Читать книгу The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal - Tom Davies Kevill - Страница 16

I rubbed my eyes, trying to make sense of the unreadable word.

‘One flyschukehill, please.’

‘Flesh licker. It’s pronounced flesh licker.’

‘One flesh licker, please.’

On a bicycle, moving slowly across the country, I was able to see and taste first hand the culinary effects that migration from Europe had on this country. In the same way that the USA’s fast food favourite, the hamburger, began as the Hamburg sandwich, knocked together by a couple of wily Germans living in New York, here in the less glamorous surroundings of Stanton, North Dakota, I was enjoying a fleischkuechle, a relic left behind by the Black Sea Germans, who after fleeing oppression in Russia in the late nineteenth century began to look to the Americas, where some had already found freedom and land in the 1870s. Continuing through the 1890s and the early 1900s, the Black Sea Germans began to arrive in large numbers in the Dakotas, bringing their wheat-farming skills and culinary traditions to this fertile new land.

‘Fleisch’ meaning meat and ‘kuechle’ meaning little cake, this simple hearty snack was by no means a culinary masterpiece, but it did just the job after an evening of heavy drinking with cowboys, and it no doubt did the same after a hard day farming the fields in the bread basket of America. It turned out to be a folded pastry envelope the size of a pair of Y-fronts, filled with a well-seasoned beef patty. Deep-fried for four or five minutes in a large vat of oil until golden brown, they were left to cool just a little before being handed in a paper napkin to hungry customers. After two fleischkuechles, and suffering from first-degree burns to my mouth, I began to master the art of eating these napalm-filled pockets. One: carefully nibble away the top corner. Two: avoid the jet of hot steam that is blasted into your face. Three: gently squeeze your fleischkuechle a few times, drawing in some cool evening air. Four: nibble a little more from the corner. Five: insert a healthy squirt of tomato ketchup and a few scoops of sliced pickles. Six: devour. I don’t know how many I ate, but for the rest of the night I seemed to commute between the bar and the stand outside. With a little food inside me I was able to keep up with my new fast-living comrades in a frenzy of dancing and drinking until a very large girl bought me a ‘real cowboy’ drink called a rusty nail.

Peeling my face from the dried puddle of drool that had accumulated on the plastic groundsheet of my tent, I enjoyed those fleeting blissful moments of memory loss before the previous night’s excess came rushing home in a crashing headache and a violent wave of nausea. Still fully clothed, I had only made it halfway into my tent and pulling myself to my feet was embarrassed to find a damp patch around my groin. At the age of twenty-seven, I had wet my tent and now I knew I could never be a cowboy. With no other choice, I packed up my bicycle and rode out of town.

The party are in excellent health and spirits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed.

Capt Meriwether Lewis, Fort Mandan, 7 April 1805

In August 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, under the orders of the President, Thomas Jefferson, set out on an expedition to explore the Missouri river and try to establish a river route across the continent. Leaving Pittsburgh, Lewis and Clark led a corps of thirty-three men across America, and by Christmas 1804 were camped in for the long winter at Fort Mandan, a few kilometres outside Stanton. Having to endure skirmishes with natives, starvation, harsh winters and disease Lewis and Clark pushed deeper into what was then Louisiana. At last, finding the navigable waters of the Missouri river, they constructed a fleet of small boats and with the help of local natives followed the Missouri upstream into the ominously named Badlands of North Dakota.

With a terrible hangover, and my spirits low, I left Stanton following in the famous footsteps of Lewis and Clark.

Until now the changes in the landscape of the Midwest had been subtle but, as I entered the dramatic surrounds of the Badlands of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the changes became more dramatic.

‘I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1883 and I could see why. For thousands of years the gentle flow of the Missouri river has carved out vast multicoloured canyons in the otherwise flat surroundings. Peculiar towering structures rise out of the ground as the sun highlights bright layers of sedimentary rocks built up over millions of years. I spent a wet and stormy night here, camped amongst the bison that roamed freely through the parkland. Staring up at the night sky, it was hard to imagine that these few hardy beasts once roamed the prairies in herds so big they would have been visible from space.

At the peak of their existence it is estimated that over sixty million bison, or buffalo as they are more commonly known, roamed the land between Mexico and Canada. As the great herds of buffalo migrated with the seasons, so too did the Native American tribes, such as the Lakota, the Sioux and the Cheyenne.

