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.