17.

The Night Walker

CUSHING, OKLAHOMA—451 MILES TO GO

January 5, 2013

I crossed the Kansas-Oklahoma border and hiked south down the wide grassy shoulder of Highway 77. I walked past Native American casinos and small derelict hovels, as well as a few quaint country homes. Unlike most of the roadways I’d walked so far, the grass along Highway 77 was covered with an appalling amount of litter—flattened cans of Bud Light and Keystone, empty bottles of malt liquor, a tattered white McDonald’s bag, a needle, a snowstorm of crushed Styrofoam.

Because nearly every house had a dog, I grew nervous every time I approached one. And because this route through Oklahoma was much more populous than the other places I’d walked through, I spent practically every moment of my day in a state of fear, or in the anticipation of fear, which is pretty much the same thing. Most dogs would turn out to be sweethearts, but many were quite evil and were often from aggressive breeds that had been ill-treated all their lives.

With the hope of walking past homes unnoticed, I took several precautions: I moved to the other side of the road; I stopped whistling, singing, and talking to myself; I placed my feet on asphalt (rather than crispy leaves); and I ceased using my trekking poles—all in order to make as little noise as necessary.

There’s no way anyone’s living in there, I thought to myself while passing what looked like a junkyard of RVs cluttered around a double-wide with a sagging roof. Just in case somebody was (and just in case there were dogs), I moved to the other side of the highway. Sure enough, a three-legged mongrel that had caught my scent came hobbling out of the scrap heap, barking at me, snarling for a bony ankle. I escaped the mongrel, but now two pit bulls from my side of the road came running at me. I quickly scanned for traffic and scampered across the busy 77 back to the mongrel that I feared less. The pit bulls—quite prudently—decided not to cross, and the mongrel luckily had already limped back to its hovel.

This was how I spent nearly every day in Oklahoma.

•   •   •

I was headed to the Pipeline Crossroads of the World: Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is the southern terminus of the 2010 Keystone Pipeline. If the Keystone XL is approved, oil will be piped by a shorter route from Hardisty, Alberta, to Cushing. A second part of the Keystone XL would be built from Cushing to the Gulf Coast refineries in Texas.

I’d been paralleling the pipeline by walking on roads for the past two hundred miles, only occasionally walking the pipe’s actual path. Because the pipeline for these last several hundred miles had been straight north to south, it made sense to follow the nearest road, which also heads north to south. But in Oklahoma, the pipeline takes yet another southeasterly turn, so I would have to begin jumping fences again.

The romantic part of me looked forward to new adventures and glorious sights over rarely walked lands: Oklahoma sunsets, rolling green fields, forests of slender pines. But the scaredy-cat in me resented having to once again walk through terrifying cow herds and keep an eye out for zealous landowners.

The state of Oklahoma, which produces the fifth-most oil, has a motley of pipelines, pump jacks, refineries, and tank farms. I hadn’t seen so many pipeline markers since Alberta.

All day, semis zoomed past me, each hauling three giant thirty-six-inch-diameter Keystone XL pipes in the shape of giant cigarettes that would be buried in Oklahoma and Texas soil. (The southern portion of Keystone XL—from Cushing to Port Arthur—had recently received presidential support and was being laid.) It was demoralizing to have to watch all these trucks, all these pipes, and all this giant equipment being transported. It made me feel small and powerless and hopeless. Half the XL was already being put into the ground. Why bother fighting something that’s pretty much inevitable? Why bother even caring? We’re warned constantly that there could be a tipping point right around the corner, where climate change could begin to speed up exponentially. In many areas of the world, it already has.

How much time do we have? Bill McKibben, in his Rolling Stone essay “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” claims we shouldn’t raise the temperature more than two degrees Celsius for fear that droughts, floods, and storms could shake the foundation of our civilization. “[Two degrees Celsius has] become the bottomest of bottom lines,” says McKibben. (As of 2012, we’d already raised it 0.8 degrees Celsius.) On a gloomier note, he adds, “Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.”

Retired NASA scientist James Hansen says that if the Keystone XL is approved and the tar sands expand “it will be game over for the climate.” Even E. O. Wilson, who usually comes across as more hopeful than other environmentalists, concedes that the conservation ethic “has generally come too late . . . to save the most vulnerable of life forms.”

