Just Before Dark

by Jim Harrison

  It is at this point the pathology enters; out of a hundred drivers the great majority find cars pleasant enough, and some will be obsessed with them in mechanical terms, but two or three out of the hundred will be obsessed with going places, pure and simple, for the sake of movement, anywhere and practically anytime.

  “You haven't been anywhere until you've taken Route 2 through the Sandhills of Nebraska,” they're liable to say, late at night.

  “Or Route 191 in Montana, 35 in Wisconsin, 90 in West Texas, 28 in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, 120 in Wyoming, 62 in Arkansas, S3 in Kansas, 14 in Louisiana,” I reply, after agreeing that 2 in Nebraska is one of my favorites. To handle Route 2 properly, you should first give a few hours to the Stuhr Museum in Grand Island to check on the human and natural history of the Great Plains. If you don't care all that much about what you're seeing, you should stay home, or if you're just trying to get someplace, take a plane.

  There is, of course, a hesitation to make any rules for the road; the main reason you're out there is to escape any confinement other than that of change and motion. But certain precepts and theories should be kept in mind:

  Don't compute time and distance. Computing time and distance vitiates the benefits to be gotten from aimlessness. Leave that sort of thing to civilians with their specious categories of birthdays, average wage, height and weight, the number of steps to second floors. If you get into this acquisitive mood, make two ninety-degree turns and backtrack for a while. Or stop the car and run around in a big circle in a field. Climbing a tree or going swimming also helps. Remember that habit is a form of gravity that strangulates.

  Leave your reason, your logic, at home. A few years ago I flew all the way from northern Michigan to Palm Beach, Florida, in order to drive to Livingston, Montana, with a friend. Earlier in life I hitchhiked 4,000 miles round-trip to see the Pacific Ocean. Last year I needed to do some research in Nebraska. Good sense and the fact that it was January told me to drive south, then west by way of Chicago, spend a few days, and drive home. Instead I headed due north into a blizzard and made a three-day back-road circle to La Crosse, Wisconsin, one of my favorite hideouts. When I finished in Nebraska, I went to Wyoming, pulled a left for Colorado and New Mexico, a right for Arizona, headed east across Texas and Louisiana to Alabama, then north toward home. My spirit was lightened by the thirty-five days and 8,000 or so miles. The car was a loaner, and on deserted back roads I could drive on cruise control, standing on the seat with shoulders and head through the sunroof.

  Spend as little time as possible thinking about the equipment. Assuming you are not a mechanic, and even if you are, it's better not to think too much about the car over and above minimum service details. I've had a succession of three four-wheel-drive Subaru station wagons, each equipped with a power winch, although recently I've had doubts about this auto. I like to take the car as far as I can go up a two-track, then get out and walk until the road disappears. This is the only solution to the neurotic pang that you might be missing something. High-performance cars don't have the clearance for back roads, and orthodox four-wheel drives are too jouncy for long trips. An ideal car might be a Saab turbo four-wheel-drive station wagon, but it has not as yet been built by that dour land without sunshine and garlic. A Range Rover is a pleasant, albeit expensive, idea, but you could very well find yourself a thousand miles from a spare part.

  A little research during downtime helps. This is the place for the lost art of reading. The sort of driving I'm talking about is a religious impulse, a craving for the unknown. You can, however, add to any trip immeasurably by knowing something about the history of the area or location. For instance, if you're driving through Chadron, Nebraska, on Route 20, it doesn't hurt to know that Crazy Horse, He Dog, American Horse, Little Big Man, and Sitting Bull took the same route when it was still a buffalo path.

  Be careful about who you are with. Whiners aren't appropriate. There can be tremendous inconveniences and long stretches of boredom. It takes a specific amount of optimism to be on the road, and anything less means misery. A nominal Buddhist who knows that “the goal is the path” is at an advantage. The essential silence of the highway can allow couples to turn the road into a domestic mudbath by letting their petty grievances preoccupy them. Marriages survive by garden-variety etiquette, and when my wife and I travel together we forget the often suffocating flotsam and jetsam of marriage.

