by James Galvin
Then I told Ray the third dream. “I’d been gone awhile and when I came home there was a ski lift on the old logging trail my dad calls the Champs Elysees and the prairie was all paved over and they had parking spaces on top for people to gawk at the view from up there.
“You know how sometimes things happen in life so bad you wish it was a dream but you can’t make it a dream so you can’t wake up from it no matter how much like a bad dream it is? In this dream I had that feeling. I knew it was real and I wanted it to be a dream, but I couldn’t make it one, even though this time it was one. I even reached down and touched the warm dirt where they’d bulldozed it off to the side. There was sagebrush and prairie flowers and grass mixed up in the gravel, and they had scraped it right to the bedrock.
“I reached down and touched the gravel and flowers to try to wake myself up by not feeling it there. But it was there and there were these guys in slick Western suits and alligator boots. They had blueprints rolled up in their hands and then I was screaming at them that they had made a mistake, they didn’t own this section. ‘Hell,’ I said, ‘you don’t own any of it, but even by your rules you don’t own this. By your rules I own it. You have no right to destroy this ground.’
“At first I couldn’t even get them to look at me so I walked up to this one bastard and screamed right in his face. He said they had surveyed it all, and if I’d lived there my whole life thinking it was mine I’d been living in the wrong place. The Caterpillar diesel started to crescendo and drown him out like surf. I couldn’t hear him, but then I somehow convinced him he’d made a terrible mistake. He looked around at the ruined hillside that now resembled a strip mine. He said it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, and besides, what good would it do if they stopped now?
“Then I was pulling out my grandfather’s service automatic, the one he used in the Philippines, the one we shoot old horses with, and I’m raising the barrel into his face, and even though I don’t want to shoot him anymore I know I’m going to shoot him anyway. So I’m pulling on the trigger, but I don’t hear it go off because the bulldozer is so loud, and it’s just this guy’s terrified face floating up into the sky like a sunset right there in the middle of the day.”
I took a swig to keep from crying. Not that I minded crying in front of Ray, but I thought if I started crying now I’d never be able to stop.
LYLE, 1981
“The first thing I noticed was something white and shiny on one of the bare ridges west of the abandoned Running Water Ranch. It was like a snowdrift that begun to appear in July and kind of spread out across the hillside. You could see more of it from the county road coming back from town than you could see up close because it disappeared behind the scrubby hills. Evidently it was spreading northward from the summit of the ridge, since, from the south, you couldn’t see nothing but rabbit brush and blue sky.
“Frank knew what it was from the start. I figured it was one of the new parcel owners doing something, but I couldn’t figure what. Anymore, even to go down and look was trespassing. So I just wondered—and figured some day to know—what was making the north side of that ridge go all white and glittery in the middle of summer.
“One morning I had just sat down at the kitchen table when I heard a pickup howling by in compound low. It was one of them trucks with a backseat, and it was pulling a four-horse trailer, and behind that there was another little box trailer made from the bed and rear axle of an older, junked pickup with round fenders, like maybe a ’56 F-100.
“That’s when I put it together.
“The trailers were overfilled with junk, mostly old appliances—washers, dryers, refrigerators, freezers—all mixed in with more nondescript pieces of white enameled sheet metal—shower stalls, possibly—and auto body parts.
“This man was bringing his Kentucky bank account from whatever hovel or digs he inhabited, probably on the north side of Fort Collins, or maybe La Porte, up to his new country estate, which was a treeless, waterless ridgetop that would be a sure-enough wind tunnel in three month’s time, at least five miles from the nearest source of electricity that could power any of those appliances even if they could have been fixed or used someday.
“Clearly this yahoo intended to live up there, in the style to which he was accustomed, on forty acres of exactly nothing, and he was moving his security blanket first. God help us.
