Watershed, page 2
I pulled off to the side of the road and stopped. “Well,” I said, “my place is a couple of miles down this muffler-buster. The lake and trail head are just half a mile on. Would you like me to drive you the rest of the way?”
“No, that won’t be necessary. Thanks for the ride.” And she lifted the handle and pushed open the door and got out. She closed the door, went to the back of the truck, and leaned her body over the bed wall to retrieve her pack. She stepped away and waved to me.
I drove on down the lane, watching her grow even smaller in my mirror. She was still standing there when I rounded the bend and lost sight of her.
*
Plata Creek Indian Community v. United States, No. C.V.-99-3456-R (filed Dec. 22, 1984). The Indian Community seeks a federal review of its charges under the Administrative Procedure Act to the Secretary of the Interior’s resolution to omit tribal lands from the Hell-hole Creek Project. The Indian Community maintains that the project benefits only non-Indian residents of the area and that the Secretary has not complied with the 1916 federal act directing him to designate 768 twenty-acre plots and to provide for water rights to irrigate them in perpetuity.
I parked in front of my cabin, opened the truck door, and sat there staring up at the brown-shingled roof and the intimidating sky above it. I’d put off the patching job for some time, but I couldn’t any longer. I went into the house, put the food away, and made a mental note to go through the shelves later to discard the spoiled stuff. Then I got the ladder from the shed and brought it into the house, knocking over, as I always did when carrying something into the house, the too-small cowboy hat I kept hanging on a nail by the door. I set the ladder where I had been sitting earlier, from where I had been able to detect the cancerous puncture; then I climbed the rungs, found the tiny hole between the boards, and pushed a broom straw through it. I next took the ladder outside where I used it to get on the roof. I found the straw and marked the spot with a scratch of white chalk. I stood and looked around and remembered how I didn’t much care for roofs. Heights didn’t bother me, but roofs—the pitches of roofs, the materials of roofs—did: especially metal roofs, which this one was not, but still the thought of it bothered me, the thought of the slick surface, of the sound of my steps on the tin, the jagged rips.
I cut some material from the roll of extra roofing felt that had been stored in the shed, grabbed a leftover shingle from the stack of several, and went out and climbed back onto the roof. The air turned frigid quickly, and when I looked at the sky I could see the snow coming: small flakes that seemed to disappear before they reached me at first, then crystals that kissed my neck and made me cold. I peeled back the shingles on the problem spot, glued down a patch of felt, and nailed down the new shingle to replace the old. It was not a great job, probably it wasn’t even the correct way to do it, but it was done and I kicked myself for not having performed the simple task much sooner. The snow fell in larger flakes and began to stick to the rhododendrons against the wall of the shed. From my perch, I looked in the direction of the road, but could see nothing, just the gray of the bad weather closing in.
I climbed down, put away the ladder, and collected a load of wood from the pile I’d chopped earlier. I went into the house and dropped the fuel by the stove, then went back outside and secured the tarp over the stacked logs beside the house before taking in another lading of wood.
Inside, I fried some eggs and a trout with the head still on it, an eye staring up at me. I sat down to it, thinking all the while about that little woman Louise out there someplace in the cold without proper gear. It was her business though. I didn’t care who froze to death from their own witlessness or considered deliberation.
When I was eight my grandfather took me hunting for wild turkey. Once out of the city he was alert to any human movement, saying that if the rednecks found you alone, there was no telling what might happen, or more to the point, it was far too predictable what would happen.
“What would you do if some KKKs grabbed your grandfather right now?” he asked as he knelt to observe some sign, his fingers moving over the ground that had been scratched up, feeling the freshness of a bird’s excrement.
“I’d run for help,” I said.
“To whom would you run?”
“The police,” I said.
He nodded, then sat on the ground and looked at me. “When you’re older,” he said, “the police will stop you and search you and, if they don’t shoot you, they’ll take you in and say you look like another ‘nigger.’ They may not use that word, but that’s what they’ll mean. It’s happened to me. It’s happened to your father. It will happen to you.”
“So, I shouldn’t go to the police?”
He smiled at me. “Yes, you should go to the police. Where else can you go?”
Hell-hole Lake was established in 1907 with BIA funds which had been set aside for the Plata Creek Tribe. The Plata Creek Indian Community at that time sought [compensation], but was not allowed to sue the federal government for misappropriation of funds set aside for Indian use, because they were not considered a collective body until 1934 and the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act and because the Secretary of the Interior at that time, Joe Schmo, called the Indian challenges offensive because of their use of the word “theft.”
It was almost dark outside and the book I was reading was putting me surely to sleep. The stove was stoked and just getting hot and the pull of sleep felt good. That’s when a banging at the front door came, although it didn’t cause me to bolt from my chair. Instead, I leaned forward and rubbed my face as I yawned. The banging came again and I got up and walked toward the door.
“Who is it?” I asked, sternly, hoping that if the knocker was trouble I might scare him away.
The knock was repeated, loud, but somehow thin.
At the door now, “Who is it?”
“Louise,” the small voice said.
