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Spring, Like a Lion
It's 145 road miles from Belen to Gallup, New
Mexico, a railroad town immediately east of the Arizona border on old
Highway 66 and adjacent to the Ramah and Big Navajo Indian
Reservations where my grandmother Williamson taught school early in
the century, returning to Ohio after a semester or two when an amorous
Navajo could not be discouraged from dogging her footsteps around
town. Ninety-some years later I had a similarly unpleasant encounter
in an Indian bar on the wrong side of the tracks in Gallup with a
hairy Navajo who carried a knife in his boot, invited me to go
deer-hunting with him, then stroking my beard asked me to be his
squaw. At least that is what Ernie Bulow, who is acquainted with the
language, made out from his somewhat disordered communication--Ernie
only a step or two behind me as we made a hurried exit by a side door.
Ernie, the son of a teacher at a Navajo boarding
school, was a teacher himself to Navajos before the federal
bureaucrats, in their zeal to "Americanize" the students, forbade him
to wear cowboy boots in the classroom. A critic, author, and book
collector, he operates a bookstore from his old bungalow overlooking
Gallup and the forested mesas surrounding the town. He makes a cameo
appearance as the trader Don Williams in The Fool's Progress by Edward
Abbey, a longtime friend, and, after supplying Tony Hillerman for
years with information pertaining to the Dineh, recently coauthored a
book with him. I drove through town past the pawn shops and trading
posts and stopped at a supermarket for a quart of orange juice. The
Indian ahead of me on the checkout line was drunk enough to think he
could fool the checkout girl into selling him a pint of blackberry
brandy, which she confiscated instead.
Route 666-the Devil's Highway--follows the Chuska
Mountains north from Gallup until they begin to veer to the northwest:
Tobatchi, Nachitti, Newcomb, Shiprock. Shiprock Peak, highmasted
emblem of the European invaders who smashed up the Navajo way of life
forever, was visible from 40 miles to the south; at the northern
horizon the Colorado Rockies like a chain of icebergs floated
miraculously beyond the desert's reach. West of Shiprock on Highway
504 a tourist in a speeding sports car nearly took out a couple of
Indian ponies grazing on the shoulder of the road, and vice versa.
From this road in the vicinity of Teec Nos Pos the Four Corners area
is viewed in its entirety, staked down by Ute Mountain at near center.
At Bluff, Utah, I crossed the silt-laden San Juan River and had a
20-minute palaver, while I waited for the returning pilot car, with
the Indian flagger who claimed it was the best job she'd ever had.
At Blanding again--all roads lead to Blanding--I
stopped to fill the truck's double tanks before starting on the
125-mile run across the head of Lake Powell to Hanksville. Above the
purple depths of Glen Canyon hazed with a golden light the Henry
Mountains loomed across the river, backlit against the evening sun,
their snows scarcely melted from the steeps above the dark precipitous
forests; I watched them in the towing mirror as far as Hanksville,
when they were finally obscured by the deepening dusk. Beyond
Hanksville, a Mormon hamlet of not more than a few hundred souls,
night came down at last and the grateful desert, bursting into the
full bloom of spring, filled the darkness with a myriad of heavy
perfumes like conflicting currents of air pouring through the open
windows. The town of Green River when I reached it at a few minutes
before ten was sleepy with scent, and the office of the Motel 6
crowded with tourists wanting to know what the smell was. The place
was full, so I drove fifty miles southeast and camped in the dark on
Island In the Sky twenty miles west of Moab.
At breakfast the cloud above the western horizon at
a point equidistant between the Henry Mountains and the Book Cliffs
was no bigger than a puff of white smoke. It was a nice cloud, a point
of interest in an otherwise banal sky, soft blue paling around the
edges. I tamped down the cookfire I had built in this official "nofire
zone" (penalty 500,000 U.N. dollars, ten years in a Park Service
dungeon, or both), slung the daypack on my shoulders, and walked out
of camp under a warm spring sun, taking care not to step on the
cryptogramite that, according to the government 2,000 miles away in
Washington, holds the whole of southeastern Utah together. The red
sand warmed, the blackbrush opened into new leaf, and the snow line
lifted toward the triangular peaks of the La Sal Mountains, 30 miles
away across the Colorado River. Horseless in deference to Park
regulations (penalty 20 million U.N. dollars, and/or life imprisonment
in Siberia), I stepped out bravely in the direction of the overlook,
where the walls of the 6,300-foot mesa between the Green and the
Colorado close in a rocky point north of the convergence of the two
rivers.
