RATTLESNAKE AIR

                                    Rogue River 2: Rattlesnake Air

     Eastern Oregon began to settle into my bones. I loved the higher altitude, the crisper air, the snow in winter instead of rain. I loved hunting rabbits and deer with Bill Gano in the open country east of Klamath Falls. There were even good trout-fishing streams.

But there was no Rogue River.

     I became nostalgic for the river. Jack Dunham and I had been friends in school before the summer of 1956 when Mom and Bill moved us to Klamath Falls. We were both skinny kids with glasses who didn’t have to study much, so we had time to prowl the hills and streams around Grants Pass like the couple of wild Indians we often imagined ourselves to be.     

     The Rogue River had flowed through our lives, a great presence at once mythical and real. When a heavy Spring rain would add its volume to that of the snowmelt from the Cascade Range, the Rogue would sometimes live up to its name and flood, suddenly and unpredictably, swatting homes and small motels from its banks with a casual power. But most of the time it glittered bright green and white over the rounded stones of its bed as it took sharp turns through the canyons on its way to slide into the Pacific at Gold Beach, or thundered over rapids into deep green pools where we'd swim and fish, with spinning rods and worms, for the rainbow trout we shared the river with, ignoring our elders' warnings about what a rogue the river truly was, and how many overconfident boys it had claimed.

     August was a special time on the river. A critical component of that specialness was, of course ‑ no school! The felt approach of September would concentrate the urgency of our adventures, the long warm evenings allowing us to stay out later. The lower water level let us sidle right up next to the river's heart. The pools where we and the trout tried to trick one another shrank until we could wade into the edges of the dark secret rooms where they lived.

     August air became hot and dry and still as it hung in the timbered canyons above the river, with western Oregon's rainy winter a doubtful memory as pickup-tossed dust rose in serpentine coils above the dirt roads that laced the woods along the riverbanks.

     Blackberries would ripen. Having stored moisture from a wetter time, they hung - lumpy, whiskered obsidian pendulums - along road‑ and trail‑sides. The sun would hit the berries and the dark green leaves that crowded out from the thorny red vines and the air would thicken with more than odor: walking there, you breathed an atmosphere of hot blackberries and dust and pine sap that was so close and right that it seemed that that mixture, rather than oxygen, was what your blood waited to extract from the air and turn into cells of muscle and bone.

     Sound would do its part along the Rogue in August. The near‑cessation of air movement through the canyons removed what had been, at other times of the year, a huge and constant presence: the low‑pitched but loud sibilance of the wind's passage through, and scraping together of, pine and hemlock and spruce and cedar needles, and the leaves of laurel, madrone, manzanita, chinquapin, chestnut, live oak.

     Maybe the sun stirred the insects to make their buggy music, or maybe they were doing what they always did, but now we could hear them better in the absence of that larger noise. In any case, an electric buzz settled above the river, in which raspy cricket calls provided a rhythmic warp onto which was woven the buzzes, whines, and drones of deerflies, black flies, mosquitoes, and gnats that crowded the still, dusty air.

     This electric buzzing air had another meaning along the Rogue: rattlesnake. Oddly, the received wisdom that we breathed in with the blackberry air had it that the snakes shed their skins in August, adding a new button to their rattles as they did so, and that late summer was the only time of year when rattlers couldn't be counted on to give their warning, as well as the time when they were out in greatest numbers. This made August the most dangerous time of the year, snake‑wise, along the river.

     Whether or not the Rogue's buzzing August atmosphere actually included rattlesnake shakes, the mixture of dust and still air and heat and insect noise along the river had the meaning, for us kids who grew up there, of rattlesnake air. That was just the way it was. But the blackberries were still there, the river was still there, the trout were still there, and September and school were approaching. So we had to go to the river in August, fishing till dusk in the deep green pools, then gathering baseball capfulls of dusty blackberries along the roadsides and returning to the river to wash our berries, clean our trout and feed their guts to their still‑swimming cannibal relatives, and eat the berries and drink cool water from one of the little creeks that flowed into the river and take a final swim in the evening light to rinse the dust from us. We'd trudge home with our freshly gutted trout strung on forks of willow branches we'd cut with our pocket knives.

     Tragedy struck: we began to grow up. Sports and girls and the awe‑inspiring world of junior high school pulled us back from the banks of the Rogue. During the summer after seventh grade ‑ 1956 ‑ Bill Gano had lost his job in a chrome mine just across the line in California, and the sawmills around Grants Pass weren't hiring. He and Mom had packed Darrell and me into the '53 Studebaker, stuffing it and a U‑Haul trailer with everything we owned, and set off looking for work. Where we found work was where we would live. Mom set a deadline of September 1st. We had to have found work by then, and had to have a place to live and have enough money for the first month's rent, so Darrell and I could start school with the other kids.             

     We made the rounds of small Oregon towns. My memory is of the dusty smell of hot velveteen seat covers, of Darrell and me squeezed into the back seat along with a pile of bedding; of Bill plodding the dust of sawmill yards, farms, ranches, and welding shops looking for work; and of Mom trying to get on at grocery stores or butcher shops as a checker or meat wrapper.

     In late August, we ended up in Klamath Falls, still with no work. Mom dropped the hammer: this is it, the boys will go to school here. We had enough money from part‑time work over the summer to get us in the door of the Shasta‑View Apartments (even small towns have low‑rent districts). Bill haunted the personnel office of the big Weyerhauser mill outside town, and finally got on there as a welder.

