Bad Land: An American Romance

1. The Open Door

BREASTING THE REGULAR SWELLS OF LAND, on a red dirt road as true as a line of longitude, the car was like a boat at sea. The ocean was hardly more solitary than this empty country, where in forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and when I wound down the window I heard it growl in the dry grass like surf. For gulls, there were killdeer plovers, crying out their name as they wheeled and skidded on the wind. Keel-dee-a! Keel-dee-a! The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea — it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged bluffs, hollow combers of bleached clay, and was fissured with waterless creek beds, ash-white, littered with boulders. Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. In the bottomlands, where muddy rivers trickled through the cottonwoods, were fenced rectangles of irrigated green.

Corn? wheat? alfalfa? Though I grew up in farmland, asthma and hay-fever kept me at an allergic distance from crops and animals, and it was with the uninformed pleasure of the urban tourist that I watched this countryside unfold. I loved its dry, hillocky emptiness. Here were space and distance on a scale unimaginable to most city dwellers. Here one might loaf and stretch and feel oneself expand to meet the enormous expanse of the surrounding land.

I stopped the car on the crest of a big swell and attacked a shrink-wrapped sandwich bought at a gas station several hours before. The smell of red dust, roasted, biscuity, mixed with the medicinal smell of the sagebrush that grew on the stony slopes of the buttes. I thought, I could spend all day just listening here — to the birds, the crooning wind, the urgent fiddling of the crickets.

The road ahead tapered to infinity, in stages. Hill led to hill led to hill, and at each summit the road abruptly shrank to half its width, then half its width again, until it became a hairline crack in the land, then a faint wobble in the haze, then nothing. From out of the nothing now carne a speck. It disappeared. It resurfaced as a smudge, then as a fist-sized cloud. A while passed. Finally, on the nearest of the hilltops, a full-scale dust storm burst into view. The storm enveloped a low-slung pickup truck, which slowed and carne to a standstill beside the car, open window to open window.

“Run out of gas?”

“No—” I waved the remains of the hideous sandwich. “Just having lunch.”

The driver wore a Stetson, once white, which in age had taken on the color, and some of the texture, of a ripe Gorgonzola cheese. Behind his head, a big-caliber rifle was parked in a gun rack. I asked the man if he was out hunting, for earlier in the morning I’d seen herds of pronghorn antelope; they had bounded away from the car on spindly legs, the white signal flashes on their rumps telegraphing Danger! to the rest. But no, he was on his way into town to the store. Around here, men wore guns as part of their everyday uniform, packing Winchesters to match their broad-brimmed hats and high-heeled boots. While the women I had seen were dressed for the 1990s, nearly all the men appeared to have stepped off the set of a period Western.

“Missed a big snake back there by the crick.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke, but stared fixedly ahead, with the wrinkled long-distance gaze that solo yachtsmen, forever searching for a landfall, eventually acquire. “He was a beauty. I put him at six feet or better. I could have used the rattle off of that fellow …”

With a blunt-fingered hand the size of a dinner plate, he raked through the usual flotsam of business cards, receipts, spent ballpoints and candy wrappings that had collected in the fold between the windshield and the dashboard. “Some of my roadkills,” he said. Half a dozen snake rattles, like whelk shells, lay bunched in his palm.

“Looks like you have a nice hobby there.”

“It beats getting bit.”

He seemed in no particular hurry to be on his way, and so I told him where I carne from and he told me where he carne from. His folks had homesteaded about eight miles over in that direction — and he wagged his hat brim southward across a treeless vista of withered grass, pink shale and tufty sage. They’d lost their place back in the “Dirty Thirties.” Now he was on his wife’s folks’ old place, a dozen miles up the road; had eleven sections up there.

A section is a square mile. “That’s quite a chunk of Montana. What do you farm?”

“Mostly cattle. We grow hay. And a section and a half is wheat, some years, when we get the moisture for it.”

“And it pays?”

