10.

The Farmer

BUFFALO, SOUTH DAKOTA—1,274 MILES TO GO

November 12, 2012

“Shysters,” Lewis said. “They’re damn secretive.”

Lewis and Patty are farmers ten miles north of Fallon, Montana. The farmland they lease is directly in the path of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline. Lewis and Patty weren’t at all happy with TransCanada—the company that will build the pipeline—whose land agents, for years, had been approaching homes in the area trying to get landowners to sign contracts.

“Who is responsible if that thing blows up? No one could answer that,” Lewis said. “Most of the people want to be treated fairly. This secretive bullshit sits in your craw. How do we know how much money people are getting up in Canada or down in Texas? Land agents won’t tell you anything. They keep you isolated. It’s all up to you to negotiate.”

The landowners were especially irked because TransCanada wanted to use a thinner, cheaper pipe under their land because most of the plains are considered a “low-consequence area.” TransCanada was offering only fifteen cents a foot to landowners, but a group of local farmers insisted on thirty dollars. It’s difficult to negotiate a fair sum, Lewis said, because all landowners must sign nondisclosures and keep their agreements confidential.

Lewis and Patty’s reluctance to embrace the pipeline seemed sensible to me—a position I assumed their private-property-respecting neighbors would theoretically sympathize with. But everyone in the area I talked with seemed either in favor of the pipeline or indifferent to it. I was told things like “Well, the world runs on oil” or “Wouldn’t you rather get our oil from our friends up north rather than the terrorists over there?”

After cookies and coffee at Lewis and Patty’s, I walked south and crossed the Yellowstone River over the I-94 bridge next to Fallon, Montana.

At the town bar and restaurant, the only place in town where I could get a Wi-Fi signal, a middle-aged lady in a work shirt and loose-fitting Carhartts sat down at my table in front of me. I’d seen her ten miles north of Fallon in her white pickup.

“So what are you doing this for?” she asked. I explained that I was in the mood for a long walk and that I wanted to see the path of the Keystone XL before it was developed.

“What, do you think ethanol is any better?” she exclaimed. Her tone was bitter and accusatory.

“I don’t really know . . . ” I said, gathering my thoughts, only to be cut off again.

“Look, you’re using energy to power that computer,” she said, pointing to the socket that my iPad was plugged into. “You don’t think we need oil?”

At this point, I had said nothing good or bad about the XL, so I was more than taken aback by her brusqueness. (Plains women, by the way—and I’m speaking generally here—are the brusquest, and therefore the scariest, demographic of women I’ve ever come across.)

“Well, the planet’s warming,” I muttered. “We gotta do something.”

Despite the bucolic character of the land, which was always a treat for the eye—even the meticulous symmetry of a well-planted hay field—I recognized that these hay fields, and these thousands and thousands of cows, and this livelihood for so many would not exist without large quantities of fossil fuel. Of the top eleven states that consume the most energy per person, seven of those states are on the Great Plains. To exist out here today, vast quantities of oil are necessary.

Not only that, but the cows themselves produce deadly greenhouse gases. Currently, there are 1.4 billion cows on Earth whose farts make up the world’s largest source of methane, a greenhouse gas 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report found that cows generate 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases—more than worldwide transportation does. In terms of methane, the gassiest states, unsurprisingly, are Great Plains states: Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, all of which have sizable oil, natural gas, and cattle industries.

To me, the larger problem wasn’t so much a land-use problem, but a cultural, philosophical, and religious problem. Would we do the terrible things to the environment today if we loved the earth more? Would we be where we are if our culture taught us to think of ourselves as part of the world and not just as its lordly stewards?

Many naturalists and environmental writers have their own ethic that they wish everyone would adopt. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic amounts to the belief that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold argued that getting a culture to buy into a new ethic isn’t impossible, pointing to our now near-universal moral indignation over slavery as evidence that ethics are capable of evolving in dramatic ways.

Leopold believed that it’s possible to extend our respect and sense of unity to not just other races and classes, but also to the natural world. This doesn’t seem impossible when we acknowledge that cultures in the past—those with pagan and animistic belief systems—thought of the world as a biotic system to which everything and everyone is connected.

Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson believes that the capacity for loving nature, which he calls “biophilia,” is already within us. He reminds us that we are drawn to other animals, “thrilled by the prospect of unknown creatures,” “riveted by the idea of life on other planets,” and that we spend more time in zoos than at professional sports events.

