The Walk to Canada

(Perhaps the first essay I ever wrote.)

The air at Benson lake is cold in the morning, even on August fifteenth. Wind blows across the water and into the krumholzed hemlock steadily throughout the night, bright stars like a white net above. When I open my eyes to the blue light of my tent I know morning has come and Neil will soon be awake, but I rest awhile longer not really wanting to hear the opening whine of his tent zipper. Sometimes in the sleepy quiet a stray chunk of granite hits the water and is registered by my ears, or a bow of hemlock drags across the tent roof. I pretend that Neil is an alarm clock I am trying to ignore, stealing a few more moments before the beginning of an early day.

At some point the illusion gives way and I am up fixing breakfast. The blowtorch roar of my stove displaces the quiet of the lake basin, and soon I am sipping a cup of hot coffee while Neil finishes off his food bag. Granola, milk powder, and dried fruit are followed by noodles, oil and soup mix. He wolfs all these down with equal parts relish and disdain; his stomach has become a hungry dog which he can hold at bay but not satisfy. His spoon scrapes around the plastic of his Tupperware bowl, procuring every last morsel of energy for the divine altar of digestion. I am eating some oatmeal and maybe a few raisins and almonds, fixated on the steam and smell of my coffee.

The sun peeks up over the ridge behind the lake. Its first orange rays light the steam from my coffee cup and the dark little trees behind me. The color of the lake turns from black to a cold green, and the wind seems to die at once. I hold my eyes out over the water and savor the cold which is still with us. Neil does the same and we sit in silence.

Both of us are wearing hats and gloves, and Neil has on a black pile jacket. My flimsy wool shirt doesn’t keep the heat very well and the cuffs have started to shred. The buttons have worn out their holes and several are missing. For the first time this summer, I envy someone else’s warm clothes—it must be a sign that autumn is around the corner.

The spell is broken as Neil’s stomach starts to gurgle again and my coffee goes cold. We pack up in silence, the only sounds are of nylon and metal rubbing and clanging. This morning packing is a well established ritual, and I follow my routine without thinking.

First the sleeping bag is bagged then stuffed into the bottom of the pack, blue nylon in black nylon in blue nylon. Then the tent is put away and the extra clothing packed above the sleeping bag. Food and cooking gear are tucked above the clothing and shelter. Toothbrush, candle lantern, journal, and maps are zipped into the top pocket. Water bottles are filled, shaken until dry and placed in side pockets. Anything wet—yesterday’s washed socks or sweaty damp shirt—is hung off the back to dry in the sun and wind.

On a warmer day the black wool shirt—smoky, tattered, and antiquated—is packed up with my hat. Soft, snug and synthetic, with its purple, red and blue panels, ear flaps and chin strap, my hat is everything backpacking gear has become, as modern as the shirt is outdated. The loud little stove, battered but reliable, is next to its fuel of refined gasoline. Everything was once a shade too bright, or too refined, but if it is mouse-nibbled, well-used, came to me free, or a little junky, I have a fondness for it.

“Forty days” I tell myself. That is how long I have had to prepare for packing up today. That is how long I have walked from the trailhead at Wapinitia Pass, Oregon. Forty mornings of hemming and hawing, of questioning the wisdom of a sleeping bag that heavy, or of carrying two bowls, a flashlight and a candle lantern. Forty mornings of sore shoulders, one tender ankle, innumerable cups of coffee. Forty mornings of the Pacific Crest Trail. Just as quickly, I wonder why I have to put a number to things. Why not think of time as the ground that wears down my boots, the sun that burns my face, or the sweat and shit that my lovingly chosen food becomes in the end?

“I wonder what sort of beer they’ll have at the park in Manning,” says Neil, breaking the silence with his concern. I look up from lacing my boots and think about that for a second. “Canada has got some good brews—Kokanee, Labatt’s, but they might be expensive,” he continues. Perhaps Neil, who has been out longer than I, tells time by his craving for a good beer. Still, numbers are the companion of all long distance hikers—miles, nights, dollars, states, days, Hershey bars.

Nothing remains to be put away and I resign myself to leaving the lake basin. The wind is gone and the sun strong, but the both of us keep our hats and warm clothes on, although I tuck my gloves away at the last minute. We hoist our packs and sway about, testing their balance. Shoe laces are checked, socks are pulled up and Neil is off, bound for the beer of Canada. I wait for a minute, taking in the light and the cold air, reluctant to leave. Over the rim of granite on the far side of the lake, snowy North Cascade peaks sit like Olympic gods, beautiful and impassive.

I don’t want to go back. Back to greasy food, Winne-bozos, bus rides, lawns, and whatever else is in store for us. Out of Olympus and down to the interstate. I try to convince myself that somehow today is a beginning, not an end, and that I could keep walking to the North Pole. My mind is calm, my body is strong, and my pack still has plenty of food. I struggle to feel some sort of finality—“the fortieth day”—but I am not ready to finish anything.

When I finished the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon, I was a wreck. Emaciated and exhausted, I rushed along the last day, stopping now and then to eat a package of ramen noodles. I can see myself clearly sitting in a clearcut, munching on raw pieces of noodle, my feet screaming at me, clothes wet and squishy, eyes glued to the trail, fixated on its end. It was like a pilgrimage; every step was bound toward the North, and my mind was relieved of burden. Pain deprivation and boredom were secondary to the sharp feel of purpose I felt. I walked out onto the highway completely spent and satisfied, too broke and hungry to walk the last section of trail to the Columbia River. That was three years ago.

Neil is running on that same sort of hunger and fatigue, his sights set firmly on Manning Park and the relief it will bring. Since we met three days ago, I have had a nickname for him: The Pilgrim. He has a habit of walking with his hands folded over his camera bag, as if in prayer, his eyes cast down, always down, to the trail. The clouds could spell out his name and he might never see it. Such is the way he has seen the 900 miles from Siskiyou pass.

We leave the lake shore, still a little chilly. Reluctantly I submit to the motion. Here and there larches seem to be yellowing, the sweet yearly act of submission. The beautiful death after the beautiful life, what more could there be? For us, there is the act of witness and the sound of footsteps clomping through the morning.

Neil walks ahead of me with a quick gait. He is all business now, expending the least amount of energy necessary to achieve the maximum distance. True to form, his head is bent and the swish of his dirty cotton pants is the loudest noise I hear.

His pack, an old Kelty, has seen better days. Bungee cords supplant missing straps and hold everything together. The original confident red and blue nylon packbag is fading from use. His boots are worn on the outside sole, feet turning slightly outward from miles of abuse. His once-white pants snag and droop over his long legs, and bunch up under a waist-belt that is covered with thick wrappings of frayed duct-tape, like the arms of a mummy.

Neil has done a lot of long-distance hiking. The Appalachian Trail and portions of the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail are all familiar to him. Like his pack, he is a little weathered, a little ragged around the edges. Like its contents, he is lean and efficient, cat-like. Day after day he walks a steady 20 miles, stopping rarely but suddenly when he gets hungry.

I am more of a dog, if anything. Capable of bursts of speed and lazy moping, I mostly walk a slow and steady pace. My pack is well supplied with food, extra chocolate even, but otherwise spare. Once I strived for 20 miles per day on the P.C.T., but not this summer. Something in me has changed and I do not envy Neil, Lou Reccow, and others I have met who rush along, slaves to their pace. When I feel up to it, I walk a 20 mile day; when I don’t, I spend lots of time looking about.

There is something telling in a hiker’s pace. Some people run themselves down, like wound up toys, only to need fresh urgency in the next day. Others find a grace in moving fast that suits them like a good pack. I met a hiker named John who ambled like a hungry bear, all strength and weight, and I could see in his body that speed was a kind of religion to him. He said that he had walked the California P.C.T.—about 1600 miles—in 65 days. That’s 25 miles per day if he never stopped once. I believed him.

There is a hiker ahead of Neil and me who has apparently turned the numbers game inside out. Since Snoqualmie I have seen Donnal’s trail register stories boasting of his lack of speed, and condemnations of people on a faster course, more extravagant diet, or longer hike. Reading his entries can be like talking to an overzealous religious convert. He tries very hard to promote his own carefully cultivated Way and leaves me feeling like I would rather be impure than suffer the burden of righteousness. I am happy that not everyone thinks of the trail as a race track, but I think that Donnal has missed something fundamental.

Let us have fast hikers and slow, ascetics and gourmet chefs, dawdling youngsters and speed-demon grandmas. Let there be a pace for each setter. But, please, preserve me from the competers and comparers; the dilettante gear freaks more concerned with Whisperlites than with babbling brooks; the peak-baggers with their collections of verbal bumperstickers. Sometimes I think the line between hiker and Winne-bozo is thinner than it once was.

