The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  * * *

  The storm had broken the heat, this time for real. I actually felt goose bumps in the morning air as I spread my exercise mat on the gravel, did my stretches, push-ups, and sit-ups, then took a fifteen-minute walk in a broad meadow, where Sage and Sky gamboled off lead.

  Leslie could not celebrate our passage from Kansas City, Missouri, to Kansas City, Kansas, with an iPod blast of KC and the Sunshine Band, since her selections left out most everything from 1975 to 1990, so she picked up Magic Droid for amusement and edification. MD informed us that K.C.K., which we’d thought was the larger of the two, was actually the smaller and considered a suburb of K.C.M. West of the city, where the Missouri bends northwestward for hundreds of miles almost to the Canadian line, we left I-70 for Kansas Route 73/7, another road on the Lewis and Clark Trail, so indicated by triangular markers showing the silhouettes of one man standing as he points forward, another kneeling with a musket in hand. The plan was to follow the river all the way to its headwaters in Montana. It’s a military axiom that no plan survives contact with the enemy. That morning’s Kansas City Star warned in bold type of our enemy’s approach—“Road, rail closures are possible as the swollen Missouri River moves south”—and we met it at a lonesome junction north of Atchison. Barricades had been flung across Route 73/7 with a sign: ROAD CLOSED DUE TO FLOODING.

  Leslie has noted a certain rigidity in my nature—anal retention, she diagnoses, looking into my face and puckering her mouth. Flummoxed, I stared at my Rand McNally atlas, the planned route marked in yellow highlighter. I’d been so dead set on following it that I hadn’t considered any alternatives. Now, I couldn’t think of one. Leslie took the atlas and studied it for a minute or two.

  She laid a finger on the town of Lebanon, far out on the Kansas plains. Just above it was a red dot. “There’s where we need to go,” she said. Next to the dot were the words Center of the Conterminous United States.

  * * *

  THE THINGS WE CARRIED

  As on a long voyage in a sailboat, we had to be as self-contained as possible, with a place for everything and everything in its place. At least once a day, one of us would forget in which place a particular thing resided, leading to the cry of “Where’s my stuff?” Here’s a partial list of what got stowed on the roof rack, in the truck’s bed and backseat, and in the trailer’s cupboards and compartments.

  Phil’s clothes: 10 pr underwear and socks; 2 pr shorts; 2 pr jeans; 4 T-shirts; 2 lightweight long-sleeve shirts; 2 heavyweight long-sleeve shirts; 2 sweatshirts; 1 sweater; 1 rain jacket; 1 fleece jacket; 1 pr each, cowboy boots, hiking boots, walking shoes, sandals; 2 belts; 2 baseball caps; 1 wide-brimmed “packer’s hat”; sunglasses. Also, over Leslie’s objections, a .357 magnum revolver.

  Leslie’s clothes: Pretty much as above but multiply by three. Also her paints and canvases and, over my objections, a bright-red folding bike.

  Dog stuff: 1 4-by-6-foot dog bed; metal dog dishes; chest harnesses; leashes; brushes, clippers, antitick medicine; 40-pound bag dry dog food (replenished en route as needed).

  Cooking and eating equipment: 1 4-place setting of Corel dishware; 2 metal cups; 1 package of plastic cups; 4 ea., knives, forks, spoons; 2 kitchen knives; 1 small cutting board; 1 large frypan; 1 small frypan; 2 pots, 1 large, 1 small; 1 hibachi; 1 camp-style coffeepot; 2 butane lighters; dishtowels, dishwashing soap, aluminum foil, freezer bags.

  Truck, trailer equipment: Complete tool kit; 15-, 20-, and 30-amp fuses; 1 truck jack w/ lugwrench, 1 hydraulic jack; spare lug nuts; 1 30-amp power cord; 1 water hose; 1 sewer hose; 4 stabilizer jacks; duct tape (for redneck repair work); electrical tape; 2 spare tires for truck, 2 for trailer; 2 5-gallon gasoline jerry cans; 1 7-gallon jerry can for water; extra cans of motor oil and brake fluid; WD-40 and other lubricants; emergency flares; tow strap. Also, 2 pr canvas work gloves; rope; bungee cords.