When I think about our culture’s addiction to fossil fuel, its indifference to the natural world, and the sheer impossibility of any major change happening soon, I can’t help but despair. Almost as depressing as an inevitable collapse is how powerless I feel as an individual. A life-ending meteor hurtling toward us is one thing. In that case, none of us can really do anything, so we might as well buy a twelve-pack, throw a few steaks on the grill, and enjoy the show. But climate change is different. It appears we can do something about it. But change is only possible if it’s a collective “we” rather than a lonely “I.” So where does that leave those individuals who care deeply about the planet but are no more than a scattered minority?

Our national myths do not help us deal with the anxieties of climate change. Our “superhero” culture wants us to take matters into our own hands, stand up for what’s right, take the leap when we reach the edge of a rooftop, and never back down even in the face of impossible odds. We’re at the point when we’re supposed to act, but signing another online petition, changing to a more efficient lightbulb, and joining a march doesn’t feel like enough.

Wendell Berry says, “The line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily.” Berry was talking less about climate change and more about managing our consumption, but the message still applies: We should make sacrifices when they’re easy to make. This is enough for me on most days. But there are other days when I worry if my commitment to environmentalism is too weak and if I’m squandering a life that could be spent doing something truly valuable. But what is valuable action? Environmental terrorism has a romantic appeal, but I’m not convinced that destruction is an effective way to build a movement, and I’m not at all eager to spend a life term in federal prison. Maybe the best advice comes from Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote what has become known as the Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Paul Kingsnorth, an environmental activist in the U.K., is one of first to come clean about his despair over climate change and what he sees as inevitable doom. Some consider the despair movement as a way of giving up or abandoning one’s moral duty. But Kingsnorth, a founder of the Dark Mountain Project, which is a network, its web site describes, “of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself,” argues that we should be honest with ourselves. Dougald Hine, a cofounder of the group, says, “Let’s not pretend we’re not feeling despair. Let’s sit with it for a while. Let’s be honest with ourselves and with each other. And then as our eyes adjust to the darkness, what do we start to notice?”

Despair, I’ve found, is a seductive alternative to a life of civic participation. Despair absolves us of responsibility. It’s a way of managing guilt: If the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, we might as well jack up the thermostat and live it up. If our efforts are futile, then there’s nothing to feel guilty about, right? There’s a “comfort in clarity” in accepting that doom is certain. If we have a clear vision of the future, at least we know our relation to it. If we leave no chance for success, fortune, or surprise, then with our knowledge of doom, we can live with a semblance of order, logic, and predictability even in a soon-to-be-apocalyptic world. Strangely, there’s comfort here.

One wonders if our leading public environmentalists are talking about climate change with their followers in a destructive way. It seems as if it’s their aim to scare the living shit out of us by offering doomsday prophecies of a soon-to-be-uninhabitable Earth and interpreting every nasty storm as a harbinger of the apocalypse. Fear can provoke action; it can get us to care. But how long can we live in a state of anxiety before burning out and resorting to despair? Scientists like Hansen and McKibben have every right to scare us, and their methods are no doubt scientifically sound, but one can’t help but wonder if the end-of-the-world rhetoric is a wise policy for sustaining a movement.

•   •   •

In Ponca City, a man in a big cowboy hat yelled at me from his red car as I crossed an intersection. His name was Everett and he offered to buy me a sandwich. I ordered a Big Mac and fries at the local McDonald’s. Everett was a retired construction worker and a recovering alcoholic.

“Has alcohol been a problem you’ve had to deal with for a long time?” I asked.

“Not since I quit,” Everett said.

He asked me why I was doing this and I explained to him that I wanted to learn about the XL and also live an adventurous life.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Well, you have a light in you,” he said. “I can see it.”

“I don’t know about that, Everett,” I said. “But thanks.”

“I can see it,” he said.

In Morrison, I set up my tent in the dugout of a baseball field so I could have a little more protection from the rain. The next day—New Year’s Eve—the rain continued, so I decided to spend the day snacking at the local gas station and the night back in the dugout. An oilman named Dusty spotted me sitting in the gas-station booth and asked if I’d like to spend New Year’s Eve with his family.

Wayne, a former police officer in the town of Ripley, offered me a night in a trailer that he was renovating. On the road the next day, he pulled over and handed me a bottle of orange juice and some warm biscuits and gravy.

