High Desert Journal

Wildfire Stars
by Laura Pritchett

"You can't manufacture love: You can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough to sustain itself against the hard winters and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates. And sometimes the core can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It's one of the dangers."- Rick Bass

Glowing white stars fly into view when I turn off my lamp and settle my head back into the pillow. Someone has painted the night sky on my bedroom ceiling, invisible by day, but glittering at night. Whoever did this, some previous owner, got the spacing and patterns right - her rendition of the sky looks like the real night sky, large flecks of light and small clusters and space. The dots of paint fade after a half-hour; I watch them dim as whatever fluorescent chemical in the paint ceases to react.

Then I watch the real stars. There's a small skylight in my bedroom, so I can see the specks of light that shine the night through. An airplane or satellite sometimes crosses my rectangle view, but mostly it is the stars, and since I live in the country, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the stars are very bright. I appreciate their intensity and the fact that they don't fade, because I have a long night ahead of me, into the insomnia-created vault of time, and I like their company, their fiery energy burning with my own.
I keep as still as I can, not wanting to wake my husband, but my mind is in constant motion. I am manufacturing love. I am daydreaming about first kisses and men's hands and about love-making.

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Calamity: The Heppner Flood
by Joanne Green Byrd

It is reported that a tremendous cloudburst occurred at Heppner late in the afternoon. All communication with that town has been cut off and nothing definite can be learned. ... Forecast Official Beals had no reports of any cloudburst, but "they would not reach me today in any case.
- "Heppner is Cut Off," The Oregonian, June 15, 1903

June 14, 1903, 5:20 pm
Harry and Emma hanby were busy in their tiny house in a canyon just off Balm Fork, five miles south of Heppner. They had - or maybe were in the middle of delivering - a new baby. Harry's mother, Melissa Hanby Kirk, was there to help. 22-year-old Nora Floreon, house-sitting at a family ranch nearby, may have been lending a hand inside, or she might have been out, going for the doctor.
Eudora Hart and her husband, Ransom, and their oldest son, Bob, were inside their ranch house on Balm. Eudora was in the kitchen; she had baked a pie for Sunday supper and placed it on the lower shelf of the cupboard to cool. They had expected the creek near their house to rise, "but it rained so hard, they did not see it." Bob stepped out the front door to look again - at the exact moment the wave hit the house.

The Hanby family and Nora Floreon were the first victims of the Heppner Flood. Eudora Hart was next; she died when the kitchen was ripped from the rest of their home.

When the floodwaters entered Heppner a few minutes later, Lee Cantwell, who had a bicycle shop in town, was watching from the hill. He reported that when the wave on Balm Fork crashed into Willow, it slowed momentarily "until it piled up 30 feet high. It then gained greater speed" until it slowed against the little house James and Delitha Jones were renting. Further on, several houses hung it up again "until a huge volume of water in the rear caught up, [and] it plunged forward with renewed and greater force than ever."

All five in the Jones family died. The Heppner Flood had now killed 11 people. In the next hour and roughly 12 minutes, it would claim another 227 victims, obliterate their homes and leave much of Heppner in ruins.

Raging into town, the flood wall stopped and doubled back on itself behind the new two-story Heppner Steam Laundry, home of its proprietors Fred and Anna Krug and their five children. The laundry building cantilevered over a creek that just a few hours before had been its tame, serviceable self. The laundry held back the main wall of water long enough - long enough for the wave to build the power to tear the building to pieces; long enough for anyone unbelievably lucky to see the water stalling there and dash to higher ground. But not long enough for the Krug family to escape. The flood took them all: Fred and Anna, Mary, Emma, Fred Jr., George and an infant.
One of the guests at the Palace, A. B. Bradbury, remembered the flood at that point as a "bank of water 20 feet high - swirling and foaming." Other witnesses would agree with salesman N. L. Tooker's 30-foot estimate, though some thought it was 50 feet high.

