Bad Land: An American Romance

9. Woods and Water

WINTER ARRIVED EARLY ON THE PRAIRIE IN 1995. On the national weather map, the northern plains were decorated with snowflake symbols in the last week of October, and when I reached Terry, at dusk on November 2, the temperature was down to 0°F and falling fast. The streets of the town were rutted ice. I checked into the old Kempton Hotel, where I was given a room the size of a shoe box, heated by an elderly gothic radiator with intestinal problems. Its innards hissed and gurgled, and it gave the tiny room a climate that an orangutan, fresh from the Borneo jungle, might have found homely, but I did not.

I stepped down from the tropics into the Arctic, and negotiated the slippery block between the hotel and Bud & Bette’s Bar-Cafe, a mercifully temperate zone. In the summer, I had admired Bud’s collections of souvenir Jim Beam bottles and Charles M. Russell prints. He now dug out something he thought might interest me — a 1916 map of the Milwaukee Road line in Montana, with stations marked on it that had long disappeared from the modern state atlas.

I copied their names into my notebook … Calypso, Bonfield, Kinsey, Tusler, Paragon, Orinoco, Porcupine, Malaga … The map dated from the glory days of high rainfall and rising grain prices, when the homesteaders had been riding their deceptive tide of good luck. By 1916, all the government claims had been taken, but there was still land available for those who had money. Private entrepreneurs had bought up thousands of railroad sections, and squatted on them, waiting for the boom. In 1916, with eager would-be farmers fired up by the homesteaders’ success, the entrepreneurs were selling off their holdings.

This map had been published by the Mabon Land Company, which announced that it had 25,000 acres for sale, at prices ranging from $15.50 to $30.00 an acre. The pitch read:

Come to Terry, where Success awaits you, where a hospitable people will welcome you and pull together to help one another regardless of station, church, or creed.

Go with us to MARVELOUS EASTERN MONTANA!

Two booths away, and facing me, sat a chalk-faced man who was the best part of a decade older than the Mabon Company map. He was toying with a plate of liver and onions, and keeping up a conversation with the family in the booth immediately behind him. I was the topic of discussion. The man eyed me intently for a while, then said: “Looks like a stranger to me, too.” He spoke loudly, with the happy solipsism of the very deaf. “Yeah. He looks to me like he’s just come off the railroad—”

It was nice to be taken for that classic figure of Terry’s history — the hopeful stranger, fresh off the train, dreaming of wheat fields and fat cattle. In the current issue of the Terry Tribune, I found an ad for a farm:

203 ac irrigated land, +149 ac dryland pasture, shop, 5,000 bu grain storage, 120 ac beef allotment, 2 feedlots with 1,000 hd capacity.

The asking price for this prime slab of well-watered eastern Montana was $285,000—not impossibly more than I might get for my Seattle house, on a scrap of urban ground that I could spit across. It looked like a fine opportunity for someone; not quite me, but I could feel the temptation of it on my own pulse. During the last two years, I had had some close calls with such fantasies. One could buy odd bits of prairie here for $50 to $100 an acre, abandoned houses frequently included; a fact that I had to handle gingerly, lest the whim of a morning should get me into really deep water.

But the short walk back to the hotel was cold enough to freeze that dream stone-dead. (No wonder the railroad pamphlets used to recommend that the emigrant should arrive no later than early September.) On the porch of the Kempton, the thermometer read minus 12°F, and the parked Jeep was sheathed in a crust of black ice.

The only telephone was beside the Coke machine in the hotel lobby — an unspoiled period interior, whose furnishings belonged to the transition period between the twilight of torn-leather-and-horsehair-stuffing and the dawn of Naugahyde. The spittoons had gone, the Coke machine was new, but otherwise the place was pretty much exactly as it must have been in November 1949: gray lace curtains shivered in the drafty windows, and a vast, ill-framed, liver-spotted color print of longhorn cattle in a meadow hung beside the cubicle where the night clerk should have been dozing over a book. The hotel’s owners were in bed; they had left one lamp on in the lobby, so that their only guest could find his way back to his room.

I stood in the gloom, talking to my wife, who was in another time zone and another season. In Seattle, the fall had barely begun, and the evening temperature was in the upper fifties. It was a big gap to bridge. Though I did my best to focus on the details of our daughter’s day at her new preschool, my attention remained snagged by the evocative shadows in the lobby.

In the early days, before the construction of Interstate 94 and the county snowplow program, a sudden blizzard followed by a cold snap would maroon traveling salesmen here, sometimes for weeks on end. They’d hole up in the Kempton, as in the hotels of Mildred and Ismay, killing time with cards and tall stories of seduction and conquest — the sewing-machine man, the lightning conductor man, the patent woodstove man. The ceiling of the lobby was still colored by the smoke from their cigars, the shabby upholstery still faintly scented with the patchouli that went into the stuff they used on their hair.

It would be a hell of a way to spend November, snowbound in Terry. The games of Seven-Card Stud and Texas Hold ’Em. The tooth glasses of gin. The dog-eared magazines. The tinny drip of dance music from the radio. The daily wait for the train, hoping for an innocent newcomer to make the vital fourth at poker. The trips to the window, to stare meaningfully at the snow, as if it could be budged by Pelmanism. The woodstove man’s unstoppable repertoire of schoolroom jokes (“You could tell she was a cowboy’s daughter, on account of all the horsemen knew ’er”). The highspot of the week — a visit to the Ebeling barbershop.

Reluctant to face the jungle heat of my room, I sat in the studded-leather platform rocker, leaning back as far as it would go, conjuring ghosts in wide ties and fancy vests, my traveling forebears. This time, I was on the road in order to turn round and go back. I wanted to pick up the tracks of the departing homesteaders, as they finally uprooted themselves from the bitter prairie and went in search of new lives farther west.

Whitened by a meager snowfall, the prairie looked more like a gale-swept ocean than ever before; mile after empty mile of foam and spindrift. But the snow was little more than a dusting: frozen grass stalks gave off a brilliant diamond glitter as they caught the morning sun, and all the lost paths that used to run between the houses had come to light again. They were everywhere, sharp-shadowed in the powdery white. At the Wollaston place, one could see (as I had never seen in summer) the curve of the drive and the rectangle of the house and its outbuildings, lightly printed in snow. There was where they’d loaded up the Ford, strapping suitcases to the roof …

I had one last call to make. A mile to the west, I stopped at the Breen ranch, where, at the center of her honeycomb of old homesteads, Wynona Breen was working on the farm accounts.

It had been a good year. The moisture had been there when it was needed. The Breens had harvested forty bushels to the acre — Hardy Webster Campbell’s magic figure. The price of wheat had risen, from around $2.50 a bushel in 1994 to a whisker short of $5.00 a bushel in the fall of ’95. An acute wheat shortage in major wheat-importing countries like Russia and Japan was creating a situation much like that of 1916. Farmers were hanging on to their wheat stocks in the hope that the price would go even higher.

“But of course, with this rise in price, we lose the government subsidy. So that still leaves us something to complain about.”

It was always a pleasure to talk with Wynona Breen. From her dry years of teaching school, she had retained the style of pleasantly tart irony that must have kept her students on their toes.

We spoke now of the exodus from the prairie, and of how the Zehm place had become the last surviving homestead in the immediate neighborhood. The Roberts family left, then Myers, Gilbert, Burgess. Johnnie Conlon left. The Wollastons left (“They were considered very well off. They had a big house, and outbuildings better than most. As I remember, Mr. Wollaston was a tall, slender man, gray-haired, quite distinguished-looking”). The Wollastons’ tenants left — first the Shumakers, then the Paddocks. The Dockens left. As a child in the late twenties and early thirties, Wynona had found herself in a rapidly shrinking social world. Schools closed. School friends vanished. But the Zehms held out.

“I wonder how it was for your father — to see all the neighbors going west? Did it just strengthen his pride in being a survivor?”

“I don’t think Dad felt any sense of pride in having stayed. He wasn’t ever sure whether he had done the right thing, or whether they had. I think it was always a question in his mind. But I felt that pride. I still do.”

The Dockens had gone east — and so marked themselves out as notable eccentrics. Everyone else went west. There was no elevated sentiment in this; no dash of Horace Greeley or “pioneer spirit.” It was hard folk economics. East was expensive, west was cheap. When you failed west of the Mississippi you couldn’t afford to go back to the high rents, high land prices, and the fierce competition for every advertised job in the eastern states. You were impelled to keep on going in the same direction that had already led you to indigence, your land consigned “to the county, for taxes.”

It was as if a body’s relative density measurably decreased as it was transported farther west. The man who sank like a stone at 95°W might achieve a sort of sodden buoyancy at 110°W, and float like an airbag at 120°W. Stories of chronic sinkers who had made out west of the Rockies or the Cascades found their way back east, just as, in an earlier generation, letters from immigrants, talking up their new lives in America, had been passed from hand to hand in the rural slums of Europe.

Many failed homesteaders left on the same train that had brought them to Montana years before. The Milwaukee Road had fallen silent on the grand opportunities for farmers on the northern plains, and even went so far as to pretend that the region did not exist. In a 1927 double-page spread, advertising the railroad, and published in the American Magazine, the large — and otherwise complete — map of the track shows no stations between Aberdeen, South Dakota, and Three Forks in western Montana. It was best not to remind potential passengers of the dry country, so it was erased from the map. People mounting the train at Ismay, Mildred, Fallon, Terry were stepping out of an episode in the railroad’s past that the railroad was understandably keen to forget.

