Driftless (2 page)

The new arrivals, almost without exception, came in search of homesteads. Families as numerous as church mice rode in wagons on wheels with wooden spokes pulled by oxen and mules, dreaming of Property. When they arrived, they climbed out of their wagons, sharpened their axes, and moved into the Driftless to harvest a ripe and waiting crop: timber. Logging roads and lumber mills invaded the hills, and within a single generation the Driftless forests—like the rest of Wisconsin’s virgin oak, pine, and maple—were cut, floated downstream, and made into railroad ties and charcoal.

After the settlers cut down the trees and dug up all the lead and gold they could find, many abandoned the Driftless in search of flatter, richer farming. Those who remained were generally the more stubborn agriculturists, eking a living from small farms perched on the sides of eroded hills. Like the Badger State totem that burrows in the ground for both residence and defense, they refused to leave. For better or worse, their roots ran deep.

Small villages blossomed with schools, post offices, and implement dealers; dairy and grain cooperatives; hardware, fabric, and grocery stores; filling stations, banks, libraries, and taverns. And the Driftless farmers moved into these villages after their bodies wore out. Old men and women sat on porches in work clothes faded by the sun and softened by innumerable washings to resemble pajamas. They talked in whispers, shelling hazelnuts into wooden bowls, telling stories, endless stories, about long ago.

The young people listened but were skeptical. It didn’t seem possible for men and women to do the things described in those stories: people didn’t act like that.

“They don’t
now,
” the old people complained.

It was impossible to explain how in those days, in earlier times, in the past, there really were giants—people who did things, good things, odd things, that others would never do. Those giants were at the heart of everything. Nothing could have been the way it was without them, but how could anyone explain them after they were gone?

Over the years, most of the Driftless villages grew into towns and cities. Other villages, however, grew up like most other living things, reached a certain size and just stayed there. Still others, like Words, Wisconsin—a cluster of buildings and homes in a heavily wooded valley—noticeably shrank in size, and entered the twenty-first century smaller than years before.

To get to Words you must first find where Highway 47 and County Trunk Q intersect, at a high, lonely place surrounded by alfalfa, corn, and soybean fields. The four-way stop suggests a hub of some importance, yet there are no other indications of where you are. This lack of posted information can be partly explained by the constraining budget of the Thistlewaite County Highway Commission and partly by the assumption of its rural members: people already know where they are. No provisions are made for those living without a plan.

Still, there is some mystery why a four-way stop should be placed here, impeding the flow of mostly nonexistent traffic. Grange, for instance, with a population of five thousand by far the largest town in the area, has a justifiable need for four- way stops and even several stoplights; but Grange is fifteen miles to the east on 47.

Red Plain, to the west, has grocery, feed, and dime stores, a gas station, a grain elevator, four taverns, and one stop sign on a highway that connects after sixty miles to the interstate.

Heading south on Q does not take you directly anywhere, but for those knowing the roads this is eventually the shortest route to Luster.

Eight miles north of the intersection, the unincorporated village of Words has no traffic signs at all. County Trunk Q is the only way into the tiny town, which sits at the dead end of a steep valley. Few people go there. State maps no longer include Words, and though Q is often pictured, the curving black line simply ends like a snipped- off black thread in a spot of empty white space. Even in Grange, most people don’t know where Words is.

NO REASON

T
HE MORNING RIPENED SLOWLY. TEN O’CLOCK FELT LIKE NOON. July Montgomery cut open a sack of ground feed and poured it into the cement trough. He looked out of the barn window into his hay field, where a low-lying fog stole silently out of the ground, filling space with milky distance. Beyond the fence, the tops of maple, oak, and hickory formed a lumpy, embroidered edge against infinity.

July had lived here for more than twenty years, but because of the dreamy quality of the morning, the landscape now appeared almost unfamiliar. The row of round bales of hay—which he’d placed near the road only weeks before—seemed foreign and completely removed from any history that included him. The road itself looked different, and when a hawk stepped off a utility pole, opened its wings, and sailed up the blacktop road toward the nearby village of Words, it disappeared into the looming fog as though entering another world. July marveled at how easily the characters of even the massive, stationary things of reality could be changed by a little moisture in the atmosphere.

On the other side of the barn he could hear his small dairy herd hurrying back from the pasture. He had let them out just an hour before, and it seemed odd that they would be coming back. Normally, they preferred to graze all day, knee-deep in grass, even in the most inclement weather.

Several cows anxiously butted their heads against the wooden sides of the building and he opened the doors, allowing them back into the barn. Agitated, they bellowed and crowded against each other, milling nervously from one area to the next, swarming in slow motion.

Something had frightened them, and July stood in the opening and searched for an explanation—a pack of dogs, perhaps. But he
could see nothing, and indeed it wasn’t always possible to identify the reason for a herd’s agitation. Like the fear that often seizes human society, it sometimes had no tangible cause. Given the social nature of animals, an errant yet terrifying idea could flare up in a single limbic system and spread into the surrounding neighborhood, communicated with the speed of a startled flock of birds. Before long, a climate of fear was established, perpetuated through the psyche’s network of instinctual rumor.

A movement caught his eye. Several hundred yards away, at the very edge of where the fog swallowed objects wholesale, a large black animal jumped the fence into his hay field, turned around in an almost ritual manner, and looked directly at him.

Now there’s something, July thought, staring back. It appeared to be a very big cat, a panther, also known as a cougar, puma, or mountain lion. He’d seen them out west and up north, but never here. Though they had once been native to the area, there had been no reports of them, as far as he knew, for generations. It wasn’t even necessary to actually see one, of course; a stray scent of the beast—inhaled by a single cow—and the whole herd would vibrate with primordial anxiety.

