The Meadow (11 page)

In 1972 the irony showed itself. Ray received a call from a man who said he was a water engineer for the Divide Ditch and Water Company, which owned and operated Eaton Reservoir. Ray's reputation for his knowledge of the back country—where the company had miles of ditches which fed, along with Sheep Creek, Eaton Reservoir—had come to the man's attention. Bill McMurray, who had run the ditches since 1948, was retiring, and the man wanted to know if Ray wanted his job. It would mean less money, but the company would pay all his expenses, give him a house to live in just below the dam (I always thought the house was situated to insure that the caretaker took care of the water flow properly), and a new pickup every four years. The man also said the company was buying a snow vehicle, like a lightweight Caterpillar, so he wouldn't have to snowshoe or snowmobile the nine miles up to Deadman, as Bill had to do all these years.

Ray was interested. He sold the plastering business for a neighborly price, paid off the doublewide, and moved up on the mountain.

He still didn't own the house he lived in, but he was living on his father's homeplace, his father's dream, which was now half-drowned and half-owned by some fellow named Lyle Van Waning.

So Ray became a water engineer, my neighbor, and Lyle's, and Frank's, and began to roam the Deadman country, running the ditches, cranking the headgates, rebuilding some of the things Bill McMurray had let slip into ruin, and generally keeping an eye on things. One of the big pluses was that there wasn't much to the job a man couldn't do drunk, and the boss was sixty miles away.

Out of habit Ray fixed everything with cement and chicken wire, like retaining walls and crumbling foundations. What he couldn't fix with cement he welded. He hated to build with wood, hated driving nails. He would rather build a fence of welded pipe than wooden rails, and he liked the idea of things lasting.

Ray was home at last, by God, and he reckoned he couldn't die now since he was already in heaven. Every time he thought of his good fortune, he just had to drink to it.

 

 

It's just a pitchfork with the handle sawn off and the tines forged over to ninety degrees, a specialized tool for pulling mud and willow sticks from culverts and irrigation ditches. Lyle sits hunched over on the tailgate. His hip boots are turned down. He flops the handle of his ditch tool back and forth from hand to hand between his knees. He smells mint growing in the willow bushes along the creek, listens to the even cadences of Ray's treatise on the Supreme Intelligence of Beavers. Lyle is not all that receptive to Ray's point of view.

“A beaver can construct a sturdy enough dam to stanch near any mountain torrent. He likes a reservoir. He doesn't need a backhoe or dynamite. Now that's a water engineer. He isolates his house, out in the middle with the door underwater so he won't be bothered.”

Lyle interrupts. “Maybe I should have built my door underwater.”

“You should have. That beaver has perfect security. He's warm all winter and has plenty of supplies. Going to town for him is as far as the nearest aspen tree.”

“That's usually where the coyotes catch them.” Lyle stops flip-flopping the handle and looks hard at Ray. Ray pretends not to notice and keeps talking.

“When the pond freezes to his liking he goes down to the dam to pull out a few sticks, like turning the crank on the reservoir, and lets out a little water. He lowers the level to make an airspace and room to swim around in there. He does it before the ice is too thick so he can't get trapped inside. It's just like that'ere Holidome in Collins. In summer that water is so still, it works just like a burglar alarm.”

Lyle listens. He knows all this, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. It isn't what people say, he thinks; how they say it is what really tells you what they're talking about. His sour mood is not the result of disagreeing—in fact, quite the opposite. Lyle hates it when Ray says things he agrees with.

“Sure they're smart, Ray, but that don't mean I have to like the sonsofbitches. Being smart just makes it worse. Makes them better at being a pain in the ass. Makes you feel guilty for trapping them. Hell, Ray,
people
are
smart.
”

The inkling of a smile begins to play around the corners of Ray's mouth. He is about to experience the sublime joy of getting Lyle's goat.

“I suppose you'd feel that way about coyotes if you was a sheep herder. Why they're smart is why they're a aggravation.”

“Number one, I ain't a sheep herder, and number two, I'll tell you who's a aggravation.”

Now Ray just beams. He covers his grin with his hand to hide the teeth he's missing. They stop talking.