  Camping gear: 2 lightweight sleeping bags; 2 small backpacks; 1 GPS; 1 orienteering compass; Swiss Army knife; Leatherman tool; first-aid kit; 1 lantern; 2 camp chairs; 1 camp table; 2 headlamps w/ spare batteries; 2 mag lights; 2 fishing rods and reels, flies, hooks, etc.; 2 pr chest waders; 1 pr hip boots.

  Electronica: 2 laptops; 1 Android smart phone (for Leslie); 1 dumb phone (for Phil); 1 digital voice recorder; 1 Nikon digital camera; 1 4G wireless connector; 1 Kindle e-reader; a bag full of wires, rechargers, and spare batteries.

  Misc.: Books (the printed kind): The Innocents Abroad, On the Road, The Oregon Trail, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, others; road atlases, maps, guidebooks; spare sunglasses and reading glasses; journals, notebooks, pens; passports; towels, soap, pillows.

  * * *

  PART TWO

  In the Heart of the Heartland

  At the geographic center of the United States.

  16.

  The midwestern woodlands and savannahs surrendered grudgingly to the central Great Plains. We saw fewer and fewer trees, and then none, except for the cottonwoods fringing the creeks and rivers: the Delaware, the Vermillion, the Big Blue. It was possible to think of our rig as a small ship; under a cloud-tiled sky, the land rose and fell, rose and fell, like green sea swells in arrested motion. A sea of corn and wheat, but mostly corn—this was Kansas—the row-crop monotony sometimes relieved by vestiges of the original tallgrass prairie that had sustained the buffalo and were now cattle ranges, bounded by barbed-wire fences.

  U.S. 36 was called the “Pony Express Highway”; its asphalt covered the trail ridden by the jockey-size couriers who had carried the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and San Francisco. In case the traveler forgot this fact, every gas station and convenience store was themed to the Pony Express, and markers occasionally appeared at the roadside displaying the emblem of a rider at full gallop.

  Ahead, for as far as we could see, the highway lay upon the undulating land like a broad, black cable reeling off the stern of a ship sailing a perfectly straight course. Accustomed to the foreshortened horizons east of the Mississippi, we had to get used to distances, immense distances, and emptiness. Many of the towns we passed through had a forsaken look—abandoned gas stations, shuttered shops, hardly a soul to be seen on the streets, and no lack of parking places if you cared to stop, but there was no reason to.

  In the late 1880s, a Paiute mystic, Wovoka, began to preach a hybridized religion combining Christianity with Native American spiritual beliefs. It spread like a prairie fire among the remnant plains tribes, penned up on reservations and desperate for anything that promised to restore their nomadic way of life. The central rite was the Ghost Dance. In a version of the Rapture, Wovoka prophesied that Indians who performed the Ghost Dance would be taken to safety high in the sky while a great flood drowned the white man and all his works. When the waters receded, fresh grass would grow over the whites’ farms and roads and towns; the buffalo and herds of wild horses would return in their former numbers; then the Indians suspended in the heavens would descend to a renewed land, there to meet the risen spirits of their ancestors and live again as they had from time immemorial.

  The Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 ended Wovoka’s millennialist dream but, as we drove on through the dying towns, I wondered if it was coming to pass, not through Ghost Dance magic but as a result of free-market efficiency. The family farm, that much-revered but largely fictitious institution, isn’t efficient; the megafarm is. Only the large-scale farmer can afford the equipment and machinery needed to wrest a reliable income from the land. “Get big or get out” has been the catchphrase on the Great Plains for years, and most small farmers have gotten out. Zeke and Maude and their towheaded kids working their quarter and half sections have been replaced by agribusiness giants owning immense acreages, sprayed with chemicals and plowed fence line to fence line by GPS-guided tractors. That’s the main reason why the region is emptier today than it was in 1920, when the tide of white settlement that began in the 1840s reached its high-water mark. Thousands of square miles have fewer than six people per square mile—the benchmark density
historian Frederick Jackson Turner adopted to distinguish a frontier from a settled area.