Considering their dependence on buffalo, it is not surprising that the Native Americans held the animal in the highest regard. Not only did the buffalo provide meat but almost every part of its body could be put to some use. Its hide for clothing and shelter. Its bones for tools and weapons. Its tough stomach as a vessel for carrying water. But the well-balanced relationship between the Native Americans and the buffalo would soon be lost for ever, changed by the introduction of white settlers. After Lewis and Clark, more and more white fortune-hunters began to head west in search of riches and glory. With horses and guns, buffalo were an easy target, and buffalo-hunting soon became directly associated with the adventures of life in the Wild West. Buffalo hides were used for leather while their tongues became an expensive delicacy, and white hunters left rotting carcasses strewn across the prairies.

The introduction of the railroads only added to the plight of the American buffalo. As railroads stretched into the western territories, buffalo provided meat for the hungry workforce, and once the railroads were complete the destruction became worse. Hunters could now take the train into the west on specific buffalo-hunting excursions, and locomotives would slow down so that passengers could take pot shots from the windows. The wholesale massacre of this proud animal only added to the demise of the Native American tribes who relied on the migration of the buffalo, and by the time the government prohibited hunting, the population in North America had dwindled from sixty million to eight hundred buffalo. The Midwest had been turned into a buffalo graveyard. Reports tell of piles of sun-bleached skeletons stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction, to be cleared up by ’bone pickers’, who found a value in the bones as fertiliser.

Leaving the Badlands and North Dakota in August, I took Highway 2 and cycled west into Montana, Big Sky Country. More than three months on the road without much of a break meant that riding had become a Herculean effort, mentally and physically. My legs were empty and constant glances at the speedometer only revealed bad news. I was going nowhere slowly. The air was muggy and infested with mosquitoes that showed no mercy. If I didn’t keep moving above a certain speed their sharp stings drew blood, forcing me to pedal faster as if stuck on some infernal exercise machine. Unable to shake off the permanent exhaustion that hung over me and with nowhere to stop and rest properly, my mood darkened.

I was also stuck in a culinary groundhog day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day, I was eating alone at the same table in the same diner. The same waitress was taking the same order from the same clipart-decorated menu with the same false smile and around me the same old farmers were having the same conversation about the same crops. Arriving in the small town of Williston on the border with Montana, I threw up my tent in the town park and, just about mustering the effort to get undressed, I climbed inside and collapsed, exhausted.

Waking from a deep sleep and not quite knowing where you are or what’s going on can be a wonderful feeling. Waking like this to find a hard object growing into your back through the floor of your tent is a little confusing, and when this unknown growing object begins to gush water, you panic. Dazed and half asleep I scrambled about, trying to work out what was going on. Was it an animal, a giant insect, some alien being? After releasing a long, profane outburst, I began to piece together what was going on. This scene, a nasty cross between Alien and Titanic, had resulted from me pitching my tent on the town park’s sprinkler system.

Wet and despondent, I packed up my damaged tent and waited for the small diner to open its doors. Sitting with a jug of coffee I picked at a stack of pancakes as the sun came up on another day on the road. After breakfast I queued up with grey-haired farmers’ wives to use the dusty and slow computer in the town’s library. An email from home lifted my spirits momentarily but I left feeling homesick once my half-hour limit was up. I got back on the road. If I was going to get over the Rocky mountains before winter set in, I had no choice but to keep moving.

All around me, buildings and farm equipment were left to rot. Schools, banks and libraries were boarded up and there were almost no young people around. With no work and few opportunities, the temptations of life in the cities were too hard to resist. As I moved from town to town along Highway 2, this social evacuation became more and more disturbing. Falling crop and beef prices led by cheaper imports had left farmers under huge pressure to compete. Market forces and expanding free trade had taken over and profit was king. Seemingly forgotten by their government, all it took was one bad year or a breakdown in machinery and a bigger farm would be willing to step in. Amid mega-farms the small ones couldn’t survive. Family-owned farmsteads were being left in ruin or bulldozed down to make the most of the precious land on which they sat, and families were forced to move on. Just as the temptation of vast profit drove the buffalo to the edge of extinction, so it seemed the same was happening to the rural communities of America’s Midwest.

On a warm Thursday evening I pulled into the town of Bainville, Montana, population six, feeling tired and dejected. The last two days had been a painful struggle against a relentless headwind, and without so much as a gas station in which to refuel, my meagre rations of peanut butter and beef jerky had run dry. Approaching the city limits, exhausted and under-nourished, my imagination began to run wild envisaging the possible treats that might await me in this small town.

Half of Bainville was drinking in the small characterless shed they called the bar. It didn’t serve food. The town had no diner and no gas station, but the woman behind the bar, educating herself via the pages of the National Enquirer, pointed me in the direction of two dusty vending machines selling sweets. Appalled at the thought of dining on M&Ms and bubblegum balls, I pulled myself on to a stool at the bar and ordered a beer.