“I begun to witness daily trips. The man’s big wife would drive the junkmetal wagon train down to Fort Collins (sixty miles, mostly dirt road) every morning, where she apparently held some kind of steady job at the livestock auction. His kid stayed mostly in town; the old man himself stayed mostly up on his piece of prairie. The truck bed and trailers were full of firewood cut to length for sale on the trip down, which was a curiosity since this man had no timber anywhere near his property excepting the National Forest, which I figured he figured was as much his as anybody’s. When the truck-train returned at dusk it was always full—a new load of broken refrigerators and shower stalls.
“I took some interest in this operation, which went on for weeks. The white, shining junkpile begun to spread across the hillside so that if the sun was westering you could see it glint all the way to Laramie, thirty miles.
“Also, the man, whose name I learned from Frank was Earl Ferris, was a marvel of sleepless energy. At the same time he was pilfering wood to sell in town and hauling trash up here, he built a rickety, battery-powered, two-wire electric fence with plastic ribbons all around his forty; and he was building a flat-roofed frame appendage to his fifties-model Airstream trailer that he lived in. Not to mention that he was noted poaching at night and trapping on some of his neighbors’ parcels—those few, that is, who were lucky enough to have a drainage and enough willow bushes to make a beaver dam. I figured he must have thought he was here a hundred years ago, and a beaver pelt brought fifty dollars instead of fifteen.”
Ray once showed me a map of the original homeplace on Sheep Creek his father had had drawn. It was a plan to build a dam where the rock outcrops pinch off the two parts of the valley like a girl’s waist. App intended to sacrifice the upper meadow to save the rest. He wanted to get financial backing in Fort Collins to build a reservoir. He planned to sell water to the dryland farmers in eastern Colorado. Irrigation had just started coming into the country. App was a very smart man. He was right on time.
The map showed topographic contours, where the dam should go, and how much water it would hold. App had paid a right smart to have that map surveyed and drawn. Floating on the imaginary lake were the words WORSTER RESERVOIR. It was supposed to pay off the doctors and set him up for the rest of his life. It was his retirement plan. Somehow things got pulled in a different direction.
There’s a lake there today but it isn’t called WORSTER RESERVOIR. It’s called EATON, and it didn’t save App’s land. And that high-altitude puddle isn’t the only thing in Colorado that bears Eaton’s name, either. There’s a town and banks and schools and libraries and God knows whatall else. Just like the great railroad builder Ivinson, in Laramie, who charged his Chinese and Irish laborers 40 percent of their paychecks just to cash them, and had everything in town named after him.
When Mark Eaton got wind of App’s plan, he leaned on the backers and got them to withdraw. Then he waited until App was desperate. He bought the upper meadow from App for a pittance and built the reservoir himself.
Ray said it would have been all right with App if he hadn’t gotten rich off the only scheme he ever schemed, but it wouldn’t have cost those moneymen a cent to name the reservoir after the man whose idea it was. But life’s ironic, and blame won’t stick to anyone: App’s last straw turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Ray sixty years later.
After swamping for ranches at a dollar a day for years, living in bug-infested bunkhouses, Ray followed the lure of city lights as country boys have always done and always will do—that gape-mouthed awe for the electric unknown pulls them in like moths, or else it�
��s just wages, pure and simple.
After Ray married Margie, a hometown girl whose father owned a plastering business and considered her to have married down, they moved to Denver where Ray got a job welding. The war was on and what Ray welded was airplane wings.
Since the Army wouldn’t let him fight (he never told me why), he decided to give more blood than a whole platoon of soldiers. This, combined with the effects of welding indoors, poisoned him to where the doctors gave him two weeks to live. Margie drove him back to Laramie to die, but he recovered in six months’ time and hired on with Margie’s father as a hod carrier.
Old Roy always hated Ray, but no one could say that the son-in-law was afraid of work, so Ray learned the trade, and because Old Roy wanted what was best for his daughter, he eventually bit the bullet and made Ray foreman.
