This is the fifth in a series of articles by Staff Writer Chuck Haga, who is retracing the route taken by author John Steinbeck in 1960 that led to the book “Travels With Charley.”
When John Steinbeck crossed the Red River at Moorhead, Minn., in 1960 and came into North Dakota, I was a sixth-grader at Ritchie School in Valley City, about 60 miles west of Fargo. I’d like to think I threw crabapples at his camper as he rumbled through.
He left no record of stopping in Valley City, but I lingered long enough last week to visit friends and see Sugarloaf Hill and Pioneer Park and other places I can name. Then I drove out of the Sheyenne Valley and onto the prairie, watching the land grow more rugged as I approached the Missouri, more rugged still when I crossed the river. Hawks dipped and drifted overhead, and a herd of maybe 50 buffalo grazed just east of Richardton. Despite the drought, there was hay put up, and the land smelled of harvest.
Back in Skokie, Ill., a man and a woman had come into Nick’s Bar and settled in beside me, and by the way they talked I knew they were travelers, too.
I asked where they were from, and the woman beamed and said Michigan. She beamed some more when I told her I had just been through Michigan and liked it, partly because the flatlands reminded me of where I was raised.
“Where’s that?” she asked, and I told her. She wrinkled her nose.
“But there’s nothing in North Dakota,” she said.
There are many ways to see and experience “nothing,” and one way is with exhilaration. E.B. White, the essayist, traveled through the state as a young man in 1922 and wrote this in a letter to a friend back East: “If you have never rushed along through eastern North Dakota, mile after mile, with never a turn, with never a landmark in all the great sea of grain – rushed along on a two-track road that comes from the sky 30 miles behind and leads to the sky 30 miles ahead – why then you ought to drop your task and do it.”
These are not the best of times in North Dakota. You can’t tell that by the pace in Fargo, still “as traffic-troubled, as neon-plastered, as cluttered and milling with activity as any other up-and-coming town,’ which is how Steinbeck found it in 1960. But Fargo has government and hospitals and a university, and it is a regional trade center.
“If you get out into the state, there’s a lot of pessimism,” said Kevin Carvell, a former newspaperman and now an aide to Rep. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. “You hear people saying, ‘Well, it isn’t going to get any better, is it? This decline is just going to keep on.’ “
The cities have grown, but the towns are smaller, the countryside nearly unpopulated for long stretches. Fewer young people are learning their sense of justice, or at least of crime and punishment, by pitching manure with a hangover and three hours of sleep.
The trend has been a long time building, of course. Alice had a population of 124 when Steinbeck camped near there in 1960, down from 162 in 1950. In 1980, the count was 62.
In Valley City, old classmates who work in town told me they worry about the farmers, and it’s not just because Main Street runs on crop money. Some of the people we grew up with are farming, and some of them are taking long horseback rides at dusk to think things out, crop prices and loan schedules and the like.
In Jamestown, on a crisp Friday night made for high school football, surgeon Vernon Fitchett watched from the stands as his son, Ben, a senior linebacker and offensive guard, played for the hometown Bluejays. “People are hurting,” the father said at halftime.
“You see it in people coming into the hospital with no insurance. They’ve let their insurance lapse because they thought they couldn’t afford the premiums. We’re seeing more and more of it.”
Jamestown missed a two-point conversion in the final seconds and lost, 23-21, to Grand Forks Central. When it was over, the teams made lines and walked through the traditional handshake ceremony, then headed for locker rooms to celebrate or regroup.
“He’s trying to get into the Naval Academy,” Fitchett said of his son. “I spent 20 years in the Navy myself, and it was a good life. I hope he makes it. But I’m not sure he’s going to have a better life than we did. We (the country) may have peaked.”
After the game, I camped on the outskirts of Jamestown and went to sleep thinking of things I should have said to that woman in Skokie. Nothing in North Dakota? The world’s largest buffalo is in Jamestown. And the world’s largest Holstein cow, 38 feet tall and 50 feet long, is on a hill above New Salem. New Town has Earle Bunyan, Paul’s cowboy brother. And in Bismarck, the City Commission is looking into building an 80-foot waterfall on the Missouri River. That’s right, a waterfall.
