Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  Beau’s behavior was even worse than his appearance. First of all, he did not walk like a dog at all but, rather, like a drunk cowboy, tottering as he moved forward and sideways at the same time. He was also uncoordinated, with none of the grace and precision you would expect in a respectable bird dog. Every time he lifted his rear leg to scratch his head he would miscalculate and miss his noggin completely, causing him to fall over—after which he would look up with a dopey, surprised expression, as he racked his pea brain to reckon what might have gone wrong.

  Beau also had a wagonload of rude habits. The abundant lip flaps on his crumpled face were perfectly adapted to amplify his already thunderous snoring, which continued unabated during the twenty hours a day he remained snoozing. In fact, his snoring sounded very much like the chainsaw I was by then so anxious to trade him for. During his few waking hours, Beau would eat about thirty pounds of antelope scat, which was the culinary delicacy he preferred whenever he wasn’t chewing on rocks. This unusual diet not only resulted in an endless trail of pronghorn poop, which dropped one pellet at a time from the hidden caverns of his prodigious lips, but also produced flatulence so toxic that I banished him to the garage, where I then feared that the pilot light on the propane hot water heater might ignite a methane explosion. And while I had bought this dog, in part, to have a pet that would scare away critters, it turned out that Beau was terrified of jackrabbits, cottontails, and even ground squirrels. He did, however, love to attack the toy monkey the girls bought for him, so if western Nevada is ever overrun by tiny squeaking chimpanzees, I’ll be all set.

  Within a week, I had generated a variety of nicknames for Beauregard. When he was especially dim-witted, I called him “SLOWregard.” When he snuffled harvester ants out of his nostrils, I referred to him as “BLOWregard.” I told him often that I held him in “LOWregard,” though that was only because when I gave him commands, he responded with absolutely “NOregard.” I was eventually persuaded by Eryn that it was in poor taste to call him “BeauRETARD,” though I failed to see how a house pet that routinely wolfs down antelope feces was much in need of respectful treatment.

  After a few weeks, though, I decided to cut little Beau some slack. After all, he had come to Nevada from Northern California, where his greatest threat was having chardonnay dribbled onto him by the breeder lady, whose face was partially paralyzed by Botox—which should, instead, have been administered to this wrinkle-faced puppy (BEAUtox?). But now this poor guy was in the Great Basin, where he was being hammered by wind and blasted in the high desert furnace, not to mention getting regular snootfuls of danger in the form of ravenous coyotes or the several species of birds big and fierce enough to pluck his baggy little ass off Ranting Hill, never mind the bobcats and mountain lions. His very first week out here Beau had a run-in with an eleven-button rattler in the garage, which is the kind of thing that can get stuck between your ears—especially if they are as huge as Beau’s are. In fairness to the pedigree puppy, Silver Hills is the kind of primitive, exposed country where even human newcomers suffer from a vague fear that they might be carried off by a pterodactyl.

  Beau’s only good habit is that he wakes me up every morning at around 4:00 A.M. to go outside and pee, which means that I go outside and pee with him. I whiz first, after which slow Beau gets the hint and takes a turn, for which I praise him decisively: “FLOWregard, well done, boy.” Taking a leak exhausts him, so he flops down with his giant lip flaps parked in the dirt on either side of his broad snout. This is my cue to sit on a nearby boulder and take in the arched dome of the sky.

  On this chilly night the wind has settled a little, and I can just make out the high-pitched yips from an upcanyon band of coyotes. The signature scent of sagebrush sweeps across the open desert. Soaring through the forking light bridge of the Milky Way is the unmistakable asterism of Cygnus, the swan, whose brightest star, Deneb, is blazing at its tail as it cranes its long, graceful neck toward the mountains. At last, the spiral light of Venus crests the desert hills to the east.

  Reconsidering sleepy Beauregard by starlight, it now seems that he might fit right in here. After all, we not only tolerate eccentricity in Silver Hills, we all but require it. If Beau is weird looking, poorly behaved, ill-mannered, comical, and glaringly imperfect, then he has all that in common with me—and, perhaps, with every desert rat who has chosen to make a life in this hard, wild place.

