CHINESE SOLDIERS, A6 AND WOLVES

Chinese Soldiers

     Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision. 

     During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war. 

     I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.

     I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed. 

     But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.

     I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.

     I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream.

      Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which is what they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese. They are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

     I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.

     I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon. 

DREAM: MONEY MAN PURSUIT

Dream: Money Man Pursuit

A man, one man, is after me. He's decided I'm between him and what he wants. It has nothing to do with me personally, with who I am or with anything I've done. I try to dissuade him, but he won't listen. Only my death will clear his way. There is a long pursuit. Part of it is over the rooftops of the human community. I do good tricks to get away but he always picks up the trail again. I go through a library with all human knowledge in it, in such a way as to leave all that knowledge in the form of impediments for him. He comes through it all, picks up my trail. Along the way, some people try to help me, but can't. Others are afraid to try. He has an AK47 which he fires whenever he comes within range, barely missing me. I hear the bullets snapping around my head like the bullets snapped past my ears near the well in Tho An in 1966. I meet a friend, a fellow combat vet. He says, "Remember that time...?" and recounts my telling him of our shelling and bombing a battlefield after a firefight until nothing recognizable was left but mud blasted into tortured shapes. My friend connects that story to the pursuit I'm now enduring, but I don't know why, unless just for its implacability, its inevitable movement in the direction of death. He says he'll be a lot more reluctant now, after a battle, to do his usual job of walking the ground and looking for survivors and for evidence of what happened there. I'm weary of dreaming this dream. I know I can't escape this man who pursues me. I know he'll kill me if I don't kill him. I lie in wait. I get up close. Fear and strength struggle in my body. The fear and the strength stop fighting, come to an agreement. The only way out is for me to become a more focused killer than he is. I become that. He comes. His eyes are maniacal, yet more cold than wild. Methodical. I now have a pistol. I aim carefully. A good head shot takes out one eye, goes into his brain. He keeps coming. I shoot again, take out the other eye. He will not die. I shoot and shoot, all brain shots. I'm aware of a wonderful, terrible ability to focus, like when I shot the rattlesnake on the Rogue River, or like standing in the open under fire at Tho An. This focus allows me to compartmentalize my being, putting my revulsion at killing off in a corner with my fear of death and the physical distractions of my environment and of my pursuer's movements. His head recoils crazily with each shot. Still he comes; he won't get it through his head. I grab a short sharp stick. Bullets are not enough; it has to be more personal. I thrust, put all my body's strength behind it, with the butt of the stick against my palm, and drive the point into one bloody eye socket, through his head, out the back of his skull. He finally gets the point. He dies, but not before he gets what he came for. We are in a fast food joint, behind the counter. Dying, he falls toward the cash register, grabs a wad of greenbacks the size of a large man's fist, too large to swallow, but rams it into his mouth anyway, his face a swamp of gore as he falls dead, still trying to swallow the money. 

HUNGER 3

Hunger 3

[My first semester at Colorado College after discharge from the Marine Corps, recently out of Vietnam.]     
     
     Mike Taylor and I went to dinner at the cafeteria in Loomis Hall. He was sitting across from me, and next to him was another student with whom we both were slightly acquainted. We'd almost finished dinner when the guy next to Mike, without saying anything, reached over to take some food from my tray. Reflexively, I turned the fork in my hand downward and stabbed the back of his hand. Four small roses of blood appeared around the tines of the fork. The guy turned pale. Mike’s jaw dropped. They looked at each other, then at me. I shrugged: "Don’t fuck with my food," and went on eating with the slightly bloody fork.

MISSOURI SQUIRRELS

Missouri Squirrels

     Christmas vacation [1966, just back from Vietnam], after my first semester at Colorado College, I decided to visit my Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman in Wheaton, Missouri. They'd made another of their moves between Oregon and Missouri. I'd go by Greyhound, of course: even the accumulated wealth of a year's overseas pay, combat pay, and a Corporal's wages was quickly gobbled by the cost of life at an expensive private college; a plane ticket was out of the question.

     The bus didn't go through Wheaton; it was too small and out of the way. It was nearly dark when I got off the bus. I asked directions. There were no local buses, no taxis. Bessie and Lank lived several miles from where I stood.

     I walked half the night along rural Missouri roads. Dogs would awaken with the crunching of my boots on gravel, bay their alarms, passing awareness of my presence to the dogs at the next farm. It was a little scary, but none of the dogs came after me. Sometime in the night I got lost, and had to knock at a farmhouse, waken someone, and ask directions. I apologized. They said it was no trouble.

