The medicine wheel
I often stop by Roscoe's
with no notice on summer afternoons when he can often make time to
knock back a beer with me. Between us old presidents, there is this fellowship,
maybe a shared sense of past suffering, a riveting of our identities with
Hoedads, and an unusually acute memory for old faces from our youth.
This crew of old prezs
still look around to each other, like searching out your planting buddies
on a glom line, each of us having stood alone on the same uneven ground
in front of hundreds of faces. .
At our worst, we two can get
maudlin so I need to offer Fred Miller another apology for more
nostalgia, although tough old bird that he is, he has said that the only time
in his life he ever felt anything "spiritual" was while a tree
planter. What contract might that have been?? We could prod the
good Fred to explain what that very broad word means to an old
Marxist like him. ( Recall if you will, that Freddy was screaming at me during
my very first hour planting, " Hey you people in there, get a move
on" , something I forgave him for by that evening….. but
still…….some wounds never really heal Freddy.)
Roscoe was going on about
the Culz 1980 contract in the Bighorns in that legendary Hoedad district-
Medicine Wheel. Thunder and lightening over their camp at 10,000 feet near the
Wheel with snow slinging down out of the dark sky as the Culz piled out
of their yurt into the crummy to take in the spectacle. Life then really
was one spectacle after another.
Brings back a lot of
memories, late spring planting when the money was good, days were long and a
new district and mountain range beckoned like a promise. Those were the days
for me in 77 when I first saw the Bighorns, riding east in the Red Star bus
from Powell in Idaho's Clearwater, a three day rest stop in Missoula in the top
floor of the Palace Hotel with a view south over the Bitterroots, and
then perched over the engine in the front of the bus, across the continental
divide outside of Butte, down onto the basin and range region of Montana with
one range after another stretching in three directions, mountains to lose
myself in for months and years.
When I lived in Kenya for
two years, everywhere I went I always carried maps of Wyoming
and Montana. During my worst days of living dead alone in Israel, I
studied those maps like the only letters from a friend.
In summer 82 I took a job as
a wilderness ranger in the Absaroka Range north of Cody , Wyoming , my
first job away from the coop in eight years. It was
after the end of Red Star's last real season as an intact
planting crew, a year when the whole coop lost about 300K and
it felt like the screws holding it all together were pulling loose for
the last time. I needed some time away, broke hearted about it although
as our last spring went on the money got a lot better for us red stars
and I was reminded of how much I loved it all. [1]
With most of the Yellowstone
high country still snowed in the beginning of July, I took two days off
to try to hitch over to the Bighorns where a Hoedad glom crew was scheduled to
chew into the last job of the season. I ended up on some god forsaken
side road close to the MT/WY border and the sweet hamlet of Belfry whose high
school team name was you know it, the Belfry Bats. (Gotta love some of
those cowboys).
I was still a good
hundred miles from camp with daylight beginning to wane over the early
summer achingly green hay fields. I thought I would never make it
and started scouting possible sleeping places when an incongruously pale green
little rig comes barreling down the road toward me, drawing close enough to
finally spy out the Oregon plates, and finally the big black leather hat low
over the glasses perched on Malcolm's nose.
Mr Manness, a
seriously lost soul mate, was at least 50 miles out of his way
where fate and some very serious Hoedad karma had brought him to
me.
He always did better
with me riding shotgun with a map.
First thing the dude says to
me is " we don't have room for your pack, leave it here and we'll come
back for it later." To hell with that I said as I unloaded its contents
and crammed them into the backseat with me and we blasted down the road into
the garishly colored hills flanking the Bighorn basin .
Life was pulling back
together after a seriously shitty season. Fuck the FS job, let's go plant some
trees.
Those late season high Rocky
jobs with a smattering of faces from a wide circle of crews, always were the
best. I found Bert Rekker there who skulked a bit, acting suitably guilty
for planting that hard season with another contractor. He thought I
was going to give him shit for then showing up on a coop job when I just wanted
to throw my arms around that big Dutch guy and hold onto him, I was
so happy to see him back with us.
At our camp near the
Medicine Wheel I found a yurt with Schlaeppi, Bugz, Janice,
Barnaby, Gravy, Steve Nasty, Marianne, Drea, Rochelle, Rudy a passle of
other Halfers and faces.
It was good laying under
a tarp open to the sky next to Gravy in our warm
sleeping bags laughing another star studded night away before
dropping off to sleep, feeling like, these were the best days of my life.
Near camp Bugz found
an ancient teepee ring hidden in a copse of trees in those long
rolling alpine meadows, and right in the middle a perfect arrow head
where he knelt down to pray.
I worked 6 days with only
one change of clothes, and made about $900, my best money that year.
And of course, there was the
Bear Lodge with Cream blasting out the crummy doors and another extraordinary
Hoedad character doing some wicked dance moves all the way across the
parking lot. There were so many of us, we could make those little places
our own.
[1] This is in spite of some astonishingly loose tree
spacing in Gold Beach where we had an epic theological battle about the
morality of sticking closely to the contract spacing specs. Of
course, I now know I was wrong about that and like Jerry Rust always
said, we did not need trees in at 10-12 by, when 16 by would give us
plenty. So much for another sanctimonious episode by your's truly.
Now in the Siskiyou they are
working to heavily thin those plantations where survival was much better than
anyone expected.
This is not to forgive (
insert name here) for advocating cutting out the whole frigging top of a
unit in 79 since this gentleman felt he had once gotten stiffed on his
federal tax rebate. Or as another minimal type put it, “gotta get your
cream where you can”. Sadly enough the trusting inspector finally
discovered this ruse and a worthy price was paid in the end. People yelped
when they decided to just not pay us for those forgotten acres.