Bad Land: An American Romance

8. Off the Map

“WHEN YOU COME TO THINK ABOUT IT, a life is a hell of a short span of time,” said Bud Brown. We were standing on the fence of the corral. Below us, in the dust, Bud’s granddaughter, a long and limber teenager, was holding down the hindquarters of a demented bull calf. She sat, stiff-backed, on the ground, bracing her left leg against the inside of the calf’s right thigh, gripping its other hoof in both hands. Her shoulder-length hair was pulled back in a tight braid, and she was generously streaked, from head to foot, in cow flop. The week before, she had been class valedictorian at the Baker High School graduation.

“First branding I came to at the Clark place, after the war, none of these buggers was hardly born yet …” Bud nodded at the paunched and wrinkled crew of men in the center of the corral. “Now they’re in charge. And it’s coming up to her turn already.”

A branding iron, glowing brightly orange from the propane barbecue grill, was plunged into the calf’s exposed rump. From beneath the crooked knee of the boy who was looking after the front end of the beast, the calf’s eye rolled back in its socket, which filled with white the color of veined and faded parchment. It drew its lips back from its jaws and yelled. Awwwwwwww! — an alto sob of astonishment and pain. A second man neatly snipped off its gonads and swabbed the bloody place with Lysol. A woman shot it full of vaccine with a pistol-shaped syringe. A third man lopped off its infant horns.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

The mutilated calf clambered to its knees and limped groggily away to the herd of waiting mother cows.

Bud said: “It takes no time to grow old.”

The shit-stained valedictorian flashed us an abstracted smile. There was just time for her to smile before the next calf, roped by the hind legs, was dragged on its back by a horseman to the site of surgery, where she and her partner wrestled it flat in the dirt.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

Beside me, Bud chafed at his exclusion from the action. “I did roping, until lately. I can’t ride no more, though; not since this damn-fool hernia.” He was eighty-six, going on eighty-seven, but wiry, compact, and with all his wits about him. He looked as if he still belonged inside the corral. “I miss it, you know. I was born to horses, and I did love to ride.”

A cherubic second- or third-grader, like a scrubbed altar boy, walked past, in grave possession of a plastic bucket labeled “Bridgeman’s Dairy Products.” The bucket was three-quarters full of testicles and blood.

“You like prairie oysters?” Bud said.

Awwwwww!

In 1910, the homesteaders had arrived on the prairie, full of ideas about how to create an ideal rural society on the empty land. In 1995, sitting on the corral fence, with all the conceited wisdom of hindsight, one could see that most of their ideas had been preposterous. The European farm village — even the Ohio farm village — could never have been transplanted to the dry plains. It wasn’t long before the society built by the homesteaders came tumbling down about their ears and forced most of them into a farther western exile.

Yet in the last sixty years a form of society had evolved here. It was more modest than the one envisioned by the early settlers. After the great humbling of the Dirty Thirties, people learned how to conform themselves to the nature of the place. The land allowed just so much habitation and farming, and no more. The chastened survivors cautiously rebuilt their world.

And here it was — in the cluster of well-dressed, well-fed families around the corral. One would never have guessed at the amount of ruination that had gone into the making of this scene, of country neighbors, at ease with themselves and each other. This was exactly how the Wollastons, Dockens, Yeargens and the rest must have imagined their new lives on the prairie, as a rooted and stable rural community, with its own local language and architecture, costumes and customs.

Awwwwwwwwww!

The last few days of May and the first days of June were branding season on the prairie: every ranch held its own branding, and every branding required the services of at least seven or eight neighboring families. At dawn, the dirt roads, usually empty, were crowded with people on horseback, and people in pickups towing loose boxes. On branding day, the most remote and lonely farmhouse became the center of a splendid fête champêtre.

For a week, I set my alarm for the paranoiac hour of 4:30 a.m., but I was never up early enough to catch the beginning of things. By the time I reached the appointed ranch, every hilltop had its motionless horseman, mounted in black silhouette against the salmon-pink sky. They were there to watch the escape routes and spy out stray cattle in the draws and coulees.

At the house, the older women and the youngest children assembled over coffee and cookies, while everyone else saddled up to join the drive, which began as an antlike file of cows and calves in the far distance, and swelled to a great drift of cattle, moving slowly ahead of the line of riders. Every minute or two, someone with a spinning lariat would break ranks, and gallop off on a diagonal to capture a runaway.

Over twenty or thirty square miles of open range, no cow, quietly browsing in a gully with its calf, escaped the ministrations of the riders and their lookout men. They policed the prairie, making a clean sweep of every inch of ground, then shoveled their enormous catch into the pen.

The full corral, with the trapped cattle hollering and climbing on each other’s backs in their panic, appeared to bulge and shudder with the noise and motion it was straining to contain. It looked to me as if it might burst apart at any second. Men, some mounted, some on foot, now entered this heaving chaos, armed with prods, and began to separate the cows from their calves. The men roared at the animals. The animals roared at the men. Portable fences were shunted about inside the corral. The composure of the horses during the mělée was extraordinary: they stood their ground, heads high, with supercilious been here, done it all before expressions in their eyes, while their riders yelled, and poked and kicked at the sea of hides around them.

It seemed a most unpromising way of establishing order and segregation, but in minutes it was done. The calves were inside the corral, and the cows were outside, moaning for their lost young. They shouldered up against the fence, sniffing and mooing, each one trying to locate its own calf among the 250 or so prisoners who now remained in the jail. The open window of the Jeep filled with the head of a distressed cow. Sorry!