Stephen Jay Gould calls for an emotional bond with nature, and Barry Lopez, a “respectful regard.” Dan Flores wonders if we should think of animals like siblings, the way the Plains Indians thought of grizzly bears. Leopold believed that “All ethics rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” E. O. Wilson, who’s written extensively on the concept of a conservation ethic, says ethics change when “people look beyond themselves to others, and then to the rest of life.” Wilson takes it a step further: We can’t just welcome nature under our umbrella; we have to think about life that has yet to exist: “[O]ur perception of time must extend from [our] own life spans to multiple generations and finally to the extended future history of humankind . . . Any ethic worthy of the name has to encompass the distant future.”

Wilson believes that we can’t expect people in the present to live solely for people in the remote future. He says that we can “never ask people to do anything they consider contrary to their own best interests” and that the “only way to make a conservation ethic work is to ground it in ultimately selfish reasoning.” A new ethic will be adopted only if it presents a “material gain for themselves, their kin, and their tribe,” perhaps in the form of “a healthful environment, the warmth of kinship, right-sounding moral structures, sure-bet economic gain, and a stirring of nostalgia and sentiment.”

This relationship with nature does not come automatically. Wilson argues that the “relationships of ecology and the human mind are too intricate to be understood entirely by unaided intuition” and “common sense.” Wilson’s saying that we are not predisposed to feel empathy for the ozone or sacrifice for generations that have yet to be born or embrace grizzly bears as brothers. Education is the only way to instill this ethic: “Only through an unusual amount of education and reflective thought do people come to respond emotionally to far-off events and hence place a high premium on posterity.” Wilson, who studied ants as a boy, believes it’s more than possible to come to love another life form if gifted with knowledge of it. But loving future generations is something else entirely. For Wilson, looking out for the earth for the sake of our descendants has less to do with acting on their behalf and more to do with creating wholesome, conscientious, and contented lives for ourselves. In other words, to care for the future is to live well in the present. “What do we really owe our remote descendants?” Wilson asks. “Nothing . . . But what do we owe ourselves in planning for them? Everything.”

In the end, I didn’t think a new ethic, in and of itself, would be enough to solve our environmental problems. More of us might come to see our relationship with the planet in a new light, but there’d always be threats from the powerful, the ambitious, and the money hungry. Even the Native Americans, with their strong conservation ethics, participated in the nineteenth-century slaughter of the buffalo and beaver, helping to bring each to the brink of extinction. A new ethic, at best, would merely make possible the government initiatives that currently lack public support.

Still, I wanted to believe a conservation ethic could exist. But when speaking to the woman in Fallon, and a lot of the folks I met along the way, I guessed that I’d probably never see one take hold in my lifetime. She drives long distances to and from her pasture every day. She might run a tractor over hundreds of acres of hay fields. Scaling down, smaller farms, higher taxes on diesel: These sorts of changes the experts recommend would be appalling, unthinkable—offensive, even—to someone like her. It’s no wonder why well-meaning scientists are so quickly dismissed, and why global warming is denied by those whose livelihoods are so reliant on fossil fuels.

•   •   •

“I’d hate to see you get shot,” said a local, who kindly handed over an orange hunting vest as I cooked my dinner under Fallon’s park pavilion.

I continued on toward Baker, Montana, now in a bright orange vest. I walked through miles and miles of canyons. When I’d approach the edge of a canyon wall, I would worry that I wouldn’t be able to find a way down. But at every canyon rim, I was quick to find a path blazed by cows that safely led down and up the steep rock-and-dirt walls.

The town of Baker sat beneath a gray overcast sky. When I first caught sight of the town, I was standing next to an abandoned windmill that had only half its blades and creaked hauntingly with each passing gust.

North of town were dozens of pump jacks, some white, bearing streaks of rust; others, pitch-black. Some were slowly dunking their proboscises into the ground, but most stood frozen, paralyzed, dead, having long ago sucked dry the pools of black nectar that once gave them life.

In town, behind hillocks of scrap heap, I could see the top of a crane busy moving metal. The town, like a lot of small towns on the plains, had an air of decrepitude, but when I entered, I was shocked to see the bustle of business: hundreds of new pickups were parked in front of bars and motels; Hummers growled down Main Street; trailers were everywhere, housing all the temporary workers who were building two pipelines in the area.