The trail levels out above the lake basin, and cuts across a long slope. Avalanche chutes surrounded by thickets of alder become more numerous and more serious looking. The barren granite passes of yesterday are replaced by a hardy forest of hemlock and wet meadow.

At Castle Pass, we come upon a sign that sets us both to laughing: U.S. Border 3 miles, has been changed with a felt tipped pen to read: U.S./Canadian, EH? Border 3 miles. Nationality is not something I have thought about in a long while. For so many days the border has just meant an end to us rather than a crossing. The idea that past that point there will actually be Canada and Canadians is somehow a little surprising.

The air is warm enough to shed a layer of clothing now. Neil is completely out of food, but I break out the chocolate. “Oh, you don’t have to share that,” he says, drool forming at the corners of his mouth. I hand him a piece without mentioning that I’ve still got plenty.

We shoulder our packs and turn down a northwest facing ridge, still dark. The huckleberries are dying here and frost patches linger in the shade. The moist, woody smell of decay and the sound of breath in cold air are hypnotizing. Soon we will leave the subalpine and reenter the true forest.

A lush bowl of grass at the head of a creek makes for wet walking in the dew. Neil marches on ahead, hands together, head down. I slow and stop frequently, thinking “Larch, Hemlock, Silver Fir” or “Granite, Sedge, Woodpecker.” My pants are soaked.

I take pleasure in the number of miles I have walked. I count precisely: 495.2 from Wapinitia Pass to Benson Lake. I make averages out of the days and weeks, I compare these to other personal averages. I think about the P.C.T.’s length (2600+ miles), and what percentage of that I have hiked. I compare the lengths of other trails. I try to remember the number of National Forests I have passed through, the number of National Parks.

When I catch up to Neil he has come upon a hiker headed the other way. She is a curious looking woman dressed in green felt hat, parka and pants and a pair of purple shoes. Her pack is a beautiful old wooden trapper-style frame with a green canvas pack bag. I can’t help but stare—she looks like a giant leprechaun, right down to the twinkly eyes and cherubic smile. She says to Neil as I walk up “Ahh, it’s just a wee dawdle on down to the border now, for yee,” and tromps slowly past us. Neil and I exchange glances and continue on.

Steadily downward now the trail descends. According to our guidebook, several abrupt switchbacks will announce the final drop to Monument 78 and the Canadian border. We hike together, and I can feel the anticipation, any drop in the trail excites us, any climb brings resignation. I have eaten nothing but chocolate and I start to fantasize about the greasy grub at Manning Lodge. Just as I think it, Neil says, “We must be close now.”

Neil climbs a small ridge and lets out a laugh, “Look at this.”

When I catch up he is staring at the border below. I can tell it is the border because a ten foot wide wide swath of clearcut forest traverses the canyon below and continues over the next hill. The border has been shaved into the forest, as far east or west as we can see. “Wouldn’t you know it,” he says “I wonder which side got the trees?”

“I suppose that depends on which way they fell.”

The long-awaited switchbacks now deposit us on the border proper. The silver obelisque Monument 78 makes it official. I break out more chocolate and we munch it like kids, laughing and clapping each other on the back. A wooden post announces the end (or beginning, eh?) of the trail, and a signboard welcomes us to Manning Provincial Park.

Monument 78 is made of two pieces of heavy metal, constructed such that the top can be removed. Inside, passing hikers leave notes, messages, bits of inspiration, complaints. We hoist the top off and read through the year’s batch. Lou Reccow, the 64-year-old retired professor, has made it, cold, wet ,and awe-struck. He wonders what next, and I sense an impending post-trail depression. Donnal has left his usual self-righteous declaration—something like, “I made it, and I did it much better than you did.” Someone else claims that the wilderness is crying out for us to be reborn into Christ. Jim from Canada says, “Go Cubensis!”

We add our own thoughts. Trail registers make me somewhat nostalgic and this one is no exception. I think about Max and Linda whom I met early on. They were holed up inside their tent, hiding from the mosquitoes. Novice hikers, they had taken on the P.C.T as a big adventure—surely a much more heroic undertaking than my own. We traded stories and advice and walked together until White Pass where they called it quits.

I think about Lou and his note. A buoyant, hyperactive, retired professor, I have trouble picturing him here, cold rain dripping from his clothes and the quiet sadness of his note.

I am not struck with profound insights, nor born again into Christ. I feel no real breakthrough in my body or soul. All I can write is that I am finishing with a smile. I leave the glory and tears to those that require them and finish my chocolate.

From the border we hike on into British Columbia, with its bright red kilometer signs and well-graded path. Atop a ridge we hear car noise and know that soon we will see highway 3 through the trees. With a sigh, I realize that soon the Greyhound will carry me down that blacktop.

Soon Neil’s and my torn clothing, wild beards, and dirty backpacks will place us at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This is perhaps one of the most disorienting aspects of reentering civilization. As hikers, the P.C.T long-distance backpacker is revered along the trail. Day-trippers will look on with awe when one says, in response to the question, “Where did you come from?”

“Oh, about 500 miles back down the trail.”

The tatteredness, the dirt, they are like badges then. They are signs of having gone further than the weekender. It feels good to be sweaty and worn down, to revel in the cheap admiration.

But step out of the woods onto the outskirts of any highway town and all of a sudden people look at us a little sidelong. Vacationers in matching jumpsuits, transient truck drivers, mini-store employees, all look down on our shabbiness and general feral demeanor. The dusty backpack and worn out boots mark us as some sort of vagrant.

Here though, we are yet in our element.

A fire road heads sharply down and past outbuildings of the park proper. Confusing trails bring us down the Similkameen river, where families on horseback ride by and strollers wander along. I suggest we wade the river but Neil disagrees. Burnt out as he is, he cannot bring himself to abandon the last several hundred yards of willow covered trail.

We cross an old bridge and there we are: civilization. A vast green lawn and blacktop roads connect knick-knack shops, toilets, overpriced eateries, and tour buses. Stunned looking families amble about, the children screaming and pointing. Cars on the highway fly past at unbelievable speed.

“Hey, Let’s go get a beer before we have to face this,” says Neil.

What I really want is to turn back. Just splash across the Similkameen and head toward Mexico. But somehow my feet don’t respond to these commands, I see them moving over blacktop, and toward what looks like a trap. Grease trap, tourist trap, money trap. It is, in fact, the restaurant.

I manage to stop for a moment and try to collect the strangeness I feel while it is fresh. I am struck by aspen trees, planted over the perfect emerald lawn. They are just on the verge of turning yellow. I stare at them numbly, not wanting to go forward, not wanting to acknowledge all of this yet. It is as if I want to dictate my own emergence back into this. The little green leaves twist in the wind, not quite ready to die. I cannot really be sure if the edges are yellowing yet, or if I just imagine it.

I turn back to where I have come from, but it is just a dense green blur of trees. I cannot even make out where the trail runs through it. I am already gone.

Monterey County Rant

I want this county to know what happened to itself. I want it to know how, when john steinbeck died and was resurrected, his dispossessed immigrants remained with browner skins. I want it to remember Robinson Jeffers never existed until he was gone. I want it to remember the Monterey Sculpture Center. I want it to know the vestiges of bohemia that were extirpated when Cannery Row was turned into a strip mall. I want it to remember Emil White and Jaime DeAngulo, but also to know about Roland Hall and Horst Mayer and Jack English and Grant Risdon. I want it to deal with the fact that marijuana cultivation created as much economy for art as rich patronage. I want it to forget about Esalen and the Post Ranch and Spanish Bay and know about the Stone House, Tassajara when it was a bootleg outlet, Mom's Home Cooking in Seaside. I want it to know where Lockwood is. I want it to smoke some Yerba Santa.

I want no more tee shirt shops. I want more Blonde Redhead in Big Sur, less Vivaldi in Carmel. I don't want my mom to have to call into the radio stations when they cannot pronounce Cachagua. I want realtors to stop saying Cachagua means Hidden Waters for more vineyards. I want less Clint Eastwood, more Teatro Campesino. I want white people to pronounce Robles del Rio correctly and stop pretending Greenfield does not exist. And for god's sakes, less fuckng golf. I want that guy who always used to run for mayor of Carmel on a platform of turning downtown into a carfree zone to come back. He was right. Paul Laub was wrong. About everything. More Nopalito rum, less chardonnay.

