by Tom Cunliffe
It was an unsettled day. Squall clouds loomed, missing us but casting their moving shadows so that the hills seemed to sway like waves on a green and yellow ocean. Not 3 miles off, a black curtain of heavy rain blotted out the small building Kirk was indicating.
‘That was the only schoolhouse in the neighbourhood until they opened the new one in Tryon a year or two back,’ he said. ‘I was educated there. All grades in one class, from eight to sixteen. Now kids have to travel further. The schooling’s better but there’s no bus like there is most places.’
‘That must place a huge burden on the mothers,’ observed Roz. ‘The distances seem enormous.’
‘To some extent,’ Kirk agreed. ‘The state government understands the problem though. Kids are allowed to drive themselves to school from their fourteenth birthday, and there’s no shortage of land to learn to drive on beforehand. It’s just to school and back though. No joyrides until you’re sixteen. One kid drives thirty-five miles each way every day. Mind you, they have it easy now. Some of my pa’s generation had to make it to school on a clapped-out horse, two or three brothers and sisters all on the same animal, through snow and all.’
For a moment, we gazed at the huge expanse of this young man’s property. It was not wealthy in money terms, but it conferred a powerful sense of identity and a healthy life for his family.
‘Kids are pretty safe on the highways,’ he said. ‘McPherson’s a dry county – no booze that is. Most folks are proud of it.’
He threw the pick-up into gear.
‘You like machinery? Come and visit my spares department.’
After a few more hills, we arrived in a large field where half a dozen vintage tractors stood open to the weather, all the same antique make and model, all facing downhill. Stretched hoods covered their two-cylinder John Deere power plants; steering wheels stood high above everything with connecting rods to the front end that extended through clear air above the engine casing.
‘Laverne and me have been collecting these for years,’ Kirk said, jumping from the beat-up truck and scrambling on to the nearest tractor. ‘This here’s the working one right now. When anything fails, we just tear one of the others down and use the best bits. Haven’t bought a tractor part in years.’ The saddle was all metal, brutal cold on a winter’s morning, hot enough to burn your backside in high summer. The front wheels were set centrally, almost touching one another and effectively making the machine into a massive tricycle. All in all, a most unusual vehicle.
This was practical conservation, I thought. Never mind if the things are pollution monsters. Far more greenhouse gases would be generated in building and delivering one new tractor to replace this line-up than the whole bunch would produce in their long life yet to come. I suggested this idea to Kirk, who agreed, pointing out that it is far greener to keep a good thing going than to scrap it when a store-bought replacement would only do the same job a wee bit better.
‘So why are they all facing downhill?’
‘Haven’t got a decent battery between them,’ he chuckled, ‘but there’s usually one with enough “go” to lick up the spark if you bump start it down the slope. If it doesn’t fire up before the bottom, your problem ain’t the battery.’
I looked down. The old girls must have suffered from permanent vertigo.
‘Do you breed your own cattle?’ I asked as we drove back for lunch.
‘We use four bulls,’ Kirk replied, ‘the heifers going out today are last spring’s calves. If you don’t get greedy and overstock the land, they fatten up good. We grow some alfalfa here, you see,’ he said, ‘it’s restorative for the land. Kinda holds the sand together and fertilises it. Makes great cattle feed in winter.’
‘What about water?’
‘With all these storms around you’d think we’d have it to spare, but we don’t. The ground’s dry, but there’s plenty of water two-hundred feet down. We pump it up with windmills.’
He gestured towards a large galvanised vat 15 feet across, standing by a windmill in a hollow. Cows were drinking from it.
‘Once a young bull gets to the right age,’ Kirk returned to the favourite subject of procreation and winked at me, ‘they get tested – know what I mean? The best, a very few, get the plum job with a lifetime of willing virgins, the rest go visit McDonald’s.’
‘Some choice.’
