The Meadow (2 page)

I want to go to Sheep Creek, too, but I can't because of all these tape measures, different sizes, too heavy to lift, too sharp to touch without slicing my fingers into more spaghetti than they already are. I can't even wave good-bye right.

 

 

The first owners of the meadow on Sheep Creek (Indians, like I said, never wintered in these mountains) were just hiding out. That's what Lyle says. They weren't really trying to make a go of the place and they didn't. Back then a man could have homesteaded a bigger hay meadow closer to town and down out of the mountains so he wouldn't be buried alive for six months a year. Lyle said, “They were horse thieves or xenophobes or something.”

The second name on the deed is App Worster's, a good enough man by plenty to make the place work. He built miles of fences, yards of homemade wooden pipe, a house, barns, sheds, corrals. He put up hay with horses and got down to scythe among the willows where the mower couldn't go. He never quit from last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery.

That was before hunting laws and App could harvest what he needed of deer and elk, antelope, grouse, brook trout. Outside the fence around his own meadow there wasn't any fence in those days, so App could turn his cows out in summer and bring them home in winter to feed them the hay he'd made.

What broke App was trying to keep his wives from dying. When one died he married her sister. When the sister died they left four kids and enough doctor bills between them that App had to give up his freedom to stay out of jail.

The third owners weren't even close. They lost the place in the Depression.

 

 

White as death and twice as cold, mathematical, it offers itself as a symbol of all stillness, all isolation when it reaches the windowsill and no one is going anywhere for a while, or when, by March, the drifts loom higher than the roofs of houses. The snow is deepest up on Deadman, where all our streams begin, where timber combs the snow out of the wind.

Sometimes in summer the air is so dry the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground. When it rains hard the soil can't take it in. It washes out the roads and pours off the surface of the pasture. Here what living things depend on is the snow that melts off mountain faces and high timber, swelling our springs and streams, filling the reservoir, infusing miles of irrigation ditches, making the meadow green.

 

 

Lyle is down mowing. From up here by the cattleguard on the hill, the Farmall looks like a river barge, low in the water, pulling upstream as it makes its first swath through the deep timothy that borders the streak of willows along the creek. The tractor moves forward but Lyle is looking back as he goes, watching the scissoring blades of the sickle bar take down the tall grass. Going forward looking back, spiraling toward the middle of the field.

There's a coyote following the tractor, just about ten feet behind it. Every so often he pops into the air like he's been stung and pounces. He's catching field mice the mower turns up. Lyle isn't paying any attention to him.

A lot of people would shoot a coyote if they got that close to it, which is why a lot of people never get that close. This one isn't Lyle's pet; coyotes can't be tamed, even if you start with a pup. It's as close to a pet as Lyle has, though. He won't have a dog or cat for fear of becoming too attached.

Lyle admires coyotes for more or less the same reasons others hate them. To begin with, the average coyote is smarter than the average human. That is why it's so difficult to trap them, and why they haven't gone the way of wolves. Then there's their toughness and uncompromising independence: if by some lapse in attention one is caught in a trap, off comes the offending limb and he's on his way.

As the price of defiance they have to work harder than most animals just to stay alive. They live mostly on mice and insects. When they are lucky or clever enough to come up with something bigger they are overcome with joy and love for one another. They rhapsodize. They harmonize their loneliness and sorrow and they don't care who likes it.

Lyle says for coyotes, “They sure never pity themselves.”

When he gets done mowing he will climb down, choke the tractor, and walk around where that coyote is sitting down just looking at him. He'll chuck a stone or a block of wood at the critter and say, “Don't you know better than to come that close to people?” The coyote, trotting casually away, watching Lyle over his shoulder as he goes, of course, does know better. He knows the difference between this man who lives in the meadow alone, summer and winter, and the ones who set the traps and poisons and poke the muzzles of .30-.30s out the windows of their pickups. This human has somehow raised his consciousness almost up to coyote level.

