Day 66: Midland, South Dakota

An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth; he always speaks to you as to an assembly. — Alexis de Tocqueville

I slept soundly in front of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Mud Butte, SD. After waking, I slipped into the church and grabbed my iPad and solar battery, which had been charging throughout the night. The water bottles I’d kept in my tent were frozen solid, but in the church I noticed a few jugs that contained water still in liquid form. I poured the water into my pot and added granola and powdered whole milk.

As I ate, I felt bad about all the things I’ve said about Christianity. I am in the Bible Belt, and I’ve received such kind treatment from the Heartland’s many practitioners. And while their views on same-sex marriage and abortion–among other social issues–are probably less than tolerant, their sense of charity, I could tell, has been heightened by their relgious upbringings. I wondered if some of their rigid social positions have more to do with seclusion and a fairly homogenous culture–which they’ve been brought up in and have little control over–and less to do with their mostly good-hearted religious teachings.

It wasn’t until an hour into my walk that it dawned on me that those water jugs might have been receptacles for holy water. As I continued my march southeast, now perhaps with the fluids of the lord in me, I felt a sense of rejuvenation. My body was in good shape, my belly, full of food, and the ten-day forecast looked heavenly: sunny, calm winds, with highs in the low-50’s.

The prairie was smattered with ice and snow, the melting signature of the storm that had just swept over the western states and kept me in my tent for three straight days. As I walked through a pasture, prickly with families of cactus and home to a herd of slow-moving cows, a man in a small red SUV spotted me and drove over the grass to talk. He thought I was a hunter at first–as almost all landowners do–but after seeing my trekking poles and backpack he gathered that I had other motivations. “Has the Lord called on you to do this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I guess I just wanted to go on a long walk.”

This is more or less my standard answer about why I’ve gone on this walk, but I’ve never been satisfied with the explanation. The truth is, I felt strangely drawn to the XL. I’m not sure why exactly, but I sensed there was something significant about this pipeline-to-be.

The story of the Keystone XL, so far, is an unusual one. There are over 160,000 miles of oil pipelines in the U.S. (and over 2 million miles of pipeline when you factor in gas pipelines), yet environmentalists have faught this pipeline with unprecedented perseverence. Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, along with his organization 350.org, has been outspoken about the horrors of the Tar Sands and what the XL might mean for global warming. There have been numerous demonstrations, highlighted by a 10,000-person protest in front of the White House in November 2011. The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have spoken out about the pipeline, as have a cadre of Hollywood celebrities.

We’ve been building oil pipelines since the 1870’s. Why are we making such a big stink about this one?

I liken the environmentalists’ fight against the XL to John Muir and the Sierra Club’s fight against the O’Shaughnessy Dam in California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley in 1906. The Hetch Hetchy was reputedly one of the most beautiful places in Yosemite National Park, but planners wanted to turn it into a reservoir to supply San Francisco with drinking water. The fight to save Hetch Hetchy was noteworthy because never before had citizens united in such numbers to oppose a public works project. Hetch Hetchy signified a change in the national mood. No longer was the public eager to exploit every resource and convert every hill and river and valley into an economic enterprise. This was a fight to preserve beauty. Muir and the Sierra Club eventually lost, and the reservoir was built, but an environmental movement was born.

Now, one hundred years later, a similar fight is being waged, except this one has less to do with preserving beauty than curbing global warming. Just as Muir did, environmentalists are saying what’s normal isn’t necessarily right, and a line in the sand has been drawn.

The XL, to me, is a battlefield in which hidebound capitalists clash with people worried about our fate on a warming planet. It’s rampant development versus careful planning; a booming economy versus steady sustainability; it’s greed versus love; death versus life. Even though the XL is hardly a front-page story anymore, I felt like it was the center of the universe–and I wanted to be here to see it, even if it was on the lonesome prairie in South Dakota.

