18.

The Preacher

RYE, TEXAS—62 MILES TO GO

February 2, 2013

I was sitting on an olive-colored couch surrounded by three preachers in the lobby of an extravagantly furnished Baptist church.

I’d come to the church, as I often did, to ask for a patch of grass to set up my tent. The youth minister I first spoke with said I could and that I should feel free to charge my electronics in the lobby until they had to lock down the church after their Wednesday night service. He asked why I was hiking the pipeline. I sensed that he was one of those open-minded, progressive-thinking churchmen, so I said, “Well, I guess I’m one of those whacko environmentalists.”

Noting that we were in conservative oil country, he said, “Just don’t tell our church members that. Say you’re just going on a walk or something.”

His partner, Pastor James—a middle-aged, lean-bodied preacher looking dapper in his pastel pink dress shirt, tie, and trousers—came up to me, introduced himself, and asked, “Has anyone on your journey talked to you about Jesus?”

“Of course,” I said, surprised with how fluidly the lie had exited my mouth.

While I’d interacted with countless preachers and Christian practitioners over the past five months, no one up until this point had attempted to indoctrinate me. In my life before the trip, though, I’d been preached to many times, and because I did not want to be preached to again, I thought I’d try to outmaneuver the pastor and dodge having to listen to what would most certainly be an agonizing monologue. But when he asked, “What do you think it takes to get into heaven?” I knew there was no way out.

“Well, I don’t have a denomination,” I said. “But I believe in the church of caring for our fellow man and Mother Earth.”

“But have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” he asked.

“No, but I have a Gideon Bible,” I said, pulling out the tiny Bible given to me in Kansas, as if it were a magical amulet that would stun him into silence.

“And have you read it?” he asked.

“No,” I said, feeling the snare tighten around my ankle. “But my mother’s Catholic. And I was baptized Catholic.”

“But you don’t go to church?”

“No . . . I guess I don’t.”

Pastor James stared more than he looked. He pointed his gaze toward my eyes but not into them. He was more machine than man, more dry doctrine than deliberate thought, more steel than soul. He had the sort of half-dead stare of someone who’s gone through some horrible experience that had taken his humanity.

“Hasn’t read the Bible. Doesn’t go to church,” he muttered, listing my sins. His suspicions confirmed, he was clearly becoming excited. He leaned his head back, puffed out his chest, and rubbed his chin with two fingers before explaining that we’re all sinners, that Jesus died for our sins, and that I needed to accept Jesus as my personal savior to get into heaven.

I was slightly embarrassed for him. Two other preachers were standing around me, and I thought they might be thinking, Oh boy, here goes crazy Pastor James again. But I could see that they—nodding their heads in assent and chiming in with amens—were getting just as much enjoyment out of this as Pastor James was.

The whole idea of someone “dying for my sins” did absolutely nothing for me. If I killed or stole or did something undeniably bad, what difference would it make if someone else died for those sins? How does dying for my sins and my future sins make my sins any more forgivable? Why does this crazy story work for so many people!? And what’s with this obsession with sinning? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don’t really sin. I drink to be merry, I lie for the sake of social harmony, and I lust because I’m stuck with a twenty-nine-year-old-guy’s body. I don’t feel guilty for any of the above, as they aren’t wrong, and when I do something wrong, my conscience catches it and I do my best to not do it again.

I didn’t get the sense that Pastor James was preaching to me out of a sense of compassion or that he truly cared about the fate of my soul. Rather, converting me was only a sort of game for him to play. As I sat on his couch in his church in my dusty clothes, he did not see me as his equal but as someone he could wield power over. I was little more than sport to him.

I sat there quietly, politely listening while thinking to myself, I’m smarter than all you fools. I knew that Pastor James, so blinded by his faith, would never have an intellectual discussion for the rest of his life. I was tired of being lectured to by zealots and global-warming deniers.

I was, of course, quite touched by the help I’d received from Christians along my path. And I found that almost all of them were moved to help not because they wished to convert me but because they found joy in helping. I was once a person who would scoff at the idea of becoming Christian, and while I knew I’d never become a true believer, I’d started to think it might be possible one day—if I ever settled down—to join a progressive, tolerant, we-interpret-the-Bible-metaphorically church if only to become part of a community and heighten my sense of charity.

