9.

The Posse

GLASGOW, MONTANA—1,522 MILES TO GO

October 20, 2012

In Val Marie, a reporter, producer, and cameraman from CBC’s show The National stopped by to talk with me.

It was surreal watching my little journey—which I’d told practically no one about until just a few weeks before I’d set out—getting attention from a major national news network.

We walked around town while I pretended to tie my boot laces, get my package from the post office, and hop over a barbed-wire fence.

The reporter asked me something along the lines of “How have your views changed on the XL during the course of your trip?” I didn’t want to come across as an environmental lunatic, which would automatically get me dismissed by at least half the viewing public, so I played down the whole “y’all are goin’ to hell” sentiment and instead tried to come across as something more culturally acceptable—“a young man on a journey.”

“To go on a journey,” I said, “is to be changed by the experiences you have and the people you meet and the places you see. [When you] go into a journey with some sort of rigid stance, you’re kind of closing yourself off from those opportunities.”

I believed in all that, but when I watched the interview later on, I felt disgusted with myself for squandering an opportunity to say something true and useful, choosing instead to timidly utter what can aptly be called “uncontroversial bullshit.”

I explained why this hike couldn’t be an anti-oil protest since all my gear, clothes, and food either had been created by petroleum or was shipped using it or contained the product itself. The reporter then asked, “Do you think that’s why they’re building this pipeline?” (In other words, “Do you think we need oil?”) I felt as if I had a response deep in the recesses of my mind, but I stumbled and stammered and scolded myself for the rest of the day.

•   •   •

There are times when the wind, unimpeded by forest or mountain, blows over the plains with the force of a buffalo stampede. It isn’t a series of gusts like it is in most places, but a constant heavy current that rushes against you without diminishment. It’s as if you’ve positioned your squinty-eyed, hair-tossed head directly in front of the earth’s air conditioner.

That night, I tried to set up my tent on the open prairie, but rocking waves of wind sweeping over the land gathered up and threw my loose items—tent bags and sleeping pad—over the grass, sending me on a series of mad dashes to retrieve them.

After collecting my things, I tried to plant my feet on the corners of my fluttering tent, which dodged my every move like a cursed Twister mat. Realizing I’d never get the tent up and that it wouldn’t stay upright even if I could set it up, I repacked my stuff and walked to a nearby road. I set the tent up in a ditch alongside the road, where there was enough protection from the wind. But around two a.m., the wind shifted direction, attacking my tent from the exposed side. The walls of my tent flapped deafeningly, sounding like the noisy crescendo just before a nerve-racking rocket launch. The wind was so loud I was compelled to unzip the door and poke my head out to see if there was an approaching tornado.

The wind yanked one of the tent stakes from the ground and launched it into the tall grass. (I had just four stakes, so losing one was a bit of a big deal.) My tiny tent collapsed on me, and one of my trekking poles was beating against my chest. I was frantically trying to stop the pole from hitting me, searching for the tent zipper, and squealing through my first taste of claustrophobia.

I got out, turned my headlamp on, and walked the road in search of large rocks (of which, apparently, there are very few on this part of the prairie) so I could hold the tent in place with their weight.

In the morning, groggy eyed and with a disgraceful mop of bed head, I dismantled the tent, and a man, whom I’d met the previous day, slowed down and screamed out from his driver’s-side window, “I like my truck!” before speeding off back to Val Marie.

The wind picked up. At times, I felt as if I could lean forward and the wind would hold me still. The tumbleweeds did not tumble across the prairie; they hovered several feet in the air, crashing into a barbed-wire fence, where hundreds crowded together desperately gripping the wire or one another. The ferocious winds turned the prairie grass into a field of flames, lifting and falling, lifting and falling, dancing and licking and lifting and falling. Above me, the clouds fast-forwarded across the sky.

Unobscured by buildings, hillsides, or trees, the plains’ sky is huge, blooming open from horizon to horizon, colored with a light pastel blue on its petal’s farthest horizon edge that deepens into a rich dark blue directly overhead until it becomes a blinding yellow pollen at its bright center.

