The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  “We’re your biggest suppliers of oil, you know,” Reggie declared.

  Yes, I knew that. With Saudi Arabia in second place.

  “And that’s as it should be. We’re not unstable, like over there in the Middle East. We’re not likely to have a revolution or a war. Hell”—he blew out a cumulus of smoke as he laughed—“we haven’t got enough people. Thank God you’re here to protect us. Otherwise, somebody would’ve invaded us by now.”

  I replied that we Yanks were only too pleased to guard our friendly neighbor to the north, then leashed up Sage and Sky and walked them along Blacktail Creek, making sure they didn’t drink.

  * * *

  For the 120 miles from Butte to Missoula, U.S. 12 was the paved twin of the Clark Fork River, following it bend for bend. Beyond Missoula, the highway turned away from the Clark Fork and crawled westward through the Bitterroot Mountains to Lolo Hot Springs Resort, a short hop from the Idaho state line. Expecting a magical town with natural grottoed baths, Leslie was a little let down to find a bar and grill, a couple of outbuildings, and two swimming pools that charged seven dollars for a dip, a thin towel, and a wire basket for your clothes. But the campground on the other side of the road was lovely, set beside clear, swift Lolo Creek and backed by a cliff of smooth, rounded rock that resembled papier-mâché, its top plumed with spruce and fir.

  Across the road, at the side of the bar and grill’s parking lot, was a … well … a thing. A thing that looked as out of place among the mountains and the forests as a Ferris wheel in St. Peter’s Basilica. An enormous blue steel box sitting on wooden blocks the size of compact cars. Two huge cylinders were attached to the front by pipes a foot in diameter. A chain-link fence, hung with NO TRESPASSING signs, enclosed the monster, and outside the fence, a pair of security guards wearing hard hats and safety vests sat under an awning, looking bored to distraction.

  “What do you suppose that is?” Leslie asked.

  I couldn’t suppose. “We’ll find out in the morning. Don’t think it’s going anywhere.”

  I walked over to the Thing the next day. Two new security guards were on duty, a bald, hulking man, Glenn, and a sparky Korean woman, Tangerine.

  “I was born in Seoul. My mother left me in the hospital,” she offered by way of explaining how she’d come to be named for a citrus fruit. “Spent my first year and a half in a foster home, then an American couple adopted me and brought me to Missoula. They named me. Back then, in the seventies, I was the only Asian, and on top of that I was named Tangerine, and it really sucked. It’s better now. There are a lot more Asians in Missoula, and more blacks, and I don’t get fucked with anymore.”

  Having presented that capsule biography and commentary on a changing America, she informed me that the Thing she and Glenn were guarding was owned by the Imperial Oil Company, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, and had been on its way to the tar sands fields in Canada. Tangerine said it was a “test module,” although she didn’t know what it tested. Two hundred feet long, thirty-six feet high, twenty-eight feet wide, it weighed half a million pounds.

  “What’s it doing here? How the hell did it get here?”

  Glenn took over. Its saga began in South Korea, where it had been built. It was shipped across the Pacific to the West Coast, then floated on a barge up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to Lewiston, Idaho, where it was loaded onto a flatbed carrier with twenty-four axles and ninety-six wheels. Goliath trucks pushed and pulled the megaload through the mountains, up U.S. 12. Traffic stalled, trees were cut down to make room for its passage, and as word leaked out that the oil companies planned to turn the highway—a scenic byway—into an industrial truck route, local residents objected. Ad hoc citizens groups joined with environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and filed suit to put U.S. 12 off limits for giant rigs. A federal judge ruled in their favor, temporarily enjoining the oil companies and the transportation firm from using the road. And so the Thing’s long journey ended, for the present, right here at Lolo Hot Springs.

  Now, Glenn continued, a band of protesters were planning a demonstration, which was why his and Tangerine’s employer, Knighthawke Security Services, guarded the rig round-the-clock.

  I didn’t see any protesters. Where were they?

