Weber The Contemporary West Fall 2014

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Poetry Focus

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Deriving from the German weben—to weave—weber translates into the literal and figurative “weaver” of textiles and texts. Weber (the word is the same in singular and plural) are the artisans of textures and discourse, the artists of the beautiful fabricating the warp and weft of language into everchanging patterns. Weber, the journal, understands itself as a tapestry of verbal and visual texts, a weave made from the threads of words and images.

—poetry focus issue— Poetry IS NOT ONLY DREAM AND VISION; IT IS THE

POETRY IS THE SYNTHESIS OF HYACINTHS AND BISCUITS.

SKELETON ARCHITECTURE OF OUR LIVES. IT LAYS THE FOUNDATIONS FOR A FUTURE OF change, A BRIDGE ACROSS OUR FEARS OF WHAT HAS NEVER BEEN BEFORE.

—CARL SANDBURG

—AUDRE LORDE

poet’s

A work. To name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.

—Salman Rushdie

POETRY and music

are very good friends.

Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream—they go together.

—Nikki Giovanni

POETS ARE SOLDIERS WORDS

FROM THAT LIBERATE THE STEADFAST POSSESSION OF DEFINITION. —ELI KHAMAROV

Lyrical POETRY is not a big part of most people’s lives.

Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people’s space. Because there is something DEEP inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it’s literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.

—Teju Cole

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to WRITE no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing POETRY in the socalled vulgar tongue of the people.

—Hu Shih When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

POET

, too, is The not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

—Niels Bohr

Front Cover: Lee Udall Bennion, Grand Canyon Morning Moonrise with Agave, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in, 2009.

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VOLUME 31 | NUMBER 1 | FALL 2014

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR

Michael Wutz ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Kathryn L. MacKay Russell Burrows Victoria Ramirez Brad Roghaar MANAGING EDITOR

Kristin Jackson EDITORIAL BOARD

Katharine Coles, University of Utah Duncan Harris, University of Wyoming Diana Joseph, Minnesota State University Nancy Kline, independent author & translator Fred Marchant, Suffolk University Madonne Miner, Weber State University Felicia Mitchell, Emory & Henry College Julie Nichols, Utah Valley University Tara Powell, University of South Carolina Bill Ransom, Evergreen State College Walter L. Reed, Emory University Scott P. Sanders, University of New Mexico Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell University Andreas Ströhl, Goethe-Institut Munich James Thomas, editor and writer Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, author Melora Wolff, Skidmore College Delia Konzett, University of New Hampshire Kerstin Schmidt, Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt Jericho Brown, Emory University EDITORIAL PLANNING BOARD

Bradley W. Carroll Brenda M. Kowalewski Angelika Pagel John R. Sillito Michael B. Vaughan ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Meri DeCaria Shelley L. Felt Barry Gomberg Aden Ross Elaine Englehardt G. Don Gale John E. Lowe Robert B. Smith Mikel Vause LAYOUT CONSULTANTS

Mark Biddle Brandon Petrizzo EDITORS EMERITI

Brad L. Roghaar Sherwin W. Howard Neila Seshachari LaVon Carroll Nikki Hansen EDITORIAL MATTER CONTINUED IN BACK

TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME 31 | NUMBER 1 | FALL 2014 | $10.00

ART 73 Lee Udall Bennion, Canyons, Horses, and the American West

ESSAY 5 17 26 100 108 118 124 141

Phyllis Barber, Great Basin DNA J.J. Anselmi, Of Waste and Desolation Andrea Clark Mason, Two Rivers Rebecca A. Eckland, True West William Kamowski, Back to the Dream Mark Rozema, What is Not Seen Robert Joe Stout, My Buffaloes Robert King, Lost in the West

Lee Udall Bennion............................73

POETRY 35 Rick Watson Two Morning Doves The Way Of...

38 Justin Evans Daily Prayers Harvest Dream It’s Like that in Springville, Forever Hobble Creek Novena Discovery 41 Kenneth Pobo LopLop Giraffe On Fire Mystery And Melancholy Of a Street The Image as Produced by Automatic Writing 45 Eric Paul Shaffer Tonight, What I Can See Right Now Five Planets At Once Don’t Mention It The Edge of Where I’m Welcome 49 Jericho Brown Another Angel Eden Big, Fine A Living Hebrews 13 Nativity 53 Chad Hanson White Lupine The Bitterness of Rodeo Words Are What We Have in North Dakota

Phyllis Barber.................................5

Jericho Brown...............................49

5 5 Susan Kelly-DeWitt Parallel Worlds Static Stinson Beach Valley Heat Wave Numbers Game 59 Candace Black Geronimo’s Grave Lent 61 Lyn Lifshin Do I Really Need to Write About What Seems Most Scary?

April, Paris The Woman Reading Tea Leaves 64 Helene Pilibosian The Literacy of Flowers They Saw with Silica Eyes The Orchard Creed Rare Ice, Warm Snow 69 Richard Robbins Breeder Reactor Turpentine Calculation Not a Runaway, Sometimes Lost 85 Martin Ott Caves of Los Angeles 87 Leonore Wilson Ode to Mustangs (after a Photograph of Hard Wilson) 89 Amy Spade Saudade 90 Tom Hansen Free Fall In Time 92 John Randolph Carter The Last Train to Katmandu I’m Tired Frantic Antics 95 Cody Lumpkin Old Man in the Hall of Nebraska Wildlife 97 Natalie Young Jonah, Pinocchio, and Whale The End of This One Part 99 Sarah A. Chavez Full Again

FICTION 129 Donald Mace Williams, Eight Reasons Palo Duro Canyon is Red 135 Jessica Barksdale, Leaving Mr. Wong

READING THE WEST

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Phyllis Barber

Great Basin DNA

Gerry Slabaugh

C

The Joplin Road barn, built in 1881, Idaho Territory. http://gerry-slabaugh.artistwebsites.com

hloe and Henry, my grandparents, lie buried in the Idaho earth (as do most of their ten children). Thora, their daughter and my mother, however, escaped Idaho. During her first and only year of college, she found a nothing-to-do-with-farming husband— a gypsy/Mormon hybrid who was kind, charming, and sensitive; a daydreaming man of the mind. They married. They moved to Ely, Nevada, to the ancient seabed of the Great Basin.

Thora left irrigation ditches, burly brothers who teased her about mercilessly, cows’ udders, an early-to-bed and early-to-rise schedule for a bigger life, but gradually grew disenchanted with that vast 225,000-square mile stretch between the Rockies and the

Sierra Nevadas, the Mojave Desert and the Columbia Plateau, that large sink where things struggled to survive and where everything turned to dust and was picked up by the hot wind she secretly hoped would blow her back to Idaho when the time was right.

Despite her good intentions, Mother’s allegiance was to Idaho. Even though she lived in different places in Nevada for much longer than she ever lived in Idaho, something in her never moved there. Her heart and mind were attached to the backside view of the Grand Tetons with its tumbling streams and profoundly mysterious peaks—the place where she was born. Something about her felt she had been abandoned by her high hopes to a land better meant for snakes and lizards, to a man

E S S A Y

Our father belonged to the desert.

He didn’t fit in with the Idaho farmers, their tractors, or their goodold-boy, clap-their-hand-on-the-back affability. He taught us the beauty of the barren. While he steered our car past Mesquite, through St. George, and past the west side of Zion’s National Park on our northbound trek, he made attempts to open the eyes and minds of his three children who sat in the backseat of the boiling car, the baby in the front seat on mother’s lap. who didn’t understand how to bring prosperity into their lives. She was a woman split in the middle. A woman longing for a semblance of home and stability, despite its drawbacks. A woman wanting a chance to be something more. A woman passing this split on to her children.

Every summer, the sun’s magna rays blasted our mint green Plymouth as it crossed the southern tip of Nevada and headed north on Highway 91.

Mother poured water from our thermos onto clean diapers, and we three kids in the backseat hung them over the window glass to cool things off. That helped, primitive air conditioning that it was. We were making our annual trek: Idaho, Idaho, always Idaho. Mom wouldn’t go anywhere else, though, basically, we couldn’t afford to take another kind of vacation.

Our father belonged to the desert.

He didn’t fit in with the Idaho farmers,

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their tractors, or their good-old-boy, clap-their-hand-on-the-back affability.

He taught us the beauty of the barren.

While he steered our car past Mesquite, through St. George, and past the west side of Zion’s National Park on our northbound trek, he made attempts to open the eyes and minds of his three children who sat in the backseat of the boiling car, the baby in the front seat on mother’s lap. “Did you know that this is all part of the Great Basin that makes up most of Nevada, Utah, parts of Oregon, California, and little bit of Idaho?” he’d say. “Did you know that the desert has many interesting secrets it keeps to itself?”

But we all secretly knew that southeastern Idaho was where the earth was solid and real, the people made of earth, not vapor. He wasn’t fooling us.

“I haven’t talked to my mother in such a long time,” Mother said, balancing baby Kathy on her lap and passing out her roast beef sandwiches, the meat sliced from a roast she’d cooked the night before, the lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and pickles stacked high on bread she’d made and slathered with mustard and mayonnaise. “I wish long distance calls weren’t so expensive. I wish we didn’t live so far away.”

“But we do,” our dad would say.

“We live in a place with opportunity.

We’re not enclosed in a box.”

“Funny,” she said, her voice sounding wistful like the wind gentling around a corner. “I always said that I’d never marry a farmer. But I miss the animals, the streams and meadows, the new-mown hay. I can’t wait to see Lloyd and Zenna. Lois. My other brothers. Mother and Dad.” Moist tenderness filled her voice as we headed for the solid part of our family—the hardworking farm folks who knew their right foot from their left, who had common sense,

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and who were masters at putting in a good day’s work. Work, work, work.

We were headed toward the uncles who wondered if Thora’s skinny kids would ever be solid enough to count for much. When these uncles hugged me, they crunched my thin bones together with their broad-chests and Superman, hay-baling strength.

Too hot in the car, the three of us fell asleep to the sound of the tires on the pavement, rolling, rolling, rolling.

When I woke from my nap, my hair wet from perspiration and mashed flat on one side, we were still driving along the rim of the Great Basin, Dad pointing out the spotty pools at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. “That’s what’s left of Lake Bonneville,” he said. “Basically a sink with no drains or outlets. Said to be here 25,000 years ago. History, kids.

You’ve gotta love history.” Steve and I sucked in our cheeks and made fish lips at each other.

But then, quiet as a finger on silk, we slipped over the border into the holy land of Idaho where Thora and her nine siblings were born.

The beginnings of southeast Idaho looked like Mars magnified. Moon surface. Cratered, acne-like pits on its face. Lumpy. Massive stretches of lava looking black and searing in the summer sun. Tiptoe barefoot across that territory and die. What happened here? Tyrannosaurus rex, Pteranodon, what exactly? Everything was craggy and cranky. Bad-tempered landscape, no beaches or groves of trees, just burnt toast, especially in the summertime. But then the land stretched out flat, turning into farm land watered by the Snake River. Our mother’s home.

There’s a struggle in me.

On one hand, Mother was Idaho— earth to be depended on. The butcher,

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the baker, the candlestick maker, all in one. Fruit pies. Cobblers. Candies.

Meringues three inches high. She baked, baked, and baked. Whole wheat bread from wheat she ground. Endless pies. She canned, preserved, jammed, and jellied all summer long. We ate huge breakfasts every day, fit for preparing us to mend fences, keep cattle inside the farm’s boundaries, chase chickens, collect eggs, pitch hay, and dig weeds from the garden.

And Mother was Mormon through and through. She once told us that her friend in junior high, maybe because they’d heard about World War I at school, thought the world was made up of Germans and Mormons. Mother laughed about that one, yet in the next breath and in so many words said: “Of course, the way Mormons are supposed

The beginnings of southeast Idaho looked like Mars magnified. Moon surface. Cratered, acne-like pits on its face. Lumpy. Massive stretches of lava looking black and searing in the summer sun. Tiptoe barefoot across that territory and die. What happened here? Tyrannosaurus rex, Pteranodon, what exactly?

Everything was craggy and cranky.

Bad-tempered landscape, no beaches or groves of trees, just burnt toast, especially in the summertime. But then the land stretched out flat, turning into farm land watered by the Snake River. Our mother’s home.

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“The church will make you happy.”

Idaho equals noble relatives, equals stability, equals common sense, equals Mormonism.

She had strong arms, of which she was ashamed, thinking maybe she wasn’t as graceful or appealing as she could be without them. She had strong legs that could walk for miles. A healthy heart and lungs. She was dedicated to making things better for her children. It was easy to trust her, even with her strong opinions. She would catch any of us should we fall (though told us we just better not fall). “You get hurt, pick yourself up. Somebody says something mean, forget it. Dust yourself off; turn the other cheek. Don’t waste time feeling sorry for yourself.”

Then there was my father, an insurance salesman, an ethereal-skyof-a-man whose pastoral life was in his head, not in the fields; a man born to parents who, during his childhood, crisscrossed the Great Basin continuously looking for work in Utah, Nevada, and southeast Idaho. He’d been a boy hanging on to the Mormon religion by a spidery thread; a boy whose father picked up and moved his family endlessly, always looking for a better opportunity. He sold newspapers in the red light district in Ely, Nevada, and received Christmas candy from the ladies of the night; a scrappy boy whose sisters sang songs in front of taverns for a few much-needed coins. Ultimately, Dad decided that his survival depended on striking out on his own.

He wanted to finish college and teach.

He wanted to write—to sit in front of his typewriter punching keys instead of cows. He had different visions.

I believed in my father and his dreams that awakened something in me

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and left my solid mother in the dust.

And yet, something in my training, maybe my mother’s wistful stories, led me to conclude that people were more solid who’d been nourished by Idaho— that they were more dependable and principled, that they resembled trees with their deep, dug-down roots. My father and I, seduced by the life of the mind, the place that offered the safest haven for both of us, the quiet, contemplation inside our heads, were possibly missing the mark.

As much as I’ve tended to books and classical music, I know that, buried inside me—the creative thinker, the semi-concert pianist, and a woman with two college degrees—there is a plainsense woman with wide hips and calluses on her hands that she hides in the pockets of her skirt, a woman dressed in a gingham apron grinding wheat into flour for bread with half-tied work boots on her feet. She is strong like her mother. Her arms can carry heavy things. She isn’t afraid of the dark and can kick a fence post with the toe of her boot, even carry a shotgun by her side if she has to. Clear-eyed, no nonsense, no vacillation, she stands for might and right. Untainted. Noble. She cannot tell a lie.

We arrived in Idaho Falls, fully reminded of our mother’s yearning for the life she once knew, the good life where work was hard but living more simple. Before we reached the turn-off to Iona, we stopped at the swinging bridge stretched over the roaring waterfalls, the bridge that bounced when you walked across and made you think you’d never get home alive, especially when your brother did jumping jacks behind you and both your feet rose up off the bridge and your stomach flipflopped. Idaho Falls, where the broad

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Snake ran—a stealthy, swift undercuring up one-fifth of the class, I got ferried rent moving along like a plow. around—a pierless boat, bobbing in the In 1930, when she was a senior in water of aunts, friends, babysitters, and high school, Mother lived near this a scratch-and-bite nursery school. But river. She boarded in the city so she in the summertime, Elaine and I played wouldn’t have to negotiate the snow on the earth where potatoes grew, next and distance from the family farm in to the pasture where cows and horses Iona every day. After high school she were corralled, where the sharp, pinchstayed in town, working at the Woods your-nose smell of cow dung stung Funeral Home for six dollars a week, our eyes. With kitchen spoons, we dug deciding not to be afraid of the dead toward the Pacific. We dug for hours, because they weren’t as dangerous as hoping to find Daddy. the living. The Depression was nothAt night I could feel a ghost horse’s ing new to her. She was used to going breath on my cheek and hear its exhalawithout. Pinching tions as I dreamed pennies. that Daddy held She married Her- At night I could feel a ghost me close to its wet man in 1937, lived nose. I felt his arms horse’s breath on my cheek and in Nevada until the around me and the winter cold of 1943, bottom rail of a pashear its exhalations as I dreamed when Elaine was ture fence beneath that Daddy held me close to its five and I was seven my feet, where wet nose. I felt his arms around months old. The I silently comthree of us moved manded the cattle me and the bottom rail of a to Idaho Falls while to come to me—the pasture fence beneath my feet, Dad left to sail the leader of the herd, a where I silently commanded the Pacific aboard a true-blue-straighttanker ship destined cattle to come to me—the leader through cowgirl. to dodge Japanese I looked into their of the herd, a true-blue-straightZeroes. Mother had wide brown eyes through cowgirl. hoped her relatives and knew there could help care for was a connection me, the baby, when between me, the she found a job, but cows, the steers, the quickly learned the rule about making calves. We were comrades beneath the one’s bed and having to lie in it. Her vast spread of stars against a clear night mother had a stroke; her sisters were sky, no city lights interfering. too busy. After months of fast scramWater, the background music to my bling, her brother, Lloyd, recommended dream, gurgled outside in the irrigation her to the school board to teach at Sage ditch, the one Mother warned us away Creek, even though she’d had only one from at every opportunity. The sounds year of college. He also offered us a of shifting cattle huddling close to the vacant house on his property, one with fence, the soft settling of hen’s featha well, one bedroom, and an outhouse. ers in the chicken house. These things While Mother taught twenty stusettling my worry about the father who dents at the one-room school, her brothhadn’t been kissing my cheek gooders’ children and my sister Elaine maknight for too long.

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We were anxious to come to the open stretch where the fields stretched toward the hills, where barbed wire fences hung from one end of the open plain to the other, and where we’d turn off the highway and drive down the dirt road to the red-roofed house and the greenroofed lodge, our car raising dust that erased the numbers on our Nevada license plates.

After Idaho Falls, we had three stops to make in Iona. (1) our grandparents’ house for tweaks on our ears and comments about how fast we were growing; (2) our Aunt Zenna’s and Uncle Bill’s, where we ate fresh, cooked vegetables from Zenna’s garden, thus learning the attributes of the heretofore scary-red beet before playing with our cousins on dusty, unpaved roads until dusk; (3) Aunt Lois’s and Uncle Harold’s, where we spent the night because there weren’t so many cousins who needed beds at their house.

Both Zenna and Lois lived in basement houses with their husbands and children: root cellar houses with a lonely door sticking out of the ground.

When we carried our suitcases inside, we climbed down narrow cement stairs and descended into the wild, cold Idaho earth, feeling like potatoes in a root cellar, always trying to get warm, afraid to put our arms outside the covers when we got in bed. Non-stop shivering. Dead-set chill. That year, however, thanks to good crops, thus more money for people to buy the RVs her husband sold, Lois greeted us in

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her now-expanded house, now built above ground, now with a warm living room, kitchen, and living quarters for the year-round residents, though still not for us.

After we spent a few days in Iona casing out the two-story, sandstoneblock post office/grocery store combo where Steve liked to buy waxy popbottle-shaped containers of colored sugar water, after tiptoeing across the curling yellow linoleum in Grandma’s kitchen while her canary trilled its song for us, after looking into Grandpa’s stereopticon at pictures of Yellowstone and Old Faithful, and after freezing to slow motion in Aunt Lois’s basement at night, we were ready for our annual ride in the old yellow school bus Uncle Bill had outfitted.

With as many cousins as could fit, we partied all the way to the ranch— playing pinochle, War and Fish, War and Clue, more War, telling jokes, the kids sometimes sleeping on the few bus seats left on the bus, while our transport passed rows of lodgepole pines.

But this year, we were told at the last minute that the bus had broken down.

Everyone had to take their own car for the annual pilgrimage to Uncle Lloyd’s summer ranch just west of West Yellowstone: the stellar, star-on-top-of-thetree, big event of our annual summer vacation.

On Highway 20, we drove northeast through miles of evergreens, the shadow and the sun striping the road.

We paused at Henry’s Fork to watch the fishermen on the bridge, angling after those silvery, slippery fish, then drove on to Mack’s Inn: the symbol of almost-being-there. We were anxious to come to the open stretch where the fields stretched toward the hills, where barbed wire fences hung from one end of the open plain to the other,

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and where we’d turn off the highway and drive down the dirt road to the red-roofed house and the green-roofed lodge, our car raising dust that erased the numbers on our Nevada license plates.

Solid, tall, lit-by-sunshine, big-hearted Uncle Lloyd, had been out checking on his cattle, but when he saw that we’d arrived, he galloped toward us on his black, silky horse, Midnight. Our motor was still ticking when we piled out of the smelly car with its remnants of spilled milk, diapers, and furtive farts.

He wore a plaid shirt with snap-on buttons and a pair of hard-as-iron fabric slacks. He wore chaps over his slacks.

He was a real cowboy, and we were all in awe. He was the brother most attentive to my mother. He was the brother my mother was most attentive to. In fact, Mother worshiped him. When I saw him in the saddle, I thought of a king on a steed, like I’d read about in books. I was stirred by the sight of our royal lineage. The year before I’d seen Mother riding beside Uncle Lloyd, amazed at how queenly she looked in the saddle—Mother’s home once upon a time. That meant there were ranchers and cowgirls in our blood. Maybe some kings and queens, too.

Uncle Lloyd hugged Mother, lifted her off the ground, and whirled her around. He shook hands with Dad, squeezed his shoulder with his strong hand, and I saw my father wince just a little. Then Lloyd hugged us greenbehind-the-ears desert rats who’d come a long way to play cowboys and rustlers. “So, how are you kids doing?” he asked, patting us on the back and smiling that cowboy-used-to-sun-andrain-and-all-kinds-of-weather smile.

“Great,” we said, then scattered—the aunts to the ranch house kitchen to unpack the groceries and make plans

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for the evening meal, Uncle Lloyd to catch some fish for dinner in the stream running through the meadow, the children to the lodge with our suitcases.

Mother seemed less anxious when she could be with her brother in her true home of Idaho. Lloyd had succeeded in the world. A stalwart in both church and community. Strong.

Sure. Plain-spoken. He knew how to manage land, crops, and herds. He loved God and wasn’t afraid to say so and liked country music on his truck radio. An amiable, natural-boss-kind-of cowboy, good to the bone, he sometimes giggled in a boyish voice when he kidded around with us nieces and nephews. Pure solid.

All of us kids felt at home on Lloyd’s ranch. We hiked through the trees on a deer trail. We ate meat, potatoes, and fresh vegetables in the red-roofed kitchen. We slept in the green-roofed lodge. Its bannisters were made of twisted tree branches with the nubs still intact where smaller branches had been sawed off, their bark barely

When I saw him in the saddle, I thought of a king on a steed, like I’d read about in books. I was stirred by the sight of our royal lineage. The year before I’d seen Mother riding beside Uncle Lloyd, amazed at how queenly she looked in the saddle— Mother’s home once upon a time.

That meant there were ranchers and cowgirls in our blood. Maybe some kings and queens, too.

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tell us again, oh please,” we joined in a cousins’ chorus.

“Well,” Uncle Lloyd began, the fireplace crackling with burning logs and a passel of cousins sitting on the braided rugs with our legs folded Indian-style, “A big storm had moved in. Pelting rain ready to launch. Russell worried about one of the sheep that hadn’t come back with the herd. Nobody could tell him any different, strong-headed like he was, so he set out to rescue that lamb.

Settling into sleep, I thought The lodge was a Wanted to bring about the saddle. I’d seen it big hull of a place it home before the with planked flooring before—a star drilled through storm hit too hard.” hewn by a slightly I pictured the the leather right where Russell unsteady hand. It deluge, the big would have been riding, an smelled stale after drops beating down being closed up all the brim of Russell’s uneven star with more than the winter. Its stairs felt hat and dripping five points of the lick-em, stickcreaked and groaned onto his long slicker. that too many people em stars our teachers gave out at “Storm clouds with too many bags were coming in school. I couldn’t wait to see it had come to stay. fast. Russell must again. Who else in this world got There was the scurry have been cresting to see the evidence of lightning, of soft-footed mice. the hill near a lone The sounds of suittree, because that’s its footprint, its tracks after the cases being unlatched where we found big rumble in the sky and the next to the beds with him. He was struck crooked spear of blinding white assorted pastel-colclean-through by ored chenille bedlightning, his boots light struck? spreads and sagging, blown out at the squeaky springs. soles.” He paused.

Outside, the The room was quiet newly-arrived cousins ran until our except for the fire, and in the stillness, I legs almost fell off, and after dinner, knew he still missed Russell. we anticipated an evening of charades “You know I keep that saddle,” he and the cousins’ annual invitation to said, a flatness in his usually twinkling a snipe hunt. We’d fallen for that trick eyes. once and followed them out in the trees “Can we see it again?” Steve and I to look for that rare-find-of-a-bird. They said carefully, not to seem too anxious got a good laugh on us city kids. But about seeing our favorite artifact. tonight, we asked Uncle Lloyd to tell “Maybe not tomorrow, but before us the story of Uncle Russell. “Please, you go,” Lloyd said. “Time to say good-

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night and turn in. Work starts early around here.”

Everyone shuffled off to brush their teeth in a wash basin and hurry to the frigid outhouse to pee, then snuggled into one of the double beds scattered through the upstairs of the lodge. More heavy quilts up to our chins, the weight made our feet spread out like duck feet.

Settling into sleep, I thought about the saddle. I’d seen it before—a star drilled through the leather right where Russell would have been riding, an uneven star with more than the five points of the lick-em, stick-em stars our teachers gave out at school. I couldn’t wait to see it again. Who else in this world got to see the evidence of lightning, its footprint, its tracks after the big rumble in the sky and the crooked spear of blinding white light struck?

The next morning, Uncle Lloyd went off to move some cattle to another grazing spot and instructed his two sons, Lynn and Dale, to saddle up some ponies for the city slickers to have a ride around the pasture. These ponies knew how to pretend, for a few minutes at least, that we were their boss.

We trotted, bounced, and slammed into the saddle. I hugged my pony’s sides with my knees—my thighs trembling from the effort before long—and used the reins with little success. My pony knew a novice wrangler on her back and chose the direction she pleased.

After the ponies were de-saddled and released to their pasture, a group of cousins suggested we go into the hills and look for tracks—bear, deer, and elk. But Dale, his horse’s reins still in his hand, pulled me aside. “Do you want to go for a ride?” he asked.

“We can catch up with them later.” He was my same age—both of us eleven, soon to hit twelve. “For sure,” I said.

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“Do you think it’s a good idea to wear those shorts?” he asked. “Not much protection.” “Why not?” I said defiantly, defending my skimpy Las Vegas attire. I was a City Girl. He needed to remember that. He shrugged his shoulders, mounted his horse, then helped me stand in the stirrup where I could swing my right leg to the other side. We headed for the ridge of trees thick in the distance. We jumped streams, picked our way around coils of barbed wire, negotiated the ups and downs, and were soon slithering through the thickness of trees.

Suddenly, a broken-off branch sticking out straight from a tall pine dug into the top of my thigh. Hard.

Dragged its broken tip across my leg, drew drops of bright-red blood across my olive and sun-tanned skin, and made a wet necklace, evenly spaced.

I refused to cry or to let Dale know he had a wounded passenger. Fighting an almost uncontrollable urge to bleat my pain, I didn’t moan, complain, or grind my teeth. I sat tall in my Nevada short shorts, trying not to wince. I avoided looking at the long, deep scratch, where my blood seeped and beaded. I was a damsel in distress. Dale was rescuing me, carrying me out of harm’s way. I must be brave and prove my Big City invincibility.

Because we were taking our annual family tour to Yellowstone the next day, there was no chance to see Uncle Russell’s saddle. Elaine, Steve, and I were bickering more than usual when we climbed into the suffocating backseat, and I was in a wicked mood, telling everyone to stay clear of my bandaged leg. But we managed to listen to our dad’s instructions as we entered the park. “Keep your windows

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When I saw a huddle of cows close to the fence that ran along the side of the road, I decided to check out something I’d suspected. With calmer-than-calm silence, I climbed up on the bottom rail of the fence and stood there without moving one muscle. In my mind, I commanded the brown, shaggy cattle to come to me. And they did. Slowly, curiously, not even hesitantly. It was like they knew me and were coming over to say “Don’t leave us, cowgirl.” rolled up. The bears look friendly, but they’re not teddy bears. If they come up to the car, just stay inside.” Lucky for us, some bears did saunter past our car, about five feet from us, and we got a close look at their snouts and their button-black eyes. We also spotted lots of buffalo near the Old Faithful Lodge, herds of elk, and deer everywhere.

The day turned out after all, but as we drove back to the ranch, I was thinking about the saddle. We’d be leaving for Nevada in the morning.

I got out of bed early on the last day to watch the sun blossom into the wideopen sky. I loved the pale oranges and whispery blues of morning, the sound of the creek, the sight of grass bending in the morning breeze, graceful as a geisha dancer I’d seen on the fan Daddy brought back from China. Without waking anyone, I pulled on my t-shirt, blue jeans, and Keds, crept down the stairs, and slipped out the front door. I looked up and down the long road and decided to walk all the way back to the

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highway, which was at least a mile if not more. A few deer leapt across the pasture, heading for the trees. Two elk grazed. A flock of birds swooped to the only telephone wire leading to Lloyd’s house. My soul started to sing. I could hear it.

When I saw a huddle of cows close to the fence that ran along the side of the road, I decided to check out something I’d suspected. With calmerthan-calm silence, I climbed up on the bottom rail of the fence and stood there without moving one muscle. In my mind, I commanded the brown, shaggy cattle to come to me. And they did.

Slowly, curiously, not even hesitantly.

It was like they knew me and were coming over to say “Don’t leave us, cowgirl.”

I wasn’t sure where this magic power came from, but it was almost as if I had a secret cow whistle built into my thoughts or some giant magnet welded to my backbone. They kept coming like a bunch of bony boys shuffling their feet, keeping their options open. I looked into their eyes when they came close. I had no sugar cubes, but they stood there. Just chewing grass and mooing once in a while, until I raised both of my arms, held them high in freeze motion, then shook my hands once to release them. The spell was broken. I hopped down from the fence. Maybe I really was an Idaho girl.

Maybe I did belong here.

