Long Way Home (18 page)

Dr. J. H. Holliday turned up on the south side in 1878. On the lam from murder charges, he promptly hung out his shingle. His dental patients were rare, however, because Doc suffered from tuberculosis, sputtering and coughing while he pulled teeth. He compensated for his financial losses at the card tables, drinking heavily—what that meant on the frontier is unimaginable—and exercising a rapier wit as sharp as the knife he liked to flash.

Doc's prowess with a revolver dazzled even Wyatt Earp, who described Holliday as “the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew.” Earp's tolerance of a wanted man offended some folks, although it probably just reflected their mutual respect and admiration.

Without question, Doc's friendship paid off when Ed Morrison and his boys tore up Shannsy's saloon after a cattle drive. Earp had once shamed Morrison in Wichita, and the cattleman, bearing a grudge and bent on revenge, was about to plug the sheriff when Holliday snuck up behind him, pressed the cold barrel of a Colt to his neck, and ordered the boys to drop their guns and pray.

The cattle business peaked in Dodge in 1883–1884, but the city had lost its luster before then. The railroad extended all the way to Santa Fe by 1880, making the overland trail obsolete, and the glory days were soon over. Maybe Earp and Doc saw it coming. They'd already ridden into the sunset toward Tombstone, Arizona, and the eternal promise of the West.

DODGE CITY REMAINS
a cow town, with a slew of feedlots, slaughterhouses, and meat packing plants. It doesn't take long before a visitor catches a whiff of manure. The livestock industry creates lots of jobs, and many go to Hispanics, who make up almost half of Dodge's population, not counting illegals. A big contingent had recently scooted over from Oklahoma, I was told, after a crackdown there on employers who hadn't been inspecting anyone's papers too closely.

I'd become so accustomed to the sameness of rural Kansas that I blinked when a low rider drove by, blasting
sureno
rap from his stereo. Some gangbangers were on the streets as well, dressed in the latest fashions from East L.A., but most Hispanics wore a T-shirt and jeans and looked sweaty and a little dirty from laboring in the cow pens.

At a Mexican restaurant where I gorged on
carnitas
, a group of workers breezed in on their lunch break, all about the same size and possibly from the same pueblo, flirting with the women at the counter in Spanglish and giving off an aura of contentment. Often I think Mexicans know something I don't. They seem to have an ease of being I envy. I can't remember ever meeting a dour Mexican in California—nasty, yes, and even obnoxious, but never dour.

In Dodge City, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp each have a liquor store named after them. The stores aren't far from Gunsmoke RV park or Boot Hill Museum, a string of frame buildings that replicate the originals, including the Long Branch, allowing Dad to slip off for a quick one while the children go for a stagecoach ride or watch a phony shoot-out between actors.

Maybe you can still have a wild time in Dodge if you hunt for it, but I settled for Friday night football. Kansans dote on the sport, so I got to the high school early to be sure of a seat. Two boys were hawking programs at the gate, exactly the sort you'd expect—lanky and unathletic, with the indoor pallor of cyberspace warriors. I asked how the Red Demons were doing this season.

“We're like two and four?” A question, not an answer.

“And the Goddard Lions?”

“They're oh and six.”

“So you've got a good chance tonight?”

An emphatic nod. “Most definitely.”

If you grew up in Dodge City with a talent for athletics, you'd surely dream of becoming a Red Demon. The quarterback was still a big man on campus and would retain that status forever, his heroic touchdown passes recollected in coffee shops and bars years later. The stadium showed how highly the community valued its team. It was a pro facility in miniature, equipped with a JumboTron scoreboard and a massive sound system loud enough to wake the elderly in the next county.

Dodge's halcyon years were the 1970s and '80s. The school had slumped a bit since then, but their loyal fans hadn't deserted them. More than a hundred, mostly adults attired in Red Demon gear, tucked into a pregame meal of Wendy's burgers and fries at folding tables on the sidelines, while the sun, a dying ember, began its descent and the air got noticeably cooler, making me wish I had a Red Demon warm-up jacket of my own.

The fanfare before the kickoff also imitated the pageantry of the NFL. A pom-pom squad, nine cowboys hoisting red flags, and a brassy marching band converged on the fifty-yard line for the national anthem. The drum major wore a holster and a toy gun on his hip—I think it was a toy, anyway. When the crowd sang “And the rocket's red glare,” the darkening sky lit up with fireworks, and the cheerleaders unfurled a huge Stars and Stripes.

