hats. Imagine yourself walking amid mountains that are not covered by rocks or trees but by thick grass. I scoured my mind for an analogy, and the best I could come up with were bare desert mountains made of sand and rock and ornery bush. But these were neither as barren nor as uninviting, and to compare these hills to anything would insinuate inferiority. These were hills of grass. A prairie mountain range. I stood looking over them in awe.

•   •   •

In the morning, I crossed the bridge to Bindloss, where I hoped to fill up with water before the long trek ahead of me over desolate country.

The town looked battered, a ghost town yet to be abandoned, the paint peeling off homes from decades of brutal, unflagging winds. It was the sort of half-deserted prairie village where you’d think it likely to hear a child’s ghostly laughter coming from the abandoned school’s creaky swing set. The school was boarded up, and several homes were in disrepair. When I asked a municipal worker where I could find water, he said, “This isn’t a good town to get water. It’s bad water here.” He gave me a bottle of water and suggested I go knocking on doors to fill up the rest of my bottles.

In truth, struggling Bindloss was probably a better example of small-town North America than quaint Consort. The plains states have lost a third of their population since the population peak in the 1920s. While in some counties there has been a surge in population due to the recent fracking boom, by 1998 46 of North Dakota’s 53 counties had lost population, 35 of them having so few people that they qualified as “frontier” counties. There are 6,000 ghost towns in Kansas alone. Between 1980 and 2010, half of all rural counties in the United States decreased in population, with an especially pronounced decline in the Great Plains, where 86 percent of rural counties lost population. In these rural parts of the plains, there are only 4.2 people per square mile.

A lot of the decline has to do with technological enhancements in farming. With high-tech machines, farmers can work far more ground than their fathers could. Young people go off to college and never come back, the railroad is pulled out, the Catholic priest leaves, a bank closes, then the pool hall, then the motel, then the newspaper, and then the Main Street shops get boarded up. If the town is lucky, there’ll still be a gas station that functions as a convenience store and diner.

The oil industry or a pipeline—anything that will bring in money and help keep a small town alive—is more than likely to be welcomed by these communities, whose inhabitants are aware that their town is approaching its expiration date. For them, questioning the oil industry could be the same thing as questioning their community’s existence.

After knocking on a few doors, I found a man who let me fill up my bottles from a giant plastic jug of water. When I told him where I’d started my walk and where I was ending, he said, “So you’re following the TransCanada pipeline, are you? Are you one of them environmentalists?”

There was something disturbing about the question. It implied—and rightly so—that there are people who care about the environment and there are people who don’t. He asked the question as if I identified with some freakish sexuality. So are you one of them erotic-vomiting quicksand fetishists?

How could a person not be an environmentalist? I grew up in a suburb outside of Niagara Falls, New York, just four miles from the ghost town of Love Canal, the site of one of the most tragic environmental disasters in U.S. history. Growing up near Love Canal—where, in the 1940s, a chemical company had buried tons of toxic waste beneath a community that would, decades later, experience abnormally high cancer rates and birth defects—taught me early on what happens when industry gets to act “naturally.” Wherever I went—Mississippi, Alaska, North Carolina—it seemed the captains of industry were mobilizing their forces.

There was nothing unusual about my upbringing. In North America, we all have our own Love Canals on the edge of our towns. So it was strange to me that even though the environment has been losing for hundreds of years, environmentalism—a term that describes simply caring about the environment—is seen as some extremist ideology. It’s sad to say, but many people, perhaps like this guy, don’t have the luxury of caring about the environment. In a dying town such as Bindloss, storing stacks of blue-green Keystone XL pipes (a heap of which were stacked across the road behind a cage fence) could be the town’s only chance at survival. That’s not to say that their amorality on the health of the environment is okay, but it does at least make their contemptuous position comprehensible.

Yes, I’m an environmentalist! I care about the fucking planet! I should have proudly announced. Instead, I sheepishly muttered something about wanting to be on a long walk, which was true, too.

With my water bottles filled, I walked out of the village, hopped a barbed-wire fence for the thirtieth time that day, and dragged my poor feet across another endless field beneath a curdled gloom-gray sky.