At once sweeping and intimate, The Trackers is a vivid portrait of the American West during the latter years of the Great Depression, penned by Asheville’s Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain.
Set in 1937, the novel is told through the eyes of Val Welch, an eager young artist from Virginia who travels West for the first time in his life, having been commissioned by the New Deal’s WPA to paint a mural in a new post office in Dawes, a one-street Wyoming town.
Making much of the trip by rail, Val purchases a used car in Denver to cover the rest of the way to Dawes. He buys a worn out ’28 Model A woodie wagon he paid less than a hundred dollars for: The canvas roof over the back end leaked and needed swabbing with melted wax. Varnish peeled off the graying wood side panels in flakes the size of thumbnails. Three of the tires dry-rotted in checkers that seemed to enlarge and multiply by the day.
Gorgeous, detailed, sensory description like this is woven throughout The Trackers, giving the novel an almost hyper reality as well as a powerful inhabited sense of time and place. Mainly though, it makes it a pleasure to read. Throughout the novel, the world of The Trackers is beautifully textured with sentences that feel like little excursions in themselves.
The novel opens with Val pulling up to Long Shot, a sprawling ranch and home to John Long and his much younger wife Eve, who have offered to put Val up while he paints the mural. Long is a well-heeled cattle rancher, art collector and aspiring politician with his eye on a Wyoming senate seat. Eve, who has been shaped by the Depression, comes from a much rougher life, leaving home as a young girl to make her own way, riding the rails as a hobo, waitressing and finally singing in a Western swing band. While we don’t actually meet the couple for a few days—they’re away in Cheyenne—being the observant artist he is, Val gathers impressions of Logan from the moment he pulls up to the ranch:
At the end of the road, the ranch house sat long and dark brown. It wasn’t old—not much is out there except the land itself—but this was aggressively new. Its angular flattish rooflines looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had been hired to draw up an enormous log-and-stone cabin one morning and had tossed it off in time for lunch…My first thought was that it hunkered against the world, as if attacking bands might still roam the plains. As architecture, it made me wonder who it was afraid of or, conversely, who its anger was aimed at.
Here Val first meets Faro, an elder slim cowboy who is in the middle of training a horse as he walks up. Finally, Faro speaks to Val, calling him by name and nods for him to go on in the house. We learn that Faro has worked for Long for many years. As we get to know him over the course of the novel, we realize he has an integrity about him, feeling at times like an ornery but immensely capable guardian to the others, especially the horses.
Inside the house alone, Val takes in the shelves of books and rows of paintings, many by famous artists, and all of it feeling staged to give anyone who enters the impression that here is the home of a cultured man. But one object in particular stands out: On a shelf higher than arm’s reach, a rifle with a long telescopic sight occupied a horizontal shelf, that looked made for it, a space to display an art object. Long, we learn, was a sharpshooter in World War I, and with the gun displayed so prominently and with the ranch named what it is, it’s clear that Long doesn’t want anyone to forget it.
Over time, Val is drawn into the couple’s orbit. They are a study in contrasts. Long is polite, well-educated and well-mannered to the point of being almost formal and distant, maintaining a veneer located somewhere between remote and slickish, while Eve is frank, sometimes brash, and unafraid to speak her mind.
One night when the three of them have a sort of competition of how the Depression has affected each of them, in a story that will hover over the rest of the book, Eve describes a harrowing night she spent in a large hobo camp that sat along a river, when a rainstorm came up and flooded the camp:
Daylight came and we huddled desperate in the thin light where we’d found purchase. The river swept by heavy and brown and full of stuff, pieces of houses and dead animals. We looked for people we knew but everybody was transient and the flood had scrambled them from their little groups. In that gray dawn nobody looked recognizable, their clothes soaked or stripped away, their faces muddy and their mouths open and dragging in air…I’d managed to climb the bank with a little satchel over my shoulder, so I had a couple of pieces of clothing and my shoes. Everybody ran around looking for their friends, calling their names. It became clear that a good many people were missing. Hard to reckon the number of people sucked away by the river and drowned.
