Fur Trail

The End

2009-12-23T21:51:00.000-08:00

This is the hundredth blog entry, the last daily update, and the first entry I’ve written without Duke hanging out nearby. Duke is now at the home of John Cosgriff. He climbed into my lap as I drove over to John’s house, his muzzle resting on my left leg and his back legs lying on the console. Duke will stay with John when I fly back to Georgia tomorrow for a two-week sabbatical. He tried to follow me out the door of John’s house when I left. I pointed back inside and made him stay, then I walked out into the dark.

Back at the cabin, as I usually do in the evenings, I paced around the living room trying to figure out what to write about. This time I kept music playing. I paced into the tiled kitchen area, then turned around and paced over the rug past the lamp and beside the bookshelf, then started to turn again and glimpsed Duke’s tennis balls resting on the shelf. That’s when I started missing him. Often while mulling over the evening’s writing, I’ve thrown tennis balls against the walls for Duke to chase or lobbed them into the air for him to catch. Now the balls looked lonely. If you believe in writing the truth – and I do – there was only one thing to write about.

I picked up a tennis ball and threw it against the far wall. It bounced back to me halfheartedly, and I walked over to it and flung it again. But throwing tennis balls, like one other activity I’ve been missing recently, just isn’t as much fun alone. I placed the ball back on the bookshelf. I walked over to my computer to shut off the music. If I was going to write about aloneness, I had better let myself feel the silence first. But I didn’t have the guts to turn the music off. I have spent, in this single and wandering life, plenty of lonely time – I was not eager to go back to it.

I have said goodbye to more than one pretty girl to pursue this single and wandering life. I received a Christmas card from one of them today, one to whom I said goodbye five and a half years ago when I graduated college. I left her to wander around in my truck with a dog and no steady job. Which has a familiar ring. At the time that I left, I loved her. Loved her wholeheartedly. But the road called. Now, she is engaged to be married and is gainfully employed in New York City. Probably, I reflected, I made the right decision for the wrong reasons. I sent her an email to emphasize the differences in our present situations. If she’s keeping score, I thought, she’ll get a kick out of this.

It’s a tradeoff that I decided to make. Probably a tradeoff that most of the fur trappers had to consider. What is the price of freedom? They left everything that they knew, spent several years wandering the Rockies, and then – at least most of them – returned to civilization. Maybe what I’m doing is similar.

There was really no choice.

Hunting: What's Got Everyone So Worked Up?

2009-12-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

If you want a hot argument, tell hunting stories in front of an anti-hunter. You can probably elicit cursing with no work at all, and with a little effort, shoe-throwing isn’t impossible. Few topics elicit unreasoned vitriol so reliably. Unsupported generalizations are common:

“The hunting community is mainly composed of grown men (and some women) with nothing more intelligent to do than kill little birds and animals because it provides fun and excitement for people who need to feel potent.” (source)
“Collectively, hunters resemble an army of under-trained, unsupervised amateur killers roaming around destroying 200 million animals a year, making it unsafe for hikers, campers and wildlife . . . A hunter's lack of feelings - empathy and compassion - for animals and lack of respect for nature go hand in hand.” (source)
“killing for fun teaches callousness, disrespect for life and the notion that might makes right” (source)
“hunters are PATHETIC morons who have to kill things to feel like a man because they can\'t satisfy their wives” (source)

That some people who oppose hunting express themselves in vehement and unreasonable ways is not surprising – irrational argument is common on all sides of nearly all hot-button issues in the United States today. But what does surprise me is the extent to which anti-hunting fervor exceeds anti-meat-eating fervor. As I mentioned in a post the other day, it’s hard to distinguish, from a moral perspective, shooting a deer that will be cut up and eaten from slaughtering a cow that will be cut up and eaten. It is true that with hunting, there is a greater chance that the execution of the animal will be imprecise and the animal will suffer before it dies. But hunting has the compensatory virtue of allowing the animal to live a natural, free-ranging life before it is killed – most commercial beef-producing operations, in contrast, confine the animals to be slaughtered in conditions that must be far less pleasant than the shaded woods or open prairie in which game animals live. To me, these factors tip the moral balance in favor of hunting over commercial meat production, but reasonable opinions may differ. Let us merely say for present purposes that, from a moral perspective, hunting and commercial meat production are in rough equipoise. If you consider commercial meat production morally acceptable, you should hold the same view of hunting.

A Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in the San Joaquin Valley. This is actually a dairy farm, but beef cattle are kept under similar conditions.

That’s what I would think – but it ain’t so. Polls show that about 22% of the US population would support a ban on all hunting (source), but only about 2.8% of the population follows a vegetarian or vegan diet (source). That means that almost 20% of Americans – one in five – eat meat, but oppose hunting.

Why?

I think it’s about the public’s views of hunters, not hunting. Re-read the bulleted quotations above. Many people stereotype hunters as unappreciative morons who kill animals to feel powerful. To be fair, I should note that most of the above quotations come from individuals who posted their opinions on the web; only the third quotation comes from a well-known organization (The Humane Society of the United States). Most anti-hunting organizations, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), refrain from overt stereotyping even if the information they disseminate appears misleading or inaccurate. But I suspect the hunter-as-buffoon stenotype drives the passion of many individual activists.

And that, I think, is the real danger of canned hunts. When someone pays hundreds of dollars to shoot an animal that is confined in a small space, the act of killing the animal may be no worse that what occurs in a beef slaughterhouse, but it’s hard to argue that the shooter is motivated by an appreciation for nature or respect for the ancient workings of the food chain. To the American public, the motive matters. Stereotyping buyers of canned hunts is easy and effective, and asking the public to distinguish canned hunts from legitimate hunts is probably asking too much – like it or not, all hunters will be painted with the same brush. For that reason, if for no other, hunters like me should oppose canned hunting.

Glaston Lake

2009-12-21T23:23:00.000-08:00

If you stand on a frozen lake after a few days of warm weather when the sun has melted some water atop the ice, then you unzip your jacket and hold the sides out in the wind, you can sail across the lake.

Glaston Lake is about two and a quarter miles west of our property, over rutted prairie dotted with cows and sagebrush. The prairie is flat enough that you can see where you’re going, and treeless enough that fifty percent of the visually observable world is sky, but it has enough topographical variation that you can find a hilltop to aim for if you’re in an ambling mood. You amble across the prairie, reach the hilltop, gaze across the newly revealed landscape – look! more grass and sagebrush, and is that a cow in the distance? – and then you see another hilltop or a ridge that can serve as your next aiming point. If you still want to amble, the stroll continues. You weave your way among the sagebrush. Happily, if you like prairie, this is a process that can be repeated indefinitely.

The prairie north of Big Timber, MT provides excellent ambling. Since you’re not far from the Rockies, you can see the snowy Crazy Mountains in the west and the white-topped Beartooths in the south. And if you amble east from my family’s property, and you have permission to cross the Lavarells’ land, you can go all the way to Glaston Lake. Which is how Rebekah and I ended up there.

“Jeb, are you sure the ice is thick enough to walk on?”

Of course I wasn’t sure. I’m from Georgia – what do I know about lake ice? Nothing. But I figured if I fell in I could probably get back out, and I wasn’t far from the warm cabin. So, I calculated, the risk of frostbite or hypothermia was low.

“Yeah, it’s been really cold,” I said.

“There’s standing water on the ice,” she pointed out.

“Right. Well, there have been a couple warm days recently, but it was cold before that.”

I slid out on the ice. You could push off and slide a short distance, sort of like ice skating in boots. I listened for cracking and heard nothing. Luckily the ice was thick enough. Duke trotted out after me and even when he added his seventy pounds to my hundred and seventy, there was no cracking. I threw a tennis ball for Duke, and Rebekah came out on the ice. She spotted what looked like a fishing rod lying on the ice, and we walked toward it. Duke brought his ball and I threw it again. There was an auger hole in the ice and a short rod lying beside it – someone had been ice fishing. Rebekah bent to examine the rod when her sunglasses fell onto the lake. The lenses caught the wind and the glasses slid across the ice. They moved rapidly – about the speed that I could sprint on solid ground. Neither of us could catch them.

“Damn!” she said. The glasses skittered away. They were almost out of sight when they came to rest on a rough patch of ice, a black dot against the white lake. “I guess they’re gone.”

For no good reason I took that as a challenge. I started across the lake after them, and experimented with several styles of walking on the way. With long steps, you got too unstable on the slippery ice and I felt like I was about to fall. Short sliding steps felt stable, but the going was slow. You could stutter step then push off and slide for a foot or two, I found, but I figured that if I tried to ice skate for several hundred yards in my hiking boots busting my butt was the most likely result. Which is how I came to be standing upright, unzipping my jacket, and holding out the sides to catch the wind. I slid across the watery ice. It was, I thought proudly, a mode of locomotion of which mountain men probably hadn’t conceived.

There’s some reward in novelty, even if divorced from practicality. It would be harder coming back. But who thinks of the future when the present is so much fun?

Google Earth image of Glaston Lake. Crazy Mountains in the distance to the west; Big Timber and I-90 to the south.

Montana in winter is THIS awesome.

Shooting Fenced Animals

2009-12-20T22:28:00.000-08:00

An eastern hunter with a shiny new rifle books a guided elk hunt in Idaho, sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park. He pays his money and in return, the outfitter guarantees the hunter an opportunity to shoot a trophy elk. No trophy, no payment – that’s the deal. In fact, the hunter can receive a guaranteed opportunity to shoot a larger elk if he pays more, or a guarantee for a smaller elk if he pays less. This is a “hunt” from which uncertainty has been removed to the maximum extent possible. So when the hunter reaches the headquarters of Canyon Creek Outfitters near Teton, Idaho, he is confident that he can make a kill. He is confident even if he has never fired his rifle; he is confident even if he is too out of shape to spend the predawn hours climbing ridges. His confidence soars when, clad in camo and rifle in hand, he enters a fenced area from which the elk cannot escape. The fence, the outfitter’s website carefully states, is "to maintain superior genetics.”

It’s called a canned hunt, and like most hunters, I hate that such hunts exist. There is no “fair chase.” The hunts turn my stomach. I have never met a hunter who spoke well of them. The public at large despises them, and anti-hunters use the events of canned hunts as fodder against all hunters. It’s an effective tactic. To most of us, there is something unsettling about an animal with no means of escape being approached by a human intending to kill it.

But of course that’s exactly what happens with every package of meat supermarket freezer. To generalize: a cow is driven into a confined area. A “captive bolt stunner” is pressed to its forehead and a bolt fires into the cow’s skull, stunning the cow and rendering it unconscious, but not shutting down its circulatory system. The cow’s neck is then cut so that the cow bleeds out – i.e., is “exsanguinated” – which helps prevent meat spoilage. At no point did the cow have a chance to escape, and at no point did the commercial slaughtering facility follow “fair chase” guidelines.

What’s the difference? What is the moral distinction between a canned elk hunt and a slaughtered cow?

I’ll be honest; I can’t find one. One person told me that because the hypothetical cows mentioned above had been born only to provide meat, they were not entitled to “fair chase” protections. I think that argument misses the mark for two reasons. First, if there is such a thing as an elk or cow’s right to a fair chase, that right belongs to the animal. Since the right belongs to the animal, it cannot be waived by a human progenitor, even if the human who organized the breeding of the animal always intended for the animal to serve as food. Phrased differently, it makes no difference to an elk or cow in danger of being killed whether humans always intended to kill it, or only had that idea after it was born. Second, most of the animals offered to high-paying consumers of canned hunts were bred for the purpose. It’s not as though the operators of the canned hunt went into the wild with a nets, captured elk, then brought them back to enclosed areas. Instead, the prey animals come from game farms, where they were bred and raised for the same purpose for which most domestic cows were raised: to be killed and eaten. The only difference is the manner of execution.

So in with both a canned elk hunt and a cattle slaughterhouse, animals born and raised for the purpose of being killed by humans are put to death, cut up, then eaten. And yet Americans are morally outraged at canned hunts, but unfazed by slaughterhouses. Why?

I don’t know, but this is what I suspect: it’s because we ignore the death that produced those meat-filled styrofoam trays at the supermarket, but focus on the death associated with a canned hunt. When most people take home 1.14 pounds of ground round from Kroger, they don’t pause to think about the once-living cow that died to produce it. They think of food, not death. But when Americans consider canned hunts, they imagine the death of an animal. They reflect on the termination of a life that, but for the hunter’s actions, might have continued. They don’t consider the elk patties that sizzled on the grill afterwards. They think of death, not food. And death is unpleasant, so they resent canned hunts.

Don’t get me wrong; I still hate canned hunts viscerally. I will never, ever, participate in one. But when I go to the grocery store and toss a pack of flank steak into my cart, I ought – if I’m being objective – to recognize that it’s about the same thing.

The foregoing arguments apply to canned hunts carried out in accordance with governmental regulations designed to ensure humane hunts and prevent the spread of disease among farmed animals. Many canned hunts, however, are not carried out in accordance with those regulations. Recently, authorities prosecuted a provider of illegal canned hunts, and as a result of the prosecution, video footage of several hunts became a part of the public record. Using that footage, the Indiana Wildlife Federation – a group that opposes canned hunts but supports legitimate hunting – made this excellent and apparently objective video.

Picturebook: A Trip to Yellowstone

2009-12-19T23:38:00.000-08:00

I turned south off of Interstate 90 at Livingston, Montana, then drove south, traveling upstream along the Yellowstone River.

I visited the park principally to see the Lamar Valley, a place about which fur trapper Osborne Russell wrote extensively in his memoirs, Journal of a Trapper.

Soda Butte and my truck are in the bottom-right of the picture.

What a beautiful damned park.

Buffalo are built to excavate snow. They use their massive heads to sweep the snow aside, and the bone structure of their humps functions as a place to attach the muscles and tendons that support the head. (Additionally, according to the reports of the fur trappers, the "hump ribs" made damn good eating.)

From a signboard in the Park.

Because the Lamar Valley attracts buffalo, elk, and deer in winter, it also attracts predators. Coyotes have long been common. Wolves were common in the trappers' days, were shot out as white people moved west, and then were reintroduced in the Park in 1995. They have since flourished. I saw a wolf in the valley, but he was too far away for a picture.

However, I did get close to a coyote. Real close. Close enough to allow Duke to talk some trash from the cab of the truck, where I'd left the window down.

Some people hunt coyotes. I've never done it, but I'd like to, so toward that end I invested $14.99 in a set of dying-rabbit coyote calls. The idea is that you blow into the calls in such a way as to mimic a dying rodent, hoping to lure a coyote into rifle range. I figured that Yellowstone would be a good place to test them, so I tucked the calls into my jacket pocket.

The decision to introduce wolves to Yellowstone in 1995 was controversial. Environmentalists, of course, loved it. But nearby ranchers protested, fearing that wolves would spread outside of the Park and kill their cattle. Because sometimes, animals introduced the Park don't stay there.

As I described in yesterday's post, the drive home was not uneventful. After sundown, I slipped off the road and crashed into some trees.

That's not where the truck should be.

The damage by daylight. Fortunately, the camper took most of the pounding.

Truck + Trees = Thunk

2009-12-19T00:41:00.000-08:00

I crashed the truck last night. I had been enjoying a nice relaxing drive – darkness had fallen in Yellowstone National Park and Duke and I were heading home. Duke was resting his chin on the console and I was listening to an audiobook about the Donner Party as we drove through the woods on a narrow, snow-covered lane. When a truck came from the opposite direction I moved to the right to give plenty of room to pass, and I accidentally edged a tire off the pavement. Big mistake. The tires that remained on the snow-covered pavement didn’t have enough traction to pull the off-pavement tire back over the lip of the asphalt, so I started sliding. Slowly, slowly slipping further down the roadside embankment. I cut the wheels left toward the road, but that didn’t help. Normally, as any experienced red-clay driver knows, you turn into a slide to pull out of it, but that only works if you’ve got space to slide a little further before regaining traction. Here the bank was steep and the shoulder nonexistent. No space. As the narrator on the audiobook was reading excerpts from the diary of James Reed, who was bringing provisions to the stranded pioneers, it occurred to me that I was going to slide down the bank and into the trees and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Shit,” I said.

The truck slid slowly, two tires still on the pavement. I could see an orange road marker ahead and knew I would run over it. I gripped the wheel tightly and hoped the orange marker was made of plastic. The grille guard slammed the marker to the snow and my truck slid over it. It thunked on the undercarriage of my truck. “Here I met Mrs. Reed and the two children still in the mountains,” said James Reed.

Maybe, I had time to think, I should step on the gas. I had the truck in four-wheel-drive, so maybe the front tires would get enough traction to pull me back on the road. But I doubted it. Likely that would only accelerate my inevitable descent into the trees and make me smack into them harder. I looked down the bank. Ten or twelve feet of a seriously steep descent.

“Damnit,” I said. My left tires followed the right ones off the road.

The back end swung downhill faster while the front tires, which were still angled toward the pavement, resisted the slide. Now I was sliding sideways. This wasn’t good. I watched the trees approach. I cut the wheel into the slide so the truck wouldn’t roll over. Even if the truck rolled, I thought, I was moving slowly enough that I probably wouldn’t be hurt. All the same, it would be more convenient to remain upright. “I cannot describe the death look they all had,” said James Reed in a serious voice. If I’d known I was about to crash I would have chosen a more encouraging soundtrack.

I looked at the trees that I was about to strike. Some were small and would probably slide under the truck without doing too much damage, but a couple were pretty big. Too big to give way. They might leave some nice dents. I wished I were heading for a forest of gentle saplings instead. All in all, events at that time were not proceeding as I would have liked.

“Shit,” I said.

“ ‘Bread! Bread! Bread! Bread!’ was the begging of every child and grown person except my wife,” commented James Reed. With a crunch the back of the truck struck some small trees, and the nose continued to slide downhill. I heard the whump of another tree sliding under the side of the truck and reflected that this was probably the slowest-moving car crash I’d ever witnessed. The nose of the truck slid until it crashed into the outward branches of a big tree. It slowed as the branches shattered progressively, then came to rest against the trunk. Spruce branches lay across the windshield. The truck was still. The engine cut off because I hadn’t pressed in the clutch. For a split-second there was silence, then James Reed interjected, “I give to all what I dared and left for the scene of desolation and now I am camped within 25 miles which I hope to make this night . . .”

I looked at Duke. He was resting his chin on the console, which was now uphill of him but still appeared comfortable. By mutual agreement we shut off James Reed and relaxed for a moment before getting out to assess the damage. In the end it wasn’t too bad – some dents and tears, but mostly on the camper. A tow truck hauled me back up the bank, then I drove the truck back home. On the second leg of the journey we did not listen to Reed.

Chinook Wind

2009-12-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

A mountain man choosing a wintering spot wanted to pick someplace that had mild winters, or at least periodic warm spells throughout the winter. He’d want to make a good choice for two reasons: first, a warm winter would allow him to get out of his lodge occasionally, wander around outside, and maybe kill some fresh meat to replace the dried meat he’d been eating for weeks. Second, if he picked a bad spot, his buddies might make fun of him for years. Captain Benjamin Bonneville, for instance, picked a bad spot to build what he envisioned as a year-round fort. He sited it just west of modern Pinedale, Wyoming, where the winters are bitterly cold, and the fort – which he immodestly named Fort Bonneville – was abandoned the first year. For the duration of Captain Bonneville’s stay in the west, the trappers called his construction “Fort Nonsense.”

I think Big Timber, Montana, the town just south of the cabin where I’m spending the winter, would have made a good spot. It’s along the Yellowstone River, so there was plenty of water. Game was likely plentiful, and there were plenty of cottonwood trees to supply bark on which horses could feed after snow covered the grass. Best of all, throughout the winter, periodic warm Chinook winds sweep in from the northwest to warm up the valley. A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote about the cold. For three or four days I don’t believe the thermometer topped 0°F. At one point it hit -15°. But two days ago, amid a hard west wind, the temperature rose to 40°. Yesterday and today, it topped 50°. John Cosgriff, whose family has ranched around Big Timber for generations, says that’s what he likes about the winters west of the Crazy Mountains – it gets cold, but every once in awhile nature cuts you a break.

Chinook winds come about this way. When a west-moving mass of air hits the western edge of the Rockies, the mountains force the air up. As the air moves up, it cools because the decreased atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes allows the air molecules to spread out. This cooling of air as it rises is called “adiabatic cooling,” and it happens all the time. But all airmasses have a temperature below which the moisture that’s locked into the air will precipitate, or condense into droplets and fall as precipitation. The point below which moisture will precipitate in a given airmass is the airmass’s “dewpoint.” So if west-moving air cools enough as it rises along the Rockies’ western slopes – i.e., if the adiabatic cooling is sufficient – to drop the air temperature below the dewpoint, then rain, sleet, or snow will fall. The airmass continues to move west, but now, having dumped its moisture, the air is drier. After the air crosses the Rockies, it descends again. And as it descends, the atmospheric pressure on the airmasses increases, shoving the molecules closer together. The air heats up. This is called adiabatic heating. And here’s what causes the Chinook wind: the rate of adiabatic temperature change is different for moist and dry air. Moist air being forced upward cools at a rate of approximately 3.5°F every 1000 feet. But dry air being forced downward warms at a faster rate, about 5.5°F per 1000 feet. So when the dried-out airmass descends to the base of the Rockies on the eastern side, it becomes warmer than it was when, moisture-laden, it first climbed the mountains’ western slopes. The dried-out, warmed-up airmass continues moving east and when it arrives in a town east of the Rockies, such as Big Timber, the townspeople call it a Chinook wind.

Two days ago, when the Chinook wind blew through. The wind picks up around the microphone when I step from the lee side of the cabin.

I am a big fan of Chinook winds. The warmer weather feels great; it makes me want to lace up my hiking boots and take to the hills. Now I can go outside in just one jacket and can wear gloves instead of mittens. If I were a cold-inured Montanan, I’d go outside in only a tee shirt. But hey – I’m no mountain man. I’m just writing about them.

Belly Crawling through Paradise

2009-12-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

The night was fair and the mountain men had food. They were happy. Firelight flickered on the faces of an Englishman, an Irishman, and two Americans as they sat around their campfire in Hoodoo Basin in what is now Yellowstone National Park. Hoodoo Basin was a part of the Lamar Valley, where the Lamar River trickled through the giant furrow that glaciers had plowed through the Absaroka Mountains. The valley held elk, deer, and buffalo year-round, and the lush grass of the glacial bottom furnished good grazing for the horses. The evergreens and aspens growing on the hillsides provided plenty of firewood. To the north stood Hoodoo Peak at 10,500 feet, to the west Parker Peak at 10,200 feet, and to the south Polluck Peak at 11,000 feet. Content in the lowlands, the trappers leaned back on their elbows and argued about whether England, Ireland, or the Rocky Mountains was prettiest.

“Talk of fine country,” said the Englishman. “If you want to see a beautiful place, go to England and see the Duke of Rutland’s castle.”

“Aye,” said an Irishman, who sat across the fire from Osborne Russell, the diarist who would later publish Journal of a Trapper. The Irishman held an elk rib in one hand, a knife in the other, and had dabs of grease at the corners of his mouth. “If ye would see a pretty place, go to old Ireland and take a walk in Lord Farnham’s domain.” With a greasy hand he smoothed his long hair. “An’ if I were upon that ground this day I’d fill my body with good old whiskey.”

But the Americans would not allow it. Russell loved the Lamar Valley, which he called “Secluded Valley.” He returned to it time and again throughout his years in the mountains. On this occasion, it was the other American who spoke, and, according to Russell, won the argument:

“You English and Irish are always talking about your fine countries,” he said, “but if they are so mighty fine, why do so many of you run off and leave them and come to America?” He glared across the fire and, hearing no rejoinder, bit a mouthful of elk out of the chunk that he held.

Ninety miles north of Hoodoo Basin, I had not yet killed my supper. Muzzleloader in hand, I climbed to the back of the mesa that overlooks Otter Creek. Sixteen miles east of the Crazy Mountains and eleven miles north of Big Timber, Montana, this is the piece of land to which I return whenever I can. The whitetails, I knew from experience, moved up and down Otter Creek throughout the morning. I laid my rifle atop a short rock wall and scrambled to the top. The top of this mesa isn’t perfectly flat. It’s a low dome, and from where I climbed over the rock wall, the hummock of earth atop the mesa separated me from the edge overlooking the creek. That was as I wanted it. Any deer grazing in the creekbottoms wouldn’t be able to see me until I crept around to their side of the mesa, and at that point I’d be moving too slowly to attract their attention. I picked up the rifle. Before working over toward the creek, though, I’d check the hilltop. Sometimes deer bedded down in the tall grass after feeding.

The wind blew hard across the high ground, and the tawny grasses bobbed furiously in the breeze. I crept slowly up the side of the dome. At each step a new sliver of land became visible over the hilltop, and after each step I paused to examine the new terrain. I moved slowly. This way only my eyes and the top of my head would be visible to any deer that I saw. I wore a camouflage facemask to conceal my forehead, which has become taller and more reflective as I have gotten older. But wisdom and hair vary inversely, I thought as I peered through the waving grass. There was a dark blot near the edge of the mesa. I squinted at it. Probably a rock, but I wasn’t sure. Lifted my binoculars. Nope – two ears and a head. It was a bedded doe, looking out over the flats of Otter Creek. She hadn’t seen me. I studied her. Whitetail doe, good sized. A target. A hundred and fifty yards away.

I sank to my knees so that the hilltop screened me from the doe. With this open-sighted muzzleloader and a deer-sized target, a hundred and fifty yards was way out of my range. I could crawl to the top of the hill without her seeing me, I thought, but even then I’d be about a hundred yards distant. I wanted to get within fifty yards, seventy at the most. I envisioned the terrain between the doe and me. After the hilltop, there was a low gully between us. If I could reach that gully, then I could crawl up the opposite side and get a shot at her. But reaching the gully would be a problem – once I topped the hill, I’d be in plain sight. I could only crawl through the widely-clumped grass and hope she didn’t notice me. No other way to do it. The wind prevented approaching her from the opposite direction. Maybe the grass would give enough cover.

I dropped my pack and, rifle in hand, moved toward the hilltop in a crouch. Then I dropped to all fours until the doe came in sight again, then flattened against the earth and crawled on my stomach. The wind was too noisy and she was too far away for her to hear me, so I crawled quickly. I crawled ten yards or so then, when I lifted my head, saw the doe. A hundred yards away. She still hadn’t seen me. I paused to look around. There was no easy approach. I rested my elbows in the dirt and pointed the rifle at the deer. The front bead sight covered the whole forward half of her body. Too far for a shot. I’d have to crawl for the gully.

I cradled the rifle in the crook of my right arm and, swiveling at the waist, reached forward with my left elbow and right knee. Doing so raised my butt and shoulders a little bit, but that couldn’t be helped. I dragged the rest of my body forward by my elbow and knee, lay flat, then repeated the process by reaching forward with my opposite elbow and knee. I found an awkward rhythm as I slid across the ground. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. The doe was still looking out over the creek. She hadn’t seen me yet. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. I felt a sharp pain in my knee as I crawled over a prickly pear. But it didn’t hurt too bad, keep going. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. I could smell the dry, crumbly earth. Vague scent of sagebrush, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. It really was pretty country. Big, empty, optimistic sky above. The snow-topped Crazy Mountains serrating the sky’s western edge, butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat, and clumps of tawny grass covering the plains to the north as far as you could see. To hell with Brits and Irishmen and their puny little islands. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. The American west, big and open, raw and untamed, unfettered by the ticky rules and norms that shrunk down a European life. This was the place for a man to make his life. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. America, where the west was not merely a direction but an ideal that instructed us still. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. Long a magnet for wanderers, dreamers, explorers, warriors, debtors, criminals, and young guys trying to escape from office chairs. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward, lie flat. How had this doe not seen me yet? I was way out in the open. Butt and shoulders up, drag forward – and there she went. I was still eighty-five yards away and the doe jumped up, bounded some distance, then stopped to look back. How must I have appeared to her? A dark shape, slithering toward her like a giant, chubby, arthritic snake with its middle section rising and falling against the ground. No wonder she ran. She stood broadside to me, offering the ideal angle for a shot. I lifted my rifle and sighted at her. With a modern scoped rifle, I could have shot her through the shoulders – a heart and lung shot – but with the muzzleloader the front bead covered most of her body. Too far. I lowered the rifle. She stood looking at me for a minute or two until, tired of pondering the mysterious ground-humping snake, she walked over the edge of the mesa. I rolled over to pluck cactus spines out of my knee.

So much for a knife in one hand, venison rib in the other. If I were a mountain man, I’d have gone hungry. I cleaned out the cactus spines, then stood and stretched. I thought about breakfast. Praise be to the modern pantry.

The view from the mesa when I went back later with Duke. Crazy Mountains in back left; Otter Creek behind Duke's head.

[note: the events described above occurred several weeks ago]

An Unlettered People and the Pulitzer Prize

2009-12-15T23:52:00.000-08:00

The Native Americans, in an indirect way, rewrote history.

Europe has left its marks all over the world. The reach of European languages illustrates the influence of European cultures. In Australia, for instance, which lies 8,500 miles away from England, the predominant language is English. In Brazil, which lies 3,500 miles away from Portugal, the predominant language is Portuguese. Inhabitants of Quebec speak French, even though France is 3,500 miles away, and Mexicans speak Spanish, notwithstanding the 4,750 miles that separate Mexico and Spain. South Africans speak English, despite 5,500 intervening miles, and of course I speak English, although 4,000 miles lie between England and Georgia. Beyond doubt, Europe has had a disproportionate impact on the world.

A natural question is: why?

For a long time, a common answer was that Europeans, who tended to be fair-skinned, had biological advantages that others did not. Some believed that European whites were smarter than anyone else, others believed that whites had more drive, and others believed that white people were more virtuous and had thus been granted global domination by a deity who sought to reward their good conduct. Some, like 19th century historian Francis Parkman, would conflate the theories and simply describe races in terms of their “merits”: in the American west of the 1800s, Parkman wrote, “[t]he human race . . . is separated into three divisions, arranged in the order of their merits: white men, Indians, and Mexicans.”

