All Gone to Look for America (17 page)

H.G. Robinson, a New York schoolteacher who had fallen in love with the idea of the Wild West, brought it out here in 1900. Yes, brought it here, or rather the men from Sears, Roebuck did. Jack thought that was
probably
‘pretty normal’. I was standing there open-mouthed: just the fact that in America more than a century ago you could whistle up a whole house by mail order and have it delivered by the modern miracle of the railroad to the middle of nowhere. That’s the difference: in Europe we’re used to a lot of stuff having been in the same place for a long time – we call it roots and tradition – in America they’re used to getting up and moving on, if that’s what makes
economic
sense – nowadays they call it a flexible labour market.

Back in the main body of the museum, I’m meandering politely around the various cabinets of curios when I stumble across poignant evidence of Malta’s own unearthed roots. Two glass cabinets held uniforms and family
photographs
of young men from Malta who had fought in America’s – and often the world’s – wars, from Flanders 1917 to Arnhem 1944, Korea and Vietnam. They, I assume, came back. In the front row is the dress uniform of Larry Schwarz who went to Vietnam in 1968 and was killed in action in 1969.

Next to it stands a large framed board containing dozens of photographs, each draped with a yellow ribbon. All of them are local lads who had served – or were still serving – in Iraq. I count 12 currently on duty there, including two brothers. A smattering of their surnames reflects the diversity of America’s ethnic European mix: Simanton, Pekovitch, LaFond, Retan, Salsbery, Ereaux, Wilkes. A dozen at one time seems a disproportionately large number of sons in peril for a community of little over 2,000 souls, barely the size of my own village in Oxfordshire.

I mention this to the two ladies who had picked me up at the station, and they just smile wanly, smiles that express pride and pain in equal intensity. The war was something they didn’t want to discuss. It was the first sign I had seen since leaving Ground Zero of the impact on America of its current global
politics
on the empire back home. It was not to be the last.

As it happened, however, there was another matter my two lady hosts were reluctant to discuss: the main reason for my getting off the train in Malta in the first place – the dinosaurs. They had one, downstairs, they were keen to tell me, although he turned out to be quite a small one as dinosaurs go, a mere 33 feet long, a brachylophosaurus, of which there were probably more hanging around here 65 million years ago than there are people now. He is famed for his ‘pristine pelvis’, Jack told me, indicating the bone in question, then added that that was why they called him ‘Elvis’. At least no one was suggesting this one wasn’t dead.

But interesting as old Elvis was, what I wanted to see was how they went about discovering dinosaur bones and unearthing them, the sort of stuff the experts did across the road, at the field station. This, however, seemed to produce a momentary embarrassment for the two ladies who had formed my welcoming committee. Normally, they said, there would be no problem
whatsoever
popping into the field station even when the actual dinosaur-digging season was over. Right now, however, in fact at this very moment,
unexpectedly
, today, there were people working in there.

Great, I say. All the better. I’d love to see palaeontologists doing their stuff, and in my experience enthusiasts of this nature are only too keen to strut said stuff before an audience. ‘Uh, right, yes, of course,’ says one, smiling nervously to her friend. ‘Yes, indeed, well we’ll have to see, won’t we,’ she replies,
resolutely
making no move to instigate that procedure, which I imagined might be done by a simple telephone call, or just walking across the road and tapping on the door. ‘I know,’ she suddenly says, ‘why don’t we get Jack to take you on a drive round to get your bearings and we’ll see how they’re getting on when you get back?’

I say, fine, if that’s what we have to do and follow Jack out back to a monster Dodge pickup with a National Rifle Association sticker on the windscreen. I guess it’s probably not a good idea to tease Jack about Barack Obama’s
attitudes
to gun control, let alone Michael Moore’s. I do ask him if he is in fact carrying a gun. He looks at me kind of surprised, as if thinking I mean does he have a Colt 45 strapped to his waist, and then says: ‘Sure, I got me a shotgun and a couple of rifles back in there.’ My look, I guess, suggests ‘Why?’ ‘Hey, this is Montana,’ he says. ‘You never know.’

