A whirlwind trip takes Clay from Bismarck, N.D., to Brooklyn, N.Y., to Farmington, N.M.
My life can be like a freight train. Or like the sad-stage career of a professional plate spinner. You’ve seen plate spinners — getting three, five, eventually, 10 plates spinning on spindles and then caroming around like a squirrel on cocaine to keep them all spinning.
After a hectic, almost heroic week of preparing for a four-hour interview in New York City for a documentary to be aired sometime next year — on eight very different historical subjects, all relating to the American West — I flew Thursday at zero-dark-thirty from Bismarck to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and on to LaGuardia; took a taxi to a modest hotel on Bell Street in Brooklyn — usual traveler’s late evening salad in the hotel bar. The next day, I was whisked to another Brooklyn location for the interviews — four of them, by four producers, with no one to sponge my face or shoot me full of adrenalin. We ran late, so I returned to my hotel at almost 8 p.m.
Salad in the bar.
I set my wake-up call for 4 a.m. and the taxi for LaGuardia at 4:30. Dawn flight to Atlanta, a short layover, then a 3.5-hour flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I arrived, quadruple jet lagged, a human wreck of exhaustion and the inevitable “postpartum” letdown after leaving it all on, well, probably the cutting room floor.
In Albuquerque, I rented a car. Fortunately, I waited only 45 minutes while the rental clerk chatted endlessly with a youngish couple who had never rented a car before and gave them some dining tips.
So far, so good.
Then, I drove 3.85 hours from Albuquerque to Farmington, New Mexico, where my friend and colleague Dennis was waiting for three days of adventure and work meetings. The wind on the open road was gusting to 50 mph, but I’m a North Dakotan, so I managed to muscle the car back onto the roadway after the big blasts.
OK, enough about me.
Here are the things that astounded me in this tightly clustered set of American experiences:
- I began the day in America’s greatest and most populous city, at 8.8 million, and ended it in Farmington, N.M., population 46,000, just 2,067 miles away. New Mexico is the fifth largest state geographically, with a population density of 17 people per square mile. New York City has a population density of 29,302 per square mile. Farmington is New Mexico’s sixth-largest city. In New York, it would be a puny neighborhood.
- I crossed much of the vast American landscape in nine hours without breaking a sweat. At 15 miles per day, it would have taken Lewis and Clark 137 days to make that journey, assuming they never had a bad day, stopped to rest, or waited for winter to pass. They would have sweated all day to accomplish that feat, like Navy SEALS hiking in the mountain vastness of Tora Bora in Afghanistan. There have been times in recent years when I have begun the day in Rome or London and slept in my own bed in central North Dakota well before midnight! And when the flight attendant announces that no peanuts are available because some kid has a peanut allergy, I throw a fit and weep like Job. You can almost hear the passengers saying, “Toss him off the plane!”
- As my dawn taxi whisked me to LaGuardia, we passed through some shabby industrial zones that looked like they were a stage set for the apocalypse. Graffiti everywhere. Rusted-out storage tanks, abandoned warehouses, a grim bodega here, and a half-hearted deli there. Every great city has an industrial tenderloin. The raw stuff at the bottom end of Maslow’s hierarchy must occur somewhere, and it cannot all be shuffled across the Hudson River to New Jersey. When I think of NYC, I imagine the Chrysler Building, Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side near the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Still, of course, there are also auto repair shops, acres of auto impoundments, 10-story rental storage units, subway vehicle repair warehouses, and Penske and U-Haul lots where the trucks are so tightly parked that you take your life in your hands before pulling out into the traffic. Civilization has many moving parts, and not all of them are pretty.
- The most extraordinary moment of a long day came when I eased my rental car out of the northern subdivisions of Albuquerque and got a glimpse of the magnitude of New Mexico’s space. The great emptiness of New Mexico is remarkable (perhaps even appalling) no matter where you have been, but to start the day in New York City and end it on U.S. 550 essentially blows your mind. You drive 40 minutes to the top of a ridgeway on the far horizon. When you reach that vantage point, you see another bowl of barren landscape extending to the next ridge 40 miles away, and then another, and another. Any of those broad valleys could swallow all of New York City with endless room to spare in every direction, giving the beleaguered people of the metropolis a little breathing room. (Ah, but most of them would be feverish with agoraphobia.) You see a remote doublewide trailer two miles off the highway on a gravel road and maybe a crude oil transfer station four or five miles in the other direction half an hour later. It looks as if nobody lives in all that space, which is nearly true.
