The nickname of North Dakota is the “Flickertail State.” That morning I saw why. Mile after mile, the small ground squirrels stood at attention along the highway. As my truck approached one, the little rodent would make a madcap, high-tailed dash for the other side, only to stop a couple of feet from the shoulder before turning around and making a last-ditch dive for the side it had started from. Again and again it happened. It looked like some sort of crazy game in which the losers were mashed clots of fur. Over many of the flattened rodents, a second one stood; I thought they mourned, but someone later told me flickertails have a keen tooth for flickertail flesh.
A sign pointed north to Backoo. Backoo, North Dakota, may not be the only town in America named after an Australian river (the Barcoo), but then again, maybe it is. I went to see it, or, as it turned out, to see what was left, which was: the Burlington Northern tracks, a grain elevator, grocery, boarded-up school, church, and a thimble of a post office. The town had closed for Saturday, so I started back to the highway when the smell of gasoline stopped me. I lifted the hood. The fuel line below the gas filter had split and was arcing a fine jet of no-lead into the sunlight. I tried to wire it closed, but it didn’t work.
I made for Cavalier, the nearest town. Had I not gone to Backoo, the line would have ruptured in Cavalier instead of miles up the road. So logic would dictate. The fact is, engine malfunctions happen only in places like Backoo, North Dakota. Axiom of the blue road. The gauge—visibly—dropped toward E, and the long miles went on. Damn, did they go on.
I couldn’t remember how much money I had left, but I did know strangers with stalled vehicles get soaked in isolated towns. Axiom of the blue road. That two-inch plastic gas line, of course, should cost no more than a quarter, but in the realm of high technology you don’t figure the simplicity or inexpense of an element, you calculate availability.
At Cavalier I pulled into the first garage I saw, and a teenaged boy with the belly of a man came out and stared. People don’t just throw words around in the North. I lifted the hood to show him the line. I didn’t speak either.
“Sumbitch’s likely to catch fire!” he said.
“I know that. Can you fix it?”
“Pull the sumbitch in the bay fast and shut her down. Goddamn!” He backed off a safe distance as I drove in.
“Have you got that hose?” Here it comes, I thought.
He pointed toward a big coil of hose hanging on the greasy wall. “Fix every sumbitch in the state if we had to.” The boy’s blackened hands grappled with the connection. He struggled, cut himself, cursed, and took off on an analgesic tour of the grease pit, blood seeping from his oily finger. I picked up the pliers and tried to free the clamp. My hand slipped as the connection popped loose, and I cut my finger. The boy sliced a piece of hose off the coil and clamped it in place. “That’ll take care of the sumbitch,” he said.
“Very speedy service. What do I owe you?” Here we go.
“A dime for the hose and two bucks for labor—that’ll take care of the leak. But it won’t do nothing about the real problem under your hood.” Here it comes for sure. “Water pump’s about to go.” He grabbed the fan blades and pulled them back and forth. “Shouldn’t be no play in the fan. When those bearings give, fan’s coming through your radiator and that’ll be all she wrote.”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”
“How long’s it been like that?”
“About nine thousand miles, I guess.”
He slapped his forehead to indicate my stupidity. “Suummbitch!”
“Trying to buy a little time.”
“You’re gonna buy a lot more than time when that sumbitch goes. I wouldn’t even drive the sumbitch to Hoople.”
“How far’s Hoople?”
“Eighteen miles.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Wouldn’t try. Take the sumbitch to the Ford dealer.”
So I did. The service man said, “Can’t get parts on Saturday. In fact, I couldn’t get a pump before Monday afternoon—if then. All of our parts come out of Grand Forks, so you might as well drive down there yourself.”
“Can I make it?” For nine thousand miles I hadn’t worried, but now I worried about seventy.
“Quién sabe, podnah? You know? Maybe you make it home. Then again, maybe you won’t make it to Hoople.”
I went down state 18 toward Grand Forks and wondered what this Hoople place was that figured as a basic guide to distance in Pembina County, North Dakota. I couldn’t get to Grand Forks before five o’clock, so I drove slowly, relaxed in my fate. The truck had carried me to the Atlantic Ocean and then to the Pacific and halfway back to the Atlantic. But now, of course, the sumbitch might not make it to Hoople.