How can one describe the immensity of the plains’ sky? You could say you can rotate your body in a 360-degree swirl and always see the sky, and that’s true. You could say you can look forward, look above you, and even tilt your head all the way back to your heels and take in the sky in one full, albeit awkward, motion. And that’s true, too. But there’s no way you can ever fully take in a plains’ sky. It’s just too big. It’s impossible to capture with a camera lens, let alone a pair of eyes. You look at the sky one moment, tie your bootlaces the next, and look up again and see something completely new, with new shapes and positions of clouds, a new slant of sunlight. Sometimes the moment-to-moment change is stark. Sometimes it’s subtle. But there is always ongoing change, a constant newness, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-re-created composition of color, cloud, and prairie dust that will force its sightseers to concede that the plains are far from a land of unvarying monotony. It is most magnificent after an evening rainstorm when the clouds break apart and the sky becomes a watering hole for an ecosystem of cloud species, each its own shape and shade, with its own interests and intentions.

Behind me were smoky blue-gray plumes, as if a city just beyond the horizon had been set ablaze. Directly to the left was a long, thin, curved cloud, a horizontal scabbard, frayed at the edges. To my front left, far in the distance along the horizon, was a mountain chain of clouds, their snow-topped crests a rosy evening pink. Directly in front of me was an upside-down atom bomb explosion, with a wide bottom and a cylinder of smooth and unruffled whiteness rising above it. Here and there were your standard white puffy clouds, small and compact, solitary buffalo taking a break from the herd to graze alone in the dark-blue grass. To my front right was a big bulbous heap of white clouds, a pyramid of popcorn that sat in front of a dark-gray storm farther back, way back, that was sending down sheets of dark rain. Directly above me was a drab gray that belched a gentle thunder. Straight to my right, to the west, with the sun easing its way down, was the most spectacular cloud collection yet: the sun sending shafts of light through pillows of cottony clouds, tearing them apart into an explosion of feathers. The torn clouds were a gloomy gray on one side and a resplendent white where their frothy edges met the full force of the sun.

I felt as if I were carrying this great blue dome above me, a Sistine ceiling, a vast ever-changing sky painting: schools of drifting clouds; flecks of sparkling star light; Serengetis of chirping, squeaking, honking birds; wildernesses of insects; the sun rising to its bleary afternoon heights or sinking down for sleep beneath purple-red clouds. It is a vast inverted ocean that is—because it has, when you think about it, no true border, no real extent, no absolute limit—infinite.

•   •   •

I crossed the border into Montana. America. Home. “No Trespassing” country.

No one in Canada had a problem with my trespassing over their property, but someone in nearly every Montana town I passed through would inform me with morbid certainty that I was crazy. And then they’d warn me (in a friendly sort of way) that I’d get shot for trespassing on so-and-so’s land. People who didn’t even own land would tell me not to trespass.

No trespassing and private property signs are posted on trees and fence posts all across rural America. Even where there aren’t signs, Americans simply don’t have the freedom (or implicit permission) to saunter through their town’s neighboring woods and fields. In the Piedmont region of rural North Carolina, where I’d been living off and on for the past few years, almost every home had no trespassing signs posted on trees, barring walkers from acres and acres of woodland. If you talk to an American about this, he’ll say, “Tough luck,” as if this tradition of exclusion were the natural state of things.

But trespassing is a bizarre concept in other countries. Continental European countries such as Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland allow hikers to roam forests, unenclosed land, and alpine pastures even though these places aren’t designated national parks. Scandinavian countries, by law, give access to virtually the whole countryside, permitting campfires, camping, swimming, berry gathering, and, of course, hiking. You can walk across virtually any countryside you care to. In Finland, it’s called jokamiehenoikeus. In Scotland, it’s “the right to roam.” In Sweden, it’s allemansrätt (or “every man’s right”). In Sweden (and I love this), fences put up for the sole purpose of keeping people out must be torn down, and property owners are actually prohibited from posting NO TRESPASSING signs (unless they’re there to keep walkers out of a sensitive area). It’s not a free-for-all for hikers, by any means. Hikers are required to stay at least sixty-five yards from homes and could be sentenced to as much as four years in jail for destroying property. Allemansrätt is friendly to landowners because landowners can’t be sued by hikers if the hiker has an accident on the landowner’s property. In the U.S., landowners who let people run wild on their land run the risk of being sued, so their NO TRESPASSING sign is often not just an ornery message but a kind of legal suit of armor.