And here's what I'm going to do about it. I'm going to sneak into Pebble Beach to pick mushrooms. I'm going to misdirect tourists looking for the Hog's Breath. I'm going up to Tehama with a water canteen and ask them to give back some of the water they stole so I can go throw it back in the Carmel. I'm going to make moonshine from the old Jamesburg bootleg springs. I'm going to walk around Big Sur naked. A lot. And not play any damn conga drums. I'm going to wring the frickin' neck of anyone who was ever on the CalAm board of directors. I'm going to poach artichokes from the fields in Castroville and hand them out at Monday Night Dinner. I will never, ever, own a polo shirt. I'm going to write howling stories reconjuring the ghosts of Ben Blomquist and Buddy Jones and the erased Eselen. I'm going to catch sardines. I'm going to get drunk and squat the bushes of Trader Joe's. I'm going to turn over Pacific Grove young, queer families with good manners and a love of butterflies. I'm going to walk right through the front gate at Esalen with a bad attitude. I'm going to dumpster dive Bubba Gump's and hand out shrimp to homeless vets and strawberry field workers. I'm going to spend all day staring at tidepools, I'm going to seduce aimless tourists, I'm going to make kelp pickles. When they desalinate the bay so we can have more golf, I'm going to repipe the hot briny effluent into some French restaurant in Charmel.

You know why? Because that little boy in the Pagrovia mural where the Granary used to be. That's me. I am this county, and somebody tried to bury me in the parking lot of a tee shirt shop, the bottom of a Louis Vitton handbag, a pool of stagnant Carmel River water with dying steelhead for company. But there's got to be something better than this.  

Planting Trees

(A version of this essay was first published in the High Desert Journal)

There are people who can afford to buy 60,000 acres of eastern Oregon just so they can shoot a few elk there, and Tom Hammond is one of them. If he wishes to fly out for the weekend from Michigan and to drive around with the ranch foreman, getting stuck just to get stuck, he does. If he gets bored trying to get unstuck, the foreman climbs a ridge and radios a hired hand who comes out with another truck and winches them out. He travels everywhere with a very expensive nickel plated rifle in the back seat and if he wishes to lecture the hired hands on how to shoot an elk, they listen attentively. It doesn’t matter that their own freezers are filled with last year’s meat.

If the mood strikes him, it is possible to stand on a high point and see nothing but his own property for many miles; the 40,000 acre ranch next door is his too and maybe, rumor has it, the one beyond it as well. He is a banker of some kind in Michigan and when Frech negotiated with him over the winter, his calls were first vetted through three secretaries.

Now it is spring time and he is staring at me blankly while I explain that the 3500 pine trees he wants us to plant on his Three Creek Ranch will not grow where he wants them to grow. Hammond is a chubby, impatient man in a new Stetson hat and a pair of very soft looking boots. “Hey,” he says, “Just tell me what kind of percentage I can get here and I’ll live with it.”

Absolute zero, I want to say. We are standing in a vast ampitheater of sage and bunch grass, a remote draw on the low slopes of Pedro mountain east of Bridgeport. A seasonal stream trickles by, turning the bottom of the draw to mud and watering a few hawthorn bushes and aspen trees. The stream will be gone soon, very soon, and the soil will quickly become dry and cracked. Planting pine trees here would be like planting tomatoes in a snowbank.

And then there are the cows, already climbing up the draw, looking for the tender bunchgrasses they know will be tucked in the high bowl like candy. When the grass is gone, they will mow through the young trees and strip their tops the way they have done to the aspens in years past.

It has taken most of a day just to drive around the ranch and though there is plenty of high ground to plant trees in, Hammond is clearly obsessed with making the desert bloom. Frech and I are giving each other furtive oh shit looks: it is spring and we need the money, but our instincts rebel from the idea of setting out trees to die on this parched hillside. That we have told Hammond explicitly why this would happen and still been encouraged to try only makes us more uneasy.

“Very, very low probability,” I say.

There are some basic rules for giving young conifers a fighting chance in this dry and cold country, and the first one is this: plant them next to other conifers. In this case, that means at the top of Pedro Mountain which forms the center of the ranch and is covered with Douglas and white fir forest. “Well, if these birch trees can make it,” Hammond protests, pointing at some aspens, “Why can’t pine trees make it?”

Marv, the aging ranch foreman, rubs at his rheumy eyes and stands half-dozing in the sun. He is well used to the whims of crazy ranch owners. I point to Marv and say, “Because Marv here probably has better things to do than come water each and every one of them all summer long. Like chase the cows around before they eat what the drought doesn’t kill first.”

Marv perks up at this. “Don’t know a thing about growing trees,” he has warned us amiably. He has spent the last thirty two years chasing cows over these hills for absentee owners and has endured many worse hardships than the whims of his newest and most generous benefactor. Anything we ask of him is answered with a quick smile and the words, “We could probably do that.” Hammond could suggest that we plow up the entire ranch and plant it with sunflowers and Marv would shrug and say “Sure, we could try that.”

Hammond looks at me blankly, like what did we hire you guys for if you don’t want to plant trees? Frech is getting nervous; we have no other work and 3500 pine trees are sitting in the shade back at the ranch headquarters, their vitality fading with each hot hour. It has taken him several years to get a shot at planting here and it is his goal to endear us to this would be local Bwana. If the trees don’t live that puts a dent in his vision of spring after spring of lucrative easy planting gigs.

I take a different tack, trying to sound scientific. “See all that bluebunch wheatgrass,” I say, knowing he doesn’t, “that tells me we probably don’t have the right kind of moisture here for growing trees. We could plant ‘em but they wouldn’t grow.”

“What kind of percentage?”

“Uh, five percent survival, absolute maximum.” I mean it.

“Hell. I am hoping to leave something up here for the grandkids to see one day.” It goes on like this for awhile, Hammond unwilling to let go of an instinct to fill this dry basin with cool green forest. We finally settle on planting some of the trees in this wasteland and most up in the snowy mixed fir zone where, if the elk, deer, gophers, cattle, and porcupine don’t kill them, they will probably grow.

That night Frech and I camp in a slashy draw where the previous owner had logged fast and furious to make a few bucks before selling out. The easily grabbed old Douglas Fir is gone and what remains is mostly mistletoe stunted and damaged by careless skidding. We don’t say a whole lot, letting the absurdity of the day settle around us. When the sun sets, a deep cold flows down the draw reminding us it is still closer to winter than to summer.

The next day, I take the four-wheeler Marv has left us and drive up through the patches of snow to gentle ridges that make up the top of Pedro Mountain. A small fire has burnt recently, leaving fir and pine dead and clearing the view. To the northeast I can see the peaks of the southern Wallowas, peaks and valleys which I know by sight—Cornucopia and Truax, the higher points of the Big Creek watershed where Frech’s home is. Closer in, I can see the remains of failed homesteads, a few recent dozer roads cut to look for gold.

The other times I have stood at the middle of a very large piece of private land, I have been struck by a giddy, narcissistic sense of power. It is no different here. Everyone else out there, down below, is on the other side of the property line, toiling away for something else that will never be as grand as what’s here and very few will ever see this sight. I can’t help but feel closer to the gentry than to the serf in the middle of such a place.

On the other hand, I have known people with huge spreads who dry up with suspicion and paranoia ultimately consumed by the threat of losing what is so hard to possess. But that happens mostly to people who let the land really get into their bones, like the ugly man who suspects everyone of wooing away his beautiful wife. Hammond doesn’t strike me as the type.

But such thoughts are above my pay grade. I am looking for fertile hillsides where I will plant trees and Marv’s cows will come eat them. It is not hard to find good planting spots up here, where most everything in view, the land radiating out from the top of this small, privately owned mountain, belongs to a man who can’t tell a birch tree from an aspen.

Addendum:

Years later, after my friendship with Frech has ended and I am no longer going to the woods every spring, the Oregonian runs an article about Tom Hammond. All that I have heard of him since we planted those trees and left is from a distant in-law of my wife’s. He says that in his part of Harney county, in Drewsey, it is well known that Hammond will buy up rangeland for inflated prices that the local cattlemen cannot afford.

The Oregonian story is about another ranch he has bought near the town of Fossil, and how he has shut off recreation and hunting roads running over the property. He has gone so far as to refuse the county access to 9-1-1 radio equipment. All involved agree the move is probably illegal but, concedes the Wheeler county attorney, Hammond could easily bankrupt the cash-strapped local government with legal fees if they put up a fight. It is estimated that Hammond’s investment bank earns about 34 times the county government’s entire net worth in a single year.

The locals talk of Hammond the way they would the federal government, as a force that locks up huge parcels of land with no concern for their welfare. But most of them are conflicted too, not accustomed to criticizing a person exercising his unbridled property rights. The reporter describes Hammond as mysterious and reclusive, says that few people, including herself, have actually met him.