The game started. On paper, the contest appeared to be a mismatch. Goddard, the pride of southwestern Kansas, was a little town of about two thousand, or one tenth the size of Dodge. The Lions' porous line only gave their quarterback, Cameron Fisher, about two seconds in the pocket, so he was repeatedly sacked, but the Red Demons were as messy as could be and couldn't run a sequence of plays without incurring a penalty.

“Hey, ref, you suck!” issued a disgusted cry after the tenth penalty, and every Christian head in the Demons' bleachers jerked around to berate the vulgar loudmouth.

The night turned colder, with a hint of frost. The cheerleaders donned track suits before halftime, and when they performed a routine, I could see their breath. In the third quarter, chilled to the bone, I left the stands, and by the fourth quarter, I was reading some more of William Stafford's poems at the motel, only marginally guilty about departing before the game was over.

That proved to be the right decision. I could have turned blue waiting on the final score. The game went into overtime before the Red Demons lost, 33–26, and the defeat did not sit well with Justin Burke, their hyperbolic head coach, who told the
Dodge City Daily Globe
, “It was the worst heartbreaking loss I've ever experienced, that the kids have ever experienced, that this team has ever had.”

THE HARD, CLEAR
light of western Kansas played out over the shortgrass prairie beyond Dodge City, elevation twenty-five hundred feet. Though still flat, the land continued its gentle rise across the Great Plains, and the air stayed dry and cold. The wind whistled. Along the nearly empty Arkansas River, some cottonwoods yielded a trace of autumn color, but the country looked austere now, rugged and challenging, ancient.

On the fringe of Cimarron, there's a little park on a ridge just off the highway. The ridge provides a good view of a remnant section of the Santa Fe Trail as it follows the river's course toward the montains. The longer you stare at the trail, trying to see it as a pioneer might, the more daunting it becomes. I couldn't wrest an ounce of hope from it myself. It just recedes into the distance, ever the same, without a clue to what lies beyond it.

Some travelers took one look at the trail, and turned back or stayed put, while others gambled on the shorter Cimarron Cutoff nearby. It shaved about 160 miles off the journey to New Mexico, but water was scarce and Indians plentiful. Kit Carson and five other trappers were once pinned down by the Comanches for three days, killing their own mules to use as barricades, before they fought their way to freedom.

The rutted tracks of wooden wheels are worn into the earth of the little park. At the height of overland migration, the wagon trains rattled across the prairie twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, carrying an untold number of courageous human beings pitting their lives against the unknown. That they so often triumphed seemed an utter miracle.

Had Americans lost their ability to cope with obstacles and surmount difficulties? Steinbeck wondered the same as he pondered the peerless bravery of Lewis and Clark.

“And we get sick if the milk delivery is late and nearly die of heart failure if there is an elevator strike,” he wrote.

The age of adventure and exploration brought out the best in us, perhaps, and now the other half of our nature—that gloomy pilgrim soul—had the upper hand again.

GARDEN CITY, KANSAS,
the football archrival of the Red Demons, and its neighbor Holcomb are notorious for all the wrong reasons, thanks to Truman Capote. They're cattle and wheat towns on the Plains, as ordinary as salt and pepper, although Garden City, like Dodge, has a burgeoning Hispanic population and isn't quite so calm anymore.

If you drive through Holcomb, you understand why the murder of the Clutter family in 1959, which Capote recounted in
In Cold Blood
, unhinged the place. It's so orderly and single-minded you might correctly assume that nothing significant ever happened there. Though fifty years have gone by, crime still scarcely exists. The police reported no rapes, robberies, assaults, or murders between 2002 and 2006. One could probably interpret that as a corollary to the absence of eventfulness.

Yet Garden City, with almost thirty thousand residents, ten times the size of Holcomb, has a higher incidence of crime than the national average, and it's only 2.6 miles away, leading one to surmise that when someone from Holcomb acts up, they know where to do it.

For my young server at El Rancho Café in Holcomb, the Clutter murders belonged to the Pleistocene. She'd seen
Capote
, shot in Manitoba, Canada, on DVD, but not
Infamous
, filmed mostly in Texas.

“He had such a squeaky voice,” she giggled.

“They talk that way in New York. All the smart people do.”

“You're making it up.”

