All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Great, I say. All the better. I’d love to see palaeontologists doing their stuff, and in my experience enthusiasts of this nature are only too keen to strut said stuff before an audience. ‘Uh, right, yes, of course,’ says one, smiling nervously to her friend. ‘Yes, indeed, well we’ll have to see, won’t we,’ she replies, resolutely making no move to instigate that procedure, which I imagined might be done by a simple telephone call, or just walking across the road and tapping on the door. ‘I know,’ she suddenly says, ‘why don’t we get Jack to take you on a drive round to get your bearings and we’ll see how they’re getting on when you get back?’

  I say, fine, if that’s what we have to do and follow Jack out back to a monster Dodge pickup with a National Rifle Association sticker on the windscreen. I guess it’s probably not a good idea to tease Jack about Barack Obama’s attitudes to gun control, let alone Michael Moore’s. I do ask him if he is in fact carrying a gun. He looks at me kind of surprised, as if thinking I mean does he have a Colt 45 strapped to his waist, and then says: ‘Sure, I got me a shotgun and a couple of rifles back in there.’ My look, I guess, suggests ‘Why?’ ‘Hey, this is Montana,’ he says. ‘You never know.’

  Jack’s pickup is big and white and has seen better years. Only one in 10 cars on the streets of Malta isn’t a pickup, and not one of them is the world’s bestselling make, the Toyota. There are Dodges, Fords and GMC pickups but not one that wasn’t made in America. People out here notice that sort of thing. He has a twinkle in his eye and as he clambers up into the truck and drives off past the field centre I can’t help noticing that of the half dozen cars parked outside it, most were in fact police cars.

  ‘Yeah, them gals didn’t want you to know,’ Jack chuckles. ‘Think they thought it might have given ya the wrong impression. They’ve even got the feds involved.’ Federal agents at a remote dinosaur research station in rural Montana? My curiosity was whetted. Surely it had to be Mulder and Scully. But Jack didn’t know or wasn’t telling. ‘I’m not sure what the hell it’s all about, but you hang about. We’ll get it sorted and get you in there.’ In the meantime I would have to struggle with my anticipation.

  It doesn’t take much to find a distraction, as we pass the ranch-style bungalow – or perhaps out here that should be bungalow-style ranch – owned by one of the two well-to-do ladies, with endless acres of grassland prairies stretching to the horizon beyond it. ‘That’s where she keeps her buffalo herd,’ says Jack in passing. ‘Buffalo,’ I catch him up short, ‘you mean actual buffalo?’ Those big hairy woolly mammoth-type things that once upon a time in the west roamed these here prairies in their millions until the advent of men with long-range rifles hunted them to the edge of extinction.

  Yep, says Jack, the very same. Am I interested in seeing them? The thought had clearly never occurred to him. Was I ever? As far as I’m concerned, buffalo in the flesh, up close and personal, are better than any amount of dead dinosaurs. Mentally, I had already consigned the buffalo to the same department of the animal kingdom, i.e. ones that I had missed by having been born in the wrong century.

  ‘Well, that’s easy,’ says Jack. ‘Let’s go,’ and throws his huge 4x4 pickup with remarkable ease off the side of the road and onto a dirt track that led to what looked to me like a barbed wire fence with heavy-duty electrodes on top for good measure.

  ‘Just need to open the gate,’ he says, hopping out, much to my mystification because I can’t see a gate.

  Then I realised that that was because I had been expecting a version of the traditional English five-bar affair, with a latch at one end or at least a rope loop to throw over a fence post. I had briefly forgotten this was the Wild West. Within seconds Jack has lifted what looked to me like a fixed fence post out of the ground and moved it and the three attached by barbed wire, but not it turns out fixed in the ground, to one side. We drive through. I close the makeshift gate which is not as easy as Jack made it look because the loose fence posts pull the barbed wire down so it catches in my trousers, and head on up into the prairie.