Baker was booming, but the pipeliners would eventually leave, the motels would empty, the bars would cut back on servers, and things would resume as they had. The money that once came in in such abundance would, in time, be squandered and forgotten.

I walked into the post office, where I picked up several packages. Josh had sent me four days’ worth of food, a brand-new four-season tent, and winter gear: a merino wool shirt, a pair of gaiters (for walking through snow), a new pair of gloves, a new hat, a pair of hiking boots, two pairs of wool socks, and two new pairs of underwear. I mailed him my old tent and comfortably bedded down in my new and much warmer shelter.

•   •   •

“For someone with a college education, what you’re doing is pretty stupid,” said Abigail, who ran the town newspaper for Buffalo, South Dakota. “I mean, it’s really stupid.”

I was in Buffalo, sitting at Abigail’s kitchen table. She and her family offered to give me a room in their home for the night.

Abigail was, and had been, laying on the criticism pretty thick, but I was dumbly content, scarfing down the eighth pancake she’d made me, which was slathered in butter and dripping with blueberry syrup. We’d had this discussion, it seemed, a half-dozen times already, and I’d long ago given up trying to justify my trip or parry her attacks with fresh retorts. “These pancakes are excellent,” I said.

Year after year, Abigail and her husband hosted foreign-exchange students, and now they were caring for two Norwegian high school teenagers, who were going to play in the state championship football game the next day, which was the talk of the town, as was the election.

It was election night and President Obama would be announced the victor early in the evening. Four years ago, I was deeply moved when Obama won. Everyone was crying. Jesse Jackson was crying. Oprah was crying. I may have had some weird allergic reaction thing going on in my eye. But rather than ushering in a golden age of democracy and renewing hope in American politics, the Obama election—whether because of a misrepresentation in character, a lack of will, or simply complicated political limitations—made the young Americans who helped get him into office lose hope in government, in our democracy, and in him. Watching the results on TV, I felt none of the glory of four years ago—only a mild relief that we at least had made the best of a bad situation.

Once a source of hope, politics to me then was no more than a semiyearly obligation, like traveling home to attend a distant friend’s wedding. I watched Obama give his acceptance speech with the same sense of wry commiseration I felt when watching that friend inflict himself with the cruel and unusual punishment of life-long monogamy: It was a celebration where I wasn’t sure what I was celebrating. I turned off the TV, changed into my thermals, and went to bed.

•   •   •

I felt as if I were in a giant orange balloon being tossed in a stormy sky. But I was only in South Dakota, on the ground, in my orange tent next to a murky lake.

There was a storm outside that the Weather Channel called Brutus. My tent fluttered violently, pounded by twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds. Freezing rain pitter-pattered against my tent walls all day long. The cold, a manageable thirty degrees Fahrenheit, dropped down to eight, and all sides of my tent were shaking with the wind except the one nearest my head, which was solid, frozen inside by my exhalations and outside by the freezing rain. I pushed against it every now and then, and with enough force, I’d hear a loud crack and the ice outside would crash to the ground.

Despite the storm, I was cozy in my tent, maybe more so because I was stuck in it. I thought mostly hopeful, happy thoughts. I looked forward to the days and years to come. I ate as much in the tent as I did when I was on the move and eagerly read the third installment of Edmund Morris’s Teddy Roosevelt biography, Colonel Roosevelt. Normally, I’d resent being stuck like this, but I’d just walked fifteen days straight, doing between fifteen and twenty-five miles a day, and I saw the need for a good long rest.

I woke up on the second day without any expectation of hiking. The forecast—which I was able to check on my iPad (whose battery was beginning to run alarmingly low)—said the weather was going to get worse: colder, snowier, and windier. I put on all of my clothes: thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, five layers of shirts, plus my rain suit, a beanie, a faux-fur hat, and a pair of gloves. I went outside to fill up my water bottles from the lake, which was only partly frozen over, and to hammer in my tent stakes as deep into the frozen ground as they’d go.

I rationed my iPad usage so I could read throughout the day and night, took a three-hour nap, and consumed an inexcusable amount of food. The freezing rain stopped momentarily, right before sunset, so I went out to use the bathroom and climbed a hill to see if I could spot a road, a house, or some sanctum of safety, if just for precautionary reasons. But I couldn’t see anything except a herd of curious deer, who had caught sight of me by the lake. The sky, though, on its western end, looked as if it were on fire: a brilliant orange wrapped in a heavy quilt of big dark-blue clouds.