When I arrived at the lodge, everyone had loaded their suitcase into the car except for me. “Where were you?” Mother asked, an edge to her voice, “and why are you always taking off without telling me where you’re going?” But then Kathy was crying, and when Mother turned her attention to calming the baby, I slid off the hook.

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“Hey, kids,” Uncle Lloyd came out of his house toward our car. “Do you have a minute to see the saddle I promised to show you?” Of course, we all nodded. He walked toward a small, square shed, pulled a huge chunk of keys out of his pocket, and unlocked the padlock on the door. The sunlight streamed inside the chilly room that had no overhead lights. In half-shadow and half-light, sunbeams filtering through the cracks between the planks of the wall, we saw the sacred saddle.

It sat on a sawhorse. It needed to be dusted. “There it is,” Uncle Lloyd said, and none of us said much of anything.

We were in the presence of something holier than holy. I hesitated, then asked if I could touch the hole, the star, the tracks left by the lightning. I’d wanted to do that for a long time. “Fine with me,” he said.

Time slowed. My finger moved across space that seemed like forever until I touched the saddle. I was touching the finger of God that tapped Uncle Russell on the shoulder. I was connected to the stem of lightning stretching from heaven to the earth to jolt Uncle Russell into heaven, connected to his presence up in the sky, his hope that we’d all live good enough lives to see him again. I lifted my finger. It left a dark smudge on the leather. I licked my fingertip to taste lightning. I tasted dust.

After we climbed back into the car and said good-bye to the cousins, aunts and uncles, the horses, the cattle, the fences, the trees, I slid to the corner away from Elaine and Steve to think thoughts on dust. Every time when we drove the dirt road that turned back onto Highway 20, the road that left the ranch behind, I felt strongly that this was how land was supposed to

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be, not some godforsaken bottom of some abandoned sea with trilobites encased in dry mud. Not in between shifting hills of sand, not at the mercy of flash floods and violent temperatures. We were safe at Uncle Lloyd’s ranch and definitely safer than we were in Nevada. The rivers were regular in Idaho. Rocks and rills, like in the song.

The pine trees tall and protective. We didn’t have to cool our rooms with a swamp cooler. We didn’t have to stay inside during the summer days to keep from burning up.

I wanted to claim this territory as mine, but maybe I wanted to lay claim to the thousands-of-acres fact that we were related to something this vast.

My father could never make the kind of living that would support a ranch such as this. He must have had to talk to himself hard about things not being roses anywhere. What was so great about Idaho? Why did Thora, one of her sisters, and two of her six brothers leave?

As we drove back to the shores of Lake Bonneville, back to the land of lizards, snakes where people weren’t supposed to live, where the few plants that could survive on an old ocean floor had to convince themselves it was safe to grow there, I knew that, as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I’d forever be a child of that scrappy geography.

A child covered with lizard scales, though maybe with a little cowhide mixed in.

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E S S A Y As we drove back to the shores of Lake Bonneville, back to the land of lizards, snakes where people weren’t supposed to live, where the few plants that could survive on an old ocean floor had to convince themselves it was safe to grow there, I knew that, as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I’d forever be a child of that scrappy geography. A child covered with lizard scales, though maybe with a little cowhide mixed in.

In the car, motoring toward the sweltering heat of summer, my fingertips brushed over the bumpy remains of the necklace scar on my leg. I counted twelve pearl-like scabs. Dad was telling us that he’d take us to the dry lake just outside of Boulder City to search for trilobites left behind during the vast evaporation when wind and sun carried the water elsewhere.

Phyllis Barber is the author of eight books—one novel, two books of short stories, two children's books, and three memoirs. How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir about growing up Mormon in Las Vegas, was named one of the five best books written about Las Vegas by The Las Vegas Mercury and thebrowser.com. It also won The Associated Writing Program (AWP) Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1991 and The Association for Mormon Letters Award for Best Autobiography in 1993. Excerpts from that book have been anthologized in many collections, including Literary Las Vegas: The Best Writing About America's Most Fabulous City.

Her second memoir, Raw Edges, published in 2010, was named one of the top 25 university press books in 2010 in Foreword Reviews magazine. In the writing of this book, she was devoted to a frank, truth-telling narrative of one of life's most difficult experiences for her where her commitment to the ideal sometimes superseded common sense. The book has been called one of the best books written about Mormon guilt. Her latest memoir, To The Mountain: One Mormon Woman’s Search for Spirit, about her twenty-year hiatus from Mormonism and her interaction with many different religions and spiritual persuasions, is now available from Quest Books. Essays from this collection have been cited as notable in The Best American Essays 2010 and 2011, and also in The Best American Travel Writing 2011.

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J.J. Anselmi

Of Waste and Desolation

I

n December of 2012, my friend posted a picture on Facebook of her boyfriend holding a dead wolf, which he had just shot and killed near Rock Springs, a small town in southwest Wyoming. The man holds the wolf against his chest, propping it up on its hind legs, its belly facing the camera. The wolf’s tongue hangs from its slack jaw, and blood trickles down its white chin.

I grew up in Rock Springs, but moved away seven years ago. When I saw the picture, I thought the gray wolf was still on the list of endangered species in Wyoming and wondered if I should report the man to the Game and Fish Department. I asked my dad, who is a hunter and fisherman from Rock Springs, what I should do. He told me that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the gray wolf from the endangered species list in Wyoming in October of 2012. It’s now legal to hunt wolves in the state.

Currently, there are a little more than three hundred wolves in Wyoming. In the northwest corner of the state, wolf hunting is regulated by season—October 1st through December 31st—and requires a hunting license.

Throughout most of Wyoming, though, the wolf is now classified as a Predatory Animal, which means that you can kill a wolf whenever you want, as long as you report it to the Game and Fish Department.

Living in Wyoming, I routinely saw anti-wolf bumper stickers and heard

people talk about how much they hate wolves, many of whom would prefer the wolf to be extinct. A few of the bumper stickers read: Help preserve a wolf, take one to the taxidermist; Shoot, shovel and shut up above crosshairs trained on a wolf; and Kill all the goddamn wolves.

I saw two wolves during the twenty years that I lived in Wyoming. I didn’t go hunting or fishing nearly as much as my dad or other boys that I knew.

Throughout my adolescence, I spent a lot of time outside and going on road trips throughout Wyoming, but I usually didn’t venture far from paved roads.

E S S A Y road. For a moment, its body seemed to My dad and grandpa, however, camp take up the entire width of the highin the Wyoming wilderness multiple way. In my memory, the wolf looks like times each year, and they’ve both been Falkor, the flying dog/dragon from The doing so for over thirty years. They’ve NeverEnding Story. Like the little boy each only seen a few wolves. protagonist’s initial reaction to Falkor in One winter day in 2002, when I was the movie, I felt a confusing mix of fear sixteen, driving on a highway through and awe. The wolf also conjured a sense the woods, I caught a glimpse of gray in of menace, a feeling that was evoked by my peripheral vision. A wolf trotted in Gmork, the sentient, wolf-like antagosnow banks on the side of the highway, nist in The NeverEnding Story, when I about ten feet away from my truck. I watched the movie was both scared and as a kid. Like the first amazed by the largewolf I saw, this one ness of its paws and didn’t look at my head. The wolf didn’t Currently, there are a little more vehicle. It kept its seem to notice me, than three hundred wolves in head down, crossprobably focusing its Wyoming. In the northwest ing the road within attention on its search corner of the state, wolf hunting a second and disapfor food. Although pearing into a black I knew that wolves is regulated by season—October wall of forest. The rarely attack people, 1st through December 31st— wolf was running, I also knew that, if and requires a hunting license. but, in my memory, for some reason I it glides over the had to defend myself Throughout most of Wyoming, asphalt. against this creature though, the wolf is now classified “Holy shit, you outside the safety of guys,” I said, trying my vehicle and with- as a Predatory Animal, which to wake my friends out a gun, I wouldn’t means that you can kill a wolf up. “I just saw a stand a chance. This whenever you want, as long as wolf.” Like me, was a silly thing to you report it to the Game and they’d both grown think because the up in Rock Springs. odds that I will ever Fish Department.

Neither one of them find myself in that had ever seen a wolf. position are virtually nonexistent. But this Hatred for the wolf in Wyoming has thought was still present. I looked away carried over from the pioneer era. Setfor a moment. Looking back to where tlers and ranchers massacred over one I’d seen the wolf, I only saw pine trees million wolves throughout the 1800s. and snow.

Wolves ate ranchers’ livestock. Wolf I saw the second wolf when I was hides were also a semi-valuable comseventeen, in 2003. One summer night, modity. Hunters and ranchers placed I drove from Rock Springs to Jackson strychnine tablets in buffalo, elk, sheep, Hole with two friends. Both of them fell cow, antelope, and deer carcasses to poiasleep pretty quickly. As I drove into son wolves. Some toxicologists consider dense woods, night enveloped the highdeath by strychnine to be more painful way. About sixty miles south of Jackthan that from any other poison. It parason, a whitish-gray wolf crossed the

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focused on destroying pups and dens. lyzes the neural pathways that control The last original wolf den in Yellowbreathing. After ingesting a strychnine stone was destroyed in 1923. By 1940, tablet, a wolf would often seize for up most scientists considered the gray wolf to three hours before dying of asphyxito be extinct in the Rocky Mountains. ation.

During the 1800s, Americans deciAs part of a wolf recovery effort in mated the buffalo population in the 1995 and ‘96, thirty-one wolves were West and also significantly reduced captured in Canada and released in deer, elk, antelope, and moose. Buffalo Yellowstone. Many and other big game Wyoming citizens animals were wolves’ opposed this reintromain sources of food, By the late 1800s and early duction. Some people so wolves started to 1900s, Western ranchers thought that, after eat livestock with leaving Yellowstone, increasing frequency. sought to annihilate the gray wolves would deciBy the late 1800s wolf. Stockmen associations mate livestock popuand early 1900s, Westoffered bounties for dead lations throughout ern ranchers sought the state. During the to annihilate the wolves. Attempting to two years following gray wolf. Stockmen exterminate wolves, ranchers the reintroduction, associations offered set fire to several-thousandwolves only killed bounties for dead twelve sheep and no wolves. Attempting to acre swaths of land. Teddy cattle, mainly preyexterminate wolves, Roosevelt captured most ing upon elk. From ranchers set fire to 1999 to 2010, wolves several-thousand-acre Westerners’ feelings about killed 418 sheep and swaths of land. Teddy the wolf when he called it “a Roosevelt captured beast of waste and desolation.” 474 cows in Wyoming. In 2010, there most Westerners’ Like many people, Roosevelt were over 1.2 million feelings about the cows and 450,000 wolf when he called believed that wolves often sheep in the state. it “a beast of waste don’t eat their kills, leaving Wyoming’s wolf and desolation.” Like partially eaten carcasses to rot. population steadily many people, Roogrew after the reinsevelt believed that troduction. A little wolves often don’t over three hundred eat their kills, leaving wolves inhabited the state by 2011. partially eaten carcasses to rot.

Seeking to reduce the budding popuRanchers convinced the U.S. governlation, the Wyoming Game and Fish ment to join them in trying to eradicate Commission created the “Wyoming wolves from the West in 1919. The U.S. Gray Wolf Management Plan,” and the Biological Survey and National Park U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved Service organized and funded large it in August of 2012. This plan, which wolf hunting camps. Governmentwent into effect in October of 2012, will sanctioned hunters used strychnine be upheld until hunters have killed and steel traps to kill wolves and also over two hundred wolves, reducing

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E S S A Y Wyoming’s wolf population by twothirds.

Part of the drive to reduce the already small wolf population in Wyoming is connected to wolves preying upon livestock. However, the Management Plan acknowledges that the amount of livestock killed by wolves is “minimal industry-wide, [but] losses to individual operators can be significant.” After wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and before the passage of the Management Plan, ranchers were allowed to kill wolves if they caught them in the act of eating livestock. If wolves consistently preyed upon a rancher’s livestock, the rancher could get a Lethal Take permit and kill up to two wolves in a designated area.

To me, only keeping these allowances in place makes more sense than approving statewide wolf hunting. At the same time, I can also understand why most Wyoming ranchers don’t want wolves in their state. Although Wyoming has forests, lakes, and rivers, it mostly consists of harsh, barren prairie, where the main vegetation is sagebrush and prairie grass. Droning wind seems incessant in Wyoming.

With wind chill, the temperature frequently drops below zero during the long winters. It is a place that constantly reminds you that nature is not sympathetic. Set against monotonous hills, intimidating mountains, or large stretches of bleak prairie, most towns in Wyoming seem frail and impermanent, as if they will eventually be consumed by the land or eroded by wind.

When I look at this scenery, I usually feel intensely isolated. The idea that we don’t need to have an antagonistic relationship with nature doesn’t seem fully applicable here. Surviving as a rancher in this place would encourage, and maybe even require, a pioneer

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mentality—a view of the wilderness and wolf as things to be harnessed, beaten, and overcome. I can see why most Wyoming ranchers don’t think that the wolf should have ever been reintroduced. Sitting in my climatecontrolled rental house in California, it’s easy for me to denounce Wyoming’s wolf hunting laws, as well as widespread hatred of the wolf. Conducting research on my computer, getting up every so often for a snack or drink of water, I believe that, although it is a doomed and idealistic notion, humans should do what they can to restore nature to what it was before the Industrial Revolution, including animal populations. However, if I lived in the desolate state of Wyoming, trying to scratch by raising and selling cattle or sheep, I would probably want to kill every wolf within sight. Of course, I also know that this mentality is anachronistic and not sustainable.

It’s hard to avoid thinking that people’s hatred for the wolf goes deeper than concern for livestock. In part, the current wolf hunting laws in Wyoming can be attributed to the amount of political clout that the livestock industry has in the state. But I also think wolves deeply scare people, which often mutates into hate.

Part of this fear is connected to the possibility of wolves attacking humans, even though wolf attacks are rare. Throughout the 20th century, there were between twenty and thirty recorded wolf attacks in North America, only three of which were fatal. Each of these three deaths was caused by rabies. Still, part of people’s fear and hatred of the wolf stems from the reality that wolves have attacked humans, although the frequency of such attacks is often exaggerated. On a

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different level, people fear and hate the wolf because it reminds us that we can’t fully control nature. To understand this idea, consider the evolutionary history of the dog.

The oldest evidence of a domesticated dog, which is a descendant of the gray wolf, is 31,700 years old. One theory about how the wolf evolved into the dog is that humans captured wolves to use them for hunting, eventually domesticating them. Another theory is that humans brought pups home after killing mother wolves and then trained the pups. But these theories don’t seem to account for how many wolves needed to become domesticated in order to instigate an evolutionary shift.

I tend to side with a third explanation— that wolves essentially domesticated themselves.

The story goes something like this: wolf packs realized that scavenging abandoned human campsites was an easy and reliable way to get food. They started to follow groups of humans, eating animal waste that people didn’t want. Humans probably tolerated wolves because they cleaned up after them. It’s also likely that wolves warded off larger predators and people noticed this. Wolves that followed humans survived and bred, eventually passing on a trait that encouraged tolerance of people. The canines started to live in smaller packs, dividing themselves amongst human families.

These pseudo-dogs formed increasingly smaller packs because a family was more likely to accept them into their home in smaller numbers. Humans and dogs soon started interacting on an individual level, eventually leading to our modern relationship with the dog.

In some ways, the dog is an amazing example of how much control humans do have over nature. It shows us that

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we can directly and deliberately affect evolution. For several thousand years, people experimented with training and breeding early dogs, trying to produce dogs with specific traits and for specific purposes. Dogs became tools. Their physical characteristics began to reflect the purposes they served for humans.

To simplify thousands of years of breeding: we needed help with herding, so we trained and selectively bred dogs until we created the border collie, the Australian cattle dog, and similar breeds; we needed help pulling wagons and carrying heavy loads, so we trained and selectively bred dogs until we created the Rottweiler, the Mastiff, and other large dogs. Many dog breeds can be traced back to the original purpose they served for humans.

Most of the 400 dog breeds that we have now have emerged within the last 150 years. Humans started to use dogs to explore how quickly and extensively they could alter a species. Scientists have recently discovered that dogs possess more mutation-prone sequences of DNA, called tandem repeats, than most animals, which accounts for dogs’ genetic malleability. Mutations occur more frequently in tandem repeat sequences than other areas of DNA, and the mutations that take place in these sequences often produce significant physical changes. Although humans didn’t know exactly why it was so malleable, they began to see the dog as genetic clay during the Victorian era, creating breeds that didn’t serve purposes beyond companionship and then altering those breeds for the sake of beauty—or maybe it would be more accurate to say cuteness. People bred dogs for traits like floppy ears, long, curly, and short tails, specific types of hair, and several others, eventually creating breeds like the Chinese Crested Hairless.

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E S S A Y dogs overwhelmingly went directly to The dog reinforces ideas about our the bowl that the person pointed to on ability to control nature. It depends the first try. Miklosi believes that the upon us to survive. But the wolf might dogs’ reactions can be attributed to a remind us that the wilderness will exist genetic predisposition that encourages without humans—that most plants interaction with humans—a predisposiand animals don’t need us, and, in fact, tion that wolves do not have. would be better off without us.

Miklosi designed a second study.

Adam Miklosi, who studies canine He tied a piece of meat to a rope and cognition, has found notable differences placed the meat in a cage. The dog in the ways wolves and dogs react and wolf had to pull the rope to get to humans. In 2009, Miklosi and his the meat. Both animals quickly solved research team raised thirteen wolves, the puzzle. Miklosi put both animals keeping them in close contact with through this step a few more times. humans. They also raised thirteen dogs, Before the next trial, he tied off the trying to make the wolves’ and dogs’ rope so it couldn’t be environments identipulled through the cal. Their findings: cage’s holes. DurWithin a few months, The dog reinforces ideas about ing this trial, the dog the wolves began to our ability to control nature. gave up after tryexhibit a general disreing to pull the rope gard for people. When It depends upon us to survive. through a few times. the dogs climbed on But the wolf might remind It quickly looked to the researcher’s table us that the wilderness will the nearest researcher and were scolded for for help, trying to it multiple times, they exist without humans—that eventually stopped. most plants and animals don’t make eye contact, The wolves, by need us, and, in fact, would be nuzzling the person’s leg. When the wolf contrast, didn’t care went through this about the researchers’ better off without us. trial, it kept trying to reprimands. Although pull the rope through they were repeatedly the cage, over and over. It paced scolded for climbing on the table, they around the cage, batting the metal kept doing it. bars with its paws. Agitated, the wolf After a few months, Miklosi began latched onto the cage with its mouth, to conduct more formal studies. In a dragging it across the ground. Miklosi room, a researcher would place two and his team have repeated this experiupside-down bowls on the ground, ment several times, warranting similar hiding food in one of them. Another results each time. Wolves never looked researcher would bring a wolf or dog to the researchers for help. into the room, and the first researcher In the wolf, I think we see the dog would point to the bowl covering the and a creature that refuses to believe food. The wolves’ reactions varied. that nature revolves around humans.

Most of them never learned or seemed The dog has helped societies progto care what the hand gesture meant. ress. Among other things, it played Even after several trials, many of the an integral role in the development of wolves kept running straight to the herding. But the wolf became an enemy bowl that didn’t contain food. But the

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of human civilization when we started but, really, wolf packs are only successraising livestock—a fact that might be ful in four to eight percent of their big stored in our collective memory. The game hunts. wolf embodies our potential to alter In rare cases, a pack of wolves will nature as well as the reality that nature kill more than one elk, deer, antelope is indifferent to humans. It also reminds or other type of animal at a time, and, us that there are concrete limits to our even more rarely, more animals than control over the wilderness. One reason they can consume at one time. If this why I think it’s important to protect the happens, the wolves will usually leave wolf is precisely because it embodies all the kill site, returning multiple times of these ideas, and being able to simulover several days to eat. The notion taneously entertain of wolves being these thoughts has wasteful might stem become a necessary from people findThe dog has helped societies step in constructing ing partially eaten a sustainable view carcasses and assumprogress. Among other things, of our relationship ing that the wolves it played an integral role in the with nature. Unforweren’t coming tunately, though, we development of herding. But the back. The idea that often fear and hate wolf became an enemy of human wolves kill for fun things that remind probably became a civilization when we started us of our limitations, way to explain misraising livestock—a fact that and these responses conceptions about make sense on an might be stored in our collective their wastefulness. evolutionary level.

Of course, I can’t memory. The wolf embodies definitively say that our potential to alter nature as One popular falwolves don’t kill for lacy about wolves well as the reality that nature is fun or when they is that they kill for don’t need food. But indifferent to humans. sport, when they I know that humans don’t need food. do both of these I’ve most commonly things. I also know heard this misconception worded in that we decimate game populations. these ways: “Wolves kill just to kill”; Perhaps our hatred for wolves is the “Wolves kill for fun.” This idea leads product of misdirected misanthropy. people to believe that wolves would Before the 1800s, there were over decimate game populations if we didn’t 50 million buffalo in the United States. regulate them, even though wolves This number plummeted as Americans have been part of thriving ecosystems moved west. Buffalo fur and meat were alongside elk, deer, buffalo, moose, and valuable commodities in America and antelope for thousands of years. I’ve Europe, and many settlers earned a livheard Wyomingites say that wolf packs ing by killing buffalo and selling their leave carcasses in their wake, only eatmeat and hides. The tongue, a culinary ing some of their kills. The Wyoming delicacy, and hide were the most valuGray Wolf Management Plan says, able parts of the buffalo. Hunters often “Wolves are highly efficient predators killed a buffalo and removed these that feed primarily on large ungulates,” parts, leaving the rest of the carcass

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E S S A Y to rot. In the winter of 1872-73 alone, 1.5 million buffalo hides were shipped to Europe and the east coast from the western United States. The U.S. government encouraged settlers and soldiers to slaughter buffalo in an attempt to starve American Indians. Train operators allowed passengers to shoot buffalo from train windows, sometimes setting up contests to see who could shoot the most in a certain amount of time. In one contest, a man from Kansas killed 120 buffalo in forty minutes.

I can’t find any information about this hunter, so let me imagine him: a burly guy in his late 20s, he’d read about the West and wanted to see the frontier for himself. Living in Kansas City, he worked as a shoe salesman. But he felt empty. His father and grandfather had both been military men, and he worried that he hadn’t fully experienced life. On a primal level, he knew that he needed to directly interact with the wilderness in some way, so he bought a train ticket to Wyoming.

When the train operator announced the buffalo-hunting contest, the man from Kansas immediately unpacked his Winchester Model 1894, which he’d bought a year earlier with money he inherited from his father. He practiced shooting every chance he got in Kansas City, even entering a few amateur competitions. Waiting for his turn, he watched three other men shoot buffalo from the window in the back of the dining car, knowing in his gut that he could out-shoot all of them.

A waiter from the dining car kept time with a silver pocket watch while another counted how many buffalo each passenger shot. When the time keeper yelled, “Go!,” the man from Kansas fully entered the moment. Leaning out the train window, he could feel the dry summer heat of the prairie on

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his face. A large herd of buffalo came into his sight. Although they should have been scared, the creatures seemed indifferent to the train.

The man quickly fired four shots into the herd, dropping as many buffalo. He hurriedly reloaded and emptied his magazine, feeling like he had to keep going. When he hit a buffalo, it would usually run a few yards before collapsing onto sagebrush. He kept shooting and reloading, littering the floor of the train car with spent cartridges. He could hear someone yelling behind him—one of the waiters telling the other passengers to come watch this Kansas City man shoot—but he didn’t care. Power pulsated his core and enveloped his brain. He just wanted to keep killing buffalo.

When he was done, he’d left a wake of buffalo carcasses.

Like most people, I’ve also killed for fun. My dad used to take me gopher hunting when I was a kid. We never ate the gophers, and none of the other boys I knew who went gopher hunting with their dads ate them, either.

One summer day, when I was eight, my dad took me about twenty miles outside Rock Springs to kill gophers.

He parked his truck on the side of a dirt road, just off Highway 430. Feeling giddy, I rolled down my window.

Sitting in the passenger seat, roughly fifty feet away from a cluster of gopher mounds and holes, I shot the animals with my .22 rifle. I killed over twenty gophers, becoming more excited with each kill. When I shot one, it usually flailed on the ground for a few seconds before dying. We were close enough to the mounds and holes that I could sometimes hear the thwack of the bullet hitting a gopher’s flesh. Now, I project the remorse onto this memory that I

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should have felt. Really though, I never hesitated to pull the trigger, and I laughed as I watched each gopher die.

Shooting and killing this many gophers made me feel powerful in a way that an eight-year-old boy rarely does.

When I was ten, my family went on a vacation to San Carlos, Mexico.

With two guides, my dad and uncle went dove hunting one day, and I tagged along. They shot over forty doves, wounding several of them.

The wounded doves ran around in frenetic circles, zigzagging through sagebrush. For a while, the guides caught the wounded birds and snapped their necks. At some point, something clicked in my brain, telling me that I’d have a blast killing these birds. I started kicking the wounded doves to death.

The birds frantically ran away when they heard or saw me approaching. I imagined that, to them, my footsteps sounded like thunderclaps. My dad and uncle laughed as they watched me run through thickets of tall sagebrush, chasing and kicking the birds. A solid kick to the head or body usually killed a dove. If I didn’t kill one with the first kick, I kept kicking it until it died. I kicked mourning doves as if they were soccer balls. When my foot connected,

it made a soft whomp against a dove’s body, like the sound of kicking a pillow. I killed at least fifteen birds within two hours. Blood streaked my white L.A. Gears, which made me feel a kind of pleasure that now terrifies me. I can’t remember what we did with the doves, but I know that we didn’t eat any of them.

Humans’ wastefulness and needless propensity to kill are some of our worst qualities, and I often wish that I could eradicate these memories from my past, as well as human history. Many people who hate the wolf probably hate these qualities of humanity, too. Maybe the motivation to kill wolves stems from a desire to erase these qualities from ourselves. But projecting the characteristics of wastefulness and killing for fun onto the wolf and using these ideas to justify killing wolves also seems like an attempt to avoid the truth that violence is intrinsically connected to power in the primitive recesses of the human brain. It’s unlikely that humans will reach a point where violence doesn’t naturally evoke feelings of power, and it scares me to think that developing a conscience—another human safeguard—is the best I can do to control this seemingly hard-wired connection.

J.J. Anselmi is a nonfiction MFA candidate at CSU Fresno, where he also works as the assistant nonfiction editor of The Normal School.

His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Obsolete!, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He's also recently become a freelance writer for Splicetoday.

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Andrea Clark Mason

Two Rivers Philadelphia, PA 1994/Moscow, ID 2010

Andrea Mason Rowing on the Snake River, 2010.

“N

o talking in the boat! Eyes on the head in front of you.”

Behind my coach’s voice, I could hear the noise of cars barreling down the Schuylkill expressway.

Both my hands clutched the oar as we passed the first bridge, and I wished we were allowed to wear gloves. We weren’t. It was snowing—not hard, just flurries, but the coaches thought it wasn’t too early in the year to get out on the river. We were headed down past two more bridges to do our usual five-mile-long row. Then, afterwards, there would be a two-mile run down to the statues of angels. One girl who didn’t feel like running would complain of menstrual cramps, and the male coaches would uncomfortably say

she didn’t have to run. Packs of boys from the local prep schools would hoot and holler as we ran by.

I grew up rowing shells on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. My high school team rowed out of the boathouse where the Olympic team practiced. The river was dirty, polluted, and had a long history of being so. Although Philadelphia was the first city to feel responsible for providing its citizens with clean drinking water and bought a large section of land that was the Schuylkill watershed and later became the first large urban park of its kind, during the 18th and 19th centuries people continued to use the river as an open sewer and to dispose of other offensive waste. Despite an 1828 law that fined a person for dumping

the area by Charles II, Penn apparently took a canoe trip up the Schuylkill into the backcountry. During this period, the seventeenth century, shad was abundant, and the Indians were busy trapping the beaver to near extinction.

There were several attempts to make the Schuylkill a navigable route, and there were also attempts at building locks at the falls several times, usually without permanent success. The waterway was used to float chestnut, hemlock, and oak down to the Philadelphia market, but the lower river was not so calm or predictable. What did emerge were two developments: the clutched the wealth of coal just oar as we passed the first When I began below the surface rowing my freshman farther up the waterbridge, and I wished we were shed in Schuylkill year, I was considered allowed to wear gloves. We County and the view a “novice,” meanweren’t. It was snowing—not that the banks of the ing I had never been in a boat before. My Schuylkill were a hard, just flurries, but the friends all played wonderful place for coaches thought it wasn’t too lacrosse in the spring, the rich to build manearly in the year to get out on but ball sports had sions. The mansions never been my thing. remain, high above the river.

I excelled at whole the river, many now body sports: swimconverted to historic ming and skiing, and buildings or museI thought it would be fun to be down ums, but they give a taste of a Philadelon the river. My parents had pointed phia—and a lifestyle—long gone. out the boathouses to me when we Anthracite coal was discovered near were driving back to the suburbs from the headwaters of the Schuylkill, in Philadelphia. The houses sat stately, old what is known as Schuylkill County. In and filled with tradition. Every night, the 1750s, the area belonged to farmers, the boathouses were silhouetted with but by the end of the century, mining white lights. had begun along the Schuylkill. In The Although the Schuylkill was origiSchuylkill, J. Bennett Nolan says, “There nally home to Lenape Indians, peaceare still valleys in lower Schuylkill ful fishing and trapping people, it was County where coal has not been found a Dutchman who was the first white and where the wheat fields roll back to man up the waters and who gave it its the mountain wall with no breaker to name. When William Penn was granted disturb the serenity of the landscape” “putrid, noxious, or offensive matter” into the river, throughout the 19th century, it was done anyway. During much of the 20th century, coal was mined near the Schuylkill headwaters. Culm, a byproduct of the mining efforts, accumulated in such large amounts that it raised the level of the riverbed and made navigation on the river difficult.