     Jack Dunham and I kept in touch through the eighth grade and the early years of high school. I'd write about hunting mule deer with Bill in the sagebrush, juniper, and rimrock country east of Klamath Falls; Jack would write about the river.

     We decided to get back to the river one more time before adulthood pried us loose from it. We would get together in August, with a couple of Jack's friends, backpack down the Rogue from Galice to Illahe, then take the mailboats on downstream to Gold Beach where his folks would pick us up and drive us back to Grants Pass.

     I'd done the same trip years before as a Boy Scout; Jack, who had lived his whole life almost within walking distance of the river, never had. We put our heads together. Someone couldn't make it in early June because of a family vacation, and some of us had summer jobs through the rest of June and through July into August. But the four of us blocked out everything else for the last week in August: we would walk the river, do it right, and enter our junior years of high school as seasoned wilderness explorers.    

     We knew August wasn't the best time: we'd have to watch for snakes.

     It really was wilderness. The roads we'd used to approach the river as younger kids stopped at Galice, a few miles downstream from Grants Pass, at the beginning of a nearly 50‑mile stretch of river that was a legally designated wilderness area. This meant that no motor vehicles could enter the area. If you wanted to see this part of the river, you walked it, or rode a horse or mule, or were one of a few stalwart (and moneyed) souls who shot through the canyons in white‑water boats with professional guides.

     Jack's family had a friend at Galice, a hoary‑headed émigré who had fled the Bolshevik revolution. The story was that he'd lived as a child and young man on a river in Russia, and had settled on the Rogue to live out his years. We spent the night at his place before our "jump‑off;" Jack's two friends would join us early the next morning.

     The old man's cabin was on the inside curve of a big bend in the river, nestled on the bank just above the high‑water mark. The river went wide and shallow around the bend, making all the shades there are of green and silver and white as it riffled over the large stones it had rounded over the centuries. The afternoon we showed up, August's blackberry‑and‑rattlesnake air crowded around us, with sunlight slanting past barely moving leaves to aim dusty inclined shafts of light at the forest floor, leaving leaf‑shadows between them in a pattern so radically bright and dark that, just walking along, the pupils of our eyes would become confused about how much light to let in, so that we'd stumble over roots we'd easily have seen on a cloudy day.

     When Jack's folks dropped us off in mid‑afternoon, telling us to have a great time and be careful, we dropped our packs on the old man's porch and walked around with him as he showed off his place. The river’s noise – especially to me, who hadn't heard it, hadn't really listened to it, for three years ‑ seemed nothing more or less than a delightful, continuous roar of water flowing swiftly over its rocky bed.

     The old man lived off his Social Security check and his garden and fish from the river and venison in the fall. The garden grew in the rich silty soil the river deposited in its own bend during high-water times. Weedless rows of corn and green beans and radishes and lettuce were springy with life. Raspberry vines planted in the open to take advantage of daylong sun gave him a flavor to alternate with the fat blackberries he gathered from the roadside.

     Afternoon slanted into evening. The old man retreated to the interior of his cabin, built of a single vertical layer of weathered boards, and insulated inside with layers of newspaper long since gilded by time and light. His furniture was a big old easy chair, a small wooden table and a couple of stools, and a phonograph. He had a stack of classical records in scuffed jackets.

     A ritual began to be enacted, one of the most guilelessly reverent I have ever seen. As the newspapers on the wall began to glow with just enough of the day's last purple light to read by, the old man knelt and went carefully through his records. He read the labels as if we were not there, his inner ear hearing the choices he made. He settled on an inch‑thick stack of records, all he could fit on the spindle that would drop them, one at a time, onto the turntable.

     With records in place, with evening fading to night, he lit no lantern. Indicating with a wave of his hand that we were welcome to stay, he leaned back in his big chair, put his feet up, and closed his eyes. Jack and I sat quietly for a while, watching the old man inhabit his own world in his own way, and listening to music we'd never heard before, knowing that although it was strange to us, it was right for hearing with the sound of the river. I imagine now that he was playing Rachmaninoff, but I don't know that. Maybe it's just that in my life now, whenever I hear Rachmaninoff, I see that old man and his cabin and his Rogue.

     He'd set the volume so that when a symphony orchestra reached a louder part of the music, it would for a time drown out the sound of the river making its bend behind him. But when the music slipped into a quieter section, the river's chorus would return, would enter the old man's ears, and would, we thought, carry him back to the Russian river of his youth.

     We tried to listen as we imagined him to be listening. It came to me that the river's sound wasn't uniform at all. If you paid close attention, some unknown watery event upstream and back in time, like light arriving from a long‑dead star, would change the volume or speed of the water, it would strike the stones differently, the sound would wax and wane and break into colored pieces, an aural rainbow of splashes and gurgles and wet black and silver whispers.

     Two or three days later, a number of things had happened. We had cursed ourselves for bringing so much food that our packstraps cut into sweaty, salt‑rimed shoulders. Tennis shoe insoles had worn through where our toes dug into them from the extra weight and the gravitational acceleration of downhill slogging. We all had prize blisters. Our food ran low; now we cursed ourselves for bringing so little. The work of walking the trails from dawn to dusk had given us appetites we'd never dreamed possible.