10
WHO in America would guess that Grand Forks, North Dakota, was a good place to be stuck in with a bad water pump? Skyscrapers from the thirties, clean as a Norwegian kitchen, a state university with brick, big trees, and ivy. On Monday morning the pump got replaced in an hour for $37.50. I had expected to be taken for three times that figure, but I met only honest people.
I drove up the valley of the Red River of the North (which empties into Hudson Bay) and crossed into Oslo, Minnesota. Near Viking, tall stalks from the sunflower crop of a year earlier rattled in the warm wind. For miles I had been seeing a change in the face of the Northland brought about because Americans find it easier to clean house paint out of brushes with water than with turpentine. This area once grew much of the flax that linseed oil comes from, but with the advent of water-base paint, the demand for flax decreased; in its stead, of all things, came the sunflower, and now it was becoming the big cash crop of the Dakotas and Minnesota—with more acreage going each year to new hybrids developed from Russian seeds—because “flower” is a row crop that farmers can economically reap by combine after the grain harvest.
Thief River Falls, another town of Nordic cleanliness, reportedly got its name through an odd mingling of history and language. A group of Dakota Sioux lived on the rich hunting grounds here for some years. Although the bellicose Chippewa controlled the wooded territory, the Dakotas managed to conceal a remote settlement by building an earthen wall around it and disappearing inside whenever the enemy came near. They even hunted with bows and arrows rather than risk the noise of guns. But the Chippewa finally found them out and annihilated them. Because the mounds hid a portion of the river, the Chippewa referred to it as “Secret Earth River.” Through some error, early white traders called it “Stealing Earth River”; through additional misunderstanding, it came to be “Thief River.” As for Crookston downstream, it took its name from a railroad man.
South of Thief River Falls, on U.S. 59, I crossed the Clearwater River; but this one, unlike a dozen others of that name I’d seen in the past weeks, was true to its description. It drained a country that became increasingly heavy with aspen, birch, pine, and spruce. I had come to the western edge of the North Woods. The prairie was gone.
On the Clearwater River and upstream from Clearwater Lake and down the highway from the hamlet of Clearbrook was the seat of Clearwater County: Bagley, a village with pines and a blue lake, a village where the names on the buildings were Lukkasson, Olson, Peterson, Lundmark. I stopped for the night and went to the Viking House Cafe for a Viking omelette (cheese, ham, green peppers, onions) and a chocolate milkshake. To the waitress in long flaxen braids, I said, “Who’s the most famous native son of Bagley, Minnesota?”
“Oh, my golly! I’ll ask the cook.” When she returned with dinner, she said, “That would be Richard Davids, author of How to Talk to Birds.”
Two old men, spectacles like dusty windows, sat slurping broth and arguing about Indian net fishing on the Lake of the Woods Reservation in the Northwest Angle, the northernmost part of the lower forty-eight.
“I never cut an Indian net,” one said, “but I never discouraged a fishing partner from cutting. No redskin should have to buy a license to fish reservation land, but he ought to f
ish fair.”
The words came slowly, with long pauses; in the silences, the soft clacking of dentures. “Indians got first rights,” the other said. “They fish for a living. You fish for fun.”
“Law’s law or it ain’t law.”
The waitress said, “You boys on the fishing rights again?”
They had trouble hearing her, although she spoke louder than either of them. Maybe, after so many years, they didn’t need to hear each other.
Louder, she asked, “Who won the argument tonight?”
“I did,” they said.
“It’s a good friendship where everyone’s a winner.”
“What’s that, honey?” they said.
I walked down to the bakery, the one with flour sacks for sale in the front window and bowling trophies above the apple turnovers. The people of the northern midlands—the Swedes and Norgies and Danes—apparently hadn’t heard about the demise of independent, small-town bakeries; most of their towns had at least one.