One hundred thousand, one million…how many acres Hammond owns by now is a matter of speculation. One person who has actually met him describes Tom Hammond as a giant man who wears safari suits and flies his own helicopter, a sort of Crocodile Dundee who brags about shooting alligators on his ranch in Florida. The image sticks in my mind, as buffoonish as the man I once met and as oversized as his vast ranches.

Grant Risdon

You have to understand, before I tell you this little story, what kind of person Grant Risdon is. The first time I remember seeing him, he was riding his white horse named Cachagua, a horse he rode everywhere and wore a pistol on his hip. It was said then that he lived in a cave, it was said that he had nearly killed a man. A lot of things were said, some of these things were even true. The first time I remember seeing him, he rode his horse up to the store as I was waiting for the school bus.

He was singing some kind of ballad, sounded drunk, and when he saw the sheriff's deputy car in front of the store he pulled out a whip and began gleefully slashing at the lights on the cruiser. When the deputy heard him out front making a racket, he exited the store and with a weary tone asked Grant, “Am I really going to have to haul you in today Grant?” That was a true story.

Grant, if you were a young kid, was a scary guy. I don't remember if he scared everyone then or if he was tolerated as a colorful outlaw the way he is now. Even the rich people who drive out from town to drink wine at the community dinner now regard him as a kind of harmless local mascot. He is looked upon the way that grungy bar down the street, the one that everyone used to wish would just go away when the neighborhood was rough, is now a cherished symbol of the neighborhood's “realness”, its last vestige of pre-gentrification.

But he, of course, is a real person as well, and these days he does not ride a horse or carry a gun. Once a week he girds himself for the trip and hitchhikes into town to go to the library and do various other errands. He will be the first to tell you that he'd, “rather see these vineyards than a bunch of development.” He has lived in the valley all of his life and dresses like a retired senior when he heads to town. To some extent, he is retired. A retired icon.

Whenever I meet him, I have to remind him that I first knew him 30 years ago, in a much more colorful time. “Those days are gone forever,” he says. He relishes the past as much as I do, accepts the present perhaps even more so.

I picked him up hitchhiking home today. In one hand he had some grocery bags and on his other hand he had a pair of castanets. He told me this story; it's probably true.

“Back during the Vietnam war, when it was going good there were a couple of friends of mine who had gone over and gotten killed. I had a car and a bumper sticker, it said Save America, Shoot a Cop.

One night I was driving over Laureles Grade and a cop pulled me over. When I asked why he said you know why, I think you're drunk. He told me to get out of the car and take a sobriety test.

Well in those days they hadn't perfected the sobriety test yet. What he did was he took his keys, dropped them in the dirt, and said Now I want you to drop down on one foot and pick up those keys.

I said okay but could you back up a little, you're kind of crowding me. He did, so I went down on two legs, picked up his keys, and through them as far off the cliff as I could!

He put me in the back of his car and went looking for the keys. Couldn't find them so he had to call for another cop to come help. They never did find the keys, so they hauled me into jail. The funniest part was the duty sergeant was so mad at the cop. Why the fuck did you think he'd give you back the keys?

They couldn't really say I was drunk but they did charge me with obstructing police work, or whatever they called it.”

The Franklin and the Huntsman

The Franklin and the Huntsman

It is late October and the desert sky spits snow down upon us. The wet flakes collect in the folds of my jacket and melt, darkening the brown canvas in splotches. Water drips from the rows of black piñyon logs stacked in front of our shack like a barricade. Peter and I are wrestling a large woodstove toward a lean-to made from pine poles and scavenged barn boards, stopping every few feet. With each rest, the Franklin stove is sucked a little further down into the red mud before we heave it forward again.

“Man, this thing is heavy. Are you sure you can’t use it?” he asks between heaves.

“Nope. I want a real stove.”

“A real stove?”

“One that doesn’t burn through wood like a locomotive.”

This is Peter’s property and his shack, so it will be his stubbornly guarded dollars which are parted with to buy a new stove. That is why we have dragged the old one out here; it is my hope that he will quickly come to appreciate what he does not have.

I have been telling him that the Franklin will not do since before the Gambel oaks lost their leaves and the rains turned the red dust to red mud. A Franklin is an oversized woodstove with an open front, designed for cheerful display of the fire on a cool Autumn night perhaps. It has large drafty doors that cannot be sealed and faux-brass orbs on top where a kettle should sit. It sucks warm air from the room like a vacuum cleaner, sending it speedily up the chimney.

Now the first snow is here, and instead of sitting by a cozy, airtight stove, we are hauling a Franklin through the mud. Where sweet piñyon smoke should waft from the chimney, nothing. This irritates me like cactus spines under a thumbnail.

I am perfectly willing to spend the winter in a 10x20 foot shack with no water, a questionable roof, and an outhouse which is really just old doors enclosing a pile of feces, but I must be warm. I must have 3 cords of piñyon pine and juniper, which is my problem. I must have a good stove, which is Peter’s.

Peter, however, will not spend any money unless forced to. A woodstove to him is an investment like jumper cables or earthquake insurance, something one buys and then hopes never to use. He has no intention of wintering in a ten by twenty foot miner’s shack in the high steppe of Colorado.

He tried it once. He fortified himself with blankets and books and Anasazi beans. He wrote to his girlfriend about the importance of quiet and contemplation. He built a sweat lodge in the mud, facing east toward the San Juan mountains.

For wood gathering, he had a bow-saw and a Volvo. After three weeks of feeding wet juniper limbs to the ravenous Franklin, the temperature dropped to five below. Cold seeped in through the tar paper and cracked windows, and under the blanket-covered door. He decided that Baja would be as good a place as any for quiet and contemplation.

So it is that he will be in California, and I will be his "caretaker." I use the word lightly because it implies something here needs taking care of, as in the maintenance of an estate. Hardly. My responsibilities consist of a green tar-papered shack, several lean-tos made with rotting poles, an Econoline van filled with beer bottles and sunk to its bumper in red mud, a well with no pump, and a collection of German picture books about the Southwest.

However, I do not plant to be cold.

“Peter,” I say again, “I must have a real stove.”

He considers that thoughtfully, as if I have requested something outlandish, such as a Cappuccino machine or a satellite dish. “Okay,” he says, “We’ll go see Phunque and put an ad in the paper.”

The next day we drive 14 miles through bean fields to Dove Creek. The snow has melted off into roadside pools. Blue Four Corners sky is reflected at us from every ditch.

A Want Ad is one way to find a stove, but Phunque is also a cartographer of the town’s junk. This is not a task he relishes; he undertakes it out of civic pride. Knowing where the junk is, he is able to direct others there—bargain hunters, scrap-metal dealers, can collectors—and thus be a catalyst in its removal.

Phunque is a tall wiry man with thick glasses and the muted voice of a librarian. He is, in fact, the living library of Dove Creek, Colorado. He is also the town’s chief economist, booster, historian, and civic voice. He can predict Autumn bean prices in the spring, recommend a realtor, remember the boom days of uranium mining, and convince the citizens to vote. His job title, though, is simply Editor and Publisher of the Dove Creek Gazette. He is finishing a cheese sandwich when we arrive at the Gazette office.

“Greetings, Mr. Phunque!” Peter shouts.

“What can I do for you?”

“We’re looking for a woodstove, you know anybody who has one?”

“Stove. Hmm. Might try Enis Weatherly on Colorado Street; he’s got a bunch of junk in his yard, might have a woodstove. He’s got just about everything else.”

Before leaving, we take out an ad. At five cents per word, Peter is extravagant in his copy writing. He claims there is no point in being too specific because half the fun is in taking the phone calls. We put down anything we might want for the shack:

Wanted

Used or salvage building materials. Woodstove, windows, Pro-panel metal roofing, lumber, water pump, etc. 677-2599

A lot of yards in Dove Creek have piles of junk in them. Some of it is good junk and some of it is bad. Good and bad are, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Good junk is anything which might be reusable. Bad junk is something completely worn out, utterly without possibility.

To me, a rusted out truck with a surviving engine is a treasure. Coils of bailing wire, no matter if rusted, can always tie something together. Unbroken single pane windows can be made into cold frames in the spring. A rake or shovel head can be fitted with a new handle.

Bad junk is warped plywood, rusted out bed frames, cracked cinder blocks. Bad junk is wet lumber which leaves a shadow in the grass when lifted. Bad junk is deflated basketballs and burnt out headlights. Old tea kettles with no handles, pickup canopies with no gate. Lawn-mowers without wheels. Televisions, dead or alive, are junk.

Of course, someone else might find these things useful in one way or another.

But to Peter, junk is a matter more of ownership. If it is his junk, it is not only good, it is valuable. He will not part with the bald tires littering his property like sores; they are actually planters which will one day be filled with vegetables and herbs. The rotting Ponderosa pine poles strewn everywhere will someday be the roof supports for his Indian style dugout house. It does not matter that he knows nothing about either gardening or construction because Peter dwells only in the future. I now suspect that these projects will come to be built; he will convince someone else to build them.