The Milwaukee Road was still in the pamphlet business. It was now hyping the marvels of the Pacific Northwest — so the Ismay Emigrés could daydream about the Snoqualmie valley as they had once daydreamed about Custer and Prairie Counties. The railroad’s in-house prose stylist shook out his box of old and well-tried adjectives:

Puget Sound is where happy dreams come true … The Sound region enjoys a climate that borders on the ideal. The air is pure, it is fresh and clean. Mellow sunshine and warm ocean currents temper the gentle breezes, giving color to the plants and flowers, and flavor to the native fruits …

Some of the passengers aboard the train must have shuddered at the eerie familiarity of the words.

Car owners readied their vehicles for an arduous epic. A family Ford, sagging low on its axles with children and luggage, could be counted on to do a hundred miles a day at best. Tires punctured, radiators boiled over on hills, valve springs broke, gaskets blew. Most people carried tents, and camped out overnight in the tent cities of the Kampgrounds of America. From Ismay to the west coast — to Portland or Seattle — it would take two weeks of living rough and crossing one’s fingers against yet another roadside scene with the hood up and smoke coming out of the engine.

Leaving Wynona Breen to her accounts, I set out to tail her neighbors on their westward flight.

Six miles west of Terry, at Calypso, the Milwaukee Road line crossed to the north bank of the Yellowstone River. There was nothing left of Calypso now except its name, and the lines and ties had been torn up. But the single-track rail bed of loose shale survived as an unmaintained road. Travel At Your Own Risk. It yielded a bone-shaking ride, which put the Jeep on a footing of reasonable equality with a 1926-model Ford.

The Yellowstone, half water, half ice, was a milky jade green, its narrow flood plain packed with farms, their fat grain-storage tanks glinting in the sun. Plowed fields came to the river’s edge, and patches of black, irrigated earth showed through the snow.

The train, slowing for the steel-truss bridge, would have gone through here at crawling speed, allowing the passengers time to dwell on a moist, green and fertile land. It must have seemed like an act of deliberate sadism on the part of the railroad. Still almost within sight of their own dusty half-sections, the ex-homesteaders were dragged through this vale of plenty and forced to gaze on the successful efforts of other, luckier farmers.

It was here that Evelyn Cameron, working on her Milwaukee Road commission, had taken most of the pictures that were captioned “Near Terry”: the plowman, driving his team across a field as flat as Iowa; the still life of produce ready for market; the cliff of ripe wheat, taller by a foot than the proud farmer, who stood at attention in the foreground. The innocent reader, a world away from Montana, had been deceived into believing that a free government homestead would look like this rich bottomland on the Yellowstone.

The homesteaders had been suckered, and, or so they told themselves, they would never be easily taken in again.

For passengers on the right-hand side of the train, the view was kinder. At the field’s end, the Terry Badlands began — mushrooms of scoriacious rock, shale falls, dry gullies, all as bare and gray as pumice stone. A pair of curious antelope stood on a snowcapped plinth. The eroded moonscape stood for everything that was inhospitable in eastern Montana: it would be no hardship to be leaving that behind.

In 1994, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, the Washington Post published the intriguing results of a recent poll: 20 million Americans appeared to believe that the moon landing was a hoax, perpetrated in the Arizona desert by the U.S. government, for the financial benefit of the big corporations who were the NASA contractors. A side finding was that westerners were twice as likely as easterners to subscribe to this conspiracy theory, which was a fine example of how gnarled skepticism, carried far enough, eventually turns into innocent credulity.

Yet if one were looking for evidence to support the idea that the federal government was into scams of this magnitude, one had only to remember the dryland homestead scheme. In 1909, the government did drop people onto an expanse of land which looked suspiciously like the surface of the moon. The scheme had been pushed through Congress largely for the benefit of the powerful railroad companies. If people in the West now showed a disproportionate mistrust of government and big corporations, they had in their history one event, at least, that they could hold up in triumphant proof of their cynical imaginings.

Did the government know that in the long term the free land was unfarmable, and that the scheme would end in heartbreak? I very much doubt it. Like their constituents, Theodore Roosevelt-era politicians believed fervently in the miracle-working powers of the new agricultural science. The railroad CEOs, like Albert Earling and James J. Hill, were under the same spell. The prevailing spirit of 1909 was one of optimistic idealism, and it was shared equally by the western emigrants and the powers-that-were.

But there was real mendacity in the way the scheme was advertised. The copywriters (who had probably never set eyes on the prairie) and the art editors created a paper country, as illusory as the Land of Cockaigne. The misleading language and pictures of the pamphlets would eventually entitle the homesteaders to see themselves as innocent dupes of a government that was in the pocket of the corporation fatcats — and their sense of betrayal would fester through the generations.

At Kinsey, the line recrossed the river, and ran side by side with Henry Villard’s Northern Pacific (now the Burlington Northern), which reached Montana in 1882, a quarter of a century before Earling’s Milwaukee Road. So long as the two railroads kept in consort, the towns along the way had a burgherish solidity, a deeply rooted air, quite different from the slippy-slidey, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow settlements on Earling’s later line. I drove into Miles City, down the wide, tree-shaded Main Street, past buildings of weathered brick and ochre stone: an Athenian bank, a Roman hotel, an Old High German convent. Each of these handsome pieces looked like a postcard from a megalomaniac’s European grand tour. I liked the town’s style, of flamboyant ranchers’ swank.

When the Northern Pacific came through here, long before the homesteading boom, Miles City was already an army base and a cattle center — and its founding industries had held steady when most plains towns went bust. Nowadays, its livestock auctions drew in ranching families from halfway across the state, filling the place like an English country town on market day; but its biggest business (shades of Fort Keogh, when the West was under military rule) was government, on every level.

When the young man came to Whitney Creek school, to deliver his unappreciated lecture on planting trees, he drove out from Miles City. His descendants were there now. Government agencies like USDA and the BLM had their regional bureaus in town. If you squinted at it right, through suitably jaundiced eyes, you’d see Miles City as a nest of federal agents: behind every stone facade, a liberal; a college kid, still wet behind the ears; an environmental extremist; and all of them living high on the hog, on honest men’s tax dollars. Or you might see it as the benevolent source of subsidies and free advice, of moral and financial support for the beleaguered rancher and farmer. Though — outside the agencies themselves — it was hard to find anyone who shared this view.

Beyond Miles City, past the government agricultural research station, the two rival railways and the highway chased each other upstream along the Yellowstone. Stunted pines grew on the slopes of lumpy, snow-speckled hills, where a few baleful cattle grazed. Every so often, I’d glimpse a distant shelterbelt, but ranches were more infrequent here than around Ismay. West of Miles City, a hundred sections were counted as quite a modest spread.

Seventy-five miles on (though it seemed just a short way down the road), I stopped at Forsyth, a pint-sized Miles City without the nuns and bureaucrats, for the Rosebud County museum. At first, I thought the museum was the usual rummage-sale assortment of old clothes, tools, utensils, photographs and other oddments, salvaged from basements and smelling powerfully of camphor; hardly worth stopping for. I was digging in my wallet for a dollar to put in the voluntary box when I saw the museum’s unique treasure: the Larsen Collection, of early barbed wire.

Stapled to sheets of Peg-Board, neatly labeled in Dynotape, were several hundred short lengths of rusty fence wire. Glidden’s Round Square Variation … Cline’s Rail … Fentress Diamond … Kennedy 3-Point … Every conceivable variety of barb was represented — from thorns to arrowheads to crescent blades. The exhibit was a revelation. I would never have guessed that the barbed wire world was so large, intricate and full of unexpected subtleties.

I couldn’t come up with any very sophisticated interpretation of what I saw. The 1870s were the golden age of barbed wire, when dozens of competing manufacturers were trying to outdo each other with experiments and innovations. By the time the homesteaders arrived, barbed wire had sunk into a period of relatively dull conformity, and Glidden’s “The Winner” had more or less scooped the pool. Then the First World War revived the art, with wire designed to resist cutters and inflict as many injuries as possible on entangled humans.

That was about as far as I could go. A connoisseur would have been able to see each piece as an attempted solution to an earlier problem, and would have been able to read in the Larsen Collection a detailed history of the fencing of the West. He’d explain the introduction of the plate-block and the chain-link in terms of what had happened on the prairie in 1874, and why this particular contrivance had seemed to be such a good idea in 1875. 1 badly wanted to meet Mr. Larsen.

“He passed away,” said the volunteer who was minding the museum for the afternoon. She had spent the last fifteen minutes following my rapt scrutiny of bits of wire; her interest in me was tinged, I thought, with mild alarm. The Larsen Collection was apparently not a common object of pilgrimage. “He owned a garage in town, but barb-wire was his big hobby. He traveled everywhere for barb-wire. Used to go to barb-wire conventions. He went to Chicago, Kansas City …”

The oddity of Mr. Larsen’s life got the better of her. She giggled.

“I heard he paid a thousand dollars for one piece of barbwire. It was this long.” She framed six inches between her fingers. “A thousand dollars.”

“It’s a magnificent collection.”

“We’ve got a whole lot of other stuff you might want to see—”

“I couldn’t. I just want to spend a little longer with the barbed wire, if I may.”

She had decided I was harmless. “I never paid much attention to barb-wire. Except once, when I was a girl. I was wearing my best dress, and it got tore on the barb-wire, from here … to here.” She smiled fondly at this memory, and I left her to enjoy it alone.

At Forsyth, the Milwaukee Road parted company with the Yellowstone River and the Northern Pacific, and struck out on a northwesterly bearing across the open plain. US 12 ran alongside the abandoned track, whose crumbling embankment, breached in many places, was marked by a broken line of dwarfish telegraph posts, leaning at all angles. These black wooden crosses made the railroad look like the serial graveyard that it really was.

There was a surprising amount of up-and-down on this stretch. Aiming for the comfortable route of the Musselshell Valley, and impatient with the intervening topography, Earling had driven his railroad straight across seventy miles of dry and bumpy country. No creeks, no trees, no coulees, no buttes, no sheltering bluffs, no shape to it at all. Even the snowy clumps of sagebrush looked lonely as they shivered in the nearly gale-force wind. But Earling sowed towns along this exposed and desolate reach of land at the same regular intervals as the towns he planted along the line of Fallon Creek.

