Baker, Montana, loiters quietly in the dust along U.S. Highway 12, crammed up against the border of North Dakota like an afterthought. You can’t get anymore east in Montana than Baker without actually becoming North Dakota. And for Baker, being North Dakota is only slightly better than being Chicago, St. Louis or, forbid, New York City.
Which is probably why Baker is right where it is.
Marmarth, North Dakota is parked along a side track outside Montana, just about as far west as you can go and still be in North Dakota. Both Marmarth and Baker are old railroad towns along the famed Milwaukee Road from Chicago to Seattle. In the late 1800’s, Marmarth was a hub of rail repair activity, servicing the big engines before and after they made the climb over the mountains to the west. It had a population of over 5000 people – rail workers and their families mostly, with a growing fraternity of shop keepers and cattle ranchers. But times have changed, the railroad has moved its operations elsewhere, and life has largely passed Marmarth by. The town is abandoned now – save for one bar, one restaurant and a population of maybe 50 people, give or take. In the winter, considerably less.
Baker and Marmarth are separated by just seventeen miles of tracks and seventeen miles of wind-swept, coyote-tramped, straight-shot asphalt highway through the fossil-rich badlands of the Little Missouri River.
During the 1980’s, I spent a summer in Marmarth, living in the old railroad bunkhouse with a group of scientists from the Milwaukee Public Museum. We were there to study dinosaur extinction. The badlands surrounding the area contain sediments that date precisely to the very moment, over 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs went extinct. Fossil fragments of dinosaurs, turtles, fish, rodent-like mammals, insects, plant material and other fauna and flora related to the extinction literally spill out of the buttes, canyons and mesas like rock candy. We had come to make sense of it all.
There were rumors, during our summer in Marmarth, of a rundown cowboy bar in Baker that had a stripper. Not “strippers” per se, but a single stripper – a solitary woman who nightly gave away the details of her plot not in chapters, but in slow, anguishing paragraphs. Occasionally a few of the scientist/greenhorns bravely ventured across the border into town in an attempt to verify this rumor. Unfortunately, I never made it. To me, the mysterious stripper of Baker remained as enigmatic as the fossil ghosts that prowled the badlands.
A year or two later I was again traveling in the area and decided to return to Marmarth to check on some of the old sites and maybe do a little unsupervised fossil collecting on my own. Looking up some of the locals who I had befriended the summer before, I arranged to stay in the old bunkhouse for a couple of nights.
On the second night, as I sat under the whispering cottonwoods next to the Little Missouri River, I recalled the stripper bar in Baker. I had been doing a lot of traveling and it was time for a night on the town. I decided to drive the seventeen coyote-straight miles of asphalt into Baker to grab some dinner and maybe, just maybe, try to find the bar, if it really existed.
It wasn’t hard to find. There was really only one bar in town. I don’t recall its name, but it really didn’t need one. A single, well-worn door half-stepped awkwardly up from the dust of the street so that patrons naturally just stumbled in and stumbled out.
I stumbled in.
The bar was dark and cool inside. It was quiet and deserted except for two old half-drunken cowboys hunched over the mahogany bar, retelling old stories for the hundredth time. They looked instinctively in my direction. Immediately sizing me up as a dude, they returned to their stories and the careful, thoughtful, long-term study of their beer glasses.
I spun up onto a butt-polished stool at the far end of the bar. Trying to look rough, or at least less dude-like, I ordered up a beer and a shot: whiskey… double… straight. I requisitioned a ranchburger with home fries and grabbed the local newspaper off of a stack at the end of the bar - a flimsy little rag of a dozen pages named the “The Baker Cattleman.” In most places it would have qualified as the local Shopper, but in Baker, it contained all the news that was fit to print: cattle auctions, obituaries, used trucks for sale, and a couple of articles about a car accident on the highway and the recent Founder’s Day parade, celebration and rodeo.
I read through the paper, slowly ate my ranchburger and watched a few people – locals it seemed - stumble in, have a drink and then stumble back out. (Cowfolk seem to be perpetually falling forward in a graceful, stumbling motion not unlike John Wayne. It must be the boots.) No one stayed for long, except the two cowboys at the far end of the bar. Like the faded pictures on the walls and the dust on the floor, they appeared to be fixtures.
