Another Fine Mess Read online

  The reward for brutally subduing a young animal in the shortest time, or staying upright on a furious older one for the longest, ought to have been nothing more than glory and a peck on the cheek from the South-East Montana Rodeo Princess. But perhaps more appositely, the event was another showcase for this nation’s bluntly fiscal concept of success. ‘Randy has only won $2,500 this season,’ sneered the PA after one especially quick-fire, flailing dethronement, ‘and with that performance he won’t be taking any cash home tonight.’ Donald Trump’s popularity depended heavily on his perceived status as a wealthy businessman, and the disdain he felt for even the most senior officials and bureaucrats he dealt with as president was founded on their mystifying, contemptible devotion to such poorly remunerated careers: ‘They max out at what, two hundred grand?’ Henry Ford felt the same disdain for impoverished intellectuals, guilty of ‘learning that had no earning power’.

  We filed outside, between a candyfloss cart and the Evangelising Children face-paint stall. How curious that America’s rural heartland still aligned itself with an age of tough-guy self-reliance which was over in the blink of an eye. The epic livestock drives that begat the iconic cowboy era began in 1867, when Texan horsemen escorted 36,000 cattle to the newly established rail head at Abilene, Kansas. Within twenty years they were history, rendered redundant by the railways’ western expansion. Buffalo Bill Cody, whose travelling Wild West roadshow spread the cowboy cult around the world, ironically abetted its demise: he made his first fortune supplying Kansas Pacific railroad workers with buffalo meat, shooting 4,280 animals on their behalf in eighteen months.

  The MTFCA forum rode once more to my assistance, but the region’s minuscule population density meant our closest available saviour lived 88 miles south, back over the state line in Wyoming. I was tempted to drive Mike to Scott Conger’s home – a tow would leave a small but irksome missing link in my transcontinental journey – but he begged me not to risk further engine damage. So in the morning I hired a car, then phoned a well-known national recovery firm and pretended to be Ross Lilleker, affecting a terrible Derbyshire accent for the hell of it. (This modest deception was conducted with Ross’s consent: before setting off I’d been thwarted in my attempts to secure breakdown cover without a domiciled US address.)

  ‘Lord, protect our new friend Tim, and get him to where he wants to go.’

  As we clasped hands around Scott and Althea Conger’s dinner table, I began to regret those fraud-update texts I’d sent them while we followed the tow truck in our hire car. ‘Ha ha – the breakdown guys fell for it!! Now on the road.’ ‘Remember, CALL ME ROSS in front of the driver!!’ Scott was not a modest-deception kind of guy. His most heinous profanity was ‘hellacious’; Diet Coke his solitary vice. Later that evening he told us that his life had changed one long-ago summer in Florida, when as a teenager he’d found himself at a fork in the road with ‘SOLVENT ABUSE’ pointing one way and ‘WATCHMAKING’ the other.

  The choice Scott had taken at this curious metaphorical junction was not obvious from his appearance. His long, greying hair blended into a cascading beard which hung in plaited shafts, like the wax from an ancient candle. Scott’s wild-eyed barks of laughter also seemed incompatible with a career that had ultimately delivered him from clocksmithery to aerospace engineering: he had designed the space shuttle’s robotic grab-arm.

  After a lifetime in the Sunshine State, Scott and Althea had recently plumped for early retirement and a dramatic relocation. Home was now a remote but very cosy wooden chalet stuck on a moon-like plain of windswept rocks, with the muscular peaks of Yellowstone ghosting up in the dusty distance. ‘I guess I’m a pioneer at heart,’ he said, passing round a platter of bratwurst, ‘and I felt I was losing track of that spirit in Florida.’ He shared a thoughtful look with Althea. ‘Also there are just way too many people down there, and we realised we didn’t really like any of them.’ Then a hoot of mad laughter. Shortly after Scott exchanged contracts on their new home, three of his nearest new Wyoming neighbours were shot dead by a pair of teenage meth-heads. I guess that’s the sort of shocking tragedy that might more routinely occur in Florida. But shortly after that, another neighbour lost half his face after inadvertently coming between a mother bear and her cubs when he went to put the trash out.

