Good Vibrations (17 page)

‘Well… Sam wasn't a young feller and he was deathly feared of tornadoes. He was all alone up there, and he was scared one would blow him clean away an' nobody would ever know. Sam had this theory that buffalo had a sixth sense about tornadoes and never got hit. He wasn't the only one, either. Plenty of the early settlers built their cabins right by a buffalo wallow, because that was where the beasts went when there was tornadoes around.

‘One day, Sam knew there was going to be big twisters. He could see it in the sky and feel it in the air, so when evening came around, he made straight for a buffalo wallow he knew. There was still buffalo up on the hills then, but when he arrived, they was nowhere in sight, so he spread out his bedding and hunkered down for the night, feeling pretty pleased with himself.'

‘How'd he make out?' asked Kirk who, incredibly, seemed not to have heard this story before.

‘Everything went fine until around midnight,' continued Laverne. ‘The storm's rumblin' all round him, but High Plains Sam could sleep though worse than that. Trouble was, the buffalo out on the range suddenly decided that it was tornado time and took up the same idea Sam had. So here comes the whole herd, galloping into their wallow right on top of him. Folks who found him said Sam was flatter 'n a frying pan.'

‘Laverne! That is one awful story,' burst out Barb.

‘Depends on how you look at it,' he replied. ‘Sam might have been trampled to death, but he got one thing right. He never did get blown away by no tornado!'

The day after we left the Neal family should have been an easy one. We had 100 miles of sandhills to cover before we reached the Nebraska border settlement of Merriman, then possibly a further 30 or so to Martin in South Dakota before we saw any gasoline, so we rode into Tryon to top up. Anywhere in the United States, achieving a brimful motorcycle tank involves a contest of will and ingenuity against devilishly clever nozzle ‘safety' cut-offs. The regulations owe more to the need for gas vendors to be protected against litigation on the remotest of contingencies than they do to common sense, but I suppose they do stop suicides from hosing red-hot engines down with gasoline. These ‘safe' nozzles aren't a serious issue for car drivers with 20-gallon tanks, but for the biker of sound mind, they are a dangerous menace. At the generally slow American speeds, the range of the Heritage was a mere 160 miles, while the Sportster, even with the special ‘highway tank', switched over to ‘reserve' at around 120. After that, how much it held was a lottery. The manufacturers certainly weren't letting on. This would be of no concern to most of their customers as they cruise the palmy boulevards of California and Florida, but out here the last teaspoonful could save a long, hot walk, so we kept cheating the system until the fuel was up to the rim.

The pump attendant shook our hands as though we'd been acquainted all our lives and we realised that by now the whole community would know about us. Someone had given us a good school report.

The road to the north across the hilly, deserted cattle country ran alongside a railroad line and soon deteriorated almost to dirt track status. Theoretically metalled, it was in such poor shape that we slowed to 20 mph to lessen the crunch if either of us came off on the longitudinal ruts that were picking up our tyres and throwing the bikes from side to side. After 10 miles of this grim riding a train horn sounded almost on top of us. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a Union Pacific freight train rumbling past, heading up towards Canada, overtaking at a combined speed of around 10 mph. The engineer gave us another two blasts. ‘Whooooo! Whooooo!' The haunting sound went through me like a shot of moonshine and it took the train over five minutes to clear us.

Twenty miles down the road the bikes were back up to speed so that we found ourselves overtaking the same locomotive. This time the guys gave us four deafening notes. They were leaning out of their cab, lapping up the macho Harleys. Just us, them and the American highway.

Half an hour later, I wasn't feeling so elated. I stopped to take a photograph and Roz pressed on ahead. When I remounted I reckoned she was 5 miles away, so I hurried on as hard as I could on a surface which was again deteriorating. I didn't see Betty Boop until I almost ran over her. She was on her side by the ditch, engine stopped, and no sign of Roz. The road was bending slightly to cross a bridge over a rare streambed with water in it.

