by Tom Cunliffe
‘Fine motorcycles, mister,’ offered a handsome man in a blue sweatshirt. Square-rigged with curly, sandy hair, even features, a moustache like mine and a seemingly permanent grin. This was Wayne Korn, prime mover of the family firm. The other men were Pokey the truck driver, short on teeth but long on heart, and Cody, a broad-handed farmer from the same neighbourhood. The lad was Travis Korn, aged twelve. Travis drove one of the three combines along with Cody and Wayne. According to Pokey, he was the best operator of the three: ‘Works his line as straight as a bullet.’
The team was completed by Wayne’s father who ran the grain collector, the vital link between the combines and the trucks. ‘Grandpa’ was a Korean War veteran who provided a sort of moral overview to the team.
That night we drained the Teacher’s in the cool darkness that followed the rain. The boys were staying at Gordon for the same reasons as us, and it was decided that we would hold on to our room for a while and travel to work with them across the Dakota line in the morning.
The time spent with the men from Missouri passed in a whirlwind of impressions. Roz sat in with Cody, and I with Wayne, perched high above a wheat-field the size of an English town in air-conditioned detachment. The juggernaut combines mowed, threshed, and every so often offloaded into Grandpa’s collecting skip trailing behind a tractor. The patriarch rushed the shipment across the stubble to where Pokey waited in the chilled cab of his Freightliner to swing on down to the elevators in Gordon.
Agricultural versions of the heavily metalled fire engines of Middlesboro, the combines seemed never to halt. Like Martian combat tanks from The War of the Worlds, the three alien monsters marched, distorted by the hot air, as they steadily harvested the land. Chaff and dry dirt blew off behind them like smoke. Ahead stood the golden wheat waving in the prairie wind; astern, stubble that would soon be ploughed under, leaving no trace of the flowing bounty they had swept up into their safe, mechanical arms.
‘Hey! Check out my coyote!’ Travis’ piping voice squawked out over the interconnecting VHF radio. Wayne and I craned our necks to the youngster’s combine and saw the yellow creature, half-dog, half-wolf, loping down-sun, flushed from cover by the whirling blades and joining the jack-rabbits bounding away across the newly shorn land.
‘Guess having the boy along keeps the rest of us young,’ Wayne said in a rare show of paternal affection.
‘You do the job year after year and you forget the wonder that’s in it. Takes a kid to remind you. There’s more grain here and up in Canada than our own people can ever use. Sometimes, I forget that me and the boys and these farmers are feeding the world.’
The combines strode on across the plain, the trucks shuttled the grain to the silos and two days passed like the haze welling out behind the vehicles. In the evenings, we hung out with the farmer and his family, whose faith in the arid soil and their own luck make all this happen, through years of plenty and years when a one-hour hailstorm just before harvest wipes out a whole crop. The single-storey farmhouse stood inside a tiny garden beside the barn where Gary still kept horses. Ten yards from the parlour window, beyond the wire garden fence, the fields began, completing the permanent intimacy with the ever-cycling crop and raw Nature, always lying in wait to punish weakness, indolence or misfortune.
Seated at the long table in the clean, modern kitchen we talked of the Native Americans that I was passionate to visit and whose lands border these farms. Nobody had much time for the indigenous inhabitants of Dakota, especially Gary’s father who had lived alongside the Sioux all his life. He had a distinct manner of speech that might have been a throwback to the days before the combine and the tractor revolutionised life on the prairie.
‘The Federal Government pays them Indians… 1,200 dollars a month,’ he said without bitterness, pausing before mentioning the sum of money, then picking it out as though it were spoken in italics. ‘They’re given houses, food and free education, and what do they do? They… spend… half the money on beer. And the rest? Why… they blow it to the wind… that’s what they do.’
I almost began to ask a stupid question stemming from theories of equality I had heard back East, then had the sense to cut off a piece of my steak and shove that in my mouth instead. None of these intelligent, responsible people argued with what was clearly considered self-evident. Offering a different point of view would have been irrelevant, pointless and damaging. I’d learned years before that for a short-term guest to criticise a host’s strongly held opinions is not only rude, it can cut off further communication as surely as drawing a blind. Besides, a stranger’s remarks are generally seen by the man in the front line as ill-informed, and are discounted.