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Uncle Tumbleweed
by Jarold Ramsey

You've come back
from God knows where
Uncle Tumbleweed.
I found you snagged on the cattleguard
this morning, marooned by the nightwind
but ready to roll any which way
when the wind's persuasive again.
Big as a washtub, dry branches
coiled up like a nest of hoop snakes,
you were once a common Russian thistle
rooted in the summerfallow, until you got religion
and cut loose over the fields,
transfigured by motion.
Years ago, my father showed me a fence line
where legions of your kind had lodged in the wires,
making a sail in the wind and dust that heeled
that fence right over. But Uncle Tumbleweed,
I fancy you've been a loner, a rover,
avoiding fence-rows and ditches and walls
altogether. I'd love to collect your story
if I knew how to ask for it, beginning at that moment
you gave up your roots and turned your first
amazing somersault over the furrows.
Stay as long as you like,
in the lane, the garden, or the patio -
in an age of herbicidal farming
we're honored to have you here.
**Read this poem and
THE STARLINGS AT TAMÁSTSLI by Jarold Ramsey in issue #10**

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As Is
by J.J. Clark

Her grandfather told her once that Asa Bordona had worked for a turkey farm out at Chinese Camp as a semen sucker. He had explained that the sucker was the boy who used a straw to draw the semen out of the male turkey to put in the female turkey so she would hatch eggs. As she and her grandfather walked from the parking lot towards Bordona's Furniture and Appliances, Lily June wondered if this was where the song "Turkey in the Straw" came from. "That damn Portagee got paid twice what me and the other boys on the crew did," Bud had told her. He had told her this so she'd know something about Asa Bordona.

At the entrance of the store, she dragged the heels of her Dingos across the pale tiles, enjoying the black scuff marks they left behind. She had cleaned and polished both her and her grandfather's work boots early that morning so they would be dung-free for their trip into town. She had wanted to wear her blue plaid shirt, but Bud was wearing his blue one with the pearl snaps so she wore her brown one, and both wore their stiffest pair of Levi's. They entered through Bordona's automatic doors and Bud doffed his second best straw hat, the one without the sweat stain at the band, baring a buzz cut and uneven ears. He hadn't gone with the black Stetson because it wasn't a wedding - they just needed to buy a deep freeze. Since girl hats only came in the color of Easter eggs, she didn't wear one.

They walked together down the center aisle of the store, the Barcaloungers lined up on their left and the La-Z-Boys on their right. The whole place reeked of lemon furniture polish and synthetic leather and high prices. Asa Bordona approached down the aisle to meet them in fancier boots and dressier pants. He gave his hand-tooled leather belt a tug so that his gigantic sterling silver eagle buckle would show above his paunch. "Young lady!" he said to Lily June. "Have I got a deal for you on a butfor."

"What's a butfor?" she asked, backing away as Bordona squatted down in front of her. He wore a pomade in his hair that smelled like expired medicine.

"For crapping!" Bordona laughed and tugged one of her pigtails before he stood back up. To her grandfather, he said, "Freezer finally conk out on you, Bud?" Bud's real name was Leroy James, but everyone called him Bud because that's what they had called him in the Marines. Lily June had no idea why the Marines called him that because he never talked about it.

The truth was that their deep freeze had conked out on them, leaving them with almost a whole steer thawing in the kitchen at that very moment, but Bud knew better than to sound desperate. "Burtschi told me that the trade-in he gave you was in good shape. I figured it might not hurt to have two. Lots of pheasants this year. Geese, too." He tilted his head towards Lily June. "L.J. here keeps me in bass and catfish besides. Some as big as she is." He exagger ated, but she appreciated it.

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A HINT OF SNAKE
by Matt Yurdana

Eloquence and iodine,
a smooth and fluent memory haunting the top-shelf shadows,
lingering
as the mention of its name kindles the air
like an aphrodisiac,
like a stitch or a twinge
deep in the chest of those who don't want to believe
it's all gone.
Some say there are a few ounces left
in a bar 30 miles north of Imnaha.
And some say it amalgamates
the senses, the hot dust and coiled darkness awakening
in the mouth, leaving us
poised on a threshold, the edge
of sage-dim tunnels, the thorned and belly-carved world
we long to consume.
They say the heirloom barley was infused with juniper smoke
cooked with an ancient recipe from a band
of renegade monks,
cooled with the cold burn of Ten Mile Creek,
and in November, before dawn, the men traveled on foot
into the mountains
and at the base of an ancient stump
unearthed
from its winter den a slumbering knot of rattlesnakes,
and took them, still dreaming, back
to the distillery
where they awoke with a splash in a massive oak trough,
each broad S
lingering on the surface,
and the blending of their scales with the smoky amber
they moved through
not only appeared to be, but actually was,
a devolution of the essence of themselves,
a co-mingling
of liquid and muscle, of ease and articulation,
a transmutation
measured and stoppered and sealed with wax, to bestow
on those who'll raise it
a new tongue.