The anguish of separation did not last long. The cows fell to grazing forgetfully among the yuccas. Consoled by food, they drifted back over the range, leaving their calves to whatever cruel and unusual punishments the men might have in store for them.

Then the branding began. There was a job for everyone, from the juvenile oyster collectors with their buckets, to the elderly lady in a veiled sun hat, who kept a tally of the castrations on a ring-bound reporter’s pad. Two teams of ropers, wrestlers, branders, cutters and inoculators worked side by side in unofficial competition. The average time taken to process a calf was about ninety seconds, though it must have seemed longer than that to the calf. To be seized by your heels, dragged, squirming, through the dust, and then to be pricked, branded, dehorned, and have your balls chopped off, would set you up with quite an experience for your one and a half minutes.

I watched through a fog of dust, and with mosquitoes raising welts around my wrists, yet I was rapt. It was like ballet, or football — people working in consort, wordlessly, with technical grace, and at speed. Like ballet or football, the branding offered a scale-model society, in which everybody had a place, everybody understood his or her own role, and in which the society managed to bring off something that no individual could possibly have achieved.

It was a stratified society, with its celebrities and peons. The ropers were the stars. In Stetsons and bandannas, lariats stiffly coiled in their left hands, they rode into the jostle of calves, spinning their ropes above their heads, just fast enough to keep the heavy, half-inch nylon braid aloft. Then, at a distance of around twenty feet, the noose was launched, and flicked under the hind feet of an unwary calf. The running bowline came tight, the bitter end of the rope was belayed with a round turn on the saddle horn, and the calf was hauled out of the corral, bouncing through the dust. Any sailor would have been lost in admiration at the display of negligently show-off ropemanship.

By far the youngest of the ropers was a ten-year-old named Will. His mother said that he’d been roping things in their backyard since he was four. He’d roped the cat, the dog, the potted plants, the chickens, the mailbox and any members of his family that were fool enough to step inside lassoing range. This year he was riding alongside the men for the first time. In a brand-new shirt of purple and turquoise, and a very old black Stetson, he wore a look of intense, prideful concentration. His whole face condensed around his eyes as he took aim at a calf, and the weight of the animal was enough to drag him halfway out of the saddle before he could cleat the rope home. He had fewer misses than most of the men.

I talked to another boy of Will’s age, who was sucking at a can of Pepsi after a forty-five-minute stint of calf wrestling.

“How long have you been doing this job?”

“I dunno. Too long, I guess.” The offhand drawl was self-consciously cultivated, and so was the boy’s blue-eyed, long-distance, prairie stare. His face was already weathered by the wind and sun, with deep creases beginning to form around his eyes and lips.

Growing up out here, these western kids were steeped in a culture that was impermeably regional. Their family satellite dishes put MTV in every ranch house; but MTV and all it stood for did not seem to have caught on in these parts, where children looked like their parents, talked like their parents and aired the same political grudges as their parents did.

When Bud’s granddaughter came out of the corral, her braid unstranding into baggy-wrinkle, she joined me on the fence. She said that in the spring she and her mother had made a 3,000-mile cross-country road trip, to inspect the three colleges that had offered her scholarships. She had turned down the University of Montana at Missoula, and Portland State in Oregon, in favor of North Dakota State at Fargo.

I said: “You didn’t like Missoula? It always strikes me as the perfect college town — that mix of industry and smart academics. They’ve got a lot of good people there. Good students, too.”

“It’s full of liberals there,” she said.

“Liberals? In the School of Agriculture?”

“Enviro types,” she said. “It was too liberal. I don’t agree with what they teach there.”

“And Portland?”

“They’ve got a liberal bias there, too. It’s a problem.”

“But Fargo turned out to be illiberal enough for you—”

“There aren’t too many tree huggers in Fargo.”

“It’s funny,” I said. “When I was applying to go to university in England, all I wanted was to get the hell out of my parents’ world. Out of the village, the church and all the rest of it. I ached to escape to the big city …”

In her cool, sideways glance, I saw myself reflected as a weird old bald guy with an accent.

“Fargo’s a big city,” she said.

She went back into the corral to wrestle calves. A few minutes later, her grandfather was telling me about his two major experiences of traveling outside the region. In June 1944, stationed in southern England, his Montana regiment had taken part in the Normandy landings. Most of his friends had been killed in the first hour. He had gone on, through France and into Germany. After the nightmare of the landings, his memories were all of European agriculture — of being astonished at the tiny fields, hedged and walled, and green beyond belief. The war had mercifully given way to this restorative vision of plump dairy cattle in pocket-handkerchief-sized squares of buttercups and clover. His great regret, he told me, was that he never managed to talk shop with a French or German farmer.

His second trip had taken place recently. At the urging of his family, he had gone to Florida on vacation. There had been talk of getting a condo down there so that Bud and his wife could escape the Montana winters. Like Europe, Florida had been a revelation. At Miami Beach, Bud had confronted an incomprehensibly alien America.

“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” he said, and tilted his head to make sure that his granddaughter was out of earshot. “Florida! They say it’s a tropical paradise. I’ll tell you: it’s full of derelict cocksuckers with scum as thick as that all over their eyes.”

“Were they … liberals?” I said, fishing.

But he misheard me.

“We don’t have too many of those round here,” Bud said. He laughed. “But they’ve got one or two out in Baker.”