“One year we make quite a profit, and the next year we go twice as deep as that in the hole. That’s about the way it goes, round here.”

We sat on for several minutes in an amiable silence punctuated by the cries of the killdeer and the faulty muffler of the pickup. Then the man said, “Nice visiting with you,” and eased forward. In the rearview mirror I watched his storm of dust subside behind the brow of a hill.

In the nineteenth century, when ships under sail crossed paths in mid-ocean, they “spoke” each other with signal flags; then, if sea conditions were right, they hove to, lowered boats, and the two captains, each seated in his gig, would have a “gam,” exchanging news as they bobbed on the wave tops. In Moby-Dick, Melville devoted a chapter to the custom, which was still alive and well on this oceanlike stretch of land. It was so empty that two strangers could feel they had a common bond simply because they were encircled by the same horizon.

It had not always been so empty here.

The few working ranches were now separated from their neighbors by miles and miles of rough, ribbed, ungoverned country, and each ranch made as self-importont a showing on the landscape as a battlemented castle. First, there was the elaborately painted mailbox — representing a plow, a wagon team, a tractor, a well-hung Hereford bull — set at the entrance to a gravel drive. A little way beyond it stood a gallows, with twenty-five-foot posts supporting an arched crosspiece emblazoned with the names of two or three generations of family members, along with the heraldic devices of the family cattle brands: numbers and letters, rampant and couchant — in western tolk, “upright” and “lazy.” In the far distance lay the ranch, its houses, barns and outbuildings screened by a shelter belt of trees. Trees! Here, where almost no trees grew of their own accord except along the river bottoms, these domestic forests announced that their owners had water, agricultural know-how, and long occupancy of the land. You could arrive at an accurate estimate of a given family’s income, character and standing in Montana just by looking at their shelter belt. Some were no more than a threadbare hedge of sickly cottonwoods, but one or two were as tall and dense and green as a bluebell wood in spring.

The families were so few, their farms so unexpected and commanding, that they mapped the land, stamping it with their names, much as England used to be mapped by its cathedral cities. Here, where a crew of surly heifers blocked the road beside the creek, was Garber country. A barred lazy A and upright T were burned into the hide of each animal — the family brand of the Garbers (“Gene-Fernande-Warren-Bernie”) whose grand ranch entrance I had passed eight or nine miles back. I honked, and was met by a unanimous stare of sorrowing resentment, as if I was trying to barge my way through an important cow funeral.

A mile on, more cattle, bullocks this time, scarred with the same Bar-Lazy-A-T. New names fell at long slow intervals: Brown … Breen … Shumaker … Householder … Their estates were great, but bare and comfortless. It might be nice enough in June to look out from your window and know yourself to be the owner of all the dust, rock and parched grass you could see, and more — but how would it be in January at minus 25°? Then the sheer breadth and weight of the land would get to you. I thought, I’d rather settle for a more sociable berth, like being a lighthouse keeper.

For every surviving ranch, I passed a dozen ruined houses. The prairie was dotted about with wrecks. Their windows, empty of glass, were full of sky. Strips of ice-blue showed between their rafters. Some had lost their footing and tumbled into their cellars. All were buckled by the drifting tonnage of Montana’s winter snows, their joists and roofbeams warped into violin curves. Skewed and splayed, the derelicts made up a distinctive local architecture.

It took me a while to see the little hilltop graveyards. I had mistaken them for cattle pens. Fenced with barbed wire and juniper posts, each held ten or twelve rotting wooden crosses, with, here and there, a professionally chiseled undertaker’s headstone. The names of the departed — Dietz … Hoglund … Grimshaw — didn’t match the names on the gallows of the working farms. Save for the odd empty jam jar, the individual graves were untended, but someone kept the fences up and the grass neatly cut. I supposed that for farmers here it carne with the territory, the job of looking after the dead strangers on your land.

