English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “Saw Marcella a while back. From a distance.”

  “Yeah?” Ray responded, with what I believe is called elaborate indifference.

  • • •

  The next morning I returned with the rake to the Reese place, confirmed with Pete that the hay was too wet for us to try, retrieved Pony, and by noon was home at English Creek in time for Sunday dinner. During which I related to my parents my visit to the Double W.

  My father, the fire season always on his mind now, grimaced and said: “Lightning. You’d think the world could operate without the damn stuff.” Then he asked: “Did you see your brother?” When I said I had, he only nodded.

  Given how much my mother had been on her high horse against the Double W all summer, I was set to tell her of the latest cook and the tomato smush and the weakling gravy. But before I could get started she fixed me with a thoughtful look and asked: “Is there anything new with Alec?”

  “No,” came flying out of me from some nest of brotherly allegiance I hadn’t been aware of. Lord, what a wilderness is the thicket of family. “No, he’s just riding around.”

  • • •

  This is what I meant, earlier, about the chain of events of that last spate of haying. If Clayton Hebner had not grab-assed himself into a twisted ankle, I would not now have been the sole depository of the news of Alec’s Double W situation.

  • • •

  The second Saturday in August, one exact month since we started haying, we sited the stacker in the last meadow along Noon Creek.

  Before climbing on the power buckrake Pete cast a long gaze over the windrows, estimating. Then said what didn’t surprise anybody who’d ever been in a haying crew before: “Let’s see if we can get it all up in one, instead of moving the stacker another damn time.”

  “If you can get it up here,” vowed Wisdom, “we’ll find someplace to put it.”

  So that final haystack began to climb. Bud Dolson, now that mowing was over, was on top helping Wisdom with the stacking. Perry too was done with his part of haying, no more windrows to be made. He tied his team in some shade by the creek and in his creaky way was dabbing around the stack with a pitchfork, carrying scraps of hay to the stacker fork. Clayton, I am happy to report, had mended enough to drive the stacker team again and I had regained my scatter rake.

  Of course, it was too much hay for one stack. But on a last one, that never stops a hay crew. I raked and re-raked behind Pete’s swoops with his buckrake. The stack towered. The final loads wouldn’t come off the stacker fork by themselves, Wisdom and Bud pulled up the hay pitchforkful by pitchforkful to the round summit of the stack.

  At last every stem of hay was in that stack.

  “How the hell do we get off this thing?” called down Bud from the island in the air, only half joking.

  “Along about January I’ll feed from this stack,” Pete sent back up to him. “I’ll bring out a ladder and get you then.”

  In actuality, the descent of Wisdom and Bud was provided by Clayton running the stacker fork up to them, so they could grab hold of the fork teeth while they climbed down onto the frame.

  Marie had driven up from the main ranch to see this topping-off of the summer’s haying, and brought with her cold tea and fresh-baked oatmeal cookies. We stood and looked and sipped and chewed, a crew about to scatter. Perry to head back into Gros Ventre and a winter of leather work at the saddle shop. Bud tonight onto a bus to Anaconda and his smelter job. Wisdom proclaimed he was heading straight for the redwood logging country down in California, and Pete and Bud had worked on him until they got Wisdom to agree that he would ride the bus with Bud as far as Great Falls, at least getting him and his wages past the Medicine Lodge saloon. Clayton, over the English Creek–Noon Creek divide to the North Fork and Hebner life again. Pete and Marie, to fencing the haystacks and then shipping the lambs and then trailing the Reese sheep home from the reservation, and all too soon feeding out the hay we had put up. Me, to again become a daytime dweller at English Creek instead of a nightly visitor.

  • • •

  “Either this weather is Out Of Control,” declared my mother, “or I’m Getting Old.”

