The Partly Cloudy Patriot

by Sarah Vowell

  My Pentecostal youth was awash in salvation testimonials that consistently backfired. Meant to inspire young Protestants with tales of redemption, more often than not these books and films and stories clued me in to the horrors of the world. I learned of knife fights from the Pat Boone flick The Cross and the Switchblade; of paralysis from the story of Joni, a girl who had her spine snapped in a diving accident, got saved, and then had a promising art career by painting flowers and things with a brush stuck between her teeth; of the Holocaust when I was five as my mother read Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, in which Dutch Christians hid Jews; and from my Landry comic book I had my first inkling of the being and nothingness that was my birthright. In the comic, Landry, in signature coat and hat, looked back on his youth. He said that as a player he won games. He said that he fell in love, got married, had children, became a coach. And then, he said the thing that shocked me. He said that despite the wins, the love, the success, the family, he said that something was missing. That is, until he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. But before that, something was missing. I gasped. I thanked the Lord for my certainty, which was the certainty of Tom Landry—faith in God, in the Cowboys, in America. It never occurred to me that something might be missing, and so I prayed every night that when I grew up, nothing would be missing. Prayed that prayer every night up until the day I lost my faith in God. And, Tom Landry would be happy to know, something has been missing ever since, different things at different times. If not love, then success, if not success, then supplies. Who hasn’t known the terror of that moment when you’re baking the cake and the oven is preheated and you’ve mixed in everything, creamed the butter with the sugar, floured the pans, only to realize that you’re out of baking powder? Every day, I wake up and wonder, What will be missing today? Looking back on Landry’s work in the theory of something-is-missingness, I am reminded of the words of his existential colleague Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote, “Man is condemned to be free.”

  And to die. Rest in peace, Tom Landry. Something is missing and it’s you.

  The Strenuous Life

  As a little girl, I was jealous of Teddy Roosevelt. I did not envy his presidency or his valor on the battlefield. What I wanted was his asthma. Theodore Roosevelt is one of my father’s heroes. So when my sister and I were children, Dad would tell us stories about TR’s buffalo hunts and the Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill. He would tell us how this brave, tough hunter and soldier was born a wheezing New York City four-eyes.

  “All little Teddy Roosevelt could do,” my dad would say of the asthmatic rich boy, “was stay in bed and read.”

  “Ew,” said my sister.

  Sigh, said I. Getting to stay in bed and read all day was what I was shooting for. The only childhood ailment I landed was a hearing problem, and when you have tubes in your ears, your parents still force you to go outside and play in the dirt with your sister.

  Dad would continue, little Teddy Roosevelt toughened himself up by doing exercises. He came out West to become a rancher and really learned how to breathe. Later on, I would come to admire little Teddy Roosevelt’s daintier accomplishments, such as civil service reform. But every parable has a lesson, and I suspected that my dad was aiming these wuss-turned-hero tales in my direction. Despite all evidence to the contrary, like my need as a three-year-old to wash my hands sixty-five times a day, he just kept on believing I would toughen up, right up until the night in 1984 I came home from the movies raving about a Woody Allen film called Broadway Danny Rose.

  Years later, I moved to New York City, to an apartment on Twenty-first Street. My first week here I walked by a house on Twentieth. The plaque next to the door said it was the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt. I laughed out loud. (The National Park Service operates the house, which makes the tour extra fun in that you’re being shown around fancy parlors straight out of Edith Wharton by a park ranger dressed to ride into the Grand Canyon on a mule.) The stifling house Teddy Roosevelt longed to escape, I’d spent my whole life running toward. Except that now, the shut-in’s life in New York City is even better than I imagined as a child, because these days, there’s the Internet. Now, you don’t even have to walk outside to go to the library.

  One morning, I began my day, as is my habit, perusing the wire service reports on America Online. I do this for two reasons. First, I like to get the straight news before The New York Times contaminates my brain. And, second, I adore the AOL headlines. “Bush Reminds Parents to Love Kids,” said one. A story about the heavyweight champ—convicted rapist was titled “Tyson: Women Don’t Like Me.” Though my personal favorite remains “Still No New Gun Control Laws.” Scrolling through the wires on June 26, 2001, an Associated Press headline caught my eye, “N. Dakota May Seek Name Change”:

  BISMARCK, N. D. (AP) North Dakotans can’t move their state to warmer climes, but some hope a proposed name change will at least help the state seem a little less northern. The Greater North Dakota Association, the state’s chamber of commerce, is backing a proposal to cut the state’s name to “Dakota.” Supporters insist the plan would help alter the state’s image as a frigid, treeless prairie.

  Pathetic, I thought. If North Dakota is that desperate for tourist dollars, then I’m going to give them some. I called my sister in Montana immediately, asking if she and my nephew would like to come with me to North Dakota for the weekend.

  “I guess,” she answered. “If you want.”