  Scott’s CV was not that of a slapdash guesstimator. The three Ts in his spotless shop stood in geometric alignment, and he wouldn’t let me order a new connecting rod from Ross until he’d measured the old one to the nearest thousandth of an inch. Althea was cut from the same precisely cut cloth: she had tweaked her cake recipes to account for the effects of altitude (‘I’ve found you need a little more flour in the mix at 5,000 feet’). We could only marvel at the generosity of spirit that had inspired them to welcome my filthy, dribbling T into their pristine workshop, and us into their orderly and immaculate home.

  ‘Not much we can do until that rod gets here,’ said Scott, showing us into the guest bedroom. ‘Then I’d like to spend a while just, you know, sorting your car out.’ I felt myself developing a strong conviction that Scott preferred to work alone, even for no money and the benefit of a complete stranger, which made it easier to accept the suggestion he now made. ‘If I were you, in the morning I’d get in that rental car and go explore Yellowstone for a few days.’

  In August 1877, 200 members of the Nez Percé tribe passed into Yellowstone Park, engaged in a desperate fighting retreat from some 2,000 US Army soldiers as they struggled towards the Canadian border and the promise of sanctuary. Yellowstone had been enshrined as a national park, the world’s first, five years previously, and that August was home to thirty-five tourists in eight separate parties. Most would come away with some unusually diverting holiday reminiscences.

  George and Emma Cowan, celebrating their second wedding anniversary with a group of seven friends from Radersburg, Montana, had been touring Yellowstone for a week when they bumped into a Nez Percé scouting party. Cowan, a lawyer and an idiot, began to quarrel with the jumpy and heavily armed Indians, who promptly shot him in the right leg. Somehow this failed to settle the argument, and when Cowan continued to bicker from a prone position he was shot at point-blank range in the forehead, then pelted with rocks for good measure. Some hours later, after his wife and their companions had been marched away to the Nez Percé camp, Cowan miraculously came to: the bullet had bounced off his skull. But as he hauled himself groggily upright, he was spotted by a Nez Percé straggler, who shot him through the left hip. Cowan pitched face-first into the mud and was once again left for dead. Once again he lived. Now sporting a serious bullet wound in each leg, he crawled 4 miles to the forest clearing where his party had last made camp. Frail and desperate, Cowan lit a fire which spread out of control, burning him severely. Somehow he dragged himself onwards, covering 12 miles in four days before he was found by a search party and eased into the back of a wagon. On a precipitous trail halfway to the town of Bozeman, the wagon overturned and flung Cowan down an escarpment. When at dreadful length he was laid on to a hospital bed in Bozeman, it collapsed beneath him. ‘Just bring the damn artillery in and finish me off,’ he croaked from the floor.

  The rest of the Radersburg party were released unharmed by the Nez Percé, with the notable exception of Albert Oldham, who was shot through both cheeks and spent the balance of his vacation stumbling lost through the woods, living on insects. A couple of tourists didn’t come home at all: Charles Kenck was shot dead in the forest during a Nez Percé encounter, and five days later his companion Richard Dietrich met the same end on the porch of his hotel. For want of a coffin, the proprietor buried him in an old bathtub. The Nez Percé never did make it to Canada, and surrendered two months later.

  I relate this tale as a potent example of the murderous, primal clashes that raged across America even at the dawn of the modern age, fostering a national mindset rather more combative and paranoid than that of a contemporary European, whose holiday alarums didn’t stretch beyond sunburn and a s
andy sandwich. Also, it was either that or hear me drone on about gazing in speechless awe at plunging canyons, spurting, garish geothermal phenomena, steamy-breathed herds of buffalo and a succession of $300 motel bills.

  This outrage of surge-pricing was down to the solar eclipse, which had drawn several hundred thousand people from all over the world to a narrow arc of ‘totality’ that happened to pass through Yellowstone. My wife grew quite excitable as the portentous moment approached, and at the appointed minute performed some elaborate ritual in a park lay-by, head tilted to the heavens with two pin-holed paper plates pressed to her face. Then, for a life-changing nineteen seconds or so, it got a bit dim and a bit nippy. ‘Wow,’ I drawled sarcastically. The locals, I’d noticed, had expressed very little interest in the celestial overlap. I don’t think Scott and Althea even mentioned it. The front page of the following day’s Billings Gazette came topped with this deathless headline: ‘Eclipse: 140,000 Descend on Wyoming, Then Leave.’