With a bag of blueberry tarts, I went up Main to a tin-sided, false-front tavern called Michel’s, just down the street from the Cease Funeral Home. The interior was log siding and yellowed knotty pine. In the backroom the Junior Chamber of Commerce talked about potatoes, pulpwood, dairy products, and somebody’s broken fishing rod. I sat at the bar. Behind me a pronghorn antelope head hung on the wall, and beside it a televised baseball game cast a cool light like a phosphorescent fungus.
“Hear that?” a dwindled man asked. He was from the time when boys drew “Kilroy-Was-Here” faces on alley fences. “Did you hear the announcer?”
“I wasn’t listening.”
“He said ‘velocity.’”
“Velocity?”
“He’s talking about a fastball. A minute ago he said a runner had ‘good acceleration.’ This is a baseball game, not a NASA shot. And another thing: I haven’t heard anybody mention a ‘Texas leaguer’ in years.”
“It’s a ‘bloop double’ now, I think.”
“And the ‘banjo hitter’—where’s he? And what happened to the ‘slow ball’?”
“It’s a ‘change-up.’”
The man got me interested in the game. We watched and drank Grain Belt. He had taught high school civics in Minneapolis for thirty-two years, but his dream had been to become a sports announcer.
“They put a radar gun on the kid’s fastball a few minutes ago,” he said. “Ninety-three point four miles per hour. That’s how they tell you speed now. They don’t try to show it to you: ‘smoke,’ ‘hummer,’ ‘the high hard one.’ I miss the old clichés. They had life. Who wants to hit a fastball with a decimal point when he can tie into somebody’s ‘heat’? And that’s another thing: nobody ‘tattoos’ or ‘blisters’ the ball anymore. These TV boys are ruining a good game because they think if you can see it they’re free to sit back and psychoanalyze the team. Ask and I’ll tell you what I think of it.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Beans. And that’s another thing too.”
“Beans?”
“Names. Used to be players named Butterbean and Big Potato, Little Potato. Big Poison, Little Poison. Dizzy and Daffy. Icehouse, Shoeless Joe, Suitcase, The Lip. Now we’ve got the likes of Rickie and Richie and Reggie. With names like that, I think I’m watching a third-grade scrub team.”
The announcer said the pitcher had “good location.”
“Great God in hemlock! He means ‘nibble the corners.’ But which of these throwing clowns nibbles corners? They’re obsessed with speed. Satchel Paige—there’s a name for you—old Satch could fire the pill a hundred and five miles an hour. He didn’t throw it that fast very often because he couldn’t make the ball cut up at that speed. And, sure as spitting, his pitching arm lasted just about his whole life.”
The man took a long smacking pull on his Grain Belt. “Damn shame,” he said. “There’s a word for what television’s turned this game into.”
“What’s the word?”
“Beans,” he said. “Nothing but beans and hot air.”
11
WERE it not for a web-footed rodent and a haberdashery fad in eighteenth-century Europe, Minnesota might be a Canadian province today. The beaver, almost as much as the horse, helped shape the course of early American history. Some Mayflower colonists paid their passage with beaver pelts; and a good fur could bring an Indian three steel knives or a five-foot stack could bring a musket. But even more influential were the trappers and fur traders penetrating the great Northern wilderness between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains, since it was their presence that helped hold the Near West against British expansion from the north; and it was their explorations that opened the heart of the nation to white settlement. These men, by making pelts the currency of the wilds, laid the base for a new economy that quickly overwhelmed the old. And all because European men of mode simply had to wear a beaver hat.
That morning in Clearwater County, I was thinking about the beaver after one surfaced near where I had knelt to taste a stream coming from a dark, slick lake leaking spirals of mist. In a narrow strip of sky opening above the brook, a great blue heron somehow got its bulk airborne without snaring immense wings and long dangling legs in the close mesh of branches.
The lake was Itasca and the stream, a twelve-inch-deep rush of cold clarity over humps of boulders, was the Mississippi River. I crossed it in five steps. The Father of Waters, beginning a two-thousand-mile journey to join the source of all waters, was here a newborn—small and pure.