  EVEN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, I do not recall precisely what I was thinking when I decided it would be a good idea to move out to this isolated desert hilltop. Surely, it must have had something to do with a desire for solitude. No less an authority on pastoral bliss than Billy Wordsworth wrote that, “with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things,” and so I had been persuaded that true insight must be correlated with harmonious silence. If I could get away from the relentless din of humanity—so little of which has substantial or lasting value—I, too, might gain the power to see into the beauty of this Great Basin landscape and the strange and amazing life we live within it.

  In conflict with this fantasy of silence is the fact that I am a father, for there is no refuge from the incessant torrent of noise that we parents both produce and are subjected to. Trying to parent and have quiet is like trying to swim without getting wet. It is not only the girls’ talking that breaks the silence around here; it is also their regrettable habit of waking throughout the night and feeling obliged to come tell me all about it. The other night, Caroline marched into our bedroom at 1:45 A.M. and blurted out, “Do you think, if you crossed a camel with a monkey, it could go without water and still climb trees?”

  I replied as any exhausted parent would. “Do you need to know the answer tonight, honey, or can I give that one some thought?”

  Hannah is even worse, because she breaks the silence in a creepier way: she sleepwalks. A week ago, she zombied her way into our room at 2:30 A.M. to ask, in that eerie, flat affect of the somnambulist, why we had decided to turn our home into a seafood restaurant and required her to become a waitress, thus ruining the birthday party she had planned for her pet zebra, Josephine. In our family, even being asleep isn’t reason enough to stop talking.

  In addition to these human distractions, my quiet is routinely disrupted by our useless pets. The family cat, Lucy, has a meow as loud as a barking dog, and frequently celebrates the witching hour by using my forehead as her ass throne. Our new dog is worse. Although Beauregard has absurdly long, floppy ears and jowls, the acoustic force of his ears and lips is his most astounding trick. Whenever he shakes his head, which he does each time I am about to enter a deep sleep, there is a prodigious flapping so rhythmic, resonant, and loud that it sounds uncannily like the beating of helicopter blades, as if a Huey were landing at the foot of the bed. Even when Beau is silent, which is rare, he is still deadly. His flatulence is so unspeakably toxic that when awakened by it, I find myself wishing he would shake his head some more, just to blast the stink away with his fanning ears and billowing lips.

  All these disruptions to my quiet occur within the house, but the real acoustic trouble originates outside, where mice scurry along the windowsills and frequently succeed in gaining access to the walls. Once they breach the levee of the stucco exterior—which they can do through a gap as small as a quarter of an inch—they delight in using their little claws and teeth to scratch and nibble at the drywall, which amplifies the scraping sound so much that as I lie in bed wide awake, I estimate the average mouse’s weight at seventy pounds. Worse are the packrats, gifted climbers that in the absence of a handy cliff, scramble straight up the stucco exterior of the house, where they gnaw away at the soffits all night in an attempt to enter the attic. And the wind out here is huge, ripping down from the Sierra in winter and blasting out of the desert canyons as the Washoe Zephyr in summer.

  It isn’t only the wind that howls, but also the coyotes. What could be more enchanting than coyote song at night? Nature writers often cr
oon about the experience of hearing the song of the pack, a transformative moment in which one is, apparently, obliged to feel an overwhelming spiritual bond with the nonhuman world. I, instead, nurture a deep bond with the fantasy of someday getting five hours of sleep. Coyote song is not at all as advertised. Their chorus, if we want to stretch a valorizing metaphor so far as to use that term, is less a sonorous howling than a chaotic cacophony of yips and yelps. I will consent to the word chorus only if I may stipulate that it is a chorus of inebriated third-graders. These selfish animals also refuse to yelp on my schedule, instead taking special pleasure in busting loose about the time I have finally rid myself of sleeptalking daughters and lip-flapping dogs.

  Old Man Coyote is not alone out there. There are also the great horned owls, which, like the coyotes, do not often produce the pastoral night song we have been led to expect. Gentle hooting? Forget it. The signature, charismatic Hollywood hoot comprises about a fifth of their repertoire, while the remainder is an amalgamation of dissonant cries, whistles, shrieks, barks, and hisses. And may I be wrapped in rattlers if the raspy, piercing wail of an immature owl does not sound like a human baby screeching in agony because its little calf has been caught in the teeth of a steel leg trap.

