13.

The Deputy

PETERSBURG, NEBRASKA—862 MILES TO GO

December 7, 2012

In Atkinson, Nebraska, at the local library, I bumped into Cindy Myers, an RN from nearby Stuart. She’d voted Republican all her life but had become disillusioned with the party and its gung-ho stance on the XL, which she thought threatened her and many other Nebraskans’ drinking water.

This was the person I’d wanted to meet all along: a red-state radical, furious and determined. Myers’s family drinks pure groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer, which sits beneath 174,000 square miles across seven states and much of Nebraska, providing water for 27 percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States and 82 percent of the drinking water for those who live atop it.

“Water is more valuable than gold to me,” said Myers. “It’s more valuable than oil. I just felt in my heart that it was my responsibility to do something.”

Like many Nebraskans, Myers became outspoken about the XL when she heard that the pipe and its dirty oil would flow through her groundwater. After Nebraskans voiced their concerns, TransCanada proposed an alternative route, but the XL was still set to run through a ninety-mile stretch of the aquifer, where the water table is less than fifty feet beneath the surface.

Myers was preparing to testify at a hearing in Albion, Nebraska, on December 4. She told me there would be hundreds in attendance, anti-XL rallies, and impassioned testimonies. “You need to get to Albion, Ken,” she said. “It’s going to be big.”

I spent the afternoon drying out my saturated tent on the lawn in front of the library while I spoke with Cindy inside. Every morning, the tent would be coated in frost crystals, but in the afternoon, when the sun would heat up my pack, the tent would turn sodden and need to be dried out.

In the evening, I went to the town bowling alley, where I out-ate everyone at the pizza buffet. Bob Seger blared from speakers, and balls crashed into pins. One of the waitresses, Deneen, sat down and chatted with me, telling me about her three girls and small-town life.

Deneen seemed taken with me and regretted that her older college-aged daughter wasn’t in town.

“I wish Kara was in town!” she said. “You guys would be so good together.”

Deneen, who couldn’t stomach the thought of me out in the cold, called her pastor to ask if he would let me sleep in the church.

I unrolled my sleeping pad on the floor in a large room where Sunday school lessons were taught. After slipping into my sleeping bag, I began to feel sorry about all the bad things I’d said about Christianity. As someone who loved nature, who thought gay people should have equal rights, and who didn’t take kindly to people implying my soul would forever burn in hell just because I didn’t believe what they believed, I’d become quite intolerant of the religion.

But on this trip I’d received such kind treatment from the Heartland’s many practitioners, and none of them ever asked if I was Christian or tried to convert me. They gave their lawns, floors, and warmth, and expected nothing in return. Earlier, a Jehovah’s Witness up in South Dakota, who’d heard about me at a diner I’d stopped in, jumped in his medical-supply vehicle, stormed down the road, found me, and offered any medical supplies I might need. I gladly filled up on rubbing-alcohol wipes and vitamin supplements.

While their views on same-sex marriage and reproductive choice—among other social issues—are often less than tolerant, it was clear that their sense of charity had been heightened. I wondered if some of their rigid social positions might have had more to do with being secluded in a fairly homogenous culture—which they’d been brought up in and had little control over—and less to do with their mostly good-hearted religious teachings.

In the morning, I found notes and chocolates that Deneen’s two high school–aged daughters had left me.

•   •   •

Determined to get to Albion in time for the hearing, I continued down the Cowboy Trail, a rails-to-trails bike path that headed east across Nebraska. The Keystone XL was in the process of being rerouted across Nebraska, so I had to find my own way across the state, and the trail was a convenient discovery. It was, though, awfully boring compared to life on the open prairie, where I had daily encounters with landowners and animals. And because I had nothing to worry about and no sights to enchant me now, I could focus my attention on how much my swollen feet hurt, which made them hurt doubly worse.

I slept in the woods in between farms or on church lawns in the towns I passed through. I turned south down Highway 14, hopping from one small country town to the next. I made it to a town called Petersburg, and I had only twelve more miles left before reaching Albion, where the meeting would take place the next day.

