The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  And then there was the Tetsa River Campground, milepost 357.5 on the Alaska Highway in British Columbia. A sign at the roadside made an outrageous claim: WELCOME TO THE CINNAMON BUN CENTER OF THE GALACTIC CLUSTER.

  I entered, tingling with mixed doubt and anticipation. The buns, hot out of the oven, were lined up in a display case, the white glaze dripping down their sides like sugary icicles. I asked the young waitress if the galactic cluster referred to the Virgo Cluster, in which the Milky Way was but one of a thousand galaxies. She wasn’t sure; the come-on was her dad’s idea. I bought one and held it to my nose to savor its bouquet before biting into it. It was dense yet as soft as room-temperature butter. An explosion of complex flavors. The icing with its suggestion of vanilla. Cinnamon, of course. Accents of brown sugar, and did I detect a suggestion of pecan? Humphreys had had all the advantages, access to the best ingredients ferried over daily from the mainland. Here was a backwoods cabin in the middle of the middle of nowhere. I took a second bite to be sure, and, oh, it slid down my throat like a slim Elizabeth Taylor in a velvet dress.

  Score: Off the charts.

  I cannot verify that the Tetsa River Campground is the cinnamon bun center of the Virgo Cluster, whose galaxies contain somewhere around 260 trillion stars. If only one out of every hundred billion has a planet capable of supporting life intelligent enough to create a cinnamon bun … well, you see why the claim may be over the top.

  * * *

  PART THREE

  Ocian in View

  Fred and Ethel.

  24.

  A sailor would have said we made 198 miles of northing that day, so I’ll say it because I felt, on U.S. 85—as I had on all the other roads since we’d crossed into Kansas—that we were voyaging on a dryland sea. The prairie’s undulations were swells, the buttes and hills far off were islands, and I could think of the drill rigs in the North Dakota oil fields as offshore platforms.

  We docked at a campground on the Heart River near Dickinson. We’d been on the Great Plains for two weeks and, except for the Black Hills, had seen no end to them. My eyes tired, as if overstretched from staring at the stretched land, I walked the dogs along the river, then through the campground. This one was different. In place of half-million-dollar rigs towing boats and ATVs and other vacationer playthings were abused pickup trucks with company logos on their doors and commercial plates on their bumpers; trailers that had a decidedly lived-in look, with weathered awnings sheltering rickety lawn chairs, corroded barbecue grills, and tools and equipment.

  Next to one, three brawny young guys in work boots were wrestling acetylene tanks and what appeared to be a generator into the bed of a Ford F-350. Any one of them could have carried the generator on his back if the truck broke down. They told me that they would be heading out to the rigs in the morning. The campground was their home for the time being, as it was for most of the others living there: welders, electricians, construction workers, roughnecks. North Dakota was undergoing an oil boom. Beneath the western third of the state and extending into Montana and Saskatchewan, embedded in shale rock, lay the largest oil deposits discovered in North America in forty years. The Bakken Field—spoken in tones of awe—was going to be pumping a million barrels a day, nearly as much as Texas. Bad news for the Sierra Club, I supposed, but good news for North Dakota. It had the lowest unemployment rate in the country—a little over 4 percent—and with workers and their families migrating from as far away as Alaska and Georgia, a reverse housing crisis: contractors couldn’t build houses fast enough.

  * * *

  The reason for our next move, a one-hundred-mile detour eastward, actually began with my mother’s death ten years earlier. Afterward, my gregarious, joke-telling father had plunged into a cycle of depression and fits of self-pitying rage. He would sit silent and inert for long spells, then grow snappy and demanding, then curse God for taking his wife of sixty-two years, leaving him to face his final years alone. Moving to Scottsdale with my sister and brother-in-law didn’t help. In time, he began to drive everyone in the family nuts, even my sister, who is almost saintly in her patience. Although he was as mentally and physically fit as you could expect a ninety-year-old to be, she hired a home health-care worker to keep him company and to take him off her hands for a few hours each day.