Not long after I arrived in Egnar, he was throwing out an old watch and so I asked if I might have it. “This is my uncle’s gold watch, and you may use it but please don’t break it,” he replied solemnly. Every so often he casually asks if it is still working, and so has made me responsible for turning his junk into something useful. By this skill he is at home bartering for the marginally useful contents of the yards of Dove Creek.

Today, of course, there is only one goal in our search. There is only one item which I will identify as good and that Peter will spend his money on. It must be a woodstove functional enough for the cold winter and cheap enough for Peter’s wallet. All else is worthless.

By that measure, Enis Weatherly’s yard is full of bad junk. To be precise, it is full of rusted and broken propane tanks. It does not contain anything remotely like a woodstove, unless I were a welder.

“Now we can’t be too anxious here or they’ll think we are easy targets. It’s also best to not talk much,” Peter whispers to me, as we get out of the truck.

I scan the yard, trying to see a Vermont Castings Defiant stove with no rust, or a Jotul with a glass door. I will the propane canisters to reveal a decent Norwegian airtight. But the tanks remain tanks. “I don’t see anything here. Let’s go,” I say.

At which point Enis Weatherly appears from behind a 50 gallon tank in the back of the yard. He walks past us with no greeting or sign of recognition and sits upon the open gate of his battered Ford. He is a small man with white hair as thick and straight as broom straw, capped on top by a new Stihl chainsaw cap. His skin is sallow and his eyes tired. There is an oxygen tank in the cab of his truck. He pulls a pack of Generic brand cigarettes from his blue coveralls, and the three of us contemplate his propane tanks like Japanese poets counting cherry blossoms.

When about half of his cigarette is gone, Enis asks, “You lookin’ for something?”

After a pause, Peter says, “You got a woodstove? Phunque at the paper said you might have one. We’re looking for a stove,” in his best imitation Okie voice.

“Stove. Hhm, don’t have any stoves. You might try the dump. Might have a stove there.”

Another long pause.“That’s a good idea.”

We sit a little longer then leave him, smoking and staring. Driving back to the shack from Dove Creek, Peter asks, “Did I sound all right back there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, like a local?”

“No one mistook either of us for bean farmers if that’s what you mean.”

Secretly, though, I’d like to think that I might have been. I’d like to think that my faded Carhartt pants and my short hair and my muddy irrigation boots are like skeleton keys into rooms that are locked to Peter. Maybe Phunque and Enis took me for a ranch kid they didn’t recognize, and Peter for my demented city cousin.

The next day we load up my truck with the remains of the shack’s walls and drive to the dump. We have torn down all the funky sheetrock and the false ceiling made from green plywood so I can insulate. There is no question that the mess is actual garbage, fit only to be buried.

If country people in general don’t throw away much, poor country people throw away even less. Consequently, the Dolores County dump is a small dump for a very large county. The seven dollar fee (twelve for non-county residents) is collected by a smiling old woman who wears a faded ski jacket in every weather. She rarely leaves her plywood kiosk.

The pit itself is a square hole dug into the soft red rock. It has none of the elaborate liners, methane relief pipes, or heavy machinery of municipal dumps. No one supervises the dumpers to make sure they are not throwing away reusable items. There is no need; poverty and sparse population being much better social engineers than recycling posters or government incentive. Practically nothing in the pit is useful anymore. Much of it, I suspect, is here only because it would be too messy to burn or too difficult to give away.

The refuse is ancient sheetrock, dirty brown couches without cushions, moldy phonebooks too wet to burn, old plastic toys, slabs of green linoleum and subfloor, mangled curtain rods, old rowing machines and musty mattresses. Diapers.

The contents are so utterly rotten and forlorn that one look into the pit convinces even Peter no useful items will be found there. He is standing on the back of my truck wearing a respirator as we pitch shovel loads of rat shit filled vermiculite and decayed wasp honeycombs the size of soccer balls into the pit. All of this was once in the walls of Peter’s cabin. The respirator is worn as a reasonable attempt at protection from Hanta virus, the killer disease carried in the feces of deer mice.

Staring into the pit, I am convinced that nowhere in this county or the next will we find a used stove of any quality whatsoever. Probably there are some rusty old box stoves to be had or more drafty Franklins. No, anything that can be used has been. A dark thought crosses my mind. Perhaps we will have to go to Cortez and buy a new stove.

The wind is blowing over the high mesa through the pit of refuse. Forgetting that Peter's ears are not covered, I shout into the respirator’s plastic shield, “Peter! We have to find a stove!”

No response.

“Take off your mask!”

He does. “Don’t worry, man. Maybe someone left a message about the ad.”

Yeah right, I am thinking as we drive back out to Egnar. The day is cold and clear, Lombardy poplar leaves blow over the highway at the end of Dove Creek where we turn off toward Egnar. Across the oak and bean field table top of land, the Abajo mountains in Utah rise in fresh snow, imposing and lighthouse-like in their command of the country. It is a good thing for me, these miles of light and vista between town and home. They let me see why I have come here for the winter, come to watch this crazy man’s property. This beauty is the only compensation, and it is ample. Peter rambles compulsively in the passenger seat.

“People always answer ads around here. Mostly they don’t have what you want, but they call anyway. Maybe they have a better item or their brother-in-law has what you want. Lots of people just call to find out who you are if they don’t know the number. One time I ran an ad for a tent and this Indian guy in Egnar called up and said he had one.

“When I got to his place he insisted I drink beer with him. We drank one beer after another and he told me stories about flying saucers and sorcery and a great big hole in the ground over by Moab where the Spirits live. He was a Cheyenne—not from this country—and he lived in a little trailer. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and asked what about this tent. He looked right at me for a long time and said, ‘You can’t have my tent because I don’t have one.’ I started to get pissed off because I’d driven a long way and spent the whole afternoon with the guy. Then he says ‘But I do have a teepee and I ain’t gonna sell it to you. No I ain’t gonna sell it to you because I am gonna give it to you.’ So now I know to be patient,” he glances at me, “And I always carry a six-pack.”

Oh great, I think. We’ll never find a stove but we might get a good deal on a ton of coal, or a free car battery, or a book about the Spirits. I might be cold all winter, but at least I’ll be amused.

When we arrive home, the red light on the answering machine is winking off and on. Two messages are from the neighbor, asking if we have seen her dogs, but the third is promising. “Saw your ad. We’ve got a stove we don’t use anymore. You can have it if you want, Johnny said to ask seventy five dollars for it...”

At least she doesn’t mention the name Franklin, and I sleep that night cold but hopeful.

The address she gives is a trailer in the town of Dove Creek. When we arrive the next day, the first thing I notice is a complete absence of any junk, good or bad. The trailer is white, and is not stained red from the dirt as its neighbors are. The driveway is newly graveled and the mailbox has daisies painted on it.

When we knock on the door, a great howling and barking ensues. The sound of a woman scolding dogs, and then the door is opened a crack.

“Hello?”

“We came about the stove,” I say.

“Oh yes. Now you stop that Charley! One second. It’s in the back if you want to go look. Johnny said I was to ask you for seventy five dollars, if you want it that is. Charley down! Anyway, its in the back there.”

At the back wall of the trailer, its front legs sunk tipsily into the mud, is a rusty but dignified Atlanta Stoveworks Huntsman. It is a squat, no-nonsense stove with three over-sized draft control knobs, heavy doors, and complicated smoke baffles that add weight and heating mass. It has two flat shelves to boil pots of water, cook vegetable soup, or heat tortillas on tin foil. Emblazoned on the front is a flag-draped bald eagle sitting proudly on a rising sun, as if to proclaim an end to cold and discomfort everywhere. Across the doors, a cheerful domesticity is professed by a log cabin puffing smoke happily from its chimney—smoke certainly produced by the honest sweat of a PaulBunyan-like wood chopper and his faithful companion, the Huntsman stove. It looks very, very cozy.

It is perfect. It is more than perfect. Were it not slightly rusty, were its rear left leg not wobbly, its value would be obvious and its price certainly higher. It is a stove worth several times the asking price, a stove so clearly able and well suited to heating the shack that its purchase is to me a duty.

“Seventy five dollars for that thing! Does it even work?” Peter breaks my rapture, shaking his head in exaggerated dismay.

“Peter, its perfect! Its worth several times that, we’ll never find another in the whole county.”

“You think?”

“Yes! I’ll fix the rust and the leg and it’ll be perfect.”

“Well, maybe.”

Behind us the woman appears at the gate, her lips freshly drawn up with red lipstick. “Do you like it?”

