Spring Break

By Lyman Hafen Break

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 transferred through his hands and feet to the transmission of the truck or to the nerve center of the horse. I was always in awe at how he did it, and from the time I was twelve, I sought to be like him, hoping someday I would possess the same gifts.

Up along the west side of the Beaver Dam gorge we headed northwesterly across the blackbrush desert. On this day, rather than continuing north toward the Lower and Upper Wells where I gathered with Dad and the old cowboys in those long ago Mays, we cut to the west and drove past Snow Spring and on through what Dad declared was the thickest stand of Joshua trees in that whole country—on toward the Tule Desert.

Midmorning, we arrived at a tank that feeds a large circular water trough made of silvery steel. A flat glimmering sheet of water lapped at the lip of the trough, and two dozen cows with slick, sprightly little calves hung around in the nearby creosote. My brother was already there. His handsome white flatbed GMC with a silver gooseneck trailer hitched to it was parked outside the fenced enclosure. He, his wife, and a young man from St. George who had hired on for the day were saddled and ready to make a sweep out across the range to bring in a few dozen more cows and calves to be “worked” the next day.

My objective for the day had been to bring Dad out for a ride in the truck, to check the range after the recent storm, and see how the cattle were doing. My plan was to be a chauffeur and good company for my father. But Dad and my brother had something else in mind. What I thought was going to be therapy for Dad was actually an intervention for me. They all knew what I’d been dealing with at work since last spring, all the complications of navigating an organization of more than forty people through a pandemic. I’d been chained to my desk for months.

My horse was saddled and waiting. Fortunately, I’d put on boots that morning rather than the Nike sneakers I’d set out. I was wearing Wranglers, and I had on a baseball cap. All I had to do was step out of the truck, adjust the length of the stirrups, step up and into the saddle, and we were off. Three hours and six or eight miles later, a different me came into water behind a nice herd of cattle.

As Dad and I drove back to St. George later that afternoon, we talked about the seven generations of our family who have ridden those desert ranges at the foot of Clover Mountain. We talked about what hard work it must have been for them…the long, dry, grueling days with few comforts and little financial reward at the end of it all.

Driving along, I smiled as I looked over at my dad. His eyes were glazed with memory and longing as he gazed out across that immense, desolate, yet achingly beautiful landscape. I looked out across it too and felt a warm wave of appreciation roll over me. I felt grateful it was still there. Grateful my father is still here. And grateful they were both there when I really needed them.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 15 grandchildren.