  After three days we were back at the Conger house. In our absence Scott had spent an obvious eternity working on my car, and with painstaking diligence. Half the engine lay disassembled on his workbench, pistons, bolts and washers lined up in neat rows, degreased and glinting. Around this still life lay squares of paper covered with runic notes and microscopic measurements: ‘#3 Crank pin post clean-up, V 1.2350, H 1.2355.’ What a guy. In a just world, he would have buggered off to Vegas for a week and made me put it all back together. (A week? What am I saying? It would have taken me two lifetimes, and that’s assuming I was reincarnated as Scott Conger in the second.)

  My spousal interlude was into its final hours, and I spent them in Scott’s shop, passing him requested tools and components as he bent over the car, squatted inside it, lay under it. Then my wife burst in, having lost track of time, and launched into a swift and oily round of farewells.

  ‘So – North Dakota again next summer, darling?’

  It had been a splendidly daft romantic mini-break. And with that she jumped into the hire car and bounced dustily off across the Wyoming moonscape.

  We finished reassembling things in the morning. The moment of truth filled Scott’s workshop with raging decibels and a wild-eyed manic laugh. ‘Your muffler’s going!’ I killed the motor and put on my Stan Laurel face. ‘Not a huge deal,’ said Scott once he’d recovered. ‘Won’t sound so hellacious when you’re out in the open.’ Then he cleared his throat and dropped into a low, sympathetic register. ‘So, you’ve got a small water leak from the front of the cylinder head. Keep an eye on that. I also found some pretty big gouges in the walls of two cylinders, so you’ll be using a lot of oil.’ He touched a finger to the tip of his nose and frowned, wondering if he should say what he was about to say. ‘And from my measurements, it looks as if your crankshaft is heading out of round.’ His tone transmitted the gravity of this mysterious verdict. ‘I hate to say this, but it’s touch-and-go if that motor’s going to get you to the Pacific.’

  Scott and Althea gave me a guard-of-honour escort back to the highway, following behind in their snappy little 1921 roadster. One minute they were there, waving cheerily; then I stuck my head out and gazed behind at an empty ribbon of tarmac. I would soon begin to wonder if all this assistance and hospitality was a subconscious reflection of the Universal Car’s everyman values. The tireless aid certainly showcased the help-thy-neighbour community spirit that so many people I’d met felt was being eroded by a ‘poor me’ culture, one dependent on federal handouts. One of the Alabama T guys said he took his lead from Thomas Edison’s grandmother, who always put food on the stove when she went out, and left the door open, so hungry passers-by could come in and help themselves. At any rate, all these T owners seemed genuinely invested in my undertaking, and in more fanciful moments I persuaded myself this had become their trip as much as mine.

  A stanza from the framed ballad that had graced the Congers’ guest bedroom sprang happily to mind:

  Out where the handclasp’s a little stronger,

  Out where the smile dwells a little longer,

  Out where the world is in the making,

  That’s where the West begins.

  Cheesy as all heck, yet spirited and deeply comforting; I felt less alone at once, and yanked down the throttle. Mike accelerated with a throaty, eager thrum, poignantly unaware that he’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and of the challenge hidden in the dust ahead. By nightfall, he’d have crossed the Rockies or died trying.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Continental Divide had the demoralising whiff of a halfway point, but America’s great watershed is heavily left of centre, and after cresting it I’d have no more than a thousand miles to go. I slammed the Ruckstell underdrive into high gear and powered steadily towards Yellowstone through an ever more rugged environment, from rust-rocked canyon to snow-veined granite, 40 uphill miles at 18mph. We topped the col between walls of bleached scree: ‘SYLVAN PASS – ELEV. 8,530’ read the little wooden sign. My eyes prickled and I gave Mike a tender pat on the wheel. From here the rivers would empty into the Pacific. From here, albeit erratically, it was all downhill.

