Another Fine Mess Read online

  For Henry’s sake, I should have left it there. But I couldn’t, and Charles had to hear me bang on about soya lecithin, found in 60 per cent of America’s processed food and therefore a chief culprit in the nation’s obesity epidemic. And then bang on further about high-fructose corn syrup, an offshoot of the ethanol corn boom, and the sweetener that does the damage in most American soda drinks.

  ‘Poor Henry,’ I sighed. ‘He’d have really hated all that.’

  Poor Charles. ‘Ee-huh,’ he said.

  It became plain after a while – a much longer while than it should have – that the Toyne fields were rather less square than I’d expected; that they were, indeed, completely circular. Charles now explained the technique known as pivot farming, in which wheeled irrigation platforms, typically a quarter-mile long, rotate very slowly around a post fixed to the centre of a corn-planted circle. Viewed from above, the effect on the landscape is extraordinary. Inspect Sedgwick on Google Earth, and you might be forgiven for thinking that an unusually ambitious conceptual artist had been given free rein along the South Platte valley. In fact, you could look down on much of the Great Plains and wonder the same: Charles told me I’d been driving through pivot country for days. ‘It’s just so much easier,’ he said. ‘My dad can actually do most of his farming on his laptop via GPS.’

  How little American agriculture – intensive, automated, industrial – now shared with its T-era counterpart. Someone had told me back in Alabama that tobacco farming didn’t die out in the state due to a drop in demand, but because it was such a wearisome pain in the arse: by the time the crop was taken away, the farmer would have handled every individual stem a dozen times. The price of mechanised efficiency, I guessed, was a disconnection from the land. The Toynes didn’t have a vegetable patch or any fruit trees, and Charles said that in common with every farm around all their corn was genetically modified. Another legacy of Ford and his Greenfield Village chums, who had proven the superiority of man over beast, and science over nature.

  At high noon and sunset, and once in between, we drove back into town and parked up outside RD’s bar. The burgers were microwaved and the ale weak, and a number of patrons had ignored the sign in the dingy men’s room that urged them not to spit tobacco in the urinal. But none of that seemed to matter – certainly not to Charles, who only ever ordered root beer. There were always four or five trucker-capped guys at the bar, elbows on the sticky wood with a bottle of 3.2 planted between them, some gazing silently at the baseball, others mumbling to their neighbour about tornadoes, destruction derbies, the rattlesnake Dwayne’s wife just found in her washing machine. The one constant was an aged beanpole in a denim shirt. I heard his name was Lee, that he was three-quarter Sioux, that he’d served in Vietnam. But Lee never spoke, or, come to think of it, moved.

  I put in some big hours at that bar, plucking straw from my sleeves and burrs from my dusted trousers, occasionally saying something nobody quite understood, downing bottle after bottle of watery beer. ‘Gotta admire your nerve trying to drive that thing across this country,’ said the guy sat next to me on the first night. ‘Took your chance and just took off, right? That was pretty brave.’ His game wink said, That was totally moronic. On the second I was buttonholed by the local bullshitter: ‘I was US national taekwondo champion, but they took my title away ’cos I kept beating guys up too bad.’ A generous fraction of small-towners do like spinning yarns, which may go some way to explaining their remarkable tolerance of the crap-talker-in-chief they’ve saddled themselves with.

  All the while a steady stream of apprehensive young out-of-towners would sidle in, bleep a wad of notes out of the bar’s ATM, and sidle out. ‘Pot shop only takes cash,’ a water engineer called Mark explained. He outlined the redneck rationale that had persuaded this very traditional community to approve the dispensary. ‘Maybe when I’m older I’ll get arthritis, and maybe I’ll find out that rubbing in some marijuana cream gets me through it. You start telling me I can’t do that, know what I’d say? Huh? Huh?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘I’d say fuck you!’

  (Sedgwick, I learned, was proudly notorious for lawless rebellion: RD’s 3.2 licence had for many decades allowed it to serve teenagers, who flocked there from Nebraska and ran riot. The town remains a magnet for hard-partying good-timers of all ages, courtesy of a remarkable loophole-cum-tradition in which the police have tacitly agreed never to set foot in its streets.)

  Charles rarely spoke, but when he did it was worth waiting for.

  ‘I know a lot of folk think I’m crazy, but goat-meat is going to really come on in the next five years.

  ‘I saw fifty raccoons on the night of the last full moon.

  ‘My brother’s got an anti-tank gun. He’s the fire chief.

  ‘So that guy who just left has been trying to pair his daughter off with me. I would like that, guess I would really like that. But I can tell she isn’t keen. Ee-huh.’

  I didn’t think 3.2 would ever do the job, but it must have, because every night I’d stamp up the Antique Inn’s echoing stairs, flomp on to my big old iron bed with a medley of coffin creaks and bouncy love noise, stare up at the lofty ceiling and think: I want to make America great again.

