The Meadow (10 page)

They found the axe the next day. Fifty years later, Ray said, “You think you've had to adjust. I was twelve years old before I ever saw a stranger.”

 

 

With half a bottle of rum in his hand, Ray made a lateral sweeping gesture, like he was using the jug to brush a fly off the table, only there wasn't any table. “They ought to e-rase the human race and put something good on here. When I get down to hell I've got a few questions for that Devil, real sticklers, like how come they let people into this world when it would have been perfect without them. I mean if you imagine the natural world without the human race, you are thinking of something perfect, perfectly balanced, that just keeps going. Only thing as messes it up is the people. Especially when they try to
manage
things. The more of 'em there are the worster it gets. Now how come they done that? That's going to be the first question. After that there's the long list and the short list, depending on if he's got time, which I imagine he's got aplenty of, but you never know if he takes questions or not.”

Ray took a healthy pull and wiped his mouth on his sleeve and passed the half-gallon of booze. Some fisherman had given it to him as a bribe to fish in the reservoir where the company didn't allow it. The news that the Chimney Rock Ranch had sold its Colorado holdings had reached us, which was why we were parked by the side of the road up to Deadman, blind drunk, taking turns weeping from rage and grief.

Not that it was anything new for the big ranch that, along with the National Forest, surrounded all of us to be selling land. Frank Lilley had been foreman down there for thirty-five years, but the multimillion-dollar spread kept changing owners, usually among Eastern wheeler-dealers looking for places to hide their money, or big corporations like Western Union—six times that I could remember. Frank had always stayed on, though he had no assurance of keeping his job from year to year. The ranch stayed a cattle operation; it just shrank from 90,000 to 72,000 acres and increased in value from one to six million dollars. We were crying because this time they had sold six sections in Colorado to Colorado land developers, which meant the summer cabin, hunting, fishing, and recreational vehicle set was moving in. The land we'd roamed free all our lives was about to be sawed up and nailed down into forty acre “parcels” all the way to Wyoming, the whole foreground of our view. About a hundred low-budget refugees in Winnebagos and fly-away shacks were massing for the invasion since the land was being pedaled at bargain basement prices. Most of the plots had no trees or water. People would be told it was a good investment as well as a recreational paradise. Only those of minimal intelligence and maximal faith in realtors' lies would fall for it. Many of them would throw away their life savings.

Ray said, “Jim, I never saw a stranger till I was twelve years old, but I've seen a passel of 'em since. You got to realize it's going to go that way. You got to cry a little more and take it. There's no way in hell to stop it. Oh, you might put a crimp in their get-along, but you can't stop 'em. And it ain't nobody's fault, neither.”

Ray put the truck in gear and drove a hundred yards down the road, not bothering to shift into third. He pulled over again, cut the motor, and took another pull from the jug. “Yessirree Bob, Jim. You've got to realize. And so do I. You own a whole section, and these people that are fixing to ruin this country just want their own personal little piece of heaven. We gotta move over and let 'em in. You've got your section. You've got your memories of the used-to-be same as I do, and they can't squat on that.”

“Ray, there are so many of them they'll make a trailer court out of the wilderness they are after. It'll be a country club for white trash. They're going to eat it up before they ever have it, and we won't have it anymore either. Those jackasses actually believe it when the realtors tell them they'll be able to get in here all winter and the creeks run high all summer and that the price of land will rise forever. They are going to build ugly things down there where we've been looking at nothing so long we're addicted to it. We won't be able to see the mountains for the junk they are going to strew down there.”

Then I told Ray the third dream. “I'd been gone awhile and when I came home there was a ski lift on the old logging trail my dad calls the Champs Elysees and the prairie was all paved over and they had parking spaces on top for people to gawk at the view from up there.