  A retired emergency-room nurse who’d grown up on a North Dakota cattle ranch, Allie Addington was then in her seventies, an indestructibly cheerful widow with a zest for life. He started to spend more time at Allie’s apartment in Mesa than he did at my sister and brother-in-law’s house. They took trips together, went to concerts and out to dinner. They began to call each other “dear” or “darling” or “honey.” Allie liberated him from the prison of his grief and restored him to at least a semblance of the man we once knew.

  He died in her arms two years later. He’d woken up, startled, at four in the morning, complaining that the room was spinning. “I knew something was wrong,” Allie told me later. “I said, ‘Joe, talk to me,’ but he just looked at me with those soft brown eyes of his, he took two or three breaths, and then he was gone.”

  When my sister called from Arizona and mentioned that Allie would be thrilled if we visited her younger brother, John Ellison, in Mandan, North Dakota, I couldn’t gripe that it was out of our way. But I had another motive. A couple of years earlier, Allie had revealed that she and John were the great-grandchildren of a cavalry trooper killed with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Private Archibald McIlhargey. Her brother had photocopies of his army records. I wanted to look at them and to talk to John about his ancestor. His story would be a link to the places we’d already been. The Black Hills gold rush had been the first act in a three-act western tragedy, Wounded Knee the third, and in between was the Little Bighorn. Custer’s Last Stand! Like the siege of Troy, an actual event so fogged in legend that it occupied some twilight realm between the factual and the fabulous.

  A really big pool player with a really big stick could have shot a cue ball down I-94 from Dickinson and broken a rack at Mandan. The only vertical objects out there were the oil field pumpjacks, nodding up and down like grazing dinosaurs.

  John, a retired optician, met us at a diner on Main Street for a heart-healthy brunch of fried eggs, bacon, and biscuits in gravy. A stocky, wide-faced man of seventy-one, he was, like his sister, talkative and outgoing. He was also a bit sentimental, tearing up easily when he spoke of his boyhood or his maternal grandmother, Rosalie, daughter of the ill-fated McIlhargey.

  “I was born with a clubfoot, and the doctors said there was nothing they could do for it. My grandmother would massage it when I was little, every day, she would gently bend my left ankle into place. It worked so well that by age five or six I was ridin’ bareback over these Dakota hills. When I was older, I’d say to her, ‘Grandma, I don’t want you ever to die,’ and she’d say to me, ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll come back to see you.’ And you know, sometimes when I’m shaving, I’ll feel a warm hand on my shoulder. I don’t know if it’s her. I try to keep an open mind about things like that. Or maybe I’m just getting old and nuttier’n a fruitcake.”

  He remembered listening to his grandmother’s tales of her early childhood at Fort Abraham Lincoln, headquarters for Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. She had no memories of her father; she was two years old when he was killed and could recall only the stories she’d heard from her mother, Josie, about the undersize but handsome Irish immigrant.

  “My great-grandfather was with [Marcus] Reno’s battalion. He carried a message from Reno to Custer that the hostiles’ village was a lot bigger than Custer thought. But Custer never listened to anybody, the son of a bitch.”

  He showed us photocopies of McIlhargey’s enlistment papers and other records. Chilling for its understatement was this paragraph in his great-grandmother’s application for a widow’s pension, dated July 27, 1878: “She further declares that said Archibald McIlhargey, her husband, died in the service of the United States … at the battle of th
e Little Big Horn, Territory of Montana, on or about the 25th day of June, 1876 … that the exact cause or manner of his death has never been known to her knowledge, he being mutilated by the Indians in what is known as the Custer Massacre.”

  Josie was awarded the pension: ten dollars a month.

  For a while John talked about the here and now: the Missouri River flooding that caused evacuations in Minot and brought volunteers to sandbag the levees in Bismarck; the oil fields drawing people from all across America. “I see license plates from places I’ve never seen before. Thank the good Lord for those oil wells out there—North Dakota may be pumping more oil than Texas.” Then he suggested we go to Fort Lincoln, now a state historical park a few miles south of Mandan. We could see Archibald McIlhargey’s company barracks, a replica of his bunk and footlocker, and a note with a biographical sketch and a brief account of his role in the battle. In his old white Cadillac, John led us to the park. Before saying good-bye, he urged us to visit the Little Bighorn battlefield.