The name “Itasca,” despite its Indian sound, came from two Latin words, veritas caput (“true head”), that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft assembled. Schoolcraft—led by the Chippewa, Yellow Head—traced the Mississippi to Itasca in order to settle an old dispute about the source of the river (the fact is, several ponds feed Itasca). He recorded in his log that the area was full of “voracious, long-billed, dyspeptic mosquitoes,” and another explorer wrote that a swarm extinguished his lantern flame. A century and a half later, the dark timber still sounded with their whine, their proboscises were still alarmingly large and powerful. With every swat, I splattered a dozen bloody bugs over pants and shirt. An ordinary mosquito can penetrate the tough scutum of a rattlesnake, but Northwoods species can pierce the rind of stones.
Highway 200 took me eastward into the forest, past No Name Road. Late spring had been creeping north, and suddenly that day it pounced. Nobody was ready for the eighty-two degrees. At Walker on the south shore of Leech Lake, I stopped at the county museum; it was closed, but the handyman, John Day, let me in to fill my water jugs. He was half Chippewa and half French, and his son was legal counsel to the litigious Chippewa tribe living on the big reservation here. Day had been in the fifth assault wave on Iwo Jima and still limped from shrapnel he caught on the island.
“This could be July,” he said. “It can hit a hundred and five in July, and forty-five below in January. One hundred and fifty degrees of temperature is how we keep the riffraff out. When that doesn’t do it, then it’s up to the mosquitoes and leeches. If it wasn’t for them, and another thing or two, this piece of God’s country would be overrun with people.”
I took a slug of cold water from my jug and nearly choked. I’d just found one of the other things: drinking water that tasted like a mouthful of raw pig iron. Day said, “You see?”
He had retired from his job as a school custodian and lived now on Social Security, a Marine disability pension, and another from the school system. He worked at the museum for the occupation of it.
“I never worried about making a living,” he said, “but I’ve done thinking about making a life. It’s hard to know the difference sometimes, and it must be getting harder, judging by all them that don’t know the difference now.”
“What is the difference?”
“Best way to tell it is that if you’re trying to make a killing, what’s going to get killed is your life.”
The highway out of Walker went through Whipholt, past the
roads to the Indian towns of Boy River, Federal Dam, and Ball Club. The land alternated between marsh and aspen woods filled with white blossoms of wake robin. I came to the Mississippi again at Jacobson and stopped to get off the hot asphalt. The river was wider here, and it took me three attempts to shy a rock across. I walked up along the banks. The Mississippi, not a hundred water miles from its source, already flowed in olive murkiness.
Late afternoon. Downtown Duluth, if you ask me, hangs a little precariously to a volcanic bluff that drops six hundred feet to Lake Superior. The city revived in cool air that began to move off the blue lake stretching far eastward, finally so blending with sky that a horizon was almost indiscernible. It was as if Duluth sat on an edge of infinite blueness. The largest fresh water lake in the world (its volume is considerably greater than all the other Great Lakes combined), Superior is so big it has a three-inch tide.
Before the St. Lawrence Seaway made Duluth the most western Atlantic port, people used to say it was an old maid city looking under the bed each night for an ocean. Now Duluth has its ocean, and some citizens dream of a new Chicago here, although a lake that can freeze over for twenty miles out one-quarter of the year is something of a hindrance.
On Superior Street I ate smoked cisco, then crossed the bridge above St. Louis Bay into Superior, Wisconsin, then down broad and empty Belknap Street running from the ore docks past old walk-ups and corner taverns, on to route 35, and out of the city. It was dark when I turned south, and I couldn’t find a place for the night. Pattison State Park drove me away with a board full of regulations. The map promised Moose Junction, Dairyland, Cozy Corners—towns that proved either no longer to exist or to be three houses and a barn. Somewhere in Douglas County I began falling asleep at the wheel. I pulled up a side road.
Combing fingers through my dusty hair, my thumb struck a growth near my temple. I pushed back the hair and looked in the mirror. A goddamned tick. Another of those little things that keeps the riffraff out of God’s North country. I tweezered it out, undressed, and looked for more. One crawling my leg, one my shirt. I put a match to them. If you pull a tick in the first couple of hours, you have little to fear from the transmission of blood-borne diseases. So they say.