  The slow, steady exodus has inspired a vision akin to Wovoka’s, minus the mysticism. Two geographers who teach at Rutgers and Princeton, Frank and Deborah Popper, have studied the Great Plains and concluded that the present level of corporate agriculture isn’t sustainable. It depends on underground aquifers and on billions of dollars in subsidies to remain viable; but even the big farms will probably go bust as water runs out. The huge Ogallala aquifer, the principal source of water for most plains farms and ranches, is emptying at the rate of four feet a year and is predicted to go dry in another twenty years. In 1987, almost exactly a century after the Paiute messiah began his ministry, the Poppers proposed creating the “Buffalo Commons,” an enormous (half the size of Texas) natural park sprawling across parts of ten western and midwestern states. It would be restored to native prairie and repopulated with bison, elk, wolves, and grizzly bears. Like the game reserves in East Africa, it would draw ecotourists from the world over and revive the declining economies in the heartland.

  For nearly two decades, the Poppers have traveled the plains, promoting the Buffalo Commons. Although they’ve sold a few people on their idea, I doubt its chances of becoming a reality are much greater than Wovoka’s vision. Most prairie citizens haven’t warmed to the picture of themselves playing host to safari parties and of their land as a game park. It’s one thing in America to preserve wilderness, altogether another to reverse our concept of progress by turning once-productive land back into wilderness.

  * * *

  Maybe because it was more cow town than farm town, Washington, Kansas, was a lively place. A rodeo was to be held that evening in the county fairgrounds, and a dozen trailers occupied the town park where we camped for the night. Families sat around in tight little circles, waiting for the contest to get under way. Pickup trucks and gooseneck stock trailers filled the fairgrounds; cows, calves, horses, and bulls with mayhem in their eyes milled in pens, raising dust; young cowboys in straw hats wandered about with girlfriends in tight jeans. Some were spectators, some contestants, the female barrel racers and the male bronc and bull riders wearing numbers on the backs of their shirts. Almost all were thin, a few downright skinny. Cattle country has been spared the plague of obesity; ranching still requires hard physical work, and rodeo cowboys are athletes.

  After buying tickets, we discovered that we had only eight dollars between us, and as we waited in the food line, Leslie calculated what combo would be most filling on our limited funds. Two brats, two sodas, and two bags of chips left us with a dollar. We took our seats in the rusting steel bleachers, packed to capacity. The rodeo got under way as a red prairie sun hovered over a horizon twenty miles away. It was, this rodeo, the equivalent of a minor-league baseball game. The contestants were either up-and-comers or aging journeymen. Not one bull rider made it to the eight-second buzzer. A team of young men in purple silk shirts—El Latigos del Diablo (the Whips of the Devil)—did tricks with bullwhips, like popping balloons and snuffing out rolled-up burning newspaper. Impromptu entertainment was staged in the bull pen, where a huge, tumescent brindle kept trying to mount his pen mates.

  Another plains storm rolled in that night, with long, sublime rolls of thunder. This time it was Leslie’s turn to close the truck’s windows and bring the dogs inside. In the morning, I walked my ambassadors around the campground, hoping to find out what the rodeo stars and their families thought about the Buffalo Commons and other matters. Attempting to blend in, I’d donned a wide-brimmed hat, put on a snap-button shirt, and exchanged my hiking boots for a beat-up pair of Tony Lamas. Sage and Sky failed in their mission, and so did my disguise. You can dress up in pinstripes and suspenders and pass yourself off as a stockbroker, but even the most careful attention to details of proper western attire will not fool anyone. There is something in the way a real cowboy carries himself that defies imitation.

  In quest of an ATM and someone to talk to, we moved on to Belleville, around ten miles west on U.S. 36, a brown sign directing us to the “historic business district.” Almost all the towns had historic business districts, and they truly are historic in the sense that they are history. Very little business is done in them these days, and the attractive but vacant brick buildings lining Belleville’s center looked like an Edward Hopper painting. It did, however, have a functional ATM and a diner with food, Big Foot Freddy’s. Its founder, one Fred Zimmerman, stood six-feet-five in his size-fifteen shoes. A worn, wooden bar, counter stools, and blue-and-white checkered cloths covering the tables completed the image of a small-town restaurant circa 1950. Most of the patrons met the age qualification for Medicare. The two youngest people in the place were the waitresses, Laura, about thirty, and Paula, about forty.

