Don't Fence Me In

You must picture two middle-aged men in the Best Western Inn parking lot on a hot July evening in Des Moines. (Best Westerns are scarcely elegant, but they make up for it by being ubiquitous and also nonuniform, unlike the other chains.) My friend, whom I'll refer to as Teacher, and who for twenty years has tried to keep me connected with reality, flips a coin between the 8th Street Seafood Bar & Grill and Jimmy's American Café. A rare sense of choice is in the air. Fish wins tonight, though we will hit Jimmy's on the return. I order everything laden with garlic and drink two bottles of fine white wine to fight the heat. When you're heading out at dawn for the backcountry of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, it's best to load up on fresh garlic, which civilized people regard as a vegetable rather than an herb. At the outset you must accept the fact that the northern Midwest and points west provide the kind of dining that only a Muscovite could adore.

It's a tad eccentric, but I would choose a place like Des Moines, Iowa, to begin. I suggest this in order to experience the transition from the immensely fertile heartland to the prairies and to the Great Plains. You will also own the cachet of being the only one you know who is starting a vacation in Des Moines. The state of Iowa, and to a greater extent Nebraska, are the only states that actually remind you of what America thinks she is like.

We are in a new four-wheel drive which is clearly the ultimate touring car for road comfort coupled with rough-country accessibility. It is packed tight with camping equipment and emergency gear, including an espresso machine that works off the cigarette lighter. One of the gravest problems when traveling away from our dream coasts is getting a cup of coffee in which you can't see a dime on the bottom. We've planned our trip around a dawdling pace, making the drive to Jordan—the epicenter of the Big Open—in a graceful three days, to be followed by three days in the area, plus visits elsewhere in Montana, and three days home. In many respects Montana is the most worthy of our least traveled states, so after the Big Open you could profitably drive around Montana for several weeks, depending on the length of your vacation.

Why drive? Because short of walking it's the only way to really see the country, which anyway is not serviced by readily available airports. If you fly a great deal, which many of us do, you forget that flying is a tyranny with despotic capitals known as airports, allowing you little more freedom than a feeder calf or a school sardine. Those who spend their time east of the Mississippi also forget that driving can be a pleasure when there's no traffic to speak of. We were leaving on the Fourth of July weekend, the supposed height of the tourist season, and on many of the paved roads of our route I clocked only three or four cars per hour.

This sort of driving can be a fabulous restorative. Unlike in an airplane, you can stop, turn right or left, on a whim. Driving into emptiness keeps you at least a few miles ahead of your neuroses, and by the time they catch up to you when you bed down in the evening, you are too tired to pay any attention to them. This past year I had a great deal of leisure time, so I drove 42,000 miles around the United States, avoiding the interstates whenever possible. Driving offers peace, solitude, inaccessibility, and the freedom and adventure that allow me to think up new novels and rest from the last one. Your whimsicality returns; you've already driven to Arizona—why not continue on down to San Carlos, Mexico and hike out the Seri Indian territory on the coast of the Sea of Cortés? And there, camped out on a mountain ridge under a glorious full moon, you throw the wrong kind of porous log on the fire and then dance a new tune as a dozen angry scorpions shoot out, a fresh brand of reality pudding. The trip was a mere seven thousand miles but without a single moment of boredom, the brain once again rippling like a smooth underground river.

It is important to get up at dawn without benefit of the newspaper or a peek at CNN. Head west on I-80, taking the Omaha bypass and crossing the Missouri to Nebraska Route 75, where you turn north. Outside Sioux City you head west on Route 12. Now you're entering wonderful country, with the rolling prairie stretched endlessly out before you, a dulcet greenish brown folding in on itself, surely a sea of grass.

On a bluff outside the village of Niobrara you can see the confluence of the Niobrara River and the Missouri, with the feeder stream's braided path mixing its beige water with the Missouri's green tide. The state of Nebraska has built some new rental cabins on the breathtaking site, and I make a note to spend a November week here with my bird dogs, hunting and river-staring. Lewis and Clark also liked this spot.