In Petersburg (pop. 333), I was sitting at the counter at a convenience store, which also ran a small Chester’s fried-chicken franchise inside. I sat next to a pile of chicken breasts warming under a hot lamp. In front of me were the remains of my lunch: two empty yogurt containers and a banana peel. I’d just finished watching the documentary Buck, about a famous horse whisperer, from my friend’s Netflix account on my iPad, and I began to upload pictures for a new blog entry.

I felt the presence of something to my left, so I looked over and saw a police officer in a tan uniform. On his chest was a brass, sharp-cornered star. He was probably in his early forties.

“Hello there,” I said.

“Can I give you a ride out of the county?” he asked.

“Umm . . . I’m actually on a walking expedition. I’m headed to Texas,” I said. (I’d been offered dozens of rides, but I’d politely declined them all, as I was determined to do the whole trip on foot.)

“Well, I need to give you a ride out of the county,” he said sternly.

Now what’s all this about? I thought.

He asked me what I was doing, and I told him that I was a writer and that I was following the pipeline. When he took my North Carolina driver’s license, he asked what my job in North Carolina was. I stumbled a bit with the question, as the whereabouts of my true home and the title of my true job were unclear even to me. Eventually, I said I’d been a student in North Carolina, where I received my master’s degree.

“Hmm . . . a master’s degree,” he said, even more suspicious.

I began to feel nervous. He was carefully inspecting my every move, looking for any sign of guilt. Aware that my nervousness might be construed as guilt, I became hyper self-conscious, and every physical movement now had layers of thought behind it.

He said he’d explain everything in the car.

We walked to the parking lot, and I said, “Sir, if you want me out of the county, I’d much prefer to walk out. I promised myself that I was going to walk the whole way to Texas. I haven’t been in a vehicle for seventy days. If you say I must get in the vehicle, I will. But I’d rather walk.”

“You need to get in the vehicle. I have orders to take you out of town.”

He opened the door to the backseat, and I stepped in. Behind me, to my left, and in front of me was a hard metal cage.

I wondered what could have caused this. The pipeline path, in this part of Nebraska, closely parallels roads, so for the past week I hadn’t done any trespassing. I’d been walking on the shoulders of roads, which is perfectly legal. So surely this wasn’t why I was being escorted out of town.

It had been a fairly normal day. I’d been walking south down Highway 14 all morning. I arrived in Petersburg around noon. I aired out my sleeping bag at the park for half an hour and looked for the local library so I could do computer work. The library had been closed, so I went to the convenience store, where I bought a meal and watched Buck. I figured I’d hang out there for a bit before heading back to the local campground for a long night of pleasure reading.

Did someone see me looking into the library windows? Or maybe someone thought it was strange that I was airing out my damp sleeping bag at the empty playground? Or maybe a few paranoid passersby called the cops from the road, weirded out by the bearded guy walking along the highway? I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong. Without any other idea, I worried that someone had caught me peeing by an evergreen tree in the previous town when I thought no one was looking. Am I going to end up on one of those lists?

He got in the driver’s seat and told me that there were reports that two homes had been broken into that afternoon. One homeowner, apparently, had come home and the doors were unlocked. Another family, a few blocks away, had discovered that their dog had been let out of the house.

I pictured Edna walking to her back porch and screaming in a shrill, blood-curdling screech, “Frank . . . Who let the dogs out?!”

“I’ve been walking for like seventy days,” I said to the deputy. “I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I’d been breaking into homes along the way.”

He took me to the first house that I’d supposedly broken into, and asked, accusingly, like I’d suddenly buckle and confess everything: “Does this look familiar to you?”

It was a small nondescript home about the size of a double-wide.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t even been on this side of town.”

We drove down a few blocks. “You said you got two calls?” I asked, while turning on my camera to audio record the conversation.

“Yepper,” he said. He pulled up to the second house.