Three more “adjustments.”
- At LaGuardia, the gate agents are, shall we say, all business and very, very efficient. Two agents near my gate explained the rules, and in some cases, their rules were like those of veteran drill sergeants. Some do’s and many don’ts, particularly now that the glut of carry-on baggage has reduced most boarding experiences to madness. One gate agent told her customers that she would be watching them very carefully as they approached the gate and that they had better have their boarding pass ready to go (and make sure it was the right one this time), or they would sorely regret their error. If anyone tried to sneak a third bag, however small, onto the plane, there would be a verbal smackdown. Don’t even think about trying to board before your row number is called and form a single line. “I’m not in the mood to referee, form a single straight line, and everyone handles their own boarding pass, no exceptions.” It felt like the intake orientation session at Rikers Island. Don’t get me wrong: I admired these women. When my number was called — and not before — I approached the gate like someone in Seinfeld encountering the Soup Nazi.
When I reached Farmington, I stopped at a grocery store to pick up an item I had forgotten to pack. The pace of life slowed so suddenly and dramatically that I looked like a dervish as I strode down the aisles. The clerks were sweet, shy, helpful, and in no hurry, and they seemed to treat me like a worthy fellow. They made eye contact. They asked me how my day was going. One asked me where I was from and what brought me to Farmington. Another assured me that it is not always this windy. The woman at the checkout counter told me there was a buy-one-get-one-free sale on toothpaste. Didn’t I want to select a second tube? She’d be glad to wait while I fetched it. Try that in NYC.
- Farmington is a regional market town on the eastern edge of the vast Navajo Indian Reservation (the sovereign Navajo Nation), and it is flanked on the east and south by a dozen Apache and Pueblo homelands and reservations. Most of the people I have encountered in Farmington are Native Americans. The indigenous population of Farmington runs to 28.5% (one in three), and the visibility of Natives here is lovely and satisfying if you are new here. I live in what is called the “Indian Country” of the northern Great Plains, but I have seen more Native Americans here in the last days than at any previous time in my life. That must produce great solidarity and cultural confidence among the Navajo, Apache, and others. I feel like a guest here. It is a very agreeable feeling. And it doesn’t feel at all like the old stereotype of Native American communities.
And yet …
- Every 20 miles or so on U.S. 550, I saw billboards calling our attention to the epidemic of “disappeared” Native American women in the American West. One sign reported that more than 5,000 Native women were “murdered or missing” last year. Anglos have become aware in the last 15 or so years that sex traffickers prey on Indigenous women all over North America. They bank on poverty, addiction, rural naivete, desperate households, low population density, and the lack of adequate policing and judicial protection to pluck Native women off the streets, the majority of whom are whisked out of their homelands and never seen again. I’m proud that my own North Dakota neighbor, former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp, made this international crisis (many of the traffickers are Eastern Europeans) one of the centerpieces of her leadership in Congress. The sex slave traffickers count on white ignorance and white indifference to perpetuate their evil doing. Senator Heitkamp did everything in her power to insist that we all begin to understand the gravity of the situation.
Conclusion:
America is a vast country, in some respects a complex of countries, stretching 3,000 miles from sea to sea. The geographic and demographic diversity of America is astounding. One federal constitution encompasses the people of the Everglades and the people of the Redwoods, the mountains of Montana and the swamps of Louisiana, the dense forests of Maine (23 billion trees, 90% of the landscape), and the treelessness of North Dakota (350 million trees, 3%, most of them planted since white people took the state at the end of the 19th century), the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota and the bone-dry aridity of Arizona and Utah, the haughty confidence of Texas and the modesty of the “Minnesota Nice,” the New Age Eden of California and the conservative fundamentalism of Mississippi. More than any other nation, we have assembled here people from every corner of the world, from every country, every religion and ethnicity, every tribe, every language, every lifestyle.
To get a glimpse of America’s astounding diversity in a single 24-hour period is a gift of the gods, even if a couple of plates have to hit the floor to make it happen.