Back at the house, there was still no sign of the cattle truck, so Barb, Kirk’s wife, served up lunch for us with her two young kids, and the new baby. We bowed our heads as grace was said, then we ate home-reared beefsteak, fried then braised, with mashed potato, sweetcorn and gravy. Food for a hungry man. As Barb and her children were clearing away, the world’s longest articulated Freightliner truck (a ‘semi’) arrived with a belch of exhaust and a whining of gears. It manoeuvred somehow so that its trailer was hard by the corral. The tractor end was immaculate in blue paint, complete with coach stripes. Gene, the driver, seemed like a long-term family friend. He probably was.
Kirk and Laverne set up a fence to guide the cows into the truck, then performed unusual feats of gymnastics armed with electric prods to chivvy them aboard. There was no question of ‘age before beauty’, here. Both men walked across the backs of the packed cattle to move the herd in the direction they wanted. There was little resistance. The cows stamped and banged their way up the ramp into their two-tier accommodation, accepting their fate without fuss. The warm, animal smell of the cattle reminded me of childhood visits to the zoo, the one element Western movies always miss out.
The truck tailgate slammed shut and Gene pulled out up the track. The rest of us, kids and all, piled into the family station wagon to follow him to the North Platte auction sales. I couldn’t help noting the roof of the wagon, which looked as if it had been beaten out like a sheet of copper except that the indentations were around 3 inches across.
‘What happened to the car?’ I asked.
‘Hailstorm this spring,’ replied Barb. ‘Hang on. I’ll show you the stones.’
She ran back into the house and returned holding lumps of ice fully the size of tennis balls.
‘I shoved a few in the freezer. These were bigger when they landed, but of course they melted a bit as I carried them through to the kitchen. They can injure you if you get caught out. If they come in summer, they can wreck a crop completely.’ She inspected the hailstones closely for a second or two. ‘Sometimes it’s like war out here.’
The auction was in full swing when we arrived. Squeezing out of the car beside the barn where the business was done, the first thing to hit was the almost overpowering reek of cattle. Barb left the kids to play outside the building, and nobody worried about them because there was nothing to fear. The rest of us entered through a sort of lobby and worked our way up to the back of the arena where we found space on the plank seating. The baby perched on Barb’s lap and behaved like a proper trooper. The reek of cows was even stronger inside than out, as a pair of cowboys under the lights beneath us chased in a small herd. The calves galloped clumsily around the 50-foot ring for the appraisal of cynical buyers seated beside nervous sellers in rows like a small circus, six or seven deep. To a man, they wore cowboy uniform, their high-heeled boots up on the seats in front, some with spurs. All had the tall, white hats except for a few of the younger sellers. They smoked cheroots and perused their song sheets as the auctioneer announced the next lot.
‘Fine bunch of steers. Haven’t drunk water in two days. All grass fed. Local reared. What’ll yer gimme?’
At this, which was a request for a starting price per pound of cow (‘pure meat – no pumping them up with water’), his preamble faded out into the classic auctioneer’s song.
‘Fifty cents, fifty cents, an’ a five? Gimme five? Gimme five?’ and so on. After a minute, the rhythm had become mesmeric, the pace had quickened and we could not understand a single intoned word. I nudged Kirk.
‘What’s the price now?’
‘I dunno,’ he shrugged. ‘Can’t hear
anything the guy’s saying. It’s like this every time.’
‘Who’s bidding? I can’t see anyone raising an eyebrow, let alone a finger.’
‘Can’t tell you that either. These buyers are all pros. They ain’t farmers. They come from the conglomerates. The auctioneer knows every one. But don’t ask me how the deal is done. I just supply the beef!’
On the day, Kirk and Laverne secured 60.5¢ per pound for their beasts, which worked out at around $540 for a typical cow. Business was lean, but it was about what they’d expected. Kirk was philosophical, Barb said they’d get by. She was relieved. They had feared worse, but it was still hard times on the range. Two years previously the same cattle would have been fetching 90¢ per pound, and her household bills never went down.
After the sale, we cruised across the gigantic, roughshod parking lot and elbowed our way into a restaurant heaving with cowmen and their families. Beef was top of the bill and everyone was choosing it. The meal was a sort of private harvest festival for everyone there, and when ours pitched up, Kirk invited us to join hands with them to give thanks for the safe arrival of the herd at market and the sale of the cattle. Laverne poured himself a tumbler of water, cut up his steak ready for the fork, and told us a tale.
