14.

The Governor

BENEDICT, NEBRASKA—803 MILES TO GO

December 11, 2012

The next day, I walked with my backpack and trekking poles into the Boone County Fairgrounds, where the hearing was taking place. Between my near arrest and bedraggled appearance, I began to feel vaguely guilty. I imagined that the drivers in passing cars were eyeing me warily, perhaps thumbing 911 on their cell phones.

When I arrived at the fairgrounds, I noticed STOP THE PIPELINE signs plastered everywhere. A Native-American tribal leader, standing with his family and a small horse, was giving a speech to a throng of protesters in the dark.

I walked into the lobby of the fairgrounds, which was a hornet’s nest of Nebraskans who’d come here from all parts of the state to have their say on the pipeline.

“It’s the walker!” yelled a woman across the room. The group crowded around me.

I was swarmed, barraged with questions about my hike, given enthusiastic hugs, wholehearted thank-yous, and two women stuffed seventy dollars in my pants. Ranchers brought me buffalo jerky and homemade pepper jack cheese.

What the hell is going on?

Apparently, Cindy, who brought me a jug of delicious pure Ogallala water, had posted a message about my journey on Facebook, and it went viral among XL radicals.

I may have been covered in dust and I may have been able to smell my crotch in a cold breeze, but I walked into the hearing with a straightened back and a raised chin, feeling like a real adventurer.

One-hundred-sixty-seven people signed up to speak, and the hearing went until two a.m. There were union members wearing orange T-shirts that read APPROVE THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE SO AMERICA WORKS. Members of Americans for Prosperity, supported by the Koch brothers, came to lend their support for the pipeline. But most of the crowd was made up of farmers, ranchers, and plain old Nebraskans deathly afraid that this pipe might—whether through climate change or contaminated water—destroy their lives.

Over the course of the next six hours, I listened to them speak. There were hoots and hollers and raucous applause. A woman called for rebellion, and an old farmer, grizzled and clad in denim, shuffled up to me, looked me in the eye, and whispered, “That’s how we do it in Nebraska.”

The next day, I packed up my things, and with the wind at my back and Ogallala in my veins, I continued south toward Kansas.

•   •   •

While Rick Hammond may never have been officially elected to political office, he’s known to some as the “governor.”

I’d met Rick and his daughter Meghan at the hearing. Eager to help out, they suggested I stop by their home for a meal and some rest.

Rick, a proud veteran of the Peace Corps (and “a liberal in a red state,” as he put it) had gone on a consulting trip to Russia years ago, where he’d shared information about raising cattle. Either because of a miscommunication or because the Russian company that had hired him wanted to exaggerate the company’s prestige, they introduced Rick to their colleagues as the “ex-governor of Nebraska.”

“I’m just a farmer,” Rick would say, bewildered.

His guests would laugh, endeared to Rick’s modesty. But the company continued to treat him as if he were an illustrious guest. He was assigned a gang of bodyguards. Solemn toasts of vodka were given in his honor. Russian Cossack dancers sought Rick out to have their picture taken with him.

Rick felt guilty about the misunderstanding, so he demanded that his translator stop introducing him as the “governor.”

“I was never governor!” Rick repeated.

At the end of his trip, at an important meeting with a large group of men, someone from the audience asked Rick, “How did you become the governor of Nebraska?”

Rick felt all the eyes in the room on him. These admiring men were humbled to be in the presence of this great American leader.

Rick looked at his translator and then to the crowd, and said—with a stately firmness—“Hard work and honesty.”

•   •   •

I crossed a bridge over the Platte River and began heading east to meet up with the pipeline, which goes through Rick’s family’s property. His daughter saw me from her truck and asked if I wanted to toss in my pack. I said sure, and she said Rick would be bringing a pair of horses down the road.

Sure enough, the governor arrived, and I rode a horse for the first time alongside Rick, who, in his cowboy hat and dark shades, held my reins. He took me to his place, where he taught me about cattle, bees, windmills, and a hundred other things about running a ranch. After two shots of vodka from a bottle he’d brought home from Russia, we stumblingly hoisted up his Christmas tree.