  It can be guessed which of those she thought was the case. This summer did not seem to be aware that with haying done, it was supposed to be thinking about departure. The wickedest weather yet settled in, a real siege of swelter. The first three days I was home at English Creek after finishing at Pete’s the temperature hit the nineties and the rest of the next couple of weeks wasn’t a whole lot better. Too hot. Putting up with heat while you drive a scatter rake or work some other job is one thing. But having the temperature try to toast you while you’re just hanging around and existing, that somehow seems a personal insult.

  Nor, for all her lament about August’s runaway warmth, was my mother helping the situation any. The contrary. She was canning. And canning and canning. It started each June with rhubarb, and then would come a spurt of cooking homemade sausage and layering it in crocks with the fat over it, and next would be the first of the garden vegetables, peas, and after them beets to pickle, and then the various pickings of beans, all the while interspersed with making berry jams, and at last in late August the arrival to Helwig’s merc in Gros Ventre of the flat boxes of canning peaches and pears. We ate all winter on what my mother put up, but the price of it was that during a lot of the hottest days of summer the kitchen range also was blazing away. So whenever canning was the agenda I steered clear of the house as much as I could. It was that or melt.

  • • •

  In the ranger station as well, life sometimes got too warm for comfort, although not just because of the temperature reading.

  “How’s it look?” my father asked his dispatcher Chet Barnouw first thing each morning. This time of year, this sizzling August, Chet’s reports were never good. “Extreme danger” was the fire rating on the Two Medicine National Forest now, day after day. There already were fires, big ones, on forests west of the Continental Divide; the Bad Rock Canyon fire in the Flathead National Forest was just across the mountains from us.

  Poor Chet. His reward for reporting all this was to have my father say, “Is that the best news you can come up with?” My father put it lightly, or tried to, but both Chet and the assistant ranger Paul Eliason knew it was the start of another touchy day. Chet and Paul were young and in their first summer on the Two, and I know my father suffered inwardly about their lack of local knowledge. Except for being wet behind the ears, they weren’t a bad pair. But in a fire summer like this, that was a big except. As dispatcher Chet was in charge of the telephone setup that linked the lookout towers and the guard cabins to the ranger station, and he kept in touch with headquarters in Great Falls by the regular phone system. His main site of operation, thus, was the switchboard behind a partition at one side of my father’s office. I think my mother was the one who gave that cubbyhole the name of “the belfry,” from all the phone signals that chimed in there. The belfry took some getting used to, for anybody, but Chet was an unhurryable type best fitted for the job of dispatcher.

  Of the two, Paul Eliason gave my father more grief than Chet did. Paul did a lot of moping. You’d have thought he was born looking glum about it. Actually the case was that the previous winter, just before he was transferred to the English Creek district as my father’s assistant ranger, Paul and his wife had gotten a divorce and she’d gone home to her mother in Seattle. According to what my father heard from Paul it was one of those things. She tried for a year to put up with being a Forest Service wife, but Paul at the time was bossing CCC crews who were building trail on the Olympic National Forest out in the state of Washington, and the living quarters for the Eliasons was a backcountry one-room cabin which featured pack rats and a cookstove as temperamental as it was ancient. Perfect circumstances to make an assistant ranger–city wife marriage go flooey if it ever was going to.

  “He’s starting to heal up,” my father assessed Paul at this point of the summer. “
Lord knows, I’ve tried to keep him busy enough he doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself.”

  If I rationed myself and didn’t get in the way of business, my father didn’t mind that I hung around in the ranger station. But there was a limit on how much I wanted to do that, too. Whenever something was happening—the lookouts up there along the skyline of the Two calling in their reports to Chet in the belfry, my father tracing his finger over and over the map showing the pocket fires his smokechasers already had dealt with—the station was a lively enough place to be. But in between those times, rangering was not much of a spectator sport.

  • • •

  Each day is a room of time, it is said. In that long hot remainder of August I knew nothing to do but go from one span of sun to the next with as little of rubbing against my parents as possible. My summer’s work was done, they were at the zenith of theirs.