Admiring the desert wildflowers and cursing the
Park Service's hippophobia, I walked for a mile or so without looking
at the cloud. It was bigger now, about the size of the Goodyear blimp,
and turning dark on its bottom. I forgot it in the pleasure of
physical exertion, the warm sun on my back sending sweat between my
shoulderblades under the thin cotton shirt, the jinking birds
through the juniper trees, and the bottomless sky overhead, and when a
breeze sprang up I pulled the shirt from my belt and let it in
underneath. When I was barely a mile from the point the breeze
stiffened to a light wind and I looked west again, where the cloud had
thrown off altogether its benignant aspect. It was a storm front now,
sweeping across the slickrock wilderness toward the Green River and
the Sky Island, a blitzkrieg of wind and lightning extending 50 or 60
miles to the north and south. There was a rolled flannel shirt in the
pack. I stopped long enough to pull it on and button it, and reached
the exposed point in a blasting sandstorm as the first fat drops of
rain fell, steaming on the sun-charged rock.
The rain turned to hail as I climbed below the
rimrock, following a deer trail leading to a shallow overhang 2,300
feet above the Colorado running swift and green in its blood-colored
trench. There was a view of the Abajo Mountains and Elk Ridge ,
Six-Shooter Peak and Lavender Canyon, and the Needles before veils of
rain and hail blotted the expanse, cutting away the valley below and
leaving me shallowly encased in rock and floating in the clouds.
Lightning bolts struck overhead and flashed across the canyon bottoms
as waterspouts poured with the runoff: falls of liquid mud and foam,
bearing along sticks, cacti, and small rocks, streaking down the
cliffs. I worked the pack from my shoulders, opened it, and peeled and
ate an orange. Then, as it continued to storm, I lay down in a cramped
position in my small dry space and took a nap. When I woke the rain
had stopped. The sky was clearing, and wraiths of cloud rose among the
rain-darkened rock columns above the river. Returning on the slick
trail going up to the rimrock, I had to grasp at the rocks and bushes
to avoid pitching backward into the abyss below.
In camp the sagging tent remained upright. My
clothes were dry inside, the camp boxes intact. I restaked the tent
and built the fire back to a defiant blaze before allowing it to burn
down to cooking coals. The wind kept up that evening and throughout
the night, and it was very cold. Several times I woke with the nylon
walls billowing around me and the aluminum poles swaying, as if the
tent were a great bird attempting to become airborne. At dawn my hair
and beard were filled with the fine red sand, but when I crawled out I
was still on the verge of the cliff, not at the bottom of it. The wind
had subsided, but it continued to blow hard and cold from the
northwest, where a shelf of gray cloud piled above the horizon. A
spring blizzard I discovered, when I caught up with it later the same
day.
Kemmerer lay under a foot of the heavy wet snow,
and snow squalls blew throughout that weekend. The deep mud froze hard
in the night, and thawed during the day to a thick gumbo. Fred
Chambers called one morning from the ranch asking for help. He'd been
hauling water for the horses when the pickup became mired and sank to
the frame in mud. Fred abandoned the truck and slogged the last
several hundred yards on foot to the house, where he brewed coffee and
drank the pot while he waited for Marcia to return from town in the
Bronco. But when Marcia and Fred, using a tow rope, attempted to jerk
the truck backward onto firmer ground, the Bronco stuck too, and Fred
returned to the house to call me.
Taking along ropes and a sheepherder jack in the
Land Cruiser I drove to Twin Creek, where the Chamberses in muddy
clothes waited on the creek bottom. We tried jacking up the rear end
of the Bronco to lay cut sagebrush under the tires, but the big jacks
sank in the wet clay without finding bottom in the bottomless road. So
Fred attached one end of a nylon rope to the left rear leaf spring,
while I advanced on him slowly in compound low. Almost within reach of
the other end of the rope the Cruiser stalled out, sinking in mud
above the axle as soon as its forward momentum ceased. "Well I'll be
dipped in shit," Fred said. "Come on to the house, and I'll fix us a
pot of hot coffee."