But an anthropological revolution was coming. In the early 1900s, well after Parkman ranked the races, Franz Boaz was teaching anthropology in New York City. His first great innovation was to stress fieldwork. Instead of hypothesizing about foreign cultures from armchairs, or relying on secondhand reports of cultures by other people whose business brought them into incidental contact with foreign peoples (e.g., fur trappers), Boaz believed that an anthropologist should interact directly with the culture about which he wrote. This was a new idea and, as it turned out, an influential one. But it was easier for Boaz to encourage his students to do fieldwork than it had been for European anthropologists – for Boaz and his students, relatively intact Native American cultures were only a train ride away. Without this access to Native Americans, the “fieldwork revolution” might not have occurred when it did.

Franz Boaz. If consulted, he probably would not have chosen this picture.

The fieldwork revolution spawned another new and widely influential theory: cultural relativism. Boaz concluded that human beings were basically the same in terms of their biological merits. White people were not inherently smarter than Mexicans, and no more inherently virtuous than Indians. He explained differences in the conduct of different races as results of cultural differences, not as reflections of the races’ underlying biological capabilities. Boaz further emphasized that all cultures had value, and that none was inherently superior to another.

This new theory of cultural relativism undermined the theoretical basis for the United States’s westward expansion. Previously, for Americans who sought an intellectual rationale for having taken the Indians’ land (and personally, I suspect such people were a minority), the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided a justification. Because the United States had been a more enlightened, advanced, and righteous society than the societies of the Indians, the theory went, it had been the duty of the United States to displace the natives. But the ideas of manifest destiny and cultural relativism ran smack into each other. How could we justify having displaced North America’s indigenous people if we weren’t any better than them? And how to justify the suppression of their cultures if we were to believe that all cultures have value? These were difficult questions to answer.

The theory of cultural relativism also left us with a conspicuous void in our understanding of history. If Europeans weren’t biologically superior to other people, why had they dominated the globe? If Europeans didn’t have inherent advantages, why did Australians speak English, Brazilians speak Portuguese, and Quebecers speak French? Why didn’t, for instance, the Apaches build boats and take over Paris? It was another difficult question. Anthropologists are still fighting over the answer, but we’ve come a long way. In 1997, Jared Diamond answered the question, at least to my satisfaction, in Guns, Germs and Steel. The fullness of his answer is way beyond the scope of this weblog, but in sum, Diamond explained European global dominance by pointing to unique geographical advantages that Europe enjoyed over any other continent in terms of domesticable plants, domesticable animals, and readily available trade routes. Diamond’s efforts went a long way toward filling the void of understanding surrounding European global dominance, and they won him the Pulitzer Prize.

more about the book

buy Guns, Germs and Steel

Diamond couldn’t have won that Pulitzer if his work hadn’t filled a historical void. That historical void wouldn’t have existed if cultural relativism hadn’t undermined manifest destiny as an explanation for European dominance. Cultural relativism wouldn’t have undermined manifest destiny if Franz Boaz hadn’t made his anthropology students do fieldwork, and Franz Boaz couldn’t have made his students do fieldwork if intact Native American cultures hadn’t existed nearby. In sum, I hope Jared Diamond put in a good word for the Indians in his acceptance speech.

Duke: Frontier Dog

2009-12-14T22:45:00.000-08:00

Long before Duke hiked a leg beside his first Douglas fir, dogs had left their mark on the annals of western settlement. Native Americans’ dogs hunted, guarded camps, and, if they misbehaved too often, provided meat for the cookpot. Further, when the Indians moved camp, the squaws would hitch long poles to either side of a dog, then stretch a skin across the poles, creating a platform called a “travois” on which the Indians placed gear for the dog to drag. White men also brought dogs into the Rockies. Meriwether Lewis (he of “and Clark” fame) brought a Newfoundland named “Seaman” along on the expedition, who assisted in hunting and retrieving. Various subsequent mountain men also kept dogs that hunted, retrieved, guarded, and provided warmth on cold nights.

Duke is not the first dog to assist in western exploration, but he is the best. By far. Duke is better, in fact, than all previous mountain dogs combined. To prove this point, I will present a purely objective point-by-point comparison of Duke to a composite of all other dogs of which we have a historical record.

The competition thus begins: Duke vs. Other Dogs.

Guarding
Warren Ferris, a trapper of the 1830s, recorded an occasion on which the barking of a mountain man’s dog alerted him to the proximity of hostile Indians, allowing him to escape. Now, Duke hardly ever barks. The only occasion in Duke’s life when I’ve ever heard him bark was when I left him in a kennel after we’d spent a few months traveling together. (It quickly became apparent why he barks so rarely – Duke’s bark is high-pitched and not very manly.) But he can guard. While Duke and I were camping in the Rockies and again in the Black Rock Desert, Duke alerted me to the presence of suspicious critters by growling into the darkness.

This may seem to give the advantage to Other Dogs, since a bark is louder than a growl. But not so fast: Ferris also recorded an occasion on which some trappers were hiding from hostile Indians, who were prowling about the forest looking for them, when the trappers’ dog’s barking betrayed their position. The trappers were nearly killed. So Duke’s growl is ideal – it’s loud enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to give away our location to enemies.

Advantage: Duke

Hunting
Indians used their dogs for catching various game – squirrels, rabbits, lynx and even sometimes deer. Meriwether Lewis’s journal reflects that Seaman supplied the party with fresh squirrels by catching and killing them.

On this point, Duke can’t compare. Maybe because he has not missed a meal since – well, he may never have missed a meal – Duke shows little concern for chasing animals more than a few yards. Which is just as well, because while Duke’s short legs aid him in slipping under barbed-wire fences, they do not make him fleet. So when it comes to capturing game independently, the scorecard reads . . .

Advantage: Other Dogs

Transport
Some tribes, particularly the Shoshone, used their dogs to transport gear over the Rockies. The dogs had to pull travois, which must have been difficult. But Duke has also hauled gear through the mountains. Although the modernity of Duke’s pack made things easier on him, he has one-upped the Other Dogs by hauling gear over not only one, but two mountain ranges – the Rockies and Sierras – in addition to the Black Rock Desert.

Advantage: tie

Warmth
When the nights got bitter cold and there wasn’t much fuel for the fire, the mountain men slept close to their dogs for warmth. In the coldest camping that I’ve done – camping in the Sierras in early November – I had plenty of clothes and a goose down sleeping bag, so I didn’t need to sleep too close to Duke. That would seem to give an advantage to Other Dogs. But when I slept outside the tent, as in the Black Rock Desert, Duke showed himself to be a first-rate cuddler. He will lie wherever you place him, doesn’t move much, and as long as you don’t make him sleep on his back, he does not snore. He also does not stink.

Advantage: tie

Retrieving
Seaman did some retrieving for the Lewis and Clark expedition. He retrieved beaver for the hunters and, on one occasion, retrieved a wounded deer that had bounded into a river.

Duke is not strong enough to pull a deer out of a river. But retrieving is Duke’s art. He can retrieve objects he detects by smell, like a grouse lying camouflaged in the brush, or objects that he sees, like a duck lying dead on the water. If there are several objects that he might retrieve, you can specify which one you want him to bring to you. If you want him to run in a certain direction before looking for something to retrieve, he can do that. Few dogs of any era can match him. Seaman may have been stronger than Duke, but when it comes to precision, Duke blows Seaman out of the water. And how often do you really need to fish a wounded deer out of a river? C’mon.

Advantage: Duke

Food
The Indians sometimes ate their dogs, and considered the meat a delicacy. When trappers visited native tribes and their hosts threw feasts in their honor, dog was often on the menu. Generally, the trappers found the meat pleasant.

I’m not going to eat Duke. This is a stupid question. Who comes up with these categories?

Advantage: not applicable

Companionship
Many of the Indians’ dogs were mean, at least to the white trappers who visited their camps. Both Warren Ferris and Francis Parkman noted that when visiting native camps, they had to beat back the mongrels who snarled and snapped at them. This may have been only because the dogs weren’t used to white men, but who said it’s okay for dogs to be racists?

We have no good record of Seaman’s disposition, but we do have some drawings of his likeness. And Seaman was just not as good-looking as Duke. Look at the picture below. Note the nondescript hair, featureless sides, and stubby nose – he looks like Grendel’s cousin. On the other hand, look at Duke. Finely-shaped head, gleaming coat, friendly expression, intelligent eyes. No contest.

Duke is not a racist, unlike the Native Americans’ dogs, and he’s much better looking than Seaman. Therefore . . .

Advantage: Duke

Embassary of Peace
Most frontier dogs have been aggressive, barking as newcomers approached and snarling at them after they arrived. But Duke is a peacemaker. I remember when Duke and I were hitchhiking along Gray’s River, where Wyoming law makes hitchhiking illegal and National Forest rules forbid Forest employees from giving rides. But a Forest biologist stopped for Duke and me. Or more precisely, she stopped for Duke. “I wouldn’t have picked you up if it weren’t for your dog,” she said.

Advantage: Duke.

Attracting Women
Not even close. Duke wins.

Advantage: Duke

So, Duke dominates. By a score of 5-1, Duke is the greatest frontier dog of all time.

Duke beside a statue of his now-vanquished and much larger opponent, Seaman. Bismarck ND.

Benefits of a Y Chromosome

2009-12-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

It was a good time to be a guy. In most Plains Indian tribes, a warrior had to be a good enough shot with a bow or musket to bring down a deer, and a good enough horseman to ride his horse among a herd of stampeding buffalo. A guy also needed to be brave and tough, so that he could fight with the enemy and endure the pain of wounds if necessary. This was because the principal duties of a warrior were hunting and fighting. Neither was an incredibly taxing pursuit: the Indians generally enjoyed hunting, and they had the good sense not to engage in the brutal, combat-to-the-death battles for which European armies are famed. When not hunting or warring, a warrior was free to sit around with his buddies, gambling, swapping lies, and smoking the pipe. In such pursuits did a warrior spend much of his time. The squaws’ work, on the other hand, was tiresome, drudging, and seemingly neverending. When a warrior killed a buffalo, most of the work in cleaning the carcass and preparing the hide fell to the women. So too with cooking and caring for the young. So too with making clothing, keeping the lodge clean, and jerking meat. The squaws were also tasked with taking down the lodges when the Indians moved camps, transporting much of the gear, and re-erecting the lodge when the tribe reached the next place that the men had selected. When visitors arrived at camp, the warriors’ duties including smoking the pipe with the newcomers and making long speeches that recounted old battles and told how brave the speaker had been. The squaws, on the other hand, had to fix food for the visitors and prepare a place of lodging. Moreover, if you were a guy, things only got better as you got older. As a warrior aged, he was relieved hunting and fighting, and had only to sit around camp and offer his opinion on such subjects as caught his interest -- a task at which old men have always excelled. But when a squaw got old, her husband was likely to take a younger wife, the new wife was likely to become the warrior’s favorite, and the older squaw was likely to have to perform the harder household work that the younger squaw got away with shirking. More than one white visitor to Indian tribes recorded the ferocity with which old squaws could nag their husbands. The warriors often paid them no mind. It was a good time to have a Y chromosome.

A buddy of mine emailed this joke to me recently:

Indian Chief Two Eagles was asked by a white government official, "You have observed the white man for 90 years. You've seen his wars and his technological advances. You've seen his progress, and the damage he's done."

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, "Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?"

The Chief stared at the government official for over a minute and then calmly replied. "When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex."Then the chief leaned back and smiled. "Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that."

Pretty Mandan maiden.

Mentally challenged but self-confident warrior prepares to slay enemies with boat paddle.

The Modernity of Cruelty

2009-12-12T19:04:00.000-08:00

Around Thanksgiving, someone asked me what Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was about. I should have just answered that it was about a guy who stumbles onto the scene of a drug deal gone bad, wanders among the wreckage and dead bodies, finds a bag of money, then spends the remainder of the novel eluding a hit-man sent to kill him while a good-hearted old Texas sheriff tries to save him. That would have been interesting. But, possibly because my present project requires me to think of myself as a writer, I felt compelled to expound upon the theme. “It’s about . . . well, let’s see. It’s about the way that the extreme ferocity of modern crime and the viciousness of some people nowadays is without precedent. How it didn’t used to be that way. And how an old sheriff in Texas just has to throw up his hands, because the crimes happening in America today aren’t like the crimes that he used to work on as a young man. Modern crime has passed him by so . . . so, it’s like this isn’t a country for old men anymore.” That’s what I said. Most likely, my attempt to sound smart was driven not only by a desire to sound writerly, but by the proximity of a pretty girl. Which is understandable. But whether I was motivated by my self-image or the impulse to show off, I said that the modern world was meaner than it used to be.

But history doesn’t support that statement. Cruelty is confined neither to modern times nor to American culture. For historical examples of cruelty , we need look no further than the young girls burned at the stake as witches in the 16- and 1700s. For cruelty outside of American culture, we can look to the many Native American tribes in the 1800s that tortured their captives, white and Indian alike, in various horrible ways. Burning at the stake was one of them.

Modern American culture can be, at times, a culture of self-flagellation. That’s especially true where Native Americans are concerned. And certainly, America has much to be sorry for in its treatment of Indians – lying to the Indians, cheating them, nearly exterminating their food sources, and in places slaughtering their women and children. None of that is excusable. For many years, some Americans justified these actions by dehumanizing the Indians. That shows a serious lack of judgment. Objectivity required that America recognize that its treatment of Native Americans was wrong. But in some ways, we have lately overreacted in the opposite direction. Now there are some who will excoriate Americans, but admit no imperfection in Native American cultures. That viewpoint also lacks objectivity. The best way to remember the past is the way that it actually occurred: many Indians tortured their captives in horrendous ways. That does not excuse America’s conduct toward Native Americans, but nor does it permit the conclusion that horrible cruelty is a modern American invention.

Some Plausible Excuse

2009-12-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

All people may feel it, but none more strongly than Americans. It colors the fiber of our beings, ineradicable and indispensable, like the blue in a pair of jeans. We inherited it from our cultural ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic to a land they knew little about, and it found expression in the westward push of the culture that those emigrants forged. To the Appalachians, then over them; to the Mississippi, then the Rocky Mountains; to the Sierra Nevadas, then the Pacific. Always onward. In this country, “west” is not only a direction but a dream. The urge to roam. It is impossible, I think, for any red-blooded American to not at some point look across the hills to a broad unexplored horizon and think “damn, I’d like to go.”

Western North Dakota.

I stood in western North Dakota, looking south over the gullied, snow-spotted prairie and watching the sun set when the impulse struck me, as it often does, to go. I’ve been lucky to do more than my share of wandering, but still the urge doesn’t let me alone. To drive off in a well-provisioned truck with no itinerary, as did John Steinbeck, or to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump the back fence,” as did John Muir. That’s the stuff of daydreams. Or to catch your horse and ride into the snow-capped backbone of the continent. That was the stuff of the Rocky Mountain trappers.

The trappers’ reasons weren’t unusual, fancy, or foreign to you and me. They wanted to roam. Would-be travelers from around the world poured into St. Louis in the 1830s, waiting for a westbound expedition that they could join. Some were poor, others rich; some unlettered, some with college degrees; some experienced outdoorsmen, some who had never fired a rifle at game. But all shared a common dream of covering wild country. Which trapping company did they prefer? It didn’t matter. What part of the Rockies did they hope to visit? Not important. When would they return? A detail to be worked out later. Wanderlust is not a need that can wait for the morrow.

And so I am going to get back in the truck and drive.

Westward! Ho! It is the sixteenth of the second month A. D. 1830. and I have joined a trapping, trading, hunting expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Why, I scarcely know, for the motives that induced me to this step were of a mixed complexion, - something like the pepper and salt population of this city of St. Louis. Curiosity, a love of wild adventure, and perhaps also a hope of profit, - for times are hard, and my best coat has a sort of sheepish hang-dog hesitation to encounter fashionable folk - combined to make me look upon the project with an eye of favour. The party consists of some thirty men, mostly Canadians; but a few there are, like myself, from various parts of the Union. Each has some plausible excuse for joining, and the aggregate of disinterestedness would delight the most ghostly saint in the Roman calendar. Engage for money! no, not they; health, and the strong desire of seeing strange lands, of beholding nature in the savage grandeur of her primeval state, - these are the only arguments that could have persuaded such independent and high-minded young fellows to adventure with the American Fur Company in a trip to the mountain wilds of the great west. But they are active, vigorous, resolute, daring, and such are the kind of men the service requires. The Company have no reason to be dissatisfied, nor have they. Everything promises well. No doubt there will be two fortunes apiece for us. Westward! Ho!

-Warren Ferris, St. Louis, 1830

A Touch of Modernity

2009-12-10T23:44:00.000-08:00

Modernity can set you back.

Awhile back, my uncle sent me a replica muzzleloading rifle that he built from a kit some years ago. It’s a Hawken plains rifle, and in 1833, it would have been the finest gun a mountain man could have hoped to carry. It is still an aesthetically pleasing rifle. It is short but well-balanced, so that it seems to rise naturally to your shoulder and remain steady when aimed. It has a blued octagon barrel, graciously-shaped hammer, filigreed lock, a dark wooden stock and brass trimmings. Small wonder that the Hawken plains rifle (like the Model 1894 Winchester that I wrote about last month) has become an American classic. It is often said to be the most copied weapon in the history of firearms.

The lock on the Hawken.

But if a gun won’t shoot it’s nothing but a bulky paperweight, so the first thing I did was load up the gun and start blasting lead into the trees in the yard. And the Hawken can do that effectively. It is fun to shoot. With blackpowder, there’s a gratifying ka-pow sound, unlike the sharper crack of a modern rifle, and a big plume of smoke and the smell of rotten eggs. When you shoot a blackpowder rifle, you feel like you’ve done something. But with repetitive firing, the drawbacks of a muzzleloading gun were quickly evident. It was taking me several minutes after firing the gun until I was ready to shoot again.

Loading and firing the Hawken.

Shooting the Hawken at night.

Part of the problem, of course, is inherent in a muzzleloader. It takes time to measure powder, pour it down the barrel, set a patch and ball on top of the muzzle, ram them down the bore, cock the hammer, and replace the percussion cap. An experienced rifleman in the 1800s, using pre-measured powder, could fire 2-3 shots per minute. But I wasn’t even coming close to that.

Another part of the problem was that blackpowder, in addition to sounding really cool when it explodes, making awesome clouds of smoke, and looking totally sweet when you shoot it at night, creates lots of barrel fouling. Instruction manuals on shooting muzzleloaders note the problem. After firing, the powder sticks in the bore – that is, the inside of the barrel – and it’s hard to ram the next patch and ball down the barrel because the stuck powder effectively diminishes the diameter of the bore. In most rifles, that meant that after every 3 or so shots, the shooter had to use the ramrod and a piece of cloth to wipe the bore clean. With a particularly tight-fitting patch and ball combination, the shooter might have to wipe the powder residue out of the bore more often. I had to clean the bore every other shot, and even then getting the second ball seated atop the powder charge was difficult. I ended up swabbing the bore every time I pulled the trigger.

Blackpowder, I had read, was also highly corrosive. After every shooting session, you had to clean the bore completely. That meant disassembling the rifle, submerging the barrel in soap and hot water, pumping a cloth up and down inside the barrel to clean it, then rinsing the barrel out and, after it dried, running a solvent-covered patch down the bore. That process, I found out after sinking lead balls into the trunks of the nearest trees, took a long time. Twenty minutes or so. And that set me to thinking: I don’t believe the mountain men did this. They kept their rifles loaded almost all the time. Many of them slept with their rifles. They were not near bathtubs with hot water taps, so I know they weren’t unloading the guns for cleaning every night. But I’d never heard of a mountain man’s barrel rusting out. Moreover, when hunting buffalo or fighting with Indians, the mountain men often fired several rounds in succession. I had never heard of them pausing to swab their bores while galloping in the middle of a buffalo herd or hunkered behind a fallen log with arrows flying overhead. It didn’t add up.

So it was an ah-hah moment when I read about non-petroleum-based solvents. Apparently what really causes the extreme fouling that I had experienced in the Hawken was not simply blackpowder, but the way that blackpowder interacts with petroleum. Blackpowder only fouls the rifle so badly as to require swabbing between shots if your bore is coated with petroleum, and only becomes so corrosive as to require daily cleaning if it interacts with a petroleum-based lubricant. With non-petroleum-based lubricants and solvents you don’t have to follow such an aggressive maintenance schedule. The mountain men didn’t have petroleum-based products because the purportedly superior oils hadn’t been invented yet. I ordered some non-petroleum-based material from Thompson-Center, the manufacturer of the rifle. In keeping with the unacknowledged sexual innuendo that pervades the argot of blackpowder shooting – “before you cock the gun, put the ball just inside the hole and push really hard with the ramrod” – the substance was called, apparently without a sense of irony, “Natural Lube 1000 Plus.” Most muzzleloader shooters, I guess, are above making sophomoric jokes about the language of their sport. But in any case, the modern stuff was disadvantageous and the old-fashioned lubricant works better. It makes it easier to slide the ramrod all the way in.

Walking the Creek on a Charmed Winter Day

2009-12-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

I stepped onto Otter Creek, my bootheel slipped, and I almost landed on my butt. After a moment of waving my arms as though I were designing an aircraft that would use dual propellers, I caught my balance. Where the snow hadn’t accumulated, I noted sagaciously, the ice was slick. Ideal traveling footwear might have been golf shoes, or at least boots with crampons, but my rubber-bottomed Muck Boots weren’t meant for this. I took a deep breath and gathered myself. This icy patch was big – about twenty feet long. An idea. I pushed off and crouched over my boots to see how far I could slide. Four or five feet. Pretty cool. I attempted a moonwalk as Duke watched with perked ears from the bank. If Duke had known anything about dancing he would have been embarrassed, but that’s why people keep dogs. They keep their criticism to themselves.

It was a glorious winter day. The temperature had risen to a balmy 10°, so Duke and I were out for a walk. He wasn’t sure about the ice. I crossed to the far side of the creek and called him. Duke ran along the bank, looking for a way to reach me without stepping on the ice, but of course there was no way to cross the creek without crossing it. But dogs are empirical learners, and even tautologies do not impress them, so Duke had to find out for himself. At length satisfied that the creek was indeed a lengthy obstacle that would require direct confrontation, he stepped gingerly to the ice’s edge and sniffed it. He put his front paws on the creek and paused.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I called. “Come on.”

Reluctantly he stepped onto the ice. His paws spread wide and his claws pressed against the slick surface. Eyes on the ice, paws clicking, he scuttled toward me. He scuttled right past and did not turn around until he’d reached the bank behind me. I congratulated him on his bravery, he congratulated me on not busting my ass, and we proceeded downstream.

Otter Creek is a highway for animals moving through the area. It runs the entire length of the parcel, and deer moving between fields commonly stay in the creekbed where they’re hard to spot unless, like I do when I’m hunting, you sit atop a nearby hill and peer down with binoculars. In places you can see their trail along the bank. After I moved a few yards downstream a thin layer of snow covered the creek and the footing was more secure. I met with a set of coyote tracks – the only other animal besides me to walk over the ice since the snow, apparently. The coyote had stayed on the ice, veering at times toward one bank or the other. Probably to sniff for moles or muskrats. Around a bend the regular spacing of the canine prints stopped and beside a cluster of paw prints was a pile of scat. Duke, who had at length decided that travel on the snowed-over sections of ice was safe, sniffed the excrement and freshened it with a few drops of his own scent before trotting ahead.

In winter, the mountain men might also have used a thoroughfare like this. When forced to find a way through unfamiliar terrain without the benefit of a trail, the mountain men struggled nearly as much as I had when hiking off-trail in the Rockies and Sierras. In his narrative of his years as a fur trapper, Warren Ferris left no doubt that he preferred following trails. When there was no established route, he wrote about following alongside serpentine streambeds, getting hemmed in by rocky bluffs, being slowed down by interlocking fallen trees, skirting hair-raising precipices, skittering across recently-avalanched rocks that tumbled downhill when dislodged. Retracing steps was common. “Had I followed a guide,” he once wrote, “no doubt much fatigue, danger and distance, would have been avoided, but ignorant as I was of the proper route, I was compelled to follow the tortuous course of the river; often to retrace my steps, and seek a more practicable passage, from some abrupt precipice, or perpendicular descent . . .” On one occasion Ferris followed up a day of easy traveling on which he’d made 28 miles with a day when he had to find his own trail and made only 6 miles. No doubt a wide, flat route like Otter Creek would have satisfied Ferris immensely. I recalled spots in the Salt River Range and the Wasatch Front where I’d followed the courses of not-yet-frozen streams and wished I could just walk through the water. An iced-over stream like this made for ideal traveling.

It really was a charmed day. Along the bank Duke and I flushed two sharptailed grouse, who burst into the air with the sounds of small helicopters taking off, and in an opening in the ice I saw several four- or five-inch trout working to stay in place in the fast-moving water. They darted under the ice at my approach and I knelt beside the opening to see if they would reappear. The trout could travel in the streams the whole year, I thought with envy. As I waited on the trout I looked at the sky to judge the time before sunset. A flock of Canada geese was passing above, a massive line of black dots sweeping above the earth, the shape of their formation ever-changing but always maintaining one or two points, the birds arrayed at a forty-five degree angle behind the lead bird, some geese flying behind the line then catching up to take their places, others dropping back to take up a position elsewhere. In minutes they covered distances that would take me hours to traverse. I felt an envy that is probably as old as imagination.

“But they can’t moonwalk,” I said to Duke.

You can’t either, he thought but did not say.

The Medicine Tree

2009-12-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

Deep in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, hidden under stone bluffs beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, concealed in an area almost impassable to a horseman, stood a tall ponderosa pine. It was an ancient pine, having taken root around the time that King James took the throne from Queen Elizabeth and workers in the Vatican completed St. Peter’s Basilica. Its scaly bark had withstood the chills of the Little Ice Age, and its seeds had fed innumerable fed squirrels as its cones clattered onto rocks below. Its trunk had survived fires nearly beyond counting; its needles had endured winter freezes that no human recorded. The tree’s lifespan overlapped not only with the life of King James, but also with mine. It lived into the 1990s.

Embedded deep in the trunk of this tree, about five feet above the ground, was the skull of an unusually large bighorn sheep. Two-thirds of one of the ram’s horns, and most of the skull, was buried in the wood. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Alexander Ross, leading a group of fur trappers, recorded the tree’s existence in 1824. “Out of a large pine five feet from root projects a ram's head,” he wrote, “the horns of which are transfixed to the middle. The natives cannot tell when this took place . . .” Warren Ferris, another trapper, found the tree in 1834. “The date of its existence has been lost in the lapse of ages, and even tradition is silent as to the origin of its remarkable situation,” wrote Ferris. “The oldest of Indians can give no other account of it, than that it was there precisely as at present, before their father’s great grandfathers were born.”

Because humans are explainers, legends emerged about the tree. Ross recorded an Indian story that when the first hunter reached the area, he shot an arrow at a bighorn sheep, wounding him. Enraged, the bighorn charged the hunter, who lept behind the tree. The animal buried his horn in the tree when he missed the hunter. Another story tells that Coyote, passing along the Bitterroot after a long journey, was confronted by an irascible ram who battled all passers-by. The ram threatened Coyote. Affecting awe for the ram’s physique, Coyote cooed that the ram must be very powerful. “I am very powerful,” said the ram. “And I fight with my horns. With my sharp horns.” Coyote appraised the ram’s horns. “Prove your power,” he said. “Prove your power first by striking this tree. Then you may do with me as you wish.” When the ram embedded his horns in the tree, Coyote slit his throat.

Because humans are creators of symbols, the tree has taken various meanings. Some Indians placed hair inside the exposed horn to bring good luck. Others left offerings at the tree so that their wishes would be granted. Still others told that, because Coyote had vanquished the pugnacious ram at this tree, the tree had given humans mastery over the beasts. In the days of the fur trappers, as Ferris recorded, local Indians seldom passed the tree without leaving an offering of beads, shells, feathers, or some other ornament. Flathead Indians performed ceremonial dances around the tree into the twentieth century. Today, people of various races drive a half-hour north from Hamilton, Montana along Highway 93 to visit the tree’s decaying trunk. They go for reasons of their own.

Sometimes, the inspiration provided by the tree has unfortunate artistic consequences.

But the ram’s head no longer sticks out of the Medicine Tree. In the 1890s, a white pioneer sawed off the horn. Later, a lumberjack tried to remove the portion of the horn that was still buried in the tree. The lumberjack failed to extract the horn, but did manage to break off a tip that still protruded from the tree’s bark. In modern times, the Salish branch of the Flathead tribe had to remove a sign identifying the tree and explaining its significance because of vandalism. At one point before it died, someone dumped salt atop its roots in an attempt to kill it. Even in 1834, Ferris’s party could not pass the ram’s horn without trying to dislodge it. The horn, Ferris wrote, was “entombed in the body of [the] pine tree, so perfectly solid and firmly, that a heavy blow of an axe did not start it from its place.”

This cries out for explanation.

For untold years, the ram’s head remained imbedded in the ponderosa pine beside the stone bluff along the East Fork where a horseman could scarcely pass. Indians venerated the tree, left gifts beside it, performed rituals before it. The tree’s location was well-known to large numbers of Indians, but still the skull remained undisturbed. It remained lodged in the tree where it had been imbedded for longer than anyone could recall; longer than the Flatheads’ oral tradition could trace. But the ram’s head could not survive the arrival of white settlers. Upon discovering the ram’s skull marvelously stuck in the trunk of an ancient pine, the cultural descendants of Europeans tried to unstick it. As soon as 1834 they were whacking it with heavy blows from axes, pounding on it with lumberjack equipment, cutting it apart with saws. Surely this points to a cultural difference.