With memories of his Peace Corps days in mind, Rick suggested that he join my hike. Even though Rick said he sees himself as a thirty-year-old “swashbuckler,” he thought that as a sixty-year-old rancher he could lend some credibility to my hike. Meanwhile, his family, who was mortally opposed to the XL, called up every media source in the area so we could get out our anti-KXL message to a bigger audience. In just the first two days, we were interviewed by two TV news stations and two newspapers.

Our goal for Rick’s first day was twenty-four miles to the town of McCool Junction, where he had connections at the church. The day was bright and sunny, but the temperature was a crisp eight degrees Fahrenheit. We set out from his mother-in-law’s home, where I’d slept the last couple of nights. After sixteen miles, the sun was setting and Rick’s feet were hurting, so we abandoned his church plans, and Rick suggested we head to his friend Chet’s ranch. We crossed Chet’s land, a cornfield that had been “disced.” (Farmers pull behind their tractors an implement called a disc that has rows of spherical blades that slice into cornfields after the harvest to help break down the corn without disturbing the soil too much.) Walking in a deeply plowed field was never pleasant because dust would often get kicked up and blow into my eyes and because it simply took more energy to push through the clumps of dry soil. Disced fields were always more manageable.

We saw Chet ahead, so we happily called out to him, waving our hands and poles in the air, excited about a home where we could rest our feet and cook a meal. Chet, seeing two screaming men walking through his field, did the sensible thing and walked into his house and loaded his gun.

•   •   •

After a night at Chet’s, who thankfully kept the gun snugly tucked into the back of his pants, we continued on across Nebraska. Rick felt reluctant to trespass over property, so we stuck to roads, which, in this part of the country, all run straight north and south and east and west exactly one mile apart.

As our boots crunched over loose gravel, we swapped tales of past loves, filled each other in on our histories, and grumbled about the XL.

Rick had grown up on a ranch in Curtis, Nebraska, in the southwestern part of the state. After bouncing around a few colleges, where he studied sociology and Russian literature, he joined the Peace Corps and lived in Ecuador for two years. When he got back, he met a farmer’s daughter, whom he adored. But Rick still felt drawn to the adventurous life. He wasn’t sure whether to stay and build a family or continue to live his life of adventure.

When Rick was twenty-nine, his girlfriend’s father asked him, “So, what’s the plan, Rick?”

“If we’re not married in six months, I’m outta here,” Rick said, surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth.

“When two people are in the same point of their life journeys at the same time,” Rick said to me, “then love and commitment will easily follow the physical attraction that brought the two together. Sometimes it’s as much about timing as it is about being in love. Someday you might want more stability in your life.”

When was I going settle down? All of my friends had homes and real jobs. My high school friend Chris was married and had two kids. Josh was married and had a kid on the way.

I liked to think that I was the sort of person who wasn’t affected by ridiculous, culturally prescribed expectations of what a person is supposed to have achieved before a certain age. But, for some reason, I was affected by the fact that in about six months the digits of my age would change from two and nine to three and zero.

I’d spent my twenties well: going to college, having adventures, moving around. But how does one spend his thirties well? I’d known people who’d prolonged their twenties into their forties—going on three-month-long trips to Thailand, then working for ten dollars an hour at camp jobs, then going on another trip—and to me, they always seemed to be traveling aimlessly, with neither strong roots set in any place nor much meaning behind their constant wanderings. Yet by no means did I want to enroll in accounting school and abandon the adventurous life I’d been enjoying. Could I keep going on adventures like these forever? Should I double down and focus on a career no matter how unappealing that sounded?

Uncertainties aside, I did know that this hike was what I was supposed to be doing at this point in my life. Here in Nebraska, on the path of the XL, was exactly where I needed to be. I may have had concerns about how to spend my future, but there was no question about how I ought to be spending my present. How rare is it to not want to be somewhere or someone else? How rare is it to have that sense of clarity, that sense that you are exactly where you need to be at this very moment in time? When you’re asked what you want to be or do, how many times do you get to say, “Exactly what I’m doing right now”?