I opened up and she stepped by me into the house. I looked outside into the night and falling snow, shut the door, and locked it. I studied the woman for a few seconds. She was wet, soaking wet, her hair defeated about her narrow shoulders; her sneakers, ice-covered and darkened, were making puddles on the planks of my floor.
“You’d better get over there by the stove,” I said. “Get those shoes and socks off before your toes freeze.” She moved toward the heat. “And the rest of the wet things, too. I’ll get you a robe.” I went into the bedroom and came back with a pair of striped pajamas that had been a gift from Karen. I had worn them once and they had nearly strangled me to death in my sleep. “As it turns out, I don’t have a robe,” I said, “but you can put these on.” Louise was stripped down to her underpants and bra. I turned away, having seen her little body, her small breasts, and her waist no bigger than my thigh.
“Thanks for letting me in,” she said.
“You bet.”
“Okay, you can turn around,” she said.
I did and I saw her holding herself tightly, lost in the cotton pajama shirt that fell to her ankles. The bottoms were still folded on the chair beside her.
“Do you feel better?” I asked.
She nodded, showing her palms the heat of the stove.
“Are you crazy?” I asked. I opened the stove and poked at the logs to get the flame up, burning myself slightly on the inside edge of the door. “I didn’t say anything in the truck because I thought it was none of my business. But now that you’re in my house and wearing my clothes . . .” I paused while I closed the stove. “Another hour out there and you might be dead, or at least missing a few fingers and toes.”
Before the action of deglutition, the pharynx is pulled upward and opened in a different direction; this is in order to receive the food thrown into it by the mouth. Once received into the pharynx, the elevator muscles relax and the constrictors contract upon the food and transport it down into the esophagus.
She didn’t say anything.
“Listen, I’m going to make some tea.” I felt badly for scolding her. I walked over to the kitchen and from the cupboard pulled down the old coffee can in which I kept tea bags. I took a couple of mugs from the rack, one bearing the name Canyon City, Colorado, and the other Wellfleet, Massachusetts. “So, what are you doing out here?” I asked, dropping the tea bags into the cups. Louise didn’t answer, but she was now sitting in the chair in front of the stove, her tiny toes wiggling, obviously hurting her as feeling worked back into them. I walked back across the room with the mugs and poured water into them from the kettle I kept sitting on top of the stove. “It’s a good sign that you can wiggle your toes like that.”
She nodded.
“Do you take milk?” I asked.
“No.”
“Would you like Canyon City or Wellfleet?” I asked, but she said nothing. “I’ll give you Wellfleet,” I said, handing her the mug. “It’s a little town on Cape Cod and it has one of my all-time favorite traffic signs. ‘Thickly settled,’ it says.”
She thanked me for the tea and sipped it.
“Listen,” I began again, “I don’t want to belabor the point, but are you crazy?” I took her silence as an affirmative response. “I guess there’s no more to say then. Tomorrow, I’ll drive you back down to town and you can check into some dementia retreat.”
“I can find my way.”
“I can’t let you go out there and become coyote feed.”
Louise’s face tightened. “If I were a six-foot man, you wouldn’t be talking to me like this.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I might be a little more afraid of someone who was bigger and crazy, but I’d be saying the same thing to a six-foot idiot who was sitting in front of my fire, half-frozen, lost, in my pajamas, and saying he was going out into the snow and deep freeze in sneakers and a sweater.” I drank some tea. “You can do whatever you want, but I just need to know, for myself, that I tried to discourage you. I’d offer you my boots and some clothes, but the problem is obvious.” I looked at her face and saw that she was indeed listening. “All I have to offer you is my roof, my fire, and food. Tomorrow, you can do what you want.”
“Thank you,” she said, putting down her mug on the floor by her feet.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“No.” She looked around the cabin and then at me. “What do you do?”
“I fish,” I said. I looked down at the surface of my tea, at a piece of leaf floating there, and I poked at it with my finger.
“No, I mean for a living.”
“I’m a hydrologist,” I told her. I realized that she was shaking, but not with cold. She was scared.
We sat there for a while without talking.
“Do you have any socks I can use?” she asked. “My feet are getting cold or too hot or something.”
“Yeah, I’ve got some socks.”
During the field study, 23–27 September, examinations of the geology, hydrology, and soil-erosion processes were made of the Plata Mountain watershed. Observations of the Plata and Silly Man Creeks were made from Rural Route 13 above the confluence of the Silly Man and Red Creeks, from the mining road numbered A-28 traversing north-south along Silly Man Ridge and from various locations along the two main creeks.
The study revealed that at least four major plateaus make up the Plata Mountain watershed. The presence of these terraces, and observations of the deposition pattern within the terraces, indicate at least two, and perhaps more, periods of downcutting and aggradation. The oldest plateau consists of undercut banks and ridges and is more pronounced in the eastern portion of the watershed, facing west to the opening of Tick Canyon. Tick Canyon streams and flood events meet and cut into Plata Canyon, and join Plata Canyon and Creek. Traces of an older, alluvial terrace can be found at higher elevations within the adjoining canyons of Skinner, Dog, and, to a lesser extent, in Hell-hole watersheds, where there are apparent cycles of aggradation as well.