  Last Sunday, this immense desert night provided an unremitting sonic parade, a noisy nocturne in which the usual annoyances occurred serially over the course of what might otherwise have been a decent night’s sleep. Sleeptalking kid, face-sitting cat, lip-flapping dog, scurrying mice, gnawing packrats, surging wind, yipping coyotes, and shrieking owls. Then, at 3:45 A.M., our chickens started clucking and squawking. Yet another of my ill-advised pastoral affectations, these hens are almost as useless as our pets. I feed them, clean their coop, keep them watered and warm, and generally enable their selfish, indolent lifestyle. They, in return, sometimes appear, perhaps, to be nearing the contemplation of, maybe, almost laying an egg, but then rarely follow through. Now, in addition to being unproductive, smelly, high-maintenance, and lazy, they were also being loud.

  In a moment of pure frustration, I succumbed to that special kind of exhausted anger that arises when a desperate need for rest has been thwarted one too many times. In that moment, some biological imperative exerted itself, as a deeply repressed survival instinct eclipsed my last shred of equanimity and convinced me that sleep was worth fighting for. Enough was enough. If the chickens were blathering of their own accord, I intended to shut them up—for good, if necessary. If it was, instead, Old Man Coyote who was riling up the feathered imbeciles, then I intended to holler until I drove him into the night, where his racket could be drowned out by the roar of wind ripping through juniper and bitterbrush. Jumping out of bed, I grabbed the handle of my big, yellow flashlight and stomped angrily out into the desert, wearing only boxer shorts (lime green, with bright red ladybugs).

  “Shut up!” I shouted into the night. “All y’all chickens, coyotes, owls, zip it! I moved out here to get some damned peace and quiet! Shut…the…hell…UP!”

  As I cursed into the darkness, the darting beam of my flashlight caught a reflection in the sage. I now swung the beam back and panned slowly from right to left in search of whatever glint the light had caught. I froze as the beam suddenly locked on two greenish-yellow lasers that beamed back at me. In the penumbra of light glowing through the sage, I could now make out in silhouette the large, rounded face of a big cat.

  I am not leery of rattlers or scorpions, but I am afraid of mountain lions, whose mule deer kills I have found atop my home mountain, and whose immense paw prints I discover inscribed like fierce hieroglyphics in the hardened caliche mud out on the flats near the canyon spring. As I stood barefoot and paralyzed, with the wind ripping through my boxers, I had a profound realization of exactly what sort of mistake I had just made. Not only was I unarmed, nearly naked, away from the house, and twenty feet from the eyes of a big cat that was not budging an inch, but I had just screamed at the King of the High Desert to shut the hell up. I had a momentary worry that in addition to being killed, I would also be featured in the Darwin Awards: “A Nevada man walked up to a mountain lion in the middle of the night in a remote area of the high desert and shouted at the big cat to ‘shut the hell up.’ The cat responded by attacking the man, killing him quickly with a vicious bite to the neck. The kill was silent, an irony the man did not live long enough to appreciate.”

  Trying not to focus on the comic potential of my looming evisceration, I backed away slowly, keeping the flashlight beam locked on those piercing eyes, expecting every moment that the big cat would spring toward me. But those greenish-yellow lasers remained unblinking, and, after what seemed an eternity, I backed against the door, slowly turned the knob behind my back while keeping those glowing eyes in sight, and eased into the house. Shutting the door quietly, I made several resolutions instantly. First, I would never, ever go outside again. Second, I would let Lucy the Desert Cat go outside immediately. Third, I would change my boxers as soon as possible. And fourth, I would snap on the exterior light in hopes of scoping the big cat. I quickly hit the switch and pressed my face to the window, cupping my hands around my forehead to reduce the glare. Slowly, calmly, out from the sagebrush walked a huge…bobcat.

  Because bobcats can have a home range in excess of 100 miles and are elusive and retiring under any circumstances, the odds of getting a good look at one are vanishingly slim, even for a wild desert hillbilly like me. In a decade of living on Ranting Hill, I have enjoyed only a single glimpse of Lynx rufus, but now, out of nowhere on this chilly autumn night, came this desert ghost, strutting to center stage on its own well-lit catwalk. The bobcat strode gracefully across the desert flat beside our house and walked calmly beneath the girls’ swing set. I was surprised at how long and cheetah-like its front legs appeared. The rear haunches were muscular and powerful, an adaptation for pouncing on big jackrabbits. The coloration of the thick fur was a wild combination of bars, dots, and bowed splotches that help to camouflage the animal as it stalks through the dappled scrub.

