Chapter one

CBREV1Chap1 n- revised 3/24/25

GETTING CLOSE ENOUGH TO SEE, WE MAKE THE PATH BY WALKING IT (working title)

“PAY ATTENTION.

BE ASTONISHED.

TELL ABOUT IT.” ( Mary Oliver)

Introduction: AIN’T NOTHING GONNA HAPPEN WITHOUT RAIN

The sun splashes across the blue Pacific, warming droplets of moisture. that soak the air. As the Easterly Winds push the moisture inland, the towering coast range squeezes the air as we would a sponge, dropping inches, and more inches, of rain on giant Douglas Firs and red western cedars that drip, drip, drip on the soft forest floor. Heading East, the Cascade Range and squeezes the air again. More Douglas Firs, blackberries, ferns. Finally, on the east side of the Cascades, the last of the rain and mountain run-off water apple orchards and lush grazing for cattle.

Now, the sponge is dry. The flat, dry wind of the desert pushes the tumbleweed and dust along the road, determined travelers. 150 miles later, the dry air crosses the Columbia and flows into the Huckleberry Mountains, foothills of the Rockies. The sponge gives up its last drops, a meager 22 inches of rain in a good year. It’s marginal, dryland farming. Wheat. Grass and alfalfa for cattle. Massive Ponderosa Pine and Tamarack. Endless Boise-Cascade forest and small hillside family farms crisscross the open fields with property lines and fences.

From the other direction, from the East, come four carloads of antiwar activists from Michigan, New York and Ohio, through Montana and Idaho, up and over Lookout Pass. After all those years of marching through the streets of Chicago, Detroit, Columbus, DC, shouting up to bland faces in the windows and frightened people on the street, “Join Us!”, we were ready to try something new.

We believed three things:

First ,that the system we lived in was fundamentally flawed. The dead of Viet Nam, Selma, Love Canal, Detroit, call out Kathe Kollwitz’s WW1 poster that says “Don’t eat the seed corn.” A system worth living in cannot eat its own babies! Broken. Badly. In need of replacement. Where’s the mechanic who can fix this?

Second, in order to change the system we would have to confront the powerful. We needed a big, inclusive, truly democratic movement. For THIS to happen, everyone needed to start talking and really listening to one another. And we all had to get smarter. And we would probably have to, at some point break the law, as we had learned when we shut down Washington DC in May of 71. We’d all been charged with “obstructing traffic!”, a small crime compared to the Viet Nam War.

Third, we would have to do this with no manual, no map. We would have to make the path by walking it.

And so the 4 carloads of activists hurtle down Lookout Pass, past Lake Coeur d’ Alene, into Spokane and then north into the Huckleberry Mountains where we buy 160 acres of dry forest, a high valley between two ridges, with a freezing fresh creek running down the center. We were on the edge of the Boise Cascade land, and as we were told one evening by four native Americans who came uninvited to drink at our campfire, on Indian land as well. Our land had at one time been part of the reservation, but had been taken as “punishment” for some long ago act of Native resistance.

We pitched our tents and hopde to win the ears, and hearts, of the community, including the system’s latest victims, the family farmer. We offered free labor, a broader view of the world, and of course we played country music in the local bar- all the while trying to learn to grow our own food, build our own buildings, and fix our own vehicles. A tall order. That was the plan.

We had few skills that were useful in this community, but we were eager learners. We were children of the decade that touted “better living through chemicals”, and we had hidden under our desks from radioactive fallout. So far we had seen “progress” destroy both health and environment. Everything seemed questionable. Our everyday reference was the Whole Earth Catalog, an inexhaustible source of “new ideas” on how to do everything. Evenings we could talk about how to get water from the ground into the house without electricity, refitting our vehicles to burn used cooking oil, and whether the old orthodoxy of painting wood to protect it from the weather was exactly WRONG. We searched for a new orthodoxy of “natural” solutions, open to looking backward to folk wisdom. Always the “outsiders”, we tried to become part of the community, so that we could talk with people about struggling for a better world.

And so we hand dug wells and fought forest fires. We bucked hay for the Lloyds, cut poles for Ernie Felch, plowed wheat for Gene Moos when he was off being Under Secretary of Agriculture for President Carter, and “stretched a wire” with Jerry Pierce, who showed up at our encampment one day with a generator in the pickup bed, raring to play country. Bucking hay all night for Donna Lloyd, while it was cool, we worked under a stunning canopy of galactic starlight. When we were done and eating those fresh farm breakfasts I dreamed of, I talked to Donna about the need to think politically, to think like a community. “Let’s build a co-op so that family farmers can buy supplies cheaper,” I said.” Let’s go talk to our congressman to get the kind of support they give agribusiness”. Donna looked at me patiently, and said, “My children all know how to grow and put up their own food right off this land. We’ll be fine.”

