16.

The Dog

AUGUSTA, KANSAS—568 MILES TO GO

December 25, 2012

Earlier, on my first day in Kansas, I had walked a country road to the medium-size town of Washington.

A large man was walking with two mammoth Saint Bernards. The Saint Bernards ran up to me, and I asked their owner where I might find a spot in town to set up my tent. He asked me what I was doing, and I asked him what the people in town thought of the pipeline.

“Well, there are pros and cons,” he said. “People are pretty upset about the exemption.”

“The exemption?”

“Yeah. For some reason, Kansas decided to give TransCanada a ten-year exemption. That means TransCanada don’t have to pay no property taxes. We were the only state to do that.”

“So what are the pros?” I asked.

“Well . . .” he said, pausing to think. “I guess there aren’t any.”

An exemption? That made no sense to me. The 2010 Keystone Pipeline goes through ten states and provinces, yet Kansas was the only one to give them an exemption. All the other states tax pipelines and make millions of dollars from those taxes. That’s why states like pipelines: They get money from them.

Kansas experienced a series of lucrative oil strikes in the early twentieth century, but the state is far from the oil giant it once was. The state legislature, attempting to attract new business and revive an old industry, has, in this case, tried to lure companies with desperate incentives.

I walked through the flat fields of Kansas, where old, rusted “nodding donkeys,” or pump jacks, stood frozen in time—reminders of the state’s irretrievable oil-happy past.

The Kansas economy—and the Plains’ economy in general, especially its agricultural industry—was unsustainable then, just as it is today.

Due to the lack of annual precipitation, the plains have always been ill suited for farming. There were severe droughts in 1910, 1917, 1933–1940, the mid-1950s, and the late 1980s, yet the twentieth century may have been the wettest century in two thousand years. (Fossil records show that droughts in the plains have lasted for up to three hundred years!)

Early American homesteaders cashed in on the wet seasons and hunkered down through the bad, deceiving themselves into believing common bromides such as “Rain follows the plow” or “Every dry spell ends with a rain.” They hoped electrical currents running through the new railroad tracks and telegraph lines would trigger thundershowers. Tax credits were given to families who planted trees because it was believed that moisture would be driven upward through the branches into the sky. In 1891, in Midland, Texas, the Department of Agriculture funded an experiment to create rain in which Major R. G. Dyrenforth essentially carpet bombed the sky using explosive balloons and kites filled with sulfuric acid, hydrogen gas, and potassium chlorate.

In the 1920s, the price of wheat went down, debts rose, and hard-pressed farmers plowed as much of the native buffalo grass as they could. The rain never came, but the winds did, picking up the bare, parched soil and turning it into 10,000-foot-high, 350-million-ton dirt storms that the locals called “black blizzards,” which would plague the plains for much of the 1930s. They were, according to historian Donald Worster, the “most severe environmental catastrophe in the entire history of the white man on this continent.” The soil was never the problem. It was rich in nutrients and perfect for crops. But without water, the crops wouldn’t grow, and the dry upturned soil would be whisked away by heavy winds.

The Ogallala Aquifer, as mentioned earlier, spreads out underneath eight Great Plains states from South Dakota to Texas. The aquifer contains three billion acre-feet of water (an acre-foot is the amount of water that it takes to cover one acre to the depth of one foot, so the Ogallala, theoretically, could cover all of Canada plus the states of Alaska, California, and Oregon in a foot of water). Because the plains get so little rain (less than an inch of which annually makes it down to refill the aquifer), the aquifer is being used up far faster than nature can refill it. Farmers use 19 million acre-feet a year, and 9 percent of the aquifer has been depleted since the 1950s. According to the National Academy of Sciences, Kansas has already depleted 30 percent of its share of the aquifer.

Plains farming is considered unsustainable because of the arid climate, the dust storms, and farmers’ intemperate guzzling of the Ogallala, but the most telling sign of the unsustainable nature of plains farming may be the farmers’ long history of depending on government aid. From 1933 to 1939, the plains received one billion dollars from federal programs. This relief, over the years, became an entitlement that plains farmers expected and demanded after all ensuing droughts. In 1988, four billion dollars of federal money was dished out, mostly to the Dakotas, much of it to farmers, many of whom fraudulently claimed wind, rain, and hail damages. “Great Plains farmers,” says Worster, “are unique only in the great extent of their dependency.” Even though the plains are staunchly red states whose inhabitants complain about big government and entitlements, many of the people in this region are essentially welfare farmers. Of all farms in the country, 33 percent receive government payments, but on the plains, 55 percent do. The nation spends twenty billion dollars a year in direct crop subsidies, almost all of which goes to the states between the Rockies and the Mississippi River. If Montana didn’t receive federal subsidies, author Richard Manning reports that the state’s net farming income would be zero.