Lyle thinks about how good beavers are for the meadow since they raise the level of the creek and slow the water down so it has time to seep into the sub-soil. When they plug the ditches, though, they mess up everything. Lyle doesn't like being forced to trap them. Last summer he tried to trap a beaver near the flume with the usual shoulder-hold Victors that drown them, but, expert as he was, he could not. Some beavers, like coyotes, cannot be fooled. One morning he found a trap sprung and there was a toenail in its jaws. Lyle knew enough not to be encouraged by this. It meant that beaver would be even more careful, at least for a while.

Lyle then hooked up a twelve-volt battery to a wire he strung across the pond about an inch above the surface. When he came back next morning more or less expecting to find a beaver floating dead on its back with smoke still coming out of its ears, instead he found that the beaver had raised the water a notch and shorted out the wire.

 

 

That beaver must have been impressed with Lyle's ingenuity, though: it moved upstream and started to rankle Ray. It plugged the culvert under the road that leads to Ray's house. The water rose and washed out the road. Ray was calm. He didn't want to drown a beaver cruelly in the usual trapper's manner, so he went down there four nights running with a bottle, a flashlight, and a shotgun. He never saw anything. He needed some sleep. The next morning the culvert was plugged and the road had a chasm four feet deep running across it. Ray was cut off. And pissed off.

He built an elaborate scarecrow and dressed it in clothes he wore all the time, for musk value. That worked one night, then the beaver got wise and sawed off the road again. Ray waited in ambush another four nights and didn't see anything. He parked his truck down there, which worked one more night. Only. Ray was devoting his life to this beaver.

He broke down and set traps near the places he could see where the beaver slipped in and out of the water, leaving little muddy slides in the bank's sweet grass.

One morning I went over to have coffee with Ray and I found his truck parked down by the culvert. Ray was slumping on the tailgate like he was passed out from booze but hadn't fallen over yet, but it was too early in the morning for that, even for Ray. I walked up and there was the biggest female beaver I have ever seen laid out drowned in the back of the truck.

Ray didn't look up. He said, “There's a whole mountain back there with streams and springs to plug no end. If I could've scared her, but she wouldn't scare.” When he looked at me his tears made freshets down his cheeks. We walked to the house for coffee before skinning her out.

 

 

Though both of his brothers died flying, Lyle told me he didn't have anything against airplanes except they were too “vibrational.” Ray had welded fighter wings, but he never went up in a plane. Dr. Bert Honea had a very used bush plane. It wasn't fast, but it could climb like a nighthawk and it could land on less than half a mile of tundra.

Bert took a notion to land his winged rattlebox on the two ruts and hump of grass referred to as “the road.” When he came in for his initial landing he buzzed the house first. I tore off down the hill in the Jeep, with a rag tied to a stick of lodgepole for a windsock, and parked off to the side of the runway.

Bert flew over twice more to test the wind, which, as usual, was every which way, shifting from side to side like a cat twitching its tail to mesmerize a sparrow. Bert decided to forget about the wind, since it had no apprehensible direction, and land the thing uphill so it would stop faster, he hoped, before it reached the fence or a lick of crosswind swiped it into a spin.

On his final approach he was wobbly. I could see his jaw muscles bunching, and his knuckles were white as sugar cubes when he clattered past me at eye level. He hit the road surprisingly smoothly, taxied up to the top of the rise, spun her around, and shut the motor down. The age of flight arrived on Boulder Ridge in the summer of 1981.

It ended that same summer when Bert came down a little harder than he meant to and the landing gear collapsed. Lyle came over and figured out a way to brace things up again with some light chain and a come-along. Bert didn't like the looks of it so we all set to work unbolting the wings. Lyle was horrified to find each wing secured by only two bolts. “Two bolts? Two bolts, Bert?” The plane went out on the back of Lyle's 1930 REO.

For a while Bert was landing and taking off on that road as if it was routine. One Saturday Bert offered rides to everyone, so they could see the country from above. Everyone came but Lyle. We took turns going up in the two-seater. We saw what loggers had done to Deadman. We saw the sand rocks like a batch of meringues. We saw our own houses.