  “Y’know, when you’re out there, you can still hear ’em fightin’.”

  Fort Lincoln, nestled above the Missouri, embraced by green hills mottled with yellow sweet clover, didn’t look like the cavalry posts in the movies: no stockade walls and blockhouses. The two-story house Custer shared with his wife, Libbie—the last house he’d ever live in—stood solitary, facing a grassy parade ground bigger than two football fields.

  That parade ground had been awash in mud on the drizzly, foggy morning of May 17, 1876, as the Seventh Cavalry passed in review before setting out for the Montana Territory, guidons fluttering, horse tack and sabers jiggling and clattering while the band played the regiment’s marching tune, “Garryowen.”

  Bright and airy, the barracks for Company I, McIlhargey’s outfit, looked more comfortable than the cramped, stifling quonset huts I’d lived in when I trained at Quantico, Virginia. Commanded by a brooding Irishman, Captain Myles Keogh, the company was one of five that made up Custer’s battalion. It was haunting to walk between the two ranks of bunks and read the thumbnail sketches of the men on the note cards pasted to footlockers painted pale cavalry blue. And there, as John had told us, was “Archibald McIlhargey. Born 1845, Antrim, Ireland. Died: June 25, 1876 … He carried the first message from Major Marcus Reno to George Custer, reporting that Indians were in front of his command in strong force.”

  Detached from I Company to serve as Major Reno’s striker, probably because he was an experienced soldier, he crossed the Little Bighorn with Reno’s small battalion of 131 troopers on that hot June morning in 1876. Its mission was to attack the Indians from the south, while Custer charged from the other direction—a pincer movement.

  As the battalion approached the huge Indian village, Reno ordered his men to dismount and form a skirmish line. The warriors counterattacked in such numbers that, as Reno later reported, “the very ground seemed to grow Indians.” At that point, he scribbled his hasty message and told McIlhargey to deliver it to Custer, who was on the opposite side of the river, looking down on Reno’s fight from a high bluff.

  Carrying the message—a message he couldn’t even read because he was illiterate—was what doomed McIlhargey. He galloped up the bluff and handed it to Custer, who read it without expression.

  So I’d read in various accounts of the battle. But there in the sunlit barracks, I wasn’t thinking about the golden hero. Either John and Allie’s great-grandfather remained at Custer’s side, waiting to hear if he was to deliver a reply to Reno, or he was told to rejoin I Company. Two possibilities with the same end. Custer’s force was annihilated; the sole survivor of I Company was Captain Keogh’s horse, Comanche. Private Archibald McIlhargey lay dead at age thirty-one.

  25.

  Before moving on to the Custer battlefield, we overnighted in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a swath of wilderness that hugs about sixty miles of the North Dakota–Montana state line. Ethel was nudged into a primitive campsite, meaning that we had to rely on her water tank and stored battery power. She wasn’t all that reliable. Scummy dishwater continued to bubble up through the shower drain when her gray tank filled; so under cover of darkness, I committed an environmental misdemeanor by draining the contents into the ground. It would have been a felony to empty the black (sewage) tank in the same way, but I managed to scavenge a bucket and drained the mess into it. I hadn’t thought things through; now I had to empty the bucket. To mitigate my crime, I crept off into the woods with a camp shovel, dug a hole, dumped the contents, and quickly covered them up.

  Dissatisfied with my South Dakota bison photographs, I wanted to see if I could do better in North Dakota. A sizable herd roamed the park. The morning expedition was to follow the Jones Creek trail, where, a ranger informed us, buffalo had been sighted recently.

  I have a good sense of direction, I’m good at reading maps; however, reminders come now and then that I’m not as good as I think I am. I couldn’t find the trailhead. Which led to our first road quarrel.

  “We must’ve gone by it,” Leslie said. “Let’s go back and start over.”

  “Think we made a wrong turn somewhere,” I said, pulled over, got out of the truck, walked in circles, studied the map and the terrain, then rummaged for my GPS.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, irritably.