There are some myths I’m sick of hearing. Some people hallow Native Americans as a race that lived in harmony with Earth and with each other, whose decisions were marked by a sagacious appreciation for future generations, who maintained a peaceful and indefinitely sustainable lifestyle. A morally superior people. That’s untrue. There were wide cultural variations between tribes, just as among the European nations from which whites came, but Native Americans built giant cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan, fought bitterly amongst each other, tortured their captives in horrible ways, and assisted in overexploiting beaver and buffalo populations as soon as the white man’s markets gave them an incentive to do so. Other written treatments of Native Americans – principally older sources, like the fur trappers’ journals – present Indians as unfeeling brutes with a weak mental capacities. From Warren Ferris: the plains were “roamed and infested by hordes of savages, among whom theft and robbery are accounted any thing but crime, and whose scruples on the score of murder are scarcely a sufficient shield against the knife or the tomahawk. Strength and courage alone command their respect.” From Osborne Russell: “The Caw or Kanzas Indians are the most filthy indolent and degraded sett of human beings I ever saw.” From Francis Parkman: “without [the] powerful stimulus [of war] [the Dakota Sioux] would be like the unwarlike tribes from beyond the mountains, who are scattered among the caves and rocks like beasts, living on roots and reptiles. The latter have little of humanity except the form . . .” That’s also untrue. The truth about the Indians lies in the unremarkable middle: they were neither morally superior nor intellectually inferior. They were basically the same as the European descendants who wrote about them, only placed in a different environment and exposed to different developmental forces. In other words, boringly similar to you and me.

But the story of the Medicine Tree demands something more. Despite the biological similarities between Indians and whites, cultural differences obviously existed. Why did the skull remain intact for untold generations, jutting mysteriously from the bark of a ponderosa pine, then get hacked from its place when whites began pouring into the Rockies? Maybe it was because most early white passers-by were visitors who identified with communities centered elsewhere, and for whom the Rockies were merely a place to extract wealth. They were extractors, not conservers. The Indians who visited the Medicine Tree, in contrast, lived in the region and may have cared more about the long-term charm of their surroundings. Or maybe the white descendants of Europeans saw the natural world as raw and imperfect, to be improved or mined by humankind as humans saw fit, to a degree that the Indians did not. While Native Americans did engineer the world around them to suit their own needs –digging irrigation ditches, deliberately setting fires to encourage new growth – it remains true that their societies were not as technologically advanced as those of western Europe. Maybe the opinion that the works of humankind constituted improvements on nature was not as deeply ingrained in Indian cultures as it was in cultures tracing their lineage to Europe. Or maybe it was as simple as this: Indians believed that nature had power over them, and whites believed that they had power over nature.

Who knows. As the bodies swirl and juices mix in the American melting pot, maybe it matters less. Or maybe, as we grapple with our tangled history and blurring ethnic identities, it matters more. At any rate, there isn’t much left of the medicine tree. After disease, a big storm, and the construction of a road near its root system, all that remains is a tall white stump. But they say that deep inside the stump, buried from view, locked in place by the knotted wood that grew around it, there remains one abnormally large sheep horn. It’s been there for centuries.

Six Below

2009-12-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

It was six degrees below zero. At noon. I opened the wooden cabin door to go outside and pushed on the screened door behind it. The door didn’t open as rapidly as I’d anticipated and I almost mashed my face into the screen. The subzero temperature had gummed up the hydraulic cylinder that keeps the screened door from slamming, making the door hard to open. I pushed, and it gave way reluctantly. I opened it a quarter of the way and slid out, calling Duke to follow me. We were on the way to town to buy groceries, drop some trash by the dump, and pick up some handwarmer packets.

Six degrees below zero, I was discovering, requires some adjustments. At six below, for instance, you would not walk outside with wet hair unless you wanted frosted tips. Nor would you run to the truck in your bare feet to retrieve something unless you wanted to risk getting frozen to the walkway. If I seem to this blog’s regular readers – Mom and Dad, that’s both of you – a little preoccupied with the outdoor ambient air temperature of late, that’s because I am. These adjustments are new to me. I have never been anyplace where the day’s high temperature did not exceed 0°F. When I got to the truck, it almost didn’t start. I had to crank it five times, and when the motor finally caught, dark gray smoke billowed out of the exhaust pipe for five or ten minutes. The diesel engine, which normally rumbles like a well-balanced washing machine, was sputtering loudly, then going quiet, then sputtering loudly, then going quiet, at the approximate pace of footsteps on gravel. I had to let the truck warm up for twenty-five minutes before I could drive it. When it’s six below, Duke is a lot less eager to go outside and a lot more eager to get back in. When I stay outside for long periods, I’ve started leaving the middle button on my jacket and shirt unbuttoned so that I can alternately thrust one hand and then the other inside my shirt, like an ambidextrous Napoleon Bonaparte, to keep my fingers from stiffening like the hydraulic cylinder on the door. At six degrees below zero, I could move an object from my truck to the deep freezer, and it would warm up. We don’t have this weather in Georgia.

But the adjustments can be made. Humans have adapted to much colder temperatures than this – for instance, the projected high temperature for Wednesday in Arviat, an Inuit town on Hudson Bay in Canada’s Nunavut Territory, is -19°F. And Arviat is located well south of the ranges where other Inuit populations have lived and thrived. So Duke and I can adjust to a Montana winter. Duke can wear, if necessary, the neoprene vest that I used to put on him at night when we were packing across the Sierras. My hands presented a slightly more difficult problem – in extreme cold, the capillaries in my fingers constrict so tightly that gloves and mittens are almost useless. There’s no heat to retain, so insulation does no good. But if I shoved handwarmer packets into mittens, I thought, I’d be okay. I knew less about how to fix the truck. I probably needed a block heater, which I had recently learned was an electric heating system that plugs into a 120-volt outlet and keeps the engine block warm. But for the first few miles on the way into town, I couldn’t push the truck past thirty miles per hour. I’d step on the throttle, but once I reached 1300 RPM or so, I lost power and couldn’t accelerate. As the truck warmed the problem lessened, but even after traveling fifteen miles, I still couldn’t top sixty. I wasn’t sure if a block heater could fix that.

So after buying groceries, dumping trash, and finding handwarmers, I stopped by the Cenex gas station in town for advice. It was an old-school gas station that still had a full service pump. Dad had told me that he’d met the folks who ran the place, though I couldn’t remember how he knew them. I parked the truck and walked inside.

A bell jingled when I opened the door and a man in coveralls came out from the garage, wiping his hands on a soiled cloth.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

“I need to ask about a block heater,” I said. “I think I might need one on my truck.” I started to explain that I was from Georgia, where you don’t have to plug your truck into a wall socket before you start it, but I could tell from his nodding that my accent had already placed me.

“Block heater,” he said, still nodding. “What kind of truck?”

“Dodge with the Cummins diesel,” I said. “5.9 liter.”

“I’ve got a Cummins, too,” he said. “Mine’s an ’01.” I told him about the smoke, and running rough, and no power while the engine heated up.

“What kind of fuel are you running?” he asked.

I paused. I couldn’t think of what types of fuel he might be referring to. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Well . . . where did you last fill up?”

I pointed out the window to his self-service pump. “Right there,” I said. “Couple days ago.”

“Number one or number two diesel?”

I didn’t understand this. I’d never heard of number one or number two diesel. I’d heard of farm diesel – a type of less-refined fuel that it was illegal to run on public roads – but surely he wasn’t asking about that. I looked at the pumps. Sure enough, one pump was labeled “# 1 diesel” and the other “# 2 diesel.” And it wasn’t just the pump numbers, either; from the placement of the labels you could tell that they supplied different types of fuel. He saw my blank look. The number two diesel was fine for use in summer, he told me, but in winter, you needed to use some number one. The number one was basically kerosene, he said. Burned hotter. He ran about 25% number one in his truck, and 75% number two. Had I put any additive in my fuel?

I looked at him blankly again.

In winter, he explained, when it got below zero, it helped to use some additive. He handed me a pint-sized bottle of diesel fuel injector cleaner. The bottle treated 125 gallons, so I could just put a little in whenever I filled up. No need to measure. Just splash a little in there. As for the block heater, he didn’t have one in stock but he could order one. Cost about fifty-five dollars.

“Thanks,” I said. I told him to go ahead and order a block heater. “You know, I think you’ve met my Dad. Jim Butler. We’re at CM Ranch on up 191. The old Musberger place.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “Bill Wallace. Good to meet you. We’re neighbors up there.”

“I didn’t realize that,” I said.

“Yeah, we’ve got the game farm.” There was a farm about a mile north of our place where they raised pheasants and grouse. I’d driven by it a couple times.

“Oh, I know where you’re at,” I said. “Good to meet you.”

I told him I’d be right back for the additive and went outside to put in a quarter tank of number one diesel in my truck. I was standing by the truck hoping that the tank would fill before my fingers went numb when Bill appeared at my elbow.

“Hey,” I said.

He pointed at my truck. “Are you sure you don’t already have a block heater on there?”

“No,” I admitted. “I got the truck out of Lexington, Kentucky, so I guess it might. I don’t know how cold it gets up there.”

“Let me take a look,” he said. “I didn’t know they even made these engines without them.”

I popped the hood and Bill looked at the engine block, then knelt by each front tire and peered under the fender wells.

“I don’t see one,” he said. “You don’t keep it garaged?”

“No, it won’t fit in our garage because of that camper,” I said. “It’s two or three inches too tall for the garage.”

“What about the old electrical shop?” he asked.

For the third time in the ten minutes of our acquaintance, I looked at Bill blankly. He might have come to accept it as my natural expression by now. If that were true, I reflected, I would have to produce an even more clueless expression to convey my ignorance. What might that expression be? Jaw slack, maybe; head tilted, eyes droopy, a little drool . . .

But Bill understood the blank look. “You know, the big bay over there in the out building. Used to be an electrical shop.”

Bill, I realized, was giving me directions to a building on my family’s own property. “Lord, I forgot about that bay,” I said. “Over in the barn. It might fit in there. I’ll try that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then call me if you still want that block heater.”

Puffing for Peace

2009-12-06T22:38:00.000-08:00

It lay on the table, crudely carved and gaudily adorned, and I knew immediately that it would be mine. If anyone knew how to make a peace pipe, I figured, it would be a prison inmate. It was Halloween 2004 and I was at the Louisiana state penitentiary’s annual rodeo and craft show – Angola Prison Rodeo, the event was called. The rodeo event would feature inmates riding broncos, attempting to rope cattle, and hanging out in the arena with angry bulls. But now I was at the craft show, perusing the inmates’ handmade wares, and I had found what I had come for.

I have taken several trips with the pipe I bought at Angola, and I’ve discovered that it has certain advantages. The Prison Pipe is three feet long and draped with various ornaments, so portability and sturdiness are not among those virtues. You would not, for instance, tuck my pipe in your pocket when you went for a walk or cram it into your pack on a backpacking trip. It would also be out of place in a Las Vegas casino or an oak-walled, whisky-furnished backroom where politicians and oil tycoons slapped backs and grinned. They would think you strange if you produced a three-foot pipe with feathers dangling from it and began to puff away. But for a truck trip in the right company, the pipe stows nicely under the back seat and makes an entertaining accessory. When my buddy Ben and I went elk hunting in Wyoming a few years back, for instance, we took the pipe with us. As we drove across the Midwest on the return trip to Georgia, a snowstorm of historic proportions was sweeping across the flatlands. Snow was piled high, cars were in the ditches, and traffic was bumper to bumper along the interstates. When traffic was stopped, Ben and I took the opportunity to fill the pipe – only with tobacco, mind you – and pass it back and forth to the varying amusement or alarm of nearby motorists. It was then that Ben pointed out the pipe’s principal advantage: because the pipe is long, the smoke cools before it reaches your mouth. No matter how hot the tobacco burns, you never risk burning your tongue.

The Indians, of course, smoked peace pipes, as did the trappers when in Indian company. When not in the company of natives, the trappers often smoked their own pipes – personal pipes of the kind in common use by European cultural descendants today. Both Indians and trappers smoked eastern tobacco when they could, which was better than the tobacco that could be acquired in the Rockies. As a result, trappers often carried extra eastern tobacco to trade with the Indians. But both the trappers and Indians mixed the tobacco with locally available substances. What they mixed it with is, as yet, a mystery to me. Sometimes, I have learned, the Indians and trappers mixed tobacco with red willow bark, which burns well but is not a hallucinogen. I wonder if the inhabitants of the Rocky Mountains ever smoked anything more potent. If the mountain men and Indians could have smoked something to get high, I think some members of both groups would have done it – the mountain men got famously drunk at the annual rendezvous, where whisky was available, and the Indians’ historical fondness for alcohol has been well documented, so I doubt that either group would have had any categorical scruples against getting stoned. Peyote is an obvious guess, but peyote is a cactus native only to the southwestern deserts, and wouldn’t have been available in the Rockies. Cannabis had not yet made its way from Asia to the Rockies. So maybe the Indians and mountain men actually weren’t getting high. Maybe they were non-hallucinogenic smokers, like Ben and me on the interstate.

I puffed on the Prison Pipe and practiced blowing smoke rings out of the bowl. The tiniest puff blown into the mouthpiece produced beautiful rings. I watched them float toward the rafters of the cabin. It wasn’t a genuine peace pipe, but the Prison Pipe was good enough for me. In fact, maybe it was better. I puffed another ring. That was a competition I’d like to see – Indians vs. Inmates: The Pipe-Building Showdown.

A short video about Angola Prison Rodeo. It's worth watching.

Cogitating on the Cold

2009-12-05T20:33:00.000-08:00

I stood still, hands thrust into my pockets, while Duke sprinted across the newfallen snow after his tennis ball. The wind was blowing hard and I turned up my collar against it. Duke passed ten yards downwind of his ball and suddenly whipped around, nose to the wind. From a full sprint to a nintety-degree turn in a single step. Duke is an agile dog. His low center of gravity helps. He’d smelled the ball and now he worked upwind, moving side to side, nose stretched out ahead of him. In a few seconds he found the ball and brought it to me. I bent to take it from him and winced in surprise when the sides of my pants brushed against my legs. The denim that had hung away from my skin while Duke made his retrieve had turned icy-cold, and when I bent down and the cloth touched my legs, it took the warmth right out of my skin. This was a kind of cold we don’t have in Georgia. And then it started snowing.

I went inside and, for awhile, watched the snow blow sideways outside my window. But that was unfulfilling. Here I was in Montana, in the middle of a whole new kind of winter, and I proposed to spend it sitting in a heated cabin? That seemed wimpy. So I bundled up in as many clothes as I could grab – long johns, fleece shirt, wool shirt, jacket, skull cap and balaclava over it, liner gloves and skiing gloves, wool socks and insulated boots – grabbed my muzzleloader, slung my binoculars over my shoulder and went outside to sit on a hilltop and scout for game. It was late in the afternoon, and dark would come especially early in these overcast conditions, so I knew I probably wouldn’t shoot anything. But that wasn’t really the point. I walked across the pasture to the hills, the half-inch of new snow quiet under my boots. The point was to be outside.

I sat on a hillside just under the top, high enough to see for some distance but not so high that I’d be silhouetted against the sky from below. It had stopped snowing, which felt anticlimactic but did allow me to see further. Miles to the west, the white tops of the Crazy Mountains lost themselves in the white sky. Closer by, Otter Creek had almost completely frozen over. The creek was a lane of white ice cutting through the pasture, marked on the sides by skeletal willows and cottonwoods. Otter Creek would be a good way to move quietly and unseen through the pasture, I thought – I could slide over the ice without making a sound, hunched below the height of the banks. Like a wraith with a rifle. No, that was melodramatic, I thought – I’d have to come up with another analogy for the blog. I flexed my fingers, which were getting cold, and lifted my binoculars. Cosgriff’s horses grazed near the fenceline.

Yellowstone Park gets way colder than this. Because the Yellowstone caldera sits in a hole, and cold air sinks, the cold air from the surrounding mountainsides pours into the Park and never leaves. Winter comes early, stays late, and gets downright nasty. Forty below, they say. At forty below, things get strange. For one, the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales converge. A degree Fahrenheit is smaller than a degree Celsius, so when it is really hot – say, hot enough to boil water – then the number of degrees in Fahrenheit will be really high, but the number of degrees Celsius will be somewhat lower. Fahrenheit, you see, is the more melodramatic scale. When water boils, Fahrenheit will label the temperature a whopping 212°, while a Celsius thermometer will report a more modest 100°. A difference of 112°. As things cool off, the number of degrees Fahrenheit will drop faster than the number of degrees Celsius, because a degree Fahrenheit represents a smaller increment of temperature change. When water freezes, for instance, a Fahrenheit thermometer says 32°, and a Celsius thermometer says 0°. This is a difference of 32°, a smaller difference than before. And the Fahrenheit scale, with its small increments and relative excitability, will be more dramatic about really cold temperatures as well. According to Jack London in To Build a Fire, spit will freeze before it hits the ground at -75° Fahrenheit. In Celsius, that temperature would be a still imposing, but less histrionic, -59°. Note that at this end of the spectrum, the number of degrees Celsius (-59) is higher than the number of degrees Fahrenheit (-75). Remember that at the hotter end of the spectrum, the Fahrenheit scale gave higher numbers (for instance, 212° versus 100°) to describe an identical temperature. So when it’s warm, the Fahrenheit scale gives us higher numbers, and those numbers stay higher than their Celsius counterparts by decreasing amounts until some point below the freezing point of water. After that point, Celsius gives higher numbers to describe an identical temperature. At some point, then, the two scales must cross. There must be some temperature at which the two scales converge – where they report the same number of degrees to describe the same temperature. There is such a point, and it is -40°. So -40° F = -40° C. Strange.

That isn’t the only strange thing that happens at forty below. They say that at extremely cold temperatures – and -40° qualifies as extreme, especially if you’re a Georgian – water vapor in the air can freeze without ever becoming liquid. It leaves tiny, unbelievably fragile ice crystals that float on the wind. “Diamond dust,” it’s called. Enchantingly, dangerously beautiful. Apparently it’s one of the few natural wonders that can’t be well photographed because the focus feature on most cameras won’t pick it up. If you do a Google Images search for “diamond dust,” for instance, the pictures that come up aren’t so great. So sometime this winter, I want to go see it. I’d like to experience forty below. I’ll just have to wear a few extra layers.

I trained my binoculars on Cosgriff’s horses. The wind blew across my gloves and my fingers were starting to get numb. The horses had white patches on their haunches – they’d waited out the snowstorm butt-into-the-wind, apparently. Not the most fragrant approach, but who am I to question evolution? I wondered if the patches of snow made their haunches cold. Probably so, especially when they melted. A horse’s winter coat is warm, I guess, but it’s not a whole lot thicker than the coats that the horses wear in summer, when it can reach eighty degrees Fahrenheit. That was true, I thought, for most animals – deer’s coats don’t thicken much, nor elk’s, nor rabbits’. Certainly their coats don’t change as much as mine does. An elk’s winter coat in Yellowstone could only be thicker than its summertime coat by what – a factor of two or three, at the very most? And that’s to endure variations in temperature from 70°F to -40°. Think about the change in human attire that would accompany a temperature swing of 110° F. We’d go from a tee shirt to five or six layers of fleece and wool. From bare forearms to Michelin-Man-look-alike. It would change the percentage of body heat retained by who knows how much. Certainly a bigger change than a deer, elk, rabbit, or Labrador retriever enjoys.

No, the conclusion is inescapable: we humans are a bunch of wimps. I flexed my fingers and walked back toward the cabin. Duke would want to play fetch again, but I was ready to wrap my hands around a cup of hot chocolate.

I posted a picture of this horse, who I have nicknamed Griz, awhile back. I since found out what happened to his ears. Apparently, when the horse was a colt, they froze.

That dude looks cold. Possibly dead.

A Place to Spend Your Winter

2009-12-04T20:28:00.000-08:00

The wind was blowing hard, but I couldn’t tell its precise direction. I opened my mouth to exhale so I could watch which way the condensate blew. I heard a whistling sound. I shut my mouth. The sound stopped. I opened it again. More whistling. It took a moment before I figured it out: the wind was blowing so hard that it was whistling across my teeth. Damned Montana winters. I opened my mouth again and exhaled. The fog from my mouth blew north, so I headed south. Smart hunters keep their faces in the wind. So do I. I was prowling around the hills with my muzzleloader, and it was cold as rip. I wore heavy long underwear, a wool shirt, a fleece vest, and a thick jacket, and still I didn’t get hot even as I climbed hillsides. On my hands I wore liner gloves and wool mittens, and still my right hand was getting numb where it gripped the rifle. I wondered if the Ace Hardware in town sold chemical handwarmers. My quest for historical authenticity, I guess, doesn’t go much beyond armament.

The trappers holed up for winter. The bitter cold was no time for traveling, and the creeks where the beaver lived were frozen over anyway. The practice of settling down for winter was so commonly practice that the trappers used “winter” as a verb. In 1836, for instance, Osborne Russell wintered with a bunch of other trappers where Clark’s Fork and the Yellowstone River flow together, near modern-day Laurel, Montana. That’s just west of Billings, only about an hour’s drive east of me. The trappers chose their wintering sites in late fall. They’d look for a spot where the cold wasn’t too severe, where there were abundant cottonwood trees, and where there were plenty of buffalo. As winter neared, they’d kill a bunch of buffalo and dry the meat to make winter provisions. After snow covered the grass, the trappers would peel the bark from sweet cottonwood trees and feed the bark to their horses. And if the trappers were lucky, the buffalo would spend the winter nearby – if that happened, there was no need to eat jerky. Fresh meat tasted better.

I sat on top of a hill and scanned the flats of Otter Creek for fresh meat. I looked across the haying fields, saw nothing, then inspected the creek with my binoculars. The late afternoon sky was darkening. There were a few mule deer on a hill a quarter-mile distant, but I was after whitetails. Anyway I couldn’t think of a good way to stalk the mulies. The rock I was sitting on was conducting all of the heat from my butt, leaving it quite chilled. I glanced at the cabin, which sat just across Otter Creek. I’d accidentally left a light on, and the inside looked warm and inviting in the yellowy way peculiar to cabin windows in winter. I sighed, there was a whistling sound, and the wind whisked my breath to the north.

Finding a wintering spot was not an easy task. The trappers had some old favorites – Jackson Hole was a common wintering spot, as were Cache Valley and Teton Valley. After Fort Hall was built near Pocotello, Idaho, trappers often wintered there. Joseph Walker spent the winter of 1832, the winter before he led the expedition I’m writing about, along the Snake River. But other trappers who chose wintering sites off the beaten path sometimes chose badly. For instance, Captain Benjamin Bonneville, who would later commission and equip the Walker Expedition, built a fort christened “Fort Bonneville” near modern-day Pinedale, Wyoming. He apparently intended for the fort to be garrisoned year-round, but winters in the area were so bitterly cold that the fort was soon abandoned. It was thereafter known colloquially as “Fort Nonsense.” Zenas Leonard, too, had a hard-luck winter story to tell. In his first foray into the Rockies, well before he joined the Walker Expedition, Leonard was a part of a trapping expedition that wintered along the Laramie River in southeastern Wyoming. His expedition chose a remote valley with plenty of cottonwood trees, but did not test the bark before winter set in and snow stopped the mountain passes. It was in early Decemeber – around this time of year – that the party discovered that the cottonwood trees were of the wrong type. The cottonwood bark was bitter, not sweet, and the horses would not eat it. Every horse starved. “It seldom happened during all our difficulties, that my sympathies were more sensibly touched, than on viewing these starving creatures,” Leonard wrote. “I would willingly have divided my provision with my horses, if they would have eat it.”

Winter provided the trappers with a psychological break as well. Winter was a time for lazing around, playing cards, smoking the pipe, swapping stories. As the trappers lounged inside a trading fort, or lay beside the fire in a buffalo-hide lodge, they socialized with their companions. Osborne Russell wrote that he had “derived no little benefit from the frequent arguments and debates held in what we termed the Rocky Mountain College and I doubt not but some of my comrades who considered themselves Classical Scholars have had some little added to their wisdom in these assemblies.” Although the trappers were generally eager to move on by springtime, having likely grown weary of their college classes and the self-appointed professors with whom they shared lodging, winter probably provided an enjoyable break from a trapper’s otherwise physically rigorous lifestyle.

A modern example of a bunch of people bullshitting.

Late fall was the time to locate wintering grounds. In late fall of 1833, the Walker Expedition was in western Nevada, having followed the Humboldt River – named the “Barren River” by Zenas Leonard – across the arid emptiness of what is now Nevada. The trappers were dangerously low on provisions, having found little game along the Humboldt and having eaten through much of the buffalo jerky that they had stockpiled months ago. And then the Humboldt River, the riparian thoroughfare on which the expedition had long depended, sank into the earth. The expedition was at the Humboldt Sink, near the base of the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas. Their horses were tired, their food was running low, and winter was approaching. It was the time of year when most trappers were building buffalo lodges and dreaming up self-congratulatory lies to tell their companions. It was time to find buffalo and prepare for the long winter ahead. But around the Humboldt Sink, there were no buffalo. There was barely any game at all. The Walker Expedition did not have, and could not acquire, enough provisions for winter. So they pushed on. At a time when their colleagues were lighting their pipes and preparing for college classes, the Walker Expedition pushed into the unknown Sierra Nevada Mountains. It would be a harrowing passage.

There were no deer in stalking range, I decided, and besides my butt was cold. I descended the hill and crossed the pasture to a place where Otter Creek ran shallow over some shoals. The edges of the creek were frozen, but the center still ran free. I took careful, sliding steps across the ice on the near side, then thanked modernity for waterproof boots as I waded across the center. I climbed onto the ice on the far side and as I walked across it, the wet rubber soles of my boots stuck momentarily to the ice the way kids’ tongues stick to ski poles. Damned Montana winters. I looked up at the yellow-windowed cabin. Luckily it was seventy degrees inside my lodge.

Songs in Wax

2009-12-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

In 1907, Frances Densmore and her sister Margaret hauled a phonograph into the Ojibwe country of Minnesota, intent on recording Indian songs before they disappeared. Densmore had no training in anthropology, no institutional support for her expedition, and no clear idea of whether Native American singers would be willing to sing into the phonograph she’d borrowed from a music store. But she was determined. Densmore’s focus on Native American music was unusual. Many of her contemporaries esteemed Indians for their eloquence in speech – the words attributed to Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, “from where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more for ever,” resounded in the popular conscience. Others of her contemporaries, taken with the old conception of the “noble savage,” idealized Indians as natural people uncorrupted by the evils of civilization. Still others admired Indians for their historical prowess as hunters and warriors. But few admired, or sought to preserve, Indian songs. In Densmore’s own words, “when early settlers and explorers heard the Indians singing there was only one opinion – it was terrible.”

Densmore and others in a wagon.

Born in 1867, Densmore had grown up in a small Minnesota town along the Mississippi River across from in island on which Sioux Indians camped. “I fell asleep night after night,” Densmore would later recall, “to the throb of the Indian drum.” A musician herself, Densmore would later study music in Ohio, New York, and Boston. She found the Indian songs captivating, and began her ethnographic work by taking notes as Indians sang. She listened to native music at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. She took notes on the tune Geronimo hummed as he whittled arrows and sold autographs for a quarter. But her real contribution to ethnography would begin when she hauled her phonograph into the prairie. When they traveled in 1907 into Minnesota’s Ojibwe country, Frances and Margaret found an Indian named Big Bear to sing into their machine. They preserved his song. Big Bear was the first of many. Densmore would travel across the United States, sometimes with her sister and sometimes alone, to record the music of the Mandans, Utes, Seminoles, Sioux, Ojibwe, Pawnee, Papago, Makah, and others. She generally paid a quarter per song, and often had to cajole reluctant Indians who believed – or at least, professed to believe – that harm would come to them if they sang their spiritual songs at inappropriate times. But she worked patiently. Densmore displayed, at times, insightful cultural understanding. For instance, she spoke in a lecture of Indian medicine men who might direct their patients, after analyzing the symptoms, to surround themselves with happy people or to fulfill a vow thus far neglected. Densmore didn’t scoff at these prescriptions. “We call this psychology,” she said, “but the Indian doctor did not have such a long word for it -- he just did it and knew that it worked.”

Yet for all her initiative, and the boldness of her mission, and the breadth of her travels, Densmore remained a culturally conservative Victorian. Prim. Before her death, she prepared a five-page autobiography that told of her work, but contained nothing of her personal life. Densmore never married, and her autobiography betrayed not a single romantic interest. She retyped her field notes and redrafted unpublished manuscripts, scrubbing all mention of the personal. Her will instructed her relatives to burn the notes and unfinished work in her desk. Throughout her extensive fieldwork, Densmore held herself, and her culture, above the Indians. Though she wrote about Native Americans, and generalized about them, and in many cases carried her ethnography beyond their music to document their traditions and beliefs, she never lived among them. When explaining how she gathered her songs, she said, “I do not do it by pretending to be one of them, and eating out of the same dishes. I have seen people who used this technique and did not find out very much. There is no use trying to be a social climber among Indians. If you begin at the bottom you will probably stay there. I start at the top and make friends with the professional men¬¬ the chiefs, doctors and tribal leaders. I stay at the Government agency and have some sort of an office to which the Indians come.” She kept strict boundaries between her subjects and her own culture. “I never let them criticize the government nor the white race, nor come across with any sob-stuff about the way they had been treated, as a race,” she said. “That was simply out.”

Frances Densmore.

Densmore recording a Blackfoot's song.

The boldness of Densmore’s mission, and the defiance of tradition it must have required for a single woman in her era to undertake it, are hard to square with Densmore’s primness. It seems like someone so willing to dispense with traditional social roles in her professional life would have occasionally broken them in her personal life. From someone of Densmore’s breadth of experience, one would expect at least one story about joining in some of the native dances she chronicled, or a tale of taking too many puffs on a peace pipe, or a story of romantic intrigue. But Densmore left none of these. This strong disconnect between the professional and personal seems strange, but maybe there is a cause. Maybe the criticism that Densmore received for violating the norms of Victorian society in her work led her to cling to those social norms ever more tightly in her personal life. We’ll never know; it’s too late to ask. But whatever Densmore’s inner struggles, she has left behind a volume of work that we ought to appreciate: thanks to her work, the Library of Congress holds 2,500 wax recordings of original Native American songs.

To hear some, click here. I recommend listening to "Moccasin Game Song."

Frances Densmore with an Indian rattle and drum.

Hunting Sharptails

2009-12-02T21:53:00.000-08:00

It was really too cold for bellycrawling, but I’d come this far. I slid the .22 rifle out in front of me toward the small promontory, then crawled to it over the grass and snow. My fleece jacket slid over the ground easily, but my cotton pants were wet from snow that had melted under my legs. And my right foot was getting cold. The discomfort was bearable, though, because I could warm up quickly if I needed to – I was, after all, in the backyard.