By the time Old Roy was ready to retire no one wanted stucco anymore. Sheetrock was coming in, replacing lath and plaster. But Ray didn’t have another trade—outside of welding, which his health denied him—and there weren’t enough pitchpine posts left in the woods to surround a gopher hole.
So Ray bought the business from Roy, and the business slowly died. As much as anything else, it died because Ray couldn’t bring himself to charge any more than slightly less than what would have been fair, especially to anyone he knew, and he knew everyone in town. Furthermore, by the time he was fifty, he had begun to drink up a considerable percentage of the profits and had started missing payments on the doublewide.
In 1972 the irony showed itself. Ray received a call from a man who said he was a water engineer for the Divide Ditch and Water Company, which owned and operated Eaton Reservoir. Ray’s reputation for his knowledge of the back country—where the company had miles of ditches which fed, along with Sheep Creek, Eaton Reservoir—had come to the man’s attention. Bill McMurray, who had run the ditches since 1948, was retiring, and the man wanted to know if Ray wanted his job. It would mean less money, but the company would pay all his expenses, give him a house to live in just below the dam (I always thought the house was situated to insure that the caretaker took care of the water flow properly), and a new pickup every four years. The man also said the company was buying a snow vehicle, like a lightweight Caterpillar, so he wouldn’t have to snowshoe or snowmobile the nine miles up to Deadman, as Bill had to do all these years.
Ray was interested. He sold the plastering business for a neighborly price, paid off the doublewide, and moved up on the mountain.
He still didn’t own the house he lived in, but he was living on his father’s homeplace, his father’s dream, which was now half-drowned and half-owned by some fellow named Lyle Van Waning.
So Ray became a water engineer, my neighbor, and Lyle’s, and Frank’s, and began to roam the Deadman country, running the ditches, cranking the headgates, rebuilding some of the things Bill McMurray had let slip into ruin, and generally keeping an eye on things. One of the big pluses was that there wasn’t much to the job a man couldn’t do drunk, and the boss was sixty miles away.
Out of habit Ray fixed everything with cement and chicken wire, like retaining walls and crumbling foundations. What he couldn’t fix with cement he welded. He hated to build with wood, hated driving nails. He would rather build a fence of welded pipe than wooden rails, and he liked the idea of things lasting.
Ray was home at last, by God, and he reckoned he couldn’t die now since he was already in heaven. Every time he thought of his good fortune, he just had to drink to it.
It’s just a pitchfork with the handle sawn off and the tines forged over to ninety degrees, a specialized tool for pulling mud and willow sticks from culverts and irrigation ditches. Lyle sits hunched over on the tailgate. His hip boots are turned down. He flops the handle of his ditch tool back and forth from hand to hand between his knees. He smells mint growing in the willow bushes along the creek, listens to the even cadences of Ray’s treatise on the Supreme Intelligence of Beavers. Lyle is not all that receptive to Ray’s point of view.
“A beaver can construct a sturdy enough dam to stanch near any mountain torrent. He likes a reservoir. He doesn’t need a backhoe or dynamite. Now that’s a water engineer. He isolates his house, out in the middle with the door underwater so he won’t be bothered.”
Lyle interrupts. “Maybe I should have built my door underwater.”
“You should have. That beaver has perfect security. He’s warm all winter and has plenty of supplies. Going to town for him is as far as the nearest aspen tree.”
“That’s usually where the coyotes catch them.” Lyle stops flip-flopping the handle and looks hard at Ray. Ray pretends not to notice and keeps talking.
“When the pond freezes to his liking he goes down to the dam to pull out a few sticks, like turning the crank on the reservoir, and lets out a little water. He lowers the level to make an airspace and room to swim around in there. He does it before the ice is too thick so he can’t get trapped inside. It’s just like that’ere Holidome in Collins. In summer that water is so still, it works just like a burglar alarm.”
Lyle listens. He knows all this, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. It isn’t what people say, he thinks; how they say it is what really tells you what they’re talking about. His sour mood is not the result of disagreeing—in fact, quite the opposite. Lyle hates it when Ray says things he agrees with.