Our group were college students and Viet Nam veterans, the sons and daughters of lawyers, salesman, policemen, and auto workers. It was the same crew with whom I had traveled to Washington DC to shut down the capital in 1971. The Antiwar Movement had developed to the point that an amorphous “national call”, could bring protesters from all over the country to shut down the war machine. A few months later, they’d picked me up to go west, where the system was cannibalizing small farmers and ranchers in increasing numbers. One of those ranchers was my neighbor, George Wallace. “Wally” we called him.

Disaster Ranch

In the dry foothills of the Rockies, Stevens County, Washington, a tall smothering plume of brown dust announces a vehicle on the road long time before you see the car. On the road, following a car too closely brings the plume into your own car, choking the passengers, and covering the seats and dashboard. After the fifteen mile trip from town, you could almost welcome the head splitting dip in the frigid creek to wash off the dust.

The roads to our little topographical and sociological hideout were tucked between two forested ridges. Really footpaths with ruts, one entered at the upper and another at lower end. At the lower end, it was a half mile drive through shaded clearings and forests, and then another quarter mile walk. The upper end was inhospitable to cars, more direct, but a steep rocky road up from the valley and over the ridge, a gash into the rocky slope cut by the loggers’ D9 Cats. Cresting the hill, the road meandered down into our encampment. In the beginning, we thought if we parked at the base, we could make the path by walking up and pushing the large rocks off to the side. But for every rock we pushed, two would re-surface from the dust and mud to take its place.

Wally’s place was just over the ridge and down then our rocky road. We had no doorbell on our encampment. Often, we would look up to see Wally on his pinto horse headed toward us, decked out like John Wayne with his holstered .38 pistol and black Stetson with the mirrored hat band. When I went down to Wally’s farmstead, I walked back down that rocky road on the steep ridge face. Once, at the top, our dogs ran off a doe, and we found her fawn hiding from the dogs, motionless and silently waiting as directed. We chased the dogs off and took the fawn home, raising it til it was capable of survival. Neither the cartographers nor the neighbors had a name for the ridge, so we called it “Deer Ridge”, giving us a powerful feeling of belonging there.

Wally’s farmstead was both big and small. He “owned” 20 acres and rented 1000 from Boise Cascade. Wally liked to call his place the “Rockin ,38 Ranch” and burned that into the hides of his cattle. We called it “Disaster Ranch.” The farmstead itself was a one room plywood shack with a sleeping loft, a farm yard crisscrossed with garden hoses, an over large chicken barn for hundreds of the little rascals and a horse corral. Wally had a cattle truck for his :going into town” vehicle, and a huge old green John Deere diesel tractor for farm chores that included “mucking out” the stinking mountains of manure in the chicken house.

Wally would let me borrow the tractor. The first time was to snake some huge dead fall logs out of the forest, Wally said proudly, “She’ll pull the guts out of a mule.” I knew the tractor was powerful. I knew it was a metaphor, but the image of actually pulling the guts out of a mule made me think twice about jumping up into the iron seat.

He’d regularly ask me to watch the cattle, who, uncorralled, would wander into the forest where there were bears and mountain lions. I would saddle up and try in my clumsy way to herd them back into the open meadows. Or I’d feed the cattle while he was gone, pouring grain into the feeders and then quickly jumping out of way, to keep my legs from getting broken when the hungry cattle muscled in. Once in frigid spring weather and inches of mud, he asked me to help the vet ease the troubled birthings of cows, pulling calves out with all our might, using the fence puller, or doing C sections and removing them that way.

As a cowboy, my lack of appropriate skills was often embarrassing, but I soldiered on trying to learn. I could barely ride, couldn’t shoot, and herding cattle was a very hit and miss affair. Once, Wally came riding over the ridge to tell me that his new wife’s ex boyfriend had threatened to come up and kill them all. Would I sit up all night on guard with his shotgun, while he, Sandy and little Jo Linn got some much needed sleep? As with everything else, I had no skills for this task, and I found myself sitting, rifle across my knees in the lit shack, a clearly visible target for anyone out in the dark barnyard who wanted to take a shot. Thankfully, the ex-boyfriend never showed up (or this would have been a much shorter book!)

Cash poor, Wally tried to compensate me by being generous with his equipment. The tractor I most frequently borrowed. We moved logs around for building houses and we plowed our bottom land, digging into alfalfa roots six feet down. “Pull the guts out of a mule.” I inspired myself as I steered the big green beast down the road, looking “high wide and handsome,” as the cowboys say.