A few hours down Route 12 the land grows even emptier. I carry along Van Bruggen's Wildflowers, Grasses and Other Plants of the Northern Plains and Black Hills, several bird books, Nebraskaland Magazine, and the dozen volumes in the Montana Geographic Series, in addition to Thomas Mails's The Mystic Warriors of the Plains and Carl Waldman's Atlas of the North American Indian. Knowledge informs, gives shape to scenery, whether it's the names of birds or flora, or that you know the Sauk prophet Black Hawk was there before Iowa's cornfields drowned the landscape, or that Route 12 belonged to the Ponca and Pawnee and, farther west, to the Santee Sioux, who tended to wander. It's a melancholy thought indeed that General Philip Sheridan said that to destroy the Sioux you must destroy his commissary, the buffalo: “Only then will the great prairies be safe for the speckled cattle and festive cowboy.” It is somehow unimaginable that we slew eighty million of these great beasts out of greed and stupidity.

Farther down the road is the cow town of Valentine, the county seat of Cherry County, which is ten thousand square miles, twice the size of Connecticut, with barely over seven thousand people. I'm hesitant to mention Cherry County, as it's one of my favorite places on earth, but it is also safely remote. Southwest of Valentine is the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest, which doesn't own all that many trees but is nonetheless grand. We stopped along the road to look at a few rattlesnakes, then at an eastern hognose snake, which likes to pretend it is a rattler. On being prodded, the hognose flops over and affects death—a splendid tactic during war and bar fights. Just east of Valentine is the Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, where we watched two bull buffalo having a thunderous argument through a fence. Other spectators were a group of bored female buffalo, a red-tailed hawk on a fence post, and several quizzical antelope. At dusk we recrossed the Niobrara, which, near Valentine, is as luminous, sparkling, and clear as an eastern trout stream.

At either dawn or evening on the prairie or the Great Plains you understand the quality of light as you do in East Africa. What might be a dullish, flammable vista in the midday July sun becomes vibrant, so that the land seems to roll in shadows toward the eye.

That second evening out, in the motel in Valentine, a few sore points tried to emerge, the first under the heading of “gizmo guilt.” Why were we in a motel with a car choked with camping gear? It is more fun to buy equipment than to use it. The Teacher wisely suggested we could drag the gear behind the car for a mile on a dirt road so our wives would think we used it. A brilliant idea, I thought. It was a hot night and, unlike the natural world, the motel room was air-conditioned and held none of the plump rattlers we noted along the road. Our cots were only two feet high and my sleeping hand might have dropped to the ground smack dab on a rabid bull rattler. The newly discovered immediate cure was to use jumper cables and administer electric shock to the bitten area. I could imagine the singed flesh and shower of sparks on a moonless night. No thank you. Perhaps five-foot-high cots were available.

I had become bored with Art and People, cities and politics, and was obsessed with emptiness, and Valentine was one of the centers of this obsession. The indigenous grasses we stared at, from little bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, prairie sandreed, and sand lovegrass, to hairy gramma and blowout penstemon—a wildflower—had become more interesting to me than New York City. A single meadowlark beat out Los Angeles, and two young antelope playing twilight tag held a solace not found on recent bookstore trips.

The next day there was an obligatory stop at the site of Wounded Knee, northeast of Pine Ridge in South Dakota. A genuflection was in order, also the questions to an unknown god of how we could have done such a thing, and are we still capable of doing so?

We felt an emotional crunch back on the interstate (interstates tend to resemble the banality of television) near Rapid City, though we used it only for the thirty miles to Sturgis. I had recently read the galleys of Dan O'Brien's The Rites of Autumn, the story of how he made a four-month trip from Montana to Texas teaching an orphaned peregrine falcon how to hunt. I wanted to meet the bird in question, and when I approached her large cage, Dolly let out a threatening shriek that redefined my notion of the feral as does a grizzly bear. I felt the sound up and down my backbone. I looked off in the near distance at Bear Butte, a mountain sacred to the Sioux, and thought of Rilke's verse: “With all its eyes the creature world beholds the open.”

Up past Belle Fourche on Route 212 we found new dimensions to emptiness, turning north on 323 at Alzada on the gravel road that leads to Ekalaka, the county seat of Carter County, and the only county seat I know of whose main approach in one direction is a gravel road. Ekalaka has a wonderful museum with a collection of dinosaur bones rivaling those of the great museums of the East. The bones are local and were gathered by the high-school science teacher, Marshall Lambert.