“I'm not. You'll have to go there and see for yourself.”

A pause. “Well, I wouldn't mind,” she whispered shyly.

Then the last of Kansas, seventy miles of road with only four towns rooted to it, Lakin and Kendall, Syracuse and Coolidge, population eighty-six. As I approached Colorado, I experienced a fresh wave of optimism, but the West always does that to me.

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1969, I got my first literal taste of the West. On that initial cross-country trip, I'd barreled through Nebraska on Interstate 80, skipping lunch because of my urgent mission and lack of money, but my stomach begged for a snack, so I pulled into a convenience store. A big glass jar of stringy dried meat rested on the front counter.

I pointed at it, a greenhorn. “What's that stuff?”

“Buffalo jerky.”

I ate buffalo jerky straight through to Salt Lake City.

Part Four

  

W
HEN OSCAR WILDE
visited Colorado on his lecture tour of America in 1882, he took a shine to it. The rest of the country did not impress him so favorably. He found it the noisiest place that ever existed, where everybody seemed in a hurry to catch a train. All the rushing about discouraged poetry and romance, he griped, although he admired our ingenuity and knack for applying science as a shortcut to creating wealth.

As an Irishman, Wilde was unprepared for the scale of the United States. He reacted testily to the inordinate size of everything, and argued that the country tried to bully others into believing in its power by using its magnitude as a club. Not surprisingly, he left his heart in San Francisco, “a really beautiful city,” and fell in love with exotic Chinatown.

In Leadville, Colorado, where Wilde spoke at the opera house, miners had discovered some of the world's richest silver deposits, causing the little outpost to blossom into a city of some forty thousand. Rascals and celebrities of every stripe turned up, including Doc Holliday, who rolled through after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Doc killed a former lawman over a five-dollar debt, and had the good fortune to pull a jury that refused to convict him.

The miners were not a sophisticated audience. One man had ordered a replica of the Venus de Milo, and sued the railroad company that delivered it because the statue was missing an arm. Wilde read to them from Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, and when they expressed their sadness that the great sculptor and silversmith hadn't come along, he explained that Cellini had been dead a long time.

“Who shot him?” a miner asked.

Wilde had a look at the silver mines, where a lode was called Oscar after him, and attended a three-course banquet at a saloon. The meal consisted of whiskey, whiskey, and whiskey. He saw a sign there that represented “the only rational art criticism I have ever come across.”

PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST

HE IS DOING HIS BEST

Leadville went bust eventually. It's known as the Two-Mile-High City now, outdoing Denver.

Lamar, Colorado, just beyond the Kansas border, doesn't have a cute nickname and wouldn't want one. The town's farmers and ranchers are no-nonsense types who deal in cattle, corn, wheat, and sunflowers on the High Plains of the Arkansas River Valley.

The land around Lamar once belonged to the cattle baron A. R. Black, who believed the shortgrass prairie was strictly for grazing, not building homesteads. His cows thrived on the abundant grass, hay, and water, and took refuge in groves of cottonwoods and plum trees on the river during the harsh winters. He owned a railroad station as well—Blackwell, on a line that followed the Santa Fe Trail.

A curious breed of hustler connived around the West in those days. The town site platter was an early species of subdivider who relied on a formula of land plus railway to attract settlers.

Reluctantly, Black struck a bargain to sell some land to a platter, but he later reneged, so the platter bought another parcel three miles away, moved the whole Blackwell station to it under cover of night, and advertised lots for sale in Lamar—a tribute to Grover Cleveland's secretary of the interior Lucius Quintius Lamar.

In Lamar I recognized another small town grappling with the future, a child of the railroad waiting for the next big idea to hit home. Its problems started in 2006 when a bus manufacturer shut down. Nearby La Junta lost a prime employer in its pickle factory at the same time, throwing the valley into a recession.

Yet the people in Lamar did not appear bitter or defeated. They seemed happier and more outgoing than similarly affected folks in the deep heartland—a matter of attitude, maybe, or a little spark of the old pioneer spirit. At the supermarket where I grabbed some odds and ends, the checkout clerk almost blew me out the door with his enthusiastic greeting, as strong as a prairie wind.

“How Are
You
Today?” he bellowed, speaking in capital letters as do many Coloradans. All that clean, fresh air must embolden their lungs. Tall and blond, with muscular biceps from lifting boxes, he could have been descended from the German settlers who infuriated A. R. Black.

