We were going to spend the July Fourth weekend at the 63, a dude ranch. I didn’t see myself as the dude-ranch type, but I’d promised Leslie. Despite the lecture delivered by Carol Springer at Meramec Farm, she wanted to ride, and had chosen the 63 because she’d stayed there on a family holiday when she was thirteen, as her mother had in her childhood.
Four thousand miles and forty-five days of hitching and unhitching, hooking and unhooking had tired me, and we still had around four thousand more to go before we reached Deadhorse. Dude ranch or no, I looked forward to getting off the road and into a cabin for a few days.
Sage and Sky would have to make an exchange, too: the truck bed for a kennel. Dogs weren’t allowed on the ranch. To give them some liberty before their imprisonment, as well as to work off the Harrisons’ pork ribs, we took a hike into the Absaroka Wilderness, climbing in an early morning chill to Pine Creek Falls, where water blasting down for a couple of hundred feet made such a noise that we had to shout to make ourselves heard. Mists rose dense as steam and sparkled in the broken light. The whole scene had the sublimity of a Hudson River landscape.
We’d seen no one on the way up but ran into a constant stream of hikers on the way down. As usual, the presence of other people brought out the crab in me; and, as usual, Leslie tried to curb my grumbling.
“Phil, are you the only one who’s allowed to hike here? You’re part of the human race, too. You’re just like them, you’re a tourist.”
“I’m not a tourist. I’m a traveler. There’s a difference.”
“Like you’re better than everyone else? Who do you think you are? God?”
“Nope. But I’m godlike.”
I grinned; she groaned and said, “That’s going to get you a smiting from a higher power.”
For the umpteenth time, we joined Ethel to Fred, then headed to the kennels outside of Livingston. It was hard, leaving our two buddies. Sage, who loathes kennels, looked at us with melancholy setter eyes that asked, “Will we ever see you again?” We felt better, and so did she, when she and Sky were led to their cage—the kennel owner called it a “suite”—and saw two blankets with dog bones on top. Sage scarfed hers down and then ate Sky’s.
The 63, so named because it was started in 1863, had been a dude ranch for more than eighty years, owned by the same family, the Cahills. It was now run by the third generation, Jeff and Deanna Cahill. Jeff, a fortyish man wearing a cowboy hat and glasses that lent him a professorial air, escorted us to our cabin. It perched on the lip of hill and had a deck looking down on the meadow where we’d parked truck and trailer. We flung ourselves on the double bed. Oh the joy.
Two dozen guests jammed into the lodge for dinner. The atmosphere was congenial, the staff solicitous. What fun not to have to cook and clean up, to be served. I was getting used to being a dude. We sat at a table with Jeff and Deanna. Earlier, Leslie had told them of her previous visit in 1967 and of her mother’s thirty-two years before that. Deanna must have conflated the two, because she asked, “So Leslie, you were here when … the nineteen fifties … the forties … or thirties?” Leslie winced, and whispered, “I’d better get a facelift or at least buy some wrinkle cream.”
At first light on July Fourth, we stood on the deck and watched the wranglers, Bob, Bill, Carol Ann, and Analiese, drive our horses from the pastures into the corrals. I was assigned to a paint, McCrae, which pleased me because he’d been named for one of my favorite characters: Gus McCrae, the jokey, good-hearted cowboy in the novel Lonesome Dove. Leslie drew Buck, a lively gelding. She asked Jeff if “Buck” was for what he did to riders or for his buckskin color. Jeff assured her it was the latter.
In groups of four to six, we mounted up and rode off. I could think of no better way to spend Independence Day than riding through those mountains, a symphony of light and space. The Rockies, like the Black Hills, rose from the bed of a shallow inland sea and were built by the same geologic event: the Laramid orogeny. It was a long construction project. Eighty million years ago, tectonic plates began to grind and crunch against each other. Fifty million years later, the work was done: a mountain chain three thousand miles long and nearly three miles high. Fast forward a few more epochs, and Ice Age glaciers plow canyons and gorges and bring forth lakes and rivers as they melt, the rivers carrying boulders and silt and the fossilized remains of marine creatures that lived two hundred million years ago. We could find them now, Jeff said, embedded in the shale slides coming off the mountains. Fantastic. Crustaceans and fish that once dwelled in a primeval sea, entombed today at altitudes of eight and ten thousand feet.