  In my journalism career, I’d interviewed everyone from mob hit men to prime ministers, from Saudi Arabian princes to Israeli cabdrivers. I was confident in my ability to get just about anyone to talk on just about any subject, but I couldn’t milk a word beyond hello out of the customers in Big Foot Freddy’s. Laura and Paula were civil enough, but too absorbed in watching The Voice on the TV above the bar to chat about the weather, much less the Buffalo Commons.

  Frustrated, we took a detour after lunch to the Pawnee Indian Village, a museum-cum-archaeological dig on a hill overlooking the Republican River. Surely the curator would talk to me, and she did. She had no choice; we were the sole visitors. Betty Bouray, an attractive woman in her thirties, with a winning smile and brown hair that threw off reddish glints, was the assistant curator. I thought she had the loneliest job in Kansas. The museum, a circular structure built around the excavation of a Pawnee earth lodge, stood all by itself out there on the rolling expanses, at the end of a country lane eight miles off the highway.

  Betty and her husband had lived in Belleville for six years before moving to their present home near the museum. Without my asking for one, she supplied an explanation as to why its citizens were so close-mouthed.

  “People are very cliquish in Belleville—it’s like high school. We didn’t care for it. Belleville is a melting pot—Czechs, Swedes mostly—and the nationalities tend to stick together. They don’t bring in strangers very well. They’re not downright rude, just not very welcoming.” It pleased me to hear that. I wasn’t losing my touch; I’d simply bumbled into that rare thing in the Middle West—an unfriendly town.

  Of course, Betty had a lot to say about the Pawnee, long ago the dominant power on the Great Plains: they lived in villages of earth-and-log lodges fortified by palisades to protect them from the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho; they were fastidious, bathing several times a day, and considered whites to be a filthy race; and they were known as “the astronomers of the plains,” though astrologers would be more accurate. They believed that the stars were responsible for the creation of the universe, influenced weather, crops, and hunting, and guided men’s lives. On display, among other artifacts, was a three-hundred-year-old star chart, painted on a buffalo hide.

  We were getting set to leave when a tall, wiry man walked in with a portfolio under his arm. His name was Duane Guile, a retired agricultural chemical salesman of sixty-one. He approached Betty with a request: could the museum display a painting he’d commissioned? He opened the portfolio, which contained several prints of Dog Soldier Raid at New Scandinavia—1869, based on an actual incident in which a boy settler was killed by the Cheyenne. Betty looked at the raw, gory picture and offered a cordial, noncommittal smile.

  We lingered for a while, talking to Duane and Betty about their lives and the state of the country. Out where they lived, distance and isolation bred self-reliance (or the illusion of it) and a suspicion of centralized power. They felt that there was too much government intrusion into private lives. For example, she said, a bill pending in Congress would prohibit people from growing backyard vegetable gardens like hers.

  (A parenthetical note: One of the things we learned on the trip was that the age of ins
tant communications has not slowed but accelerated the spread of myth and rumor. The bill, known as the Food Safety Modernization Act, was intended to tighten safety regulations in industrial food processing plants, not to criminalize home gardeners. It had, however, ignited hysteria in cyberspace. Bloggers and gardening and farming Web sites, from one end of the political rainbow to the other, howled. “Giant chemical companies are conspiring with Congress to ban organic farms and gardens!” screamed lefty greens. “The bill is a Stalinist plot to collectivize American agriculture!” libertarians cried. Because the strands of truth and baloney are seamlessly woven into the Web, it’s very difficult to figure out which is which. Betty couldn’t be blamed for fearing that she was going to be turned into an outlaw for growing tomatoes and cucumbers.)

  Meanwhile, Duane moaned that too many taxes were “going to things the people who pay them don’t believe in.”

  “Don’t get me on my soapbox,” he pleaded, so I asked how he occupied himself, now that he was retired.

  He raised cattle on a small pasture. It was more or less a hobby. One thing was certain: Duane wasn’t going to move into a Sunbelt retirement community. He would cling to the Great Plains like the big bluestem grasses carpeting the ranges. His great-grandfather had settled in the town of Skandia in 1874, and his grandchildren were the sixth generation to live there, in the American Outback. The people of the plains are what mattered, he said. They took care of each other.