“You know how sometimes things happen in life so bad you wish it was a dream but you can't make it a dream so you can't wake up from it no matter how much like a bad dream it is? In this dream I had that feeling. I knew it was real and I wanted it to be a dream, but I couldn't make it one, even though this time it
was
one. I even reached down and touched the warm dirt where they'd bulldozed it off to the side. There was sagebrush and prairie flowers and grass mixed up in the gravel, and they had scraped it right to the bedrock.

“I reached down and touched the gravel and flowers to try to wake myself up by not feeling it there. But it was there and there were these guys in slick Western suits and alligator boots. They had blueprints rolled up in their hands and then I was screaming at them that they had made a mistake, they didn't own this section. ‘Hell,' I said, ‘you don't own any of it, but even by your rules you don't own this. By your rules I own it. You have no right to destroy this ground.'

“At first I couldn't even get them to look at me so I walked up to this one bastard and screamed right in his face. He said they had surveyed it all, and if I'd lived there my whole life thinking it was mine I'd been living in the wrong place. The Caterpillar diesel started to crescendo and drown him out like surf. I couldn't hear him, but then I somehow convinced him he'd made a terrible mistake. He looked around at the ruined hillside that now resembled a strip mine. He said it wasn't his fault. It wasn't anybody's fault, and besides, what good would it do if they stopped now?

“Then I was pulling out my grandfather's service automatic, the one he used in the Philippines, the one we shoot old horses with, and I'm raising the barrel into his face, and even though I don't want to shoot him anymore I know I'm going to shoot him anyway. So I'm pulling on the trigger, but I don't hear it go off because the bulldozer is so loud, and it's just this guy's terrified face floating up into the sky like a sunset right there in the middle of the day.”

I took a swig to keep from crying. Not that I minded crying in front of Ray, but I thought if I started crying now I'd never be able to stop.

 

L
YLE
, 1981

“The first thing I noticed was something white and shiny on one of the bare ridges west of the abandoned Running Water Ranch. It was like a snowdrift that begun to appear in July and kind of spread out across the hillside. You could see more of it from the county road coming back from town than you could see up close because it disappeared behind the scrubby hills. Evidently it was spreading northward from the summit of the ridge, since, from the south, you couldn't see nothing but rabbit brush and blue sky.

“Frank knew what it was from the start. I figured it was one of the new parcel owners doing something, but I couldn't figure what. Anymore, even to go down and look was trespassing. So I just wondered—and figured some day to know—what was making the north side of that ridge go all white and glittery in the middle of summer.

“One morning I had just sat down at the kitchen table when I heard a pickup howling by in compound low. It was one of them trucks with a backseat, and it was pulling a four-horse trailer, and behind that there was another little box trailer made from the bed and rear axle of an older, junked pickup with round fenders, like maybe a '56 F-100.

“That's when I put it together.

“The trailers were overfilled with junk, mostly old appliances—washers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers—all mixed in with more nondescript pieces of white enameled sheet metal—shower stalls, possibly—and auto body parts.

“This man was bringing his Kentucky bank account from whatever hovel or digs he inhabited, probably on the north side of Fort Collins, or maybe La Porte, up to his new country estate, which was a treeless, waterless ridgetop that would be a sure-enough wind tunnel in three month's time, at least five miles from the nearest source of electricity that could power any of those appliances even if they could have been fixed or used someday.

“Clearly this yahoo intended to
live
up there, in the style to which he was accustomed, on forty acres of exactly nothing, and he was moving his security blanket first. God help us.

“I begun to witness daily trips. The man's big wife would drive the junkmetal wagon train down to Fort Collins (sixty miles, mostly dirt road) every morning, where she apparently held some kind of steady job at the livestock auction. His kid stayed mostly in town; the old man himself stayed mostly up on his piece of prairie. The truck bed and trailers were full of firewood cut to length for sale on the trip down, which was a curiosity since this man had no timber anywhere near his property excepting the National Forest, which I figured he figured was as much his as anybody's. When the truck-train returned at dusk it was always full—a new load of broken refrigerators and shower stalls.