I’d tried trespassing over fields and pastures along the pipeline path, but I quickly determined that it was too dangerous; it led me too close to people’s homes. I felt as if I were constantly being watched. Oklahoma is nothing like Alberta, where one family takes care of ten thousand acres and where I might see only one home over the course of the day. Here, the pipe’s path took me past many small impoverished homes. Dogs heard my footsteps and howled. I could see their thick white bodies moving behind stands of trees. I kept my bear spray, with the cap off, in the side pocket of my pants, prepared to douse any growling curs with a mouthful of cayenne.

This was poor country. Lawns were covered with rusty swing sets, rickety trampolines, faded multicolored plastic tricycles. To the side of each home was a junkyard of useless vehicles. Dogs lived miserable lives on short chains. Garbage was everywhere.

I felt pity but also a sense of disgust: pity for the miserable living conditions and disgust for the cultural poverty that was as much choice as affliction. It’s easy to blame the travails of the poor on whatever political party you most dislike. These parties probably deserve part of the blame, but one can’t help but think critically of these lifestyles when hardships are partially self-inflicted. The garbage, the obesity, the drug addictions, the alcoholism, the glowing television sets in living rooms, the obsession with huge fuel-inefficient pickup trucks.

Part of this, no doubt, has to do with growing up in an area where one doesn’t have many opportunities and where social mobility is stunted. Yet I could see that this poverty also derived from an almost-flagrant isolationism, an extreme sense of privacy, a self-expulsion from society. Nearly every home had a fence around it and a snarling cur under the porch. There were countless signs reading BEWARE OF DOG, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and NO TRESPASSING. I presumed that it was just as unlikely for a neighbor to knock on one of these front doors as it was for an outsider. How could there be any sense of community when neighbors couldn’t visit one another? How could we understand the world when we’re secluded and holed up in hovels? And just as their homes are closed off to the outside world, so are many of their minds. I tried speaking with one man about climate change, and all he said was “Well, did you get that information from the liberal or the Democrat scientists? I tell you, there ain’t no way I’m voting for someone who wants to make my gas more expensive.” It was moments like these when I’d lose all hope for meaningful action on climate change.

After a few close calls with dogs, I decided to stick with highways, which would add many miles to my trip, but I figured it would be better than walking in constant fear.

Because Cushing is one of the oil hubs of the world, I expected the city to be an island of prosperity in a sea of poverty. But I quickly learned that Cushing was anything but. Grass was taking over the sidewalks. Brick buildings were crumbling. Families lived in aged trailers alongside packs of wild dogs locked inside tiny fenced enclosures. We’re told that pipelines bring wealth and jobs to communities along their paths, yet there in Cushing—at the center of the oil universe—it was hard to tell if you were still in a First World country.

I walked through Cushing as quickly as I could and felt the terrible desire, for the first time in my journey, to reach the end.

•   •   •

I made it into Atoka, Oklahoma, just before nightfall. It was now my standard procedure to go straight to churches to seek advice about where I should set up my tent. Most times they’d let me camp on their lawns, and sometimes they’d let me sleep on the floor inside. I spoke with the youth minister of a Baptist church, who very kindly directed me to the backyard of a vacant lot in town owned by a relative.

The town of Atoka, the minister told me, suffers from some of the typical maladies of poverty: theft, drug abuse, broken families. “A quarter of the town is beneath the poverty line,” he said.

He drew for me a map of the town with directions to the vacant lot. It was getting dark when I set out, and I took a wrong turn, which led me down a street very clearly suffering from poverty, where a rottweiler, attached to a leash that looked about as brittle as one of my beard hairs, lunged at me over and over again. I kept walking, thinking I knew where I was, until the road ended. To my side, I saw three men in the dark standing idly against the side of a home. I didn’t have any reason to think they had anything malicious in mind, but I was scared nevertheless.

I called the minister on my phone, and he drove out and rode alongside me as he guided me to his aunt’s lot. While the vacant lot was still in a poor part of town, he said it was safe, and it appeared to be so. The property was bordered with trees, so if I set up my tent behind the lot’s empty house that was propped up on concrete blocks, no one would be able to spot me.

I set up my tent and inside I ate cans of tuna and sardines (that the youth minister’s wife had given me) for dinner and finished reading The Lord of the Rings. I settled into a deep, peaceful sleep as I did most every night.

I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of a dog sniffing my tent. Curious to see what breed it was, I sat up and looked out one of my tent’s portholes. It wasn’t to the right of me, so I looked out the left porthole.

