Lawrence Block - Step by Step

Now, almost twenty years later, we’ve been to eighty-four of those towns, and know of about a dozen more.

You know, it reminds me of what they used to say about Rembrandt — that in the course of his life he produced three hundred canvases, of which four hundred are in Europe and the remaining five hundred in the United States. The analogy holds only so far. With the paintings, the implication would seem to be that there are a lot of counterfeit Rembrandts floating around, while it seems rather unlikely that anyone is producing bogus Buffalos.

So how to explain the numbers? The answer, I’ve come to believe, lies not in the realm of geography at all, but in the more unsettling world of modern physics. The best I can do is to theorize that, in accordance with Heisenberg’s principle, Buffalos are like subatomic particles; the mere act of looking for them causes new ones to spring into existence.

Our first Buffalo was in Alabama, and Rand McNally knew about it, so finding it was a simple matter of driving there. But it seemed to have gone out of business; there were no highway signs welcoming one, and the word buffalo hand-lettered on a wall was the only indication of where we were.

A local tradesman advised us that people still called the place Buffalo, and that the name had originally been Buffalo Wallow, because once upon a time there had been bison wallowing there. They were long gone, but then so was just about everything else.

We put on our Buffalo shirts — we had a batch of these, products of New Buffalo Graphics, our favorite showing the noble animal and the civic motto, Buffalo, City of No Illusions . Then, suitably attired, we took Polaroid photos of each other in front of the sign on the wall, and next to a sign we found at a half-acre lot next to a general store. The sign didn’t have a Buffalo reference, but what it did have was a message sternly advising one and all that the lot was a private club, restricted to members, and that trespassers would be prosecuted. It was, for God’s sake, a vacant lot, sprouting rank weeds and strewn with trash. Who would want to trespass? Who would care to be a member? And what was the point of the sign?

“It’s to keep out the Jews,” Lynne said.

Buffalo, Mississippi, was our second conquest. And it began to give us an indication of what lay ahead of us. Because it wasn’t on any of the maps, and it hadn’t shown up in any of the volumes I consulted, not even the industrial-strength atlas. In all the years since then, I’ve never seen a reference to the place anywhere. It was pure happenstance that we had any reason to look for it.

Or perhaps it was the agency of a Higher Power, operating in this instance through the medium of a CB radio. Lynne had insisted that we obtain this device, but when I was in the car I wouldn’t let her turn it on, because I couldn’t stand the thing. But after we’d logged our Alabama Buffalo we had moved on to Mobile, where I hung out for a day while Lynne tended to some family business over in George County, Mississippi.

I stayed in our motel room, writing my monthly Writer’s Digest column, and I’d just wrapped it up when she came in, telling me it was a damn good thing we’d bought the CB. “Because two truckers were talking,” she said, “and one of them mentioned Buffalo, Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a Buffalo in Mississippi.”

“There isn’t,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “there is now. I got all excited, and I cut in and called ‘Breaker One-Nine,’ the way you do.”

“The way I do?”

“The way people do. The way CBers do. I asked about Buffalo, Mississippi, and how you get to it, and one of those old boys said it’s near McLain.”

In the morning we drove to McLain, which is on the road to Hattiesburg. A fellow at a gas station steered us toward the road to Buffalo. “There’s not much there,” he said. “Why do y’all want to go there?”

Why indeed? We followed his directions, and right where it was supposed to be we found an old graveyard, with a sign proclaiming it to be the Buffalo cemetery. That was the sole indication that there’d ever been a community here, but it was plenty. On with the Buffalo shirts, out with the Polaroid, and our Buffalo collection had doubled in size.

“That’s pretty amazing,” Lynne said. “How many people do you figure have ever been to Buffalo, Mississippi?”

“We’re not the only ones,” I said. “But all of the rest of them seem to be dead.”

The Buffalos were never the point. What they did was provide the illusion of purpose for an essentially purposeless odyssey. We’d left Florida with the intention of seeing something of the country, but if that’s all you’ve got in mind, it’s impossible to decide where to go next. The Buffalo hunt was always ready to tell us whether to turn left or right. We’d just head for the nearest Buffalo, and along the way we’d probably find something interesting.

The Buffalos themselves were sometimes interesting and sometimes not. Buffalo, Mississippi, was only the first of a whole slew of ghost Buffalos, towns that had once been actual communities but had failed to thrive. Buffalo Gap, Saskatchewan, was one of these, with only a cemetery to give proof of its former existence, while others lacked any population whatsoever, living or dead.

Buffalo, Texas, was situated at an Interstate exit, which made it one of the few Buffalos with a motel where we could stay overnight. The town also boasted a really good lunch place, the Rainbow Café. And Buffalo Gap, Texas, not too far south of Abilene, was home to Judy’s Gathering Place, where the food (and Judy’s company) was so good it was worth a detour on another drive across Texas.

But most of these towns were just there to be checked off the list, not much more than photo ops. Some of them were right where the map said they’d be, but others proved elusive. I remember spending half a day driving around looking for Buffalo Cove, North Carolina, and I’m not sure we ever did find it; we took a picture at some cove or other, and I don’t suppose anybody could prove it wasn’t the right spot, and I don’t suppose it matters, either.

And what did we do, while looking for Buffalo?

We drove around, and spent our nights in budget motels. The road atlas, and the prospect of one Buffalo or another, pointed us in a certain direction, and a set of Mobil travel guides let us know what diversions we might find along the way. We hit our share of national parks and monuments, including such big attractions as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon and Glacier, but also including Big Bend and Zion and Arches and Badlands and Crater Lake. We rode mules at the Grand Canyon and horses at Zion, but at most of the parks we hiked a few miles on the trails.

The Mobil guides pointed us to some interesting places we’d never have thought to look for. I remember a morning in western Kansas when we found our way to a house that had served as a hideout for the Dalton brothers, a place to hole up between bank robberies. There was, we were given to understand, an escape tunnel leading from the house to the barn in back, but we had to take that on faith. Still, it was an interesting stop.

From there we drove south into Oklahoma, where we picked up Buffalo, Oklahoma, before heading east through Ponca City and Bartlesville. There was a museum in Bartlesville, where an oilman’s collection of Western art was on display, and from there we drove north across the Kansas line once again, to Coffeyville, where a museum commemorated the day when those same Dalton brothers held up two banks at once.

It wasn’t the brightest move they ever made. The law was waiting for them, and pretty much riddled them with bullets. (Emmett Dalton survived his wounds, served his time in prison, and moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote a couple of films before building a successful career in real estate. You can’t make this stuff up — but if you drive aimlessly around the country, you can find out about it.)