“Well,” Peter says. “We’ve seen a lot of stoves lately. It’s kind of rusty.”

“Oh. Johnny said I could take fifty for it.”

“Fifty," Peter thinks for a second, "Well, we’ll go look at a few others and let you know.”

As soon as we get in the truck, Peter turns to me and smiles brightly. “What did you think of that?”

“Of what?”

“Of knocking her down twenty five dollars without even asking, that’s what.”

“Peter, it’s worth twenty five dollars plus two hundred more. Why didn’t you buy it? It was perfect.”

“We might get other calls.”

Driving past the Abajos, through Egnar, I see a bald eagle perched upon the setting sun as it sinks behind the cold white peaks. I see a little cabin with Paul Bunyan inside huffing frantically at dying coals. I consider severing our phone cord when we get home.

All of the next day we cut firewood in the burn down toward Slickrock. I am gruff with Peter, felling trees distant from the road. He hurries along, oblivious, carrying the rounds back to the truck. When I stop to sharpen the saw or eat lunch, he rummages in the oak brush for tin cans and beer bottles left by the fire crews and uranium prospectors.

This land is awash in energy sources compared to which firewood is quaint and crude. Amongst the charred piñyon and leafless oaks, tin signs on burnt posts mark uranium claims. A few locked oil wells wait on a future of higher fuel prices. On the canyon rims above, homesteaders once dug their own coal.

Having never dug coal or drilled for oil or scoured the hills with a Geiger counter, I am partial to piñyon and chainsaws. The clear Autumn weather, the smell of wood chips, the groan and snap of a falling tree, these are the aspects of a ritual, a ritual of survival. I wonder if the prospector loves his burning rocks the way a wood-cutter loves wood?

By the afternoon my bad mood is dissipated with the sweat of good labor, smothered by the sweet smell of cut piñyon.

When the sun drops behind the Abajos, the temperature falls quickly. The ruts of mud and dirty snow freeze and crunch. I am bucking a little tree, cutting up the limbs when I hear Peter shouting behind me loud enough to overpower chainsaw and earplug.

“The truck! The truck!”

On the road beneath us my truck is tilted into a ditch, the rear wheels held high above the road, the transmission grounded on the dirt.

“I was backing up and I didn’t see the ditch in the grass and next thing I know...”

Peter rambles crazily replaying the scene over and over. I laugh at the upturned truck. I want to smack Peter so he will shut up. What am I doing here on the edge of winter with this fool?

“Should we dig it out? I’ve got some gloves if your hands are cold. I think we better hurry up, it’s already cold.”

Peter’s wool hat is pulled down over his ears and his eyes are bright with adrenaline. I realize that he is scared. It is freezing and we are miles from the pavement, which is itself desolate. We have no food, no water, no sleeping bags. We have no means of communication and no one knows where we are. As far as the eye can see, the only signs of human activity are some aging telephone poles down toward the ghost town of Slickrock.

I promise myself that when we get out of this I will buy that stove myself. I will make at least that part of my existence stable. Then I will sell it to Peter at a profit when I leave. It will be my reward for getting out of this.

“What are we gonna do?”

“It’s elk season; we’ll walk down the road until we meet some hunters with a winch and they’ll come haul us out,” I say, and walk away before he can remember that we’ve never seen anyone else on this road.

“Oh man I am so sorry,” Peter repeats as we walk. He is bundled in his jacket and ripped pants. His pockets bulge with extra gloves that he offers to me every few minutes. The light lingers in the west, and the ground crunches beneath our feet. During the rare moments of silence, when Peter has exhausted his entreaties and offers of extra clothing, I feel a camaraderie towards him. Only his talking infuriates me.

“Hey, you’re taking this really well.”

“No big deal. We’ll find some hunters.”

“You think so? Maybe we should make a shelter before it gets dark.”

"We’ll find some hunters.”

And we do. We hear them first, the guttural sound of diesel in low gear. Then they appear, two orange-hatted, red faced men in a Dodge flat bed truck. Mounted on the front bumper is a big Warn winch, the kind for hauling dead elk up steep ground.

When our truck is pulled out and inspected for damage, Peter offers them a beer. The hunters refuse and drive off, shouting, “No problem at all!”

“Peter,“ I say, “I am going to buy that stove tomorrow if you won’t.”

“Stove? Oh yeah. You want that thing?"

“Need. Need that thing.”

“Well, go ahead then.”

We drive slowly back to the shack, drinking Milwaukee’s Best and watching the road for elk.

The next day I phone the stove lady as early as I think polite.

“Hello I am calling about the stove.”

“Oh? Oh yes. Do you want it?

“Well we really like yours but we like another that is forty five dollars.”

“Johnny said not to take any less than fifty.” Apparently I am not much of a bargainer.

“Well I‘ll give you fifty for it. See you tomorrow then?

“Okay. I’ll tell Johnny you said fifty.”

I am elated. I can picture the little smoke puffs from the chimney. I can smell the incense of burning piñyon in the yard. I hang up the phone and stretch out in a lawn chair, imaginary radiant heat warming my backside. I am almost drowsy when I remember: the stove has to be moved here first.

“Peter, ah, how’s your back?"

“Oh not good man, I’ve got this vertebrae that goes out. Why?”

Never mind.

When I get to town, the stove lady has a hand written receipt ready. She counts the two twenties and the ten carefully.

“Fifty dollars just like we said. How you gonna move it?”

“I was hoping I could drag it over to the truck myself.”

She laughs, “Well, good luck.”

I walk around to the back and behold the Huntsman. It looks impossibly heavy—the thick iron, the big knobs, the complicated baffles. It leans into the mud like a tilted tractor. I give it a tentative push forward. Nothing. I pull to the left, nothing. I pull to the right, nothing. It is stuck in the evil mud. I remove the fire bricks and stack them in the back of the truck. Still, it is heavy as a lead piano. Help is needed.

I go to the only place I know to get help in Dove Creek, the only place where asking odd questions is expected. I go to see Phunque.

“Move a stove? Hmm. Don’t know anyone who moves things. You don’t have any help?”

“No, I don’t know anyone here.”

“I can’t think of anyone.”

I try the Lonesome Dove bar, intending to offer ten dollars for help. But one look into the midday gloom, and I am convinced no one is sober enough to lift anything but beer bottles. I try the feed store, but I get the same response as at Phunque’s. I find Gladice, Peter’s neighbor who works at the gas station.

Gladice sits at her stool looking out on the parking lot, screwing a cigarette into a plastic filter tip.

“Hey Gladice.”

“Hello Josh,” she says without looking at me.

“Say would you know anyone who could help me move a stove?”

“What’s wrong with Peter?”

“Bad back.”

“That’s a good one. No, I don’t know anyone.”

I am weary from the blank looks and the puzzled expressions of Dove Creek. The town is a closed door to an outsider. It enjoys rejecting me. I decide to return to the trailer and tell the stove lady that I will have to come back tomorrow. The temperature has dropped and the streets are icy. They fit my mood: muddy, treacherous, and full of potholes.

When I get to the driveway, there is a man in a black motorcycle jacket standing in the gravel. He comes around to my window.

“Do you need a hand?”

“Well, I guess I do. Are you Johnny?"

“Yeah. Loraine called me at work. It’s a heavy stove to move. Burns real well though.”

I am embarrassed at having offered forty five dollars.

“Are you sure you don’t mind moving it?”

“No problem at all.”

Even with two of us, we move the stove in stages over the frozen mud, dragging one side then the other. When we get to the truck, Johnny throws some boards up and we heave the mighty Huntsman into the bed. The rear springs sink low over the wheels.

“Hey," I say trying not to get too excited, "thanks a lot.”

“No problem. It’s a good stove. I’m glad you can use it.”

He has a warm smile on his face, and he looks me in the eye when we shake hands to close the deal.

By the time I get home, the air is very cold and Peter is bundled up lying on the couch. The couch, in a former life, was a Chevy Bronco bench seat. The stereo plays Latin dance songs on the public radio channel. I was prepared to grudge Peter his idleness, but he looks rather pathetic lying there.

“I got the stove,” I announce.

“Good! Gladice says zero degrees tonight.”

“Well it still has to get from the truck to here.”

“Gladice brought a dolly.”

“She what?”

“She brought us a moving dolly. It’s by the door.”

Sure enough, there by the grace of Gladice is a bright red dolly with one flat tire and a bent handle, as welcome and unexpected as a fresh tomato in February. Before I can react, Peter is putting on his gloves and a wool hat, ready to lend a hand.

“What about your back?”

“I’ll be careful.”

Outside, the sky is clear and still. The stars burn like white coals in the cold air. Peter and I lower the loaded dolly down a ramp of plywood and two by fours, both tires flattening under the strain.