  And all of a sudden there they are: like something I’ve only ever seen in a Wild West painting, a herd – admittedly small, no more than a dozen or so beasts – of native American buffalo. The bulls are immediately recognisable, their great shaggy heads seemingly way too large for even their powerful bodies. And yes, I know they should really be called bison, but that’s not what the cowboys called them and cowboy country is where they come from in my mythology, and that’s where we are right now. A bison is a creature in a zoo. A buffalo is an animal from the storybooks, found in its element on the great plains of America, and here I am right now staring at a herd of them.

  ‘Hard to imagine, isn’t it,’ says Jack, ‘the sight of millions of them things, as far as the eye can see, spread out across the plains?’

  Jack is a hunter himself, like most folks around here – even the motels have signs that proclaim ‘We welcome hunters’ – but he shakes his head in rueful amazement at the wanton slaughter: ‘They did it for the hides, of course. They’d come out first for the otter and when there wasn’t much of that left, they took out the buffalo – also for their meat of course, it’s rich and low-fat, probably healthier than beef,’ he adds, just so I understand that even out here in Montana they are aware of the advantages of sensible eating. Then he adds: ‘And of course, they really did it to drive out the Indians. When the buffalo were gone, the Indians went too.’

  I do not know how extensive the process of politically correct re-education has been in the United States over the past few decades, but it strikes me here – as it did in Niagara – that there is a genuine feeling of melancholy regret amongst even the most hard-headed American men about the fate of the ‘redskins’ they now refer to wholly naturally as ‘Native Americans’. No suggestion of course that what’s done could – or should – ever be undone, but a genuine feeling of sympathy for a group who got a ‘rough deal’ from history.

  Maybe it comes from a love of the land that the settlers who pushed the natives to the brink of extinction nonetheless inherited from them. And passed on to their descendants. Men like Jack. ‘I never knew what people used to mean when they talked about Montana as “big sky country”,’ says Jack, staring up at a bright blue canopy that extends in all directions to the scrubland of an infinitely distant horizon, ‘but then I went east, and all of a sudden I found myself thinking: hey, what happened to the sky?

  ‘You get people who’ve never been out on a ranch and they come out here and just love it, and then you get kids who’ve been raised on the ranch, and they can’t wait to leave.’ And I automatically think of the row of pictures of young men in uniform upstairs in the museum.

  ‘There’s not a whole heap for kids to do around here, I guess,’ says Jack a little later as we share a beer and a pizza at a Formica table in a noisy little bar-cum-diner lit by fluorescent strips and with a jukebox in the corner. ‘They have a racetrack out there,’ he points to an area west of town, ‘for hot rods. They do ’em up, take ’em out there and race ’em. You can hear ’em miles away when they do.’

  I’m listening for the roar of motors above the jukebox when a dark-haired young woman comes up to our table. Jack introduces me to Sue, who is one of the palaeontologists who comes up to work in the field centre in the summer season. She too is cagey about our chances of getting in there today. ‘It’s kind of complicated,’ she says, ‘but Professor Bakker is in there working with them, and he says it’ll all be finished today, so you can get in there for sure first thing tomorrow morning.’

  Which seems as good a promise as I am going to get, as I part company with Jack and Sue with an arrangement to meet over breakfast. That leaves me, as it gets dark and the temperature drops alarmingly, to sample the uncertain delights of Malta’s nightlife. Already at five o’clock with the light gone it feels as if the emptiness all around has closed in. There’s a shift from the laidback rural feel of the day to a more sporadic febrile night world. Pickups rac
e around in the dark, kids in lit lock-ups play with welding tools, and outside the main garage sits a row of vintage 1940s Ford saloons, big and bulbous, the sort of thing you expect to see Humphrey Bogart climb out of. Most are rusted through. A signs says AUTOS FOR SALE. It’s hard to know if it’s a joke or just left there to decay alongside the merchandise.

  This is the bedrock of America that George W. Bush has spent nearly a decade mining. For the kids who don’t want to stay on the ranch, the army is the best ticket out of mid-Montana, an expenses-paid way to see the world, only to find that the world they see these days looks like the burnt-out barrios of Baghdad.