“Well, I have lots of time to think on my walk,” I said to Pastor James, hoping that that would end the conversation, as he could then rest assured that he’d planted a seed of thought in my head and that I’d be mulling over his words of wisdom on my long walk. But all he heard was “I have lots of time.”

“But you don’t have lots of time!” he said. “None of us know God’s plan!” The service was about to start, so he plucked a pamphlet from a shelf titled, “Do you know for certain that you have ETERNAL LIFE?” and handed it to me with a look on his face that seemed to say, If I didn’t get through to him, this will.

•   •   •

I’d begun to feel a little wimpy.

In Oklahoma, because I’d been so terrified of everything—and because I felt like I’d used up eight of my lives on this trip—I decided I ought to be extra careful with my final ninth. So, instead of walking along the pipe in Texas (which was being laid by pipeline crews), I decided to walk on the shoulders of major highways where I wouldn’t get in trouble.

But the walk had become fairly boring. There was less interaction out on the highway, less adventure, and certainly less Keystone XL. I’d already walked many miles across the state without having had a meaningful conversation with a landowner affected by the XL. I felt like I was cutting a corner.

But after I received an e-mail from a guy named Storms Reback, who asked if he could join me, I thought having a partner in crime would make me feel more comfortable about following the pipe closely again. I also received a Facebook message from a young lady who was a PhD student at a university in Texas, who wondered if she could meet up with me, too.

Storms is a lean and affable and witty forty-two-year-old writer from Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and child. He’s the author of three books about poker; his latest is called Ship It Holla Ballas!, about a group of teenagers who made millions of dollars playing online poker before it was outlawed. It had sold well and the movie rights had been purchased, but Storms had had enough of writing about poker so, feeling the same strange draw to the Keystone XL I’d felt, he decided to join me for a week or so.

He met me in the small town of Arp, Texas, where I had a package to pick up. We hit it off right away, as if we’d been friends in a previous life, talking about books, hiking, and the state of the environment.

I asked a man at the post office where I might be able to set up my tent in town, and he told me I could set it up on his front lawn. Once we got talking, and once he noticed I was very much in need of a shower (which he later confided to me), he offered his guest house, where Storms would meet me. The next day, Storms and I took off south. I was a third of the way through Texas, with about two hundred miles to go to Port Arthur.

Storms and I, after heading south out of Arp, quickly came to the pipeline path, which was essentially a one-hundred-foot-wide dirt road. Here, one of the many pipeline-laying companies had removed the trees and grass to make way for the business of laying the pipe. We walked next to a deep ten-foot trench into which the pipes would be laid. The pipes, off to the side, were all propped up on pallets so that cranes could pick them up and set them in the trench. Colorful flags were festooned over the width of the path.

Storms was eager to jump into this adventure. “Well, what do you think?” he said, excited, looking down the forbidden dirt path.

“I say we go for it,” I said.

And so we set off over the dirt path, which was a fine hiking trail except for the barbed-wire fences every hundred yards or so. After nearly forty minutes of easy walking, we heard a truck rumbling behind us. It pulled up and two Smith County cops came out.

“We probably shouldn’t be on here, should we?” I said.

“No, you shouldn’t,” said one of the cops.

Our licenses were taken and the policewoman explained to us that there’d been protesters from the Tar Sands Blockade in the area in the past, so the landowners who’d caught sight of us thought we might be them. Eventually, they let us go, and we promised we’d stick to county roads closest to the pipe.

We dealt with the typical travails of walking across the occasionally impoverished Heartland, but now that I had a partner, the dogs were less vicious, less ambitious, less confident. And I noticed that I no longer was walking through Texas with fear. The presence of another human being had magically put me at ease.

Jessica and her dog, Benny, met up with us in the tiny ghost town of Consort, Texas, which has not only a church and an empty volunteer fire department but also an ideal camping setup at the pastor’s house: a fire pit, a big lawn to set up tents, and church bathrooms.