At Vananda, a gaunt, brick, narrow-windowed, three-story school, like a defunct prison, reared over a woodpile of flattened shacks.

At Ingomar, ragged ears of tar paper flapped from the bare frames of the few undemolished houses. But people still lived here — in a cluster of trailers surrounding the Jersey Lilly bar, whose walls were hung, improbably, with African hunting trophies. Nothing else in the bar chimed with the faded country-house chic of these slain wildebeests and springboks.

At Sumatra, which was little more than a heap of auto parts, fencing wire and railroad ties, the only visible inhabitant was a dog, with a bit of collie in it, who approached the Jeep and offered me his or her bone.

Even the Milwaukee Road Pamphleteer of 1910 sounded a good deal more cautious than usual when he eulogized the area:

This section … has until recently been kept from developing through lack of transportation facilities. On the bench … are found immense areas of gently undulating prairie land excellently adapted to farming without irrigation. The country is so new that not much has yet been accomplished in the way of actual farming, but enough has been done to demonstrate its feasability.

Yet this dour country — more inhospitable by far than the land around Ismay — was homesteaded, pretty much from end to end. The giveaway tracks in the snow confirmed it. Now there wasn’t a hint of cultivation, and not even a sheep or cow in sight. High up, a patient hawk dipped and wheeled, searching for signs of life below. In November on this prairie, a raptor could go hungry.

When the line was freshly laid, Albert J. Earling chugged through here in the presidential railroad car, giving names to vacancies. A reporter, on assignment from a Chicago paper, was in his entourage. As the line bent sharply southwest, to fall in with the flat little valley of the Musselshell River, and another name was called for, Earling turned to the reporter.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Melvin Stone.”

Earling said, Let there be Melstone: and there was Melstone.

A forlorn grid of dirt streets and moldering shacks. When they could afford it, Melstone families had deserted the shacks and moved into trailers in their yards, but there did not seem much to choose between their old and their new accommodation. Junked automobiles stood where they had stopped in the 1950s and ’60s. Bereft of glass and every salvageable moving part, their rusted shells had come to look like the Melstone version of civic sculpture. There was a general store, two bars, three churches (Faith Lutheran, Congregational Bible, Our Lady of Mercy), a U.S. Post Office, and Melstone High School, Home of the Broncs. The school looked like the kind of place where sensitive types got beaten to a pulp in the yard.

Melstone appeared to have fallen clean through the net of white North America. It would not have been out of place in Senegal or Guinea-Bissau, this sorry accumulation of makeshift shelters, scrap metal and mud. Only the satellite dishes betrayed the fact that Melstone was in the same state as the Ted Turner ranch and the Whoopi Goldberg log cabin. I thought, if I lived in Melstone, I’d ache for a transcendent world, and take to drink, religion or HBO.

But the Musselshell valley was the beginning of something new. A few miles on from Melstone, there were harvested wheat fields, water meadows, dairy cattle. Sandstone bluffs, black with pines, crowded the road — almost a forest! To the tree-starved people on the train, this sudden, promising coincidence of woods and water must have stirred their blood. Children had never seen a landscape like this — tall, green, full of perspectives. For the first time, they were looking out at “scenery”—nature arranging itself like a theater. Parents found memories to fit the view. From the pleasant small town of Musselshell, through Delphia and Gage, I was half in Montana, half in Devon, where the same red sandstone clifflets squeeze the upper reaches of the Exe and Dart.

It was good to be back, however briefly, in a land of likenesses. The Plains proper had no precedent in my experience — as they had no precedent in the experience of the homesteaders who settled there. The Musselshell valley was companionable; less lonely by far, because so full of echoes of the old, known world.

I pulled into the forecourt of the Big Sky Motel at Roundup. The title of A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s 1952 novel had a mysterious, philoprogenitive life of its own — it was on every Montana license plate, and there wasn’t a town in the state without a Big Sky auto-repair shop, or a Big Sky food mart. The title was a runaway bestseller, though the book itself was, in my estimation, tough; too many pages of talk in cornpone dialect. My Big Sky room was quiet, well appointed, and appropriately big; I was surprised to find a notice on the writing table which said Persons renting the rooms are responsible for undue destruction.

On my way out to dinner, I stopped by the office, to find out what was the acceptable level of due destruction, and who these unduly violent guests might be.

“Hunters,” the woman said. “They clean game in the rooms.”

“You mean — the disemboweled stag on the rug?”

“Not quite, but we’ve come close.”

On the first page of The Big Sky, a man returns home with “a ball in his thigh and the bloody hide of an Indian in his knapsack.” He had kept the scalp and tanned the skin and made himself a razor strop out of it. No wonder native Montanans practiced butchery in their motel rooms, if A. B. Guthrie was a reliable guide to Montana tradition.

Sheaf of books in hand, I crossed the street to the Pioneer Café, where I spread them on the table, and worked through my meal. I wanted to check the population of Melstone, and looked it up in the Rand McNally Montana gazetteer. There was nothing between Medicine Lake (357) and Miles City (8461), though Melstone, with its high school, post office and its twenty streets of trailers must have been twice as big, at least, as Medicine Lake. Rand McNally had done to the town what the Milwaukee Road did to half of Montana and the Dakotas. Melstone had been conveniently abolished.

In Steve McCarter’s Guide to the Milwaukee Road in Montana, I looked up Earling, Albert J. There wasn’t much. “A tough railroader who had come up through the ranks to assume the presidency.” A photograph, taken near Butte in 1915, showed Earling standing in a group of other railroad officials. He was short (like James J. Hill), with a fringe of white beard, and a big belly, thinly concealed by his black overcoat. I held the picture close to the lamp on the table. Was he wearing wire-rimmed glasses? I thought so.

During the day, I had become obsessed with Earling and his blithe disregard for natural limits. There never should have been a railroad line between Forsyth and Melstone: the country was too rough, the gradients too steep. That hadn’t stopped Earling from building one — or from quilting that unsuitable land with market towns and homesteads. Along the entire route of the Milwaukee Road, Albert Earling created as many ruins by accident as Tamburlaine the Great had done on purpose.

Still on the Musselshell, a hundred miles southeast of Great Falls, something was happening in the far distance. The sky appeared to curdle, as the Rocky Mountains slowly disentangled themselves from the clouds. It was a great moment for the refugees from Ismay, as at last they caught sight of the dark, knobbly spine of the United States. Beyond the Rockies lay the new new world — wet, timbered, moss-green, squelchy, fertile. With the mountains now in sight, the old new world of prairie dust was suddenly, definitively, behind them.

US 191 followed the north-going spur of the Milwaukee Road, through Judith Gap, and on to Great Falls and the Fairfield Bench. The luckiest of the homesteaders — as it eventually turned out — were those who clung on longest to their half-sections before letting go. People who managed to hold out until 1937 were rescued by the New Deal, when Rexford Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration offered them the chance to move, on easy terms, to small farms on irrigated land.

The WPA operated dozens of these projects in the West, with an army of workers (many of them ex-homesteaders) damming rivers, digging canals and ditches, and diverting water to hitherto arid soil. But for the community of desperate farmers around Ismay, it was the Fairfield project that everybody talked about.

The offer was this. The government would sell you a plot of land, with a WPA-built two-bedroom single-story farmhouse, a barn and a hog-and-hen house, on a fixed-rate mortgage of 4 percent, repayable over forty years. Price: $4,500 for 80 acres, $6,000 for 160 acres. This worked out at $32.50 a month for the quarter-section farm.

To many people, the offer was irresistible — a steal. The government would be the farmer’s landlord. The government would buy his crops, and tell him what to grow. On a proved-up homestead, the farmer at least had a certain shabby independence; he wasn’t beholden. On the Fairfield deal, he’d be a government pensioner. He might as well be a fur-hatted comrade on a farm collective in Stalin’s Russia.

Henry Zehm said he wasn’t going. The Seventh Day Adventist was deeply suspicious of the scheme. The forty years of debt went against the grain of his character. He didn’t hold with “irrigation.” The homesteaders had been taken in once too often by fancy science.

Zehm enjoyed wrangling with his neighbors, the Paddocks, who were farming the old Wollaston place as tenants. Cliff Paddock had declared himself for Fairfield; Zehm tried to dissuade him. Wynona Breen told me: “Dad thought the Paddocks were getting themselves into something they’d never, ever, get out of. They were forty years old, and now they were going to put themselves in debt for another forty years? They were just tying their children down. That was Dad’s thinking, and when Dad was talking to Cliff, he was sure he was doing the right thing; but when Cliff was no longer around, Dad had his doubts. Cliff sure seemed to be doing well out at Fairfield, and Dad brooded a long time over that.”

The Paddocks sent their stock, tools and furniture out to Fairfield in a Milwaukee Road boxcar. The family followed in their Ford.

Now, closing with Great Falls, and back in dry and rolling cattle country, I could sense the apprehension of the Fairfielders as they approached their new home. There was little in the landscape to reassure them. The earth was as dusty as that of Ismay. The air was thinner. There were no trees.

But the city of Great Falls was a surprise. It was moneyed and well fed, its big Victorian houses encrusted with decks and pillars. The streets were lined with old sycamores, and the lawns were verged with tall shrubberies. The sheer buzz of population in the city was something to wonder over, after the long emptiness of the drive west. Downtown, great sand-colored fortresses, street after street of them, held offices and department stores. Children pressed their faces to the windows of the car — the place was a five-story Manhattan.

Warehouses and shunting yards hid the Missouri from view till the last moment. The river presented itself suddenly from behind a wall of brick: wide, brown, wind-chased. It looked like the Mighty Mo, even this close to its source. A low trestle bridge carried the Milwaukee Road line over the water.