  “They’re camped out somewhere up Fish Creek Road. Don’t know where exactly—that road’s thirty-one miles long. Some of ’em are from as far away as Florida, and I’d like to know how much gas they used to get here and protest extracting oil that gas is made from. Everybody has the right, but if you’re going to be honest about it, you should bike up here, or walk, not burn gallons and gallons of gas.”

  I would have been hypocritical to argue. We’d covered 4,250 miles from Key West and had consumed roughly 350 gallons, give or take.

  We determined to find the protesters later.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, a campground neighbor told us that we had to see a field of blooming camas flowers just across the line in Idaho. We found the field, watered by a meandering stream, blanketed with purple blossoms.

  The camas is an edible tuber and is thought to have given the Bitterroots their name. It was introduced to Lewis and Clark by the Shoshone, the tribe to which Sacagawea, the fifteen-year-old girl who guided them through the mountains, belonged. Camas helped sustain them in their severest test: the crossing of the Bitterroot Range in the fall of 1805. Thinly clad in buckskins and moccasins, they climbed steep, snow-drifted trails for ten days, ran low on food, and at one point were reduced to eating one of their pack horses. A ranger at a Forest Service station told us that the Lee Creek trail approximated a segment of their trek. We decided to hike it, to get some idea of what the explorers went through. Of course, it was summer, and we had plenty of food, and a way out, so it would be a pretty faint idea.

  The first half mile was easy. Sage and Sky ran back and forth, jumping into ponds and streams, happy as two bird dogs could be, especially when Sky flushed a big ruffed grouse. Then the trail grew as steep as a staircase—without the stairs. Up and up into the twilight cast by spruce and lodgepole pine, and so many hairpin switchbacks that it took fifteen minutes to gain a hundred feet of altitude. Sage’s limberness astonished us, although I had to carry her over deadfalls obstructing the trail. At six thousand feet we rested, acknowledged that we were no Lewis and Clark and Sage was no Seaman, and headed back down.

  After soothing sore muscles in the hot springs, we cooked up mac and cheese for dinner, built a smoky campfire, and hung out with our neighbor Steve and his ten-year-old daughter, Emily, a tall, bright girl. Steve, a well-built man with bristly gray hair, was divorced. He’d picked up a wreck of a small, boxy aluminum trailer for nothing, got it ready for the road, and was taking a trip with Emily “to get to know her better.”

  He worked for a truck dealership in Missoula and knew all about the Thing. It had been in the news for weeks. It was a kind of local celebrity, and its arrested progress inspired Steve to utter a few remarks about liberals and environmentalists in a tone that declared he wasn’t either.

  Emily stopped him in midsentence and asked, “Wait a minute, Dad. What do you mean when you say liberal?”

  Taken aback, he hesitated for a beat. “A conservative thinks that people should be responsible for themselves and can handle their problems without help from the government. A liberal is someone who believes that people should help other people and is all for the environment and nature.”

  Emily piped up. “Then I guess I’m a liberal.”

  She grinned, and so did her father. He was getting to know her better.

  We batted politics around and talked about the economy, Steve saying that he’d worked for another truck dealership until 2010, when, after years of downsizing, pay cuts, and cuts in benefits, he got laid off.

  “I was out of work for nine and half months. Then I got a job in the same business. I hate it. The guy I work for”—grimacing—“yells all the time. But the pay’s good. Y’know one thing I did learn was that I
could live on a lot less than I thought when I was drawing unemployment.”

  I resisted reminding him that unemployment compensation was a liberal invention. But I did not resist a gentle dig when, after I complained that the campground’s uncured pine firewood produced too much smoke, he gave us an armload from his stack of seasoned hardwood.

  I thanked him. “That’s neighborly of you, Steve. Keep that up, and next thing you know you’ll be a liberal.”

  He laughed. “I’ll consider myself an open-minded conservative.”

