This Land

by Dan Barry

  Actually, an omelet costs $7.99, plus tax, with meat, hash browns, toast and drink. But at least now you can have an omelet here.

  At least Greg Mueller, a manager of train operations, can eat a hot roast beef sandwich ($7.49) while thinking about a hill nearby where he can see the crisscross of trains below and the constellation of stars above. At least Marty Castrogiovanni, another manager, can sip a coffee ($1.46) while marveling that Bill, tiny Bill, is part of what may be the busiest train line in the world, in terms of tonnage.

  At least now you can look up from your omelet, overpriced or not, and see through the window another train carting part of Wyoming away.

  Day and night, those trains, creating a consuming sound undeterred by special curtains and thick walls. It is a sound of money being made, lights turning on and the disturbed earth rumbling at your feet. It is the sound of a dot called Bill, too busy to sleep.

  Silence Replaces Bids and Moos at Stockyards in Suburbs

  SOUTH ST. PAUL, MINN.—APRIL 14, 2008

  In a place that no longer belongs where it has always been, there rises from wood-slat pens the farewell lows and bellows of cold, wet cows. So long, so long, they call out to the oblivious human bustle. The stockyards of South St. Paul say goodbye.

  The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years; by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world; by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer’s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.

  Times have overtaken the stockyards, for reasons too obvious to dispute. Higher costs. Farms lost to suburban sprawl. The increasingly awkward presence of livestock in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, accustomed now to more sophisticated aromas than what wafts from the pens.

  Punctuation to this reality came in January, when yet another animal escaped from the stockyards. A bull weighing nearly a ton apparently did not like what it had been sold for and wound up for a while on Interstate 494 during the morning rush hour. A police officer’s shotgun blast soon freed the animal from worrying about the evening commute.

  So this day—Friday, April 11, 2008—is the last day, closing a deal struck over a year ago when the owner of the stockyards, the Central Livestock Association, sold off the last 27 acres of what was once 166 acres of mooing, bleating, undulating commerce. The new owners will soon bulldoze everything to make room for more buildings of light industry—pens for people.

  Stockyard denizens in blue blazers and in Carhartt overalls, in fine cowboy hats and in cheap baseball caps, pause in the gray morning cold to talk memories and to sell memorabilia. They assure one another that they’ll soon be catching up at Minnesota auctions in Albany and Zumbrota. But mostly they just wait to buy and sell and ship and talk and do the business of livestock.

  Here is John Barber, big and strong and 69, the yard’s main auctioneer for nearly four decades. What a voice he has, so deep and soothing that you want to bid on something, anything: Would there be room for a heifer in the apartment? He lubricates his throat with apple juice and Halls cough drops and says he doesn’t use a lot of filler words when singing his auction song because he doesn’t want to confuse people.

  But that voice breaks a bit when he talks about this day. His wife, Toots, works here as a clerk, and so did his three daughters, and so did his father, Bob, hauling livestock. When Mr. Barber was a boy, he would ride in the cab of his father’s Mack truck for those 150-mile night rides from Milroy—and then they were here, father and son, in the roiling, toiling, raucous yards.

  John Barber

  His father died not long ago at 93, he says. “You have to think about him” on this day, he says. And the slightest drop in that mellifluous voice tells you it’s time to talk about something else.

  And here is David Krueger, 50, in bib overalls, and his son, Paul, 27, in bib overalls, two farmers who know the stockyards as well as they know their own spread in nearby Hastings. The Krueger name goes back a long ways here, so much so that when they’re selling their livestock, Mr. Barber always calls it “reputation cattle,” and people know what that means.

  The Kruegers have donated a 900-pound heifer to be the last cow auctioned at the stockyards, with the sale proceeds going to an agricultural scholarship fund. Its father was a Simmental named Red Rock, and its mother was a Black Angus named, simply, N501 Commercial. As for its own name, chosen well before its historical role was determined: Timeless.