‘You wait and you’ll see,’ continued the farmer, his face lined to the bone by seventy sub-zero winters and the desiccating winds of as many blazing summers. ‘Go to Pine Ridge and see how they live. It’s a shame how they… waste… their land.’
The Weather Channel promised storms by the evening of the third day, with 50 per cent chance of hail. The combines pressed on with renewed effort as the clouds gathered. This was the fourth day the Korn boys had worked this farm. They had known the family for years and were apprehensive for them, but you can no more rush a combine than you can a sailing ship. Wayne and Travis kept to their cabs and I accompanied Pokey to the elevators where the atmosphere was so dust-filled that no man could work there and hope to survive for long. Masks were required, of course, but masks are rather like crash helmets to a Western American motorcyclist; to be worn when absolutely unavoidable, but otherwise shunned as a restraint on freedom. The inside of the hoist was like a cathedral, dark and echoing. Above us, the silo soared skywards like a round-topped spire.
Roz had been fascinated by the sight of the wheat being churned around and whirled into the maw of Cody’s combine, so she stayed in the cool cab, contemplating the catharsis of the year as the storm clouds gathered, chatting of family and the practicalities of living life in Missouri. Cody’s even temperament had survived the tragedy of two lost chidren. He kept himself busy, he said, which helped balance his mind. As Roz talked the day away with the quiet man of the outfit, he told her Wayne and he were considering making an offer on Betty Boop if ever she became redundant. They’d both sampled her around Gordon and, like the rest of the world, seemed to have fallen in love with her. Roz suspected that this idea was equivalent to the acquisitive infatuation sailors feel for all manner of unlikely items thay see in far lands. ‘These guys remind me of seamen,’ she said to me late one night. ‘They’re staring at the horizon, but really, they’re thinking of home.’
The last of Gary’s grain came in half an hour before the storm broke. Watching the precipitation sweep towards us like a scythe riding on gale force winds, we rushed the bikes and Wayne’s truck into the barn to keep them from the otherwise inevitable damage. We beat the weather by seconds. The stones were not the tennis-ball-sized grapeshot we’d been shown down in the sandhills, but they would have done well as musket balls and would surely have destroyed all our paintwork. The hailstorm blew off to leeward after fifteen minutes, leaving us all hanging about shell-shocked. Gary looked as though he could hardly believe how closely he had been let off the hook for another season. The rest of us were glad for him, but fearful for his neighbour. The hail had mostly scattered off the road and piled into the sides, where it was melting as fast as ice in a cooking pot. The gleaming truck was stuck behind the bikes and Gary’s car, so Wayne borrowed Betty Boop and chugged away up the road while the rest of us drank coffee with the farmer’s wife. He was back in a half-hour.
‘Sure enjoyed the ride, Ma’am,’ he said to Roz, polite as always, but for once not smiling. Then he turned to the company. ‘But the next job’s a mess.’
The boys agreed that the best they could do was rally round, help the poor guy salvage what he could and hope his insurance didn’t renege. What remained of the job wouldn’t take up all the time allotted for it and so far they had had good fortune from the weat
her, leaving them a week or more ahead of schedule. It was even possible that they would win enough days to go back to see their families while they were waiting for their next crop to ripen up on the Canadian border.
‘Can’t I stay on here, Dad?’ demanded Travis immediately. ‘You know Ma’ll grab me for the start of school if we go home, and you need me to drive.’
The parallel with my own daughter’s upbringing was obvious. Year after year, she had been a week or three late for the autumn term so that she could complete some voyage or other in the family boat. She had taken no harm. Even if his wife disagreed, Wayne clearly thought as we did. Travis could well miss a fortnight’s schooling, his father said to me later.
‘I was just testing to see how he really felt. We’ll hide him away clear of the schoolroom until the job’s over. The plains will take up the slack.’