For all the signs that threaten the would-be trespasser, cases in which trespassers have been shot are rare but not unheard of. In 2009, a family in Liberty County, Texas, was driving home from an evening of swimming. When they parked on the side of the road to pee in the woods, they were met with gunfire from nearby homeowners who’d crafted a sign that read TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. SURVIVORS WILL BE RE SHOT!! SMILE I WILL. The four family members were shot with a twelve-gauge shotgun, including a seven-year-old boy who was hit in the head and died.

Perhaps the most well-known trespassing tragedy is the case of Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student in Louisiana. In 1992, Hattori, who’d dressed for a Halloween party as John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever, accidentally approached the wrong house and was shot by homeowner Rodney Peairs. The event sparked an international relations nightmare.

Such a violent reaction to a person’s walking across someone’s property was bewildering to me because—even though I was breaking the law—I’d never once felt like I was doing anything wrong. Walking cross-country is like crocheting or picking berries: It’s so harmless and innocent that you begin to feel harmless and innocent, too. You feel wholesome.

Why are we like this? Why are we so obsessed with private property?

Our systems of property derive largely from our English legal ancestry. English Puritans who settled in Massachusetts understood private property to be “akin to the right to absolute possession of [a man’s] own soul and conscience,” writes author Richard Slotkin. But unlike England, America doesn’t have much of a history of the “commons,” where English villagers, for centuries, shared land for grazing cattle, collecting firewood, and other practical purposes. America was, from the beginning, a private property country.

By the mid-eighteenth century, most colonists owned land and 80 percent of the population worked in agriculture. Thomas Jefferson believed that property rights gave citizens economic security and a sense of self-reliance, which he thought would encourage independent political judgment. (Jefferson, understandably, didn’t foresee conservative talk radio.) He imagined a nation of farmers, and his vision would influence federal land-distribution polices.

With the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress set out to survey land to the west of the established states, dividing up the still-undeveloped continent into square 640-acre sections. “The national grid,” John Hanson Mitchell writes in his book Trespassing, “was essentially the ultimate expression of private property . . . [America] viewed land not as a place of wildness and beauty or a source of sustenance but above all as a commodity to be bought and sold primarily for capital gain.”

The U.S. military waged war with the Plains Indians throughout the 1860s and 1870s, pushing them off their ancestral lands and making the settling of the West inevitable. In the 1880s, the lines on the map became lines on the ground with the advent of barbed wire. Without cheap mass-produced barbed wire, it would have been impossible to successfully subdivide the plains (where there weren’t enough trees to build long wooden fences). Land that had been borderless from the dawn of time was suddenly a checkerboard of wire.

Over time, the idea of “no trespassing” became legally sanctioned. The Supreme Court acknowledged that in areas where there is a “common understanding” the public is permitted to hunt, fish, and travel over private land, but this right is revoked the second a landowner posts a NO TRESPASSING sign or builds a fence. This is referred to as the “power to exclude,” and it’s given to all property owners.

Consequently, going for a long walk on the plains is impossible unless you are an owner of a large piece of property or if you have obliging property-owning neighbors. Barbed-wire fences, NO TRESPASSING signs, legal impediments, and a general feeling of unwelcomeness, not to mention the fear of getting shot, make travel over huge swaths of the country—and by no means just the Great Plains—difficult, illegal, and practically impossible.

In America, the so-called freest country on Earth, no one really has the right to roam. To walk across wild America, except in national parks and on government-approved trails, you have no choice but to trespass.

A sorry state of sauntering, indeed.

•   •   •

“Don’t you think it’s a little late in the year to be traveling?” asked the cashier at the Reynolds Market in Glasgow, Montana, pop. 3,253. Sliding a box of Pop-Tarts and a stack of jumbo-size candy bars over the scanner, the cashier, an old woman who I sensed was the type who normally radiated a grandmotherly warmth, asked her question with a steely coldness. This was not the innocent query of a stranger but the stern admonishment of a mother, one who keenly and quickly gathered the foolishness of my enterprise and who spoke to me as if I were a member of her brood.

I felt embarrassed and guilty and tried to reassure her—but was really trying to reassure myself—that I wouldn’t have to deal with the Montana cold (which, in December, gets down to an average of seven degrees Fahrenheit) since I was heading south to warmer climes, far from the icy clutches of a Montana winter. The clerk shook her head and warned me to at least stay away from the town of Wolf Point. “If anyone there as much as walks toward you, get away,” she said. Not too long before, a forty-three-year-old female teacher was abducted and killed by two men who worked in the nearby oil boomtowns.