My grandmother baked pies. All the time. There were always pies. One day, it could have been any day, I was eating pie in her kitchen. I was less than ten, I remember. I must have been. I watched her pull another pie from the oven. Blueberry.
“You don’t like Grandfather,” I said.
“Your grandfather is a very smart man,” she said.
“But you don’t like him?”
“He’s very smart.”
We were in my truck driving down the twenty-five icy miles to Clara’s store. “Why don’t you let me drive you all the way to Plata?” I asked.
“The junction will be fine,” she said and, when I didn’t press, I felt her looking at me. “What kind of hydrologist?” she asked.
“The boring kind,” I said. When I looked over at her I could see the answer wasn’t amusing to her. “I’ve been studying the watershed of Plata Mountain for the Naturalists’ Conservancy.”
She nodded.
“It allows me to live here. I’ve studied the flow of the Plata and some of the creeks for Fish and Game as well.”
“The mountain is dying,” she said. “My grandfather told me that before he died. He said the river is no longer any good. He said the Plata can’t feed the fish.”
“The Plata is in trouble, but it’s not dying.”
“You should come to the reservation and meet my people. They’re a part of this land. I didn’t grow up here, so I’m not. But my mother is as much a part of this land as Silly Man Creek.”
I nodded.
I could feel her looking at me. I could feel her thinking. “How can a river be in trouble and not be dying?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer for her.
“Our way tells us that when the river dies, so will our people.”
I nodded again.
I let Louise out just above the store at the crossroads. As she closed the door, I asked, “What’s your last name?”
“Yellow Calf,” she said, and I could see that the information had been released automatically and that she was sorry for that. She closed the door and walked away along the main highway. I drove down to the store, parked, and went inside.
I was greeted with “Your girlfriend called again” from Clara. She was standing behind the counter, pulling red jelly beans from a many-colored pile of jelly beans on the surface in front of her. I watched her long liver-spotted fingers at work. “Why are you doing that?”
“I charge more for the red. People like the red ones, so I pull them out and charge more.” She glanced up at my frown and shook her head. “Don’t give me a hard time. You’re willing to pay a few cents more for brown eggs.” She passed a broken bean through her lips. “All eggs are the same,” Clara said, popping another piece of candy into her mouth. “Why prefer the brown ones?”
I poured myself a cup of coffee. “Tell her to stop calling you,” I said, changing the subject.
“What?”
“When she calls again, tell her to stop bothering you. Tell her to stop tying up your business line.”
Clara nodded. “If you want me to, but I kinda think you ought to tell her yourself.”
I looked at Clara and felt small. I put down my mug on the counter and said, “Let me have the phone.” She set it down in front of me, right in the middle of all the jelly beans, and told me she thought I was doing the right thing. I told her to shut up.
I dialed Karen’s number, it hurting me with each pressed tone that I knew her number by heart, and waited through a couple of rings. “Hello, Karen. This is Robert. I’m still up here fishing. I hope you’re well. Please don’t call me anymore.” I hung up.
Clara watched the receiver go down into its cradle and then looked up at me. “I’m impressed.”
“It was her answering machine.”
Clara smirked.
“By the way, I like the orange ones.”
Observed also were expansive structural relations in the region, including the Silly Man Ridge monocline, a fault running north-south, several east-west faults, and a portion of Plata Mountain. Another fault, which is suggested by the topographical features of the west face of Plata Mountain, may have some impact on surface drainage. The major north-south fault and the east-west structural facets in Plata Canyon have impacted the Plata Mountain watershed itself, evidenced in the field, and confirming Fran Rocker’s work on the geology of Plata Mountain watershed (USGS Paper 45679-T [1981]).
When I arrived at the little store/gas station at the intersection of two highways that was Plata Township, the sun was just touching the tops of the mountains of the Crow Creek range, making them golden and ochre, cutting them sharply against the horizon. I went into the store and grabbed a package of Twinkies from the wooden shelf by the cash register. A couple of older men in cowboy hats were in line in front of me.
“My bull is sick,” the wider of the two said. “He’s got these black spots on his throat.” He kept tucking his shirt into the back of his trousers with his free hand.
“Hmm,” the second man said. “I bet it’s screwworm.”
“Have you ever seen this screwworm?”
“No, but I’ll bet that’s it. You should call the vet and have him come out and look. My cows, they got them spots and the vet field agent came out and that’s what he said. Screwworm. He gave them some shots, but the spots, they are still there.”
The men walked out and I stepped to the register.
“Health food nut, eh?” the young woman said, picking up the Twinkies to look at the price. “You check the date on these?”
“They never go bad.”
“That it?”
I took a roll of wintergreen mints from the paper box by the till and let them roll across the counter.
“Ninety-eight cents.”
I gave the woman a dollar.
“And you get two whole cents back,” she said, smiling, a gold tooth midway back on the left side of her mouth showing.
“Do you know the Yellow Calf family?”
“I know where they live,” she said.