     Fishing became more than fun: it was between us and hunger. We washed the salt and dust from our trail‑weary bodies by diving off boulders into deep green pools. We walked through birdless forest cathedrals, where boles of Ponderosa pine shot up, branchless for a hundred feet before they put out the canopy that all but blocked sunlight from the forest floor. We passed places with magic names, places Zane Grey had written about in Rogue River Feud, one of his many books about cowboys and mountain men and mountains and rivers and deserts that I had absorbed directly into my bloodstream: Horsehoe Bar, Rainie Falls, Black Bar.

     We stopped one thirsty afternoon at a miner's homestead cabin; he pulled a quart of home‑brewed beer out of a cold spring and shared it with us. It took our heads off: so cold, so good, so forbidden. We clowned our way off into the afternoon, acting drunker that we could possibly have gotten on a quart of beer split five ways.

     We were in Hell's canyon, where the Rogue narrowed between steep rock walls and pounded its way through, the steepened gradient hurling masses of water at and past the rocks with a violence that impressed four teenage boys, as no parental warning can, that we were in a place wild enough to kill us if we screwed up. Or even if we didn't.

     As we entered the canyon, we had a little talk. We didn't sound like kids anymore. We were impressed, even scared, by our situation. The nearest road or telephone was probably twenty miles away, in what direction was anybody's guess. A broken ankle would be a disaster of a high order; we discussed who would stay, who would go for help, in what direction, what to carry. And a snakebite here wouldn't be survived by making razor cuts on the bite, applying the Cutter's suction cups, and calling for help.

     The trail in this part of the canyon was a notch cut in the canyon wall, about halfway up. It was less than two feet wide in many places, with a sheer drop below ‑ often too high to survive, should one turn suddenly to talk to the guy behind him and be jostled off the trail by his pack hitting the rock face behind him ‑ and a sheer climb above. We'd seen lots of bear shit and tracks; they were coming down to the river to feed on fish and berries. If we met a bear or snake on this part of the trail, there was only one way to go, and that was backwards. Fast. And carefully.

     In our suddenly grown‑up conference, it was decided that I would lead down the trail into Hell's Canyon. I had the only real weapon, the .22 Ruger Single‑Six revolver my mom had helped me buy earlier that year, after my 16^th birthday. The wisdom absorbed from the older men in our families asserted itself. We agreed that it would be mighty stupid to shoot a bear with a .22 pistol, if the bear gave us any other choice. Someone said that black bears, the kind we had in that country, had thin skulls ‑ had seen such a skull ‑ the thinnest part being right over the center of the brain. If you have to shoot, shoot for that. If you see a bear, look for cubs, and for God's sake, don't get between a mother and her cubs.

     Afternoon. We were moving through the canyon, hot, tired, exhilarated, scared. We were all fantasizing wordlessly about cold sodas at Illahe, about did they have cheeseburgers there, about putting our feet up and letting the mail boats speed us to Gold Beach, about soaking our huge blisters in the salty Pacific.

     I heard something beside my ear. I stopped, turned, and looked a rattlesnake in the eyes, six inches away: yellow, round, unlidded, unblinking, with long dark vertical pupils slightly wider at the center of the eye and tapering to points at top and bottom. It seemed then, and seems to me now, that I exchanged stares with those eyes for a lifetime. They became, for the rest of my life, not a symbol (too real for that), but the incarnation of everything strange, dark, evil, dangerous.

     The cutting of the trail in the canyon wall had left the top of the cut, at this point, exactly at my eye level, and the snake had been sunning itself there. It didn't rattle; what I'd heard was its startled movement in the grass.     

     Things seemed to move in slow motion, but they told me later I'd moved way too fast. I'd nearly knocked all three of them off the trail with my frantic backstepping.     

     I did all this at once, they said. I yelled "RATTLESNAKE!" so loud it must still be echoing in the canyon; I jumped back, slamming my pack into the face of whoever was behind me, starting an unfunny Keystone Cops chain reaction among the four of us; and jerked out the Ruger and cocked it.

     The snake had moved as quickly. It had moved right at me, all but touching my face, dropping over the rock bank just under my chin, its head almost sliding down inside my shirt front, slithering down the five feet of cut rock to the trailbed where I'd been when I turned to look into its eyes, and started across the trail. Once it was stretched across the trail (it was about three feet long), it stopped, blocking our advance. I raised the pistol, sighted on the body of the snake, moved left along it to where its head must be in the clump of grass it had begun to enter. I had just had a nose-to-nose view of how a rattler's body is built, with the quick taper just behind the head. I couldn't see the head, but I saw the taper, so the head must be just here, where I'm aiming now. I remember to aim a little low, like Bill and my uncle Lank had taught me to do when shooting a pistol.     

     I squeezed. The pistol jumped. I don't remember hearing the shot, but it must have echoed in the canyon. The snake didn't move. I re‑cocked the pistol, pulled it back to the right where the thick part of its body rested just above my sights, and fired again. The part of the snake where the bullet hit twisted as the hollow point tore it almost in two, the exposed red flesh dropping back into the dust of the trail.

     We backed off a few yards and set our packs down. Somebody got me a stick. I walked slowly up to the snake, pistol in right hand, stick in left, and pulled the rest of the inert body back onto the trail. I poked at it until we were sure it was dead, then we got up close to look. The first bullet had torn most of the tissue out from the head; one fang dangled from the skin.