“And don’t shoot yourself,” she said, with just the slightest touch of humor.

Her last piece of advice was in reference to a little Glasgow inside joke I’d heard a few times already, alluding to an incident that took place in town a few months before my visit. Ray Dolin, a struggling thirty-nine-year-old photographer from West Virginia, was hitchhiking across the country to write a photographic memoir called Kindness in America. Dolin took a bus to Montana, where he began his hitchhike, but was promptly shot in the arm by a stranger in a passing car outside of Glasgow. Naturally, the people of Glasgow were ashamed that one of their own would do such a thing. But, in the months that followed, after the police had arrested a potential shooter, Dolin confessed that he’d actually shot himself, claiming that he was trying to commit suicide. For good reason, the authorities were unconvinced, suspecting that Dolin’s misfire was actually a bold and rather bloody publicity stunt for his memoir.

Dolin was the talk of the town, and wherever I went in Glasgow, people flashed a relieved smile, and said something along the lines of “You’re not going to shoot yourself while you’re here, are you?”

I continued on over cow pastures, hay fields, and country roads. I slept next to a church in the town of Whitewater, was followed by two snarling curs near a farmer’s home, and usually sought a home once a day where I might fill up my water bottles. All my foot problems began to gradually disappear. They were getting tougher, but I’d also become far more fastidious about my foot care. Each night, I’d clean them rigorously, scrubbing in between my toes, clipping my toenails, applying creams, and adjusting Band-Aids. I began to appreciate why there are religious foot-washing rituals, which I used to think were yet more bizarre and kinky religious ceremonies. But I realized that feet, on a walk especially, ought to be washed with great care. They ought to be washed religiously. When my feet were useless, I was useless.

As for my shin splints, usually I’d start the day with a hardly perceptible soreness, making me wonder if my shin had fully healed up overnight. But halfway through the day, I’d awkwardly step on a rock, or sink my foot into a gopher hole, or get it tangled in soybean vines, and I’d fall to the ground in agony, look up into the sky with moist eyes, and cry out, “WHY?”

The deeper into Montana I hiked, the more the landscape changed. The grassy prairie became grayer and rockier. These hills—replete with fossils and dinosaur bones—seemed old, dry, decaying. The place was a geological sideshow: giant slabs precipitously balanced atop thin columns of dirt; the ground sinking an inch with each footfall as if it were full of air; the rocks so soft they’d shatter when I tried to use them to hammer in my tent stakes. The rotting, flaky cliffs were like statues, worn and crumbling, reminders of a grander age. I had the impression that mighty things happened here long ago. Now, the land’s denizens—farmers and hunters and livestock—seemed to be mere tourists on a historic battlefield where Jurassic glories once shook the earth.

As I walked from Glasgow to Nashua, the temperature chilled and the wind picked up, seeping through layers and biting my skin with frosty fangs. I put on my hat and gloves. Then my coat. Then my raincoat and pants. And finally, at night, my thermal underwear. In my tent, in all my clothes, in my five-degrees-Fahrenheit-rated sleeping bag, I still couldn’t stop shivering. This was troubling because I was wearing every article of clothing I had with me, and if it had been another ten or twenty degrees colder, I would have suffered all the more.

I came across my first Keystone XL workers—twentysomethings in a pickup truck doing surveying work—who seemed happy to meet me. Their older, gruffer overseer told me that I wasn’t allowed to trespass, and when I politely told him I’d been doing just that for more than a month, he scoffed and drove off. Another middle-aged guy, this one a local with a cowboy hat and a long beard with no mustache, told me, in a kinder way, to stick to the roads because I might be confused for a hunter or because cowboys would think I was out to steal one of their calves. He gave me a head nod as if to swipe a hard line under what he’d just said.

I took his advice, but walking these north-to-south and east-to-west roads was adding about a third more mileage to my trip because my true path was straight southeast. After half an hour, I thought, What the hell, no one’s going to see me out here, and started walking southeast again, always with a compass in hand, checking it once every minute to make sure I was on the right path. With my trekking poles, I figured I looked more like a bearded praying mantis than a cow thief and that no cowboy in his right mind would confuse me for one of his own.