Repeatedly from 1866 through 1946, studies recommended abandoning the river as a water source, seeking cleaner water upstream. It wasn’t until 1945 that the Schuylkill River Project was born in an attempt to clean up the river and restore it to its former glory.

Both my hands

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We were in position at ¾ of the way up the slide when the gun went off, and then Carrie’s oar was in the water, but it was stuck and it wouldn’t come out, a rowing occurrence called catching a crab.

The whole boat lurched to one side.

By the time we got going again, we were so far behind we weren’t ever going to catch up.

(12). Nevertheless, coal and its byproducts did find their way into the water source, corrupting it.

Robert B. Johnson, in A History of Rowing, claims rowing began in the ancient world but that the idea of rowing in crews came from navies.

Johnson traces the popularity of rowing in England to its similarities with the age of chivalry, when athletic prowess and courage could win a man knighthood. Rowing combined precision and timing—thinking skills—with the raw physicality of taking a boat down the river. In 1867, the Schuylkill Navy, an organization of rowers still in existence, announced that Philadelphia was going to become the supreme boating city in America.

Thomas Eakins, a Philadelphia painter and rower, captured the golden age of rowing, the 1870s, before the sport became bogged down in scandals and betting, in a series of paintings called “The Rowing Pictures.” He painted the winners of his day—John Biglin and Max Schmitt—working alone or with other rowers on the Schuylkill. Once, he even painted himself in a scull in the background. At the time Eakins began painting the rowers,

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he had just come back from studying art in Europe. He was interested in depicting the human body, but nudes were not really acceptable in Victorian Philadelphia. He used the rowing pictures as an outlet, a way to capture posture and muscles, grace and precision.

At the beginning of the spring rowing season my senior year, I was getting ready to race a double, a two-seated, four-oared shell, with another girl, Carrie, a thickly built woman with a mess of curly brown hair. The race, the first of the season, was called Stotesbury.

We rowed casually down to the race line. Two Canadian girls in unisuits looked intimidating on the starting line next to us. The prom had been the night before, and though I had gotten more sleep than most of my friends, I still hadn’t gone to bed at 9 p.m. as my coach had directed me to. We were in position at ¾ of the way up the slide when the gun went off, and then Carrie’s oar was in the water, but it was stuck and it wouldn’t come out, a rowing occurrence called catching a crab.

The whole boat lurched to one side. By the time we got going again, we were so far behind we weren’t ever going to catch up. I remember I could hear my team mates shouting “Come on. Pick up the rate,” but at that point, it was too late. We lost miserably, by boat lengths.

We were on our spring break training trip in Florida when I got news that I’d gotten in to the first college to which I’d applied, a small liberal arts school without much of a rowing team.

In Florida, we mostly rowed singles and doubles, and dolphins followed us, trailing behind the stern. I remember thinking I had to make a decision. I was now the captain of the women’s team, and I had been recruited to row at some

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of the schools to which I applied. What would my life consist of, I wondered.

Did I want the next four years of my life to be all about crew? In high school, crew had been an escape from everything else. Would it continue to be that if I rowed at a school with a competitive rowing program? I doubted it.

Later that spring, my doubles partner and I were doing well. After the illfated row at Stotesbury, we were doing better, at least winning three of our last races. We were rowing at Nationals in Camden, New Jersey. At the starting line, we decided to take off our shirts and just row in our black sports bras.

Our start was nothing like the one where Carrie caught a crab. Instead, we were propelled, almost on top of the water. Right away, we were ahead, and we were gaining—boat lengths of open water, it seemed. My arms, my heart, my lungs were pumping as fast as possible, my muscles contracting and expanding nearly on their own, and I was thinking about nothing except how fast I could move my arms away from my body. Speed was all I wanted. And then there was the finish line, and we were the first ones over it. We had won.

We were national champions, except no one knew who we were because we had taken our shirts off.

At the high school senior roast where teachers and staff embarrass students, the librarian had me. She held up a slinky, black lace camisole and read a few lines from an Anne Sexton poem: “I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball, but I am rowing, I am rowing.”

By then, most everyone had heard about my race in the black sports bra,

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and though I hadn’t yet decided to become a writer, the librarian knew me because of how much I liked to read and hang out in the library. She had gotten it exactly right. What I loved about rowing was its beauty, its intricacy, its poetry.

Senior year was almost over, and I was trying to decide how much of a part of my life I wanted to make crew.

The place I really wanted to go—Dartmouth—wasn’t interested in me, but University of Pennsylvania, the dock over from ours on boathouse row, had recruited me and accepted me to attend school there in the fall. I knew what my life would be like—afternoons in the weight room and on the rowing machine. Practices twice a day on Saturdays. Their rowing program was old and had tons of money. Begun in 1835, it was the beginning of organized sport at University of Pennsylvania.

Before that, the male students would use a local gymnasium for boxing or shoot pool at a nearby parlor. It was an Ivy, the best—I should have been

We were propelled, almost on top of the water. Right away, we were ahead, and we were gaining—boat lengths of open water, it seemed.

My arms, my heart, my lungs were pumping as fast as possible, my muscles contracting and expanding nearly on their own, and I was thinking about nothing except how fast I could move my arms away from my body. Speed was all I wanted.

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After winning the race, Schuylkill River, 1994.

be happy, and yet, I wanted something else. I wasn’t totally sure what that something else was, but I felt it when I saw a power bar commercial in the Sierra magazine I was reading in the library during one of the painful days before the deadline when I was trying to decide what to do with my life. My friends said things like, “You got into Penn and you’re thinking of not going? That’s crazy,” but I wasn’t sure I wanted more of what I already knew. I wanted something different, but I couldn’t—or didn’t know how to—describe it. I wasn’t sure four more years rowing in that dirty river was it.

I had talked to my parents about applying to colleges in the West, and my mother had said, “no.” She wanted me to be able to drive home for breaks.

I chose the first college that had accepted me, a small liberal arts school in upstate New York with an under-funded club rowing program. After rowing out of the Olympic boathouse, it didn’t measure up to even my high school program. I wasn’t totally sure why I’d made the choice I had. I just meant to

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go somewhere where my dad hadn’t gone to law school and rowing wouldn’t be my life. Perhaps I knew that I wasn’t competitive enough to keep it up for four years; I’d been bow in the double, not stroke. I simply had to follow the stroke rate Carrie set. My coaches had even told me they didn’t Linda Mason think I was competitive enough to row stroke. And I had an idea what rowing at Penn would look like—miles on the rowing machines in the winter to the point of puking or seat racing, a high-pressure situation where the coach substitutes two different women with the same crew to see who could make the boat go faster. After all, what I liked about rowing was sitting in the boat, inches away from the water, the precision of the stroke, how it took brains and muscle, watching the curl of water around the blade, taking part in something beautiful.

Even though the mansions on the banks of the Schuylkill were no longer private residences, the lifestyle of the upper class wasn’t totally gone from Philadelphia. In the affluent suburbs where I grew up, a charity ball was thrown every year where debutantes wore white dresses, danced with young men, and then were presented to society. My mom enrolled me to be a deb. I went to the first gathering—a reception in the backyard of a huge stone mansion. When my friend’s mother picked

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me up, she said, “You’re not wearing heels?” I was wearing a fitted, yellow, silk dress, appropriate gold jewelry, and stockings, yet she had noticed my shoes: flat. Maybe that was the moment I decided it wasn’t for me. I remember feeling uncomfortable as I made my way among other private-schooleducated women, all of them wearing their pearls and heels. This wasn’t to be the only gathering. It was just the first.

Later, there would be trips to the eye hospital and other fundraisers so we could begin to take our mothers’ place in Philadelphia society.

I came home and told my mom, “I don’t think that’s for me.” I heard from my friends who had stayed in about buying the right white dress and gloves, or learning the intricate dance to be done on stage that night. Still, my dad had already sent his check in, so we were given several tickets. I brought my first college boyfriend, wore a red, strapless dress, and drank so much that I was throwing up in the toilet the next morning when my mother hollered up the stairs that we had to leave to drive to my grandparents’ for Christmas Eve. Not for me.

A red and a black duffel bag sat on the polished, marble floor in front of me. Through the loudspeaker, trains were announced. My mother hugged me. Then my dad did. I felt a combination of excited and abandoned. Even though I had chosen this, not to go to New York or DC like all my friends had, I felt scared, lonely. I was heading halfway across the country. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Thirtieth Street Station, the Philadelphia train station where we said goodbye, was emblematic of everything I was leaving: white pillars outside, a high, vaulted ceiling inside, friezes of various historical

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events, gilt detailing and the Angel of Resurrection bronze statue commemorating WWII veterans in the center.

Where I was going, nothing was as old.

Cities in the West were the age of the suburb I’d grown up in.

Over the next decade, I moved from Colorado to Idaho to enter a writing program. I pursued backpacking and skiing until I saw a sign at the farmer’s market advertising learn-to-row and Master’s crew. I asked the representative—a fit guy in his fifties—what I could expect. Were there ten-mile runs and calisthenics? I remembered how thin and strong I was senior year of high school. I didn’t think I was in shape for that.

“No,” he said. “It’s pretty mellow.

We just like to get out there and row.”

I was at the next practice, but it was nothing like rowing on the Schuylkill.

The mountains rose up on either side of the Snake River, and we would some-

Andrea Mason Shells by the Snake River, 2010.

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Rowing with medals, Schuylkill River, 1994.

times see a beaver or blue heron on the banks. The drive down to the river was on a two-lane rural road instead of a four-lane, crowded expressway. On the drive—where we hardly ever saw other cars but occasionally had to follow a combine or ATV—we could often spot deer, elk, or quail crossing the road or looking curiously on from a nearby hill.

The rowers were different too.

Some had learned to row in college, but others had learned from community programs. There were architects and professors but also house painters and truck drivers.

Still, sitting in the boat was the same: the feeling of being just inches away from the water, practically in the river. It had never been the races that filled me with joy. What made me happy was just rowing along, being outside, watching the ducks and the puddles in the water we made with our oars. There was also the feeling of accomplishment, the power of eight rowers working together when the boat was balanced and moving so fast on top of the water that it felt like flying,

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For one week while our coach was on vacation the rowers brought their own small boats to row. After practice, one of the rowers brought out a cooler full of Linda Mason beer. Three of us sipped beers as we waited for the rest of the rowers to return to the dock. Each of us said something about how lucky we were to be rowing on the beautiful Snake. One of the guys mentioned that he didn’t miss rowing on urban rivers back East, where he had seen cash registers and hypodermic needles either float by or dropped along the banks. Still, what we saw when we marveled at the view wasn’t natural. The Snake was sometimes called “Snake Lake,” a reference to the fact that the wildness of the river was long gone. In 1945, Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to build the first of four dams along the Snake to provide electricity and water for irrigation, and to make Lewiston, Idaho, an inland seaport.

Through the process of damming the river, they not only flooded ancient archeological sites, but they also made it nearly impossible for chinook and sockeye salmon and steelhead to make it back to their spawning grounds. In 1988, Snake River coho salmon became extinct. In 1991, Snake River sockeye were listed as an endangered species. In

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1994, Snake River chinook salmon were listed as endangered. Barges ferry fish through the locks around the dams in a dim effort to keep the species reproducing. I wondered if the rowers – most of us East Coast transplants – romanticized the West, wanted to see it as virgin and pristine when perhaps this river had been changed and manipulated just as much or more than those eastern rivers? Given enough time, would it become as polluted as the Schuylkill?

One afternoon, in a single, a shell made for one person, I rowed to the other side of the river to get some shade from the hundred degree heat, and I thought about what the Snake might be like if it wasn’t tamed and controlled by these huge dams. It might be the wild whitewater with rapids named Granite and Wild Sheep that runs through Hells Canyon. We probably wouldn’t be able to row it in shells, but the salmon would swim freely, and we would probably know more about the sophisticated ancient people who settled along the Snake 9,000 years ago, the people who carved small, bone sewing needles and traded with another tribe for the jawbone of an arctic fox.

The Army Corps of Engineers had attempted to save the Marmes rock shelter, where these ancient people lived, by building a levee, but the force of the water was too great, and now the shelter sits under forty feet of water.

I had no doubt that of the two rivers I knew, neither was truly wild. Humans had tamed them nearly to the point of destruction, but it didn’t stop me from feeling that they were worthy of appreciation. The Schuylkill has been restored to its pristine origins and is now a place locals fish and picnic along

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its banks. I imagined the same fate for the Snake. Philadelphia was the first city to realize that a city had a duty to provide fresh drinking water to its citizens. On the other side of the country, the government had seen its role in providing cheap electricity. Each river had done a service.

The Snake had been here long before the dams and will be there long after it. People heavily involved in the dam debate say the Pacific Northwesterners want it all—cheap electricity and healthy salmon runs. Keith C. Petersen, the author of River of Life, Channel of Death: Fish and Dams on the Lower Snake, asks what the public would pay to save the salmon. He says the public claims they don’t want the salmon to go extinct, but the cost of saving the salmon is abstract because they are not farmers along the lower Snake looking to irrigate or transport their wheat. He introduces a scenario that could affect everyone. If the dams were taken out and the cost of energy spiked, businesses and homes would be affected, jobs would be lost, and school programs would be cut. Homeless and

I had no doubt that of the two rivers I knew, neither was truly wild.

Humans had tamed them nearly to the point of destruction, but it didn’t stop me from feeling that they were worthy of appreciation.

The Schuylkill has been restored to its pristine origins and is now a place locals fish and picnic along its banks. I imagined the same fate for the Snake.

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Petersen suggests that, at least in our lifetime, the lower Snake will be a river of compromise, where no one special interest group gets its needs met but where the public continues to want —and get—salmon and cheap hydroelectric power. The magazine I write for (owned by a power company) ran an article where a polling company from Portland, Oregon, reports 70 percent of Northwesterners would be concerned (35 percent very concerned) if electricity prices went up 5% to ensure healthy salmon runs.

Looking back at Thomas Eakins’ rowing pictures, I am reminded that training to be a competitive rower always was a rigorous undertaking. In Johnson’s A History of Rowing, published in 1871, he describes training for a crew, based on how the Harvard crew trained, which included a diet of mostly boiled meat (even for breakfast), runs, rows, and bouts of sweating under 6-8 blankets and/or 2 featherbeds after drinking a pint of liquor. After, rowers were encouraged to rub down with a

towel until their skin was red and raw.

Although training for being a competitive rower had changed by the time I came to rowing, it remained a sport that encourages an athlete to get down to the basics: sweating and running and rowing until one is sore and aching, until nothing else matters. That senior year of high school, I lived for those five mile runs and two hour practices.

When my body ached, everything else faded.

Even though I knew that both rivers had been meddled with, I can’t change my experience on them, knowing the Snake feels more authentic and pure to me regardless of the fact that it might actually be farther from its natural state than the Schuylkill. I think about that girl I was who rowed the Schuylkill, and the other girl that moved West for snow-capped mountains, gushing rivers, and the dearth of debutantes. What she thought was a blank slate. I wonder what words of wisdom I could impart to either of them. If I could go back in time, would I? Of course, I know that neither of them would have listened to what I have to say.

Andrea Clark Mason's work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, High Desert Journal, Weber—The Contemporary West, Permafrost, and other journals. She has received grants and awards from The Sacatar Foundation, Centrum Education and Creative Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Everglades National Park. She has a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Idaho and teaches writing at the Community College of Denver.

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P O E T R Y

Rick Watson

1. Two Morning Doves

Max Patzner

Two morning doves (both boys, Girl/boy, I wouldn’t peek, you see) Break up their song this first sunny morning in June, And “Ka bam,” they’re hard at each other, Gone into wing to wing combat— “Who, who?” turns to YOU! , No You!—I imagine— All pecking, peck-pecker, poke the head peccadilloes— So mourning in morning comes— So much for nature— Lord above, these are the Ways, so human— Is this what these birds do and Know that they are doing?

Or is it I, my fig-leafed shame?

The balance of nature or will of God, I simply don’t understand—

P O E T R Y

2. The Way Of… The dun hen and blue-headed cock, Urban pheasants at home on Robert Street, When they see the yellow cat creeping! Silence— Oh hunter, crouched tiger in small print, You missed them both as you leapt and Then pounced on some big bug or mouse— Look! In the tall grass, the blue head Bobs up, drops down, watches your Scrap hunt, keeps safe in savannas of silence— The dun hen is deeper, down in the grass, like earth— Blood sacrifice, devour, in praise of the full belly gods— Make laws, protect interests, cheat peasants, orphans and widows— Transcend: where grace blows you clean As the northwest winds after the night storms of May Of course we will never be free until kindom come: In the meantime we clutter our karma with blind sides And stumbling runs; hunter, hunted, victim; Blood hounded; to us that wind is just wind.

tzner

Pa Max

Max Patzner

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T.S. Eliot In Bonetown, Dakota, After the Flood “A breath of pine, and the wood song fog By this grace dissolved in Place”

—T.S. Eliot, Marina The snow of three days dissolved last night And in the full light, Saturday, The smallest sparrows, Bonetown big in sparrow terms, Were fierce and loud in the cherry trees Beneath the half moon That will be done by Christmas White sky, grey, the frost on the roofs, cars and trees Dissolve from echo to silence, half formed prayers The sun breaks gold to rise against The flat, still sea of blind blue sky This one-week before Christmas, 5 months after the flood, “And by this grace” the pain and hope “Dissolved” until the dark water dreams were done And our feet touched solid ground again, this “place.”

Rick Watson is North Dakota Associate Poet Laureate and teaches Pop Culture, Honors Classes, Communication Arts, and Music History at Minot State University. He has been a singer/ songwriter and poet in North Dakota since 1967.

Rick has two books available—The Lost Colony, and The Lost Colony: Christmas. Two more books, The Spot and Blue Jesus, are to be released in 2014. His songs are available on www. highplainscreole.com. His album, Flappers, was released this Spring. Another, tentatively titled Praises That Remain, will be released this Fall.

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Justin Evans

Daily Prayers 1. Prime It’s simply a way of life, rising early before the sun has leapt over the silhouette of Three Sisters Mountain.

If laughter really is a form of prayer, then work, too, must be communion.

Canyon winds rush through the cottonwood.

Autumn grain sways like sea anemone.

Already there is bird song in the air.

2. Compline A flock of red-winged blackbirds high in the Cottonwoods sit in quorum, discuss sunset The day’s apogee long since past no time for debate remains Sun will fall. Night will come settle in, ushered by a familiar breeze What remains is whether sky will catch fire or sink into a deeper blue All the while knowing there is no difference

Harvest Dream The full moon has reached its apex. We still have acres to go before we can find our beds tonight― this harvest season.

Damn the almanac.

It’s only a book. It knows nothing of the dirt and sweat that will never leave the creases of our palms, blistered feet, or the shallow graves we dug on our long march to Zion.

Hobble Creek Novena It was all the trees, all the mountains.

It was the ever elusive bend of Hobble Creek from which I could never escape. Please forgive my childhood optimism― an impertinence I never outgrew.

Oh, let me stay, tucked within soft folds of shade given by tree and headstone alike.

Here I will lay me down, undress my body, slip into my death like a bath. Here I will mark my final days by the slow hours, each passing effortlessly into another― afternoon dusk into the amnesia of night.

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It’s Like that in Springville, Forever Somewhere in Springville, I buried my childhood beneath the fertile earth.

I am not certain whether it was at the roots of a Cottonwood or Sycamore. Maybe it was an English Walnut. It was early, dark, before Spring had stepped entirely into view, moon obscured by Three Sisters Mountain.

But one place in Springville is good as another and I am somewhat certain I will end where I began.

Discovery Plowing my father’s land I found an Indian spearhead— its orange-red face grew translucent letting in a small part of sunlight.

I held it in my hand for a moment, pocketed it and returned to the plow— where I felt it against my thigh threatening to cut me with each step.

Justin Evans was born and raised in Utah. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1988-1992, he graduated from Southern Utah University and eventually the University of Nevada, Reno. He currently lives in rural Nevada with his wife and sons, where he teaches at the local high school. He has published four chapbooks of poetry, as well as the full length collection, Town for the Trees (2011, Foothills Publishing). His new book of poetry, Hobble Creek Almanac (2013, Aldrich Press), focuses on his hometown of Springville, Utah.

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Kenneth Pobo

LopLop

By Max Ernst Half bird, half man, something that resembles both. This could easily be me.

As soon as I escape the ground, a few of my parts start to fall off. It’s common— the Scarecrow got scattered, put back together, and still ruled Oz. Perhaps the body wants to return to the Earth or, to get lift, we have to let bits of our selves go. How much is poking our heads in the sky worth? What must we surrender so that we can float, a hot air balloon, not bird, not human, not much of anything, but free.

P O E T R Y

Giraffe On Fire

By Salvador Dali This morning I couldn’t shake the dream I had about being back in grade school, only it wasn’t my school. A stranger, I had grown up and tried to fit myself behind the desk, tried to hide in plain sight.

The teacher, a man made of step ladders and spoons, knew I didn’t belong, made me swallow mud. I woke up, poured coffee. The paper said that a North Sea gas leak could be flammable and hard to contain. Nature keeps spiking a fever, the doctor playing golf.

A neighborhood giraffe walks by the picture window, on fire, eating leaves from our maple tree. On a sill our Meyer lemon opens her yellow mouth and blurts something that annoys the giraffe who takes his flaming skin into the next yard. School buses start sliding by, blue kids stuffed into seats, oranges in a crate. They know their fate is to be devoured. I haven’t quite accepted mine yet. I’m a sleepwalker, fully awake, desiring sleep, dreamless sleep, but not death, not that. Someone has put empty drawers in me. I want them filled.

With what I don’t know, but filled.

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Mystery And Melancholy Of a Street

By Giorgio De Chirico For decades I’ve been the little girl rolling her hoop down a strange street, a shadow creeping up. I have a name for it, Death. Maybe it will overlook me a while longer or until the hoop gets away and lands against an arcade. What if I’ve misnamed the shadow? It could be Life—I want it to stop and talk to me, let me rest from rolling the hoop, but Life may have many streets to walk on, people with a stronger need to talk.

I could hide in the circus wagon, wait and see who the shadow is, but I’m scared of the dark, scared I’ll get trapped and be taken far off. I grew up in a land with purple lilacs and salmon iris.

I didn’t want to leave but I did. I remember Nature as the aunt I loved who moved away and died. It may be dusty doorways and nervous buildings from now on. The shadow, who knows, it could be my own, some “me” that forms, dissolves, remakes herself in motion, where stillness comes.

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P O E T R Y

The Image as Produced by Automatic Writing

By Brassai I told him: You’re a big city girl now.

He told me: Am not.

Am a country boy who sits on a porch, loving guns and YouTube.

We’re in love. In hate.

In a sphagnum moss goo that we sink in, thinking we’re rising over tree tops. Years mount up like unpaid traffic tickets.

Kenneth Pobo teaches creative writing and English at Widener University in Pennsylvania. His chapbook Ice And Gaywings won the 2011 quarrtsiluni chapbook contest. In 2009, he won the Main Street Rag chapbook contest for Trina And The Sky. His poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere.

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Eric Paul Shaffer

Tonight, What I Can See Right Now upcountry Maui at midnight

Weather’s never too cold in the tropics, and everything gray is painted or bleached till the sun raises the grain. At night, stars stray within easy reach. I can track the constellations, but I can’t choose the time the clouds clear. I wait tonight to peer between. I trace Lyra, two strings in a vague curve with a blazing blue heart, Vega. In that moment, before clouds come between us, the “summer triangle” appears above: the lyre, the eagle, and the swan. Right now, I can see all.

My friends, we call it “the present,” yet too often we forget it’s a gift. Every night, the sky is in your hands. Open it.

P O E T R Y

Five Planets At Once “Come on outside,” he said. “Tonight,

you can see five planets at once.”

He was grinning, with the sort of secret a brother keeps.

“There’s no moon. They should be easy to see.”

In the field, eye-deep in the night, he pointed into the dark.

“The big white one up there is Jupiter. Some people can see

three or four moons without a telescope.

That butter-colored one is Saturn.

“There’s Mars. It’s a little faint, but if you look hard,

you can see the red color.

The brilliant one right over the mountain is Venus.”

Then, he was silent. We stared together at a sky glowing

with the other worlds ringing our sun.

Wind and small animals rustled in the grass.

“Hey,” I said, “I thought you said we could see five planets.”

“We can.”

“Well, look. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Venus is only four.”

“That’s right.”

I could hear the smile in his voice. I thought for a moment, but not long enough. “So what’s the other one?”

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He chuckled, and said, “Earth.”

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Don’t Mention It The scat on the trail is there to stay. We step over, not around, the pile. The vultures overhead are the same or different ones who scored the blue yesterday. After all, who but a vulture can tell one vulture from another? That’s just the way it is.

We kick up the dust. The cloud settles to earth unless wind catches it, then it settles somewhere else, but it always settles.

Look at the mountain. If you can see it, it’s there. If you can’t, it’s still there. What you see means nothing to the mountain.

And that’s why I’m here, boots, bottle, and bandana. This rock recalls those who made the place sacred. I have no intention of dying as poetically as they did. Those poems are written, and I’m not going back. I will leave rooms crowded with books, shoes, and other belongings someone else will have to discard.

No sweet, solitary death for me. I come to this place to ponder this little mystery. I’m glad we’re here today. We stopped a fool from killing a rattlesnake on the trail. We told him we’d go to jail before we watch one more creature killed when we could save it.

The trail becomes a place when we stop walking, and rattlesnakes, lichen, manzanita, and vultures are bound to be here. We insisted he thank us for our surly wisdom and for not kicking his sorry ass down the mountain. He left angry; we kept climbing. Vultures glide above, as significant as everything that circles. Death is grim for those who die, but for the rest of us, a day like that, or like this, is just another day, and today, the sky is just as blue and beautiful or blank as the people around us can make it. A lookout tower of stone and timber tops the peak. The door’s locked. We’re here.

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The Edge of Where I’m Welcome At the edge of where I’m welcome, I pause. In the surf, children call and splash. Men tease each other with words and boards. Women coax the sun to darken their curves. Waves break like the quick flow of something molten. One boy writhes in the sand, making an angel on the beach. Another overturns a bucket, a perfect cone of sand in a row of others whose rims crumble as the sea seeps from within.

Before me is the wrinkled blue face of the unknown. The sea looks friendly. After striding through the sun and scorch of sand, I will walk into the cool surge of what I cannot see, to float on the rising and falling of wind and waves. The water is clear until I reach the depth a man can stand, where seeing through the waves becomes a trial.

One needs a mask, a mouthpiece, and a hollow rod to look into the sea as far as the clarity of the unknown allows. But before all that, I pause at the energetic edge. Where the horizon curls are the riders of waves, the stronger swimmers, and the clouds marking the end of the world I know. I take a moment to remember I’m standing on an island where friends, food, and fresh water flow, where all that supports me is all I need. I consider my place before I walk into water that bears me away from the ground I depend on, before my feet dangle, flashing and pale, over the darker ranges of a sinking world I no longer know as I swim further from shore. I stand here, reverent, for a moment, at the edge of everything I know, before I walk into the clear mystery of the depths before me, depths that welcome me, but do not.

_

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of Lahaina Noon (2005) and Portable Planet (2000). His poems appear in Slate, North American Review, Ploughshares, Poetry East, Rattle, The Hollins Critic, The Sun Magazine, and reviews in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales. He teaches at Honolulu Community College.

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Jericho Brown

Another Angel I found myself Bound to Him And bound to His Bidding. He left Water without color And land without much Motion to mention But kept me going Like a toy wound tighter Than His one odd eye When I failed to deliver A message in time. He built Bugs and beasts. I understood My sexlessness. He invented Men and women. I knew I had no father. He never told me What I was, what He could be.

Now, two boys in Oil City, Louisiana Complain about their bodies, Featherless and modeled After the reflection He passed in a stream.

They got sick Playing barefoot in mud Darker than what the sun leaves Alone, and they hate Their symptoms. I am That kind of pain Put to purpose but unloved, Bound to the Lord who looks At those two brothers, Never noticing his own, Bound like their strange sister Told to bathe them Once, filthy and feverish, They finally come home. ˆ

Janka Látecková

P O E T R Y

Eden One winter, we decided to plunge, to swim or drown, Bare-dicked and beautiful. Then we slept as if the town Was warm, though before either of us got born, heroes Thought to end all threats by building one final weapon.

We said what any man should when waking cold, his lover Pressed against him close—Promise, and, I could die this way. ~ Let’s celebrate, oh ye gentlemen of Thunder Bay. Show me a brick. A bottle. Knuckles and feet.

Put on a pair of Nikes made for catching prey.

Don’t just scare me. Find your keys and beat The limp out my wrists. I worked all Friday, And this is North America, for God’s sake, treat Me like it, like I looked at you that able way You look at women to prove yourselves straight.

Big, Fine Long ago, we used two words for what we thought Valuable: big and fine for a house, a car, a woman, All three the same to men who claimed them: Each to be entered, each to experience wear and tear With time. But more than the love for big, fine Possessions was love for the face one man offered Another saying, You lucky. You got you a big, fine _____.

Men still have that problem. We wait on other men To tell us we exist and grant existence to those Who say mine and mean it as infants do, grabbing What must be beautiful since someone else saw it.

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A Living A scribble, a pat on the back—and no more Itches. I should have been a doctor. Better, A preacher, a man who calls men to lift Hands in surrender disguised as praise.

Everyone loves Jesus. He saves. He’s A healer. I lose when my man is right: I cannot pay an electric bill, mine or his, One of us sick, the other sicker, neither Knowing how to sew or salve a wound, only How precise the sound of him punctured.

Hebrews 13 Once, long ago, in a land I cannot name, My lover and my brother both knocked At my door like wind in an early winter.

I turned the heat high and poured coffee Blacker than their hands which shivered As we sat in silence so thin I had to hum.

They drank with a speed that must have Burned their tongues one hot cup then Another like two bitter friends who only Wished to be warm again like two worn Copies of one holy book bound by words to keep Watch over me my entire life in the cold and never ever sleep

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Nativity I was Mary once.