     August or no, the snake either hadn't yet shed its skin, was already wearing a new one, 


or had skipped the process in the year humans called 1959. Anyway, it had a fine rattle of 


about ten segments. I cut the rattle off and put it in a small wooden tube we carried some 


kind of medicine in. That night at our campfire, I held the fleshy part of the rattle against a 


hot ember, so it wouldn't rot and stink. There was a crackling sound as it cauterized; I 


snorted the smoke from it back out of my nostrils. Jokes about how they'd have had to put a 


tourniquet around my neck if the snake had bitten me in the nose sent our nervous, relieved 


laughter out over the lower reaches of Hell's Canyon. 

CANAL/ DOGS OF EBERLEIN STREET

I was barely 15, but what I saw and did – and the decisions I made -  at the canal that late winter day, and what I saw others do and not do, is still with me more than 50 years later. I’ve told it to students in my martial arts classes, as a way to get them to think – ahead of time – about how important it is to move when it is time to move, when a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

                                             Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town.

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, broken‑down pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the four‑letter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad.

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!"

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold.

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenaline‑jerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An.

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two armlengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people.

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy.

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.          

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well‑directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.

The following story is about the time I felt the deepest fear of my young life. I would remember it in Vietnam. I still remember it.

Dogs of Eberlein Street

     I was sixteen. We lived in the Shasta View Apartments in Klamath Falls, another leftover WWII housing project that we lived in for most of my childhood because they were always the cheapest. The project was on the far side of town from the high school, and since it was winter and I was in basketball or wrestling practice every day after school and missed the bus, I walked home in the dark.

     I'd long since found the shortest way home. By the time I got to Eberlein Street, bordering  the northern edge of the project, I had it made. One night I turned onto Eberlein and was halfway along it, with only two or three blocks to go, when a dog came out and started barking at me. I tried to ignore it. They can smell fear, I'd always been told, so act like you're not afraid.

     But the dog persisted. It wasn't your typical front‑yard mutt sounding the alarm as you passed its territory. The dog seemed really angry, though I hadn't done anything, and hadn't strayed from the sidewalk. I got scared. The dog came in closer, barking and growling with real menace. It went for my ankles. I turned and kicked; it dodged just out of reach. It seemed to become even angrier. Other dogs in the neighborhood started barking. A second dog came out and joined the first. It seemed to have the same peculiar anger, as if the two of them had just discovered a kid who had severely abused them as puppies.

     They teamed up on me, making it difficult to move along the sidewalk. More dogs came. There were five or six. They all behaved the same way. I was terrified. I broke and ran. That infuriated them even more. Oh no you don't, they seemed to say. They worked like a wolf pack, cut me off. They got me in a circle. I broke out and ran. They cut me off again.

     I made it to the street light on the corner across the street from the project. They cornered me there in the cone of light at the base of the pole, barking furiously and growling and taking turns lunging in to nip at me. I was doing a frantic dance to avoid their teeth, trying to kick at them to drive them back, yet reluctant to actually kick one hard for fear they’d just tear me apart.

     I yelled at them, yelled for help. Porchlights were on all along the street, but no one came. I couldn’t believe that the noise the dogs and I were making didn’t bring people pouring out of the houses to help, or at least to see what was going on. But no one noticed. The human world was locked away inside those houses, and I was banished to some bestial zone outside it.

     I finally flailed and yelled and stumbled my way across the street. The dogs peeled off and left once I entered the project. I ran into the apartment. I was shaking. I got out my .22 Ruger single‑action revolver, which Mom had let me buy on my sixteenth birthday, and just held it. I wanted to load it and go kill them. I knew I couldn’t just walk out in a populated neighborhood and start shooting, but every throbbing part of me wanted to. Mom tried to calm me down, and kept an eye on me lest I load the pistol and head for the door.

     That night I went to bed and lay awake, holding the pistol, still shaking at times, looking out the window, looking for the dogs, wishing they would come up to the window, now that I was armed, wishing they would try to attack me again, right through the window, so that I would have no choice but to load and shoot, wishing I could shoot and shoot and kill them all.

DRESS BLUES/ ALMOST A COWBOY

     Bill Gano was my step-dad when we lived in Grants Pass, and for a while longer when we moved to Klamath Falls. He’d take me and Darrell hunting and fishing, and teach us the ways of the woods. I was sorry when he left.

Dress Blues 1

     Bill took me to a gun shop in Klamath Falls. We couldn't afford anything, not even a used rifle. We went there to dream. Maybe they'll give me some overtime, Bill said. And we'll pick spuds together on weekends when they come ripe. Maybe we can get a good used .30‑30, not this year, but in time for next deer season. We could sure use the meat, save on groceries. Gotta tell your ma that, or she won't let us spend money on a rifle. .30‑30's not the best gun for this country, though. Good brush gun, but short range. Need somethin' that'll reach out farther in this open country, .300 Savage maybe. That's a real nice rifle, got a good long barrel, you get a peep sight on the back, with that long distance between sights, you can be real accurate. Bill liked peep sights. He'd gotten used to them during World War II, when he'd fired the Springfield 1903 .30‑06, and later, the M-1 Garand. Ought six's a good caliber, he said. You could get a lot of different loads for it, and you could buy ammo anywhere.

     We were talking like that, and the store owner, who knew we didn't have any money, was letting me handle a used .300 Savage off the rack. He wasn't busy. "Boy handles a rifle real nice," he said, knowing that'd puff me up, which it did. Puffed Bill up a little too, because he'd taught me.