I reached a gravel road and, low on water, I stopped at a local ranch. I yelled hello and a young man came out of a barn carrying a giant pistol in a holster strapped around his waist. The pistol was ridiculously long—compensatingly long—so long the barrel poked through a hole and dangled nakedly around his lower thigh.

“Sorry about the gun,” he said. “Out here, you never know when you’re going to need it.”

I knew that the Lakota hadn’t embarked on any raids in more than a hundred years and figured that there was little crime in these parts, so it was clear that he’d armed himself just for me. I asked him if I could have some water. He said no but proceeded to grab my bottles and fill them up. I could tell I was making him nervous, so I tried to put him at ease by telling him about my trip and remarking how beautiful his land was. I asked him where I might set up my tent, hoping he’d offer his land, but he pointed down the road and told me I could set my tent up wherever I wanted to in that direction.

I found a place down the road to set up my tent, and all through the night, I listened to snowflakes fall onto my thin tent roof, scraping down the sides. Here it is, I thought. Here’s winter.

George Orwell’s dilemma in Down and Out in Paris and London came to mind. Orwell was living as a poor dishwasher in Paris and was chronically worried about the day he’d finally go broke. But on the day he went broke, he discovered he no longer had anything to worry about. Now he just had something to deal with. I guess I felt the same. Now that winter was here, I could stop waiting for it and just start dealing with it.

The next time I had an Internet connection, I e-mailed Josh to ask him to dip into the kitty of emergency cash I had left him and mail me a winter hat, gloves, an extra pair of socks, a face mask, gaiters, and a four-season tent.

•   •   •

“This is the sheriff. Good morning.”

It was eight a.m. and I was camped, as the young man had suggested, along the road in a distant field. On the edges of my tent, snow had piled up in small mounds. The grass glistened everywhere, coated in frost.

I unzipped my tent and began slipping my feet into my frozen boots as I wished the sheriff a good morning, and said, “Well, this probably looks pretty strange, doesn’t it?” The sheriff had driven his vehicle over the grass and parked on one side of my tent. When I stepped out of the tent, I saw that strategically positioned in a sort of triangle around me were the sheriff, a middle-aged man wearing a flannel hat with ear flaps, and his son, the young man I’d spoken with the evening before. I looked at the young man and wanted to say, Dude, what the hell? I thought we were cool? Instead, I wished him a good morning and thanked him for the water from the night before.

I explained what I was doing, acknowledged how crazy it sounded, mentioned my family, and said I wanted to go on an adventure before I had “to go back to work.” Truth was, I never wanted a real job again, but any mention of “family” or “work,” I’d learned, instantly made me seem more normal.

“I got a call from the neighbor,” said the sheriff. “I just wanted to come out here and make sure you weren’t crazy.”

“Well, you gotta be a little bit crazy to do something like this,” I said, waving my hand at my tent and backpack, playing the only card I had, which was an open display of submissive “please don’t shoot me” self-deprecation. I brought the discussion back to the weather, the beauty of the land, and where I was heading today, figuring it would be wise to take control of the direction of the conversation before they could.

The sheriff laughed, but the middle-aged man appeared to be unaffected by my charms.

“You wanna be careful around here,” he warned gruffly.

“Does this area have a reputation for crime?” I asked.

“No,” he said, taken aback. “But people around here ain’t used to what you’re doin’. The owner of the land here, if he saw you walkin’, he’d a shot ya.

“What you’re doin’ ain’t normal,” he continued. “In my lifetime, I’ve never seen a hiker down this road. And my dad’s never seen one in his.

“What you’re doin’, it’s . . . it’s . . . strange.”

At the moment, I was innocently standing next to my tent, yet he spoke as if I were oiling myself up for a satanic ritual.

“It’s strange,” he muttered again.

“I’m sorry I raised the alarm,” I said. “I’ll pack up and be on my way now.”

My tone was compassionate and apologetic, but I was flustered. This was the first time in forty days that someone had asked for my ID (not including border crossings). It was suggested that I might get shot. It’s a shame, I thought, how I’d just walked through incredible scenery—a stunning stony-cliffed landscape—but no one except for me, a few cows, and a handful of xenophobes would ever get to see it.

In time, though, I’d feel sympathy for them. If I had been in their situation—having lived all their days in remote lands and having had no exposure to hikers, hitchhikers, and bearded travelers—I’d probably feel just as scared and act the same way, too.

“I’d stay on the roads,” the gruff man said, which I did for about ten minutes.