So much to do, only three sun-drenched months to do it. Let us help. We start by pinpointing the and , then lay out the , , , , , a dizzying slew of summer essentials, and over a dozen more ways to make the season sizzle.

Brandy Armstrong

HELLO, SUMMER: Brandy Armstrong, a runner from Ogallala, Nebraska, hits Cocoa Beach, Florida, in a vintage bikini from MELET MERCANTILE; shorts () from ROXY BY QUIKSILVER.

PLUS: ; ; ;



HEAVY WATER
for Robert Maxwell’s Exposure Photo Gallery of surfing’s invincible underground.

Swellsville, USA

Bare feet on hot sand. Surfboard on the waves. Lobster in the pot. A long, hot season to stay wet and never go back inside. summer starts here—don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

Tori Praver

Surfer Tori Praver at Cocoa Beach, Florida

Cocoa Beach, Fl While the waves are more mellow than menacing, Kelly Slater’s hometown boasts some serious surf cred. Gear up at one-acre Ron Jon Surf Shop (4151 N. Atlantic Ave., 321-799-8888) and head south toward Patrick Air Force Base, where, if you don’t mind the occasional sonic boom, you can score at breaks like Picnic Tables and Second Light. Refuel seven miles farther south at Da Kine Diego’s Insane Burritos, in Satellite Beach (1360 Hwy. A1A, 321-779-8226). The joint’s outdoor Bamboo Theater screens the latest surf flicks. Montauk, NY It’s just three hours by train from Penn Station to the peaceful right-hand break at Turtle Cove and the smooth lefts at Ditch Plains. Make camp at the Atlantic Terrace hotel ($85–$385; 21 Surfside Pl., 631-668-2050), which overlooks an eponymous beach break fueled by hurricane swells spinning off the Carolinas. Work up an appetite for Harvest on Fort Pond (11 S. Emery St., 631-668-5574), nose-riding wizard Joel Tudor’s favorite spot for monster helpings of seafood and sunset views. Santa Cruz, CA Power up on coffee and croissants at Kelly’s French Bakery (402 Ingalls St., 831-423-9059) and pop next door for a custom foam-grinding session with shaper Ward Coffey. Warm up on the mellow rights at Cowell Beach before risking life and limb in the barrels at Natural Bridges State Beach. Then flop down on the bluffs at Lighthouse Point, where pros boost airs so close to the cliff, you’ll flinch as they pass. Après, fish tacos and cervezas go down smooth at El Palomar (1336 Pacific Ave., 831-425-7575). Coos Bay, OR Frontier town meets surf scene in Oregon’s biggest logging port. Check out Ocean Soul Surf Shop (91122 Cape Arago Hwy., 888-626-7685), where local firefighters and fishermen pick up their surf wax. Co-owner Donnie Conn will steer you to “wherever it’s going off.” For beginners, that might be the cold-water waves at Sunset Bay or, if you like more juice, Bastendorff Beach for intimidating peaks like Shitters. Rogers Zoo and Bizzaratorium, in North Bend (2037 Sherman Ave., 541-756-2550) offers live music. Yakutat, AK Lower 48 just too crowded? Hop the twice-a-month ferry from Juneau and head to Icy Waves Surf Shop (635 Haida St., 907-784-3226). It shouldn’t be hard to find: Yakutat has only two paved roads. Beg directions to the peelers at Cannon Beach; then, after overnighting at Glacier Bear Lodge ($110; 812 Glacier Bear Rd., 907-784-3202), have bush pilot Les Hartley (Alsek Air, 907-784-3231) drop you and your gear on one of countless unknown, unnamed, and potentially perfect point breaks along the rugged coast.

Perfect Pickup Games

A Guide to Summer

TOUCH FOOTBALL: From left, Blake Pearson, a San Diego surf-store owner, wears jeans ($165) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN and a hooded sweatshirt ($301) from R BY 45 RPM. On Nick Fairman, a short-boarder from Winter Park, Florida: boardshorts ($45) by PATAGONIA; cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; vintage button-up shirt by MELET MERCANTILE. On Ryan Heavyside, a Palm Beach, Florida, competitive surfer: boardshorts ($120) by TRACY FEITH; boardshorts ($60) by RLX RALPH LAUREN.

Soccer While the Beltway crowd cheers D.C. United’s 15-year-old ´Ú³Ü³Ù²úó±ô phenom Freddy Adu at RFK Stadium, slide-tackle a lobbyist or knock in a header under the gaze of Lincoln’s statue. Impromptu scrimmages are held most evenings on the National Mall’s soccer-perfect turf. Beach Volleyball As the birthplace of the sport, Manhattan Beach, California, takes its volleyball seriously. Its nearly 100 first-come, first-served courts, spread along a two-mile strand, are tractor-groomed weekly and fill up nightly. Bring a net and ball and you’ve got game. Ultimate Frisbee If you can’t find a game of disk in Madison, you’re just not looking. The University of Wisconsin is home to one of the country’s top college programs, and Madison offers a city league for every season. Walk-ons are welcome nightly at Vilas Park and Olbrich Field, all summer long.

The Swinging Life

Gold Cup 2 Eye

It was just an old rope swing, tied to a pecan tree on the banks of a lake in the Ozarks. But when I stumbled upon it, and grabbed the knot and swung out over the water, what came back to me with a whoosh was my seventh summer, probably forgotten or pushed away because that was the year my mother died.

My old man had nearly brained himself trying to install the heavy rope on the limb of an old box elder. Unwilling to climb up, he’d elected to weight one end of the rope with a claw hammer, which he heaved heavenward in the hope it would sail over the limb. Finally, to my amazement, it worked. He tied a spent Firestone to the rope with a double square knot, installed me inside, walked the boy-bearing tire to the apex of the slope, and pushed.

“What should I do?” I screamed as I soared out toward the water.

He yelled back in his East Texas cracker twang, rich with mules and chiggers. “Y’all figure it out.”

The thing that came to addict me wasn’t just the wild ride and the plunge into the creek; it was that you could apply an infinite amount of torque to the rope by winding up the tire before liftoff, coiling it like a spring. Then, standing on the tire, spinning like a dervish, the test was this: Could I marshal the timing it took to dismount at a point that would deposit me in the water instead of the brush?

In another game, my best pal and I would swallow a Fizzie-kind of like prehistoric Pop Rocks-then wind up the tire, working it like a posthole digger. As the carbonated confection began bubbling in our bellies, I’d climb into the tire while my pal climbed on top. Once airborne and spinning, it was mano a mano until the loser barfed.

But what I liked best was simply the compulsive, solitary act of swinging, pumping my legs for hours to keep the tire in motion. It was the best way to take myself somewhere else.

SUMMER ESSENTIALS
Deck Shoe Revival
Remember these babies? Sperry Top-Sider plates the eyelets on its handmade Gold Cup 2 Eye deck shoe with 18-karat gold, which won’t corrode or rust. Meanwhile, memory foam molds itself to the shape of your sole, while padded deerskin uppers softly cradle the rest. $150;

Rubber Soul

The Pacific stretching westward, rolling hills, empty beaches inhabited only by sea lions—there’s no getting around it: The West Coast’s Highway 1/101 is the classic summer drive. Head out on the 734-mile stretch winding from San Francisco to Astoria, Oregon, for spectacular scenery, crowd-free adventures, and the wind-in-the-hair perma-grin you can only get on the open road. Our weekend guide:

Mile 44: Fuel up on Pacific oysters ordered live from the seawater tanks at the Tomales Bay Oyster Company, a working farm in Marshall. 415-663-1242

Mile 196: Plunge into a swimming hole along the highway as it follows the South Fork of the Eel River through Richardson Grove State Park. 707-247-3318,

Mile 319: Hike beneath 2,000-year-old, 300-foot redwoods at Redwood National Park and Redwood State Park. 707-464-6101,

Mile 513: Boogie-board the 500-foot sand dunes of Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, then bed down in a deluxe yurt at Umpqua Lighthouse State Park. $65 for up to seven people; 800-452-5687,

Mile 640: Sea-kayak, hang- glide, or surf at Cape Kiwanda State Natural Area. 800-551-6949,

Mile 695: Grab a table at the Sea Shack (503-368-7897), on Nehalem Bay in Wheeler, for a bucket of Cajun shrimp and an icy beer. At Wheeler Marina (503- 368-5780), rent a boat and traps to go crabbing off Nehalem Bay State Park.

New American Chopper

Katie Zirnfus

PEDAL PUSHER: Katie Zirnfus, a surfer from Titusville, Florida, heads to the break in Cocoa Beach. Sweatshirt ($52) and bikini ($72) by RIP CURL; vintage bucket hat by ROGAN.

Trade in those riding leathers for a pair of surf trunks and flip-flops and cruise your local boardwalk atop the chopper-inspired Electra Straight 8. With a Shimano Nexus three-speed hub, old-school coaster brake, and red powder-coated spokes, these wheels are Peter Fonda cool. $570;

Who Needs Cristo?

Missed out on the saffron Gates? Head to Amarillo, Texas, where the public art is as large as the 72-ounce steaks dished up at I-40’s Big Texan Steak Ranch. Natural-gas tycoon Stanley Marsh 3 started funding big art back in 1974 with Cadillac Ranch, ten vintage Caddies buried nose first in the Panhandle. Over the years he’s painted a mesa blue; built Giant Phantom Soft Pool Table, a 180-by-90-foot patch of dyed-green grass with 42-inch canvas balls; and commissioned a pair of gigantic sawed-off legs in a field south of town. “Art is a legalized form of insanity,” Marsh has said. “And I do it very well.” Go crazy yourself scoping out Amarillo’s thousands of Marsh-funded street signs, with slogans like I’LL BE RIGHT OUT MA! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! and LUBBOCK IS A GREASY SPOON! Summer here is frying-pan hot, so when yer bod heats up faster than a Texas cheerleader, dive into 6,251-acre Lake Meredith, 38 miles north of town on Texas 136. Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, 806-857-3151,

Fuel Up on Fresh Air

Blue on Blue

Poolside at Blue on Blue

Two Lights Lobster Shack, Cape Elizabeth, Maine
Just south of Portland, on the tip of Cape Elizabeth, this landmark New England seafood stop sits on the rocky shoreline below one of the most photographed lighthouses in the world. Park yourself at a table on the deck and try the fresh clam chowder, boiled lobster, or fried clams and scallops. $1.50–$22; 207-799-1677


Coyote Cafe Rooftop Cantina, Santa Fe
Pull a stool to the edge of this downtown café and settle in with a prickly pear margarita and the Coyote’s famous salsa and guacamole. But save room for chef Mark Miller’s classic southwestern dinner menu—including the mango-avocado chicken sandwich and seared salmon tacos. $4–$14; 505-983-1615


Sports Corner, Chicago
This wildly popular pre- and postgame pub, directly across from Wrigley Field, is one of the few outdoor grills where you can hold a chicken wing in one hand and catch a home run in the other. Cheering—for the unfussy American fare and the Cubs—is mandatory. $5–$12; 773-929-1441


Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard, St. Louis
Any summer road trip through the heartland deserves a stop at this circa-1941 walk-up window, along old Route 66. Don’t be intimidated by the lines that snake around the side of the building: Their vanilla custard flavored 23 ways—like praline and abocho mocha—is worth the wait. $.50–$4.50; 314-481-2652


The Water Club, New York
Head straight for the Crow’s Nest, the seasonal upper-deck café at this stylish East River eatery. With its colorful umbrellas, palatable prices, and stellar views of the Empire State Building and the 59th Street Bridge, it’s a must for piña coladas and shrimp cocktail from the raw bar. $9–$26; 212-683-3333


Blue on Blue, Beverly Hills
Everything about this poolside café in the courtyard of the Avalon Hotel screams hip: from its inventive American menu (can you say Muscovy duck breast and a side of peach quinoa?) to the cushioned chaise lounges and bamboo-shaded private cabanas. And did we mention the pool? $10–$30; 310-407-7791

Ribs, Sugar?

We say the Memphis way is the only way when it comes to applying smoke and slow heat to the ribs of our oinking friends, so we asked Desiree Robinson, pit mistress of legendary rib shack COZY CORNER, for the skinny on backyard ‘cue in the classic dry-rub style. “Make sure you’ve got nice medium-size racks, not baby backs, with enough fat to make that meat tender,” she says, “plus a good fire so they can sizzle down.” Yes, ma’am. HERE’S THE RUB: 3 tbsp paprika; 1 tbsp chili powder; 2 tsp seasoned salt; 2 tsp black pepper; 2 tsp brown sugar; 2 tsp garlic powder; 1 tsp cayenne; 1 tsp oregano; 1 tsp mustard seed; 1 tsp thyme; 1 tsp coriander; 2 tsp dried green peppercorns, ground; 1 tsp allspice. HERE’S THE DRILL: Rub mixture into ribs at least eight hours before cooking. (Yank the membrane off the bones, too.) Place a fireproof bowl full of water and flat beer in the grill pan. Snug charcoal around the bowl, fire up, and let burn until white but still hot. Lay a foil “envelope” of wet wood chips on the coals, then smoke ribs bone side up for two to four hours, and keep that lid on. Paint with sauce when done, if you like—but, says Robinson, “I usually don’t.”—Chris Davis

SUMMER ESSENTIALS
Lone Star Grill »
Transcend the charcoal-versus-gas debate with the Traeger Texas Style Grill—a cooker powered by pencil-eraser-size wood pellets. A continually rotating auger feeds the fire, allowing you to grill, slow-roast, or smoke your dino-steaks just so. $999;

Swing Shift »
The Byer of Maine Santiago XXL double hammock is a generous eight-foot-long cotton cocoon with a carrying capacity of 400 pounds, so there’s room in there for you and at least one other close personal friend—no matter how many ribs the pair of you just polished off. $80;

Longboard Tech »
Hobie’s Epoxy 9’2 Performer by Surftech looks like a vintage balsa longboard, but wait—that’s an advanced sandwich of PVC sheet foam and Tuflite epoxy resin. Upshot: The Performer is nearly six pounds lighter, yet 30 percent stronger, than a traditional foam-and-glass board. $900;

Hot Rocks

If there’s a deal breaker to a climber’s summer dream scene, it’s rock that’s scalding to the touch. Fortunately, Estes Park, Colorado—a town of 6,000 at 7,522 feet in the Rockies—offers something that desert crags don’t: alpine air conditioning and hundreds of routes just outside of town in Rocky Mountain National Park. “The park is best known for 14,255-foot Longs Peak, but the smaller mountains offer equally challenging multi-pitch routes,” says 24-year-old phenom Katie Brown, a Patagonia-sponsored climber who lives in Moab but spends a month or two in Estes Park each summer. “Lumpy Ridge, a series of granite domes, is my favorite. One dome, the Book, has an awesome 5.9 called J. Crack and a 5.10c called Fat City. I also like to hike the four-mile trail around Lumpy Ridge for the views of Longs Peak.” When Brown craves quesadillas, she heads to Ed’s Cantina & Grill, in town, a favorite hangout of resident climbers like Beth Rodden, 25, and her 26-year-old rock-star husband, Tommy Caldwell. “Estes is about escape,” says Rodden. “You can just run into the mountains and play your heart out.” Rocky Mountain National Park, 970-586-1206; Estes Park visitor information, 800-443-7837.

Pony Express

a guide to summer

HALFWAY TO CAPE CANAVERAL: From left, Ryan rides shotgun in boardshorts ($56) by O’NEILL and OAKLEY MONSTER DOGGLE sunglasses ($145), while Blake sits at the helm in PATAGONIA boardshorts ($45).

This year, an icon of American cruising revs back into action in a major way. We’re talking about the FORD MUSTANG CONVERTIBLE GT, a retro-styled muscle car that feels like freedom even when it’s just sitting in the garage. Drop the top with the push of a button, slap on some SPF 30, and turn the ignition. The 300-horsepower V-8 doesn’t simply roll over; it rumbles, and its giddyup will fairly launch you out on the summer highway. That much is to be expected. What’s new is the tight handling: Just think about changing lanes or charging into a tight corner and the Mustang seems to do it for you. The easy maneuvering’s a nice feature for the curves of California’s Highway 1, but keep your eyes on the road when you pass a congregation of head-turning bodies at the beach or you might tug yourself off course. Better to save your people watching for a stoplight—all the better, of course, for people to watch you. Models with V-8 engines from $29,995;

You Can Dig It

For prime seafood with a stellar view, skip the restaurant lines and shovel up a surfside clambake. We tapped Bill Hart, executive chef of the legendary Black Dog Tavern, on Martha’s Vineyard, for info on how to do it up right. First, make sure fires are legal on your beach—chances are you’ll have to get a permit. Then dig a square pit in the sand, two and a half feet deep and three to four feet wide. Line the bottom with fist-size rocks and toss in some firewood. (If you’re looking for a tinge of sweet in your bake, try cherry or apple wood.) Let your fire burn for about two hours—until the wood is gone and the rocks sizzle when sprinkled with water—before adding a layer of store-bought fresh seaweed. Now lob in your grub: For ten hungry beachgoers, that’d be 20 whole red bliss potatoes, eight to ten Spanish onions (halved), ten ears of corn (husks and all), ten links of linguica sausage, ten lobsters, and three to four pounds of mussels and clams—Hart recommends steamers and littlenecks. Cover it all up with more seaweed and a board laid across the top to lock in the steam. The rest is easy: Shoot the breeze for the next two hours until the clams have opened up (any that haven’t are bad). Slip on your oven mitts, pull out the goods, and serve ’em up with lemon wedges and melted butter.

Cheap Date

Three thousand dollars might seem a little steep for one night in sleepy little Rhinebeck, New York, but I managed to spend it. The reason for the exorbitant fee: I had paid for half of a three-bedroom cottage from Memorial Day to Labor Day (or MD–LD, in classified-ad parlance) and slept at the house exactly one time.


I should have known in March, when my friend Ben and I drove around with Hairsprayed Realtor Lady, that my vacation venture was doomed. The house we rented was sweet-a gray-shingled Cape on three acres of gently rolling hills-but the interior was littered with ladybug exoskeletons. If shiny, rosy ladybugs are cheery good-luck symbols of summer, shouldn’t their postmortem husks be considered bad juju?


I opted to overlook the omen and signed the lease. We signed partly because the realtor’s M.O. was to make us believe that this house was the only good one left. We also signed because each of us had recently been dumped, and renting a summer house was a way of getting on with our lives in a screw-all-y’all kind of way.


We drove back to the city, and in the ensuing months I would imagine scenes from my coming summer in mellow, low-key Dutchess County: I’d be strolling down the sun-dappled dirt driveway, stopping to eat wild blackberries right off the bush, clearly recovered from my breakup.


As it happened, when “MD” rolled around, I was still lonely and sad, and Ben had gotten all hot for a woman whose friends were also coupled up and on the docket for Hudson River Valley fun. A few Saturdays, I drove up to Rhinebeck but, feeling like the seventh-person sourpuss along on a triple date, drove back to the city before bedtime.


Right around the time I watched Ben and his girlfriend drive off to a sunset wine tasting, I realized that my sun-dappled summer was not to be. And so, near the very end of August, I forced myself to actually sleep there, to get my alleged $3,000 worth. It didn’t even come close.

Lazy River

It’s no secret that Boulder, Colorado, offers the best urban inner-tubing in the States, possibly the universe, as locals cool down and bruise themselves “floating” more than a dozen drops of Boulder Creek between Eben G. Fine Park and the take-out of choice, beside the downtown library. These rapids range from tame sluiceways to a shoulder-high waterfall, where teens chill out watching sorority girls lose their bikini tops. Here’s how to tube it right. 1) Get your puncture-resistant, Barcalounger-size radial inner tubes for $12.50 at the streamside Conoco on Broadway and Arapahoe. 2) Sneakers, everyone! If sandals sufficed, you could grab any number washed up on shore. 3) Hide a six-pack of something frosty near the take-out’s sunny south steps. Beer is illegal in Boulder’s parks. Never, ever hide beer. 4) Launch! Feet first, butt up, valve stem down. 5) Warning: That guy over there is probably urinating in his surf trunks right now. Don’t swallow the water. 6) Butt up! 7) After a big drop, plunge your ankles in to catch the downstream current and get dragged away from the froth. 8) Steer clear of the man snorkeling for sunglasses, the bamboo-flute-playing hippie standing midstream, and the marauding gang of boys on boogie boards. Those practicing tai chi under the maples are generally nonthreatening, but you can’t be too careful. 9) Relax your butt. The second half is a mellow drift through a tunnel of cottonwood trees. Can you taste the ice-cold Fanta?

Summer Essentials

summer style

DRIFT ON IN: The photographs on these pages were shot surfside at Cocoa Beach’s landmark 1912 Driftwood House. Owner Rob Sullivan, a local board shaper, runs his surfboard and clothing company, Driftwood, out of the vintage structure.

HOUSE PARTY: From left, on Blake, vintage shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; jeans ($108) by LUCKY BRAND JEANS. On Brandy, camisole top ($198) and leather pants ($1,198) by RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL. On Ryan, vintage T-shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; button-up shirt ($50) by WRANGLER JEANS; suede pants ($695) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; flip-flops ($15) by HAVAIANAS. On Victoria, crochet top ($98) and jeans ($165) by RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL. On Mike, sweater ($150) and cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; boots ($110) by NIKE. On Nick, vintage jeans jacket by LEVI’S; vintage T-shirt by MELET MERCANTILE; cargo shorts ($85) from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; flip-flops ($12) by HAVAIANAS. On Katie, vintage poncho and necklace from POLO BY RALPH LAUREN; jeans ($92) by LUCKY BRAND JEANS.