There was a sign for Fairfield beyond the bridge, and, west of the Missouri, the character of the country changed again. The land flattened, became veined with small creeks, and farms appeared, at increasingly short intervals, until they were half a mile or less apart. I saw one poplar tree — and then there were dozens of them, forming avenues and shelterbelts. Fringes of tall, browning grass defined fields of plowed soil, the color of milk chocolate. I was back in the world of likenesses; this was a Dutch landscape, a memory of Friesland in winter … dung-smelling townlets, with names like Tjum and Twizel.

Here the canals — the Floweree, the Greenfield Main — were dry until the spring, their beds a piebald and unlovely mixture of dried mud and white ice. Nor could the local architecture bear the Dutch comparison. The old WPA standard-issue farmhouses were still here, incorporated, as kitchens, or rec rooms, into rambling bungaloid assemblages of add-ons and afterthoughts. Instead of the spires and campaniles of the Dutch churches, one had to make do with the whitewashed garages of the Assembly of God and the Church of Christ, whose theology, at least, was equal to the fiercest brands of Dutch Protestantism.

God made the world, Man made Holland, and F. D. Roosevelt made the Fairfield Bench. After nearly sixty years, it still had the plain, angular, utility stamp of the New Deal on it. It looked like a government project. The town of Fairfield (“The Malt Barley Capital Of The USA”) could be seen from far off as a line of silver storage tanks, in whose shadow lay fifty or so more-or-less-identical single-story frame houses; tidy, white, decently maintained, irreproachably dull.

Two-point-five miles up a long, straight, dirt road, I found the Dale Paddock mailbox. It stood outside a farm like all the other farms on the Fairfield Bench.

Dale Paddock had been eight when the family moved here from Ismay. He opened the back door as I drove into the farmyard: a lopsided smile, a shock of gray hair, combed back fifties-style, the look of an aging James Cagney, and the soft voice of someone trying not to disturb a sleeper in the next room.

I had in my bag a stack of photographs of the Wollaston place. He hadn’t been back there since 1937. We laid them out on his kitchen table.

“Oh, my!” he said.

There was the slope down which he, his two brothers and his sister used to sled in winter. He remembered it as being a lot higher. Yes, that was where the horse barn was … and the hog house … and there was the path to the chicken run …

“What’s that?” He stopped me as I riffled through a batch of pictures.

I knew what he was going to say.

“That’s my sled! That’s the sled my Dad made!”

“Really?”

I was a little reluctant to let him have the photo: the words “Percy’s Sled” were clearly penciled on the back. Now I had two eight-year-olds in competition for it.

“Oh, my. I never thought I’d see that again …”

He talked of how the family had gotten by in the drought of the 1930s. His father made all the children’s toys, his mother made their clothes. They lived on chickens and home-grown vegetables. The few cents a week that entered the household came from sales of butter, cream and eggs to Leon Clark’s Mildred store. “We never went hungry, but we lived pretty frugal.”

He still lived pretty frugal, in frayed work shirt and patched overalls. His kitchen was bare, and he didn’t offer so much as a glass of water. But he farmed 600 acres of prime barley land, and the yard outside was rich in agricultural machinery.

He remembered the move in oddly bitter terms. The day before the family left, he had packed a barrel with his toys. His father, who was feared by the boy as a grim disciplinarian, had said that there was no room in the boxcar for Dale’s precious barrel.

“Mostly what I remember about the move is those toys.”

A full minute later, he was back on the topic.

“It was only a very small barrel.”

“But when you got to Fairfield, how did you see the difference between the Wollaston place and here? Can you remember how it struck you, as a child?”

He brightened. “Oh, but there was a world of difference — there was water!”

The newcomers learned the happy, arduous craft of irrigation. They dug trenches in their fields, then built dams to block the sluggish current in the supply ditches. The water rose, the long trenches slowly filled. Glittering tinsel threads of water lined each field — a lovely sight to a dry-farmer’s eye.

Big fish lived in the ditches. Fairfield water came from the Sun River Canyon high up in the Rockies. It made its long and circuitous descent via the Pishkun Canal, the Sun River Slope Canal, the Spring Valley Canal and the Greenfield Main Canal. Fat trout swam down from the mountains to the Fairfield Bench, in search of easy pickings. The new farmland was bugrich. Gnats and grasshoppers were constantly tumbling into the ditches, where the water in the evenings was pockmarked with the circles of rising fish. Thrashing two-pounders could be caught with worms and a bamboo pole, tickled (by the canny and the patient) or speared with a pitchfork.

Just weeks before, people had been on their knees, praying for enough rain to darken their fields of dust. At Fairfield, they became hydraulic engineers, spear fishermen, intimates of water, the Montana-Dutch. It must have seemed a miraculous deliverance.

“Did this experience turn you all into staunch Democrats?” I asked. “Did you go on being grateful to the government for its invention? Do you think the government still ought to be active in agriculture?”

“Well,” Dale Paddock said, with caution, “my father was a Democrat. He was all for Roosevelt.”

“And you?”

“I vote for who I think is best. But I’d have to say this: we wouldn’t be sitting here where we are, talking at this table, if it hadn’t been for FDR and his New Deal.”

Eight miles south of Fairview, I picked up the trail of Ned and Dora Wollaston on their way west in 1927. The Rockies were now heaped high along the horizon — razor-edged, matte black, lightly stippled with snow. US 200, climbing steadily toward the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass, snaked through grassy carbuncular foothills dotted with juniper trees.

The Wollastons were on Percy’s trail. In 1924, Percy had left Mildred on the train, his high school diploma safe in his bag on the overhead rack. When he reached Seattle, he’d take a temporary job and try to find himself a college place, maybe at the University of Washington. He got as far as Thompson Falls, Montana. The Clark Fork valley was gray with wood smoke. Passengers on the train were coughing and dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs; and when the train pulled into the Clark Fork depot, an official from the Forest Service went from carriage to carriage, calling for able-bodied volunteers to help fight the fire. Hoboes climbed out from under the wheels of the train, and Percy joined the growing band of young men at the side of the track. Three years later, he was still in Thompson Falls. He and Myrtle Amundson were engaged to be married in the summer.

The bends in the road were getting tighter, the incline steepening, the solitary junipers giving way to stands of fir. The Jeep made all this too easy. Even in cars I owned, not too long ago, I would have been down to second gear, with the needle on the temperature gauge dickering near the H-mark. Crossing the Continental Divide in a Model T was a matter of long, slow nursing; watching the dials, feeling one’s way up the dirt road through the narrow tires and hard suspension. I could do a lazy forty-five; Ned and Dora would have been lucky to be doing ten.

At close to 4,000 feet, we at last entered that landscape for which Albert Bierstadt’s painting of the surveyor’s wagon on the plains seemed to be pining from a distance — a landscape of frame, mass, composition. The road corkscrewed round walls of sheer rock, with fir trees clinging by their toes to the barest hint of a ledge. The forest, dusted with snow, fell away into the chasm on the left-hand side of the highway. Dark nimbus clouds rolled overhead, and, through a break between them, the afternoon sun showed in diagonal bars of light. The tires of the Jeep hissed in the sand-stained slush on the pavement.

After more than two hundred years of exposure to the Romantic Sublime, the eye has dulled. Caspar David Friedrich and John Martin can be found on calendars, and Bierstadt’s grand set pieces now look cheesy. You wouldn’t buy a painting from someone who set up an easel in the Rocky Mountains today: the mere choice of location would be an almost-certain guarantee of the picture’s badness.

But I had approached the Rockies from the vacant plains. Having finally adjusted my eye to the uninterrupted 360-degree sweep, having grown used to the idea that a little sixty-foot butte could command a whole landscape, I was helplessly excited by the somber mountains, where storm clouds were snagged in the branches of the firs, and the light had the refractive consistency of water. On Rogers Pass, at 5,610 feet, I ached for a paintbrush, and the skill to use it.

Beyond the pass, small creeks began to gather at the roadside. They trickled in from behind spurs of mossy rock, joined forces and, within a few miles, became the tumbling headwaters of the Blackfoot River, bound for the Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. The long downhill ride through the trees, with the river breaking white alongside, gave the Wollastons’ Model T a chance to cool, but led to a new alarm, about the braking system. On this model, there were brakes only on the rear wheels, and they were worked by a rod that led from the hand lever to the axle. Each time Ned pulled the lever back, the brake shoes ground noisily on the drums, the asbestos worn to the rivets. The car coasted from bend to bend, with nearly half a turn of play in the steering. Dora, craning her head out of the window, saw puffs of smoke coming from the wheel rims whenever Ned hauled on the brake.

Then, at 4,500 feet, the river slowed and widened, and the road leveled, as a high valley opened up around the car. Between the stands of lodgepole pine and silver birch lay alpine meadows with grazing dairy herds. The valley was riddled with trouty streams, named with gruff Montana humor: Sucker Creek, Humbug Creek, Sauerkraut Creek, Keep Cool Creek, Poorman Creek. New log cabins, varnished like boats, dotted the landscape. Here was the beginning of summer-home, recreational Montana, where the woods were loud with the pop-pop of hunting rifles, and, in season, the unfolding parabola of a fly line would glint in the sun above every creek.

The town of Lincoln, the capital of this happy valley, was a mile-long avenue of motels (“Hunters Welcome!”), R.V. courts, bars, eateries, crafts shops and sporting-goods stores. My attention must have been failing, for I did not notice an unkempt bearded man, just three weeks older than I am myself, pedaling away from the Lincoln Community Library, on Ninth and the highway, with a sackful of books on sociology and Chinese philosophy. I would like to have spotted Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber suspect, a full five months before his arrest by the FBI; but (as I later found) it would have been nearly impossible to have singled him out from all the other bearded loners on bicycles, with self-inflicted haircuts, who were part of the Lincoln landscape.