Somebody big as a beginning Gave me trouble I was too young to carry, so I ran Off with a man who claimed Not to care. Each year, Come trouble’s birthday, I think of every gift people get They don’t use. Oh, and I Pray. Lord, let even me And what the saints say is sin within My blood, which certainly shall see Death—see to it I mean— Let that sting Last and be transfigured.

John Lucas

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Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans and is a recent recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. Brown is now an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award.

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Chad Hanson

White Lupine

Andy Porter Photography

I climb through fields of purple flowers on the side of a ridge in the Wind River Mountains. At the top, I pause to look back over the terrain. The land tilts up at me in every direction. Treetops melt together forming a blanket of green, arching up from the lowlands, reaching onto the rock ledges guarding the rim of the valley. Pillars of granite burst through a wash of pine needles, declaring victory over time and erosion. At my feet, I see a white lupine and I cannot go home.

P O E T R Y

The Bitterness of Rodeo From a speaker in the rafters, an announcer asks, “How many of you travelled here from California?” A hundred people hoot from their seats in the stands.

The announcer counters that with, “Welcome to America.” The crowd busts into laughter. Cowboy hats nod approval. Belt buckles jiggle up and down from their positions on the topsides of Wrangler jeans. It’s a win for the bull riders and barrel racers.

But the joke belies the knowledge that the tide already rose. The old West sank into the surf of history.

Words Are What We Have in North Dakota He spent the decade of his twenties in the Sierra Range. His mother called on the first of October. She needed his help. A week later, he stands in his mom’s yard with a suitcase in his hand. When he looks into the distance, he feels like he is standing on the top of a bubble. His eyes miss the peaks that line his home in the Owens Valley. “Oh, well” he says, “We’ll make mountains out of the stories that we tell. We’ll build peaks out of our past. Words are what we have in North Dakota.” He doesn’t notice his mother behind the screen door on the porch. She says, “Words are all we ever have. It doesn’t matter where you go.”

Chad Hanson teaches Sociology at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming. His poems and essays have appeared in REED, Matter, Flyway, Third Coast, The Chariton Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. A collection of his work, Trout Streams of the Heart, was recently published by the Truman State University Press.

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Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Parallel Worlds The surface of the river hooks light into taut loops like a crocheted afghan some winter mother needles into glitter-lace flung against the bare gold of the levee.

The stars fell to earth and caught in the nets we tossed on the waters, she read to me once when I was five. ~ The skein of dusk unwinds in a swirl of dry bindweed; it tangles in the heartshaped leaves of cottonwoods, in willow skins, in pickerel weed. Night falls faster and faster on the littered shore where we stand talking in hoarse whispers, Mother.

P O E T R Y

Static She sits cooling in the shadows, hips immersed, knees

disappearing in fluid arcs, dappled curvatures, like some heavy shorebird rinsed in light, beside plumes

of willow. She would paint herself in as part riverbird if she could, stroke her arms iridescent, blend her

tear stained face to oxide wings ruffled over ocher cliffs on the opposite shore; her fleshy thumb is shaded in next

to milk-veined quartz. Here ancient mudflows cemented oxbloods and ivories, skull bones of horses, a white scum

of volcanic tuff. The thought of suicide muscles the picture— once—twice—three times. She blots out all the radio

voices that could drive her to it—“booze devils” her mother would call them.

The woven crucifix on her neck is wet with sweat. The clouds

oppress her like low flying angels.

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Stinson Beach The waves were crashing and the seals were yelping, calling us to attention, those of us tilted into ourselves, into a book, the pages flipping in the steady salt breeze, and those of us tossing the music of horseshoes, the good luck of horseshoe U’s clanging metallic against the brash fluid sound of the sea, where now two seals were leaping; shining and leaping; looking sunlit and joyous together as they slipped—so gracefully!— back down into the invisible.

Valley Heat Wave These afternoons are so oppressively hot, the body wants to trade its electron sheen for cool marble, its sweaty melting pot of atoms for a taut museum piece of pack; for wintry slabs rimed in frost; an arctic river churning north to the land of glaciers.

Nearby in a neighboring rice field, three snowy egrets stab a patch of shade, keeping icily aloof, hoarding their secrets.

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Numbers Game My fear of mathematics does not include my love for counting backwards through the years to tally the hours I’ve spent breathing: 496,464. And if I break each sweep of the clock down further into seconds, like a day laborer smashing the central stones of a ruined temple—if I use them (29,787,840) to pave an invisible highway to the moon I’d weigh 16.7 pounds there today; I’d have to tether myself to lunar dust just to keep from floating away. And if I could look back at my unspooled life from that vast distance, I’d see that I have crept very far along on the path to infinity, measured out this morning in footsteps and miles, as I walk steadily north past lindens and sycamores, poplars and ash, through meteor showers of Novembers and falling leaves.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press), eight previous small press collections, and a new online chapbook, Season of Change (Mudlark No. 46: http:// mudlark.webdelsol.com/mudlark46/cover_text_kellydewitt.html). For more information, visit her website at www.susankelly-dewitt.com.

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Candace Black

Geronimo’s Grave

Andrew Wynne http://www.andrewwynne.co.uk/

Prayer cloths whisper welcome in the tree above Geronimo’s grave.

I’ve come back four decades after flying west in my mother’s arms, wrapped in her mastitis fever, her breasts full of what the doctor said to deny me.

October. Days of rain and Medicine Creek have washed out roads, the red dirt of possession claiming its ancient contour.

Geronimo looked through barred windows to Mt. Scott, topped in photos by my parents and sisters, Daddy holding the youngest, my round shadow staining the ground below the camera.

P O E T R Y

Lent It was the season of penitence. Ice. Naked branches stark against the low light that bracketed short days.

If I believed every past sin tipped the balance—my catalogue of lies, betrayals, plotted murders, inattention, failures to act, loss of faith—I’d have repented.

Crossed a plaza on my knees like the abuelas in that Jalisco village. Fasted.

Denied myself small pleasures on a daily basis—the kind I’d miss most: fresh ground pepper, knitting.

Even apologized, the hardest act of contrition. But I talked myself out of it. Because I didn’t believe anymore. That I was responsible.

That I was the one dragging us down. My list of shit was no bigger—probably smaller—than other sinners’.

I couldn’t feel guilty as chevrons of geese flew north, so close I heard their wings when I went outside to find each day’s bad news. The ground was waking up.

It was almost audible. Sap racing. Roots extending their reach.

The earth, its memory second only to God’s, some say, granted absolution no matter what I did.

Candace Black teaches in the creative writing program at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her book of poems, The Volunteer, was published by New Rivers Press in 2003. Her chapbook, Casa Marina, won the 2009 Thomas Wilhelmus Award and was published by Rope Walk Press in 2010. To learn more about Candace, visit http:// mavdisk.mnsu.edu/blackc1/index.html

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Lyn Lifshin

Do I Really Have To Write About What Seems Most Scary?

Isn’t it enough I’ve fought against it with ballet classes every day, often more than one? Do I have to tell you about the letter from a woman who says, “Now in the gym the men stop looking”?

Do I have to joke, “Pull the plug if I can’t do ballet,” laugh when a friend says, “I didn’t sleep with him because I’d have to get undressed”?

Do I have to remember my mother saying she’d rather be dead than lose her teeth?

I think of the friend who says she doesn’t worry about what poem she’ll read but about what she will wear. Another says she wants plastic surgery but doesn’t think it’s right for someone in the arts: shouldn’t she care about loftier things?.

I think of another woman who will be photographed only in certain positions. Do I have to tell you what I’m thinking about isn’t death?

P O E T R Y

April, Paris Nothing would be less shall we call it what it is, a cliché than April in Paris. But this poem got started with some thing I don’t think I could do but it reminded me of Aprils and then three magazines came with Paris on the cover. Sometimes I’m amazed at all the places I’m not, let’s say Paris since actually it’s only March but in the magazines they are at outdoor cafés which must be quite chilly now. And I forgot the cigarette smoke, until I see many in the photographs are holding what I’m sure isn’t a pen. I wondered how they can always be eating, biting and licking something sweet and still have the most gorgeous bodies. I wonder too how my friend, once an actress, so maybe that’s a clue, could dress up in scanty, naughty, as she puts it clothes for her husband while I am sitting here in baggy jeans and torn sweatshirts. I’m wondering if it’s because he’s lost his job and she is trying to cheer him up.

I began thinking of Paris when she described the umbrella she decorated with drops of rain, how she just wore a garter belt under it. I thought of tear shaped drops of rain I made for the Junior Prom’s April in Paris, long before I felt the wind thru my hair on Pont Neuf.

It’s there in the photograph which I hope is more original than the idea of the photograph because I plan to use it on my next book. I wish I could feel what she must, dolled up, trying to soothe this man and getting off on it. As for me, only imagining you, the one with fingers on me, holding me on the page of a book could make me as excited

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The Woman Reading Tea Leaves “you will feel intensely but not for long.” I think how my Greek date’s face paled. Did I, even then, believe her? That wildness, hysterical nearly, all zing and pizzazz as Balanchine’s rubies. Are you surprised it’s my birthstone? Too often I am that woman in red shoes, obsessed to breathless, dancing in to fires and scorching lips, hips and hair. Too much burns like a building on fire. Heel walks, wagging hips and pelvic thrusts and heel stomps.

If I seem demur, hardly explosive, not even a garnet close enough to touch what’s under my hair

Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the United States. Her work has been included in most major anthologies of recent writing by women. Lyn received an MA of Arts from University of Vermont and 90 credits toward a Ph.D. from Brandeis and State University of New York at Albany. A documentary film about her, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made Of Glass, was re-released in 2013. Her most recent book of poetry, Tangled as the AlphabetThe Istanbul Poems, from NightBallet Press, was also released in 2013. For other books, bio, and photographs, visit her web site at: www.lynlifshin.com.

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Helene Pilibosian

The Literacy of Flowers The adolescent run blurred the edges of her studies as Maral prepared her palette for fundamental flowers.

Unfazed, her brush feasted on the green of stems and leaves and the skin of frogs while tulips held up their heads.

Belief abounded as concentration clipped sound.

The petals read assignments like miniature Houdinis, heeding the literacy given them.

The iris purpled under the cappuccino sky that looked drinkable with the froth of cumulus clouds.

Butterflies punctuated the picture, drawing comments and compliments that accrued to fascinating finds.

Her pencil sketched many facets of this scene— the coloratura garden, the gregarious friends, the red and blue emotions, the seeds of devotion, the soil of mild days and the long narration of botany’s legends to give to her friend.

Abigail Larson www.abigaillarson.com

They Saw with Silica Eyes The Colorado River gave body to the Grand Canyon and the Navajo, though it had a vision of its own.

The clip-clop of the chestnut horse explained this native form as the girl thought she was reborn when the plight of the arrow narrowed in embankment mud.

Pink and green cathedrals prattled in the canyon sunshine as blue jewelry walked its spirit on some new wrists and chests.

Buffalo hid behind the pages of history wrapped in the disguise of visitors who had climbed the hills where bears valued their fur.

Attuned to saloons and sheriffs talk, metals stayed in the mines.

The Canyon wisely swooned and bent the Colorado into its sphere.

People walked around and looked down, down, down to see no palpable ground.

Would something thrown thud? ~ Nearby power rammed the hills.

So many came to work that dam, to use it as a harness, to make a trail of technology.

People multiplied history, and water from the Colorado invited guests to its party.

Spirits of the Shoshone hovered near a small footbridge modestly announcing Nevada, Utah and Arizona, the meeting that made Lake Meade a water meets boat playground with sand teasing the knees.

She heard a father sing

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P O E T R Y of silica called jasper in jewelry with a joy-echo that emanated from mines of the ghost towns as the Rocky Mountains scrubbed the brush with shale and flush of sunrise, with the atmosphere of condor wings and with rocks mocking walls silently.

The Orchard Creed The Everydreams enjoyed the style of California’s hair with the power of gardenias and spray perfume of melons.

They ate the figs that sprinkled the scene with seeds that spelled sweet vitamins along buttered hills of yellow grass for an exploding population.

Healthy worms in the soil; tested and tempered acidity.

A scramble of dangling plum, orange, peach, nectarine and the all-important grape, which Dionysus and Bacchus often eyed with rites of fermentation from ancient Greece and Rome where wine fed ritual ecstasy.

The continuity led immigrants to Fresno to rule with hands and muscles that conquered land.

Mr. and Mrs. Garmirian, having overseen the farm’s accomplishments for 50 years, explained their earthy manners as crops personified their creed.

The counties lined up along the rolling hills— Sonoma, Mendocino, Napa Valley, Monterey and others.

Spanish missionaries had carried tradition

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when they planted grapevines inspired by the sun from the 11th century to the present.

Climate control strolled on theories fattened by the dry air as fruit that fit the logic of the lifestyle.

The people sipped luck from its own cup.

They also feasted on catalogs of seeds and tape recorders.

A lone lemon tree rooted in gravity soured the senses of the sun but sweetened them with sugar.

Reputation had a fruit effect debates reflected on.

Pleasing cups and pleasing plates proclaimed the richness of years as democracy added a deeper flavor.

Rare Ice, Warm Snow for the underbelly of the hills with performance personalities that list Shearer, the flower; Marx, the mustache; Rogers and Astaire, dynamite in shoes.

Bogart, the smoking trance; Peck, the power grower; Hepburn, the diamond tiara; Mamoulian sporting Silk Stockings and Blood and Sand.

A span of decades and still the public’s rubric likes reruns as it cajoles pretty puns.

Mogul fame and action tamed the dips in heroine conversations with subversive music to explain the intertwined emotions.

For international forays, the seclusion of the Bengal tiger

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P O E T R Y lectured on rural India where the parable of marriage threw its teeth into the jungle.

Actor and actress partied on the haven of Hollywood hills.

Speakable or unspeakable love knew the mobility of stars, slew monsters like Godzilla who interrupted the space of a summer of embraces.

Investments lit the street lamps as wisdom dropped in with a slow sell and prim pondered female dresses.

Graphics of Monument Valley winked at the red carpet.

But over the decades, graphics gained intensity and talkies became shockers.

I Remember Mama, Paramount the growling lion of MGM, Crosby, Sinatra and the rest reached the pinnacle of words.

De Havilland swooned as fame of fashion and luck glittered in the show-and-tell world.

Change: wizards of popularity filmed Lord of the Rings, renting a place named Somewhere.

Were you there when fantasy became the favor, even to where ice was rare and snow warm with the Hollywood horde?

Helene Pilibosian has worked as a newspaper editor and now heads Ohan Press. Her latest book, My Literary Profile: A Memoir, has been awarded honorable mention by the New England Book Festival. She has published three books of poetry: Carvings from an Heirloom, the Writer's Digest award-winning At Quarter Past Reality, and History's Twists (honorable mention). Many of her poems have been anthologized, and her early work has been cited in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. She holds a degree in humanities from Harvard University. For more on Helene, visit http:// home.comcast.net/~hsarkiss.

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Richard Robbins

Breeder Reactor

In 1961, an experimental reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory was destroyed when a control rod was removed incorrectly and a core meltdown and steam explosion resulted. Due to extensive contamination, the three persons killed were buried in lead coffins.

All their long half-lives under the same basalt as Craters of the Moon, all of their parts its own flat horizon now over brief sea floors of lead, darkness without weather, dark without promised breath box-to-earth-to-box, all of their human parts flat while the isotopes spin to keep one moment of them alive, the cloud coming their way a heated kiss, their eyes closed for its arrival, last front to move across their landscape, last half-second dream before the sickness.

P O E T R Y

Turpentine Sometime try forgetting the roar of melted glacier falling over stone toward whispering cities in the basin. Or a wad of paper flaring in an ashtray. Or in the hearth, the woods, the ash-level rushing to meet flame beneath the tipi made of sticks, the wind’s language launched at heaven. Sometime try forgetting the leg as it broke, quiet knuckle, or the melon-thump that day a speeding biker died into the curb. Or the silence all around him, and home. Sometime smell, sometime taste the last bite of fish and watch how it leaves you each time you swallow wine or breathe. What if her hand on your hand, still warm and floating only half its weight now all these years since the day— what if that weight dissolved fast as the taste of herbs on carrots, what if the eye having called it to mind had to send it away for good, her hand banished to the place memory never reaches again. His voice calls you to the creek. Sage smell like turpentine and high desert. Then the small tug from the world under water. The reeling. The flashing coming your way. Its dance across roils. Its breading each side of itself on the sand. Sometime try forgetting what you know.

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Calculation The anatomy of desire led to the mathematics of doubt, and that— over months and months walking alone through an iris garden drunk on its own perfume— that led usually to the calculus of grief or, in better days, those brief spells between each drizzling front in off the coast, in better days it led to the biometrics of tenderness, the economy of lip and eyelash, the sun coming through the window in sheets onto the tousled sheets of the bed, every limb akimbo as in an Escher print where one leg of the body, pencil-gray but alive, walks into the leg of the other, where one hand draws the hand that draws itself. So much calculation along the journey to affection, the emphatic ear lobe and clavicle, the opera of skin riding softly over each rib, the Giacometti of a neck, the little hairs there, the way only one side of mouth smiles at the other’s voice, two sides less often, the way the heat of them passes back and forth in the machinery of sex, the machinery of loneliness a kind of whisper sent out, called back before it reaches the ocean of another ear. So much calculation even after it ends: Crows paint matrices on the sky, placing their X’s there and there in an assembling, dissolving theorem, their loud fermatas

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P O E T R Y claiming not certainty, not doubt, not non-belief but a reckoning of wonder, high up on their currents, a black-feather hovering for months from that day forward over the multiplying, uncountable hearts.

Not a Runaway, Sometimes Lost The nearly pro semi-pro guitarist plants herself, cross-legged, near the ice cream store.

Old and young walk by with equal speed, no eye contact, no tip, no sign of pleasure as she climbs, descends the scales semi-well.

The left strap of her dress falls to upper arm as it has all day, sun burning a fret on the body-side wanting to make chords but only half-managing. Every hour a ferry lands. New people walk her way for sweets. She has come so far, she must think: On her own. A new town. No men. She’s learned the steadiness of song, the tune her lungs and fingers almost know, live inside, a home.

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Richard Robbins grew up in Southern California and Montana.

He studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees at the University of Montana, where he earned his MFA. He has published five books of poems, most recently Radioactive City and Other Americas. He has received awards from The Loft, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. He directs the creative writing program and Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University, Mankato. For more about his work, see http:// english2.mnsu.edu/robbins/.

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A R T

Lee Udall Bennion Canyons, Horses, and the AmericanWest

Moonrise in Cataract Canyon, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in, 2008.

A R T Born March 17, 1956, in Merced, California, Lee Udall Bennion moved to Utah in 1974 to study art at Brigham Young University. In 1976, she married ceramist Joseph Bennion and moved to the rural setting of Spring City, Utah.

She has three daughters and is active in the family-oriented life of Spring City.

After a six-year hiatus from school, Lee returned to Brigham Young University in 1983, where she earned a BFA in painting in 1986.

She has received numerous honors and awards from the art community. She was given the Utah Arts Council Artists Fellowship in 1988, the Utah States’ Governors Mansion Award in 2009, and Springville Museum of Art lists Lee as one of the 100 top living artists in Utah. She has been the featured subject of several articles and art periodicals and in a short video called Drawing Horses by Steven Olpin. She has served on the board of directors for the Utah Arts Council, representing visual artists of the state. Her work is sold through David Ericson Fine Art in Salt Lake City and is owned by art museums and private collectors throughout the west.

Self at 51, oil on canvas, 48 x 24 in, 2008.

Lee enjoys an active outdoor life with her husband, Joe, in the wilderness areas near her home in central Utah and that of the Southwest.

This involves many hours hiking or in the saddle on her horses, as well as backpacking and river running the desert canyons found in southern Utah and Arizona—especially the Grand Canyon. The feelings generated by the places she visits and loves are communicated in her paintings by the rich, intense colors of her landscapes even more than by the pictorial elements.

In addition to painting, running rivers, and trail riding on her horse, she is the maker of “Mom’s Stuff Salve—Superfood for Skin.” It is made from locally gathered pinyon pitch, comfrey from her garden, local beeswax and other nutritious ingredients. This and cards of her art work as well as original hand watercolored etchings are available on her website: momsstuffsalve.com.

Lee believes that the only real change in her work over the years has been her increased ability to get the paint to do what she wants it to do. That change is evident in the abundant detail, more complex symbolism, natural elegance, and greater delicacy of her more recent work. Although her beliefs and concerns have changed little over time, the increasing depth that a well-lived life endows is part of the increasing richness of her paintings. They truly portray who Lee Udall Bennion is in the most intimate and basic sense.

Blue in Hand, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in, 2008.

Sunset, Moonset, with Navajo Mountain and San Juan River, oil on canvas, 13.5 x 18 in, 2012.

The Artist on Her Craft The strongest desire I have when painting is that my work be beautiful and reflects the love and interest that I have in my subject.

I paint my life: objects, people, animals and places, memories and ideas.

My paintings start as line drawings done directly on the canvas with vine charcoal. The composition is carefully constructed at this time.

The color and the texture of the paint are also very important to me.

The paint, when viewed up close, is as interesting and beautiful as the overall view of the painting.

I use the model (the object of a still life, or a view) very little when painting, but more when I am drawing. While painting I work mostly from memory and intution, hoping that the colors and forms will speak about my view of what they represent and how I feel about them, rather than just capturing a likeness.

I hand carve and paint the frames for my paintings. I often put as much time and energy into the frames themselves as I do into the work on the canvas. The frames are an integral and organic part of an, in effect, combined art work.

My Life Still, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in, 2012.

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Grand Canyon—Two Yellow Boats, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in, 2009.

Adah with Amaryllis, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in, 2001.

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Morning Moonrise Grand Canyon, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in, 2004.

Small Blonde, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in, 2010.

Sundance, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 in, 2014.

Poppy, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in, 2009.

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Ellen and Bob, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in, 2008.

Baby in Basket, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in, 2009.

Tall Blonde, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in, 2008.

Poppies, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in, 2010.

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Prelude, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 in, 2014.

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P O E T R Y

Martin Ott

Caves of Los Angeles

There was once a valley and parched land that gulped water and settlers, underground aqueducts for manna rays and merfolk crooning chanteys beneath asphalt, drawing legions to explore the uncharted depths.

Bubble up in mouth froth and dew, beneath condor wings, airplane fumes.

There was once a weary traveler, who settled at a wine bar, noticing a woman in a wedding dress and combat boots, dark eyeliner and tear tattoos.

He was fixated on her chest where hung a murky blue broach the color of LA sky, and discovered that she had not opened it for fear of finding herself.

She let him fumble with the clasp in her bedroom covered with a carpet

P O E T R Y of clothes and unpaid bills to feel for the thin layer hidden there.

Rise to melodies of coffin and egg, lost things and unanswered rings.

The was once a unemployed man about to lose his home in North Hollywood, and he agreed to let a studio rip up his garage foundation to bury body parts for a small sum, for a film about an actor turned serial killer.

Plastic bone pieces were painted by art school grads, wrapped in duct tape strips and red tar. He saw hands stained in the business of the buried, even make-believe, but this opened hole and rubble, this wound, was real.

Don’t narrow the aperture to dusk.

Knock on air, and let yourself in.

A former U.S. Army interrogator, Martin Ott currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes poetry and fiction, often about his misunderstood city. He is the author of three books of poetry: Underdays (Notre Dame University Press, to be published in 2015), Captive (De Novo Prize winner, C & R Press), and Poets’ Guide to America (co-written with John F. Buckley). His debut novel The Interrogator’s Notebook, was published in 2013 by Story Merchant Books. His blog, writeliving.wordpress.com, has thousands of readers in more than 75 countries. Find out more at: www.martinottwriter.com.

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Leonore Wilson

Ode to Mustangs after a photograph by Hardy Wilson

Tumbling dust as one solitary male scrabbles over the monolithic Nevada desert. then another, with hooves kicking hard, sharp half-moons while phantom mice scatter into their canopied chamber‌ These are savages, inhospitable as the earth that skrawks and crackles beneath them, at the stub-end of summer.

Violence incarnate of the irreverent old west— listen to the meteorites hiss, like skatepunks on half-pipes,

P O E T R Y

bronze gods in their male fiefdom teeth scoured with salt manes whipped by wind— all tantrum a spew of emotions repeating this annual range ritual as the sweet mares graze elsewhere beneath the ribs of sheer mountains, oblivious to the awful neighing in the chill domain of the good gods’ dawn.

Leonore Wilson is on the MFA advisory panel at St. Mary's College. She has taught English and Creative Writing at various colleges and universities in the Bay Area. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Quarterly West, Pif, Third Coast, Madison Review, etc. She has been nominated for 4 Pushcarts. She is the poet laureate of Napa County.

Her new poetry book is Western Solstice by Hiraeth Press.

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Amy Spade

Saudade

The desert dusk rushes at me, catches tender-throated feelings, orchestrates them: a hummingbird’s purr like the soft brushstrokes of heart wings, rustle of wind in the sweep of scotch broom and peppergrass like breathy whispers, rhythm of crickets’ legs like a grand song of the earth, the limitless expanse of evening sky, azure and firey crimson, fading now to amber and midnight blue as another night without you descends, the moon a lovely, yellow crescent I’ll watch swell to full and then wane before I leave this desert place and see you again. To my bittersweet, glad longing, I surrender.

Originally from Detroit, Amy Spade lives and writes in Los Angeles.

She holds an MFA from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Nimrod, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Cottonwood.

P O E T R Y

Tom Hansen

Free Fall Your breasts are no longer boobs but saggers or flappers.

Each year they fall even farther in love with the law of gravity.

And my amazing, nightly uprising, muscle-hard jack in the boxers now only dreams of a resurrection destined never to come.

In the late afternoon of our marriage I am a man of parts: dentures, hearing aids, pace-maker, truss….

You with your back brace and bunion pads, your mismatched glass eye, your Depends— you are my dream-girl ideal.

At bedtime for foreplay we giggle and slowly dismantle each other.

On the backs of our transparent hands brown spots blossom like toad shit.

The feet of small carnivorous birds crimp skin on our faces and necks.

Our eyesight’s still good. Too damn bad!

Who wants to look in the mirror at the only friend we have left: the ugly stepsister truth?

How could we tell when we fell into this cobwebby well called old age, our journey from light to tumble-down night would strip us and beat us and leave us so wretched and funny?

Still, we hang on for dear life, dear wife, while softly whispers, O no you must let go for dear death….

In Time We seem to be a dance we do in time we keep.

In time we lose.

We sing our names on summer air.

They echo there.

They disappear.

In time we lose what time we had.

But what a dance we were or did!

Tom Hansen received his B.A. and M.A. in the mid-sixties from the University of Michigan, followed by two years of predoctoral work.

His poems most recently appeared in Atlanta Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Windhover, and the online journal Per Contra. In 2006 BOA published his first book of poetry, Falling to Earth.

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John Randolph Carter

The Last Train to Katmandu

John Randolph Carter

Bored, but enthusiastic, I relax my penumbra.

Several pint-sized strippers appear and proceed to make omelettes, bake bread and perform other domestic tasks.

If I were less occupied seeking insights, I might manufacture pint-sized burlesque houses so these strippers would have somewhere to go.

Somewhere portable.

All this reminds me of the time my Uncle Max took us to the circus and left us alone with the clowns.

The next thing we knew we were emerging from a tiny automobile in the center ring.

Which reminds me of the first time I read a book that I really enjoyed.

It was titled The Long and the Short of It. It was about a duck and a giraffe and how they became improbable friends both in size and geography and had bizarre adventures.

I’m Tired The recluse makes us shudder.

Then poke the wheel and summon demons.

But witches follow in swift pursuit.

Then summon salmon and have them swim backwards.

There is no rest when rascals rule the roost.

Then summon Simon, the Pie Man. Let him soothe the savage fire with pastry.

Let irony be the savory sauce.

We’d best request that the porcupine embrace us without causing pain.

Let me speak plainly.

I’ll come again when pudding is served.

The problem lies with silver silence.

Then probe until you find your solace.

My mic is dead. I have no watts.

Then come again when non is nonsense.

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Frantic Antics Gallons of Gadzooks Elixir are found by a mountain stream.

The noodle preserve is accused of larceny.

Rare curmudgeons discover Auntie Dotes.

From far away comes a strange thermometer.

Religion is only half the answer.

Solutions are found in warm water.

Lasting compost divers discover minions.

The Pope is pooping. The loot is lasting.

The magician is awash in guilt bubbles.

From inside the fort comes a call for help.

“Put aside fragile booties!”

This is not Betty Grable’s long lost underwear.

John Randolph Carter is a poet and artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poetry has appeared in journals including Bomb, The Cream City Review, LIT, Margie, North American Review and Verse. He has been the recipient of N.E.A., New York State Council and Fulbright grants. His art is in thirtytwo public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One-person exhibitions include The University of Michigan Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute.

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Cody Lumpkin

Old Man in the Hall of Nebraska Wildlife for Ted Kooser

Elementary school students tumble into the Hall of Nebraska Wildlife like elementary school students who don’t want to be here, even though a field trip is a day off from 64 color box crayons, math drills, and monkey bars.

They step on the backs of the shoes of the classmate in front of them and stare down at the stained, thin carpet that is probably older than their eldest sibling. They glance up occasionally to see the animals posed and stiff in their boxed wilderness. Just another day until an old man, hunched, wearing a mesh ball cap from a local gas station long extinct and a beige Members Only jacket begins to dart around the Hall

P O E T R Y like a sidewalk squirrel. His purple-veined hands, press the black buttons that bring this tomb to life.

There is the hawk’s whistle fade, the magpie’s yips like a machine gun, and the meadowlark with the confident trill of a soloist who hits the right notes and nothing more. Before the students and their chaperones realize it, the old man shoots his arthritic joints down the Hall to summon a growling badger from its den and the grunts of Buffalos in the runt, which sound like a jeep powering over a rocky outcrop. He is almost skipping, when he rushes to push the bird song buttons again to keep the cacophony.

The children, awake now, join in with hums and howls. They spin in circles like dust devils that will soon enough turn into nothing.