 

 

The coyotes trust Raymond, too, but they must think him sentimental: he puts out Alpo for them. Ray and Lyle can argue all night about the desirability of moose or wolves or grizzlies, but they are in accord on coyotes. Ray says, “You can admire a coyote—he's an outlaw, but it's damned hard to admire a sheep.”

Each year when Ray drains the reservoir, trout get stranded in pools below the dam. One August a mother coyote showed up with her two pups to teach them a thing or two about angling, coyote-style. It was before sunrise, but she didn't realize a drunk can be awake anytime, and that morning he surprised them. She somehow let those pups know to run for cover while she held Raymond in her gaze. He tried talking to her, and after awhile, she decided he was harmless if not quite admirable.

The next morning she showed up by the weir in full view of the house. There was the open can of Alpo. Ray was watching, drinking instant coffee, from the kitchen window. After that the three coyotes came in broad daylight. Ray and Margie Worster watched from the house as they splashed and romped in the shallow water, swallowed whole about a bushel of trout apiece, and, bellies swaying, moved off to find some shade in which to spend the rest of the day, and maybe sing a little toward dusk.

 

 

The last time Lyle cut hay, before his health gave out, he mowed with the '23 Farmall he bought in 1946, the one he'd used every year for forty years. He gave up haying with horses because horses that are only used one month of the year get too jittery and dangerous. The first field you cut you just have to let them mow where they want to—the swath like a child's scribble in the field. He'd have bought a tractor sooner, but you couldn't during the war.

The Farmall has iron wheels and you have to hand start it choked and with the gas shut off, and then, when it catches, you run like hell back to turn on the gas before it dies. Whenever it broke Lyle fixed it—even if he had to forge a part himself, up in the shop, right in the middle of haying. After a certain point you couldn't buy anything for it anyway. Lyle kept it greased and drove it easy and fixed it when it broke. After about 1960 nothing ever went wrong with it.

In the early years Lyle fixed up a sweep on the front of a truck and ran the hay up with a stacker he made of lodgepole cut nearby. Then the whole family and sometimes neighbors would pitch in. Using a stationary baler, they tied the bales by hand and hauled them to the barn on the 1930 REO, which they also used to haul lumber and sand. That truck is still in the barn in perfect working order, except that you have to drive it down to the creek each day and fill the radiator with the coffee can Lyle keeps under the seat. It leaks exactly one coffee can of water a day whether you drive it or not.

Lyle didn't own any farm equipment newer than 1948. Along with his pickup and car it all belonged in a museum, except that Lyle was too busy using it. That old equipment stopped traffic on the county road at haying time.

Each year for forty years Lyle got the hay into the barn before it started snowing hard, starting in the stubble of the meadow, which disappeared willingly under the first layers of crystals that fell, as if they didn't mean anything by it.

 

 

Oscar Marsh, on the other hand, is more of a classic kind of Wyoming rancher. Besides everything else that means, it means if it moves he shoots it. It's like being a ten-year-old with a .22 for your whole life. Nothing changes but the bore. Oscar has a hunting-lodge-style living room with a big stone fireplace in his log house. Some of the most beautiful creatures ever to contain motion are nailed to the wall. It's a kind of innocence, and I don't blame Oscar because he is ninety and pretty leathery himself from all those years in the unrestrained wind.

Once, out riding, Oscar drew a bead on an old coyote at about two hundred yards. As usual he didn't miss. When he rode up to collect the pelt he found that the coyote only had two legs. The other two had been caught in traps at different times in a long and bitter coyote life, and the old bastard had chewed them off, one front foot above the ankle that he could still stump around on, and one hind leg chewed off (or maybe, as Oscar said, shot off) at the knee. Somehow that coyote had figured out how to make a living in his diminished condition. Both wounds were old. His coat was healthy, not starved-looking or mangy. Apparently he was perfectly happy to go on suffering if that's what life was for, though he probably didn't mind being shot by Oscar that much either. Oscar said if he'd known that old boy was missing two legs and still getting along, he didn't know whether he would have shot him or not.