     A few days later I was stacking firewood on Bessie and Lank's porch. An old man walked by out in the street. He stopped to watch me. At least, that's what I thought at first, that he was just watching me stack wood, to pass the time like old men will, maybe to pass judgment on my ability to lay up a neat and stable rick of wood, which is a recognized art among country people. I began to be more careful.

     Then I realized that he wasn't so much watching me work as looking at me personally, at who I was. I straightened, nodded. "Howdy," I said.

     "You kin to Bob Metcalf?" he asked. No preliminaries, no introductions, no chitchat about firewood or the rare skift of snow that had Wheaton drivers sliding all over Main Street. "He was my dad...." A dozen questions bubbled in me, but none formed quickly enough. "Y' look just like 'im. I delivered mail in these parts for thirty years." He turned and walked on.

     We were going out to see Dan Metcalf, my grandfather, who lived near Monett, a town even smaller than Wheaton. He'd long since separated from my grandmother Elizabeth, a woman who'd had long flowing black hair as a young woman, who my dad always claimed, with some pride, was part Indian. Maybe Cherokee(

); she'd come from Oklahoma.

     Dan's current wife was Rose, who was always spoken of (though never in her presence) as "a reformed prostitute." Even out of her presence, people never said "prostitute" without "reformed" being attached. They were trying to be generous to her because, they said, she was good to old Dan. But you could tell they were working at it. And you could tell she felt it too, but she just went about her business. I wasn't quite twenty-four, but had probably seen more prostitutes than most of the Metcalfs around there. Rose didn't look like the prostitutes I'd seen. She looked more like Aunt Bessie to me: a plainspoken, plainlooking, hardworking country woman. Except for an extra air of worldliness about her - a tinge of sadness, it seemed to me, at knowing and having lived a truth that everyone else also knew (some more directly than others) but would never say aloud.

     Dan was a lean, kindly old man who was glad to see me but was clearly holding back. He didn't say much. Bessie and Lank figured later that I reminded him too much of his son, dead only six years. My dad had committed suicide at age 40, in 1960.

     Dan and Rose both looked to be people who had cleaned up their acts considerably from the way they'd lived until well into their middle years. Dan came from a long line of moonshiners. The story had it that one night he'd come home likkered up and blasted a hole in his own roof from inside the house with his shotgun, just for fun.

     I wanted to go hunting. Something in me needed to close that circle, to carry a rifle meant to put meat on the table instead of to kill another human and leave him to rot in the mud. Bessie and Lank thought about it a while, and said, Well, we might go out and visit Lank's sister and brotherinlaw, Dorothy and Floyd Jennings, who lived in Thomas Hollow, one of those folds in the Ozarks like those where most of my extended family grew up. (They spelled the word h-o-l-l-o-w, but everyone said "holler". Bessie and my mother were born and raised on a 160-acre homestead in "Star Holler".

     They were a little reluctant to drop in on the Jenningses, especially Floyd. They seldom saw this man. He kept to himself, didn't have a lot to do with relatives and even less with outsiders. Don't expect him to cotton to you, they warned. He's just that way.

     We drove out to Thomas Hollow. Lank brought along his slide action Remington .22 rifle, which was very accurate, for me to use in case Floyd could be talked into a hunt.

     We all sat down in their cabin's small living room. Dorothy busied herself offering us coffee and cookies. Bessie and Lank introduced me, said I was just back from “Veet Nam.” Floyd lit up, started rocking animatedly in his chair. "Ah was thar, durin' the war," he said. "Well," he went on, "guess I should say, durin' the other war, or World War II, or whatever." Actually, he said, he'd never been ashore in Veet Nam. But he'd been aboard a Liberty ship in those waters. "Yup. Spent quite a spell thar. Hell, most people 'round heah nevah had no idy they was such a place, let alone whar it was. Leastwise till this war come along. I'd say somethin' about it, an' a body'd just shrug. But I knowed. I was thar. Durin' the war."

     Lank and Bessie had relaxed. Lank chimed in that he'd told me Floyd had a pretty good squirrel dog. Still got 'im?

     "Oh yeah, he's gettin' on, but still does pretty good, for a collie." That was the first I'd heard of a collie being a hunting dog. I'd had two collies as a kid, Mike and Buddy, so we talked about collies for a while. Pretty soon we were up in the hardwood grove behind the cabin, Floyd and the dog and I. Lank said he'd not go this time, he'd lend me his rifle and let me do the huntin' 'cause I hadn't been in so long.