Jack’s pickup is big and white and has seen better years. Only one in 10 cars on the streets of Malta isn’t a pickup, and not one of them is the world’s
bestselling
make, the Toyota. There are Dodges, Fords and GMC pickups but not one that wasn’t made in America. People out here notice that sort of thing. He has a twinkle in his eye and as he clambers up into the truck and drives off past the field centre I can’t help noticing that of the half dozen cars parked outside it, most were in fact police cars.

‘Yeah, them gals didn’t want you to know,’ Jack chuckles. ‘Think they thought it might have given ya the wrong impression. They’ve even got the feds involved.’ Federal agents at a remote dinosaur research station in rural Montana? My curiosity was whetted. Surely it had to be Mulder and Scully. But Jack didn’t know or wasn’t telling. ‘I’m not sure what the hell it’s all about, but you hang about. We’ll get it sorted and get you in there.’ In the meantime I would have to struggle with my anticipation.

It doesn’t take much to find a distraction, as we pass the ranch-style
bungalow
– or perhaps out here that should be bungalow-style ranch – owned by one of the two well-to-do ladies, with endless acres of grassland prairies stretching to the horizon beyond it. ‘That’s where she keeps her buffalo herd,’ says Jack in passing. ‘Buffalo,’ I catch him up short, ‘you mean actual buffalo?’ Those big hairy woolly mammoth-type things that once upon a time in the west roamed these here prairies in their millions until the advent of men with long-range rifles hunted them to the edge of extinction.

Yep, says Jack, the very same. Am I interested in seeing them? The thought had clearly never occurred to him. Was I ever? As far as I’m concerned, buffalo in the flesh, up close and personal, are better than any amount of dead
dinosaurs
. Mentally, I had already consigned the buffalo to the same department of the animal kingdom, i.e. ones that I had missed by having been born in the wrong century.

‘Well, that’s easy,’ says Jack. ‘Let’s go,’ and throws his huge 4x4 pickup with remarkable ease off the side of the road and onto a dirt track that led to what
looked to me like a barbed wire fence with heavy-duty electrodes on top for good measure.

‘Just need to open the gate,’ he says, hopping out, much to my mystification because I can’t see a gate.

Then I realised that that was because I had been expecting a version of the traditional English five-bar affair, with a latch at one end or at least a rope loop to throw over a fence post. I had briefly forgotten this was the Wild West. Within seconds Jack has lifted what looked to me like a fixed fence post out of the ground and moved it and the three attached by barbed wire, but not it turns out fixed in the ground, to one side. We drive through. I close the
makeshift
gate which is not as easy as Jack made it look because the loose fence posts pull the barbed wire down so it catches in my trousers, and head on up into the prairie.

And all of a sudden there they are: like something I’ve only ever seen in a Wild West painting, a herd – admittedly small, no more than a dozen or so beasts – of native American buffalo. The bulls are immediately
recognisable
, their great shaggy heads seemingly way too large for even their powerful bodies. And yes, I know they should really be called bison, but that’s not what the cowboys called them and cowboy country is where they come from in my mythology, and that’s where we are right now. A bison is a creature in a zoo. A buffalo is an animal from the storybooks, found in its element on the great plains of America, and here I am right now staring at a herd of them.

‘Hard to imagine, isn’t it,’ says Jack, ‘the sight of millions of them things, as far as the eye can see, spread out across the plains?’

Jack is a hunter himself, like most folks around here – even the motels have signs that proclaim ‘We welcome hunters’ – but he shakes his head in rueful amazement at the wanton slaughter: ‘They did it for the hides, of course. They’d come out first for the otter and when there wasn’t much of that left, they took out the buffalo – also for their meat of course, it’s rich and low-fat, probably healthier than beef,’ he adds, just so I understand that even out here in Montana they are aware of the advantages of sensible eating. Then he adds: ‘And of course, they really did it to drive out the Indians. When the buffalo were gone, the Indians went too.’

I do not know how extensive the process of politically correct re-education has been in the United States over the past few decades, but it strikes me here – as it did in Niagara – that there is a genuine feeling of melancholy regret amongst even the most hard-headed American men about the fate of the ‘
redskins
’ they now refer to wholly naturally as ‘Native Americans’. No suggestion
of course that what’s done could – or should – ever be undone, but a genuine feeling of sympathy for a group who got a ‘rough deal’ from history.