  “Trying to figure out where the hell we are,” I answered, irritated by her irritation. Another of our differences was coming out, namely, I am deliberate and she’s not. What I take for deliberateness she takes for slow-mindedness.

  I found the GPS and turned it on and waited.

  “Now what?”

  “It takes a couple of minutes for the GPS to acquire satellites.”

  “Let’sgobackandstartover.”

  Five weeks on the road, living in a closet with wheels. I blew up, reaching through the door to smack the dashboard. “Goddamnit! You’re like some goddamned impatient sixteen-year-old!”

  Leslie shouted back, “That’s better than being a geezer who takes all day to find out where the hell he’s at! Doy-de-doy-de-doy.” She did her best imitation of Mr. Magoo checking maps and coordinates at glacial speed.

  Our first quarrel. My mind flew back to Key West and Harry Wade, the retired Alabama cop who doubted our marriage would survive the trip. Fortunately, all our fights, like bottle rockets, sizzle and fizzle. I fulminated; Leslie jiggled her foot. Then we collected ourselves, Leslie mollified by my realization that, yes, she was right. We had to go back and start over.

  The Jones Creek trail wound through country as wild as when Teddy Roosevelt came out to the Badlands from New York to hunt, ranch, and recover from a near-paralyzing grief: his wife and mother had died in the same house on the same day. The rugged desolation woke the conservationist in him, and in the three years he’d spent running Elkhorn Ranch, he established his reputation as a rough-and-ready frontiersman, decking a cowboy in a saloon brawl, capturing outlaws. Roosevelt had flaws to match his virtues—he liked war a little too much—but wouldn’t it be bully, as TR liked to say, to have another president who can win a barroom fight and run down outlaws, especially the kind who wear suits and ties and have degrees in finance?

  Okay, back to the buffalo hunt. Two miles in, we were graced by the appearance of a lone bull. He stood about two hundred yards off, swatting flies with his tail, its tuft brushing dust from off his massive hindquarters. I dropped my pack and fumbled for the camera. Just then, the bull trotted up a slope, his movements at once ponderous and graceful, then folded his legs and lay down on a narrow bench shaded by an overhanging cliff. I could not stalk up to his secure perch without startling him into a charge. We watched him for a while through binoculars, and it was enough just to see him, at rest in his solitude.

  * * *

  A high priest and priestess of the Airstream faith, Larry and Lou Woodruff, greeted us when we returned to the campsite. They were towing a new Excella, which was to Ethel as a Lexus is to a Volkswagen Beetle, circa 1968. Having spotted
the little Globetrotter, they’d felt compelled to meet her owners, whom they assumed to be coreligionists. I was sorry to admit that we didn’t own Ethel, and that we were neophytes. But I knew Rich Luhr, the guru of Airstreaming. They did, too; they’d written for his magazine. I asked their advice about Ethel’s quirks, particularly her gray tank’s tendency to fill up in no time and flood the shower stall. Larry advised that I buy a portable holding tank. It is equipped with wheels, so it can be rolled to a dump station. I was very excited, which shows how far removed from indoor plumbing we’d become. Then, turning from sewage to wildlife, he suggested we drive the park’s loop road at dusk, when elk came out of hiding.

  The loop road was thirty-two miles long. We felt as if we were on safari, there was so much game. Buffalo bulls crossed the road in front of us; the fluid late afternoon light was perfect, and I got my photographs. Farther on, as we slowed for a sharp turn, a bison of awesome bulk lunged out of the brush and plodded down the road straight toward Fred. I stopped. A steel “moose bar” protected the grille and headlights, but I wasn’t sure it would hold if the bull mistook Fred for a rival and butted him. A few yards short of the truck, when we could hear his plate-size hooves striking the pavement, he angled off slightly and kept on coming, right on the centerline, and passed the driver’s side close enough to brush the side-view mirror. I could have poked him with my finger, which I most certainly did not. I sat motionless, holding my breath. Fred is six feet, four inches top to bottom, and that bull’s hump rose to the roof. Leslie snapped a picture, and all you can see is my nose and a mass of dust-streaked brown filling the window.