Now we were nearing Miles City, the cow capital of Montana, and the Big Open itself, about which definitions vary. In your Rand McNally you might draw a vertical line between the Fort Peck Reservoir (the over-dammed Missouri) and Miles City, and a horizontal between Winnett and Brockway. This is a little limiting, as the drive between Lewistown (a wonderful place) and Sidney is five hours, and the largest town of the first three-hours’ drive is Jordan, with a population of 485. The stretch between Winnett and Brockway is an absolutely empty 130 miles, except for Jordan. I realize this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I draw enormous solace from this expanse. Those who think of the area as desolate are ignorant of earth herself. The redoubtable state senator from Jordan, Cecil Weeding, sent out a campaign brochure that said, “We don't have people standing at our elbow everyplace we go. We've learned to fend for ourselves and enjoy the solitude isolation brings. Crime isn't even a real problem . . . neither are crowds . . . gouging . . . pushing . . . shoving.” This is a reflection from Garfield County, with nearly 3 million acres and a population of 1800.

Early the next morning (we had a choice of 5 A.M. and 7 A.M., before or after his morning chores; we chose the latter) we met with Art Larson, who ranches south of Cohagen (population twelve) with his wife, Nancy, and son, Carl. The Larsons ranch about thirty sections (a section is 640 acres) of their own and an additional forty in partnership. Art, a third-generation Swede, is the owner of the property and possesses all the misunderstood characteristics of the cattle-bound Westerner: laconic, shy, almost absurdly independent, loathes government control, loves horses, and is deeply suspicious of sheep ranchers and wheat farmers. I was a little startled to learn that Nancy had been a member of the San Antonio Symphony and reads the outlandish novels of Tom McGuane, who had initiated this introduction, and that their son was off at a rock concert in Billings. After half a day with them I had a distinct feeling that here was a life being lived well.

We spoke of the violent windstorm of the evening before, during our first night in Jordan. The Teacher and I had been dining in the QD Cafe there when a cowboy ran in and hollered he had “outdrove a storm down the creek bed.” Then the building began to shudder and garbage cans flew across the parking lot, where cars and cattle trucks wobbled in the wind. Everyone in the café was silent, waiting for the rain that might abate the drought, one of the worst since the 1930s, but no rain came. After dinner (a fine rib steak) we drove into the nothingness as the wind subsided a tad. The air was pink from the dust against the setting sun, and great bolts of lightning drove earthward in the black sky to the south. It was so Wagnerian that the Teacher slipped a Wagner tape into the car deck.

Art and Nancy looked a little tired, and we learned that those selfsame Gotterdammerung lightning strokes had kept them and their neighbors up all night fighting range fires. Despite his fatigue, Art drove us around the ranch checking the windmill-driven water wells. The ranch feeds eighteen hundred yearling cattle, which are driven, as in the old days, down to Miles City in the fall. After checking the water tank, we looked over a herd of cutting horses that the family breeds, raises, and trains. Cutting horses are an elegant hobby indulged in by solvent ranchers, and for many of them the contests provide their major social occasions.

It is a comfort to the Larsons that there are only two neighbors within twenty miles, and then the next is fifty miles to the west. There is also a mildly grim note in that near the turn of the century, soon after Art's grandfather arrived, the countryside was covered with homesteaders. The average rainfall in the area is between twelve and thirteen inches, but averages reflect a thirty-five-year cycle and, as such, can be—and are—killing statistics. You might get a few years of twenty inches followed by half a dozen years of half a dozen inches, at which point the final homesteaders would leave by the thousands, which they did in the Great Depression. As in western Nebraska and Kansas in the 1870s and 1880s, the railroads and their robber barons, the dominant force in homestead expansion, tended to fib about the amount of rainfall past the ninety-eighth meridian. Even now, Deborah and Frank Popper, of the Rutgers University geography and urban studies departments, respectively, have predicted that economics and climate will force most of the region—especially its most rural areas, including much of the western Dakotas—to return to its native state.