When the Huntsman is out of the truck, we reverse the ramp, pointing it into the shack. We roll the stove over the threshold without ceremony and into its place on the plywood. The bad leg is propped up with bricks. I am mildly surprised that the floor does not collapse.

Peter hooks up the old stovepipe, a rickety thing that will have to go later. I put in the liner of bricks, which clank warmly against the thick iron fire box. I brush off some of the dust, wishing I had time to clean and polish the rusty sides.

It is a fine stove, even wobbly and stained. It has a dank smell like the red mud, like something brought out of the ground. It is cherubic with its broad belly and cheerful cabin emblazoned on the front.

I crumple a few pages of the Dove Creek Gazette (an article about a mysterious plane crash out by the Utah border) and cover them with dry splits of juniper. On top I place small logs of piñyon and dig out a box of red Strike Anywhere matches.

Peter digs out two cans of Milwaukee’s Best. “Not exactly Champagne!” he says with a laugh.

“Not exactly the Ritz,” I reply, and set the fire alight.

Unsettlement: Some Impressions of Egnar, Colorado

To be published in the Spring 2012 edition of the High Desert Journal

My dad keeps a tattered road atlas next to his telephone. On the cover is a picture of Hurricane Point in Big Sur. The green hills of the California coast are faded and white crease lines cover the ocean. Whenever I call from an unfamiliar place he finds it in the atlas and draws a little blue star with a notation next to it: Summer 96, The Farm, Unity Oregon. I used to call a lot from small western towns and he’d have to hunt for them on the map while I gave clues to the nearest city or river or picturesque place. When my girlfriend Tanya and I travel to southwestern Colorado one winter, he has to pull out a more detailed world atlas because the Rand McNally doesn’t list all of the small towns. After a few minutes of shuffling, he cannot find Egnar but says, “I see on the atlas that it must be between the area of Colorado marked Wheat and the area marked Uranium.”

The sum total of Egnar, the town, is a fading school building and a cinder block post office. It is to a town what a footprint is to a foot, a fading reminder of something else, preserved only well enough to call attention to its decay. The two services it provides, schooling and mail, also provide the only opportunities for desk jobs. To the south is the bigger town of Dove Creek, with a café and groceries, two liquor stores and a bean milling plant. To the west are the Abajo mountains in Utah, to the east the San Juans and the Sleeping Ute batholith. To the north is the Dolores river canyon and the uranium ghost town of Slickrock. The surrounding landscape is a patchwork of piñyon pine, juniper (which the locals call cedar) and Gambel oaks amongst expanses of cleared farm land.

Egnar, the people, is a scattered population of ranchers, dryland wheat and bean farmers, old miners and a few retirees and newcomers living out of sight from one another on a 7,000 ft. plateau. Egnar is a tough, weird place, full of tough, weird people. There are a lot of holes in the ground there, a lot of people with depleted lungs, depleted bank accounts and dry luck. It is not like the eastern Oregon ranching communities I’m used to, hard bitten but tightly knit. In mining country, when the hole goes dry, the digger moves on.

Our home for the winter is a derelict uranium miner's cabin that was hauled to its present location long ago. It still has trailer lights on one wall and is the last house on highway 141 for thirty miles or so.

Uranium

Philip, who owns the old miner’s shack, tells me during one of our first driving forays over the country to watch out for the green dust along the highways. “That’s uranium,” he says. It’s a green that looks vaguely malignant, like the shade my alcoholic grandmother’s hair turned when her pipes went rusty and she wouldn’t call a plumber. I’m not sure whether to believe him, but I drive by slowly anyway, eyeing the cutbanks through the safety of the rolled up windows.

When Tanya arrives a few weeks later, I repeat what I've heard about watching out for the green dust. She thinks a minute and asks, “If that’s uranium, then why do they just leave it everywhere?”

A sensible question, and the answer is that the green dust is actually Mancos shale, a sediment about as harmful as beach sand. I’d almost asked Mike, a local geologist I’d befriended, about it but decided not to. I did not want to reveal a lack of common sense, like an Iowan having to ask his neighbor what corn looks like. Mike does tell me, however, that many of the local wells are contaminated with soft coal and other minerals.

When we drive into Dove Creek for groceries it’s remarkable how many oxygen carts we see. Junked cars sit on blocks in front of worn-out trailers. We meet people who live without electricity and die of lung cancer from working in the mines. It’s a kind of western Appalachia with its own rootless underclass of uranium victims. Only no one has come here to romanticize their poverty, write songs about their plight. They are dying out too fast for that.

When I go to the local landfill, it consists of entirely unusable debris: old diapers, rotted sheetrock, worn out mattresses. A few scavengers pull scrap metal here and there. For the most part, though, anything in this county not ruined yet quickly finds a new use or else is left in the front yard to rust and shelter pack rats.

Glenda

Tanya and I are visitors, but Glenda has spent her whole life here. She lives next to us in a trailer that has been expanded into a house. Her yard is filled with old cars and car parts strung out along the highway. Bent crankshafts and old bed springs stick out of the sagebrush, a blue Toyota Corolla body rests on its side sinking into the red clay. Chickens and dogs of all sizes poke around everywhere.

Glenda has a red face so creased and worn as to make her age impossible to read. She smokes cigarettes from a long filter tip and carries a pistol in the door of her truck to shoot rabbits with. Her shoulders and legs are going lame; she has already survived a round of the cancer that killed her father. At night her chickens roost on an old ladder and look in through the window at the blue light of the television. Sometimes they freeze to the ladder and she has to cut them off the next morning. The first thing she does, when I meet her, is to pull two Old Milwaukees from beneath her snowmobiler's parka and hand me one.

Welcome to Egnar.

To survive here, Glenda has pumped gas, sprayed weed killer for the county, worked behind the post office counter and planted trees at a nursery near Cortez until she busted her shoulder. When she was younger, she swabbed liquid uranium crystals from refining tanks in Uravan. She has gathered up mud puppies and driven to Lake Powell to sell them for bait. She has made beaded earrings and tried to sell them by mail order. She has filled out envelopes for one of those work from home outfits that advertise in rural magazines. She has collected aluminum cans to pay the power bill. She has butchered elk for others in exchange for a share of the meat. For awhile, she played bass in a family country and western band.

One night when we are eating venison ribs in her house, I ask what uranium actually looks like.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

Glenda gets up and goes into the kitchen, where she rummages through a cabinet and comes out with a glass mason jar.

“My dad kept a sample from every place he ever worked. I know I’m not supposed to have it. Maybe someone will come along and want to know what it was all about; it might be worth a few dollars. My sister flushed hers down the toilet in Cortez.”

She places the jar in my hand. Inside are layers of grayish, chocolate brown and dirty yellow dust. “That top one there, that’s yellow cake, the real thing.”

I am attracted and repelled. I want to open the jar and touch the yellow cake, I want to hand it back to her. I imagine a malignant electricity, a glowing heat seeping from the jar. I give it to Tanya, whose eyes are wide. So this pile of dust is what the fuss was all about.

Glenda’s father died of prostate cancer. She says that toward the end of his life, “You could run a geiger counter over his body and the needle would spike at each joint.” That did not stop the government from delaying his compensation claims until after he died.

Though the radiation took his life, Glenda says her father loved digging uranium. He told her how, when working a thick seam of ore, he could see the outline of the river bed that had deposited it. Only he was usually standing under the river looking up. “Dad said you could see all sorts of spooky animals, faces, strange stuff in the ore. There was more to it than just dust.”

Slickrock Tailings Receptacle

North of Slickrock is Disappointment Valley. At its western end is an absurdly wide gravel road that could easily accommodate four or five cars abreast. It leads a short way north into the sage and juniper flats and ends next to a little run-off pond and a huge pile of cobbles behind a chain link fence. In the December air the pond is frozen and the surface is a green sheet of ice.

Posted signs circle the hill of cobbles. On each, black and yellow triangles overlap to form a six part circle. You don’t have to be close enough to read “Department of Energy” to know what the signs mean. The same kind of circle hangs on the side of old bomb shelter from the days of the Cold War. You see it on the walls of hospitals: Hazard! Warning! Radiation!

Behind the fence is a low polished stone, engraved with black letters. The only granite for many miles, it is a tombstone of sorts. It announces the Slickrock Cleanup Tailings Receptacle, a grave for 1,200,000 tons of radioactive tailings removed from old Union Carbide mines along the Dolores river. The stone commemorates the day of the site’s dedication in 1996 and gives the radiation count at that time: 149 Curries. I learn later that the background radiation is about 15 Curries, meaning that this pile of rocks is 10 times more radioactive than the surrounding area. The mission of the Slick Rock (sic) mill site was to provide uranium for the United States government. The source of contamination was the residual tailings that remained after the milling process extracted the uranium.

