Heartland's Eternal Beat
Hunt Along Tango-11, And You Might Bag The Sweep of History

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

TANGO-11, Wyo.

There's no here here.

To the thousands who daily hustle their cars and trucks up I-25 toward Casper from Cheyenne, this stretch of high desert nothingness, about five miles beyond Wheatland, looks as anonymous as a landscape invented by Samuel Beckett.

From that sleek road, little can be seen: a haze of steam, perhaps; the crust of the finger canyons that mark the extent of a river valley; and miles of rolling hill, munched almost barren by cattle.

But Tango-11 bears investigating, because in its confines one can see a rare confluence of the pillars of civilization -- or its discontents. That's quite a claim, I know, for a chunk of rural Wyoming a million miles from Times Square, but I've trekked its trails and meadows and haltingly scaled its cliffs three times now, and I'm always amazed by what's here, if only you look hard.

Tango-11 is a square mile or so of heartland bisected by the Laramie River, and where the river has meandered, it has declared paradise, a fertile swath of green very like other river valleys where man's long climb began.

The greensward is a mile wide, trending more or less westward to the small Wyoming city that gives the trickling stream its name. Down here, close to the water, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better descriptor than "Edenic."

Surely man's first collective memories of a mythic garden were formulated in such a place. Meadow and tree cooperate harmoniously a thousand yards each side of the trickle, and a western wind sets every green thing aquiver with the pulse of life. The willows and cottonwoods whisper in that turbulence, the deep grass undulates like the surface of the Pacific while overhead, the sky manufactures huge marble structures that turn out to be only clouds; they look like Michelangelo's stairway to heaven -- gleamy, creamy, epic. It's just damned beautiful.

But I didn't come to gaze and issue purple prose. I came to hunt.

With a good friend and a good guide, I have three times passed days in the Laramie River Valley, waiting for Father Deer to arrive and feed me. Sometimes he shows and sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he wanders close enough and sometimes he doesn't. It depends on skill, stamina, patience and good marksmanship, all of which I lack, which means it really depends on luck. If the animal chooses to mosey close, you are successful. If not, as has happened, you go home empty-handed. That's why they call it hunting and not killing.

But, sitting there in the cold before the dawn, watching the rocks gradually emerge from blur to shape as the sun caught them, I thought: This is how it began. Men, alone, with some kind of weapon, waiting for some kind of animal in the chilly dark. Okay, so Ooglock went back to a cave with his flint-headed spear and I went back to the Wheatland Econo Lodge, threw my 7mm-08 on the other bed, and collapsed on my bed to make the pain of a 4:30 rising go away. If he doesn't score, his kids die, his wife dies, his tribe dies, his race dies; if I don't score, my kids laugh. Fool and money, soon parted, that sort of thing.

But somehow for a million years in lush river valleys like this one, Ooglock kept his family fed, enough so there'd be another tiny, desperate generation. That's where it began, our topless towers of modern Ilium: with the hunters.

Because if you hunt, you bond, seeing teamwork as a way to up the kill. Even us modern boys do it; Dan will drive the deer toward us, or that's the theory. The practice was that the deer just rolled over and, as I yearned to do in the Econo Lodge, went back to sleep. Still, you get the principle; from the bonding comes the teamwork, from the teamwork the sign language, from sign to spoken to written to, hey presto, The Washington Post. And if you grow tired of the whimsy of the hunt and the chances of the gathering, sooner or later -- say a million years later -- you see the wisdom in planting. Thus the second pillar of civilization is born: agriculture.

The Laramie River Valley, no matter how random its beauty seems, has been carefully nurtured toward steady fruitfulness by hard, practical men who didn't know they were creating abiding works of art when they laid out their fields. That's another thing the city idiot in me came across: the fabulous, artistic order of agriculture, how it seems random but really hews to brilliant design. No art director could conjure the vision I saw one afternoon while hunkered in the shadow of a massive oak. Before me, some kind of very green rolling field, not grass but something agricultural. Clover? Soy? I asked Dan, who farms wheat, and he told me and I forgot. Okay, green, green, not emerald green but some density of chlorophyll so intense it makes you think of immortality or new money. To the left, hay rolls. Again, I have no idea why they have a machine to roll hay into 12-foot logs, but as design the pieces are magnificent in how they set off the flatness of the green field, give it depth and definition and, almost kitsch, point to a slatternly old barn of burnt umber. Then, you see a rim of trite but beautiful yellow-gold-auburn trees edging the meadow, and those immense clouds over them, all of this incidental brilliance put here to sustain the species, you have to think: somebody -- or Somebody -- real smart figured this out.

So you've learned how to eat regularly. Guess what, you're still a barefoot cave-dweller or hut-lurker with dirty toes, and deerskins for duds. How do you sustain the next step toward civilization? And the answer is: You move into something called "indoors." Think that for a million years of human life on this planet there was no such thing as "indoors" and you begin to understand the primal energy behind the call, "Gimme shelter."