Essential Summer: Liquid Refreshment

Forget the apple martinis. Parallel-park your sloop between the million-dollar yachts at the wharf at Sam’s Anchor Café, in Tiburon, on the sunny north side of San Francisco Bay, or mix up your own tangy glass of SAM’S PINK LEMONADE:
1 1/4 oz citrus vodka
1 1/4 oz 7Up
1/4 oz fresh lemon juice
1/2 oz sweet-and-sour mix
1 oz cranberry juice
Serve on the rocks in a 12-oz glass with a twist of lemon.

—H. Thayer Walker

Wheels Up

With enough vertical feet and hundred-mile views to keep your blood pumping for a week, the Telluride-to-Moab mountain-bike route stands handlebars and stem above your usual summer ride. Operated by privately owned San Juan Hut Systems, this 215-mile route lets you and up to seven pals pedal from the San Juans’ 14,000-foot peaks and spruce-carpeted slopes down to the twisting canyons of Utah’s red-rock country. No need to pack heavy—each night you’ll stay in a one-room wooden hut stocked with sleeping pads and bags (just bring your own liner) and enough bacon, eggs, pasta, and beer to keep everyone in the group satisfied. The seven-day, six-night route—which follows mostly doubletrack fire roads—is open every summer from June 1 to October 1 and costs $553 per person. Go between mid-June and early July, when storms are less likely, and you can catch the lupines and Indian paintbrush in bloom. On the final descent into Moab, opt for the more challenging Porcupine Rim Trail, then stash your bike and head over to the Moab Brewery for a patio pint of Dead Horse Ale and a view of the La Sal Mountains, which cradle the last of the hard miles you just rode. 970-626-3033,

Sweet Freedom

Boston, MA
Boston calls itself “headquarters for America’s biggest Independence Day party,” and we have to agree. The free, all-day extravaganza draws upwards of 700,000 to the banks of the Charles River. The Boston Pops performs, fighter jets buzz overhead, and—for the finale—17,500 pounds of pyrotechnics are launched into the sky from barges. Best seat in the house? Why, the bow of your boat, of course.

Galena, IL
Birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant, this hilly river town of 3,500 kicks off the celebration with a morning parade, just like any small town should, followed by rooftop parties, wine-and-cheese tastings, live music, art exhibits—sponsored by local merchants—and, at dusk, a patriotic sound-off in the midwestern sky.

Telluride, CO
Declare your independence at Telluride’s fiercely funky parade, in which locals and visitors march, ride, skate, gallop, and dance down Colorado Avenue in homemade costumes (picture risqué cowgirls and dancing superheroes). After the local firefighters’ ribs-and-roast barbecue, enter the pie-eating contest, then burn it off during the sack races. At sunset, lie back on the lawn—there’s nothing like fireworks against all the purple mountains’ majesty.

The Beach Rx

While camping on what is now my favorite beach, I once stepped on a scorpion.


I was alone in Cayo Costa State Park, a barrier island of sand and palms about 100 miles south of Tampa, Florida. I rushed to my boat, then to a neighboring island restaurant, where I called the only doctor I knew. It was a Sunday, near midnight.


“Is there much pain?” he asked.


Nope, the slight burning sensation had faded.


“Any dizziness? Uncontrollable salivation?”


It was a scorpion, I reminded him. Not a werewolf.


His indifference changed to irritation. “Did the scorpion sting you on the tallywhacker?”


Was the man drunk? “No!” I snapped. “Didn’t I just tell you I stepped on it?”


“Yes, but I’m a urologist. So why the hell are you bothering me at this hour?”


Return to my camp, the doctor advised, and administer alcohol and ice.


It is a wonderful thing to sit alone on a beach, on a starry night, with nothing to do but drink a thermos of margaritas as prescribed by a pissed-off physician.


Filtered through tequila, a beach becomes more than a percussion skin for waves. This particular beach is many miles long and shaped like a new moon, a convex curve extending into the Gulf of Mexico. My camp spot was at the island’s narrowest point. It was an isolated place with no docks and no homes, centered on a fragile land break bordered by sea, and thus more intimately connected to a wider world. But this small section of beach was now linked to my own small history.


The scorpion was not my last intimate encounter on this beach. My wife and I returned often to that camping spot. Our sons learned to snorkel there. They learned to throw a cast net and how to build a fire that’s good for frying fish.


Both sons-out of college now-still camp there. It remains my favorite place to go for a solitary jog or swim.


Cayo Costa State Park offers primitive cabins ($30 per person per night) and tent camping ($18 per site per night); rental information, 941-964-0375

Rapid Transit

Flush with western Montana’s signature sapphire runoff, the upper Middle Fork of the Flathead is the best float trip you’ve never heard of. Geography is the Flathead’s own permit system—the put-in is tucked away in the Great Bear Wilderness, south of Glacier National Park—so traffic is limited to those willing to fly a Cessna 206 into Schafer Meadows’ backcountry airstrip from Kalispell or horsepack their gear six miles along Granite Creek to the put-in. The river is narrow and steep, meaning you’ll want a slim sports car of a raft and heads-up guiding to make a clean run through four days of Class IV rapids to the take-out at Bear Creek. You’ll camp in Douglas fir and lodgepole pine forests surrounded by the jagged peaks of the Flathead Range, pick rising 20-inch cutthroat out of the herd with a dry fly, and hike to Castle Lake and the cirque-born waterfall that feeds it. The best whitewater is before July, but the fishing peaks later that month during the caddis-and-stone-fly hatch. Four days, $1,095 ($100 extra for horse-packed trips); Glacier Raft Company, 406-888-5454,

The Last Picture Show

a guide to summer

Watch movies under the stars with HP’s ep9010 Instant Cinema Digital Projector. The unit combines a DVD player, a DLP front projector, and a booming sound system and throws a nine-foot image onto any handy garage door or brick wall. $2,000;

WHERE TO FIND IT: DRIFTWOOD, ; HAVAIANAS, ; JET, 323-651-4129; LEVI’S, ; LUCKY BRAND JEANS, ; MELET MERCANTILE, 212-925-8353; NIKE, ; OAKLEY, ; O’NEILL, ; PATAGONIA, ; POLO, RLX BY RALPH LAUREN, and RALPH LAUREN BLUE LABEL, ; POLO JEANS CO. RALPH LAUREN, ; R BY 45 RPM, ; RH VINTAGE, ; RIP CURL, ; ROGAN, ; ROXY BY QUIKSILVER, ; TRACY FEITH, 323-655-1444; WRANGLER JEANS, CREDITS: Stylist: Deborah Watson; Prop Stylist: Forest Watson; Hair: Moiz Alladina for Stephen Knoll Salon; Makeup: Teresa Pemberton/Judy Casey; Production:

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IF YOU THOUGHT PAUL GIAMATTI’S CHARACTER in Sideways was obsessed, consider the growing cult of American oenophiles for whom only ultranatural “biodynamic” wine will do.

Biodynamic Wine

Vintners producing this exalted juice concoct compost by burying cow dung packed in cow horns in the fall, unearthing them in the spring, and “dynamizing” the muck by stirring it with rainwater in alternate directions before spraying it on the soil. Cosmic and lunar cycles dictate when to harvest and when to bottle. Got buggy pests? When the moon is in Scorpio, burn some of the bastards and spread their ashes as a warning to others.


The belief behind these lavish devotions, based on the 1920s writings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, is that the tastiest grapes grow in soils treated like living beings that can be exhausted by overuse and chemicals. After decades of slow growth in France, the practice has caught hold in the U.S. The first American vineyard was certified biodynamic in 1996; today, 14 are certified, with 11 more working toward approval. Still, nobody can say for sure how the rituals lead to such fine wine. “Whether it’s biodynamics or all that attention, something enhances the flavor, the health of the fruit,” says New York City–based master of wine Mary Ewing-Mulligan.


I gathered some California biodynamic reds for a raucous dinner that ended in slurpy talk. Compared with traditionally grown varietals, Frey Vineyards’ 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon ($14), and the 2000 Four Vineyards Pinot Noir ($46) and 2001 Los Carneros Cabernet Franc ($36), both from Robert Sinskey, tasted more like the piquant little apricots I grew last summer than the fat, indifferent ones I bought at the supermarket in January. The real test was pitting these American wines against an American meal of corn bread and bison chili with New Mexico peppers. While the flavors of all three stayed vibrant, the winner was Sinskey’s cabernet franc, which was so full of nuances and dark secrets, I went into our garden after the last glass and bayed at the moon.


(Ching Bling)

Mountaineers looking to keep their cool on high typically rely on a flask and mild hypoxia. But last year, some began wearing a New Agey neck charm purported to enhance performance under stress. Introduced in 1995 by Larkspur, California–based Clarus Products International, the Q-Link holds crushed minerals that the company says balance the body’s “biofield,” boost-ing endurance and mental clarity. Clarus points to clinical studies (mostly cellular) to back the claims, though many mainstream scientists scoff. Clarus has sold a quarter-million of the peppermint-pattie-size ornaments—choose from acrylic ($130), silver ($300), or gold ($840)—and they’ve been a hit with PGA golfers. In the Himalayas, Q-Links have been spotted on Mountain Madness guides and 8,000-meter-peak veteran Michael O’Donnell, 48, who says it helped him fight exhaustion on Tibet’s 26,906-foot Cho Oyu. But don’t expect your base-camp doctor to push them just yet. “Mountain sickness is so subjective, you’ll have a big placebo effect,” says Dr. Peter Hackett, the recently departed president of the International Society of Mountain Medicine. “It could help mountaineers simply because they think it does.” —Adam Skolnick

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The Montanan has lost his way. This is not to say I’m lost. I know exactly where I am—sort of. Gasping for air, I’m crouched beside my bicycle after pedaling up a country lane to the crest of a hill above the Ouvéeze River in Provence, the former Roman colony in southeastern France famous for its golden light. The 17 other guests on this luxurious cycling tour aren’t anywhere in sight—they’ve finally discovered that although my sense of direction is rarely in doubt, it’s usually wrong, and are no longer eager to ride with me. Whatever. I’ll eventually find the elegant Château de Massillan, where B&R has booked us to spend the final two nights of our extravagant moveable feast. But what’s the rush? The point of doing anything in France is to kill time until the next meal.

Below me, vineyards, olive groves, and fields of lavender shudder in the mistral, the north wind that blows relentlessly for spells of three, six, or nine days, then evaporates. Towering a mile above is the luminous white limestone spine of Mont Ventoux, as startling and improbable a landform in this domesticated geography as is Ayers Rock in Australia or Devils Tower in Wyoming.

I’m pleased to see all this produce growing fat under the gauzy June sun. Over the past week, the bounty of northern Provence has supplied me with a dozen meals so lush with flavor and texture I’ve been brought more than once to the verge of tears. The most recent of these grand gluttonies was a lunch concluded an hour ago on the terrace of the Domaine de Cabasse, a hotel restaurant under the medieval hillside village of Séeguret.

Dining for two hours to the melody of frogs chirping in the courtyard pools, I started with a salade méelangée from the restaurant’s garden, laced with fresh red currants, then a diaphanous asparagus soup, a small rack of lamb, and a succulent breast of guinea hen, followed by a plate of cheeses, including a banon frais and a péelardon, made from goat’s milk. The finale was a sweet biscuit drenched in chocolate and drizzled with a raspberry confection. Each course was complemented by a blossomy-tasting jug of white wine called Les Primavèeres, made from grapes harvested in the fields next to our long table, and further larded by slices of baguette we dipped in a green sauce called anchoïade, made from anchovies, basil, and olive oil.

Now, my legs still burning from the climb up this hill, my face glowing from sun and wind, I decide that a little nap is just what the doctor ordered. Easing back into a bed of wild red poppies, I press my fingers against my happy, swollen belly and belch.

Last winter I was offered a choice of writing assignments. I could fly to North Korea and try to elude my government-issued handlers in order to sneak off and report on outdoor recreations few Westerners have ever experienced, or I could join a sensuous high-end cycling trip in southern France with the Toronto, Canada-based outfitter Butterfield & Robinson, the crème de la crème of upscale guiding services. Duh.

As the 180-mile-an-hour bullet train from Paris raced south down the Rhône River toward Avignon, I stared at the blur and grew wistful thinking about the sweet months I misspent in that ancient maze of a city in 1971, as a college student who sort of attended classes in French history at the local école. The next morning I boarded a bus B&R had chartered for a 15-mile trip to the village of Boulbon, where our bicycles awaited. I sensed immediately that our guides, Jean-Louis Doss and Libby Dalrymple, both patient and amiable 35-year-old bilingual Canadians, were going to be excellent playmates. And the itinerary looked like a bike ride in heaven: seven days of petit déjeuner, lunch, and dinner interspersed with moderately demanding bike rides of 20 to 40 miles through the dreamscapes of the Côtes du Rhône.

I wondered about the other guests. Because my fellow cycling gourmets were shelling out $9,790 per couple for the week, plus thousands more for airfare, incidentals, and shopping sprees in a vastly overpriced country where a shot of espresso can set you back six dollars, I assumed in my convenient, knee-jerk bias that they’d be stuffy, reactionary, middle-aged bores.

When Jean-Louis introduced me to my bike, I saw that it had a name, Dalmatian Coast, painted on the frame, next to a tag with my name printed on it. In fact, everyone’s bike was tagged and named. Testing out this tough hybrid road warrior, custom-manufactured for B&R by a British Columbia company called Rocky Mountain Bicycles, I adjusted the seat, shocked the shock absorbers, rang the bell, and fiddled with the buttons on the handlebars that quick-changed the transmission through its 27 gears. Then I sailed off on a shakedown cruise around the town square.

The Dalmatian looked up to see a svelte blond landscape architect from California named Wonderful World and her husband, Working It Off, a regal, linebacker-size real estate investor, staring at him. In truth, the Dalmatian hadn’t been on a bike in 15 years. And this pair had the majorly buffed legs of people who ride hard every day. Wonderful World wandered over to my crash-up as if bearing a warning not to drag down Group with any more of this monkey business. But instead, smiling, she offered the Dalmatian a tube of Vaseline skin ointment. Veteran bikers smear this stuff on their thighs and butt parts to prevent the heartbreak of chafing. She wore socks that read YOUR BIKE SUCKS.

“An American businessman with VD goes to a doctor in Shanghai,” she told the Dalmatian, apropos of nothing. ” ‘Must amputate,’ the doctor says. The man goes to another doctor for a second opinion. Same advice. So he goes to a naturopath. ‘Oh, these doctors!’ the healer cries. ‘All the time chop-chop. You wait a week. It fall off on its own.’ ”

So much for the Dalmatian’s preconceptions. He examined Group again and saw that grown men and women who dress up in padded bike shorts, gaudy polyester shirts, little fingerless gloves, and silly helmets shaped like insect heads are probably not going to be rigid bluenoses. Besides, when you’re on the road, sweating like Britney Spears at an all-you-can-eat, it’s impossible to be imperious.

In a café water closet, the Dalmatian applied the chafing cream. When he emerged, Group had already hit the road. No matter. He freed his bike from a post, using the same bike-lock combination that was issued to everyone, and skimmed the day’s printed directions, given to him by Jean-Louis (or J-Lo, as Group began calling him, because he’d never heard of Jennifer Lopez). This first ride would climb through olive trees and evergreen forests and then descend into apple orchards to our first hotel, in St.-Rémy. There would be lots of stops along the way, including lunch at Oustalet Maïnen, in Maillane, which, like most of the eateries where we would gorge over the next week, is a premier restaurant listed in that bible of French cuisine, the Michelin guide. As the Dalmatian rode through Boulbon, he tried to calculate 200 meters, the distance to the first major turn. Let’s see, if a kilometer is 0.62 miles, and there are 1,000 meters in a kilometer, then … Damn this metric system!

Apparently his figures were off, because he soon found himself pedaling next to heavy traffic on the shoulder of the D35, one of the major arteries the guides had designed our routes to avoid. As he waited for the traffic to clear so he could turn around and head back to Boulbon, J-Lo and Libby drove up in the white B&R van. The Dalmatian would have to wait until the farewell dinner at the end of the week to find out why they were laughing.

Now on the right road, the Dalmatian paced himself. He took a two-mile detour to St.-Michel-de-Frigolet, a monastery built more than a thousand years ago, where monks still do whatever monks do. Heading back, he discovered that one of his shoes was untied.

As he sat, J-Lo drove up in the van. The Dalmatian hung his head in embarrassment as J-Lo got him unstrung. Because Group was already at lunch, J-Lo suggested that they drive to the restaurant. As they wound through the Barbentane Forest, he explained that the Dalmatian shouldn’t think of it as the Van of Shame; guests opted out of bike rides to take breathers all the time.

While Group ate, Le Grand Fromage took digital photos of the food, which she would e-mail to friends. Dressed in skin-tight black spandex, the Fromage was a droll and petite Aussie jock married to the Ghost Rider, a Melbourne vintner and entrepreneur who was telling a story about the couple’s recent lunch back home with Geoffrey Rush, the star of Quills, a movie about the Marquis de Sade. The Great Sadist would be a leitmotif of conversation, because we would stay in Mazan at one of his former châteaus. After an hour and a jug of wine on the walled terrace and fork-tender beef in a dark espagnole sauce so complex it made me woozy, the Dalmatian was ready for the road again.

Throughout the afternoon the Dalmatian stuck close to the others, especially the Tuscan Twister, a California orthodontist, and his educator wife, the Fairford Flash, a couple who seemed like they understood directions. We stopped at Le Musée des Arômes and wandered around, uncorking perfumes and the essences of the many botanicals that flourish in Provence.

Our hotel, a newish establishment called the Ateliers de l’Image, was a superlative place to kill time until dinner. The Dalmatian soaked his aching body in an enormous tub of hot water scented with white nettle and fleur d’oranger, imagining himself a succulent main course marinating in a man-size tureen. Although he thought his training for the trip would be sufficient—tennis and horseback riding and an hour a day on a stationary bike while he watched the Cubs—his butt parts were telling him that he should have taken heed of B&R’s advice to ride an actual bicycle 20 miles on a real road two times a week for a couple of months.

After his basting, the Dalmatian padded in his flip-flops past the tree house and through the gardens to the large swimming pool, where he lay walruslike in a chaise next to the Czech Noodle, a thirtyish, black-haired Minneapolis lawyer who advises corporations about international law, especially the Chinese kind. His wife was there, as well: the Tryst, whose happy explanation of the financial work she did was over the Dalmatian’s head. As people laughed about the day and began to experience that kind of bond forged on only the most transcendent of vacations, the Noodle smoked an enormous Cuban cigar. The Ghost Rider turned up and showed us a Pilates exercise to stretch our spines and our minds. The Duchess of Sienna, a New Jersey builder, bought the pool people a round of drinks. Soon it was time for dinner. The Dalmatian underdressed in a blue blazer, khaki jeans, black T-shirt, and Aussie cowboy boots.

We took taxis through the countryside to a bistro called Chez Bru, in Eygalières, a village built on the site of a neolithic settlement. Dinner was mostly à la carte, a three-hour affair of several courses, including a perfect thimble of foie gras, suckling pig in a translucent caramel sauce, an aromatic goat cheese called picadou, and a chocolate mousse, everything escorted by a fruity red wine called Les Baux-de-Provence and other bottles from the nearby Domaine de Vallongue winery. Everyone sated, it was back through the herb-scented night to St.-Rémy.

The next morning, after prosciutto, goat-cheese omelettes, and croissants, the Dalmatian found his bike lined up with the others in a courtyard. The guides had left a foil-wrapped wedge of dark chocolate on our seats, and our squeeze bottles were filled with water and slices of lemon. As it turned out, the Dalmatian would need every calorie and every drop to tackle the afternoon’s ride, which was short in distance but vast in punishment.

We pedaled a leisurely couple miles to St.-Paul-de-Mausole, a mental asylum where Vincent van Gogh committed himself in 1889 for the most productive year of his suicide-shortened life. While we waited in the shade of a wisteria trellis for Mathilde, who would be our guide to St.-Paul, Wonderful World and the Dalmatian discussed how to smuggle home the seeds of this vine, considering then abandoning the idea of swallowing them before reaching customs. Mathilde led us around the public areas of the hospital, showing us the unchanged subjects van Gogh painted—the walled field, the hospital buildings, and the olive grove, where the mistral was beginning to toss around the limbs.

The Dalmatian was thinking about lunch when he heard the strains of some acoustic jazz that bore the flavor and cadence of Stefan Grapelli. This turned out to be a five-piece band led by the guitarist Coco Briaval and his brothers, who had shown up to entertain Group while we hunkered down on blocks of quarried granite and feasted on cheeses, breads, and salamis washed down with red Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

And then it was time to conquer Les Baux.

Les Baux was once a fortress atop an outcrop in the Alpilles Range. It became the headquarters of medieval lords who made life hell for everyone else in Provence. After leading a trusting foursome of bikers around the circular main drag of St.-Rémy, looking for the right road, the Dalmatian stopped to ask directions. These turned out to be accurate but not true; they led to the shortest route instead of the scenic one plotted by the guides. Off we went, the blindest leading the blind. However, as if the Dalmatian were wearing a radio collar, J-Lo in his inevitable white van found us in time to prevent a tragic loss of scenery. He turned over the wheel to Libby so he could pedal with us to the summit.

The grade increased from acceptable to unfriendly as we wound upward through the hills. We stopped to buy cherries at a roadside stand from women whose faces lit up at J-Lo’s apparently pleasing French-Canadian accent and his general brooding good looks. Pushing on, we had to slow down for a mini-parade bearing the Olympic torch and making its way toward St.-Rémy. The Dalmatian decided to practice Libby’s advice about steep hills: “Don’t think about what you’re doing,” she said. “Concentrate on something else. I think about the boys I’ve kissed.”