Cowboys in Stetsons, denim, and boots were walking the streets of Lamar, past a familiar row of vacant storefronts. Their shirts were checkered and sometimes pearl-buttoned. They took dips of Skoal and Copenhagen and squinted quite a bit, slightly blinded by the light. Often the beds of their trucks were piled with hay. From the cab, they could see for miles across the Plains.

I stopped at the old railroad station, now a Colorado Welcome Center. In a corner of the parking lot, a small group of seniors had gathered for coffee under a banner that read “Lamar Democrats for Obama.” As a swing state, Colorado had shifted from Clinton to Bush, but the pollsters believed it might be ready to swing the other way.

Dean and Mary were in charge at the Welcome Center. “What Can I Do for You?” Dean inquired pleasantly. He, too, spoke in caps, although with less emphasis than the clerk.

“I'd like to be welcomed, I guess.”

“Well, You
Are
! Welcome!”

Being welcomed was no simple matter. It involved a ceremony of sorts. As part of its largesse Colorado, our eleventh-wealthiest state, really lays on the freebies. I received a good-quality map, a 215-page full-color guide to the sights, and a T-shirt that celebrated trout fishing.

Dean and Mary wanted to hear about my trip, so I filled them in and then asked about the Obama supporters outside. The mere mention of the group unnerved Dean, whose face grew flushed.

“They shouldn't be there at all,” he protested. His voice sounded normal now, as if to accommodate a serious topic. “They're
supposed
to have a permit. This is city property. We've always been conservative in Lamar. The state used to go about sixty/forty.”

Mary endorsed the conservative angle. She was older and calmer, white-haired and grandmotherly. I remarked on what a prize Colorado would be for the Democrats, and how a recent poll I'd seen in the
New York Times
online showed Obama in the lead.

“The
New York Times
!” Dean completely lost his cool. “The media is so biased! I've about had it with the
Denver Post
, too. Every story is from a liberal standpoint!”

I had a sneaky suspicion Dean listened to Rush Limbaugh, but I agreed with him about the media. If anybody still believed in the fallacy of objective journalism, I'd yet to meet the innocent. One could only talk about relative objectivity and trust the sources with the best record for honesty—or for avoiding dishonesty, to lower the bar further.

In the face of Dean's outburst, Mary had gone a trifle fluttery. She wisely changed the subject to Colorado's spectacular natural resources, and soon we were all pals again and sharing appreciative memories of the Rockies.

To complete the welcome ceremony, Dean gave me a pushpin and led me to a contour map on the wall. It was stuck with so many pins it looked like a porcupine. Each represented a visitor to the center, and where the visitor was from. New Mexico was covered with pins, while only a couple of red flags were planted in Maine.

“Well, what do you know?” Dean had regained his composure and professional style. “You're the Second Person from Ireland!”

THERE'S AN OLD
joke about La Junta. A motorist, lost, asks for directions to it at a gas station.

“It's pronounced La Hunta,” he's told. “How long you plan to stay there?”

“For Hune and Huly,” the motorist replies.

La Junta takes pride in its Hispanic community, and so do Las Animas and Rocky Ford. The little towns, each half Latino or more, form a rough triangle on U.S. 50. They're dry, dusty, and agricultural, with distant views of the Front Range. Garlands of dried chilis hang on porches, and you can buy them at
mercados
, too, along with
queso
, epazote, and piñatas.

Rocky Ford farmers brag about their melons. At a roadside stand, I tried a sliver of cantaloupe, the sweetest and ripest I'd tasted since the Eastern Shore. Growing conditions are ideal in the lower Arkansas Valley, but the farmers worry about sprawling cities such as Colorado Springs and Pueblo filching their water, always at a premium. Their semiarid banana belt gets less snow than the state average and only about fourteen inches of rain annually.

Manzanola, Fowler, Avondale, and then Pueblo, where I quit for the day. As the West dictates, I was traveling longer distances now and had covered 270 miles since leaving Dodge City that morning. The driving was often an exercise in solitude. Between Kendall, Kansas, and Holly, Colorado, I seldom saw another car.

Pueblo looked massive after all the emptiness, four times as large as Dodge and far more congested. The city once earned its money as a saddlemaker, but the industry literally went under when the Arkansas River flooded in 1821 and washed away the downtown. Later Pueblo became known as a tough, pro-labor steel town. Colorado Fuel and Iron was its chief employer until the steel market crashed in the early 1980s.