A serious groundwater contamination problem still exists at Slickrock. Once a thriving boomtown, the entirety of the town was demolished and hauled away. Radiation had permeated everything, including the houses and schools. We go there often to hike and must first drive past several chain-link enclosures circling nothing but water testing wells and gravel fields where the town once was.

The uranium was milled especially for the Manhattan Project.

Firewood

In an advantageous symbiosis, the residents of the area don’t like to use the surrounding juniper and piñyon for firewood, preferring the yellow pine and aspen I’d use only as a last resort. A large burn full of blackened and aged wood begins down the road from our house. It’s so close I don't even worry about buying a permit; I've never seen a cop on the road.

But dead wood is not the only form of energy in the burnt-over hillsides. Here and there we pull up the tin markers of old uranium claims and stumble over capped oil wells that will remain idle, I’m told, until the price goes up. In a few places there are shallow coal pits dug by settlers. Coagulated heat is everywhere beneath and above the gamma grass.

I cut an extraordinary amount of wood to heat the small cabin. I pile the dusty piñyon everywhere, circling the walls of the tiny cabin until it can hardly be seen. Both the juniper and the piñyon smell wonderful when burning, a mixed incense—the juniper astringent and invigorating, and the piñyon cinnamony and rich. Poor man's aromatherapy a friend calls it.

This is something I’m good at, finding the trees and sharpening the saw, getting the wood home and taking care of the wood stove. I have planted thousands of trees and cut dozens of cords of wood. I have participated in what is necessary to make the forests come back again and I sleep well over my choices of which snags to cut. It’s a joy unavailable to anyone who flicks a switch to unleash BTUs from oil or coal or natural gas. You can't replant the dug up earth.

Anasazi

It is easy to see how a person could spend their life studying the Anasazi. Everywhere in this country there are perfectly preserved reminders of their existence. Nowhere else, except maybe visiting the totem villages of the Haida, have I ever felt the presence of a past culture so keenly. Philip tells me that to find Anasazi ruins—the politically correct term now is Ancient Puebloan Culture—all one needs to do is check the altitude. On any mesa above a certain height something will be on top.

Tanya and I take a backpacking trip to Grand Gulch in Utah during a spell of cold, dry weather. The wind blows down the canyon, flattening our tent, sending the dogs huddling behind rocks. Frozen pools of water, dry waterfalls, bare cottonwoods. When the sun briefly aligns over the canyon walls, we stop and bask like turtles.

Along the canyon there’s a band of rock that lends itself to shallow caves. It was here that the Anasazi retreated from their agricultural existence on the mesas and fields above. Where places like Mesa Verde preserve a culture near its zenith, the caves of the gulch are fearful, poorly fortified hideouts. Climbing to some of them you can see old turkey pens, adobe bricks, dried squash and beans and, most amazing of all, fingerprints in the mud chinking.

There are many theories about why the Anasazi fled. Speculating about it is a kind of Rohrshach test that reveals more about the speculator than the subject. The culture is so evident, so well preserved, yet the cause of its dissolution is opaque. My own armchair theory is that the caves of the retreat are too open to siege to be protection from armed enemies. I think that they were running from something internal, perhaps disease. Something sudden and inexplicable that drove bands of the survivors to isolate themselves from one another in small camps. That seems to be the obvious purpose of the caves to me, to be able to pull up the ladder when the infected come to call. That's just my two cents.

Years later, I relate my version of things to a friend who has recently rafted down the San Juan river. “I think,” he says, “they discovered God. You discover God, you start to have fear. You start to fear, you start to hate the world. You hate the world, you fear your neighbors.”

Winter

The weeks pass. It is a winter of heating water on the wood stove, hauling huge piles of groceries from Cortez, of visiting Mike and his wife Deborah who teach us about brain tanning leather and geology. One slushy warm day, we succeed in replacing the pump in Philip's well, and the running water is miraculous. We stare at it, take pictures, boil up big pots of tea, watch it run out over the yard like hillbillies discovering oil. The remainder of winter is somehow different, as if having running water has ended the sense of struggle. We build a wood-fired hot tub out of a stock tank balanced over a sideways burn barrel. Even on sub zero nights, Tanya and I bask in the steaming tub, looking up into the white stars.

During a warm spell that melts snow from the Gambel oaks and softens the red mud so that we have to throw boards in the yard to walk around, my Australian shepherd JD is hit out on the highway. In the warm chinook wind, Tanya and I find him in the dark, his guts trailing out behind him like a bloody rope. We pack him into my backpack and hike up the Dolores to bury him on a scree slope where the coyotes won’t quickly uncover him.

Mostly, however, we just hang out with Glenda, talking often on the phone, eating elk and Holsum bread off of paper plates at her house. We help tar holes in her roof, and she brings us dented cans of tomatoes from a truck that crashes in Dove Creek. Tanya wins a frozen turkey playing bingo in Dove Creek with Glenda and her sister. We go fishing for whitefish with her and her boyfriend Dee, his oxygen tank and our combined five dogs.

It is good to fix her trailer, climb beneath her truck in the mud to change the oil sending unit, to bring her loads of firewood that she doesn’t quite know how to accept. It is good to have these small projects and have them be useful to someone else.

Leaving

When the spring begins and the red mud starts to unfreeze, it’s time for Tanya and me to leave. It has been a difficult winter. A winter of counting pennies, shoveling our own feces into the hot tub fire, of waiting on payments for the pump, wood stove and sheetrock that Philip will never send. There’s not much to hold us here. There are few jobs, few friends, few opportunities. It’s a sparsely populated place for good reasons. We are leaving for Oregon to plant trees, teach math, seek out empty houses that we might caretake. We are headed home.

As we pack to go, Glenda appears with a small saucer of beer. Setting it on the ground she pulls a wiggling puppy from her jacket and says, “Here you go Josh.” It’s a farewell gift, a token of Glenda's friendship. She’s felt guilty about JD's death and I’m honored that she, who disparages most people's ability to take care of animals, has thought me worthy of a new dog. It's as if she is telling us that we have stuck just a little more than most people who come for a single season.

The question I’ve asked myself all winter is how does this place replenish itself? The answer is that it doesn't.

The scattered residents of Slickrock, Disappointment Valley and Egnar live amongst rich energy sources but get their power from coal plants in New Mexico. Most of the people who dug up the rock to feed the Cold War are either dead or dying. Dee, who is illiterate and has advanced lung cancer, tells me that the government fights any attempt by the miners to get compensation for their illnesses. It’s futile for any miner to claim compensation if he or she admits to having ever smoked a cigarette. “That's their favorite strategy,” says Dee. “They just say whatever you have, no matter how much ore you dug up or sucked down, they just can't tell whether it was that or cigarettes.”

The miners beg and fight for the money to cover chemotherapy and pay their electric bills while money flows into the former Soviet Union, the enemy whose defeat was justification for the miners' shabby treatment. The money goes there to clean up missile sites, secure supplies of enriched uranium, encourage capitalist development.

Southwest Colorado is exemplified for me in the tough, sickly dryland bean plants. Looking almost dead as soon as they are born, they grow slowly and miraculously in the face of drought and wind. This is a place where communities don't seem to stick very well to the land. Even the Anasazi's agricultural prowess was short-lived, obliterated by drought, disease, or spiritual fear, and was replaced by the nomadic ways of the Utes and Navajo.

Cultures here don't sustain themselves for very long. They settle like layers of sediment over one another. A layer of Anasazi covered by the Ute and Navajo, a layer of uranium dust, a layer of beans and wheat, trace elements of the Mormons, who mostly stay over the line in Utah. The most recent layer is composed of the newcomers and retirees. Their cedar sided houses drink in the view, placed unwisely in the middle of the wind blasted, treeless mesas. Patches of hopeless ryegrass surround them, a nod to the morainal moors of Scotland.

This is a land resistant to the gentle notions of environmental sustainability and community stability. Such dreams are mostly for places with enough water, where the grocery shelves are well stocked with vegetables grown not far away. Where the palette of the land is filled with robust greens and loamy browns. In such places, longing for deep unshakeable roots grows like a Douglas fir seedling—well watered, glistening in the rain. But the soil of Southwest Colorado is striated with mysticism and detachment, hard red and sickly ochre.

An anthropologist in Durango tells me that the Navajo language contains inexplicable references to oceans and boats, two experiences that could not have been present in their culture for many, many generations. Underneath us, though, are layers and layers—miles, really—of compressed, water born sediment. Once upon a time they were the shores of a vast inland ocean. Perhaps the Navajo are remembering something. Perhaps they are dreaming.