The snow had brought the sharptailed grouse back. When I first got out to Montana, there was snow on the ground, and I’d seen sharptails walking by my kitchen window in the mornings. They fed in morning and evening, and during the day they’d congregate – “covey up,” in the parlance of bird hunters – under some trees on the far end of the barn. As the snow melted, the sharptails moved away, presumably back to higher elevations. For about a week I didn’t see them. But the recent snows had brought them back. Late in the morning, I’d seen them fly in from the north and land under their favorite grove of trees at the far end of the barn, beside Otter Creek, just a hundred yards from the cabin.

Sharptailed grouse.

Sharptails make good eating. I stood several hundred yards off from the grove where the birds were coveyed and tried to figure out how to kill one. If I’d had a shotgun, I’d have gotten close to the barn and walked toward the grove, then shot at them when they flew. Wingshooting – that is, shooting the birds when they’re flying – is the usual way of shooting grouse, quail, or any upland bird. But I didn’t have a shotgun. I did have a bolt-action .22 with iron sights. It was no good for wingshooting, but if I could get within 30 yards and could spot a bird before it flew, I could kill with it.

The sharptails were wary. You couldn’t just walk right toward them. Before they left the property the first time, I had tried on a couple occasions to sneak up on the covey. It wasn’t easy. When stalking a deer, you can wait until the deer is grazing, or wait until the deer is looking the other way, then creep forward. Or you can move sideways until there’s an obstacle between you and the deer – a bush or low hill, for instance – and advance without being seen. But with a covey of birds, those methods don’t work as well. There’s always at least one bird with its head up, scanning for predators. And if you put an obstacle between you and the bird you want to shoot, another bird in the covey is likely to have you in its line of vision. When that bird sees you, he’ll fly, and the others will follow. When I’d stalked this covey before, I’d spooked the birds well before I got in range. If I’d been a coyote, I’d have starved. The best thing about human civilization, I sometimes think, is the ready availability of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

But today I had a taste for grouse, and this time I’d use Otter Creek to get close. I’d sneak up the creekbed from the south, crouching below the level of the bank, until I got near the grove where the birds were hanging out. Then I’d sneak up the bank and bellycrawl through the tall grass until I could get close enough for a shot. So, rifle in hand, I walked a wide circle around the grove, far enough away from the birds to avoid spooking them. Once I was beside Otter Creek and about 400 yards south of the sharptails, I put a large clump of willows between me and the birds. At this distance, the willows obscured me from the entire covey. I walked toward them.

When I reached the willows, I crouched behind them and peered through. The leaves long gone, all that remained were the dark, brittle stems. Gently I pushed a few aside and watched the grove. The wind blew softly, clear and cold, and rattled in the willow stalks. I waited. I wondered if the sharptails had moved on. But then the movement of something tan caught my eye, and when I looked closer, I could make out a head poking above a feathered grouse body. They were there. I watched them for a moment, then retreated from the willows and slid down into the creekbed.

I had hoped to sneak up the creek in my waterproof boots, keeping my feet in the water, but the cold snap that had brought snow had also left a layer of ice over the creek. I needed to cross to the opposite bank, and this was as good a time as any to test the ice. I kicked it, and it held firm. I slid a foot onto it, then shifted my weight onto the foot. The ice held. I brought my other foot onto the ice and started to slide across the creek. The ice cracked. My foot fell through to the creekbottom below, but thankfully my boots were taller than the creek was deep. Water swirled around the rubber and neoprene. I crashed, waded, and slid to the opposite bank through the blocks of broken ice, then crouched on a ledge by the edge of the water. I moved along the ledge toward the grove of trees. At one point the ledge narrowed to almost nothing. I tried to cross, but slid toward the creek, hit the ice with my right foot, and broke through. Here the creek was deep and water poured down the top of my boot. I jerked it out of the water. Cold – real cold. But I was too close to the covey for cursing. So I crawled forward, trying to move as quietly as possible through the dried grass and the snow. I was close enough, I thought, to hear the covey if they flushed. And I hadn’t heard anything, so they were probably still there. I crawled forward. I felt a chunk of ice beside my ankle.

When I neared the grove, I found a gently-sloped section of creek bank and crawled up. As I neared the top I flattened against my belly, pushing the rifle ahead of me, dragging myself along by my elbows. I wanted to come up over this hill with only my eyes showing. The fronts of my cotton pants were soon soaked from the snow, and they were cold pressed against my thighs. I heard myself breathing hard, and stopped to rest. You can’t shoot a rifle accurately if you’re gasping for beath. I waited awhile, then crawled forward. The water sloshed around inside my waterproof boot. My breath crystallized in the air before me. I moved slowly to minimize the rustling of the grass. Finally I lifted my head. Through the waving stalks of grass, I could see the grove of trees next to the barn. And on the near side of the grove sat a sharptailed grouse. Twenty-five yards away. I lifted the rifle and braced my elbows on the ground. I lined up the target, front sight, rear sight, then squeezed the trigger.

The crack of the rifle did not scare the birds – I guess they didn’t know what it was. I shot three sharptails, then lay the rifle aside and watched the rest. They huddled against the earth for awhile, necks tucked in, immobile balls of feathers. Fat-looking birds, like butterball turkeys pumped full of feed before Thanksgiving. Then some began to move. When the sharptails stood they looked sleek – tall birds with elegant necks and strong legs. Proper gamebirds. Patterned plumage that varied from dark, pine-bark brown on their wings to light, two-by-four tan on their necks. Underbellies of white flecked with brown. Short downturned beaks. They strode leisurely among the trees, heads poking forward then sliding back, stopping sometimes to peck at the earth. I like hunting, killing game that I will eat, inserting myself into the food chain directly. But the most thrilling part of a hunt is observing animals that do not know – or in this case, have forgotten – that you’re there. That makes it worthwhile. That makes it worth braving the cold, falling in creeks, crawling through the snow in wet pants. I watched the birds for a moment more, then rose to my feet. The birds flushed and I walked toward the cabin to get Duke. The thrill of hunting is especially worth braving the cold if you’re only a hundred yards from your house.

Duke with a sharptail he retrieved.

Meat from one sharptail -- the breast and legs. The hole in the breast is from the .22 bullet, which passed all the way through.

A Mountain Man's Rifle

2009-12-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

I pulled the set trigger on a replica .50 caliber Hawken rifle. Now a tap on the forward trigger would fire the rifle. With its dual triggers and percussion cap firing system, a Hawken would have been a top-of-the-line rifle in 1833. A mountain man would have been lucky to have one. I breathed deeply, let out half the breath, set my cheek firmly against the stock, and shut my left eye.

I remember one evening back in Georgia when I climbed up into my treestand with my usual rifle. I had just gotten comfortable in the stand and leaned my rifle in the corner when I saw hogs feeding on the edge of a swamp. Ten to twelve of them, way in the distance – scattered between 400 and 500 yards away. A very long shot. But my rifle was a good one, a Browning bolt action in .308 with a 3-9x scope on it, I was shooting high-quality ammunition, and I had just gotten off the shooting range. I was confident. I picked up the rifle, rested the foregrip on the edge of the stand, centered the crosshairs a few inches above a fat hog’s back, and fired. I missed, but the hogs were so far away that they didn’t spook at the sound of the rifle. I lifted the bolt handle, pulled it back, pushed it forward, then pressed it down. The rifle was ready to fire again. This time I held a little higher. I squeezed the trigger. The report of the rifle broke the stillness again, and about a half-second later, I heard the thwack of a bullet striking flesh. A hog fell. I worked the bolt and fired again. I shot eight times in the span of a few minutes. I killed five hogs.

After I tramped across the swamp, I rolled the hogs over to see where the bullets had hit and where they’d exited. I was shooting premium cartridges, loaded with conical bullets that were designed to expand when they hit the target, but to stop expanding before the bullet disintegrated so that the bullet retained its mass and penetrated deep into the target. Or if the bullet was moving relatively slowly when it hit the target – as these bullets were, since the hogs were so far away – the bullets were designed to expand very little to ensure adequate penetration. Most of my shots had been good ones, striking the hogs in the shoulders and passing through the vitals, and in four of the hogs, the bullets had passed all the way through. At this range – about a quarter mile – that was excellent performance by my scope, rifle, and cartridges. And, frankly, damn good shooting on my part.

Hogs in the truck bed; my rifle lying on top.

A cross-section of the Barnes MRX, the bullet that I prefer in my .308. The bullet on the right shows what happens after the bullet strikes its target -- the plastic tip disintegrates, then the notched copper peels back, causing the bullet to expand if it hits its target while traveling fast enough. Under no conditions, however, will it expand further than the bullet on the right. Such limited expansion ensures adequate penetration. A good balance between expansion and penetration is crucial for a clean kill.

I squinted down the barrel of the replica Hawken. It had no scope, of course, so instead of centering crosshairs on a target that appears in the same visual plane as the crosshairs, I had to line up the rifle’s rear sight, front sight, and target, all which appear in different planes because they’re at different distances from your eye. The front sight was a tiny metal bead that the shooter places on top of the target. The shooter then adjusts the rifle so that the target and bead are centered in the V-notch cut into the rear sight. When all three are aligned – the target, bead, and V-notch – then the shooter should fire. My target was a sheet of notebook paper stapled to a cardboard box 50 yards away. I had marked a dot in the middle of the paper for a more precise target, but that had turned out to be foolish since the front bead sight covered up most of the sheet. I couldn’t come anywhere close to seeing the dot, so I just covered up the middle section of the paper with the bead, then held the bead in the V-notch. I touched the trigger and, with a roar and a burst of smoke, the rifle fired.

I laid the rifle down and walked toward the box. The trappers’ armament and my .308 bolt action rifle were worlds apart. Compared to most modern cartridges, the round I favor – the .308 Winchester – was a heavy, slow-moving bullet. Even so, the bullet with which I’d killed the hogs left the muzzle at about 2600 feet per second, and it was a sharply-pointed conical bullet designed to cut through air with minimum resistance. The ball I was firing out of the Hawken, in contrast, left the muzzle at 1900 fps and wasn’t designed for aerodynamics at all – it was a lead sphere. So the Hawken’s ball started slower, and lost velocity faster, than my .308 bullets. The net result is this: if I adjust the sights on my .308 so that the bullet will strike my point of aim at 100 yards, then the bullet will be 0.1 inches high at 50 yards and about 25 inches low at 400 yards. If I adjust the sights the same way on the Hawken – that is to say, “sight it in” at 100 yards – the bullet will strike 1.7 inches high at 50 yards and a whopping 7 feet low at 400 yards. In practical terms, that means the Hawken is a short-range weapon. The shots I made on those five hogs wouldn’t have been possible with a Hawken. Not even close. At least for someone of my proficiency, the Hawken is a 100-yard gun.

The replica Hawken, built by my Uncle Dennis from a kit in the '70s or '80s. Near the corner of the table are the lead balls that the rifle fires.

I walked up to the cardboard box and squatted in front of it. I was “sighting the rifle in” – that is, adjusting the sights until the point where the sights indicated was the point where the ball struck. That means you aim, shoot, adjust the sights, then aim, shoot, adjust the sights, and repeat the process until the ball strikes true. I hadn’t even hit the paper. There was a hole in the cardboard, though, about two inches above the paper and a few inches to the right of center. That would require significant adjustment. I walked back to the rifle, picked up a screwdriver, and adjusted the rear sight.

Hopefully the next ball would strike true. I swiped the bore clean, measured 85 grains of black powder, poured the powder down the barrel, centered a precut cloth patch on the muzzle, pressed a ball onto the patch, started the patch and ball down the barrel with the ball starter, rammed the patch and ball down to the powder with the ramrod, picked up the gun, cocked the hammer, and placed a percussion cap onto the nipple under the hammer. Now, when I pulled the set trigger, the gun would be ready to fire. It took a couple minutes. If you were a mountain man, I thought, you’d want to load your gun before you saw the grizzly.

And even then it would take a well-placed ball to kill a grizzly with a muzzleloader. Because in addition to being slow-moving and aerodynamically inefficient, a lead ball departing from the muzzle of a Hawken does not penetrate game reliably. As compared to the bullets I shoot in my .308, a lead ball is soft. When it hits flesh, it tends to disintegrate. That disintegration is fine if you’re shooting into the side of a relatively small animal, like a deer, because the bullet doesn’t need to penetrate deeply before it reaches the lungs and heart. But if you’re shooting into something large – e.g., a grizzly bear, buffalo, elk, or even a deer from an angle other than broadside – then you’d want more penetration so that your bullet will reach the animal’s vital organs. Otherwise, you can’t be sure of inflicting a mortal wound. And if the lead ball strikes bone before reaching an animal’s vitals – if, e.g., you hit the shoulder bone on a broadside shot – then the ball may never reach the vitals. In the case of a deer, elk, or buffalo, the animal will probably escape, since you will probably not be able to reload quickly enough for a second shot. In the case of a grizzly bear, you may have only pissed him off. That’s not good.

I lifted the rifle to my cheek, pulled the set trigger, and squinted along the barrel at the piece of paper. The Hawken is fun to shoot, but I’m glad it’s not my meal ticket and protector.

Ron's Barber Shop

2009-11-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

Twenty-seven must be the perfect age. You’re old enough to know what you like, but still young enough to do about anything. For instance, my body was sturdy enough to carry me and a full pack over the Rockies, through the Black Rock Desert, and over the most rugged section of the Sierras. I can still sprint at a good clip, I can throw Duke’s tennis ball with reasonable accuracy and velocity, and my eyes are sharp enough to aim a rifle with iron sights. But I’ve been around long enough to know what I like. I like hunting, hiking, and driving across the country. As I have already noted in this weblog, I like burgers and beer, and anthropology and mint juleps. And this morning, when I walked into Ron’s Barber Shop, saw a giant fish on the wall, and smelled pipe tobacco, I knew I had found a good spot.

I sat down in the only barber’s chair and Ron tied an apron around my neck.

“How do you want it cut?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. In some places this is a difficult question to answer – I just want a regular haircut. There aren’t too many options in the world of men’s barbering. The way I see it, unless you want a spike or a mohawk or you wear your hair like Willie Nelson, you pretty much either buzz the hair or you give the same haircut that every guy has. I am one of the regular-cut guys. It isn’t complicated. In some establishments – usually places to highfaluting to call themselves barber shops, where they stack shampoos with funny names behind the counter – I have had difficulty expressing this sentiment. “Hairstylists” have quailed at my request for a regular haircut as though I were asking them to drive to Anchorage without a roadmap. I find such caviling irritating. How complex can cutting a man’s hair be? Just give me the same haircut I’ve had since I was born.

“Nothing special,” I said to Ron. “But make it pretty short.” I paused. “I can tell you what I don’t want – I’m losing my hair at the top, and I don’t want to have one of those haircuts where it looks like you’re trying to cover up the bald spot by combing over. Just let it go, that’s my philosophy.”

He nodded as though that made perfect sense, which it does.

“So a regular haircut, and short?” he asked.

I knew I’d like this place.

Ron was an old guy with glasses and gray hair cut short around the sides of his head. A buzz guy. He also knew how to cuss, a trait I admire. He didn’t mind an occasional four-letter word, at least when ladies were absent, and didn’t care very much if you disapproved. But he didn’t swear exhibitionally, the way some folks do to make you think they’re jocular or tough. He’d been born around Big Timber, and had lived here all of his life. As a younger man, he’d had a ranch up on the Boulder River. “But some guy from New York wanted it more than I did,” he said, “so I sold it.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Oh, yeah. But at my age . . .” He paused. “You just can’t mess with it anymore.” He walked to the other side of my head and did some snipping. I rested an ankle across my knee. We sat in silence for awhile. “You can’t make any money at it,” he said. “At ranching. You can make a living, but it’s no way to make money. I still say, the only time you make money ranching is when you sell the place.”

Another guy walked in. Ron said hello to him, he said hello back, I said hello to the new guy, and he said hello to me. He sat in the only waiting chair against the wall.

“So how has Big Timber changed since you grew up here?” I asked Ron. The guy against the wall chuckled, then smiled when I looked at him to let me know he hadn’t meant to be derisive.

Ron chuckled too. “Terms of size, it hasn’t changed much at all,” he said.

“The people,” said the guy who had just walked in. His name, I would learn, was Arnie. “The people have changed. Used to be, you’d know everyone on the street. Now, I walk down the street and eighty percent of the people I don’t know.”

“Too many Georgians coming in here?” I grinned.

“No, the Georgians are fine,” Arnie. said. “It’s the Californians. They’ve ruined their state, and now they want ours. Want to run it too. Want to come out here and tell us how to do things.” He shook his head, and if we had been outside, I think he would have spat in the dirt.

“That’s the damned truth,” Ron said.

But neither of the men seemed angry. Just wistful. Arnie told about how it was getting hard to let the local folks hunt on his ranch anymore, since nowadays so many of them wanted to do it. He used to let local folks hunt, as did most landowners, but now he had two problems. First, people were coming in from out of town wanting to hunt, so there were more hunters. And second, because out of town folks were buying up the land around Big Timber and not allowing hunters, there was less land. “The people from out of town want to have their own private zoos or whatever,” he said. “And they don’t realize how that affects the neighbors. I’ve got a neighbor who’s got 130 head of elk on his place. Won’t let anybody hunt. Just got 130 elk out there. These folks don’t know – he doesn’t realize – how much damage 130 elk can do to his neighbors.”

He meant, I think, competing with his cows for grazing. For Arnie, cattle had priority over elk. Most folks used to agree, but now it’s not so clear. The world that he had described is ending. Ron had it right: it’s hard to make money ranching in the old way. It doesn’t pay because it’s inefficient – without subsidies, ranching would be finished already. The subsidies will last only so long as ranchers maintain lobbying power, and that lobbying power will wane as ranchers’ contribution to the economy wanes. Nowadays, the demand for this land is recreational. People from out of state. People like the New Yorker who bought Ron’s place. Hikers, hunters, and sightseers. They prioritize elk over cattle.

“I don’t know,” sighed Arnie, leaning back against the wall. “Maybe I’ll sell.”

What a stylish haircut . . .

Mint Juleps and the Fates of Continents

2009-11-29T20:40:00.000-08:00

“What is this, mint?” I asked as I picked a green sprig from the glass full of them sitting on the bar.

“Feel the stem,” Rebekah said, “if it’s square, you know it’s in the mint family.”

“That’s cool; I didn’t know that.” I felt the stem – perfectly square. “Yep, mint. I wonder if they can make a mint julep.”

“That just means it’s in the mint family,” she reminded me. “It could be mint, spearmint, any of those.”

“I see,” I said. I caught the bartender’s eye. “Can yall make a mint julep?” I asked her.

“Sure can,” she said. “You want one?”

I told her I did, and Rebekah and I returned to talking about the book she was reading, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. I’d read the first part of the book before I left it in a Waffle House one day, and I still remembered some of it. As the title suggested, the book surveyed modern anthropological findings about pre-Columbian Native American culture. It told of giant American cities: Tenochtitlan, it said, had running water and was larger than any contemporary European city; Machu Picchu was a thickly-populated and well-constructed city perched in a place that complex societal organization to build; Cahokia was the thriving hub of a continental trade network.

“If Columbus had never reached the Americas,” Rebekah asked, “do you think the Americas would have caught up? Would they have become as developed as Europe?”

I told her I didn’t think so. Technological development in the Americas faced some hurdles that development in Europe did not. The availability of draft animals, for instance. I paused to watch the bartender, who was pouring Jim Beam into a blender. She reached for a handful of mint-family sprigs and dumped them in. That wasn’t right – a blender can be involved in some phases of mint julep production, such as shredding the ice, but the whole concoction shouldn’t be just dumped in there. The aesthetic signature of a mint julep is an intact sprig of mint, partially submerged but with some leaves waving languidly above the rim. The glass wouldn’t fit in on the porch without them.

“That may be your drink right there,” Rebekah said.

And you don’t use just any bourbon for a mint julep. Maker’s Mark is ideal, and although lesser bourbons are acceptable, Jim Beam was stretching it. I’ve drunk mint julep at the Kentucky Derby, and my mother has made some mint juleps that could rival any mixed drink ever made, so I considered myself an authority on the subject. At least compared to Montanans. The bartender pressed a button and the blender started whining.

“Yeah, I think it might be,” I said.

At the time of the development of agriculture, there were only fourteen large mammals in the world suitable for domestication. To be a candidate for domestication, a species had to satisfy each of several characteristics: the species had to be herd-oriented, non-aggressive, capable of reproducing in captivity, able to digest readily available foods, able to grow and reach maturity in a few years, and calm enough to live in an enclosure without panicking. This idea came from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. Eurasia was host to several of these large mammals, including the water buffalo, certain species of camel, cattle and horses. The Americas had but two: the llama and the reindeer. Neither could help the North American Indians, since the llama was native to South America and didn’t reach North America until modern times, and the reindeer was restricted to arctic regions. The American bison wasn’t amenable to domestication, as evinced by the failure of ranchers – modern or prehistoric – to domesticate it in the way that cattle or horses have been domesticated. Try to envision, for instance, someone riding a bison or hitching it to a plow. Because to be domesticable, an animal had to meet all of the several criteria. Diamond had used some fictional novel to illustrate that principle; I couldn’t remember which. But it was something to the effect that every functional family is dully identical, while every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own unique way. All the large mammals of North America, Diamond analogized, were dysfunctional for domestication in their own ways.

“Anna Karenina,” Rebekah said.

“Yeah!” I said. “How did you say that second word again?”

She said it, and sounded like a word that would be hard to say with a southern accent. The waitress brought a white slushy concoction with green flakes and set it in front of me. I decided not to try and repeat “Karenina,” so I put the glass to my mouth instead.

Rebekah wasn’t too sure about my theory that pre-Columbian American cultures would not had developed in the way that European cultures did if left alone for a few centuries more. She’s a graduate student at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, and she teaches college classes on an Indian reservation around there. Really likes her job, and really likes her students. She feels like she’s made a connection to Native American culture since she started teaching there, and I guess she has. Earlier she’d described, with some fascination, the ritual dances that some Native Americans still do. She’d also said that many of her students lacked the advantages of typical college students – they were working their way through school, or had to take night classes, or struggled to find daycare for kids. They didn't have, in other words, the advantages that I'd had. And yet, Rebekah had told me, the tribe was pushing education, and enrollment was rising. I remembered with a flash of pride that I was one-sixty-fourth Cherokee. Or maybe it was one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, I couldn’t remember.

There were some pretty good reasons to think I might be wrong about my theory that North American cultures, if left untouched, would not have advanced to European technological levels. One of Europe’s developmental advantages was that domesticated species and technological advancements from Asia could travel to Europe relatively easily, since they could cross Eurasia at a constant latitude and thereby avoid major climatic stresses en route. North America didn’t have that advantage: South American domesticates and technology had to pass through the Central American jungle – murderous mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, and all – before reaching North America. In consequence, native North American cultures missed out on some pretty cool stuff. The llama, for instance, never reached North America, and neither did the systems of writing developed by some South American cultures. But what if Europeans had not ventured across the Atlantic in 1492, and had instead waited until 1992? Surely llamas, writing, and other cultural innovations would have crossed between the Americas somehow, either overland or by sea. That could have changed the game.

My mint slushy tasted good but, I reflected, that was more likely attributable to my notoriously easy-to-please palate than the quality of the beverage. I slurped some of it. You wouldn’t serve it at the Derby, but it still tasted like mint and whiskey – a good combination. I was about to voice disagreement with Rebekah, just for the sake of argument, when she spoke up.

“Jeb,” she said, “you’ve got a mint leaf stuck to your lip.”

I wiped it with a forearm, grinned, and decided not to be so contrary.

Accuracy and Availability

2009-11-28T20:19:00.000-08:00

I guess people have always confused the accuracy of an explanation with the availability of alternatives.

For Joseph Walker’s expedition to the Pacific, one primary source dominates the historian’s landscape. Zenas Leonard, the young man hired to be the expedition’s clerk, kept a journal on the trip. After the trip, when Leonard returned to Pennsylvania, Leonard’s story was published in a local newspaper in two installments. Leonard’s account is thorough and, apart from the dates Leonard provides, is generally consistent with corroborating sources when such sources are available. But for much of what happened, Leonard’s story, as published in the Pennsylvania newspaper, is the only source we have.

When no other source addresses a part of the Walker Expedition that Leonard describes, historians writing about the Walker Expedition have often treated Leonard’s account as though it presented unimpeachable fact. For instance, while the expedition was leaving the Sierra Nevadas and heading toward the Pacific, Leonard recounts two occasions on which Captain Walker allayed the expedition members’ fears about natural phenomena. First, Leonard reports that after making camp one night, “we were startled by a loud distant noise similar to that of thunder.” Leonard says that some of the expedition’s members thought that it might be an earthquake and that “we would all be swallowed up into the bowels of the earth.” According to Leonard, when Walker hypothesized that the sound came from the waves of the Pacific, all the expedition members were calmed. (Walker’s explanation cannot have been correct; at the time, the expedition was two days’ walk from the ocean.) Second, on November 13, 1833, there was a meteor shower. Mountain men would refer to that meteor shower for years as “The Night it Rained Fire” or “The Night the Stars Fell.” Leonard reports that a few words from his Captain was all that was needed to calm the expeditionary group: “after an explanation from Capt. Walker, [the expedition members] were satisfied that no danger need be apprehended from the falling of the stars, as they were termed.”

Bil Gilbert, author of an otherwise excellent biography of Walker, draws on these examples to conclude that “it is apparent that by that time the hard-bitten trappers had come to have an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom and turned him into a soothing authority.”

To me, that sounds like a bit much. Available texts allow a historian to conclude that Walker was well-regarded among mountain men as an explorer and as a leader, but concluding, on the basis of Leonard’s journal, that this group of weather-beaten mountain men had “an almost childlike faith in [Walker’s] wisdom” strikes me as a stretch. I find it hard to believe that a few words from Walker, however well-regarded he was, could have allayed the fears of this large group of notoriously independent mountain men in the immediate and universal way that Leonard indicates. A far more likely explanation, I think, is that Zenas Leonard was telling a story that would sound good in the Pennsylvania press, so he oversimplified events and lionized his expedition’s leader. I don’t mean to imply that I think Leonard’s stories about the meteor shower and earthquake noise were entirely false – I suspect they were based on real events (the meteor shower, at least, is a recorded astronomical fact) – but I do not think an objective historian should swallow Leonard’s account whole. Both of Leonard’s remembrances on which Gilbert based his “childlike faith” hypothesis reek of hero-worship.

It is true, of course, that we have no version of events to compete with Leonard’s. But the absence of an alternative explanation does not convert a readily available explanation into unimpeachable fact. It may once have been the case, for instance, that the best available explanation for a cloudburst was “we did a rain dance,” and it may once have been the case that the best explanation for Earth’s biodiversity was instantaneous creation of each species by a divine figure, but the unavailability of alternative explanations for rain or species diversity did not transform rain dancing or creationism into accurate explanations for the world around us. Now we have meteorology and evolution, which appear to be more rational explanations. It is of course true – in case you are a rain-dancer or creationist – that neither modern meteorology nor evolutionary theory is perfect. Both theories are almost certainly imperfect, and should be improved in the years to come. But the unavailability of a better theory cannot transform a readily available theory – be it rain dancing, creationism, or hard-bitten trappers turned to children sitting raptly by Joseph Walker’s knee – into a perfect explanation.

Leonard may be our only source for certain details, but that doesn’t mean everything he said was accurate. It is conceivable, of course, that Leonard’s storytelling is perfectly accurate, as some historians seem to assume. It is much more likely, however, that he succumbed to at least some of the temptations that beset all storytellers – to embellish some facts, omit others, and shuffle others around in order to impress an audience. Leonard was only human, and historians who forget the limitations in human retellings turn a willfully blind eye to one of the most predictable patterns in human attempts to reconstruct the past.

One of Cosgriff's horses in the foreground; Crazy Mountains in the background.

Ol' Cropped Ears. Half cutting horse and half grizzly bear, he's both fleet and ferocious, a freedom-craving cow's worst nightmare.

The Perils of Creedence Clearwater Revival

2009-11-27T21:47:00.000-08:00

The radio was playing CCR, the sky was bright blue, the two-lane road was wide open; I was driving fast and drumming my hands on the wheel to the beat. I was driving the Subaru that we leave out in Montanta, and compared to my truck, that car will fly. The wind roared past the door seals. Yellow dotted line smearing by, G-forces pressing me against my seat belt in the curves. I’d never seen a cop on this part of US 191, and I figured it was unlikely that any cops would be working the beat on Thanksgiving morning, so I was cruising. Radio playing as loud as Duke could stand. You try driving a fast car on an open road in Montana when “Down on the Corner” is playing and obeying the speed limit – I challenge you. It can’t be done.

A vehicle came over the hill ahead of me. I peered at it as I got closer. A blue pickup truck – no problem. I resumed singing – “Rooster hits the washboard and people just gotta smile . . .” – and Duke stood in his seat, looking at me, wagging his tail, wondering what the hell I was saying and why. The way fishermen wonder why fish jump. I grinned and was reaching out to pat his head when a low-profile light on the roof of that pickup flashed blue, then red.

Damn.

I hit the brakes hard and Duke nearly fell off the seat. I wondered how far over the limit I was – I didn’t know how fast I was going, but I was pretty sure it was north of ninety. The truck started to pull off the pavement, so I slowed down and stopped. In Georgia, I thought, you can lose your license for exceeding twenty-five over. I didn’t know what the speed limit was on this road. The truck turned around, lights flashing on the roof and in the grille now, and pulled behind me. I swore. How high would I need the speed limit to be for me not to have broken it by twenty-five? Seventy? In my rearview mirror I could see the cop step out of his truck. I doubted the speed limit was seventy on a two-lane road.

I remembered someone telling me that cops like for you to have both hands on the wheel when they approach. Apparently if you do that, the cop might figure you know what’s going on and think you’re involved in law enforcement. I cut the car off and dropped the key in the cupholder and put my hands on the wheel. Maybe he’d write me a ticket for slower than I was going. I’d heard of that happening. I would have to ask; this could end badly unless I caught a break. The cop was growing larger in my rearview mirror. A big cop, too; taller than six feet and broad at the shoulders. I realized I’d forgotten to roll the window down. I looked at the door – damn, power windows. I put the key in the ignition and was fumbling around with the window switch when the cop bent down and placed his aviator-shielded face on the other side of the glass.

