Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas (review)

In 1995 I walked from Kansas City to Helena, Montana, and canoed home on the Missouri River. Great Plains denizens, particularly those of modest or little means, proved to be the most generous and open, albeit hard-headed and sometimes backward-looking, people I’ve met in my lifetime. Ken Ilgunas now reports Great Plains dwellers’ character has changed little in the intervening years.

Trespassing across America is, on the surface, the story of Ilgunas’s quest to follow the controversial Keystone XL pipeline through the heart of the Great Plains from the Alberta tar sands to the Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. To pursue his journey, he hikes the pipeline route as closely as he can. Finding roads often far from the pipeline path, he hops fences, at first with reservation and then unabashedly. Meanwhile, locals open their homes to him and warn him that landowners let rifles do the talking. He finds, however, that landowners forgive more than they reprimand (or shoot) and almost everyone offers more than Ilgunas asks.

While informative about the various aspects of the pipeline controversy, Ilgunas’s story is an exquisite travel memoir celebrating individual effort and Great Plains social diversity. It shows us the people of the Great Plains in all their wealth and poverty, pride and tatters. It walks the line between love of the people he meets and criticism of their (and our society’s) small-world views. Trespassing is as much celebration of Great Plains life as it is a cautionary tale.

Ilgunas demonstrates acuity in several levels of narration. Relating the history and background of the XL pipeline and the intricacies of climate science, he contemplates the intersection between human and nature. He weaves technology and Great Plains homespun wisdom into the 1,915-mile trip. Detailing the individuals with whom he forms relationships, he also shows cultural differences between provinces and states. He also informs us enough of his own travails, successes, and humor to make him an apt and welcome travel partner.

Ilgunas finds that for all their generosity, strength, and individual spirit, many Great Plains dwellers sacrifice “local” thinking for corporate-brewed nostrums, reactionary political talking points, and groupthink. He finds many reject climate science and sidestep social good for jobs propaganda, pointing out the pipeline promises to create only about 30 full-time positions along its route. “What happens to our country’s core will affect the rest of the body,” Ilgunas writes (79). He shows us the healthy and diseased aspects of Great Plains life, and hopes the negatives don’t constitute an incurable infection.

Ilgunas begins and ends Trespassing an opponent of the pipeline. But this is no polemic. He enlightens us about the complications of the Keystone XL debate, the interests involved, and the pipeline’s implications for global warming. He holds little hope for a solution to the increasing greenhouse gas emissions the pipeline will enable. But he believes that in the long term, Americans, and perhaps the world, will figure their way out of a tangled and urgent conundrum—How do people addicted to oil maintain their habit and keep from smothering themselves?