12.

The Denier

MILLS, NEBRASKA—995 MILES TO GO

December 3, 2012

The cows in front of me scattered, and I sprinted down the slope along the creek bed as fast as I could under the heft of my pack. I flung my trekking poles off to the side. I needed to get my pack off so I could run. Really run.

I unbuckled the waist buckle of my pack. The ground trembled beneath the cows’ hooves. I lifted my hands to my chest to unbuckle the top buckle of my backpack. The weight of the pack had shifted, and the belt was straining in both directions, making it impossible to unclasp the buckle with the normal push of a button.

“C’mon!” I growled through clenched teeth, struggling to unbuckle it, still running. The cows were getting closer.

“C’MON!”

It unbuckled. The pack fell off of my back like a rocket booster. I didn’t have a moment to appreciate that I’d just dropped two-thousand-dollars’ worth of gear to be trampled by the pursuing herd.

My arms pumped furiously, the tips of my hiking boots dug into the soft grass, my leg muscles plunged me forward in great groin-stretching leaps. In midstride—and I don’t know why I did this—I flung off my orange hunting vest.

I ran along the dry creek and began to mount the slope in front of me. I had no idea how many cows were behind me. Twenty? Fifty? (I submit this as a new proverb: “When you’re not sure how many cows are chasing you, don’t stop to count.”) I ran up the slope and saw another barbed-wire fence ahead.

My face was bright red, my eyes squinted, my arms pumping, hands karate chopping, forehead veins bulging, digestive system impressively still functioning.

I made for the fence, throwing myself onto the ground, and rolled safely beneath the bottom wire. I lay there gasping for air, staring up into the dusky gray overcast sky. The cows came to a halt at the fence, and I stood up and looked into the eyes of my enemies, feeling a mix of relief from my escape and dread as I realized my fear of cows was back and that I’d have to carry it with me for the rest of my hike.

It was about an hour before sunset. I knew I needed to get my pack, which, of course, had my tent, clothes, and sleeping bag. I ducked under the fence and walked toward the herd screaming like a maniac. The cows stepped back a few yards but then started walking toward me again, so I walked back to the fence and decided that I need to change my strategy.

I walked the perimeter of the fence, seeking a cow-free route to get my stuff. I told myself, Just do it, ducked under the fence, and scurried to the creek. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to find the pack, but there it was, untrampled, sitting on its side. A black cow with a white face climbed down the hill and trotted behind me, so I ran along the creek shouldering my pack, forgetting about the search for my dear trekking poles. The creek bed was all muck, so my feet and ankles got sucked into the earth, but I pushed forward, escaping the white-faced Skeletor cow, set my pack outside the fence, and commenced another mission to find my poles, which I did find, though my orange hunting vest was never retrieved.

The prairie gave way to canyons, and I set up my tent at the bottom of one next to another dry creek bed. As I lay in my sleeping bag staring at my tent ceiling, I heard the march of hooves nearby and then a deep moan. I unzipped my tent door. A thin gauze of clouds sat in front of a crescent moon, bright and fuzzy. I vaguely spotted the bodies of black cows walking next to the creek, black ghouls floating across the grass. I tied my bootlaces and uncapped my bear spray in case more split-second heroics were called for. In the morning, I reached another barbed-wire fence and entered yet another cow pasture and did the only thing I could: I screamed and waved my poles over my head, advancing headlong toward the herd.

•   •   •

I was eating a pumpkin pie with a plastic spoon while hiking down Highway 18 in southern South Dakota. A homeowner, who’d seen me walk past his home, thought I might be hungry so he had jumped in his truck and brought me three-fourths of his leftover Thanksgiving dessert. This was one of several kindnesses offered to me near the town of Winner, South Dakota. A hardware store manager fixed my trekking pole that had broken in two (with hard plastic tubing and a lot of duct tape), I charged my electronics at a Chinese restaurant, and the local police gave me permission to set up my tent in the local park.

But as I broke off the highway and began trespassing over farmland once again, the warmth and hospitality of town gave way to a cold and uninviting countryside. It was a weekend and hunters were out, so every few minutes I heard the putt, putt, putt of rifle shots. Most of the shots were far away, but there were a few sharp bangs from nearby that felt so close I found myself looking at my limbs to make sure I hadn’t been shot and had been walking purely on pain-numbing adrenaline. In one rocky section, I heard gunfire so close that I dove behind a rock and waved my new orange hunting vest in the air as if it were a white flag of surrender. When a covey of quail rocketed out of some shrubbery, my heart stopped.

