Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
or two, I should at last be across the state line, and though I'm hopeful of circumvent-
ing the oil chaos, it looks as though I'll have to ride a bit on the interstate or else go
considerably farther out of my way. Still, any of that seems preferable to going through
Williston.
My mood has improved since Havre. I've made good progress, more than two hundred
miles in the past three days, and the landscape, though still vast and isolating, has grown
increasingly, subtly warmer. The fields and ranchlands have seemed more fertile, with
deeper colors, and the light is starting to change, gradually hinting at autumn. Yester-
day I left Malta in the early morning, and the sun, risen but mostly hidden behind dark,
fast-moving clouds, suddenly pierced through them as though with an awl and sent a
cone of rays down on the prairie in the distance. In the movies, it would have been the
herald of a spaceship landing.
Another uplifting event: I've sighted—had an inkling of, anyway—a colleague in the
neighborhood, a fellow writer. Just west of Malta on the south side of U.S. 2, the state
has carved out a historical site commemorating a region where, evidently, the west was
once especially wild. Early in the twentieth century, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid operated around there. At any rate, at an otherwise unextraordinary roadside loc-
ation, a small parking area looks out over the prairie and a wooden plaque has been
erected marking the spot. It reads unlike any official prose I've ever seen, and I can only
assume that a former MFA student, unable (thankfully) to land a teaching job, had been
hired by the state department of public works. “Early Day Outlaws” is the title, and the
inscription begins like this:
The old West produced some tolerably lurid gunslingers.
Their hole card was a single-action frontier model .45 Colt, and their long suit was
fanning it a split second quicker than similarly inclined gents. This talent sometimes
postponed their obsequies quite a while, providing they weren't pushed into taking up
rope spinning from the loop end of a lariat by a wearied public. Through choice or force
of circumstances these parties sometimes threw in with the “wild bunch”—rough-rid-
ing, shooting hombres, prone to disregard the customary respect accorded other people's
cattle brands.
I've been trying to imagine the conversation between what must have been the very
young person who wrote this and (in my mind) the veteran state employee who approved
it.
“ 'Tolerably lurid'?”
“Yes, sir. It's tongue-in-cheek language, you know, mimicking the idiom of the time and
place.”