  If you're driving solo, another enemy can be the radio or tape deck. This is an eccentric observation, but anyone under fifty in America has likely dissipated a goodly share of his life listening to music. Music frequently draws you out of where you belong. It is hard work to be attentive, but it's the only game in town. D. H. Lawrence said that “the only true aristocracy is consciousness,” which doesn't mean you can't listen to music; just don't do it all the time. Make your own road tapes: start with cuts of Del Shannon, Merle Haggard, Stravinsky, Aretha Franklin, Bob Seger, Mozart, Buffett, Monteverdi, Woody Guthrie, Jim Reeves, B. B. King, George Jones, Esther Lammandier, Ray Charles, Bob Wills, and Nicholas Thorne. That sort of thing.

  If you're lucky, you can find a perfect companion. During a time of mutual stress I drove around Arizona with the grizzly bear expert Douglas Peacock, who knows every piece of flora, fauna, and Native American history in that state. In such company, the most unassertive mesa becomes verdant with possibility.

  Pretend you don't care about good food. This is intensely difficult if you are a professional pig, gourmand, and trencherman like I am. If you're going to drive around America you have to adopt the bliss-ninny notion that less is more. Pack a cooler full of disgusting health snacks. I am assuming you know enough to stay off the interstates with their sneeze shields and rainbow jellos, the dinner specials that include the legendary “fried, fried,” a substantial meal spun out of hot fat by the deep-fry cook. It could be anything from a shoe box full of oxygen to a cow plot to a dime-store wig. In honor of my own precepts I have given up routing designed to hit my favorite restaurants in Escanaba, Duluth, St. Cloud (Ivan's in the Park), Mandan, Miles City, and so on. The quasi-food revolution hasn't hit the countryside; I've had good luck calling disc jockeys for advice. You generally do much better in the South, particularly at barbecue places with hand-painted road signs. Along with food you might also consider amusements: If you stop at local bars or American Legion country dances don't offer underage girls hard drugs and that sort of thing. But unless you're a total asshole, Easy Rider paranoia is unwarranted. You are technically safer on the road than you are in your own bathroom or eating a dinner of unrecognizable leftovers with your mother.

  Avoid irony, cynicism, and self-judgement. If you were really smart, you probably wouldn't be doing this. You would be in an office or club acting nifty, but you're in a car and no one knows you, and no one calls you because they don't know where you are. Moving targets are hard to hit. You are doing what you want, rather than what someone else wants. This is not the time to examine your shortcomings, which will certainly surface when you get home. Your spiritual fathers range from Marco Polo to Arthur Rimbaud, from Richard Halliburton to Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was the first actual novelist I ever met, back in 1957 or 1958 at the Five Spot, a jazz club in New York City. I saw him several times, and this great soul did not swell on self-criticism, though, of course, there is an obvious downside to this behavior.

  Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse. They are akin to the ardent sailor and his small sailboat. You needn't travel very far unless you live in one of our major urban centers, strewn across the land like immense canker sores. Outside this sort of urban concentration, county maps are available at any courthouse. One summer in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, after a tour in Hollywood had driven me ditzy, I logged more than 5,000 miles in four counties on gravel roads and two-tracks, lifting my sodden spirits and looking for good grouse and woodcock cover (game birds literally prefer to live in their restaurants, their prime feeding areas). This also served to ke
ep me out of bars and away from drinking, because I don't drink while driving.

  Plan a real big one—perhaps hemispheric, or at least national. Atrophy is the problem. If you're not expanding, you're growing smaller. As a poet and novelist I have to get out of the study and collect some brand-new memories, and many of our more memorable events are of the childish, the daffy and irrational. “How do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to your senses five?” asked Blake. If you're currently trapped, your best move is to imagine the next road voyage.