But at times the Heartland of America–beating with a dull thump–hardly seems like the center of the universe. The Heartland seems old, dying, sterile. So many barns are abandoned and rotting. Barbed wire rusts on old wooden posts. Hair is more gray than brown, and bodies, more round than square. I never see children, and the woman of child-bearing age seems to have vanished from the face of the prairie like the bison. The few men my age crowd around slot machines in bars. Hunting excursions take place more behind steering wheels than on foot. Wives are pleasured but six times a year. A group of farmers at a restaurant played gin. They questioned my sanity (which is openly questioned during most every visit into town), and they teased the big guy at the table, saying that he likes to go on long walks, too. “From the couch to the TV,” he said laughing.

There is a glaring absence of vitality here. All pale embers; no flying sparks. Maybe the hot, the passionate, the ambitious doesn’t suit this land, this lifestyle. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with taking over the land your great-grandpa homesteaded, and living a quiet, leisurely life on the farm. Maybe, but I thought there was something missing. There’s a heavy contentment with the everyday task, but where’s the exuberance of the uncommon deed? A life lived not half-wild is a life only half-lived.

***

Somewhere in central South Dakota, I passed the 600-mile mark of my trip. While my legs and hips and back felt good, and my feet were no longer plagued with cuts and blisters and gashes, I began to feel a weariness settle into my bones, into the very roots of me; a weariness that I knew wouldn’t go away with a day’s, a week’s, or even a month’s rest.

Because of the waning daylight, I’m limited to walking from 6:30 am to 3:45 pm, making it all the more difficult for me to reach my 20-miles-a-day goal. To compensate for the lack of daylight, I push myself hard, taking as few breaks as I can, reminding myself–when my feet and shoulders are aching–that I’ll have the whole evening for lounging and reading and writing.

In Midland, South Dakota, where I’d pick up a food package, I spent the evening at the local bar, where I ate a double bacon cheeseburger and charged my electronics. The bar also functioned as the town’s gas station, grocery store, and casino, the last of which was located in a small dark room behind old-style saloon doors.

I sat quietly in the corner trying to write, but the bar became rowdy and I wasn’t able to focus, so I entertained myself with the Broncos-Chargers game on the television. The conversations in the room ranged from branding cows to hammering fence posts to Kim Kardashian to a very sincere debate about what it means to be a good son.

Roger the plumber was the first person to befriend me and he told me that when I went to the bathroom the whole bar wondered aloud who I was and what I was doing. “They thought you were a monster,” he said laughing. What really confused them were my trekking poles. When the bartender, a middleage woman, asked me, later on, what I used my “skiing poles” for, she, clearly unsatisfied with my explanation, gave me a dubious look and seemed even more leery of me. When Roger announced to the crowd what I’d set out to do, the bartender told me I’d get shot if I walked over so-and-so’s property, which was a warning I instantly dismissed, as I’ve heard warnings like this again and again. “Oh, he’ll shoot you!” she said. I gathered that these aren’t so much warnings, but reaffirmaing boasts about how rugged their land is and how tough the people who dwell on it are. The men, at most all of my stops, warn me about cougars, talking about the big cats with intimate knowledge, as if they engage in monthly wrestling contests with the animal, even though no one has even seen one. “Has he shot anyone before?” I asked the bartender. “Well, no,” she said.

Roger called himself a “black sheep” because he was one of very few people who favored progressive politics in South Dakota. Throughout the night, the bartender screamed at him, with equal parts affection and scorn, “Obama lover!!” Roger laughed, and tried to engage them in a political discussion, but the bartender and the rest of the bar, deflected his efforts and repeated the refrain of how Obama helps lazy people. Roger suggested I sleep on his floor for the night–an invitation which I eagerly accepted.

He ordered two more beers (“two for the ditch”) and I followed his truck to his home in the center of town. I sat with him in his house-trailer at his kitchen table, which was cluttered with a rat’s nest of magazines, envelopes and a pair of Hane’s briefs, which he saw no reason to remove. “What do you think about the legalization of marijauna?” Roger asked while constructing a makeshift pipe out of a Coke-a-Cola can, piercing a hole into the polar bear’s head. “It doesn’t bother me,” I said.