  Before the bobcat receded into the darkness beyond the reach of the porch light, it paused just once, momentarily turning its head in my direction. Its face was beautiful, unmistakably lynx-like, with upright, black-tipped ears, and bright eyes, while the broad, curved flair of its whiskered cheeks made its head appear impossibly large. And then it was gone. Although it was only 4:00 A.M. I made myself a mug of strong java and sat in silence—at last, the magic of that long-sought, nourishing silence—looking out into the inky darkness, already treasuring a memory of the best night’s sleep I never had.

  WANTING TO CLIMB one last mountain before winter shut down the high country until June, on Veterans Day I headed with my buddy Steve to Mount Augusta, a 10,000-foot peak in the remote Clan Alpine Range in west-central Nevada, just a few hours’ drive east of Ranting Hill. From the summit of Augusta you gaze west across the vast alkali playa of Dixie Valley, into the precipitous eastern escarpment of the Stillwater Mountains, and then all the way to the Sierra Nevada crest above Lake Tahoe, more than 100 miles away. It was a perfect fall day in the mountains of the high desert: crisp, azure, bracing, and made sweeter by the knowledge that winter would soon swing the mountain’s gates closed until late spring.

  Although Steve and I had been out six or seven hours without seeing any people, we were not the first to pass this way. We found and left several glossy, black, obsidian arrowheads, which Steve examined for their percussion strike pattern and estimated were about ten thousand years old. On a steep, exposed traverse a few miles from the summit, we tracked a bighorn sheep in the snow before pausing to drink in the alpine light and expansive views.

  “Steve,” I said, “I’m gonna miss the high country when winter comes. This is the extreme, old-school, hard-core, all-out, straight-up, real-deal wilderness….” At just this moment I was interrupted by a tremendous roaring out over Dixie playa, ten miles to the west.

  “F-18s,” Steve explained, as a distant pair of black dot
s glinted, banking into the sun.

  I blinked once and then looked again to see the fighters slice through a high-mountain pass and roar directly at us with inconceivable speed. The planes hugged the rocky ground so closely that we instinctively fell to our chests and covered our ears with our palms as they shot over, and I could feel the ground vibrating so hard that for a moment it seemed that my ribs might pop off my sternum. As I glanced up from the rocks, squinting, I saw the chase plane rock its wings back and forth in greeting before suddenly flipping over and arcing, upside down, over the summit above us. In an instant, the fighters vanished, and an ocean of alpine silence engulfed the tunnel of thunder they had carved through the sky. I rose to my feet slowly, brushing gravel from my lips and beard.

  “A pair of sixty-million-dollar arrowheads,” Steve said, starting up the mountain again. “They can do almost Mach 2,” he called back to me over his shoulder, “but they slowed down to about 700 miles an hour so they wouldn’t burst our eardrums.”

  I stood frozen for a moment, still numb from this dramatic interruption of my mountain idyll. “You call this wilderness?” I shouted after Steve as he climbed into the sky without pausing to field my question. Sensing the waning of both the day and the season, I too pushed on toward the summit.

  Not far from Mount Augusta is one of the loveliest high-elevation canyons in this part of Nevada: “GeeZee Canyon.” “GeeZee” is desert-rat longhand for “G. Z.,” which is itself shorthand for “ground zero.” It was here that, in the year I was born, a nuclear weapon was exploded. While nuclear tests in northern Nevada were few, more than nine hundred nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site in southern Nevada, which is a mere sixty-five miles from Las Vegas—a distance so short that those F-18s can cover it in about 200 seconds. Despite years of the federal government’s unequivocal assurances of public safety, Nevada and Utah “downwinders” suffered and died from radiation-induced cancers in what many old folks in the Great Basin still view as a thermonuclear war waged upon their communities by their own government. As a plume of fallout dispersed across the Intermountain West, it blanketed farms and fields, ranches and schools, homes and towns, businesses and playgrounds. The devastating illnesses caused by radiation poisoning fell disproportionately on pregnant women and on children.