blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING
The Etiquette of Gravel Roads
By Bryce Andrews, 8-11-08
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Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10
I. Through the Fields
After dinner has settled I sneak out for a run on the dark side of sunset. I head southeast on Greenhouse Road, a straight line of gravel that rolls gently across hayfields. In most places I can see a mile in either direction.
Sprinklers run on either side of the road. On my right a wheel line is buried to the axle in alfalfa. Its nozzles fill the air with arcing sprays of water and a constant chut-chut-chut. The finest particles of water stay airborne, ride the breeze to the road, and settle on my skin.
When I’m ready to turn around, I pause for a while and stretch. A neighbor is swathing beside the road, carving a diminishing spiral through fifty acres of wild hay. The wire-pronged bars of the conditioner turn quickly. They comb upwards through the grass, standing it straight for the sickle bar’s teeth.
A swather is a strange machine, one out of proportion with itself. Behind the wide and intricate header are two narrow rectangles: a vertical glass one that lets the operator see, and a horizontal vented metal one that lets the engine breathe. Seen in profile from a distance, the swather appears to be hunching forward. It looks intent. It seems alive. It chomps insatiably around the field, drawn on by the virgin growth in front of it.
The swather turns a corner, and suddenly I can see the driver through the window of the cab. I raise my hand. He sees me through the dusk and waves back.
II. Up Rock Creek
Running home, I think about yesterday. With a half hour of sunshine left, I rode my motorcycle through Deer Lodge and then north. I turned west toward the mountains on Rock Creek road.
I chose that road because it was beautiful, and because I’d heard mutterings about what the Rock Creek Cattle Company was up to. “Developers,” said a cashier in Missoula. “Mansions,” grumbled a neighbor. “Jobs,” slurred a beer-sop at the Montana Bar. I wanted to see for myself.
Following the road, I got lost in the feeling of flying through a perfect world. The rare gold light of evening raked benches and draws, transforming the folds of the landscape into a puzzle of tan and black. Cattle grazed below me on Rock Creek, and their colors were vivid beyond description against the green grass of an irrigated field.
On a straightaway I wound the motor up until the scenery blurred, and as I braked through a corner, I saw them: A quarter mile up the road, two vehicles were raising clouds of dust. Although the road was wide enough, I pulled to the side and waited.
As they drew near I could make out two brand-new SUV’s, one tailgating the other. Both had out-of-state license plates, but I waved to them as I would a friend because we had found each other in gorgeous light on an empty gravel road. Assuming the drivers were homeowners or investors, I hoped they might stop and tolerate a few questions about what was happening higher up on Rock Creek.
I got a dust cloud for my trouble. The drivers stared dead ahead as they whizzed by. I don’t think they even saw me. The dust settled and I kicked my bike into gear.
III. The Etiquette of Gravel Roads
Maybe it is a little thing, an insignificant one, to notice a man waving at the side of the road or miss him altogether. Maybe it was a fluke, or the drivers were just in a hurry. Still I cannot shake the feeling that they inhabited a different world, a strange Montana bearing little resemblance to the place where I work and live.
Their Montana did not require attending closely to the hooves of cattle, or to clouds building above the Pintlers. It had not taught them to study the condition of grass plants, or learn the etiquette of gravel roads.
I continued uphill across cattle guards that rattled the bike. New gravel was spread on some of the corners, so I took them slowly. As I rode, I pictured the dead-ahead stares of the drivers, and it worried me that the new owners of this place might reduce a complex ecological and social landscape to a house, a mountain view, and the road to get there.
But that was yesterday, and now I’m running home while night comes up in the east. To my left, one of the pivots has kicked on. Its under-slung nozzles spray water down on alfalfa. The drops are silver in the dusk, so that the sprinkler seems to be carrying a fog beneath it. One end of the pivot is anchored in the center of the field, and at the other is a big Rain Bird water gun, which swings through the points of the compass, pulsing out water like a heart beating.
I watch it swivel from west to north. It gestures like an outstretched arm at the crops, the cattle-dotted benches, the wild foothills and the peaks as if to say: “look at this, look at all of this.”
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Comments
I am old, a logger in my youth. I still can hear the musical tinkle in the butt rigging as it is dragged over the hill by the haulback, and high toot of the whistle that stopped the lines. I can smell the fir needles drying in the sun, or the nettles and devils club among the thimbleberry and salmonberry. The smell of tobacco and old coffee in the crummy, and gear dope, diesel, and burnt brakes on the donkey puncher and the shovel runner. I can see a billion ice crystals in the dawn air, and rain coming at you up the hill. Whiskey jacks having lunch with you, and ravens opening lunch bucket snaps. And I have never quit loving the forest I logged, the trees that are now being cut on the same land we logged so long ago. Bobcat kittens in the road, and grouse eating alder berries in the ditch. The smell of road dust in the hot summer afternoon, and the clear, precise flavor of that first beer cleaning your mouth of the day's grime. Man, just savor what you are doing, because it will not get any better, the skies any clearer, the sunsets any prettier than they are right now. Ain't life great?