I hung on the brakes with my heartbeat in limbo, realising in an instant this was what I had been dreading all the way from the coast. Running back to the yellow bike, I was struck by how small and vulnerable she looked lying in the dust, but what I desperately needed to know was what had happened to my wife. Was she in the ditch with a broken neck? Had she wandered off somewhere with a snapped wrist, or crawled into cover with a fractured leg? The selfish thought formed for a second that the trip was going to end here in the pounding heat just south of Sioux country, but in truth I couldn't have cared less.

Weighed down with remorse for dragging Roz along all the way from the New Forest to dump her bike here on the lonesome prairie, and beside myself with anxiety, I called out, dreading silence most.

‘Down here!'

I scrambled towards her voice and, to my inexpressible relief, saw her sitting happily by the water, boots and socks off, dangling her feet in its bubbling flow.

‘What the hell?'

‘Come on down. It's lovely and refreshing.'

‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine. It was so damned hot I just stopped to bathe my feet. Betty fell over when her stand sank in the sand. I felt stupid just waiting for you and I certainly can't lift her up, so I left her. I hit the ‘kill switch' for the engine and turned off the fuel. I think she's OK.'

‘Thank Christ for that,' I mumbled, and I meant it. Specifically.

An hour later we were in South Dakota. As if cut off by some great planner's knife, the sandhills gave way to fields with crops ready for the combines and we floated down a road like a silken carpet. The change was startling, but so was the price demanded by the glitzy motel on the busy Route 18 that runs west out of Iowa, through Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation and on to the wilds of Wyoming and Laramie. After the past week, we felt so out of place on the wall-to-wall carpet of the lobby that we walked right into the oven again. Thirty miles along the highway we hung a left to retreat into Nebraska. The road here was in better shape than the one we'd used to make our northing, but it still wasn't much. Half an hour down its length with the sky looking like something High Plains Sam would have appreciated, we finally arrived in the frontier town of Gordon. We signed for the last available booking at the realistically priced Colonial Motel, grateful by now to find any lodging at all. The fancy place up in Dakota had also been busy, in total contrast to our experience out West so far, where nobody ever said, ‘No room.'

‘Why is everywhere full?' I asked the manageress.

‘Crops are coming in,' she explained. ‘We got the usual truckers, plus a commercial traveller or two, but that outfit next to you are harvesters from Missouri. And there are others. They'll be around for a couple of weeks. They come every year. I'm expecting a new crowd in around midnight.'

We walked across to our room and shoved the bikes under the veranda. As we unlocked the door, the rain crashed down and we drew lots for the first session in the shower.

By the time I was cleaned up, the deluge was over. Fresh out of booze, I ventured down the street to the liquor store where I was sold a ‘quart' of Teacher's Highland Cream, 43 per cent export strength. The whisky was a long way from home and, glancing up the scrappy thoroughfare sided with shoe-box buildings of indeterminate age, some wooden, most of composite brick and concrete, I reflected that I was too. An assortment of light industries lined the road, while grain silos and other small towers of less obvious function made up a distinctive skyline. As always, heavy electricity wires criss-crossed at random from rough pine poles. Apart from me, the sidewalks were empty, and no traffic disturbed the evening's powerful scent of rain, so I walked back to where the Colonial Motel stood at the intersection of Main and the road north to Dakota. The motel's substantially constructed rooms were arranged around an L-shaped forecourt to one side of a sprawling parking lot half filled with trucks and mobile farm machinery.

The neon lights were just coming on as I stepped up to our door. Outside the next cabin four men and a boy were sitting on the step sipping cold drinks. Just as the bikes leaning on their stands were our own badges of identity, these guys were distinguished by a huge, jacked-up pick-up that was somebody's pride and joy. Maroon coach-painted and immaculately clean, its running boards stood 3 feet above the ground. On the door in distinctive script was the legend, ‘Korn Harvesting Services'.

‘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.'