Moving slowly, the panther paced with elastic ease along the old fence, carefully measuring its distance from the barn, keeping partially hidden in the fog, like a ghost not willing to assume corporeal form. As it moved, it continued to stare at July, and July continued to look back.

He wondered why a panther would reenter an area its ancestors had long ago abandoned. The larger reasons, of course, included the encroachment of human civilization and depletion of natural habitat; but July wondered what the urge itself must have felt like—from the inside—to compel it to leave its familiar haunts. If it was a male, the pursuit of a female might lure it into the unknown; a female, on the other hand, might venture out in search of food or the protective seclusion needed to raise its young. July also imagined that both male and female might, like some people, simply enter an unknown area for the sake of discovering how it compared with what they already knew.

As he watched the panther striding slowly, elegantly on the edge of the woods, July also saw no reason to deny to the creature the possibility of acting without a compelling motivation. Perhaps it ended up in his hay field without knowing why it had come.

July remembered his own journey to the Driftless Region, more than twenty years ago.

He recalled first that nothing had hurt. He’d woken up in a surprisingly comfortable ditch along an unrecognizable road in the middle of the night, near the end of September, somewhere in Wyoming. The stars seemed especially thick and chaotic above him, brilliant but mixed up, as though they had been stirred with a silver oar. He had no memory of how he’d come to be here—wherever
here
was—and he felt to see if some parts of his body were perhaps broken, bleeding, or missing. But nothing seemed out of place, and nothing hurt.

After more checking, he discovered that his wallet was missing. And his duffel bag, lying next to him in the long grass and weeds, had been ransacked. Most of his personal belongings—rope, stove, cooking utensils, hatchet, knife, compass, lantern, bourbon, dried food, candy bars, matches, soap, maps, and a couple books—were gone. All that remained were a couple items of clothing, his sleeping bag, and his water bottle.

But nothing hurt and that seemed like a good omen. Things could be much worse. Whoever had left him here had not found the flat canvas money belt tied snuggly around his abdomen. He then fell back to sleep and woke up an hour later at the sound of an approaching vehicle.

A pickup moved east along the highway. It was closely followed by a noisy single-axle trailer, pulled by a bumper hitch. As though extending a carpet of light before its path—a carpet it never actually rode on—the truck came to a rattling stop at the nearby intersection. The driver climbed out and walked back to check on the trailer. Cramped from sitting and arthritic with age, he moved stiffly.

July dusted off his clothes, walked out of the ditch, and joined the old man at the trailer.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

The old man seemed startled at not being alone and warily inspected July and the duffel bag extending from his left arm.

“So far, so good,” he said, and resumed shining his flashlight through the open slats in the side of the trailer. The dense circle of yellow light moved over a massive Angus bull. The animal’s warm smell had a sweet yet acrid quality and when it shifted its weight from one set of legs to another, the trailer groaned respectfully.

July walked to the other side of the road and urinated on the gravel shoulder.

It was a clear, summerlike night, and the sky glowed with unusual green luminance.

The spilling sound reminded the old man of his own full bladder and he also peed on the edge of the road. Far in the distance a dog barked.

“You need a ride, young man?”

Inside the truck, the driver adjusted his billed hat and lit a cigarette. July shoved the duffel bag under the seat and sat beside him. “Where you going?” he asked.

“Wisconsin. Ever been there?”

“Nope,” said July.

As they rode through Wyoming, the old man explained that he and his brother kept a herd of Herefords in southwestern Wisconsin. They wanted to breed up some black baldy calves, and the old man had driven out to the stockyards in Cheyenne, looking for a long yearling with eye appeal. At a late auction, he’d bought one.

July liked the way the old man talked—his accent and choice of phrases. On this basis he decided to continue with him.

“How long you been in Wyoming?” the old man asked.

“Eight or nine months, working on a ranch.”

“You from around here?”

“Nope.”

“Where you from?”

“Everywhere,” said July. “Never been to Wisconsin, though.”

“Where were you before you were in Wyoming?” asked the old man, openly exhibiting the interest of someone who currently lived in the same house he had grown up in.

“Unloading ships on the docks in California.”

“And before that?”

“Hauling wheat in Canada,” July said. His window was open and the warm night air blew against the side of his face. “I spent almost a year in the prairie provinces, driving truck. While I was there I met a man, a logger with a plastic leg who could run faster than anyone I’d ever seen. And at night he’d take off his leg and count the money hidden inside it. Other people were always betting him he couldn’t outrun them.”

“How’d he lose his leg?”

“Cut it off by mistake with a chain saw, above the knee.”

It was the kind of talk people make in bus stations and other places when they do not expect to see the person they’re talking to again—stories about other people, maybe true and maybe not. It was good-natured talk, well suited to the thin, fleeting comfort shared by strangers. Ghost talk.

They traded driving in South Dakota and continued all the way into Wisconsin, where the old man began to anticipate returning to his brother and their farm more eagerly.

“It’s not that far now,” he said. “Only about twenty miles past the next town. My brother should be waiting up for us. The coffeepot will be on and we can have a real meal.”

The trailer rattled loudly after running over a large pothole in the pavement, and the old man stopped at the deserted intersection and went back to check on his young bull. It was dark, and after looking at the tires, he inspected the interior of the trailer with his flashlight.

July got out and stretched.

When the old man climbed back behind the wheel, July stood in the road and drew the large canvas duffel bag from under the seat. He pulled the strap over his shoulder.

“Thanks again for the ride.”

“My place is just a little ways ahead. Look, my offer for a place to sleep is good.”

“Thanks, but, well, no thanks.”

“At least let me drive you into Grange. I don’t feel right leaving you here in the middle of the night.”

The young man looked away. He was uncomfortable with not
complying with the older man’s wishes yet remained determined to be on his own. “Where does that road go?” he asked, nodding north.