YOU’RE MAYBE WONDERING ABOUT THE PICNIC BASKET. THOUGH NORTH Dakota with its wide views and variegated grasslands is a fine place to picnic, for most this holds only in summer. As Swede would later report in her short, scattershot, and extremely readable history, The Dakota Territory as I Recall It,
Few westward travelers since the emergence of internal combustion have attempted picnics in the Badlands in January.
Anyone who’s been there understands why.
But Roxanna Cawley was exempt from assumption. She knew, and her neighbors knew, that when the land lies buried in the miseries of winter, and loose boards twist with the cold, and the air hangs glassy and absolute over the world, that is when the merriest of all picnics happen. Anyone can tell you these are the times you need a picnic most, and the fact is, if you were lucky enough to live in the North Dakota Badlands in 1963, you could load up and have one at will.
We didn’t know where she was taking us. Dad, driving, just followed her directions. We were a quiet troop. Swede was curled away from me, and I couldn’t have spoken if asked, for my throat ached with coming departure and with the beauty I had perceived in Roxanna. So upright and calm she appeared, there in the front seat, and so graceful, and so separate from Dad. Had the scene been mine to write she’d have scooted closer to him; she’d have reached for his hand. Were Dad’s heart my tablet I’d have taken it up and erased Davy’s name, so terribly did I wish to stay, and had it been whispered to me that all Roofing had burned, to the last toothpick, so that we had no home to return to, I’d have rolled down the window and shouted thanks to heaven without a thought for Dr. Nokes or Bethany Orchard or anybody.
We went round a bend and Roxanna suggested we park, a difficult trick because the road was so skinny. Dad eased to the right till doors and hubcaps scraped the hard snow wall left by the plow. We piled out left. The road was a trench with sides too high to see over; we had to climb onto the Plymouth, bumper, hood, roof, which was something to laugh about and made us all more comfortable. But it was cold, up on the snow! The moon was what Swede called a gibbon moon, meaning not quite full but oval like a monkey’s head, and it showed us a white hillside up which Roxanna led us, her wool dress whipping. I ran and took the basket from her and she put her mittened hand on my shoulder and so we climbed, topping the hill at last to look down at what seemed a garden of fire.
Fire, and rising steam, and specks of light—the specks pooling and runneling then blinking out to be replaced by others. The fire came from a split in the earth that had opened and zigzagged away through the hills. Smoke and heat and sporadic low flames issued from this crack and from others branching outward. It was a fearful sight for young readers of Scripture, and Swede clutched my arm even as I looked at Roxanna for reassurance. No, I didn’t think it was the genuine Hell; it was way too pretty. Yet Swede had read to me how the distinguished atheist Voltaire sat straight up on his deathbed, moments before acquiring the farm, and with horror in his eyes described in journalistic particulars a geography of firespouts and molten earth and dense smoke that moved in heaps along the ground—all in all, an account not far from the sight before us now. No doubt Voltaire had a moment or two of deep regret before departing into that country—I know I was nervous—but down we went, descending the hillside lit by orange snow, down into the lee of the hill where the wind couldn’t reach. And the snow as we walked got softer and wetter, and now we could see that the specks of moving light were streams of snowmelt, and the streams pooling and grading down into the crack were what created the steam and made the air so warm and sociable the lower down we went. Roxanna told us how generations ago lightning had sliced into an aged cottonwood whose roots ran across a vein of lignite. The vein was narrow and deep and the fire settled into the coal and spread inchwise until here, a hundred years later, it lay before us, a snaky glowing web reaching away into the evening. It was only our good fortune, Roxanna said, pulling her hood back from her face, that it had happened here and not in more populous country; for then it would be a famous attraction, like Hot Springs or Lourdes, where the multitudes of rich and feeble sat around in scalding mud with cotton up their noses; as it was, we were the only folks about, and though it might be zero and blowing a gale up on the hill, down here where the ground itself seemed coming unstitched we had to undo our coat buttons and loosen our scarves.
“Mr. Land, right here,” Roxanna said, and Dad took a folded blanket off his shoulder and flung it across a flat rock by the flames. The rock was bare and dry, and for radiant warmth it was like sitting on a rooftop. Before us the crack was more than a yard across and the fire pranced up out of it a foot high. Did you ever burn coal? It makes a white-gold flame with a clean cerulean core. We leaned back on the blanket and were too warm—to our joy and disbelief—even unbuttoned.
“Roxanna,” Dad said, “it’s a miraculous place. I never saw better.” He was sitting beside her. The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt. I looked at Swede and saw hope showing in her face, and felt it in my own.