     The little bell over the door jingled, and a man walked in. Instantly, the three of us were breathing different air. The man wore a striking blue uniform, topped by ‑ of all things in a dusty logging and cattle town ‑ an immaculate white cap with a brown leather brim and a shiny brass emblem. He removed the cap and tucked it under his left arm as he entered. The dark blue uniform tunic had brass buttons and a funny high collar that closed at the throat, and red piping at the sleeves and pockets. There were medals ‑ some shiny silver, some multicolored cloth ‑ on his left breast. The silver medals seemed to represent rifles and pistols. There was a broad crimson stripe down each leg of the blue trousers.

     The man knew the gun shop owner; they greeted each other. I could sense a subtle change in Bill, even though he was behind me, looking over my shoulder at the man in the strange uniform.

     The man in the uniform was watching me ‑ with approval, it seemed ‑ handle the .300 Savage with all the aplomb a skinny kid with glasses could muster. He nodded over my shoulder at Bill. "There's a young man I'll be talkin' to one of these days," he said to all of us. Then, to me: "Ever hear of the Marines, son?" He smiled. I was thirteen or fourteen. I knew nothing of him or his world.         

     I did know that both Bill and the gun shop owner had changed when he walked in.

     "No," I said.

     The man might have said something else. I don’t know. I just remember how he looked, and the feeling he brought into the room. And Bill saying with a testy voice, "He's a little young for that."

     The man in the glittering blue, white and red uniform did his business and left. I could feel the air in the room return to something like it had been before he came in, though a part of his presence remained.

     I looked at Bill's face with my question. Part of his answer was already in his face; it contained some mixture of awe and disapproval, with a hint of myth or mystery.

     "Marine recruiter, I guess," Bill said, looking at the gun shop owner, who nodded as he leaned on the counter. I asked who Marines were, lobbing the question for both of them to catch. The store owner said something that confirmed the awe in Bill's face, about Marines being the best fighters. There was more awe in his reply than I saw in Bill's face, with none of the disapproval.

     I was surprised at the anger in Bill's voice. He said something like, Sure, Marines have a lot of guts, but they don't care, they do all this crazy stuff, just stand up and fix bayonets and walk right into it instead of trying to do the job with less casualties. They get a lot of guys slaughtered just to prove how brave they are.

     As we walked back to the Studebaker Bill said, very pointedly, that when my time came, I should join any branch of service but the Marines.

     I never forgot Bill's admonition. But the man in blue had done his work.

    Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank were dirt poor, but the finest human beings I never new. Not long after the episode in the gun shop, they got Darrell and me a summer job on a ranch in Northeast Oregon.

                                                  

Almost a Cowboy

     Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank got Darrell and me hired on for the hay harvest at the Wellman ranch on the Powder River near Baker, Oregon. Bessie and Lank had lived in Baker since they'd come west from Missouri in 1940, except for a brief return in the 1960’s. Stan Wellman was Lank's hunting partner and all‑around sidekick. Stan's father, Les, owned the ranch; Stan was the foreman. Les, still vigorous, was over seventy.

     Most of the work was done with tractors, but Les had kept his horse‑drawn sickle‑blade mowers and dumprakes. At a time when most ranchers had acquired baling machines, he still stacked his hay loose. The process of getting it from standing hay to stacked hay had several steps. First it was mowed, mostly by mowers attached to his big John Deere diesel tractor or one of the two or three others he had around ‑ I remember a Massey‑Ferguson, an Allis Chalmers and maybe a small Case. But sometimes ‑ partly just to show off, Stan said ‑ Les would hitch a single horse to an old steel‑wheeled mower he had and clean up along fences or along the willows by the riverbank where it was dangerous to drive a tractor. Claimed he had more control with the horse‑drawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good.

     After a field was mowed, the fresh‑cut hay lay out over it like a tufted quilt whose cover was woven of threads of every possible shade of green. Another tractor would come along pulling a windrower, leaving the cut hay in neat, parallel‑curving rows up and down the length of the field. Then it was our turn with the dump rakes. I drove the team, and Darrell drove the single horse, pulling twelve‑foot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twenty‑year lives. Darrell's single bay horse would walk alongside the row he was bunching. The curved, two‑and‑a‑half‑foot spring steel teeth, distributed a few inches apart along the width of the rake's carriage between the two large steel wheels, would slide along under the windrow, rolling the loose hay into a bunch until the teeth at the center of the rake were filled to capacity. Then we'd kick a lever to engage a cog out at one wheel, and the whole row of teeth would rise with the turning of the wheel and drop a nice bunch of hay on the stubble. We'd release the lever and the teeth would drop into the windrow in front of the fresh bunch and start the cycle again.

     Pete and Bill were my team. Bill was the older of the two, a rangy bay who wasn't much to look at, but who did most of the pulling. Pete was a sleek, pretty black horse with white stockings, part Percheron, who even seemed to prance a little as if he knew he was good looking. I still think of him every time I see the Budweiser clydesdales on TV. But as long as I drove the two of them, Pete would hang back just a little, while the ugly, faithful Bill leaned into his collar and got the work done.