Cody Lumpkin was born in Georgia around hog-killing time. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in English at Marshall University and has served as a Senior Poetry Reader for Prairie Schooner. He has had poems published recently in South Dakota Review, Yemassee, and Tar River Poetry.

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Natalie Young

Jonah, Pinocchio and Whale

Being narcissistic the speaker feels he or she can add a flourish to the October leaves jotted and printed before—the fridge to freezer idea, the crunchy, flaking idea of fall.

He or she walks out the front door in the morning, and thinks the neighbor is also leaving.

In fact, it’s just the leaves hitting pavement with enough force to fake footsteps.

Unlatching the car door, he or she hears the ocean unfolding itself in a body of pancake-colored leaves.

Only a tree of substance can create foliage waves that ruffle into beach.

He and/or she rake into the middle of the papery sea.

He pushes seashells into the street, sweat trickles off his nose. She accounts the noise, fear of sharks, the idea of men swallowed into the bellies of whales.

She wouldn’t mind an evening meal of shrimp and krill.

He and she pull the water into crisp bronzed hills.

P O E T R Y

The End of This One Part The bird the one I was never to attach to is going away.

You say stressed, mostly I think sad.

Guilty.

A little angry you inherited this creature from a mother, who purchased on a whim.

A whim who will live longer than all of us.

We say he’ll be happier. I say we did the best we could.

Most people are doing the best they can. Singing.

Dancing. Berries.

Singing. Shouting.

Nuts. Singing. Toys.

The cage always locked.

He should have been free more. Held. Most people

aren’t doing nearly enough.

Natalie Young is a founding editor and graphic designer for the poetry magazine Sugar House Review. Recent and forthcoming publications include South Dakota Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, terrain.org, and others. She is a fan of Swiss cheese and May Swenson.

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Sarah A. Chavez

Full Again Rays of light like water spreading themselves over her skin like oil, pooling and evaporating, the pigment becoming brighter.

She never thinks to wear a hat.

On her walk to the grape fields, she sees those other women, light faces shaded in tightly woven hats, pruning their rose bushes in khaki culottes.

What a beautiful species, she thinks when, with embroidered handkerchiefs, they dab their glowing foreheads.

Until the lissome dusk descends behind the long straight rows, she reaches and picks and pulls and sorts. Strains her solid arms to grab, stoops low to swoop, peers deep into the vines and squeezes the grapes’ small roundness. She builds crates and folds boxes, hefts bushels onto the beds of trucks.

All day, she works.

In evening’s quiet the heavy denim, stained t-shirt, and ripped long-sleeved flannel lie, a marked version of herself on the floor of the bathroom.

She can just be female now: damp from the shower, breasts resting flat to either side, fingers daintily splayed against a soft stomach.

Sarah A. Chavez is a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley. She received her Ph.D. with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, So To Speak: a feminist journal of language & art, and North American Review among others. Her chapbook All Day, Talking is now available from Dancing Girl Press. For more information on Sarah, visit her website: www.sarahachavez.com.

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Rebecca A. Eckland

True West

Florida Institute for Instructional Technology

Way out in the land of the setting sun, Where the wind blows wild and free, There's a lovely spot, just the only one That means home sweet home to me.

If you follow the old Kit Carson trail, Until desert meets the hills...

W

e sang this song once, our fingers twisted around a metal chain while we pushed our legs high into the Stellar’s Jay colored sky. It was after school time when the freedom from bells sent the group of us into the school-yard to play and I saw the sagebrush-covered world from behind my fringe of sandcolored bangs. “Girl Scouts” time, the then-thing that kept me busy until my parents came to take me home. I was a Brownie, then, a rank I despised for the tawny-brown sash we were supposed to wear. (It was nothing like the vibrant green I had imagined.) Nothing is as you imagine it, though. Nothing like you thought.

My days as a Brownie: we learned the Nevada State song before turning our attention to knotting friendship bracelets from multi-colored yarn, or

learning to knit long, useless soft ropes with our clumsy hands, promising each other we’d be friends forever. Me and a redhead named Laura, who had freckles across the bridge of her nose and the largest stomach I’d ever seen. She was my fascination, for a while, especially when she said she and her dad had eaten an entire “Earthquake Sundae” from a local shop in downtown Reno together. You got your picture on the wall for that sort of thing. I was jealous of her celebrity status.

Or the few times we went camping in the Sierra Nevada. Once, while sleeping in tents and crowded around an open flame dripping with burnt marshmallows, we sang the Nevada state song, interspersed with another one of our favorites: beans, beans the magical fruit. Or, at the last camp which was one with wooden cabins, in the moun-

tains, in that vast somewhere of distant memory smelling of pine and the tiedye still drying on our fruit-of-the-loom cotton shirts and of the dirt and soil that burrowed under our fingernails and into our skin so deeply, it took weeks of baths to wash it all away.

Or maybe that’s not what I’m getting at exactly. It was beneath the dirt, somehow. The way it clung to all of us in equal measure to the time we spent out there, in the West I remember.

I wondered if there was something in it I’d missed when I was otherwise occupied with my university life, comprised of French Existential Philosophy and the declination of verbs in Anglo Saxon. Yet, driving home, I wanted, suddenly and for the first time in my life, a child with whom to subject this song, if for nothing other than another curious detail of her mother’s past. A cultural artifact of Mom, distinct and precious and disappearing and yet, timeless. Distinct.

But the meaning is slippery. After all Nevada, means, snow—not sage— covered.

We stopped singing as we grew up and apart. Kumbaya and Nevada’s song beyond embarrassing when you’re in high These days, coyotes school and just plain At sixteen years old, Nevada’s get to me and horny tired of rural Nevada. endlessness was a monotony, toads, too— like the The other kids my one I caught and held age tried to forget and the most uncool thing in the palm of my about it by drinking was to love the West. I said I hand one summer themselves beyond when I was twelve senseless in the middle hated it. I acted like I did, too, and the warmth of my of the desert, outleaving for France my junior palm made the little side Spring Creek, year of high school. But now toad, with his spines Nevada— as if there at the age of 31, I find myself around his eyes and were an inside. They siena-pear-shaped flat called the place “the saturated in nostalgia. body, fall asleep. I was middle of nowhere,” walking with a tall girl which suggested its who lived across the street—Megan— fringes would include the one-stoplight and her mom and two siblings through town with its single grocery store and the desert. Her mom was an avid bar. walker, I remember, and asked me to At sixteen years old, Nevada’s come along. Scampering across the endlessness was a monotony, and the trail was the flat-bodied horny toad. most uncool thing was to love the West.

I’d cornered him beneath a sage brush I said I hated it. I acted like I did, too, and lifted him, concealed between my leaving for France my junior year of hollowed out palms. He never squirted high school. But now at the age of 31, I blood from his black eyes once; othfind myself saturated in nostalgia. And erwise, I know I’d have dropped him. though I hardly remember those others Instead, he spread himself flat and his I sang those songs with, I unexpectedly eyes drooped and he fell asleep, his remembered it driving South on Highbreathing seeping into me through the way 395 on a trip back one summer to skin. He must have traveled a good visit my parents who still live there, in three miles that day, out and around a that place of sage and pine.

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Ask anyone who’s driven through Nevada if it’s beautiful. They’ll tell you “no.” It takes a certain eye to see the beauty there. I read once that the kind of eye it takes is one that replaces the need to see “green” for “brown.” I’m not quite sure that’s it, though, because there are meadows and forests there, too, if you know where to look for them. circular path cut by mule deer and pack horse.

At the end of the day, my parents made me let him go, saying he’d die if I didn’t let him run into the desert.

So, walking slowly to the edge of our yard—where the sagebrush began—I set him down just as the last rays of sun dropped below the horizon where there was a distant rumble of summer thunder coming from behind the mountains. His eyes opened then, suddenly cold, and he scampered away, blending in with the large landscape, as though consumed.

All those other things—the sagebrush and bitterbrush and deer trail that hover on the verge of extinction in my memory—still have a foothold in the places where my parents live, miles from towns and more miles from me.

My mind squints to remember them, and yet I can’t, quite. It’s like that light at dusk when the wind’s blown all day and the desert itself becomes a blur.

So, too, with the coyote. Despite the rancher’s best efforts, the coyote is still doing all right—still commanding the scavenger scene, still killing

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rabbits and the stray domestic cat.

After all, we know this from the names of animals we no longer call home: Spooky, Boots or Shadowcat—they’re out there becoming desert, eroding to soil, by now. And the hawks, who circle high looking for prey. There’s plenty of mouse and rodent here, their carrion.

And as for the rest: well, garbage creeps up more than it used to in the desert.

Hub caps, especially, missing the cars that tried these rough, unpaved roads on for size. Perhaps Nevada is everybody’s wasteland. It’s my wasteland of memory.

Ask anyone who’s driven through Nevada if it’s beautiful. They’ll tell you “no.” It takes a certain eye to see the beauty there. I read once that the kind of eye it takes is one that replaces the need to see “green” for “brown.” I’m not quite sure that’s it, though, because there are meadows and forests there, too, if you know where to look for them.

Nevada-beauty is something else: an aesthetic of detail. Or, of patience.

Will I return once more or should I stay in the comfort of San Francisco Bay? It depends on the exchange rate and my ability to secure a job here or there. Culture vs. culture is never an easy choice. This makes me feel disloyal somehow, this preference I have for trees and greenery and a place where ivy can grow and sage does not. Where it rains instead of snows and there’s actually a thing called fog that rolls in, turning the place pensive. But it’s not quite that, either. There’s nothing free here. You have to buy a permit to run the local trails when, in Nevada, all you have to do is find them.

One of the reasons I stay in California, though, is that I can see myself teaching a class on the Literature of the

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West. We’d consider Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and though not Nevada, he still wrote about a place that was his home, that was dry, and that, like the vastness of the Great Basin, became less vast and disappeared into a populace.

Or, Mary Austin who lived outside Independence, California—a valley mere miles from where my parents live in Nevada.

And since everything in Nevada— outside Las Vegas—begins with geography, I would unfold a large map of the true American West and trace the country Abbey, Austin—and I—write about. I’d locate their homes—his, a dot beneath Lake Powell that was once Glen River Canyon. And then I’d draw a dot, some hundreds of miles to the northwest, to where I am from, Spring Creek. After all, sometimes in the True West space is larger than you think because towns—and other points of reference—are so far apart. And in class, we’d marvel at those spaces in between.

Most importantly, I’d ask my imaginary students if there are words they come across they do not know, or concepts. It would be like teaching French, only I wouldn’t have to worry about my accent. And I would get to translate for them.

Sagebrush, they might say. That came up in France, too. What is sagebrush?

Try explaining that to a person who’s never known. It’s our State Flower, I’ll say, but it’s not a flower, though it’s a plant that does flower, a low-lying bush.

Smelling like a herb when it sweats, like creosote, but softer. With little yellow flowers in spring, branches more tending toward gray than green, no taller than my knees. A place for snakes to rest beneath when the temperature rises, or a refuge for lizard, snake and mice.

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Horny toad. Rattlesnake. Mule deer. I can’t wait to do this: for the first time in my life, I’d be a guide and not a follower. The West, after all, is not just another region. It’s also another way of seeing things. A way of knowing. Without trees, you get to see for miles.

Margaret Atwood once asked, “Where is the North, exactly?” She asked in an essay which described her trip North to Ontario to see the place where she was from. The first time I read it, I didn’t understand. I’d thought: North is Up. North is where the magnet points. North is where Polaris is. But now, I understand. And now, I ask a similar question: Where is the West, exactly?

It’s not only a place, but a cardinal direction, the one pointing Left on a page. But you know, location is relative.

Ask anyone, they’ll tell you California’s West of everything. But California’s not. I live in California and have to drive East to meet True West.

Wherever it is, there’s a lot of it.

I’ll stand at CG’s Bar—in Wellington, Nevada—and imagine a line traveling West past the horizon and the sunset line and beyond that, too, across the Pacific and Asia and Europe, the Atlantic and inevitably make it back again. That line, drawing West, would somehow hit East again, ending up in Asia—or not ending—but traveling through— back through oceans and

The West, after all, is not just another region. It’s also another way of seeing things.

A way of knowing. Without trees, you get to see for miles.

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E S S A Y sunset, our conscious mind is directed toward the grand finale: the end of one life, the beginning of another. An erasure of the past, a chance to start anew.

Or I don’t know, maybe I’m full of shit.

But every time I stand before a Nevada sunset, there’s a grand suggestion of finality, our mind yearning for a period to end the garbled sentence of thought.

Yet, True West rests in the backs of our minds, always. The Final Frontier.

There’s something, a feeling, nipping at us, calling us back, asking “Just one more time.”

Back to what? Maybe it’s the thought of an endless horizon. Or of possibility...of going back into the past.

Or of exploring an unknown future.

In any case, it’s a chill in the morning dawn, always present here, even in summer.

When we face West to a brilliant sunset, our conscious mind is directed toward the grand finale: the end of one life, the beginning of another.

An erasure of the past, a chance to start anew. Or I don’t know, maybe I’m full of shit. But every time I stand before a Nevada sunset, there’s a grand suggestion of finality, our mind yearning for a period to end the garbled sentence of thought. Yet, True West rests in the backs of our minds, always. The Final Frontier.

There’s something, a feeling, nipping at us, calling us back, asking “Just one more time.” seas—to New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Boulder, Salt Lake City—until it crossed out my eyes in strikethrough as though to remind me that I was looking in the wrong direction.

It’s not hard to imagine this immenseness when you’re standing on the top of one of Nevada’s lonely peaks. You can look and look forever.

Across prehistoric ocean floors, forests that have turned to stone and eroded away, and even into the soul of stars.

Map projections make it loom larger— or smaller—depending on the map. It’s not only geographical space, it’s space related to body image. The smallness of (us) compared to the largeness of (West) that cannot be ignored.

When we face West to a brilliant

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Where does the West begin?

Every place—every house, every neighborhood and city and country— has something that lies to the West of it. Follow the long stretch of I-80 from the Continental Divide—Colorado and into Utah’s Salt Flats. From there you’ll come across Wendover, the town of two time zones, then Wells, Elko, Carlin, Battle Mountain, Winnemucca, Fallon, Fernley, and Reno. Then you can cross the border from Nevada to California in the height of the Sierra Nevada Range.

Of course, where the West begins (and, perhaps ends) is a matter of opinion. Is it the Continental Divide of the high Rockies? Or should the West start earlier, in those great expanses where economies still rest on old forms of work—of massive fields of corn or ranching? Is Mid-West West? Are you in the West when you see a man dressed in Wranglers with spurs on his boots and a Stetson, sitting atop a quarter horse, his breath smoking in

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the cold-crisp of dawn? Is West where towns double as truck-stops along a lonely stretch of highway? Is it the first gift shop selling rugs made of alpaca wool? Is the West the oldest town in Nevada—and the argument continues. Was it Dayton—a cow town—or Genoa—the first Mormon settlement— that was really Nevada’s first? Each town’s bar claims the title.

Genoa wins because it’s in the state song. The one that got me thinking about Nevada in the first place: If you follow the old Kit Carson trail, Until desert meets the hills, You certainly will agree with me, It’s the place of a thousand thrills.

Genoa is (supposedly) the place of “a thousand thrills.” Perhaps it was bigger, once, than it is today, more than just a state park with a wooden fence around it and two restaurants, and that old-timer bar with a dusty bra hanging from the antlers of a deer-head. Genoa might have been more than a single street strung along the foot of the Eastern Sierras. I can imagine it might have been thrilling, once: it was the place of water in the midst of a dry landscape.

It was where cattle and crop could flourish. But maybe it isn’t a question of more. I’ve found that sometimes more is, really, just more.

When is the West?

When I was sixteen, West was the prison that held the landscape in check, the thing that kept me in—that kept me stuck tangled in sagebrush. We all thought that. Especially if we’d been there awhile, those girl scouts and boy scouts all grown up, finding themselves lost in high school. And them: drinking in the middle of nowhere, that dirt trail leading us to a place beyond the range-

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cattle and the dim twinkling of porch lights at night. That place of dirt and dry and sage with the imprints of kegs and black-burn marks from open fires lined with stones in the sand which would wait to be erased by wind.

It was the West that killed us, we thought. It was the place—not us—that did it. The way a Jeep got overturned one night headed back (or out?) of nowhere, speeding too fast and over a rock, cornering the wrong way. One body was smashed into the desert floor that night, surrounded by the twinkling of broken glass, reflecting moonshine like stars. Or another months later, a shotgun went off in the passenger seat of the cab of a pick-up truck, straight into a sixteen-year old head, headed home to pasture. We never knew if it was an accident or not. And the others—three at once—stuck in a Honda Accord between two semi trucks and a tunnel miles out of Carlin along I-80.

Headed West, sandwiched so thin the coffins had to be closed.

And me: refusing to eat until my kidneys nearly checked out. The West was the opposite of what we’d always

It’s hard not to notice the kitschy outposts that dot the road. Native Americans selling mockeries of things they might have once made. “Handpainted” pots not painted by hand. Rugs from animals not kept in this part of the world in patterns from another continent.

Tobacco, the cure-all for us all, but the thing that killed them.

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E S S A Y wanted. Perhaps that is why most of us I pointed past the glass to where left. he was. My first thought: the cats are Where does the West end? outside. Old Tuna and Meows—sixEach time I come back, I notice teen is pretty old for a cat—were born that the ranches are more sparse and when I was a freshman in high school. drier than usual. The trees—what little That’s what made me point. After all, there are of them—seem less and less I thought, seeing the coyote would be alive. More stretches of dead emptiness enough. He’d see me and dash back appear, with the edges of near-rotted into that vastness I came in search of. fence suggesting a more lucrative past.

But instead, I hear a mechanical Or maybe that’s just me—being gone click behind me and Mom’s partner’s for years at a time got a gun. A long makes memory a rifle—don’t ask me When I was twelve, I remember fictional thing. the caliber—and his lying my cheek flat on the But it’s hard not eyes are already in to notice the kitschy the sights, aiming at desert floor once the horny toad outposts that dot the moving target, skittered to freedom. The light the road. Native tracing his way en route from twilight to night.

Americans selling along the periphery mockeries of things perhaps a quarter If you sat there long enough, they might have of a mile away. He it would happen. The change once made. “Handstealthily slides out from browns and grays to rosy painted” pots not the glass door to the painted by hand. patio, not before tellpinks and warm-hued yellows, Rugs from animals ing Mom and I to be cerulean fading to the navynot kept in this part quiet, to be still. He violet of evening as though this of the world in patcan hear you. terns from another It doesn’t take was beauty’s destination. continent. Tobacco, long. There’s a sharp the cure-all for us pop from the gun all, but the thing that and the sort of yelp killed them.

I never wanted to hear as I watch the It’s the coyote, though, that gets to slinky body of the coyote crumple to me. The desert-dog. The eater of cats the dust. This is True West, I tell myself, and sheep. My mom’s partner tells but somehow I haven’t yet arrived. me that the farmers get in planes now, hunting the coyotes by the dozen from The weather: so much warmer than the air, leaving their carcasses to rot the year before. My eyes narrow, waitin the fields until those carrion birds ing for the August thunderstorms. I come, wide-winged, in search of meat. know they’ll come around dusk when I saw a coyote at the very edge of they always did. You have to wait to their property, my first morning back see it—the beauty only comes after a in what I thought was True West. A wealth of patience. When I was twelve, steaming cup of black coffee in hand I remember lying my cheek flat on the amidst a vibrant rose-colored sky, I desert floor once the horny toad skitspotted his gray rag-tail body weaving tered to freedom. The light en route in and out among the low-lying brush. from twilight to night. If you sat there

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long enough, it would happen. The change from browns and grays to rosy pinks and warm-hued yellows, cerulean fading to the navy-violet of evening as though this was beauty’s destination.

Mostly, though, I remember the rumble before the rain.

I sit on the front porch of a house I didn’t know growing up, scanning the horizon above the mark of land.

The sky’s clear, for now. There’s birds circling our periphery, searching for what I know lies there. I wait, though, for the storm.

It’s dark when the rumble comes.

But it’s only a lightning storm, miles distant from this place I once knew and felt at home in. A place farther West, perhaps.

Rebecca A. Eckland received an MFA in Nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2012. She also holds two master degrees—in English and in French—from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her work has appeared in the online journals The Barnstormer, Caught in the Carousel and USMS.org. She has also contributed to 3/Go Magazine, The Rudder Magazine, Reno News and Review, Tahoe Quarterly and Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover’s Soul.

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William Kamowski

Back to the Dream Elkhorn, Montana, 1870—2___?

Magdalen Wojtowicz

D

uring the family move to the “Treasure State” in 1985, a memorable bumper sticker on a well-labeled pickup truck passed us by on Interstate 90. In delightful ambiguity, it proclaimed, “Montana is what America used to be.” Is that good or bad? I wondered, though I was pretty sure the author of that declaration hadn’t intended any ambiguity but only a nostalgic gesture of local patriotism.

I didn’t begin to appreciate the many other possible meanings of that bumper sticker for another fourteen years when our daughter Gwen grew curious about both ghosts and ghost towns. To deflect her interest in the direction of history, my wife and I gave her Donald C. Miller’s book Ghost

Mark Moreau’s Doghouse, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011.

Towns of Montana, and that led to a family vacation in the summer of 1999, exploring the abandoned towns among the state’s Rocky Mountain ranges. In our week on the road, we saw a good deal of what Montana used to be, from Garnet to Pony to Virginia City to the natural history museum in Bozeman, the Museum of the Rockies—our first stop, actually, which lent coherence to our divided fascination with extraction and extinction.

When we first set out, we each had different ideas of what we meant by “ghosts,” from the minor demons of wincing floorboards to lingering spirits in skeletal homes. And none of us had given much thought to the fact that most western ghost towns

are, of course, mining settlements that flourished for a relatively short while, depending on what one means by “flourished”: in Montana, Castle perhaps 8 years, Granite 10 years, and Elkhorn a remarkable 20 plus years after 1870, when Peter Wys discovered a rich silver deposit there. These were all towns that sprung from the rich harvest of geological time only to fade in a few years to sketchy records of a short-lived enterprise. Some remained completely abandoned, like Castle and Granite; others sparsely inhabited, vital in one building but sepulchral in another, like Marysville and Elkhorn, two towns where the dream of precious metal mining has recently recurred in earnest.

Elkhorn was the most memorable of our stops, some 25 miles south of Helena in the Elkhorn Mountains. Although the town in 1999 scarcely recalled the booming settlement of 2,500 people in its heydays of the 1880s, its several dozen remaining wooden structures still seemed a rather “complete” collection of homes, shops, hotel, meeting hall, and saloon, upright or at various angles to the four winds.

A serviceable dirt road, the old Main Street, climbed the slow slope of the town past the meeting hall and hotel and carved wooden signs, one testifying to the former location of a barber shop that was moved to Nevada City, a rich gold town of the 1860s but today an outdoor museum of historic buildings in tourist-rich Alder Gulch. Gone also were the Elkhorn Trading Company store, the Miners’ Clubhouse, and the general store

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of Henry J. Shriner who came from Wickes in 1888 to sell everything from nails to flour to confections just before the invention of inexpensive chocolate and the Hershey bar.

Still surviving were Mobeck’s Cabin, the neighboring shoemaker’s shop, the mine watchman’s cabin, and Mark Moreau’s “doghouse” out back of a home long gone. Shelter for the husband temporarily out of favor with his wife, this doghouse was a sturdy little one-room cabin, still well-squared after a century—the product of the husband’s self-interested handiwork, no doubt.

Besides the restored Fraternity Hall and Gillian Hall, adopted in the 1970s by the Western Montana Ghost Town Preservation Society and now offered to the public as a miniature “state park,” only a handful of the original buildings showed any signs of upkeep. Unlike the preserved and restored ghost towns of Garnet and Bannack, Elkhorn appealed more for its natural decay.

Just before the bend in the road on the high end of town, an ore chute protruded from a box-like building, which was all that remained intact of the mill-

Magdalen Wojtowicz

Gillian and Fraternity Halls, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011.

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E S S A Y E. & A.R. WENSTROM. Died July 28, 1889.

Aged 4 Mos. 15 Ds.

Magdalen Wojtowicz

Chute at Front of Millworks, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011.

works, scattered in ruins alongside the tailings heap behind it. Here, a larger view of history imposed itself: another tilted sign proclaimed that William Jennings Bryan had delivered a version of his “Cross of Gold” speech on this very spot. In the soft, quiet wind, it seemed a struggle of memory and imagination to recover Bryan’s vigorous words: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Very few orators have ever been so very eloquently wrong. Bryan’s pleas for a silver standard, reiterated in this silver-mining town, were to fall as flat as the market in the 1890s. But the great words of the great orators are not valued for their accuracy: they have a certain truth in their error, asserting the vision over the fact.

The road bent again to the right across the high side of town, stretching through a thin stand of pine trees toward the cemetery and the record of a more poignant tragedy. From 1888 to 1889, a wave of diphtheria took many of Elkhorn’s children, as the tombstones attested: ADA V. DAU. OF

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ROSE DAU. OF WM. & NETTIE ROBINS. Died APR. 3, 1889.

Aged 11Ys. 2 Ms. 18 Ds. Gone ere sin could blight or sorrow fade.

Some of the worn inscriptions evinced a formal if homely dignity, along with an awkward yet earnest pathos: GOLDIE COLE Died Aug. 16, 1889.

Aged 5 Yrs. & 5 Mo’s.

“Rest babe on Jesus bosom, All free from care and pain; A few more springs may blossom, And we will meet again.”

Among these visible dead were so many others whose grave markers had decayed to unreadable remnants.

Still more no doubt had vanished altogether, including the grave of the first-born child of Dr. and Mrs. Dudley, who came to Elkhorn on a sleigh, a newly married couple straight from their Christmas-day wedding at Butte in 1886, and left with their grief in 1889.

The death of children must have been a chronic tragedy, hardly confined to the diphtheria epidemic, as one

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gravestone, crowned with the figure of a lamb, from a decade later reminded: ANNIE OPIE DIED Jan. 21, 1898 Æ. 1 Yr 3 Ms 16 Ds Thy hands are clasped upon thy breast.

We have kissed thy lovely brow. And in our aching hearts know. We have no Dar ling now.

So many of these graves were elaborate little affairs, some marked by ornate marble-like headstones, others charted by rectangular fences of wrought iron rods or wooden pickets.

Within the enclosure of more than one fenced grave, a tree had thrust itself up irreverently, oblivious roots draining the once hopeful breast of a silver miner who had died of harsh labor and a drafty house. The miner had become the mine.

ing town razed for lumber,” declared the headline in the Billings Gazette in August, 2003. Mr. Hilton Hern, owner of Montana Rustic Lumber, was dismantling several of Elkhorn’s structures, principally for salvage, with a gesture of respect in the direction of history. “There’s over a million board feet of lumber that we’ve salvaged,” said Hern. Among the fated buildings, the Metropolitan Hotel was scheduled for reassembly as a display piece at a ski resort: “We want people to know that we’re saving history.”

Even so, the bulk of the lumber would be set to new use: “probably slated for siding someone’s home, for interior wainscoting or for picture frames,” wrote the skeptical AP journalist. From such a large harvest of decorative lumber, somewhere even today, a woodcrafter may still be mitering strips of rustic Elkhorn into picture frames.

Very likely those frames will dress scenes conceived in lamentable aesthetics: some awkward, puzzled moose sharing a stream unwillingly with its

Leaving Elkhorn that August of 1999, I wanted to think that this slowly fading ghost of a town would survive another hundred years.

But Elkhorn is now perhaps half the artifact it was fifteen years ago when we first visited it, for it has had more than the elements of the natural world to contend with.

As our new century began, the slow decay of the town was sadly quickened: “Crumbling history: Last of min-

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Magdalen Wojtowicz

Grave of Annie Opie, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011.

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E S S A Y wildlife photographer; a nineteenthcapital interests of St. Louis, New York, century mining town etched from the and even Europe (for a time the Elkmemory of a dusty western movie. horn mine was owned by an English Instead of cynical, I suppose, one syndicate). could be philosophical, even resigned, They slapped their towns together about the town’s accelerated decline. in a flurry of optimism and abandoned After all, it will someday succumb them just as quickly, sometimes exuentirely to decay; and decay itself, berantly to follow the word “gold” to to borrow historian Leah S. Glaser’s another stream in another mountain words, is “part of the organic nature of range, sometimes more reluctantly in the broader historical landscape,” the defeat, as at Elkhorn, when the more drift in time to which fragile silver dreams everything leans. But dissolved into the it is tempting to say inscrutable murk of They slapped their towns that the dismantling politics and economof Elkhorn’s buildings together in a flurry of ics. Theirs was at first came as the predictoptimism and abandoned them a life of instant gratiable upshot of our own fication from the easy era, when history, as a just as quickly, sometimes placer wealth at the means of understandexuberantly to follow the word surface, but that life ing ourselves, holds soon yielded to the “gold” to another stream in a place of little value slower returns and another mountain range, in our national vision, more complex labor while commodity of hard-rock mining. sometimes more reluctantly remains, as always, Their quest evolved in defeat, as at Elkhorn, privileged. True, from the dream of when the more fragile silver something of the sort treasure skimmed might be said of the from a stream bed to dreams dissolved into the original Elkhorn, for it the realities of deeply inscrutable murk of politics was built to mine the buried ore that had treasure of natural his- and economics. to be drilled, blasted, tory with scant regard carted, crushed, sortfor the genesis of that ed, roasted, amalgamwealth. Ironically, the ated, concentrated, remnant town has itself been mined, and shipped to the smelters for its gold, its fading record of success and failure silver, and lead. transcribed into sawmill statistics.