But what makes indoors possible? Fire? Yeah, sort of, but something slightly higher up the tree: controllable fire. That is, power.

And that is why, when you sit cupped in the cold rocks of a cold morning in the Laramie River Valley, you behold a queer and completely unexpected thing. It could be a satanic mill of some sort or a Dickensian blacking factory -- an immense industrial structure with three or four Titanic-scaled stacks belching typhoons of steam. It's so 19th century, so Age of Iron and Steam. At night, the place looks particularly hellish, as if they're burning witches at the stake in there, orange hues and shadows crosscutting the clouds of vapor. It's less dramatic by day but still gigantic and unexpected, like an aircraft carrier parked in Denver. It seems to be the Laramie River Station, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Missouri Basin Power Project, complete with over-design-studioed corporate logo on the big sign out front. This industrial beast by some alchemy transforms the energy of coal into energy of the buzzy, sparky kind, then by more magic telegraphs it over wires to refrigerators and microwaves hundreds of miles away.

You folks eating your Big Macs and sushi in the San Fernando Valley, I bet you're doing so courtesy of the Laramie's push against some turbine blade here in Tango-11.

You can hate the power plant, for it certainly ruins the beauty of the spot, with its ring of cooling vats, its windowless visage presenting a slightly totalitarian face to the world, its chain-link fence and guard posts, its acres of parking lots loaded with pickups, but the truth is, if we are to have a civilization, we need power and so it might as well be here as anywhere. Do you want it on the Mall? I thought not.

In any event, it brought jobs and prosperity to little Wheatland five miles to the west, so what's the point of hating it? It's beyond hate. It simply is, and that is that.

So you have in this one square mile game, crops and power. You have it all, no? Really, without these you would not have a civilization, you'd be as much prey as Father Deer to what lay up the finger canyon in the darkness. Maybe your killer would be there and maybe not, maybe he'll be there tomorrow and maybe not, your life would depend on that whim.

So what is the last thing you need?

You need protection.

And that is where Tango-11 itself comes in. It's across from the power plant, on the dull side of the road, not close enough to the river to impinge on Eden. You'd probably pass it without notice, for no structures mark its presence, only a vacant lot surrounded by the same cyclone wire that encloses the plant. A few No Trespassing signs seal it off from human contact and -- I am not making this up -- actual sagebrush puffballs blow forlornly across its face. Again, is this kitsch, or does an art director lurk somewhere off-screen?

One day I demanded that my companions drive up to the deserted site so that I could drink it in. Not that there's much to see: some low gray industrial structures in need of a paint job they'll never get, indecipherable in their meanings to untrained personnel. But I could make out the thing that gave it away and gave the place its Golgotha-like buzz. It was the silo hatch.

Tango-11 -- T-11, the rusting sign on the fence designates the site -- is a missile silo. For a quarter of a century it housed the last century's variation on the theme of the flint-tipped spear, that is, a large tube of various fuel brews with "zine" in their otherwise unpronounceable names, a cluster of computer chips and wire boards, a gyroscope, and of course a warhead, probably the W-87/Mk21 MIRV, fused for airbursts. It was a nuke-tipped spear called the Minuteman III LGM-30G, meant to be hurled the next continent over, and detonate with the power of a thousand Laramie River Stations in some poor downtown called St. Petersburg or Leningrad, turning that -burg or -grad into high desert with a 121-year half-life. It actually was rocket science.

There you have them, the four pillars: the hunt, the harvest, the heating and the killing of the other. Try and build a civilization without them. I celebrate them, because I like to eat, sleep warm and not have my throat slit in that sleep. Yet at the same time I know it's possible that many will look at the four not as pillars but as pathologies. They represent the human -- or excuse me, male -- ego at its most rapine-driven. Each involves a species of rape, does it not?

You rip the life from the animal, and rip the meat from its corpse, dominating it to destruction. You rip the prairie up and plant your little rows of seeds, and pipe in water and dump on nutrients until you get a product that has very little to do with nature at all and services some corporate entity called agribusiness, which in turn feeds 300 million or so of us statistical zygotes representing something called The People.

You decree a power palace on the fruited plain, where once deer and antelope roamed, but you've already killed them, so now you can use the push of the water to generate the steam that becomes electrical energy and lights the streets of Encino far, far away, at the cost of a constant smear of vapor on the plains that you've already raped with a plow and a hunting rifle. And if anyone tries to take this edifice of exploitation away from you, you incinerate him and a million of his brothers half a world away in a nanosecond.

All these things can be hated. Go ahead, if you want to. If it makes you feel good. But the truth is, your feelings really don't matter against the immensity of what actually is. That's really what Tango-11 is: a naked reminder that under it all, the fundamental things still apply.