This wasn’t ideal land to be trespassing over, unlike the endless grasslands of Alberta and Montana. There, I’d walked for hours before seeing an abandoned home or a gravel road. I’d felt so unobserved that I’d drop my pants and go to the bathroom as unabashedly as the cows. But here there was a vast network of country roads, each separated by a mile, with many small family-run farms growing corn and sunflowers (which had been harvested months before). Every time I leaped over a fence, I felt as if I were being watched, or that I might accidentally walk into someone’s backyard upon mounting a hill. I hopped a barbed-wire fence, and when I looked back, I spotted a red truck prowling behind me. I waved, but all that was returned was a blank glare.

On the road, a landowner who owned a dump saw me walking. He was the sort who looked like he’d been battered by an addiction and buoyed by religion—a rescued dog, bearing a renewed faith in humanity from kind treatment, but in the depths of him still lurked the monster of his past who might snap at someone’s hand whether extended out of kindness or malice.

“I’m on a long walk,” I said.

“You’re fucking crazy, man,” he said.

“Well,” he said, reconsidering, “I guess you gotta do something. Me, I run this dump. And about four hundred head of cattle. I get in trouble if I’m not doing something.”

I asked him if I was in Nebraska yet, and he said that the state was just past the line of evergreens. Careful not to walk on his property or in his woods, I took the road into Nebraska.

It was cold and the sun was hidden behind an overcast sky. Because I didn’t have the directional aid of the sun and because I was nervous about the last guy and the red truck, I walked due west—in the wrong direction—for an hour.

I crossed the South Dakota–Nebraska border around dusk and staggered into the town of Mills. The town, like many country towns in these areas, was hardly a “town” in the conventional sense of the word. There weren’t any businesses, only about six homes, half of which seemed deserted. I called out hello in front of one but was greeted only by a sleepy dog. There was a building—the town’s community center and history museum—that had a truck parked in front of it. I knocked on the door and no one answered, but I heard a vacuum purring inside, so I sat on my pack on the front lawn waiting for them to finish. Another truck pulled up and a large man in his seventies wearing a camo-patterned shirt got out and, amused, asked, “Well, what might you be doing in Mills?”

I told him about my expedition and asked where I could set up camp for the night. He said his name was Gary and that I could set up my tent in the woods by the creek. But first, he brought me into the museum for a tour. The museum, which Gary runs, used to be a home. It’s still fully furnished and operational, serving as a sort of hunting hostel during the fall and also as a museum for the locals in the area who’d given Gary their family histories and photo albums.

Gary showed me around. I looked at all the pictures on the walls. Many were family pictures or pictures of kids lined up in front of their school from the 1930s and ’40s. “Mechanization has changed the way of life here. When I was a boy, there were four schools within twenty miles. Now there’s one high school with thirty kids.”

We sat at the kitchen table, and we talked, or Gary talked and I listened. He told me about his twenty-eight years as a county commissioner, his son’s ranch down south, and the few times he lobbied in Washington for a farming program.

“When you get older, you get more opposed to change,” he said about himself. He’s appalled that the Ten Commandments can’t be displayed in government buildings, he’s scared to death about the influx of foreign-exchange students for fear of another terrorist attack (that might take place in Omaha, Nebraska, where the U.S. Strategic Command is based), and he’s doubtful that climate change has been influenced by mankind, claiming that the temperature was just as warm during Lewis and Clark’s expedition across the region two hundred years ago.

I listened carefully, keeping all of my thoughts to myself. I didn’t say anything, but I was taken aback and somewhat unsettled by how different our concerns were. We got along well enough, though, and he offered me the museum for the night, along with all its amenities, and whatever food I’d like to forage from the fridge and cupboards.

He left for home, and I had a Risky Business moment in my thermal underwear on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, jubilantly sliding across it. Man, I’m going to enjoy this.