He told me that the South Dakotans are conservative and pro-business, but that they’re “South Dakotans at heart” and they don’t like it when a big corporation forces them to put a pipe on their property. Still, he said, they rarely vote in their best interests, unthinkingly favoring the party of the wealthy when it might be better for them to vote for the party that best represents the middleclass. When I asked him why they do this, he said, “People around here don’t know how to have an intellectual conversation.” His voice was a slow, slurred baritone: drunken but wise.

I knew what he meant. I’d been walking for two months, but it wasn’t until now, with Roger, that I felt completely free to share my thoughts, uncensored, with another person. It is difficult to find a true conversant: one who is not ruled by his own prejudice or dogma or even his own opinions. The true conversant is one whose opinions are alive and vibrant, living documents of the mind, subject to change, evolve, and grow nuanced and complex.

In the morning, when I awoke, I found that Roger had already left for work. I packed my things, wrote him a thank you note, picked up my package at the post office, walked down gravel roads, and then hopped a barb wire fence into prairieland. And I didn’t get shot.

Mud Butte Church.

A hunter took this picture of me. I’m not sure why, but my head in this picture looks disproportionately larger than the rest of my body.

This guy, a Jehova’s Witness, heard about me when speaking with friends at the local diner, and drove out to offer me some food and any medical supplies I might need. I took a handful of electrolye supplements.

The towns on the map in South Dakota are often deceptively small. Some “towns” like this one–Plainview, SD–consisted of just these few vacant buildings.

More and more, I’ve had to get my water from unconventional sources. The creeks are few, and those that I find are often muddied by cows. There are, though, various wells and springs in the cow pastures that pump water from the ground. This was one of those pumps. I still treat my water with Chlorine Dioxide drops.

Cheyenne River

Corn! As I head south, I’ve been coming across different crops. This was my first corn field, and was rather unpleasant to walk through, as the stalks are sharp. I’ve also walked through sunflower fields.

Day 59: Holed up in South Dakota

I feel like I am in a giant orange balloon being tossed in a tempestuous sky. But I am only in South Dakota, on the ground, somewhere in cow country, next to a murky lake.

There is a storm outside that the Weather Channel calls “Brutus.” My tent flutters violently, pounded by 25 mph winds. I listen to the pitter-patter of freezing rain all day. And the cold–a tolerable 30 F now–will drop to as low as 8 F before the storm dissipates. All the sides of my tent shake, except the one nearest my head, which is solid, frozen inside by my exhalations, and outside, by the freezing rain. I push against it every now and then, and with enough force, I’ll hear a loud crack, and the ice outside will come crashing down to the ground.

Despite the storm outside, I am cozy in my tent, maybe more so because of it. I think mostly hopeful, happy thoughts. I look forward to the days and the years to come. I eat as much in the tent as I do when I’m on the move, and I eagerly read the third installment of Edmund Morris’s Teddy Roosevelt biography, Colonel Roosevelt. Normally I would resent being stuck like this, but I’d just walked 15 days straight, doing about between 15 and 25 miles a day, and I see the need for a good, long rest.

I wake up the second day without any expectation of hiking. The forecast–which I’ve been able to check on my iPad (whose battery is beginning to run disconcertingly low)–says the weather is going to get worse: colder, snowier, and with stronger winds. I put on all my clothes: thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, five layers of shirts, plus my rain suit, a beanie, a faux-fur hat, and a pair of gloves. I go outside, fill up my water bottles from the cow pond, and hammer in my tent stakes as deep into the ground as they’ll go.

I ration my iPad usage so I can read throughout the day and night, take a 3-hour nap, and consume an inexcusable amount of food. The freezing rain stops momentarily right before sunset, so I get out to use the bathroom, and to climb a hill to see if I could spot a road, a house, or some sanctum of safety, if just for precautionary reasons. But I can’t see anything except a herd of curious deer, who’d caught sight of me, by the cow pond. The sky, though, on its western end, looks like it’s on fire. It’s a brilliant orange, with big blue dark clouds passing over.