The mining and milling apparatus to do all this is astounding: drills, Most men who make history care dynamite, water pumps, cable and ice very little about it. The miners of the lowered into sweltering depths, hopold West made history with little per cars on small gauge rails running thought, apparently, to the kind of through dank adit tunnels, underancestors they would be. Like the ground mule barns, horse and mule trappers, who left a scant legacy of teams above for trains of ore wagons, themselves, the miners were self-exiled and teamsters finessing the “ribbons” questing adventurers, who gave over to guide those teams slowly down the most of the wealth they found to the mountainsides from the mines to the

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City—the quieter stories are now no mills where piston-like stamps and more than suggestions in the stubborn mercury solutions in monstrous vats ruins of less raucous towns like Elkseparated stone from metal. In some horn. Today’s visitors to Elkhorn tease cases the mathematics is staggering: a out the smaller scenes, the softer ficfour-thousand-foot flat braided cable, tions, the ordinary ghosts that may yet to pull 5 tons of ore up a mine shaft, linger: envisioning the mill foreman’s weighed 12 ½ tons—12 ½ tons of cheap wife papering the parlor walls, the metal hauling up 5 tons of ore for gold cart teamster smoking patiently below and silver that would be measured in the chute that fills his wagon with ounces. pulverized ore, the school girl in late The countless scraps of machinery afternoon crossing Main Street to buy a still rusting at the Gold Creeks, the Gilt nougat from Ford’s Candy Store.

Edges and the Elkhorns—a dredger bucket half-sunk in a stream bed, a As devotees of history and beneficiapiston rod that lost its engine—are but ries of hindsight, we can be comfortable a small fraction of what once mechawith our imaginative reconstructions, nized the mines and mills, and yet this even smug about discarded lessons of surviving fraction of industry probably the past that we now choose to resoutweighs all the gold and silver that cue. But we should recall that modern that machinery sent to market. The historians like Hayden White and, more implications of these relics are clear recently, Beverley Southgate, tell us enough in hindsight: if you wanted to that there is no such thing as history make money from gold and silver minas we used to think we knew it. They ing in nineteenth-century America, you tell us rather that “recorded” history is should have invested in the machinnarrative, a story—neither what actuery—in iron and steel—not in the gold ally happened in the past, which we and silver. cannot know precisely, nor inarguable In Elkhorn’s best years, $14 million facts certified by the printed page. As worth of silver came from the sweat and aches of a thousand miners and mill workers more or less, 500 woodcutters, an unknown number of wives and soiled doves—and too many children lost.

Outside of the cemetery, very few among these many have left any trace of themselves, even in folklore. Alongside the boisterous popular lore—like the legends of Henry Plummer, his “road agents,” and their Magdalen Wojtowicz enemies the Vigilantes Doctor’s Office, later the Mine Watchman’s Cabin, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011. at Bannack and Virginia

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True, to a point, we choose what becomes the past. But there, then, is the beauty and the gift of a town like Elkhorn that partly allows and partly denies us that choice.

Certainly, we can pick through the remnants of Elkhorn for what is interesting or important, or for what we find a thought in, but the “fact” is that most of the choices have already been made for us over time—one wants to say, by time. We can only select from what the vandals, the elements and happenstance have spared.

storytelling, history is what we choose to focus on, what we find interesting or even useful; how much we choose to write and how we arrange the contents.

True, to a point, we choose what becomes the past. But there, then, is the beauty and the gift of a town like Elkhorn that partly allows and partly denies us that choice. Certainly, we can pick through the remnants of Elkhorn for what is interesting or important, or for what we find a thought in, but the “fact” is that most of the choices have already been made for us over time— one wants to say, by time. We can only select from what the vandals, the elements and happenstance have spared.

And so, we can see a sloping stable or the stained, muted wallpaper of a once stylish house, or the sagging transport wagon at the foot of town.

But we cannot see the Northern Pacific

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railroad tracks that were taken away decades ago, nor the 125-foot trestle that thrilled the train passengers on the spur through the Elkhorn gorge.

We can no longer even note the very spot on which William Jennings Bryan delivered his oration, because the sign that still marked the event as of 1999 is now gone. And who put it there in the first place?

Even the “reality” of the emptied mining towns today, at Castle, Garnet, Comet, Elkhorn, belies the originals.

For the modern visitor to these towns, the noisy pell-mell construction of building after building to house the men and machines, the fierce din of tunneling and milling, are overgrown by silence. The regrown forests obscure the brief old boom scenes in a guise of quaintness, romance, and beauty, where a natural vitality is reclaiming human ruins. But the surviving black and white photos of the boom days in the gold and silver towns witness a drear indifference to nature, romance, and beauty. The old scenes of those heydays were bleak landscapes of the trim, the slapdash and the ramshackle all wedged together into the creases of denuded mountains whose trees had fed the appetites of mine, mill, and town for timber and fuel. It’s really only the modern visitor who brings to these scenes an unlikely aesthetic, an appreciation of an imagined beauty that makes a new fiction of the lost original.

History, relics, and now fiction: Elkhorn—almost any Montana ghost town—begins and ends in fictions. It begins with a fiction of self-deception: the imagined expectation of ready wealth. But fact arrives: the new mine lures more men than it keeps; or the mine closes when the lode pinches out

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sooner than hope had predicted. The men, and their families if they have any, leave their cabin, shack, or boardinghouse—some for further expectation and self-deception, others to return to the East that they have helped to enrich by impoverishing themselves. They leave the town to decay into a century they have never thought of. The hollow town becomes a story, many stories, in its text of decaying artifacts: the solitary bank vault still standing in Granite, the lone smelter stack at Wickes, the plywood-shuttered boardinghouse at Southern Cross, the schoolhouse stuck a-kilter in the stream at Coolidge.

Among the few certain facts is this one: the history of Montana mining is much more a record of failure than of success, though the booms captivate the memory: the rare wealth at Grasshopper Creek where Bannack became the first capital of the Montana Territory in 1864; the richer, even rarer, harvests in Alder Gulch where Virginia City claimed the capital in 1865; the more enduring success at Helena, which assumed the status of capital in 1875 and evolved, most uncommonly, from mining town to modern city. Helena is both the rare and the insidious success story. Along with copper-rich Butte, it has inspired the boom myths that outspeak the more frequent failures—like the hopefully named busts at Sterling and Midasburg (Midas, remember, was a fool with ass’s ears).

In our own century, the “last best place” is not so much a land to seek a risky living from as it is a quiet legacy to live in. Yet remarkably, the dream of mining for wealth persists among those who, uncomfortable with the past, would edit down what we do know of “history” to its few success stories. In that spirit, at the start of the twenty-first

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century, one rather wistful candidate for governor declared mining to be the future of Montana. In 2005, a small group of history enthusiasts exhumed from its unmarked grave in Big Timber the body of Pete Zortman, a once successful mining entrepreneur, who built one of the early cyanide ore processing mills in the 1890s and died a pauper’s death in 1933. They honored Pete’s remains with reburial at a prominent spot in the cemetery of Zortman, the now scrap of a town named after him.

Meanwhile, the town of Roundup has again staked its chips against the house for another gamble with coal, while dreamers speak credulously, like those who once believed in El Dorado, of “clean coal.” At Marysville in 2007, four years before gold reached its recent phenomenal prices, RX Exploration began reworking the old Drumlummon gold mine, to the chagrin of some current residents who seem to prefer the quiet old ghosts to noisy new trucks. At Elkhorn, Elkhorn Goldfields is pursuing its “Golden Dream,” a new gold mining venture in this old silver site. To give the company its due, it has

They leave the town to decay into a century they have never thought of. The hollow town becomes a story, many stories, in its text of decaying artifacts: the solitary bank vault still standing in Granite, the lone smelter stack at Wickes, the plywood-shuttered boardinghouse at Southern Cross, the schoolhouse stuck a-kilter in the stream at Coolidge.

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E S S A Y Elkhorn Mercantile, a modest affair with a lean inventory, where most items cost $1: a can of pop, a candy bar, an ice cream on a stick. A visit to Elkhorn would not have been complete without a stop at the store and a chat with proprietor Ron McGinness.

In that same year, on one of our visits to Elkhorn, my wife Maggie and I were surprised

by Mr. McGinness’s Magdalen Wojtowicz offer to sell us the store New False-Fronted Building on Elkhorn’s Main Street, Elkhorn, Montana, 2011. along with the house claimed a commitment to cleaning up attached to it for $42,000. the nineteenth-century mining mess, The offer was oddly tempting, but my but the whole venture seems tainted momentary disappointment overshadwith optimism. Not to be bested in the owed it: “Where are you moving to?” I arena of optimism, local schools in Jefasked, sadly assuming that he too was ferson County were already planning abandoning Elkhorn at long last. With their budgets on anticipated taxes from a smile that showed he understood my the Golden Dream before drilling even mistake, he said, “Oh, no, I’m going began in 2011. to build across town,” and he pointed Well, mining was certainly the past straight on past me through the open of Montana and once was its present, door of the shop—to somewhere over but was never its future. Yet the urge the roofs of Fraternity Hall and Mark to mine in the Treasure State, the very Moreau’s doghouse, over the grass idea of mining in the western imaginaand sage and a leaning neighborhood tion, dies hard. Maybe that urge is the toward a new idea in an old story. “real ghost”—the implacable force of We kindly turned down his offer history’s fictions. and paid him $2 for a can of Coke and

a Hershey bar, which, incidentally, has As fading testimony to both the not changed in over a hundred years— boom and the bust of the past, perhaps the formula for Hershey’s affordable Elkhorn will become a small part of milk chocolate having been developed the future of Montana. Remarkable as in 1899, the year the Elkhorn mine first it may seem, as late as 2004, quite near shut down. the original site of the Elkhorn Trad“I’m going to build across town.” ing Company, known as the Elkhorn Well, why not? Unlike today’s dogged, Mercantile, there was still an operatdreaming exponents of extraction, Mr. ing shop in the town, it too called the McGinness seemed quite comfortable

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with the past, for it is a thing apart to envision a new home in a world of relics. His seemed a very realistic expectation, perhaps an inkling of the future, for in the years since we last spoke with him, several new cabins have been built in the town. On our latest visit to Elkhorn, John, among the handful of yearround residents, told us that one of the recently built structures, a single-room, fresh-planked building with a short false front, will soon open as the new store. This, too, seems one of the more probable dreams, far more likely than the old visions of inexhaustible placer gold, or the new hopes for a gold mine in an old silver town. As John reminded us while showing us his rock and mineral collection, fool’s gold glitters more brightly than the real thing.

Alongside the new, though, the old Elkhorn continues to fade. Where old homes and shops were dismantled for rustic décor, the unsalvageable lumber was left to rot in slowly flattening heaps. Spring after spring the

soft mountain grass and the bitter sage will grow high around these barrows of irredeemable lumber, around the ever-eroding structures, and even the crumbling tombstones, until the natural cycle reclaims what commodity has no interest in anymore. Eventually, nothing will mark the old Elkhorn except what can be seen from a mountaintop or an airplane: the subtle color variations in the grasses growing from squares of earth enriched by decomposed homes and shops, by the small stakes and claims of ephemeral human industry.

Perhaps in another hundred years, only the handful of homes built in our own day will remain, still occupied but splintering from the strain of sun and cold, worn and tired after many owners. Inside the doorless garage of one such dream will rest the hulk of a gasoline-powered pickup truck with a sun-bleached tailgate and dangling bumper, the legend of its faded bumper sticker barely visible: “Montana is what America used to be.”

William Kamowski is Professor of English at Montana State UniversityBillings where he teaches British Literature and Mythology. His articles on Chaucer and medieval literature have appeared in the Chaucer Review and other literary journals. This essay is his first reflection on the American West.

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Mark Rozema

What Is Not Seen

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can still feel the rocking of the Sea Bear as I leaned too far over her gunwhale, slashing madly, stupidly with my gaffe at the imperturbable water. Gone, gone! The biggest king salmon I’m sure that I will ever see. Or, to be more precise, the biggest king salmon that I will ever not quite see, but will believe in with the faith we reserve for things not seen. A wave of self-pity overwhelmed me. Once again, I slashed at the water with my gaffe. Fuck, Fuck, Fucketty-fuck, Fuck!!!

I stared at the rolling billows for a long time.

Just moments earlier, I had seen the persistent yank on the line. I didn’t know, yet, if it was a salmon, a hali-

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but, a toothsome lingcod, or one of the ubiquitous rockfish. Whatever it would turn out to be, a particularly violent tug convinced me that it would be a noteworthy catch. When its sleek, dusky form was close enough to the boat to be momentarily glimpsed, I felt a rush of adrenaline. It was a salmon, and a big one indeed. Jesus! I thought. That might be a seventy-pound fish! It was my third season fishing, and I thought I could estimate the weight of a salmon by a kink in the line and a fleeting glance at dimpled water. In my previous two seasons, I had not seen, much less caught, a king of such magnitude.

It was my first day out. The day before, I had wandered through the harbors of Sitka, Alaska, looking for

creature slipped, without fuss, away. A work. Despite my lack of experience single Chinook of that size is worth a on a troller (I had set-netted for two lot of money and a lot of glory. I don’t seasons in a different part of the state), know what galled me more—the fact I found a skipper who was willing to that I didn’t get the fish, or that no one take me on, as his fifty-foot boat was was there to witness the epic saga. No difficult to manage by himself. I went one saw; no one knew. home to pack my duffel, and then put Oh well, I thought, forelornly, as I out to sea on the Sea Bear. gathered myself together and took a I was the only crew. While the skipdeep breath. Dukkha. Life is dissatisper was at the wheel, I was in the stern, faction and struggle. For both me and running hydraulic pulleys that raised the salmon. It did not want to die, and and lowered six weighted cables into for this it cannot be the water. To each blamed. I got back cable, I clipped leads to work. With the baited with herring. rest of the season As I raised the cables, Was it really such an archetypal still ahead, I tried to a sharp tug on the fish? I don’t know. But in hope that a bigger lead indicated the one would come presence of a halibut, my memory and in my soul, along. But I should rockfish, lingcod, or a that king of kings still lurks have known better sleek and bright Chi- just beneath the surface of my than to expect that nook. We were after consciousness and just beyond any fish I caught the kings. It was my the powers of perception. could be bigger than job, then, to successthe one I didn’t. fully bring the fish on More real than God, but just I know, I know. board, unceremoniWe all have such ously end its life, gut as elusive, unpredictable and tales. Almost caught and clean it, then put unprovable. Maybe it is what it. (Sure you did, it on ice. To bring a we cannot see that leaves the Mark. Almost partfish in, I used a gaffe, greatest mark upon us. ners up late at night which is a stick with with if only when we a metal hook lashed drink red wine at to one end. It may three in the mornsound strange and ing on the kitchen floor.) But I’m telling perhaps hypocritical, but even as I evisyou—it happened. At the time, I didn’t cerated them, I had great admiration even tell the skipper, who had been up for those bright kings—so full of fight, in the wheelhouse steering the boat. I so full of spirit. didn’t want him to doubt me.

I will eschew the over-wrought Nevertheless, doubt creeps, as it description of great struggle. Suffice it should, into my recollection. I did not, to say that in the moment just before after all, clearly see the creature. Was it the fish broke the surface of the water, really such an archetypal fish? I don’t just before I could hook it with my gaffe know. But in my memory and in my and hoist it into the stern, in the time it soul, that king of kings still lurks just takes for an ego to go from full to flacbeneath the surface of my consciouscid without comprehending the shift, ness and just beyond the powers of perthe line went slack and the shadowy

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E S S A Y ception. More real than God, but just as elusive, unpredictable and unprovable.

Maybe it is what we cannot see that leaves the greatest mark upon us.

After fishing season ended, the autumn days grew short, and the rains settled in. Soon, mist shrouded the rocky islands, and November gales ripped through branches of Mountain Hemlock and Sitka Spruce. What fell as rain on the coast fell as wet, heavy snow in the mountains. I assumed that brown bears were hibernating.

Even in the winter, I love to climb mountains. It is a way for me to find peace and hear my own thoughts over the clutter of daily life. So, on a windy November day, I set out for the summit of a mountain on the outskirts of Sitka.

I worked my way through fresh, heavy snow until I was a few hundred feet below the summit.

Crossing a small clearing, I came upon a bear’s paw print. It was enormous; it seemed the diameter of a soccer ball. The outline of the print was crisp and distinct; it had not yet been rendered fuzzy by the light, powdery snow that was falling. Indeed, it seemed that the print still glistened wet from the heat of the body that had made it.

My pulse quickened. I scoured the landscape, looking for the bear. I had no doubt that it was very close. I also had no doubt that it knew where I was, and probably had known for quite a while. The tracks angled off into the woods to my right. The squirrely wind had no discernable consistent direction, so I couldn’t tell if I was upwind or downwind.

Eventually, I had to decide what to do. I decided to continue to climb, since that was what I had come to do in the first place, and I doubted that the

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bear shared this objective. Floundering through deep fluff, I made my way to the summit, where a fierce wind drove snow-snakes over the ridge. A storm was brewing. The charcoal sky blended into the impenetrable grey of the Pacific Ocean. I knew I should waste no time getting down, but I took a moment to fully feel the peculiar mix of uneasiness and joy. On the way down, I knew that the inscrutable, invisible bear was somewhere in the trees, not sleeping.

I’ve seen big bears. I’ve encountered them in the wild, although never at close range, and I’ve never been threatened by one. I’ve heard many stories about their power, and I’ve seen that power myself. Once, from a small plane, I watched a magnificent blonde sow gallop as fast as a racehorse through swampy muskeg. It is hard to walk, much less run, through such country. The bear, running from the plane, came to a thirty-degree slope.

Charging up the hill, she didn’t slow down one whit. If anything, she accelerated. When I think of power, I see that bear in my mind’s eye. But I’ve never felt the presence of a bear as acutely as on that November day when I could not see the animal, but knew it to be present.

In addition to being a fisherman, my skipper on the Sea Bear also worked as a hunting guide in the Tongass National Forest. His primary targets were enormous brown bears, and his primary clients were rich white men. He was a successful guide, and he usually guided his customers to their quarry. I was saddened to think of those magnificent bears reduced to rugs just to fatten the egos of corporate CEOs and lawyers.

(Yet how different am I from those lawyers? I don’t know. I certainly wanted to catch that fish.)

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I also don’t know if my skipper felt regret about killing bears, because I didn’t ask him. But I did ask him if there was a particularly memorable bear, perhaps one that returned in his dreams. He said that the bear that lingers in his imagination is one he did not see. One he did not get. One who led him in circles, so that it was unclear who was stalking whom. The one who left my skipper’s camp in a shambles, tents shredded, supplies scattered. The one who chewed up his frying pan. I don’t know of any single image that conveys a bear’s power more vividly than this impression not of a bear, but of a bear’s passage: toothmarks—not just scratches, mind you, but deep indentations—in a cast-iron skillet.

Power is in a bear’s jaws, but power is also in small things: the steady drip that wears away granite, or the mushroom that breaks through asphalt. The most aware I’ve ever been that I was at the mercy of another creature in the wild was not due to a bear or any other top-of-the-food-chain predator. I was humbled by a common insect.

Several years before I lived in Sitka, I spent a summer in the arctic, near Kotzebue. At about midnight on the Fourth of July, I departed from the village of Ambler, on the Kobuk River, with a few friends. Our destination was an abandoned jade mine about ten miles away, in the foothills of the Brooks Range. It was a spur-of-the-moment adventure.

We didn’t take much. We had a gun, in case of bears. No one mentioned mosquitoes.

We rode four-wheelers as far as we could go, then set out on foot across the tundra. It was slow going through dense thickets of willow, over uneven hummocks of berries and heather, and the occasional pit of boot-sucking

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muck. The arctic sun was hot, even at its lowest point in the sky, and our shirts were drenched in sweat. The mosquitoes, bad enough along the Kobuk, became unbearable out on the tundra. I had never seen anything like the swarms that completely covered our backs, our necks, our faces and arms.

Several times, we slathered on the Deet. It didn’t keep the insects off of us, but it kept them from draining us dry of blood, at least. We swatted them with bandanas, but it was like trying to bail out a sinking boat with a teaspoon.

I felt that the incessant whine and the constant biting were going to drive me insane. My friends, arctic veterans, seemed to hold up a bit better, but after a while they showed the strain as well.

We stopped and brought out the bottle of Deet. It was almost empty. And we were a long ways from any re-fills.

Nervous laughter, as we looked at the very small amount of repellent left in the bottle, and considered how far it would go among four grown men who, between them, had a substantial amount of exposed skin. I don’t recall if anything was said, but it seemed we looked at each other with the same kind of fatalistic humor that might pass between four friends on a raft out at sea, just before they must decide who will be eaten first.

We did the best we could. The bug dope didn’t amount to much. I suppose we were all thinking about how far it was back to the village. I wondered how long it would take for a human body to be drained of blood.

But we didn’t turn around and head for Ambler; instead, we pressed on toward the mine. Being up the slope of the mountain, at least the mine might have a breeze and some offer some respite from the ruthless insects.

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E S S A Y In a moment of quiet, I listened; perlimbs of willow and alder were haps I imagined it, but it seemed that sheathed in tiny blades of frost, catchthe familiar whine of the mosquitoes, ing and splintering the cold brilliance of magnified by billions or trillions, had the early spring sun. Nearing the crest a deeper resonance, a hum not unlike of the ridge, I was awed by the layering electricity going through high voltage of light: salmon-tinged clouds above power lines. I realized that I was not golden rocky outcrops above milkyworried about the mosquitoes I could blue snow in the shadowed valley. see. The swarm was prodigious, but I wanted to look down into that valit was comprehensible. No, it was the ley, so I slowly light-footed it toward mosquitoes I could the edge. The snow not see that humbled upon which I walked me and held my fate was crunchy, firm, Sometimes there are signs in their… well, not and elegantly furhands. Probisci? As far when these things are about rowed and fluted as I could see, and far- to happen, but I didn’t yet by nearly constant ther….For hundreds wind. At least it felt know how to read them. I was of miles, in every firm. Born and raised not yet attuned to language of direction, mosquitoes in the desert southas dense as this. The west, I was new to snow—the muffled whump! bear gun was of no use the mountains of the that precedes a separating against them. north. I didn’t fully slab, or the delicate shift that Luck smiled on appreciate the danger us. In a few more of cornices. I didn’t precedes a sudden snap over miles, we reached the understand that mine, and—as is often a twinkling of loose sugary under the crusty top crystals. Before I knew what the case with such layer of snow was a places—it had a cache was happening, I fell through. layer about as consolof unopened crates of idated as Styrofoam things like corned beef packing peanuts, and hash, pilot bread and that under that was jam, and…mosquito repellent. another thin crust, and under that— nothing but air.

Ten years earlier, when I first came Sometimes there are signs when to Alaska, when I was young and these things are about to happen, but stupid, when my ambition exceeded I didn’t yet know how to read them. my caution, when my confidence far I was not yet attuned to language of outweighed my experience, and when snow—the muffled whump! that preI took it for granted that my cup of luck cedes a separating slab, or the delicate was refilled every morning, I climbed shift that precedes a sudden snap over a mountain in the Chugach Range. It a twinkling of loose sugary crystals. was a minor peak, probably unnamed, Before I knew what was happening, I really just a subsidiary bump along fell through. a corniced ridge, but it looked over a There are some physical sensations glorious valley. the memory of which sticks with a perIt was late afternoon on an April son for a lifetime. One such sensation day. On my way up the mountain, is to have your body punch through a

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surface you thought was solid, and to feel your legs swing freely in a space you can’t see. It is a sensation I don’t care to repeat, but I confess that the recollection of it is enough to remind me how much I love my life and wish it to continue.

Why did the snow give way at precisely the spot that it did? Why did the shelf of snow remain strong enough under my elbows to allow me to crawl out? I’m not sure that why? is a useful question. At any rate, because I am one lucky dumbshit is a possible answer.

Some people resort to words like grace, karma, prayer, fate and luck to address such questions. Some impute motive to unseen beings, or see every molecule of the seen and unseen world as infused with intentional spirits.

Others could explain to me the physical properties of snow, and how variables such as my body weight and the time of day affect the everchanging structure and plasticity of

snow crystals. Either way, the snow in its glory seems indifferent to my fate, and unburdened by responsibility.

It—along with the fish, the bear, the storm, and the mosquito—needs only to be what it is. Interconnected to all other animate and inanimate parts of the world in ways we can only partially understand and predict and often cannot see, we live and die, we eat and sometimes are eaten, and we are often pardoned, irrespective of merit.

I never looked into the abyss. I mantled my way back onto the hard snow, praying it would hold my weight, then scrambled down the windward slope on my hands and knees without even seeing the hole that had nearly ushered me into the next (if there is one) life.

No thank you, I whispered under my breath to the snow. It did not answer, but it continued to shine even more brightly than before in the rays of the setting sun. Which is, I suppose, a kind of answer.

Mark Rozema holds an MFA from the University of Montana. His nonfiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Sport Literate, Flyway, The Soundings Review, and Camas—The Nature of the West.

His first book, Road Trip, is forthcoming from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. He lives in Shoreline, Washington, with his wife, daughter and dogs. He enjoys track & field and rock climbing.

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Robert Joe Stout

My Buffaloes

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welve years old, independent and accustomed to roam the bristly riverbanks on my own, I succumbed to the temptation offered by the North Platte River’s depleted summertime flow to wade through the slow current, curious to know what lay beyond the thick growth of cattails on the other side. A murky slough half-obscured by slender young cottonwoods fed into the river—a likely place for muskrats, I thought, deciding to explore further. A rustling in the trees brought me up short and I stopped, then detected a range calf splashing through the turgid water.

It was an odd-looking beast, spindly-legged, with hunched, misshapen shoulders and thin hind quarters. I’d heard my dad and his friends describe domestic animals reverting to ruder origins after several generations and I approached cautiously, aware that

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where calves exist, calves’ parents also can be found.

Suddenly noting my presence, the calf backed through the water, its head lowered and one hoof flailing the weeds. It seemed unable to decide whether I were friend or foe and made half-a-dozen halting attempts to lunge forward, then pulled away and with an awkward, lolloping effort scrambled up the bank and lumbered away, stopping twice to shake its hunched shoulders before disappearing into a tangle of brush.

I shrugged, amused but not surprised—until a movement in the brush further away caught my attention.

Warily I backed away, surveying the scrabbly terrain between me and the river in case I needed to make a run for safety. Slowly a form emerged—bovine, huge, shaggy, with ominously curved horns and ponderously hunched shoul-

explorer to discover this wild herd. ders. I’d ever seen a cow or bull like it And being a boy forced to make his except… way alone across the prairie, seeking I almost fainted, then quickly shelter with the buffaloes to avoid a shook myself back to my senses. The band of avenging Sioux. Even when bovine—the buffalo!—lowered its I slipped fording the shallow river I head and scratched at the turf with one imagined grabbing a bull buffalo’s ragged hoof. I was farm boy enough to fur and riding him through rapids to know not to run from wild animals or escape hostile arrows. vicious dogs but to retreat slowly and Nevertheless I managed to connot give them occasion to pursue or tain the thrill of my discovery—and attack but I was so mesmerized by this its stimulation of my imagination—to dark, brooding countenance I couldn’t assume an air of move. This huge beast nonchalance when continued to hoof I tested a farmer I the ground, snorting I imagined being a mountain passed on my way through thick black man penetrating the sloughs back to town. nostrils, then slowly, to become the first white “You think there with what seemed might still be buffalike ponderous effort, explorer to discover this wild loes roaming around it turned and shoved herd. And being a boy forced here?” its way back through “Not a chance. the undergrowth close to make his way alone across If there was, someto where the calf had the prairie, seeking shelter with body’d kill ‘em. Or disappeared. the buffaloes to avoid a band take ‘em to a zoo.”

I hesitated, wonof avenging Sioux. Even when His reaction was dering if I really had no different from seen what I thought I slipped fording the shallow those I got from I’d seen. Buffaloes! I river I imagined grabbing a teachers, friends and repeated to myself, parents the followReal live buffaloes! As I bull buffalo’s fur and riding ing week. (Had I moved away, staying him through rapids to escape told any of them on higher ground in hostile arrows. outright that I’d order to avoid mushseen a herd of bufing through swampy faloes they wouldn’t slough mud, I rehave believed me. Nor could I have examined the place I’d seen the beasts blamed them; my imagination often and detected other movements, other transformed the carp I caught into shapes, and realized that I’d stumbled rod-bending salmon and the little crop upon a small herd of adults and calves. dusters from the airport in Scottsbluff Twice after I left them I turned to into dangerous MIG jets.) But as soon make sure that there weren’t really as I could get away I set out on another hundreds of them ready to stampede sojourn across the river. across the countryside as they had done Just before noon I approached the less than a century before. I imagined place I’d seen the buffaloes. Superstibeing a mountain man penetrating tiously I crossed my fingers: In the the sloughs to become the first white

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E S S A Y particular, were easy to identify. One week or ten days that had passed since was much smaller than the other two, my first expedition I had begun to and one of the larger ones had only a doubt that I really had seen the shaggy nub of a horn on one side of its wide beasts. head. Whenever I could I brought them I needn’t have worried. The buffathings to eat—hard apples that had fallloes were upriver a few hundred yards en prematurely from our backyard tree, from where I’d first spotted them. I hay or straw that I’d picked up along counted fifteen in the herd, including the roadside before fording the river, three calves. They stared sullenly, the watermelon and cantaloupe rinds. bulls shifting position to watch me, Probably because their shaggy heads they were my dislowered and their covery—my secret— thin forelegs restGradually I learned to I found them interlessly splashing water distinguish one from another esting to watch. In and mud. I took up a and gave them names. The reality they did very position in the shade little except scratch to watch them. Where calves, in particular, were easy themselves on tree had they come from? to identify. One was much trunks or any other How had they managed sharp objects they to live this long without smaller than the other two, and could find protrudbeing discovered? one of the larger ones had only ing from the slough If the answers my a nub of a horn on one side banks. In crashing imagination chose through the underwere more exotic than of its wide head. Whenever I brush they often analytical, my obsercould I brought them things to would break a sapvations as I returned eat—hard apples that had fallen ling, then rub on the to watch them week stub until it glistened after week were solid prematurely from our backyard and practical. The tree, hay or straw that I’d picked like polished glass.