I started with a long steaming-hot shower, periodically nudging the shower dial closer and closer to the H, and soon enough I was bathing in a fog of sizzling steam. I shampooed my hair twice, my beard once, scrubbed my armpits, and thoroughly cleaned between my toes. I threw my clothes into the washing machine, and while wearing my black thermal underwear, I made a supper of lima beans, tater tots, and ground beef, all retrieved from the freezer. I turned on the Sunday night Packers-Giants game, watching it while stitching up my torn clothes, which had become a once-a-week ritual.

The house felt as if it had been broken in well, as if good lives had been lived there. There were awkward-looking family pictures from the 1990s, shelves of books with 1950s bindings, a rifle mounted on two deer hooves. Oh, the domestic bliss! I felt as if I could have spent a whole week here, happily sleeping next to the propane heater, watching stupid television shows, concocting strange dinners from the food that visiting hunters had left, and playing Minesweeper on their ancient computer.

I walked down the halls of the museum late in the night, looking at the pictures of families from the 1930s and ’40s. The people looked young and strong and thin. I wondered if a place such as Mills—and all the abandoned towns I’d walked through—would have been better off without the mechanized industry that made these families, with their sturdy bodies and tough hands, unnecessary and obsolete. I thought I’d be happier in a village with good homemade food, close neighbors, and laughing children than in an empty one where one man and a few John Deeres can handle six thousand acres. But I suppose it’s easy to get nostalgic about the past, especially one you hadn’t lived. Perhaps, in my reverie, I’d failed to take into account the aching backs, the workdays from sunup till sundown, the dead infants, the dairy cows gone dry.

“It was all hard labor,” Gary had said.

•   •   •

In the morning, I watched The Today Show as I ate my breakfast and packed up. There was an inch of snow on the ground, and I wasn’t at all eager to leave my little warm home.

I walked over prairie, hopping over fences rather than rolling under them so as not to let the wet snow moisten my clothes. I kept on Highway 137 even though it didn’t follow the pipeline because I wanted to use the bridge to cross the potentially uncrossable Niobrara River.

A thirtysomething man in a small SUV pulled over to me and asked me why I was walking.

“I’m about to make some lunch,” he said. “Do you want to come over for some?”

I walked a half mile back to his home, which seemed both local (with its mounted heads of deer and camo bedspreads) and worldly (with a shiny keyboard placed in front of a big Mac computer monitor). While Stan made a watermelon smoothie and grilled cheese on pumpernickel, and offered me zucchini bread, still moist, that his mom had made him, I filled him in on my adventure. The XL, it turned out, is set to go through his land, which he’s okay with because of the compensation he’ll receive and because he acknowledges that we have an oil-dependent economy.

“But don’t even think about going on my neighbor’s land,” he warned. I thought this was going to be another Great Plains tough-guy boast, but apparently his neighbor was so upset about the XL going through his property that he’d taken his gun out and threatened the TransCanada land agents who had tried to cross his land.

“He’ll really shoot you,” Stan said.

“Say no more,” I said. “I’ll stay off.”

I thought Stan and I were similar. We were close in age, it seemed he’d been to college, and he had an appreciation for the beauty of the prairie, which I’d come to admire, too. Unlike my conversations with older folks who prefer to talk more than listen, my conversation with Stan was far more of a give-and-take. I’d been hoping to meet someone like him: someone I could ask provocative questions without worry of causing offense; someone who might give me a clearer understanding of the Great Plains mind-set.

“Are people around here concerned about global warming?” I asked.

“No,” he said, with a surprised smile. “Why? Are you?”

“I’m definitely worried that we’re warming our planet,” I said.

Stan said he was happy I was there because he never got to talk to people like me and that I might be able to fill in some of his blind spots. He said that the people in this area are independent, hardworking, self-reliant, and that they resent any sort of government interference. He told me that the government asked some of the ranchers to build fences around their canyons so their cows couldn’t defecate in the Niobrara River. He also said that the government was spending tens of millions of dollars studying a bug that might be affected by the pipeline (which, I’d later learn, wasn’t true, as the research was a free service provided by a few professors and students from a local university). I was doubtful about the bug thing, as I didn’t think a narrow pipeline would have a huge impact on a whole species, but what did I know? Perhaps there was an unreasonably expensive study, but without that knowledge, I couldn’t disagree with him.

He said he thought global warming was all “hype,” created so the government could seize more power.