A few days before, I was in Buffalo, South Dakota, sitting at a kitchen table of a family who offered to give me a place to stay for the night. “For someone with a college education, what you’re doing is pretty stupid,” said the woman of the house. “I mean, it’s really stupid.” She was, and had been, laying on the criticism pretty thickly, but I was stupidly content, as I was eating the eighth pancake she’d made me, slathered in butter, and dripping with blueberry syrup. We’d had this discussion, it seemed, a half-dozen times, and I’d long ago given up trying to justify my trip, neglecting to parry her attacks with fresh retorts. “These pancakes are excellent,” I said.

But constantly being called “crazy” and “insane” does have its impact. As I walked out of Buffalo, down the road, I wondered, “Am I crazy? Maybe I shouldn’t be traveling cross-country? Is what I’m doing… wrong?”

Such thoughts are like burrs stuck to my pant leg, prickling me once every few strides. It’s not until I get out onto the open prairie, or into canyon country, or under a ceiling of stars that I’m finally able to shake them off. There is a wild joy that swells in my chest. Every day there is a new trial. There’s something new to learn; something new to see with every step, every turn, every drop into a canyon labyrinth. It’s an infusion of newness! And when immersed in this constant newness–when every step is exploratory, every interaction, novel, and every day, completely different from the previous–it’s hard to think of going back again to the dullness of the normal, the expected, the planned.

Staring at this orange sky now–whose color probably portends a more vicious stage of the storm–I am dazzled. It has nothing to do with being at the mercy of weatherly extremes or “pushing my limits.” Rather, I feel the presence of something spectacular–sinister, perhaps, but no less spectacular–and it occurs to me that there are great truths bound in beauty, truths I cannot comprehend, but truths that are there, pregnant with mysterious meaning.

Worried that these clouds will bring a fog or blizzard that might impair my visibility–perhaps so much that I won’t be able to find my tent–I run back to my tent as quickly as I can. The grass and cacti and thistles are frozen over, plump with ice coating their contours, forming a field of brittle, glistening stalagmites. As I run, the ground shatters, tinkling like a shaken Christmas tree.

I sleep restlessly. The cold is too cold, and my sleeping bag, over the past several nights, has accumulated moisture, and is no longer living up to its 5F degree promise. My iPad is dead, and my digital library, gone, but I’d taken note of the forecast and saw that tomorrow would be as cold and windy, though clearer.

In the morning, I pack my things with numb fingers and head southeast. Less than an hour into my hike, I see the forecast was mistaken. The sun, which was bright and blinding moments before, is now lost behind a encroaching plume of dark cloud. Snow begins to fall, and I can only see a mile in the distance. I do see, however, an abandoned barn, which becomes my new destination–my new “hole” for the day and night–where I’ll build a fire, make a warm meal, dry my sleeping bag, and sink into a comfortable slumber even in the midst of this terrible, beautiful cold.

This is Mud Butte, where I currently am. More specifically, I’m in the town of Mud Butte, in a Catholic Church, where I’m charging up my electronics, which are hard to live without, during these long nights especially.

Day 53: Buffalo, South Dakota

In Fallon, Montana, I was given a can of soup, a homegrown tomato, and an orange vest typically worn by hunters. (“I’d hate to see you get shot,” said the local who kindly, and sheepishly, handed it to me as I cooked my dinner under the town’s pavilion.)

Earlier, on my walk through the prairie, I had a coffee and three oatmeal cookies with Patty and Lewis, farmers who had land about ten miles north of town. I knew I was off the pipeline path, so I wasn’t expecting to glean insights about the XL, but Patty and Lewis were leasing land seven miles to the west, where the pipeline was to be laid.