  Consequently a good deal of my leisure or at least time-killing was spent along the creek. I called it fishing, although it didn’t really amount to that. Fish are not dumb; they don’t exert themselves to swallow a hook during the hot part of the day. So until the trout showed any signs of biting I would shade up under a cottonwood, pull an old magazine from my hip pocket, and read.

  A couple of times each week I would saddle Pony and ride up to Breed Butte to check on Walter Kyle’s place, then fish the North Fork beaver dams on my way home. Walter’s place was a brief hermitage for me on those visits. The way it worked was this. We and Walter were in the habit of swapping magazines, and after I had chosen several to take from the pile on his shelf, I would sit at his kitchen table and think matters over for a while before heading down to the beaver dams.

  That low old ranch house of Walter Kyle’s was as private a place as could be asked for. To sit there at the table looking out the window to the south, down the slope of Breed Butte to the willow thickets of the North Fork and beyond to Grizzly Reef’s crooked cliffs and the line of peaks into the Teton River country, was to see the earth empty of people. Just out of sight down the North Fork was our ranger station and only over the brow of Breed Butte the other direction was the old McCaskill homestead, now Hebnerized. But all else of this long North Fork coulee was vacancy. Not wilderness, of course. Scotch Heaven left traces of itself, homestead houses still standing or at least not quite fallen down, fencelines whose prime use now was for hawks to perch on. But any other breathing soul than me, no. The sense of emptiness all around made me ponder the isolation those early people, my father’s parents among them, landed themselves into here. Even when the car arrived into this corner of the Two Medicine country, mud and rutted roads made going anywhere no easy task. To say nothing of what winter could do. Some years the snow here drifted up and up until it covered the fenceposts and left you guessing its depth beyond that. No, those homesteaders of Scotch Heaven did not know what they were getting into. But once in, how many cherished this land as their own, whatever its conditions? It is one of those matters hard to balance out. Distance and isolation create a freedom of sorts. The space to move in according to your own whims and bents. Yet it was exactly this freedom, this fact that a person was a speck on the earth sea, that must have been too much for some of the settlers. From my father’s stories and Toussaint Rennie’s, I knew of Scotch Heaveners who retreated into the dimness of their homestead cabins, and the worse darkness of their own minds. Others who simply got out, walked away from the years of homestead effort. Still others who carried it with them into successful ranching. Then there were the least lucky who took their dilemma, a freedom of space and a toll of mind and muscle, to the grave with them.

  It was Alec who had me thinking along these heavy lines. Alec and his insistence on an independent life. Was it worth the toll he was paying? I could not give an absolute affidavit either way. What I did know for sure was that Alec’s situation now had me in my own kind of bind. For if my parents could learn what a fizzle Alec’s Double W job was, it might give them fresh determination to persuade him out of it. At very least, it might soften the frozen mood, put them and him on speaking terms again. But I had told Alec I’d say nothing to them about his situation. And his asking of that was the one true brother-to-brother moment between us since he left English Creek.

  • • •

  That’s next thing to hopeless, to spend your time wishing you weren’t in the fix you are. And so I fished like an apostle, and read and read, and hung around the ranger station betweentimes, and eventually even came up with something else I wanted to do with myself. The magazines must have seeded the notion in me. In any case it was during those hot drifting last of August days that I proposed to my mother that I paper my porch bedroom.

  She still was canning. Pole beans by now, I think. She tucked a wisp of hair back from where it had stuck to her damp forehead and informed me: “Wallpaper costs money.” I never did understand why parents seem to think this is such startling news, that something a kid wants costs money. Based on my own experience as a youngster, the real news would have been if the object of desire was for free.

  But this once, I was primed for that response from my mother “I’ll use magazine pages,” I suggested. “Out of those old Posts and Collier’s. There’s a ton of pictures in them, Mom.”