“And this house right here,” he said, pointing to another equally nondescript house. “I hope it wasn’t you, and if I find out it was, you’ll be coming back to Boone County, Nebraska.”

“Well,” I said, unable to hold back a chuckle at all this ridiculousness, which reminded me of all of my mother’s false accusations throughout my adolescence. “You’re free to check my stuff.”

Day turned into night as we headed south down Highway 14. I could still vaguely see the rolling land, mostly fallow hay fields and cornfields. I was upset that I was in a vehicle, but for the most part, I was amused by the situation. Here I was, a foreigner being wrongly accused of a crime—the dog liberator—in a small country town. This was all so movielike. So First Blood. So My Cousin Vinny. The only thing missing was a conversation in which each of us thought we were talking about two different crimes.

“Listen, Officer,” I’d say, thinking this was all about my indecently peeing in the woods. “I just had to do it. I didn’t think anyone was watching.”

“You had to do it?” he’d say.

“Well, it’s an impulse, a compulsion . . .”

“So you admit to it?”

“Well, yeah, I admit to it.”

“And this wasn’t the first time you’ve done it?” he’d ask.

“Goodness, no,” I’d say, taken aback. “I’ve been doing it in towns all along the way.”

He’d nod to himself, as this would confirm all his suspicions.

“Normally, I’m more careful about it,” I’d add. “But you gotta go when you gotta go.”

“Well, you ain’t goin’ to be goin’ nowhere for a long time, boy. Alls I know is that we’re gonna settle this right here in Boone County, Nebraska.”

“So how far along is the county line?” I asked.

For the past week, I’d planned to arrive in Albion on December 4. There would be protests, demonstrations, and impassioned testimonies about the Keystone XL route. I’d meet many environmentalists and landowners opposed to it. It was sure to be a goldmine for information, so I was not at all happy being shipped out of and possibly banned from Albion.

“You got thirteen miles till you get to Albion,” he said. “Then another thirteen to eighteen miles to get out of the county from Albion.”

“So does that mean I won’t be able to be in Albion tomorrow for that meeting?”

“Umm . . . probably.”

“You mean I probably won’t be able to be in town?” I asked.

“Not unless you get yourself back there. Alls I know is that I’m gettin’ you out of my county because of what’s happened so far. I can’t prove you did anything wrong, and you’re not in any kind of trouble, but things like that don’t happen in a town of only 180 to 220 people. We don’t got no crooks in Petersburg.”

“Sir, I don’t appreciate your accusatory tone,” I said. “I’m a good person. I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I think this is wrong.”

He coughed, then after a minute of silence, he started to make small talk about the weather, but I was too upset to indulge him.

For some reason, he couldn’t take me the whole way, so he pulled over in a big gravel lot, where another police officer was parked in his SUV. He was supposed to take me the rest of the distance. When we got out, I asked the deputy, “Do you want to go through my pack?”

“No, because I don’t know if they’re missing anything,” he said.

He then began to update the other officer.

“We had one report, but with two houses . . . One of the houses had a dog that was inside the house. Now the dog’s outside. No one else is around. They should be at home. So it leads to suspicion. Can’t accuse him of it, ’cause you can’t prove it. So the sheriff just said, ‘Move him out.’”

“He’s a writer,” the deputy continued. “And he’s following the pipeline, and he wants to be at tomorrow’s meeting. Guess we can’t stop him from coming back. At least we’re getting him out of the way now.”

I was standing only a few feet away as they talked about me this way. Despite the disrespect and accusatory tone, my amusement had returned and I listened to their conversation with an emotion bordering on glee.

The other officer seemed far more levelheaded. As we continued south past Albion, he asked what I was doing. I started from the beginning of my trip—all the way back in Denver—and gave him a thorough description of all the stages of my journey.

“I think this is all so silly,” I told him. “I have an iPad. It’s not like I’m destitute.”

This new officer, feeling sorry about the whole thing, turned down a gravel road and made his way back to a campground in Albion, where I’d spend the night.