He decided instead to figure out how many teeth he had (27). And finally he stood on top, happy to be alive. The fast coast back down the hill to the hotel was almost worth the effort of climbing it, although the Dalmatian missed a turn and had to stop for directions, which were true but not accurate.

That night, the Dalmatian lay in bed lulled by the sighs of a sultry breeze as it slipped through the shutters. His pulse slowed, and his mind cleared. A long-forgotten state of consciousness began to take hold, something intimate and tangible, a certain serenity it took a while to identify.

One uniform by day, another by night, nicknames, hanging by the pool, a goofy je ne sais quoi, and a constant appetite triggered by open air and sport—just enough of a challenge to persuade even the most stoic of Puritans to embrace the pleasures of the table. Suddenly the Dalmatian remembered why it all seemed so familiar. This was summer camp!

As a Boy Scout, the Dalmatian reported to Montana’s Camp Na’pi (named for the Blackfeet creator), next to Glacier National Park. Although his French safari was an adult affair concentrating on jugs of wine as much as sport, the banishment of pedestrian goals and life’s ordinary hassles was very Na’pi-like in the sensibility it fostered.

The summer-camp state of mind seized the Dalmatian completely as the week meandered from one flawless day to the next. Boy camp always ended with awards. Grown-up camp in Provence was no different. Before our final dinner at the Château de Massillan, a 16th-century castle used as a hunting lodge by King Henry II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, Wonderful World was presented with a tiny white thong in recognition of her 60-mile ride—along with Working It Off and Le Choiseul—to the summit of Mont Ventoux. (This feat occurred when the Dalmatian was taking a day off in Mazan, feasting on daube, a beef stew served with spaghetti, at a local restaurant called St.-Germain, and afterwards failing to get some euros from a device he thought was an ATM but was actually a dispenser of DVDs.)

The Dalmatian’s name was announced and his achievement lauded. This was his act of getting lost five minutes after the start of the trip, a new B&R record. The award was a small wheel of Camembert on a ribbon the Dalmatian proudly wore around his neck the rest of the evening.

The last supper moved from an asparagus salad to a luscious rack of lamb, then strawberries from the hotel garden marinated in olive oil, and jugs of wine from Gigondas and Rasteau, towns we biked through. The Dalmatian sat with Burgundy or Bust, the intense polylingual owner of an ad agency in Puerto Rico, and his wife, the Dante Piccante, an erudite psychologist who explained, over peach sorbet, the clinical definition of sadism.

When the Dalmatian woke up later between his lavender-scented sheets, he knew camp was over. But he wanted to extract the last possible taste of France. Padding across his room, he looked down three stories onto the château’s courtyard and the pool and the Renaissance ghosts moving to and fro in the light of a full moon. Then he went to the minibar and got out his cheese.

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SLOUCHING AROUND IN STEEL-SHANKED BOOTS, smoking Luckies, and showing off their tattoos, the guys were built along the heroic lines of NFL players. The chicks were scruffy, infested with bugs, and, for the time being, homeless. This was a critical moment in the lives of these two osprey babies. Because the chicks’ parents had nested on a 40-foot power pole, NorthWestern Energy had dispatched four linemen, three supervisors, and a utility-company biologist named Sam Milodragovich to move the ospreys’ home to a safer spot.

First a lineman went up in a cherry picker, brought the chicks to the ground in a Bud Light box lined with a cotton shirt, and laid them in the dewy grass. The defenseless and stressed-out nestlings—the one I named Sissy was the size of a large Cornish game hen, her brother, Sonny, the size of a small one—were gulping air. Without their mama to open her six-foot wingspan and shield them from the June sun, they were beginning to overheat.


The cherry picker went up again, and the lineman looped ropes beneath the nest, a bagel-shaped cup four feet across, woven from cottonwood branches and padded with wheatgrass. I looked heavenward and crossed my fingers. Sissy and Sonny’s parents were flapping in angry gyres above the abduction, and shrieking with rage. Although they could have attacked, their formidable black talons arching to gouge an eye or rip a jugular, this ape was just too big. I had named Duke and Doreen the summer before, when I’d watched them raise two sons in a massive ponderosa at the edge of the Clark Fork River, which runs along the western boundary of our land, and I felt bad about their anguish.


Just as the nest was lifted from the pole, my neighbor, a sculptor who owns the 12-acre parcel of forest and swamp next to ours, appeared. She looked down at the chicks and up at their parents, and burst into tears. But, as Milodragovich explained, the utility had no choice—the nest couldn’t stay where it was, even if moving it meant wrecking it, then rebuilding it as best they could.


Like many osprey couples along the Clark Fork here in western Montana, where logging and development have deprived these melodramatic birds of the old-growth pines they prefer, Duke and Doreen had built on a feeder pole radiating wires in four directions. It was highly likely that when it rained, electricity would arc from the wires and into the wet nest, broasting the birds, shutting off the juice to all the houses in this backwater, a three-hour float from Missoula, and maybe starting a ground fire. Besides that, utilities are required by federal and state laws to alter distribution equipment that threatens to fry raptors.


So the company’s soldiers planted a 45-foot pole with a four-foot wooden platform on top to anchor the nest, and a nine-foot crossbeam jutting out from under the platform. This way Duke and Doreen would have a place to take off and land when Sonny and Sissy got rambunctious a month down the road.


Looking at these beleaguered chicks, I couldn’t imagine they’d last long enough to learn how to fly. But I’m one of those bleeding hearts who believes that nature disturbed is nature ruined. Concerned, I began a reconnaissance of this bird family that would become a consuming preoccupation. For me, a long summer of fretting, hand-wringing, and lessons learned had just begun.


Lesson number one was this: Contrary to rural legend, ruthless hunters such as ospreys don’t abandon their young just because some guy in a hard hat touched them—no birds do, for that matter. After all, Pandion haliaetus, bearing the genes of predatory dinosaurs, has thrived virtually unchanged for 15 million years, becoming the planet’s ultimate airborne angler and colonizing six continents. As recently as a million years ago (or maybe last year), the ancestor of the hard hat was eating things he found in his ear.

WHILE MILODRAGOVICH cooled the chicks by sprinkling water on their pinfeathered backs, which bore the pale tan stripe of the immature osprey, one of the linemen knelt down to fan them tenderly with the morning news.


“Man, ain’t that the life,” he said.


“What do you mean?” I asked.


“The dad, their old man?” he said, pointing up at Duke. Like most osprey males, Duke was smaller than his mate, and his gleaming white throat didn’t bear the necklace of spots displayed by the female. “All this fucking guy does all day is lay around and fish.”


The nest arrived intact at its new location—next to the road, and 30 feet away from the old pole—without shedding more than a twig. The bucket of the cherry picker came down, and Sonny and Sissy went back up. Although ospreys seek homes on the highest point around, they sometimes build backup nests, the equivalent of a cabin at the lake. So the last chore for NorthWestern Energy was to bolt a PVC pipe to the top of the crossbeams on the old pole so the birds couldn’t build there again.


As the convoy of vehicles retreated down our lane, I withdrew to my front pasture, across from the platform. Within seconds Duke and Doreen were hovering over the nest and their craning chicks and, with a palpable sense of relief, settling in for a long day in their new digs.


At midnight a ferocious thunderstorm blew in. Clara, our border collie, cowered at my feet as I stepped onto our front porch to see what I could see, certain that the gale would blow the ospreys away. The wind was driving the rain at acute angles, and the windows were shuddering from the thunder. But there, illuminated in a strobe of lightning, was the nest, the white crown of Doreen’s head just visible. By morning, Duke and Doreen were busy feeding and shading their kids, as if the night before had just been a scary dream.


Lesson number two: Besides nest robbers such as the great horned owl and the raven, and a couple of egg-sucking varmints like the raccoon, there isn’t much in nature that ospreys fear. The most serious threat to the species was wrought by the hand of man. Before organochlorine insecticides like DDT were banned in the U.S., in 1972, in part because they cause thinning and eventual rupture in the shells of their eggs, ospreys and other raptors such as the peregrine falcon were surely headed in the direction of zero. But now, on any summer day, you can count all sorts of busy, occupied nests when you float from our place 20 miles downstream to the Alberton Gorge, the Clark Fork’s Class III whitewater. The bird is again such a major player in these parts that the local rookie-league baseball team, affiliated with the Arizona Diamondbacks, named itself the Missoula Osprey. (“So much fun,” the franchise promises, “you’ll drop your fish.”) The 2,000 or so fans who show up for big games stomp, shriek, and flap as one during the traditional Osprey Dance.


Still, I fretted about something I’d learned about Sonny. Being the second-born and the smallest, when the pecking orders were handed out, Sonny got hosed. He wasn’t in as much danger as if he’d been hatched last into the more common osprey brood of three chicks, but as the smallest sibling he ran a risk of starving to death, or being pushed out of the nest by Sissy. This is because Duke, who helped Doreen incubate the eggs and who would do the grocery shopping until the kids could fish for themselves in August, would feed himself first, then Doreen, who would eat her fill before tearing off any remaining shards of sucker, bull trout, or whitefish for Sissy. Sonny would eat last, and for him the pickings would be slim.


Although I understood that this strategy increased the chances that at least one of the chicks would fledge—that is, grow up strong enough to fly—the working-class chip on my shoulder that had always compelled me to wallow in inequities was now bidding me to side with the underbird. But really, the whole family had vexed me from the moment Duke and Doreen began building this new nest, one stick at a time ferried to the top of that power pole. Why didn’t they just return to the perfectly good crib they’d built the season before? After all, it was right next to the water and all those tasty denizens within, and a quarter-mile removed from the county lane, with its confusion of traffic. Had the birds gone nuts?


Probably not, Milodragovich told me. The old nest might be too buggy. Or maybe, because the meandering river had undercut the bank below their old ponderosa, Duke and Doreen sensed that the tree was no longer safe. Most likely, he said, other birds had snatched up all the high-rise apartments in old-growth trees along the river. So why a power pole by the road? Well, why not? Ospreys are successful worldwide partly because they readily adjust to the noisy affairs of humans. When the baseball team began building what will be its new ballpark, in downtown Missoula, and opponents of the edifice pointed with self-satisfied irony to a pair of active osprey nests less than a thousand feet from what will be home plate, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist named Rob Hazlewood was called in. “If we were to have a problem with these two nests, we’d have to halt construction in all of Missoula,” he said, alluding to the heavily nested river corridor that runs through the city.

OSPREYS MIGHT BE tolerant, but they’re not compliant. Unlike falcons trained to bring home the bacon, or Challenger the bald eagle, who swoops into Yankee Stadium during the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at big games, ospreys refuse to do tricks. The only interaction I saw between humans and Duke’s bunch was the game the birds made of backing their butts to the edge of the nest when a pickup passed underneath so they could rain down ten-foot slurries of white shit. Eee-eee-eee! they cried in glee afterward.


I worried also about the nature of our neighborhood, which is a redneck Shangri-La of big dawgs, trucks with bad mufflers, heavily armed Gomers, and gangs of marauding feral boys with BB guns. Although the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes harming an osprey a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $15,000, I’ve seen people in these parts fire shotguns at most anything in the air. But this time the neighbors surprised me. As soon as everyone learned that Duke and Doreen were raising babies, people began moving to the porches of their shitboxes after dinner, binoculars trained on the nest, following every osprey move.


And so a sort of peace reigned through June and July as the birds settled into a routine. For a few minutes in the morning, while Duke watched over the nest from a two-wire pole in a nearby hayfield, Doreen flew to the river for her morning constitutional, and then right back, usually lugging a cottonwood stick to add to the nest. (Some venerable nests weigh 500 pounds, and are repositories of crime tape, animal bones, dolls, bicycle chains, and barbed wire, not to mention mounds of fish parts putrefying in the sun. One of the linemen told me that the first time he was ordered up into the cherry picker to relocate an osprey nest, the overpowering smell made him vomit.)


Next, the adults spent several hours preening, debugging, and screeching at other birds to keep their distance. One day, when a turkey vulture appeared far overhead, Duke ran him off, staying on the scavenger’s tail till both birds were out of sight. In the afternoons, Duke headed for his favorite perch, on a limb below his old nest, which allowed him to scrutinize the shallow channel below. It usually took him less than an hour to dive-bomb a fish and return to his power pole to eat it, snapping his wings at the squadron of tiny sparrows trying to herd him away from their forest nests in a defensive maneuver called mobbing. While he tore off bits of fish, his family cried pathetically for a bite.


During this ritualized begging, I watched Sissy more than once peck Sonny upside the head, and couldn’t help remembering the many times my own beloved sister had kicked my shins bloody in fights over the tetherball. When Sonny finally got to eat, the piece of sushi Doreen offered was puny. But to my relief, both chicks grew so fast I thought they were on steroids. By mid-July they weighed as much as their parents—about three or four pounds.

Finally, on August 3, it was time to learn how to fly. Duke took up position on his power pole. Doreen flew to a pole of her own down the lane, within sight of the chicks, who’d been showing off their wings for a week. Both parents began calling. It was Sissy, of course, who left the nest first, hopping out to sit on the beam NorthWestern Energy had installed, and then leaping into flight. Soon daughter and parents were turning circles far above the nest while Sonny sat—and stared.


At last he decided to make his big move. I assumed he’d fall flat on his face, but he jumped straight up into the morning breeze. He hung there suspended, his wings flexed to three-quarters of their span, and then fully spread as the wind bore him away. He rose with strong, choppy strokes to join his family, as if this was something he’d been doing for years. While they swooped and called to one another, I did a little Osprey Dance to celebrate Sonny’s achievement.


Now that the kids could motor, a new routine began to rule the roost. Everyone headed off in the morning to hang out at the river or in a century-old cottonwood on the banks of our swamp. I saw Sissy take her first fish soon after she’d learned to fly, but for weeks I never spotted Sonny even attempt to fish. I suspected that he’d found the nest of another couple and was pretending to be their son. (In places where lots of ospreys live, it’s not uncommon for adults to welcome the neighbors’ kids, and to share the family’s food.)


At dinnertime the ospreys gathered at the nest for conversation and a nosh. Although Sissy was a big girl now and was feeding herself, she also demanded food from her parents, and became irate when they turned any over to Sonny instead. Sometimes he gave in to her insane appetite and surrendered the fish, and sometimes he flew away with it.


By the third week of August I realized that Duke had abandoned his family and was on his way, I hoped, to his wintering grounds on some steamy estuary in Latin America. Doreen left a week later. The adults winter separately, and with luck they would meet back here at the nest in May and do it all over again. For a while the siblings came together at dinner, in a pale reprise of the dramatic and noisy family debates that had now driven the neighbors crazy.


When Sissy left on Labor Day for Panama or Colombia (she’ll be back in two years after spending her freshman year abroad), I became strident about the hard knocks Sonny had endured, a way of excusing his lack of ability. But then I saw it—I saw him catch a fish! Sitting on the ponderosa perch that belonged to his old man, he suddenly dived toward the river, slammed into it with outstretched talons, disappeared below the surface, and emerged in an explosion of spray with … a fingerling. But, hey, friends, this was a fish! Exultant, Sonny flew all over the neighborhood with it, showing off what he’d caught, before settling back onto the nest for a lonely but triumphant bachelor dinner.


A few days later I saw him heading toward Duke’s favorite power pole with an enormous sucker, turning it as he flew to make its big-lipped head face forward so that the fish would be more aerodynamic. But then Sonny somehow got his talon stuck inside the rib cage of the fish. He tried to shake it off, but it wouldn’t budge. The rest of the morning he flapped from nest to pole to river and back again, trying to rid himself of what was now a loathsome burden.


“Eat it!” I shouted.


And, of course, that’s what Sonny did, spending the entire afternoon at lunch. When he finally shook himself free, the skeleton fell to earth, and a magpie carted it away.

As the light turned amber in mid-September and the nights turned crisp in that sublime change of season that makes people wistful, Sonny was still showing up at the nest. The Missoula Osprey had finished their season with the league’s fourth-best record, and the rookies had flown home to Caracas and Tokyo. The first ducks and geese were heading south along the flyway. And I was thinking of that Sandy Denny song: “Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving / But how can they know it’s time for them to go?”


Apparently, Sonny didn’t know.


“Go,” I shouted one morning after a storm had turned the sky the color of a bruise. “You can’t stay here.”


That afternoon I took Clara to the river for a swim. The shadow cast by a chevron of geese passed before us. And then the shadow of Sonny. Although I was glad he was leaving and looked forward to seeing him again in the spring of 2004, I already missed him, and immediately fell into a postpartum funk. Now what would I do with my days?


But here was lesson number three: I might not know how to live, but they do. When it’s too hot, they head north; when it’s too cold, they head south. And it’s the simple things that matter most: family, good food, and flying high.

The post Birds on a Wire appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

THIS WAS THE BEST MOMENT to walk among them, right after the crash and thunder of their annual orgy, when the bulls have fought and fornicated to happy oblivion and the cows are pregnant. Grasping a fistful of prairie grass like that shuffling caveman in Quest for Fire, I edged close enough to the herd of wild bison to smell the sweet musk on their shaggy coats. Though these behemoths seem ponderous and in their aprés-party torpor sleepy and docile, a panicked one-ton bull can accelerate to 30 miles an hour in less time than a quarter horse, as the beast’s gored and flattened victims have discovered too late. Plus, you never know what might piss one off. Double plus, both boys and girls have horns.

“Mute testimony to nature’s grim fury”: decaying North Dakota farms in the thirties and forties

“Mute testimony to nature’s grim fury”: decaying North Dakota farms in the thirties and forties

“This battered land”: North Dakota's past tense, circa 1936

“This battered land”: North Dakota’s past tense, circa 1936

“This battered land”: North Dakota’s past tense, circa 1936

So I retreated. But not before taking a hard look into the face of North Dakota’s history, and what may be its future. I’d been hearing that much of my beloved old state—where I spent three gloriously wanton years as a teenager—is marching back into its past as the Indian population grows and the white population declines, bison herds are resurrected, and prairie grass replaces wheat. Imagine it: a vast chunk of America beginning to hum again with the romance and true grit of the frontier.


While I drove the 600 miles from my swampy ranchette in western Montana to the North Dakota state line, I concocted a heroic picture of myself on these brave new savannas, loping on my mare through stirrup-high bluestem waving narcotically in the wind, riding out to check on my own personal herd of bison. In this fantasy I looked like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. Only I sat the horse better. In reality, I was looking for new digs, a climate healthier than the overpriced acres of buggy floodplain my wife, Kitty, and I owned. In my ancient Ford Bronco, I planned to crisscross North Dakota, searching the emptied, down-and-out spaces between its little cities for that sweet thing every American covets: a killer bargain in real estate. Some wild and abandoned place where we could afford to surround ourselves with a serious chunk of turf.


Prairie that looked just like this, I thought. On a golden autumn day on the bluffs above the Missouri River 25 miles upstream from Bismarck, it was easy to experience the illusion of the frontier; the riverscape was nearly identical to the one Lewis and Clark described. I wandered down a coulee, looking for an old ghost town I’d read about named Sanger, one of scores of vacant villages no one has the heart or energy to tear down, places amateur historians like to say are “mute testimony to nature’s grim fury,” or suchlike. Since no one else seemed to want Sanger, I figured maybe Kitty and I could grab it for a song. I pictured us quartering ourselves on the second floor of a former bank, say, or a hardware store.


At the bottom of the bluffs I made my way across a terrace plush with yellow grass as high as a prairie wolf’s eye, mindful of the open wells and basements that riddle these old towns. I entered what looked like Main Street—or, rather, a game trail that used to be Main Street. From a window in one of the broken houses, a lace curtain flapped madly, like a cheap trick in a theme park, and was sucked back inside. Through the door of another house, a shadow fled across the bare laths of a sun-drenched wall. Something thumped and crashed, and there was a scritch of little feet. In the wind I heard voices singing. Or was this distant song only magpies yelling in a chokecherry thicket?


As the startling hush of night in North Dakota began to fall, I decided that Sanger would be perfect, if the price was right, and began planning our big move. Corral here, garden there, bison pastures on the terraces, beehives on the bluff. But the next morning I realized that my search for a little house on the prairie had just begun. As it turned out, the Nature Conservancy owned Sanger, and had a plan for its future, one that didn’t include immigrants from Montana. Well, better the Conservancy than some rat bastard of a subdeveloper, I thought.


But who am I to cast the first stone?

TOWNS LIKE SANGER are one of the reasons I love North Dakota, what I call the Halloween State, a haunted land crowded with ghosts and suffering from an acute inferiority complex—a place described by one of its famous natives, the late CBS news anchor Eric Sevareid, as a “meaningless rectangle” on the “cold, flat top of our country.” Cold and flat, to be sure. But, for me, fraught with significance. When I first crossed into North Dakota the week before, I had been exhilarated instantly by the drama of abandonment, the pageantry of forced marches in the direction of zero, the comedy of vines pulling down walls.


The Census Bureau reports that, during the 1990s, North Dakota’s white population declined from 604,142 to 593,181. Of North Dakota’s 53 counties, 47 of them lost population. When you get to the 2000 Census Web page for the state, it reads like the parish registers of French villages during the Black Death: Bottineau had lost 862 souls since 1990, almost 11 percent of its population; Cavalier, minus 1,233, a 20 percent decline; Renville, down 550 for a net loss of 17 percent. In 1990 there were 5,383 people living in LaMoure; in 2000, only 4,701. In 1950, Hettinger boasted 7,100 names on its rolls; in 2000, a mere 2,715.


Old people die in North Dakota, of course, just as babies are born. What accounts for much of this staggering loss of humanity is the chronic illness of the farm economy, especially in the western parts of the state—the river country sometimes called the Coteau du Missouri—and across North Dakota’s midsection. The decline in agricultural income is due to depressed prices for cattle and grain coupled with the rising costs of fuel, equipment, and fertilizer and a lingering drought that, in some parts of the state, has entered its third year.