Despite the natural limits of plains farming, it will likely continue to intensify as long as there’s aquifer water, fossil fuels, and government aid. When prices for crops rise and farmers can make a bigger profit, they don’t hesitate to cut down old tree lines that functioned as wind breaks or turn marginal farmland (usually only good for cattle pasture) into fields of corn and soybean. Between 2006 and 2011, farmers in the Corn Belt (the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa) turned 1.3 million acres of grassland (about the size of Delaware) into corn and soybeans because of what Nebraskans call “seven-dollar corn.” It’s the biggest ongoing ecological crisis that no one knows about.

As I’d learn on my walk, an undisturbed grassland is an incredible thing. The plains boast of almost twelve dozen species of grass, such as the big blue stem, which can grow ten feet high. The plains grasses, unlike the crops that have replaced them, have evolved to survive droughts and low precipitation, and are perfectly suited to live on the plains. The grasses’ narrow blades are ribbed with ridges and covered in hairs that protect them from drying winds. Some grasses know to roll up their leaves in dry spells to keep their tissue moist. But they mostly avoid the scorching sun by living underground, the roots typically making up 60 to 80 percent of the plant’s weight. In dry spells, the roots store sugars and proteins as they wait for the next rainfall.

These root-dense soils are home to 60 to 90 percent of all the biological activity in the Great Plains, an underground biosphere that is heavier than the mass of all the animals aboveground. There, too, the native prairie abounds in biodiversity. In the mixed grasslands of the north, a Nature Conservancy study listed 72 mammal species, 18 reptiles, 13 amphibians, 160 butterflies, 222 birds, and 1,595 grasses, sedges, and wildflowers.

•   •   •

What will the plains look like in fifty years? In five hundred? Plains residents won’t always have the aquifer to water their crops or the fossil fuels to power their machinery. What’s going to happen when the government can no longer justify propping up an unprofitable industry? What happens when everyone leaves? The answers to these questions are significant, not just to the plains but to a nation very much dependent on its breadbasket.

In 1987, two New Jersey academics, Deborah and Frank Popper, tried to answer these questions. The Poppers recognized the inevitable demise of the plains economy and the “largest, longest-running agricultural and environmental miscalculation in American history.” Their proposed solution was the “Buffalo Commons,” a 139,000-square-mile buffalo sanctuary spread across the plains states, which the Poppers said could be “the ultimate national park” and the “world’s largest historic preservation project.” They imagined the government helping to return the land to its pre-European state. Not only would the reintroduction of buffalo have ecological benefits but, the Poppers argued, the Commons would also allow portions of the plains to reinvent themselves as ecotourism hotspots.

The Poppers, unsurprisingly, were not exactly given the key to the plains towns they visited. Residents took offense to the Poppers’ vision of a plains without people. For them, the Poppers’ idea was a tacit condemnation of their livelihoods. Police had to chaperone the Poppers on their visits, and a talk in Montana in 1992 had to be canceled because of death threats.

Over time, however, the Buffalo Commons became more and more real as NGOs, states, private groups, and tribes began to slowly bring the buffalo back. This wasn’t the federal government takeover that the Poppers originally envisioned but a scattering of ranchers and groups coming to grips with the challenges of mainstream plains agriculture and seeing the wisdom in bringing back an animal that had evolved to thrive on the plains. The last free-range buffalo was killed in 1891 when there were only a few hundred captives living on ranches. Now there are 500,000 buffalo living in North America, some for reasons of conservation (about 20,000), but most for meat production. According to the USDA’s Livestock Slaughter Annual Summary, 51,662 buffalo were slaughtered nationwide for meat in 2014.

The American Prairie Reserve in Montana is an example of the Buffalo Commons in action. It’s a private organization that formed in 2001 and aims to be the largest wildlife reserve in the contiguous U.S. Its goal is to secure 3.5 million acres of public and private land, which would make the reserve a third larger than Yellowstone National Park. (Remarkably, the reserve, as of 2014, has already secured 305,000 acres of public and private land, where it has already reintroduced buffalo.)

Part of the problem with the plains ecological crisis is a problem of recreation. If you look at a map that shows all the national parks, wilderness areas, and public lands in the country, the plains are practically empty. The United States is 35 percent publicly owned, yet from North Dakota down to Texas only 2.8 percent of the land is. (Kansas is the least publicly owned state, with just 0.92 percent of its land owned by the government.) Because of the lack of public space, there’s simply nowhere for travelers to experience and therefore appreciate and wish to take care of the plains. We call them the “flyover” states for good reason: There’s really no way to see them other than to fly over or drive through them. Consequently, there’s little public pushback to preserve our grasslands and the species that dwell on them. (On the plains, only 1 percent of the native prairie has long-term protection.) That’s why Steve Myers, a schoolteacher from Longmont, Colorado, and his idea to create a 1,700-mile Great Plains Trail are so intriguing. The Great Plains Trail, which he aims to finish mapping out by 2018, will closely parallel my route from Montana to Texas and rely on public grasslands and rarely traveled country roads.