Incidentally, there is a specific etiquette that should be followed in visiting remote places. You don't ask, “How could you live here?” which implicitly questions the value of someone's entire life. There's an amusing sign in the café-store-bar in the tiny village of Shell, Wyoming: “Welcome to Wyoming. Frankly, I don't give a —— how you do it back home.”

Art sent us off on back roads to Ingomar to have a bowl of beans at a bar called Jersey Lilly's. This added a mere 150 miles to a round-trip back to Jordan. We saw great numbers of antelope and the rare, brief sight of a song-bird astride a flying hawk's back, pecking away in foolhardy rage. We swerved off the road, thinking we saw a yellow balloon with a basket of passengers, but it was a golden globe of tumbleweed a few hundred feet up, catching the sun and drifting along in the wind currents.

Ingomar turned out to be a near ghost town and the bar the only functioning business. There were rails out front where you could tether your horse, and two footloose lambs gave us a hard look. We had a good bowl of spicy pinto beans with the proprietor of Jersey Lilly's, Billy “the Horseman” Seward, a prominent lightweight boxer of the late thirties and early forties. World War II saved Billy from becoming punchy, and he runs his unintentionally period-piece bar and café with verve. We looked at his boxing scrapbooks, and I noted a photo of a ballerina from Chicago that he didn't care to talk about. For a moment I was back inside a novel, some western version of Sherwood Anderson. I asked about a sign advertising the Ingomar Rodeo and Fondue Party. The idea was that you had a big scalding potful of boiling oil and folks stuck chunks of beef in on pitchforks so they could cook it to taste. Sauces were also provided.

On the long way back to the Garfield Motel, the Teacher mentioned that at our current rate of expenditure a month in the Big Open would cost far less than our four days in April in New York City. I agreed with pleasure, though a great deal can be said for room-service breakfasts at the Carlyle, lunch at Lutèce, and the simple fact, at this point, that I would pay a cool fifty bucks for a slice of pizza from Ray's.

Before dinner at the QD (the only game in town, but quite pleasant) I stopped at Jordan's two saloons, because I like taverns and, not incidentally, I like a few drinks. How can you experience the rich fabric of life in a locale without visiting bars? The answer is, you can't. On this particular evening I wangled invitations to bird hunt on a couple of ranches. This wasn't difficult, as reasonably behaved strangers are met with curiosity and friendliness in Jordan. Then I met a peculiar lout, a stranger from Bozeman, who bragged that he had shot 2,200 gophers that summer and was aiming for the “record” of 4,700. He wasn't amused when I asked him how he cooked the critters. Did he lie? I get to ask such questions because I am not a shy, retiring shrimp of a fellow. The air was cleared when the Teacher came into the saloon to fetch me for dinner.

On this trip I chose not to visit the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which encircles Fort Peck Reservoir. I made this decision because I did not want to rub my nose in another piece of nasty government business—some years ago two thousand antelope starved to death here because over half the forage was consumed by cattle. The Bureau of Land Management administered a program by which refuge land was rented to ranchers, so that the very name “refuge” is a phony sop offered to environmentalists. This Bureau of Land Management mess is scarcely unique to the area (read James Conaway's Kingdom in the Country). On a recent trip into the Cimarron National Grasslands in southwest Kansas, I was struck by the utterly barren junkiness of the area. Over the years any number of my questions have been met by the usual bureaucratic condescension, at which point I like to answer that as a seventh-generation farmer I'm quite able to recognize raped and barren land without being chided by a nitwit slobbering at the public trough. It's probably not very amazing that the worst stewards of the land are not the so-called greedy ranchers but our careless, sprawling government itself.

That last evening we drove back north of Jordan for a stroll. A lovely girl in a mauve shirt was riding a horse across a limitless pasture in the twilight. Beyond her in the darkening landscape two coyotes were calling out to each other. It was a scene of unpardonable beauty, and as far away from everything I don't like as I could possibly get. It is there, and free for the looking if you can handle the driving. The Buddhists like to say, “The path is the way,” and that is the proper mood for this trip. You can sing “Home on the Range” at the antelope, hawks, meadowlarks, rattlers, and sharp-tailed grouse, and no one will care. And you won't have to go shopping, because there are no shops. It is the grandeur and mystery of a land in which we have only been slightly involved.

1989