Their tails were in buffaloes, I discovup along the roadside before constant motion, ered, were docile mostly because by animals. Unlike cattle, fording the river, watermelon late summer their they did not drift and cantaloupe rinds. patchy fur hung in apart as they fed, nor ragtag shreds from did they leave the their bodies and no network of sloughs to longer protected them from the hordes graze in open pasture. of mosquitoes that hovered above them Gradually they seemed to accept everywhere they went. my presence, much as they accepted The calves were more entertaining. the startled movements of jack rabbits They would chase each other, lowering bounding through the patches of Indian their heads and butting, or splash into paintbrush and wild asters that dotted the slough and roll in the mud. One the solid ground among the sloughs’ day while I was watching, the smallmeandering channels. Gradually I est one, trying to evade the other two, learned to distinguish one from another plunged into deeper water and flailing and gave them names. The calves, in

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with its hooves but never would let me and bawling sank into the goo. The two get close enough to touch it. other calves milled around it, echoing That there were only three calves its stricken cries while trying to avoid in the little herd and eleven or twelve getting mired themselves. I ran towards adults puzzled me, although I knew them, intending to help, but they that subsistence had to be difficult and turned and stomped the mud as though many things could happen to an immathey might charge. ture animal. No longer were there any I hesitated, not wanting to make wolves in southeastern Wyoming and the situation worse than it was, then no other animals were large enough or I saw one of the adult buffaloes lumstrong enough to successfully attack the ber towards the bawling calf. It eased buffaloes. Except for men with guns, into the slough one ponderous step at they had no natural enemies. However a time, its bearded jaw scraping the I knew that diseases could wipe out murky surface, and butted the calf, animal populations. forcing it to stop its One year I’d seen Old scrambled bawling.

Man Root’s pasture Slowly, submerging Of the three calves the one littered with the its head and shoving carcasses of bloated it between the calf’s with the nubby horn was the sheep, and everyone back legs, it pushed most friendly. Sometimes in the county had upwards. The wildly when I would approach it, it been warned about flailing calf regained some plague that jack its footage and would romp towards me as rabbits could pass on scrambled out of the though faking an attack. to domestic animals. mire while the adult, One Sunday, snorting and thrustjust after a return to ing its huge head from school had started to side to side to get the limit my expeditions across the river, water and mud out of its mouth and I chased a pair of ugly vultures off a nose, backed slowly out of the slough, long stretch of high ground between pausing with each step as it sought firm two shallow, flooded slough channels footing. and discovered the carcass of what The foundered calf seemed to learn appeared to be a buffalo calf. One front from its experience. No longer did it leg seemed to have been broken, either romp unheedingly into the mucky from birth or a fall, and its skull was water but seemed first to test its footing pressed into the stickery turf as though as the adult buffalo had done. it had been trying to seek comfort there.

Of the three calves the one with At first I thought it might have been the nubby horn was the most friendly. the remains of one of the three calves Sometimes when I would approach it, it I’d befriended, but then I realized that would romp towards me as though fakit was much smaller than any of them. ing an attack. But when I’d run towards Probably it had died shortly after it had it, it would back away and turn and been born, I decided. detour around me. When I tried to coax I paused for a while by the carcass, it closer with something to eat, it would considering whether or not to try to twist and shuffle and dig at the ground

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E S S A Y bury it and put a marker stone over the grave, but I had no shovel or any other digging instrument with me and I couldn’t find any stones large enough to build even a temporary monument.

Saddened, I said a little goodbye and trundled off to look for my live animal friends.

My curiosity about my little herd nudged me to try to find out more about buffaloes, especially those that once roamed southeastern Wyoming.

In a couple of books that I found in Torrington’s little Carnegie Library, I came across references to various small herds that had turned up in isolated parts of the West, including southern Canada, Montana and Sonora, Mexico. In addition, ranchers here and there had corralled a few cows and bulls and even tried to interbreed them with domestic cattle.

I left Wyoming when I was thirteen and lost contact with most of the people I’d known in Torrington. To my knowledge, nobody that either I or my parents knew had seen or knew anything about my buffaloes. But years later, when I was managing editor of western history magazines, I came across an account describing several small herds that grazed Bureau of Land Management acreages in the hills west of Chugwater during the Great Depression. Another account described a touring Wild West show breaking up

on its way to Casper and releasing all of its animals, including “buffaloes, horses and cowboys” but it gave no indication where any of the three might have gone.

I’m reasonably sure that my buffaloes continued to live among those interconnected sloughs until after I left Wyoming. I remember thinking about them—perhaps even praying for them—during the fierce winter blizzards that swept across the plains. I could picture them huddled together enduring the wild and cold and patiently waiting for better tomorrows—as buffaloes had done for millenia before my little herd had come into existence.

Thirty-some years after those boyhood jaunts I detoured from a trip to Denver and stopped in Torrington.

Having an afternoon free, I decided to rediscover the slough where my buffaloes had made their home. But the terrain seemed to have changed, the old landmarks had disappeared. No longer could I find the place I’d forded the river. From a distance I detected a stand of cottonwoods that might have been those that I’d visited so often as a boy, and for a minute or two I thought I sensed a strange animal presence and I told myself—and the boy I’d been— that of course there still were buffaloes there.

Like me, my little herd had survived.

Running Out the Hurt is Robert Joe Stout’s most recent book.

He also has published Why Immigrants Come to America, Miss Sally, a creative nonfiction volume called The Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives, and poetry, short fiction and essays in numerous magazines and journals, including The American Scholar, The South Dakota Review, America and Smoke.

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F I C T I O N

Donald Mace Williams

Eight Reasons Palo Duro Canyon Is Red

Tom Sharp PDCanyonPics.com

W

hen he got the telegram saying his little nephew, Carl, on whom he doted, had died at the home place near Shamrock, Texas, Leroy, having been fired from his job as a riveter in an aircraft plant a few days before for stealing scrap metal, grabbed the Long Beach paper and found an ad from a kid who wanted to go home to Erick, Oklahoma, and see his parents once more before he enlisted. Leroy’s destination was only twenty miles west of Erick. They set out. A little east of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, the slick wartime tire at the right rear went flap-flap. While Leroy leaned against a fencepost, his cigarette glowing and fading in the dusk with his angry breaths, the kid unloaded the trunk of the Chevy, got out the still slicker spare, and jacked up the wheel. He was having trouble positioning the holes of the spare wheel over the lugs when Leroy, who had swaggered over to stand behind him, said with a snort, “What’s the matter, too heavy?” The kid straightened onto his knees, brushed a shock of blond hair out of his eyes with a forearm, and said, mildly, “I’ll be glad to turn the job over to you, Leroy”—pronouncing it luhROY, not LEE-roy. After that, everything the kid said made Leroy

F I C T I O N snarl. In Tucumcari, where they stopped to get the flat fixed and the kid took a five out of his wallet to contribute his half, Leroy got a glimpse of another five and a ten. The kid would get four-fifty back in change, on top of that. They drove on for a long way, Leroy at the wheel.

“Where are you going?“ the kid said, alarmed. He had woken up in Amarillo, and now he realized that the car was turning south.

“None of your goddamn business,” Leroy said.

“Let me out. Come on, let me out.”

Leroy pulled the pistol from the left pocket of his windbreaker and pointed it. All the way to the turnoff, then all the bumpy minutes eastward along the dirt ranch road in the dark, he cursed the kid, who sat breathing loudly, not answering. After a bit, the car dropped down a steep grade into a tributary of Palo Duro Canyon.

At the top of the winding ascent on the other side, Leroy stopped.

The kid backed tight against the door and fumbled for the handle. “Go ahead, git out,” Leroy said. He didn't want blood in the car. When the kid turned and ran, Leroy lunged across the seat and fired several times. Making noises like a baby with croup, the kid stumbled a few feet and fell. Leroy fired once more with the muzzle against the kid's temple. Then he reached down and took his billfold, stood again, and with one foot half-kicked, half-lifted the body over the edge, laughing at the slithering sound it made against the side of the canyon before it hit bottom. When he got back into the car, he swore: his shoe was covered with blood, his sock wet. After a moment, he jerked the car around and drove off fast. He wanted to get to poor Carl’s funeral on time.

2. The shots woke him up in the early morning chill. He jumped up from his buffalo-robe bed and in the middle of a dash, almost a leap, for the opening of the tipi, he grabbed the old smoothbore musket that his grandfather—judging him old enough, now that his voice was changing—had given him. “No! No!” his mother called out to him, dropping the half-beaded moccasins she had swooped up and raising her hands in despair. He kept running, his eyes on the canyon walls. A huge troop of white soldiers was coming down the trail, some of them already at the bottom. He jammed the musket stock against his shoulder and pointed, but something knocked the barrel up and he heard the voice of his neighbor, a Comanche elder. “Get your mother and the little girl up into the rocks,” the neighbor said. “You go with them. Go.” He obeyed—his mother was already running that way, her arms so full of valuables that she could only beckon to him with her head to hurry.

His small sister ran alongside her, never looking back. Carrying the musket in one hand, he ran last, protectively, still watching his chance for a shot. Something stung his thigh and at the same time he heard a buzz like a wasp. He kept running and soon was climbing, cupping his hand once or twice to give his sister a foothold. Out of breath, the three of them crouched in an arroyo. “You are wounded,” his mother said,

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clapping a hand over her mouth. He did not answer but aimed the gun and fired into the mass of soldiers on the canyon floor, the kick jolting his shoulder back. That was all he could do, since he hadn't thought to grab his powder horn and shot pouch. The soldiers, he knew, would capture the horses and burn the camp. He and his mother and sister, along with the whole camp, would have to go back to the reservation at Fort Sill, their shelter and means of transportation gone. He, at least, had something to take away. He had his wound, which his mother now began binding with a strip cut out of her dress to stop the bleeding.

And he had another trophy. The soldiers had come to take the canyon, the whole land, away from his people, and he had fired at them. He, barely more than a child, had fired a shot in battle. That would last him the rest of his life.

3. The young cougar’s favorite food, buffalo calf, had vanished from the canyon a few months before. The replacements, though plentiful and not usually guarded at night by the oddly clothed horsemen who spent their days with the herd, had a bland, sweetish smell that repelled her. She fell back on venison, which was what she was enjoying now at the bottom of a nearly bare terrace above the creek. A minute before, she had jumped onto the back of a small whitetail doe that was going down to water and had sunk her teeth into its neck. The organs and entrails, which she had exposed as soon as the deer fell and before it was dead, glistened in the light of the nearly full moon that hung above the east rim, and when she looked up from her eating her eyes took the moonlight as greenly as an alley cat’s. Blood from the abdominal cavity also caught the moonlight, moving sluggishly as it sank into the clay between clumps of grass.

4. The painter, white-bearded, sat on a rock and looked above his wooden easel at the mini-landscape in front of him. “A garden,” he said to himself. It was a shallow bowl not much wider than a tennis court, and the plants it grew were rock pedestals in various stages of maturity, some knee-high, some chest-high, some taller than a man. All had light-red stems and variously skewed gray caps. “’The Weird Garden,’” the painter said, already forming his title. He was sitting with his back to a much larger formation: the famous Lighthouse, well established as the emblem of Palo Duro Canyon though the state park had been open only a few months. A friend had said it would make a marvelous subject, but when the painter, carrying his easel, had puffed his way up the faint trail to the foot of the Lighthouse, he lost all interest in it. No matter that someone might actually buy a pastel painting of such a well-known formation and that money had been scarce these five years since the Wall Street crash. All the painter could see was the little family of rock gnomes. They made a strange impression on him, their vegetative quality seeming like a travesty of growth. “Like death,” he

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F I C T I O N said. Without taking his eyes off the scene he fumbled for a pastel stick of the right color for his response if not the right color for the objects themselves. He started work. As he finally finished, he realized that the sun was low over the canyon rim. He had an hour’s walk back to the big Ford touring car. Jumping up, he bumped the easel and spilled his collection of pastel sticks on the ground. He swore, scooped up all he could readily find, and turned around to start walking, grabbing the easel and telescoping its legs as he did so. It came to him that as he had spun around, he had felt something familiar underfoot. He turned to look. His boot heel had smashed one of the sticks into a coarse powder and ground it into the hard soil. It was the one he had used the most for his sketch: the blood-red one. He laughed. “Giving back what I took away,” he said. He turned again and walked quickly down the trail.

5. They chose a picnic site beyond the second water crossing. The boy drove the Studebaker up close to the table, cut off the engine, and with an arm around her waist pulled her to him. So soon after the end of the school day and so early in the spring, they seemed to have Palo Duro Canyon all to themselves. They kissed for a long time, the tips of their tongues playing on each other’s lips. Then he heard a muffled pop, and she pushed herself away. “What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Well . . . listen, I’m going to get in the back for a minute. Don’t look, OK?” He heard her fumbling with her clothes as he stared at the floorboard. When she had finished and they stood outside the car, he saw it: a lower profile at the front of her blouse. He grabbed her and kissed her frantically, a hand rotating on the thin fabric, then slipping through the gap between buttons. Almost running, he pulled her into the stand of small cedars at the back of the picnic site.

Dressed again, he took her hand, the dark spot on the pale ground catching his eye as he led her out of the trees. He leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I’m sorry I hurt you.” She stopped, put her hands on his shoulders, and gazed into his eyes. “Nothing, nothing you do could ever hurt me,” she said.

6. Rayshel, whose name he pronounced “raise hell” when he was playing dominoes with her brothers, got the notion of climbing a little way up one of the gentler slopes of the canyon. Herbert, tan and lean-faced, shrugged and agreed, then had to pull her up the last pitch, holding his cigarette in his mouth so he could use both hands. He stood on the ledge coughing and hacking while she looked from side to side and wiggled in pleasure. “Aren’t you glad I got you up here?” she said. “Just look at those colors.” Herbert was too far along toward spitting to stop, but he nodded in the middle of the launch. “Well, you don’t act glad,” she said, “spitting on the ground like that.” She squeezed his arm. She knew the cedar played hell with his allergies in the late winter. What bothered her was the streak of blood that was al-

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ways in it when he spat, these days; but he refused to see a doctor. He stood with her a few minutes. They found a natural bridge far across to the east, up a side canyon. “That’s something to tell the kids about,” he said. “Come on. Time to go.” He could never stay away from the farm an hour without fretting. She sighed and took his hand, starting cautiously over the side. Nothing beautiful ever lasted.

7. In the cool of early morning, when the lizards could barely move, the roadrunner glutted himself, the slender tails disappearing last down his long, down-curved bill. But now the sun hung far enough above the east rim of the canyon to warm the clay floor and the things that crawled on it. The roadrunner spotted one more lizard and dashed for it like a chicken bearing down on a grasshopper, only twice as fast. His spotted, shaggy crest ruffled as he struck at the rust-colored back. The lizard, though bleeding hard, scuttled under a pile of gray rocks. Enraged, the roadrunner stood clacking his bill with a sound like a miniature motorboat. He forgot soon, though, and after an aimless moment ran to the top of a bare mound behind the rockpile and stood silhouetted, as comical as a long-legged, long-tailed woodpecker. He ducked his head and called. Others, for miles across the floor, were also calling, the voices softer than mourning doves’and as mysteriously carrying. An early-morning hiker, watching for deer and turkeys, barely noticed the calls. It was as if they were part of the landscape, a constant emanation of the red arroyos, the off-white cliffs, the dark junipers, and the multicolored stands of daisy, aster, spiderwort, and Indian blanket.

8. Helmuth Wachholz, wearing a white cowboy hat and grinning widely, was on a horse for the first time in his life. Joachim Schlemmer, having dismounted and tossed the reins back over the neck of his horse—the horse stayed put anyway, being used to tourists—pointed his camera. “Now back up,” he said, and they both laughed. As if either of them had any idea how to put a horse in reverse. So Schlemmer backed up instead, watching his subject through the eye of the camera.

They had scarcely stopped smiling in the hour since they had rented the tired horses and jounced off into the canyon. They wanted photographic evidence for their girlfriends and parents back in Stuttgart and for their co-workers at Mercedes; and Wachholz would give a picture or two to his grandmother, who lived in Leipzig and would be coming to visit often, now that the Wall was down. After this picture, the young men would change places. “A little more and I've got it right,” Schlemmer said, taking another step backward. Wachholz yelled, “Vorsicht!” Too late. The unseen cactus stung Schlemmer's leg like a beast with claws, and as he spun away in a panic his boot heels slipped on the loose top of the ground. He fell against a jagged gray rock, hold-

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F I C T I O N ing the camera up and safe. “No problem,” he called, getting up and brushing himself off. He noticed then that his arm was dripping blood.

He showed his friend. “Wounded in the Battle of Palo Duro,” he said as he pointed the camera again, this time watching behind himself. He laughed. “Pesky Comanches,” he said.

Donald Mace Williams of Canyon, Texas, is a retired newspaper writer and editor. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas. His Texas novel, Black Tuesday’s Child, was a finalist in 2007 for the Violet Crown Award of the Writers’ League of Texas. His novel The Sparrow and the Hall, set in seventh-century Northumbria, is due out in late 2014 from Bagwyn Books.

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F I C T I O N

Jessica Barksdale

Leaving Mr. Wong

M

y mother’s thick gray braid hangs down her back, cupping her like a steady palm. Her hair is the only thing about her that’s not shrunken and shriveled, though it was once black, obsidian in bright light, a darkness that made you blink.

The nurses have done as I’ve requested, combing and braiding her hair every morning, a task my mother used to do for me, back when mine was long but never as thick and dark as hers.

This afternoon, as per her custom, she’s sitting in the game room, bent over her hand of cards, staring at her suit secrets. Across from her, Mr. Wang is in the same pose, his glasses far down on his slim nose. He’s dressed as usual—button-down shirt, black tie, black khaki pants. His hand shakes as it grips his cards, though his eyes glance sharply at the pile of cards in front of him, my mother’s face, and back to his hand. He and my mother come here after movement class, playing cards as they sip at glasses of water, no ice. Bad for dentures and sore gums.

All around us, a canned music, somewhere between classical and cheese. In the hall, the shuffle of patient and nurse, the clatter of walker and tray table.

Mr. Wang sees me, raising his eyebrows in greeting, but he doesn’t shift in his seat or disturb the game. The cards slap. Mr. Wang sucks his teeth. “Oh, Marnie,” he says. “You dumped those clubs long ago.”

“Just you wait,” my mother says.

I still, hover, slowly take one step. My mother has been known to throw down her cards, turn to me, a prying stranger, and bare her teeth. Or burst into tears.

Or press her forehead to the card table. She’s called me names and tossed chairs. And she’s stood up, suddenly in the body of her younger self, and rushed to me, grabbing me by the shoulders, looking me in the eyes, sweeping my hair off my forehead.

“My little sweetie,” she’d said when this happened the last time, kissing my forehead, my nose, as if I were her little five-year-old sweetie, the age I was when last she called me that for real. She’d led me to the couch in the one corner and

F I C T I O N patted her lap, as if I were to sit there and listen to a story. I sat next to her, pressed against her bony hip and sharp rib cage and listened as she asked me how school was and then told me what was for dinner: pot roast, mashed potatoes, pan gravy, green beans. For dessert, banana cake with white frosting.

“Your father will be home soon.” She patted my cheek. “Best to change out of your school clothes and set the table.”

For an instant, I forgot that I was fifty-two, mother of three sons, and, just recently, a grandmother of twins. But in that moment, I was her little girl, wearing a red plaid jumper and black Mary Janes with white ankle socks, sitting near her mother who smelled like Palmolive dishwashing liquid and Dial shampoo. I was the little girl whose best moments were these, glowing in her mother’s full shining attention.

But then like the old switch of a TV channel—the turn of the yellowing plastic dial, the gray fuzz, the next program—my mother moved on in time, back to the part where all things—or no things—happened at once. She turned and walked back to the table and her game.

“Oh, Mr. Wong,” my mother says now, putting down her cards.

“You’ve beaten me again.”

I move closer. When I was a teenager, she would lament over her plump arms, her round white thighs. Even her feet had been rounded white pillows. “Everyone’s so impossibly slim!” she would say as my friends paraded by in their jeans and t-shirts, showing off their flat belly-buttons.

Mr. Wang smiles and looks up at me, eyebrows up again. Since she moved into the facility and met him right here at the window table, my mother has called Mr. Jeffrey Wang, Mr. Wong. Never his first name or his correct last name. Mr. Wong stuck.

At this point, she calls me “you,” as in “Oh, it’s you.”

“One hundred and two to eighty-nine,” he says.

“Mark it down,” my mother says in the same voice she used to call out “Clean your room.”

Mr. Wang tallies the hands, pulls the cards toward him to do a shuffle of sorts. As he paws the cards together, my mother suddenly turns around, her eyes on me. I freeze, try to swallow, and then soften.

“Hi,” I say. I take a step closer, put my purse on a chair. Maybe today, I’ll be able to sit down and watch them play for a while. But my mother is rigid, cutting me a raw, angry glance.

She bites her lower lip and then lets out a big sigh. “Where are the hamburgers?”

She turns back to Mr. Wang who is now dealing the next hand.

“They never bring us the hamburgers.”

“They sure don’t,” Mr. Wang says, the cards a one, two, one, two on the table. “And I like mine medium-rare. Won’t give me anything but extra well-done.”

He winks at me. “And that organic ketchup!”

My mother snatches up her hand, guarding it against her chest.

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“Bastards,” she hisses, glancing over her shoulder at me. “Woman, no-hamburger bastard.”

“Be nice, Marnie,” Mr. Wang says. “Your pick.”

“Glad you remembered, Mr. Wong,” my mother says, whisking the top card off the pile. “But you won’t be glad for more than half a minute.”

“Your mother hasn’t responded to recent therapies,” Mrs. Ryan says.

I nod. When Mom first moved in, the crackerjack team started with the easy things, exercise, good nutrition, occupational therapy (macramé, puzzles, collages) and social interaction (card games with Mr. Wang, visits with my children and then, later, the babies, supervised trips to the park). Apple Valley seemed perfect, with its quiet rooms, the calm, structured environment, the tasty, healthful meals, served up three times a day. In terms of meds, first my mother was on Aricept, which was supposed to slow the progression of the disease, and then Namenda, which was purported to improve mental activity. But still the anger. Still the “you.” Still the flipped over card table chair, the empty eyes.

“What next?” I ask.

Mrs. Ryan lifts her shoulders in an almost-shrug and then seems to remember she shouldn’t make such a non-clinical move.

“It’s probably time to move her to the Harmony building. The program there is much more intensive. Constant supervision.”

I bite my lip and then stop, remembering my mother’s lip, the red gnaw marks. My father left my mother well-provided for, an annuity giving us enough to pay for years of assisted living. But the Harmony building with its focused care? We’d be dipping into her reserves. And just last month, her internist told us she had the heart of a fortyfour-year-old woman.

“Sound as a bell,” he said. “Marnie, your ticker is ticking.”

Maybe my mother would live another fifteen, twenty years, reaching 100. By then, I could join her here. “What about Mr. Wang?”

“He’ll understand,” Mrs. Ryan says. “He’s been with us for a long time.”

“He has?” I say, feeling a swift shame for his family. “He seems so healthy. I mean, he could be living with relatives.”

Mrs. Ryan nods. “He’s 96 years old. There’s no one left now but him.”

Later, I start my car, roll down the window, and idle before putting it into reverse, watching groups of elderly people walk along the path that wends through the facility. In the distance, white ducks float on a pond. On the banks, willows dip thin branches into the water. Somewhere in the distance, a child laughs, a visiting

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F I C T I O N relative burning off steam. Inside, the card game over, my mother sits at a table eating dinner.

When my mother first moved in, she and I took that walk, she in her white Keds, me holding her elbow, her sweater buttoned at her neck, her blouse unbuttoned, exposing her large, industrial strength bra. We stood there as I re-buttoned her, but we talked to each other as we had for years. Which child was doing what and where. Who would marry whom and how. The vagaries of buttonholes. The loss of the sewing machine in households. The oddities of the spring weather.

The horror of undergarments. I took her elbow, and we started off again, laughing a little.

That day, I tried to convince myself that this was the last letting go.

Her house, her friends, the neighborhood she’d lived in for fifty years.

And when she moved, the last tangible evidence of my father’s life was parsed, tossed out, packed up and put into storage: cufflinks, college diplomas, high school yearbooks. Yes, the marriage was gone, packed or sold, her own furniture and keepsakes stuffed into a POD and delivered to a storage facility. At first she had visitors, but eventually, her friends became unwilling to drive the twenty miles to Apple Valley, what with the cataracts, surprise highway closures, and bad drivers these days. After a few months, there was no trace of my mother’s prior years, her earlier life, nothing visible on the outside and nothing she actually remembered, not even the faces of her parents or child or husband, enough so that the photos on her dresser upset her. One day, I stuffed them in my bag and took them home.

So we’d start new, but this would be the resting place for her current life, the place she’d dig in and stay. And now she was moving again. She was letting go of what little remained.

When I arrive for my next visit, my mother is not playing cards with Mr. Wang. Instead, she’s in her bedroom, restrained and drugged.

She attacked an orderly for disrupting the card game. Even now as she sleeps, she mumbles, “Get out of my light, you black bastard.”

I rear back, search for breath. My mother may have spent all her adult years in the suburbs, but she marched for peace and equality. A vegetarian, she organized a fruit and vegetable co-op. She confided to me that she and her library friends burned bras in garbage can fires near the Bay Bridge and stopped traffic with their jiggle-y protest.

Mrs. Ryan tells me my mother will be moved first thing in the morning, and I can come back tomorrow to see her.

“You can stay,” she says, looking down at my sleeping mother as a parent might look at a misbehaving child. “But she’ll be out of it for a while. It took quite a lot to calm her down.”

“A lot?” I imagine several men trying to hold my mother down, her braid whipping from side-to-side, her eyes wide and hard and dark. She yells, “Black women bastards! Get the hell away from my card game. And bring me that damn hamburger!”

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“Drugs,” Mrs. Ryan says. “Marnie’s very strong.”

I gently encircle my mother’s wrist, feel the bones under her thin skin, press my fingers against her tendons and nerves, all struggling to break free. Inside her body, her mind is there, upset. If I believed in a soul, I’d imagine that’s upset, too. Chained. Trapped.

“She’ll be okay,” Mrs. Ryan says.

So I say goodbye and wander down the hall, vacant as a lost balloon, feeling as though an orderly gave me a shot, jabbing it into the fat of my upper arm, a scene out of a madhouse film. I can’t swallow, and my eyes are dry. I’m a Doctor Frankenstein first attempt, two left feet, two left hands. I bumble into the game room, and there is Mr. Wang, his shirt buttoned, his glasses on the bridge of his nose, his hands pawing a deck of cards.

“Care for some cards?” he asks.

As we play—gin rummy never my forte, and I lose one hand and then two—I learn that Mr. Wang had three children, all of whom died in the past five years, at 70, 72, and 75. None had surviving children.

His wife Lydia died in 1987 of breast cancer. He worked at his own accounting business until he was 78. He didn’t move into Apple Valley until he was 87, staying in the big ranch house in Moraga until he couldn’t bend down to prune his beloved geraniums.

Now that I can really look at him without fear of my mother’s reprisals, I see there’s more than his shaking hands to give away his age. His face is so lined, it almost looks perfectly folded, like the linen napkins my mother rolled tight, froze in the freezer, and then ironed flat. His breath redolent of mint toothpaste over denture decay; his fingernails thick and slightly yellow.

But he smiles, asks me about my sons, my grandchildren. He steers around my fled ex-husband, a story my mother might have told him when she still remembered. His voice has the slight halt and terseness of what? Cantonese? Mandarin? But his grammar is perfect, his sentences flowing. “Would you like to play another?” he asks the first time he wins.

I nod. He deals. The light slants into the room until it is just a triangle of opaque gold, dust motes floating like tiny brilliant fish in its glow. The afternoon ticks by, the triangle folding up into dusk and eventually, the lights flick on.

“I’m afraid to admit I lead five to zero,” Mr. Wang says.

I look up, wanting to tell him the story of my life since my mother forgot it. How that fled ex-husband came back once and left again. The next time he showed up, I let him stay on the couch. The third time, I called the police. How I’ve been set up on blind dates and forced onto dating web sites by my friends. How my children are happier than I am, their lives unfolding with an ease I never knew. How my mother is exhausting me. I want to tell him that I’ve lost her so many times, I don’t know if any of her remains. How seeing her makes me want to simultaneously howl in sorrow and run away and never come back. I

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F I C T I O N want to tell him that I’m afraid that I will turn into her. That maybe, I already have.

But how can I say any of this? Mr. Wang has been left by everyone and everything. His whole family, one by one. Now my mother is leaving him, too.

“Tomorrow?” I ask.

Mr. Wang nods. “Rematch.”

At home, a half-opened curtain, three email messages from prospective dates, a full kitty-litter box. Mycroft sleeps on the top of the couch, the one slice of sun on his tabby belly. On the coffee table, the photos I brought out the night before, the ones I lifted from my mother’s boxes before the POD carted everything away. Now, though, I can’t bear to look at any memories, and I put the albums away in the coat closet and sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, ignoring the blink of the phone machine and the dishes in the sink.

Like Mr. Wang, I’m an accountant, though not as successful, unable to buy a ranch house in toney Moraga with its half-acre lots and quiet cul-de-sacs. But I know how to count. My days being able to remember who I am are numbered.

The bag is warm, heat radiating to my hand. I smell the oil and sauce and meat as I walk down the hall, ignoring the glances from staff. I’m sure they wonder what I’m doing here now, in this building, when my mother has already been moved.

I find him in the game room, a bridge foursome going strong in the far corner. Mr. Wang looks up, pushes his glasses up his nose, smiles.

“I have the damn hamburgers,” I say. “Medium-rare.”

Jessica Barksdale is the author of twelve traditionally published novels, including Her Daughter’s Eyes and When You Believe. Her novel Becca’s Best is forthcoming from Ghostwoods Books. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Compose, Salt Hill Journal, The Coachella Review, Carve Magazine, Mason’s Road, and So to Speak. She is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, and teaches online novel writing for UCLA Extension. You can read more at: www.jessicabarksdaleinclan.com

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E S S A Y

Robert King

Lost in the West

Florida Center for Instructional Technology

For it seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those than lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed.