Roz and I returned to Gordon for the last time after sharing an impromptu harvest supper with the whole team. As my headlamp blazed ahead into the starry night, I realised that watching the Nebraska cattle families and the plains farmers living their compromise with the ancient prairies was giving me the beginnings of an understanding of the underlying strength of the United States. Roz had remarked in Baltimore that America is too close to its past to recognise itself. In these parts, it seemed almost as if the past had never finished at all, and that the life the settlers risked everything for had been found and kept. My overall impressions had been very different in the multi-cultured cities of the East, and I concluded that the ordinary people of the plains were somehow cleansed by the unavoidable certainties of Nature which confront them every minute. Theirs is the life of freedom, secured by service to the family, the nation and their god, that the Constitution of the United States foresaw.
14
A CLOSE CALL ON
THE RESERVATION
I settled into my personal, vibrating semi-consciousness, reflecting as I rode that even the Colonial Motel had turned out to have its dark side. I was suffering from back pain that morning as a result of several bad nights in a bed that for the money should have been a lot more comfortable.
‘Lumpy,’ was the verdict.
Apropos of nothing in particular, Pokey had told us that the manageress had used our room while her apartment was being renovated. The day before we left, she was not in her office when I went to settle in advance for our final night. Various people were hanging around the check-in, and finally the owner of the place showed up to find the manager’s apartment stripped and the cash-box empty. The good woman had ‘done a runner’ with the proceeds.
‘She always treated us right,’ Wayne said as he started up his sparkling truck. ‘Nice lady.’
That last evening, Roz and I had given up trying to convince ourselves the bed was tolerable, so we chucked the mattress on to the floor, always the last-ditch answer. As it had come away from the base, the mattress revealed a stash of a dozen or more empty bottles of gin and vodka tossed at random between it and its supporting springs.
I was still chuckling about the excesses of our unusual hostess when we came up with a throng on horseback following the high roads towards Pine Ridge. The altitude had been imperceptibly rising for hundreds of miles as the plains rolled towards the Rockies so that we now enjoyed blissful relief from the noonday heat, with cool mornings and evenings. For some reason I could not identify, once inside Indian country, the land actually felt higher and, as the outsiders had promised, the organised wheat-fields were replaced by unkempt, yellow-brown prairie. The first indication of the travellers was a tailback of traffic along the two-lane highway. Next, a dust cloud could be seen rising ahead. Finally, we trundled past a hundred or more full-blooded Native Americans, men, women and children, meandering towards the town. Perhaps a third straddled ponies, the rest were on foot. The ponies were athletic-looking creatures, light-coloured with bold brown or black markings. The horsemen went bareback. Many had long hair with coloured headbands like the Apache warriors of my schoolboy comic books; one or two wore feathers slung point-up. Beads and brightly patterned cloth swung in the sunshine, and there was a joyous lack of formality in the way the group moved amongst themselves. A mounted man trotted by, half-turning on his pony’s back to joke with a bunch behind him, youngsters scampered here and there, almost between the horses’ feet, women swayed along chatting amongst themselves, and the whole crowd ebbed and flowed out on to the blacktop, seemingly unaware of the traffic jam. Like just about everyone else in North America, however, they registered the bikes, waving and calling as we trickled slowly ahead.
The Indians could have been heading up to Medicine Lodge 120 years ago to meet Black Kettle and Standing Bear, such was the effect of their costume and the totally non-Caucasian dynamics of their interplay. They reflected the high sun softly from their buckskin and wampum, we shot it back off our chrome and steel like helio mirrors, yet with the styling of our leather saddlebags, our scarves drifting in the wind and the essentially ‘Western equestrian’ seating position of the Harley-Davidson, we were far more in harmony with the scene than any of the air-conditioned cars and their white inhabitants.