  Yellowstone, even as an instant replay, still astounded me. It’s like a pocket planet of scenic magnificence – alpine peaks and conifers, mouthwash-blue Scandinavian waterfalls, the Russian steppes, Mexican scrubland, boggy Gaelic moors, even a swathe of sub-Saharan savannah. That’s before you throw in all the primeval wonders, those sulphured, steaming gorges and turquoise fumaroles. ‘I sat there in amazement while my companions came up, and after that, it seemed to me that it was five minutes before anyone spoke.’ So wrote Charles Cook in 1869, recording his expedition’s dumbstruck arrival at the head of a 20-mile-long, 1,200-foot-deep canyon, crowned by a mighty green cataract and flanked with steaming, hissing walls of crimson, mauve and yellow. Cook’s expedition had been dispatched to the lonely Montana–Wyoming borders after wide-eyed fur trappers and prospectors came back from the region with tall tales of hot waterfalls that rose upwards, of petrified forests, an alien world of fire and brimstone that trembled underfoot and belched orange gas and boiling mud. Silenced awe became the Cook party’s default mode: it was all true. That such a well-trodden nation, by then an established global superpower, should have secretly nurtured this extraordinary lost kingdom seemed almost unbelievable. For most, it still was: America only accepted Cook’s account when an expedition the following year returned with irrefutable photographic evidence.

  It wasn’t hard to see what had drawn all the natives who tootled patiently behind me in camper vans and convertibles. Yellowstone is a sort of pioneer-age theme park, where Americans get to see what their nation looked like before they dammed the canyons, poisoned the lakes and shot all the buffalo. Every vista had a gaudy, cinematic majesty, retouched in Technicolor and screened in Panavision: an epic land fit for all-American movie heroes, from John Wayne to Bambi. And look – isn’t that a Model T Ford? Give that guy a big cheer, kids!

  When Yellowstone opened its gates to motor traffic in 1915, a Model T was first through them, and in this nostalgic environment Mike found himself upgraded from funny old car to official tourist attraction. Whenever I pulled over, two or three vehicles would screech in behind, disgorging eagerly curious passengers who ran up with camera-phones and questions to foil my urinary intent. I’d never felt more conspicuous. After driving out through the park’s western gate and back into Montana, I picked my nose for three minutes straight.

  Eclipse pricing remained in force, and in a Model T I was in no position to outrun it. That night at West Yellowstone I paid $193 for a malodorous, wobbly-walled motel chalet, an outlay which I felt compelled to offset with a Hungry Man TV dinner. Every meal in this microwaveable range provides 9,000 per cent of your recommended daily intake of pasty self-loathing, and comes served with a sachet of real human tears.

  This particular example also included a tub of thick gravy, which I adulterated with Tabasco before dumping on a pallid slab of turkey. An o
minous odour coiled forth from my first plastic forkful: as my mouth promptly confirmed, that gravy was chocolate dessert. But the wifeless world is an ugly place. I cleaned my indented tray, belched horribly, then walked out into a chilly mountain sunset with a toothmug of Jim Beam. To Mike: sleep tight and bravo. Farewell to Montana, and those skies of fabled scale.

  Home, home on the range,

  Where the something and something-else play,

  Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

  And … everything’s … miles … away.

  Idaho, which I learned on entry was Too Great to Litter, remains an open-range state where cattle roam free, until they get their hooves wedged in a stock grid with the Stars and Stripes painted across it. The road at once sank 2,000 feet, releasing my skull from compressive discomfort after two days at altitude, and asphalt gave way to chalky gravel. Under blue skies I scrabbled over a barren plateau edged with bare, brown mountains that took vague shape in a haze of wildfire smoke, bashing Mike’s horn for company. Black dots browsed distantly amongst sagebrush and golden bushes of blazing star. A sign read: ‘ZIPLINE – 75 MILES’. I never acclimatised to this country’s sheer vastness. Seventy-five miles was the distance from my house to Swindon, a journey no one of sound mind should consider for the sake of a dangly swoosh down a cable (nor, with due apology, for Swindon). There were occasional pockets of pivot-farmed activity, combines kicking up clouds of chaff as they brought in the harvest, grasshoppers thwocking into my radiator. Then it was back into the dead zone, my own private Idaho, following a trail of telegraph poles to a shimmery beige horizon.