More for me, I thought as I drove toward Slope County, in the state’s parched southwestern corner, feeling only a small twinge of guilt for lusting after land in a place where people are losing theirs. According to a couple of guidebooks I was packing, Silent Towns on the Prairie and Ghosts on a Sea of Grass, Slope’s county seat, Amidon, is a ghost town. Because it lies inside the Little Missouri National Grassland and just north of White Butte—at 3,506 feet the state’s highest point—I got excited: Here was protected range and, I hoped, embarrassingly cheap real estate. But on the cold and windy day that I drove into town, I was disappointed to discover that the joint was jumping.


“Do I look like a ghost?” a cattle rancher asked me outside the courthouse after I showed him my books.


Doris Preiss, the deputy county treasurer, whose brother is the mayor, told me that she’d heard rumors of Amidon’s death, but they were exaggerated. “None of our houses are abandoned,” she said. “Well, yes, we’re losing people all the time. I’m 68, and one of the youngest in town. But then there are also people like Linn.”


Thirty-something Linn Holloway, the deputy auditor, and her husband moved to Slope County from the Seattle area, where he’d been a shipfitter; he now works as a welder, commuting 50 miles north to Dickinson. They bought 40 acres outside town with three barns, a big shop, and a solid four-bedroom house, all for $74,000. Then they moved in some horses.


“Although everything’s brown this year, we’ve got snapshots showing our place in July, a couple years back, as lush and green as anything in Seattle,” Holloway said.


I hoped she didn’t see me salivating. Once Kitty and I sold our Montana riverfront, we’d have $300,000 to shop with. Kitty was eager to leave our bottomland, because the sun rarely appears in the winter and the air is smudged by the puke belt surrounding a paper mill upwind, pollution that aggravates her allergies. I began calculating the number of acres you’d need to surround yourself with to eliminate the friction that causes neighbors on abutting ten-acre ranchettes to despise one another. Fifty? Probably something more like a hundred.


“North Dakota is a well-kept secret,” Holloway told me. “You don’t have to lock your house when you go on vacation. You can leave your car running on cold days in front of the stores in Dickinson. You can buy houses in Slope built before World War I, well-maintained, with original oak paneling and floors, for less than $30,000, and move them wherever you want. People are always moving houses around.”


That’s the good news. But as I reminded myself while driving out of town, North Dakota is no place for wimps. The summers are hot, and the winters will break your balls. (The record high is 121, at Steele, and the low is minus 60, at Parshall.) Dakotans like to believe that their long winters encourage reflection and reading, and the open view across the prairie inspires a broad-minded intellectual armature. The Ojibwa Indians, according to North Dakota anthropologist James Howard, found their spirits lifted and a new swagger in their step when they were forced from their dank forest heartland around the Great Lakes and out onto the shiny plains.


On the downside, the state is past due for a biblical shitstorm like the Winter of the Blue Snow, which began in 1886, when a bulge of arctic air strangled the northern plains for six months and gale-force winds piled snow into drifts so high that the following spring, cattle ranchers like the young Theodore Roosevelt came across their dead beeves suspended in cottonwoods. The Winter of the Blue Snow helped put an end to the fenceless, open-range era of cattle ranching and ruined Roosevelt’s operations around Medora. Still, as he said later about his character-building stint here, “if it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become president of the United States.”

I LOOKED AT A COUPLE of small cattle spreads in Slope County whose prices were right, but restoring these treeless, browned-out pastures seemed like more work than I wanted to take on. On the way to the next county, I stopped at a 1,700-acre wheat operation owned by Ernie Holzemer. The buildings were cocooned by more than five linear miles of ash and elm trees planted in dense shelterbelts to combat wind erosion, giving the place the gentrified appearance of a country club. Because North Dakota is sprinkled with thousands of these islands, like the archipelagoes of the South Pacific, I decided to add abandoned farmsteads to my quest.


Holzemer, 52, has, in fact, fabricated his own golf course—four holes in the strips of grass between the shelterbelts, with another two holes planned. He is a self-taught golfer. “I bought my clubs,” he told me, “at a pawn shop.” Well, why not prairie golf, I thought, adding the sport to the other inducements for life on the range. A few rounds of small ball every morning after the chores, followed by a martini and lunch at the clubhouse. Sweet. The next morning the sun finally drilled a tunnel through the smother of clouds that squatted on the plain so low I stooped when I got into my Bronco. As I headed south from Interstate 94 toward the burg of Regent, the ground haze evaporated and a stunning flatness was grandly illuminated. What a map I have calls 100th Avenue SW (as if a mighty city might someday stand here in these windblown fields of Stark County) is a 32-mile stretch that locals call the Enchanted Highway. Installed here and there along this remote two-lane blacktop are enormous, striking metal sculptures standing against the unsheltering sky. Here’s a covey of gaudy ring-necked pheasants on a hillside, featuring a rooster 70 feet long; the world’s largest metal grasshopper (according to Guinness World Records 2002); a 70-foot buck bounding over a mammoth rail fence; and a tin family whose huge, propeller-hatted boy grasps a lollipop. They were created by artist and retired schoolteacher Gary Greff to attract visitors and to counter what the Web site RoadsideAmerica.com calls the “dire depopulation predictions” of the national media. “Spunky North Dakotans say ‘BITE ME!’ to out-of-touch urban doomsayers, with their weepy laments of prairie beauty,” the Web site maintains.


Much as I admired Greff’s work, what was beginning to absorb all my attention was the ultimate product of North Dakota throughout much of its natural history: bison. According to the North Dakota Bison Association, there are 23,000 animals in the state, out of some 270,000 across the country. Eric Rosenquist, the manager of 6,000-acre Cross Ranch, the Nature Conservancy’s model stock operation and preserve sprawled across the bluffs above Sanger, admires the animal because of its heroic ability to thrive in the worst storms that North Dakota can throw its way. “We never feed them hay in the winter,” he told me. “They’ll dig through two feet of snow to get at the grass, which is dormant seven months of the year. Then sometimes you’ll see them standing on the tops of the hills looking right into the face of the blizzard. It just doesn’t faze them. At the same time, you’d see cattle huddled in a gully trying to get out of the weather.”


Rosenquist said that the animals, along with fire, are the perfect tools for maintaining grasslands so all of the hundreds of varieties of plants growing on North Dakota’s epic lawn have a chance to thrive. “These grasslands are dynamic,” he explained. “They need to be constantly disturbed.” It’s the nature of bison to graze a patch of prairie right down to the nubbin and then move on to another patch so the first piece has a chance to rest and recover. Because they eat every kind of plant, all the competing varieties of native flora are compelled to play fair.


Farther east, near the James River, in LaMoure County, I suddenly pulled over because of the way an abandoned wheat farm caught the late-afternoon light. There was something about the rise on which the buildings had been erected—or maybe it was the hedgerows of trees radiating from the once elegant multi-eaved house, built in the 1920s—that reminded me of farms I’ve seen in France, earthy and gracefully at ease with the landscape. On the lawn was a velveteen couch that looked like it had been dragged out of the house so someone could gaze at the stars in comfort.


Since the windbreaks concealed me from all directions, I built a campfire in the yard, warmed up the buffalo burger I’d bought earlier, and sat down to enjoy it. When you dine on one of these wild, grass-fed, hormone-free animals, you’re struck by how dense and dark the meat is. All four of the state’s Indian reservations are building and managing their own herds, and many of North Dakota’s bison producers are already supplying a boutique market in the big cities, where porterhouse steaks sell for $40 in restaurants. You can see what a potential bonanza there is for ranchers who do it right.


After I finished dinner, I decided that this particular area wasn’t quite right. For one thing, there wasn’t much grass, only fallow fields plowed for grain. I decided to concentrate my search on land that had never been bludgeoned by a plow.

DRIVING NORTH FROM FARGO, I didn’t bother looking for bargains, because the Red River Valley is one of those national sacrifice areas that has been surrendered to industry and is largely controlled by dynastic families. In this case the industry is intensive grain and sugar beet farming. Although the grass here once stood to a horse’s withers, almost all of it has gone under the blade, and most of the acreage in this river corridor costs more than we could afford. The only reason I ventured onto this nearly rockless and relatively lush edge of North Dakota was because I wanted to revisit Grand Forks, site of the most exhilarating years of my life.


We lived on McKinley Avenue in a trailer court called Presidents Park, scraped from a cornfield, while my old man planted the prairies with Minuteman missiles tipped with thermonuclear howdies. Although I was enrolled—at least on paper—at Central High School (Go, Knights!), when my cronies and I weren’t in class, we would hit the streets, the malt shops, anywhere but the halls. Piloting a tractor-size 1948 Chrysler sedan (which I bought by delivering the Minneapolis Tribune on foot in the snow), I woke up every morning believing I’d ascended to heaven. Presidents Park was a largely parent-free zone under the strict control of teenagers.


In order to piss off almost every adult I knew, one autumn I campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. His campaign slogan (“In your heart you know he’s right!”) was bowdlerized by the Democrats to read, “In your guts you know he’s nuts!”


I dismissed the widespread predictions of a Lyndon Johnson landslide. Voters lie in order to look like conformists, I reasoned, but when they actually step inside the booth they’ll do the right thing and vote for the guy who isn’t afraid to launch a few of those rockets my daddy spent his long working hours planting under the wheat. I changed the name on our street sign from mckinley to au h2o and ignored the frosty reception I got on the doorsteps of voters. Especially after a Central High junior named Maggie joined the campaign.


The night before Halloween, we stood grasping our campaign brochures on the porch of some leading citizen’s grand old Victorian house, on Belmont Road. Maggie suddenly plucked the cigarette from my lips and, with a deft and practiced gesture, flicked it into the yard. Then she put her tongue in my mouth.


“Vote for Barry?” I said when a housewife came to the door.


“Go neck somewhere else,” the woman said.


Now Presidents Park is just a low-rent island in a sea of condos and apartment buildings, without a stalk of corn in sight. I decided to check out the devastation caused by the 1997 flood, when the river inundated downtown, which then caught on fire, supplying the media with days of astonishing images of what appeared to be some war-torn city overseas, symbols of North Dakota’s anguish. But I was comforted now; except for a few bare lots, it didn’t appear that much had changed, especially not Central High.


After my brief tour of Grand Forks, I drove west through Rugby, which lies at the precise geographical center of North America. I was thinking that for urban paranoids who don’t feel safe unless they’re in the deepest part of their apartments, North Dakota is just what the doctor ordered. Pushing farther on through congealed fog in McHenry County, I pulled into the alleged ghost town of Berwick. Sidewalks from busier times had been torn asunder by roots and frost heaves, and none of the 20 buildings along its few tree-lined streets seemed to be occupied. I got excited again. Maybe this was the place. I checked out a brick one-story, a former bar called Holmes’. But what really caught my eye was an abandoned Lutheran church that was in excellent shape, its 40-foot whitewashed spire rising out of sight in the gloom. Although Berwick was surrounded by grain fields, there was some native prairie here and there that might be coaxed to expand while we converted the church into a place to live. We could stable the horses on one side of the nave and live in the other. Keep chickens and warbling finches in the spire and ride every warm-season day from one end of the empty horizon to the other.


“Some guy from Rugby beat you to it,” I was informed by a man who rode up on a lawn tractor. This was Bob Forrest, a retired construction worker who invited me into his house to meet his wife, Marjorie, a longtime North Dakota resident. “They bid $600 for it,” Marjorie said, offering me a cup of coffee. She showed me her school albums from the days when Berwick had been a bustling little farm center where country people came on Saturdays to sell their cream to the long-gone general store. “Now there’s just us three old couples,” she said wistfully. “Oh, and Moose. Moose is a farmhand.”


“It sounds like a close-knit place,” I allowed.


She looked away. “We don’t socialize much anymore.”

THE NEXT DAY I drove through the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, much of which was flooded when the Garrison Dam backed up Lake Sakakawea, in 1953. At the time it seemed like insult added to injury to the Three Affiliated Tribes who live there—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. After all, more than 80 percent of the Mandan tribe—who had befriended Lewis and Clark, helping Jefferson’s predatory henchmen through the winter of 1804—had been wiped out by a smallpox epidemic introduced by whites in 1837. But like the bison, tribal people have not only held on; they may yet enjoy a sort of sweet demographic revenge. For one, their birth rates are far higher than those of whites. The Census Bureau reported that 25,870 Native Americans lived in North Dakota in 1990, 60 percent of them on four reservations and the rest scattered throughout the state. Ten years later the Indian population was 31,329, a 20 percent rate of growth. Also, more than 40 percent of the state’s Indians—composed of the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and the Spirit Lake Tribe of Sioux—are less than 18 years old. Gary Bell, a 31-year-old Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara who wears his hair in a long black braid, works in New Town as an announcer and disc jockey spinning country-and-western, rock, and tribal tracks for KMHA, the Native American-owned public FM radio station. As we stood outside a traditional circular Mandan earth lodge, in which Kitty and I could live pretty comfortably and have plenty of room left over for our dogs, he said that, like a lot of Indians, he has connections to relatives in big cities all over the country but decided to stay put and raise his little girls right here.


“I want them to know who they are,” he said. “I want them to live here, where we’ve always lived.”


Marilyn Hudson, who’s Mandan-Hidatsa, worked in San Francisco in 1960 before returning to her reservation to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, later, to administer the tribal museum. “Many Indian people are coming home after they retire,” she said. “It’s just easier to live here than in a city. You have more independence. It’s cheaper. The roads are straight, and it’s not as hard to get around.”


But while Native Americans and old-timers are welcomed home with open arms, there’s an undying distrust among North Dakotans for out-of-state opportunists (like me, I suppose). It was resentment among farmers about their subservience to distant moneyed classes—which controlled the railroads, paid low prices for wheat, and charged high prices for flour—that spawned the Nonpartisan League. This confederation of hayseeds took control of North Dakota after World War I, established a state-owned bank and grain elevators, and transformed the government into the closest thing to a socialist state America has ever had.


The modern incarnation of this paranoia about outsiders has created a law that bars most nonprofit organizations from purchasing agricultural land. The exceptions, including the Nature Conservancy, must get approval for any such purchase directly from Republican governor John Hoeven and a board of advisers that includes the state agriculture commissioner and the head of the Farm Bureau. This legislation, passed in 1993, was fueled by fear that North Dakota would be overrun by rich environmental organizations that would hammer down local competition for the best land, withdraw moneymaking acreage from production, and ban hunters.


Luckily, the state’s xenophobic legislation doesn’t apply to me, a private citizen. And I’ll say it now, people: I have no intention of planting any damn wheat here. Or barley. I’ve seen buffalo all over the state, from the Logging Camp Ranch, in Slope County, to the Cannonball Ranch, in Mandan, near Bismarck, and am convinced of the importance of the beast in restoring this battered land to health.

I HAD PUT 3,000 MILES ON MY BRONCO in a state that’s 300 miles wide. I’d looked at dozens of ghost towns and buildings in dysfunctional burgs, vacated farmsteads mildewing in the rain, gorgeous, melodramatic sweeps of land wrapped in shelterbelts and crying out for someone to adopt them. Everything was good, but nothing struck me as exactly right.


So I drove a few miles west of Minot, up in the north-central part of the state, to check out some land for sale in Gassman Coulee. I parked in the stubble of a wheat field that was part of the property and hiked down into the coulee. Every step took me farther away from the wind. When I descended to the pastures on the floor of the draw, where an intermittent creek meandered, my heart began to thump. Thick stands of bur oak and hawthorn marched up the draws. As I strolled along a heavily used game trail, a covey of wild turkeys fled before me and hid in a thicket of wild roses. I stopped to sweep my hand through a lush, waist-high carpet of grass and forbs. Although the ground was matted with the tangled, un-natural mulch that fire and then grazing buffalo would quickly groom, it seemed like I was peering down at the canopy of a rainforest, there were so many species of grass. I looked away, certain that every blade was numbered. And, of course, the place felt haunted. The clapboard house had caved in and surrendered to saplings and vines. There wasn’t another human habitation in sight, and if I had anything to do about it, there never would be. Hold on, I told myself, I think someone’s about to say “Eureka!”


I looked at the price on my printout again. When I called the realtor from my cell phone, she assured me that it was accurate: $70,000 for 112 acres. The reason it was so cheap, she said, was that farmers didn’t want it—most of it was too hilly to plow. But it was an ideal place to raise bison. And ride horses, at least from April to November, because from December to March the average daily low here is two degrees, a good temperature for killing insects but too cold to burden the lungs of horses with heavy effort.


A minor matter, I thought. I was suddenly seized with an image of spending the winters here like the mad Norwegian immigrant writer Jon Norstog, who penned a score of epic Old Testament passion plays in the early 1900s, setting them in type by his own hand and printing them in a shanty on the prairie.


I dialed Kitty, imagining the expression on her face when she heard the good news. I figured that, like North Dakota itself, she could be coaxed into seeing the wisdom and rewards of making old things new again.

The post Raising North Dakota appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Hear Bill Vaughn read an excerpt from this article on National Public Radio’s

THIS IS THE WAY WE DIE. Middle-aged men with martini bellies shoveling snow off a rink, or charging the net, or sprinting around some steamy track in July, trying to prove something. The bloated heart seizes, the stressed vessel explodes, and suddenly we’re pitched into the abyss, face flat against the ice, the clay, the cinders.

As I lurched into the final lap, the temperature pushing 95, it felt like some street-corner thug was thumping my solar plexus with his knuckles. You gotta problem, Peter Pan? You wanna cha-cha? But this yelling wasn’t coming from some unknown bully, it was coming from the bully I had married, my wife, Kitty. “Run faster!” she shouted as she ran behind me, checking her stopwatch, totally not winded. “What’s wrong with you?”

With 100 yards left to go, the pain in my chest moved an octave higher, and my hamstrings began to screech. It was Independence Day, the final day I had allowed myself to attempt a seven-minute mile and reach out at last to grab my dream—the Eagle badge, the highest rank a Boy Scout can earn. If I could somehow stumble across the finish line, at least I could bite the dust in the service of a cause. I could picture it, the heroic plaque bearing my name at the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America in Irving, Texas. This Bird Soared, it would say, Better Late Than Never. A year earlier, when I happened upon a copy of what had been the most influential book of my boyhood, misfiled on a shelf of used novels in one of those dusty bookstores that smells of cats, I got the sort of spiritual jolt Christians must experience when they see the Shroud of Turin. Ah, there he was again, unremembered for 40 years: Norman Rockwell’s red-haired, freckle-faced geek in gaiters and a full field uniform, striding across a piney ridge, grinning that infectious grin, one hand raised in good cheer, the other one clutching the 1959 edition of The Boy Scout Handbook.

Rockwell’s portrait of Howdy Doody in khaki would be the first of the many delicious mysteries Scouting would throw my way. In the painting, the Handbook that Howdy Doody is clutching bears a painting of Howdy clutching a Handbook, which also bears a picture of Howdy clutching a Handbook…and so on. I squandered many hours with a magnifying glass and a microscope probing this hall of mirrors to see if it was infinite, one of the reasons my progress through Scouting’s ranks was retarded.

And while other Scouts were rising from Tenderfoot to First Class and Star and Life, or even to the coveted Eagle, I got bogged down in such arcane fixations as the Ner Tamid, a blue-and-white ribbon suspending in bronze the Ark and Eternal Light of the Jewish faith. Not only was I not Jewish, I believed that the “rabbi” you were supposed to consult in pursuit of this beautiful and mysterious religious icon was actually a hutch of rabbits you worshiped, a sort of 4-H project with spiritual overtones.

But for me, then a skinny and vastly ignorant 11-year-old growing up in the boondocks of central Montana, the most intriguing passage in the handbook was titled “From Boy to Man.” Although unencumbered by any explanation of reproduction, here was the first mention I’d ever seen of a phenomenon called nocturnal emissions. It came with an ominous warning, however, resonant of The Mummy’s Curse: “There are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry.” Worry about what, I wondered. And how could you cause such emissions yourself, whatever “emissions” were? Most important, why would you want to?

By the end of my Scouting days at age 13, I managed to advance only to First Class, earning a paltry five merit badges along the way, 16 short of the 21 mandatory and optional badges required for Eagles. Now, standing in the bookstore thumbing through this scuffed and dog-eared handbook, which had belonged to some careless runt named Steve, I inhaled deeply its faint perfume of pine smoke and mildew, and there lifted from my spirit a great rancid aura of regret. I suddenly knew what I wanted. I wanted to finish my career as a Boy Scout. I wanted to be an Eagle.

I DROPPED BY THE office of a poker buddy, a crime attorney we call Loophole, who donates his spare time to a Missoula troop that meets at St. Francis Xavier Church. I was looking for a scoutmaster who would sponsor my rise to the top.

“You want to get involved again, and that’s great,” he said. “So why don’t you just sign up to be a volunteer?”
“Yeah, I probably will,” I lied. “But I want to do this first. So I have more, you know, standing?”

Loophole leaned back in his executive leather chair and arranged his features into the poker face that made him such a shark at our weekly games.

“No can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a rule. If you don’t get the Eagle by your 18th birthday you can’t ever get it.”

Since Loophole is a lawyer, I didn’t believe him. So I wrote a letter to the Boy Scouts of America. The response was a note from John P. Dalrymple, the director of the National Eagle Scout Association at the time, who confirmed that unbending policy. “We receive a number of requests each year from adults who would like to go back and complete the requirements,” he wrote. “Most had attained the rank of Life Scout and only needed one or two merit badges.”