It was two thirty a.m., and that’s when I saw a man walking toward my tent. He was coming straight for me. He had the gait of a horror movie villain: a springy yet hobbled lurch, confident and steady. It was dark, but I could see that he was carrying something big, some large hand tool or weapon perhaps.

I was completely paralyzed by fear. I could have started to prepare myself for the attack. I could have opened my jackknife, taken off the cap of my bear spray, or simply dialed 911, but I did nothing. I could hardly even breathe. I’d always imagined myself doing something Bruce Willis–esque in moments like this, but instead I simply watched him walk toward me, and all he had to do was unzip my tent and clunk me over the head with whatever he was carrying.

But he continued past my tent into the woods, his dog following at his heels.

What should I do? Perhaps he was harmless, but now maybe he’s thinking to himself that he has an easy target? Maybe he’ll come back with more people? Why did he walk within just a few feet of my tent? Feeling more vulnerable than ever, I called the cops.

“This isn’t quite an emergency,” I said nervously over the phone. “But I’m walking across the continent and I’m camping in Atoka in a tent behind an abandoned house in a vacant lot on X Street.” It wasn’t until I said this to the operator that I realized just how crazy what I was doing was. “I don’t know, maybe you could have a patrol car come out?”

Ten minutes later, two police cars came by. I emerged from my tent and the cops, who’d walked into the backyard, pointed their bright flashlights into my squinting eyes. I explained what had happened, and they seemed pretty nonchalant about it.

“He was probably just coming out to get a look at ya,” said one officer, as if approaching a random tent in the middle of the night with a medieval weapon were as normal a thing to do as taking out the trash.

“Yeah, he was probably coming out to get a look at ya,” said the other.

I was grateful that the cops came out, yet I wasn’t at all put at ease. I lay in my sleeping bag for the rest of the night, waking to any noise, gripping my weapons in each hand.

•   •   •

In the morning, I headed east along Highway 3.

That night, I slept in the town of Lane next to a convenience store, where I used the Wi-Fi to begin the second season of Downton Abbey. The next day, I walked toward Antlers. I knew from the forecast that I was going to get hit hard by rain, so I made sure to tightly seal all of my stuff in waterproof garbage bags inside my backpack.

And sure enough, the storm came. There was booming thunder and white-hot flashes of lightning. There was nowhere to take cover, so I kept walking on the grassy shoulder of the highway. The rain picked up: Thousands of big lumpy raindrops hit me at once like alien missiles. Even with my rain gear on, the rain managed to seep through all my clothing, saturating everything. It was the heaviest rain I’d ever seen, let alone walked in. My hands, wound tightly around my trekking poles, no longer had much feeling, and I could feel my body fighting to keep me warm. “KEEP WALKING!” I screamed into the storm. “C’MON!”

At one point, the rain was coming down so hard I thought it might knock me over. It was a biblical storm: equal parts wicked and cleansing. In a matter of twenty minutes, three cars pulled over to ask if I needed a ride, and each time I had to explain that I was on a walking expedition.

I longed for shelter. Where will I sleep tonight? I imagined a lonely middle-aged widow—a rancher’s wife with straw-colored hair—calling me from the porch of her home to come inside for shelter. “What are you doing out there?” she’d yell. “Get yourself in here!” At first, she’d think I was a homeless person, and I’d come in, and she’d say, “For heaven’s sake, you must be freezing. Let’s get you out of those wet clothes.” I’d go into the bathroom, and through the gap between the door and the wall, she’d catch sight of me peeling off my shirt, noticing, to her astonishment, that I had neither the withered limbs nor the lumpy gut of a bum but the finely chiseled physique of a hiker. “Dear God,” she’d mutter to herself involuntarily, suddenly flooded with desires that had long lain comatose in her grieving heart.

Having received no such invitation, when—freezing, saturated, and exhausted—I got to Antlers (which boasts of being the Deer Capital of the World), I went straight to the local pizzeria and changed into my dry clothes in the bathroom before ordering myself a supreme pizza. A family with two little girls, who’d seen me come in, was curious about what I was doing in Antlers so they came over and asked. I told them tales of charging moose, stampeding cows, and crazy Nebraskan cops. I left out the dilapidated homes, crazy dogs, and strange men walking toward me at night, thinking that I had a good reason to remember the better side of Oklahoma. The girls posed for pictures with me, saying they were going to talk about my trip with their class, and the grandfather left ten dollars on the table, went to the register, and paid for my pizza.