“I like little appeasing vapors.”
16. Arthur O. Bakke outside Kalispell, Montana
“‘Let no man deceive himself. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.’ First Corinthians three: eighteen and nineteen.”
“‘Why should I wish to see God better than this day?’ Whitman, ‘Song of Myself.’ Here’s another one from a Sioux medicine man called Black Elk: ‘Whatever you have seen, maybe it is for the good of the people you have seen it.’”
“Errors. To know God, to know the City of God—that’s the only true life.”
“Maybe this is the City of God.”
“How could it be? The City of God has streets paved with transparent gold.”
“Sounds pretty worldly. That’s the standard account in Revelation, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Revelation.”
We rode on in silence to Kalispell, and Bakke dozed off again. I looked at him. He seemed one of those men who wander all their lives. In him was something restless and unsatisfied and ancient. He was going everywhere, anywhere, nowhere. He belonged to no place and was at home anyplace. He understood that the Bible, in spite of its light, isn’t a particularly cheerful book, but rather one with much darkness, and he recognized that is where its power comes from.
Yet the word he carried to me wasn’t of the City of God; it was of simplicity, spareness, courage, directness, trust, and “charity” in Paul’s sense. He lived clean: mind, body, way of life. Hegel believed that freedom is knowledge of one’s necessity, and Arthur O. Bakke, I.M.V., was a free man hindered only by his love and conviction. And that was just as he wanted it. I don’t know whether he had been chosen to beat the highways and hedges, but clearly he had chosen to. Despite doctrinal differences, he reminded me of a Trappist monk or a Hopi shaman. I liked Arthur. I liked him very much.
Near Kalispell he woke up. I said, “I’ll let you off at the junction of ninety-three so you can hitch toward Missoula.”
“I could ride on with you. I know a friend in North Dakota.”
“I’ve got to go alone, Arthur. For now, I have to go by myself. There’ll be times when I’ll wish for your company.”
He hobbled out and came around to my window as gusts again pulled his beard sharply. We shook hands, and he said, “Carry God’s blessing, brother.”
“You’ll be all right in this wind?”
“‘For I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content.’ Phillippians four:eleven. Hardships are good. They prepare a man.”
“I believe you.”
4
THE boy was severely handicapped. Trying to fill a big thermos from a spring spewing out of the mountain east of Kalispell, near Hungry Horse, he laughed as the cold water splattered him, and he burbled something.
I had no idea what he said. “Very cold water indeed,” I answered.
He burbled again, then lost his footing, and fell hard on the wet rocks. The gush hit the flask and kicked it away. I went to help him.
“Leave him alone!” someone shouted over the crash of water. A man who looked as if he’d swallowed a nail keg came toward us. “Let him do it. You’ll make him weak if you do it for him. He’s my son. He understands.”
The boy struggled up and slipped and struggled again.
“I’ll hand him the thermos.”
“Let him get it.” The boy retrieved the jug and went back to the big spout. He fell again, got up, and tried again.
“Grab on to the pipe!” I shouted, but he couldn’t do it and hold the jug. The thermos bounced over to me. I picked it up and handed it to him.
“He’ll never survive if he gets turned into a pussy,” the father said.
“He’ll never survive if he dies filling a thermos jug.”
“Malarkey! We’re on our way now to float a branch of the Flathead. That river’s a bad-tempered horse, and you’d better stay on top of it, or it’ll beat your liver out. This little gimp’s got more white-water time than most of those canoe daredevils, and he can’t even swim. Just never learned fear.”
The boy succeeded in filling the jug. I filled mine and drank off a pint. My teeth ached from the cold, and I grimaced. The boy watched and did the same thing, but his grimace was too real.
“Glory is that cold!” I said to him. “And good!”
“Golden gud!” he repeated.
The father stepped in to fill a jug. “On our way home,” he said with authority, “I’ll fill a five-gallon can. I’ll tell you something. I used to go through sixty suppositories a month—two a day. Last year, I started mixing this water with a teaspoon of cayenne and equal parts of nutmeg and flour. Now I don’t even use six tablets a month.”