I decided to forge ahead without the blessings of the BSA. Because I would lack official endorsement, I couldn’t even pursue the Eagle as a Lone Scout, a program for kids living in backwaters like mine. I’d have to do my work as a Virtual Scout. I would enlist Virtual Counselors to oversee my efforts and sign my own forms when I met the requirements. Since I planned to follow the Scouting guidelines used in my day, I returned to that smelly bookstore to search for merit-badge pamphlets from the early 1960s.

While chasing down this vintage literature, I learned that shifting demographics have forced Scouting, like all American institutions, to adapt. When the BSA began losing membership in the 1970s its leaders realized that they needed to cast a wider net, to the burgeoning horde of urban boys whose opportunities to experience the outdoors were limited, for instance. The heart of Scouting is still swimming, fitness, camping, and hiking—the whole summer-camp routine, albeit these days it’s a good deal less demanding of brawn than of brain. To become an Eagle now you must count among your 21 merit badges Communications, Emergency Preparedness, and Environmental Science. No longer are badges offered for Cotton Farming, Small Grains, or Beekeeping, but you can earn optional badges in Cinematography, Crime Prevention, or Truck Transportation. There’s one for Disabilities Awareness. And one for Genealogy, a nod to the Mormons, who command such a central role in Scouting today that their threat to withdraw 400,000 Scouts from the movement may have been a deciding factor in the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the BSA’s ban on homosexual leaders.

I set about recruiting my Virtual Counselors, and I pleaded with Kitty to serve as my Virtual Scoutmaster.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s in it for me?”

After a good deal of whining, I finally swung the deal by agreeing to a deadline: If I didn’t earn the 16 merit badges I still needed in one year, by the end of business on July 4, I’d give up. I wasn’t worried. True, fewer than 4 percent of all Scouts ever become Eagles. But these tests were designed to challenge the intellectual and physical prowess of an adolescent. How hard could they be?

EIGHTEEN MILES into the big trek—the 20-mile slog that caps the requirements for the Hiking badge—the November rain turned to sleet. My left Achilles had announced a mile earlier that it was working under protest, and if I ever wanted to play tennis again I better cease this nonsense pronto. Even more irksome was the camp smoke rising up ahead in the gathering dusk. Although the route I had mapped out leads into an industrial wasteland surrounding the train yards of Missoula, I figured that in the chill of early winter the hobo jungles here would be deserted.

“Best set yerself,” a voice called out.
He could have been 20, or 60. He had Charlie Manson eyes, hair so matted it had gone to dreadlocks, and the tip of his nose was missing. But the scavenged plywood nailed above him in a clump of haggard cottonwoods was keeping off the weather, and there was a dry lawn chair next to his fire. In my exhausted state it looked like a throne.

“Where you headed?” he asked. If this guy was a bludgeon killer he was certainly pleasant about it.

“Downtown,” I groaned in relief as I sat down, imagining again the cheeseburgers and beer that were waiting for me at my favorite grill, if I could just get there.

“You don’t want to go down there. They got a new loiter law, and you can’t panhandle no more neither.”

I rubbed at the cramp building in my calf and wondered why this hike was causing me such grief. After all, I had polished off with relative ease the five ten-milers also required for the badge. For one of these marches I went on a tour of Kota Kinabalu, the sultry and buggy capital of Malaysia’s Sabah province, carved from rainforest on the north coast of Borneo. On another, I trudged along the Ptarmigan Wall in Glacier National Park, annoying other hikers by singing “I Love to Go A-Wandering.”

After I finished with this litany the man looked at me hard, then reached into a brown plastic garbage bag under his chair. I flinched, thinking that he was going to brandish a tire iron after all. But what he held out was a pint of Lewis & Clark vodka. I took a pull on it.

“I was a Scout,” he said.

This was news that simply clobbered me. By the looks of his rummy eyes the only merit badge he’d ever earned was for Distilling.

“Yeah, had my Star badge.”

I braced for some heart-wrenching tragedy. “What happened?”

He took a hit from the bottle and screwed the cap back on. “Got more interested in 4-H. The steers. And whatnot.”

WHEN I WAS 11, I JOINED the Legions of Pottsylvania, a gang of kids named after the Balkan-style homeland of Boris and Natasha in the animated Rocky and Bullwinkle television show. I eventually rose to the top through seniority and dumb luck displayed during dirt-clod wars with other gangs, and thus became Pottsylvania’s general. But under the autocratic rule of the new supreme commander, defections increased. Finally, Arthur Lemon, my trusted aide-de-camp, announced that he would no longer have any time for Pottsylvania either; he’d joined the Boy Scouts. He was wearing a khaki uniform with a black scarf tied around his neck in a dapper, squared-away manner. There were official insignia sewn to his shoulders, and on his chest flashed a shiny piece of bronze. This was so far beyond our puny efforts to cast Pottsylvania in a military mold that I was instantly smitten with envy.

“You should join,” he said. “I’m gonna ride up there right now.”
“Up there” was a sprawling house on a bluff above the Missouri River owned by a heart surgeon. When David, the surgeon’s son, announced that he wanted to be a Scout, the good doctor decided that rather than ferry the kid into town he’d bring the Scouts to David. So they organized a unit they called the Skull Patrol, and designed a scarf featuring a phosphorescent skull-and-crossbones on a field of black silk.

“So who’s this, Arthur?” The intense block of a man who was shaking my hand spoke like Orson Welles and looked like Jimmy Cagney. He smelled of pipe smoke and horses and bay leaf, and emanated such confidence and goodwill that whatever it was the Boy Scouts were all about, I knew I just had to be part of it.

The following summer the sun sparkled on the impossibly blue waters of Lower Saint Mary Lake on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation just outside Glacier Park, causing the Second Class badge on the chest of my new uniform to flash agreeably. I was kneeling in the stern of a canoe working on the J-strokes you must perform in order to qualify for the Canoeing merit badge. The final test would be the next morning at dawn. I would be asked to name the parts of the canoe, show the counselor all the strokes, and, finally, overturn my boat in these bone-numbing waters and prove that I knew how to right the craft and slosh the water out of it in the single deft move all the candidates had been taught. (Canoeing turned out to be one of the few skills I would ever master.) In the bow, David had turned around to coach me, and to recite an inspirational limerick from the stores of doggerel he had committed to memory. There was a young woman from Kent…

After David’s father abandoned the Skull Patrol and ran off to California with his nurse, I was surprised when my old man caved in to my pleas to serve as our scoutmaster. You’d think my badges would have flowed like wine, but when I went to him for the Painting badge after a bit of labor on our picket fence, he told me that if I wanted it bad enough I’d have to do the house. To this day the smell of paint makes me gag. Also. the color turquoise.

IN A CLEARING NEXT TO Little Back Creek, a streamlet that issues through the riverside half of the western Montana ranchette that Kitty and I call home, I piled brush around the bowed trunk of a massive cottonwood that had keeled over from old age. I built a nest inside this humpback from dead leaves and bunchgrass, and a fire ring outside it from river rocks. My cozy debris shelter would be the headquarters of my battle to prove to Kitty that I deserved the Camping, Cooking, and Nature merit badges. There would be no Gore-Tex tent for me, ma’am, no $300 sleeping systems or propane stoves. For two days I would eat trout from the river and morel mushrooms from the swamps washed down with tea brewed from chamomile I picked myself.

I intended to overachieve in these matters because my struggles with Scouting the past 11 months had surprised and humbled me. Yes, I had qualified fair and square for the dozen merit badges I had tackled so far, but in some cases just barely. Dog Care, for example, administered by our veterinarian. When I was asked to put our red heeler through his paces, Radish crawled under the horse trailer after I ordered him to stay, barked when I told him to sit, and peed on the vet’s truck when I threw a stick for the beast to fetch.
“I’m going to pass you,” the vet said. “But only because you did good on the knowledge part. Maybe you should think about obedience school.”

The pursuit of some other badges had been protracted sieges. My essays about the natural history of our ranchette and the role of forests in the economy ran several thousand words. I sent this complicated project to one of my Virtual Counselors, a forester who happens to be my brother-in-law, and who caretakes a private estate in New Hampshire. He picked it to pieces, scolding me for losing my objectivity about corporate loggers and their running-dog lackeys in the Forest Service. But in the end he gave me my badge.

It took me two warm-weather seasons to complete Lifesaving, partly because I’m a clumsy and inept swimmer who relies almost exclusively on the dog paddle and the backstroke, but mostly because whenever I dove into our lagoon, where I was practicing to save Kitty from “drowning,” water shot up my nose. The Horsemanship badge was relatively easy because I’ve ridden my whole life, and it was Kitty who trained Timer, my mare. But the counselor was my sister-in-law, a barrel racer from Kansas whose rodeo triumphs are family legends. Wilting under her critical glare I blanked on the names of the muscles and bones of the equine hindquarters. Even though my riding test came during a winter freeze, when she finally let me off Timer I was bathed in a nervous sweat.

When it came time to take the test for the Firemanship badge, the counselor I wanted didn’t want anything to do with me. Not only was he a real fireman, he’d been an Eagle himself, and was deeply suspicious of journalists because of widespread criticism of the BSA’s stand on homosexuality.

“I’m not interested in that story,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m only interested in me.”

“Look,” I pushed on, “why would I care? When I was a Scout there weren’t any homosexuals.”

After he turned me down I considered trying to recruit someone from our rural firehouse, but all those guys had been in the crew that had doused a blaze I had caused in our kitchen a year earlier by leaving a pan of cooking oil unattended on the stove. So in the end I had to turn to Kitty to stand in as my counselor.

ON MY SECOND afternoon at camp I waded into the river and cast forth a length of fishing line baited with a newly hatched salmon fry. Kitty had signed off on my Camping and Nature badges, but it was crucial now that I catch a fish. My test for Cooking was scheduled for dinner, and I had nothing to cook except a few morels and a handful of rice. But the fish weren’t biting, and by 5 p.m. I was panicked. Then an old man wandered down the beach from his boat and I learned that the river had been generous to at least one angler that afternoon.

Later, as a great horned owl hooted nearby in the glow of sunset, I poured Kitty another beer and put a stick on the fire. “How’s your trout?” I asked.

“It’s very good,” she said. “What did you catch them on?”

“Oh, this and that. Whatever.”

“No, really.”

“A Jackson,” I mumbled. “And a Hamilton.”

She put down her fork. “You bought these fish?”

“The requirements say to cook camp food. It doesn’t say how to get it.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “So are you going to be able to finish Personal Fitness?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

With a month to go it was the only test I had left, but it was proving to be the hardest. When I was rummaging for merit-badge pamphlets I could only find a few editions from the 1960s, forcing me to abide by the contemporary requirements for most of my badges. Unfortunately, I happened to find the 1960 printing for Personal Fitness, which then, as now, is a mandatory badge. But while the modern requirements ask nothing more of a boy than as many sit-ups, pull-ups and push-ups he can do in 60 seconds, the old rules demand that you perform 50 sit-ups, eight pull-ups, and 21 push-ups.

Sir, yes, sir! I managed to finish these tasks in relatively short order, even excelling in the sit-up department by knocking out 100. But while the wussified contemporary badge asks you to write an essay about why tobacco is bad and why you should eat good food, the old rules order you to swim 100 yards, perform an 18-inch standing jump, and run a seven-minute mile. I bought a club-quality treadmill and trained all winter while watching reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle. I gradually moved from a 12-minute mile to a nine-minute one, and I surprised myself in April by clocking in at 7:16, although I had to grab onto the treadmill’s arms for dear life. But I despaired of ever being able to do better. I told myself that maybe when summer came the sun on my face and the wind in my hair would inspire me, and my little black heart would find the strength it needed to push me home.

SIX MONTHS AFTER my Eagle deadline had passed, the woods were glowing with Yuletide cheer as we gathered around the family’s annual Christmas bonfire for fireworks, singing, and speeches about everyone’s achievements during the year. I was glowing as well, and not just because of the industrial-strength martini I’d served myself at dinner. In the circle were a number of my Virtual Counselors, and they were glowing too. Kitty read the speech I had prepared for her, in which she lauded my true grit and welcomed a new Eagle into the world. And then she surprised me by pinning a tiny gold eagle earring to the chest of my crisp new Boy Scout khakis. Instead of carols this year, I suggested, how about we do a few camp songs instead? After handing around some sheet music I’d copied from the 1963 Boy Scout Songbook, I led a lackluster rendition of “Home on the Range,” and then “Red River Valley.” Halfway through “Waltzing Matilda” slackers began to drift back to the house for a card game. As Kitty left I told her I would stay till the fire burned down. When everyone was gone I opened the songbook and squinted at the words. Except for the baying of a neighbor’s hound, the woods were silent. Under the constellations I sang “Scout Vesper,” to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.”

Softly falls the light of day,
While our campfire fades away…
Have I done and have I dared,
Everything to be prepared?

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Spying from my hammock as Radish dragged home the spine of a winter-killed whitetail he'd scavenged in the forest, I realized that I had developed a bad case of professional jealousy. The truth is, my 13-year-old red heeler was far better at what he did than I am at what I do. While I was missing the boat, buying high and selling low, choking on the anxieties that settle in with the night, yet feeling nothing in the morning except that cool remove, Radish joyously organized his days so that they passed before him like gleaming cans of Alpo on an endless conveyor belt. Because he was a monument to the simple life naturally lived, I decided to study him one summer day, to read him as if he were one of those get-ahead books, Ten Habits of the Super Successful, say, or Twelve Steps to the New You.

The next morning I wandered from the bedroom to find him sprawled on the living room couch with Clara, our little four-year-old Border collie. On the other couch were three of their pals from the neighborhood, an expensive corgi of the Cardigan variety named Mister Rogers, an Australian shepherd named Cricket, and a sweet-tempered pit bull named Big Head Todd. These high breeds sometimes spent the night whenever Radish allowed them through the dog door. They had about them the contemplative emotional weather of people who had just settled onto their beach blankets with a best-seller and a cold one. My wife, Kitty, ushered out the neighbors so the home dogs could eat their breakfasts. And then our day began.

Radish trotted down the hill behind the house to the slough for a drink and the first of his many swims. Next stop was the corrals, where Kitty was feeding the horses. Radish made a beeline for Mokie, a mare Kitty's family has owned for all of the horse's 35 years. His obsession with this geriatric wonder was based on the fact that because her teeth have been ground to stubs much of the meal she chews dribbles from her mouth and falls to the ground. After grazing on horse feed, Radish sampled next a nice fresh horse turd, a delicacy no dog can seem to resist, rendering the phrase “shit-eating dog” redundant. He was so fond of a little taste every day that in the winter he smuggled in frozen hunks of it, dropping them on the hearth to thaw.

When he was finished at the corrals I followed as he headed across our front field, under the wood-rail fence, and out into the pastures of the ranch next door. When we first moved to this floodplain in western Montana, Radish counted on the fact that the rancher fed his cattle every morning with milled oats. Because stealing oats came under the heading of what Radish did for a living, he made these feedlots a mandatory stop on his daily roam until the rancher went to an all-hay diet. But it wasn't the memory of porridge that drove Radish on, it was grooming. Or maybe “image enhancement” would better describe the streak of green cow shit that he smeared across his cape as he rolled on his back in the muck, his legs waving languidly in the sweet mountain air. He jumped to his feet with a satisfied grunt and turned to admire the glorious mess he'd made of himself.

I walked him back down to the slough and heaved a stick into the water. He went after it like a shot, throwing himself off the bank and hitting so hard his belly flop spooked a pair of pheasants, which exploded from the brush with a stream of cuss words and a flurry of wings. When Clara heard the ruckus she streaked from the house and flung herself into the water as well, in order to wrestle Radish for the stick. They swam around each other in circles, growling, a dog fixed to each end of the stick, until Radish let her have what she wanted. It was his nature to live and let live. He'd been in only two fights—a blue heeler named Bingo tore his right ear, and a neighbor's calico named Wilma jumped on his back and rode him like a bronco.

We got Radish from a cattle rancher named Jerry Hamel, whose spread is on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Six years earlier we'd bought a mare from Hamel, and we trusted his estimation of animals. But when we drove up to look at the pup he was so fat and his legs so short I decided this blob couldn't possibly be a heeler—that speedy and quick-witted working breed that everyone in the West who traffics in quarter horses simply must own to complete his self-conscious ensemble.

But Jerry assured me that this bag of butter was indeed a heeler; he was fat because he and his brother, Mouse, were the only pups in the litter. When we drove back to the rez a few weeks later, Radish and Shine, his momma, were playing in an irrigation ditch. Before he could waddle off I snatched him up. While I sat with him in the truck and Kitty chatted with Hamel I noticed that this new addition to our menagerie had no tail.

“Jerry!” I called, not knowing then that working dogs are often docked so there's nothing to get in the way of the work.
“Where's his tail?”

“Ho, you know Indians,” Hamel said. “We ate it.”

When Radish was clean he rolled in the grass, then began barking furiously at a pair of red-tailed hawks, which looked down from their gyres to see whether this nuisance might be something good to eat. His love-hate relationship with birds sprang from the dressing-down I gave him after he tried to eat a neighbor's chicken the day we moved from the city to the country. “Yer dawg done bit off Gary's butt hole,” Gary's owner observed, cradling his damaged rooster, which would soon recover.

Maybe this kind of projectile barking was compensation for his ebbing powers—his hindquarters, for example, had begun showing the emaciation that strikes the males of all mammals, plus he'd developed a heart murmur. Or maybe it was just a new tactic he was employing in his ceaseless harvest of the world. But friends, this dog could bark! When it happened unexpectedly indoors your stunned eardrums cringed from the force of it. In the autumn Radish sat under our Goodland apple tree and barked heavenward until fatigued, nerve-rattled fruit just gave up and dropped from the branch.
He went back to the slough for a beverage and then grazed on the tender tops of the broad grass that carpets the banks between the cattails. After joining Clara and Mister Rogers for a chase game in the backyard, he went to a special spot under a mountain laurel in our walled garden for a nap. An hour later, with temperatures pushing 90, he padded into my office and ordered me to take him swimming in the river.

The instant I grabbed an inner tube from the elm where they're stored, the dogs bolted down the path to the river. Clara flung herself from the bank with Radish close behind, and they began paddling furiously for the opposite shore. Although the channel here is only a hundred yards wide, the current swept us downstream twice that distance before we could beach ourselves on Radish Island. The dogs shook themselves and raced down the gravel to a sandy lagoon on the tip of the island where a languid whirlpool keeps the sticks I throw in play.

Although he was bred to work cattle, Radish had never been fully trained to do anything. He came and went as he pleased, slept on the furniture, drank from the toilets, climbed on the tables to look for butter, and yapped like a hyena when I licked my plate, because that also came under the heading of what he did for a living. Some people were horrified that I was raising a hippie, but I admired the liberties he took. They were the canine equivalents of what I would do if I had more courage—the complete 365-day year I would devote to nothing except learning Welsh, building a still, making preparations to have a taxidermist freeze-dry my carcass on Getaway Day, and riding my horse from Caracas to Buenos Aires.

Uneducated as he was, however, Radish had always been a quick study. He immediately learned how to heel, how to use his dog door, and how to cajole what he wanted from horses without getting kicked. Because a parcel-delivery driver gave him a biscuit ten years ago, he began leaping into all delivery vans the moment they pulled up to the house and would lope down the lane to the neighbor's if a van stopped there instead of here. Since they knew that he would not exit their vehicles until he got a treat, the FedEx and UPS and Airborne Express drivers all began carrying biscuits when they came this way.

His vocabulary included 23 words. When you told him to fetch the ball, he would not fetch a stick. When you told him to get the box, he would savagely tear apart any of the cardboard boxes I threw in the yard. When you ordered him to get the Mousy he brought forth a pink rubber toy he'd owned for three years, gnawing it only hard enough to make it squeak. And when you yelled Mouse! he knew that what you meant was not his mouse, but mice at large. He killed scores of these vermin in the house and in the feed shed by quickly crushing their heads, but ate only one of them—the first one he killed, which made him nauseous.

While we strolled through the river grass to the head of the island after our swim, Radish disappeared, as he often did on these day trips, and didn't join us until Kitty and I were reading in bed late that night. He jumped up between us, forcing Clara to make room, and was asleep before I could say hello. I smelled his coat and rubbed it, trying to figure out where he'd been. Here was the faint astringency of the feral mint that grows in a briar patch not even the horses can penetrate. From his belly I plucked off beggar's-lice that told me he'd visited a thicket where he'd once dined on the remains of a fool's hen that a fox had killed. And here on his hock was a dusting of wood ash that had clung there when he'd walked through a fire ring where we'd gathered around a Christmas bonfire.

But it wasn't till he farted with a burlesque blat that I knew he'd been on the trail of something dead to eat. Whatever it was—beaver, duck, muskrat?—the reek of its by-product was sweet and putrid and combustible. Kitty turned away with a groan and shut off her lamp. The first time he farted loud enough for anyone to hear, Radish yelped and ran out the door. The next time it happened he turned and barked at his butt. And then he went through a period when these emissions woke him from his dreams with a start. But the last couple years he'd grown indifferent to even the most outrageous fart, like the one that just escaped. I considered turning him from the family bed. But before I could summon the energy I fell asleep.

The slapping of the dog door woke me up at 2 a.m. Kitty and Clara were sound asleep. I threw on some clothes and went out into the antiseptic light of a full moon. I heard the rattle of Radish's tags as he trotted off, and decided to follow. Instead of heading back into the jungle, he went to the river and dove in. Out on Radish Island, he trotted to a path through the willows that ring the shores and hide from view the sandy plain within. He stopped to dig. When I appeared before him, dripping, he looked up without surprise. Then he extracted the deer femur he'd buried. Compared to his usual fare, this tidbit wasn't much to write home about. But what did I know? I sat down in the sand as he gnawed and chewed. For the first time in months I had spent most of an entire day in a state of serenity. When you make any effort to live the way a dog lives, especially a dog who dances with complete abandon from one impulse to another, the past evaporates and the future becomes nothing more than the next good thing. I must have been whispering, because Radish, bathed in moonlight and the sultry air, cocked his ear to listen. And then he winked.