By early evening, I had pretty much decided that those two cowboys were about all that was happening in Baker when a door to the rear of the bar opened and a woman carrying a leather shoulder bag and a large boom box walked in. She was thin, 40-ish, possibly 50-ish. She wore dusty jeans and a fancy pink cowboy shirt, with tassels on the sleeves, open in the front, pulled over a tight black t-shirt with the words “Bulls Balls” spelled out in rhinestones. She had the loping, slightly bowl-legged gate of someone who spent a lot of time on a horse. Long, stringy sun-bleached hair poured from beneath a dirty cowboy hat, and her dark, leathery skin was dry and blotched. She wore heavy makeup and was smoking the stub of a brown cigarillo.
She set the boom box on a conveniently placed stool, plugged it into the wall and clicked a couple of switches. The room suddenly lurched as a throbbing pop tune filled the room. Ignoring the drunken cowboys and looking directly at me, (the only other patron in the bar) she set the bag on the floor, pulled off her hat, slapped it against her thigh and began to pull at the tails of her shirt. This was not what I had expected. I buried my nose in the “Cattleman” and tried my best to look non-chalant.
The two drunks at the bar looked up from their drinks and glanced over in my direction with a tired, quizzical grin. They had seen Bernice perform a thousand times. They knew her story: chapter and verse. It was the dude’s move.
Glancing up into the large mirror above the bar, I saw the woman pull her t-shirt up over her head, buoyantly releasing two unnaturally large, somewhat saggy white boobs into the room. They rolled like ocean waves echoing in the harbor a couple of times before settling down flat against her chest, pointing directly at the tips of dusty boots that appeared to have slipped into at least a thousand stirrups She was looking directly into the mirror, directly at me.
I tried to concentrate on the “Cattleman”.
“What’s this,” I said to myself, “an estate auction out at the Looten farm!? Hey! A John Deere 1350 for $500!” But it didn’t sit. Over the disco beat, I heard a zipper zip and another glance at the mirror revealed Bernice slipping out of her jeans, a G-string wedged firmly up her tired, leathery, white butt crack. I needed to meet this train wreck head on, so I turned to her and nodded, trying to smile casually – but all I saw was white skin, bad teeth, boobs, and stretch marks. Mostly boobs.
The jeans fell to the floor and I returned horrified to my paper.
“Hey,” I heard, “hey you!”
The music stopped. The drunks looked up. I froze.
It was the dude’s move.
“Hey!” A woman’s voice bellowed from across the room. It was aimed directly at me but I tried to ignore it.
“Hey! You! Professor! What’s so god-damn interesting in the New York Times?!” I looked at the drunks for help. They looked at me for an answer. It was, they thought, an awfully good question.
The bartender poured me another shot. On the house. I summoned all the courage I could find and turned to the woman. She was stark, fricking naked – hands on hips, burning a hole in my direction, a pile of clothes at her feet. An old stripper with a farmer’s tan! Now that’s a sight you just don’t see every day… unless, apparently, you’re a drunken cowboy from Baker, Montana.
I didn’t know what to say. “Actually, it’s not the New York Times,” I said weakly, “it’s the….” I glanced at the paper, “ it’s the Baker Cattleman.” The cowgirl stripper with sagging udders kicked at the pile of clothes and began to walk in my direction. She was pissed. It was bad enough that she had to take her clothes off every night for drunken Bert and Ernie over there, but being ignored by a traveler, fresh meat for cri’sake, this was too much. My indifference had added to her, already, bad day. A cowgirl stripper with an attitude. Jeez.
It was a standoff. Just me and Bernice. I held my breath.
The door of the bar kicked opened and two rough-looking ranchers came billowing in, wrapped in noise and swirling dust behind them. “Well, will you looky here!” whooped one of the ranchers, looking at bare-assed Bernice like he’d just found a stray mare. “Yeee-hah!” he shouted, whooping and slapping his thigh like a rodeo cowboy, spreading a thin cloud of fresh gumbo clay dust out over the room.
The tide had turned. Bernice quickly regained her stripper composure. Pulling her shirt seductively back over her shoulders and flipping the boom box back to “really loud”, she resumed her bump and grind for the obvious and noisey pleasure of the ranchers. Bernice was back on message and back in form.
I looked at the drunks and they nodded towards the door. I threw a large tip on the bar and slipped out in all the commotion.