  There is a yellow ribbon in the barred window of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Club, and a huge one in the side window of the Great Northern Hotel. The liquor store – next to the drug and alcohol dependency centre – has a sign by the door proclaiming ‘God Bless Our Troops.’ I have no idea how many of the good folks of Malta – and they seem to the casual visitor remarkably good folks indeed – support George Bush and his campaign in Iraq rather than the less complicated concept of ‘our boys wherever they are’. It is a dilemma not unknown in Britain, but it’s not a question I feel, as a foreigner – and make no mistake, even we Brits are very definitely foreigners out here – is overly wise to raise. You certainly wouldn’t want to show disrespect to anyone wearing a yellow ribbon, even if nobody seems 100 per cent certain about its origin as a symbol.

  I had – perhaps rather rashly – associated it with the rather naff 1973 pop hit for Tony Orlando and Dawn, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, about a convict looking for a sign his ex-girlfriend still wants him back. Hardly the most flattering of origins for a military symbol. It turns out, however, that the pop song in itself was derived from an earlier, oral, military tradition, though one popularly believed to relate to a much earlier ‘pop’ song, ‘She Wears a Yeller Ribbon (For her Lover who is Fur [sic] Fur Away)’, a US Army marching song from the First World War. The ribbon itself in popular tradition goes back to US cavalry uniform in the nineteenth century, though there is no evidence beyond its widespread adoption in Hollywood westerns. It may even have its origin in the yellow sash worn by Cromwell’s Puritan troops in the English Civil War, translated to America by Protestant emigrants. What is for certain is that its symbolism became ingrained in the 1979 US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Teheran when the wife of the most senior diplomat being held tied one around the tree in her Maryland garden. Since then it has been ingrained into the American psyche as reflecting solidarity with its nationals in danger.

  There’s also a yellow ribbon behind the counter in The Stockman, which has a sign above it proclaiming this to be Montana’s largest bar. The other sign puzzles me, however: the one that proclaims, ‘Where the pavement ends and the West begins’, until I realise that by ‘pavement’ they mean ‘tarmac’ – paved road, further emphasising the need for the missing dictionary. The Stockman has a large central floor space permanently cleared for the live country music played at weekends. Right now, on what I would still term an early Wednesday evening but seems already to be night in Montana it is deserted save for half a dozen men in baseball or cowboy hats. A sign above the bar says: ‘Even a fish stays out of trouble if he keeps his mouth shut.’ This seems good advice.

  Despite the ludicrous pictures of fat John Prescott posing in an outfit given to him by a rich American businessman, there’s something about cowboy hats worn in situ by men whose heads seem to fit them that makes me believe they might just possibly be packing a fully-functioning six-gun as well. I have to remember: this is America. Even back in relatively suburban Niagara Falls the casino asked customers not to bring firearms into the gaming rooms, reflecting the fact that they might actually be carrying them.

  The local motel bar closes at 9:30 p.m. banishing even the men in cowboy hats to their rooms. I wander out into the street and try my luck in The Mint Bar and Casino – casino here meaning simply the presence of dollar-swallowing poker machines. Inside is a long bar with a long line of men in baseball caps drinking Bud Light from bottles while the seemingly never-ending ball game plays on a flat screen behind the bar.

  I ask for a draught beer and get an insipid, pale and tasteless Bud Light. Seeing nobody looking much like conversation among the line of individuals necking bottles along the bar, I let the poker machine – is this becoming a dangerous addiction? – swallow three dollar bills in succession, and then decide to call it a night, wandering back out into temperatures that have now dropped to a decidedly chilly minus 2 C.

  On the way back I notice only one of the local police cars is still outside the field station. Mulder and Scully have packed up for the night. The truth is out there. All I have to do is wake up and smell the coffee. I had no idea it would be in the company of an evangelist Texan in a Stetson.

  9

  Cretaceous Park

  THE MAN WAITING for me over breakfast in the diner of the Great Northern Motel the next morning looks like Indiana Jones’s eccentric grandfather. There are people whose larger-than-life reputations precede them, but often in the flesh fail to live up to expectations. Professor Robert ‘Bob’ Bakker is unquestionably not one of them.