“I took some interest in this operation, which went on for weeks. The white, shining junkpile begun to spread across the hillside so that if the sun was westering you could see it glint all the way to Laramie, thirty miles.

“Also, the man, whose name I learned from Frank was Earl Ferris, was a marvel of sleepless energy. At the same time he was pilfering wood to sell in town and hauling trash up here, he built a rickety, battery-powered, two-wire electric fence with plastic ribbons all around his forty;
and
he was building a flat-roofed frame appendage to his fifties-model Airstream trailer that he lived in. Not to mention that he was noted poaching at night and trapping on some of his neighbors' parcels—those few, that is, who were lucky enough to have a drainage and enough willow bushes to make a beaver dam. I figured he must have thought he was here a hundred years ago, and a beaver pelt brought fifty dollars instead of fifteen.”

 

 

Ray once showed me a map of the original homeplace on Sheep Creek his father had had drawn. It was a plan to build a dam where the rock outcrops pinch off the two parts of the valley like a girl's waist. App intended to sacrifice the upper meadow to save the rest. He wanted to get financial backing in Fort Collins to build a reservoir. He planned to sell water to the dryland farmers in eastern Colorado. Irrigation had just started coming into the country. App was a very smart man. He was right on time.

The map showed topographic contours, where the dam should go, and how much water it would hold. App had paid a right smart to have that map surveyed and drawn. Floating on the imaginary lake were the words
WORSTER RESERVOIR.
It was supposed to pay off the doctors and set him up for the rest of his life. It was his retirement plan. Somehow things got pulled in a different direction.

There's a lake there today but it isn't called
WORSTER RESERVOIR.
It's called
EATON,
and it didn't save App's land. And that high-altitude puddle isn't the only thing in Colorado that bears Eaton's name, either. There's a town and banks and schools and libraries and God knows whatall else. Just like the great railroad builder Ivinson, in Laramie, who charged his Chinese and Irish laborers 40 percent of their paychecks just to cash them, and had everything in town named after him.

When Mark Eaton got wind of App's plan, he leaned on the backers and got them to withdraw. Then he waited until App was desperate. He bought the upper meadow from App for a pittance and built the reservoir himself.

Ray said it would have been all right with App if he hadn't gotten rich off the only scheme he ever schemed, but it wouldn't have cost those moneymen a cent to name the reservoir after the man whose idea it was. But life's ironic, and blame won't stick to anyone: App's last straw turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Ray sixty years later.

After swamping for ranches at a dollar a day for years, living in bug-infested bunkhouses, Ray followed the lure of city lights as country boys have always done and always will do—that gape-mouthed awe for the electric unknown pulls them in like moths, or else it's just wages, pure and simple.

After Ray married Margie, a hometown girl whose father owned a plastering business and considered her to have married down, they moved to Denver where Ray got a job welding. The war was on and what Ray welded was airplane wings.

Since the Army wouldn't let him fight (he never told me why), he decided to give more blood than a whole platoon of soldiers. This, combined with the effects of welding indoors, poisoned him to where the doctors gave him two weeks to live. Margie drove him back to Laramie to die, but he recovered in six months' time and hired on with Margie's father as a hod carrier.

Old Roy always hated Ray, but no one could say that the son-in-law was afraid of work, so Ray learned the trade, and because Old Roy wanted what was best for his daughter, he eventually bit the bullet and made Ray foreman.

By the time Old Roy was ready to retire no one wanted stucco anymore. Sheetrock was coming in, replacing lath and plaster. But Ray didn't have another trade—outside of welding, which his health denied him—and there weren't enough pitchpine posts left in the woods to surround a gopher hole.

So Ray bought the business from Roy, and the business slowly died. As much as anything else, it died because Ray couldn't bring himself to charge any more than slightly less than what would have been fair, especially to anyone he knew, and he knew everyone in town. Furthermore, by the time he was fifty, he had begun to drink up a considerable percentage of the profits and had started missing payments on the doublewide.