Land agents, representing TransCanada, the company that will build the pipeline, had been approaching homes in the area for years.

“Shysters,” Lewis said. “They’re damn secretive.”

Apparently the land agents do as much as they can to deal with landowners individually. Lewis said that they’d coerced some older people to sign compensation contracts, but other landowners–worried about the quality of the pipe, the compensation they’d get, and who would deal with clean-up if there was a break–joined forces and acted under the Great Plains Resource Council.

The landowners were especially irked because TransCanada desired to use a thinner pipe under their land because it was allegedly a “low consequence area.” They were also offering 15 cents a foot to landowners, but the Council was insisting on $30. But it’s difficult to negotiate a fair sum, Lewis says, because all landowners must sign disclosures and keep their agreements with the company confidential.

“Who is responsible if that thing blows up? No one could answer that,” Lewis said. “Most of the people want to be treated fairly. This secretive bullshit sits in your craw. How do we know what they’re getting up in Canada or down in Texas? Land agents won’t tell you anything. They keep you isolated. It’s all up to you to negotiate.”

We talked for about an hour, Patty filled up my water bottles, and I walked south to Fallon, where I’d cross the Yellowstone River over the I-94 bridge next to Fallon.

At the town bar/restaurant, the only place in town where I could get Wi-Fi, a middle-aged lady came and sat down in front of me. I’d seen her ten miles north of Fallon in her white pick-up.

“So what are you doing this for?” she asked. I explained that I was in the mood for a long walk and that I wanted to see the path of the Keystone XL before it was developed.

“What, do you think ethanol is any better?!” she exclaimed. Her tone was bitter and accusatory, and she spoke to me as if I was a lobbyist for the ethanol industry. But at this nascent stage of our conversation, I’d yet to give her any indication that I had any prejudices against the XL. I do of course have prejudices, but for all she knew, I could be on this trip to bless the sacred grounds into which the glorious pipeline shall be laid.

I didn’t know much about ethanol, but I gathered that it wasn’t a realistic solution to our oil dependency problems. “I’m not smart enough to know the solution,” I said. “But I think we can reduce our oil consumption. We use twice as much energy as Europe.”

“Yeah, but it’s a lot denser over there,” she said. “Look, you’re using energy to power that computer,” she said, pointing to the socket that my iPad was plugged into. “You don’t think we need oil?”

(As for her “denser” point, author and scientist Jim Hansen has this to say: “Only a small part of the difference in energy use [between the energy efficient Europe and Japan vs. energy gluttons, Canada, U.S, and Australia] is accounted for by greater travel distances… The primary difference is that Europe and Japan have taken steps to minimize fuel needs.” He adds, “California achieves energy efficiency close to that of Europe and Japan” because of an “astounding variety of energy efficiency standards and incentives.”)

Agitated with her accusatory tone–that was only, I’d soon gather, a roughness of speech common in these parts–I said, “Well, the planet’s warming. We gotta do something.”

In my tent that night I was appreciative of her jarring questions because it forced me to think about the situation, but also troubled because I didn’t have the faintest clue what the solution was. I opened up my Kindle application and went through the various energy policy books I’ve read over the course of this trip.

David Owen, author of The Conundrum, says that we must focus less on making things more efficient (because efficiency enables consumption), and more on reducing consumption, which is the root of the problem. (America, he points out, accounts for one-fourth of the consumption of oil, coal, and gas, and individually we “consume resources five times the global rate.”) He recommends that we 1) Drastically reduce our dependency on automobiles; 2) Enact a “fee and dividend” tax system (in which consumers are taxed for purchasing things that produce greenhouse gases, but the public receives those taxes back so they can invest in more sustainable lifestyles); 3) Invest in grand alternative energy projects (he describes a team of scientists who would like to test, on a large scale, their idea for sending planes 2,000 feet into the air, where they’ll harness the heavy wind energy which will be sent down a cable that the plane is attached to); and 4) Live in “dense, efficient, intelligently organized cities,” which “are the future of the human race.”