After the branding came the slap-up lunch, in the shade and cool of an open-fronted barn. Long trestle tables had been set, coolers piled high with cans of beer and soda pop. From the house, women carried vats of mashed potato, ham, pot-roast beef, sweet corn and beans. The ropers, calf wrestlers, castrators milled in the barn, their faces dusty and glowing, drinks in hand. The lunchtime party had been going on for more than a week; tomorrow it would shift to the Williams place, the day after, it would reconvene at another ranch. For the duration of the brandings, these people would live in a society as close-knit and gossipy as that of debutantes in the heyday of the London “season.”

Looking from face to face, trying to guess who was related to whom, and how, I realized that I was among a people in the singular. The individuals in the barn were recent descendants of Bessarabians, Scots, English, Germans, Swedes; their grandparents had come from every kind of human settlement, from great cities to tiny villages; yet in two or three generations they had come to resemble each other as closely as any gathering of broad-bottomed Welsh hill farmers or Gaelic-speaking crofters.

The old war between ranchers and homesteaders had long ago been settled, in sex and marriage. Bud Brown had grown up on a 300-section ranch, where he learned to deride the “honyockers”; his wife came from a half-section homestead south of Ismay. And so it was with almost every family in the barn. On every modern ranch, there was a parental or grandparental memory of a homestead, and often the homestead itself was there on the ranch, as Grandma’s Place, or Uncle Bill’s Place. So, too, the division between ranching and farming had blurred: in the 1990s, ranchers farmed and farmers ranched. Where the land permitted, you grew wheat; where it didn’t, you raised cattle. The exigencies of the land — which had forced thousands of people to leave it in penury — had at last created a society that was whole, integrated, happy (it seemed), and modestly prosperous. Looking at the people in the barn, one would never guess the rancor and despair that had gone into their making.

I introduced myself to my host for the day, Merle Clark. I had seen and heard him once before, when he announced the Independence Day rodeo at Marmarth, North Dakota, the previous year. Then, his voice had come out of a Tannoy speaker above my head, a twangy baritone, harping on about the “cowboy way.”

“Today,” said the badly adjusted voice, part-screech, part-echo, “it seems like America has lost its way. Seems like our country is lost in the wilderness. Don’t it seem like that to you?”

Up in the bleachers, a lot of hat brims nodded.

“And you know what to do when you’re lost in a wilderness. You go back to the last fork in the trail, and make a right turn. In these troubled times, maybe America needs to go back and find that fork in the trail. Find the cowboy way. You could always trust the cowboy for a fair handshake. For getting along right with his neighbor. For respecting his animals. And for being a good steward of the land …”

In person, Merle Clark was not the bucolic Ross Perot figure of his July 4th speech. Skirting fifty, tall, with horn-rimmed specs, his tan face pitted with old acne scars, he was soft-spoken and incongruously bookish-seeming. His family had been ranching here on the Little Missouri River, just across the state line into North Dakota, since 1893, Clark had taken on the job of looking after the place’s history, from the dinosaurs on. He was a trustee of the Bowman museum, to which he donated dinosaur remains found on his land. He was halfway through restoring his grandfather’s Model T. In the barn, glass-fronted bookshelves held what he had been able to salvage of the Clark family past: his great-grandfather’s silver spurs, a Colt revolver, Jurassic fossils picked up on the ranch, tools, tack, belt buckles — a boy’s treasury of antique thingumajigs and what-you-may-call-its.

Showing off his collection, he talked of how the drawing of the Montana-Dakota line, at 104°W, had sliced the dry plains in half and robbed the plains people of their political voice. On the Dakota side, power lay in the lake-riddled farmland east of the Missouri, from where most of the state’s senators and congressmen were elected to Washington. In Montana, the relatively populous west, with its forests, mines, mills, farms and cities, could always outvote the flat and treeless east.

We were in a state that wasn’t on the map of the United States. Daktana, or Monota. It had a distinct geography and economy, but it had been effectively disenfranchised by its more crowded neighbors. So it was a natural target area for outsiders with big ideas. The latest scheme was to give the land back to the American bison, and turn it into a “Buffalo Commons.”

“We first read about it in Newsweek magazine. We thought, somebody’s jokin’! But there it was. They called us ‘The Outback.’ This Buffalo Commons thing began with a couple of kids from Rutgers University. In New Jersey. They opened a book — didn’t bother to read between the lines — and figured they could reinvent the old frontier here. The Wild West, where the buffalo roam … Then we realized they were serious. The government was financing studies on it—”

It was the old story, of the prairie as a blank page. The New Jersey wilderness enthusiasts were in the tradition of James J. Hill and Hardy Webster Campbell, sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.

“You go through four generations of the snow, and the droughts, and the dust storms, and you grow roots. Those kids, it didn’t seem to occur to them that there are people here — that we’re trying to make a living, trying to raise our families … that we still have hopes. We’re not looking for ‘compensation.’ We live here. It’s been real scary — and it’s not over yet.”

I saw why Merle Clark needed his history collection. The family mementoes were proof that the plains were not a tabula rasa. To outsiders, this land still looked like space, and could as easily be a weapons test site, or a safari park. To the ranching families, it was a place; landscape, not mere land, with all the shape and particularity of home.

“I’ve got twenty-seven miles of fence on my place. You ever seen a buffalo wade through a fence?”

