003
That's Deep
Nonfiction
by Ellen Waterston | 0 Comments
People who have always lived with an ear close to the land, an eye trained on distant horizons, hear and see things differently. Take Jack. Seventy if he’s a day. He ranches outside Mitchell, Oregon, population 200. Has been on the same ranch all his life.
Although Mitchell’s Pink Spur Bar has been closed for years, until recently the sign swung catawampus at the end of a single rusty strand of chain, gaudy and rakish. The general store and post office, the tire shop, and the nine-room Oregon Hotel are still open for business, sluggish as it may be. The owner of the Little Pine Truck Stop keeps a live brown bear in a cage next to the gas pumps. He’s had it since it was a cub. He only recently decided it wasn’t safe to go inside the cage to feed the enormous, hapless critter. The buildings are clustered on a loop road that half-moons off Highway 26. The town is like someone in intense meditation. Breathing and the passage of time have nearly stopped. The main but little-traveled road goes on to Fossil, Izee, Suplee, John Day, remote locations in Oregon’s outback, Oregon’s High Desert.
Mitchell’s claim to fame is that it’s an access point for the Painted Hills. They’re like a color-coded ant farm—chapters in geology, paleontology and anthropology vividly revealed in the side-cut of the hills. The green layer holds fossilized record of ancient waterfowl and shells that left their concentric or lacey ribbed print in the rock. Yellow reveals the giant tusk of the mastodon or jaw of the saber tooth. The blue sediment speaks of native populations who roamed the land and fished for the spawning salmon out of Cherry Creek. The damp caves secluded in the creases of the hillsides sheltered them and their petro glyphs. The Natives left behind telltale obsidian arrowheads that caught the glint of the afternoon sun and the eye of the white folks who homesteaded the area.
The white settlers found that the hardy bunch grasses around Mitchell were loaded with protein for their cattle. Creeks there ran year around. The John Day River coursed between the rainbow hills. It was easy gathering off the high country and down the draws that cinched in the valley like a belt. Microclimates got boxed into the canyons. Things grew there that others in the High Desert only dreamed of—peaches, plums. Even corn and tomatoes had a fair chance.
Jack’s ranch had achieved such a perfect balance: an abundance of water, wildlife, mountain summer pasture and meadows overwhelmed with alfalfa or dry land rye. Cows certainly loved it. Always weaned big calves. Mother cows bred back consistently. “I warn my girls,” Jack would say. “Come up empty and you’ll be shipped. Guess none of them want to leave.”
Trailing cows all those years in and around Mitchell country, Jack had developed some “settin’ in the saddle” theories. Tilting his porch chair, rolling a toothpick back and forth across his mouth, he’d venture one or two. Like the fact that a cow and her calf will always return to where they last sucked. So even if they get split up, hauled off miles in separate directions, they will find their way back to that very spot. He knew of cows that forded rivers, broke through fences to return to where they last gave milk, when careless cowboys had accidentally separated pairs. He’d go on to speculate how humans did the same. Figured most of the time folks spent on some psychiatrist’s couch was trying to figure out just where that spot was they were last truly nourished. He believed knowing when you’ve been nurtured and by whom was critical—and that it had to take place in regular increments, at certain formative points in your life, or “a calf turns lepy, a person lonely.” Or how any species that gets too fancy for its own good is headed for extinction. “Over-armored or over-ornamented. It’s the start of sayonara. Worried about folks these days— mobile what’s-its, SUV’s. They seem to think it’s all necessary, get ‘em somewhere they aren’t. They forget. Grass is always greener where it’s watered.”
But there was one theory of Jack’s I found the most compelling and, like the others, he had come up with it up trailing a bunch of black baldy yearlings off the high country. As Jack put it: “When you’re young, very young, time goes by real slow but the metabolism is hell bent. As you get older, time speeds up and the metabolism slows down considerable. At death’s door,” and here Jack got pretty excited, “the metabolism stops altogether, and yet time goes by so fast that all your life's experiences flash before you in one single, fleeting moment.” He removed his sweat-stained cap, slicked back his gray hair with the hand missing a forefinger thanks to a run-in with the tractor, and replaced the cap on his head. “What,” he asked me, “do you make of that?”
I’ve been turning that one over till the edges are worn smooth. According to Jack’s theory it would seem at some point the arcing ellipses of time and metabolism must intersect and when they do, should be in exquisite balance and harmony. Do you suppose this intersection is a single moment in our life? If so, it must be one of near perfection. How can we know when it is? How can we know when we’re in it? Or is it a particular quality within each moment? If I get really good, can I stay at that intersection and experience everything that way? Could I experience my whole life like the moment when the fly line dances out over the river, before it hits the water? Before a baby takes in its first breath on the way to a life-affirming cry? The time between the coyote’s laugh leaving its lips and when I hear it on the other side of the valley? Just before I wake from a dream? Is it the moment just before we express our love—the expression of it waiting just backstage anticipating its entry? Can we only recognize these moments in hindsight? Like salt thrown over the shoulder for good luck? Or can we live in the present and immediate knowledge of these moments eternally, by practicing, by nurturing an awareness that they are always happening around us, until it is the all and only of life?
These are some of the questions I’m planning on asking Jack at this spring’s branding.
This essay appears in Ellen Waterston's new book, Where the Crooked River Rises, due out fall 2010 from Oregon State University Press.
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