“We can take care of our own land,” he said. “We don’t need the government to come here and tell us how to live.” Environmentalism, as he saw it, was more or less a ploy for more government control.

“Don’t you think environmentalism is all about power?” he asked.

I was stunned silent by the question. It was now clear that we had such different values, such different ways of thinking. My mind went in a hundred directions at once, giving me no clear rhetorical path to follow. Environmentalism, to me, had nothing to do with power. Environmentalism was about stopping another Love Canal from happening. It was about keeping fracking away from my old North Carolina home. It was about keeping the Gates of the Arctic National Park wild and undeveloped. It was about giving caribou calving grounds, eating foods from healthy soil, and making our planet habitable for the next seven generations. To me, environmentalism was about, well, life. And to be opposed to it was so unthinkable that my mind had no response prepared and could not improvise one on the spot. From the phrasing of this one question, I gathered that any sort of mutual understanding was impossible.

Antienvironmentalism and climate change denial are no strangers to the Great Plains. But denial, of course, is not exclusive to the Heartland. It seems that the more temperature records are broken, the more the sea level rises, and the more destructive our storms get, the more we as a country try to put climate change out of our minds. For the first time since 1988, climate change was not brought up in any presidential debates. Of twenty countries polled, America ranks at the top of countries that are doubtful about the existence of climate change. According to a Pew Research Center poll, only 18 percent of Romney’s supporters believed in man-made climate change and only 25 percent of Tea Party Republicans agreed that global warming, man-made or not, is happening. Meanwhile, in the real world, 97 percent of climate scientists acknowledge man’s role—a consensus Galileo would have killed for.

But because a warming planet is so frightening and the prospect of changing one’s lifestyle so unsettling, people force themselves to believe it isn’t true. When there isn’t outright denial, there’s apathy. The Greek apatheia means the refusal or inability to experience pain. When you don’t want to or don’t know how to deal with the pain of climate change, apathy becomes an attractive alternative. And it’s hard to blame the deniers for it. Living in ignorance or apathy, after all, might be more sensible than living in fear.

The plains weren’t always this way. In the early 1900s, they were a hotbed of progressivism, granting women the right to vote well before most all of the states east of the Mississippi. Because of the difficult nature of making a living on the plains, the people became, according to Wallace Stegner, “militantly cooperative, even socialistic.” In Kansas—now one of the most conservative states—was a town called Radical City. Nearby, in Girard, Kansas, the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason was printed and read by hundreds of thousands. There, in 1908, Eugene V. Debs accepted the Socialist Party’s nomination for president.

But eventually the people were either defeated by Dust Bowls, made obsolete by technology, or grew rich from oil. And the progressivism—and all that pioneer fervor—vanished.

The Heartland now beats with a dull thump. Take a drive through the plains and you’ll see ghost towns, barns rotting, barbed wire rusting on old wooden posts. I never saw children, and the women of child-bearing age seem to have vanished from the face of the prairie as dramatically as the buffalo. The few men my age crowd around slot machines in bars. Hunting excursions take place more behind steering wheels than on foot. Earlier, I happened upon a group of farmers at a diner playing gin, and they teased the big guy at the table, saying that he liked to go on long walks, too. “From the couch to the TV,” he said, laughing.

And now there is a foreign corporation that wants to jam a thirty-six-inch-diameter pipe through the land their great-grandfathers homesteaded, and no one seemed to think that there was anything wrong with it. Where was the Wild West unrest, the cowboy chivalry, the calls for rebellion?

I came here to see the center of the universe, but at times, the Heartland seemed like the farthest thing from it. Maybe the hot, the passionate, and the ambitious don’t suit this land anymore. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with taking over the land your great-grandpa homesteaded and living a quiet life on the farm. Maybe, but I thought there was something missing. There’s a heavy contentment with the everyday task, but where’s the exuberance of the uncommon deed?

My speechlessness with Stan was slow to break, and what words came out were garbled and mostly incoherent. The subject was changed and we awkwardly said good-bye, both of us maintaining our good humors. I walked down the highway, careful not to step on his neighbor’s land (which had a threatening sign on it that read THIS PROPERTY IS GOVERNED BY THE CASTLE DOCTRINE).

I crossed the bridge over the Niobrara River, hopped a fence, and continued southeast through the Nebraska prairie.