I stood in line before the vats of food, and carried a heaped plate over to the Clark table, where Bud Brown, his son Johnny, and one of the ropers, a gaunt, chain-smoking, crevassed Marlboro Man, were already seated. One way in which people became a people here was simple weathering: after sixty years of exposure to this climate, almost everyone’s face looked like the badlands — brown, eroded, mapped with branching creek beds and coulees.

They were talking about dinosaurs. The Little Missouri valley was a dinosaur graveyard, and it had lately begun to attract other, unwanted outsiders, with designs on the land. A dinosaur skull fetched $25,000 on the fossil market; a partial skeleton, half a million and upwards. Freelance paleontologists with axes, shovels and flashlights were to be found trespassing on ranches after dark. Earlier in the year, a tour-bus driver on the dinosaur-footprint trail had got wind of a section of backbone that had been laid bare by the spring rains: he had issued his passengers with tire irons and screwdrivers, and left a ragged hole in the ground.

“… eight inches of bone to an inch of brain,” said Johnny Brown, of Tyrannosaurus rex.

“Sounds like he ought to have had a job with the EPA,” said the cadaverous smoker, in the gruff, smileless way of the western ironist, and steered the conversation round to the endlessly fruitful topic of the arrogant stupidity of the federal agencies.

Ranchers and farmers, with their wheat subsidies and grazing rights, had more tax dollars in their pockets than any other single group of Americans, not excluding, say, single teenage black mothers on welfare; but if they were grateful for this public largesse, they kept their feelings well concealed. The agencies — the BLM, the EPA, OSHA, the Forest Service, and the rest — were hated as nests of big-city liberal types with college degrees and no understanding of the land. Little had changed since Percy Wollaston endured the lecture on tree planting by the Prairie County extension agent in 1912: the federal agents of the 1990s were seen as a bunch of officious snoops, full of misbegotten ideas, whose mission it was to destroy the farmers’ and ranchers’ traditional way of life. Because they were greatly feared, they had given rise to a genre of folktale in which they were represented as laughably gullible and inept.

Within the last six months, “federal agents” had introduced wolves to the Yellowstone National Park, whose eastern border lay about 300 miles from the Little Missouri. (“Do you know a wolf travels from thirty to forty miles in one night?” said Merle Clark.) The roper had it on good authority that an organized group of vigilantes had already shot one wolf and transferred its radio collar to a coyote. “He’s getting them real excited out there. They’re learning a whole lot about wolf behavior in the wild that isn’t in their college tex’books.”

Bud Brown had a story about two young women from the BLM who had shown up at the Brown ranch, arriving in a liveried sports-utility vehicle with a loose box hitched to the back. The women’s manner was high-handed; they were impatient to start on their inspection, and made a show of looking at their watches while Johnny Brown finished off a job in the yard. “Only trouble was, when the time came, they couldn’t get their horses out of that trailer. They tried pulling them, they tried talking to them, they tried banging on the front from outside … So Johnny went in there, and they backed out for him, sweet as anything. They were fine show horses …”

Bud went on to admire the agents’ riding kit, their new boots and whips, their handsomely cut jodhpurs. “Oh, you could see they’d been to ridin’ school.” His son had led them off, at a brisk trot, on a tour of the property. Bud said: “I had to laugh, when I saw their little asses bouncing up down in their saddles, pretty as all hell.

“Johnny, he was kind of thorough. Didn’t want them girls to miss nothing. So it took ’em a while to see all thirty-six sections … Time they got back to the house, it was past nightfall — and you could have sold their little asses for raw hamburger.”

“So they were back next week, eager for another ride?”

“Funny thing: we haven’t had a squeak out of the BLM since that day.”

Even as I laughed on cue, I saw that these stories, about urban outsiders hoodwinked and discomfited by crafty locals, all had a double edge. I took them as fair warning.

When lunch was over, I joined a small group of women who were going to view Mrs. Clark’s new quilting machine. The machine lived in a trailer a quarter of a mile from the house, and in its size and its profusion of gadgetry it rivaled the latest piece of agricultural technology from John Deere.

The trailer walls were hung with examples of Mrs. Clark’s work: sequin-studded arabesques, a frieze of Bambi-style fawns, partridges and pear trees, a cut-out silver river, an oriental magician.

“Merle designs most of my quilts. You might not think it, but he’s an artist. He has such an imagination!”

The machine did not make the quilts — that was still a matter of patient, long-winter-evening handcraft. It finished them. So Mrs. Clark took in quilts sewn by ranchers’ wives from all over eastern Montana and western North Dakota, and pumped them with a million stitches, to give them a factory gloss. While her husband was out on the ranch during the day, she was here in the trailer, listening to the radio and feeding other people’s quilts into her machine.

Quilting was her lifeline to the outside world. It kept her on the telephone to her customers, and it took her away to quilting shows and conventions — to Billings, Bismarck, Rapid City, Sheridan … These outings were, she said, the highspots of her annual calendar. She liked the long solitary drives, and then the bright buzz of society at the end of the road: the name tags, the shared tables, the sales pitches, the quilts and the quilters.

“Portland, Oregon,” said Mrs. Clark. “That’s my kind of city—”

“Yes, I like Portland, too,” I said. “It’s big and small in just the right proportions.”

“I’d like to live in Portland—”

“Really? Surely you wouldn’t want to trade …” I flapped my hand at the view from the trailer window: the dinosaur-encrusted rocks descending to the river, the people on horseback under the cottonwoods by the house, the great, lumpy sweep of the Clarks’ land as it rolled away to meet the distant sky. “Wouldn’t the claustrophobia of the city get to you inside a week?”