McCrae, unfortunately, sounded as if he were soon to be entombed. Climbing a hill, he huffed and wheezed like a two-pack-a-day smoker. But I was delighted with him, and that was unusual. I have never been able to warm up to a horse the way I do to a hunting dog. I don’t trust horses. They’re prey animals, likely to see almost anything as a threat. A piece of windblown newspaper, or a damned leaf or two flutters by, and you with your fine education and your portfolio of midcap stocks fly over the beast’s head and wind up badly bruised if you’re lucky, hospitalized if you’re not. But McCrae was reliable, responsive, composed, with an alert intelligence in his eye. He seemed to like me. For the first time ever, I’d established a relationship with a horse.
For the next two days we loped and trotted across alpine meadows quilted with lupine and larkspur and Indian paintbrush. We climbed a trail along Mission Creek, white water so solid that it looked like a snowbank in motion.
A square dance was held in the bandstand one evening after dinner. The caller was the 63’s manager, Karl, a German immigrant who’d immersed himself in the folkways of the western United States. He knew all the moves and steps. With Teutonic thoroughness, he made us rehearse before playing each tune on his sound system. Fiddles screeched and banjos twanged, and we clomped around while Karl barked in a slight German accent, “Gents to the center, form a Texas Star … Promenade your partner … Swing your corner … Allemande left with the old left hand.” I was reluctant to participate in this summer-camp activity, certain I would make a fool of myself. And I did. Most of the other guests seemed to know what they were doing. Even eight-year-old kids were reasonably competent, while Leslie and I, well, struggled.
We retired to the pool room and library, tried our hand at a game of eight ball, then we sat down and talked to the wranglers Analiese Apel and Carol Ann Liesen. We would have confused their names if not for their contrasting appearances: blonde Carol Ann stood six feet; dark-haired Analiese might have made five-one with a strong wind under her. There were other differences. Carol Ann was demure, the daughter of a cowboy and a cowgirl; she’d been home-schooled because the Idaho ranch where she’d grown up was seventy miles from the nearest school. Analiese was a city girl from the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, a girl with attitude and an ironic wit.
“I had a gangster phase,” she said. “I wish to delete that phase of my life … You know, tight jeans, sloppy shoes, oversize shirts I stole from my brothers, blingy earrings. I listened to rap music, smoked cigarettes, and thought I was pretty cool. I’m glad that’s over.”
“So was your gangster phase stylistic, or were you really a gangster?”
“People don’t take eighty-pound mall rats into gangs. My oldest brother, Tony, he’s twenty-five, and he still thinks he’s a gangster. The night that everything changed was the night we found him with his eye socket crushed in because somebody had jumped him. And after that night, everything kind of fused into perspective. This isn’t the life I want, this isn’t the kind of person I want to be, this isn’t the kind of place I want to be in. I want to be gone.”
That summer six years ago—Analiese was fifteen—she landed a job at a Girl Scout camp in Wisconsin, where she learned to ride and then to teach riding.
“It was a shocker, going from urban to country. We had no TV, no papers, no contact with the outer world. I mean the music we sang was about frogs and bubble gum and worms. It wasn’t, you know,
‘I’m going to smoke some crack and find me a prostitute.’ Very different from what I’d grown up with. But I got a new appreciation of the things that mattered. My saving grace is actually horses.”
She’d lived in sixteen different places since then and attended three colleges, going, she said, “wherever the wind takes me. I don’t get too involved in places, so I can easily uproot and go somewhere else.”
“So I take it there’s no guy in this picture,” I said.
“Far too much work. I have a horse named Peppa. She’s all that I need in my life at this point in time.”
Carol Ann’s path to the 63 had been more traditional. “I grew up riding. My parents cowboyed most of their lives. I grew up in that lifestyle. It’s just something you learn automatically,” she said in a self-effacing way.
She was twenty years old, and this was her third year at the 63. She’d worked guest ranches every summer but one since she was thirteen, and she’d learned a few things, like the difference between dealing with the public and caring for large animals.