Fred telephoned Richard Lewis at the Lewis Ranch
for emergency aid, and while the three of us waited for Richard to
arrive with his stock truck and a winch Fred recalled an incident from
his youth as a boy of 15 or 16, back in Tennessee. He was being
harassed at school by a much bigger and stronger boy, who had it in
for him and was threatening to give Fred the beating of his life.
Finally he jumped him in the playground and Fred, by a stroke of luck,
managed to get the advantage. He knocked the boy against a wall and
began to kick him in the groin and around the face. By the time they
pulled Fred off the kid was a candidate for the hospital, and the
principal summoned Fred to his office. The principal was an enormous
man with round hulking shoulders and a huge paunch. "Hell, Fred," the
principal said, "I don't know what I'm going to do about you. It looks
like this is a case for the police. If that boy's parents want to
press charges, I'm afraid you're in for a lot of trouble." "He's been
laying for me for weeks," Fred told him. "It wasn't my fault." "Well,
why did you have to keep kicking him? Why couldn't you just have
knocked him down?" "Mr. Johnson," Fred said, "you maybe have never
thought about it, being such a big guy. But a little guy like me has
to think. If I get in a fight with that fellow every couple of weeks
I'll maybe win one out of five fights, if I'm lucky. A little skinny
guy like me has to give a big guy like that something to remember so
he won't come back for more." "Well, Fred," the principal said, "it
sounds to me like you have a point there. Now I tell you what I want
you to do. When I start yelling I want you to shout and holler and
maybe cry a little, and ask me to let up on you. And don't you ever
tell anybody what we're going to do, OK?" Then Mr. Johnson took off
his belt and started to beat on his desk with it until, Fred said, he
thought he was going to knock it to pieces. "That'll teach you!" the
principal yelled; so Fred began to holler and beg for mercy and shout
that he was sorry and that he'd never get in a fight again. Then the
principal quit beating his desk. He replaced the lengthy belt about
his girth, and winked broadly at Fred. "You go now, son," he said.
"I'll call this boy's parents and tell them I've fixed everything, and
you're never going to bother their kid again." Fred was about to make
another pot of coffee when he happened to look from the window of the
trailer into the bottom. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "Richard's
there already, waiting for us."
We ran the cable out and Richard Lewis winched each
of the three vehicles from the mud onto firm ground while Fred,
Marcia, and I stood behind the borrow pit and watched. "It almost
looks like we knew what we was doing," Fred observed. Then Richard
rewound the cable on the winch and Fred took his Thermos from the
pickup seat and poured him a cup of black coffee. Marcia walked back
to the house while the three of us, ignoring the snow squall,
discussed pending business by the planning and zoning commissioners.
Richard promised he was going to inform the commissioners that the
folks at Twin Creek were unanimous in favor of putting a trailer park
in the area. Fred countered that he'd take a can of white paint and
paint the letters E L K on each of the Lewis cows, erect billboards
along the highway (ONLY TWENTY MILES TO THE GREAT ELK SHOOT ... ONLY
TEN MILES . . . JUST THREE MORE MILES ..), set up a ticket stand at
the entrance to the Lewis ranch, and sell hunting permits to hunters
from Salt Lake City.
When the snow squalls stopped the winds came. They
howled for weeks out of the Southwest, pouring across the high desert
country and removing the equivalent of five or six inches of rainfall
from the ground, leaving it dry and hard as fired clay and the
mountains stripped of snowpack. The latest stormfront hit as they were
beginning to sheep-shear on Thoman Ranch, where Bill Thoman was
hustling now to contract the itinerant shearers before they moved up
to Montana. Owing to the coldest and wettest spring in a decade, the
Forest Service had warned ranchers in the Bridger Valley that they
might not be permitted to put their animals this year onto summer
range in the Uinta Mountains, where the snowpack varied from 250
percent of normal to 500 percent, and backpackers arriving from the
East and West coasts were discovering the Wind River Range to be
impassable above 9,000 feet. In Wyoming, the absence of that most
lovely of natural phenomena called spring is one of the worthwhile
sacrifices we make for the relative nondevelopment of the state by
lotus eaters from somewhere else.