     The tree limbs were bare, their leaves now a crunchy mattress we walked on. With that noise, we'd never have seen a squirrel, but for the dog. The collie would run ahead, making a big circle out in front of us. Pretty soon he began to bark. "He's got one treed," Floyd said. We walked toward the tree where the dog was, and stopped a few yards away. Floyd motioned, Be still. Squirrels, when they hear a threatening noise, will go around the tree, putting it between them and the noise. After we'd stood still a while, the dog slowly circled the tree, moving away from us, barking and making a racket in the dry leaves. When the collie got to the far side of the tree, we saw, up high, just the head of a grey squirrel peek around the tree. I looked at Floyd. He nodded back at me. I raised Lank's rifle, pushed off the safety, took my time, got just the sight picture Lank had described to me, put the front bead where its top was at the center of the head, where the squirrel's eye would be if I could have seen it at that distance. I squeezed off the shot. There was a long pause. The squirrel slid, tumbled over a couple of branches, fell to the ground.

     We walked over. Floyd knelt and picked up the squirrel and examined it. He stood and looked at me, went so far as to raise his eyebrows. "Right in thuh eye," he said. "Don't waste no meat thataway."

     We shot four or five squirrels - "just enough for a mess of 'em" was how Floyd put it - and walked back to the cabin. His wife made us all a big pot of squirrel and dumplings. All the while Floyd and I sat and talked about Veet Nam, even though he'd never been ashore. We talked about the South China Sea, how there were flying fish that would bust out the side of a wave and glide, and sea snakes swimming close to shore.

     After all, we'd both been there, durin' the wars.

                              

LA COP / SAIGON KIDS

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer [1968] are a continuum in my memory: I recall traveling to the place, who was there, where I went next. Other things are isolated, like one of those oldfashioned photographic portraits with just a face in an oval: no background, no past, no intimations of the future. 

     This story is like that. Somewhere in a hallway of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon, I was talking to a man, a stocky middleaged American. He wore civilian clothes and a sidearm. He was telling me that he was a cop; he'd been walking a beat in Los Angeles when opportunities opened up for American policemen to go to Saigon and work as advisors to the police there. 

     I told the man I was a journalist. He gave me this strange look, from deep within himself, then said something like, "...huh. You want a story...." and hinted that he knew one that would curl my hair. I said I was all ears. He said he couldn't really tell it, that it was secret. But he wanted to tell it, I knew by the way he stayed rooted where he stood, the way he quickly and repeatedly engaged and disengaged my eyes with his. I said we could go somewhere and talk. I said I could keep his name out of it. He said he couldn't do it. But he wouldn't move to leave, and I wouldn't either, so we both just stood there. I leaned against the wall. Casual. I gave little prompts: "So, police work?" That kind of thing. He would shift his weight, start to turn away, then turn back and say one more thing. This went on for a while. Police work, well, yeah. They would go out at night. They would go to villages, towns. Just a few men. They had a list. Suspected VC. Big shots. Sometimes names get added to the list. He paused, shifted, spoke to me with his eyes, pleading with me to understand what he was saying but not saying: Lotta names get crossed off the list. 

                     

2: Kids

     I was walking alone in Saigon, in the outskirts of the city where refugees had put together shanties from the heavy cardboard sleeves that bound cases of C rations, wood from ammunition crates, and other detritus of war. It was hot. No. It was hot: the sun seemed a huge cymbal from the devil's own band, clanging out waves of molten brass that all but banished blue from the sky. The sun, and foot and vehicular traffic, had pulverized the dust of the street into the finest powder, which, with the passing of any foot or wheel or furnace-breathed breeze, rose in gritty ubiquitous clouds and hurried to stick itself to anything that claimed kinship with moisture: skin, eyes, teeth. No young men were present. (In Vietnam, it seemed you were mostly in places where there were no young men, or only young men.) The eyes of women caught just enough sunlight to reflect it from the shanties' dark interiors. Children owned the streets.

     I came upon a little girl standing alone in a wide dusty street. She wore filthy bib overalls, and a plastic bracelet on her left wrist. Snot was running from her nose; tears from her eyes. She was holding Black Label beer cans to her ears with both hands, in the way kids all over the world will hold sea shells to their ears, listening to the ocean. She held the pose as I photographed her; the picture has been published several times.