I thought I had gotten to this place because I’d trusted that initial flash of inspiration I had felt when Liam suggested we hike the path a year before. In time, all such flashes dim. The potentially life-altering sensation that once felt so ground shaking always goes away, and it’s easy to come up with reasons not to follow through. A bear will maul me. I’ll get shot. I just don’t know if I can do it. But I didn’t want to let that flash go. I wanted to remember it. I wanted to hold on to it. I wanted to hold on to it because I had a hunch that these flashes come for a reason—perhaps they represent some aching existential need, or perhaps they’re paths presented to us by something greater than ourselves, or perhaps they’re messages uploaded from the subconscious. I’d learned long ago not to think of those flashes of inspiration as crazy ideas but as messages from fate calling upon you to do something grand.

The tug-of-war between freedom and security, adventure and comfort, voluntary poverty and wealth would always exist in me, just as it did in Rick. I didn’t have the answers, but I did know that I would not sacrifice my present to live for the future. The Plains Indians, to survive, didn’t sit still in droughts or build permanent townships. They followed the buffalo and the rain. And they were able to survive for thousands of years in an unforgiving land because of this flexibility, this embracing the present without obsessing over the future. Better to be guided by lightning strikes, I thought.

•   •   •

On our third day together, when we stopped to take a break in a ditch, I grabbed Rick’s bedroll and strapped it to my pack.

“Hey, what are you doin’?” Rick asked.

“I’ve been carrying my pack for so many months I barely feel the weight anymore,” I said. “It’s no big deal.”

“You’re pulling me up by my tail,” he said.

“By your tail?”

“When we have a calf that’s struggling, we help him out. We pull him up by his tail. That’s what you’re doing for me.”

Despite Rick’s international experiences, he was at heart a man of the plains, full of practical knowledge and cowboy wisdom. He called horse dung “road apples,” taught me about the different species of grasses, and explained the intricacies of growing corn. As it got warmer, instead of saying that he was going to remove a layer of clothing, Rick said, “I gotta shuck some duds.”

Some of Rick’s explanations about farm equipment were so technical that they went completely over my head, but I was happy to have a local guide, and someone to walk with. I called him the “governor” as a joke, but I saw that Rick did have a bit of the silver-tongued politician in him. He was smooth talking and persuasive and diplomatic. He could be too assertive at times, but he was always genial. He could put anybody at ease.

My lack of knowledge—about everything—became apparent to Rick immediately, so he was determined to teach me everything he could.

When I asked him what a “pivot” is (the watering apparatus that pivots in a circle irrigating crop fields), he took my ignorance almost as a personal offense. When I stopped him in midsentence to ask what a “combine” was (a machine that reaps, threshes, and winnows corn or soybeans), he looked at me with a mix of pity and bewilderment, and said, “Duckling, by the end of this trip, you’re going to know a bit more about how the world works.”

Rick was still leery of trespassing, so we stayed on roads, which added miles to our trip, but I didn’t mind now that I had a companion. But as we continued on, Rick began to realize how much longer we’d have to hike if we stuck to roads. With his heavy pack and sore feet, leaving the roads to reduce our mileage suddenly became an appealing prospect. We were looking at my map and I pointed out our route. “It’s 6.5 miles by road,” I said, “but about four miles as the crow flies.” Rick, whose confident stride had turned into a hobo’s hobble, scoffed at the idea of taking roads.

“We’ll take the field,” he said.

We were now going over corn and grass and soybean fields. In a pasture, upon observing me flinch when a couple of cows trotted past, he exclaimed, “They’re not going to hurt you! They’re just curious!”

A woman who recognized us as the famous pipeline walkers pulled over in her car and offered to haul our packs to Fairmont. In midoffer, Rick, who didn’t even know this woman, tore off his pack and heaved it into her backseat.

A reporter with the Lincoln Journal Star came to interview us for a story (in which I’d be unflatteringly, and, dare I say, falsely, called “grimy-looking,” as I’d just taken a shower the day before). I sat in the front seat and Rick sat in the back.

The journalist began with the standard question (“Why are you doing this?”) and I started giving him my standard answer (“Well, I wanted to go on a long walk”), but as I spoke, I felt Rick’s fingers jabbing into my hip. Rick had joined the hike to stir up some publicity in order to fight the pipeline, and he wanted me to get straight to the point and nail TransCanada.

“You don’t walk 1,700 miles to go for a stroll,” Rick interrupted.