  That I had thought the matter through to this extent told her this meant something to me. She quit canning and faced me. “Even so, it would mean buying the paste. But I suppose—”

  I still had my ducks in a row. “No, it won’t. The Heaneys have got some left over. I heard Genevieve say.” Ray’s mother had climaxed her spring cleaning that year by redoing the Heaney front hall.

  “All right,” my mother surrendered. “It’s too hot to argue. The next time anybody makes a trip to town, we’ll pick up your paste.”

  • • •

  I can be fastidious when it’s worth being so. The magazine accumulation began to get a real going-over from me for illustrations worthy of gracing my sleep parlor.

  I’d much like to have had Western scenes, but do you know, I could not find any that were worth a damn. A story called “Bitter Creek” showed a guy riding with a rifle across the pommel of his saddle and some pack horses behind him. The pack horses were all over the scenery instead of strung together by rope, and there was every chance that the guy would blast his leg off by not carrying that rifle in a scabbard. So much for Bitter Creek. Then there was a story which showed a couple on horseback, which drew me because the pair made me think of Alec and Leona. It turned out, though, that the setting was a dude ranch, and the line under the illustration read: “One Dude Ranch is a Good Deal Like Another. You Ride Horseback and You Overeat and You Lie in the Sun and You Fish and You Play Poker and You Have Picnics.” All of which may be true enough, but I didn’t think it interesting enough to deserve wall space.

  No, the first piece of art I really liked was a color illustration in Collier’s of a tramp freighter at anchor. And then I found a Post piece showing a guy leaning on the railing of another merchant vessel and looking across the water to a beautiful sailing ship. “As the ‘Inchcliffe Castle’ Crawled Along the Coast of Spain, Through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Engineer Was Prey to a Profound Preoccupation.” This was more like it. A nautical decor, just what the room could use. I went ahead and snipped out whatever sea story illustrations I could find in the stack of magazines. I could see that there wasn’t going to be enough of a fleet to cover the whole wall, but I came across a Mr. Moto detective series that went on practically forever and so I filled in along the top of the wall with action scenes from that, as a kind of contrasting border.

  When I was well launched into my paperhanging, Mr. Moto and various villains up top there and the sea theme beginning to fill in under, I called in my mother to see my progress.

  “It does change the look of the place,” she granted.

  • • •

  The evening of the twenty-fifth of August, a Friday, an electrical storm struck across western Montana and then moved to o
ur side of the Continental Divide. It threw firebolts beyond number. At Great Falls, radio station KFBB was knocked off the air and power lines blew out. I would like to be able to say that I awoke in the big storm, so keen a weather wizard that I sat up in bed sniffing the ozone or harking to the first distant avalanche of thunder. The fact is, I snoozed through that electrical night like Sleeping Beauty.

  The next morning, more than two hundred new lightning fires were reported in the national forests of Region One.

  Six were my father’s. One near the head of the South Fork of English Creek. One at the base of Billygoat Peak. Two in the old Phantom Woman burn, probably snags alight. One in northwest behind Jericho Reef. And one up the North Fork at Flume Gulch.

  The McCaskill household was in gear before daybreak.

  “Fire school never told us they come half a dozen at a time,” muttered my father and went out to establish himself in the ranger station.

  I stoked away the rest of my breakfast and got up to follow him. My mother half advised and half instructed, “Don’t wear out your welcome.” But she knew as well as anything that it would take logchains and padlocks to keep me out of the station with all this going on.

  As soon as I stepped in I saw that Chet and Paul looked braced. As if they were sinners and this was the morning after, when they had to stand accountable to a tall red-haired Scotch preacher.

  My father on the other hand was less snorty than he’d been in weeks. Waiting for the bad to happen was always harder for him than trying to deal with it once it did.

  “All right,” was all my father said to the pair of them, “let’s get the guys to chasing these smokes.” Chet started his switchboard work and the log of who was sent where at what time, Paul began assessing where he ought to pitch in in person.