     I was walking down a very wide street, if that is what we should call a flat dusty strip bounded by refugee shacks. Children rushed out from within, between, behind the shacks in twos, threes, hordes. They surrounded me, shouting in shrill voices in the language they'd learned from GI's: "Hey, you! Fuck you! You give me money!" Small hands curled into claws worthy of predatory birds and tore at my wrist watch, skin, clothes. My notebook was yanked from my hip pocket. It was important. I wheeled and bent over to retrieve it. Business cards of journalism contacts fell from my shirt pocket; a child's hand darted in and plucked my pen from the same pocket. They worked together like coyotes, front and back. 

     Later that day, a friend and I caught an Air Viet Nam Boeing 727 to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That night, I dropped into an exhausted sleep in my bed in the Hotel Mondial, and had a nightmare about the Vietnamese children. Like a two part television special, it began with a recap of the day's events, then continued beyond what had happened that afternoon.

Dream: Vietnamese Children 

I'm walking down the Saigon street. A few of the children are running up and tugging at my hands and clothes; then one stops squarely in front of me on the sidewalk and cups his hands and sticks them in my face and says, "You! Fuck you! You give me money!" I say no but they won't step aside so I just keep moving through them. There are so many now that I am wading as in hipdeep surf, and there is more tugging and I push them away and yell "didi!" and they yell back at me with their shrill angry voices and more of them come and they get closer and finally one of them snatches the Vietnamese phrase book from my back pocket. I turn quickly and it falls to the ground. The kid backs up. I bend over to pick it up and a notebook and a pen fall out of my shirt pocket and some loose papers begin to scatter as the wind flips the pages of the notebook. I reach for them quickly but the children are all over me grabbing for my things. A kid behind me has my wallet almost out of my back pocket and I drop everything else and turn to grab him and, turning, I fall. I'm on my back now in the deep dust of the street, clutching the wallet to my gut with both hands. Smaller, clawed hands with terrible strength wrench it from me and the sky is lost in a cascade of leering children's faces. Sticks and rocks come at my face from among those smaller faces and the sticks get bigger and the faces blur together and I see nothing else and feel only the now painless thudding about my head and the dust in my lungs, and the children's shouts fade into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and that stops suddenly and there is only the thudding and then the barking of a dog out in the darkness. 

CARTOON: McCARTHYISM BEFORE I KNEW THE NAME

Cartoon

     I was in the first or second grade, which would have been in the period 1949-51. Art was my least favorite class; most of the other kids could make drawings and paintings that even I could see were better than mine.

     The assignment was to draw a cartoon. The teacher explained what a cartoon was, and the class turned to. The topic was Communism. If I ever heard the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I don't remember it. What I remember is a lot of emphasis in that class, as well as in others (social studies in particular) about Communism, how Communists, also called Reds, were very bad and didn't believe in God and were trying to take over the world and yes, even America. America was good and strong because we were Christian and free, but we wouldn't stay free unless we all fought hard against the Communists. 

     The teacher approached my island of stillness in the sea of flailing elbows and crayons. She was concerned and helpful. But I just couldn't do it. I couldn't think of anything to draw, or anything that I could draw that would be recognizable. 

     She wouldn’t give up. She hovered at my shoulder, kindly but insistent: Now, think. What have you learned about Communism? Can you draw that? Just try, Dean. Don't worry, cartoons aren't even supposed to be good drawings. They're supposed to make things look bad or stupid.

     She asked what was the simplest thing I could think of that I'd learned about Communism. When that turned up nothing I thought I could draw, she asked whether I thought Communism was bad. Oh sure, I nodded. Then she asked, What's the simplest thing you can think of that's bad?

     The phrase "snake in the grass" came to mind. I'd heard my parents say it about someone they didn't trust. Good, she said. Can you draw that? Go ahead. Draw that.

     I drew a squiggly line to represent a snake, and a few pencil strokes for blades of grass. I lettered COMMUNISM underneath it in my kid's scrawl. 

     "See?" the teacher said. "I knew you could do it."

ALMOST A COWBOY

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 horsedrawn sickleblade 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 steelwheeled 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 horsedrawn rig, and when you saw him working it you had to admit he was good. 

     After a field was mowed, the freshcut 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 twelvefoot wide rakes. My team would straddle the row, doing by habit what they'd been doing most of their nearly twentyyear 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 dumprake, 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 barbedwire 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 frantic 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 barbedwire 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 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 bobwire 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.