No Country For Old Men — Nusrat Durrani

NUSRAT ON THE ROAD IN AMERICA.
Starting April 7, 2019 Nusrat is on the road in the American heartland visiting small towns, meeting ordinary people to bring their stories to the rest of country and the world.

White Shield Reservation, North Dakota

Bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, driving through tornadoes; & jolted in tiny planes & landing in Bismarck at midnight, rain falling like bullets on the tarmac. Dinky airport, charcoal night, glistening roads, the comforting croak of Tom Waits, Can, BuzZcocks, Salif Keita inside the Grand Cherokee. Outside, I imagine the dense Arikara sky blur into earth and bleed into darkness. It’s 2 am and a flash of energy suddenly animates my shy young Chinese assistant, a part time black metal singer, who breaks into a low, menacing and heavy growl, scaring the hell out of me.

The rain stops abruptly and we pass Garrison in slow motion. It's lit like a movie set, with a Diary Queen and a gas station, the shiny blue highway slicing the orange neon glow in half. Deserted, except... except for a herd of deer with radioactive blue eyes, smiling at us outside the 711.. or is this a sleepless dream? The flickering GPS leads us back into the deep dark night, a right turn into a nowhere dirt road that’s supposed to take us to another lonesome motel but this is pure North Dakota wilderness.. tires crunch rock and gravel and we crash into the steel fencing of what we discover is one of the hundreds of Intercontinental Ballistic Nuclear Missiles aimed at Russia. Fuck.

Somehow, we find the motel. Bear skin and steer heads on the wall, old country music on a radio somewhere, and a note on the desk asking us to self-check-in. The only guests in a sprawling, empty place designed to look occupied. I dream of Townes Van Zandt swimming in the moody Lake Sakakawea, which I haven’t even visited yet, and in the morning we hit the road again to visit Old Scout Cemetery and get lost with Tom Stromme from the local newspaper trying to find Jazz Young Bear, Native philosopher and elusive interviewee.

What’s the point of it all, but another sunset in the lunatic’s eye and a country with a President who says we have no vacancy but there’s a devastatingly beautiful landscape and all these abandoned cities and factories with nobody in them? Jazz Young Bear is speaking in a reverie, his eyes are closed, his voice is booming in the darkening sky, "the Native people will survive the USA", and his words ring true, mythologies are being rewritten, and trout jump and up and down in historic rivers and grandmothers weep. And I start the car and fly into the highway again...