 

 

Lyle was born in a house made of dirt. Kind of like a grave with a roof on it. It was dug back into a low hill with slabs of the prairie grass it was lost in piled up high enough in front to support a roof and make a couple of windows so you could look out every once in a while just to make sure there was still absolutely nothing in sight and a door you had to duck under.

Lyle quit school after the eighth grade because his old man ran off and forgot about his three kids and their mother and the sod cabin I'm trying to remember from a photograph I once saw of it. By age fourteen Lyle was able to do a man's work for half a man's wages in the fields, old enough to start killing himself with cigarettes and chew and help his family keep living in the grave they called home.

In Flagler, Colorado, you are too far east to see the mountains, and there are no trees because there is no water. In 1934 it was all dryland farming in what the first Europeans who saw it called a desert. It was the kind of place where you'd think only the poorest most desperate sonofabitch with an overactive imagination and a zealous trust in benevolent powers of a higher nature would even sit down to rest, let alone live, back then, before irrigation turned it green. You'd have to be adaptable as an Eskimo or dumb as a snake to want to call it home.

Sod houses, like jungle huts and igloos, are made from the very stuff the inhabitants seek protection from. It's like fighting fire with fire, only in this case it's fighting grass with grass.

 

 

So you start by digging a hole, like a gopher or a prairie dog, then you cut up some of the sod you've disappeared into and sandbag it all around yourself as if there was a nearby river you were expecting to rise, or as if you were making a gun emplacement. You leave a couple of holes for windows and a gap for the door that will be low enough to keep you humble for the rest of your life, even if you move away.

Sod was layered over poles for a roof. The grass on the roof had to be alive to keep the roof from leaking and falling in.

Those burrows were warm and dark in winter, at least a refuge from the raging whiteness that was everything outside. They were like submarines till spring. In summer they were cool, black when you first came in from the bright sunshine. The only real drawbacks were roof leaks and bug-infested walls. The walls could be covered with burlap and whitewashed or plastered white, which stopped the bugs but brought the winter glare inside, a major cause of madness in pioneer women. Lyle's mother never whitewashed their walls and left the burlap dry.

She had three children with her in the grave her husband made for them before he left. Imagine a winter glare. The windows are blank. The house is in a white suspension.

Hear the wind blow.

 

 

The doors of sod houses open inward; otherwise, the inhabitants could be trapped by heavy snowfall. After a blizzard the sky is a purple bowl the sun, like an egg, rolls around in. The earth is as blind as a hard cloud. The house is just a slight swell in the snow until someone opens the door inward, and like a drunk who's been leaning there all night, a small avalanche tumbles inside.

From the outside the first thing you see is a broom stuck up out of the snow like a sudden flower. It pokes around, making a hole. Then shovelfuls of snow sail into the air in steady puffs.

One floppy-hatted head pops out from the burrow and, gopherlike, looks all around. Then the whole man climbs out and begins to excavate a passage to the door. Two boys emerge, followed by a smaller boy. They wade out through deep but dry new snow, across the yard to a shedlike affair that is less buried because of the body heat and stamping about of animals.

One boy rolls a bale of hay off the stack to knock the spindrift off it. The other places an icy bucket under the cow and begins to milk with red, swollen hands. The streams of warm milk against the pail sound like fabric ripping. The man unhooks a bridle from a nail and places the bit under his armpit to warm it. The small boy just stands there with his hands at his sides.

When the horse is bridled the man calls to the house the name of a girl or woman, and she emerges from the snow-burrow bundled so tight she can't bend her arms easily. She wears a big, moth-eaten sweater over her coat. She is carrying a ratty green blanket and a lunchbox.

The little boy, who is Lyle, is hoisted onto the horse by his father and packaged in the blanket. His sister, Clara, hands him the reins and the lunchbox. Lyle begins to flail his heels against the enormous horse's sides without result. This is a horse that wouldn't break into a trot if you dipped his tail in coal oil and lit it. The father says, “Giddyup, Bill,” and slaps the horse's flank hard enough to hurt his freezing hand. The horse begins to plod through the smooth, undrifted snow up an almost imperceptible rise toward the deep sky where Lyle disappears on his way to school.