  The valves – four oversized steel golf tees – arrived on the third morning, and Charles and I got to work outside his shop under the sardonic gaze of Wrath, a ginger tom, who monitored proceedings from Mike’s roof. (‘Envy got herself poisoned a few months back,’ said Charles. ‘Lust comes to visit me every couple days. Ee-huh.’) Installing the valves was easy enough, at least once Charles had fabricated an appropriate tool by angle-grinding a load of chain links in half and welding them into the jaws of a great big pair of pliers. Then he disappeared into a shed that had once housed an ill-starred partridge-breeding experiment, grovelled noisily about, and returned with what looked very much like a child’s safety dart, the type with a little suction cup on the tip. ‘After today,’ he intoned, holding it gravely to my face, ‘you won’t ever want to see this thing again.’

  Lapping valves is pretty straightforward. To create the desired air-tight fit between the bevelled underside of the valve and its seat in the engine block, simply apply a smear of abrasive compound to the valve rim, affix the suction cup of your lapping tool to the valve face, lower it into the seat and get whittling. That’s all there is to it. Just smear and whittle. And whittle. And smear. And whittle, and whittle and whittle and keep whittling until palms shriek and wrists die and Wrath gazes pitilessly down from on high.

  We shared the torture in strict rotation, doing 100-whittle shifts. The first valve took us two hours. To ease access for the second, we removed the manifold – an initially vexatious task that became very much easier after the whole thing snapped in half. Charles at length unearthed a spare manifold in a cobwebbed heap of T parts his grandfather had salvaged over many distant decades. It was warped and rusty, and of a rather different design to its fractured predecessor – indeed so different that we would in due course have to fashion a bespoke gasket out of cardboard. But before we could do that, there was much whittling to be done. So very much whittling. We whittled until the great big sky went orange at the edges, casting a gilded beauty across Charles’s junkyard. We whittled until Wrath stretched, yawned and hopped down and away into the gloaming. And at last, under moonlight and a twinkling planetarium of stars, we reassembled Mike and fired him up.

  ‘Ee-huh, it would be pretty easy to finish the bottle.’

  I’d never seen Charles drink, but our epic endeavour demanded a toast, and he’d provided it by unscrewing a home-mixed blend of tequila and Mountain Dew. This proved a surprisingly agreeable combo, but I had to drive the T back to the Antique Inn and wasn’t quite ready for induction into Sedgwick’s brotherhood of reckless rebels. So I pressed a wad of twenties from my grubby, red-raw hand into his, then shook it and drove off into the chilly blackness, the flickering half-light of the T’s main beam picking out haystacks and a long-nec
ked, fluffy goatherd.

  It was hard to leave Sedgwick. I’d been there long enough to see the twice-a-week freight train rattle lethargically through, across the rotting timbers laid over the end of Main Avenue. Long enough to know that Lupe and a cashier at the gas station near the interstate were the only Democrats in town. Long enough to become a bit of a local character. ‘’Ello, Guvnor,’ called out a purple-haired gothette in fluent Dick Van Dyke, walking towards the pot-shop staff door as I wedged my holdall into the running-board bag-rack the next morning. ‘’Ave a bloody good day.’ This lonely little town had joined the growing ranks of Trump Belt communities that had done me proud in the cheeriest, most selfless and least Trumpy manner imaginable.

  Mike was running fast and furious, firing on all cylinders but breathing out through a bent manifold bodged in with rust and cardboard. We roared back into Nebraska on US-30, a stretch of the Lincoln Highway that was America’s first transnational road, connecting New York with San Francisco: dedicated in 1913, and fully paved within twenty-five years. Towns that had thrived in the service of this trailblazing artery now lay bereft, full of derelict motels and gas stations. Some bore the dread legend ‘UNINCORPORATED’ under their signposted names, bankrupt and now governed by a larger, richer neighbour – the shameful fate that had so nearly befallen Sedgwick. At the Antique Inn I’d found an old compendium of local news, in which the 1970 opening of Interstate 80 was celebrated by a monochrome crowd of thousands. Poor fools, saluting the march of progress, tragically unaware that the life-giving through traffic which sustained their towns would have vanished come daybreak. The Ford giveth and the Ford taketh away.

  As an experienced Great Plains farmer I now felt more engaged with the environment. I knew my buffalo grass from my needle grass, my bluffs from my buttes. For long hours I followed the old Pony Express route, a history proudly related by regular interpretation boards. You had to read the small print to learn that this fabled institution existed for just twenty months. And for long days I criss-crossed the Oregon Trail, which from the 1830s to the railway age transported 400,000 settlers into the untamed west, a five-month journey by wagon.

  Nebraska never endured a gold rush and so was spared the associated boozy, shooty depredations. The folk who got off the trail here were peaceable homesteaders, drawn by the government act that allowed settlers to claim up to 160 acres of land if they could ‘prove up’, by building a home and cultivating the virgin land for five years. The Homestead Act wasn’t repealed until 1986; in 1974, Vietnam veteran Ken Deardorff became the last American to file a claim under it, when he proved up on 80 acres of Alaskan wilderness. Less than half those first-wave homesteaders succeeded, but the Nebraskan cohort was a hardy one and would in due course claim 45 per cent of the state’s windy flatlands, the highest proportion in the US. Most were European farmers, doughty cultivators whose efforts intensified in the late nineteenth century, with the spread of steel ploughs and mechanical reapers. Within a generation this weaponisation of European-pattern farming had planted wheat right across the prairies and beyond. Within two it had wrought a disaster from which many small towns would never recover.

