Wisecracking Across America - 15. Chapter 15

Thursday, May 27, 1999

It's unfair to say eastern Montana is simply flat. To be truthful, there probably is some texture. But the human eye can't see it. Okay, okay: there are hills. And maybe some low mountains. An ebb and flow of trees. "And it's green as it ever gets," a cheerful woman told us in Kalispell---her husband had just driven home from North Dakota.

It was green all right. And the sky was blue. And I was suitably astonished for the first two or three centuries we edged across the plains. There wasn't even a speed limit, though that would change in June. But I couldn't imagine being bound to merely seventy-five miles an hour crossing this tundra. There wasn't enough time.

In Rudyard we passed a sign saying 596 Nice People---1 Old Sorehead. I sympathized with him. Soon we were out-running trains; it seemed Tom had secret Mario Andretti genes. We not only left behind the hundred-car freight trains pulled by double diesels. We also aced short, sleek AmTrack cruisers.

In Harve, we stopped before developing Thousand Mile Stare. Also, I'd tanned hell out of my window arm, forgetting to roll down my sleeve, and needed some sun block. In a freshly renovated seven-block park, a plaque to James J. Hill, Railroad Builder, read: "I shall make a mark upon the land in a way it will never be eradicated."

Good thing he wasn't in strip mining.

Later, as cars slipped by doing ninety, we noted Chief Joseph's Bear Paw Battlefield, now rusting with quonset huts and abandoned farm machines. And towns with unlikely names considering the geography and politics: Kremlin. Harlem. In the last six days, I'd spotted only two African-Americans, and they were both on trains. We counted as many Masonic Halls as I'd seen in my life, and had a conversation with a waitress about Eastern Star---Tom had noticed her secret decoder ring matched his grandma's.

In Glasgow, on another desperation stop, we stayed too long in an antiques shop, mainly because it was air-conditioned and glare-free. The truck was air-conditioned, too, though using it cut us off from the world we'd come to see. Besides, we weren't hot. Just road dead.

The woman who owned the shop was also a potter, one of Tom's interests. They talked for a while about technique, then of carpel tunnel---she had it, and could only work several hours a day. "It doesn't hurt," she insisted. "But I need an operation to restore my grip."

I mentioned an older couple we'd talked with in Washington, who'd closed their pottery after forty years because of arthritis.

"It's not that bad yet," the woman said grinning.

She seemed an urban escapee, but turned out to be consummately local: her grandfather had settled Montana when it was still wilderness, building to a patriarchy. "He was amazing," she told us. "Really unpredictable---I think I got that from him. Though some things I've done have surprised even me."

Would she ever consider leaving the isolation?

"No."

Why?

Mostly, easy stuff: she liked it here.

While Tom admired her pottery, I started her granddad's memoirs, a dense, fifty-page pamphlet with a dozen-or-so black-and-white photos. It was awkwardly written, maybe even dictated---he'd been eighty-seven at the time. But he'd put down everything he'd thought was important. And if the words weren't exciting, his life was certainly different from anything I knew.

He'd been born in Iowa in 1888, moving with his parents to North Dakota at eleven. They weren't quite homesteaders, but within a year had a chance to "buy a relinquishment on a homestead," evidently from someone who'd washed out. It cost three hundred bucks, and he describes the land as "raw," and writes of sod-breaking and house-and-barn-building. His dad's carpentry skills were almost more valuable than his farm experience, weather making crops unreliable as income. Prairie fires were also a danger. Once grass blazed, there was no putting it out. Still, by the time he was twenty-one, North Dakota was pretty well settled, and since he wanted a farm of his own, he headed to Montana.

He traveled first by train, then stagecoach, then buckboard---a kind of stripped-down carriage, which mostly seemed wagon wheels and seat. He'd planned to go alone, then a married neighbor joined him, and they met two other guys on the way. The four claimed adjacent 320 acre sites on the Little Rattlesnake Creek. Little creek. Big snakes.

After establishing the claim, he headed home to North Dakota: to farm, thresh, help his dad, work in a grain elevator, do carpentry---anything to make money. In October, he went back to Montana to build a twelve-by-eighteen-foot homestead shack. It cost fifty-six bucks, the wood and tar paper hauled by a team of hired broncos over barely existent trails. In November, cold and sick of boiled prairie dog and skinned jackrabbit, it was back to North Dakota. Just before Christmas, he married, though was tending the grain elevator the following dawn. Still, his first kid came barely ten months later, so he wasn't all work. Or maybe he was just carefully planning: it takes plenty of kids to run a farm; he was the oldest of thirteen, and had six of his own.

In spring, after gathering wedding presents of geese, cows, chickens, a sow, a wagon, and a team of horses, he loaded them all in box car for fifty-eight bucks. That left him ten in life savings---a crisis, because when his stuff was weighed on arrival he needed another thirty in overcharges to unload. Fortunately, he swapped seed for cash, and when his wife arrived a week later, they put her remaining travel money---roughly six bucks---into groceries: "Mostly flour which was about $2 a hundred (pounds). From then on through the summer we lived on what we could get out of our cows and chickens...so with lots of milk, cream, butter, eggs, and flour to make bread and pancakes we never went hungry."

When his wife was ready to give birth, they rented a house in town for fifteen dollars, paying the doctor another twenty-five for delivery. A month later, they were back in their tiny shack, though hardly alone: a trio of unmarried neighbor-farmers spent the winter on straw-filled mattresses. In the spring, two Minnesota couples, each with three kids, joined them as well, making the kitchen wall-to-wall sleeping.

That's the first ten pages. The writing gets less detailed as life gets more ordinary, though there's a schoolhouse fire in 1916, huge floods in '39 and '52, the arrival of electricity after the second World War, and even a murder. Also, lists of townspeople and twisting begats, ending with his twenty great-grandchildren and their present---well, 1976---careers. I bought a copy to finish reading later, Tom got some pottery and hand-made rugs, and we took water to the dog, sullenly leashed in the shade. Still, we left reluctantly, and only partly due to the glare.

Two drab hours later, we reached Williston, North Dakota. It was nothing to celebrate---and I mean nothing. Though we had finally left Montana. With only the badlands to cross.

420 miles