     Darrell and I had hired on at three dollars a day, plus meals at the harvest table and cots in the bunkhouse. We'd start our day before dawn, walking to the pasture in the dark while it was still soaked with dew to catch the horses and get the halters on them and lead them into the barn and buckle on their collars. Then while they were chewing their grain we'd step up to the post where each horse's harness hung on a long peg, and slip the rump end of the harness up onto our shoulders like Les had taught us, sliding each new strap down until the entire harness was arranged along the arm. Then we'd reach up and grab one of the hames in each hand and walk over to the horse and throw the whole business out along the horse's spine with a motion like coastal fishermen use to cast their nets. Next, it was step back alongside the horse and distribute the straps along his back until the rump strap dropped in place. Then grab his tail and free it from that strap ‑ the one that took the pressure when you backed up the rig ‑ so the horse could use his tail against the flies. Then go back to his neck and slip the hames into the grooves in the collar, making sure they were seated, and buckle them together in front of the horse's chest. Then there were just a couple of straps to buckle loosely under the belly. The bridles would go on after breakfast, when we were ready to back them to the rig and hitch the doubletree to the horses' collars, and the tugs to the dumprake.

     But first we'd go to the house where Les' wife would feed the crew a huge breakfast which we'd finish in time to hitch up and start the tractors and be headed out through the gate as the first light slanted across the fields.

     Les Wellman lost no time getting his three dollars a day's worth of work out of us. The first morning, he showed us how to catch and harness the horses, drove to the field with us and showed us how to operate the dump‑rake, and turned us loose. We thought we'd died and gone to heaven, getting to drive real horses like that, doing real ranch work, just like we'd heard about from the grown men and seen in movies.

     The romance was quickly tempered, at least for me. Returning from the field the first evening, feeling sunburnt and exhausted and hungry and thirsty and full of myself, I was driving along the edge of a field next to a barbed‑wire fence when a horsefly ‑ an attack bomber of an insect ‑ spooked my team, and they bolted into a full runaway, with me bouncing on the steel tractor seat and holding onto the reins for my very life. The world spun and jounced and became a huffing clanking juggernaut on which I was stuck like a confused flea, which could destroy me equally easily if I stayed perched on the tractor seat or if I tried to get off it. I remembered the old hands' stories of what a man looked like if he fell under a runaway dump rake and got perforated by a dozen or so of the giant steel teeth and then dragged over rough ground. I decided to try to stay on the tractor seat, using my hold on the reins to stay upright. I heaved my hundred ten pounds against the ton and more of galloping horseflesh, trying to make my desperate whoas heard above the roar of hooves and horsebreath and machine.

     I'd just about gotten them slowed into a manageable run, when the rig hit something and the tongue broke between them, and they spooked again.

     Somehow the rake's teeth stayed locked up in the traveling position, and somehow I stayed in the seat. But it was a long ride. Every time Pete and Bill started to settle down and began responding to my desperate pulls on the four heavy leather reins, the broken point of the tongue would stick in the ground and break off and cause the rig to lurch violently and they'd spook again. Finally there was no more tongue to break off, and they ripped the tugs loose from the rake and took off and the universe was suddenly still as I sat looking at the strands of the barbed‑wire fence in front of my nose.

     Les Wellman came driving up on the "Johnny popper," which was what we called the John Deere because of the noise its diesel engine made. He throttled it down and looked me over. By the time he spoke, Stan and some of the others had come up as well. Les actually had a hell of a sense of humor, but you'd never know it until you'd been around him awhile. His way with a joke was to get other people to laugh till their sides hurt without ever cracking a smile himself. So, did he ask if I was alright? Nah. What he said was, "Well, don't just sit there, boy. Go catch yer horses.”

One day when the harvest was nearly over, Mom came out to the ranch to visit Darrell and me. We showed her around, trying our best to act like old hands. We'd walked her out to the pasture to introduce her to the horses, and were back in the barn showing her the harness and other tack and how we did this and how we did that. There was a steel‑grey horse in a box stall at the end of the barn. We knew little about it, except that it was a stud colt. He was as big as a good‑sized saddle horse, because he came from larger draft stock, like Pete and Bill. But they were gelded, and the colt wasn't, which explained why he was so full of beans.

     Les came into the barn and went to the colt's box stall. We walked over and introduced Mom to him. The colt was loose in the stall, which was large enough for him to be range around and bump the sides and stamp, even rearing back on his hind legs and pawing the air like Roy Rogers had his horse Trigger do in the movies. Pure male, pure power. Les spoke to me, all business: "Dean, take this halter and get in there and put it on that horse and tie him up to that ring in the corner post, while I go get my farrier's tools. I got to work on his hooves." He turned and left the barn.

     I quartered an apple with my pocket knife and took the halter and stepped between the rails of the stall. The horse reared back on his haunches and pawed the air and stamped the ground and laid his ears back and whinnied loud. "Son, are you sure...?" Mom sounded worried. But sons, of course, delight in worrying their moms, and in going ahead with what worries them even when the sons themselves realize that what they're doing is stupid. Besides, I couldn't back down from something Les had told me to do. "It's all right, Mom," I said, expressing more confidence than I felt.

     I moved slowly. "Hoa," I said in as steady a voice as I could muster, wishing my voice would hurry up and change so I could make that deep, calming, almost crooning sound the older men made when they walked up to a horse. "Hoa, boy." I kept talking, slow and easy. I don't know if it was the apples or my voice, but he settled down some. He let me approach, feed him one slice and stroke his nose ‑ "Slo-ow now, easy, easy, fella" ‑ and his neck and shoulder. I raised the halter and got my arm around his neck. He threw his head, lifting me off the ground like some toy human. I talked him down again and gave him another piece of apple and used another to back him into a corner of the stall with me at his head and fed him the last of the apple and while he was chewing it I slipped the halter over his nose and up over his ears and reached under his throat and buckled it. All the while he fidgeted, knocking me about with his head. I turned him around and walked over and got one end of the rope through the snubbing ring in the corner, then used its mechanical advantage to take up whatever slack I could every time he moved his head. Now when he threw his head the rope jerked hard against the steel ring, and the halter strap cut into the back of his neck. He'd let off, and I'd gain some rope. We repeated that dance until I had him snubbed up in the corner with two half hitches.            