“I don’t know.” She laughed. “There are times … It gets desolate and lonesome here. You should know that.”

The Clark place was sixteen miles from the nearest paved road; seven miles from the nearest neighbor.

“A bit of culture does no harm,” said Mrs. Clark.

A bit of culture. When I stayed in Baker, most evenings I drove twenty miles east for dinner — to the Pastime Supper Club, in Marmarth, North Dakota. Marmarth was a desiccated railroad town, spawned by the Milwaukee Road where it crossed the Little Missouri. Each time I went there, the town appeared to have grown a little smaller. It consisted of a few dozen surviving families, living on food stamps in trailers and tar-paper shacks. Its brick Main Street had deteriorated into a line of boarded-up shells. The painted letters over these dead businesses still said “Bank,” “Hardware,” “General Stores.” It would take another year or so before the words faded completely out of the brickwork.

There were two surprising holdouts. One was the old theater, kept alive by a company of keen amateurs. You could see ranchers playing Shakespeare in Marmarth. The other holdout was the Pastime. It was entered through the kind of crepuscular beer joint in which one might expect scuffles to erupt as extensions of normal conversation. Beyond the black bead curtain at the end of the bar lay Marmarth’s oddest piece of real estate, a 30-foot by 25-foot chunk of suburban southern California.

The lighting was low, the lime-green walls were hung with framed stills from silent movies. The tables were set with green linen tablecloths and napkins to match, with a vase of fresh flowers to each table. The high-school waitstaff were outfitted in tight black skirts and trousers, with white dress shirts and black ties. The male diners were eating filet mignon and Chateaubriand steaks with their Stetsons set back on the heads, and exchanging rainfall figures in one-hundredths of an inch.

There was a wine list. It was short, but it was a wine list. There were escargots on the hors d’oeuvres menu. Also prairie oysters. The aquarium-colored dining room, with its young waiters hovering like skinny angelfish, made me, too, feel pleasantly buoyant, as if the passage through the bead curtain had abruptly halved my specific gravity.

The restaurant was run by the daughter-in-law of the woman who owned the building and presided over the bar next door. Before her marriage, the younger woman, a local girl, had escaped North Dakota for Los Angeles, and had worked as a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Ojai, not far from Ventura. When she returned to her hometown, she came back with a vision of metropolitan high life, which she set out to re-create in the derelict lumber room behind her mother-in-law’s bar.

Her displaced trattoria struck a nerve. People came from all over to dine at the Pastime; they skidded over the gumbo from remote ranches; they made the journey from Dickinson, Bowman, even Miles City. People I knew said they liked the Pastime because it served the best steak they’d ever eaten, but I doubted this explanation. Cattle ranchers and their wives don’t make a 200-mile round trip for the sake of a piece of dead cow. It was the big-city glow of the Pastime that drew them, its manager’s nostalgic recollections of her salad days among the palm trees and tuxedos.

One night when I was dining there, I was surprised to hear, in the murmur of dry, western voices, a too-emphatic British one. I tuned in to the conversation two tables off, and soon picked up its drift. The foreigner was a Manchester businessman, in Baker to do a deal over some by-product of the nearby oil field. He had flown in from London, via Minneapolis and Rapid City, that day, and had not yet changed out of the herringbone-tweed suit that he’d evidently worn for the flight. His complexion was gray-cheese. He had thyroidal, tree-frog eyes.

Given that we were in the Pastime, it was hardly surprising that he didn’t seem to know where he was. He gazed into his glass of Cabernet and asked, “Would you still call this the Middle West, then?”

His hosts, four men and one woman, were nervous of him. They were still figuring out how to play this queer English fish. Trying to make him feel at home, they questioned him politely about his homeland. They touched the usual bases — the distance between Manchester and London, and between Manchester and Scotland, the domestic troubles of the Windsors, Margaret Thatcher, soccer fans, and — the consuming passion in these parts — rainfall, about which the Englishman was disappointingly inexplicit. For each topic, he had a jokey, shopworn anecdote, designed to deflect the questioner. He had probably been put through exactly the same hoopla last week, in Nairobi, or Kuala Lumpur. At last, one of the men invited him to enlarge on “the socialized medicine you have over there.”

“The NHS?” said the businessman wearily. I could see him casting his eye along the dusty top shelf of his anecdote collection.

“You go into a hospital in England now, and nobody speaks English. The doctors are all from Pakky Stan …” He was sleepwalking through the story, which concerned a woman who wanted to have a baby, at a fertility clinic, where three Pakistani doctors (why three?) were on her case.

He did the doctors, in turn, in a Welsh accent, which may have unnecessarily confused his listeners.

“First doctor comes in, says, ‘Madam, you are inconceivable!’ Second doctor comes in, says, ‘Madam, you are unbearable!’ Third doctor comes in, says, ‘Madam, you are impregnable!’ ”

It seemed to me that the man had remembered the bones but forgotten the flesh of this story. Some major ingredient was missing. However, on the word “impregnable,” the storyteller chuckled, terminally, in a signal for the laughter to become general. The Americans waited for more, quizzed their visitor with baffled smiles, then went nh-nh! nh-nh! nh-nh!, baring their teeth like unhappy chimps.

“Would you care for another glass of wine, Mr. Robertshaw?”

It was Cosmopolitan Night at the Pastime Supper Club.