Jessica was tall, fit, had long brown hair tied up in a ponytail, and wore hip hiker’s garb. Storms took off to bed early, leaving Jessica and me alone by the fire with a bottle of whiskey. I watched the light of the fire dance over her cheekbones and began to appreciate that I was in the presence of a Smart and Attractive Woman. I went to the bathroom, worried I was going to throw up (she and I had finished the whole bottle), but fortune took pity on me and the urge passed. When I careened back to the fire, the coals had mellowed and Jessica was sitting on the pit’s rim. I sat next to her. She was talking about something, and I felt this terrible, awful desire to simply rest my tired, vulnerable, needy head on her shoulder. It had been more than half a year since I’d touched another human being. The alcohol had duly drowned my inhibitions, so I went for it, and she let out an awww and gushed out words of pent-up fondness. “You’re so nice,” she said. “And I really love what you’re doing on this trip. I’m going to take you back to my tent and I’m going to snuggle you the whole night.” I poured water over the fire and got in her tent, where I lay with her the rest of the night next to her dog, who didn’t seem at all fazed by the presence of this intruding gentleman caller. If there’s anything more revitalizing to a guy than lying with a beautiful woman, I’ve yet to find it.

In the morning, Storms caught sight of me leaving Jessica’s tent (which made me feel like a rock star) with what he later described as a “sheepish grin.” I said good-bye to Jessica, and my grin went away when I was hit by the full force of the hangover. An hour into our day’s walk, I had to lie down in a bed of pine needles and sleep off my sickness on the shoulder of the road for two hours while Storms read on his iPad. I took a bite out of a granola bar, said I was going to throw up, slept for an hour more, and woke up feeling like a new man, telling Storms that I was “all the way back.”

We walked through East Texas pine country, sometimes on dirt roads completely shrouded in the shadows of the pines’ long bushy limbs. The homes in this hilly country looked like battered schooners riding on ocean waves.

Mike Bishop is a former Marine, a Vietnam vet, a retired chemist, and, at the age of sixty-four, a first-year med student. We met him at a café in Douglass, and he invited us over for a bonfire at his place.

Bishop had made national headlines the month before when a judge brought the construction of the Keystone XL to a screeching halt. Bishop’s contract with TransCanada stated that the company would be transporting crude oil when, in fact, it would be shipping dilbit (short for “diluted bitumen”), a heavier, more corrosive, more toxic substance.

He told us about how the pipe was being laid just one hundred feet from his home, where he took care of his wife, who had Alzheimer’s, and his sixteen-year-old daughter. Bishop was fiery, sharp, blunt, and maybe a bit crazy. He spoke nonstop for the next hour.

“I’m sixty-four years old,” said Bishop. “My daddy’s been dead for many, many years. He taught me three things. He said, ‘Mike, people are driven by money, power, sex, or all of the above.’ That’s it. There is no other motivation in the world. So follow the money. That’s the only thing here because TransCanada is not fucking anybody except me and other landowners.”

We walked to his house, where Bishop gave us a tour. Next to his white mailbox, overtaken by rust, were two flags: an upside-down American flag and a yellow flag with a serpent that read DON’T TREAD ON ME. His home was a quaint shack, the eaves speckled a moldy green. The composition of his property, apart from the XL’s dirt path, was serenely bucolic, with a swath of green grass bordered by pines and a gentle gush of a stream meandering through. It was quiet and misty.

“I told them,” Bishop continued, “‘I don’t like you. I don’t like your company. I don’t like the fact that you can bully people around. I don’t like the fact that you threaten to put me in jail on my own fucking property. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I got another six-acre tract of land. You put your pipeline anywhere on that six acres. Anywhere you want. For free. I don’t want your money. I will move any buildings, any fences, anything I’ve got over there. I will move it for you. Just keep it away from where I raise my children and from where I am now raising my grandchildren.’”

When TransCanada didn’t agree to this, Bishop got angry. Yet he didn’t get any support from conservatives in the area, who should, at least theoretically, he figured, be in support of private-property rights.