For Pueblo, like Lamar, the future was a question mark. Some planners think it will rival Denver in twenty years, while others shudder at the idea and oppose any further construction projects. Affordable housing was a bonus for the city's coffers until recently, but the developers couldn't borrow the cash to finance any more subdivisions at present.

In spite of the economic uncertainty, Pueblo's city center is a gracious example of urban renewal done right. That evening, I explored the Arkansas Riverwalk, a path that skirts both sides of the stream. In the renovated Union Avenue District, Don Campbell and Tom Carpenter were holding court outside Campbell's store, a repository for antiques, rare books, and other collectibles.

They sat on straight-backed chairs, regally commanding the sidewalk. Nobody slipped past without a by-your-leave, but they were charming rogues and got away with it. In the court's hierarchy, Campbell was clearly the king, with Carpenter cast as his loyal retainer, still keen and boyish at sixty or so, with his hair in a long white ponytail.

As monarch, Campbell ruled gently and distractedly. There was a ruined magnificence about his rugged, bearded face, as if he'd been trading blows with life for a good half century and had won about as often as he'd lost. He nodded off whenever the conversation bored him, retreating into a private universe.

“Pull up a chair,” he offered grandly, and Carpenter jumped up and fetched me one from the store. Our blockade was now almost impassable.

Carpenter hailed from Los Alamitos, New Mexico, but his family had moved to Pueblo when he was ten. Though he had lived elsewhere—Flagstaff, Arizona, for one—he'd returned home to retire. He fancied himself a writer and claimed to be at work on an oral history of the region called “Prairie Walker Chronicles.”

“ ‘Prairie Walker Chronicles,' ” Campbell muttered with mild disdain.

“Didn't you want to go to Yale, Mr. Campbell?” Carpenter asked, drawing his friend into the mix.

“That is true.”

“And didn't a Bush beat you out?”

The joke fell flat. It had a mildly stale aroma.

“I attended Cornell instead,” Campbell said, putting things right. I'd never take him for an Ivy Leaguer, but he graduated from Cornell and won distinction as a heavyweight wrestler, although he weighed only 178 pounds. He also threw the discus and held the world's record “for about five minutes” before somebody else broke it.

Campbell's presence in the West was cloaked in mystery. It was a long story he seemed disinclined to relate except in snippets. Iowa figured in the tale somehow, if I remember correctly, and there were some mishaps and wrong turns before Colorado entered the picture. About Pueblo, he was more forthcoming.

“It started bad, and it stayed bad.” He sounded facetious, as if the badness suited him. “It's always been a poor town, and it stayed that way.”

“Things have been tough here since CF&I closed down,” Carpenter reminded him. “That used to be the biggest mill west of the Mississippi. We've got Oregon Steel now, but it's smaller—”

An attractive woman sidled around the blockade, and Campbell snapped to, swiveling his head to appreciate her from behind.

“Good-bye!” He gripped the arms of his chair, as if to rise. “I wanna go where she's going.” Then he sat back down.

“Pueblo must be fifty percent Hispanic,” Carpenter went on. “There's an underground crime scene, and lots of drugs.”

“Mafia,” Campbell added. “Can't talk about it.”

Carpenter lit a cigarette and smiled at a young couple with a toddler as they stepped off the curb to get around us. He had a sunny disposition in contrast to the occasionally morose Campbell, and decided he'd been giving me an unfair, one-sided view of Pueblo.

“The city has some positives, too,” he said, making amends. “There are some good bars and a music scene. Freddy Fender has played gigs around here. Did you know this was Damon Runyon's hometown? The writer of
Guys and Dolls
? He worked for his father's paper. Our repertory theater's named after him. Colorado State University's got a pretty decent football team—”

“I have a blessing in these conversations,” Campbell interrupted. “When these sixty-year-old punks come around, I can't hear what they're talking about!”

“They've done a great job downtown,” I said. “The Riverwalk's a real plus.”

“Private money,” Campbell informed me. “Investors.”

With its history as a union town, Pueblo usually votes Democratic, so I asked about my hosts' preferences.

“I'm not at liberty to say,” Campbell commented, but he was just being sly. After a pause he revealed, “We're both Republicans.”

“I might cast a protest vote for Ron Paul myself,” Carpenter said.