  Why the donation? Simple, says David Krueger: “To say we had the last one.”

  To understand their desire to claim this honor, you need only walk up the 18 rusty steps to the catwalk that stretches over acres of open-air pens brimming with snorting, urinating, defecating cattle—a black-white-brown sea surrendering puffs of steam from wet hides, and the occasional yardman shout of Hey! Hey! Hey!

  Hands inside his overalls, the elder Krueger wonders aloud about fortunes made and lost on these grounds, the packing companies come and gone, the characters who haunted Hog Alley and Sheep Alley. He wonders how many animals have moved through here since the yards opened.

  A mind-twisting sort of answer is contained in a stockyard brochure commemorating the end of this era: “If the 300 million head of livestock that came to the South St. Paul Stockyards since its opening in 1887 were placed head-to-tail, they would form a line 248,560 miles long that would extend around the earth at the equator more than 10 times.”

  Yes, but who would clean up afterward?

  The catwalk leads for the last time this gray day to the sales barn, a half-arena facing a ring covered with wood shavings as fine as beach sand. For the first part of the morning the stockyards have been auctioning off memorabilia to a standing-room-only crowd. A Ziploc bag of 10 pencils bearing the names of livestock-broker companies long gone goes for $180.

  “Folks, if you have a question, just raise your hand,” one of the auctioneers, Lyle Bostrom, jokes. “We’ll get right to ya.”

  After a while Mr. Barber reclaims his seat, signaling that the final cattle auction is about to begin. All that livestock from Minnesota and Wisconsin, unloaded from trucks and herded into pens, now to be rushed into the arena for some momentary preening, bought, rushed out, loaded up and carted away.

  At the same time there comes the smell of cooking beef—free hamburgers!—to settle over the arena and pens, and to underscore the fate of at least some of those gathered here.

  Mr. Barber gives a verbal tip of the Stetson to the Minnesota Beef Council, and to Barb, the owner of the stockyards cafe: “Stop in there, and Barb’ll fix ya up.” Then, with nothing else to say, he begins his auction song, a tongue-dancing scat of words and numbers that thwarts translation.

  He sings to the cattle trotting into the arena 10 and 20 at a time, many of them relieving themselves to convey what they think of the honor. He sings to the audience, from the old farmhand who keeps his callused hands down to the rich buyer who bids with mere flicks of a finger.

  He sings to the Kruegers in the pens, to Barb in the cafe, to Toots in the back and his girls far away. To his father. He sings with a voice steady and strong, as if he’s afraid to stop. As if the sheer force of his song can hold off the entrance of the final cow, the one called Timeless.

  Far Removed and Struggling, but Still a Piece of America

  AKIACHAK, ALASKA—OCTOBER 6, 2008

  The bush plane glides over the tundra in autumn, descending slowly into the green and orange with avian grace. Soon its wheels kiss a spit of an airstrip in a western Alaska place where senators and governors rarely visit, a Yup’ik Eskimo village called Akiachak.

  Its tribal police chief, John Snyder, waits in a white pickup at the end of the gravel runway, wrapped in a maturity beyond his 23 years. He introduces himself with a gentle joke, then begins down the rutted road to his community of 700.

>   A veteran of the Iraq war lives here. An Obama campaign worker arrived not long ago to shake hands, a rare moment of political recognition. A local elder is part of a federal lawsuit demanding that election ballots and referendum questions also be provided in the language of Yup’ik. Through an interpreter she says: I want to know what I am voting on.

  And here, tribal customs and the Internet vie for the attention of the young. People live on the salmon they’ve caught, the moose they’ve killed and the box of Cheerios that costs them double what you pay. The rising prices of gasoline and heating fuel have forced some families to double up or move away, and about a third of them have no running water.

  “Welcome to Akiachak,” the police chief says, in surplus-rich Alaska.