“Good morning,” he said when I finally got the window down.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I said with more bitterness in my voice than I’d intended to allow.

“How are you today?” he asked.

“Well, I was doing alright.”

He chuckled slowly. “You were doing –” he raised his left hand above the doorsill, held it palm-down and rocked it side to side the way people do when they’re describing something approximate – “about ninety-two.” He paused. “That’s a little fast for here.”

I looked at the wheel. “Yes it is,” I admitted. I was about to launch into my best excuse, which I had planned to use for this occasion because it would also lead into my excuse for not having an insurance card, that I didn’t usually drive this car, I normally drove a heavy-duty pickup, and this durn car is so smooth that you can get to going so fast without realizing it, and . . . when he spoke.

“Try and slow it down a little,” he said.

I couldn’t believe it – was I going to get out of this? “Uh – yes, sir, I’ll do that, I . . .” I stammered, still looking down.

“Just slow it down some,” he reiterated. I noted a large fleshy protuberance in the left side of my vision and realized that it was the cop’s right hand, extended for a handshake. I looked up into his glasses and shook his hand. It was not the hand of a man with whom you’d want to get in a barfight.

“I sure will,” I said.

He chuckled and rose to his full height so that I was looking at his belt buckle. “Have a good Thanksgiving,” he said as he walked away.

As a wise man once said, I’d rather be lucky than good any day. All the same, I set the cruise control to sixty-five on the way home. It helped that CCR was finished playing.

Thanksgiving with the Lavarells

2009-11-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

It was that time after Thanksgiving dinner when digestion, normally a secondary task that can be accomplished while you attend to something else – working, walking, doing the dishes, etc. – requires your full attention. The Cowboys were beating the Raiders on TV, and we sat in a semicircle watching them in various states of somnolence. Those of us who occupied reclining seats with poke-out footrests stuck our feet out in front of us. At least one set of eyes was closed. But I have always been a quick digester, and soon I rose to stretch.

“Where are you going?” asked one of the blonde-haired kids that had been running around all day. I had trouble keeping them straight, but I think his name was Dylan. It had been a long time since I’d been around so many kids.

“I’m going to go let my dog out of the truck,” I said. “You want to come meet my dog?”

“Okay,” he said.

As I walked toward the door I passed Rebekah, who was reclining in her chair. I tapped her stocking feet. “Would you like to come meet my dog?”

She considered for a brief moment. “Alright,” she said.

We walked out to my truck, which was parked behind a cluster of cars. The Lavarells, who are the closest thing I’ve got to next-door neighbors, had a big crowd over for Thanksgiving. There were aunts, uncles, grandparents and in-laws milling around. They had set out quite a feast, and had been kind enough to invite me over. Turkey, dressing, sweet potato casserole, cranberry gelatin, mashed potatoes, some kind of yellow dish with bread crumbs and carrots. All excellent. And, because Mrs. Lavarell’s family comes from Norwegian stock, they also served a delicious fried flatbread called “lefse,” which you eat by smearing butter on it, dumping sugar on the butter, then rolling it into a tube. The other Norwegian dish they talked about but did not serve was “lutefisk” – cod soaked in ice water for ten days, treated with lye, and served in gelatinous form. It is, by all accounts, rank. But I was told that some Norwegians actually eat it. I was glad the Lavarells had elected to serve lefse.

I don't care who eats it, I'm sticking with lefse.

Out at the truck, I unloaded Duke and grabbed his tennis ball from under my seat.

“Can I throw it?” asked the boy.

“Sure,” I said, “but first let me show you how. There’s a procedure you should follow.”

I told Duke to heel, and once he was sitting by my right ankle, I threw the ball. I waited until it had bounced a couple times, then said “Duke” – and off he went, pounding the dirt with his paws.

“That’s good. But will he bring it back?” asked Rebekah. Rebekah, I had learned, enjoyed testing me. She taught at a tribal school near Bismarck, North Dakota and was working on a master’s thesis regarding the habitat of burrowing owls. I liked her. I hadn’t been able to sort out exactly what subjects she taught or what field she was studying, but she knew a lot about conservation, Indian tribes, and ecology, all interesting subjects to me. I was happy that she was testing me on Duke’s training. That’s a battle I can win.

“This dog? Oh, you bet. He’s a professional.”

Duke had the ball in his mouth before it stopped rolling and came jogging back to me. At my command, he sat at my right ankle. “Give,” I said, and he gave me the ball. I smiled cockily at Rebekah.

“Can I try?” asked the kid. I gave him the ball and he chucked it about forty yards. Duke retrieved it and brought the ball to me.

“This time, let’s do it a different way,” I said to the kid. I knelt and covered Duke’s eyes. “We’ll do a blind retrieve, where you throw it and then I’ll have Duke follow my directions to the ball. Throw it up that way –” I pointed in a direction where we hadn’t thrown yet – “and I’ll send him after it.”

The kid started to rear back. “But don’t throw it too far,” I added.

“How far?” he asked.

“Oh, about middle range,” I said.

He looked uncertain. “Throw it about twenty yards,” I said. The kid still looked confused.

“He’s seven, Jeb,” Rebekah said. She was right, I guess – seven-year-olds don’t compute yardage. I’d forgotten. There was a time when I was good with kids, but I was out of practice.

“Oh. Well – just throw it regular. Not quite as far as you did last time.”

He threw the ball fifteen yards or so and emphasized that he could have thrown it further. Males are such showoffs. I uncovered Duke’s eyes and sent him after it. I looked at Rebekah. She smirked.

Back inside, Rebekah and I sat on a bench that the Lavarells had brought inside to seat the family. Dessert time. Mrs. Lavarell brought me a plate with slices of pumpkin pie, cheesecake, some other brownish pie and a goodly dab of ice cream. I liked it all. I was beginning to wonder if my palate, which had returned a verdict of “excellent!” every time I’d put any of the Lavarells’ Thanksgiving food into my mouth, had been rendered unreliable by three months of my own cooking when another blonde-haired Norwegian boy ran up to Rebekah.

“Watch this!” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“Watch me hit the golf ball,” he said as he ran out the door. We watched through the glass. He set a golf ball on the grass then picked up a club that was almost as tall as he was. He grasped the very end of the black handle and took the club back as far as he could, bending at the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and wrists. It looked as though he were participating in a golf club throwing contest. Maximum power.

“I like this kid’s style,” I said.

“He’s a baseball player,” Rebekah said.

“What a way to live, though. Full-bore.”

“Swinging for the fences,” she said.

The kid swung and made contact. The ball zipped sixty yards, and he ran after it. After collecting the ball, he ran inside.

“Hey, while you were out, the phone rang for you,” I told him. “The PGA wants you on the Tour.”

He looked confused. “The professional golfers,” Rebekah explained to him. She cut her eyes at me.

“He’s nine, Jeb,” she said.

“Oh.” I smiled. I have liked living out of my truck, but there are some things I’ve missed out on.

Cooking Rabbit

2009-11-25T20:54:00.000-08:00

I stoked the fire and put some salt water on to boil. This would be my second time cooking rabbit. The first time, I’d cut the rabbit into pieces, marinated it for a couple hours in red wine and brown sugar, then sautéed the meat in a skillet. It was terrible. The rabbit was edible in the same sense that a marinated boot sole would be edible. I tried to serve some of the meat to friends so that I wouldn’t have to eat it all, but they refused. I had to throw it out. This time, I planned to cook the rabbit mountain-man style: either roasting or boiling it. Not, I will note, because I thought it would taste better – but because I care that much about historical authenticity. In fact, I was not looking forward to eating it. The unpalatability of my prior culinary product, I suspected as I listened to the fire crackle and watched the salt water boil, was attributable only in part to my marginal abilities in food preparation. In all likelihood, part of the problem was that rabbit just doesn’t taste very good. I checked out a few rabbit recipes online, just out of curiosity, and found most of them suspiciously complex – one involving celery, carrots, onions, water chestnuts, mushrooms, chicken broth, salt, pepper, cornstarch, sherry, and not all that much rabbit – which suggested that rabbit meat needed significant assistance to satisfy the modern palate. Compare the foregoing ingredient list to the way most people cook a steak: marinate in Dale’s Steak Sauce, grill, eat. Which meat sounds better: beef or rabbit?

But I am nothing if not persistent. I cut up some chunks of the rabbit I’d shot and plunked them into the boiling salt water. I cut a slice of rabbit, jammed it onto a coathanger, and hung it over the fire. Then I sat back to await results.

A slice of rabbit hanging over the fire.

Rabbit – or to be precise, hare – was an important food source for mountain men. According to archeologist Sam Drucker, most of the discarded bones around the Green River rendezvous sites came not from buffalo, elk, deer or antelope, but from rabbits. Rabbits were probably particularly important to members of the Walker Expedition, who traveled through lots of game-poor country. Buffalo, the mountain men’s staple food, weren’t available west of the Great Salt Lake. In fact, there wasn’t much game at all along the Humboldt River, the watercourse that the Expedition followed across Nevada, and the Expedition’s members struggled to find game in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during their winter crossing. When one of the expedition’s hunters killed a deer on the western edge of the Sierras in late October, Zenas Leonard remarked in his journal that it “was the first game larger than a rabbit we had killed since the 4th of August when we killed the last buffaloe near the Great Salt Lake.” Between the Sierras and the Great Salt Lake, the Expedition survived on jerked buffalo meat and, in all likelihood, a good number of rabbits.

The campfire-roasting method of preparation was probably most common for small groups of trappers. It’s the way Jeremiah Johnson cooked the rabbit he killed in his eponymous movie. The method is pretty simple: build fire, hold rabbit over it. Well-equipped trappers might have had salt and pepper to flavor the meat. Because the Walker Expedition was both well-equipped and had passed by the Salt River and the Great Salt Lake, they would almost certainly have had salt, and might have had pepper. When I pulled my hunk-o-rabbit off the fire, I intended to use both.

The boiling method would have been possible only for larger expeditions that carried kettles. There’s no record of whether the Walker Expedition carried kettles, but roughly contemporaneous, similarly-sized trapping expeditions did. Many Indians often boiled meat, especially for ceremonial occasions. The trappers would likely have parboiled the rabbit – which I recently learned means to boil with salt – in order to improve the taste. In modern parlance, parboiling is supposed to draw the wild, gamey taste out of the rabbit. When preparing my parboiling pot, I had opened the spout on a can of Morton’s and dumped liberally.

After 45 minutes, I got up to check the salty-water pot. Reluctantly, I fished out the chunks of meat. I set them in a bowl and stared at them. They didn’t look bad, really. Just like regular morsels of cooked meat. I was still suspicious. The rabbit I’d sautéed the time before hadn’t looked bad either, and it had still lost me friends. Grimly, I picked a chunk up between my fingers. I put it in my mouth.

A few chunks of parboiled rabbit.

And you know what? It was good. Maybe it was just the upcoming holiday, but it tasted like dark turkey meat. The only problem was that I had used too much salt. But not bad. I walked to the fireplace and inspected the slice of meat hanging from the coathanger. My hopes for this piece were dim – it even looked bad. Burned on the bottom, fleshy on the top. Nevertheless, I pulled it down and sliced it off the hanger. The meat was done. I tore a piece off the top, started to sniff it but stopped myself, then popped it in my mouth. And damn if it wasn’t good too. Even without salt or pepper. Tasted like grilled dove.

These mountain men didn’t have it so rough after all.

Jeb Butler, Wrangler

2009-11-24T21:03:00.000-08:00

I pulled harder until the lead rope slipped between my hands. I picked it up, wrapped it around my knuckles three times, and pulled again. “Come on, damn you!” I said.

But he wouldn’t move. I spat in the dirt and glared at the horse. He looked placidly back at me, chewing. Maddening.

It was one of John Cosgriff’s horses. They’re grazing on our place for the winter, but they’re not supposed to come in the yard. Otherwise they’d tear up the grass and leave turd piles for us to remember them by. There’s a three-rung wooden fence that surrounds most of the yard except where it abuts Otter Creek, and John had run a single white strand of electric fence along the creekside. Between the three-rung fence and the single-strand electric fence, the yard was fully enclosed. But this horse had gotten into the yard enclosure somehow. I needed to get him out.

He was grazing down by Otter Creek, at the far side of the enclosure from the gate. The reason he was at that end of the yard was that the rest of the herd, which was still outside the enclosure, was grazing on the opposite side of the creek. This horse, like all horses, wanted to stay as close to the others as possible. They’re herd animals. I grew up around horses, and I knew that one of the toughest things to make a horse do is leave the herd. It’s as difficult as driving a cat, or making a cat come to you, or teaching a cat to retrieve, or making a cat do anything useful for that matter.

Well, maybe not that hard, but it is difficult. Most of John’s horses are fairly skittish, so I figured I’d try to drive the horse over to the gate. Although it’s not easy for a single person to drive a reluctant animal, I figured I could use the fenceline to my advantage the way an open-field tackler uses the sideline – to limit his options. I’d just drive him along the fence until we reached the gate. So I walked toward the horse.

And he came to me as I approached. He stopped a couple feet away and reached his nose toward me like he was going to bite a button off my jacket. Clearly, I thought, you can’t drive a horse that won’t run from you. So I spoke softly to him and lifted my hand. He sniffed my glove then resumed sniffing my chest. Slowly I lifted my hand to his neck and petted it. I can get a lead rope on this horse, I thought. I’ll just lead him out. That’ll be easier than trying to drive him.

So I retrieved Duke’s leash from the truck, tied a piece of nylon rope to the end of the leash to lengthen it, and walked back to the horse. I approached slowly. Again he reached out as though he wanted to make a snack of my buttons. Again I let him sniff my hand, and again I reached up to his neck. I slipped the leash over his neck and tied it in a knot that wouldn’t slip and strangle the horse under tension, then I tugged on it. The horse started after me, and I congratulated myself on knowing my way around horses. Once you know one horse, I thought, you know a good bit about the rest of them. Then the horse got more reluctant, and I had to pull to keep him going. He slowed further, and I was leaning against the rope as I pulled. Then he stopped altogether.

“Come on, now,” I said. I pulled. The rope slipped through my hands.

I wrapped the rope around my knuckles and pulled. “Come on, damn you!” But still, nothing. I pulled again, this time with sustained effort. The horse held his head high and leaned back ever so slightly, bracing against his front hooves, and the only thing that changed was that my knuckles hurt. I might as well have been pulling at a barn.

“Damn your time,” I muttered. I walked around behind the horse, still holding the rope, and slapped him across the rump. No reaction. I hit him again, harder, then ran back in front of the horse to pull. He stood still. I looked him in the eye for a considered moment, then walked around to the horse’s side and pulled his head alongside his flank. When you do that, a horse has got no alternative but to turn – it’s the way they’re built. The horse turned, following his head, and I led him in a quick circle then straightened out and headed briskly for the gate. He stopped in his tracks and, because I wouldn’t let go of the rope, so did I.

I turned back to him. “Are you a horse or a damned mule?” I demanded. I’d never been around a horse that absolutely refused to be led. I jerked on the rope three times in succession. Nothing. I let the rope go slack and considered the situation. Surely I could outsmart a horse. The horse relaxed, blew through his nose, and reached his nose toward my jacket as if still hoping to pluck a button. “Up yours,” I said. I pulled again on the rope, this time turning away from the horse and laying the rope against my shoulder. Again the horse braced lightly on his front hooves and did not move. I must have resembled a Yorkshire terrier pulling against its leash: straining, ineffectual, and running my mouth in an incomprehensible but annoying fashion. At length I desisted.

Time to change tactics. “Alright, I’ll fix you,” I told the horse. I let his lead rope dangle and went to the garage, where I found about thirty feet of burlap rope and our ATV. I grabbed the rope, got on the ATV, and drove across the yard to the horse. I got off, walked up to the horse, and pulled on the lead rope one more time. He didn’t move.

“That was your last chance,” I told him. "Now we’ll do it the hard way.” I tied one end of the burlap rope to the lead rope, played out about ten feet of burlap, then tied it to the ATV. I got on the ATV and started idling toward the gate. Its engine had more than one horsepower, I noted with satisfaction. Slowly I pulled the slack out of the rope. It pulled tight. The horse jerked his head up in alarm. I idled forward. The horse tossed his head backward. The burlap rope snapped. The horse paused, realized it was free, and went back to grazing. I swore. The leash, nylon rope, and a few inches of burlap rope trailed from the horse’s neck.

“Damn you,” I whispered.

I walked over to the electric fence control box and switched the power off. I walked along the single strand of electric fence and pulled three of the stakes out of the ground. The single white strand lay harmlessly on the ground on the bank of the creek between the herd and the Rebel Grazer. I grabbed the rope that dangled from the horse’s neck and pulled him toward the fence I’d taken down. He came willingly enough now that I was leading him back toward the herd. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this sooner. I was almost to the creek when he stopped. He was looking at the white strand laying on the ground a foot in front of him.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s off. Just step over it.”

But he refused. I pulled. He stayed. I pulled again. He stayed again. I whacked ol’ Button Biter across the rump with a stick. He stayed put. It was a familiar sequence, and after an unreasonably lengthy period, I gave up.

I hated to call John. I’d have to admit that I had been unable to get a single horse from the yard to the pasture. He’d think: “has this guy ever handled a horse before?” and he’d say: “oh, that’s okay this is a difficult horse” and then he’d use some old-rancher method and would, in about two minutes, whisk the horse back into the pasture. It would be some simple method that looked obvious in retrospect, and I’d feel the way you do when you look all around the house for your favorite hat and finally realize, after an hour’s search, that all you had to do was reach on top of your head.

Some of the mountain men faced even steeper learning curves than me. Before I started studying the subject, I recognized that most of the trappers had to learn mountain skills from scratch: how to find mountain passes, how to travel through deep snow, what kind of animals were dangerous, how to communicate with Indians. I had to learn some of the same things myself. But I didn’t realize how much some of the trappers-to-be had to learn. Osborne Russell, for instance, signed up with a fur company in St. Louis in 1834 and traveled west. He remarked early in his narrative, Journal of a Trapper, that many of the recruits were new to wilderness travel, but I didn’t realize how new they were until I read the part where Russell was assigned to garrison Fort Hall. Fort Hall is near Pocatello, Idaho, and it took Russell’s party almost four months to get there. After Russell had joined the garrison, and after the main party had left, some members of the garrison went out hunting for the food they’d need to survive the winter. Russell wrote, “I now prepared myself for the first time in my life to kill meat for my supper with a Rifle.” He had never hunted before? The man was in the middle of Idaho – parts of it are barely civilized now; the area was certainly wild then – and he had never killed game with a rifle! It seemed like he’d waited a little late for his first experiment. But Russell goes on blithely to recount the experience of shooting twenty-five times at a buffalo without killing it, and of chasing a wounded grizzly into the brush and nearly getting mauled as a result. Back at the fort, Russell boasted of his grizzly encounter. “[B]ut I secretly determined in my own mind,” he wrote, “never to molest another wounded Grizzly Bear in a marsh or thicket.” Good call, Osborne.

The horse was nonchalantly grazing in my lawn. Time to call John. I started to turn back toward the cabin and the phone, but then I hesitated. I’d give it one more shot -- I’d try driving him once more. Again I walked up to the Captain Recalcitrance, and again he turned toward me.

“No,” I said, “get out of here.” I waved my arms and stepped toward him. I pushed against his neck. “Get on.”

The horse stepped away from me. “Go on, now,” I said, and I slapped his side. He started walking. I drove him toward the single-stranded electric fence, then alongside it, then alongside the three-runged wooden fence and all the way to the gate. It took about two minutes. I drove him into the pasture. He whinnied as he trotted through the gate. Then he curved around the enclosure and broke into a canter. I leaned on the fence to watch him. He slowed down as he crossed Otter Creek, then cantered, almost galloped, across the tawny pasture toward the herd. Head held high, dark mane and tail streaming behind him. A gorgeous animal. Osborne Russell ended up trapping the Rockies for eight years, operating much of the time as a free trapper who called his own shots. Maybe I’d make it yet.

A couple of Cosgriff's horses on the proper side of the fence.

Helpful Hints for Cartographers

2009-11-23T22:17:00.000-08:00

Otter Creek was frozen over in most places and fringed with ice everywhere else. I stepped over the ice that lined the bank and onto the shoals. The water rushed against my calf-high boots. I eyed the rocky streambed uneasily. I was wearing my heavy wool jacket and a bulky synthetic skull cap – it was way too cold outside to be falling into creeks. I imagined the scream that would likely escape my lips if I toppled into the water. Shrill enough to shatter the glass on the cabin and loud enough to be heard for two miles, it would besmirch my family name for years to come. Determined to avoid such infamy, I set my feet carefully on the mossy rocks, arms extended on either direction like a tightrope walker in Inuit garb, and picked my way across Otter Creek. I clamored onto the opposite bank with relief, then turned to look for Duke.

A coot in Otter Creek. (Picture taken a couple days ago, before the creek froze.)

He was sitting on the opposite bank looking at me with his ears perked. Probably being well-mannered, I thought – when we forded streams while hiking, I’d make him wait on the bank while I crossed so that he wouldn’t bump into me mid-stream and knock me over. I guess he remembered the procedure. What a well-behaved dog.

“Okay,” I called. “Come on.”

Duke started toward the water, put a foot on the icy edge of the stream, withdrew it and looked at me again. He perked his ears. I stared back at him.

“Duke, you lazy ass! Get into the water!”

He sprinted up the bank in one direction, looking for a way across. Then he ran down the bank in the opposite direction. He found a spot and picked his way down the bank, stepped on the ice, then retreated again and ran the other way.

“Duke,” I said, “it’s a stream. You can’t run around it. We crossed this two days ago – it’s Otter Creek!”

I ought to call it Lazy Lab Creek, I thought. It would be a better name than Otter Creek. When it comes to naming topographic features in the American west, two themes dominate to the exclusion of just about everything else: using a local animal, and using someone’s last name. Otter Creek, Bear Lake, Sheep Creek. Bridger Mountains, Owens Valley, Humboldt River. Frankly, I think these themes are overused, and I’d like to see some variation.

A muskrat in Otter Creek. I have never seen an otter in it.

In fact, more inventive names have been actively suppressed. For instance, a trapper named John Colter encountered a stream in what is now Wyoming that ran through tar pits. The river stunk, so Colter called it the Stinking River. It was a good name, and it stuck. It was easy to remember, especially if you were downwind. In his memoirs, the trapper Osborne Russell referred to the watercourse as “Stinking River.” But years later, the Wyoming state legislature would decide that “Stinking River” was not complimentary enough. In an attempt to make the river’s name inoffensive, boring, and bland for the ostensible benefit of future pantywaists, the legislature renamed it the “Shoshone.” Bad call. Norman McLean, in the short story USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, tells the tale of the stream that his Trail Crew called “Wet Ass Creek.” It was a delightful name: did it mean that the creek was, for some reason, unusually damp? Did it mean that the creek’s discoverer, when crossing, fell backward on his butt? Or did it mean the discoverer had a nasty case of swamp ass? A map reader could only grin and guess. But instead of savoring the ambiguity, the Forest Service’s Survey Crew decided that the name was too indelicate. At least the Survey Crew bypassed such obvious alternatives as Deer Creek or Jones Fork: they called it “Wetase Creek” and passed it off as an Indian name.

The American west is in need of better names. There’s no use faking humility; I think cartographers should begin by consulting me. “Lazy Lab Creek” would be a good start, and then they could add “Stinking Pants Spring” for the pit of bovine excrement that I fell into a couple months back. And “Rocky Mountains?” Talk about an uninspired name for America’s most inspiring topographical feature. As Del Que shouted in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, “the Rocky Mountains is the marrow of the world,” and we have named them after the generalized substance that exists in every mountain range everywhere: rock. Dull. That has to change. I propose calling them the “Marrow Mountains,” in honor of Del Que, and then changing “South Pass” to “The Narrow in the Marrow.” And while I’m at it, I’ll reach back to my home state – Atlanta should start calling itself Tohellwithsherman, Georgia. This would require Yankees to say the words whenever they bought plane tickets into our state. And if they refused, what would be the loss?

I would allow some relatively dull names to remain, but only if the name had an interesting story behind it. For instance, Wyoming’s “Sweetwater River” has three nominal stories. One historian says that an early trapper gave the river its name because the water tasted sweet. Warren Ferris, the trapper who wrote Life in the Rocky Mountains, says that the river got its name while a mule laden with sugar slipped in the river and drowned. Still another historian records that a bunch of traders in a “drunken carousel” accidentally dumped a bag of sugar into the water. If we combine all of these stories to ascertain the truth, we learn that the river’s discoverer was drinking downstream of some drunk traders who, in the course of “carousing” with their mule, knocked a bag of sugar off the animal’s back in mid-stream. I’d rather have called the watercourse “Fond-of-Mule River,” but the story is good enough that I’ll settle for “Sweetwater.”

Duke ran down the opposite bank of Lazy Lab Creek and stopped where he’d started. He sniffed the ice at the creek’s edge, then stepped onto it. He waded into the water. Duke’s legs are unusually short for a lab, and although that’s an advantage for slipping under barbed wire fences, he paid the price now. The water splashed against his stomach. I realized with a vicarious wince that other sensitive parts of his anatomy hung at the same elevation. He stepped over an ice floe in midstream and the ice rubbed against his underside. He commenced to running, and bounded the last few steps out of Otter Creek.

He ran to me and I knelt to pet him. He was wet but wagging his tail. Maybe “Lazy Lab Creek” isn’t right. Henceforth, in Duke’s honor, I’ll call it “Retract Creek” instead.

The Other Side of the Glass

2009-11-22T22:27:00.000-08:00

A blue flatbed truck was parked at the northwest corner of the property, and someone was out in the grass digging. I put on my mackinaw jacket, tucked my insulated gloves in the pocket and walked across the pasture toward the truck. The temperature was hovering around freezing and the wind was ripping, twenty knots or so. Gusting harder than that. Duke, who loves the cold, ran ahead of me. I turned up my collar.

Probably John Cosgriff repairing the fence, I thought. John’s family has been ranching around Otter Creek for generations, and I’ve come to know him since we bought property out here. John cuts hay on our place in late summer and pastures his horses on our land in winter, and in return he lets my father, my uncle and me hunt on his property. As I got closer I could see a tan cap with earflaps, floppy with age and darkened with dirt. Frayed strings hanging down from the earflaps. John Cosgriff. The wind was blowing from him to me, and Duke, smelling who it was, ran to greet him. John had just dug a hole for a new fencepost and was trying to hold the post upright in the hole and simultaneously shovel the loose dirt around its base.

“If you wait long enough, someone’ll come along and hold that post up,” I called.

John looked up and grinned. “Hey,” he said.

“Let me grab that post.”

John shoveled dirt around the fencepost and packed it down with a steel pole. John’s horses were grazing at the other end of the pasture, so we didn’t have to worry about them running through the fence while we worked.

“How do you like this Montana weather now?” he asked. It was cold, but I knew the bottom hadn’t dropped out of the thermometer yet. Last week we had warmer air blowing down the valley, what John calls a Chinook wind. We were still feeling some of the warmth.

“Well, I figure it’ll get colder, so I’m trying not to wimp out yet.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Wait ‘till it gets to zero or a little below zero and the wind blowing like this. That’s cold.”

“Right. I’ll let myself bitch about the weather when it gets that cold.”

“Yeah,” he said. He finished packing dirt around the post. “Although, you know, working out of the pickup these days, it’s never that bad. You’ve got the heater a few feet away.” I looked at John’s truck. Grille broken out, exhaust pipe broken, muffler hanging from a strand of bailing wire. But apparently the heater still worked. John talked about how they used to work out of some other piece of equipment, the name of which I didn’t catch. Sometimes I don’t understand everything John says. He talks as though I have also been ranching in Montana for decades. “Open cab and stuff. You’d get so cold you had to get off and warm your hands around the exhaust manifold.”

I nodded. “What happened to the old fenceposts?” I asked.

He pointed to the roadside ditch where he had laid the posts. “That one had rotted out,” he said. “And the others were about to go, so I figured I’d go ahead and replace them all.” I looked at the posts – rotted for sure. I’d driven past this corner ten or twelve times and hadn’t noticed.

John had already put in two new posts before I got there. Now we had to install braces. When you run a barbed wire fence, you generally use three heavy wooden posts in each corner of the pasture – one post in the true corner of the pasture, and then two adjacent wooden posts along the fenceline so that if you looked at the three posts from above, they’d form an isosceles right triangle. All three posts are sunk fairly deeply, and the two non-corner posts are braced to the one in the corner. You fasten the barbed wire to the heavy triad of posts in one corner of the pasture and then use a come-along – basically a hand-operated winch – to stretch the wire tight from one corner of the pasture to the triad of posts in the next corner. After the wire is stretched tight, you clip the taunt wire to metal fenceposts that you drive into the ground along the wire’s route, one about every thirty feet. The metal fenceposts will hold the wire in place as time passes and the wire loosens, but it’s the heavy wooden posts that get it taunt in the first place.

John pulled a chainsaw off the flatbed to notch the wooden posts so that we could install a brace. He made two horizontal cuts, each about an inch deep, in the side of the post where the brace would attach. One cut about eight inches above the other. Then with an axe he chipped out the wood between the cuts. That made one notch. He repeated the process on the opposite post, and sawed a wooden pole fit between them. We lifted the pole and set it in the notches John had cut. It fit snugly. He nailed the pole in place, and the brace was complete. Then he sawed two cuts in the other side of the corner post so that we could install the second brace, and I picked up the axe to chip away the wood between the cuts he'd made. It was close work so I swung with my hands apart on the axe handle. I got it done, but it took me about three times as long as it had taken John and the result was not nearly so neat.

I leaned on the axe handle when I had finished. There were stray marks all over the post from where I’d swung the axe and missed my mark. “I need to work on my accuracy,” I said.

“Oh, it looks pretty good,” John said.

“You do the next one. I need to watch again. I didn’t pay close enough attention the last time.”

