“What them Indians ought-ah do is take a map and break up their reservation into acres. Give um numbers, paint um on balls, hire a big old Portland publicity outfit and then hold themselves a giant statewide lottery. After the pot’s full, the TV cameras roll and the winning ball comes pinging and ponging down the chute and into the golden cup, pay off the winners with half the money and use the rest to drill themselves a water well. If there ain’t no winners, drill themselves two.”
— An old bar fly’s solution to the current battle in the endless Klamath River water wars raging down south. Overheard (the gist) in the La Monta Roadhouse (sign posted on the bulletproof door: Fight in here and you’re 86ed for life).
* * *
“You hear about that crazy Nevada young buck that went and bulldogged a rodeo bucking bull?”
The second fellah looks the first one up and down. “Can’t say how I believe that.”
“I don’t mean he done it in the rodeo — they’d never allow it, not with the kids in the stands. I mean this young buck he did it out in the Jarbidge down there north of Elk-hole. Elk-hole’s famous for raising some of the finest damned bucking bulls in the world, as I’m sure you know. Why just as soon as the cute little fellahs are weaned they cut um loose all alone out there in the lonesome. Open land raises um up good and wild. Once a bull’s full grown and catching sight of another bull gets um to boiling into a fury, and spying a horseman bout drives um mad, that’s when the stockmen know he’s good for show.
“So, seeing how nobody keeps an eye on um, this young buck he decides to bulldog one. He gets up a partner to help him turn a bull, get some pictures and incase something goes wrong. So they drive up in there, off-load their horses and head out into the scraggly rolling hills. They top a rise and spot a big old bull standing braced and glaring up at them, his ears stiff and trembling, his nostrils sucking and snorting. Before the bull can get any ideas, they charge um head-on at a full gallop, get um turned and chase um down. The fellah gets up alongside, leaps off his horse, grabs a hold of the bull’s horns, digs in his heels and away they go. Took him an hour to get the bull tuckered enough so he could jump astride um, and most the rest of the day riding um round and round before his knees got to buckling. Then the fellah he eases on down to the ground, carefully grabs the bull by the horns, violently twists his head and lays him down hard on his flank, thump, the bull looking up at him like he’s thankful for the relief.”
“I can allow how that makes sense.”
“He damn sure did it, too — his mug shot’s frontpage in the Elk-hole Daily Crier. Inside there’s a picture of him and his partner leaving the courthouse, too. They torn it up out there so much it looks like a gang of Salt Lake City feedlot hogs got loose from an overturned big rig, high-tailed it up into there and then rooted up the ground like it was bursting with acorns, grubs and ground squirrels. What with the cloven hoofs and the boot heels, they’d done so much damage the damned BLM ranger down there went and gotta court order ordering them to get on back and restore the land it to its natural condition. They’ve gotta fill in all the holes and furrows, set the knocked over sage bushes back upright and plumb, rake the ground till it’s smooth again and, by way of punishment, never again entertain such thoughtlessness under penalty of the law.”
“Hum. I can allow how that makes sense. Wouldn’t surprise me if they had them poor boys pack in plastic baggies and pooper-scoopers.”
* * *
WHAT IS YOUR LIFE WORTH? No trespassing
— Sign posted on boneyard/equipment yard barbed-wire fence off McKay (pronounced McKee) Creek.
* * *
Tired of refereeing shit-slinging matches and playing bumper cars, a San Francisco policeman comes up here and hires on as a Crook County Deputy. Seeing how he’s the new man on the force, they put him to patrolling the backroads on account of it being so awfully boring out there. But boring’s fine and dandy by this fellah’s lights and, as he settles into his new routine, more and more it gets so every time he’s pulled back into town because somebody calls in sick, or to render assistance, join in a manhunt, testify in the courthouse or turn keys in the jail upstairs, he feels a little bit left out. Weren’t long before he’s crossing his fingers hoping they’ll hold off on hiring some new guy so he don’t get promoted up and out of his job.
Once a week the deputy patrols the federal highway east from Prineville and into the National Forest up to the Wheeler County Line some 40 miles away on the Ochoco Divide. Outside town the highway leads through river bottom cattle ranches framed with rimrocks and then it gently climbs into the mountains. The land goes from pivot-irrigated pastures to bunchgrasses and juniper to ponderosa and lodgepole and, up near the pass, to Doug fir, white fir, hemlock and red cedar. Lazy meandering Marks Creek rides shotgun, and most the way it’s edged with willow and aspen, cottonwood and vine maples shaped like painted double-yellows splitting the lightning bolt, snow-country meadow.
The National Forest is dotted with plenty of side roads for the deputy to have look/sees along and In-Holdings to keep an eye on, them mostly raggedy old hunter’s camps or breadbox ranch-hand spreads just big enough for a few horses or a couple of cows. Even though there’s a fair bit of vehicular traffic up that way, still its beauty makes it the deputy’s favorite stretch. About all he sees anyway is lonely cross-country truckers, local ranchers, occasional loggers, hunters, fishermen and wilderness types, and not many of them are in a big old hurry to get themselves killed. Then he does see some vehicles heading for Boise, or Baker City if they prefer, but they don’t add much to the flow. All and all, he calculates that more cars pass through the Bay Bridge toll plaza during a Wednesday midnight hour than cross over the mountains in a day.
