been turned into a buffalo graveyard. Reports tell of piles of sun-bleached skeletons stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction, to be cleared up by ’bone pickers’, who found a value in the bones as fertiliser.
Leaving the Badlands and North Dakota in August, I took Highway 2 and cycled west into Montana, Big Sky Country. More than three months on the road without much of a break meant that riding had become a Herculean effort, mentally and physically. My legs were empty and constant glances at the speedometer only revealed bad news. I was going nowhere slowly. The air was muggy and infested with mosquitoes that showed no mercy. If I didn’t keep moving above a certain speed their sharp stings drew blood, forcing me to pedal faster as if stuck on some infernal exercise machine. Unable to shake off the permanent exhaustion that hung over me and with nowhere to stop and rest properly, my mood darkened.
I was also stuck in a culinary groundhog day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day, I was eating alone at the same table in the same diner. The same waitress was taking the same order from the same clipart-decorated menu with the same false smile and around me the same old farmers were having the same conversation about the same crops. Arriving in the small town of Williston on the border with Montana, I threw up my tent in the town park and, just about mustering the effort to get undressed, I climbed inside and collapsed, exhausted.
Waking from a deep sleep and not quite knowing where you are or what’s going on can be a wonderful feeling. Waking like this to find a hard object growing into your back through the floor of your tent is a little confusing, and when this unknown growing object begins to gush water, you panic. Dazed and half asleep I scrambled about, trying to work out what was going on. Was it an animal, a giant insect, some alien being? After releasing a long, profane outburst, I began to piece together what was going on. This scene, a nasty cross between Alien and Titanic, had resulted from me pitching my tent on the town park’s sprinkler system.
Wet and despondent, I packed up my damaged tent and waited for the small diner to open its doors. Sitting with a jug of coffee I picked at a stack of pancakes as the sun came up on another day on the road. After breakfast I queued up with grey-haired farmers’ wives to use the dusty and slow computer in the town’s library. An email from home lifted my spirits momentarily but I left feeling homesick once my half-hour limit was up. I got back on the road. If I was going to get over the Rocky mountains before winter set in, I had no choice but to keep moving.
All around me, buildings and farm equipment were left to rot. Schools, banks and libraries were boarded up and there were almost no young people around. With no work and few opportunities, the temptations of life in the cities were too hard to resist. As I moved from town to town along Highway 2, this social evacuation became more and more disturbing. Falling crop and beef prices led by cheaper imports had left farmers under huge pressure to compete. Market forces and expanding free trade had taken over and profit was king. Seemingly forgotten by their government, all it took was one bad year or a breakdown in machinery and a bigger farm would be willing to step in. Amid mega-farms the small ones couldn’t survive. Family-owned farmsteads were being left in ruin or bulldozed down to make the most of the precious land on which they sat, and families were forced to move on. Just as the temptation of vast profit drove the buffalo to the edge of extinction, so it seemed the same was happening to the rural communities of America’s Midwest.
On a warm Thursday evening I pulled into the town of Bainville, Montana, population six, feeling tired and dejected. The last two days had been a painful struggle against a relentless headwind, and without so much as a gas station in which to refuel, my meagre rations of peanut butter and beef jerky had run dry. Approaching the city limits, exhausted and under-nourished, my imagination began to run wild envisaging the possible treats that might await me in this small town.
Half of Bainville was drinking in the small characterless shed they called the bar. It didn’t serve food. The town had no diner and no gas station, but the woman behind the bar, educating herself via the pages of the National Enquirer, pointed me in the direction of two dusty vending machines selling sweets. Appalled at the thought of dining on M&Ms and bubblegum balls, I pulled myself on to a stool at the bar and ordered a beer.
‘You aren’t from round here, are you, honey?’ asked the barwoman, peering over the headline, ‘Britney’s New Drug Shame’.
‘No, I’m from London,’ I replied, with little patience for conversation.
‘So what brings you to lil’ ol’ Bainville?’
‘I’m looking for the perfect meal on my bicycle.’ I popped a couple more M&Ms and washed them down with a second beer.
‘Well, we like our beef out here. Ain’t that right, Vance?’
She sent a glance to a solitary grey-haired figure in a black Stetson, sitting at the end of the bar. He didn’t respond but emptied his glass of beer, and then began on another. I had been hearing about the legendary quality of beef in Montana since the onset of my journey, and in my last week it had been impossible to ignore the countless heads of healthy cattle that happily grazed the lush plains and hillsides of the Big Sky State. So far I hadn’t found anywhere to eat this famous bovine treat.
Grabbing the barwoman’s attention with a raised hand, Vance called her over and they exchanged a few whispered words, looking in my direction. The barwoman filled two more icy mugs of beer and placed one in front of each of us.
‘Mr Anderson says he’s got some steaks and oysters at home if you’re interested. The drinks are on the house.’
I was bundled into the back of a pick-up truck with my bicycle and Mr Anderson’s large panting German shepherd dog, and we turned off the highway a few miles out of town. We rattled and bumped down a dusty track through smooth rolling hills dissected by the unnatural straight lines of fence posts, which stretched unbroken across this vast landscape speckled with grazing cattle. Dwarfed by the steady form of two large buttes, whose steep sides and stubborn craggy summits broke through the grass-carpeted surroundings, Vance Anderson’s ranch looked like a child’s model. An immaculate, white wooden house sat next to a tall red Dutch barn, surrounded by a series of tidy fences. Horses with necks bent to the ground chomped and pulled on the yellow grass, momentarily breaking their feeding to acknowledge our arrival and the swirling cloud of dust that trailed behind us.
I was handed a cold can of Budweiser and took a seat on the porch. Mr Anderson emptied the remains of a sack of charcoal into half an oil drum and got a small fire going. We talked a little but Vance Anderson was a man of few words.
He lived alone but told me of his family, his work running a cattle ranch and the problems facing ranchers in Montana. His large farmhouse needed a family in it, but he told me there was no work in the area for his children so they had moved to the city. They weren’t interested in cattle farming. With his grey handlebar moustache, deep weathered features, denim pop shirt and dusty boots, Vance seemed to represent the last of a diminishing breed. Perhaps the Midwest won’t have any real cowboys in it in a few years. Cattle farming will have become automated, and men won’t sit on porches shooting the breeze. The traditions I had seen at the rodeo and heard in the country music were fading away.
My protein-hungry muscles began twitching with excitement when Vance reappeared from the kitchen with a plate piled with two Flintstones-sized steaks, marbled with lines of yellow fat and smudged with the dark patches of aging, but I was mystified by the plastic bowl beneath the plate which was full of what appeared to be fleshy water balloons.
Splitting open a testicle brings tears to your eyes, even if it’s not one of your own. Vance gave me a sharp knife and instructed me on the finer arts of peeling and preparing a calf’s testicle, while he put a couple of potatoes in the oven. Otherwise known as Rocky mountain oysters,
