On what for me was the first day of spring this year, I drove my father out on the winter range. Dad turns eighty-nine in May, and he can still tell a story and relate history as compellingly as ever. But he’s not able to do much physically any more. His knees, which have been replaced a couple of times, are pretty well shot. He walks with a cane and hasn’t swung a leg over a horse for many years.
We drove up Bluff Street in his well-seasoned GMC Duramax diesel pickup and followed old Highway 91 through Santa Clara and on up to Ivins and out across the Shivwits Reservation and up and over Utah Hill. The route always takes me back to the Mays of my youth when, after I turned twelve, Dad began bringing me on the spring cattle drive. In addition to the fact that I got to spend a week on horseback, what made those Mays so magical was getting out of school to do it. I guess you could say those cattle drives were my spring break. All my friends were sitting at their desks at Woodward Junior High while I was sitting in a saddle on the vast and wondrous Beaver Dam Slope. At Castle Cliff, we turned off old 91 and hit the dirt road that breaks west toward the Beaver Dam Wash. When I was a kid, we called it the roller coaster road, and Dad would take those dips and ridges at top speed in the rattling old cattle truck with our horses standing splaylegged in the back trying to keep their balance. This spring on that same road, Dad’s pickup fairly floated across that country. The dips and ridges have been built up and shaved off, and the pickup’s modern suspension mostly took all the fun out of it. We drove deep into the Joshua tree forest, across the desolate landscape we knew would soon turn green after the recent storm. Dad was humming a tune. I could tell it was good for him to be in the
country where he’d spent most of his adult life, to be in the place where he had become as much a part of the story as the rocky ridges and the creosote flats and the dramatic draws and ravines that cut down toward the cottonwood-lined wash at the bottom of the canyon.
We crossed the wash at the place where my dad got stuck once when I was very small. I wasn’t there, but I was standing in the doorway at our house in St. George when he arrived home late that night covered in mud from his boots to his eyes. He’d left the truck right there where it was stranded in the wash, and when they went back out the next day with equipment to pull it out, a flash flood had filled the cab with mud up to the windows. The story spread virally through St. George that day…through the actual, rather than virtual, social media of the time.
I pushed the button for four-wheel drive as we climbed back out the other side of the wash. The rocky road is extremely steep there, with sharp switchbacks, and I remembered how Dad used to orchestrate the gear shift of the old cattle truck and work it like a wizard, the truck racks bulging with cattle and one missed gear meaning total annihilation of the truck and all its inhabitants. Dad was dexterous at driving that amazing old truck. He seemed to be at one with it, just like he was with his horses. Somehow, what he thought, they did. The mystery was in how the message was
Spring Break By Lyman Hafen
38 www.saintgeorgewellness.com