“I don’t think the government needs to be telling me what to do in my bedroom with my wife or another man. I don’t care if you two go get married or me and him get married,” Bishop said, pointing at me. “That’s our business. But conservatism has gotten a bad name in the past twenty years, so I said, ‘You know what? No more.’ For years I thought this climate change was a bunch of crap. Then I started studying it, and said, ‘I’m through with the Republican party, I’m through with the bullshit.’

“You don’t know how many nights I’ve laid up here thinking about not killing anybody but shooting them in the butt with a .22. I could conceal in those woods. They would never find me. You don’t want to kill nobody, but you hit a guy in the knee or the butt and he’s never going to forget what happened. And then the next guy down the line is going to say, ‘I don’t know if I want to go to work for these people.’ And you just go down the line shooting people in the butt. Then, I thought, wait a minute, these are guys trying to feed their families. They’re doing the same thing I would do if I were in their shoes. You can’t be angry with them. You’ve got to focus your attention on the company.”

Bishop stopped in the middle of his thought to listen to the thrum of croaking frogs.

“Listen to that. Hear that? How long do you think that’s going to last when these fucking machines start coming over here?”

In the morning, he awoke early to bring us coffee and wish us a fond farewell.

“Do you have a gun or a knife?” he asked.

“I have a knife and some bear spray,” I said.

“Do you have a KA-BAR?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you skilled in martial arts?”

“No, I haven’t had to deal with anything like that.”

“I am amazed, dude. Let me tell you, I’m a tough guy and I wouldn’t be caught dead walking the roads down here anywhere that pipeline is. Those people scare me. Let me tell you something. When I win in the end, they’re going to try to kill me.”

I may never have been as flattered as when Bishop waved us off and yelled in his Texan drawl: “Let me tell ya. You guys got balls.”

•   •   •

Storms and I continued our southward march across Texas. We slept in an abandoned church parsonage, on church lawns, and when we couldn’t find any churches, we knocked on doors asking for advice about where to camp, hoping that a homeowner would offer his or her lawn.

The weather had turned moist and sticky. The pine forest turned into a viny jungle full of chirping birdsong and the choral hum of insect kingdoms. Salamanders kept warm atop guardrails, and the grassy roadsides were strewn with the carcasses of wild pigs, rat-tailed opossums, and the brittle shells of armadillos. Turkey vultures, in great flocks, hovered over the road, seeking their next mangled feast.

We knocked on the door of a small home and asked a guy named Barney if there was a church nearby. Before we could explain who we were, what we were doing, and where we were going, he offered us his guest house.

Barney, a “thirty-three-carat Cajun from Louisiana,” as he described himself, is a guitarist in a gospel band who said God gave him a gift to be able “to play anything with a string.” He had stage-three melanoma. The treatments suppressed his immune system, and we saw him get sicker as the evening wore on. He said he served in Vietnam, and after he was wounded, he refused to go back. He was thrown in jail for three months. In Germany, a lieutenant called him a coward. “You ain’t been over there,” Barney said to him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, motherfucker.”

Barney had some rather progressive views on immigration because he’d raised two Mexican-born boys who were taken away from him after they’d grown up and were in their forties. But that was the end of his progressivism. After he’d invited us into his home for milk and chocolate cake, he went on a rant about how the United States was becoming the Soviet Union, calling Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein “lot lizards” and “road whores,” and complaining how it was only a matter of time before we’d become a dictatorial state like all other countries with strong gun-control laws. Having had such conversations with old white guys a hundred times on this trip already, I made an excuse to leave, abandoning poor Storms with Barney.

Barney would tell us later that he was in support of the pipeline. “Anything that can give a man a job is good to me,” he said.

Jobs, jobs, JOBS!

This is all I heard wherever I went. Everything that creates jobs must be GOOD!

No one understood that the pipeline wouldn’t create that many jobs. For all the miles of laid pipeline that I’d walked over in Canada and Kansas, I didn’t see one pipeline worker. And having seen the toll that oil and pipeline jobs have on workers brings into question just how “good” these jobs really are. Although the pipeliners are well paid, they have to live far from their families in motels or trailer parks for months on end. And from what I saw, Fort McMurray, Alberta—where the oilmen of the tar sands live—is no Norman Rockwell painting. Men aren’t walking to work in hard hats each morning carrying lunch boxes and coming home to hugs and kisses from their children each night. Most all of the workers in Fort McMurray have left their families, and between the long hours, the morally ambiguous nature of their job, and the utter absence of spirituality and civic engagement in their lives, many turn to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitutes. And it’s obvious that many of them aren’t putting their hard-earned dollars in cookie jars for rainy days but toward these fleeting enjoyments.