No mountains, though. The state admits as much in a big highway billboard outside Mandan. “Welcome to North Dakota,” it says. “Mountain removal project completed.”
Mandan is where the West begins, Steinbeck said. The buttes loom ahead as you approach the Missouri, and then the land is brown and rocky and scored by wind and water. Then come the Badlands. “They deserve this name,” he wrote. “They are like the work of an angry child.” An earlier visitor, a cavalry general, said it was “hell with the fires out.”
In Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I stopped to make coffee, look at the jagged and painted land and do some reading. I am behind in my reading, just as my provisions usually lag a state or two behind. I was still reading about the coast of Maine and eating Maine potatoes in Ohio, reading about Lake Erie and drinking Ohio wine in Wisconsin.
In the park, I read Teddy Roosevelt. North Dakotans are fond of TR because he loved the place and once said he wouldn’t have been president if he hadn’t ranched and hunted there in the 1880s, toughening his body and mind.
“If the ordinary men and women of the republic have character, the future of the republic is assured,” he wrote in 1913. But if they lack character, “then no brilliancy of intellect and no piled-up material prosperity will avail to save the nation.”
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The sky in North Dakota can be awesome, especially when a change in the weather approaches. But it is Montana that calls itself Big Sky Country. A friend who moved from North Dakota to Billings some time ago says the sky is indeed bigger there. It’s because the mountains give it perspective. It looks bigger because you’re conscious of just how far you’re looking. In North Dakota, you’re looking at space.
I took a side trip north out of Billings, stopping briefly at the Musselshell River to inspect a monument to the doomed flight of Chief Joseph and his Nez Pierce. Weary of fighting soldiers but reluctant to be confined to a reservation, they sought refuge in Canada, but they were caught and defeated in 1877 at the Battle of the Bear’s Paw. There is a sorrowfulness to this and other, similar markers in the West, victories of American arms that now seem more embarrassing than any of our defeats.
At Barber, sort of a suburb to Ryegate, I met Ted and Betty Waddell, who live on a small ranch with an assortment of named animals, including Muffin the horse and a mournful bassett hound called Otis. I arrived just in time for Sunday services at Grace Lutheran, and the Waddells invited me to share a pew.
There are seven pews. We were a congregation of 15, and we crowded into the back four rows and listened to the Rev. Keith Wolter decry “obsessive busyness.” He was as guilty as anyone, he said, so after services he was going to go home and take a nap. “I’m not worried about life around here grinding to a halt,” he said. “There are enough neo-pagans left around here to take up the slack.”
It was a glorious autumn day, warm and sunny at noon and with the damp-warm smell of earth and fallen leaves in the air. It was shirt-warm but it still felt good to wear wool in the afternoon because it had been so chilly in the morning and you knew it would be chilly again soon.
Ted Waddell managed a larger, working ranch for 11 years and still has the tools and some animals and many of the manners of a rancher. He opens beer bottles with a cattle hoof trimmer, for example, if that’s what’s handy. But he is an artist of expanding reputation, and he makes his living now by painting and sculpting his interpretations of life in the West. He uses animal bones and whole road kills in some of his works, and he once puzzled neighbors by stuffing his pickup cab with tumbleweeds, which he wanted for a sculpture.
“People are friendly here, but at the same time they’re reticent,” he said. “If you’re out there screwing up, unless you ask someone, they won’t say anything. They will allow me to live and make paintings and strange things they don’t understand.”
He’s in his late 40s, a short, sturdy man with hair long in back and a thick, handsome mustache. He speaks carefully, as if in brushtrokes. He loves the diversity of Montana, he said, from near-desert to high plains to mountains. “I’ve been here all my life, and there are so many places to see that I don’t even know about yet.
“We have a sense of place here. And we have a sense of struggling, of surviving. We’ve been through seven years of drought and grasshoppers and winters. You stand against all those things and then spring comes and you’re alive. And that’s part of what I do with my art. I respond directly to the seasons, the animals, to the things that are changing our culture. I suspect a lot of it is inevitable, but it’s tremendously poignant and sad, too, and exciting.”
There are continuing struggles over scarce water, over resources and how to use the land, he said. Betty Waddell, who teaches psychology at a college in Billings, said there is “a tension between people who love the land, want to care for it, and people who don’t love the land the same way. They don’t think of it in terms of the next generation. They love it for what it does for them now.”