One morning in February, when Radish turned away from his favorite nosh, I figured the banana must be tainted or the yogurt soured, and dumped it in the compost. But he wouldn't eat a thing I offered. Not hamburger nor cheddar nor Asian pear. When he went to his dog bed the next day, he couldn't get up, or wouldn't. It was as if he had entered the world at one end of a crowded banquet table, eaten his way to the other end, and announced that it had all been very yummy indeed but he'd had his fill. Since Christmas he'd been dwindling from congestive heart failure and a bum thyroid we were treating with drugs. And he had developed psychogenic polydipsia, a mental quirk that convinced him he was always thirsty. As he looked up at us with seamless trust, Kitty or I carried him, arms around his chest, from house to yard so he could do his business. But four days after he lay down, he messed himself. Kitty and I held a tearful meeting. It was time to call our vet.

Within seconds the phenobarbital stopped his heart and closed down his brain. As we kissed him and said good-bye, the light in his eyes went out. I wrapped him in a horse blanket and carried him outside. Clara ran from us and sat in the snow, confused. We buried him with his feed dish and a tennis ball, in the rhubarb patch, just downhill from the apple tree. It was Valentine's Day.
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A BULLET IN THE MOUTH, and a bullet in each eye. Say what you will about the depravity of the act, the assassin’s aim was true. Instead of merely obliterating the potent and spiritually charged humanoid etched into the cliff above us, the shooter had reduced it to a mere cartoon. This eerie four-foot being, framing its ancient face with outstretched hands, now resembled Casper the Ghost, or that lost soul in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.

On the Blackfeet Reservation, in full regalia.

Bear Lodge, controversially known as Devils Tower.

A totem of the Sweet Grass Hiils.

An offering at the medicine wheel.

Bullet-riddled Dinwoody petroglyphs.

Prayer cloths at the base of Bear Lodge.

Sweat lodge frames in Ulm Pishkun State Park.

Chief Mountain, early handiwork of Napi, the Creator.

“They shouldn’t have done that,” the man beside me said, without heat. Paul Revere was a sixtyish Arapaho who happened to be visiting the remote petroglyphs of Dinwoody Canyon, in western Wyoming, the same shiny autumn day that I was. While I was just a common tourist, he was here with his priest, the Reverend Harold EagleBull, a Lakota in his fifties who served as pastor for Our Father’s House, the Episcopal church down the road in the Wind River Reservation town of Ethete.


“What these figures represent is significant,” EagleBull said. “To Western culture, to the missionaries, history is in the Bible. But for Native Americans our history is here, in nature. Nature is our Bible.”


Luckily, most of the two dozen beings portrayed in this high panel of carvings had not been damaged by vandals. Created at least 1,000 years ago, and perhaps as long ago as 7,000 years, they were formed by artisans pecking into the weathered red veneer to reveal the pale sandstone underneath. Some archaeologists believe that those responsible for the petroglyphs may have been distant relatives of the Eastern Shoshone, who were forced by the U.S. government in 1877 to share the Wind River Reservation with the Northern Arapaho, much more recent arrivals to the region. Before the Plains tribes were shattered by the Indian Wars—which ended in 1890 with the U.S. Army’s massacre of a band of Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota—hunter-gatherer clans had set up summer camps in these canyons.
“I can imagine the people here,” Revere said. “I can hear the drums.”


“Do you think these pictures are self-portraits?” I asked.


“No. My grandfather told me they used to see these silver things flying in this area. Ones with wings on them. They used to see them out here a long, long time ago.”


My hair felt like it was full of static electricity.


“You mean UFOs?”


Revere nodded. “They shined. They were spacemen. My grandpa’s grandfather told him, and he got it from his grandpa. They were here before the people. I think the people worshiped them, praised them, because they could fly.”


After Revere and EagleBull drove off in their pickup, I climbed the high mound of boulders and rubble at the base of the cliffs. I couldn’t get next to the wall because tribal authorities had erected a steel fence around it, useless against bullets but a deterrent to less lethal forms of desecration, such as graffiti.


While making a closer study of these portraits I noticed a humming, or a vibration, a sensation registering somewhere between the aural and the tactile, like the chatter of locusts. I felt light-headed. Dehydration, I figured.


I sat down on a cube of rock and dabbed at the sweat on my face. As I waited to see what might happen next, the sound stopped. Then it started again. Suddenly, this place had my full attention.

CATHOLICS HAVE CHARTRES, Jews have the Wailing Wall, Buddhists have Bodh Gaya, and Muslims have Mecca. The Native Americans have their own sacred places as well, largely unknown to the rest of the world, spoken about on the reservations in hushed tones. Most of these holy sites are features of the landscape—Wyoming’s Devils Tower, the mountains of Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Black Hills in South Dakota, Rainbow Bridge in Utah, Mount Graham in Arizona, plus hundreds of rivers, waterfalls, peaks, trees, caves, and stones from one side of the continent to the other.


Like most old religions, the faiths of the 35 tribes and bands of the northern Plains revolve around communion with that mysterious, omniscient energy, without beginning or end, that is believed to have shaped the universe, and continues to rule it. Just as in Christianity, thanksgiving, sacrifice, offerings, and petition to this single power are at the core of Native American devotional rituals. But because traditional Indians believe that the Creator and lesser spirits are always present—like water in the world of a fish—faith isn’t about some guy in the sky or hedging your bets. Prayer and the quest for accord with these forces are regarded as critical, as natural to moment-to-moment living as taking your next breath.


In Shoshone cosmology, for example, there are air people such as birds, earth people such as bears, and underground people like the badger, an important player in the lower world. Travel between the realms is a central part of the religious experience, sought in vision quests at places that have proven over the centuries to be rich with energy and that connect the faithful to spirits that are sources of knowledge and strength.


But understanding the forms of Indian spirituality is not the same as feeling it—something a white cynic reared in a European culture still alien to the sacred landscapes of this country can probably never experience. As Narcisse Blood, a spiritual leader of the Kainai tribe in Alberta, Canada, the northern band of the Blackfeet Confederacy, told me and a group of others last winter in Missoula, Montana, a true understanding of Blackfeet religious practice is possible only when carried out by Blackfeet people thinking and speaking in the tribe’s “sinewy, complex, and subtle” language. “Still, I have a lot to learn,” Blood said. “I’m going to go to my grave not knowing everything.”
Like a lot of people, I was thinking about exactly this—death and religion—on September 12 last year. I was sitting in a church, a rare event that was coincidental with what had just happened. But this humble chapel, St. Peter’s, is important to me. Barely a thousand square feet, with a simple pine altar and whitewashed walls of rough-squared logs, it was built in 1878 by Jesuit missionaries with the aid of Thomas Moran, one of Montana Territory’s first Catholics and my great-grandfather. It sits in a high pasture on a cattle ranch 20 miles from the Missouri River town of Cascade, under a ring of stone-topped buttes carved into antic shapes by the elements. My grandfather was born here, and so was my mother. Although St. Peter’s is 70 miles from the Blackfeet Reservation, it was built at the heart of their traditional homeland. In some ways it’s a symbol of the tribe’s loss. And for better or worse it represents my family’s long association with Indians.


After a while, the lifeless air that infests most churches finally drove me out. I walked up Boot Hill to the cemetery and wandered among the gravestones. I was trying to imagine my mother as a child playing on these grassy slopes, but couldn’t get out of my head a picture of those Blackfeet boys and girls snatched by Jesuits and Ursuline nuns from their broken clans in order to bleach the paganism from their blighted souls, confused children put up in the two boarding schools whose ruins litter this abandoned place.


I’ve always lived around Indians, and grew up across the creek from a Blackfeet family. But it occurred to me, standing in that graveyard, that I was no better educated than many of those urban sightseers who will mark the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s journey by packing the kids into the Winnebago and heading off into Indian country to trace their route. So I decided to look at this land with fresh eyes, to try to appreciate it for new reasons. It wasn’t as if I had been looking for God in all the wrong places, because I wasn’t looking for him at all. I wanted to see if a skeptic like me could extract something of the mystery and wonder tied up in the places that Indians hold sacred. And I wanted for once in my life to experience that aboriginal perception of time that’s measured by the eating of a meal or the hike from one spot to another, time sensed as a procession of seasons endlessly repeated across an eternal landscape. I yearned to escape the unrelenting ticktock of America.


I changed the oil in my ageless Bronco, loaded a cooler, and drew a route across a map of the northern Plains, starting from my place in western Montana, floodplain that was once Salish land. Just before I headed forth I tied a fragrant braid of sweetgrass to my rearview mirror.

AFTER DINWOODY CANYON, where I had begun to feel like an intruder in a private world, I headed toward a much more accessible and public site, one that is central to the Plains Indians religion. From the Wind River Reservation I drove three hours across the former inland sea that is now the Bighorn Basin to the Medicine Wheel Scenic Passage, a two-lane Wyoming highway that was so steep I had to shift the truck into low range. In the typical manner of high peaks, Medicine Mountain makes its own weather. At 5,000 feet the sun was shining. At 7,000 it began to snow. After I parked the Bronco in order to climb the last mile and a half on foot, it started to rain. Just as I crossed timberline and reached the top of the ridge, a sudden wind stripped away the wrapper of clouds at the summit, revealing staggering vistas of the basin spread out on one side, and the wooded lower slopes of the Bighorns on the other.


The Medicine Wheel was built by unknown hands from cobbles of pale-yellow limestone arranged without mortar. Twenty-eight spokes emerge from a central cairn measuring seven by twelve feet to a circle 80 feet in diameter and 245 feet in circumference, around which six smaller cairns are assembled. Indians have made pilgrimages to the wheel for centuries, to seek visions, to make offerings, to commune with the dead, to plead for the sick, and to purify themselves in sweat lodges. No one’s sure what this architecture means. It might have been an astronomical device marking the movement of the stars. Or maybe it was a blueprint for the proper construction of a tepee or a medicine lodge, or the site of the first Crow Sun Dance.
At first glance the Medicine Wheel made no sense to me, rocks piled this way and that, fenced with three strands of rope stretched between thick pine posts. But as I walked around its perimeter the pattern began to emerge, the rim, the spokes, the cairns. Tied to the ropes and strewn among the stones were hundreds of things left by the faithful—deer horns, seashells, beads, animal bones, pouches of tobacco, braids of sweetgrass, small, mysterious bundles wrapped in rawhide. A sign bearing a photograph of the wheel held the words of an elder named Old Mouse, from the Arikara tribe of North Dakota: “Eventually one gets to the Medicine Wheel to fulfill one’s life.”


After a while I began to feel pulled by the undeniable aura of the site. Part of it was due to the physical and spiritual remove of all wild places. And there was something else here as well, that even I could feel: the humility you can’t deny when you sense the scores of generations of the faithful who have stood in this very spot.


What was not apparent were the political storms that have raged here for a century. Because the mountain lies just inside the Bighorn National Forest, established in 1897, it’s managed by the Forest Service. That means the fate of the Medicine Wheel has been at the mercy of the agency’s policy of “multiple use,” which theoretically ensures that everybody gets some. In 1970 the Medicine Wheel was declared a national historic landmark, giving it some protection from government monkey business. But as visits increased, by tourists and the faithful, the smell of money was soon wafting through the scrubbed mountain air. In 1988 the Forest Service, at the urging of businesspeople 30 miles west in Lovell, Wyoming, proposed commercial exploitation of the site that would include erecting a gigantic steel platform above the Medicine Wheel so its structure would be instantly apparent, as well as building latrines, a 200-vehicle parking lot with slots for RVs, and huts for cross-country skiers and snowmobilers.


People on the nearby reservations went ballistic—the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne just over the Montana border, the Shoshone and Arapaho farther south in Wyoming, the Lakota in South Dakota. They formed a pressure group called the Medicine Wheel Coalition and besieged the Forest Service with letters. (Remarkably, before passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the first Americans could have been prosecuted for worshiping at the Medicine Wheel.) The debate finally ended in 1996 with the signing of the Historic Property Plan, which requires federal land managers to consult with Indians about proposed uses of sacred sites.


As I circled the wheel, a pair of newlyweds rode up on mountain bikes, laughing and talking. But as soon as they felt what I had felt after recognizing the pattern of the stones and the gravity of the place, they fell silent.


“Wow,” the guy said.


I nodded. “Exactly.”


In the wind, clacking against a post, was a carved wooden feather bearing a poem. “Beauty before me. Beauty behind me. Beauty around me. Wherever I go I walk in beauty.” As I headed down the mountain I passed a young Indian couple on their way up. The man was pushing a stroller. When I said hello to them, the baby smiled, lighting up the world.

WATCHING CLIMBERS INCH UP the walls of Devils Tower, in northeastern Wyoming, is a chief entertainment for tourists, half a million of whom come every year, inspired in large part by the alien shenanigans that take place here in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After taking my turn staring through a Park Service telescope, noting how tiny were the rock jocks and how massive was the rock, I fell in behind a family in matching blue shorts and white kneesocks who decided to walk around the tower on the 1.3-mile asphalt pathway built around its base. There were prayer cloths tied to trees and, in a gesture by the Park Service toward multiculturalism, signs advising visitors that this was holy ground to native people, so show some respect. There were also signs that explained the tools and techniques of crack climbing.


The tower, proclaimed a national monument in 1906, is the setting for a common legend. According to the Kiowa Indians, a bear chased seven sisters, who clambered onto a tree stump. The stump surged heavenward, transporting the girls to safety as the bear clawed deep gouges in the bark of the rising monolith. The sisters were transported by the Creator into the sky and resurrected as the seven stars of the Pleiades.


Geologists figure that some 60 million years ago, a molten surge of rock thrust through sedimentary layers that had been laid down in a vanished ocean, and cooled before it reached the surface. As the magma turned to igneous rock it fractured, creating a tight subterranean bundle of six-sided columns. Over the eons the elements and the Belle Fourche River ate away the softer rocks, leaving a singular colossus with nearly vertical walls rising 867 feet from the rolling grassland.
In the tourist traffic it was hard for me to get an undisturbed sense of the place, so I headed off toward the 1.5-mile Joyner Ridge Trail, a path less traveled, where I could look at the tower from a distance. Watching as its shape and color changed in the passing afternoon sun, I recalled the time I had come here as a kid, piled into the backseat of my old man’s Ford with my sister, on our way to Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Glacier. We traveled at a furious clip, along a route I had come to think of as Ashtray Alley because the only thing I cared about was the opportunity to augment my collection of tawdry knickknacks printed with primitive renditions of the sights we were supposed to be experiencing.


Of course, I had no idea then of the controversies surrounding the tower. Even the name is disputed. The first maps of the area called it Bear Lodge, a translation of the Lakota name Mato Tipila. But an Army colonel named Richard Dodge changed the name in 1875, when he escorted a team of scientists and surveyors into the area, in violation of U.S. treaties, after George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills. The Lakota Sioux, who ruled this region, despise the name, in part because of its link to the darker forces of Christianity.


Today, Devils Tower is regarded by the climbing community as one of the premier crack-climbing challenges in North America. Although climbers agreed in 1995 to stay off Mato Tipila throughout June, the month of the summer solstice and of the traditional sun dances here, the sport remains a hotly contested topic. The bolts hammered into the stone, the attempt to subdue the natural world, the yelling between climbers, plus all that pissing on the rock—these things are a sacrilege, argue the natives, some of whom wonder why it’s a federal offense to climb the faces of those dead white men carved into Mount Rushmore. As Lakota writer Vine Deloria Jr. said in the 2001 public-television documentary “In the Light of Reverence,” “It’s not like we designated a place and said, ÔThis is going to be sacred.’ It came out of a lot of experience. The idea is not to pretend to own it, not to exploit it, but to respect it.” For this reason, there are mixed feelings among natives about the sculpture of Crazy Horse being carved 17 miles southeast of Rushmore on Thunderhead Mountain. Although this stonework, chiseled by an Anglo artist at the request of the Lakota, celebrates the great Sioux warrior and is a reminder that the Lakota were never defeated by the United States in battle, it’s taking shape through the blasting and drilling of the holy Black Hills.


When the light began to fade and Bear Lodge took on its last color of the day, I realized it had been two hours since I wondered what time it was. On my way back through the visitor center I slipped the watch from my wrist and left it on a bench.

ON I DROVE, through the Cheyenne and Crow reservations in southeastern Montana, past houses clustered around sweat lodges—not the traditional low lodges framed with bent saplings, but plywood structures you could stand up in, sort of the reservation equivalent of the backyard swimming pool. I stopped for gas on the Cheyenne Reservation and fell in love with a skinny Indian girl working the cash register, who looked at me as if she were looking at mud. On the Crow Reservation I stopped at the Custer battlefield to check out the colonel’s headstone. While standing there I remembered the old joke they like to tell on the reservations: What were Custer’s last words? Jesus Christ, look at all the fucking Indians!


By the next day I was deep inside the Blackfeet country of central Montana, where bands of Paleo-Indians lived among herds of bison that turned the savannas black with their numbers.
At Ulm Pishkun State Park, where the plains rise to meet the Rockies, native hunters would drive the animals to their death over sandstone cliffs carved by the Missouri River. I tried to picture the high drama of a day that ended well, the joy and thanksgiving that would follow, the drumming and singing, good fortune celebrated with raucous sex and heartfelt prayers that could come only from a culture in which daily life and the life of the spirit are bound together seamlessly.


I headed north to Browning, Montana, the blustery tribal seat of the Blackfeet Reservation. School had just let out and the joint was jumping with shrieking kids, high schoolers gunning their engines, younger ones loping their horses bareback down the sidewalks and into the streets. There were herds of riders and clattering horses surrounded by packs of yelping dogs, the through-town traffic stalled while the village children took control. I stopped a boy with a mop of black hair who was riding a sorrel mare and dragging a scruffy colt on a halter.


“You ride around like this every day?” I asked him.


“No, faster. She’s got a stone bruise,” he yelled, speeding off.


I got into a long line at one of the two big quick stops in town, the only white face in sight, and ate a personal pan pizza in the park outside the tribal offices while two guys in full Fancy Dance regalia practiced their moves for some upcoming ceremony, the bells on their outfits clanging.


I had decided that my last stops on this trip would be Chief Mountain in nearby Glacier National Park and the Sweet Grass Hills 100 miles to the east, special places to the Blackfeet in part because they were the first things made by Napi, the Creator. I made a stop at the Museum of the Plains Indian and handed over $4 for another braid of sweetgrass to get me through this last leg of the journey.


Every sightline at the far end of Glacier is dominated by the 9,000-foot fortress that in the Blackfeet language is called Minnow Stahkoo, an isolated, eroded monolith made from the remnants of massive stone plates. As I drove around the quarter-circle of highway that rings Chief Mountain, I tried to make out the image on its face of a woman holding a child in her arms, the grief-crazed widow in the old story who threw the child and then herself from the peak after her war-chief husband was killed in battle. His body was brought here, and the family was buried in the rocks at the base of the mountain, which towers like a tombstone over their graves. br.
I passed a wind-warped pine whose trunk was tied with orange and red prayer cloths. I backed up to a turnout on the two-lane for a better look. There were other trees as well, festooned with strips of white, blue, and yellow. Indians come here for vision quests and prayers; it is said there are secret paths to the summit.


“These places have always demonstrated power to us,” says Curly Bear Wagner, a 57-year-old Blackfeet elder and cultural adviser who lives on the Blackfeet Reservation. “We still use them today because our culture is very much alive. Everybody knows that the power lives up on top of Chief Mountain, and these spirits always want to be honored.”


After walking three miles into the woods along the Lee Ridge Trail, eager to get as close to Chief Mountain as possible, I realized I was in the middle of grizzly country, without pepper spray and without a tree I could climb fast enough to save myself from becoming the other white meat. I decided I was as close to this holy peak as I needed to be. Although Narcisse Blood and others believe that bears never attack Indians, a fat lot of good that was going to do me. I turned around and retreated to the truck.

BY THE TIME I REACHED the Sweet Grass Hills, the first snow of autumn had coated the high country. Like Chief Mountain, the three main peaks of the Sweet Grass Hills rise unexpectedly from the prairie, formed ages ago by magma pushing against layers of sedimentary limestone and shale. Now these 7,000-foot buttes are a sanctuary for elk, which were plains dwellers before ranching and grain farming drove them into the mountains. From the foothills I could still see Chief Mountain, gleaming in the sun a hundred miles across Montana.


I parked in the ruins of an abandoned mining camp near Middle Butte. As I picked my way along a cow path up the slope, the mountain slowly rose into view. From this angle its perfect cone made it look like a volcano. On top of the ridge I sat down and stared at the sun, glowing through the clouds above the left side of the peak. The omnipresent psychic noise of the world began to fade away. Then that humming-vibration thing started again, the same sensation I’d experienced back at Dinwoody. It must be the high blood pressure I was diagnosed with before the start of this endless Indian summer, I thought. The doctor said it would kill me.
But she didn’t say when.


Or maybe it was something else, after all. In 1992, somewhere around here, four Canadian campers discovered a treasure in a cave that established the antiquity of the Sweet Grass Hills as sacred ground. It was a pair of seashells six inches in diameter, bored and carved to resemble ghostly human faces. Called gorgets, they might have been status symbols as well as religious icons, probably worn around the neck. They’re believed to be about 500 years old, and were probably left in the cave as a spiritual offering. It’s unknown what role they played in religious practices, but the possibility that they were traded here from as far away as the coast of Florida suggests how vast was the network of aboriginal commerce in North America.