I’d begun to think that a man will not morally object to any job—whether the job requires that he bulldoze forests, make land mines, or poison his neighbor’s water—if it means he’ll get a paycheck to feed and shelter his family. I say this only partly demoralized. The North American conscience seems designed to very admirably care for self and family, but rare is the person whose conscience is piqued by the sufferings of dwindling species, of a warming planet, or of the fate of generations to come. Unburdened by such abstract thoughts, we wish for little more than a fridge full of food, a big truck, a warm home, and a happy family, and we think it nonsensical—if we think of it at all—to worry about a future we can never really predict and certainly will never see. And while this all seems very shortsighted, it is not without its own logic.

But I never said anything like this to Barney or any of the people I met. They were all older than I was, and because they’re old and I was young, they assumed they knew more. And because I spoke little, they thought I knew little. But because they spoke a lot, I knew they didn’t know much. Each person spoke to me as if they were doing me some great service, as if they were imparting sage wisdom from ancient texts. But more often than not, I saw that they were propagandized, only regurgitating rumors they’d heard at the local café or half-remembered falsehoods they saw on the TV. They talked in absolutes, spoke expertly on every issue, and rarely if ever would you hear someone say, “Well, I guess I don’t know much about that.” They weren’t free-thinking men, but stone tablets onto which dogma had etched its wicked creed.

When I started this trip, I wondered if I had been living too much in a bubble. Perhaps I’d been reading too many New York Times articles. Perhaps I’d put too much faith in peer-reviewed science. Perhaps—surrounded by open-minded, well-educated, progressives—I was missing the bigger picture. Perhaps if I left academe and went out to the Heartland, I’d tap into the wisdom of the prairie and the farmers who worked it. Maybe they knew the land and skies and environment in ways we suburbanites and city dwellers didn’t. Maybe I’d find that they had good reason to deny man-made climate change.

But not one person I encountered had said anything even halfway intelligent when denying global warming. No one had read books or articles on the issue, and they couldn’t begin to understand how peer-reviewed science works. They saw themselves as too freewilled and independent to be duped into accepting something that an accomplished and well-trained scientist says is true. But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one’s worldview and reject those that don’t.

I found myself reading a number of Civil War biographies on this trip. I read Tony Horwitz’s Midnight Rising about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals about Lincoln and his cabinet; and Jean Edward Smith’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. It didn’t occur to me until then that I might have been drawn to the history of the Civil War because of its similarities with our current climate-change crisis.

Like during the pre–Civil War era, one half of the country is supportive of a cruel and unjust institution—or, to be more specific, a clearly destructive and unsustainable way of life—and the other half (though abolitionists weren’t quite half the country) finds something morally reprehensible in our fossil-fuel free-for-alls and their environmental implications. And just as we view the supporters of slavery as backward, simple-minded, and even quaint, future generations may look upon the deniers of today with a similar mix of disbelief, scorn, and amusement.

But perhaps it’s not so simple. Most deniers are old, and as one forward-thinking pastor explained to me, people have a hard time believing something they haven’t experienced in their lifetime. Lincoln, in one of those moments of great magnanimity that he is known for, said:

[The Southerners] are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up . . . I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.

Since they’ve lived in a world run on coal, gas, and oil that up until recently has caused little perceivable damage, perhaps I should have some level of sympathy for the deniers. As a young person, unsettled in life, it was easy for me to accept the idea of change, even bold change. But for the deniers, their whole lives have been built around the consumption of fossil fuels, and, in a way, it seemed almost natural for them to resist change.

•   •   •

Storms and I made it to the town of Wells. Storms was planning on heading back home to his wife and child in Austin the next day, so he was eager to talk to more landowners who had something to say about the XL since he was thinking about writing an article about it and our hike. Reverend David Goodwin at the Methodist church, who very kindly let us spend the night at his home, told us he knew a guy named Bobby who had a lot to say on the XL and that this guy had special knowledge of XL protesters being paid for their activism.