  * * *

  We woke up to an unusual sensation: cold. Burrowed into our sleeping bags, we watched our breath plume. I jumped out, dressed in about two seconds, put coffee on, then went outside to check on the dogs. They lay huddled together for warmth, and I had to crack the ice crusting their water dishes. After weeks of broil and bake, I fairly wallowed in the frigid air.

  Today was our day to find Protesters of the Thing. They turned out to be camped miles down a rugged dirt road, prompting Leslie to ask, “If you hold a protest in a forest and no one sees it, is it still a protest?”

  At last we came upon a line of dust-filmed cars and pickups, heeling over on the right side of the road, a few so plastered with stickers and decals advertising almost every environmental issue that you could hardly tell what color they were. A hand-lettered sign over a latrine read SHITTER, and a bedsheet hung from poles declared NO TAR SANDS. We were there! A wan young woman and a young man whose beard and hair were innocent of a barber’s touch directed us to the Welcome Tent, a lean-to beneath which sat two more beards, one black, one gray. Glued sticks hung from a tree branch overhead to form the letters RRR. The graybeard told me that it stood for Round River Rendezvous, an annual gathering of mountain-man trappers in the 1840s. That puzzled me a little. This was an Earth First! protest, right? Not an encampment of mountain-man reenactors?

  “Nick will explain. He’s our media relations guy.”

  Graybeard picked up a radio and summoned Nick Stocks, a twenty-seven-year-old whose facial hair was confined to sandy stubble. I asked Leslie’s question: if this was a protest, what was the point of holding it in the middle of nowhere? Or was I under a misimpression?

  I was, Nick answered. This was the annual rendezvous of Northern Rockies Rising Tide, an affiliate of Earth First!

  “Every year there’s a rendezvous in a different part of the country. Different local communities spend some time bidding where the next year’s rendezvous is going to be, and then the community decides where. We bid to come here to draw attention to the shipments, the big rigs, the Alberta tar sands, issues that pertain to Montana.”

  That seemed to evade the question, so I rephrased it: “How are you going to call attention to these issues way out in these woods?”

  “Well, the rendezvous is not a protest in itself. It’s a gathering of the Earth First! community. There are a lot of traditional features to a rendezvous … There’s generally an act of civil disobedience of some kind where we call attention to a local issue.”

  That was to happen on July 12, but he didn’t know what form the civil disobedience would take. Earth First! being an ultrademocratic organization—some would say anarchistic—every action is debated, decisions arrived at by consensus of everyone involved. In this case, that would be about 150 people.

  “But we can safely say that there will be a protest at the end of the rendezvous.”

  I saw, or rather heard, why Nick had been chosen as a media spokesman. He was a fast, forceful talker, firing words on semiautomatic with hardly a breath or pause between them. He claimed—and news reports appeared to bear him out—that Northern Rockies Rising Tide’s opposition to the shipments had grassroots support from groups as diverse as the Nez Perce and Salish Indian tribes, the Missoula City Council, and people who didn’t share its lefty politics, like biker clubs and Tea Party partisans, even, he said, “gun-totin’ rural folks.”

  “Because they don’t want to see mining equipment that’s built out of country going to another country,” he explained. “People who live up and down U.S. 12 need to use the road for access to hospitals, ambulance service. That’s been a big issue for these folks because these loads are so big and no one can get by them unless they pull over. They do a rolling blockade.”

  Some of the loads, he went on, had violated an Idaho law prohibiting blocking a highway for more than fifteen minutes at a time. The oil and transportation companies had chosen the highway for a reason: the megaloads cannot pass under the bridges and overpasses on interstates. There are none on U.S. 12.

  When I brought up security guard Glenn’s objection—burning gallons and gallons of gas to protest extracting the oil that produced the gas—Nick sighed. He’d heard it before.

  “The people we’re up against—ExxonMobil makes more money than most small countries—wield huge, huge influence. To oppose them, we need to transport people, but we don’t have the resources to transport everybody. We have to use the tools of this world to move toward the world we want to see. To me, that argument is one of saying, Well, if you’re true to your own beliefs, you’d isolate yourselves from everybody and not have anything to say to anybody and just stay in your own woods.”