  Montanans do not, as a rule, vacation in North Dakota. In fact, there is a cottage industry of jokes about the diminished intellectual capacity of the North Dakota neighbors. Such as, two North Dakotans are building a rocket to the sun. When they are informed that they and their rocket will burn up before they even land on the sun’s surface they reply, “We’ll be okay. We’ll just go there at night.” A Montanan is capable of making up North Dakota jokes on the spot. My parents, for example, were having a garage sale at their Bozeman home. My father hoped to sell a wheelbarrow he bought at someone else’s garage sale the previous summer. He bought it for ten bucks, he tells a potential buyer, so he’s selling it for five, because, he quips, “I attended the North Dakota School of Business.”

  “I’m from North Dakota, too!” the woman exclaimed, asking him what town the business school is in.

  According to that AP article about the state changing its name, “Lee Peterson, the governor’s economic development director, didn’t believe the name was a major factor in people’s assumptions about North Dakota. ‘The problem with North Dakota is that no one knows about us,’ Peterson said.” That is true. I grew up next door to North Dakota, and the only thing I know about it is that Lawrence Welk comes from there. So imagine my surprise when I went to North Dakota’s official state tourism Web site and the first image on the screen is the face of Theodore Roosevelt next to the quote, “I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.”

  Huh. Teddy Roosevelt lived in North Dakota? The western land where he became a man in my father’s stories was North Dakota? I always thought it was Wyoming—some breathtaking landscape where present-day movie stars buy ranches. I pictured TR riding a horse around the sort of craggy Rocky Mountain terrain where Harrison Ford could swoop in and rescue hikers in his helicopter.

  I met my sister and nephew in Billings, and we drove to Medora, North Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The first thing we see in the park is Roosevelt’s log cabin. It’s been moved from its original site on the Maltese Cross Ranch and plopped down in the visitor center backyard. It’s beautiful—raw but cozy, with a rocking chair by the door and a buffalo hide bedspread that is so spectacular I find myself wishing they sold them in the Pottery Barn catalog.

  Roosevelt fled to the Dakota Territory in 1884, when, within twenty-four hours, Valentine’s Day coincidentally, his mother died and Alice, his wife, died in childbirth. He mourned Alice for years. He must have lain sleepless and grieving in this bedroom. Devastated, Roosevelt mov
ed here to the Badlands. The place looks like a broken heart. The harsh and solitary buttes and ravines have been beaten up by eons of wind. Everything’s bleak in color but for the burnt red of coal veins struck by long-ago lightning. “When one is in the Bad Lands,” Roosevelt wrote, “he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe’s tales and poems sound.” As my sister drives past a windy rock pile, I can picture Roosevelt slumping home to his rocking chair at night, reading Poe’s poem about his dead wife, “That the wind came out of the cloud by night / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.”

  “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains,” Roosevelt wrote of the Dakota landscape. “And, after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him. Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind; the plains stretch out in death-like and measure-less expanse, and as he journeys over them they will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.”

  Deathlike, melancholy monotony: Roosevelt’s writings on the place, while quotable, must be a mixed blessing for North Dakota’s press agents. Every superlative he uttered is modified by reality. “Grim beauty,” for example, gets a lot of play. In the North Dakota Department of Tourism brochure, the sort of sunset photo I’d imagine departments of tourism live for is marked with a Roosevelt epitaph about how “nothing could be more lonely”—there’s that word again—“and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses.”

  Amy drives us around the South Unit of the park, past prairie dog towns and weird vistas and wild horses. After a while, we pull off the road. Amy puts Owen in a backpack, and we go for a hike. The trail winds through rocks and brambles. Echinacea grows wild beside the path. We’re the only ones here, and at a thick patch of brush I make Amy take my picture, not because it’s particularly beautiful, though it is, or because I’m having a good time, though I am. I just want a record of me standing here, so far from where I live.

  We get back in the car, and we’re on the road maybe two minutes when we get out again to gape at a bison. We had already seen a whole herd of them, but there is something more noteworthy about one lone, dark animal standing still, perfectly framed in front of a little beige butte. It is so still, in fact, that I understand how easy it must have been for those white hunters in the nineteenth century to pop off buffalo for fun from the windows of passing trains. How could anyone kill anything so magnificent, I wonder as we head into the town of Medora for lunch. A lunch, I confess, of tasty buffalo burgers.

  My sister and I get to talking about hunting. I’ve never been, but Amy used to be quite the marksman. There are photos of her all over our dad’s shop, a smiling eighth-grader standing over her bleeding quarry. A gunsmith, Dad made her a .22 for Christmas when we were ten, the year he built me a dollhouse. I ask her what it was like to go hunting with Dad. At first, she says, she loved it. She liked hiking and poking around in the mountains with him. She liked it up until the day she shot an antelope and it didn’t die right away. She panicked, watching it writhe around in pain. She fetched Dad, who had to shoot it twice in the head just to finish it off. By the next time they went hunting, for deer, she still hadn’t gotten over that antelope. She kept her lingering guilt to herself. Dad sat her on the top of a hill and went down below to scare deer in her direction. This maneuver worked. A deer walked right up to her, but she shooed it away before Dad could find out, whispering, “Get out of here! Go away!” She didn’t want to kill again.

  “Jesus,” I say. She was out there in the freezing mountains learning about life and death and the dire food chain when I was back home screwing around with my dollhouse and its tiny windup piano that played Beethoven.