Reverend David told us about his spinal cord being crushed when his vehicle rolled down a mountainside in Germany while he was serving in the army. He didn’t experience any symptoms until two years later when he suddenly could no longer move his left arm. And then everything below his waist stopped working, too. His doctors told him that with his condition (called syringomyelia) he had five years before the rest of his body would quit on him.

He said he was spiritually healed at a retreat six years after the accident. Three years after that, David had an experience with God while he was in meditative prayer.

“I was telling him how beautiful the world he created is,” David said. “And God said, ‘Raise your left arm,’ and I said, ‘It don’t work.’ I just felt this thing saying, ‘Raise your left arm.’ And I was like, ‘It don’t work.’ He was like, ‘Raise your left arm.’ And I was like, ‘God, it doesn’t work. You know it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked since 1994.’”

And that’s when David’s arm shot up in the air.

“I was like, ‘What in the world?’ I’m freaking out. I’m scared to move my arm because it shot up by itself. I’m scared. I’m looking at it like it’s a ghost. I slowly brought it down. I’m in my wheelchair and I’m riding as fast as I can to find somebody to show them that my arm was working. I said, ‘I’m going to walk in a year.’ So I just went home and I had 120 hours of physical therapy and I started doing everything they told me not to do, and got into a swimming pool and started teaching my body to do what I thought I needed to do. It took almost exactly a year.” David had since become a reverend at the church in Wells, where he and his wife have raised two kids.

David drove Storms to Bobby’s as I pedaled a bicycle behind their car.

Bobby was a bulky guy, gray haired, and probably in his early fifties. He wore a camo jacket and blue jeans. Reverend David introduced me as a writer gathering stories on the pipeline who’s “sort of against it.” Bobby, looking at my beard and slightly ragged clothing, saw in me the very protesters who staged demonstrations near his land.

“Now let me ask you this!” he exclaimed, scowling, pointing his finger at my face. “Do you know how much a gallon of gasoline costs in Saudi Arabia?”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t!” he harrumphed. “That’s interesting. Do you know what a liter is?” he asked.

I was tired of avoiding conflict, avoiding the topic of climate change, avoiding speaking my mind to men like Bobby.

Bring it on, bitch! I thought to myself. I’m taking this conversation all the way to climate change.

“Yeah, I know what a liter is,” I said.

“Well a liter of gasoline in Saudi Arabia costs sixteen cents.”

“Yeah, but we won’t get the Keystone XL oil,” I said, gathering where he was going with his point. “Or at least we won’t get all of it. Valero, the refining company, which would get 20 percent of the Keystone XL oil, has stated that they’re going to export it to nations overseas.”

“Valero is one of the few refiners in the country,” he said, “that gets its oil from America and sells its oil to Americans.”

“Well, I can’t tell you the history of Valero, but I can tell you they aren’t selling that oil to America. The pipe won’t do much to lower gas prices.”

Reverend David, seeing that things were heating up, interrupted to say that we had to head back to his house because dinner was ready. Storms, who also seemed to want to avoid conflict, tried to steer the conversation down a more peaceful path.

But Bobby jumped in, pointing at my face again. “What do these protesters care about whether this pipe goes through this or that person’s land?”

“Grubby-looking people,” his mom chimed in, looking at me.

“Well, for them, it’s not a local issue. It’s a global one.”

I was about to bring up global warming, which I knew would have enraged Bobby, but Reverend David got up and began to nudge us out of Bobby’s house.

The next day, as we began our walk south again, I thought about all of the things I could have said to Bobby and how much more persuasive I could have been. I supposed it didn’t matter, though; Bobby wasn’t going to change his mind no matter how much evidence was put under his nose, as he’d never be convinced of something he didn’t wish to believe. The battle over climate change, I thought, like the battle over civil rights, will not be won by convincing disbelievers of facts or appealing to their morality but by passing the torch of reason down to the generations to come, who will replace and laugh at us all.