Rust and Dinosaur Dust
A break down in the Badlands
Wren called me from the road yesterday as I was planting basil in the green house, the day shimmering with watery light. She had said goodbye to me and the farm on Tuesday, bound for Salmon, Idaho for a summer job with Fish and Wildlife, and driving the old farm truck, a Toyota older than she is. She was excited to live in the back of it all summer; she outfitted it with a platform to sleep on and storage bins underneath. We packed the truck together on Monday and she took little but the barest essentials: sleeping bag, stove, pot, flashlight, a few clothes, a few good books. Last summer she rode her bike across the country and carried everything in two panniers, so she learned to be a minimalist. This summer was going to be luxurious.
"The truck is acting really weird," she said over the phone, in her understated way, but I could hear the panic in her voice. A few questions later I understood that she had broken down on 1-94 in a construction zone where the highway was down to one lane. The truck had suddenly revved up to 110 and then fell to 30 and shuddered to a stop.
"I'm in the breakdown lane but it's kind of sketchy here," she said. "What do I do?"
"Just go sit off the highway if you can," I said. "It's not safe to stay in your truck. Where are you? I'll try to find you a tow."
She pinged me a location: Glendive, Montana. A town hugging the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana on the edge of the badlands. On Google earth the town looked like a small square patch on a huge rumpled blanket the color of sand. A picture of the town mascot popped up: "Glendisaurus," a life-size statue of a triceratops standing by the highway. Fossil country. Wren wasn't too far from the statue, in the breakdown lane, surrounded by construction vehicles, real dinosaur bones and the hot, ancient dust of an inland sea.
It was the Friday of a holiday weekend, not an easy time to find help. I called Baker Boyz Towing in Baker, and Don picked up. "Sure, I can help her. I'm about 80 minutes away." As he got closer, a very long hour later, he called me back to find her exact location. I studied the map .....yes, after the river, before the overpass. "I see the construction," Don said, and I could hear the sound of the wind and trucks over the phone. "How about I keep you on the phone until I see her." Later, Don called me back and offered to drive Wren three hours to a town that had rental cars, in case she was stranded until after Memorial Day. "Oh wow," I said. "Really?" "I like to do more for people than be a wrecker driver. It's not for my business, but more for my life," he said. "All I have going on this weekend is church on Sunday morning." I practically fell in love with this kind stranger.
Just as kind were the folks at RZ Auto where Don dropped Wren and the truck. It didn't sound hopeful at first. "We never see these foreign trucks out here," they told Wren, so they had to order parts. The rear wheels were shot, or sheared or seized, or something. I never got a clear picture. Wren slept in the truck in the parking lot at the auto shop, locked into the chainlink, told to pee behind some junk cars.
The next day, Saturday, two guys worked all day on the truck, commenting that they had never seen rust like that. I imagined the underside of Wren's hard-working farm truck, rust breaking some things and sealing others together that shouldn't be sealed, making the work less like mechanics and more like surgery. It had never traveled this far or hard. It had simply been decaying here on this moist and salty hillside. I felt bad.
Wren on her bike trip last summer; pics by her friend, Zoe, who joined her for the last leg through the Rockies.
The break down of the truck shook Wren's confidence for a while. In the yard of the mechanic, with nothing to do but wait for two days, stared at for her flowing pants and Birkenstocks and judged for being a young woman alone, she began to doubt herself a bit. One guy working on the truck had a tattoo of an American flag wrapped around his neck, she said, and when she asked a question said nothing, like it wasn’t her place.  She walked four miles to a state park for something to do. Everyone stared, she said, as if they hadn't seen a stranger in years.
Besides the park, the main attraction in town was a dinosaur and fossil museum. All the exhibits were set up to tell a Creationist story and to argue that dinosaurs were on earth at the same time as people and were even on Noah's Ark. I kind of love that idea, I have to say. Stories make our world, afterall, as much as the bones and fossils we find in the dust and the meanings we attribute to them through science. I mean, it's all improbable. I'm not a Creationist, but the world is capable of holding endless contradictions, so why shouldn't we. I think the problem is less about what is right or real, and more about what happens when we insist on either-or, not both-and, and don't accept what others believe.
Wren's confidence came back as she engaged with the family who owned the auto-shop, as she asked questions and they spilled out their life stories, about working in the prison, about living in the badlands. In the end, they showed her nothing but kindness. Good people, hard-working people, who by 10 pm on Saturday night got her back on the road, headed west.