As time passes Eve makes it plain that she resents Long using her to attract and win over important men who could help him realize his political ambitions. This comes to a head after a miserable dinner held for three doltish businessmen that Long forced Eve to entertain. Incensed by Long’s treatment, Eve runs away, taking a valuable Renoir with her.
Long hires Val to go after her, a daunting assignment since the artist is smitten with Eve himself. Complicating things further, Val realizes Long isn’t as concerned for Eve’s welfare as much as his own political ambitions. Long worries she may have returned to her itinerant life, perhaps connecting up with her childhood husband who Long isn’t convinced is dead, which would make Long a bigamist and dash his hopes for the senate.
On a lead from Long, Val heads to Seattle, and the novel shifts into higher gear. Val searches for Eve in the city’s biggest slum, its Hooverville, an encampment of hundreds of shacks and lean-tos. Val takes in this impromptu settlement noting details and images that he’ll want to sketch when he returns to his hotel. An observer of the first order, he delivers The Depression to us up close:
People had built shanties out of scrap materials and held them together with whatever they could scavenge, used nails and wire. The walls might be sided with three or four different materials on the same structure—wide boards, cupped delaminating plywood, layers of cardboard. Anything flat and manageable and at least temporarily waterproof. …Roofs, ideally, were tar paper over the same material as the walls, but tin cans stomped flat made fair shingles….
His second day in Hooverville, as Val makes his way through the camp showing occupants Eve’s picture, he meets a couple of college educated men in their forties, one of whom may recognize her. The men share a tarpaper shack and because of his interest in their place, invite Val inside:
…Two cots on opposite walls, two armchairs with stuffing coming out of arms angled toward a woodstove made from a ten-gallon oilcan and length of downspout, a braided rag rug in the colors of farm clothes—tans and browns and faded denim….Pressed against all the walls, hundreds of books rose in horizontal stacks from floorboard to the joists of the shed roof. They said the books made good insulation in the winter, and they’d bought them by the wheelbarrow load for little more than the work of hauling them away from big houses where hard times had caught up with the people who had lived there and were on their way elsewhere.
Another unforgettable image—the men using books to insulate their tarpaper shack, and sometimes pulling out “a piece of wall” to read. The reader can’t help but contrast the intimate, almost cozy space the men have made for themselves, compared to Long Shot with its pristine, untouched volumes that occupy the shelves of Long’s cavernous home.
After much work and following up leads as he crisscrosses the country, Val finds himself in Florida in a taxi, headed into an ominous swamp where he’s learned Eve’s first husband, Jake Orson, grew up and where his family still lives. The place itself reeks of malevolence. They come upon two men their arms covered in blood, skinning a gator, and an eagle glares down at them from above, and then there’s the snake: A little ways on, we stopped to watch a very large water moccasin move with great effort across the roadway. It had evidently eaten something large and its body was stretched and swollen, a dark heavy cylinder about to split open from just past its wedge of head to its comically twig-like tail. It moved slow and flaccid, like it needed to grunt with every few inches of forward progress. We watched it cross the road in disgust and fascination, aware that if it were fully charged up with venom it could kill us both.
Surviving the swamp and his violent encounter with Orson’s family, if barely, Val comes away from Florida bloody and bruised but having learned that Jake Orson is still alive, living possibly in Portland and may or may not be married to Eve. As his search for Eve narrows and Val receives word she may be singing in California, the danger that awaits in a San Francisco nightclub may not be as darkly ominous as the Florida swamp, but that doesn’t mean it might not be deadly.
In the end, The Trackers is an eloquent and dramatic testament about people shaped if not shattered by the Depression. Everywhere Val travels in search of Eve, he bears witness to the hardship and violence of poverty, and he copes how any artist would, by observing and recording. And in that way, he is a documentarian of despair. But it’s not all darkness. Running through The Trackers is a dignity and gritty hope of people persisting, of making do, like the two men Val meets in Hooverville surviving as best they can in their tarpaper shack, kept warm by walls of books.