  With a cold rain falling, the truck bangs along a gray road past weather-beaten houses raised on stilts. A few years ago, two-thirds of the village was finally connected to water and sewer lines; this is the one-third still waiting. Many residents, including Mr. Snyder, bathe with water retrieved from the Kuskokwim River and use honey buckets as latrines. Some of these malodorous buckets sit like garbage cans along the roadside.

  Past the paint-peeled Moravian Christian church, in need of new windows and containing small black books from 1945 that say “Liturgy and Hymns in the Eskimo Language of the Kuskokwim District, Alaska.”

  Past one of the two general stores, where the crazy-high cost of living is stamped on the cans and boxes arranged under the dull light. A 12-ounce bag of Lay’s potato chips: $7.39. A 19-ounce can of Progresso beef barley soup: $4.29. A 20-ounce box of Cheerios: $8.29.

  Mr. Snyder pulls up to an office building where three tribal leaders offer greetings. Between private consultations in Yup’ik, they explain how Akiachak replaced its city form of government two decades ago with a tribal council. They say they work hard to maintain native customs: the language, the care and respect for elders, the refusal to waste food like salmon.

  “If you do,” the tribal administrator, George Peter, says, “the abundance of salmon will go down.”

  The keen national interest in Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president, is not shared in this outpost of the state. At the mention of her name, the elders say nothing but look at one another with half-smiles.

  Instead, they cite another Alaska Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who recently held a hearing in the small city of Bethel—a 15-minute flight from here—to discuss how some people can no longer afford to live in the villages of their ancestors and are leaving for Anchorage. The elders say she is on to something.

  Although the population in Akiachak has risen slightly in recent years, they say, young people seem more interested in iPods than in Yup’ik. And while every eligible Alaskan will receive more than $3,200 in oil rebates and dividends this year, they say, gas here costs $6.59 a gallon, and heating oil $7.06 a gallon.

  “Yesterday our village police officer told us two families just moved to Anchorage,” Daniel George, the tribal council chairman, says. “Even my nephew and niece have moved to Anchorage.”

  Anchorage, the Oz of Alaska. Natalie Landreth, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund, recalls that when the local elder, Anna Nick, 70, was summoned to Anchorage last year to be deposed in her voting rights lawsuit—which so far has prompted a preliminary injunction requiring that Yup’ik translations be made available at the polls—the tiny woman arrived with a wish list of things needed by people in her village.

  Ms. Landreth drove her to a Walmart at 8 in the morning and asked her when she wanted to be picked up.

  “When do they close?” Ms. Nick asked.

  The rain has stopped but the cold has not. With work to do, the tribal elders return to their trucks and desktop computers. Police Chief Snyder drives on.

  Past a fish camp at the river bank, where caught salmon are cleaned and smoked, with carcasses saved for mush dogs. Past the boat he uses to travel hundreds of miles in search of moose and bear and caribou. Past small ducks that he says make for good soup.

  People on all-terrain vehicles wave to Mr. Snyder as they drive past. He is well-known here, the son of a former police chief, a law enforcement officer who carries no gun and rarely uses handcuffs. For one thing, if his boat were to tip in the Kuskokwim while taking suspects to jail in Bethel, anyone in shackles could drown.

  “You cooperate with me, I’ll cooperate with you,” he says.

  The village is safe. But six months ago it experienced its first murder in anyone’s memory when, the police say, a man ended a bootleg whiskey night by shooting his female companion. Mr. Snyder answered that call and does not want to discuss it; too close.

  His truck wends past the village’s sprawling school, built a few years ago to resemble a traditional community house for elders. It has a room lined with Mac computers, a library with expansive windows and a cafeteria that serves as the village’s only luncheonette. In one kindergarten class, children are learning the Yup’ik word for star.

  “Agyaq,” they say together. “Agyaq.”

  Mr. Snyder continues on to accommodate a request to visit the village cemetery—clearly not something he wants to do. He walks along a boardwalk above the mud-topped permafrost to where white wooden crosses rise like too many candles on a birthday cake. Some crosses are fresh, their bone-whiteness stark against the brown-green weeds. Others are collapsing into gray rot, returning to the earth.