Unaware of the celebrity that lay in wait for Lincoln, I drove on down to Missoula, where I took a room at the Village Red Lion, and called up Deirdre McNamer, the Montana-born novelist, to ask if she was free that evening. We arranged to meet at the Post House bar.

The bar was beginning to fill up for a poetry reading when I arrived (Missoula is that sort of town). Waiting for McNamer, I wrote in my notebook a description of Ned and Dora’s drive through the Rockies, and made a note to myself to find out more about how the brakes worked on a Model T.

When she showed, I was fog-headed, lost in the Wollastons’ epic trip. I could talk of little else.

“You came over Rogers Pass?”

“Right. Imagine doing that in a Model T … actually, they probably had to make the climb in reverse, because the gas tank was under the seat …”

“I don’t think so—”

“What do you mean?”

“Rogers Pass wasn’t built until sometime in the 1950s. You got the wrong pass, bud. They would have gone through Helena and over Mullan Pass.”

Back at the Village Red Lion, I suffered a night of chagrined dreams.

Early next morning, while I was brooding over the pitfalls of imaginative reconstruction, the Jeep went into a fishtail slide on a section of US 200 that may, or may not, have been part of the road traveled by Ned and Dora in 1927. It had been snowing desultorily all night, and big, splashy flakes were still falling. The roadside was littered with casualties: a pickup with its nose buried in the ditch, a car standing on its roof. The flashing lights of ambulances and highway-patrol cars lit the slippery way down to the Jocko and the Flathead Rivers. I took it at a chastened crawl, with impatient trucks shush-shushing past the Jeep, and making wakes of flying snow.

Down in the valley, the snow was falling as rain, and it was dusk at 10 a.m. There were weeping willow trees in people’s yards, brown bullrushes in the ditches at the roadside; alder, sycamore, nettles. Cows stood up to their chests in green stuff, and the wheat stalks in the small, harvested fields were packed as close as the bristles on a broom. To anyone fresh from the droughts of Ismay, it would seem only fitting that the skinny little town at the confluence of the Flathead and the Clark Fork should be named Paradise (pop. 300).

The broadening river was full of cigar-shaped wooded islands. As the rain cleared, and sunlight caught the edges of the clouds, the water turned soapstone green — a color borrowed from the conifers on the high slopes above. Small farms were crowded into the narrow space of the valley floor. A few acres could support a family here: a dozen dairy cattle, an orchard, a plowed field sown with winter wheat, chickens scratching in mud, two ponies on a wood-fenced pasture — and all this within the compass of a handkerchief, by prairie standards.

I fancied — cautiously — that to Ned it must have looked as green as his idea of England. Anything would grow here, if you could find a patch of soil to call your own.

For this flatland was in very short supply. The valley walls closed in, squeezing the river, the highway and the railroad into a crack hardly big enough for all three to pass through at once. The Clark Fork turned into a mile of whitewater rapids; then, as the valley opened up again, it slowed and widened into a motionless green pool behind the dam at Thompson Falls.

The town began with the diarrhetic scent of steam from the Crown Pacific lumber mill, Masterpiece Taxidermy for the hunters and a company that sold ready-made log cabins to people who had the pioneer spirit but lacked the pioneer brawn and the pioneer handiness with an axe. Set a block back from the riverbank was the line of plain, brick, two-story businesses that still served as Thompson Falls’s downtown. The place could not have changed all that much since Percy stepped off the train to fight the forest fire.

He did well on the mountain, and when the fire was out, Percy was offered a job with the Forest Service, as a smoke chaser. No nineteen-year-old would have found it easy to turn the offer down. Each smoke chaser was issued with a ten-by twelve-foot tent, with wooden boards for walls, a supply of food, a packhorse mule and the license to roam his own assigned neck of the woods. Percy’s territory lay west of the Clark Fork — a rambling freehold of trout streams, mountain peaks and pine forest. To report in to HQ at Thompson Falls, he had a field telephone, which he clipped on to the Montana Power Company line, which conveniently bisected his patch of wilderness.

In the woods, he found company. During Prohibition, Thompson Falls was a fugitive center of the distilling industry. The mountain water was good, there was grain to be had in the valley, and there were moonshiners’ cabins on most of the more inaccessible creeks. Percy’s first task was to reassure his neighbors that he wasn’t a threat to their business. He visited frequently with the moonshiners, and became a considerable judge of whiskey.

He’d gone west to get a college degree, but the degree faded from view. Living in his tent, he was able to bank most of his wages against the day when he and Myrtle would be married — though being a smoke chaser was hardly the occupation of a family man. In the bitter fall of 1926, after being caught out on a mountainside in a three-day blizzard, he became a maintenance man on the Montana Power dam. For someone who had been brought up on a failing homestead, and who had seen how easy it was to fall through the net, into destitution, it looked like a good job. It promised tenure, a ladder to climb, company housing and “benefits.” By the time that Ned and Dora arrived in Thompson Falls, Percy had found a safe if lowly niche in corporate America.

Ned and Dora took a room in the Black Bear Hotel on Main. Land-hungry, Ned scouted around town for an affordable chunk of Thompson Falls. On April 25, 1927, he paid Orrie K. Goodwin a total of $550 for eight lots on the block bounded by Clay and Church Streets and by Third and Fourth Avenues. The whole parcel amounted to a little less than two-thirds of an acre.

Ned’s small new world was on the wooded slope north of Main Street, and it had a clear view over the town and the river; ten minutes’ walk from the hotel and the stores, but high enough to stand proud of the pall of acrid steam from the mills.

The house he built for himself and Dora was still there, snugged-in among the add-ons of later owners — and I saw immediately the plan that he had in mind. The front of the house looked south, over the Clark Fork, as the homestead had looked south over the swale. Instead of the shale bluffs of Ismay, there was the great, inky wall of forest, where Percy had done his smoke chasing. At the back, as at Ismay, a stone path led from the kitchen, north to the henhouse and the vegetable garden, which Ned’s grandson could remember as the equal of Mr. MacGregor’s in the Beatrix Potter illustrations. The new house was the old house, transplanted to a Rocky Mountain Eden.

The Wollastons were among the first of the ex-homesteaders from Prairie and Custer Counties to settle here. But it was soon common to see on Main Street faces familiar from Terry, Mildred, Ismay. Word got back to the prairie that it was hard to starve in Thompson Falls.

In the little junk-store museum, once the jail, I met Gerald Bybee, who had come to the town in the 1930s, fleeing the family homestead in western Montana, where life with his alcoholic father had become intolerable.

“There were salmon in the river then. Game in the woods. There were the wild strawberries, blackberries, huckleberries and all those other berries … You could live pretty much off the land.”

“And jobs?”

“Oh, sure. There were jobs. If you could use a saw … There were jobs in the mills. Then, if you knew something about horses, you could get a job as a mule wrangler. There were still a lot more mules than people in Thompson Falls, and even for people with no experience of logging, there were all those jobs in the timber industry that anyone who’d grown up on a homestead could do.”

There was little money in any of this. Bybee described the Thompson Falls of the late thirties as “a scummy little town,” where, in 1939, he had been able to buy six tax-defaulted lots, inside the city limits, for “as much as $1.50 apiece — and I thought that was too much.”

It was the ease with which one could be self-sufficient that brought people here. Ned and Dora were able to support themselves largely out of their back garden, with fish from the river and a haunch of venison hanging in the shed. Ned hired himself out as a carpenter in the Forest Service, supervising the repair of bridges that were washed away in the spring floods, and a few months of casual work were ample to keep the household in funds through the year. Within a short time of his arrival in Thompson Falls, Ned was a Justice of the Peace and a city worthy.

He and Dora were buried a step away from their property on Clay and Third, in the Masonic cemetery. They lay side by side under plain, flat stones.

DORA M. WOLLASTON EDWARD LUARD WOLLASTON 1864 1936 APR. 23, 1872. MAR 2, 1951

Most of the homesteaders went on farther west, and I didn’t want to lose sight of their continuing trail. Ditching the Wollastons on their arrival at the place where they died was a wrench; but the house on the hillside seemed as safe a berth as one could hope for for the young Minnesotan with a compass-rose tattoo on the back of his hand.

I was hungry. Nearly forty miles on from Thompson Falls, there was a sign for Noxon — a name I thought I recognized from Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie as another of the homesteaders’ destinations. The town was on the far bank of the river; shrouded by winter trees, on an apron of green water meadows, it looked a pretty place, and I crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork in search of a late lunch. In close-up, Noxon was less attractive than it should have been — a rambling string of bungalows and trailers, with a general store, a gun shop and the Landmark Café.

I opened the café door on an amiable buzz of talk between the owner of the place and three men seated round a table inside. The talk stopped dead at my entry. I hoisted myself onto a stool at the bar, and asked for coffee and a hamburger with salad. The owner took my order, but declined to make eye contact with me.

The four men of Noxon closely resembled each other. All had black spade beards. All were shaving forty. The three at the table were dressed in hunters’ camo caps, plaid flannel shirts, suspenders (in which they each lodged both thumbs), work pants and big black lace-up boots.

I made a similar inventory of my own clothes. I had dressed to face the early-breakfast crowd of reps in the Missoula Red Lion: an olive green shirt, gray herringbone-tweed jacket from Brooks Brothers, corduroy slacks from Eddie Bauer and a pair of blue leather deck shoes. In the Landmark Café, Noxon, I might as well have been wearing a ball gown, high heels and a wig.

The silence behind me turned to an inaudible muttering, as conversation resumed in strict sotto voce. My food came. It was good, and I said so, but still the owner refused to catch my eye. I then remembered where I had seen the name Noxon — not in Wheels, but in The New York Times a few months previously. Noxon was the headquarters of the Militia of Montana, which had come to sudden public attention in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Landmark Café was evidently the regimental mess.