Yep, and it's being obeyed about as well as the rest of the commandments.
As someone who doesn't live on gravel but drives a lot of it, I'll slow down for a ranch house but rarely for a newly built Mcmansion. But for a runner, a walker or someone beside the road I'll slow down enough for them to say, "Howdy" in a conversational tone.
Also, keep in mind that five fingers extended from an open palm can easily be turned to only one finger. Perhaps that might get their attention.
"Chut-chut-chut." Just perfect. I grew up in one of the suburban valleys of Southern California, a couple of miles down from the San Gabriel foothills ranch where Rain Birds were invented and made (or where the guy who invented and made them lived, anyway). I will always, ALWAYS have that sound in my head whenever I see water thrown on crops, be they hay and beanfields or merely some suburbanite's greensward.
I received a dramatic reading of your blog a few minutes ago and I must say that you brought a city slicker to the country in the first two paragraphs. By the end I was plotting revenge for the idiots that sand blasted you on that old gravel road. Your writing was incredible. When I closed my eyes I could see, hear and feel the landscape your described floating by and the scenes of Montana that I hope to visit someday.
Rob
I've taken to chasing down gravel-road speeders and lecturing them. Most people are terrified of conflict. Give 'em an ass-chewing right there on the road and I guarantee you they'll think twice about dusting the next runner or biker they encounter.
That said, I have an old Subaru and damn it's fun to rally on logging roads. 30 mph feels like 100 when you're racing around sharp curves with trees mere inches away. But all ya gotta do is hug your side and all will be well. We nailed a California family the other day. They were driving a rented minivan in the middle of the road approaching a blind turn! We came around the bend, I put two wheels in the brush and still clipped them as we passed. They got out all indignant, said I was driving too fast, and I said, drive on your side and I could pass you at 80 without incident. The old man (whose son was driving) said, sounds sensible, have a nice day.
We also dealt with, and deal with, our share of joyriders on dirt bikes, ATVs, and cars and pickups. Never minded sharing the road, but didn't appreciate being at the mercy of someone else's recklessness.
Out-of-staters are known for passing blanket judgments, because they often come from places where personal judgment and case-by-case interpretation aren't permitted or valued. Hence the overturning of our decades-old open-highway open-container law, which was railroaded through the Montana legislature by a senator who moved here from Florida. Ditto for our "safe and prudent" speed law, which suffered an untimely death due to a ticketed tourist's lawsuit against the state.
Being a Montanan is not about birthright, it's about attitude. Rigid black-and-white thinking is not a Montana trait. Generalize all you want, but always know that there are exceptions. And until they prove undeserving, try to give folks the benefit of the doubt.
Hell, I often take exception with out-of-staters too, but that doesn't mean that I don't have the luxury to think that some of the practices that "natives" consider their "birthright" to be asinine. I agree with you about the open-container thing. As long as someone is sober, I don't care what they're drinking. The "reasonable and prudent" thing hardly qualifies as a Montana legacy since it was here and gone so quickly (2 years? 3 years? I preferred the $5 on the spot no ticket anyway!), so I don't even care about that one. But damn, Montanans seem to have a chip on our shoulders these days! If that is the right "attitude" to qualify, I'm glad I never signed up.
So the winter scene in Montana would be the ambulance with lights flashing and siren waling, with the ambulance chaser right behind it, and behind the ambulance chaser, a pack of wolves. Now there would be a rodeo worth watching.
It seems to me we'd all better get a chip on our shoulders, and fast, or the Montana we all define slightly differently but love the same is doomed. Apathy will be our undoing. It's that chip that transformed us from a bunch of British subjects into the United States of America, and it's what Montana needs now to overcome this very dire threat to our identity and way of life. People are moving here too fast to be assimilated. Live and let live has to work both ways or it doesn't work at all. "Let live and eventually, move away" is not a mantra Montana can abide.
Whether we like each other or not, we Montanans are family, and as such we will always bicker amongst ourselves. But when a real threat presents itself, we need to shrug off those differences and band together -- in shared passion, shared indignation, and a shared determination to keep the family together.
Lectures are a hard swallow indeed, but people need some fire in their guts! Light the match however you can.