“You attribute healing power to this water?”
“Water’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the cayenne, nutmeg, and flour.”
“That’s different.”
“Nobody believes me. If you ever get hemorrhoids, try it, and don’t worry about thanking me. I never could thank the old boy I got it from.”
Eastward: U.S. 2 up the long canyon of the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. To the north, gusts scoured gritty snow from one wind-shorn peak to another: Mount Despair, Mount Rampage, Mount Scalplock, Mount Doody. In a crevasse I stopped to watch six mountain goats cling to the canyon wall. The mountain goat isn’t a goat at all, but rather a relative of the antelope, and one proved it by bounding ledge to ledge, each time sticking like an arrow.
The highway ascended the west slope of the Continental Divide. In the middle of the pavement at the top of Marias Pass stood a tall limestone obelisk marking the divide and also commemorating Teddy Roosevelt. Your basic double-duty monument. Then the great mountains of the west lay behind, and, sweeping ahead, mile after terribly visible mile of roadway across a grandly canceled plateau, were the grasslands of the Big Sky country.
The state of Montana had marked spots of fatal car crashes with small, pole-mounted steel crosses: one cross for every death. Along the highway, as it traversed the Blackfeet reservation, the little white crosses piled up like tumbleweed: a single, a pair, a triple, a half dozen, a group of nine. What began as an automobile safety campaign, the Blackfoot—once among the best of Indian horsemen—had turned into roadside shrines by wiring on plastic flowers. Somebody later told me the abundance of crosses around the reservation was “proof” of chronic alcoholism.
The reservation town of Browning, unlike Hopi or Navajo settlements, was pure U.S.A.: an old hamburger stand of poured concrete in the shape of a tepee but now replaced by the Whoopie Burger drive-in, the Warbonnet Lodge motel, a Radio Shack, a Tastee-Freez. East of town I read a historical marker that said the Blackfeet had “jealously preserved their tribal customs and traditions.” Render therefore unto Caucasians the things which be Caucasian.
At Cut Bank, the rangeland and wheat fields and oil wells began. Montanans call U.S. 2, paralleling the Canadian border all the way to Lake Huron, the “High-line.” The most desolate of the great east-west routes, it was two lanes of patched, broken, rutted, mind-numbing pavement running from horizon to horizon over the land of god-awful distance.
I stopped at Shelby. Shelby used to be on the old Whoop-up Trail, a route followed by Missouri River whiskey traders who sold to Indians. What the U.S. Army could not accomplish—the destruction of tribal organization—whiskey traders did with help from Christian missionaries who suppressed the old rituals. The white settlers, moving in after tribal disintegration opened this land, should have erected a monument to the whiskey bottle. The Blackfoot, for example, once hunted an area about twice the size of Montana; now their reservation of steel crosses and Whoopie Burgers doesn’t occupy even all of Glacier County. It isn’t that Indians lost their land because of whiskey—that stuff they called the Great Father’s Milk—they just lost it faster because of whiskey.
The Husky Cafe truck stop, glowing warm in the spring wind, was one of those places with a rack of joke postcards about fishing weekends, outhouses, mule
cruppers (“I’m the one on the left”), and full-color photographs of spotted fawns and antlered jackrabbits. At the counter and tables sat the diesel boys in their adjustable, ventilated caps that said MACK, GMC, KENWORTH, WHITE.
I seldom go into truck stops. When I hear teamster cant about being the self-professed “son-of-a-bitches of the highway,” when I hear stories of retreads shredding at seventy, when I watch drivers trying to recuperate on coffee and chili, and look at faces with eyes bloodshot from “pocket-rockets,” and witness their ludicrous attempts to be folk heroes, I get very nervous the next time I see one pushing forty tons seventy miles an hour at me. But that night in Shelby, I didn’t have much choice.
One eighteen-wheel stud said to the waitress, “Hun, you know, don’t cha, that old truckers never die—they just get a new Peterbilt.”