Once the eye grew accustomed to the dizzying sweep and chop of the prairie and began to focus on its details, the whole country presented itself as a graveyard, it was so strewn with relies of the dead: single fence posts, trailing a few whiskers of wire — the body of a Studebaker, vintage circa 1940, stripped of its wheels and engine, on a sandy knoll — a harrow, deep in the grass, its tines rusting to air — on the tops of the buttes, small cairns of carefully piled stones. For as far as one could see the dead had left their stuff lying around, to dissolve back into nature in its own time, at its own pace. A civilization of sorts, its houses, cars, machinery, was fading rapidly off the land, and it wouldn’t be long now before its imprint was as faint as that of the Plains Indians’ teepee rings or the shallow grooves worn by the single-file herds of buffalo.

I pulled up beside a wrecked house that stood close to the road, and, stepping high and cautiously for fear of six-foot rattlers, made my way through the remains of the garden, past the assorted auto parts, the stoved-in chicken coops, the tin bath with a hole in its bottom, the wringer, the bedstead, the Frigidaire with the missing door. Though its frame had started to corkscrew and its front wall bulged, the house was in better shape than most; a gabled two-story cottage with a collapsed veranda that in its day must have been as proudly, prettily suburban as any farmhouse on the prairie.

Inside, I was met by a panic scurry of wings: swallows had built their wattle-and-daub nests at picture height on the parlor walls. Squealing shrilly, the birds fled through the windows. It looked as if the owners had quit the place as precipitately as the swallows. They’d left most of their furniture as it stood — to the mice, who’d nested in the sofa cushions, and the birds, who’d marbled the slipcovers with their droppings. A flyswatter hung on its appointed nail. A foldaway ironing board stood open, inviting the thought that perhaps the family had left the house for the last time in their Sunday best.

In the room beyond, the walk-in closet was still full of clothes on wooden hangers. I reached for a dress, but the mildewed cotton carne away in my hand like a fistful of spiderweb. In the bottom of the closet stood a pair of cowboy boots. All day I’d felt in urgent need of snakeboots, but these were a good size and a half on the large side for me, and their leather was so stiff and cracked that it felt fossilized.

Above each window in the house, the curtain rods had torn fringes of lace suspended from them. These genteel remnants shivered in the wind. Lace curtains on the prairie … Whoever had put them up had made a thorough job of her hemstitching. Though the curtains themselves had rotted and blown out long ago, their stubs looked as if they might yet survive several more years of gales and blizzards. I could feel the woman’s excitement in her handiwork as she veiled the buttes and outcrops with a pretty fall of white lace. The curtains must have altered the land for her as importantly as any amount of plowing and planting.

The parlor floor was a musty rubble of papers, books, magazines. Here, open on its title page, was a copy of Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual, badly foxed and swollen with damp; there was an ancient Montgomery Ward mail-order catalog. I stirred the rubble with my shoe and raised a mud-splattered postcard, mostly illegible. Dear Neva, Hi Honey, what’s the … with you, did you … or are you … we went fishing … if you have to go down to meet her … we went to the dance Monday … couldn’t darn … Saturday … In the corner behind the sofa lay a sheaf of manuscript pages. They’d been chucked into the single dry spot in the room, which had otherwise been raked from end to end by rain and snow, and the ink on them was unsmudged. Perched on the sofa arm, I settled down to read.

The densely scribbled figures looked like prose, but were in fact an epic of desperate small-hours arithmetic — a sum that continued over seven pages of heavily corrected addition and multi-plication. The handwriting grew crankier, more bunched and downward-sloping, as the sum progressed and the numbers mounted. To begin with it didn’t look so bad. The amounts were small—$4.20, $9.15, $2.54—and they took time to swell up and burst. They sketched a careful life: rent to the Bureau of Land Management (the letters BLM were repeated several times and ringed in a blue doodle that went through the surface of the paper); payments to Sears, to Coast to Coast Hardware, to Kyle’s Radiator Shop, to Lawler Drug for animal vaccines, to J. T. Rugg for seeds, to Walter somebody for tractor tires, to L. Price for a whole bunch of things, to Farmers Elevator, to Sinclair, blacksmith, to Oscar Overland for oats, to Ward’s and Hepperle’s and Gamble’s and Fullerton Lumber.