“Come on, Reuben,” she said, “let’s explore!” So off we went with not so much as a caution from Dad, for he was looking at Roxanna through what I fancied were new eyes, she having worked a fairy tale in bringing us to such a place. It was indeed miraculous. How else to describe a valley where in deepest winter steam plumes as if from a battlefield, where boulders crouch warm as artillery, where spreading fire wakes frozen salamanders with which to scare your sister? We ran all over that piece of ground. We forgot the picnic. We jumped over narrow places in the crack and dumped armloads of snow down it for the thrill of the hiss. Once, resting against a heated stone, we witnessed the ignition of a dead juniper, a lacy brown juniper not ten yards away—it gasped, incandesced, roared into flame and departed forever. For a moment Swede and I had the same thought, that things in this realm were subject to spontaneous combustion (try that on for an idea to give you the crawling heebies), but running over she peered down the hole where the tree had rooted itself. Below lay the vein of glowing lignite; the event we’d seen must’ve happened here a thousand times before.
Returning, we saw a covered pan jetting steam beside the fire, also a small Dutch oven set a bit farther back. Dad and Roxanna were talking lightly in the way adults do who’ve just shifted gears to accommodate children—an infuriating tone for kids attempting to sound the future. Though Swede pried skillfully, Roxanna was more than a match for her sidelong queries; we had to be content with the hearty smells from the pots and with noticing how Roxanna sat, her back against a boulder, cushioned by Dad’s folded coat. Were there time for it, I’d here describe the delicacies we later spooned up: the heavily salted beef stew with pearl onions and, from the Dutch oven, a golden gingerbread sweetened with canned fruit, a caramelly mixture Roxanna called Brown Bear in a Cherry Orchard. But time was short. Dad was gazing downvalley with a flummoxed expression.
“Is that Martin Andreeson?” he inquired, pointing at a man in a coat picking his way toward us through the rocks.
Roxanna said, “Who?”
“Martin Andreeson,” Dad replied. “Government man. Is that him, kids? I can’t quite tell.”
The fellow was wearing a kneelength coat belted at the waist and he was stepping carefully alongside the firevein. He hadn’t any picnic basket and his hands were pocketed. Then out came one hand and he waved at us like some old friend.
“It’s him,” I said.
Dad sighed.
“What’s he want? Who is he?” Roxanna wondered.
Dad didn’t answer; where was he supposed to start?
“Jeremiah?”
“Well—you’ll see.”
“Hello,” said Martin Andreeson, walking up. “Hello, Jeremiah—Reuben. Say, where’s your girl?”
Dad looked round. Swede had disappeared as briskly as that juniper tree. “Exploring, I guess. You’re in time for supper, Mr. Andreeson.”
“Thank you. I ate.” The putrid fed picked a boulder and sat himself down. He popped loose a cigarette and lit it from groundfire, then took a big puff and winked at me through the smoke. He always acted like he was your favorite uncle visiting from India—boy, it was aggravating.
“Roxanna, this is Martin Andreeson,” Dad said. “Martin, Roxanna.”
“My pleasure, Mrs. Cawley.”
It was quiet a moment while Andreeson smoked and looked around. You couldn’t help but notice he was kind of a handsome jerk, sitting there in the glow. He looked extremely tickled, also. I figured we were in serious trouble on account of staying hid so long.
“Well?” Dad inquired.
“I’m pleased,” Andreeson replied, “to have run across you again. Do you know, I had some car trouble back in Linton.”
“Looks like you’re fixed up now.”
“I’ll be honest, Mr. Land. We are getting close to Davy. And the closer we get, the more dangerous for him. I’m not threatening anyone, it’s just the truth.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m asking for your help. I understand your reluctance.”
“I can’t help you. If you’re close, as you say, you already know more than I do,” Dad replied, adding, after a moment, “Just for the sake of discussion, how close do you suppose you are?”
“He’s in the Badlands,” Andreeson said.
“You appreciate the Badlands are fair-sized.”
Andreeson smoked a little, appeared to decide on forthrightness. “A rancher not far from here keeps a few pigs in his barn. Last week the daughter went out to do chores and her favorite of these pigs was missing—yes, her favorite. Pen closed, barn door shut. Well, these mysteries happen sometimes. Pigs are smart, I understand. So they didn’t call the sheriff till they lost a second pig the same way. Vanished from a shut pen.”
Dad said, “Wait a minute. You think it’s Davy, taking these animals—that he’s here?”
“Not far from here.”
“Did somebody see him?”
Andreeson said, “I expect he’d be taking them for food, don’t you?”
“Did they see him?”