  We went off on a tour of the encampment, and it had all the organizational elements that Earth First!’s antipathy to organization—the top-down kind, anyway—seemed to deny: a sanitary kitchen and a staff capable of feeding everyone; a medical staff trained as wilderness first responders (an herbalist included); roped-off areas for “morning circle,” as the daily assembly was called, and for workshops on subjects from knot-tying to legal issues to, Nick said, “metaconversations about the future of the kind of world we want to live in.” Backpackers’ tents and lean-tos made of tarps were pitched on hillsides; banners splashed with slogans and artwork were draped from the trees. One young woman was washing her feet in Fish Creek; full bathing was forbidden because it would pollute the stream. All in all, the rendezvous had the combined flavors of a scout jamboree and a kind of Woodstock without the music; and though most of the campers were under thirty, a handful looked like they’d been at Woodstock.

  “It begs the question if it was glued together in the first place,” Nick remarked when I asked if he thought the country was becoming unglued. He then went into a long commentary on the alliance of big government and multinational corporations that ignored the needs and wishes of local communities. If the nation’s seams were becoming frayed, that was why.

  “We look toward more community-based decision making, we look toward consensus, we look toward local engagement as the map to the future we’d like to follow. In a lot of ways, we reflect what the conservative right says: Y’know what? Maybe we need less federal government. Maybe we need more decision-making power on the local level as opposed to on a federal level.”

  A Jeffersonian vision, if you will—yeoman citizens in voluntary association, each with a voice as strong as a CEO or a U.S. senator or a corporate lobbyist. Easier said than done.

  28.

  Imagine ski-chalet roofs seven thousand feet high—that’s what it looked like on both sides of the highway that ran through the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Alongside, the Lochsa River was a constant boil of rapids and standing waves, never a yard of calm, just white water churning like surf in a hurricane. Looking at it, Leslie said, had the same hypnotic effect as watching the Yule Log endlessly burning on TV. We pulled over and walked out onto a footbridge to take pictures of the torrent. Another traveler was there, and when I said I wouldn’t go down that river unless a doctor told me I had only two weeks to live, he said that he’d just rafted it with a guide. “That took guts,” I said, thinking, You and your guide are out of your minds.

  The Selway joined the Lochsa, and together they tumbled into the Clearwater, and the highway turned sharply to follow that river northwestward. We stopped for the night in Orofino, an old gold-mining town. The campground was sandwiched between the river and a railroad siding cr
ammed with idle logging cars. A sign on each read: WARNING—CAR MAY TIP OVER. We kept our distance. Orofino stood at a ford frequented by the Nez Perce hundreds of years ago, the spot marked by rust-colored sculptures of an Indian woman on foot and a warrior on horseback. Lewis and Clark had stopped there to scout for timber suitable to make dugout canoes. They certainly would not have recognized the place today. Porsche owners were holding a rally, and new Boxsters and restored 911s filled the parking lot of a riverside Best Western.

  In the track of the Corps of Discovery, we passed through Lewiston and into Washington the next day and made a discovery of our own. Eastern Washington looks like western Nebraska—plateaus as treeless as the moon out to the horizon, with only patches of camas to relieve the monotony. A hundred and fifty miles of this brought us to the Columbia, nearly a mile wide, bounded by high, stark cliffs that could make you think you were in the Middle East. We dipped into Oregon, crossed a bridge back into Washington, and headed west, the tan-and-brown cliffs tiered like layer cakes assembled by a novice baker.

  Suddenly, they appeared atop the ridgelines on both sides of the river: white steel poles taller than twenty-five-story buildings, turbine nacelles the size of school buses, blades from tip to tip as long as a 747’s wingspan, some still, some twirling slowly. The wind towers went on for five miles, fifteen, twenty, fracturing the skyline, and transmission towers marched into the distance like giant robots. I’d seen wind farms in New Mexico and Texas, but these were wind ranches, wind countries.