  The passenger seat of a car my sister is driving as we dissect our shared childhood is the most comfortable place in the world. She’s in charge, does everything, and my only job is to bring the music—I’m going through a Ricky Nelson phase—and keep her awake. I am the flighty twin. She’s the one who drives cars and gives birth and bakes pies. She rolls her eyes when I tell this story, because it ends with me saying, “And I was the special surprise baby,” but our parents didn’t know they were having twins. In the womb, Amy and I had the same heartbeat. Mom gave birth to Amy, and the doctor said, “There’s another one in there.” It’s silly, but I think knowing that has been the driving force of my whole life. I always thought of myself as the extra kid. Not in a bad way, I just thought Amy could do everything a daughter is supposed to do—go hunting and produce a grandchild—and anything I could contribute to my parents’ parental hopes would be gravy, a bonus.

  Lately, the contrast between my life and my sister’s has widened. A few months ago she moved from Bozeman, the relatively urbane college town where we grew up, to a remote county in the middle of Montana that boasts of hosting “more deer and elk than people.” Amy’s husband, a soil scientist, got transferred there. Employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, my brother-in-law is the only person I know who’s still making money off the New Deal.

  When I went to visit my sister’s family, the first thing I saw upon entering her “town” was a bunch of tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street. It’s a two-hour drive from any sort of civilization. The closest attraction is an abandoned mining camp about which a historical marker states, “The Silver Panic of 1893 caused the town to die a rapid death.”

  Amy’s house, which looks out at a ring of mountains and sits next to a Forest Service road perfect for hiking, is just the sort of isolated mountain home that city folks dream about when the car alarms go off. On the other hand, I called her one morning and asked what she was up to and she answered, “Making bagels.” It took me a second to figure out that she was actually making bagels, because she can’t buy them there so she’s boiling the dough from scratch just like the pioneers used to do.

  One of the interesting effects of my sister’s move to nowhere is that we’ve never been closer. Partly that’s because I’m worried about her stuck out there so I call her all the time, but it’s also because, curiously, we now have so much in common. Our common bond is that we both live in extreme places where, if you’re at all given to reflection, you constantly question where and how you live. In Manhattan, I lack spaciousness and nature and quiet; in the sticks, she lacks choices and culture and bagels.

  Every now and then my sister will say something that reminds me how she’s so much more western than I am. On the phone recently, she was recounting some local skirmish involving a “lawman,” and I interrupted her midsentence, asking, “Did you just say ‘lawman,’ Amy? Are you talking about a cop?”

  I have the same sorts of dislocating moments talking to our father. Boning up for my trip west, I read Roosevelt’s book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Describing it to Dad, I mention that I’m nervous about going to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. In three separate passages, Roosevelt remarks how plentiful the rattlesnakes are around there, and that one of them killed a little girl when it bit her in the ankle and then she fell down from the pain and it bit her again in the neck. I’ve always had a thing about snakes.

  “That reminds me of this one time I went snake hunting,” Dad replies. “I caught this rattler and I was holding his jaw shut. He got so mad that he wrapped himself tight around my arm. I was wearing cowboy boots, though, and I slipped and hit my head on a rock and knocked myself out. I woke up and I was just lying there on the ground looking up at the sky. Then I remembered, ‘Seems like I had me a snake.’ I looked down at my arm and the snake was still wrapped around it, only he’d gotten so mad that he tried to bite me, but he bit himself instead. He bit himself so hard that one of his fangs came out and got lodged in his own body. The fang was just stuck there poking out of his flesh. Now he’s really mad and he’s writhing and he’s only got one fang left in his mouth and he’s coiled himself even tighter around my arm. So
the only way I can get him to let go of me is to take out my pistol and just shoot him off my arm.”

  When you are a westerner living on the East Coast, this is just the sort of folksy anecdote the city slickers expect you to tell. But I was the worst Montanan in history. My one blood and guts yarn, a mountain biking accident in which I woke up in an ambulance, involves hitting a parked car at an intersection because I was spacing out about an art history project on the way home from the library. In fact, as an adult, I’ve become so enamored with our national parks because I want the federal government to intervene between nature and me—to protect me from myself, to build sidewalks and guardrails and post big signs that say SNAKE CROSSING or KEEP OUT.

  The only halfway rustic stories I have about my former life on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide all take place at one of my many dumb minimum-wage jobs. The closest thing I have to a cowboy story is being a motel maid during the College National Finals Rodeo and swabbing up out-of-town calf ropers’ Coors beer vomit. Come to think of it, my interaction with the Rocky Mountain landscape was limited to my participation in the service industry economy built around others’ enjoyment of said landscape. I made your supper when you got back from rock climbing. I cleaned your motel room while you toured Yellowstone. I baby-sat your kids while you went hiking in the Spanish Peaks. And, at the ski hill bar, I listened to you rave about how “the powder was awesome!” as I handed you your beer—unless you were Canadian, in which case it was a grudgingly mixed White Russian or a glass of Clamato, an appalling mixture of tomato juice and clam.