Читать книгу Magdalena Mountain - Robert Michael Pyle - Страница 20

Huddled by a kerosene lantern in his chilly battlement, Mead gained respect for his Anglo-Saxon ancestors who gutted out winters in northern European castles. And much as the learned among those cold-castle dwellers might have read ancient manuscripts by February firelight, Mead continued to pore over the journals of October Carson by the light of his high-intensity lamp. Night after solitary night, he tucked his roaches to bed and returned to the scribblings of the bearded itinerant. As he did so, James Mead followed Carson into spring.

The first volume saw the man working a construction job in California (brief, perfunctory jottings) and weekending in the near Sierra, trying to emulate John Muir in life and language (longer, lusher entries). Not until he left the job and the weekend frontcountry did he find his own voice, as he wandered from blank to blanker spot on the western map. Each volume told a year, and each roughly rhymed in route with the one that went before, as Carson circled back to favorite places and added new ones depending on transport and whim. Sometimes an intriguing name on a map would be enough to take him hundreds of miles out of his way. But then, as Mead learned, Carson really had no “way.” The style became leaner, no longer mimicking Muir, as he passed through later seasons and lower places. His sense of destination, however, remained fuzzy, and he never betrayed a plan or a purpose.

So Mead found himself back where he’d first looked over Carson’s shifting shoulder. He had dropped from Bear Lake down along the Great Salt Lake, taken a winter construction job in the city. It didn’t sit well. He seemed to require an element of insecurity—searching, finding, losing, and searching again—and it was colder than hell on that job. So he collected his pay, took a Trailways bus to Jackson, and with the snow off early, began hunting for old bottles, insulators, and other bygones. He seemed to have eaten for a month or more off purple, green, and blue bottles he’d ferreted out of the sagebrush and aspen of old homesteads and cattle camps around Jackson Hole, while he went to ground in an abandoned cabin. He watched for sage thrashers, the big, sickle-billed brown birds erect on the blue-gray tips of the big basin sage. In such places more often than not he could find mauve medicine flasks, their manganese turned purple by long exposure to the sun, or old-time Coke bottles, and these he could flog to curio and bottle shops stocking up for the tourist season in Jackson. But soon he’d saturated the local market, and he needed something to get him through the rest of spring into summer. So he signed on as a boatman for one of the smaller Snake River rafting outfitters.

June 6. Nine p.m., exhausted. I love the river, but ye gods! These people work! Twelve to sixteen hours a day, six or seven days. They pay me well, but there is no time to walk the banks or ramble among the delectable spring-green salad bar of a countryside we pass through six or eight times a day. And I’m getting awfully tired of my voice, delivering the interpretive spiel. I find myself envying the passengers, who will be moving on down the highway after the float. Their families, station wagons, and most of their dogs, however, I do not covet.

June 12. Nor did I envy some people I took down the river yesterday. Our chat went something like this: “Where do you folks hail from?” I asked as we entered an eddy. A conversation always staggers to its feet at that calm point, as the boaters begin to sense my presence as something more than a pair of oars, and this was a safe start.

“Ottawa,” came the clipped reply from the apparent patriarch.

“Cold up there last winter?”

“Ottawa, Kansas. Hotter’n hell right now.”

“I guess,” I offered. “Does your family generally come to Jackson to cool off?”

The porky Ottowan looked impatient, his tomato face crinkled at the corners in irritation, as if this was not exactly what he would have chosen to discuss. “Nah, usually Estes Park, or sometimes Glenwood Springs. They’re cheaper’n this hole.”

“Jackson Hole, you mean?” He didn’t catch his own pale pun. “But always somewhere in the mountains?”

“Damn right,” he said, “if I have anything to do with it.” Carson guessed he did.

At that his wife broke in with a tentative plaint. “I’d love to stay in Kansas one summer and see the prairie flowers in the Flint Hills down around Cottonwood Falls, or go to the beach—any beach, even Lake Michigan would do fine.” She sighed. “But as Elbert says, it’s always the mountains.”

“Now don’chu start, Ruth . . .”

Just what I didn’t need on my boat, a family spat. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

“Elbert’s family are Okies,” Ruth continued. “And Okies reckon there’s no vacation that IS a vacation unless it’s in the Rockies. Texans are just as bad. If it isn’t over a mile high, it doesn’t count.”

“We just lahk the mountains better . . . ain’t that raght, kids?” Elbert said.

The Wheeldon children, inured to their parents’ topographic dialectic and not about to get sucked in again, grunted as one and mumbled something about Disneyland. They knew they’d pay for taking sides, and they didn’t really care where they went, as long as it was far away from school. The rushing river and the movements among the shore grasses were far more riveting than this ancient argument.