Growing up, I spent part of every summer at Boy Scout camp on the Blackfeet Reservation, next to Glacier, and I had always thought of these places the way kids do; that is, that the world must have been made the day I was born and nothing of any significance happened before that wondrous moment. But to realize while looking at these sacred sites how long human beings have been here, and how over thousands of years they developed very intimate relationships with the natural world, is to suddenly experience a kind of dizzying sense of how new we are, how tenuous and expendable and weak and unimportant, and how strong and enduring is this landscape.


“We’ve been here a long time,” Narcisse Blood said last winter. “And we’re going to be here for a long time to come.”


Suddenly exhausted, I lay back in the sweetgrass and let its luxurious vanilla perfume wash over me. When I woke up, the sun was on the other side of Middle Butte. And I was covered in snow.

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

Black kids have had few heroes in the great outdoors. Until now.

Hype!

The last word in clogs for jocks

Go figure. Having borne for a thousand years the same relationship to fashion that the tater has to gastronomy, the lowly clog is now the hottest ticket in jockware. Merrell Performance Footwear has sold more than a million slip-ons since launching its line in May 2000, and most every other outdoor footwear firm, from Vasque to Salomon, offers clogs this season for your every need. But one company is poking fun at the backless fad. Last fall, technical-boot purveyor Montrail unveiled the world’s first mountaineering clog. The VerClog, according to marketing director Boo Turner, is a Montrail Verglas technical alpine boot surgically altered by a cobbler. “It has a classic wood lasting board, so it’s completely rigid for technical ascents and crampon techniques, such as frontpointing,” she says. For reasons of public safety it’s probably a good thing that (1) the VerClog is actually a spoof, (2) there’s only one pair, and (3) it isn’t for sale. On the other hand, it’s a pity: If the current footwear mania reaches its inevitable conclusion and clog dancing sweeps the après-ski scene, the VerClog would kick some serious butt.

Wave of the Furture

SURFERS HAVE LONG PRAYED to Mother Nature for heavenly waves. Some have even burned boards on sacrificial beach bonfires. But this winter, one SoCal environmental group is placing its hopes in the power of human ingenuity.

Back in September, members of the Surfrider Foundation lowered 120 fourteen-ton sandbags off a barge anchored at Dockweiler State Beach near LAX. Their goal: the nation’s first artificial reef designed to jack up surfable waves. Nobody knows how well the fake break will work, but the big test is expected in January and February. If the planet does what it’s done for the last few eons, powerful northern Pacific storms will crank out stacks of swells that will speed across the ocean and eventually spill over the seven-foot-deep reef as though it were a natural sandbar, hopefully creating perfect A-frame peaks on top. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” says Pratte’s Reef designer David Skelly, a coastal engineer and owner of Skelly Engineering. “But I know it’s going to produce a surfable wave.”

Whether the waves show up or not, a government ruling that helped finance the reef has already made environmental history. In the mid-1980s, the California Coastal Commission, a state regulatory agency, allowed Chevron to build an oil-pipeline jetty off the town of El Segundo, but told the company it would have to make amends if the project diminished local waves. In 1994, the commission decided it had, and the oil company paid Surfrider $300,000. Pratte’s Reef is the result. “This means that waves deserve the same protection as redwood trees,” says Surfrider executive director Christopher Evans.

The group has opted to study Pratte’s cultural and environmental impacts before pursuing any additional reef projects. Skelly, however, sees a day when fake breaks dot the globe. Two others, installed last year at Narrowneck on Australia’s Gold Coast and in 1999 at Cables Station on Australia’s West Coast, are performing with mixed results. But Skelly, an avid surfer, is still stoked. “This takes surfing into the 21st century,” he says. “It allows us to consider making surf spots that mimic classic breaks like Pipeline and Malibu. It opens a whole new field of opportunity for the sport.”

Unsafe at Any Speed

They raised the walls and smoothed out the bumps, but the Lake Placid bobsled and luge track is still one very wild ride

…And All I Got Was This Lousy Prosthetic Foot

How an around-the-world cycling tour went very, very wrong

The Second Cold War?

THOSE NUTTY RUSSIANS. Who else would try to jump-start a half-frozen body with a hypo full of EDTA—a white crystalline acid commonly used to treat lead poisoning and known around most households as good old-fashioned sodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate? Kyrill Ivanov, a researcher at St. Petersburg’s Pavlov Institute of Physiology, claims he has discovered a method of resuscitating hypothermic subjects without rewarming their bodies. By injecting his patients—thus far, very pissed-off rabbits and rats, chilled in ice water—with EDTA, Ivanov managed to flush the excess calcium that builds up in cold-weakened cells and restart the shivering reflex. But Ken Zafren, a member of the board of the Wilderness Medical Society, is skeptical about EDTA’s efficacy with humans. “Whenever you move important electrolytes around the body, it could have unintended consequences,” he says. Still, if Ivanov’s hoped-for human trials pan out, a syringe of EDTA may one day join that space blanket in your winter survival kit. Or nyet.

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AS THE DROUGHT of 2000 ground on forever like the invader in some perpetual Eurasian tank war, the forests of the West burned to ash, the broasted air filled with smoke, and everywhere was the growl of bombers flying off to heave slurry at the fires. Tensions, as the anchorpersons say, escalated, both those that sprang from reality and those confected by delusion. In late July, when 350 Hells Angels roared into Missoula, Montana, to party hardy at their annual bash, the chief of police countered with 170 reinforcements. One sweltering night after the bikers withdrew from the bars downtown to the ski hill they’d rented, a phalanx of cops in body armor attacked a noisy crowd of civilians gathered in the smoky streets to let the good times roll and to protest all the cops, and blasted everyone in sight with pepper spray. South of the city a minister’s son, a father of five, was charged with beating to death an older neighbor who had brandished a pistol to illustrate a point about the younger man’s incessantly howling hounds.

For me, these dramas were simply atmosphere, no more than scrim, I admit, for my own private passion play—the simmering feuds with neighbors I’d lived among for a decade, squabbles petty and not so petty that were finally coming to a boil under the weary ocher skies. But such is the nature of what I call the Squalor Zone—the rural sprawl surrounding Missoula and most of our Republic’s cities, that unsavory low-rent sediment layered between suburbia on one side and, on the other, the sweep of farms and big ranches and finally the wilderness—that folks just naturally like to get in your face. The topics of debate are standard: “Resolved: Whereas your [dog, mule, horse, cow, child, fence, hunting ethics, conservation practices, respect for private property] could stand improvement, sir, mine is above reproach. You fucking asshole.”
Even my wife, Kitty, and I had begun to annoy each other by skulking around on tiptoe and checking over our shoulders. The forest at Dark Acres—our little slice of Shangri-la on the Clark Fork River, a five-hour float from the heart of Missoula—is so littered with wind-sheared timber that any combustion in this parched jungle would have erupted into a firestorm consuming our house and shop and corrals. We stopped riding in the forest or putting out our four highbred quarter horses back there to graze because their steel shoes might strike a rock and throw a lethal spark.


Every afternoon during the peak of the wildfire crisis I shimmied up the angled trunk of a toppled ponderosa to peer through the smoky-yellow glare like a mad gibbon. I issued myself binoculars, a walkie-talkie, a professional-quality slingshot, and a bag of inch-wide stones from the river. At the first sign of fire I would radio Kitty, who was working back at the shop on one of the books she designs for publishers. If I got into a skirmish with a trespasser or spotted one of the many unknown, demented persons who enjoyed reckless gunplay in the ridges above our place, Kitty would call in the sheriff. The slingshot, I told myself, was for protection.


On July 31, when the thermometer hit 100 degrees, I was catnapping in my hammock, mustering the energy for sentry duty, when the shouting began. My first groggy notion was that a neighbor was challenging me to come out and fight. But it wasn’t a feudist causing this ruckus. It was a fire. And it wasn’t the forest that was burning. Under an angry funnel of greasy black smoke, flames were devouring several shacks on a cluttered four-acre tract we dubbed the Rent Trailer, whose owners leased a stained and battered mobile home huddled in a clot of elms to one family after another. The fire had started when a frayed electrical wire jury-rigged from the mobile home to the woodshed had shorted out, showering the shed with sparks.


“Bring more!” Kitty yelled, dragging a pair of garden hoses behind her as she ran down our drive toward the flames.


I did as I was told. By the time I showed up, a disorganized crew of Squalor Zoners had gathered, and they were frantically attempting to connect a series of hoses in order to squelch the fire with water. The trailer was still unscathed, but the flames had leveled two shacks, destroyed an old tractor, and were feasting on the mounds of junk you always find in the weedy yards of netherlands like ours.


The current occupants had escaped unsinged. Mom herded her three kids and a pair of vicious rottweilers into the old family van while Dad saved the chickens and the inferno raged on. A big-voiced four-year-old, whose singing was a daily serenade during happier times, hung her head and wept. We backed away, utterly defeated. In the distance, sirens began to wail.


The next thing that happened was the arrival of deputies and firefighters, speeding up in a dozen trucks, circling the homestead like Comanches in some ancient oater. They doused the inferno in short order and even managed to save the home (whose shell-shocked occupants moved right back in).


I glanced over and caught the eye of Junior Dugan,* a diesel mechanic with whom I had exchanged not one civil word in seven years, not since our bout over zoning featured him in one corner, building himself yet another house on the nine-acre principality of Dugania, facing off against me, a meddler from the property next door, who was lobbying the county to shut him down. Crew-cut and fit, Junior was wearing one of his trademark white T-shirts, still gleaming despite the sooty mess.


Kitty and I stared at the parade of midweek gawkers idling by in their pickups on the county lane. Would Emmitt Hooper show up, I wondered, the retired postal worker with whom I had nearly come to blows over our conflict about water rights? What about C. R. Copeland, the lumber-mill employee who had enraged everyone by erecting a barbed-wire Berlin Wall around a delectable parcel of open range in order to keep his cattle in and the world out? And where was the neighborhood’s loosest cannon, Jay Zank, a chronically underemployed road-construction gofer who trespassed at will by cutting fences, encouraged his bony horses to graze on other people’s pastures, and shotgunned the No Trespassing signs I threw up in defense?


What is it about the Squalor Zone, I wondered, that compels people living here to quarrel all the time? Why does it seem that the chief form of exercise in these pastoral outbacks is jumping to conclusions? After all, each of us has clear title to our corner of the garden that has become the American Dream yet again, the small landholdings that Thomas Jefferson figured would make even the most loutish wastrel a contributor to the commonweal. Is there something about that most counterfeit of vanities—the pride of land ownership itself—that makes us so imperious? Or could it be that all the feuding I’d been party to wasn’t about other people at all—it was about me?

AMERICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS feud was played out in a forested floodplain not unlike that of the Clark Fork. Trouble on the remote Tug Fork River, the border between Kentucky and West Virginia, had been percolating long before Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield in the fall of 1878 of stealing his hog. But contrary to folklore, the families didn’t take up arms to settle the dispute; they went to court. A jury ruled in Hatfield’s favor, and McCoy abided by the verdict, although he did not accept his defeat gracefully. However, none of the preexisting bad blood (which compelled the judge to stock the jury with equal numbers of Hatfields and McCoys) was spilled until Johnse Hatfield knocked up Randolph’s daughter, Rose Anna. Two years later, in 1882, three of the girl’s brothers murdered Ellison Hatfield on election day. Then the Hatfield patriarch, “Devil Anse,” avenged his brother by executing Randolph’s three sons near what is now Matewan, West Virginia. This blood feud would roil Kentucky and West Virginia for another decade, bring the dispute over borderland jurisdiction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and cost eight more lives.


During the same decade a lethal running battle broke out between cattlemen and sheepmen along Cherry Creek in the Tonto Basin of what is now central Arizona. For years the first cattlemen in these meadows, where grama grass grew to the stirrups of a horse and the ridges were black with heavy pine forest, had vowed that no matter what squabbles arose among themselves, not a single sheep would enter this open range. They looked down on sheepmen and the Navajo herders they employed, and were horrified by the grotesque damage done to other areas of the territory, where sheep had been allowed to graze grass to the nubbin and their sharp hooves had torn up the turf. In 1886, when the biggest sheep outfit in the territory, the Dagg Brothers of Flagstaff, decided to move a herd south over the Mogollon Rim from exhausted pastures, they hired a local clan, the Tewksburys, for protection. Within a year cattlemen had driven the sheep out of the Tonto Basin, instigating a full-tilt feud that would claim the lives of a score of men over the next six years and would become known as the Pleasant Valley War.


Range wars between ovinophiles and bovinophiles would flare across the grasslands of the West for many decades to come. In Wyoming, it’s estimated that in the two-decade period surrounding the turn of the 20th century, raiding cattlemen and their henchmen would bludgeon and shoot to death more than 100,000 sheep. It was predicted that this sort of carnage would occur in the unbelievably rich prairies of Montana, but in fact many cattlemen here were hedging their bets and setting aside part of their range for sheep. Even so, when Kitty was a child growing up in the 1960s on a thousand acres of irrigated Hereford ranch in Montana’s Helena Valley, the frontier prejudice against woollies was still rampant. Every fall when the cattle buyer came to call, Kitty and her five siblings were compelled to hide their 30-head herd of Suffolks—each beloved 4-H sheep bestowed with a name like Stuart, Stanley, or Stephanie—because their presence might make the buyer lower his price for the family’s beef.
Old-fashioned feuding also endured into modern times in the hollows of Greene County, Virginia. The players in this running skirmish were from the Shifflett and the Morris clans, families that had intermarried so often during their two centuries of coexistence in the Blue Ridge Mountains that their surnames were simply formalities. No one knows the origin of the free-for-all—except that it was born from the “Code of the Hills,” a body of unwritten rules about vengeance, vigilantes, and hillbilly conduct holding that, for instance, if you knock up my sister, I’ll burn your house down—but at its most violent it seems to have revolved around moonshining. One early fight, however, was a rock-throwing battle in 1922 over the issue of abusive language. During the next nine years a dozen men were murdered by gunshot or bludgeon, and there were scores of assaults, murders, and weddings. In 1931 a local newspaper, the Daily Progress, reported that “wholesale hot-headed shooting was the order of the day yesterdayÉwhen two men stood face to face and killed each other in a fierce pistol- shotgun duel.” The combatants were Manuel Morris, 45, and Bernard Shifflett, 35. Three bystanders were also wounded in the melee. According to witnesses, Shifflett’s carcass was filled with lead from head to toe. These dysfunctional families were still devouring themselves as late as 1961, when a jury sentenced 40-year-old George Shifflett to 60 years in the state pen for shooting to death his cousin, Eugene Morris, a 38-year-old father of nine, in a dispute about a stolen barrel of corn mash used to make whiskey.


Men learn to quarrel with one another in the same way they learn to sit a horse or talk to a woman; that is, from their dads. The eccentric habits of my father were legendary in the marshy boondocks where he raised me and my sister without the benefit of a woman’s touch, after our mother died when I was seven. We lived on three bushy acres straddling Sand Coulee Creek south of Great Falls, Montana, in a hayseed’s paradise called Rat Flats. Although it was scraped from the Great Plains instead of the Rockies, Rat Flats, which also lay in an economy-class floodplain dotted with shabby, cold-comfort ranchettes, was culturally identical to my new Squalor Zone. The refurbished commercial turkey coop we called home was less than a quarter-mile from the Missouri.


My old man kept chickens and pigs and a horse named Pinky, and for a time he owned part interest in a buffalo named George. He fed his pigs stale doughnuts he fished from bakery trash cans. For his sake it was probably a good thing he had this menagerie to fuss over, to distract him from his darker passions. Besides bars and bar fighting, he also enjoyed spreading roofing nails in the ditches of the county road because he didn’t like the growl of dirt bikes. After shooting a neighbor’s noisome dog he claimed that he was just trying to scare it into silence and it musta hadda heart attack. He regularly strode along the creek and shotgunned crows in the box elders because their cackling put him on edge.


In his later years he sought to augment his civil-service pension with extra cash, so he invested in plumbing and electrical outlets in order to create lots on his front acre for three rental trailers. The neighbors circulated a petition intended to stem the buildup of his rural slum and forced the county commissioners to deny him permission for any hookups. Cantankerous to the end of his life, he trucked three dented mobile homes to his pasture anyway, and parked a couple of his vintage Dodge Darts out there as well. When the neighborhood complained, he gleefully pointed out that since I ain’t hooked up nothin’ no law was broke.

DARK ACRES, SO NAMED because it languishes all winter under a foggy gloom cast by Black Mountain across the river in the Lolo National Forest, had once been part of a fading cattle operation, a century-old homestead cloistered inside a mile-wide loop of the river, whose owners began subdividing their empire in the 1970s. Like Squalor Zones everywhere, this here’s Trailer Country, friend. Most of the structures on our wedges of wooded bottomland were trucked in (I get snooty because our “modular” home arrived in two pieces). In addition to the usual farmy clutter of implements, everyone’s compound sports at least three trucks, plus one or maybe all of the following: a four-wheeler, a snowmobile, a fake wishing well, a trampoline, or a collection of equines and the jumble of shelters and corrals they require.


Outbuildings in the Zone are thrown up without regard to covenants, because there are none, or to zoning. People keep goats and peacocks and guinea hens, and burn mattresses and ruined vehicles wherever, and lurk all fall up a tree with a bow and arrow, waiting for something tasty to stroll underneath.


For a long time the Zone’s ranchettes were outrageous bargains—we bought our house and shop, plus 11 acres of marsh, pasture, jungle, and parkland, in the fall of 1990 for $69,000. Today Dark Acres would net us several times that, but we wouldn’t move back to a city even if someone gave us a house there, and not just because of the organic pleasures of living with horses. The animal freedom to walk out the back door anytime, day or night, to howl at the moon or go for a swim has just become too addicting. Despite its headaches, this place is as close to the rhythms of daily life inside the natural world as most Americans are ever going to get. Once you’re on the banks of the Clark Fork and are dwarfed by the palisades of the Bitterroot Mountains on the other side, you see nothing in any direction of the visually insubordinate work of mankind. It might as well be 1600 b.c. By day the luscious transparent river chatters and rolls stones and dimples in the fading light with rising trout. At night, under a Milky Way so showy you can actually see how it got its name, the leaves of the willows shudder in breezes perfumed with the tang of pine sap and sage.
But there was rancor in paradise the first day we moved in, when our dog Radish, a red heeler, wandered down the dirt road and beat up a chicken named Gary. (A detective at the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department later told me that loose animals are among the most common causes of friction between people in these parts.) I tried to placate Gary’s masters—two brothers named Bunker raising three small boys in a double-wide that looked like it had been dropped from a cargo plane—with a six-pack of Mexican beer and a promise that if the fowl croaked I’d buy them a replacement. When their eyes lit up I deeply regretted this offer.


“Gary’s a hunnert-dollar chicken,” I was informed.


“What!”


“Yeah,” the other brother said. “Gary’s a fightin’ chicken.”


I watched these two yahoos for a week to make sure Gary didn’t have another accident and end up in a stew. But the Bunkers were telling the truth about raising gamecocks for a “sport” that’s not legal in Montana—and the dumb bird pulled through.

AFTER I PUT the matter of Gary behind me, I was soon embroiled in more serious hostilities. As the new lord of Dark Acres, I felt compelled to take on the matter of sprawl in the neighborhood, my position being that there shouldn’t be any more. (It’s always the most recent immigrant who wants to bar the gate.)


One day, when I heard the clamor of pounding hammers coming from Junior Dugan’s place, I strolled over to investigate and discovered that he had dug the foundation for a new house and was busy building a frame, the spring sun glaring off his white T-shirt. I checked the zoning and discovered that he didn’t own enough acreage for another home. When I phoned Junior and informed him of this fact, he replied that because the family’s occupancy on Dugania predated the zoning laws, he could do what he liked. After a local lawyer advised me that there weren’t any grandfather clauses in the zoning system, I filed a complaint with the County Board of Adjustments. The hammering at Dugania abruptly stopped. Junior filed an appeal. One hot night three months later the board ruled 3-0 in his favor. At midnight the lights in his unfinished house suddenly blazed on—a message to me, the new crank on the lane.


Still, the most aggravating of the local government’s failures in the Squalor Zone was its inability to do something about the gunfire emanating from an evil quarry everyone calls the Gravel Pit. Owned by the state but leased to the county, this trashy amphitheater, gouged from a ridge above the river within rifleshot of Dark Acres, has served as a shooting gallery for two generations of plinkers and vandals. We’ve heard automatic weapons up there, Uzis, maybe AK-47s, and watched as tracers cut through the night sky like meteors. Then there were the impromptu “turkey shoots,” that burgeoning Squalor Zone sport in which contestants detonate sticks of dynamite by plugging them with bullets. Occasionally some of these madmen fired at the bottomland, figuring that if it looks uninhabited, it must be. But if you hike up on the ridge and stare long enough you’ll begin to notice signs of life down there, down where we live—horseback riders, dog walkers, firewood cutters, coeds in gaudy float toys, anglers in drift boats, old men on the banks casting for whitefish. Finally some longtime Zoners grew weary of dodging bullets and clenching their teeth from all the noise and circulated a petition demanding that the county enforce its own no-trespassing policy at the Gravel Pit. Everyone was pleased when the county surveyor ordered the construction of a wire fence to keep out the riffraff. But the very night it was finished someone backed up a truck, hooked a chain to a post, and yanked the entire fence right out of the ground.