“Sure they’re smart, Ray, but that don’t mean I have to like the sonsofbitches. Being smart just makes it worse. Makes them better at being a pain in the ass. Makes you feel guilty for trapping them. Hell, Ray, people are smart.”
The inkling of a smile begins to play around the corners of Ray’s mouth. He is about to experience the sublime joy of getting Lyle’s goat.
“I suppose you’d feel that way about coyotes if you was a sheep herder. Why they’re smart is why they’re a aggravation.”
“Number one, I ain’t a sheep herder, and number two, I’ll tell you who’s a aggravation.”
Now Ray just beams. He covers his grin with his hand to hide the teeth he’s missing. They stop talking.
Lyle thinks about how good beavers are for the meadow since they raise the level of the creek and slow the water down so it has time to seep into the sub-soil. When they plug the ditches, though, they mess up everything. Lyle doesn’t like being forced to trap them. Last summer he tried to trap a beaver near the flume with the usual shoulder-hold Victors that drown them, but, expert as he was, he could not. Some beavers, like coyotes, cannot be fooled. One morning he found a trap sprung and there was a toenail in its jaws. Lyle knew enough not to be encouraged by this. It meant that beaver would be even more careful, at least for a while.
Lyle then hooked up a twelve-volt battery to a wire he strung across the pond about an inch above the surface. When he came back next morning more or less expecting to find a beaver floating dead on its back with smoke still coming out of its ears, instead he found that the beaver had raised the water a notch and shorted out the wire.
That beaver must have been impressed with Lyle’s ingenuity, though: it moved upstream and started to rankle Ray. It plugged the culvert under the road that leads to Ray’s house. The water rose and washed out the road. Ray was calm. He didn’t want to drown a beaver cruelly in the usual trapper’s manner, so he went down there four nights running with a bottle, a flashlight, and a shotgun. He never saw anything. He needed some sleep. The next morning the culvert was plugged and the road had a chasm four feet deep running across it. Ray was cut off. And pissed off.
He built an elaborate scarecrow and dressed it in clothes he wore all the time, for musk value. That worked one night, then the beaver got wise and sawed off the road again. Ray waited in ambush another four nights and didn’t see anything. He parked his truck down there, which worked one more night. Only. Ray was devoting his life to this beaver.
He broke down and set traps near the places he could see where the beaver slipped in and out of the water, leaving little muddy slides in the b
ank’s sweet grass.
One morning I went over to have coffee with Ray and I found his truck parked down by the culvert. Ray was slumping on the tailgate like he was passed out from booze but hadn’t fallen over yet, but it was too early in the morning for that, even for Ray. I walked up and there was the biggest female beaver I have ever seen laid out drowned in the back of the truck.
Ray didn’t look up. He said, “There’s a whole mountain back there with streams and springs to plug no end. If I could’ve scared her, but she wouldn’t scare.” When he looked at me his tears made freshets down his cheeks. We walked to the house for coffee before skinning her out.
Though both of his brothers died flying, Lyle told me he didn’t have anything against airplanes except they were too “vibrational.” Ray had welded fighter wings, but he never went up in a plane. Dr. Bert Honea had a very used bush plane. It wasn’t fast, but it could climb like a nighthawk and it could land on less than half a mile of tundra.
Bert took a notion to land his winged rattlebox on the two ruts and hump of grass referred to as “the road.” When he came in for his initial landing he buzzed the house first. I tore off down the hill in the Jeep, with a rag tied to a stick of lodgepole for a windsock, and parked off to the side of the runway.
Bert flew over twice more to test the wind, which, as usual, was every which way, shifting from side to side like a cat twitching its tail to mesmerize a sparrow. Bert decided to forget about the wind, since it had no apprehensible direction, and land the thing uphill so it would stop faster, he hoped, before it reached the fence or a lick of crosswind swiped it into a spin.