In Seattle, I watched the Late Show with David Letterman, for news of Ismay and its reinvented self, Joe, Montana. I saw the usual string of actors trying to plug (in the new, wry, unpluggy, postmodern way) their current movies. I saw a football player, but he wasn’t Joe Montana. I saw a performing dog who got stage fright, and failed — to everyone’s satisfaction — to do his tricks. Letterman himself, with jaded eyes and contrived farmboy grin, presided over the nightly parade of foolery like a babysitter with a bag of poisoned candy in his pocket.

The audience roared when Letterman threw simple folks to the lions, and there was a clear space on the show for the Nemitz family and the Joe, Montana, story. But each night this space was filled by other eager victims, like the Canadian gas-station owner whose claim to celebrity was that he was named Dick Assman. Mr. Assman seemed happy to be (so to speak) the butt of Mr. Letterman’s wit, and he reported, via satellite, that his gasoline sales were soaring.

If Ismay could get its four minutes on Letterman, the prairie roads would be packed solid with tourist cars, and tourist dollars, on July 3, Joe Montana Day. I badly wanted it to happen, because it would produce a queer, distorted echo of the past, with a swarm of novelty seekers descending on the town, much as the credulous homesteaders had descended on it in 1910.

Something was going on out there. On June 22 a fax arrived in the offices of a Seattle newspaper, addressed to no one in particular. It was from Linda Dozoretz Communications, Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. It read:

STATEMENT REGARDING JOE MONTANA

Despite published reports, Joe Montana never agreed to appearances this month in Joe and/or Billings, Montana. He hopes to be able to visit Montana in the future.

So the town, or its agent, was at least managing to turn the blades of the rumor mill — and if the rumors were reaching Sunset Boulevard, perhaps Joe, Montana, didn’t need the services of David, Letterman.

At the end of the month, I drove to Montana, and arrived in Ismay to find three big Winnebagos with out-of-state plates already camped out. Their owners were retirees with family connections here. They had come from cities in Utah, Washington and California to pay homage to the half-sections of land on which their parents had come to grief. Prosperous, in summer pastels, raking the landscape with video cameras, they were representatives of the great homesteading diaspora, and hardly less conspicuous here than a party of American-Jewish tourists on a ceremonial visit to their ancestral Russian shtetl.

In the town, each ruined house was being cordoned off with plastic tape, as if it were a crime scene. Prohibitive notices were everywhere: Private, Keep Out, No Entry. Ismay now saw itself as famous, and was affecting the surly manners of a besieged celeb. Across from the post office, people were unloading Porta Pottis from a truck; I counted twenty-eight yellow plastic cabins on site so far, and there were more still to come. I imagined the Porta Pottis dotted over the prairie, where they would look uncannily like claim shacks in Eve Cameron’s pictures.

Loreen Nemitz was on duty in the post office, and I asked her how many visitors were now expected.

“Four thousand minimum. Some people are saying six to eight.”

A stage was going up outside the new fire hall and community center. A man with a tractor was plowing the rodeo arena. More lengths of tape were being stretched across the prairie to make designated parking lots.

I watched these preparations with the critical eye of an old hand at such events: my own teenage summers were darkened by the loom of the church fete, when, as a son of the cloth, I was coerced into trimming the shaggy vicarage hedge, carrying tubular stacking chairs from the parish hall, hanging Tannoy speakers in the firs, pitching the tombola tent and selling tickets at the gate, where I scowled at the punters from behind dark glasses and did my best to pretend that I was far elsewhere. Joe Montana Day had all the marks of a church fete. There was the same local big-wiggery — the same officious fellow taking command of the microphone to test the sound system (“Testing! Testing!”), the same self-appointed fusspot on her endless, circular tour of inspection, the same self-important elders dishing out orders to the young.

But this was a fete with great expectations. There hung over the scene the palpable faith that July 3 would sell Ismay/Joe back to the outside world and put it once again on the big map. The slogan on the T-shirts read “Don’t Pass Up Joe, Montana!”—and the negative construction betrayed the fact that it was a lot easier to pass up Joe, Montana, than it was to make the detour for it. So the mood of the preparation was tense. When I mentioned the name David Letterman, I got the evil eye.

On the morning of the third, there were roadblocks on the three tracks that led into town, with a $5-a-head entry fee, and marshals to direct the traffic. My car was consigned to a lonely spot of prairie, fenced off, with white tape, for the first time in sixty years. I walked through the pleasantly uncrowded streets of collapsed houses, said hello to the Fallon Creek CowBelles, who were setting up their Bossy Bingo stall (you win if the cow poops on your number), and made my way toward the commotion at the far north end of the town, where the parade was billed to start.

From their tarpaulin shrouds at the backs of barns, the homesteaders’ dream machines had risen again for Joe Montana Day. I recognized them from the advertising pages of the ancient farming magazines — the steam tractors, threshers, balers, binders, along with the Model T Fords, the horse buggies, the vintage fire engine. The hot morning air throbbed with the whump-whump-whump of the tractors, and was rent by the soprano whine of elderly starter motors. A dog howled back at the fire-truck siren. In the windless clearing in the cottonwoods, the smell, of mingled dust, oil, steam, horse dung and Gatorade, hung heavily, as thick as fog.