‘Prices might be low,’ he started out, ‘but so long as you’re fit and well and you think straight, there’s always some poor guy worse off. Take High Plains Sam; used to hunt out our way in my grandpa’s day. He didn’t think right. He suffered from optimism, and he ended up dead.’
‘What happened to him, Grandpa?’ asked Kirk’s son, tucking in to a ‘kid’s portion’ that would have shamed many a London restaurant.
‘Well… Sam wasn’t a young feller and he was deathly feared of tornadoes. He was all alone up there, and he was scared one would blow him clean away an’ nobody would ever know. Sam had this theory that buffalo had a sixth sense about tornadoes and never got hit. He wasn’t the only one, either. Plenty of the early settlers built their cabins right by a buffalo wallow, because that was where the beasts went when there was tornadoes around.
‘One day, Sam knew there was going to be big twisters. He could see it in the sky and feel it in the air, so when evening came around, he made straight for a buffalo wallow he knew. There was still buffalo up on the hills then, but when he arrived, they was nowhere in sight, so he spread out his bedding and hunkered down for the night, feeling pretty pleased with himself.’
‘How’d he make out?’ asked Kirk who, incredibly, seemed not to have heard this story before.
‘Everything went fine until around midnight,’ continued Laverne. ‘The storm’s rumblin’ all round him, but High Plains Sam could sleep though worse than that. Trouble was, the buffalo out on the range suddenly decided that it was tornado time and took up the same idea Sam had. So here comes the whole herd, galloping into their wallow right on top of him. Folks who found him said Sam was flatter ’n a frying pan.’
‘Laverne! That is one awful story,’ burst out Barb.
‘Depends on how you look at it,’ he replied. ‘Sam might have been trampled to death, but he got one thing right. He never did get blown away by no tornado!’
The day after we left the Neal family should have been an easy one. We had 100 miles of sandhills to cover before we reached the Nebraska border settlement of Merriman, then possibly a further 30 or so to Martin in South Dakota before we saw any gasoline, so we rode into Tryon to top up. Anywhere in the United States, achieving a brimful motorcycle tank involves a contest of will and ingenuity against devilishly clever nozzle ‘safety’ cut-offs. The regulations owe more to the need for gas vendors to be protected against litigation on the remotest of contingencies than they do to common sense, but I suppose they do stop suicides from hosing red-hot engines down with gasoline. These ‘safe’ nozzles aren’t a serious issue for car drivers with 20-gallon tanks, but for the biker of sound mind, they are a dangerous menace. At the generally slow American speeds, the range of the Heritage was a mere 160 miles, while the Sportster, even with the special ‘highway tank’, switched over to ‘reserve’ at around 120. After that, how much it held was a lottery. The manufacturers certainly weren’t letting on. This would be of no concern to most of their customers as they cruise the palmy boulevards of California and Florida, but out here the last teaspoonful could save a long, hot walk, so we kept cheating the system until the fuel was up to the rim.
The pump attendant shook our hands as though we’d been acquainted all our lives and we realised that by now the whole community would know about us. Someone had given us a good school report.
The road to the north across the hilly, deserted cattle country ran alongside a railroad line and soon deteriorated almost to dirt track status. Theoretically metalled, it was in such poor shape that we slowed to 20 mph to lessen the crunch if either of us came off on the longitudinal ruts that were picking up our tyres and throwing the bikes from side to side. After 10 miles of this grim riding a train horn sounded almost on top of us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a Union Pacific freight train rumbling past, heading up towards Canada, overtaking at a combined speed of around 10 mph. The engineer gave us another two blasts. ‘Whooooo! Whooooo!’ The haunting sound went through me like a shot of moonshine and it took the train over five minutes to clear us.
Twenty miles down the road the bikes were back up to speed so that we found ourselves overtaking the same locomotive. This time the guys gave us four deafening notes. They were leaning out of their cab, lapping up the macho Harleys. Just us, them and the American highway.