“I’ve heard that about a goddamn million times.” She had the skin of a Dresden figurine and the mouth of a Fruehauf driver. “They say the drive in your shaft’s about shot.” Automatically she pushed a mug of coffee under my menu. “What’s it for you, hoss?” Someone cracked another joke at her. Looking at me, answering him, she said, “Teach your old lady to suck eggs.”
I ordered two eggs anyway, a slab of hashbrowns, and a cut of ham. The conversation next to me was about a trucker killed in a wreck. He had been pulling a “fatload” of fifty thousand pounds of hanging beef in a reefer well above legal speed.
“Heard Bouncer bought pork over to Black Eagle,” one said. “Was he up?”
A garrulous teamster whose handle was Rubberlip said, “That wasn’t it. Half-ton come on the other way and tossed a brick straight in the air and let him run into it. Half-ton was probably doing eighty so that brick come through the windshield at a hunerd and fifty mile an are.”
“He had union problems all along.”
“Ain’t no tongue gonna tell for sure now, but that union bull is coverup. Some seatcover’s old man finally got word on him. He’d pornicate a snake if you held its head.”
The waitress slid a platter of three eggs down her arm.
“Only ordered two,” I said.
“The eggs was small tonight.”
5
WHAT does the traveler do at night in a strange town when he wants conversation? In the United States, there’s usually a single choice: a tavern.
The Oil City Bar was north of the railroad tracks near the spot where the Great Northern accidentally founded Shelby in 1891 by dumping off an old boxcar. From it the town grew, and the antecedents still showed.
One of the authors of the Montana Federal Writers’ Project describes Shelby in the 1890s as
the sort of town that producers of western movies have ever since been trying to reproduce in papier-mâché…. The town playboys were featured in the Police Gazette after holding up an opera troupe passing through on a railroad train…. The men shot out the engine headlight, the car windows, and the red signal lights, and forced the conductor to execute a clog dance.
I was out looking around to see how the old Wild West was doing when I came across the Oil City Bar. Although the night had turned cold and gusty, only the screendoor was closed; the wooden one stood open so men in down vests wouldn’t overheat. A shattered pool cue lay in the corner, and to one side was a small room lighted only by the blue neon flicker of a beer sign—the kind of light you could go mad in. Left of the ten-point buck trophy and above the gallon jars of pickled pig’s feet and hard-boiled eggs hung a big lithograph of a well-formed woman, shotgun in hand. She was duck hunting. Other than her rubber boots, she wore not a stitch.
A man, somewhat taller than the barstool and dressed in yellow from shoulders to cowboy boots, drank with assembly-line regularity. He leered wobbly-eyed at the huntress, tried to speak, but blew a bubble instead.
I blame what was about to happen to him on the traditional design of the American bar: a straight counter facing a mirrored wall, which forces the customer to stare at himself or put a crick in his neck looking at someone else. The English build their bars in circles or horseshoes or right angles—anything to get another face in your line of sight. Their bars, as a result, are more sociable. For the American, he stares into his own face, or at bottles of golden liquors, or at whatever hangs above the bar; conversation declines and drinking increases. If the picture above the bar is a nude, as is common in old Western bars, you have an iconography for creating unfulfilled desire: the reality of a man’s own six o’clock face below the dream of perfect flesh.
I turned away from the huntress to watch a pool game. There was a loud flump beside me. Knees to his chest, the man in yellow lay dead drunk on the floor. He looked like a cheese curl. His friend said, “Chuckie’s one good little drinker.”
A woman of sharp face, pretty ten years ago, kept watching me. She had managed to pack her hips into what she hoped was a pair of mean jeans; a cigarette was never out of her mouth, and, after every deep draw, her exhalations were smokeless. She was trying for trouble, but I minded my own business. More or less. The man with her, Lonnie, walked up to me. He looked as if he were made out of whipcord. “Like that lady?” he said.
“What lady is that?”
“One you been staring at.”
“Without my glasses, I can’t distinguish a man from a woman.” That was a lie.