Officials from the Nemitz family stood by, talking importantly into CB radios. The Hampshire churchwardens of my youth would have given their eye teeth for those CBs, and the air of military business that they conferred on the event. Zero hour was being delayed for fifteen minutes, due to technical problems. All the machines worked, but it appeared to be impossible to persuade them all to work at the same time. No sooner had the dormant Model T been woken with a crank handle, than the steam tractor just ahead of it gave a sigh, and fell asleep. Several of the drivers were at least as old as their vehicles, and showed the same inclination to doze off.

At last the parade began to move, led, on horseback, by Gene Garber, a rancher with thirty sections to the west of Ismay. His daughter-in-law, riding just behind him, carried the flag of Montana, with its roundel of mountains and trees, a plow in the foreground, and the motto Oro y Plata, “Gold and Silver.” Garber, magnificently booted, spurred, buckled and batted, carried the Stars and Stripes, and rode as if he were taking the cavalry into battle, his eyes sternly fixed ahead on some distant point, possibly in Wyoming.

Both the Nemitzes and the Garbers were relative newcomers here. The Nemitzes had come to Ismay in the 1970s, the Garbers in the late 1950s. As the architects of Ismay’s change of name to Joe, they had annoyed some of the older families, who saw the Nemitzes and Garbers as Johnny-come-latelies, selling to a Kansas City radio station a hometown that was not theirs to sell. This, too, rang a familiar bell with me, schooled as I was in the stab-in-the-back politics of the church fete.

With farts of black smoke and noisy gouts of steam, the antique farm machinery got under way. An open tourer rolled past, on narrow, whitewall tires, loaded to the gunwales with passengers. “Farming In E. Montana For 4 Generations!” said the cardboard placard, propped on the running board. Then came an evangelist, riding a horse with whom he was evidently on uneasy terms.

“Woe! Woe! Woe!” he shouted, like George Fox calling down the wrath of God on the bloody city of Lichfield. His placard said: “Jesus Is Lord — Bringing The Gospel To The West.”

His horse drew its lips back from around a set of long, smoker’s teeth, snickered, and began to walk, quite slowly, on its hind legs. The evangelist clung to the horse’s neck, dropping his Bible onto the dirt at my feet. I picked it up for him. It was a New Testament, in a modern demotic translation, bound in black plastic. While the horse pranced, and the unhappy evangelist tried to wrap himself around it as if he were climbing a rope, I thumbed quickly through the pages. There were many underlinings in blue ballpoint, accompanied by single-word annotations in a large and angular hand. The end of the book was so studded with these additions that it was a different color from the rest: the evangelist was a big fan of Revelation — though any dreams he may have harbored of being a horseman of the Apocalypse were now being rudely shattered.

The other man of God in the procession, Father Tobin (the man responsible for the graffiti on the south wall of the Catholic chapel), had wisely chosen to walk. He wore a Stetson above his black clerical stock and dog collar — a combination that made him look like the gunman who has to be run out of town by James Stewart or John Wayne.

Families rode by in traps and creaky wagons, six disabled veterans from Miles City were jammed into a Model T, Ric Holden drove a late-model Buick advertising “Ric Holden For State Senate,” and, from the flatbed of a Chevy pickup adorned with the slogan “Forsyth — Goosehunting Capital of Montana,” a man with a black box and a six-foot antenna was radioing instructions to a lifelike mechanical goose, which padded along on its own, a little way behind the truck.

Long gaps kept on opening up in the parade, as sections of it got stuck behind a stalled engine, or the evangelist’s ungodly beast. The Forsyth goose wandered off into the grass and died. The marshals, busy with their CBs, stopped and restarted the procession every few minutes, but each time they got it mended, another piece broke.

One machine remained serenely in motion. The Grasshopper motor mower dealer had attached himself to the end of the parade, and, when everything else was at a standstill, he was doing pirouettes and fouettés aboard his ruby-colored demo model. Spinning slowly on, as it were, a dime, he chatted up potential customers, including me.

For $4,500, this paragon among mowers could be mine: it would go anywhere, cut grass in the most awkward corner, and give the smoothest, quietest ride of any machine now on the market.

At noon, I tried to gauge the size of the crowd, counting it off in blocks of twenty. I reckoned that there were 360 people, including everyone involved in the parade. It was a fine, good-neighborly turnout for a church fete, but it was several thousand short of the number required to bounce Ismay back into the mainstream. Up at the fire hall, where the boxes of Joe, Montana, T-shirts, caps, coffee mugs, sweatshirts, bumper stickers and cozies were stacked from floor to ceiling, there was no sign of active trading.

Keenly disappointing as this may have been to the Joeites, the Ismayites seemed entirely happy with the way things were panning out. The prairie families had the day to themselves. They didn’t want to expose their world to outsiders. Outsiders were either asking footling questions about whether cows could really sleep standing up, or they were sizing up your ranch for its potential as wolf habitat. When outsiders were about, front doors had to be kept locked. With the realization that the tourist hordes had, after all, decided to pass up Joe, Montana, there came a light breeze from the north, which cleared the air of the smells of the parade, and a sudden, perceptible lightening of spirits, as if the real holiday could now begin.

By rodeo time, 3 p.m., the crowd had thickened, to around 800 people. Pickup trucks were backed in line along the side of the arena, with women and children seated on the open tailgates, while men convened by the beer tent, or leaned against the fence, arms spread-eagled, hat brims pulled down low over their eyes.

This wasn’t a rodeo for tourists. There was none of the usual malarkey — no yee-haw! bull riding, no down-home drollery from the commentary box. It was a serious exhibition of everyday ranch work, done against a stopwatch and before an audience of several hundred knowledgeable critics.