Other, more radical, ideas exist, such as returning the plains to its Pleistocene form by reintroducing the megafauna that went extinct around the same time that human settlers arrived from Asia more than 10,000 years ago. It’s argued that the plains can’t be brought back to their true form without at least 70 percent of the megafauna that abruptly vanished. The camel, which would be reintroduced, is actually a North American animal that migrated to Eurasia and populated the Old World. Coming to America would be a homecoming of sorts. Asian elephants would replace the mammoth and the African lion would replace the North American lions. The elephants and camels, supposedly, would control the encroachment of woody and shrub plants, as they did historically.

It’s futile to predict the future because we’re all so bad at it, but it was clear to me that the plains’ destructive agricultural experiment will continue for the foreseeable future—with bigger and bigger farms, more effective farming technologies, and heaps of taxpayer cash—until the water and oil get too expensive.

•   •   •

I was in southern Kansas walking down a country road when I spotted a big black dog dashing toward me. It hugged the property owner’s fence line, keeping its body low to the ground while keeping its wolf eyes trained on me and moving with the sleek-bodied stealth and confidence of a hungry lioness. It was the size of a German shepherd, and had a shiny jet-black coat.

As soon as it got to the gravel road, it took off on a full sprint, snarling through its white fangs. It stopped just feet from me, then lunged at my ankles. I thrust both my trekking poles toward its face. It backed off but continued to closely follow me as I sped forward, separated only by the short length of my trekking poles that I kept pointed at its face.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with crazy country dogs in Kansas. Most times, I’d just ignore them and keep walking. They’d prowl behind me for a bit until they got too far from home, and I’d haughtily refuse to even look their way, a tactic that proved to be fairly effective. Sometimes, when I could tell the dog was merely bluffing—and these dogs were always easy enough to identify—I’d baby-talk it out of its rabid fervor and have the animal nuzzling its head against my thigh in no time.

But this dog, I knew instantly, wasn’t the sort that could be wooed. It was savage and bloodthirsty, probably bearing a ferocious love for its family and a dim-witted hatred for everyone else.

It followed me for several minutes, gnashing its teeth and sprinting at me whenever I turned my back to it. My only thought was to keep moving and not let it get in front of me. I used my trekking poles to keep it from biting my legs, but I felt my jackknife glowing in the right pocket of my pants. I knew if it bit me that I’d let it have my arm or leg while I aimed a fatal pierce into its chest or neck.

“Pedro! Pedro!” a little boy cried from the front porch of the home the dog had run from.

Hearing the little boy’s calls seemed to incense the dog even more. Pedro followed me for a fifth of a mile and didn’t turn back until the man of the house came out and screamed for the dog to return.

Once I was a good distance from the house, I put my pack down and retrieved the canister of bear spray, which I’d mostly forgotten about. Thereafter, on country roads, I’d keep my bear spray strapped to my backpack’s chest buckle, ready to be grabbed and discharged within seconds. Between Pedro and the other snarling dogs, I was getting nervous whenever I approached houses on rural roads. I had no choice but to eye all homes—and all dogs—with fear and suspicion.

•   •   •

I made it into the tiny town of Potwin, Kansas, on Christmas Eve. I asked a woman if she knew any of the pastors in town. She said she did but that he wouldn’t be around until the evening service that night. She invited me into her home, where she fed me chili and cookies. I attended services with her family, took Communion, and slept on the floor of the church balcony.

On Christmas, I continued south to the medium-size city of Augusta (pop. 9,274). It was twenty degrees Fahrenheit outside with blistering twenty-five-mile-per-hour winds. My map said the country road I walked along would lead me over a creek, but when I reached it, I saw that the creek was wide, deep, and frozen, and that there was no bridge. I heaved a large dead branch into the air, and when it fell on the ice, I was encouraged when the creek maintained its solid form. I began to cross it, but after two steps, fault lines spread across the ice under the weight of my foot like cracks in a broken mirror. I quickly turned back to shore, where I began a long detour to another road to find a way across. When I hopped over a tall barbed-wire fence, my maps fell out of my back pocket and were carried away in the brisk wind like fall leaves destined to decompose under a foreign, faraway tree trunk. It was yet another exhausting day, but I’d long ago become as numb to exhaustion as my hands were to the biting cold.

I walked straight east along a road, took a southeasterly shortcut over a cow pasture, then headed south along a new gravel road. On the road, two dogs rocketed out from beneath their porch and charged after me. Their barks were terrifying at first, but once I sized them up—a small white Chihuahua and a young black Lab—I knew I had nothing to worry about.