NASA scientist and climatology expert Jim Hanson, in his book Storms of our Grandchildren, recommends that we put an end to coal-fired power plants, forego unconventional fossil fuels (i.e. Tar Sands, shale oil), and that we employ a fee and dividend tax system, as described above.

Bill McKibben, in his book Eearth, recommends that we scale back to small economies and small farms. “By some estimates,” McKibben says, “as much as half of global warming gases can be tied to the livestock industry, with its huge demands on our grain crops… It takes eleven times as much fossil fuel to raise a pound of animal protein, as a pound of plant protein.”

Walking through these cow pastures and over these hay fields, I’ve often wondered if they will still be around in 100 years. Will we figure out a way to power the tractors and transport the cows and dispense the meat across the country–without unleashing the ghastly greenhouse gases? Or will the industry be immobilized by the scarcity of obtainable oil? Despite the bucolic character of the land, I recognized that this lifestyle–these hay fields and thousands and thousands of cows–cannot exist without large quantities of oil.

This woman drives long distances to and from her pasture every day. She probably runs a tractor over hundreds of acres of hay fields. Scaling down, small farms, higher taxes on gasoline. The sort of changes these experts recommend would be appalling, unthinkable–offensive even–to someone like her. It’s no wonder why well-meaning scientists are so quickly dismissed, and global warming, denied, by those whose lifestyles are so reliant on oil.

After Fallon, I continued on to Baker, Montana. I walked through miles and miles of uninterrupted canyon country. When I approached a steep precipice, I would worry that I wouldn’t be able to find a way down. But at every canyon rim, I was quick to find a path blazed by cows leading down and up the steep walls.

The town of Baker sat underneath a dank, overcast sky. When I first caught site of the town, I was standing next to an abandoned windmill. which used to pump water from a spring to provide cows with water. Half its blades were missing, and all it could do now was creak, hauntingly, with each passing gust.

North of town were dozens of pump jacks, some white, bearing streaks of rust, others, pitch black. Some were slowly dunking their probosces into the ground, but most, it seemed, stood frozen, paralyzed, dead, no longer able to sustain itself on the pools of black nectar that have since dried.

In town, behind hillocks of scrap heap, I could see the top of a crane busy moving metal. The town had an air of decrepitude, but when I entered I was shocked with the bustle of activity. There were hundreds of newly bought pickups, parked in front of bars, clustered at motels, Hummers headed down Main Street. There were trailers everywhere, housing for all the temporary workers building two pipelines in the area.

Baker is booming, but none of the bustle gave me the impression of prosperity, sustainability, improvement. The pipeliners will leave, the motels will empty, the bars will cut back on servers, and things will resume as they had. The money that once came in in such abundance, will be completely squandered and forgotten.

What a dismal looking future, I thought. Graveyards of pump jacks. Dead ducks on tailing ponds. Well water bursting into flame. Droughts on the plains. Hurricanes in the north. Water on the poles. Yet as the world warms and oceans rise, the country clamors for an employer-in-chief to create jobs, jobs, jobs, growth, economy, progress…

I walked into the post office, where I would pick up several packages. Josh had sent me four days worth of food, a brand new four-season tent, and winter gear: a merino wool shirt, a pair of gaiters (for walking through snow), a new pair of gloves, a new hat, a pair of hiking boots, two pairs of wool socks, and two new pairs of underwear.

I was delighted to have the new gear–ecstatic even–consumer that I am.

Would this be a badger?

Artwork from Josh’s nieces, Maggie and Eleanor, received in my latest package.

My La Sportivas headed to the trashbin. They served me well, but I hung onto them too long. I’m wearing my large–and heavy–hiking boots now.

This is what happens when you hike for 40 days in the same underwear.

These skin-like bandaids are expensive, but they’ve done an admirable job helping me deal with gashes and chafing on my heels.

My new 4-season tent. Nights are warm, but the condensation in the morning is undesirable.