On page 3 a ringed figure showed for the first time: $1040.40—“Note at Baker Bank.” The interest on this loan looked enviably low; at $40.50 for the year, it carne out at around 4¼ percent. But even this was more than the family was spending on clothes ($35.51, with everything bought at J. C. Penney). $1040.40. The horrible amount of the note was written out several times over in the margins, and islanded with shaky circles.

By the last page, the handwriting was all over the place and the figures were standing, or leaning, an inch high on the paper. How do you turn $2.54 into $5688.90? I’ve made my own pages of calculations in the same distraught writing; seen the numbers gang up on me and breed. What the bottom line always says is the Old 2 A.M. cry, We can’t go on living like this.

This house had been built to last. Its frames were stout, its cedar floor laid like a yacht’s deck. It had been meant for the grandchildren and their children’s children, and it must have seemed — in what? 1915? 1920?—a rock-solid investment: a fine house in the country, with a barn and outbuildings. Even now one could feel the pride of its owners in their creation, though it had sunk in value to a few dollars’ worth of firewood and a convenient nesting box for the neighborhood birds.

An emigrant myself, trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West, I took the ruins personally. From the names in the graveyards, I thought I knew the people who had come out here: Europeans, mostly of my grandparents’ generation, for whom belief in America, and its miraculous power of individual redemption, was the last great European religion. Faith in a bright future was written into the carpentry of every house. To lay such a floor as that, tongue in chiseled groove, was the work of a true believer.

Looking now at the fleet of lonely derelicts on the prairie, awash in grass and sinking fast, I could guess at how that faith had been shaken.

“IMMIGRANT, n.,” says Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary; “An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.”

I knew about that. Aged forty-seven, I had chucked up everything and just cleared off. It wasn’t a long- or well-considered move. On a visit to the Pacific Northwest, I caught a shadowy glimpse of a new life, and flung myself at it. Arrived in Seattle, I worked hard to make the new life stick, but I was short of roots and reasons. I took to making long drives eastward (which in the West means backward in time), always looking out for some point of connection between my own careless flight west and that of my precursors. Lacking an American past of my own, I hoped to find someone else’s cast-off history that would fit my case.

Here, among the ruins, a thousand miles and eighty years east of Seattle, was the point I had been searching for. I was certain of it.

A little further on, past another pocket cemetery, stood a schoolhouse on a hill. Hay bales were stacked in what had been the yard, between the trestle frame of the swings and the basketball hoop on its pole. Some flakes of whitewash still adhered to the bare grain of the wood on the schoolhouse wall. I stepped inside.

A dead woodpecker lay on the floor and more swallows had built their mud igloos on the walls, but the schoolroom retained the odor of morning milk, wet coats and spelling bees. The place had been heated by a great cast-iron stove, dusty and birdlimed now. In winter, it would have roared and crackled through the lessons, its voice as memorable to the students as that of the teacher. A framed sepia engraving of George Washington hung over the blackboard, on which some recent visitor had left the chalked message, SPOKANE OR BUST!!!

The teacher’s quarters were downstairs in the basement. Ice heaves had wrecked the cement floor, but everything else was in place: the chaste single bed, the table and upright chair, the propane gas cooker, the rocker, with a maroon velvet cushion, for listening to the radio in the evenings over a mug of cocoa and a book. The chest of drawers had been emptied, but there were three cardboard boxes of moldering schoolbooks under the bed. Comfortably seated in her rocking chair, I leafed through the teacher’s library. The books had been published between 1910 and the late 1930s: grade-school readers, most of them put out by Ginn and Company, enshrining a version of America that now seemed hardly less distant than that of the Pilgrim Fathers, it was so bold and bright and innocent.