Staring at this orange sky—whose color probably portended a more vicious stage of the storm—I was dazzled. It had nothing to do with being at the mercy of weather extremes or pushing my limits. Rather, I felt the presence of something spectacular—sinister, perhaps, but no less spectacular—and it occurred to me that there are great truths bound by beauty, truths I could not comprehend, but truths that were there, pregnant with mysterious meaning.

Worried that the clouds would bring a fog or blizzard that might impair my visibility—perhaps so much that I wouldn’t be able to find my tent—I ran back as quickly as I could. The grass and cacti and thistles were frozen over, plump with ice coating their contours, forming a field of brittle, glistening stalagmites. As I ran, the ground shattered, tinkling like a shaken Christmas tree.

I slept restlessly. The cold was too cold, and my sleeping bag, over the past several nights, had accumulated moisture and was no longer living up to its five-degrees-Fahrenheit promise. My iPad’s battery had died, so my digital library was gone, but I’d taken note of the forecast and saw that tomorrow would be as cold and windy but clearer.

In the morning, I packed my things with numb fingers and headed southeast. Less than an hour into my hike, I saw that the forecast was mistaken. The sun, which was bright and blinding moments before, was lost behind the encroaching blimp of dark clouds. Snow began to fall, and I could see only a mile in the distance. I was being overtaken by a blizzard, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to set up my tent in these winds with my frozen fingers. I saw, however, an abandoned barn. As I approached, an enormous great horned owl leaped out from a glassless window, and I felt awful because I’d scared it from its home right before the storm. I picked up scrap wood and started a fire with tattered rope. I made a meal and held my sleeping bag over the fire to dry it out. Hot steam escaped my bag and instantly dissipated into the crisp air.

Out here, in this abandoned barn, I thought about how townspeople all along this hike were always calling me “crazy” or “insane,” as Abigail did back in Buffalo. When you’re called these things every day, it can have an effect. I’d wonder, Am I crazy? Maybe I shouldn’t be traveling cross-country? Is what I’m doing . . . wrong?

Such thoughts were like burrs stuck to my pant leg, prickling me every few strides. It wasn’t until I got out onto the open prairie or under the frozen fireworks of a starry night or in an unusual place like this abandoned barn that I’d finally be able to shake them off. When the ground is hard, the landscape half-wild, the weather pleasant, and the pain of walking gone, I’d feel a wild joy swell in my chest, a joy known only to the solitary traveler of many miles.

One day, I didn’t come across a road. The prairie was mostly flat, the ground gently lifting and falling. As I went on, the land became hilly, then turned into canyons with steep ravines full of dwarf hackberry trees and dried piles of cow manure. There isn’t a geographical name for this sort of terrain. It was a magnificent combination of prairie, hill, and canyon. The hills were shaggy and green, though their grass-bald cliffs were colored a pale dirt brown. When I got to the top of one of these cliffs, I looked toward the horizon and saw grander—real mountains—in the distance. There weren’t any villages, farmhouses, or industry—nothing but undulating hills. Some were a wild grainy green, and others, the bigger ones, pyramids of loose rock, some of which appeared to be topped with a sculpture or a decorative stone pinnacle, but were, on closer inspection, clusters of boulders that nature had chosen to strangely arrange.

I was constantly awestruck by the unexpected. And sometimes I’d be overcome with this joy, this love, this ecstasy. Whatever it was, it would linger, and sometimes I’d carry it with me for hours. I’d be overcome with a strange love for this rock, this blade of grass, that white cloud tearing into pieces, this body, this life. I wanted to fall to the ground and hug it. I wanted to suck all the air from the sky and eat all the dirt and consume everything so it and I were finally one. I had come to feel this with an astonishing regularity.

Every day there was a new trial. There was someone new to meet, something new to think, something new to learn, something new to see with every step, every turn. It was an infusion of newness! We weren’t meant to be dishwashers, doing the same thing day in and day out. No, I knew from this sustained joy, this steady percolation of fulfillment, that we were meant for lives of variety, of novelty, of adventure. Immersed in this constant newness, when every step was exploratory, every interaction novel, and every day completely different from the previous, it was hard to think of ever going back to the dullness of the normal, the expected, the planned. Looking over the great white windy plains, I didn’t think I was crazy. Rather, I thought that a life lived not half-wild is a life only half-lived.