“The lady said you were distinguishing her pretty good.”
Well, boys, there you have it. Some fading face trying to make herself the center of men’s anger, proving she could still push men to their limits.
“Couldn’t recognize her from here if I did know her.”
He pressed up close. Trouble coming. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Happens all the time. She thinks men stare at her.”
“Look. No offense, but I’ve no interest in the woman.”
“I can see it, and she can see it, and that’s the trouble. But let’s talk.”
It was an act he had been coerced into. He was faking it. He called for two beers and set one in front of me. “Take it,” he said. “When I sit down, I’m going to tell her you apologized for staring but you just thought she was one hell of a fox. Don’t make a liar out of me.”
He walked off. That was the silliest row I never got into.
I went to the restroom. When I came out, Lonnie was standing at the bar and the woman had gone to sit with three other women. She didn’t buy it, I thought. DRIFTER BLOWN AWAY IN BAR.
“Trouble?” I said.
“Forget it. She works with those broads. Casterating bitches every one.”
There was a commotion that got loud and moved outside to the windy street. Two men from Mountain Bell, the phone company, were going to fight. They came at each other, locked outstretched arms and pushed, circling slowly as if turned by the prairie wind. They tired and revolved slower, but neither let go or fell down. A police car drove up and honked. The fighters went to the squadcar, both leaning on the window to listen. After a while, they slumped off in opposite directions, and that was the end of it.
Lonnie and I watched from the bar. After it was over, he said, “Jack Dempsey had a real fight here.”
“A fight in this very bar?”
“Not a bar fight—heavyweight boxing. Shelby built a grandstand for it. Forty thousand seats. Seven thousand people showed up. Town almost went bust.”
The woman came over to Lonnie and said, “Let’s go.” She was mad. I left soon after, walking out into the streets of the new Wild West.
6
THE first thing I knew that morning in Shelby was that I was catching cold. My throat felt like a cat had got a paw down it and scratched out a strip. Then I saw the day: blustery and foul. I went back to the Husky grill and let them fill me with potato-skin hashbrowns and eggs and their hot, fierce coffee. I was trying to burn out the cold, the weather, trying to get ready for a long passage across the Great Plains of the North.
A man wearing denim—hat, jacket, pants, boots, and probably even his shorts—sat down beside me. “Is tha
t your truck with the Missouri tags?” he asked. I told him it was. He said, “Shoulda named the Missouri River ‘the Montana,’ you know. That dammed river, and I’m not cussing, is born, you might say, due south of here a ways. And we got more miles of it than you people down south.”
“Might as well call the Mississippi ‘the Minnesota’ then,” I said. “Anyway, explorers named the Missouri after Indians who lived along it.”
“So where’d those Indians live?”
“In Missouri.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Doesn’t stand to reason.”
“The men who named it didn’t know where the river came from. They saw the bottom end first.”
“That’s how the jackass got named.”
I asked where he was from. “Next county over. Liberty County. Only three other Liberty counties in the country. For the talking Americans do about freedom, I’d say that’s interesting. Tell me a county not named after a man or an Indian tribe.”
“Well, you have… there’s…” I couldn’t do it.
“Three thousand and some counties in the country and half are Jefferson, Jackson, Johnson, Monroe, Madison, Washington, or Lincoln. What’s your county?”
“Born in Jackson but I live in Boone.”
He smiled. “I’ve studied it. In Montana we got Beaverhead, Deer Lodge, Silver Bow, Petroleum, Sweet Grass, Wheatland, Rosebud. Even one called Musselshell. But the nation’s got a problem—no counties left to name things after. No rivers or mountains either. Got to use freeways now.”
He started to say something else when a woman put her head in the door and blasted us with cold, wet air. “Clay! Late again!” she shouted.
“Coming,” he said. “So long, Jackson.”
“Talk about names,” a man who sold potato chips said and pushed a receipt in front of me:
FIRST AND LAST CHANCE LIQUORS
202 BRONTOSAURUS BLVD.
DINOSAUR, COLORADO