When I thanked the owner for a fine lunch, he turned his back on me and busied himself with the coffee machine. To give him and his cafe their full due, the place was more grimly unwelcoming than any restaurant I have eaten in in my life — but the hamburger and salad, and coffee, too, were beyond reproach.

I spent a short while prowling in the Jeep (which must have been at least as offensive as my urban weekender’s getup), along the mountain road at the back of the town. At intervals of half a mile or so, there were mailboxes by the side of muddy tracks leading deep into the trees. It was prime survivalist real estate. As the homesteaders had been drawn to this valley for its easy pickings, so a later generation of surly romantics had found in it the perfect site for their version of life in the woods. With a hunting rifle and a pair of dogs, you could sally forth from your cabin like Natty Bumppo, snacking on chokecherries. When the dogs growled in the dark, you’d go out to the stockade with night-vision binoculars, searching the forest shadows for lurking federal agents.

That version of the West seemed half Boy Scout playacting, half deadly paranoia, with some queer Bible reading thrown into the mixture. Its leading figures — Bo Gritz, the Trochmann brothers, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh — were like bad-blood descendants of the homesteaders. In their resentment of government, their notion of property rights, their harping on self-sufficiency and self-defense, as in their sense of enraged Scriptural entitlement, one could see one perverse legacy of the homesteading experience and its failure on the plains.

The Noxon gun shop, I noticed, though it was in rifle and shotgun country, advertised itself with a not-very-well-drawn picture of an automatic pistol on the wall: a weapon meant for shooting people, not pheasants or deer.

When, earlier in the year, a bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, the gist of every column and editorial that I saw was Terror in the Heartland: How Could It Happen Here? The tone was always aghast, and there was much lamentation over the fact that the bomb appeared to have been planted by an American from the heartland, and not by the person of Middle Eastern appearance who had been promptly seized by the FBI.

In private, and closer to the so-called heartland, I heard a quite different response. “Any farm kid could have done it. You’d think it would happen more often than it does.”

Farmers in the West regularly made bombs. They used them to blast stumps out of the ground, blow up walls of rock, and make quick work of ditch digging. The sound of distant explosions was part of the everyday fabric of country life.

“If I were to start on it now, this morning, I could have it ready to blow up a federal building by two o’clock this afternoon. So could you.”

Fertilizer, saturated in diesel fuel, and packed into a confined space (like that of a rental van), is more stable and economical than dynamite, and needs only a detonator to set it off.

My informant fished a suitable detonator out of a drawer. “Like this.” An Atlas blasting cap, the size and shape of a refill cartridge for a ballpoint pen, with a loop of yellow and orange wire attached to its back end. Blasting caps could be got — against a purchaser’s signature — from any rural hardware store. You’d push the blasting cap into the explosive mixture, and complete the circuit with a battery and a doctored clock.

Ted Kaczynski was arrested at his cabin on the afternoon of April 3, 1996. A few days later, I drove back to Lincoln, to try to find out why this taciturn refugee from big-city life in Salt Lake, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Cambridge and Chicago had chosen the high valley as his sanctuary from the urban-industrial world. Newspaper reports had described Lincoln as the heart of the heart of the backwoods — which didn’t chime with my fleeting memory of the place. Journalists from the world’s press were still quartered in the town’s half dozen motels, so I packed my fly rod, and went to Lincoln as an uncredentialed fisherman, scoping out the Blackfoot River.

I stayed at the Lincoln Lodge Hotel, a fine log pile, built as a dude ranch in the 1920s, when Lincoln was beginning to make itself known as a hunting and fishing resort. It was now run by Bill and Diana Holliday. Diana was from Ismay — had gone to school at Whitney Creek — and we traded gossip from the far east of the state. She’d never gone back to the homestead on which she had grown up. Her memories of Ismay were of penury (“There were five of us children, and the family lived on $90 a month. This was around 1960. For clothes, my mother used to go to the dump at Terry …”), dust and bitter cold. She had longed to escape to a greener, richer world. She’d lived in Great Falls. “And that was so green to me, after Ismay.” Last summer, she and her husband had bought the old hotel in Lincoln, and they were in love with the town — its wateriness, its woods, its air of unpretentious prosperity.

“When I heard on the radio that they’d caught the Unabomber in a ‘remote’; part of Montana, I thought they must mean someplace like Jordan. I couldn’t believe it when they said Lincoln. This isn’t ‘remote’!”

“To a reporter from New York, I suppose Lincoln might look like the wilderness. Maybe that’s how it looked to Ted Kaczynski too.”

I took an evening stroll through town. Lincoln was an extended park of rustic cabins, trailers and R.V.s, each on its own tree-shaded plot. Some were summer rentals, some were lived in year-round. Novelty windmills creaked in front yards. Antique wagon wheels were propped against the sides of houses, in honor of the pioneer past. Most of the year-rounders had some cottage industry to support them — they were taxidermists, wood-carvers, flytiers, or they cut out and painted plywood butterflies. I peered through the window of the Lost Woodsman Gallery — sculptures by Rowley, whose rough-cut bears, Indians and frontiersmen, hewn from pine logs, were masterworks of Easter Island kitsch. The ornamental wagon wheels came, I guessed, from Roly Poly Land Antiques.

A herd of tame deer wandered from cabin to cabin, scrounging for leftovers. People put out bowls of oats for them, and restaurants fed them on the wilted remains of their salad bars. Fat and trusting, the deer were the town’s communal pets.

So Kaczynski, mooning around Montana in ’71, had lit on this idyllic family-vacation spot, with its friendly animals and tinkling streams. To the Chicagoan, the docile student, raised on the high-school American classics, Lincoln must have looked like Thoreau’s pond, Twain’s river and Fenimore Cooper’s forest all conveniently rolled into one.

I sent myself to sleep reading the Unabomber’s tangled thesis, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The author was a very urban nature lover. “The positive ideal that we propose is Nature,” wrote “FC,” but his idea of Nature was infuriatingly hazy and sentimental. He doted on the early settlers of the West for eating “wild meat” and living in such isolation that “they belonged to no community at all, yet do not seem to have developed problems as a result.” With characteristic bathos, he opined that “Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several reasons … Most people will agree that nature is beautiful.” The word natural cropped up in sentence after sentence; FC’s habitual synonym for “good.”

In the dead center of the thesis — paragraph 115 out of 232—was a fragment of miserable autobiography; an unmistakable cry from the Unabomber’s heart:

The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to achieve in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits — just the sort of thing that boys like …

I never camped in the woods! I never went fishing! I never had an air gun! They never let me be a boy!

Ted Kaczynski was turning thirty when he arrived in Lincoln. Was it his lost boyhood of “active outdoor pursuits” that he found here?

Next morning, Bill Holliday said, “He wasn’t too different from a lot of folks round here. Vets, mostly. They make do without electricity; they hunt and fish — live off the fat of the land; they keep themselves to themselves. You don’t pass the time of day with them — not until they speak first.”

“They ride bicycles?”

“A lot of people get around on bicycles. It’s so flat—” said Mrs. Holliday.

I discussed wet-fly presentation with Mr. Holliday, and went out to look at the river. The Blackfoot swirled greenly under the road bridge half a mile from the hotel; it was too swollen with snowmelt to be fishable, but it was a magnificent river, and full of big cutthroat trout, rainbows, wild browns and whitefish. If only Kaczynski had been arrested a month later, I would have had some prime fishing. As it was, I followed Stemple Pass Road over the bridge toward the Kaczynski place with Humbug and Poor-Man Creeks chattering within earshot of the road. It was a pleasant forty-minute walk, past summer homes and pastureland, to the school bus stop beside Gehring’s Lumber, where the FBI had pinned their search warrant to a post, and officiously blocked the logging trail that led to the Kaczynski cabin. The cabin was just out of sight, but I could see the satellite dish of his immediate neighbor, like a creamy giant mushroom in an aspen glade.

It was woodsy, but it was not “the woods.” When the spirit of Emersonian self-reliance failed him, Kaczynski could ride his bike to the Blackfoot Market and pick up the Del Monte canned food, whose containers, meticulously labeled, figured prominently in the FBI inventory. But this proximity to town must have had its disadvantages. Snowmobiling was Lincoln’s economic mainstay in the winter months, and when Kaczynski was laboring on his life story (Item MB28 in the inventory was a “brown clasp envelope marked ‘Autobiography’ ”), he must have been plagued by the din of rainbow-striped machines whizzing past the cabin, for the logging road, which took a zigzag path through a shallow canyon, was a perfect snowmobilers’ racetrack. FC was similarly troubled: his thesis complains of “noise-making devices” intruding on his “autonomy.”

For industrial society, its lawn mowers, TVs and radios, lay right on Kaczynski’s doorstep. If he was FC, and trying to live like the solitary “frontiersmen” hymned in the Unabomber thesis, he must have felt himself constantly mocked by the late-twentieth-century tourists who piled into Lincoln, at every season, to enjoy the active outdoor pursuits for which the place was famous — the anglers, cross-country skiers, hunters, hikers, off-road 4WD enthusiasts. His cabin was most certainly not a haven of solitude in what the Unabomber called “WILD Nature.”

Yet here were deer, elk, black bears, rabbits and fish that would leap to a baited hook. Kaczynski gardened — grew his own carrots and potatoes. The FBI inventory, with its bags of fishhooks, bows and arrows, guns (one of them homemade), together with the chemistry set, the peanut-butter jars, the Hershey’s cocoa cans, the soft-drink bottles (“Raspberry Super Sip”), suggested the life, not of a man, but of a dangerous boy. The most grown-up thing on the list was the supply of Trazadone antidepressant.