“The public you can leave at the end of the day, but the animals you have to see every day. You know, people give their kids, like, goldfish for a pet, and if the goldfish dies it’s no big deal. But if your horse dies, it is. To have something that big relying on you to keep its life intact, it’s definitely a big deal.”
Carol Ann and Analiese’s day began before dawn and ended after sundown. They rode out in semidarkness to round up the ranch’s herd and drive it to the corral. They curried and brushed and picked hooves and with the two male wranglers saddled and bridled two dozen horses, and at the close of the day they took off the saddles and bridles and turned the horses loose. It was a life that put them out of synch with 99 percent of Americans their age.
“We don’t blend in very well with our generation,” Carol Ann commented, without regret. “They get so far away from nature, they get so far away from, you know, what built them,” Analiese added. “There’s a disconnect, it’s more about things than about places and people. It’s ‘Ooo, I lost my iPod, my life is over.’”
“I have a laptop, mainly for school, and a cell phone because I have to,” Carol Ann interjected. “But I do love my iPod.”
There was no TV on the ranch, and Leslie thought that its absence was a blessing. “I work on the East Coast,” she said. “I drive to work every day, and I listen to the radio, I watch TV, although I hardly listen to it anymore because all I want to do is throw things at it. These people are screaming at those people, and you really do get a sense that things are just flying apart. But I have to say that on this trip we’ve hardly run into any angry people.”
“It has to do with media,” Analiese said. “What makes the ratings is pissed-off people, the weirdos. I mean you hear more about Lindsay Lohan than you do about crop prices. There’s such a disconnect—this is a whole new spiel—of people from their food source. Children think milk appears in a jug or it just falls from the heavens.
“I think the country definitely is in disarray. At the same time, to grow as a country, we need to have conflict, and conflict is healthy, conflict is good. But the media has this awesome way of blowing it out of proportion. It would be nice not to have this skewed perspective on the television. Yes, there are extremely left wing and extremely right wing, but the middle ground very rarely gets reported on. And you know, there’s a huge disconnect between urban life and rural life. There’s nooo sense of community in that respect.”
I reckoned that the young woman who’d morphed from city-street hip-hopper to Montana wrangler knew both sides of that rupture. But I wondered where she was going with this.
“The first step would be to educate kids on the country they live in,” she said. “Emphasize history, emphasize geography, emphasize lifestyles outside of your own. There are kids out there that haven’t even seen what a cow looks like except c is for cow.”
“They can go down to the grocery store and buy themselves a hamburger patty,” said Carol Ann. “They don’t know beyond that point what goes into that animal to get him to that stage. Growing up like I did—I won’t lie, the first calf we butchered was little Pee-Wee, and I cried. Yes, you’re sad when your favorite calf has to go to the market, but you learn to deal with it. You learn to appreciate what you eat and where it comes from and the work that goes into it.”
So I guessed where we’d gone was back to the same idea Carol Springer had tossed out: “It’s not a great evolutionary thing to be so distant from where your food comes from.” True connectedness doesn’t come from electronic gadgets; it comes from a connection to the land and the origins of what you put into your stomach.
* * *
We took a last ride the next morning and, during a final lunch with the other dudes, listened to a guest crying over spilled milk. Namely, that the Environmental Protection Agency planned to compel dairy farmers to clean up milk spills as if they were oil spills, but had to back off when outraged citizens rose up in protest. By this time, we recognized the signs of modern mythmaking: the guest had cherry-picked putative facts from the Internet to confirm his preconceptions that the government is out to get us all. If he’d made the effort, he would have learned that the EPA was seeking not to pass a new law but to repeal an old one, on the books for years, that put milk spills on the same footing as oil spills. The problem was too much information. A twenty-first-century American can access more of it in ten minutes than an eighteenth-century American could in a year, yet the dominion of falsehood remains. It can be stated as a kind of mathematical principle: the degree of ignorance on any given subject is directly proportional to the amount of information available about it.
27.
After reuniting with Sage and Sky, we took I-90 to Three Forks, Montana, where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin Rivers, tumbling from their origins in the Rockies, join to form the headwaters of the Missouri, at 2,341 miles the longest river in North America.1 Lewis and Clark arrived there on a Thursday morning, July 25, 1805.