The Lab kept running after me, but once I parried its barks with baby talk, he let out a relieved whimper and ran up to my legs. He put his two front paws on my hip, I petted his head, and he let out a deep guttural moan, as if I were finally giving him some long-withheld pleasure. I sat down to have a snack and fed him a slice of buffalo jerky.

The dog began to follow me, and I welcomed the company for the first few minutes, but when I realized he wasn’t going to stop, I began to yell at him to go home, even threatening him with my sticks when he wouldn’t listen. I resolved not to look at or talk to him except to angrily yell at him to go back home. But each time I yelled, the dog would only tuck his tail between his legs and fall on his back submissively.

I secretly adored the dog and had already thought up a name for it (Kansas), but I dared not utter it aloud for fear that—by giving it a name—I would allow this icy acquaintanceship to evolve into something more.

Despite my fantasies, I quickly determined that Kansas was not the best companion for a long walk across Oklahoma and Texas. He was too small and too timid to be able to defend himself against the big angry dogs I was constantly encountering. And he was stupidly fearless around cars and roads, crossing the roadways at whim.

I did well to maintain my vow of silence, but when we reached a busy bridge with narrow shoulders, I knew that Kansas would follow me over the bridge and would very likely get run over. I had to do something.

I made a leash with a thin orange tent guyline, tied it snugly around Kansas’s neck, and began walking toward the bridge. Kansas was confused and hesitant, not because he was stubborn but because he clearly had never had a leash put around his neck before.

“Let’s practice a bit first,” I said.

We got off the bridge and walked back and forth along the grassy shoulder of the road. He got the hang of it, I rewarded him with fond pats on the head, and we successfully crossed. After that, I was determined to train him not to go anywhere near the road, casting discouraging invectives at him when he went to cross but lavishing him with warmth when he hung by my side. By the end of the day, I wondered if he might make a good companion after all. He wasn’t the smartest dog in the world, but he clearly had a functional set of legs and a bit of perseverance, which was about as much as I could say for myself. I took him to the Augusta police station, where I explained who I was, what I was doing, as well as the whole dog situation.

They told me they were going to take him to the pound, where he’d remain for three days until the owners claimed him. If no one claimed him, they said they’d have to put him down.

“Put him down?” I said.

Another cop showed up. He put a leash around the dog’s neck and tried to pull him into the backseat of his patrol car. Kansas wouldn’t budge, so the cop asked me for help. I grabbed his body and struggled to shove Kansas and his flailing limbs into the back. The cop closed the door, and Kansas peered longingly at me through the window.

The cop called churches for me—to see if any would lend me a floor for the night—but there were no offers. The cop then offered to buy me a motel room, but, too prideful to accept money, I declined even though I badly wanted a warm place to stay on so cold a night. I walked downtown to the local movie theater, where they were showing The Hobbit in 3-D. It was freezing outside, and the theater had yet to open, so I went into a gas station, where I hoped to buy some coffee and stay warm in a booth for an hour or so. The owner approached me as I drank my cappuccino in the corner of the store and told me I had to leave.

I walked to the movie theater and knocked on the door, hoping someone would let me in. The owner inside, preparing for the movie, said that she was all alone and that I couldn’t come in.

I felt pitiful standing out in the cold with the wind blasting in my face on this dark lonely street with no place to go on Christmas. There was irony here—being scorned on a religious holiday and all—but on this trip I had received such generous treatment from so many people that it was impossible for me to feel upset or frustrated. It was as if I had a stockpile of goodness in me, so any sort of injustice or cool treatment had little effect, as I always had fresh memories of kindness.

Eventually the theater opened and I watched The Hobbit. I got more than my eight dollars’ worth, but I wondered if the film could have benefited from more darkness, more humanity, more reality. Where were the moments of crippling fear? The raw emotion? The knee-buckling pain? Where was the traveler’s grime or the hiker’s hobble? The shin splints and blisters?

The owner of the theater, who’d been initially leery of me, was so worried about my camping out in the cold that—during the movie—she called the police station and urged them to let me sleep at the station, which I ended up doing.

In the morning, I packed my things and got ready for my day’s walk south, but I was held back. Just as the lady in the theater knew she couldn’t let me sleep out in the cold, I knew that I couldn’t let the dog die in the pound. I decided to wait in town the three days so I could adopt it and take it along with me, but first I had to see if I could contact the dog’s owners. I showed the police where the dog had come from on my map, but they said they didn’t know how to get the phone number. I decided to put my Internet stalking skills to good use, and I eventually found the phone number of a neighbor of the dog’s owner and explained the situation.

Later, I got a call from the owner. “Thank you so much for taking care of our dog,” she said. “A dog of ours died last year and many tears were shed. We’ll be very happy to have him back.”

With that, I threw on my pack and headed south to Oklahoma.