Item L9 interested me. “A Plastic Bottle Labeled ‘Strychnine Oats.’ ” I mentioned it to Diana Holliday. “You feed oats to the deer, don’t you?”

“Oh,” she said: “that makes me really angry at him. He hated the deer. They used to eat his garden …”

The positive ideal that we propose is Nature.

Lambkins Lounge at the center of town was like an English pub at Saturday lunchtime, loud with talk, and welcoming.

“You’re from Seattle?” the bartender said. “That’s where all the serial murderers come from. You’ve got Ted Bundy … you’ve got the Green River Killer … You’ve got the whole bunch out there. This guy is our first and only. We’re kind of inexperienced.”

She was down to her last six “Lincoln, Home of the Unabomber — The Last Best Place to Hide” T-shirts, with the composite drawing of the hooded, mustached man in aviator shades blazoned on the front. The first edition, of 400, had arrived at 9 p.m. the previous evening; fifteen hours later, I bought the last T-shirt but one. A rush reorder had been sent out to the factory, and the second printing was due to arrive first thing on Monday morning.

Profits were going to the volunteer fire department, which had set its sights on a defibrillator. By Saturday morning, the defibrillator was in the bag, and the volunteers were looking at the next item on their shopping list — a compressor for filling air cylinders. After that, they wanted new jackets.

“It’s split this town right down the middle,” said Jay Verdi, the fire department’s bearded PR man, who had dreamed up the idea of turning America’s Most Wanted man into a windfall for Lincoln. “A lot of folks are mad as hell at us for doing it.”

“Well, if you hadn’t got there first, some private entrepreneur would have cashed in on it,” I said. “But why so few shirts? You could have printed five thousand—”

“We were being a bit cautious. We were afraid this whole thing could blow over in a few days. We didn’t want to get landed with a pile of stuff we couldn’t sell.”

I thought of the cavernous fire hall in Ismay, stacked floor-to-ceiling with Joe, Montana, stuff. Lincoln’s sudden blaze of notoriety and fortune seemed more securely rooted.

With each T-shirt came a card, printed in curly black script, like a funeral invitation:

This Is A Sad Event In The

Nations History But Some

Good, Will Come From It, In

The Way Of Lincoln

Receiving A Defibrillator To

Save Lives

Our Sympathy Goes Out To

The Families Of All The

Victims

The Lincoln Volunteers!

“Did you pay any attention to Kaczynski before he became world-famous?” I asked Verdi.

“I rode with him to Helena once. In 1978. I was buying a new Blazer. Sat with Ted on the stage.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He said ‘Hello.’ ”

“Anything else?”

“At the end, he said, ‘I probably won’t be riding back with you.’ That was a lot of words for Ted. Nobody had a conversation with him. You’d say ‘Howdy.’ Ted’d grunt. That was as far as it ever went.”

As I was leaving, Verdi said, “The two guys who made the arrest … one of them’s a friend of mine. When they grabbed him, Ted didn’t struggle, like they said in the media. There wasn’t anything like that. My friend said the wind just went right out of him. Total relief.”

Past the Idaho state line, Sandpoint was lodged in the top of the ear of Lake Pend Oreille. A number of people from around Ismay had come here, most of them in 1934. As in Thompson Falls, there were jobs to be had at the mills and on the logging outfits. There were also “stump farms,” going for next to nothing, where the timber companies had left swaths of clean-cut ground; battlefield acreages of stumps and slash. Some of the exiles were incurable farmers. They took on these desperate bits of land, blew the stumps out, and started over again.

I saw little tilled soil near Sandpoint, though there were many horse farms, and some dairy herds. The town, motley in its architecture and thick with traffic, was in need of a bypass operation. Stuck in a jam, I read the messages of disaffection on bumper stickers, GUN CONTROL MEANS USING BOTH HANDS, RUSH IS RIGHT. BO GRITZ FOR PREZ. DON’T STEAL — THE GOVERNMENT HATES COMPETITION. A lull followed, with a sticker advertising the local public radio station, and I’D RATHER BE QUILTING. Then IMPEACH CLINTON AND HER HUSBAND was countered by a liberal crack, RUSH IS REICH, on an elderly, mud-spattered pickup. PREACHER RAN OFF WITH MY WIFE AND MY DOG — I SURE MISS THAT DOG.

Sandpoint cannot have enjoyed the fame that had lately fallen on it. A couple of weeks before I drove through, Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective in the O. J. Simpson case, had found the town sufficiently white for his retirement needs. Louis Beam, ex of the Ku Klux Klan, and now an advocate of armed citizen resistance, had also just moved in. The Aryan Nations lived close by, and, twenty-five miles north of Sandpoint, on Forest Road 632, lay the cabin on Ruby Ridge where a federal marshal and Randy Weaver’s wife and son were killed in a shoot-out with the FBI.

Thirty miles on, at Newport, I crossed the line into my home state of Washington, and switched on the radio. A phone-in-program, with callers baying for liberal blood, broke for commercials. First up was an ad for Initiative 48, the property rights measure, due to be voted on on Thursday.

It told the tale of a retired couple, whose little farm had been declared a protected wetland by the EPA, because the old man had dug a ditch on it. The narrator was a woman, whose indignant tone matched that of the telephone callers a minute before. “Vote yes on 48! Our only opponents are out-of-state environmentalists and Seattle extremists.”

The most unlucky, or least resourceful, of the homesteaders went on from here to the Columbia valley, where they picked apples. The orchards of eastern Washington offered jobs, of a sort, to the swarm of transient labor created by the Dustbowl. The erstwhile farmers of Montana worked shoulder to shoulder in the orchards with the dispossessed sharecroppers of the South. In the American way, they lost their former identities and were given new names. It didn’t matter what state you had come from; out in the far West, you were called an Okie, sometimes an Arkie. The terms were contemptuous. They denoted people who were worth, at best, 15¢ an hour. For many of the homesteaders, it was a heartbreaking, spirit-sapping return to the serfdom that they had come to America to escape.

I spent the night in Spokane, then headed west, on US 2. It was snowing again. Outside the gates of the Boeing plant, a picket line of frozen strikers held up snow-fringed placards: I gave them three honks of the car horn, tooting solidarity. The salute had little to do with the particular cause of the Boeing machinists. It was more a way of saying hello to my own kind — urban-industrial types; the unself-sufficient; people with cars not pickups, and shoes, not boots; pizza-delivery clients; registered Democrats.

Not far beyond Spokane, the sagebrush came back, and a long, desolate reach of broken prairie, rifted with shallow coulees. Abandoned farmhouses showed on the skyline. To come so far from the dry plains, only to find them here once more, cannot have done much to raise the hopes of the new arrivals. You might be riding the rails, spread-eagled under the carriage of a Great Northern express, and see, between the wheels, the same twiggy sage, same feeble grass, same dust, same ruins that you thought you’d left more than eight hundred miles behind.

On AM radio, an evangelist was talking, interestingly, about flying squirrels in the Book of Revelation. I tuned him out when I discovered, after several minutes, that he was referring only to flying scrolls. On the next-door channel, G. Gordon Liddy was referring to himself as “The G-Man,” and talking twaddle about the government. The radio was best left switched off. If one listened to it for long in eastern Washington, one could easily become convinced that one had entered the national capital of religiose bigotry, where soi-disant Christians were getting up a jihad to cleanse the earth of their enemies. When they defined their enemies, it was clear that they meant me.

The road wound down, with icy patches in the shadows, to the sage-green water of Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, above the Grand Coulee Dam. For no region of the country got more from the New Deal than the now vengefully conservative eastern half of Washington. I had never seen the dam, and took the detour to it in a spirit of political pilgrimage: I wanted something positive to set against G. Gordon Liddy and his tribe of mean-minded admirers. I would have liked a Woody Guthrie tape to slip into the car stereo:

Look down in the canyon and there you will see,

The Grand Coulee showers her blessings on me;

The lights for the city, for factory, and mill,

Green pastures of plenty from dry barren hills …

The dripping concrete face of the dam, pitched between two bald mountains, was pharaonic. It was bland, gray and sizeless, with nothing to convey a human scale, like a window, or a walkway. The indentations of the sluices looked like teeth. The thing might easily have been mistaken for the slave-built tomb of some legendary despot.

That it could be traced back to a crippled dandy, inhaling cigarettes through an amber holder, was a happy contradiction. One looked at the dam’s gross solidity, then thought of Roosevelt, with his wasted legs, obsessively hiding his disability from the people. The dam was the invincible public face, of the-only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-fear-itself. Backed up behind it, hundreds of feet deep, was the lake with Roosevelt’s name on it. Had he, I wondered, deliberately chosen the lake, not the dam, as his personal memorial?

Inside the visitor center were hung photographs that might have been taken around Ismay, of collapsing houses, vacated in the drought. The dam’s first intended function had been to irrigate the dry-land farms of the Columbia valley. But the Second World War, when Roosevelt committed the United States to being “the great arsenal of democracy,” created such a demand for power that the dam was dedicated to the manufacture of electricity. It wasn’t until 1951 that the irrigation project got under way. At the ceremony for the opening of the Grand Coulee Main Canal, forty-eight gauze-clad “apple princesses,” representing the states of America, stood in line against a waist-high rope on the lip of the dam, and emptied jugs of Columbia water into the new canal. Intrepid apple princesses! They must have been selected less on the basis of their beauty than for their head for heights.

I went on west, over empty prairie country, met up again with the Columbia at Bridgeport, and followed the river down to Wenatchee. The wall-like sides of the Columbia valley were bare of almost all vegetation except for the stubborn, shivering clumps of sagebrush. There were shale falls, jagged splinters of rust-colored rock, the occasional nesting conifer. Left to nature, the great U-shaped valley, with the Columbia sliding through it, brown as sludge, would have appeared sterile, as if poisoned by its river.