  I'm planning a trip when I finish my current novel, for which I had to make an intense study of the years 1865 to 1900 in our history, also the history of Native Americans. I intend to check out locations where I sensed a particular magic in the past: certain culverts in western Minnesota, nondescript gullies in Kansas, invisible graveyards in New Mexico, moonbeam targets in Nebraska, buffalo jumps in Montana, melted ice palaces in the Dakotas, deserted but well-stocked wine warehouses in California. Maybe I'll discover a new bird or animal. Maybe I'll drive up a gravel road that winnows into a two-track that stops at an immense swale, in the center of which is a dense woodlot. I'll wade through the bog into the woods, where I'll find an old, gray farmhouse. In this farmhouse I'll find all my beloved dead dogs and cats in perfect health, tended by the heroines in my novels. I'll make a map of this trip on thin buckskin that I'll gradually cut up and add to stews. Everyone must find their own places.

  1987

  Don't Fence Me In

  You must picture two middle-aged men in the Best Western Inn parking lot on a hot July evening in Des Moines. (Best Westerns are scarcely elegant, but they make up for it by being ubiquitous and also nonuniform, unlike the other chains.) My friend, whom I'll refer to as Teacher, and who for twenty years has tried to keep me connected with reality, flips a coin between the 8th Street Seafood Bar & Grill and Jimmy's American Café. A rare sense of choice is in the air. Fish wins tonight, though we will hit Jimmy's on the return. I order everything laden with garlic and drink two bottles of fine white wine to fight the heat. When you're heading out at dawn for the backcountry of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Montana, it's best to load up on fresh garlic, which civilized people regard as a vegetable rather than an herb. At the outset you must accept the fact that the northern Midwest and points west provide the kind of dining that only a Muscovite could adore.

  It's a tad eccentric, but I would choose a place like Des Moines, Iowa, to begin. I suggest this in order to experience the transition from the immensely fertile heartland to the prairies and to the Great Plains. You will also own the cachet of being the only one you know who is starting a vacation in Des Moines. The state of Iowa, and to a greater extent Nebraska, are the only states that actually remind you of what America thinks she is like.

  We are in a new four-wheel drive which is clearly the ultimate touring car for road comfort coupled with rough-country accessibility. It is packed tight with camping equipment and emergency gear, including an espresso machine that works off the cigarette lighter. One of the gravest problems when traveling away from our dream coasts is getting a cup of coffee in which you can't see a dime on the bottom. We've planned our trip around a dawdling pace, making the drive to Jordan—the epicenter of the Big Open—in a graceful three days, to be followed by three days in the area, plus visits elsewhere in Montana, and three days home. In many respects Montana is the most worthy of our least traveled states, so after the Big Open you could profitably drive around Montana for several weeks, depending on the length of your vacation.

  Why drive? Because short of walking it's the only way to really see the country, which anyway is not serviced by readily available airports. If you fly a great deal, which many of us do, you forget that flying is a tyranny with despotic capitals known as airports, allowing you little more freedom than a feeder calf or a school sardine. Those who spend their time east of the Mississippi also forget that driving can be a pleasure when there's no traffic to speak of. We were leaving on the Fourth of July weekend, the supposed height of the tourist season, and on many of the paved roads of our route I clocked only three or four cars per hour.

  This sort of driving can be a fabulous restorative. Unlike in an airplane, you can stop, turn right or left, on a whim. Driving into emptiness keeps you at least a few miles ahead of your neuroses, and by the time they catch up to you when you bed down in the evening, you are too tired to pay any attention to them. This past year I had a great deal of leisure time, so I drove 42,000 miles around the United States, avoiding the interstates whenever possible. Driving offers peace, solitude, inaccessibility, and the freedom and adventure that allow me to think up new novels and rest from the last one. Your whimsicality returns; you've already driven to Arizona—why not continue on down to San Carlos, Mexico and hike out the Seri Indian territory on the coast of the Sea of Cortés? And there, camped out on a mountain ridge under a glorious full moon, you throw the wrong kind of porous log on the fire and then dance a new tune as a dozen angry scorpions shoot out, a fresh brand of reality pudding. The trip was a mere seven thousand miles but without a single moment of boredom, the brain once again rippling like a smooth underground river.