Maybe it comes from a love of the land that the settlers who pushed the natives to the brink of extinction nonetheless inherited from them. And passed on to their descendants. Men like Jack. ‘I never knew what people used to mean when they talked about Montana as “big sky country”,’ says Jack, staring up at a bright blue canopy that extends in all directions to the scrubland of an infinitely distant horizon, ‘but then I went east, and all of a sudden I found myself thinking: hey, what happened to the sky?

‘You get people who’ve never been out on a ranch and they come out here and just love it, and then you get kids who’ve been raised on the ranch, and they can’t wait to leave.’ And I automatically think of the row of pictures of young men in uniform upstairs in the museum.

‘There’s not a whole heap for kids to do around here, I guess,’ says Jack a little later as we share a beer and a pizza at a Formica table in a noisy little
bar-cum-diner
lit by fluorescent strips and with a jukebox in the corner. ‘They have a racetrack out there,’ he points to an area west of town, ‘for hot rods. They do ’em up, take ’em out there and race ’em. You can hear ’em miles away when they do.’

I’m listening for the roar of motors above the jukebox when a dark-haired young woman comes up to our table. Jack introduces me to Sue, who is one of the palaeontologists who comes up to work in the field centre in the summer season. She too is cagey about our chances of getting in there today. ‘It’s kind of complicated,’ she says, ‘but Professor Bakker is in there working with them, and he says it’ll all be finished today, so you can get in there for sure first thing tomorrow morning.’

Which seems as good a promise as I am going to get, as I part company with Jack and Sue with an arrangement to meet over breakfast. That leaves me, as it gets dark and the temperature drops alarmingly, to sample the
uncertain
delights of Malta’s nightlife. Already at five o’clock with the light gone it feels as if the emptiness all around has closed in. There’s a shift from the
laidback
rural feel of the day to a more sporadic febrile night world. Pickups race around in the dark, kids in lit lock-ups play with welding tools, and outside the main garage sits a row of vintage 1940s Ford saloons, big and bulbous, the sort of thing you expect to see Humphrey Bogart climb out of. Most are rusted through. A signs says
AUTOS FOR SALE
. It’s hard to know if it’s a joke or just left there to decay alongside the merchandise.

This is the bedrock of America that George W. Bush has spent nearly a decade mining. For the kids who don’t want to stay on the ranch, the army
is the best ticket out of mid-Montana, an expenses-paid way to see the world, only to find that the world they see these days looks like the burnt-out barrios of Baghdad.

There is a yellow ribbon in the barred window of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Club, and a huge one in the side window of the Great Northern Hotel. The liquor store – next to the drug and alcohol dependency centre – has a sign by the door proclaiming ‘God Bless Our Troops.’ I have no idea how many of the good folks of Malta – and they seem to the casual visitor remarkably good folks indeed – support George Bush and his campaign in Iraq rather than the less complicated concept of ‘our boys wherever they are’. It is a dilemma not unknown in Britain, but it’s not a question I feel, as a foreigner – and make no mistake, even we Brits are very definitely foreigners out here – is overly wise to raise. You certainly wouldn’t want to show disrespect to anyone wearing a yellow ribbon, even if nobody seems 100 per cent certain about its origin as a symbol.

I had – perhaps rather rashly – associated it with the rather naff 1973 pop hit for Tony Orlando and Dawn, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, about a convict looking for a sign his ex-girlfriend still wants him back. Hardly the most flattering of origins for a military symbol. It turns out, however, that the pop song in itself was derived from an earlier, oral, military tradition, though one popularly believed to relate to a much earlier ‘pop’ song, ‘She Wears a Yeller Ribbon (For her Lover who is Fur [
sic
] Fur Away)’, a US Army marching song from the First World War. The ribbon itself in popular tradition goes back to US cavalry uniform in the nineteenth century, though there is no evidence beyond its widespread adoption in Hollywood westerns. It may even have its origin in the yellow sash worn by Cromwell’s Puritan troops in the English Civil War, translated to America by Protestant emigrants. What is for certain is that its symbolism became ingrained in the 1979 US Embassy Hostage Crisis in Teheran when the wife of the most senior diplomat being held tied one around the tree in her Maryland garden. Since then it has been ingrained into the American psyche as reflecting solidarity with its nationals in danger.