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The Great Nucleus
by Seth Walker

As Pete Seibert emerged through the doors of a still-steaming troop train high in the Colorado Rockies, he stopped and gazed upon an Army base that was a vision in white. More than 800 new white barracks smelling of fresh-cut timber stood in front of him in rows along the 10,000-foot plateau. Snow-covered mountains, some of them reaching above 14,000 feet, soared in the distance. Snow camouflage - heavy white cotton jackets with matching pants - was standard issue. Even the skis carried by the men were white.

It was May 1943. Seibert, then 18, first considered the Navy Air Corps for his war service, but then he heard about the Army's 10th Mountain Division, a group of select skiers, climbers and hikers known colloquially as the "ski troops." Seibert's family home in New Hampshire, the one he'd just left for the first time, featured something most didn't: A ski rope tow. He'd become a good skier by spending countless winter hours clinging to it as it dragged him and his hickory skis to the top of a small slope. When he heard about the ski troops, he knew it was for him.

Seibert had never seen such outdoor talent. Several members of the division were known for their outdoor prowess well before they arrived at Camp Hale. David Brower was at the top of the list. Brower, who would later morph the Sierra Club into the nation's leading environmental organization, made a name for himself in the 1930s as a master climber of the California Sierra's gray granite, and in 1939 he increased his fame by completing the first-ascent of Shiprock, a 1,700-foot vertical spire in the New Mexico desert then-known as America's "last great climbing problem." Others strolling around Camp Hale included Bill Bowerman, who would eventually put pieces of rubber into his wife's waffle iron and invent the revolutionary Nike running shoe. Lean, quiet Tap Tapley, an instructor in the 87th regiment, could often be found communing with the mules in the stables. The part-Passamaquoddy Indian possessed an unparalleled manual intelligence - he could survive in the woods for weeks with simply the clothes on this back - and he preferred the advice of the wind over that of the military brass. Eventually, he helped develop the curriculum for Outward Bound America and became its first instruc tor. In sharp contrast to Tapley was loud, boisterous Paul Petzoldt, a bear of a man who founded the National Outdoor Leadership School. Others at the base eventually created, designed or ran more than 100 ski areas in America, fueled a Seattle-based climbing dynasty that put the first American on top of Mount Everest, led sport companies such as Dunlop, and some qualified for the Olympics. Others joined Brower in environmental causes.

Seibert, five-foot-eight, with a high forehead, dark eyes and arms and legs seemingly made of oak, was assigned to the 86th regiment with Brower. Eventually, like Brower, Seibert would also become famous. After the war, he co-founded the town of Vail, Colorado and the ski area there. In doing so, he helped pioneer the modern mar riage of Wall Street venture capital with outdoor adventure - much to the future chagrin of Brower and other conservationists.

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By the Grace of Cows, I Go
by Andrea Gromme Baxter

I heard the truck coming before I could see it. As it crested the hill, I could make out the beat-up shape of a vintage Ford pickup. On a lonely canyon road in rural Wyoming, I waited for it to pass. As the truck approached, the driver slowed until the passenger side window was directly opposite me. The old timer at the wheel sat there with a bemused look on his face. He pushed back his hat and said, "I've known many cowgirls in my day, and some of them rode paints, but this here, I've never seen." With a twinkle in his eye he continued, "A cowgirl who rides a paint just doesn't have enough self respect to ride a Holstein cow." With a tip of his hat he drove away on up the canyon. As we watched the old truck disappear around the bend, I laughed out loud. Pi, my saddled Holstein cow, looked up at me with what seemed to be a smile.

Cows were always on the periphery of my youth. They lingered along our neighbor's fence line at the base of Colorado's Front Range and populated the pastures on my family's land in the heart of Wiscon sin's Sand County. I was captivated by their big brown eyes, soft long lashes and languorous nature. I was particularly drawn to Holsteins because of their patchwork of black and white markings that are reminiscent of cloud patterns. In my youth, I saw cows as thoughtful and whimsical.
Yet, cows gave me troubles.

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