February 15, 2001

Plains Folk: On Roads and Road Books

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

They aren't going to like this in Fargo. Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize winner, in his new road book, "Roads," refers to the Gateway City as "the bleak little town on the Dakota-Minnesota border."

On the other hand, he loves the stretch of the Kansas Turnpike through the Flint Hills, the same piece of road that years ago that fellow from the Chicago Tribune insisted was the worst drive in America. McMurtry likes it that there is "not one tree to violate one's sight line." Now this is a true plainsman.

The subtitle of this new book from Simon & Schuster is "Driving America's Great Highways." Marketing people these days call such works "road books." Previous generations of readers knew them as "travel narratives." In a travel narrative the author leaves home on some sort of quest, sees exotic lands and peoples, and comes home not only to tell of them but also to reflect on how he has been transformed by the experience.

There are many great travel narratives of the plains. Francis Parkman's "Oregon Trail" and Josiah Gregg's "Commerce of the Prairies" are classics. Ian Frazier's "Great Plains" ranks high in recent times. What they all have in common, though, is that the travelers came from somewhere else to report about this peculiar open space in the middle of the country. McMurtry, on the other hand, begins and ends on the plains. Archer City, Texas, is home base.

This is the guy who wrote "Horseman, Pass By" ( basis of the movie "Hud") and "The Last Picture Show." After that he wrote a whole box of books, including "Lonesome Dove." After going Hollywood for many years, he came home to Archer City, bought a bunch of buildings (including the old picture show), and opened a mammoth used book store. He also had a heart attack, lost the capacity to write for a while, and came back writing in a new voice. What I'm saying is that "Roads" is a road book inside a travel narrative, the larger story being the author's whole life.

The book goes coast to coast, but clearly, the center of interest is the plains. McMurtry stops in Council Grove, Kansas, because Josiah Gregg did.

He revels in the Oklahoma Panhandle, finding it "still as lonely, lovely, and spooky as ever." He sees a swivel chair in the middle of the road in eastern Colorado and the face of Jesus on a tortilla in Lake Arthur, New Mexico.

The narrative reaches a sort of climax–the equivalent of Francis Parkman's peering at the minnows in "Oregon Trail" (I know that's obscure; you'll have to look it up)–on the northern plains, driving Highway 2. "At some point in the afternoon," McMurtry recalls, "somewhere between Fort Peck in Montana and old Fort Union in North Dakota, near the spot where the Yellowstone River flows into the Missouri, I realized I had found paradise."

For connoisseurs of prairie travel, U.S. 2 is the perfect road. "U.S. 2 is as good as it gets. The hay fields were golden, the plowed land a rich brown, the Missouri bluffs bluish, the sky a deeper blue, the thunderheads a brilliant white, the hummocky, rolling rangeland a somber gray... Once into North Dakota, tightly packed fields of tall sunflowers alternate with hay fields or the occasional patch of unharvested wheat.

"Throughout that afternoon and the next morning the realization slowly grew on me that I had accidentally found something I hadn't really expected to find: the dream road, the good-as-it-gets road, the ideal path into the heart of the great steppe."

As for what McMurtry learned on the road, read for yourself, but I'll tell you it has to do partly with roads and partly with women.

Finally, a correction. In a recent column asking newcomers on the plains to tell their experiences, I messed up and gave an obsolete e-mail address.

E-mail writers, I can be reached here: tom@plainsfolk.com.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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