As John efficiently chipped out a notch on the third post, a Mercury SUV drove up on the gravel road. Two young guys inside. They slowed and rolled down the window. John looked up.

“How’re you guys doing?” one of them asked.

“Good,” I said. I figured they were friends of John’s – most folks know each other around here – so I waited for John to say something. But he didn’t. I guess he figured that since we were on my family’s land it was my job to do the talking. I took a couple steps toward the car and said, “how’re yall?”

“We’re okay,” one of them replied. I waited a second for him to introduce himself or say what he was doing but he just looked at his buddy nervously and then they drove off. John picked up the axe again.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

I watched them drive away. “Colorado plates,” I said.

Not from around here. I thought about the way we must’ve looked to them – a couple guys out in the cold beside a worn-down flatbed, fixing a fence. Tools lying around, old fenceposts in the ditch, a dog sitting in the grass. They were probably concerned about the impression they were making on the locals. Probably thought I was a rancher. I grinned at Duke and spat in the dirt. I picked up a hammer and some fence staples and walked back to the posts. It was nice to be on this side of car window for a change.

Overlooking Otter Creek; Crazy Mountains in background. The view from a hilltop on our place looking west.

Overlooking Otter Creek; Beartooth Mountains in background. The view from a hilltop on our place looking south.

Nature on an Empty Stomach

2009-11-21T22:43:00.000-08:00

Almost a mile up the valley, on the other side of the cabin from which I had come, a herd of deer moved across a field. I could just make out their bodies in the fading light of evening. Dark brown bodies on a golden-brown field, now bare of the snow that still clung to the hillsides and lurked in shady patches under the cottonwoods of Otter Creek. Otter Creek was the winding centerline of this valley, its course traced by cottonwoods that now stood dark and leafless. I trained my binoculars on the deer. Whitetails. I’d be hunting them in a few days. I counted twelve of them – a big herd, even for this area. They were moving from Otter Creek, a thickly-populated corridor for cervine travel, west toward the Crazy Mountains. I dropped my binoculars. The snow-capped Crazies bounded the valley to the west, their peaks pushing into the clouds. To the east, the flatlands surrounding Otter Creek ascended into sage-covered hills breached by coolies and interspersed with rock cliffs. Beyond those hills, flatlands. The western edge of the Great Plains. It was a remarkable place to sit and survey the country.

I have wondered if this appreciation for natural grandeur is a modern development. Did man have to know cities, buildings and roads before he could appreciate landscapes, mountains and rivers? Did man first have to be certain that he could wrest sufficient food from the earth before he could appreciate its beauty? Aldo Leopold – a nature writer who stands shoulder-to-shoulder in prominence with John Muir and Henry Thoreau – thought so. In his Forward to Sand County Almanac, he wrote, “[t]hese wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured of a good breakfast.”

But I’m not so sure. The fur trappers, for whom the availability of breakfast was frequently in doubt, appreciated the natural splendor of their surroundings. Osborne Russell, a trapper in the 1830s who penned his memoirs in Journal of a Trapper, waxed eloquent about various natural scenes. He was particularly enamored with, and was most moved to gush about, the Lamar Valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park. “For my part,” Russell wrote upon one of his visits to the valley, “I almost wished I could spend the remainder of my days in a place like this.” Zenas Leonard, clerk of the Walker Expedition and author of Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard, wrote about the natural beauty of various scenes, particularly the San Joaquin Valley. Warren Ferris, a fur trapper who wrote his memoirs in Life in the Rocky Mountains, described the beauty of the Rockies. Despite living outdoors almost all the time, and despite frequently foregoing a good breakfast, these trappers found aesthetic value in the wild things around them. Leonard did note that, on occasion, the trappers were too concerned about survival to ponder pretty landscapes: when on the brink of starvation in Yosemite country, he wrote that “we spent no time in idleness – scarcely stopping in our journey to view an occasional specimen of the wonders of nature’s handy-work.” But even then, when recounting the Sierra crossing that the Walker Expedition almost did not survive, Leonard recognized the beauty of his surroundings – even if his thoughts quickly returned to his empty belly.

Of course, Russell, Ferris, and Leonard were all Americans in the political, rather than native, sense – they came from the east where they had known cities, buildings and roads. So if the question is whether an appreciation of natural beauty is inherent, or must be learned by exposure to landscapes altered by man, these three trappers – although they lived day-to-day in wilderness, and although the sources of their next meals were frequently in doubt – do not provide perfect answers. A better test would be to asses the degree to which Native Americans appreciated natural beauty. That’s a question I can’t answer, because the Indians didn’t leave much behind in the way of written records. But we can make this observation: the historical record is replete with explorers, trappers, pioneers and settlers leaving the eastern settlements and heading west for wilder country. But I can think of no example of a Native American leaving the wild country and seeking to live in a town.

The sun had long since slid behind the Crazy Mountains, and soon it would be dark. I had no headlamp and a good distance to walk before I got back to the cabin. Reluctantly, under a darkening sky tinged with orange, I rose to go.

A bison in Yellowstone National Park.

Picture taken in late September.

A Bit of Sense

2009-11-20T20:34:00.000-08:00

I remember cowering in the ash, crumpled into a fetal-position ball by the debilitating chill, too cold even to piss. We had started too early, worn too few clothes, and now we were waiting for dawn so that we could clamor onto the summit of LeMagaruit, a low volcano in Tanzania that you didn’t want to summit in the dark because you might step into a lava flow. Clumped just below the caldera rim, huddled together in an eroded field of gray ash, we stared at the eastern horizon for signs of the sun. I was on a NOLS trip with several other American students, and this was supposed to be a warmup for Kilimanjaro. As I held back my urine, unwilling to subject either my ungloved hands or my unguarded penis to the gnashing cold, I decided that mountain climbing didn’t make a damn bit of sense.

John Krakauer wrote about his Mt. Everest expedition in Into Thin Air, which is about as fine a book as I’ve read in the past five years. To summarize, it was really cold and there wasn’t much oxygen and a storm came up and several people died and several others, Krakauer included, were saddled with a lifetime of guilt for not being able to save them. They knew the risks and climbed anyway – and for what? To say they stood in a particularly high place? When my group set our boots to climbing Kilimanjaro, reached 19,000 feet then had to turn around because a member of the group developed high-altitude cerebral edema – the swelling of the brain caused by high altitude, accompanied by hallucinations, a loss of rational thought, and a loss of motor skills – once we got her down safely, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the summit. Some other folks wanted to take another shot at the top, and if conditions had permitted the climb, I’d have gone with them just for the hell of it. But as for summiting, I didn’t much care. Seven years later, I still don’t.

These reflections, as I drove through the night listening to the Into Thin Air audiobook and reacquainting myself with Krakauer’s writing style, made me feel mature. Here was a story of a bunch of sure-enough grownups, with wives, husbands, and children, taking absurd risks to achieve an objective with which I was unimpressed. I smiled to myself and remembered Harvey Manning’s line from Walking the Beach to Bellingham: “To be sure, long lines of tourists plodding their way up the path to the top of Everest interest me. So do ants.” I stood with Harvey.

But as so often happens with self-righteousness, the next thought was a deflater. It wasn’t the risks that bothered me. It’s just that I didn’t much care about their objective.

True, mountain climbing doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But then, I have long enjoyed duck hunting. I remember getting up before dawn on frigid January mornings with my buddy Ben where we shivered, dressed hurriedly, then looked at the waders. One pair leaked and the other didn’t and we didn’t know which was which so we’d each grab a pair and wade into the beaver pond with our fingers crossed. And I remember standing stock-still, shotgun in hand, as icy water poured down my leg and pooled around my foot thinking, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But we went duck hunting again and again and I loved it. I remember mounting a bicycle at one end of a sandy strip of beach, a foam-covered eight-foot-long PVC pipe in my hand, and staring at a buddy a hundred yards distant with his own bicycle and his own foam-covered pipe. Then we’d pedal toward each other as fast as we could go, stabbing at one another with our lances then colliding with thumps, groans, banging metal and spraying sand. I remember examining the bruises on my chest and thinking, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. But I jousted again, and I loved it.

I tried to get a college buddy of mine to go camping once. “Jeb,” he said, “I could leave behind my warm bed, my TV in the morning, the snacks in the cabinet, and the beer in the refrigerator. I could leave all of civilization behind and go walk around in the woods. I could handle it. But why would I do that?” His point, I think, was this: it didn’t make sense.

Often, the best parts of living just don’t make sense. Joy and sensibility are frequently at odds. Something’s gone wrong: insomuch as enjoying one’s life is a sensible goal, one of these concepts must have gotten off track. Joy or sensibility. One of them is amiss. It’s an easy choice. Having determined that “sense” is defective, I have resolved to jettison it at every opportunity. :)

The aftermath of a joust.

Liars, Allegedly

2009-11-19T22:35:00.000-08:00

“I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me,” wrote Osborne Russell, a native of Maine who was trapping beaver in the Rockies in 1837, “and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life.” I sighed, put down my book, and made a note in my legal pad: “O.R. perceives Crow as duplicitous.” In the left margin, where I write one-word labels so I can scan my notes later, I wrote “RACISM.” It’s a label that appears throughout my notes on fur trappers’ journals.

Condemning such generalizations as racist is a reflexive reaction of my generation, I think. That may be a good thing. It’s better than immediately concluding that an actor’s race determines his conduct. But my generation also strives recognize cultural differences. In Japan, for instance, it’s alright to slurp your noodles. In the United States, it’s not. Either system of manners is fine, we believe, and neither set of table norms is superior to the other. Recognizing that cultural difference, however, is another way of adopting a generalization: Japanese slurp their noodles in public, but Americans don’t. That, I think, is an unobjectionable generalization.

So it’s okay to generalize about cultures and their views on noodle-slurping. But if I were to claim that “black people act like criminals,” that would be an objectionable generalization properly condemned as racist. So, some generalizations are permissible and others aren’t. The dividing line may lie here: generalizing about norms in different cultures is permissible, so long as it is accurate, while generalizing about alleged propensities of different races, as distinct from cultures, is not. In other words, it’s okay to note cultural differences, but not okay to imply that race determines character. For instance, I had a long conversation with a black guy I met in bar in Berkeley who had been born in Sudan but raised in the United States. We talked about how neither of us gave a damn about soccer, which is what the bar had inexplicably decided to show on TV. For me to apply generalizations to this guy would have made no sense because he and I were, broadly speaking, culturally identical. Although he’d grown up in New York and I in Georgia, we were both culturally American and our differences were negligible when compared to – for instance – the differences between Osborne Russell and a Crow Indian in 1837. We were racially different but culturally similar, so generalizations were inappropriate.

Osborne clearly generalized about the Crow. Was my all-caps label of “RACISM” correct? It is indisputably true that the agriculture-based culture into which Osborne Russell was born differed markedly from the hunting-and-gathering culture of the Crow. Their cultures diverged about as much as it is possible for cultures to diverge, in fact. And for all I know, it may have been true that folks from Maine in the 1830s placed a higher value on interpersonal sincerity than the Crow. Maybe what Russell viewed as “duplicitous” the Crow would have viewed as “sound strategy” – a sort of caveat emptor approach to negotiation. A little like modern TV ads in which insurance companies present themselves as allies of their claimants. So when Russell wrote that “I am well aware that a Crow Indian can express great sorrow for me and at the same time be laying a plan to rob me or secretly take my life,” was he being racist? Was his claim more like generalizing about cultural predispositions to noodle-slurp, or more like generalizing as to the allegedly inherent criminality of a different race?

It’s hard to say. To begin, we don’t have the Crows’ side of the story – they left no written record of their views of the trappers’ sincerity. And in part because we don’t have access to the Crows’ perspective, it’s hard to gauge the cultural sincerity of the trappers. Although by 1837 the federal government and the governments of some states – e.g., Georgia – had been swindling eastern tribes like the Cherokee for years, there wasn’t yet enough of a governmental presence in the west to make governmental swindling a possibility. That would come years later, when the United States started packing Native Americans onto reservations. At the time, the trappers were the western representatives of the United States. One hundred and eighty years after the height of the fur trade, it’s difficult to generalize about the fur trappers’ cultural tendencies. Were they more sincere, or less sincere, than the culturally distinct Crow? And if there was a difference in the cultures’ relative sincerity, would it have been racist to acknowledge it?

Forget Forever

2009-11-19T00:21:00.000-08:00

There will come a day when we’re all gone, but nothing much will change.

Humans have always been self-absorbed, and it shows in the way we describe the world around us. Creation myths usually depict the culture in which the myth circulates as preeminent or “chosen” – in Deuteronomy 7:6, for instance, the Jews’ god announces that Jews are his chosen people. Until astronomical data proved otherwise, humans imagined that the Earth was the middle of the universe, and when that model proved empirically untenable, insisted that the sun was the universe’s center – the geocentric and heliocentric theories of astronomy, respectively. The mythology of the Blackfoot Indians provided that the creator had made birds and animals so that man could eat of their flesh. In the movie Jeremiah Johnson, a Rocky Mountain fur trader named Del Que rides into the foothills shouting, “I ain’t never seen them, but my common sense tells me that the Alps are foothills, and the Andes are for children to climb. Yes sir, these here Rocky Mountains are the marrow of the world!” When man describes the drama of the universe, he accords himself the central role.

But the geological record does not. According to present theory, Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. Life appeared around 3.7 billion years ago. Multicellular organisms evolved around 1.8 billion years ago. Life crawled out of the seas and onto land for the first time about 500 million years ago, and dinosaurs waddled forth 230 million years before the present time. Anatomically modern humans emerged 400,000 years ago.

Some comparisons in raw numbers: crocodiles have been around for 200 million years. Trilobites, a group of three-lobed mud crawlers that looked like beetles but are now extinct, pulled off a phenomenal feat by lasting 340 million years. Blue-green algae has been around for a whopping 2.8 billion years. At 400,000 years, man has been around for 0.2% of the crocodile’s time, 0.11% of the trilobites’ time, and .01% of the algae’s time. To put it figuratively, using an analogy from Dave Brower as presented in John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid: if one analogizes man’s evolution to the six days of Genesis, for all of Monday and Tuesday morning, Earth was lifeless. Life began on Tuesday at noon. At midnight on Wednesday, blue-green algae got started. At 4 PM on Saturday, dinosaurs and trilobites entered the scene, and five hours later, both were extinct. Three seconds before midnight – only three seconds before midnight – humankind emerged. We have not been here long enough to win the leading role in the Earthly drama.

And we will not be here much longer. Just as organisms die, species go extinct. Giant meteors like Chicxulub pound the earth; supervolcanoes like the Yellowstone hotspot explode; unknown conditions alter the atmosphere as with the rusting of the Earth in the late Archean; the climate changes drastically as with the Pleistocene ice ages. The more complex species, the faster it goes extinct. Mammals go extinct especially quickly. We’re the most complex mammal we know of. Our time on Earth is finite.

One slightly hung over morning when the coffee was late to arrive, I made this argument to my good friend Matt Stoddard. In a self-important moment, of which I have a regrettable plentitude, I said that no reasonable argument could be made to the contrary. He disagreed: humans would migrate from Earth when they needed to, he said. They would keep planet hopping and never go extinct. But the planethopping theory has a problem: for any given stretch of time, there is some probability that humankind will die out. To be charitable, let’s give humans a 0.1% chance of dying out in any given millennium. If we’re talking about whether man will ever go extinct – that is, planet-hopping indefinitely – then we’re talking about infinite time. Infinite time contains infinite millennia. So the chance that, in one millennium or another, man will eventually go extinct is infinity times 0.1%. Any number times infinity is infinity. The math: extinction is a certainty.

What will happen when humans no longer exist? Not much, probably. The crocodiles will keep swishing through warm salty water and cockroaches will crawl through our pantries. Or maybe the mode of our extinction will be dramatic enough to drag crocodiles and cockroaches down with us. In that case, the more primitive, sturdy forms of life may be all that remain: blue-green algae (aka cyanobacteria) might continue to add to the 2.8 billion years it has spent on Earth; the chemosynthetic microorganisms that live beside hydrothermal vents at the bottoms of the oceans might survive; so might the extremophilic microbes that live inside today’s nuclear reactors. In any case, the passing of Homo sapiens will be the norm rather than the exception – another mammal bites the dust.

And what if we managed to drag all life out of existence? The nonexistence of life wouldn’t be new. Earth existed for 800 million years without life, and the universe existed for about 9 billion years without Earth. Life is not indispensible to the operation of the cosmos. “Life” is, after all, only a label humans have given to a particular set of chemical patterns and reactions that we have observed on the surface of our own planet. The preoccupation with these particular patterns and reactions is, so far as we know, only a human fixation.

I pulled my jacket off the rack and walked outside with Duke. I could hear Otter Creek rippling in the darkness, could see the stars like so much silver confetti tossed across the sky. The cold night air slipped under my fleece and crept inside my pullover, cold against my lower back. Whatever the significance of the chemical patterns that make up my brain and body, and however long my species and I will continue to exist, it was a beautiful night. Duke sat beside me and looked up, waiting to be petted. What a blessing it is to have been included in the pageant of existence.

Cabin by night.

Hare Hunting

2009-11-17T18:09:00.000-08:00

The sunlight bounced off the snow and shone through the living room windows, lighting the table where I sat at my computer. I looked through the window at the hills across Otter Creek, coated in about four inches of snow and nuzzling a light blue sky. Tawny grass poked through the snow in steep places and deer tracks crisscrossed the yard. A magpie sat on the fence twitching its tail. I pulled my gaze from the window, waited a few moments for my eyes to readjust, then went back to work.

Thirty minutes later I put on my jacket, buckled on my gaiters and followed Duke out the door. He bounded in the snow like a puppy. Deer tracks were everywhere. Piles of scat in the front yard. Partridge tracks across the driveway. I walked across the footbridge over Otter Creek and saw that deer had been using the bridge too. The snow was old enough to crunch underfoot and the wind was blowing just hard enough to roar across your ears when you turned into it, but not hard enough to be uncomfortable. A gorgeous day.

I angled toward a copse of trees with some deadfalls lying at their bases, intending to walk past them and roam around in the hills. Duke ran ahead. He was sniffing around the bases of the trees when a snowshoe hare lept from the cover of the trees and ran forty yards across the open snow, then stopped and stood on its hind legs to watch me. He would have been in easy range if I’d brought a shotgun. The mountain men ate lots of hares and rabbits. Sam Drucker, the archeologist in Pinedale, had told me that most of the discarded bones at the mountain men’s rendezvous site did not come from deer or buffalo, but from hares and rabbits. The members of the Walker Expedition probably ate more rodent than they would have liked – when one of the expedition’s hunters killed a deer on the western edge of the Sierra Nevadas in late October, Leonard remarked in his journal that it “was the first game larger than a rabbit we had killed since the 4th of August when we killed the last buffaloe near the Great Salt Lake.” I whistled for Duke, who smelled the hare but had not seen him yet. He came to me and we walked back to the cabin for a gun.

Dad had taken our shotguns back to Georgia, but I picked up the old .30-30 and jacked a round into the chamber. Zenas Leonard wouldn’t have had anything like this rifle, but this gun had its own place in American lore. A lever-action gun with a short barrel, open sights and a hardwood stock, the Model 1894 Winchester was ideal for carrying in a scabbard strapped to your saddle. The necked-down cartridge was the flat-shooting wonder of the late 1800s – though powerful enough to take down an elk or moose with a well-placed shot, the bullet was light and fast, relative to its contemporaries, which made it excellent for killing at several hundred yards. And it was beautifully balanced. The rifle’s balance makes it attractive even today – throw a Model 1894 to you shoulder and it holds naturally steady. Swing it as though shooting at a moving target and the barrel slides across the horizontal like an expensive Italian shotgun. Carry it by your side with a hand across the action and the rifle hangs, muzzle slightly down, just like God intended. It was designed by John Browning, a gun designer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whose designs – the Model 1894 rifle, the 1911 style pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle, the Auto-5 shotgun – remained the templates with which subsequent designers began their work until the very late twentieth century. But of all his designs, and perhaps more than any other rifle, the Model 1894 is the American classic. It is the best-selling centerfire sporting rifle of all time. John Wayne used a Model 1894. If that won’t sell rifles, nothing will.

Our Model 1894.

Duke saw the rifle when I came back out of the cabin and bounced on his front feet in excitement, anticipating that he might have something to retrieve besides a tennis ball. “Hold on, buddy,” I told him, “we have to find him first.” I walked toward the copse of trees where we’d started the hare and looked to the spot where he’d run. He was no longer there. “Stay,” I whispered to Duke and walked to where I’d last seen him.

The hare was probably close – most rabbits, when started, run in a large circle. I looked around as I walked but didn’t see him. The snow where the hare had stood was pockmarked with deer tracks, but before long I found the hare’s prints. Two long prints shaped like snowshoes, then two nearly circular prints from the front feet. His tracks were visibly fresher than the surrounding prints. I followed them for a few yards. They led back toward the copse of woods from which the hare had first emerged. I looked into the trees, stumps, and downed logs that formed the copse. If I followed the tracks into the trees, the trees would limit my field of vision and I probably wouldn’t see the hare until I got close, at which point he’d run. He’d be hard to shoot on the move. But if I circled the trees, the hare might stay put, hoping that I would pass by without seeing him. And if, peering into the woods, I could see the hare before he ran, I’d have an easy rifle shot.

Hunting often troubles the modern conscience. Nothing gets anti-hunters worked up more than hunters defending their passion by explaining that they enjoy being out in nature. “If your aim is to commune with nature,” anti-hunters exclaim, “why are you killing the animals? Go hiking and leave the gun at home!” It’s easy to understand their response. But the experiences are different – so very different. Hiking is a wonderful way to observe nature. There is much to be said for tramping though beautiful country, admiring the views, and watching animals in their natural habitats. But a hiker is only a tourist. A hunter is something else – when you creep through the woods, your footfalls quiet, face in the wind, eyes roving the forest, seeking out game because you intend to kill it, peel back its skin, and digest it so that its flesh contributes to your own, you are no longer a tourist. You are a living, breathing, scheming participant in the food chain. There is nothing else like it.

I circled the copse of woods. The sun was almost directly overhead and the foliage was long gone from the trees, so I could see into the woods. A large trunk, three feet in diameter, lay parallel to my course. I looked along it, focusing at one end of the log, then the next section, then the next. Human eyes often overlook stationary objects when they scan an area, but if you examine the area piece by piece, pausing to refocus your eyes each time, you’ll notice more. Tufts of grass, broken branches, a drift of snow. No hare. I continued the circle. I heard the tinkle of Duke’s collar and I held out my palm to remind him that he was under “stay” orders. Even when footfalls and the sight of a human form won’t spook game, the sound of a human voice may stir them to flight. The wind picked up and the trees swayed, creaking. A magpie fluttered from one limb to another. I stopped to look. There, beside the big log, sat the hare. I should have seen him earlier. His fur was white and grayish-brown, perfect camouflage for his surroundings. He had spotted me but wasn’t sure if I’d seem him. He sat on his haunches. I raised the rifle, cocked the hammer and centered the front sight on his chest. He didn’t move. I squeezed the trigger.

When my eyes refocused from the recoil the hare lay dead, sprawled backward in the snow. The bullet had entered his chest, passed through his chest cavity and upper abdomen, and exploded out his lower back. Lots of damage. Not surprising when you shoot a rabbit with a deer rifle, but at least he hadn’t suffered. Although there wouldn’t be much left of the backstraps, his haunches would make good eating. I backed away and called Duke, who retrieved the hare, then watched eagerly as I cut the meat out with my knife. Duke’s eyes, normally trained on my face when we’re doing something together, never left the hare. I grinned. A part of the food chain.

Duke retreiving the hare.

Buffalo Hunting

2009-11-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

Dust in your nostrils, wind in your face, thunder in your ears, rifle in your hand.

There is no doubt but that the frontiersmen loved running buffalo. When a herd appeared, buffalo hunters mounted their fastest horses and grabbed whatever armament they had available – sometimes pistols, sometimes blackpowder rifles of .50 caliber or better – and raced for the herd. A fleet horse was much faster and more agile than a buffalo, so before long the hunter was among the galloping beasts. Francis Parkman, who traveled the Oregon Trail and wrote about it afterward, said that a hunter could ride alongside a buffalo and place his hand on the coarse hair of a running buffalo’s back. If the buffalo were fresh, Parkman related, there was little danger in riding so close that one could touch the buffalo. But if the buffalo was tired, with its tongue lolling out and froth at its mouth, the buffalo became dangerous – it might try to sideswipe the horse, and when the horse lept aside, the rider could fall. A rider who fell in the middle of a buffalo stampede never rode again.

A buffalo hunter would mix his horse into a stampeding herd. He heard nothing but the thunder of hooves and the rasp of the animals’ breath. The tawny dust pounded loose from the prairie rose into the rider’s eyes, obscuring all but the dark outlines of the buffalo nearest him. Still he pressed his horse forward. The smell of sweat, musk and manure filled his nostrils. He rode through the herd, selecting a target. Finding what he wanted, the rider maneuvered his horse toward the animal, rifle in one hand, reins in the other, gripping his horse with both knees lest he should fall and his body be churned into dust in the prairie below. A tired buffalo sideswiping at the rider’s horse could throw him, or the herd could gallop through a ravine that neither the buffalo nor the buffalo hunter saw coming. Either would be fatal. The rider pulled abreast of the animal he had selected and pointed his rifle at his target. He watched the buffalo’s body heave as it ran, and aimed for a bald spot behind the animal’s front shoulder visible when the foreleg was extended. The hunter fired. An accomplished buffalo hunter, Parkman writes, could kill five or six animals in a single hunt, reloading his single-shot muzzleloader at a full gallop in the midst of the herd.

When hit, a buffalo normally didn’t react immediately. If well struck, however, within a few seconds the galloping buffalo began to slow. It lost its place in the herd. It slowed to a walk, then stopped. It stood on the prairie, still for a moment, glazing eyes staring over the dusty expanse. It tottered, then fell. The hunters might take the buffalo’s tongue and hump ribs, then move on. Or a hunter might take only the buffalo’s tail as a trophy. Or he might leave the whole buffalo in the dust.

In such a way was the American bison nearly exterminated.

American buffalo -- called a bison, really -- in Yellowstone National Park.

The Girl in the Starbucks in Bishop, CA

2009-11-15T20:49:00.001-08:00

I sat with my feet propped up and my hands clasped across my lap, feeling well-fed and smug. Starbucks was playing soft music with a healthy dose of Willie Nelson, and I stared idly at my laptop screen awaiting inspiration to write about my day in the Owens Valley. I had just showered and put on my town clothes – clean Carhartts and a blue fleece pullover that, though it would pass for formal only in establishments of very modest sartorial standards, was one of the nicer shirts in my truck. I typed a few words and leaned back in my chair, enjoying the cleanliness and warmth. A girl that worked there brought me samples of peppermint coffee and pumpkin bread and, although I had not purchased anything since I’d walked through the door and logged into Starbucks’s wireless internet, I helped myself to one of each and smiled at her.

I sifted through the pictures I’d taken and picked a couple to upload with whatever prose I eventually produced, then leaned back and consulted my notes for the day. It looked like it would come together just fine. I made a couple more notes, stood and stretched, and walked to the counter.

The young woman who stepped over to the register to meet me was pretty in a pert, clean, peppermint kind of way. Very pretty. Brown hair that was just a little curly, fair skin, a lively expression. She was a little older than the sample-bearing girl; a little closer to my age.

“What can I get you?” she asked.

I held her gaze for a just a moment before I responded. “Pumpkin bread,” I said, “that stuff was good.”

“Pumpkin bread?” she said. She looked at the girl who had brought me my sample, then looked at me and smiled. “We’re out.”

“But I just had a sample!” I said. “So that was a tease?”

She laughed. “Tease?” she said. “Yeah, I guess it was a tease. We just had a little left, and we decided to cut it up and pass it out. So everyone could have a taste.”

So I asked her what she recommended in its stead, we debated for a moment the relative merits of lemon or banana bread, and finally I followed her recommendation and ordered the lemon. She glanced around the room as she pressed buttons on the register.

“It seems like everyone is studying tonight,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess it’s exam time,” I said. “But my days as a student are gone, unfortunately.”

“Are you taking classes at the University?” she asked.

I smiled and said no, I was working on a book. I told her that I’d followed the Walker Expedition from Wyoming to the Pacific, that I did a little writing each night, and that I was trying to complete my nightly assignment. Eventually I’d produce a manuscript that I’d try to get published.

“Wow, that’s cool,” she said. “Good luck with the book.”

I took the slice of lemon bread back to my table and got to work, and now the words came a little quicker. I was leaning over the keyboard and squinting intently at the screen when she appeared at my elbow with a try of coffee samples. It was some kind of fancy instant coffee, she said, that didn’t taste like it was instant. She was wrong about that last part but I had the good sense not to tell her that and we talked for a little while about instant coffee and music – a little awkwardly, but not too bad. She was really pretty. I let an awkward pause hang for just a minute to see what she’d do but she stayed there and toughed it out until I changed the topic and I thought, that’s a good sign.

She moved on with her tray and I got back to typing and around 8:30 I leaned back for final proofreading. There were a couple burrs I’d need to clean out before sending envelopes to publishers but it was a serviceable piece of writing, so I attached the pictures and uploaded it. Then I turned the computer off and thought, if I don’t ask her out I’m going to regret it later. I hadn’t eaten yet – maybe I could take her to dinner. I coiled up the power cord. But then I remembered that Starbucks was open until 9:30, after which would be too late for dinner. Maybe she’d like to meet up for a drink afterward. I slipped my laptop into its case and picked up my notes. She’d seemed interested, I thought. I liked my chances.

So I walked back to the counter and caught her eye.

“Where’s a good place in town for dinner?” I asked to start off. She listed a couple places, including one called Whiskey Creek that sounded promising, and while she talked I checked her left hand to make sure there wasn’t a ring on it.

“And also,” I looked her in the eye, “I don’t know what time you get off, but would you like to meet up for a drink after work? I’d be happy to buy you a beer.” I sounded calm and confident, and was pretty impressed with myself.

But apparently she wasn’t. She didn’t mention a boyfriend but said that she didn’t get off until 10:00, worked two jobs, and needed to get some sleep.