Rick was right. By now, in this reporter’s car, I realized that I’d made up my mind and was done holding back.

The jobs, the money, and the oil the pipe would transport—though undeniably beneficial to some people, many of whom I’d met on this trip—did not merit being used as justifications for an industry that is in the process of destroying the planet. The jobs would be few—around five thousand for a couple of years as the pipe is being laid and a mere thirty permanent ones afterward. And despite all the claims that “We need oil!” it may surprise many people to learn that we actually export more oil than we import. In 2011, America’s biggest export was fuel. And in 2012 at the refineries at Port Arthur, Texas, where the XL would end, 60 percent of the gasoline and 42 percent of the diesel were exported to foreign countries. Needless to say, much of the tar-sands oil will not end up in our gas tanks and airplanes, as many expect.

But I was never all that interested in the here-and-now details of the XL. Rather, I always thought there was something more to the pipe. Something historic. We’ve been building pipelines (first in the form of wooden gutters) since the 1860s, yet environmentalists have fought this particular pipeline with unprecedented perseverance. I likened the fight to John Muir’s 1906 battle against the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley, a stretch of protected land in Yosemite National Park that some had called the most beautiful in the world. Never before had Americans united in such numbers to oppose a public-works project for the sake of preserving natural beauty. Muir and the Sierra Club lost, and the reservoir was built, but from the fight an environmental movement was born. Now, one hundred years later, a similar fight is being waged. This is that moment when a group of people draw a line in the sand and say they’ve had enough. Regardless of whether the pipeline gets approved or rejected, there seems to be a great change occurring within the country—one that’s spelling the end to what has been for more than a hundred years an ordinary source and conveyance of energy.

The solution to humanity’s biggest problem still escaped me, but I felt I could say one thing with confidence, especially after traveling one thousand miles on foot: We could get by with far less.

I remembered faltering with CBC a couple of months back when the reporter asked, “Do you think we need this pipeline?” I wished I had said what I would now say to this reporter: “No, I don’t think we need this pipeline. We don’t need to expand the tar sands. And I don’t need this fancy backpack or these trekking poles. I don’t even need this trip. North Americans have a funny understanding of the word ‘need.’ We use twice as much energy per person as Europe. The tar sands emit more CO2 than many countries. The last thing we need is more oil. We need, rather, different consumption habits, a whole new relationship with the world. We need to quit destroying everything out of a sense of ‘need,’ when all we really need is a fucking sweater.”

•   •   •

Rick and I continued on to Fairmont, where a seventy-year-old woman named Juanita, sympathetic to our cause, had offered to provide us with food, showers, and lodging.

In the morning, Rick and I strapped on our packs and walked along a railway, which Rick was excited about because, as a younger man, he’d worked as an assistant boss on railroads. A photographer for the Lincoln Journal Star came to photograph us for the story. He talked about different angles for pictures, mentioning the “watering apparatus” in the background. Rick and I gave each other mirthful looks, just barely managing to contain our ridicule.

“Did you hear what he called the pivot?” I said to Rick later. “A watering apparatus . . .”

Eventually, the railroad ended, but there was a path where an extension of the railroad once was, and we walked that for the rest of the day, ducking under branches and climbing down steep slopes where bridges used to be.

“I’m wavering,” Rick said, mounting a slope.

Rick had hoped to go all the way to Steele City with me—at the Nebraska-Kansas border—but it was clear that the three days of walking were taking a toll on him.

Then came the dreaded silence of a hiking partner. It’s good when they bitch and moan: That means there’s still a bit of fight left in them. But when your partner becomes silent, you know he’s made his decision, and it’s only a matter of time before the expedition party splits.

Rick’s sister-in-law Abbi came to the town of Milligan, where we had ended up that night. Rick treated us all to dinner. “I gotta husk some duds,” I said in the restaurant.

“You mean shuck,” Rick said.

“Well, actually, you’re right,” he added. “You’re learning, duckling.”

Rick and I hugged good-bye, and we both very sincerely expressed hope that this wouldn’t be our last meeting.

In the morning, I continued on, still following the abandoned railroad path, feeling, for the first time on my long journey, the curious and sharp pang of loneliness.