The trouble at Dark Acres was in the soil, waiting for us long before we arrived. Because swamps divide the place into two provinces it had always been easier for trespassers to access the more distant half of our property than it had been for the residents. For decades the savviest of these interlopers would make three pilgrimages a year to this sweet land for reasons that had nothing to do with the soul. In May they arrived to creep around in the snowberry bushes searching for wild morels. When these mushrooms pop up after a warm spring rain they look like little brains on sticks, and are a savory delicacy in soups or stuffed with wild pheasant. For the first couple years we were so happy to be living in the boonies we never objected when we saw people trespassing with their ubiquitous goody bags. Besides, I didn’t know a morel from a toadstool. But after a friend pointed out one and then another and persuaded me to take a taste I finally understood. We discovered that the richest beds were clustered on the banks of a swamp that we immediately named Lake Morel. The next day while I was riding Timer, our bay brood mare, with Kitty close behind on Rolex, a paint, we came across a middle-aged guy making his way from Lake Morel to his canoe with a pair of bulging pillow slips.


“What’s in the bags?” I asked cheerfully.


He looked at them as if they had just jumped into his hands. “These ones? Oh, heck, nothing much.”


“Here’s the deal,” I advised him. “Don’t come back. Ever.”


The arrogant, self-righteous tone in my voice of the overprotective landowner surprised me. But I had to admit that I liked the way it sounded. In truth, I was full up to here with trespassers who thought they could treat Dark Acres like a public park simply because the tangle of forest made it impossible for us to see them from the house. (It’d be like walking out your back door one day to find a stranger plucking flowers in the garden.)


I looked at Kitty, expecting her to be embarrassed, as usual, by my rude behavior. But she was smiling. Because of all the shooting in the vicinity, Kitty had become even more anxious than me about our animals’ safety. (When Kitty was growing up on her family’s ranch, a trespassing hunter once shot a prized Hereford bull claiming that he thought the behemoth was a deer.) Because Kitty was a cool and collected moral arbiter, she had always impressed me as the voice of reason. So if she decided something could no longer be tolerated, that was the only mandate I needed. Henceforth, I would be unforgiving in my enforcement of a strict no-tread zone around Dark Acres.


Riding alone the next day, Kitty flushed out a thirtysomething couple dressed in shorts and periwinkle pile pullovers hiding behind a juniper. Spooked by their persons, and by the gunnysacks they were hefting, Rolex suddenly shied sideways. When Kitty recovered her composure she ordered the couple to get lost and told them to spread the word that this place was now and forever off limits.


In early July the wild raspberries begin to ripen. Even though the bushes grow in briar patches they share with stinging nettles and hawthorns bristling with spikes, fruit poachers steeled by experience regularly managed to find their way in and out. And when they emerged from this prickly maze with the goods their eviction was swift and sure. Dark Acres, our trespassers were learning, was no longer the neighborhood commons—it was our beloved backyard.


Far more menacing than the produce thieves were the bow hunters who invaded the floodplains those first few autumns to prey on the whitetail herds. Their presence was confirmed by the proliferation of tree stands all along these happy hunting grounds.


When I rode upon the first buck in the fall of 1991, dead long enough to have been stripped by the way of the world, a broken arrow lodged in its bleached shoulder bone, I felt bad for his suffering, but these herds wouldn’t be diminished by his loss. Besides, scavengers need dinner, too. The next season, after we found a doe and then another, both showing evidence of arrow play, I wasn’t so sanguine. As a response to these first dead deer I bought some red-and-white No Hunting signs and mounted them on conspicuous trees. We had debated blanketing our horses with Day-Glo during hunting season, but in the end we simply turned them out into the forest for a few hours, crossing our fingers and hoping our signs would save them from the killer monkeys above. One day during bow season, I went out to bring in the horses and happened to glance up at a ponderosa onto which I had nailed a notice. Perched on his little steel shelf right above the sign was a hunter aged no more than 20. He was dressed in camouflage fatigues and his face was smeared with camouflage makeup. He wore a camouflage hat and camouflage boots. I admired his zeal.


“I see you!” I called out merrily.


“What?” he whispered.


“Get your ass out of my tree and take your spikes with you.”


“What?”


“Here’s the deal, dickhead,” I explained. “I’m going to the house for the chainsaw, and if you’re here when I get back I’m going to cut you down.”


“Is this place posted now?” he asked, feigning innocence.


Maybe I had overreacted to wasted deer or all the gunshots across the river, but again, I liked the sound of menace in my voice. It seemed like a way to scour all the trouble from the soil.


But in the fall of 1995, another dead deer sparked a skirmish that nearly led to open warfare. This time it was a doe, gut-shot with a steel-tipped GameGetter, the wounds as precise as the sutures of a surgeon, punched like crosshairs on opposing sides of her belly. The gluttonous Radish, along with coyotes or foxes, had already eaten into her anus and stripped her gut of all its freshly digested greens, rich with vitamin C.


Whose work this is I think I know.


Seething at the neighbor who, I was certain, had shot the doe across his fence, I walked back up to the house along a canopied path through water-birch thickets to get a rope and a horse.


After I hauled the whitetail into an ancient ponderosa with the help of Timer, I secured the rope to the trunk with a square knot. Suspended there from a limb, the doe transcended the nothingness of death and became a message for the living, fraught with the stark poignancy of Andrew Wyeth’s 1961 watercolor Hanging Deer. Nearby, just across the fence, was another old ponderosa. Spikes driven into the green wood led to a steel tree stand 20 feet up. The sign I pinned to the fence post was brief: “Doe gut-shot by a bow hunter and left on the ground to rot.”


The phone rang a day later. It was my neighbor, Jay Zank, patriarch of Zankland.


“Hey, chickenshit, a real man would come to me first.”


“Real men don’t waste game,” I said.


“It ain’t me!” he shot back. “Them woods are full of hunters. So fuck you, asshole.”


“And the same to you, sir.”


A few days after we raised the dead whitetail I found her carcass on the forest floor underneath the dangling rope, which had been cleanly sliced with a knife. While Kitty took charge of Timer I took charge of the rope, and we soon hoisted this forest billboard back in the tree. Around Thanksgiving, after the first heavy snow, three shotgun blasts and then the whine of a retreating snowmobile shattered the hush. Trudging from the house, I wasn’t surprised to see that my No Hunting signs had been blown away.

THE JEWEL OF THE Squalor Zone, the object of every horseman’s desire, is a 100-acre savanna stretching along the Clark Fork’s eastern shore. When I discovered this grassy parkland in 1993, half of it belonged to a clan named Copeland, which was leasing the other half from the state for use as cattle pasture. Celebrating an intoxicating summer afternoon by floating the river in an inner tube, I had drifted into a trough of whitewater on the far side of what I call Radish Island, the island’s namesake paddling furiously by my side, snapping at the foam. We were hurled into the main channel, and when the current slowed as the water deepened we headed for the bank to catch our breath.
Wandering the game trails meandering through stands of purple willow, I saw that the river had created these grounds for just one thing—riding horses at breakneck speed, something we could do only in short stretches back home because of rocks and tree roots. The river had been thoughtful enough to carve a system of relief channels that run parallel to it for a mile, and had blanketed these serpentine recesses with a cushioning two-foot layer of washed white sand. Riding in these dry washes would give our horses the sort of pumpitude they could only get on a treadmill or at the beach, the edge they need to bring home the money when Kitty competes on them at rodeos and barrel races.


I sat down on a stump ferried here by the floods, while Radish excavated the den of a field mouse, and confronted my own hypocrisy. In order to ride from Dark Acres to the State Land we’d have to cross a piece of private property. I yearned to make this place part of our daily routine because of the great forward motion it would yield, and because I had fallen in love with the illusion that we were living in a less complicated world where we were free to jump on our horses and ride wherever we wanted. But getting a visa would be a problem.


That’s because the land we’d need to cross was owned by Emmitt Hooper. Our relations with Hooper had been less than cordial from the start, when he had stormed onto Dark Acres the autumn we moved in to yell about my leaning of branches against the wire dividing his place from ours. I explained that I was trying to keep down our vet bills by reducing the exposure of horseflesh to barbs, and hello to you, too, neighbor.


But now we’d have to give Hooper something for allowing us to put a gate in that very fence. I was willing to bribe him, but first I’d try to get what I wanted for free. What he asked for was our permission to let archers enter Dark Acres to chase down wounded deer. We knew Hooper resented the deer for stealing his heavily irrigated grass from a dozen mangy, low-bred sheep he owned. So we weighed our contempt for bow hunters against our sudden affection for the State Land and agreed to give Hooper what he wanted. Then, pushing our luck, we went to C.R. Copeland, the lumber-mill worker, and got permission to ride on his property as well.


Kitty and I saddled Timer and Rolex and rode from our corrals to Copeland’s farthest corner, a sandy peninsula on the mouth of a placid riverside slough that I had named the Mabel, after my grandmother. Turning for home, we opened the throttle. Timer glanced back to see if I’d lost my mind, then got so excited she started her gallop with a buck and a fart. As we shot along the beach and turned inland for the savanna she pivoted her ears to listen for the familiar whoa that always reeled her back to earth just as she was starting to have fun. Radish couldn’t keep up with us now and began barking in frustration, his yap fading as we distanced him. After Kitty entered one sandy wash and I rode into its parallel twin I glanced over to see her disembodied blond head skimming just above the ground at 30 miles an hour. We shot from the washes onto a sandy beach through a thicket of willows, and I put my forearm over my eyes to shield them from slapping branches. Finally, as we trotted into our own pastures and slowed to a walk, everyone was winded and trembling and bathed in a righteous sweat. When Radish showed up for the apple all the animals get after a good ride we stood in a circle—woman and man, horses and dog—glowing with endorphic well-being, smiling the smile that says, this is so worth the hassle.


And so for several years our ride to the mouth of the Mabel became a fixture at Dark Acres, something we did almost every day.

IN OUR TENTH SUMMER at Dark Acres the water war began. When we bought the place, which came with irrigation rights to the river, we also acquired water rights to the Mabel. Our portion of this marsh had been partially dammed in 1971 to create a reservoir for thirsty cattle. But over the decades it had been hopelessly clogged with tires, farm implements, rotten hay, and dead animals. After I finished cleaning it, which took three years, we not only had a trophy skating pond, but a whole community of wildlife began returning to its former haunts. And the babbling of the Mabel through a steel culvert in the earthen dam was a sweet sound indeed.


Emmitt Hooper did not share our pleasure. As the endless drought baked Montana, the Mabel’s seemingly inexhaustible flow dwindled. One day Hooper paid us a visit to demand that we hire a contractor to extract the old culvert and bury a new one deeper in the dam. The new culvert would send more water to his place, but it would completely drain the Mabel. Since Hooper was allowed to irrigate from the river, just as we were, I didn’t see the point of ruining our sumptuous, restored wetland just so his mangy sheep could have even more to eat. I did nothing, hoping Hooper would go away.


As the Godfather said, I tried to get out, but they kept pulling me back in. One morning in the winter of 2000, Radish wandered over to Copeland’s place and discovered a dump full of his favorite thing besides bananas—animal parts. He came home so bloated he waddled, and as I put down a bowl of water for him in the yard he barfed. In the vomit were crushed bones and two halves of a cow’s ear. Radish the garbage hound, whose appetites compelled him to sit under our apple tree for hours in the fall barking at fruit in the hope it would drop, gorged at the dump whenever he could, filling the house with night smells that yanked us awake, seized by the conviction that the septic tank had burst. I could have chained him up or run to town for a kennel. Instead I called the county health department to see if property owners are permitted to warehouse rotting flesh on the back forty.


“No, it’s not legal,” a field agent from the health department told me. “It’s a health hazard.”


Not many days later I walked to the dump to fetch Radish and found him staring at the place where his beloved offal had once been strewn. “Please accept my condolences for your loss,” I said, directing him home. The county had ordered Copeland to clean up the mess.


When the ground thawed that spring, the hills were alive with the sound of Copelands pounding on steel posts. Within 48 hours the clan had strung a four-wire fence bristling with No Trespassing signs from the river to the road, almost a half-mile of barbs. Although Zoners everywhere will hotly defend their right to fence out the world, they’re never happy when someone else does it.


Then, one hot night in June 2000, Hooper showed up at our door to deliver his water demands again. The Squalor Zone is not the sort of place where one arrives unannounced (no Welcome Wagons have ever brought around fine products from local merchants, and not one child has ever braved our darkened drive to come begging at Halloween). So when Radish began to howl his Intruder! howl, I reached for the nearest weapon.


“I’m telling you again, dig up that culvert!” Hooper demanded when I threw open the door.


I showed him my old Ping five-iron. “Don’t come back here,” I said, adding, “You idiot redneck jerk.”


He retreated, with me on his heels, down our long lane, through our fence, and back into his pickup parked on the county road. As he drove off, we exchanged more pleasantries, and flipped each other off.


And so it was that by the late summer of 2000 all relations between Dark Acres, on one side, and Hooperland, Zankland, Copeland Land, and Dugania, on the other, had been severed. The balkanization of the floodplain was complete. Were there ambassadors, they’d be recalled. Not only were we barred from Copeland Land by his barbed-wire Berlin Wall, but Hooper, still smarting from our fight about water, had banned us from his property as well, which meant we could no longer run our horses along the river. We felt like we had lost a loved one.


While the drought wore on and temperatures rose I began interpreting natural events as avatars of doom. The herbs in my kitchen garden starting bolting faster than I could pinch off the seeds. The cottonwood leaves turned yellow and dropped. One afternoon I ran back to the forest when I heard screeching and found a red-tailed hawk fighting in the middle reaches of a cottonwood with a gargantuan raccoon. When the coon’s weight snapped a branch he fell soundlessly, hit the ground, bounced, and hit the ground again. I assumed he was dead. Poor little fella, I thought. But as I approached him he shook his head, hissed like a cat as he feinted angrily in my direction, snatched up the whitefish he’d won in the fight, and vanished with an indignant snarl into a briar patch of hawthorns.

ON THAT TEMPESTUOUS day of the fire at the Rent Trailer I found myself thinking about my old man’s seething inner world and wondering if the dark side of his character might have been reincarnated in his bellicose son. Looking back at a decade of acrimony, I sensed that if I were ever compelled to defend my own incendiary behavior before some celestial judge, there’s a chance I might need a lawyer. Maybe I was daft from all the smoke in my lungs, but I decided on the spot that in order to gauge how good this lawyer ought to be I would go to my neighbors, waving a white flag, and ask them to tell me their side of the story—no matter how bad their version of events made me look. Nothing would be lost, although it was possible that I would make a hasty exit stage left, my butt peppered with rock salt. But perhaps a bold move like this would write the postscript to our feuding, freeing all of us to concentrate on saving our places from a disaster like the one before us now.


The next morning I called Junior Dugan, my old adversary in our feud over zoning.


“Don’t think of me as someone you’ve had a quarrel with,” I told him. “Think of me as a reporter. It’s a chance to say what you want to about that jerk down the road.”


Ol’ Junior found the idea amusing. But decided against it. “I think it’s better to just put it behind us,” he said.


“Because you won?” I asked.


“Because I have nothing more to say.”


I gave up trying to get more, wondering what I was missing. I ordered a transcript from the hearing that allowed Dugan to finish building his house. And there it was: The county health department had screwed up by issuing him a septic permit without asking to see a zoning permit. If the Board of Adjustments had turned down his appeal he could have sued them from here to Sunday.


Next I called C.R. Copeland, who agreed to talk to me face-to-face. Sweating on the drive over, I wondered again what the hell I was doing. But Copeland, who was recovering from food poisoning, moved carefully and talked quietly. He said his decision to fence the whole of Copeland Land was the result of years of abuse. Trespassers used to drive trucks onto the place to build bonfires and shoot guns and party and harass his cattle. “Went down there one day,” he said, “and there was a lady roping my calves. ‘I ain’t herdin’ ’em,’ she says. ‘I’m just practicing roping.'”


Although members of his clan objected, C.R. had allowed people such as me and Kitty to ride on Copeland Land if we got permission. But he was finally pushed too far the day he confronted Jay Zank, trespassing, mounted on one of his worthless horses. As Copeland recalled, “He said, ÔI’m going riding over on the river and you can’t keep me out.’ And he told me to fuck off. But he was right. If it’s not fenced you can’t legally keep somebody out. Because they don’t know where the line is. Now they do.”


I looked at him. “I’m going to tell you something that might piss you off.” Bracing for the worst, I said that it was me who ratted him out to the health department about the dead pile. But he already knew—after all, people in the Squalor Zone talk, and very little remains secret.


“What do you think about me doing that?” I asked.


“If you had come to me and discussed it I would have picked up that stuff or buried it,” he replied reasonably.


And that was it. No heat, no oaths, no payback. I was vaguely disappointed. After we commiserated about assorted local irritants such as the Gravel Pit—C.R.’s irrigation pipes had been shot, and he’d found bullet holes in the door of his shop—he told me he was currently feuding with a neighbor whose dog he’d shot because it was attacking his calves. He said he’d complained to the owners about this animal’s predation and made certain they understood what could happen. After he had dispatched the cur, his neighbors called the sheriff, who confirmed that Copeland was legally entitled to protect his herd.


Ah, I thought, will the circle of spite ever be unbroken?


Next I tried to get Zank’s side of the story, but he wouldn’t agree to talk. In fact, he wanted to scream: “You’re pushing your goddamn luck, asshole!” I tried to keep him on the line, but he finally slammed down the receiver so hard it made my ear ring.


Before I visited Emmitt Hooper, I picked a box of Goodland apples from our tree to bring as a peace offering. Tensions had already eased considerably; the Mabel was now gushing with more water than we had ever seen during the summer. But Hooper had not forgotten the night of our fight.


“You come out the door like a raving maniac,” he told me as we sat in his living room. “All you would have had to do was to say I don’t have time to talk to you right now.” Still, he advised me that if the flows petered out again I would have to lower my culvert, implying that he would have no choice but to employ the power of the state to bend me to his will.


So why didn’t he avoid all this trouble and just irrigate from the river, I asked.


“Oh, I used to do that,” he said. “Had a gas pump down there. But someone kept putting sand in the engine and wrecking it.” As I headed toward my truck I asked him what he spent so much time working on in his shop. “Toys,” he said. “Wooden trains. You know, for the grandkids.”

ON LABOR DAY the skies opened and the fires of western Montana finally died out. In October more than twice the normal amount of rain fell down, and the drought seemed at an end. I figured maybe this combustible season in my relations with my neighbors might have ended as well. C. R. Copeland kindly offered to let us ride again at Copeland Land, if we would come to him for a key to the padlock on his gate. We worked on our fences and on a stone wall we were building from river rocks, and a sort of peace returned.


With no feuding duties to occupy me, I set out to get the official line once and for all about who has the right to do what in the Squalor Zone. But the Missoula County Attorney’s office never answered my letters and lists of questions about the rules relating to dogs, fences, guns, and weeds. I was dismayed by this silence, but not surprised. It confirmed my lifelong belief that when it came to rendering services, the law preferred the Squalor Zone to render unto itself. I decided that in a perfect world a handbook of laws and customs would be issued to every address outside the city limits, a Fodor’s guide to the Squalor Zone that your realtor would give you the day you moved to the country.


I had better luck getting answers from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, which confirmed that folks in the Squalor Zone can pretty much do what they want in regard to the discharge of firearms on their own land; that bow hunters must get permission to chase bleeding deer onto private property; and that the state’s Stream Access Law says you’re not trespassing as long as you are a recreationist who confines your person to land below the high-water mark. Then MFWP’s information officer scolded me for denying hunters access to Dark Acres. “You wouldn’t be considered a good conservationist,” he said. “Allowing an animal’s meat to go to waste is hard for someone in my position to understand.” He said that in Missoula County there are only two effective ways to control the deer herds—hunting and vehicle collisions. Without these governors, he said, the whitetail population would explode, animals would run out of food and starve, and the mountain lion population would also explode. Did we want to live in a place where dogs and children were no longer safe? Of course, the MFWP man doesn’t have to live with the gaseous outrages of Radish, nor does he apparently worry about our horses becoming equine pincushions. But I got the point.


In these kinds of disputes, he concluded, “It is often the case that neighbors just don’t like each other.”


Winter approached, and I heard on the grapevine that Emmitt Hooper was planning a lawsuit intended to drain the calming and innocent water of the Mabel, which was about to harden into my favorite ice-skating pond. One chilled and rainy morning, I led Scarlett, my palomino mare, to the forest so she could browse on the last of the season’s grass. As I passed by the Mabel I stopped to watch a mated pair of mallards swimming in the rain, growing fat and glossy before they winged south for winter vacation.


Then a shotgun blast shattered the peace. I put Scarlett back in her corral and ran toward the disturbance, ready for battle, not thinking straight even after all the steeling I had experienced from the conflict of the last decade. There on the river was a tiny island of reeds drifting languidly in the mist. Although I knew that what I was seeing was just a kid duck-hunting in a floating blind he had gone over the top to build, in the water-colored light this graceful vessel looked like something from a Viking funeral, a craft that ferries the soul. I had the sudden sense, which must come at last to everyone, that the days are truly numbered. Did I really want to spend this dwindling allotment of time feuding with my neighbors?


None of us should even be living here, I thought. The economic system that allowed individuals to own land in a floodplain was corrupt. These corridors along our rivers should be held in common so a person could walk unimpeded the length of the Missouri, or embark on a horse trip from Missoula to the Pacific without rednecks yelling to get the hell off. The only reason any house was allowed to be built at Dark Acres at all is because the original owners hauled in enough fill to build a terpen, an artificial hummock engineered by ancient Celts and used by the early Dutch to make sure their churches stayed above the North Sea when it flooded. And yet, even though the Squalor Zone is crawling with so many of the unglued they could pack an auditorium full of anger-management patients, this is the best place I’ve ever lived.


And until they pry my cold, dead fingers from the deed, I’ll never give it up.

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