I called Clyde Clark to make an appointment to have
the horses shod, but two weeks passed before we had a day suitable for
doing it. Several years before when we shoed in wet weather, an
unbroke gelding reared as I held his head, striking me in the chest
with his knee as he went up and knocking me on my back in a couple of
feet of mud and horse manure. Time arrested itself as he towered above
me, a black Pegasus, and dropped back to earth in slow motion, his
forelegs spreading in the final instant to plant his black hooves in
the mud on either side of my rigid chest. Shoeing horses in mudtime,
as T.S. Eliot said of writing poetry, is a mug's game. I therefore
waited patiently for clement weather, passing the time by sorting gear
and loading the horse-packs for the season: tents, tent-stakes,
groundcloths, bedrolls, woolen pants, sweaters, and socks, hatchets,
nylon rope, knives, map cases, 41. magnum rounds, fly spray, cooking
utensils, canned deviled ham, canned smoked oysters, biodegradable
soap, Jim Beam in plastic bottles, beer, fine Italian wines, a tape
deck., recordings of Scott Joplin, Maria Callas, and J.S. Bach, the
complete works of P.G. Wodehouse, and a few good oil paintings to hang
in camp (only Boy Scouts are never really prepared). When at
last we got a fine day, I met Clyde at the ranch and he went around
two horses while I held the clippers, handed him the nails, and
watched the fleecy clouds above and Truman Julian's sheep below moving
in opposite directions across the rolling sagebrush hills.
Toward the end of May I loaded the horses and
pulled them up La Barge Creek to Scaler's Cabin, a disused guard
station belonging to the Forest Service. From there, riding the
gelding and leading the mare with the packs, I rode up the overgrown
trail into the freshly greened wilderness of early summer.At
Fontenelle Lakes the grasses were pressed down, rank with the scent of
bedded elk. West of the lakes Commissary Ridge, unmarked by traces of
snow, rose steeply red. The horses breasted the trail at a trot and I
drew rein at the top of the ridge to let them blow. Eastward the
succession of parallel ridges rolled toward the desert basin, but to
the west the country was steeper and more rugged, a confusion of dark
ridges pitching against one another at differing angles. This side of
Commissary a trough ran south to meet the forested headwall overlooked
by Electric Peak, a massive head of red ore surmounted by a fringe of
pine forest. The declining sun, reaching under the brim of my hat,
burned my right cheek as we rode toward the park behind the headwall,
and a dark cloud standing like the column of the Lord above the
southern end of the ridge.
We made Red Park in half an hour. I tied up in an
edge of pine and was pulling the packs from the mare when the first
roll of thunder arrived. The cloud had spread and darkened, and I
guessed the storm would strike hard to the south before moving east
toward the Green River. I unsaddled the gelding and picketed the
horses on the new grass. The next time I heard thunder, the tent was
up inside the trees and the packs lay around it on the pine needle
ground. Mammatus hung from boiling purple clouds overhead as the rain
began to fall. I tucked the packs inside the tent and ran to unstake
the horses, who had dropped their heads and turned their rumps toward
the wind and hail. Electric Peak drew down lightning in streaks of
fire, and bolts struck around the park with a tearing sound, followed
by the crash. I tied the horses in the trees with numbed fingers, wet
to the skin and shaking violently from a deep cold. Inside the tent I
stripped away my soaked clothes and crawled naked into the sleeping
bag. I lay in the bag for an hour while the shivering subsided slowly
and the storm rumbled away to the north, following the line of the
ridge. Then I dressed in dry clothes and emerged from the tent into
winter, everything white but the dark green of the pine trees and hail
a foot deep on the ground.
I gathered dry wood within the forest and built a
fire. While the coffee boiled I repicketed the horses on the melting
hail, and brought the whiskey bottle from the packs. Standing above
the hot fire I drank coffee and whiskey from a tin cup while the red
wafer of sun went down over in Idaho, turning the mountains pink with
evening light. Droplets of water from the dripping pine branches fell
with a hissing sound into the Pentecostal flames that warmed me from
the outside while the whiskey worked within, and the horses pulled
noisily at the new grass where the last of the hailstones soaked
through it into the red soil beneath.
I was dry, almost warm now, and in a few minutes it
would be spring again. Taking the cup I climbed to the top of the
ridge and looked north to the Fontenelle Lakes, where the elk had
emerged from the timber to graze along the edge of the slough. They
made a herd of about 30 head, including several new calves and a few
good bulls. I watched them until the cup was empty. Then I walked
downhill again through the trees, where a fire was already burning on
the red wet earth. |