“Well,” I said. “Alright. Rest well.” I turned to go.

“Try Whiskey Creek,” she said. “It’s a pretty nice place.” I said I would try it and waved goodbye.

“Good luck on your book,” she said to my backside. Then she blurted: “I’m writing one too.”

I stopped and turned. “Really? What about?”

“It’s a children’s book,” she said. “Based on Celtic myth.”

That night in the camper, I fed Duke and laid his mattress on the floor. He ate with his tail wagging as I thought about the girl from Starbucks. Maybe I’d asked her on the wrong kind of date – probably an invitation to get a drink at 10:00 from a traveling guy sounded like a proposition for a one night stand. Maybe I should have stuck around town and asked her to go hiking tomorrow. I climbed into my sleeping bag and switched off the light. Celtic myth – what could that be about? I didn’t even know there were Celtic myths. She had seemed interesting, and was certainly pretty. I remembered the way she smiled. I was drifting off to sleep with pleasant thoughts of a fair-complected brunette when I was jerked back to consciousness by a regrettably familiar sound.

I rolled over in my sleeping bag. “Duke,” I called irritably, “stop licking yourself.”

The Way We Remember

2009-11-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

The American mountain men were notable – and at the same time, unexceptional – in their approach to natural resources. These men, the United States’ vanguard in the North American west, enjoyed a few rich years of beaver trapping in the Rocky Mountains before harvest numbers started to fall. The beaver, as numerous mountain men acknowledged, were being trapped out. There simply weren’t enough of them. The mountain men responded to the declining beaver population just as Garret Hardin would have predicted: they trapped further, and harder, and longer. By the time demand for fur hats dropped off and killed the beaver trade, the trappers had nearly extirpated beaver from the Rockies.

So with an eye to investigating modern parallels of resource overexploitation, I spent today touring Mono Lake and the Owens Valley – two areas famously dewatered by the city of Los Angeles, which began diverting water from the Owens Valley in 1913 and from the streams feeding Mono Lake in 1941. Diverting massive quantities. In the Owens Valley, farmer’s wells went dry, farms went belly-up, and Owens Lake became a dust bowl. At Mono Lake, the water level dropped precipitously, migrating birds that had traditionally found refuge on islands were devoured by predators as land bridges emerged, and strange rocky formations called “tufa” that had formed on the bottom of the lake poked above the waterline. But these, fortunately, are stories that may happy environmental endings: in response to litigation, Los Angeles began allowing enough water to reach Mono Lake that its level has been slowly rising since 1994, and in 2007, the Owens River once again flowed, albeit at diminished levels, into the dusty bed of Owens Lake. Mono Lake is still very low, and the lakebed of Owens Lake is still substantially dry, but things are headed in an encouraging direction.

A sign by the mostly-dry lakebed of Owens Lake. If you can't get what you want, at least enjoy being bitter about it.

So it was with some satisfaction that, after dark had fallen, I drove north on US 395 from Owens Lake toward Bishop, California, with a mug of hot chocolate in my hand thoughts of supper on my mind. Because I admire his writing and hope to learn from it, I was listening to Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Sunburned Country in audiobook form, wondering idly whether I should stop at the next roadside pullout to pee, or wait awhile longer. On the one hand, I had to go. On the other, I was having a very nice drive and it was cold outside, and what if a cop drove by . . .

Engaged in such important musings, I wasn’t paying my fullest attention when I heard Bryson say, “I spent a good hour reading through the book at random, spellbound by the simplicity of the age she described.” The simplicity of what age? I wondered. I couldn’t imagine an age in which people considered their problems simple, so I put off my bodily needs for a moment rewound the audiobook.

Bryson was talking about a book, published in 1959, that described the economic prosperity of Australia in the 1950s. Bryson wrote that “with admiration bordering on amazement, Ms. McKenzie [the author] notes that by the end of the 1950s, three-fourths of city dwellers in Australia had a refrigerator, and nearly half had a washing machine.” He then quoted McKenzie: “‘most homes have other electric appliances, such as vacuum cleaners, irons, and electric jugs.”

“Oh, to live in a world in which the ownership of an electric jug was a source of pride,” Bryson pined. “I spent a good hour reading through the book at random, spellbound by the simplicity of the age she described.”

Now this, I think, is a common fallacy. There is nothing inherently simple about an electric jug. It is more complicated than a clay pot, but less complicated than a Cray Supercomputer. That does not mean that an age in which ownership of an electric jug was coveted was a “simple” age – just as the age in which a CrayPlus SuperDuperComputer exists will not render “simple” the age in which we considered its predecessor advanced. An electric jug only sounds simple to us because we are familiar with it. In 1959, presumably, Australians were unfamiliar with the device, and there was nothing inherently simple about wanting one. Coveting an electric jug only seems simple if we superimpose our notions of the device’s commonality onto the people of the 1950s.

But I think the root of the fallacy of yesteryear’s simplicity runs deeper than our failure to appreciate technological advances. We tend to think of times gone by as “simple” because the problems of those days have, for the most part, become irrelevant or have been resolved. Because we know how the story of yesteryear’s problems ended, we don’t view those problems as particularly threatening, and our ancestors’ preoccupation with those problems seems to have been needless. Since our ancestors were preoccupied with problems that were not so grave as to end the world as we now know it, their age seems simple, as though there wasn’t much to worry about. Today’s problems, by contrast – whose resolutions are still in doubt – seem more threatening, more severe, more complex. But our ancestors’ problems likely appeared equally threatening before history wrote the chapters that resolved their problems and connected their time with ours.

There was, for instance, nothing simple about the California Water Wars of the twentieth century: whether farmers and ecosystems of the Owens Valley would ever reemerge, and whether Mono Lake would continue to hold water, were very much in doubt. In the nineteenth century, the question of whether beaver and buffalo would go extinct in the United States – as had the passenger pigeon – was an open question. That we now believe we have the answers to these questions does not mean that the problems were simple when they first burst on the American west.

I stopped the truck at a turnout and got out to answer nature’s call. The other analytic question raised by dismissing past ages as simple is that it implies that the present age is more complex, and its problems graver, than others. As I listened to the splatter I looked up at the stars, bright, cold, and eternal. Maybe this is the age to end all others, but you’ve got to be suspicious of someone who tells you that – exaggerating the difficulties of the present is a common bias. Dickens said it best, in the lesser-remembered half of his introduction to A Tale of Two Cities. In a salute to another excellent writer, I’ll end this entry with his quotation:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A Sense for These Things

2009-11-13T23:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the signs all line up. It was suppertime when I hit town limits. The town’s name was “Walker.” The brightest lights on the building were neon beer signs. The only vehicles in the gravel lot were pickup trucks. Hank Thompson’s “A Six Pack to Go” was playing when I walked across the porch. Next to the door there was a stuffed pad of the kind that people buy for their dogs.

I told Duke to stay on the porch, then opened the door of and looked in. A guy with a gray ponytail and glasses stopped wiping down a table and looked at me. I paused, trying to think of the best way to get what I wanted.

“Can I get you some food or a beer?” he offered.

“Yeah, I’m about to order some food in a minute,” I said. I stepped inside. He seemed like a nice guy. I went with the direct approach, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else. “I’ve got my black lab with me; would it be alright if he came in?”

The guy hesitated and I knew I had him. I pressed. “He’s real well behaved,” I said. “He’ll just sit by my chair if he needs to. He isn’t going to bother anyone.”

He put his hands on his hips. Then: “sure, bring him in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Okay,” I said to Duke, who had been waiting. He trotted in behind me. I sat at a corner table and Duke laid his head on my lap, his tail wagging so hard that his rear end swayed. “I appreciate it,” I told the guy, “he’s real excited.” Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” came over the speakers. I knew I’d found a good place. I picked the menu up off the table and glanced through it for the burger section. Duke sat on the floor beside my chair. I figured Duke would win the guy over before too long.

“Man,” I said when he walked over to take my order, “you’ve got some great country drinking songs playing.”

“Yeah, we play a lot of country music. We’re kind of known for . . .” He paused, looking for the right words.

I grinned. “Tying one on?” I asked.

“Every now and then,” he allowed. “I’m still recovering from the last one.” He said his wife had died not long ago, and he’d needed to begin the process of moving on. Needed to forget for awhile. Needed to have fun. Needed to get away from Walker. In such a time of tragedy, country music is instructive, and this man was a scholar of the tunes. He knew what to do: he went to Nashville and got drunk.

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to get as drunk as I did,” he said. “I wanted to hit all those bars on Broad Street, but we got to Tootsies at about 4:30.” I had lived in Nashville for four years – Tootsies was the bar across the street from the old Ryman Auditorium, where Waylon and Willie used to sit between shows and drink on credit. Live music, old oak bar, pictures all over the walls. A great place for a scholar. “And I sat there awhile, and there was this fiddle player . . .” He whistled. “Wow, she was good looking.” I said, yeah, they raise some cute ones in Tennessee. “And she could fiddle, too. I love a fiddle. So I sat there ‘till 7:30 or 8:00 when I got hungry, at dinner, and then I came back. And they were still playing. Same band! This is hours later. So I listened ‘till they finished the set, and then listened to the next band that came on. And they were good too.

“So I didn’t leave the place until late. I mean, late. So I’m walking out of there, and I’ve had a lot to drink. I mean, I’m drunk. And this panhandler hits me up, and I thought, oh hell, but I gave him some money and kept going. I was staying at the Sheraton, which was a few streets over. And a couple blocks later I saw another person on a bench up ahead. So I figured I’d walk past real fast and hope I didn’t get panhandled again, but I’m swaying back and forth and, I mean, I can’t walk fast anywhere.” A nice guy, I thought. I normally look panhandlers in the eye and tell them no. “So I go past the guy on the bench and I look down at him . . . dead as a hammer.” People passed out on benches, I remembered, were not unusual in downtown Nashville. “So I kept going. And there’s this cop and the end of the street, so I walked up to him.”

I grinned. “Got to be careful doing that,” I said. “I got picked up for being drunk in downtown Nashville when I was eighteen.”

“Well, I walked up to him,” he continued. “And I said, ‘there’s a dead guy on the bench back there.’ And the cop said, ‘yeah, okay, go on home.’ So I went back to the hotel, and the next morning there was an ambulance out there, crime scene tape, everything.”

“So the guy really was dead?” I asked.

“Yep. I knew what I’d seen.”

“Man.”

“But Nashville’s a great town. I’m definitely going back.” He knelt on the floor in front of Duke. “What’s his name?” he asked.

He brought me a burger and some local draft beer, and we talked about country music. He mentioned Doc Watson, who he’d seen perform. I mentioned Guy Clark, who sang “I have seen the David / Seen the Mona Lisa, too / And I have seen Doc Watson play the London Stockade Blues.” Jeff put on a Guy Clark album. We agreed it was great. He told me about Willis Alan Ramsey, who had only put out one album but it was a good one, and I wrote the name down on a napkin. The signs had not lied – I’d stopped into the right place. Mountain View Barbecue in Walker, California.

I had one more test to run. “Who’s this town named for?” I asked.

“Joseph Walker. He was an old fur trapper.”

Jeff in front of the bar he built by hand.

Country Drinking Songs of Note

I’m Home Getting Hammered (And She’s Out Getting Nailed)
Jesus, Are You Drinking with Me?
I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me than a Frontal Lobotomy
You Look Good Through the Bottom of My Shot Glass
Get Off the Table, Mabel (The Two Dollars is for Beer)

Esmeralda Creek, California. Along US 50 about twenty miles east of Placerville.

Edge of the Continent

2009-11-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

Leaning back against a eucalyptus tree, I extended my bum knee in front of me and looked out over San Francisco Bay. Duke sat in the dirt next to me, panting from having chased a jackrabbit. I reflected that, in a sense, the trip was over. I had anticipated that this moment would be accompanied by revelation, a moment of clarity in which the mists of history would be swept away by the ocean breeze, the attainment of an enlightened state in which the motivations of the Walker Expedition and their relevance to the modern world would be laid bare before me. I had expected to understand what those men did, why the historians had gotten it wrong, and what those errors revealed about American mythologizing. At the very least I had expected to have some good idea or novel insight. Duke looked at me and panted in my face. I reflected that I had never gotten around to brushing his teeth.

So I stopped trying to think like a writer and sat under the tree like a normal person. It was a huge tree, standing by itself on a golden-grassed hillside, with mammoth branches hanging low over the ground. The bay breeze rattled its brittle leaves as the sun sank toward the horizon. I picked up a twig and shucked off the bark at one end so I could chew on it. Seagulls cavorted over the shoreline, whirling and screaming. A long raft of small black birds floated like pepper grains just beyond the breakers. Joseph Walker and I had both run out of continent, I thought. What a shame. I lifted the twig to my mouth, but Duke snagged it midway. I patted him on the head and picked up another stick for me.

About thirty minutes’ drive east was Joseph Walker’s grave. The sky was bright blue and the air pleasantly brisk, so Duke and I had parked in downtown Martinez, CA and walked to the cemetery. But the cemetery was fenced and the gate padlocked, and from the fence hung a sign forbidding entry without the permission of the Martinez police department, so I called the station. The police said if I came on down to the station they’d loan me the key. I went, signed my name, and, key in hand, returned to the cemetery. The well-oiled lock popped free and strolled around the cemetery until I found Walker’s grave.

There were signs near his tombstone, the bulletin-board type of signs where the signmaker affixes a sheet of paper to a board, then bolts a sheet of plexiglass over the board. But most of the papers had fallen down inside the plexiglass where they lay in a curled and yellowing heap. I pushed aside some overhanging tree limbs to read the few typed sheets that remained in place. They were wrinkled and liberally interspersed with errors, some typographical and some factual. I grinned. The notion of perpetual fame is illusory anyway.

So I sat on a bench and looked at Walker’s tombstone. Black lettering on white stone. Walker had been all over the west; the expedition I was following was but one of his many pathbreaking trips. His tombstone read, “Emigrated to Mo. 1819 / to New Mexico 1820 / Rocky Mountains 1832 / California 1833 / Camped at Yosemite Nov. 13, 1833.” I knew from my reading that he’d traveled a lot more than his tombstone reflected. Walker was apparently an adherent of the one-page résumé rule. I wondered what might one day be written on my tombstone, and realized quickly that the one-page rule would probably suit me too.

The sun, now setting, glinted orange off the choppy waves of the bay. Sooner or later, we all stop wandering. I chewed on my eucalyptus twig. Zenas Leonard stopped roving not long after the Walker Expedition returned to the Rockies. He hitched his horse and went back to Pennsylvania, where he wrote the journal I’ve been studying. Joe Meek had been a particularly wild member of the expedition – he got so drunk at rendezvous that he passed out outside his tent and, when awakened in the morning, was told that a rabid wolf had passed through the camp the night before. Another man had been bitten and was deathly ill. Meek commented only that if the wolf had bitten him, it would have died of alcohol poisoning. But Meek, too, quit wandering and, in middle age, became a sheriff in Oregon. Joe Walker wandered until he was too old for the nomadic life – some would say he wandered a little bit longer – before finally settling in California. Other mountain men quit wandering only when they died on the trail.

For most wanderers, I think, there come definable moments when you have to choose. Times when one trail ends and before another begins. Times when you have to choose between another adventure and those aspects of life with which wandering is incompatible. Because a wanderer cannot build. If you want to build – a profession, a network, an estate, a family – you have got to stop. I walked down to the beach and lit my pipe. Waves rolled in from further than I could see and crashed to a stop against the beach.

San Joaquin Valley

2009-11-11T23:38:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing good about eating your horse. But the members of the Walker Expedition, high in the Sierras, cold and starving, out of provisions, horses dying anyway from want of pasture, had to do just that. The meat of starving animals that had been climbing mountain ranges for weeks can scarcely have been palatable. Zenas Leonard described the meat as “black, tough, [and] lean.” And in addition, eating your horse meant shooting your faithful companion, a hardship to which even hardened mountain men like Leonard were not inured: “[i]t seemed to be the greatest cruelty,” he wrote, “to take your rifle, when your horse sinks to the ground from starvation, but still manifests a desire to follow you, to shoot him in the head and then cut him up & take such parts of their flesh as extreme hunger alone will render it possible for a human being to eat.”

So the members of the Walker Expedition were elated to reach the San Joaquin Valley, where grass grew tall and game abounded. Their elation at having survived the crossing of cold, barren, unmapped mountains and finding food again is probably beyond modern American parallel, but might have resembled a very hungry hiker entering a supermarket or a student from a boys’ boarding school attending a party at the Playboy Mansion. The men feasted on deer and bear, and were no doubt happy to have food again. The horses cropped grass hungrily and were probably happy to have reached the valley for another reason besides.

The Merced River as it descends the Sierra Nevadas into the San Joaquin Valley.

Today, I found, the parts of the valley through which the expedition passed are not so prosperous. There are expansive groves of almond and pistachio trees, stately in their symmetry, and broad green fields for cotton, impressive for their breadth. But the region is poor. In 2006, six of the San Joaquin Valley’s counties were among the 52 poorest in the United States. Its soil seems to grow not only nuts and fibers, but also rusted cars. A wheelless pickup with an undercoat of blue peeking through a peeling red; a Crown Victoria with the roof smashed in; an orange Datsun hurled onto an unpaved road along with some cinderblocks and a pile of dirt to serve as a roadblock. Trailer parks in which close-packed residents have used now-sodden plywood to patch holes in their walls. Sagging wooden barns, still in use but so precarious-looking that I’d be loath to sneeze inside them. CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) in which hundreds of cattle are squeezed between metal fences to live in their own excrement while they provide milk or fatten up for the beef market. The excrement the cows produce is considerable. Especially since neighboring farmers sometimes purchase the manure as fertilizer, the dung contributes mightily to the valley’s fragrance. In some cases, the manure has been so voluminous that farmhands have drowned in it.

After dark, I drove for the coast. I wanted to make some miles, so I took the unusual step of stopping at a fast food joint. Parked just beyond the drive-through of a Del Taco, I was unwrapping my burrito when I heard a rapping at my window. It was a woman in her early twenties with two waist-tall sons. They were climbing out of a shiny, new-looking PT Cruiser. The woman’s hair was curled and her down jacket had imitation fur along the collar. Her ears and neck glittered with jewelry.

“Excuse me sir, can you help me with something?” she asked when I rolled down the window.

“Sure,” I said. I figured she needed jumper cables or to use a cell phone.

“If you could just spare a few dollars, like five or ten dollars, just so I can get some food for the kids. Just for the kids.”

“Oh of course,” I said. I reached for my back pocket. I’d reached for my wallet without thinking – the kids had got me. She kept talking as I pulled out my wallet and opened it, now a little ruefully. “I’m not on drugs or a criminal or anything. I’m just want to get some food, you know, for my kids.” I realized, without looking back at her, that she was attired too opulently to be begging. I was being suckered. “Because it’s going to be awhile before I get my check,” she said. She meant, I knew from my time in the public defender’s office, her welfare check.

I looked at her. California’s welfare system is famously generous. She was even overweight. I eyed her necklace. A big, glittering pot leaf suspended from a gold chain.

“What’s your necklace?” I asked.

She looked at it then back up to me without a trace of embarrassment. “Oh, I just like the symbol. I’m not on pot or marijuana or whatever.”

I already had two dollars in my hand, and I gave it to her.

“Is that all you can do?” she asked.

I looked at her as coldly as I could. I closed my wallet. “Yeah,” I said. I wished I’d told her to pawn her pot leaf instead.

“Alright, thank you, God bless,” she said. Then she took one of her sons by the hand and turned away. “Come on, let’s go get some more dollars,” she said as she pulled him across the parking lot toward a minivan.

The kids followed. It was, I guess, another unremarkable day outside a fast food restaurant for them. Times have changed since Zenas’s day.

American Cogitation

2009-11-10T23:46:00.000-08:00

I was opening the antiquated refrigerator for a quart of milk while the proprietor rang up the fat girls. The big white box had four separate glass-paneled doors and blocky silver handles that looked like they’d come off a ’56 Ford Fairlane. If I hadn’t seen the milk through the window I wouldn’t have known it was a refrigerator. The proprietor laughed at something, a big laugh that filled his wood-walled convenience store. “Well, you ladies have a good night,” he said. They wished him a goodnight and walked out.

1956 Ford Fairlane.

There were only the sounds of my footsteps on the floors and the anchorman's voice on the TV as I started for the register. I stopped to check out his ice cream selection, and I wasn’t surprised when he broke the silence. He muttered something at the TV in a voice that invited comment. I picked out an ice cream sandwich out of the freezer and walked toward the register. The proprietor, a gray-haired man with an alert gaze and a crow’s feet around his eyes, looked up.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Fair trial,” he said. “I said this guy doesn’t deserve a fair trial.”

“Who?”

“The Fort Hood shooter. You know, the guy that shot and killed thirteen people at Fort Hood. They caught the guy.”

“Oh, I hadn’t heard,” I said. “I’m a little behind on the news.”

“Yeah, he doesn’t deserve a fair trail. They ought to line him up in front of a firing squad, and then give only half the shooters live ammunition. Let that be his fair chance.”

“Ahuh,” I said. I looked up at the television. Fox News. I put my milk, ice cream and box of macaroni on the counter.

“They ought to have known,” he continued. “Bells should have gone off when he said that in his . . . his Muslim religion, ‘we value death more than you value life.’ Bells should have gone off then.”

“Oh, man,” I said. I was still hung up on the guy’s disdain for a fair trial. How could you possibly oppose a fair trail? If the guy is guilty, then he would be adjudged guilty and sentenced, likely to death, just as this guy wanted. And if there was a fair trial and it turned out that the cops had the wrong guy, then every American ought to be glad we went through the formalities of determining guilt or innocence before executing the suspect. This guy made it sound like a “fair trial” was a privilege that could be withheld when the American public was sufficiently pissed off. Nuts.

But I couldn’t see any good that would come of arguing with the proprietor, who was probably just trying to make conversation anyway. So I asked about something I was interested in. “Why’d he do it?” I asked.

“Terrorist.”

“Just to hurt folks,” I commented. It can be an ugly world. Terrorism, I think, is what happens when someone is angry at a particularity and lashes out at a generality. It’s us-versus-them thinking with a catastrophic failure to distinguish among “them.” At least, that’s the only reason I can think of for someone deliberately slaughtering the innocent. “Damn,” I said to the proprietor.

He shook his head as started to ring up the groceries. “You know, he belonged to the same mosque as two of those 9/11 guys. You know, the ones that crashed the planes into the Trade Center.”

“No, I hadn’t heard that.” I paused, wanting to say something we could agree on. “You know everyone who’s ever set foot in that mosque will be on the FBI’s watch list now,” I said.

“You know what I think the Army ought to do?” he said. “Drive a bulldozer up to that mosque and just go right through it. Flatten it. But no, we can’t do that, because it wouldn’t be politically correct.”

That almost set me off. Politically correct? Using the term “Indian” instead of “Native American” is politically incorrect. Referring to proponents of Second-Amendment rights as people who “cling” to guns is politically incorrect. But bulldozing a house of worship solely because some former attendees have committed heinous crimes is a long way from “political correctness.” Bulldozing the mosque would trample the Constitution, the document that every soldier in the Army swears to protect. It would make a mockery of the freedom and justice for which America purportedly stands. To say nothing of lashing out at an undifferentiated “them.”

“Alright,” I said, taking my groceries in my arms. Never wrestle with a pig, they say, because you both get muddy and the pig likes it. “You have a good night.” I didn't mean to convey my disagreement but I think it showed.

And that’s your voter, I thought as I walked down the stairs. A friendly guy who runs his own business – likely a pillar in the local community. Well-spoken and probably better informed than most. But he thinks that trials should be withheld and houses of worship bulldozed when a crime is sufficiently heinous. Rule of law, out. Rule of lynch mob, in.

I climbed in the camper to load the milk into the refrigerator. “Democracy,” Churchill once quipped, “is the worst system of governance ever devised by wit of man, except for all the others.” It was hard to see how democracy could deliver adequate governance when you talked some of the citizens. There seemed to be no deliberation between stimulus and response. Only a conditioned reaction. It was like a word association game: terrorism . . . execute! mosque . . . bulldoze! Such were the ruminations of the voting public. Dismaying. I could train Duke to vote and accomplish as much. “Terrorist,” I would say, and Duke would step to the right. “Change,” I would say, and he’d step left. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the objective American voter.

I opened the milk jug, took a swallow, then capped it and put it in the refrigerator. But the pleasant fact was that this nation does not generally execute people without trial or bulldoze houses of worship whose attendees have misbehaved, despite the clamorings of some citizens. And I don’t mean to isolate the proprietor here – nuttiness is by no means confined to convenience store owners in small California towns. I’m sure he’s not alone in his opinions as to firing squads and Army bulldozers, and I’m also sure that some other event – say, the opening of a Marine recruiting station in Berkeley – would excite equal nuttiness on the other side of the aisle.

But to a remarkable degree, and with some exceptions, America has done an excellent job of resisting the pull of the lynch mob. For instance, it never entered my mind that the suspected shooter would not stand trial, or that the mosque he’d attended would be summarily demolished. And although today’s voters commonly appear unthinking and ill-informed, I doubt that we voters are any worse than the voters of yesteryear. In fact, if anything, today’s voters are likely better-informed, given the generally increased proliferation and quality of today’s news sources. (Go read a newspaper from Lincoln’s day – it’ll make even Fox News seem fair and balanced.) So there’s the consolation: obtuse as today’s voters may be, we’ve always been this obtuse. And yet our Constitution remains more or less intact. So in a way, this convenience store owner’s exhortations are a testament to the enduring merits of democratic governance. Testament to a system that, by listening to all of its citizens, resists the worst tendencies of each. Testament to a system that proves that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. Testament to the merits of collectivism.

As I climbed out of the camper and wiped my milk moustache on my sleeve, the proprietor came down the steps. He’d seen the “Wall Drug” sticker on the back of my camper and, being from South Dakota, came out to chat about it. I guess he’d thought we got off on the wrong foot. He looked at the sticker, and had to see the old Kerry-Edwards sticker directly underneath it. But he smiled, and we talked amiably about the irresistibility of a well-marketed tourist trap. America is great.

Store and proprietor.

Burgers and Beer

2009-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

this entry was supposed to post yesterday; for some reason it didn't auto-post correctly

my apologies

“Grillin & Chillin: Burgers & Beer” said the front of the squat gray building. Little flames rising from “grillin;” little icicles hanging from “chillin.” I drove past at sixty. I have learned a thing or two about burger & beer establishments on this trip, having visited the Green River Bar in Daniel, WY, the Cowboy Bar in Montello, NV, and sundry other establishments that I didn’t write about. And something about that place didn’t feel right. But I looked at the clock – 12:30. I hadn’t had lunch yet. Could I really claim expertise in burgers and beer if I passed up a restaurant that purported to specialize in those exact food groups? Especially at lunchtime? I looked at Duke, who agreed with me. I turned the truck around.

Near Hollister, CA.

A row of stools behind the bar, a several tables on the floor. Nothing unusual about that. But the place was clean. No grit jammed where the walls met the floor; no dust on top of the beer lamps. No smell of old hamburger grease; no eu de stale beer emanating from cracks in the bar. Four plasma TVs hung from the walls, but no outdated calendars or badly-mounted deer heads. Twelve beers on tap, mostly fancy ones like Sierra Nevada or Longboard Ale. Someone came out of the kitchen and hauled away a Starbucks coffee dispenser that, apparently, they’d set out for breakfast. A sign advertised yogurt. Grillin & Chillin also had a liquor bar, and next to the liquor sat a little glass-doored refrigerator specifically for Red Bull, an energy drink. More mysterious different-colored bottles stacked on top of that.

The bartender handed me a menu, and I smiled and gave it back to her. “You know, I don’t guess I’ll even need that,” I said. “I’d like a cheeseburger and –” I glanced over at the row of taps – “a coke.”

“What kind of cheese?” she asked.

When she came back from giving my order to the cook, she drew an oversized Mason jar from a glistening stack of identical ones and poured me a coke. I asked her about the mysterious bottles sitting on top of the Red Bull refrigerator. They were like Vitamin Water, she said, but a little different. The red bottle was for energy, the green for strength, the blue for relaxation, the yellow for alertness – or something like that. She explained that there was powder stored under the cap, so you’d buy the bottle, then pop the cap and shake the whole thing, thus mixing the powder with the water and thereby producing the mood drink of your choice. “We’re the only place around here that has them,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “So people come from miles around?” I smiled, but I think she sensed my skepticism.

“Actually, some people do come here to get them.”

She was blonde-haired and pushing forty with a straight-line businesslike mouth, but I hadn’t met many women of any age or shape recently and just wanted to chat with her. I asked if she ran the place – no, just the bar – whether she was from around here originally – oh yeah – and how long they’d been open – since June – as she shuttled back and forth behind the bar. Efficient. She was cordial, but didn’t really want to talk to me. I drank from my Mason jar and waited on my burger.

Grillin & Chillin was an representation. Rural folks originally drank out of Mason jars because they didn’t have glasses, but this place had ordered a crate of them specifically for drinking out of. Probably without the lids. The Green River Bar, the Cowboy Bar – those places were imitations of old west saloons, but they were genuine beer & burger joints. You got the impression in those places that they served up burgers because they weren’t equipped to cook anything else. Not so here. Places like the Green River Bar and the Cowboy Bar attracted fans – people like me who preferred colorful restaurants and were willing to tolerate a badly-cooked hamburger to get it – and so run-down beer & burger joints carved out their own niche in the cultural landscape of America. The hole-in-the-wall burger joint became a recognized category. It attained rhetorical reality; it created its own cultural space.

The bartender brought me my cheeseburger. It was neither under- nor overcooked, the meat was of high quality, and the fixings on it were fresh. Delicious. Grillin & Chillin wasn’t fooling anyone. No one could come into the restaurant and think, “oh, this is a run-down hole in the wall, as you can tell by their use of Mason jars as serving vessels.” People came, in all likelihood, for the good hamburgers and the powdered passion water or whatever it was. The place provided only the superficial trappings of a classical beer & burger joint. Judging by the way the restaurant filled for lunch, though, customers were satisfied with the trappings. The Mason jar was a symbol of another time, and nothing more. And apparently, people didn’t want anything more.

