Weekend Essay from Camas Journal

Weekend Essay: A Clean Tool and Enough Effort

By Russ J. Van Paepeghem, Guest Writer, 7-05-09

	Photo by Greta Rybus.

This dream.  I had this dream last night: my father made me a cup of coffee and poured it into a steaming mug and gave it to me.  I took it. I saw that the coffee was green; that it had chunks of fiber floating in it, and I knew that it was unfit to drink.  I remember feeling that I wanted to trust him.  He must have seen me, because he or something else swiped the cup and with it, snuffed the ashes of a fire that, though right beside me, I didn’t know was burning.  Then I woke up.

*

The first time barbed wire pierced my hands was in a place called Round Valley, and I was too young to dig a post but old enough to pack wire in banded spools and haul pounds of two inch staples in Clorox jugs.  My dad and brother carried yellow stretchers and claw hammers and Channellock fencing tools – pliers with three biting sections and the nose of a hardened steel raptor for culling staples from the nest of a post.  Those blue-handled pliers seemed to grow like flowers in the back pockets of their jeans.  Our work was silent and necessary and real.  We used these tools like surgeons, and we repaired the scars left by snowmobiles and winter snows and spring floods, as if all these things were against us and ours.

This work happened on the same paths that the yearlings walked.  It was a strange border beside fences.  Something of a trail, something of a prayer.  One-year-old cattle walked those boundaries as if to say to them: you can’t hold me forever. They searched for breaks in the fence, for moments of escape.  These same cows left in the morning and came back to barns and sheds and people at night, the same way we did.  I guess it was fair to say that we were much like the cattle we were raising.  Our footsteps burned into the dirt just as well as theirs.  We took suck from the ground.  We plodded along that fence line as if to say: you can’t hold me forever.

You got to Round Valley from Boise by first loading the truck – a four-door flatbed job that sometimes hauled hay, sometimes hauled burn barrels, sometimes us boys to school and all times burned quart after quart of 20w-50 Techron your old man charged at NAPA.  You loaded it with coolers of food and sleeping bags for the old falling in house you’d stay in up there and with yourself and your brother and sometimes your mother and then you’d gear up that pass called horseshoe bend double-clutching as if it mattered and all four barrels of overgrowed carburetor wide open to the wind. When that sad old Chevy melted down at 260 degrees, you’d pull over on a turnout and hide your face when your dad, who always drove, found a short-handled shovel and scraped from the pavement the flat carcass of a porcupine and threw it in the back as if to soothe the gods that roiled under the hood.  With the porcupine now twined to the flatbed, maybe hanging on the headache rack to dry, and with your head out the window you’d wind down the other side of the bend and past the rock that looked like a loaf of bread – something formed by lighting striking twice – and then you’d be at the river, the Payette.  This blue ribbon you’d follow in its canyon past the flats at Gardena and into the notion of Banks and beyond the A-frame at Smith’s Ferry and through snakes and kinks of the road and its ponderosa pine and aeries of bald eagles and piles of garbage beside Cecil Andrus’ signs that said Idaho is too great to litter until you got to this big open space where the highway curved due north and it looked like the fences five wires high blended with infinity.  Took two hours, always.

Round Valley was south of Long Valley and way way west of Sun Valley, thank god, which meant it was still a good valley where houses didn’t sprout like weeds.  I should say too that to get to Round Valley, you also passed through this spot on a grade between Banks and the turn to Packer John where the ponderosa on the slope northwest of you stood out from the sage and, if you allowed, formed the outline of a bowlegged cowboy, tall Stetson to boot.

*

There exists this shared belief, I think in the West, that any problem can be handled with a clean tool and enough effort.  This is religious of course.  Sometimes that belief gets spoken, when it needs teaching to those thick-headed enough not to get it.  The spirit of the West lies in its people and their power to observe.  And so all this knowledge that trickles down from generations is generally sieved through action, not through discourse.  We learn by doing and by the conversation of sweat and rope and leather, not by talking about it.  Sieve in place, the general rule applies that everything we do is something to learn from.  This much I knew when my old man turned back to me once on the Petersen Place in Round Valley, and seeing me struggling with the burden of wire which was then cutting into my palms – wire so dense with rust its stain wouldn’t wash off for days – he turned around and said to me, the last of us three: “Now don’t weaken.”

The sections that the fences bound in were named for their owners or former owners or something else that took that place of ownership.  Strickland Place.  Petersen Place.  Herrick’s place.  Ol’ Velveeta’s Place (a story which I’ve never heard).  Skunk Creek.  The Home Place.  What a thing to call it?  The Home Place.  640 acre parcels of coulee and curlew and young yellow pine and soil and water.  Water sometimes so clear it seemed you could break light with it and in other places and times so brackish you couldn’t see through a quart.  There were rights to it, but no one owned that water.

Perhaps that moment on the Peterson Place was the signal to my father that I wasn’t cut out for this life, that he should encourage me to do other things, away from cattle.  Was it the grimace on my face?  The cuts on my hands?  The way my brother turned against him when it came to work?  All I know is that some decision was made to elide me from the leases at Skunk Creek and Clear Creek, from the gathering at Cascade and Cambridge, from calving at Little Valley, from the feedlot in Star – from all of it.  I was there, but I was a boy.  It could have been that he wanted to leave himself out, that I was a consequence of that.  Week after week of cows and then fixing fence for cows and then going back to cows. I would have left it too.  Silence sometimes hung so heavily when we fixed fence that we would not talk for the entire day, except to grant each other a slug of water or a moment in the occasional oasis of shade.  What my father truly lived for was to go fishing at Herrick Reservoir when the day was over. 