‘You aren’t from round here, are you, honey?’ asked the barwoman, peering over the headline, ‘Britney’s New Drug Shame’.

‘No, I’m from London,’ I replied, with little patience for conversation.

‘So what brings you to lil’ ol’ Bainville?’

‘I’m looking for the perfect meal on my bicycle.’ I popped a couple more M&Ms and washed them down with a second beer.

‘Well, we like our beef out here. Ain’t that right, Vance?’

She sent a glance to a solitary grey-haired figure in a black Stetson, sitting at the end of the bar. He didn’t respond but emptied his glass of beer, and then began on another. I had been hearing about the legendary quality of beef in Montana since the onset of my journey, and in my last week it had been impossible to ignore the countless heads of healthy cattle that happily grazed the lush plains and hillsides of the Big Sky State. So far I hadn’t found anywhere to eat this famous bovine treat.

Grabbing the barwoman’s attention with a raised hand, Vance called her over and they exchanged a few whispered words, looking in my direction. The barwoman filled two more icy mugs of beer and placed one in front of each of us.

‘Mr Anderson says he’s got some steaks and oysters at home if you’re interested. The drinks are on the house.’

I was bundled into the back of a pick-up truck with my bicycle and Mr Anderson’s large panting German shepherd dog, and we turned off the highway a few miles out of town. We rattled and bumped down a dusty track through smooth rolling hills dissected by the unnatural straight lines of fence posts, which stretched unbroken across this vast landscape speckled with grazing cattle. Dwarfed by the steady form of two large buttes, whose steep sides and stubborn craggy summits broke through the grass-carpeted surroundings, Vance Anderson’s ranch looked like a child’s model. An immaculate, white wooden house sat next to a tall red Dutch barn, surrounded by a series of tidy fences. Horses with necks bent to the ground chomped and pulled on the yellow grass, momentarily breaking their feeding to acknowledge our arrival and the swirling cloud of dust that trailed behind us.

I was handed a cold can of Budweiser and took a seat on the porch. Mr Anderson emptied the remains of a sack of charcoal into half an oil drum and got a small fire going. We talked a little but Vance Anderson was a man of few words.

He lived alone but told me of his family, his work running a cattle ranch and the problems facing ranchers in Montana. His large farmhouse needed a family in it, but he told me there was no work in the area for his children so they had moved to the city. They weren’t interested in cattle farming. With his grey handlebar moustache, deep weathered features, denim pop shirt and dusty boots, Vance seemed to represent the last of a diminishing breed. Perhaps the Midwest won’t have any real cowboys in it in a few years. Cattle farming will have become automated, and men won’t sit on porches shooting the breeze. The traditions I had seen at the rodeo and heard in the country music were fading away.

My protein-hungry muscles began twitching with excitement when Vance reappeared from the kitchen with a plate piled with two Flintstones-sized steaks, marbled with lines of yellow fat and smudged with the dark patches of aging, but I was mystified by the plastic bowl beneath the plate which was full of what appeared to be fleshy water balloons.

Splitting open a testicle brings tears to your eyes, even if it’s not one of your own. Vance gave me a sharp knife and instructed me on the finer arts of peeling and preparing a calf’s testicle, while he put a couple of potatoes in the oven. Otherwise known as Rocky mountain oysters, or prairie oysters, these tidy little bags were quite a bit bigger than my own pair but the whole process was still uncomfortably close to home. I had to make a delicate incision through the tough skin-like membrane that surrounded each ball before removing what lay inside from its pouch. Slicing the sac’s pink contents through the middle, I dipped them in a little egg yolk, coated them in flour and dropped my balls into a hot skillet of vegetable oil that was spitting on the grill.

Three and a half months before putting a testicle in my mouth, I had left home on a bicycle in search of the perfect meal. I had not wanted to take the easy option of eating on my own in smart restaurants. I began the trip because I wanted to eat what ordinary Americans were eating, and so far that was exactly what I had done, from sharing Puerto Rican rice with gangsters in New York to gorging on turkey cooked a hundred ways in Frazee. And now that I was sitting here on Mr Anderson’s porch eating Rocky mountain oysters, watching Montana’s big sky smoulder in a fiery kaleidoscope of red and orange while the coyotes called into the night, I believed I might have found what I was looking for.

May your horse never stumble, and may your cinch never break,

May your belly never grumble, and your heart never ache.

Cowboy poem