Half an hour later, I wasn’t feeling so elated. I stopped to take a photograph and Roz pressed on ahead. When I remounted I reckoned she was 5 miles away, so I hurried on as hard as I could on a surface which was again deteriorating. I didn’t see Betty Boop until I almost ran over her. She was on her side by the ditch, engine stopped, and no sign of Roz. The road was bending slightly to cross a bridge over a rare streambed with water in it.
I hung on the brakes with my heartbeat in limbo, realising in an instant this was what I had been dreading all the way from the coast. Running back to the yellow bike, I was struck by how small and vulnerable she looked lying in the dust, but what I desperately needed to know was what had happened to my wife. Was she in the ditch with a broken neck? Had she wandered off somewhere with a snapped wrist, or crawled into cover with a fractured leg? The selfish thought formed for a second that the trip was going to end here in the pounding heat just south of Sioux country, but in truth I couldn’t have cared less.
Weighed down with remorse for dragging Roz along all the way from the New Forest to dump her bike here on the lonesome prairie, and beside myself with anxiety, I called out, dreading silence most.
‘Down here!’
I scrambled towards her voice and, to my inexpressible relief, saw her sitting happily by the water, boots and socks off, dangling her feet in its bubbling flow.
‘What the hell?’
‘Come on down. It’s lovely and refreshing.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. It was so damned hot I just stopped to bathe my feet. Betty fell over when her stand sank in the sand. I felt stupid just waiting for you and I certainly can’t lift her up, so I left her. I hit the ‘kill switch’ for the engine and turned off the fuel. I think she’s OK.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ I mumbled, and I meant it. Specifically.
An hour later we were in South Dakota. As if cut off by some great planner’s knife, the sandhills gave way to fields with crops ready for the combines and we floated down a road like a silken carpet. The change was startling, but so was the price demanded by the glitzy motel on the busy Route 18 that runs west out of Iowa, through Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation and on to the wilds of Wyoming and Laramie. After the past week, we felt so out of place on the wall-to-wall carpet of the lobby that we walked right into the oven again. Thirty miles along the highway we hung a left to retreat into Nebraska. The road here was in
better shape than the one we’d used to make our northing, but it still wasn’t much. Half an hour down its length with the sky looking like something High Plains Sam would have appreciated, we finally arrived in the frontier town of Gordon. We signed for the last available booking at the realistically priced Colonial Motel, grateful by now to find any lodging at all. The fancy place up in Dakota had also been busy, in total contrast to our experience out West so far, where nobody ever said, ‘No room.’
‘Why is everywhere full?’ I asked the manageress.
‘Crops are coming in,’ she explained. ‘We got the usual truckers, plus a commercial traveller or two, but that outfit next to you are harvesters from Missouri. And there are others. They’ll be around for a couple of weeks. They come every year. I’m expecting a new crowd in around midnight.’
We walked across to our room and shoved the bikes under the veranda. As we unlocked the door, the rain crashed down and we drew lots for the first session in the shower.
By the time I was cleaned up, the deluge was over. Fresh out of booze, I ventured down the street to the liquor store where I was sold a ‘quart’ of Teacher’s Highland Cream, 43 per cent export strength. The whisky was a long way from home and, glancing up the scrappy thoroughfare sided with shoe-box buildings of indeterminate age, some wooden, most of composite brick and concrete, I reflected that I was too. An assortment of light industries lined the road, while grain silos and other small towers of less obvious function made up a distinctive skyline. As always, heavy electricity wires criss-crossed at random from rough pine poles. Apart from me, the sidewalks were empty, and no traffic disturbed the evening’s powerful scent of rain, so I walked back to where the Colonial Motel stood at the intersection of Main and the road north to Dakota. The motel’s substantially constructed rooms were arranged around an L-shaped forecourt to one side of a sprawling parking lot half filled with trucks and mobile farm machinery.
The neon lights were just coming on as I stepped up to our door. Outside the next cabin four men and a boy were sitting on the step sipping cold drinks. Just as the bikes leaning on their stands were our own badges of identity, these guys were distinguished by a huge, jacked-up pick-up that was somebody’s pride and joy. Maroon coach-painted and immaculately clean, its running boards stood 3 feet above the ground. On the door in distinctive script was the legend, ‘Korn Harvesting Services’.