But the days never ended.

I remember thinking one summer in an afternoon glow that someday I would live in this valley and I would take a wife and we would strike a living here and I would do it all when I was sixteen.  I thought this while living in a camper for a week, taking wages from a man named Daryl for fixing his fence.  I’d come up that summer and walked around the waist high grasses that the stock hadn’t been turned out on.  I fished Herrick from the banks and from the canoe that I’d strapped to my Ford.  I paddled out among the grey snags that stood upright that reminded me of the quiet valley that this water had flooded.  I’d caught my first fish there, a rainbow.  I had enough trust in the place that I would have done it – I’d of stayed – if my folly wouldn’t have precluded it: you can’t fix fence in the winter, boy.

*

Almost one-hundred years ago, my great grandfather Remie loaded himself in Antwerp into the angry innards of 560 feet of steel that steamed across the wrecking Atlantic.  He was landed on Ellis, March 1, 1911.  The manifest of that ship had him going to his brother in Boise, where he would find work or move toward it.  In 1918, he likely traveled on toll road from Warm Springs, left the mesas of Boise, his brother Ben, and whatever he’d done there, and took work in the foothills of Long Valley.  His brother Gus was already there.  It was also where my great-grandmother, Susie, had been working since the age of twelve cleaning the houses of locals.  At a Cascade dance they met.  He was twenty seven; she was fifteen. 

They married in February in the home of friends. 

In Round Valley he built a log cabin for his wife because that was the way of things.  He splayed the earth with steel and bit and two draft horses and tried his hand at farming.  This brought drought.  Disease.  “Remie went to logging to survive,” Susie said of the times.  He spoke Flemish and maybe French; Susie, English.  And so a Western silence was born in this crucible of my local history.  I don’t know that there was anything to say.

Wherever that cabin was is now called the Home Place, and the man who should know its exact whereabouts, my grandfather, Remie Junior, doesn’t know where it is either.  I’m not sure it ever mattered much to him.  Because after two years of giving it a go in Round Valley, his father packed up and moved to the Boise valley – fooled by its alias, the Treasure Valley – and raised his six children one beef at a time until a stroke finally seized him in ’59. 

Junior’s C.B. handle is Beechnut, for the tobacco he once chewed bag after bag.  (He still chews, Levi Garrett.) When he goes to church, he wears his Sunday western-cut suit, his white felt Stetson in the winter, straw in the summer.  His boots are pointed and polished.  At eighty-one his glasses are tri-focaled.  He packs enough shit in the back of his suburban to survive nuclear holocaust, which may be why he packs it.  From his shirt pocket sprout pens and notebooks and a bag of Rolaids.  In those books, he used to record the weights of the knockers he’d buy out from the end of livestock sales – the runts and sicklings that no one else would take.  For Junior, the home place doesn’t matter because his father made the decision to leave it and to live where they did and that was enough.  This is religious too.  You push and you petition and you push and you petition until the time comes when you are delivered to someplace where you no longer have to push.

Someone asked me: What does it mean to be a man in this new West? I asked in response: What does home have to do with it? I think I’ve always thought these questions were unfair because they were never asked around me.  So I didn’t ask them.  Wallace Stegner says, “The western culture and western character with which it is easiest to identify exist largely in the West of make-believe, where they can be kept simple.” Simple was the idea that, like his namesake, my father could marry and handle what was given to him.  Simple, like before my parents divorced, I learned that my great grandfather had married a woman in Belgium and divorced her and came to America and remarried.  Where was this simple, fiery knowledge when I fenced myself in a marriage on the wrong side of the Cascades to a woman who could not love a man of this or any West?  Sometimes I wanted those waters to flood those fencegrounds and just give everything a good soaking.

The fences of silence that bound us were fences we plotted and searched for breaks.  Rote was the response that we fix that break, that we sew it up with that rusting chaos of wire and stretch it taut so as to hear it sing and fasten it to that wooden post made to be against its nature and then walk from it all assured that it would last another season.  You can’t hold me forever. What if we had just walked through that fence?  What if we just B-lined it for Herrick and instead of staples and wire we’d have had rods and creels?  And what if we just spent the day saying to hell with it and fished and talked and caught a mess of keepers that we could take home and remember?  Wasn’t that just as urgent?  Or what if we headed up into the hills with the Mausers and the mags or better yet with the .410 and looked for grouse after a clean rain?  We could have bugled.  We could have watched hummingbirds do work so articulate that we’d have fallen down for the awe of it.  We could have sat in huckleberries and picked until purple.  Could have made our lives there.

*

On my grandfather’s home is a thick wooden sign the size of a good table.  It’s hung there as long as I can remember, though before I imagine that it hung from two eyes that lagged into a spanning log that was fixed in some way to two uprights on opposite sides of his lane.  The sign was high enough, I suppose, that cars and people could pass under.  And we did.  We went to that brick house on the river in Star that he’d built with money from selling out the feedlot, and we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays.  The sign was then sort of bright and promising.  Now, on the south side of their trailerhouse in Middleton, it is weathered and faded.  The Lazy VP Cattle Co.  Contradiction writ large.  No Van was ever lazy; no partition of wood and steel could ever last as long as the promises it tried to border.

Fences.

This essay is one of a series of pieces submitted to the University of Montana’s literary environmental magazine, Camas and selected for publication on NewWest.Net as a chance to feature new voices in Western environmental writing. Check back throughout the summer for more from Camas writers.

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