Why this tribe were on the road remained unclear for only a short while. We were low on fuel when we arrived at the settlement of Pine Ridge, so our first stop in the main town of a reservation the size of Yorkshire, was the local filling station which was also the most significant building around, part store, part restaurant and automotive centre. Before we had even opened our tank caps, a heavily built young Indian descended on us aboard a 1971 Harley held together with wire and string. Sid Half-Head wore no helmet, his long braided hair flowed over his leather shirt and his breath suggested he’d enjoyed a liquid lunch. We had met one or two Indians back at Gordon, handsome men with high cheekbones, cowboy kit, dark ponytails and perhaps a thin necklace of wampum beneath the open necks of cotton shirts. Sid didn’t have their figure, but he had the broadest face I’d ever seen off an Inuit. There was no doubting his ancestry. He admired our topof-the-line modern machines, which were clearly beyond his wildest financial aspirations, without even a tinge of envy.
‘Evolution engines,’ he nodded, referring to our motor units, a marque introduced comparatively recently. ‘They as reliable as folks say?’
‘We’ve come all the way from the East Coast and they haven’t missed a beat.’
Sid shook his head and I inquired about the travelling tribe now weaving its way into town.
‘Sioux nation pow-wow,’ he announced with pride. ‘Starts tomorrow. Folks’ll be gatherin’ from all over. North Dakota, Montana; Iowa even. Plenty here already.’
We parked the bikes and ambled across the street with him to the yard of a wooden building where four young girls in full tribal regalia were being quizzed by a group of female elders. Neither Roz nor I could make head or tail of the proceedings. I turned to ask Sid, but he had bored quickly and split, leaving us on our own in a small crowd of local onlookers. The girls seemed to be giving résumés, after which they were cross-examined on what appeared to my mind the most banal issues.
‘They’re being assessed for the Queen of the pow-wow,’ a midrange voice spoke up from my elbow. Looking down, I found myself pressed against a well-endowed Indian woman of around thirty. She looked me in the eye, paused, then continued, ‘To be selected is an honour.’
This fine-looking lady promptly introduced herself and started to fill me in on her experiences on the back of various motorcycles, complete with intimate details. When she picked up the fact that Roz was there too, she turned from me and started work cutting her down to size. Roz’s Spitfire-pilot father, her childhood in the caravan at the end of the runway, the ‘Clergy Daughters’ public school and the heavy-duty motorcycling suddenly sounded excruciatingly middle class when our friend announced that although she had rarely left Pine Ridge, she had taken full advantage of the educational opportunities offered to Native Americans and had a degree and was daughter to one of the tribal elders. What clinched h
er superiority was being the great-granddaughter of one of the young chiefs who forsook the white man’s imposed reservation. They had chosen instead to live free with Crazy Horse in those dangerous years leading up to the annihilation of General Custer in the summer of 1876. Together with Rain in the Face, Black Foot and a number of other sub-chiefs under Sitting Bull, these warriors are among the most charismatic men in American history, but their triumph was so inevitably brief that few of them survived to see their ancestral hunting grounds turned into wheat-fields. The Oglala Teton Sioux chief, Red Cloud, managed an uneasy compromise, persuading his people to subsist on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but Sitting Bull was ultimately assassinated and Crazy Horse lost his life in suspicious circumstances. In 1890, Black Foot was cut down with hundreds of his unarmed kinsfolk, many of them old men, women and children, in the determining massacre by the US Army at Wounded Knee.
All this remained in the back of my mind as the young lady worked out that ours were the two bikes parked over the road. Turning her back on the beauty queen competition, she took my arm and asked in a matey sort of way for a lift to the field on the edge of town where the pow-wow was apparently gaining momentum.
‘You have to be there,’ she was saying. ‘Big party, music, dancing, and great conversation. You can pitch your tent by the teepees.’
Roz expressed an understandable ambivalence at this offer.
‘Isn’t it just for Sioux?’
‘The pow-wow is for anyone feeling the spirit move them,’ responded our self-appointed tour guide serenely, leading the way across the stream of traffic to the bikes. From the safety of air-conditioned cars, RVs and virgin four-tracks, passing tourists stared at the Indians, but few made the move to come out into the open. It crossed my mind that perhaps they all knew something I didn’t, but it seemed churlish to refuse this enthusiast a lift.