Montana is a good place to be a woman, she said. “I think women are stronger here, and it’s because so many of them are changing flat tires in blizzards so their kids can go to school. So many of the women I meet from the East seem like wimps to me.
“We still have that double edge to fight against here. (To) some of Ted’s artist friends the image of the woman is she’s either on a pedestal or she’s a whore. And I think a lot of Western men still think of women in those two ways.”
We went to town for a harvest supper, sponsored by five churches and heavy on roast beef. Pastor Wolter wasn’t there, it being nap time, but some politicians were on hand and very busy, including a county commissioner running for another term. When I asked him how people are doing, Ted Eklund smiled and said, “They’re destitute.” What do they need? “A hard winter,” he said, smiling again.
“It’s unusual for a rancher to say that because a hard winter takes a lot of feed for your cattle, and a hard winter is tough on roads. But it’s awfully dry here, and it has been for years. We need snow. We need to build up that snowpack in the mountains, or next year there won’t be any irrigation at all.”
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I drove back to Billings to pick up the Yellowstone River again, a pebble-banked sluice of a river flanked by rows of brilliant yellow-orange cottonwoods. This was Steinbeck’s route, but long before that it was Lewis and Clark’s Trail. I put Teddy Roosevelt in the trunk and brought out the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
“Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a certain pleasure,” Clark wrote on May 26, 1805, as he approached the eastern face of the Rockies. He worried about the dangers and difficulties ahead. “But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise.”
It was in that spirit, not with foreboding, that I approached Yellowstone National Park.
It was getting toward evening when I reached Livingston, about an hour’s drive north of the park, so I bought a T-bone and made camp by Pine Creek in the Gallatin National Forest. I locked my garbage in my trunk and didn’t take any snacks to bed and tried not to think too much about all the posted warnings about grizzlies sometimes passing through. It was cold that night, close to freezing, and darker than normal, I thought. But the most ferocious visitor I had was a Steller’s jay that came to share my breakfast.
I can’t decide if the park was worse or better than I expected. I wasn’t more than a few miles inside when I saw three elk, a bull and two cows, and that was reassuring. But it hurt when I came to a sign that said “watch for moose” and all I could see was a marsh of ash and stands of charcoal that once had been lodgepole pine, spruce and fir.
John Kavchar and Miquette Magnusson came walking through the sooty plain, and we talked. They live in San Diego, and they’ve both been to the park before. They came to see the damage. “The first thing I noticed was the smell,” she said. “You don’t smell the pines. You still smell the smoke.
“But it’s not as bad as I expected. I was hearing, oh, our kids will never get a chance to see Yellowstone the way it was. Well, they’ll get something else — a chance to see a forest rejuvenating. They can come back after 10 years, after 20 and 30. It will be a wonderful experience for them.”
As she spoke, Kavchar pointed to a wisp of smoke that had started from the ash a few yards away. “Let’s put it out,” he said. “I don’t know, are we supposed to?” she wondered. And so we stood there and had our own containment vs. free burn debate.
We decided to put it out. Magnusson stomped on the budding fire, and turned it into two little fires. So we reversed ourselves and opted for a hands-off policy.
Fire crews remain encamped in the park, and occasionally a helicopter beats overhead, water bucket dangling. But there have been some good rains, and the snow should come soon. There was snow on the mountain peaks above where I camped.
The worst-burned sections have almost a plastic or molded look: the once spongy lichen floor now smooth and shiny black, thickly spiked with charred tree trunks. Other areas are patterned green and black, where the fire came through like a split tide or an erratic breeze. Take a few steps into the forest on a closed trail and you understand why it’s closed. Charred trees towering above you crack with the slightest breeze and groan like bad door hinges.
But in much of the park, the scent again is of lush pine and the sounds are of elk bugling, buffalo rutting. Anglers still work the Firehole and Madison rivers for trout. Tourists still come from everywhere. “It’s magnificent,” said Richard Hastings, a law student from England. “We have nothing like it.”
And at 5:18 p.m. the day I was there, no more than five seconds after Earl Rexroad of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, turned around and said, “Ought to go any time now,” Old Faithful fired away.