But it had not been left to nature. At the lower levels, wherever there was a flattish tongue or ledge of ground, there was an orchard. The apple trees were planted equidistantly, eight feet apart, in severe ranks, like soldiers on parade. At intervals of twenty feet, the steel nozzles of sprinklers protruded from the soil. High-tech windmills, strategically positioned, pumped water from the river to the apple roots. All the pleasant connotations of the word “orchard” (as in “the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough,” or “Deep meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns”) fell abruptly away at the sight of these strange industrial orchards with their platoons of identical, barbered apple-producing units.

It was wonderfully efficient. Each acre — each half-acre — of soil was fully employed and working round the clock. Anyone with, say, twenty acres of these tongues and ledges would be rich; or so it looked.

In the 1920s — before the Columbia was dammed and canalized, and before the introduction of powerful electric pumps — the orchards were irrigated by the dozens of small tributary streams that drained into the rive. This gravity-fed system had worked well enough to maintain a settled, and standoffish, apple aristocracy, centered on the city of Wenatchee. The successful orchardists (as they called themselves) were able to ride out the Great Depression.

Went to Wenatchee, Washington. It was a common line in the family memoirs collected in Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie. In the spring, the ex-homesteaders, going west, met up with the north-going tide of Dustbowl refugees, who had spent the winter in the orange plantations of California. They paid two bits a night to stay on campgrounds, or slept rough in the “hobo jungles” down by the river. Cherries were the first fruit to ripen; the pickers were paid three-quarters of a cent per pound. General orchard labor: 12¢ to 15¢ an hour. In the apple packing sheds, the rate of pay was 3¢ a box. The college-educated (and many of the homesteaders had been to college in a previous life) competed for jobs as warehouse clerks in the offices of the big Wenatchee apple combines.

They fished in the Columbia, and panned for gold on the river bars. There wasn’t much gold, but prospecting could pay at least as well as apple picking; $3.00 or $4.00 a day, if you were both lucky and expert.

I took my figures from a man who had done all these jobs, and worked alongside the migrants in the orchards in the 1930s. Bruce Mitchell was the town historian — a nonagenarian in roaring good form. With his portable oxygen supply at his elbow, he sat in his long, picture-windowed living room overlooking the darkened river, and delivered to me, in a rolling, musical baritone, a first-rate lecture on Wenatchee in the Depression.

He talked of how the good people of Wenatchee lived in a society so formal and stratified that residents of the few blocks in the town center would not condescend to recognize the existence of the below-the-salt north- and south-enders. The migrant workers were viewed as a subhuman breed. “These people thought that any kind of manual labor was unclean.”

To the Wenatcheeites, the Okies were the alien unwashed. “Now, you’ve heard of Oklahoma?” Mitchell boomed at me.

“Well, yes — of course …”

He threw his head back, and continued.

“Now, you’ve heard of Oklahoma, where they never have the blues — Where the bandits steal the jitneys, and the marshals steal the booze, Where they always hang the jury, but they never hang the man, And if you call a man a liar, you get home as best you can; Where the wise owls are afraid to hoot, and the birds don’t dare to sing … For it’s hell in Oklahoma, where they all shoot on the wing.” Mitchell took in a deep indraught of breath. “That was Oklahoma,” he said. “And you know what to call the bit of hose they use to siphon gas out of your car? An Arkansas credit card.”

Mitchell’s wife shuffled silently in and out of the room as he declaimed — checking on his oxygen level.

For the homesteaders, who still thought of themselves as proud freeholders, with title to their own half-square-mile of America, the camps at Wenatchee were a long humiliation, grimly borne, and the snobbery of the town kept them perpetually aware of just how far they’d fallen.

In her 1964 memoir, Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle, Lois Phillips Hudson described how it was to be a child in the camps. Her family had homesteaded in North Dakota; in 1937, “with our mouths, nostrils and eyes full of the dust blowing from our bare fields,” they sold up, loaded the car, and “drove West to find water and survival.” They reached Wenatchee. Hudson, aged ten, was jeered at in the school yard when she tried to tell her classmates that she was from North Dakota. A boy told her: “We’re Okies. That’s what you are too.”

I didn’t yet know that it was disgraceful and dirty to be a transient laborer and ridiculous to be from North Dakota. I thought living in a tent was more fun than living in a house. I didn’t know that we were gypsies, really (how that thought would have thrilled me then!), and that we were regarded with the suspicion felt by those who plant toward those who do not plant. It didn’t occur to me that we were all looked upon as one more of the untrustworthy natural phenomena, drifting here and there like mists or winds, that farmers of certain crops are forced to rely on. I did not know that school administrators and civic leaders held conferences to talk about the problem of transient laborers.

Yet people did manage to escape the camps. Some ex-homesteaders raised loans to buy a three- or five-acre orchard for themselves. Their children are growing apples in Wenatchee now. Some got a patch of land on the shore of Lake Chelan, built a row of cabins there, and opened a resort. Some — like the Hudson family — returned to their car, and continued westward, over the Cascade mountains, to Seattle.

During the night, the advancing front of a warm Pacific storm system slid under the drift of polar air that had brought premature winter to the Northwest. The temperature was rocketing. At 6 a.m. the TV weatherman was forecasting 59° for Seattle by noon. The mountain passes, for which snow alerts had been issued the previous evening, were now clear.

Route 2, to Stevens Pass, was streaming like a mountain brook. All the snow in the Cascades was melting, and more rain was falling. I had always known that this westward journey was a quest for moisture; I hadn’t counted on an outcome so embarrassingly profuse in its success. In the dank half-light of the forest, moisture dripped and splashed and puddled. The windshield wipers on the car couldn’t keep up with it. The cloud ceiling, which had grazed the taller buildings of Wenatchee, had been left far below; toiling round the corkscrew bends, the Jeep was way up in the clouds.

A dozen miles short of the pass, a big Douglas fir, unable to bear the weight of sodden snow in its branches, had fallen across the road. The upper half of the tree had shattered over the left-hand lane. An eastbound pickup was stopped just short of the casualty, and two men were trying to shift sufficient debris from the road to clear a passage through. I joined them. It was bracing early-morning work, scooping up armfuls of still-frozen foliage, and hauling away the powerfully scented logs into which the tree had conveniently broken. The drenching rain, the invigorating, aftershave smell, and the unaccustomed exercise put me in a high good humor. I enjoyed the company; both men, pushing seventy, spoke in the voices of Appalachian Kentucky or Tennessee. It was a common accent here; in the 1930s, whole towns of unemployed miners had come to settle in the foothills of the Cascades. We grunted amiably at each other as we worked. We were nearly through, when one of the men stared long and hard at the Jeep — about which I had grown daily more self-conscious during the drive.

“You wouldn’t, by any chance, have a say-ellulah telephone in that … rig, of yours?”

“Actually—”

“Call 9-1-1, ask for highways emergency. Get them on the case, and put some tax dollars to work.”

I did as I was bidden, and resolved to sell the Jeep. If I wanted to go incognito around here, I needed an ’89 Chevy pickup with a broken tailgate, and something brown and furry to dangle from the rearview.

Beyond the pass, the Skykomish River was a torrent of boiling cappuccino. Rafts of smashed timber were collecting in the eddies, and tree-sized logs cartwheeling in the turbulence. A Seattle radio station was broadcasting flood alerts for the Skagit, the Stillaguamish, the Skykomish, the Snoqualmie, the Snohomish, the Tolt, the Green, the Cedar … And still the rain kept falling, in vertical bars that turned icing-sugar-white as they hit the road. A duck hunter was reported lost in the Snoqualmie. By the time I reached Sultan and Monroe, the Skykomish had burst its banks, and the lower-level streets had turned into canals.

The deluge of snowmelt and rain was extravagantly fitting. Seattle had always been the wet capital of a dry country. Its magnetic field stretched far back, over the Rocky Mountains, across the whole length of Montana, even into the Dakotas. I’d felt it in Marmarth and on Merle Clark’s North Dakota ranch. Minneapolis was a lot closer on the map than Seattle, but it was “back east”; you had to climb to it, against the cultural tilt of the West. Seattle was a western city — the highway and the railroad ended there, and it was to Seattle that people looked, for jobs, for higher education, for major-league ball games, for a chance at a renewed life when the prairie finally dried up on you.

For the homesteaders, Seattle meant jobs. There was work to be had in the shipyards and on the docks. For Art Worsell, there was the Seattle-based Alaskan fishing fleet. He found employment as a deckhand. When the United States entered the war in 1941, there were factory jobs at the Boeing plant. People could fail, and fail again, on their way west — and still hope to find a living here in western Washington.

As the Skykomish converged with the Snoqualmie, the land flattened, into a floodplain of black silt. The ex-farmer would look out — sadly? or with pleasure? — at the turned soil in the fields, the cows wading in clover, the jungly undergrowth of ferns and brambles, the lily pads covering the drinking ponds, the red barns, the luxuriance of timber. With a hungry market close to hand, produce here would walk straight off the farm, and at a high price, too.

Moisture was everything. Modern Seattle liked to promote itself as The Emerald City. In the competitive world of seducing conventioneers to your town, you need an alluring moniker for the place, and someone had filched the Emerald City name from The Wizard of Oz. I used to wince at this until, for the first time in a hundred years, I saw the movie again.

When the tornado plucks Dorothy from her homestead in dusty Kansas, it whirls her away from black-and-white to the new world of Technicolor. There are mountains, a forest and, in the legendary distance, the towers of the Emerald City. Dorothy’s dream of a green city is rooted in the exigencies of life in a dry, brown land.

So it was for the migrants as they crossed the Cascades, and saw green Seattle sprawled below them, sea-bordered, lake-slivered — as near as real life yields to the wonderful city of Oz.