Have you a flag hanging in your schoolroom? What are the colors in our flag? Many people think that these colors have a meaning.

They think that the red in our flag means that we must be brave. They think that the blue in our flag means that we must be true. They think that the white means that we must be clean.

A poem, printed in gothic script, nicely caught the mood of things:

A youth across the sea, for the sake of a hope in his breast,

Shook out a steadfast sail upon a dauntless quest.

He had seen a star in the West,

He had dreamed a dream afar;

He wrought and would not rest.

Heirs of that dream we stand,

Citizens of that star—

America, dear land!

I read stories about Washington and Betsy Ross, about the sickly boyhood of Theodore Roosevelt (“For years he had to sleep sitting up against some pillows. He could not lie down without coughing”) and the impoverished boyhood of Andrew Jackson (“But Andrew kept growing in spite of all they said. He clinched his little fists at colic, measles, and whooping cough. He talked very early, and walked instead of crawled …”).

From a useful book titled Who Travels There, I learned what to do when lost in the wilderness:

If you ever find that you are lost, do not become frightened. There is more danger in fright than there is of starvation or accident. If you allow yourself to become frightened, you become possessed of what we call “the panic of the lost.”

As soon as you discover that you have lost your way in the wilderness, sit down with your back against a stump or stone, take out your jackknife and play mumblety-peg, or sing a song. This will pull you together, so to speak. Then take a stick, smooth off a place in the dirt, and try to map out your wanderings. Making this map will cause you to remember forgotten objects you have passed on the road, and may help you to retrace your steps.

The America of the schoolbooks was a realm of lonely but invigorating adventure, where poor farm boys grew up to be President; land of the brave, the true and the clean, where a beckoning star stood permanently above the western horizon and poverty and ill health were mere tests of one’s American mettle.

To prairie children, this schoolbook America must have seemed reasonably close to home. Its heroes were small farmers like their parents. There were no cities in it and not a whiff from the smokestacks of heavy industry. Theodore Roosevelt’s childhood (most of which had actually been spent on East 20th Street in Manhattan) was relocated, for storybook purposes, to the great outdoors, where little Theodore “tried to take part in all the sports which other children took part in. He tried so hard that before he was a big boy he could swim and row and skate and box and shoot. He could ride horseback. He could sail a boat.” Beyond the village and the farm lay the wilderness, from which boys with jackknives learned to navigate their way home. The values honored in the books — self-reliance, piety, woodcraft, patriotism — were all values that would come in handy in eastern Montana. Children in New York and Chicago, poring over the same texts, might as well have been reading about life in Uttar Pradesh.

Here, though, you could see your own experience intimately reflected in the books. The Grade 3 Learn to Study reader (1924) had a chapter titled “How to Save”:

Have you ever tried to help your father and mother to save money? Some children think that they cannot save, because they are not working and earning money. You can save money by saving other things.

Good advice followed. Save your clothes: keep out of the mud; hang your things up when you take them off; use a napkin when you’re eating; learn to sew on buttons. Mark your possessions: keep your rubbers fastened together with a clothespin; buy a 10¢ roll of adhesive tape and use it to put your name on your cap, gloves and boots; shave a strip off the top of your pencil and write your name there. Don’t waste costly paper: if you want to draw a picture, do it on the back of a used sheet.

The chapter on “Buying Christmas Presents” gave one an idea of the kinds of luxuries that were within dreaming distance of a third-grader on the prairie: a spinning top (10¢), a jackknife (38¢), a striped ball (5¢), a toy automobile (65¢), a locomotive ($1.00) and — hope against hope! — way up on top of the list, a pair of skates for $2.00. The twelve designated presents carne to a total of $5.68.