  He sets the tone of the day straight away by making a joke about my unkempt frizzy hairstyle. This is a bit forthright, but I’m sort of used to it. It’s just a bit bizarre coming from a man with round John Lennon glasses, an unruly long white beard and a mane of greying hair swept back into a disorderly ponytail protruding from underneath a giant white cowboy hat. And then I spot the twinkle in his eyes. Bakker is sending out a challenge. I can tell we’re going to get on like a house on fire. It’s a question of who can take the heat longest.

  Renowned as a polymath, eccentric and one of the great eminences of American palaeontology, Bob Bakker is one of the most quirky, inspiring, intelligent and eloquent companions anyone could have for an excursion into the wilderness of Montana.

  He asks what I want for breakfast and while I study the menu trying to make out what the locals would have, he orders for me: coffee and bacon in an English muffin. It’s a bit of a cliché, but grand, really. He probably has no idea how hard it is to get English muffins in England: the word nowadays routinely summons up what my mother would have called a fruit bun i.e. an American muffin. Bakker meanwhile reinforces his eccentricity by ordering his own particular start to the day: French toast and cold water.

  Straight off, despite the prim embarrassment of my lady hosts at the museum yesterday, Bakker wastes no time in enlightening me to the real story behind the mysterious goings-on in the lab the day before. He had been in there with them, and obviously enjoying himself. Unfortunately not Mulder and Scully as such but nonetheless a substantial detachment of local county, state and federal police finding their way around among bones that were considerably older than those they might normally have come across in detective work.

  The criminal they were on the track of had been employed at the field station several months earlier. He was a felon okay, but not quite run of the mill: a rogue palaeontologist who had turned ‘to the dark side’ transforming his scientific calling into a nice little earner by pilfering bone specimens. It seems ‘bad form’ to me but hardly on a scale with grand larceny or art forgery. Which only goes to show how little I know; Bakker wastes no time in telling me. In fact, it seems, corruption in the arcane world of palaeontology has a lot in common with both. For example, a really good, rare bone specimen, could on the black market – I’d not until now really thought of there being a black market in dinosaur bones – be worth between $200,000 and $300,000.

  Worse, the suspect was also believed to have been tinkering with classification to make a random piece of bone seem more interesting than it really was. In other words, by falsifying the background of where it was found – almost exactly like an artist forging a more famous signature on a painting – and then leaving it in place for several years, he could effectively authenticate its phoney provenance, thus boost
ing its value when it mysteriously disappeared to resurface on the black market. I was impressed. If the truth really was out there, it didn’t stop someone tampering with it to make a quick buck.

  For most of yesterday Bakker was going over boxes full of old bones, some still pending classification, trying to spot things that were obviously out of place. And, more importantly, things that might have gone missing. But now the ‘feds’ and their lesser accomplices have bagged their evidence – he’s understandably not going to tell me what he fingered – and moved on. ‘We’ll see,’ he murmurs with that same twinkle in his eye, now directed towards Sue, his fellow palaeontologist who has joined us. ‘We’ll see.’

  Meanwhile I’m going to see inside my first ever dinosaur field station. And I can’t hide a certain frisson. I’ve been up close to dinosaur bones before, of course. Who hasn’t? I still remember my first childhood visit to London’s Natural History Museum with its giant reconstructed diplodocus. But this is not just another plaster-cast dinosaur skeleton; this is the real thing. This is where they lived. These are the guys who dig them up. If they ever do get round to cloning them one day, it’ll be somewhere like here they come to get the raw material. And you can’t have watched Jurassic Park and tell me that’s not cool.

  But who – or possibly what – I want to know is/was Judith River. ‘Eh?’ goes Bakker. ‘Oh. It’s a river.’ I look around, at the endless empty vista of rolling scrubland extending in every direction beyond the rusty grain elevator and the low-rise buildings of Malta. ‘No, not here,’ says Bakker, almost with irritation. ‘Miles away, to the south.’

  I look even more perplexed and Bakker heaves a sigh, realising at last that he is dealing with some sort of paleontological moron. Which I could have told him, if he’d asked.

  ‘This – not this,’ he waves a hand at the surrounding sparse scenery, ‘but where the bones are found, is the Judith River Formation.’