Ruth changed the subject. “And how about you, Mr. Carson? Are you a real mountain man?”

A taunt as much as a query?

I knew the trap. To describe my life only boils the husband’s wanderlust, if it’s still alive, and offends his wife’s sense of security, or else confounds his propriety while piquing her curiosity. But I’d already managed to do all that, so I said, “Well, I’m not a trapper. My grandpa used to sum up Sunday dinner by saying that it was mighty fine, what there was of it, and plenty of it, such as it was. The Snake River is like that for me.”

Elbert was fixing to ask me what the hell that was supposed to mean, when the current took the boat and swung us about. The hiss of the Snake in full spring runoff drowned out his further remarks. Slipped out of that one, you old codger.

An hour later, with our bow rope wrapped around a snag like a small python hungry for hardwood, I pulled the raft to shore. Beside a lime-green meadow where the tall white candles of corn lily screened the edge of the forest, I proposed lunch. I was hoarse from pointing out ospreys and moose over the river’s voice and telling about the trappers’ rendezvous that used to take place in Jackson Hole (“Now those were mountain men,” Ruth had interjected, for Elbert’s benefit or mine, I wasn’t sure). So I grazed in silence, wishing I could slip off to search for morels beneath the chartreuse cottonwoods.

Ruth Wheeldon, wife to Elbert o’ Mountains, stood and brushed the dust off her not unsightly bottom, walked over, and planted it on the grass beside me. Owner of a pretty face from a Penney’s catalogue and a summer Sears sundress, she did not offend with her sunny Kansas presence. Elbert ignored us and snoozed some way off as the kids explored the shore, every now and then bringing back a bug or a snail to be admired and identified. I kept an eye on them, but they refused to fall in and take their dad with them.

“So what is it really about mountains for you, Mr. Carson? Your granddad’s saying was charming, but a little obscure for a farm girl like me.”

Not off the hook after all. I tried again, and said something like “Mountains soothe with horns and bones, make you rich with rocks. And they’re the best place to spot a puma by far, except for some carnivals I’ve seen.” Or perhaps I just said, “Maybe we should talk about rivers.” I expected Ruth to be miffed at my seeming to take sides with Elbert and liberties with logic, and I was prepared to say that I loved oceans too, and prairies. But she surprised me.

“Not just the way I’d have thought to express it. But it sounds better than Elbert’s my-way-or-the-highway reasoning. You know, I don’t have anything against the mountains. This”—she waved a chapped but shapely hand around—“is lovely. It’s just his damned bullheadedness about it. He’s so seffish with our little bit of vacation time. John Deere only gives him two weeks off. He’s got a right to enjoy them as he wishes. But ah work too . . . and I should have some say.”

So here it comes, I thought; and it did. She asked if I worked (besides this), didn’t I have a family to support, and . . . then stopped. “Sorry,” she said, her slender neck pinker than before, “it’s none of my business.” And turned her sunflower face toward the river.

Elbert, disturbed by the deerflies, had risen from his nap and was struggling with a worm and a hook for an impatient daughter. He was paying us no attention.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind your asking. It’s just hard to explain my way of life these days. I’ve been rafting only a little while, and it might not last much longer.” Then a brown butterfly, one of the spring’s first, caught my eye. “See that butterfly?” Ruth said she would not have noticed it, but she caught a glimpse as it nectared on an early arnica. It was a cocoa-colored, silver-threaded satyr called Hayden’s ringlet. I told her a little, how its larvae nibble the fresh young grass and how its name came from the Hayden Geological Survey expeditions of 1871. We crept up on it.

“My, my!” said Ruth. She liked its blue, yellow-rimmed, silver-centered eyespots.

“Its relatives fly on the high mountain tundra,” I said. “The river’s rising means snowmelt upstairs, and the alpine butterflies can’t be far behind. I’ll be joining them down in Colorado.”

“Why? Butterflies are beautiful, and very nice, but can you live on them?”

“That’s another thing Grandpop used to say,” I replied. “ ‘Is there any money in butterflies?’ I’d reply, ‘I doubt it, Grandpop.’ And I was mostly right. Actually, there is a little. I collect uncommon species and peddle them to museums. This is where I am sort of like those old mountain men—I just trade in butterflies instead of beaver pelts. I make enough in season to buy beer and ground beef, and it gives me an excuse to be up in the high country.” I tried to tell her about the intoxicating fragrance of the tundra, the utter enchantment of the glacial peaks above timberline.