So it goes when life mimics an ideological niche, instead of ideology adapting itself to fit life. When Jay Adams had leaned over and said drunkenly, “I’m a pioneer,” he was imitating ideology, attempting to align his own identity with the particular cultural space in America occupied by pioneers. Grillin & Chillin took it one step further: Grillin & Chillin wasn’t even an imitation. Jay Adams had been trying to fool me into thinking he was a pioneer, but Grillin & Chillin wasn’t trying to fool anyone into thinking it was run-down. It was an unabashedly modern restaurant, replete with flat-screen TVs, offering only the symbols of a classic beer & burger joint. And the symbols were all people wanted.

So it is with much of modern America, and maybe it has always been so. When I pulled on my cowboy boots and wore them to class at UGA, no one thought, “oh, I guess Jeb rode his horse to class today.” But they probably did think, “hmm, I bet this guy prefers Willie Nelson to Marilyn Manson.” When teens who dress in the gothic style wear combat boots, no one thinks, “oh, this young lady must be shipping out to Afghanistan in the afternoon.” But they do think, “I will look elsewhere for a babysitter.” Such footwear is not so much an imitation of an ideological niche as an invocation of certain cultural space. Another mode of communication.

And it’s common. Nearly everyone wears clothing, speaks in a certain way, or acts in a manner designed to evoke thoughts of some cultural space that he does not pretend to occupy. It’s a means of communicating one’s identity. Tent stakes in the cultural landscape, so to speak.

I finished my burger and licked my fingers, then looked up for the bartender. Against the far wall I saw packets for making green tea. Green tea? In an alleged burger and beer joint?

Damn. I’ll grant you some cultural invocation, but you’ve got to keep the ratio to a respectable level.

Sierra Crossing: Day Four (11/2)

2009-11-08T22:11:00.001-08:00

Life teems at edges. Pelagic life abounds in the shallow margins of the oceans where the sun penetrates the water. Bobwhite quail congregate at the edge of forest and field, as every good bird dog knows. Coastal creatures like crabs, redfish, minnows, and shorebirds thrive in the zone between the tides where the land is submerged at high tide and dry at low tide. Stream-living trout lurk downstream of big rocks where the slack water of an eddy abuts the turbulent water of the main channel. Everywhere, there is life at the edges. Side-by-side habitats produce more life than either habitat in isolation.

I readjusted my pack and stood to catch my breath at the edge of a taiga-rimmed lake. The day was clear-skied and calm-winded, so the water lay still. The surface reflected the blue sky and the green conifers that encircled both the lake and the heavens. A perfect mirror. If I had stood on my head, the view would not have changed. Or if I had wanted to see what a skinny white guy looked like when he did not bathe, brush his hair, or shower for several days, I had only to step up and lean over the lake.

I stayed back and peered into the water through my polarized sunglasses. I was looking for an excuse to catch my breath and rest my aching knee. A school of minnows cruised through the shallows until they encountered my shadow, then darted to deeper water. Further out into the lake, but still within seven or eight yards of the shore, two trout lolled over a bed. They had cleared an oblong patch of lakebottom of sticks, leaves, and algae, leaving only light sand exposed. The patch was only a foot or so long – just large enough for their bodies. Their torsos were greenish-brown, their backs spotted, their lower fins bright orange and tipped in white as though they had swum too low over a paint can. Cutthroat trout, humans called this species. They finned the water languidly, rising and falling in a rhythm all their own; slowly circling each other. The piscine equivalent of necking, I figured. I looked up and down the lake’s margin. There were trout all along the edge, lovy-dovily lingering over their beds.

Fertility along the edges. So it is with nature, and with human thoughts. The most intellectually innovative cultures in western history have been trading empires, where ideas from afar clashed – places like classical Greece and Elizabethan England. And where academic disciplines meet, progress often results – for example, modern economic theory, having butted up against sociology and psychology, seems on the verge of abandoning its centuries-old assumption that people make economically rational choices and may produce more accurately predictive models as a result. Ideas thrive on the edges, where multiple mental tools can be brought to bear. I stood and watched the trout. They were beautiful. I would not have appreciated them nearly so much if I had not just been hiking.

One of the lakes in the area known as "Ten Lakes."

Looking down on Ten Lakes.

Later that day, I reached the cache, where I had stored extra lunch meat, extra tortillas, extra cheese, and one Coors Light. Guess which of these food groups I had was happiest to find.

Sierra Crossing: Day Three (11/1)

2009-11-07T21:43:00.000-08:00

The snow on the north side of Tuolumne Peak was treacherously beautiful. An unhalted sun highlighted its rises and shadowed its recesses. Above the timberline, with no evergreens to disrupt its undulating purity, only scattered brown boulders shouldered through the snow. It blanketed everything else: smaller rocks, the soil, high-altitude brush, the trail.

I was 9800 feet above sea level, and had climbed 1800 vertical feet from Cathedral Creek to get here. I breathed heavily, hands resting from my shoulder straps. Duke sat in the snow beside me. Before us the mountainside fell away, revealing the deep-green forested valley through which Cathedral Creek ran. On the opposite side of the valley the trees grew thick near the creekbottom, thinned as the land rose toward another series of mountaintops, became isolated as the slopes gave way to rock, and failed altogether where white snow sat atop the otherwise bald mountaintop like an old man’s hair. I pulled my notepad from my pocket. The mountaintop was completely, utterly silent. The kind of silence that doesn’t happen in the developed world. I heard my pen scratching on the paper as I made notes; I heard the snow creak as Duke shifted his weight. Then we were still, and – nothing. No rush of traffic, no drone of an airplane, no hum of a central air unit. No buildings, no roads, no campfire rings, no candy wrappers, no footprints, no trail. Quiet. I listened, and smiled.

The fur trappers lived most of the year in wilderness, but they thought like Europeans. The new continent was unimaginably vast; its boundaries undiscovered. Their views of America’s natives would be called racist today. They trapped to make money, a commodity useful only in European-descended societies. And most importantly, they identified themselves as part of the European cultural landscape. They viewed themselves as gloriously free, bravely self-reliant, as vanguards of the civilization from which they had come. The adjectives they applied to themselves were rooted in a European perspective. The notoriously boastful trappers were not, by and large, men for whom freedom and exploration were merely incidental byproducts of the way they made a living. In written accounts of their lives, whether written autobiographically or by professional biographers, the trappers almost always emphasized the wild country they had seen and fights they’d had with Indians. The trappers saw themselves as frontiersmen, wild and free, and were cocky about it.

So encountering terrain like this – “discovering” it, if your cultural perspective is European – was a big part of the trappers’ motivations. It made good storytelling. I made a couple final notes in my notepad. The trappers sometimes chose adventures with an eye to bragging about them afterward. Joe Meek, for instance, told his biographer that he went along on the Walker Expedition because traveling to the Pacific would be “a feather in a man’s cap.” I paused and considered, for a moment, how I might transform my scribbled notes into a polished written product, then pocketed the notepad. Although the trappers had to be constantly attuned to their surroundings, they were not oblivious to the stories they could tell afterward. I zipped my pocket closed to keep the notepad secure, then knelt to buckle on my snowshoes.

I crunched into the snow, winding between half-buried boulders and passing beside a high-alpine pond about the size of a swimming pool. Duke, happy that I was wearing my snowshoes, followed in the compacted snow behind me. I walked to the edge of steep drop, then turned around to find another route. I walked along the bottom of a high cliff face, momentarily cold in its shadow, then veered again to the north looking for a way down. Far below me, the snow had melted to intermittent patches, revealing a glistening stream that ran through stands of willows and evergreens. Beside the stream I could see the trail, but I couldn’t get down to it – a rocky dropoff, nearly as steep as the cliff in whose shadow I’d walked, blocked my descent. I hiked back up to the cliff face.

A pool with a view.

Searching for a route down.

Finally, I thought I saw it: a ravine running from my elevation to the trail below me. It was steep, but I could handle it. I grinned as I walked into the ravine, striding easily in my snowshoes. The rocky walls of the ravine were fifteen yards apart. The snow in the bottom was firm enough that I didn’t sink into it, but loose enough that Duke could keep his footing. This would work. In one of the ravine walls, someone had carved a three-foot-tall letter “O.” Maybe that meant I was on top of the trail. At any rate, I thought, I’d found a perfect corridor to the bottom. Maybe I’d make a mountaineer after all.

I was sixty yards into the corridor when it pitched down. Pitched steeply. The slope wasn’t sheer, and the ravine bottom was still covered with snow, but it was way too steep for me to carry a pack down. From the way the sun glinted off the snow, I could tell that broad stretches of it were hardpacked snow without a covering of powder. That meant that Duke couldn’t keep his footing either. I looked back up the way we had come. The walk back up to the cliff face would be hard, if I could do it at all. And once I got back up, there was no guarantee that I’d be able to find a better route down.

An idea. If Duke and I slid down the ravine, we’d be traveling about thirty yards on our butts. But I could see where we’d stop, and there were only a couple rocks in the way. I could avoid them pretty easily, I thought. Duke would be able to maintain better traction than me. I could slide feet-first and steer with my heels, and if I left my pack on, it would protect me from hitting my head. On an intuitive level, the idea of sliding spooked me. But the thought of climbing back out of the ravine, only to hope for some more passable route, held even less appeal. And on an intellectual level, I couldn’t see how sliding would be any more dangerous than picking my way down over some alternative rocky route. It might even be safer. I looked at Duke.

“You want to slide?” I asked.

He looked up at me gamely.

I took that for a yes. I took off my snowshoes, buckled them together, and threw them down the slope. They slid to the bottom. I threw Duke’s pack, and it came to rest nearby. No turning back now. I put on my gloves, closed the vents in my pants, and zipped my jacket all the way up. I dug in my heels and sat on my butt at the top of the slope. I looked at the “O” carved on the ravine wall. Probably stood for Oh Shit Canyon, I thought. “Stay,” I said to Duke, and lifted my heels.

I slid fast. I braked with my bootheels, kicking up a spray of snow that fell across my face. I leaned back on the pack and braced with my elbows and hands so I wouldn’t flip over. The snow was cold against my butt. I skidded around the first rock. Snow pushed up the sleeves of my jacket and shot between my cuffs and gloves. I heard myself giggle as I slid past the “O.” I bounced over gentle rises and recesses in the snow. My sleeping pad scraped over the hardpack. I dug in my left boot to steer toward the snowshoes and dog pack, and the spray intensified. I started to spin so I tapped my right boot to straighten. The mountain air was cold and clean as it rushed over my snowy face. Too soon, I slowed to a stop within an arm’s reach of the snowshoes. I looked up. Duke was waiting anxiously at the rim. I called him and he stepped onto the slope. He stayed upright, half-running and half-skidding down the slope, until he barreled into me at the bottom. I lay back in the snow and laughed out loud.

The sky was bright blue and the sun shone down on my face. Tail wagging, Duke buried his nose in my jacket and snorted. I scratched his head and whooped, loudly. It echoed off the rock walls. I grinned. That’s why you make trips like this.

Two shots of the western juniper, which tends to grow on sheer, rocky slopes.

Sierra Crossing: Day Two (10/31)

2009-11-07T12:04:00.001-08:00

Sierra Crossing: Day Two (10/31)

2009-11-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

I had to chew on my toothbrush to work the ice out of it, and had to pour boiling water on my boots to thaw them before they fit right. Dawn had broken, but mountains to the east still shadowed my camp. I knelt by the stove to boil water for oatmeal and boot-thawing. My fingers were stiff, and it hurt to spark the lighter. I wondered how long it would take for the sun to climb above the mountains and shine directly on me.

I was camped in a grassy flat along Return Creek. After crossing over the 11,000-foot saddle yesterday, I had descended the other side to Summit Lake, mostly without a trail. Finding your own way in mountainous terrain is not easy because you must almost always choose a route without being able to see it all. Invariably, trees, hills, or dips in the terrain obscure areas where you’ll be walking. You can only hope that those areas are passable. Additionally, if you’re limited as to the steepness of grades you can climb – if, for instance, you’re a Georgian hiking through Sierran snow with a 60-70 pound pack – you’ve got to judge the grade of a uniformly white slope from afar. For a novice like me, that’s hard. The net result of these difficulties is that in my own off-trail navigation, I resembled a ball in a pinball machine, bouncing off various obstacles and reversing course until, as if by luck, I made it through.

So it was with great relief that I had found a deep-rutted trail on the north side of Summit Lake. I had followed the trail alongside the lake, out of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest and into the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park, happy to trade the adventure of stamping new footprints in the snow for the predictability of following where others had passed. The lakeside trail was level and clear and I had the sensation of moving rapidly with almost no effort, as though I were being propelled forward on greased ball bearings. I could walk like this forever, I thought giddily. Duke had trotted ahead of me, tail high and wagging. At the Park’s edge a sign proclaimed that dogs were not allowed, hikers were required to have “Wilderness Permits,” and firearms were prohibited. I had left my revolver in the truck, I reflected pleasantly, which meant I was batting over .300. Duke peed on the sign, and I stopped to take a picture.

That had been yesterday afternoon, when the sun was shining and the air comparatively warm. At my creekside campsite, I sipped tea as I waited for the sunlight to burst over the mountain and warm my chilled hands. When sunlight struck I would strip down to my hiking clothes and get back on that wonderful, unmistakable Yosemite trail.

The joy and pain of hiking is hard to recount, because the sensations reside in uncountable repetition and gradual revelation. There is no single step on which your quadriceps start to burn, only a mounting ache that builds as you walk; there is no crescendo at which the weight of your pack jerks you backward, only the persistent tug of its straps as you tick off tenths of miles. There is no moment of glory when you defy your desk-weakened legs to reach your destination; no gravity-defeating moment when you overcome the weight of your pack. Those victories come slowly, step by step. It is determination, not flash, that prevails.

With the sun came welcome heat, and as I stuffed my sleeping bag, I felt hot in my long johns, wool shirt, and double layers of fleece. I stripped down to my hiking tee shirt and a jacket, shouldered my pack and buckled it around my waist. I picked up Duke’s pack – it had worn sores behind his front legs, so I would carry it today – and walked to the trail.

The trail led alongside Return Creek, descending gently through a red fir forest where sunlight filtered through the canopy and snow was relegated to intermittent patches. The scent of pine pervaded the air and the fallen needles were soft beneath my boots. The buckle on one of my snowshoes, which was now strapped to the side of my pack, tapped against the snowshoe’s plastic body in metronomic time. Gradually my right bicep began to ache from holding Duke’s pack. I draped it across my left arm instead. The buckle tapped in time with folk songs that my father had taught me when I was a boy. Let me tell a story, I can tell it all / About the mountain boy who hauled illegal alcohol / His Daddy made the whiskey, the boy he hauled the load / And when his engine roared they called the highway Thunder Road . . . The trail entered a broad meadow, tawny grass filling an oblong patch where the pines bowed away. The stream tarried in the sun, its path veering capriciously from one side of the meadow to the other. It burrowed out its bank in one place, widening its turn to ludicrous proportions; in another it cut through a narrow band of earth and sawed an oxbow into obscurity. The buckle tapped against the snowshoe. And there was thunder, thunder, over Thunder Road / Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load / And there was moonshine, moonshine, to quench the devil’s thirst / The law, they swore they’d get him but the devil got him first . . . The trail left the creek and climbed among light gray granite boulders. Lodgepole pines, smaller than the stately red firs but equally erect, began to supplant their larger brethren. I switched Duke’s pack back to my right arm. A rocky precipice nearby afforded a view of the forest below; a rocky precipice in the distance left a stream with nowhere to go except into the late autumn air, where it tumbled whitely into the green forest below. An ache developed in my left knee, high and just behind the kneecap. The buckle kept tapping. On the first of April, nineteen fifty-four / The federal man sent word he’d better make his run no more / He had two hundred agents, spread throughout the state / Whichever road he took, he said, they’d catch him sure as fate . . . The trail descended now, switchbacking along a granite face. The quartz of the rock glittered in the sun, and I ran my fingers along the cool, bumpy rock. Below was the sound of rushing water. A breeze drifted up the canyon. The trail kept descending, my knee kept aching, the buckle kept tapping. Son, his Daddy told him, make this run your last / The tank’s filled up with hundred-proof; your car’s tuned up and gassed / Now, don’t take any chances; if you can’t get through / I’d rather have you back again than all that mountain dew. At the bottom of the canyon the trail reached the Tuolumne River where a tributary lept over a granite wall to join it. The tributary’s waters broke apart in their race to the Tuolumne and poured across the wet rock in three distinct white streams like the billowing beards of three old men. I switched Duke’s pack to the other arm. The waterfall roared as I crossed the river on a well-built bridge and started the ascent on the other side, my knee hurting in earnest now. The buckle of my snowshoe kept tapping. But there was thunder, thunder, over Thunder Road / Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load / And there was moonshine, moonshine, to quench the devil’s thirst / The law, they swore they’d get him but the devil got him first . . .

As I stared into the campfire’s coals that night, my left leg outstretched in front of me and my wet socks draped across the rocks that formed my fire ring, I wondered again why I was doing this. Duke’s head rested on my thigh. It was hard to know. I wondered what tomorrow would bring.

The meadow.

Waterfall into the Tuolumne River.

In places, the trail was dug deeply into the earth.

Late in the day, I stopped at McGee Lake to fill up both water bottles and my Camelbak in preparation for a dry camp.

Sierra Crossing: Day One (10/30)

2009-11-05T20:04:00.000-08:00

It was my third time over this terrain and I still couldn’t find the trail once I climbed past Frog Lakes, and that wasn’t very far into the valley. Well – I’d find my own way up. To the south, the valley was bounded by the now-familiar Black Mountain and the ridge from which it arose, and to the north by another ridge dominated by Dunderberg Peak. The valley was wide and flat, shaped more like a U than a V. Probably glacial. At the valley’s western terminus, the rocks rose abruptly from the wooded floor to a nameless peak on the southern edge of the terminus and to a saddle on the northern edge. All of the valley’s edges – Black Mountain, Dunderberg Mountain, the nameless peak, the saddle – were well above the timberline. All of them were snowy and rocky. All of them were over 11,000 feet high. For a Georgia boy, that’s up there.

I had two options for reaching the saddle. I could either stay in the valley floor until I reached the terminus, then climb up to it, or I could gradually ascend the valley’s northern wall as I moved west. The valley floor was wide and flat, and the sides steep. Normally I’d have stayed in the valley floor as long as possible – one of the lessons I’d learned about off-trail walking was that hiking along a hillside was hard on ankles. Especially with a full pack. Going directly up a hill was tiresome, but easier on the body. But today, traction would be the issue. Even with my crampon-bearing snowshoes, I couldn’t climb steep terrain, as I’d found out earlier when I slid in reverse down a little hill. So I angled up to the northern ridge.

Today the sun glittered off the snowpack as I trudged through the silent valley. The sky was bright blue. Duke followed behind in the broad tracks of my snowshoes where the walking was easier. How would this scene have appeared to the members of the Walker Expedition? No doubt they were more accustomed to hiking though snow than me. They may have been less worried. But they had no idea – none – what they were getting into. I knew that I had about forty miles to walk until I reached my cache, which was located near the middle of the Sierras Nevadas, and I had six days of provisions in case I got snowed in. I knew I had several peaks and several steep-walled valleys before I even reached the mountains’ midpoint. But the Walker Expedition had traveled for hundreds of miles through the basin and range, where solitary ridges separated wide valleys. Zenas Leonard seems to have believed the Sierra Nevada mountains presented a similar obstacle: he wrote of a scouting party that found a trail that it believed “led over the mountain,” and wrote about arriving, after a day or two, “at what we took for the top.”

Oh no, Zenas. Your use of the singular is misplaced.

With such expectations the expedition headed into the Sierras in late October. They were already down to the last of the buffalo meat they had prepared along the Bear River, having found little game along the Humboldt. The breadth and the cold of the Sierras took the expedition by surprise. Some of the mountain men –the prudent ones, arguably – wanted to turn back for buffalo country. Though they were a minority, neither the appeals of their compatriots or the exhortations of Captain Walker could alter their intentions. And in this loose-knit expeditionary force, no one could force them to stay. Reluctantly, the majority acceded to the minority’s wishes to turn back. But the majority – “which always directs the movements of such a company,” according to Leonard – imposed a condition: the dissenters couldn’t take any horses or ammunition with them. That ended the issue. The expeditionary force remained intact.

High up on the ridge, I stopped again. I was panting. I stood at the bottom of a hundred-foot-long talus slope that lolled out like a tongue from the ridgetop. I had reached the saddle’s elevation, but I still had several hundred yards of ridgeside to traverse to get there. The terrain between me and the saddle was steep and snowy, and there would be little to stop me if I started sliding. In fact, I could end up sliding and butt-bumping over rocks all the way down to the timberline. A painful prospect, particularly because other sensitive parts of my anatomy might also receive a thumping. The top of the ridge looked like it provided comparatively flat walking, if I could only scale the talus slope. But the rocks were loose and – being talus – already tumbled down once. By their nature they lay just shy of the angle of repose. But I remembered my lesson from the Wasatch Front: the going is often easiest on ridgetops. I looked at Duke, who sat gamely beside me.

Across the snow.

Up the talus.

I kicked a boot into the talus and put my weight into it. The boot slid about half a step back and I kicked my other boot in above it. Before it could slide all the way back I took another step. I scrambled upward. When the rocks got to small to support me I clawed at the slope with my hands, shuffling and sliding and clacking my way up on all fours. My pack pulled at me like the tire you drag at football practice and I gasped for breath in the thin air. I fought upward toward a big rock sticking out above the scree, scrambling with all four limbs. I lunged for the big rock and caught it with my right hand. Grasping it, I knelt in the talus to rest. Ragged breaths. Nothing was ever easy. Why, I wondered, did I set myself to tasks like this? But I’d freeze if I waited around to answer that one. Finding the question more irksome than being out of breath, I pulled myself up to the rock, hooked an elbow around it, then used it for a footrest. I clamored toward the ridgetop, four steps forward and two steps back, slipping and sliding and clattering to the top.

Wind ripped across it, but there was a wide, flat rock on top of the ridge. I sat thankfully and dug my jacket out of my pack. I looked over my path below – talus slope, then steep snow and rock, then scraggled trees, then thick trees, then Frog Lakes, Cooney Lake, Virginia Lakes. Beyond that, Mono Lake basin.

Well. I was that much closer.

Sierra Crossing: Initial Attempt (10/29)

2009-11-04T21:45:00.000-08:00

“Hey man, I’m about to eat lunch; can I call you back?” he said.

“Ah, I just wanted to tell you I’m going into the woods for a few days,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I’m doing the Sierras hike. I’ll be out there seven to ten days, I think.”

“No shit,” Ben said. Ben was my best buddy. We’d done lots of traveling together, but he got married last fall and now his wife is expecting their first child in a little over a month. “Well, be safe,” he told me. “I’m at an all-you-can-eat fajita buffet. It smells awesome. Enjoy eating freeze-dried food.”

I laughed.

“Yeah, I’m going to load up my plate. Have fun drinking out of creeks.”

“Fuck off,” I grinned into the phone.

“Just kidding,” he said, “I’d rather be there.”

It was two hours later and I’d already lost the damned trail. It had led broadly away from where I’d parked my truck, an obvious if not inviting white avenue through the evergreens and around the ice-edged lakes. Three or four inches of snow on it. But when the trail led through treeless spaces, it was hard to follow. Thus it was that I found myself slogging up a hummock on the far side of a meadow, not knowing where the trail had gone and discovering that, like knowledge of winter camping among hikers, snow was not evenly distributed across the landscape. I transferred my weight to my uphill foot. It sunk through the snow with a whump. My leg sank almost to the knee. Deep here, evidently.

Figuring out where the snow was deepest, and where it was too steep to climb, was especially hard when the sun wasn’t out. In such conditions – conditions that skiers call “flat light” – the snowy ground becomes an indistinguishable mass without shadows to mark its peaks and valleys. Instead of looking at a shaded relief map, it’s like looking at an unshaded topo map with the topo lines removed. In short, when the sky is overcast, the reflection of light off the snow provides about as much information about its contours as the featureless state-lines maps that were printed in your elementary school textbooks. But at least those maps were colorful.

The snow was white and the sky was duct-tape gray. I took another step, and again sank to my knee. I pulled my downhill boot free from the snow to step forward once more but when I did, snow got packed in between my boot and sock. Meltwater-to-be. With days of hiking ahead of me, wet boots would not be okay. I spat in the snow to announce my displeasure but the snow remained cold next to my sock, my uphill foot remained lodged in the snow, and the warmth of my saliva remained insufficient to clear a path for my boots. I thought about that fajita buffet. If Ben and I had talked for longer he might have reconsidered his avowed desire to be in the Sierra Nevadas in late October.

At the top of the hill I knocked snow off a stump and sat down on it. I took off my gloves and dug the snow out of my boots, then fished my gaiters out of my pack. They came from a military surplus store at a discount price. I fiddled with the too-long cinch straps and wrestled with an ornery zipper. Gradually my fingers stiffened as I worked around my wet boots and the gaiters’ metal buckles. When I finished, six inches of excess strap trailed in the snow behind each gaiter. Leaving the strap trailing was asking to trip and fall, I knew, but I shoved my chilled hands in my pockets anyway. It would have to do for now.

I trudged past the Virginia Lakes, Cooney Lake, the Frog Lakes. The trail became a lost cause, the line indicated by my GPS a meaningless, imaginary track through the snow, rock, and forest with no ground-level indication of its existence. A little like, I imagined, the line in my elementary-school textbook dividing Europe from Asia. A cheerily bright line fondly penned by some complacent cartographer. A warm, comfortable, complacent cartographer, I suspected, who had never left his nest of Snickers wrappers long enough to traverse the terrain he purported to describe. I climbed ever higher up the canyon toward the source of the drainage that fed the Frog Lakes, then Cooney Lakes, then finally the Virginia Lakes. The Frog Lakes were frozen over – not an ideal habitat for an amphibian. If the cartographer was doing the naming, he was really out of touch.

Short of breath, I stopped to look around. To the south, Black Mountain and the steep ridges that flanked it walled the canyon. To the north, a nameless ridge, not as high but equally steep, blocked my view of anything outside the drainage. A high wind hurtling out of the north billowed snow off the ridgetop and into the valley like a sideways-shooting ice geyser. Smaller spats of wind moved across the valley floor, sweeping their own collections of ice particles before them. And to the west, at the end of the canyon, was my destination – an 11,000-foot-high saddle. I had to get up there. And I didn’t know how.

Duke came trotting back to where I stood panting, his red pack flapping jauntily against his sides. Duke’s tail whipped from side to side, slapping one side of his pack and then the other. He loved the cold. I sighed as I reached to scratch his ears. “Duke,” I told him, “I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He pressed his face happily against my legs and snorted. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone and stop acting so damned chipper. But of course you can’t say that to a dog. I wished Ben had come. Or anyone had come. This hike required an outsized spirit of adventure, a quality on which I usually run long. But on this occasion I wanted reinforcement. For the first time on any of my hikes, I thought about giving up.

* * * * *

I climbed higher, until eventually – as I described here – the snow got too hard-packed for me to move across. At that point I turned back, having decided to get my crampon-bearing snowshoes from the truck and try again the next day.

Cooney Lake, frozen over.

Writing

2009-11-03T22:00:00.002-08:00

Writing about one’s travels is not a new idea. It’s been done well, and it’s been done poorly. I want to do it well. I figure my odds of getting something published are about one in six, but in order to increase those odds I’ve been reading well-regarded travelogues. Peter Jenkins’s A Walk Across America, William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and David Grann’s The Lost City of Z all are good. The first four are mostly voyages of self-discovery. The Lost City of Z has a historical basis, as will my book, but it also tells of the author’s growing obsession with his subject. But in each book, there’s a component that I really don’t have: the author’s personal stake. In each book, the author reveals a part of himself. And it’s a painful part: the out-of-place disenchantment of a recent college grad (Jenkins), the confidence-crushing loss of a job and a wife (Least-Heat Moon), the softness and complacency of one who has gone too long without outdoor adventure (Bryson), the defiance of middle age (Steinbeck), and the myopic obsession with a lost Amazonian city (Grann).

That spooks me, because I’d rather not be so honest. But in each of those books, the self-revelation drives the narrative – it allows the reader to identify with the author. Without that identification, I don’t think a travelogue can succeed. Writing may be like hot sauce and country music; it has to hurt a little to be good.

The hardest part will be balancing the book’s components: history of the Walker Expedition, the country I pass through, the people I meet, diversions into other interesting subjects (e.g., geology), and self-revelation.

It would help me to get feedback from yall on what types of entries are fun to read and which are boring; which are interesting and which are dull; what you’ve seen too much of and what you’d like to see more. Email me. I would appreciate your input. Duke is a helluva dog, but he’s not much of a literary critic.

Thanks, in particular, to Dad, Mike Melonakos, Katie Sheehan, Kim Harris, Letitia Sikes, and Mike Caplan for the feedback they’ve offered.

POSTSCRIPT. Right now, I am backpacking in the Sierras. I will probably be gone on that backpacking trip for a week or more, so this blog entry is one that I prepared ahead of time and scheduled to post in advance. I’ll start writing “live” posts again when I’m back to my truck and computer. While I’m gone, there will be no new blog entries for Saturday or Sunday.

Roadside Humor

2009-11-02T22:00:00.001-08:00

Upon seeing this picture Katie Sheehan remarked: "Aww, Baptist humor." Imboden, Arkansas.

At some convenience stores, you can ask for directions. I wouldn't ask here. Along Interstate 80 in Nebraska.

Notice how the lake is dry. That makes it easier to walk on. Crescent Lake NWR, Nebraska.

The hillside monster is watching you. South of Great Salt Lake, Utah.

My guess is, these people are social conservatives. Happy Halloween from Logan, Utah.

Can a fellow get a drink here? It's hard to tell what kind of establishment this is. By truck stop off Interstate 80 in Nebraska.

POSTSCRIPT. Right now, I am backpacking in the Sierras. I will probably be gone on that backpacking trip for a week or more, so this blog entry is one that I prepared ahead of time and scheduled to post in advance. I’ll start writing “live” posts again when I’m back to my truck and computer. While I’m gone, there will be no new blog entries for Saturday or Sunday.