     I was stepping out between the slats of the stall, carefully out of range of the colt's rear hooves, when Les came back into the barn carrying his rasp and nippers. He leaned over the top rail and looked at how the colt was tied in the corner.

     He actually showed surprise. "Goddamn, boy. Don't you know that horse ain't even broke?" His little joke, which I hadn't gotten at the time, was supposed to have been that I would get in the stall, and the colt would rear and snort and terrify me into climbing back out in a hurry. I guess he'd forgotten what a boy will do when a man has challenged him, or when his mother is watching.

Darrell and I had never worked so hard in our young lives, but we hated to see the haying season end. A few days before we finished, Les had put me up on the Johnny Popper - the one with the hand clutch that you leaned way forward with a dramatic motion to engage ‑ and turned me loose bucking the hay that Darrell and I had bunched with the dump rakes. Was I something!

     Then the hay was all up, and Darrell and I had to get our stuff from the bunkhouse and put it in the old blue Studebaker. Les came around and asked if I wanted to ride fence for a while on some pasture land he had out on the Virtue Flats sagebrush country on the other side of Baker.

     Was he kidding? Ride fence? On a horse? A saddle horse?! Mom! Please, Mom! M-A-A-A-M! I must have sounded like a scared lamb.

     It wasn't to be. It was late August; she had to be back to work in Klamath Falls, and Darrell and I had to start school. We left Baker, unhappy to go but thrilled at what we'd done that summer. Wait'll we told the other kids some of the stuff we'd heard in that bunkhouse. I still remember one verse the older boys sang to the tune of "The Old Chisolm Trail":

                   Last time I seen 'er,

                   ain't seen 'er since,

                   she was jackin' off a nigger

                   through a bob‑wire fence,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree, to a tree,

                   gonna tie my pecker to a tree.

     We stopped at a gas station to fill up for the drive home. Mom asked me to pay for the gas. Huh? I said. Darrell and I were rolling in dough: three dollars apiece for every day of the haying season – about eighteen days - and we'd had no time to spend any of it. We'd never had close to that much money in our lives.

     "Son, that's all the money we have," she said. In fact, she needed for both of us to give her all we'd earned, until she got us back home and got back to work herself. She was sorry, but that was just the only way.

     We gave her all our money. We knew she was sorry, and that she wouldn't

lie to us and just take our money for herself. She said she'd try to save us a little

spending money out of it.

FIRST BLOOD/ FINDING JESUS

I was a young kid, seven or so, when I shot at a robin on the housing project lawn with my bow and arrow. To this day, over 50 years later, every time I see a robin, I remember this story. 

                                                               First Blood  

     As a kid I loved Indians. It started with some illustrated books in the school library. One book about the Iroquoi tribes became especially totemic for me. There were earth-toned renderings of the insides of longhouses, with sleeping platforms of poles lashed together with sinew and piled with robes of animal skins, with the space and the dusky‑skinned people and the implements of their lives ‑ the beaded moccasins, the deerskin leggings, the obsidian knives, the stout bows and hide quivers of feathered arrows ‑ lit only, but magically, by firelight. I began to live in a fantasy world. I wanted to wear those skins, carry those weapons, live in a space as richly textured, as warm, as right as the interiors of those longhouses. I wanted to be one of those people.

     I saved the cardboard cards out of Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes, the ones that separated the layers of biscuits. Each card had instructions from the comic-book character Straight Arrow on how to make some kind of Indian artifact: how to lash on a flint arrowhead, or how to carve a spearhead out of wood and harden it in fire.

     I made my own bow out of a seasoned branch and some heavy string, and it worked pretty well. Arrows were a different matter. I searched every tree in my life ‑ there weren't many, there in the project - but couldn't come up with a single stick straight enough to fly at all true.

     I saved my allowance and collected pop and beer bottles till finally I could afford a store‑bought arrow. I shot and shot. I got to where I could hit with some regularity a pretty small target, if it wasn't too far away.

     One day I took my bow and arrow outside and started for the end of our building, to shoot in the sagebrush out along the railroad tracks. I saw a robin hopping on the grass in our yard. It was hopping away from me with its head down, absorbed with whatever it was trying to catch to eat. I stalked it from behind. It never saw me. I got close enough, aimed, let fly. The robin screamed, a sound I had never heard a robin make, and ran clumsily along the grass, dragging the arrow which had entered its ass, right under the tail. It screamed and ran, wobbling desperately until the arrow dropped out on the grass. The robin hopped and finally flew weakly out of sight. My heart pounded; I felt blood pulsing in my throat and head. I didn't understand what had happened. I didn't understand why I had shot at the robin ‑ people didn't eat robins ‑ or why I had hit it, or why it didn't die, or what I would have done if it had died. 