“And in winter?” she asked.

“I work the beaches for glass floats and other salable flotsam, as well as clams. My needs are few and easily met. It’s mostly just to be there in the storms. So you see? I like beaches too! I’m not just a mountain guy. And certainly no Jim Bridger.”

“No,” said Ruth. “And maybe just as well.” Then, something like this: “I sort of see. It does sound exciting, in a way, and certainly not boring. Scary at times, I’d think.” Maybe I nodded. “But what do you do for insurance?” (She emphasized the in-.) “Or retirement, or next month’s mortgage payment?”

“Well, I have none of those things,” was all I could think to say.

“So you’re one of those . . . you’re homeless?” She said it with a slight but perceptible little shudder of fear or loathing, I couldn’t tell.

“Can’t take my shopping cart on the river,” I said, “or up the trails.” Trying for levity in case it was loathing. It worked; she laughed.

“Maybe all this traveling and poking about . . . maybe what you’re looking for is a home, and a family . . . I assume you haven’t got one of those, either?”

“Correct. Never reproduced, not presently married. And I don’t want a home, Ruth, at least not right now. I’ve had one before and I may have one again, partner too. But for now, footloose seems to suit me better.”

“Then maybe—forgive me—what you should be catching is a real job?”

I told Ruth she wasn’t the first to say so, two wives among her antecedents. And that I worked construction sometimes. Then, maybe a little defensive, “I’ve worked hard at many different jobs, all colors of collars. But no job sticks for long these years.”

“Do you faght? Drink? Gamble?” Ruth had dropped all pretense of reserve and manners. The river does that to clients sometimes. She seemed both repelled and fascinated. In any case, curious, to a degree she’d probably regret once we put to shore. But I didn’t seem to mind.

“No,” I said, “none of the above. I get along fine with my workmates, and I don’t resent a good boss. I just always seem to walk away after a paycheck or two. The road and the country it crosses always call more strongly than the work whistle. It’s just being in thrall—somebody else calling the shots, planning my day . . . my life. Abe Lincoln said, ‘We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.’ Or as Eric Clapton put it, I’ve got the keys to the highway, and I’ve just got to move.” Only I probably didn’t say it that well. What she said was, “We’re driving to Estes Park from here. Would you like a rahd?”

I contemplated the Hayden’s ringlets flip-flopping between the grass blades. Those saffron ovals brimming with silver scales that run out and rim the margins: beautiful. W. H. Edwards called it an Erebia back in the 1800s. He was mistaken in terms of taxonomy, but you can see why he made such an assignment. The real alpines will soon be out, up there in the Rockies: not only Erebia magdalena, but also epipsodea, callias, and theano. But especially magdalena. How could I resist the invitation even if I wanted to?

I’m not sure whether such reasoning or the promise of a little more time with Ruth made up my mind. Both, I suppose. So, notwithstanding the daunting prospect of hours cooped up with edgy Elbert, his sunburned spawn, and their pooch, I accepted. “Sure,” I said at last. “If you think it will sit all right with your husband.”

“Just don’t pop too many of your grandpa’s words of wisdom on him, and he’ll be fine. He’ll probably mutter a lot and I’ll hear all about Charles Manson before we go to bed at night, but I don’t think Elbert will veto the idea. And the kids will love the adventure of adopting a mountain man. Sometimes I do get my own way.”

Swaying like prairie grass, Ruth rose and walked over to Elbert. He was drowsy after a six-pack all on his own. I guessed he would have left the cans if I hadn’t been there, but I can’t be sure. Ruth advised him of the change of plans. I saw him jerk, as if she had invited the aforementioned Manson to tea. I reckoned just then that Elbert could stay behind and be a boatman (or a raft) and Ruth and I could go to Colorado and sell the kids to Basque sheepherders, but no such luck. He decided to come along after all.

So that afternoon, after I’d docked the raft and drove us back in the bus, I handed in my oars. The river boss wasn’t thrilled; he said I’d done a good job and he was hoping to keep me on through the summer, and maybe next year too. But river runners are notorious for being mercurial at best as employees. I collected my pay, cleared out of my cabin, and loaded my small pack of gear into the Toronado wagon between the kids and the coolers, the dog and the suitcases. We took off for Colorado, down past the Tetons, the Gros Ventre, the Wind Rivers, and the hot country east to Wamsutter and Laramie before cutting south on 287 through Virginia Dale. We made an unlikely crew, and Elbert’s tomato face never did uncrinkle. But Ruth’s sunflower smile often appeared in the rearview mirror.