Then one time while puttering along a side road checking for skid marks, barked trees and holes blasted through the underbrush on the downhill side, he catches sight of a herd of mustang paints breaking out of a meadow and into a treeline. And, just like Dorothy, the deputy realizes he ain’t in San Francisco anymore, it tickles his heart and he’s hooked.
So one sunny afternoon up there the deputy rounds a bend and finds himself tailgating an ancient but sparkling clean one-ton pickup truck doing exactly 55mph. The driver is a clean-cut old fellah wearing a stiff Stetson hat, his lanky longhaired birddog’s inside the cab, facing the windshield and sitting at attention, and the deputy takes him for a gentleman rancher.
Suddenly the gentleman hits his brakes hard and whips a wicked left-hand turn onto a side road. “That’s funny,” the deputy says aloud. “He didn’t use his turn indicator and he didn’t see me in his rearview mirror.” But he chalks it up to a geezer’s moment of inattentiveness and thinks no more about it.
Next time he’s patrolling in Prineville the deputy pulls up behind the same gentleman and, right there on the federal highway/main drag leaving downtown, without signaling the guy whips another wicked left-hand turn. Thinking it might just be a coincidence, the deputy tails him and damned if he doesn’t see him whip a wicked right-hand turn and then another one. “That’s it,” the deputy says aloud. “This guy’s dangerous.” Since the vehicular operator can’t bring himself to take a peek in his rearview mirror, the deputy’s gotta whoop his siren to announce himself and then whoop it three times more to get him pulled over.
Now thoroughly flabbergasted, the deputy marches up beside the truck loudly demanding to know why in hell the guy ain’t using his turn-god-dammed-indicators.
As the old fellah laboriously rolls down his window, his face wrinkles into a scowl. He squints up at the deputy and snarls, “Ain’t nobody’s business where I’m going.”
* * *
Since the waitress looks to be in her 70s, I ask if she’s a home girl. “Born, raised, went away, came back,” she beams.
“So you call this Baker City or is it just plain Baker?”
“It’s Baker City, hon-. Been Baker City ever since the gold bonanza and they built the first bank. It’s ‘Baker’ only on some of the highway signs. Saves paint.”
“It’s a beautiful place for a city.”
“We think so.”
* * *
Since Ochoco Creek runs the length of Prineville, the town kindly built a paved walking-path that follows it. There’s fish in the creek, including steelhead and rainbows, and I see this young boy standing on a rock fishing with a little fishing pole.
“Catch anything?” I ask him.
“Sometimes.”
“What kind?”
“Liddle ones.”
* * *
There’s this ancient old gal who likes spending Happy Hour sitting the bar over in the historic Horseshoe Club downtown. With pints of Coors Genuine Draft (or Bud Lite) costing $2.50 and shots of firewater $3.50, she figures it’s a good way to stretch her old age money. Then she does enjoy getting out the house, hoofing it down the sidewalk, having some polite company and, when her spirit’s willing, telling tall tales about back when she was a young sagebrush-and-cow-shit-smelling cowgirl. For instance, the old gal claims her great grandpa came over from Ireland to herd sheep and then got famous for freezing to death during the Great White Storm of 1889. T’was a blizzard so big and fierce it killed tens of thousands of cattle and horses all up through the upper West — killed off plenty of elk and pronghorns, too. Up there on Big Summit Prairie an unattended band of sheep got caught out in the open, squeezed together for warmth and disappeared under six feet of snow. Wasn’t till June that their frozen carcasses reappeared and folks discovered them. While their wool stank to high heaven, they were still standing up. Their meat was still good and they salvaged what they could.
Now at the time her great granddaddy was staying in a shepherd’s shack up there on Wildcat Creek below Two Pillars. He’d gotten all his sheep down to their winter pastures alright but, wanting to paint some landscapes, he’d gone back up in there to stay an extra week or two. I know, nobody’s ever heard of an Irish painter, but nobody ever heard of her grandpa in that way, neither. Though she dares say his oil paintings — fall colors, gurgling creeks, frosty forests and all — ain’t half-bad.
Then nobody alive had ever seen the likes of this storm and it took not just grandpa but everybody by surprise. It was like out of the blue the sky up and changed its mind. Like a spooked stallion bolting, out of the northeast came freezing wind gaining speed with every stride. The very first snow flew sideways so hard it spun folks around. The snow gathered in drifting heaps and, before ole grandpa knew it, he was snow-bound. T’was all he could do to keep the snow from crushing his roof, his fireplace going and a trail open to his liddle stack of firewood.
“Didn’t anybody come up after him?”
“How could they? It got so cold the pines froze solid and exploded like sticks of dynamite. Winds so powerful all you could see was the snow stinging to your eyeballs; drifts so deep you’d sink your horse and yourself to boot. All they could do was wait till things calmed down and, once they finally got up to the shack, they found him frozen solid and sitting sideways on the last of the dead coals in his fireplace. His feet were pushed up against the rocks, his knees were bent together and his head was resting up in the bottom of the chimney. Since they couldn’t get him out of there without breaking him up, they left him till the thaw.”