  It is important to get up at dawn without benefit of the newspaper or a peek at CNN. Head west on I-80, taking the Omaha bypass and crossing the Missouri to Nebraska Route 75, where you turn north. Outside Sioux City you head west on Route 12. Now you're entering wonderful country, with the rolling prairie stretched endlessly out before you, a dulcet greenish brown folding in on itself, surely a sea of grass.

  On a bluff outside the village of Niobrara you can see the confluence of the Niobrara River and the Missouri, with the feeder stream's braided path mixing its beige water with the Missouri's green tide. The state of Nebraska has built some new rental cabins on the breathtaking site, and I make a note to spend a November week here with my bird dogs, hunting and river-staring. Lewis and Clark also liked this spot.

  A few hours down Route 12 the land grows even emptier. I carry along Van Bruggen's Wildflowers, Grasses and Other Plants of the Northern Plains and Black Hills, several bird books, Nebraskaland Magazine, and the dozen volumes in the Montana Geographic Series, in addition to Thomas Mails's The Mystic Warriors of the Plains and Carl Waldman's Atlas of the North American Indian. Knowledge informs, gives shape to scenery, whether it's the names of birds or flora, or that you know the Sauk prophet Black Hawk was there before Iowa's cornfields drowned the landscape, or that Route 12 belonged to the Ponca and Pawnee and, farther west, to the Santee Sioux, who tended to wander. It's a melancholy thought indeed that General Philip Sheridan said that to destroy the Sioux you must destroy his commissary, the buffalo: “Only then will the great prairies be safe for the speckled cattle and festive cowboy.” It is somehow unimaginable that we slew eighty million of these great beasts out of greed and stupidity.

  Farther down the road is the cow town of Valentine, the county seat of Cherry County, which is ten thousand square miles, twice the size of Connecticut, with barely over seven thousand people. I'm hesitant to mention Cherry County, as it's one of my favorite places on earth, but it is also safely remote. Southwest of Valentine is the Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest, which doesn't own all that many trees but is nonetheless grand. We stopped along the road to look at a few rattlesnakes, then at an eastern hognose snake, which likes to pretend it is a rattler. On being prodded, the hognose flops over and affects death—a splendid tactic during war and bar fights. Just east of Valentine is the Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, where we watched two bull buffalo having a thunderous argument through a fence. Other spectators were a group of bored female buffalo, a red-tailed hawk on a fence post, and several quizzical antelope. At dusk we recrossed the Niobrara, which, near Valentine, is as luminous, sparkling, and clear as an eastern trout stream.

  At either dawn or evening on the prairie or the Great Plains you understand the quality of light as you do in East Afric
a. What might be a dullish, flammable vista in the midday July sun becomes vibrant, so that the land seems to roll in shadows toward the eye.

  That second evening out, in the motel in Valentine, a few sore points tried to emerge, the first under the heading of “gizmo guilt.” Why were we in a motel with a car choked with camping gear? It is more fun to buy equipment than to use it. The Teacher wisely suggested we could drag the gear behind the car for a mile on a dirt road so our wives would think we used it. A brilliant idea, I thought. It was a hot night and, unlike the natural world, the motel room was air-conditioned and held none of the plump rattlers we noted along the road. Our cots were only two feet high and my sleeping hand might have dropped to the ground smack dab on a rabid bull rattler. The newly discovered immediate cure was to use jumper cables and administer electric shock to the bitten area. I could imagine the singed flesh and shower of sparks on a moonless night. No thank you. Perhaps five-foot-high cots were available.

  I had become bored with Art and People, cities and politics, and was obsessed with emptiness, and Valentine was one of the centers of this obsession. The indigenous grasses we stared at, from little bluestem, Indiangrass, switchgrass, prairie sandreed, and sand lovegrass, to hairy gramma and blowout penstemon—a wildflower—had become more interesting to me than New York City. A single meadowlark beat out Los Angeles, and two young antelope playing twilight tag held a solace not found on recent bookstore trips.