  “My buddy’s down here somewhere,” Mr. Snyder says, tramping through the weeds and crosses. A buddy who committed suicide at 18.

  There are more: here lie three relatives, dead before 40 from alcohol; another school friend lost to suicide; another relative. Although alcohol is banned in many rural villages, including Akiachak, it remains the scourge of native life. Mr. Snyder walks downhill, head bowed.

  Driving toward the airstrip, passing high school athletes on a late-afternoon run, he says he could never live in a place as crowded as Anchorage. He says he prefers rainwater to any other drink, enjoys the taste of bear, whether barbecued or in a pot roast, and plans to teach his two young sons to speak Yup’ik.

  The dot of a bush plane skims the horizon. It lands, and eight passengers board. The pilot asks each one how much they weigh.

  Three small children and a lame dog watch from a safe distance. Then, as the whining plane pulls away, these Yup’ik children, these American children, wave goodbye.

  At a School in Kansas, a Moment Resonates

  JUNCTION CITY, KAN.—JANUARY 21, 2009

  Shortly before lunchtime on Tuesday, a strange quiet settled over Junction City Middle School. Strange because quiet does not come naturally to a collection of 875 students in the full throes of adolescence. But this clearly was a moment, a time to set aside childish things.

  The sixth and eighth graders had shuffled into the auditorium of the year-old school, past the signs saying no gum, drinks or food, while the seventh graders took seats in the adjacent cafeteria, redolent of chicken patties frying. All were silent, and not only because the expressions of the adults hovering about signaled the need for communal reverence.

  They gazed up at large screens to watch the presidential inauguration in Washington, nearly 1,100 miles away, though the distance sometimes seemed even farther. While the audio feed remained steady, the video stream stopped and stuttered, like old NASA images from space, so much so that Aretha Franklin seemed to start singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” before opening her mouth.

  But this glitch only added to the moment’s import, as if to echo other firsts—sending a man to the moon, say—along the American continuum. And these YouTube-era students never snickered; they only watched, some wide-eyed, some sleepy-eyed, the flickering images of power’s formal transfer.

  Also watching, also looking up, was Ronald P. Walker, 55, the schools superintendent, from a cafeteria table he was sharing with six seventh-grade girls. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and a red tie—the same attire as the president-elect n
ow striding across the screen above.

  Mr. Walker grew up in an all-black town in Oklahoma, worked his way through the ranks of education, and is now the only black schools superintendent in Kansas. He worries about budget cutbacks as a result of the economic crisis throttling his state and his country, but he saw in the man appearing above him a thinker, a statesman, the embodiment of hope.

  “And his emphasis on education is critical for all of us,” Mr. Walker said.

  One could argue that many of the students in Mr. Walker’s charge have more at stake in this far-off Washington ceremony than most. Junction City may be a place of about 20,000 in the flat plains of Kansas, but it is as diverse as any place in the country, mostly because in many ways it serves at the pleasure of Fort Riley, a major military base a few miles away.

  Slightly fewer than half the students are white, more than half receive free or discounted lunches—and a full third have some connection to Fort Riley, which adds both a cultural richness and an uncommon kind of stress.

  School officials say the students worry less about grades and friends than about when a parent will be deployed, when a parent will return, whether a parent will survive combat.

  These are not daydream worries, what with 3,400 soldiers from Fort Riley now in Iraq, and the knowledge that 159 soldiers and airmen from the base had been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of last year.

  Not too long ago, there was a report of graffiti in the bathroom at the high school. The culprit was a girl, and what she had written, over and over, was: I Miss My Dad.

  So here they were, the children of a place called Junction City—a community proud of its distinctive Kansas limestone buildings, struggling still with its honky-tonk, “Junk Town” reputation of long ago—looking up at screens, waiting for a new and different show. Gazing up, too, were many adults, most of whom had thought they would never see the day.