Mom had kicked our dad – second of her five husbands – out of the house, and she and my younger brother and I had moved to Southern Oregon. There, still a boy, I became a Christian. That lasted twelve years or so, until one day in a burning village…

Finding Jesus, and Eb Hogue's Knife

     We were living in a little rented house on Conklin Avenue in Grants Pass. Darrell and I met a kid named Eugene Wright, who was my age and lived a few houses up the street. He'd come around trying to sell Cloverine Brand Salve, some all‑purpose ointment that magazine ads said you could sell door to door and make a lot of money. It came in tins the size of a snuff can. He didn't sell many.

     Something had happened to Eugene's parents; there was some reason they couldn't raise him. He lived with his grandparents, the Hogues. He was an only child, a chubby kid who wasn't very strong. He'd been labeled a sissy, and took a lot of shit from other kids. He was very religious.

     He and I became friends for a while. He didn't do much that I liked, like playing football or baseball, but he did read books, so we had that in common. He talked a lot about Jesus. I got bored with that, but everybody said it was the truth so I figured it must be so. He worked at converting Darrell and me. I remembered a time in Pasco when I'd asked, "Mom, is there a real God 'n' Jesus?" She'd just said, "Yes, dear," as if I'd asked if the sky were blue. I wanted more of an answer, but none came.

     Mom had been praying a lot more lately. It was pretty much in the air we breathed. In the small towns we'd always lived in, whenever somebody was born or died or got married, the seriousness of the occasion meant that it was a religious one. Heads would bow, some old man would pray out loud, and you had to be still.

     Eugene kept after us to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal savior. He warned that we'd go to Hell if we didn't, and we knew he was right because everybody else said the same thing. The difference was that most people only said that if you asked them, and Eugene said it without being asked. Darrell and I shrugged and said, Well, guess we better do it, sure don't want to go to Hell. (Back then, you always capitalized nouns like heaven and hell and any pronoun or adjective that referred to God or Jesus.)

     So one time when Eugene was talking about Jesus we asked him how you went about doing this.

     "It's easy," he said. We'd need a special place, one that was sort of secret and private. We were at his house. He led us out back to a shed that had a partial attic and we all climbed up there and knelt down, which we'd have had to do anyway because there wasn't space under the roof to stand. This was perfect, Eugene said, because Jesus didn't care where you accepted Him as long as you did it, and He could see everywhere, so you didn't have to be in church. (Pretty good, seeing through walls. Wish I could do that.... I imagined myself walking down Conklin Avenue watching women bathe.) Darrell and I hoped Eugene was right; we didn't want to go around thinking we were saved and then end up in Hell because we'd gone about it wrong.

     So we knelt on the boards in that shed's attic and Eugene Wright asked us if we accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and we said we did, and we all bowed our heads and Eugene said a prayer and that was that. We were Christians. Eugene was excited. Lots of preachers don't do that good, he said, getting two in one week.

     Some time later Ebenezer Hogue, Eugene's grandfather, put a .22 rifle to his head and killed himself in their living room. Eugene and his grandmother couldn't bear to stay in that house, so they moved a short distance away. Mom rented their house. She let us see the bloodstain on the wooden floor once, then put a rug over it and we moved in. It was the best house we'd ever lived in, with a back yard big enough for a vegetable garden. We’d learned in school that Indians had taught the Pilgrims to plant corn and beans in the same hills so the beans climbed the cornstalks. I planted ours the same way, and sure enough I didn't have to put in poles for the beans.

     Eugene gave me a hunting knife that had been his grandfather's. He didn't want to keep it because it saddened him, and he wasn't a hunter anyway. It was pretty old, with a small brass hilt. It had had a handle of two pieces of some early plastic, one riveted to either side of the tang. One side had fallen off. It had a crude sheath that Eb had made. He'd told Eugene it was the Indian kind. (The old man had told Eugene about seeing real wild Indians as a boy. When Eugene retold the story to me, I was so thrilled I could see a file of dusky figures, moving among the trees like a warm breeze, disappearing over a ridge.) The sheath had leather covering the blade but also wrapping around most of the handle. That way you didn't need a keeper strap, which brush could unsnap anyway when you walked through it, plucking out the knife without your even knowing it. Plus you didn't have to unsnap anything to draw the knife; you just grabbed the top of the handle and pulled it out. The hunting knife I carry to this day has a sheath I made the same way.

     It wasn't a pretty knife, but it was mine. I didn't like that it was missing part of the handle until one day when I was throwing it in the front yard. Most hunting knives are heavier on the handle end, making it harder to control how they turn in the air, thus harder to stick. Having half its handle missing gave Eb's knife a nice balance.

     I practiced. There was a tree in our front yard that was big enough that I could hit it every time, and its bark was soft and even, so the knife would stick easily when I could make it hit point first. I became a kid zen knife‑thrower. I would spend hours a day standing back from that tree, throwing the knife, retrieving it from the tree or wherever it had bounced to, walking back, throwing it again.

     It was a matter of grip, release, and distance. It worked best to grip the knife by the blade and throw it overhand so the knife made a half turn and arrived at the tree point first. Once I saw the principle involved, I chose a favorite grip, the one with most of the blade in my hand, and settled in at the distance from the tree where that grip would give me a nice half turn and stick in the bark. I threw and retrieved and threw and retrieved. After a few days I could stick it almost every time at my chosen distance. I began to throw harder, and that changed things for a while but when I found the right combination it became even more consistent. Then I chose a spot in the bark for a smaller target, and before long I could throw the knife hard, stick it most of the time, and often very near that spot. Then I no longer seemed to be throwing the knife; it just flowed out of me as I let it go.