Reading from Clark’s journals with his capricious punctuation and spelling, we stood about where Clark had, looking at the Jefferson’s confluence with the Madison, both running high and fast. Climbing up Fort Rock, we could see the Gallatin surging around a rocky, shrub-covered bluff to give itself to the Missouri, two parts water and one part mud.
To stand at the source of a great river is to be present at a perpetual beginning. I felt a mixture of wonder and humility, and could only imagine Lewis and Clark’s emotions, knowing that theirs were the first European eyes to see the headwaters. The French explorer Jacques Marquette had named the Missouri in 1673 (corrupting an Algonquin word for the tribes that lived at its mouth, Oumessourit [people with canoes]), but Lewis and Clark had the privilege of naming its three major tributaries.2 They had put them on the map.
From atop Fort Rock, I-90 showed in the distance; otherwise, the explorers would have found much that was familiar.
July 7, 2011, was very hot, and July 25, 1805, was verry hot. And one other thing they would recognize. Leslie slapped her arm and said, “Mosquitoes most troublesome.” Clark wrote, “Musquetors verry troublesom.”
In the journals there is no mention of Lewis’s dog, Seaman, attempting to escape the heat and bugs by hurling himself into the river. Sage and Sky tried it and almost took me with them. If I hadn’t dug in my heels and practically strangled them with the leashes, the three of us would have been on our way to St. Louis.
* * *
The whole trip, Leslie had been anticipating a big test for Fred and Ethel. The very words crossing the Continental Divide conjured in her mind a road winding up and up for hours, sheer drop-offs, the truck struggling, possibly overheating, the trailer scraping guardrails, sending pebbles hurtling down into crevasses. The highway did wind upward, though not for hours, and Fred’s big V8 hauled Ethel as if the grade were a bowling lane. Near Butte, hemmed in by slablike rock formations, we passed under a bridge. A green-and-white sign hanging from
it said: CONTINENTAL DIVIDE. ELEVATION 6393.
“Wait, what! Is that it?” Leslie asked. She sounded crushed.
“Yes. From here on, all the rivers flow west.”
“No, I mean, is that it? Where’s the struggle?”
“Well, we could always drive back down and try walking up, if it’s a struggle you want.”
* * *
Butte, Montana, born as a gold camp in the 1870s, grew into a boomtown, burned down in 1879, was rebuilt and boomed again with the discovery of copper, much in demand as electricity was developed, went broke in the Great Depression, revived during World War II, then became a kind of company town for Anaconda Copper, which dug the Berkeley Pit in 1955—at the time the largest strip mine on Earth—and operated it till 1982, when it shut down and Butte entered another decline, its population falling from a high of sixty thousand to its present thirty-four thousand.
Pollutants from more than a century of mining are still being cleaned up. Butte is a paradigm of the western mining town’s natural history: from tent camp to boomtown to Superfund site—the largest such site in the United States. The downtown business district, called Upper Butte, has architecturally distinguished buildings, some empty or half empty, their sides painted with “ghost signs” of long-vanished enterprises. With the headframes of old shaft mines poking up here and there, it has the look and feel of a city in the midwestern rust belt.
The Berkeley Pit is its most dramatic attraction. A mile long, half a mile wide, seventeen hundred feet deep, and partially flooded with groundwater chock full of arsenic, sulfur, and heavy metals, it’s the only toxic waste dump in America open to tourists.
We could see no sense in paying money to look at a contaminated hole in the ground and pulled into a campground outside the city, on Blacktail Creek. Two Canadians touring the United States were parked next to us. I had a postprandial drink with them, Reggie and Mark, father and son. They were electrical contractors involved in another extraction industry—the tar sands oil fields in northern Alberta. After delivering a seminar on how oil is produced from tar sands, Reggie volunteered that he’d made $320,000 the previous year, and his wife $100,000. I hoped he and his son would live long enough to enjoy their riches. Both were, to be polite, on the stout side, guzzled beers like soda, and smoked as I’ve never seen anyone smoke before or since. Each had four packs of Marlboros stacked in front of him, and it appeared that wouldn’t be enough to last the night. The Berkeley Pit was less toxic than the air around our picnic table.
The Longest Road Page 22