  The Dustbowl was an entirely man-made tragedy. Those early settlers were blessed with rains that delivered bumper harvests; when the more typical prairie droughts began to kick in, they put their faith in superstition. ‘Rain follows the plough’ was a maxim from the Field of Dreams school of rural delusion, a belief that the turning over of earth in ever greater quantity would somehow cause the skies to darken and leak. What it actually did was offer up 100 million acres of loose, dry topsoil to the wind gods, who gratefully dispersed it in dust storms that buried 300,000 square miles of farmland during the 1930s. Almost all the places I’d driven through since the Texas panhandle had suffered, many of them terminally. More than 350,000 desperate ‘Okies’ abandoned their homes and drove west (I feel the need to point out that the refugee family who had such a terrible time in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath didn’t have it in a Model T, but a 1926 Hudson Super Six).

  On 10 May 1934, a single ‘black blizzard’ picked up an estimated 650 million tons of Great Plains topsoil and dropped 12 million of them on Chicago the next day. Farmers suffocated in their fields. Cattle were blinded. Seven thousand people died from ‘dust pneumonia’, most of them children. The whole grim episode was a reminder of the damage mankind can wreak when introduced into a virgin environment as a tooled-up invasive species. Another reminder: the sixty-five million buffalo who roamed the plains when the Europeans arrived had been culled to a few hundred by 1900, many shot for fun or profit, but most done in by the barbed wire that girdled every Great Plains farm and ranch, cutting them off from food and water.

  Nebraska seemed wholesome and low key: one of the first states I’d been through that was neither thriving nor in obvious decline, just peaceably holding its own. As a blunt yardstick, West Virginia – a state with an almost identical population – suffers more than seven times as many fatal overdoses. Nebraska was still pretty damn Trumpy, though. Just past the formidable wall of stripy rock that is Scotts Bluff I drove by a huge home-made billboard with large images of George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Trump beneath the slogan: ‘IT’S TIME FOR GREATNESS AGAIN!’

  The Donald had been on holiday for a fortnight, a delicious respite brought to a very unhappy end by events in Charlottesville, the sweet little college town where, in some previous life, my journey had begun. White nationalists had organised a rally in protest against the removal of two Confederate statues from the city’s parks; a local woman, Heather Heyer, was deliberately run over and killed at a counter-demonstration. I was deeply unsettled by a tragedy that seemed to strike so close to home. And that was before Trump waded in, his curiously camp and cartoonish tones – half Top Cat, half Dr Evil – squawking anew from the radio beside me. As I crossed the state line into Wyoming, he was blaming ‘both sides’ for the death, and opining that the white nationalist ranks included ‘some very fine people’. In a slightly faster and more substantial vehicle, I would have pulled a U-turn, headed back to Scotts Bluff and driven right through his face.

  I struck north into Wyoming on the CanAm Highway, heading above 4,000 feet through the final frontiers of European conquest. The signs outside most towns offered an incorporation date in the T era, and every landmark had a hard-bitten, pioneer ring to it: Deadman Draw, Rawhide Creek, Mule Junction. One sleepless motel night I discovered that Wyoming and Colorado are the only two completely rectangular states in the union, mapped out with a few idle swipes of an official’s rulered pencil. Bish-bosh, who cares, no one’s out there anyway. Not even a token nubbin of panhandle.

  ‘NEXT GAS 81 MILES’ read the sign that sent me out of Lusk, the introduction to an under-watered, under-nourished wilderness of sickly ranchland. Every half-hour I’d pass a low-slung farmhouse insulated by an outer wall of baled hay, just waiting to be snowed in. The average Wyomingite drives 17,735 miles a year across these lonesome expanses, a third more than residents of any other state and four times the European average. They also went Trump with unequalled enthusiasm: Hillary Clinton secured just 55,973 votes in a state larger than the UK.

  That leaky manifold grew steadily louder, an uncouth, flatulent rasp that delivered draughts of exhaust gas straight into the cabin, and meant every yank on the throttle lever came with a pained wince. And as the road tilted up into the Black Hills and crossed 5,000 feet, the intermittent misfire that had been plaguing Mike like a stubborn cough for weeks became suddenly more regular. These racking, spluttering paroxysms always sounded terminal, yet just as we seemed set to coast to a silent halt he would suddenly recover, hacking out whatever had been stuck in his throat and roaring gleefully onwards.

  Gold was first struck in the Black Hills in 1874, by a US Army prospecting team under the command of General Custer, a vainglorious egomaniac whose principal goal appears to have been to carve his name into as many mountaintops as possible. In consequence, his party nev
er found more than a few flakes, and freelance gold-diggers pitched up with modest expectations. On 9 April 1876, two months before Custer’s recklessness would do for himself and 267 comrades at Little Big Horn, four prospectors – Fred and Moses Manuel, Hank Harney and Alex Engh – staked a lode claim to an outcrop near Deadwood, on the South Dakota side of the hills. They had just discovered the vein of gold that would provide 10 per cent of the word’s total production for more than a hundred years.