We had our own disasters. One time, we had a flat in one of the big, almost head high rear tractor tires. Aiming to bring the tire into town for repair, I got it off the tractor. It landed with a too hard thump in the dirt, and I found to my wonder that four of us skinny long haired hippies could not lift it into the truck. We didn’t know it was filled with water designed to increase stability on the slopes. We had to bring in a repairman from town, a costly exercise and something we tried to avoid by doing everything ourselves. Later, we borrowed the tractor for some task, but rudely and suddenly discovered the brakes were out, when it ran away downhill, flipped and sat. And sat…un moveable.

So there was the shack, and the cattle, and the chickens in their reeking “warehouse”, and the horse corral, and the tractor – but there was no barn. The winters were too cold and snowy for cattle to feed themselves, so a mountain of hay had to be brought in, and that hay had to be kept dry. My first day at Wally’s place I noticed the beginnings of the construction of a mammoth hay barn, a barn that would never be completed.

The barn became the biggest crisis. He put up everything he owned as security– horse, saddle chickens, tools, guns, camera and his land - to borrow the money from a local dairy farmer, Orland, to build the hay barn. I had met Orland in better times at his dairy. He was a giant of a man. Like an aircraft carrier slipping to dock, his enormous right hand reached out to give me a glass of fresh milk, his voice booming a welcome. “Drink this…. “… And I drank it. Of course.

But the bad times came. Orland, who was Wally’s “bank”, had loaned Wally the money for only half the barn, but when the time came to loan the other half, Orland declined, leaving Wally with half a barn and hay rotting in the snow and rain.

A few more body blows to Wally’s Bonanza dream, and he was facing foreclosure. He lost everything. Tomorrow, Orland would arrive to put everything Wally owned in Wally’s own cattle truck and drive it away to his dairy. But Wally had a plan. He managed to purchase twenty acres under a different name, 30 miles away in Idaho. And he had a plan for us. The plan was to use Wally’s cattle truck to “steal” all of his belongings, before Orland arrived the next day to take it. Given that we were on call to save the whole planet, it seemed a very small crime.

SONG

With Wally waiting just over the line, we were committing another small crime.

Now Wally had told us, after you park

Go in the chicken house and work in the dark

They’ll be roostin’ and restin’ and settin’ and ready to hatch.

But some fool said, “Hey Turn the Light On!”

And with the flick of a switch turned midnite to dawn

And all of a sudden we had 500 propjets to catch.

Now the bank had gave Wally a strong “go ahead”

Go ahead, build the barn they said

Here’s part of the money and we’ll give you the rest come fall.

But the northwind come in and the money ran out

The beef and the barn and the farm was in doubt

They said “ We’ll take the ranch for the loan, come on.

We’ll take it all.”

With Wally waiting just over the line,

We were committing another small crime.

So we packed up his saddle, his tools and his horse

Two goats, two cows and Sandy of course

But when we backed up the truck every bird in the house was airborne.

It was roosters and chickens and cackles and curses

We were helpless and hopeless and what was much worse was

We were up to our knees in the stuff

It smells bad, but it’s warm.

So, we dove for the birds the only way it’s done

Down on the floor up to your tongue

Six friends from the valley and five or six hundred hens.

We couldn’t do nothin ‘bout the shed and the shack,

But if the bank steals the farm, well just steal it back.

We went round the chicken house

Again, and again, and again.

It took an hour or more to get em all in

You couldn’t have told us to stealin’s a sin

Cause if sin smells bad, we were the essence of hell.

And hell bent on finishing this very small crime

with the windows down we rolled over the line

and in the dawn’s early light gave Wally and Sandy a yell.

Now this song’s bout over I’m ready to pass

Chickens took to layin’ and I took a bath

But the same thing will happen again next fall.

Cause the system’s set up to knock the small ones down

Ain’t no use movin’ to another town

Let’s quit patchin’ it up and fix this thing once and for all.

After hauling Wally’s “kingdom” to Idaho, we rolled back home shortly before dawn, parked Wally’s cattle truck in our meadow and headed off to bed. I thought I’d return the truck later, and quickly nodded off. Towards eight, I heard a vehicle come up the road. It was Orland headed up to Wally’s. It would be only a minute before he saw Wally’s truck at our place and stop. That’s all the minute I had to race across the field, across the alfalfa stubble, and up to the road to grab the keys out of Wally’s truck. The minute came and went. I opened the door of the truck, reached in, grabbed the keys, and turned to find Orland’s enormous aircraft carrier of a hand reach out, palm up, while his stadium announcer voice rumbled “the keys.”

I handed ‘em over, and Orland went on up to Wally’s to retrieve the rest of the loan collateral that was no longer there.

Life in the valley went on just as before. Wally had always talked about paying me for my labor, but we both knew that would never happen. But before we left Wally and Sandy in Idaho, Wally reached over and handed me his old mandolin.

“Write me a song. Tell this story.”

I’ll call it the Small Crime Suite.