The still and watchful crowd pressed against the fence. Inside the arena, long stretches of uneventfulness were broken by sudden bursts of controlled pandemonium. A frightened heifer, released from the traps, tore through the dust and collided with a fence post, followed, a split second later, by a horseman with a lariat. The ground underfoot quaked to the pile-driver thumping of hooves — and, for a moment, the world in front of one’s face became all horse, its hot bulk and panting breath, its unexpected loudness, like a truck on a wet expressway. There was just time to register the spurred boot digging into its belly, the shivering muscle in its flank, the flash of an upturned hoof, before it swerved, and whatever was happening was happening far elsewhere.

“Nine-point-four seconds.”

A cautious ripple of applause.

“Nice horse,” said a preteen connoisseur in a straw hat, meaning that the rider wasn’t up to much.

One competitor particularly interested me. Older by a decade than most of his rivals, and correspondingly jowlier and paunchier, Jim Neary was known to me by sight from his campaign posters in Baker, where he was running for county sheriff on the Democratic ticket. “Honest, Reliable, Trustworthy Jim Neary” was how he billed himself. In this reactionary part of the state, where the word Democrat tended to mean liberal environmentalist sonofabitch, Neary was obviously going to have an uphill struggle in the November election. So he was taking his campaign from rodeo to rodeo, demonstrating that even a Democrat who could rope a calf in less than ten seconds must have some good in him.

As it turned out, honest, reliable, trustworthy Jim Neary was unplaced in the calf roping and lost the election.

The rodeo’s finer points were too fine for me, and I slipped away when it was still in full swing. Beyond the arena, the ruined village was empty now. The Fallon Creek CowBelles had gone. The wind blew a single paper cup down Main Street, and the voice of the rodeo announcer over the loudspeaker quickly gave way to the off-key, tin-whistle flutings of the meadowlarks.

The piles of Joe, Montana, merchandise would take their place beside the Ismay, Montana: An Opportunity For You pamphlet of 1920. The T-shirts will soon turn into field-mouse nests, and the souvenir mugs will eventually find their way, as pottery shards, into the soil. Someone, sometime, will unearth them, along with the chipped stone arrowheads of the Plains Indians.

By nine next morning, the dismantling of the show was nearly complete. The Porta Pottis, most of them in mint condition, were back aboard their truck. A crew of volunteers had been at work since dawn, and many of the younger men had the blanched and jittery look of people nursing unaccustomed hangovers. There had been a fireworks display, followed by a dance in the fire hall. Drink had been taken. Some of the revelers had fallen asleep in the dirt among the ruins. The prevailing mood was one of crapulous melancholy.

Gene Garber’s son, Warren, said, “I don’t think there’ll be another Joe Montana Day next year — or ever.” He had worked as hard as anyone on the preparations for the great day, and he seemed personally mortified by its failure. “We had perfect weather. You couldn’t have asked for better. But the people never came!”

“You needed that spot on the Letterman program.”

“Letterman!”

Warren Garber was tombstone-bearded, with a tendency to shamble, bearishly. In my presence at least, his habitual expression was a sleepy smile, half-astonished, half-amused. When talking, he would pause to shake his head vigorously, as if trying to rid himself of a bonnetful of troublesome bees.

“You know the media,” he said. “In your opinion, as someone from outside … was there something we didn’t do right?”

“Last year, the Joe thing was a novelty,” I said. “But you can’t be a novelty two years running. The caravan moved on. You were last year’s news.”

“We were going to be on Letterman on June 15. We thought it was all fixed.” He shook his head. Those bees again. “If it had only been last year, with the weather we had yesterday … It would have been — incredible! It would have been out of this world.”

From talking of the perfidy of the Letterman people, we drifted into Warren’s favorite theme with me — the rank ignorance of country life shown by all the urban visitors he’d ever met. Warren had featured in the film made last year by the San Francisco TV crew. He had hung out with this bunch of city bumpkins, and found them wonderfully stupid. He was incredulous at the things they didn’t know, about cattle, and crops, and farm machinery, and the Montana winter. He fixed me with an accusative eye. “Some of those people … just because they have a septic tank, they think they live ‘in the country.’ They have no conception! It’s unreal!”

He affected an air of benevolent pity for the know-nothing urbanites. In Billings, Warren had seen at first hand the horrors with which big-city people had daily to contend — the desperate crush of humanity, the ceaseless noise, the loneliness, the man-made cliffs that savagely curtailed the vision.

“You saw all this in Billings?”

“I don’t know how people can stand to live in a city like Billings,” Warren said. He shook his head and guffawed at the insanity of the world.

He had visited rural Minnesota, and found it barely more tolerable than the Great Wen of Billings. There, the trees had closed in on him. “You couldn’t see but half a mile,” he complained.

More than anyone else I met, Warren Garber was a creature of the open plains; a claustrophobe and an agoraphobe, for whom the America he saw on television was a bewildering foreign country. He disapproved of it, but hankered after its good opinion. He had badly wanted to be on David Letterman.

“Can I ask you just one thing? There’s something I want to know—” He gave his brains a thorough shaking, and from deep inside his beard he produced his question. “The fireworks. You saw our fireworks. Well — what I want to ask is — were they like what you’d expect at a fireworks display where you come from … back East?”

I had to admit that I had left long before the fireworks.

“You should have stayed,” he said.