A man in a white tunic carries a twenty-kilo cross from town to town, and his family follows him in a caravan. In the United States, the road is a way of life: hobos riding freight trains illegally, cowboys still following the herds, hippies of the Rainbow Family, Navajo shepherds. Christophe crosses the country with them, from east to west, over more than 10,000 kilometres and in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. From one ocean to the other, these nomads cultivate their freedom right on the tarmac, all the way to the desert where the last shepherds are being driven off a land that holds coal.
“In the United States more than anywhere else, sooner or later you end up taking the wheel”, letting the vastness unfold beneath the floor.
“Every train has its own cargo of energy and mystery.” Christophe ends up taking one, alone.Lance carries his cross along the roadsides. It weighs about twenty kilos, less, he says, than that of Jesus, who bore the sins of all humanity. Twenty-three years ago, a carpenter and father of two, he suggested to his wife that they sell everything, buy a bus and follow the true path; he thought they would be gone six months. Today they have seven children, five of them born on the road. In each town, he asks a church to let him park the caravan in its car park for the season. “It’s not the kilometres that matter, but the number of people I can convert to the word of Jesus.” Near Milwaukee, at the foot of the Great Lakes, Stretch waits for a train under a bridge. A hobo, he rides freight trains illegally, from harvest to harvest: apples in Washington State, oranges in Florida. He follows the sun, he follows the seasons. Vagrants, on the other hand, don’t work and go nowhere. He ran away from his mother’s at thirteen, he is now forty-three, and has more than a million kilometres on the rails behind him. “That thing, once it’s running in your veins, you can never shake it off.” The railway police are not to be trifled with, and for the sake of a beer Stretch lets the train go.
Waiting for a train, says Stretch, takes “a quarter of an hour or 4-5 hours”: “the railroad has its own rhythm”.
For Lance, being on the road “means serving the Lord with all my heart”.In Nevada, two centuries ago, cowboys drove cattle across the open spaces. Fences and ranches have since settled the cowhands, but the Spanish Ranch carries on a nomadism that is dying out. A handful of buckaroos follow the herds there across an estate a hundred kilometres long, some 300,000 hectares. Ira, their boss, has been there eight years and has almost always been a cowboy. Up at three in the morning, they catch the calves by the hind legs to lay them down, brand them and notch their ears so they can be counted. “Not a bad office, is it?” You depend on no one, you know nothing of traffic jams; the hardest part is winter, and not seeing his family as much as he would like. The chuck wagon is no longer drawn by horses: it is an army truck painted yellow, where Christophe, hired because the cook has quit, prepares the meal for eight cowboys. Nomads? Ira doesn’t know whether the word fits, but they spend a lot of time following the herds from one end of the country to the other. In the evening, around the fire, life starts up again. Then the tepees are folded, and between cowboys no one ever says goodbye.
“Here, a man is worth nothing without his horse”: every morning, cowboys and mounts gather in the silence of the plains.
Men “of the solar race, of those who feed on landscapes and wash in mountain streams”.
The ranch is said to be bigger than the State of Rhode Island: some 300,000 hectares.
Up at three, the cowboys usually finish their day in the early afternoon, exhausted; life only resumes in the evening.In a forest in Washington State, the Rainbow Family gathers on the 4th of July to pray for peace and love, on the fringes of consumer society. No leader, no organisation, no official spokesperson: a camp among a few trees, and a hug offered on arrival. There are said to be several tens of thousands of them in the United States and around the world. At noon, on the day of the great prayer, the crowd gathers in the meadow. Kyma weeps with joy before 20, 30, 40,000 people, “the history of America being written before our eyes”: they are all his friends, his family. One day, in Chicago, he saw a gnat as big as a Boeing 747 land on a blade of grass, in perfect harmony with nature; that day, he met God, and since then he has looked at the world through God’s eyes. “The road, for me, is emotional freedom.” When he passes the houses along the road and sees how people live, he is afraid. He lives here, outdoors: nature is his homeland, like the mountains and the West Coast.
One of the camps in the forest is called Rooster Sauce Camp, after a chilli sauce, sriracha.
“Welcome home. A hug?” No leader, no spokesperson: this is how people are welcomed.
“In the middle of the tracks, flowers sometimes grow too, tender and ephemeral before the eternal.”
What frightens Kyma about the people in houses: “the system has made them stupid”, and above all “very intolerant”.At the end of an impassable track, near Monument Valley, Kat, Zhonnie Katenay by name, lives in a hogan, the temporary Navajo dwelling that is moved with the seasons and the sheep. Nomads since time immemorial, the Navajos were penned into reservations. Kat teaches Christophe to throw a lasso, then sets off for the day with the flock, leaving the young goats behind. In the past, a family could have more than two hundred sheep; he has half that, and the government allows only twenty per family. Yet every family needs wool to make blankets: it is the basic economy. They can no longer cut wood, or gather medicinal plants. “We’re not leaving of our own free will, we’re being driven out.” The reason lies beneath their feet: billions of tonnes of coal. Kat has been to prison several times for protesting against the fences, when barbed wire was put up on their land. His hogan was once destroyed by the police, then rebuilt. He loves the coolness of summer mornings, the clouds, a few drops of rain.
In the hogan, “it smells of fir”, and “of goat hair too”; there isn’t a car for miles around.
For Kat, these bans are “a way of killing our economy and our traditional culture rooted in the land”.
The sheep had to be kept in the valley for a few hours; already they want to climb back up, and you have to run: “they never stop”.
After ten thousand kilometres, Christophe finds men “caught up by the system”, driven out “over a matter of coal and dollars”.“I hope the history and the way of life of Native Americans will be stronger than all these colonial-style attacks.”Kat