Ray had been hanging back. “Oh, no, you go ahead. I ain't in no hurry.” I wondered if he was afraid to go up, but when I thought about it, thought about Ray, I knew that wasn't it.

Bert said, “Ray, you're last. Now or never.”

Ray got ready to speak by covering his mouth with his hand. He pretended he was feeling his beard, but really he was hiding his bad teeth. He said, “Bert, I've spent my whole life on this mountain, and I just don't think I can stand to see it look small.”

 

 

One of the things modern medicine has managed to do besides turning hospitals into churches and doctors into priests, is to infect the culture with the foreknowledge of distantly imminent death, something human beings don't really have it in them to cope with. What I mean is, we are supposed to live knowing we are going to die; we are not supposed to live knowing when.

The modern victim of Intensive Care often goes from someone who knows he is going to die, at some unpredictable time, to someone who is in danger of imminent death, to someone who doesn't have a chance and knows it. I'm not talking about the time it takes for your life to flash before you. The body ticks on horribly, without hope. And everybody has to know about it, too, especially relatives who are forced to talk more about miracles than is dignified.

Bert Honea told me that when he was a resident in an inner city hospital he had to learn, for the most part, to divide the patient's complaints by ten to get an accurate sense of the degree of pain and the seriousness of the condition. When he moved to Laramie and set up his practice, he learned that with ranchers you have to take the complaint and multiply by ten to know where you are.

Example: A guy about ten miles west of here, cutting poles in the National Forest, broke some part of the drive train on his truck once it was loaded. He jacked it up and went to try to fix it. It fell off the blocks and crushed his legs.

Luckily there was a CB radio in the cab that he could reach and he raised a neighbor lady, and what he said was, “Hello, Ruby? How ya doin'? Say, is Don busy?” By the time they found him he had passed out, but they managed to save his legs.

Another example: A young woman whose husband had died, but who stayed on at the ranch alone was robbed one night by two strangers. They shot her twice in the face and threw her body in the root cellar. Two days later she crawled out and drove herself to town.

In old age the same woman, still living on the ranch alone, got a call from friends in town who couldn't get out of their driveway because of a heavy snowfall. Louise drove her Jeep twenty miles at night through the blizzard, pulled them out of the driveway, turned around and went home. She got stuck herself about a mile from her house. While digging herself out, the Jeep, which she'd forgotten to leave in gear, rolled over her leg and broke it. She crawled home and went to bed. When her leg still hurt in the morning she called the doctor.

Anyone who knew him would have thought Frank Lilley was far more likely to get blasted out of the saddle on his hundredth birthday by a bolt of lightning than to go down the way he did.

So when Frank came into the clinic to see Bert, the very fact was worrisome to say the least. For about four months Frank had had a pain when he breathed or lifted his arm. He said, “It doesn't really hurt or nothin', Bert, it's just that something's not quite right in there.”

Bert started out hoping for curables, but Frank went from being someone who is going to die someday to being someone who is as good as dead, and everybody including him had to know about it and go on living with that knowledge for months.

The day I saw Roger come out with his horse trailer to move the herd from the Sand Creek pasture was the day I knew Frank was done for. I don't know how I knew, exactly; I just watched that plume of dust burning down the county road like a fuse and I knew.

The Civic Auditorium was the biggest room they could find for the service. They say it's a terrible thing to see a grown man cry, but when you see a whole roomful of tough-as-jerky, dried-up old cowpokes who never talk except to say hello, good-bye, and excuse me, all broken down with weeping it's kind of a relief. That day in the auditorium there were a lot of very tough people, men and women, choked up.

Arlo Hewlett, the county extension agent, had to stop in the middle of his eulogy, which was mostly a story about how the county commissioners (of whom Frank was one) took Frank to a seafood restaurant and tried to get him to order fish. Frank said, “Boys, to me, seafood is a cow standing in the stock pond.” Arlo had to stop in the middle and say, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I've got a kind of a catch in my throat.” He stepped back from the microphone and stood stone-still for about two full minutes before he went on with another funny story.