At the hotel with Skip and Molly, I nap for a couple of hours—Cristina went back to Alexandra’s apartment in the last wee hours, and will catch her flight home from Wisconsin, as will Skip and Molly. I leave without waking them, rolling out in the early gray dawn, and while I won’t make Montana by sunset, I’m hoping to at least cross the state line today, maybe by midnight.
It’s two hours quicker to run the gauntlet through frackland—to aim for North Dakota rather than South—but I choose the southern route again. Minnesota on that stretch is still corn, as it was on the way out here, and it allows me to turn my mind off and just drive. On my iPod, the Cranberries, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark. The residue in my brain is washing clean, as if I’m strapped to the car’s grill and the wind is peeling away any complicating or extraneous thoughts, until all that remains is the elemental distillation of loneliness. I feel ready to write again.
I drive until the corn at last disappears, until the first green of summer hay fills my eyes. South Dakota. I’m still twelve hundred miles from home, but it feels like home. West.
As if only now having escaped some unnamable danger, I finally stop for a nap. I detour onto a gravel road and park beneath a giant cottonwood outside an abandoned church, with the prairie wind rocking the car. I know I shouldn’t park beneath a cottonwood, the limbs of which are prone to fall, but I want the shade, and I hope to stay safe for the next half hour.
I nap, deliriously happy, and upon reawakening find that the wind has stopped. Cattle are lowing and mourning doves calling. On the gravel road in front of me an old guy strolls along with his daughter or granddaughter walking behind him.
In Mitchell I waltz into the Holiday Inn Express as if I’m a paying guest and case the free buffet. A banana and a bowl of Raisin Bran, some orange juice. I think I have enough money to get home. I have no idea where my next check is coming from.
From Mitchell, I detour due north, on up into North Dakota. Jamestown, nearing dusk. Strange clouds paint the sky. The wind’s been out of the west all day. There are mobile homes everywhere, all for sale. What an oxymoron, mobile and home. For miles there have been silhouettes and billboards advertising a baby white buffalo. When I get to the exit I take the bait and turn off.
The place is as hokey as I knew it would be: a faux Old West town with a barn, a rail fence, a jail, a little museum, closed—it’s just after seven. I imagine the old barbed wire and horseshoes that are inside it; the kerosene lanterns and rusted shovels. But I didn’t want to see the old cattle brands anyway. I came for the white buffalo.
The other two cars in the lot are leaving. I park and walk past the blacksmith shop. It’s all mine. Beyond the gravel parking area looms a giant papier-mâché buffalo, his crimson eyes bloodshot. He looks larger than the space shuttle; how does he hold up in this wind? Drawing closer, I see that a concrete shell has been poured over him. He looks wild, furious. It feels good to stand beneath him. This is a magnificent beast, even if he is made up. He comes from some place of truth.
I walk down toward a lower pasture, wondering where the white buffalo is. I see a few brown buffalo on the green hillside. A storm is hastening. Purple bulging clouds. The wind is roaring. I’ve decided it’s a bullshit tourist trap—Oh, he died last year, or, He’s at the vet this week—and then, on the hillside, emerging from a tangle of juniper, steps a fucking white buffalo.
Oh. My. God. He is a baby, a yearling.
Right from the beginning, there is an otherness that sets him apart from the rest. He is as beautiful and elegant as he is alien and other. For me he conjures one of those luminous desert plants with the bone-pale blossoms that open only at night. He trails the rest of the herd at a distance, the white ship of him drifting in the wind, and it’s almost as if he’s nervous to be out in the light like this, fading though it is. I walk along the fence, keeping pace across that distance—eighty, maybe a hundred yards—and then he works his way back into the juniper, as if the mere act of being visible was taxing him.
I go back to the car, cleansed and refreshed. I’m invigorated by the sheer absence of people, a feeling that carries me on into the night, all the rest of the way across the Dakotas. Eventually I grow sleepy again but push on for the Montana state line, hungry not just for home but for everything I have not yet seen. In these first few days after the summer solstice, there’s very much the feeling that if I quicken my pace just a little, I can see it all. At last I cross the state line, leave the interstate, and pull into a small dark town. Giant mule deer wander the empty streets as if they are its sole residents. I park once more next to an old church, and again beneath a canopy of cottonwoods. Even in the night, I can tell by the sound of them that it’s June. How much else do we know without knowing?
One of the best things about burning oneself down to the last nub of the wick is the quality of sleep into which one tumbles afterward, and that wavering line between the real world and the world of dreams in the final sinking down. As I begin to plunge, my last thought is a memory from long ago, back when I was just starting out. I was traveling with Elizabeth from Mississippi to Texas to visit my parents. We’d been driving all night, taking back roads without a map, just wandering south and west. At some point in the night, with the tracings of fireflies all around us, we’d ridden on a dilapidated ferry across a flood-swollen river. On the other side, when we could go no farther, I pulled down a sandy road back in a deep forest of pines. We were exhausted, and we each barely had time to lean our seats back before being sucked down to those waiting depths.
And at the bottom of that lake of sleep, I heard wolves, or coyotes, howling all around us, a whole pack of them baying and swarming either side of us. It seemed that the truck began to move again, driving forward of its own accord, the road still rolling forever, and the river of white sand beneath us possessing a current we could not resist, pulling us farther forward. I tried to come up from the bottom of the lake. I sat up and pumped the brakes. There were bright spotlights everywhere, and the swirling backs of wolves—or were they dogs?—visible out every window, and human voices behind the searchlights, voices in the darkness that I could not understand. They seemed to be hunting something. And then the lights, and the hounds, were moving on, we were not what they were searching for, the light was pulling away, and I was already falling back down again, could not stay awake or aloft any longer, if ever I had been.
We awoke at gray dawn to the songs of mockingbirds and courting cardinals and the two-note whistles of bobwhite quail; the florid May scents of loblolly, magnolia, honeysuckle, and wisteria. And etched into the white sand was a multitude of dog tracks from where the wild pack had passed by in the night, chasing whatever it was they were after, while we had remained behind, never quite waking, chasing sleep.
That a dream could be a dream and yet real life too—could even leave proof of its passage—was a revelation that I hope has not been lost on me. And here in Montana, back in the cradle of home, I am glad to call it to mind again, and to remember how those hounds went on—it was a dream—and yet how they had been there, too, as real as anything ever is or was.