I loaded two armfuls of books into the trunk of the car and headed south to Baker, where I stayed in a motel room furnished with junk from the wilder reaches of the 1950s. The pictures on its walls were all of water: two horseback explorers were in the act of discovering a mountain lake; a packhorse bridge spanned a river in what looked like Constable country; printed on dark blue velvet, a Japanese sea was in the grip of a tsunami. They were pictures for a dry country. At $23.50 for three beds, a bathroom and a fully equipped kitchen, the room was pleasingly in character with the frugal spirit of the place.

That evening a lightning storm moved in on Baker from the west. One could see it coming for an hour before it hit: the distant artillery flashes on a sky of deep episcopal purple. As the storm advanced, I sat in a bar on Main Street, reading the life of Patrick Henry in Four American Patriots: A Book for Young Americans by Alma Holman Burton.

“Colonel Washington,” said Mr. Davies, “is only twenty-three years old. I cannot but hope that Providence has preserved the youth in so signal a manner for some important service to his country.”

“Ah,” thought Patrick, “George Washington has done so much for his country, and he is only twenty-three!”

The people in the bar were huddled and talkative: living by day in so much space and solitude, they evidently liked to squash up close at night. At the back of the place, two poker tables were in session, with the players gossiping unprofessionally between reckless bids of 50¢ a time. The slogan in scabbed paint on the bar door announced, Liquor Up Front, Poker in the Rear.

He looked down at his hands. They were brown and rough with toil.

“Alas!” he said, “I do my best, and yet I cannot even make a living on my little farm!”

This was quite true.

Patrick could not make his crops grow. Then his house caught fire and burned to the ground. It was all very discouraging!

The snippets of bar conversation were, on the whole, more interesting than Alma Holman Burton’s prose. A Mexican seated at the table next to me was talking to a scrawny, pencil-mustached, thirtyish type, perched on a swivel stool at the bar. The Mexican said he was up in Baker from Wilmer, Texas.

“Wilmer?” said the guy at the bar, in a whoop of delighted recognition. “I know Wilmer! I was in jail in Wilmer. Buy you a drink, man?”

And so, at the age of twenty-three, Patrick Henry, with a wife and little children to provide for, did not have a shilling in his pocket. But his father helped a little and Sarah’s father helped a little, and they managed to keep the wolf from the door …

… which would not have been a dead metaphor to a child in eastern Montana, where wolves picked off the sheep at nights and “wolfers” trapped the animals for bounty.

The thunder was directly overhead, and it was immediately followed by a long kettledrum tattoo of rain on the roof. The bar went quiet. Everyone in it listened to the rain.

“It’s a gulleywasher,” the bartender said, gathering in the empties.

The thunder rolled away eastward, toward North Dakota, but the rain kept coming.

“It’s a gulleywasher,” said the man who’d done jail time in Wilmer, as if he had just minted the expression.

A crowd formed at the open doorway of the bar to watch the downpour. The rain fell in gleaming rods. Main Street was a tumbling river, already out of its banks and spilling over onto the sidewalk. Its greasy waters were colored red, white and blue by the neon signs in the bar window. A truck sloshed past at crawling speed, throwing up a wake that broke against the doors of darkened stores.

“That,” said a turnip-faced old brute in a Stetson, speaking in the voice of long and hard experience, “is a gulleywasher.”

People craned to see. A couple had brought their toddler along (this was an easygoing bar in an easygoing town); the man lifted her onto his shoulders to give her a grandstand view of the wonder. The rain made everyone young: people dropped their guard in its presence, and the pleasure in their faces was as empty of self-consciousness as that of the toddler, who bounced against her father’s neck, saying, “Water. Water. Water.” Some shook their heads slowly from side to side, their faces possessed by the same aimless smile. Some whistled softly through their teeth. A woman laughed; a low cigarette-stoked laugh that sounded uncannily like the hiss and crackle of the rain itself.

It went on raining. It was still raining when I drove back to the motel, where the forecourt was awash and the kitchen carpet blackly sodden. I sat up listening to it, attuned now to what I ought to hear. When rain falls in these parts, in what used to be known as the Great American Desert, it falls with the weight of an astounding gift. It falls like money.