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory

H

ere’s a family story of the west. One day in the early 1900s, Arthur and May King, not yet my grandfather and grandmother, set out from their hometown of Sterling in northeastern Colorado to drive to the Rocky Mountains.

And this was so long before Highway 14 was laid fairly straight west from Sterling the hundred miles or so to my front-range hometown of Fort Collins and only paved in 1954 when I was in high school, let alone before Interstate 76, the diagonal swath of concrete from Nebraska past Sterling to Denver in 1970, so long before those highways that the worn track of the main road was not much more evident than the

less-worn tracks of the minor roads, or even the faint double set leading to somebody’s farmhouse, because that’s where they ended up, spending the night in a stranger’s house, the wallpaper pattern exactly like their own home, lost on the prairie where you can see in all directions.

Getting lost in that landscape was not difficult, of course, with a notable absence of landmarks in northeastern Colorado, the location of Beaver Creek, for example, described by a pioneer guide book as “8 miles from the tree.”

Even Custer got lost around there in 1867, leaving his men behind—an error in judgment that might have portended later ones—to charge excitedly after his

E S S A Y my young ancestors getting lost on the first buffalo and then, some miles away, grasslands while driving west to the to be thrown off, Yellow Hair hoofing mountains that stayed with me. I’d it on his own around a big nowhere returned to my home state after years until his men found him. And there of being away and was only now, at 70 were others, like 80-year-old Grandpa plus, investigating my little histories, Burke who went out into the sand hills wanting to see what old I’d find in what in 1899, the year my grandparents got was new, that past that always undermarried, to look for a calf and was lies the present. But who could get lost never found. Or Reverend Tetsell—of in Sterling in the 21st century? Me. the Tetsell Ditch, one of the first built in

those parts—who, coming home with Still, we’re likely to get lost in the a load of wood, got lost in a blizzard West in more ways than the physical. and finally, a common ending, tied up We can get lost in the lines of the team its past, taking as and said “Take us truth the stereotyped home, boys!” which, We’re likely to get lost in the images of heroism after hours of “weary and individualtramping,” they did. West in more ways than the ity—the cowboy or Or, another iconic physical. We can get lost in the sheriff, the Pony story, the time in its past, taking as truth the Express rider dur1910 when Judge stereotyped images of heroism ing that four-year Weeks and Orin Courtwright went to and individuality—the cowboy or venture replaced by Sterling, picked up the sheriff, the Pony Express rider the technology of the telegraph, to be Orin’s mother and during that four-year venture replaced again by the sisters, and started back “on the trackreplaced by the technology of the grubby gold prospector who could less prairie”—in this telegraph, to be replaced again have been our greatcountryside you by the grubby gold prospector grandfather—those know the reason richly and falsely for the cliché—but who could have been our greatromantic images that realized they were grandfather—those richly and allow us little more lost with night comfalsely romantic images that than escape. As a ing on. They had child, I’d ride in the tents and supplies allow us little more than escape. backseat into Wyoand easily camped, ming on Highway although the Judge 287, imagining the Lone Ranger and kept awake all night, smoking his pipe, Tonto on horseback looking down at stomping around the camp, and cursing the long valley from the red rim-rock his bad luck. At daybreak—you’re waitalong that part of the Overland Trail ing for this—he saw his shack about which I didn’t know about yet.

300 yards away There are so many of We sometimes try to carry our past these stories around that I sometimes with us, Sterling, Colorado, named find myself defining the American West for Sterling, Illinois, the hometown as a place you can more easily get lost of the first postmaster. For that matin than anywhere else. But there was ter, Abbeville, Mississippi, where my something about that story, my story,

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grandfather Arthur was born before being trundled west at 1 ½ years, was named for the Abbeville in South Carolina from which those pioneers came in the 1830s.

These days we still use names to recall where we’ve been, or where we were, our mythical memories playing themselves out. A few months ago, I drove west on Colfax in Denver and noticed, in two blocks, the Homestead Motel, the Trail’s End Motel, and the Chuckwagon Diner, names of relics and now relics themselves with their ‘40s architecture. On my way to Sterling that time, I’d driven toward Fort Morgan, passing a trailer settlement named The Wayward Wind, then a series of houses on large acreages called Trail Side Ranchettes. And one gets used to this, the ranchette a type of development described by some “as a way to eat up the landscape very fast,” the suburbanization of the American West.

From ranch to ranchette.

On my way to Sterling, I’d stopped in Ft. Morgan which lies, I knew by then, on the old Overland Trail—the 1864 site of the fort approximately covered by the Municipal Skate Park and Tennis Courts—and had lunch at a restaurant called, believe it or not, “Memories.” The faces of old-timers, stolid and severe, stared out on the walls of my booth, the main walls in the café covered with a washboard, old saws, grinders, more tools I didn’t even know the names or use of. I’d eaten lunch while the sound system played, in succession, Patsy Cline’s “I Go Out Walking,” then “Duke of Earl,” then “Do the Locomotion.” The pioneers of the late 19th century and songs from the middle of the 20th were both “oldies,” the memories of the two generations before me and, as the current older generation, my own.

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But it’s also easy to get lost in the present, assuming that everything under our feet—the bones of Paleolithic hunters, the dried blood of ancient battles, the struggle for survival on the part of all races—is dead and gone, is not “present,” from the Latin “to show.” And if we don’t find it showing itself, that old thing has nothing to do with us who live in one particular day after another.

In and around Greeley, where I now live, thirty miles from my old hometown, I’ve encountered those wavering boundaries. Driving a county road one afternoon, I stared at a bright new sign at the corner of an intersection announcing “Space Available.” In one sense, the sign was correct, nothing but fields extending in all four directions from the crossroads, but in another sense the land was already filled, thick with crops and pasture-grass. These days in Colorado any “space” thus advertised is being defined as something you don’t want there anymore.

The sign promised this space was available for more commercial uses, more housing, more development, more more, a vacancy that would be filled.

Growth was the promise of the open spaces of The West, and its progress was carefully attended to and loudly announced from the mid-1800s through the 1900s. Now growth has become, in Colorado as well as other western states, an issue—still an unquestioned goal for some, a variety of problems to others. It isn’t only environmentalists who are starting to get concerned about strip-malls, parking lots, and developments invading rural space.

These days the U.S. loses a couple acres of farmland a day to such construction, a different kind of erosion than the 1930s, and some farmers are making more money selling their water rights

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E S S A Y and towering cottonwoods, refusing the to expanding and thirsty cities than new suburbs with their bare curving irrigating their crops. streets and spindly trees on land made But it’s too easy to be smug about out of someone’s farm. But I’d had my other people’s choices, especially a own come-uppance. “I know where younger generation. Robert Pyle, in you live,” a long-time citizen of Greeley Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban remarked when he heard me give my Wildland, writes of growing up near address to someone. “That used to be the Highline Ditch in Denver and his a farm thirty years ago.” So what did I connection with that artificial system know of old? which yet offered him experiences Still, master with nature. He also planned communities complains about seem different. I’ve Green Valley Ranch, driven past a new one a planned community My own family pioneers near Denver’s Interin the 1990s, which may have come to Colorado national Airport in advertised “a serene to build a new hometown what certainly looked and inviting lifestyle for themselves but they like the proverbial for your family” as wide open spaces, well as “a piece of journeyed mainly to survive nothing but range Colorado history of a worn-out farm in post-Civil land around, its sign the heritage of pioWar Mississippi, the town announcing the new neers who came in housing development search of their dream.” almost obliterated during the of “REUNION.” And, It also represents, Pyle Vicksburg campaign. I doubt in case I missed the notes, “the oblitirony, a subtitle: “A eration of that history, they thought of pursuing New Hometown.” that dream, as the happiness, nor would they The development’s old homesteads and have thought of themselves website says the grasslands go beneath name “was chosen the bulldozer’s blade.” as being “in search of their to represent a deep I’ve wondered how dream,” as the current phrase appreciation for the many residents of has it and as the Green Valley past, a sense of wonGreen Valley Ranch, der about the future despite its name, could Ranch folks have it. and a commitment to really say they thought living every moment of their pioneer to the fullest.” This, then, is the New heritage as they looked out at a neatly Suburbanism, with its parks and trails, trimmed lawn. And yet Pyle admits he its recreation centers and athletic fields. also had to remember his own famThis, the copy reads, is what makes ily seeking the new Denver suburb of Reunion “something entirely new— Hoffman Heights forty years earlier. a community created for the pursuit “We, too,” he says, “were simply seekof happiness.” Well, that’s one of our ing the nicest place we could afford, as rights, I guess. far from town as possible.”

Near Reunion is a development Moving to Greeley, I purposely called—another name echoing from our bought a house in an older neighborhistory—Buffalo Run. Its golf course hood with a quiet folksy atmosphere

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living in Reunion have an unobstructed condos are called “The Fairways at view of the Rocky Mountains, at least Buffalo Run.” Nearby, on a bench at a for now—those vistas where we “live” bus-stop along the highway to Denver in another way than occupation. Hal is a sign: “Your Ad Here.” Wherever Rothman, one of the historians of the you are when you’re here.

New West, points out that demogMy own family pioneers may have raphy, where we actually live in our come to Colorado to build a new homecities, our subdivisions, our planned town for themselves but they journeyed communities, defines our reality. But mainly to survive a worn-out farm in geography, that stretch of flat or rolling post-Civil War Mississippi, the town or sharply ascendalmost obliterated ing and descending during the Vicksburg landscape, is “what We can also get lost in the campaign. I doubt we aspire to in our they thought of future, our eyes gleaming at dreams.” And this pursuing happiness, a section of “empty land,” is where we live, he nor would they have says: trapped—conthought of themselves our minds preoccupied with sciously or not— as being “in search of incessant planning for what between demogratheir dream,” as the is to come, for what new can phy and geography. current phrase has And this means, be “developed,” the sound it and as the Green of course, we can Valley Ranch folks of a word that first meant also get lost in the have it. To move into future, our eyes a planned community unwrapped, exposed, unfolded, gleaming at a section and then moved on to the seems to me to be of “empty land,”our moving directly into meaning of “enclosed.” So we minds preoccua new house in a new unwrap the open space and then pied with incessant development existplanning for what ing on the arid plains enclose it, not always realizing only for economic what we are doing in the present is to come, for what new can be “develreasons—no natural and casting off as unessential or oped,” the sound reasons here with no of a word that first river, no railroads, no unimportant what was done in meant unwrapped, important junction of the past of the West. exposed, unfolded, geography—connectand then moved on ed to a city or town to the meaning of only by your car and “enclosed.” So we unwrap the open saying, as you drove under the movspace and then enclose it, not always ing automatic door, ‘I’m home now.” realizing what we are doing in the My family’s way was to arrive on a dry present and casting off as unessential or plain of rattlesnakes and cactus and unimportant what was done in the past wonder how it could ever be home. of the West. All these ways of getting We westerners, it has been pointed lost in any one time have their dangers out, live in a paradox. In the main, we because our lives, no matter how we live in cities; the west is densely urban live, continue in all three tenses at once. by definition. But we still have those vistas of open space—even the folks

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E S S A Y But they were here, the pioneers, the settlers, the families, my family, first facing this land after generations of others had first faced it for a millennium and left, now almost a blank landscape, the buffalo still here but fading, the Indians all but gone, the soldiers gone, the stage-stations and telegraph poles gone. They were New People in a Big Land, my ancestors, and here I am, old and little, wondering about the blood I come from and the land I grew up in and now have returned to and what part I have played—or what part I dreamed all of us played.

And here’s the new story of being lost. I’ve come, after driving through Sterling for several years, to the town of my father’s father’s father, starting a trip I thought might test the boundaries between the past and present that are not, as Schama says, “so easily fixed” as we might think. And I’ve had lunch at the Memories Restaurant.

That night, I’m standing outside the Corner Bar on Sterling’s Front Street across from the railroad tracks. I’ve had supper at the Village Inn down the street, a national chain, no inn and no village, just another echo from some earlier time we don’t remember.

I’ve finished walking the blocks of the original town site—down Fourth Street, southwest to the slant of Division Avenue and east to Front Street—purchased for $400 and platted in 1881 by Minos C. King, the brother of my greatgrandfather James Madison. The old section is a little “off” from the rest of the town, following the diagonal of the railroad tracks until the Packard addition in late 1887 was set up on straight N-S-E-W lines, all other additions following that orientation.

I’ve had a quiet walk, meeting no one in the streets. A building that

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looked as if it had been a hotel at one time had a light and an open door and I found a small ceramic studio still open, the woman working there telling me the hotel had once housed prisoners of war, another example of history under the layers of the present.

That night, approaching the Corner Bar at First and Main, I wondered if it was where the first lumber yard and general store had been, a plain board shanty opened by great-uncle Minos and R. E. Smith where, according to Emma Burke Conklin’s Brief History of Sterling, “the present pool hall is situated”—but her book is dated 1928.

Stepping inside, I’m immediately blasted by the noise and bustle. A dozen long-haired, sun-tanned workers down beers while laughing loudly, and the two women behind the bar inhale and exhale clouds of smoke—this is a year or so before the state will ban smoking in bars—while talking to a burly friend with “Pimptown University” on his T-shirt. Some rough work is over for the day and it’s time to get together.

If it were the site of the original store, great-grandfather James would have shaken his head, born into a temperance family and living in what would be a temperance town for awhile. The first matter of business in the earliest meeting of the Sterling town board in November of 1887 was to unanimously grant Charles Kelly’s application for a saloon license for three months. Soon it was a town of three saloons, but Sheriff Dixon Buchanan, in a 1930s interview, described meeting “Uncle Jimmie,” as my great-grandfather was known, on the sidewalk in front of the Advocate office and sitting down with him to select a temperance ticket, a mayor and town board who wouldn’t give out saloon licenses. Sterling went years before it had another

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saloon. And then, of course, there was my car, the rain is coming down hard, the experiment in Prohibition of which, and by the time I turn onto the street to the Sterling Democrat noted in 1922, go toward my motel on the east side of “even the most ardent prohibitionist town, I can barely see the road in front can not justly claim that there has been of me. Then everything disappears any great diminution in the consumpcompletely in—well, in a damned big tion of intoxicating liquors.” wall of water.

And the consumption is continuRain pounds in surprisingly fierce ing in the Corner Bar. I’ve walked the surges against the car which lurches silence of the late 19th and early 20th cenand sways, the tires spraying up water tury original streets and now find the to the windows. I follow one car’s noise and smoke and raucous laughter taillights that soon turn off and I keep of the 21st almost going. I’ve never disorienting. Everyone been in rain this is having a good time viciously blindafter the working day I’ve walked the silence of the ing, unable to see and I’m not sure what late 19th and early 20th century anything outside, kind of time I’m havand I inch neroriginal streets and now ing. I finish my beer vously along. For find the noise and smoke and and step outside to a moment, I can st find a customer, beer make out a yellow raucous laughter of the 21 in hand, wavering a line to the right of almost disorienting. Everyone little on his feet, and my headlights and is having a good time after the staring toward the then realize it’s west. a double-yellow working day and I’m not sure “There’s a damned line and I’m on the what kind of time I’m having. I big wall of water comwrong side of the finish my beer and step outside ing,” he half-slurs, street. I shift over nodding toward the to find a customer, beer in hand, and actually open west. wavering a little on his feet, and the door, driving I stop and look, the while peering down staring toward the west. clouds a gray sheet at the blurry yellow from sky to earth, but streaks, a survival all I can manage is, trick I invented for “Really?” myself in a North “Yep,” he affirms. “A damned Dakota snowstorm. My motel isn’t visbig wall of water coming.” He spins ible to the right, nor are the lights from unsteadily and disappears back inside. the gas-station I know is near, or the car I start toward my car parked a few sales lot I’ve noticed earlier. blocks away by the institution of the I figure I must have crossed the Village Inn, squinting as a few rainSouth Platte on the eastern edge of drops pelt against my face. A block town, but I still can’t see anything to get away and an erupting town-siren my bearings until I find myself sudstartles me. I check my watch—a little denly driving under a huge looming past 7—and wonder ignorantly about gray shape and realize it’s the overpass the sudden wailing. By the time I reach of Interstate 76. I’ve passed my motel

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E S S A Y and am heading in an obliterating the window looking down at the illugray wash toward Kansas, maybe, or minated swimming pool, torn branches Nebraska, where my grandmother May and shredded leaves floating on its came from, daughter of pioneer Tom bright surface. I can barely believe what Evans who ran the stage station near has just happened. I’ve been, for a few Antelopeville which would someday be moments, lost in the nature of the place called Kimball, that western Nebraska but am now, like my grandparents, safe landscape not much among strangers, a different from eastern kind of retreat for a Colorado and now kind of pioneer in the everything the same 21st century. Outside, I still can’t see anything to in the torrential rain. water surges through get my bearings until I find And here I am, about Sterling’s gutters myself suddenly driving under and pipes to empty to retrace her steps backwards in the night a huge looming gray shape into the South Platte storm. and take something and realize it’s the overpass of I slow even more, like two to three Interstate 76. I’ve passed my finally spotting a dim weeks to travel the light and turning into South Platte to meet motel and am heading in an what materializes as obliterating gray wash toward the North, then the a convenience store Missouri, the MisKansas, maybe, or Nebraska and gas station at the sissippi, the ocean.

Interstate’s Sterling As I go to sleep I feel where my grandmother May exit, a kind of stage came from, daughter of pioneer this dark movement station. Inside, the outside.

Tom Evans who ran the stage female clerk huddles under the counter, The next mornstation near Antelopeville “taking cover” as she ing, I drive to get a which would someday be says the radio has told newspaper, then park called Kimball, that western by the courthouse her to do because of to walk downtown the tornado—what the Nebraska landscape not much siren had meant—and different from eastern Colorado again, passing the location of Grandseveral nervous drivand now everything the same father Arthur’s first ers who’ve come off the Interstate, strangin the torrential rain. And here house on Hamilton ers interrupted in their I am, about to retrace her steps Street which is now the Quest Building. I own journeys, gather walk past the Courtaround talking. In ten backwards in the night storm. house Square and minutes, the storm sit beside the new has eased off enough bronze statue, “Popcorn Man,” a replifor me to at least see the road and, my ca, I discover in the newspaper, of Clardestination much closer than anyone ence Mentgen, who sold popcorn on else’s, I dash out, getting soaked in the that corner for years from one of those ten seconds it takes to pile back into the old-fashioned carts. Funds were raised car. This time I find my motel and then from past and present residents who my anonymous room where I stand at

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remember buying popcorn or candy or peanuts or sno-cones from Clarence’s stand when they were children, making this statue more historically relevant than any general on, or off, his horse.

Folding back the paper, I read the editorial for a seasonal fire ban, warning local residents to “recognize practices that lead to wildfires and manage those practices better in consideration of a dry climate.” A grass fire, perhaps like a tornado, “is always only a moment, a decision away. That is partly a decision of living in northeast Colorado’s semi-desert climate, but it is a challenge worth finding ways to control.”

I have breakfast at the J & L Cafe— “Jones and Lane, honey,” the waitress answers my question. “It used to be up there,” she points north. The story at the counter and in the booths behind me is about last night’s tornado that tore off the roof of Halloway’s auto dealership and dumped it on top of some cars. The café’s motto on the menu is, “Where the Past and Present Meet,” and when the waitress comes back I ask a second question. “Just because it’s been around so long,” she shrugs. While I wait I flip open the newspaper again to find announcements for two 50th wedding anniversaries, two photos for each, the couple’s first wedding picture and one of them now. Above me, a model train runs around a track positioned on a high ledge, a couple of cars carrying local advertisements.

Thus I eat eggs, potatoes, bacon, and toast in the center of my ancestors’ hometown at a café started in 1938, one year after my birth, and I’m happy at the coincidence of a promising motto of two times meeting.

A few years later, I come back to Sterling from my home in Greeley driving straight east on Highway 14

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past little except rangeland. Crossing into Logan County, I’m in the middle of thinking about hopes and plans and change in the West. Kenneth Jessen’s Ghost Towns: Eastern Colorado lists something like 40 of them in Logan County, although it depends on your definition of ‘ghost’ as he includes some small towns he considers “dying.”

Some of these ghosts were stage stations, like Valley and like Lillian Springs, both on the South Platte, both burned to the ground during the Indian wars of the 1860s. Some disappeared as railroad history changed, like Rockland, started in 1888, expecting the Burlington & Missouri which was never constructed. Others are examples of small places failing against others, like Laura, which died leaving not even a foundation, when nearby Peetz, founded in 1917, got the railroad station.

South of me is, was, the evanescent Logan where, Jessen says, “nothing remains.” South of that is Merino, founded in 1906, the year before my father was born, located on the land of the failed Buffalo Colony in 1874, still occupied but with a number of empty businesses, now in a declining state which, says Jessen, “may join the ranks of completely abandoned towns in the future.” Still, a website claims it as “home to a thriving school district.”

I’d driven through Merino—an aunt of mine once lived there—and briefly explored a very shady, bucolic collection of homes. The Merino Trading Post was closed, its sign promising at one time “Ice Cream, Gatorade, Eggs, Ship UPS, Tanning.” The Co-Op building was closed, a weathered “For Sale” sign on the front.

Still heading toward Sterling, I know that Graylin is north of me, its Poplar Grove school replacing the original sod school and finally moved to a ranch to

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E S S A Y serve as a barn. The last year of Graylin Heights high school, started in the early ‘20s, was in 1941 when students were moved to the Sterling system. Two locations have been recorded, says Jessen, but “nothing remains at either site.”

And, north of Graylin lay Westplains, with its evocative name, never an actual town with laid-out streets but a number of small houses. When Jessen visited to take photographs, the only sound he heard was “the relentless wind coming in from the northwest, blowing the loose shingles on the buildings.”

East of Sterling is Fleming, which never recovered from the 1930s although it still has 470 inhabitants. In the preface to the 1971 Memories of Our Pioneers: Fleming, “Fleming has seen good times and bad, but, we’ve weathered them all and will again…we’re hanging on.”

But there was no hanging on in those communities around Fleming when the rains stopped, the grass and sagebrush became a dustbowl, and many homesteaders left: Le Roy east of Sterling, still populated but barely according to our standards, Chenoa, abandoned in 1885, Logan Center, Blackhawk, Warrensville and Chalet.

North of Sterling, and almost in Nebraska, Peetz has survived, with a little over 200 people, “several thriving businesses,” the Town Hall now housed in an old bank building that survived the Depression. During its busiest years there were 50 businesses and 450 residents. But here comes the future, the area now the location of the Peetz Table Wind Energy Center, one of the country’s largest wind projects, a “cornerstone of renewable energy development” in the county, I read on its website. Loving names, I noted one project owner is NextEra Energy

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Resources. One era, the next era, the NextEra. I drive down Highway 14 into town, not the route I’ve taken in the past, and in seven blocks pass a Pizza Hut, a McDonalds, a Taco Johns, a KFC, a Dairy Queen, a Papa Murphy’s, a Subway, and an Arby’s. A Wal-Mart Supercenter came in 2000, a Home Depot in 2005, a Walgreens in 2007, “a growth spurt,” the Logan County website calls it. I drive the route I walked a few years ago. The Corner Bar, changed later to “The Loose Caboose,” then to “For Sale or Rent,” is now “Bottoms Up.” The ceramic studio in the hotel which housed prisoners of war is now “Rockin’ R’s Game Room.”

Sterling, now dubbed “A Colorado Treasure” on the town’s website, has been having some good years. Agricultural prices have been up. The top employers in town are the Sterling Correctional Facility, the Sterling Regional Med-Center, the school district, the Wal-Mart, Sykes Enterprises which specializes in information technology, and the junior college. In 2006 it was named Best Small Community of the Year by the Economic Development Council of Colorado.

I stop for lunch at the J&L again— I always will—reading the menu specials, a smothered pork chop or smothered biscuits or a four-piece order of fried chicken. The old motto I’d admired is now gone from the menu. I think the past isn’t touching the present anymore and I’m wrong.

I sit at the counter next to an elderly, which means my age, rancher—Stetson, striped shirt with pearl buttons, jeans, and boots—eating a salad. After a while, I introduce myself and meet Jim, a Sterling native born four years before me, with a ranch “out near Peetz” in the direction of the new Sterling Cor-

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rectional Facility. I ask about Sterling’s economy these days.

“Well, it’s always been agriculture,” Jim says. “And it’s been pretty good lately. Prices up.”

“I suppose the Correctional Facility is a good thing for the economy,” I put in. “What do people think about it?”

“Well,” he replies cautiously, “folks got to vote on it.”

I feel some tentativeness in his answer. “So was there a big difference in the vote?”

He takes a bite of salad and a sip of coffee. “I don’t know,” he replies quietly. “But I never met anyone who said they voted for it.”

I mull this answer for a moment and he goes on. “Sterling supplies the water and the sewer. You’d think we’d have control over it, but we don’t. They expanded a few years ago and nobody asked anybody what they thought.”

“I’ve got a connection here,” I say after a pause. “My great-uncle was Minos King. He helped start Sterling,” I add uselessly because Jim nods.

“Growing up, I used to play with Minos’ grandson,” he says and I am taken aback by the startling connection.

“Minos, he had a lot of interests,” he says, somewhat cryptically, about

the founder and store-owner, cattleman, sheep-man. I mention rain and irrigation, and he says the main thing is to keep some cover on your fields or they’ll dry right out.

I look around. “I miss the model train that used to be above us,” I say, and he looks up in surprise.

“There it is,” he nods and I see it stalled at one end of the room.

“But it used to go around the whole room,” I say and then he remembers that. I think of asking about the motto that made such an impression on me the first time at this café, but it seems trivial now. I think I should actually get out my notebook and interview him more, but I can’t think of the right questions—the King grandson’s name or what games they played or what his own children are doing now or what he thinks of the absences surrounding the landscape of his life or the new presences. I get up to leave and we shake hands like old men do, a formal and friendly connection and, at the same time, a possibly final goodbye. Outside in the sun, I take a last look at my grandfather’s town, savoring a moment in the middle of our times, which is where we almost always live.

Robert King has published two volumes of poetry, Old Man Laughing and Some of These Days, and several chapbooks. His book on North Dakota, Stepping Twice into the River (2007), was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction.

This essay is from a book-in-progress, Reunion: Colorado.

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T S E W E H DING T

REA

read-ing [from ME reden, to explain, hence to read] – vt. 1 to get the meaning of; 2 to understand the nature, significance, or thinking of; 3 to interpret or understand; 4 to apply oneself to; study.

ENDANGERED SPECIES IN THE AMERICAN WEST The United States boasts the greatest diversity of ecosystems of any country. It is home to more than 200,000 species. However, about one third of U.S. plants and animals are considered at risk by biologists, and at least 500 U.S. species are already extinct or missing.

The West, particularly Hawaii, the Appalachians, and Florida have the most at-risk species.

EcoWest (a product of the consulting firm California Environmental Associates) reports that Hawaii, California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada are the top at-risk states in the nation. At least 25% of the freshwater fish in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, California, and Oregon are at risk for extinction.

Endangered species clustered in subset of counties

Number of Federally Listed Species 1

5-9

2-4

>_ 10

Source: Tobin, Mitch. “Trends in Endangered Species Listings,” 27 November 2012; http://www.ecowest. org/2012/11/27/trends-in-endangered-species-listings/

FRESHWATER FISHES IN THE AMERICAN WEST Northern Arizona University hosts the symposium, Land Use History of the Colorado Plateau.

The researchers report the following: A number of once common native plant and animal species on the Colorado Plateau have become increasingly rare, and some, particularly freshwater fishes, have become extinct.

Habitat destruction, degradation, and fragmentation, sometimes in combination with hunting and poisoning, has led to significant decreases in the overall populations of a number of species. The federal government has classified a few of these as endangered, meaning that the species is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range. Others, classified as threatened, may reach endangered status if habitats continue to be degraded and populations continue to fall….

Dam construction and regulation probably had the greatest adverse effect on native fishes of southwestern rivers, while the effects of excessive groundwater pumping have imperiled many spring systems and their associated fauna. The number of nonindigenous fish species in the Southwest is considerable: Arizona has 71 species; New Mexico, 75; Utah, 55; and Texas, 96….

As a whole, fishes in the western United States are clearly more imperiled than those in the eastern United States. More than half of the fishes listed as endangered or threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or being considered for such listing, occur west of the Continental Divide.

GANS) BONYTAIL CHUB (GILA ELE

Historically, the bonytail was probably one of the most abundant fishes in the Colorado River basin but has now been called “functionally extinct” (Carlson and Muth 1989). Bonytails were one of the first fish species to reflect the changes that occurred in the Colorado River basin after the construction of Hoover Dam; the fish was extirpated from the lower basin Illustration by Kent Pendleton. Courtesy of Colorado Division of Wildlife. Colorado between 1926 and 1950.

Outdoors, May-June, 1975.

Source: http://cpluhna.nau.edu/Biota/fishes.htm

Biologists set up the camera stations to capture photographs of typically elusive, forest-dwelling carnivores.

Kim Hersey, mammals conservation coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said the second station produced the array of images—the first wolverine verified in Utah since a wolverine carcass was found in 1979.

"This is the first strong documented evidence of a wolverine in the state since the late '70s. They are a very rare animal," Hersey said. "This could potentially be an expansion of their range."….

Continued threats include habitat loss and reductions in late spring snowpack, with estimates that put the wolverine population at about 300 individuals in the North Cascades in Washington and in the Northern Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

Facing a court order, the federal government in 2013 proposed to list the wolverine as threatened and put out a call for scientific and public input. A decision to list or to withdraw its proposed action is due in early August.

Source: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606200/Biologists-cameras-capture-rare-image-of-wolverinevisiting-Utah-2-first-in-decades.html?pg=all

Resources

SALT LAKE CITY—A fleeting, five-minute visit in a remote area of the Uinta Mountains yielded 27 images of an animal not spotted in Utah for more than 30 years—the elusive wolverine….

Utah Division of Wildlife

Breaking News

R E A D I N G

T H E

W E S T

THREATENED AND ENDANGERED BY THE NUMBERS San Diego State University hosts the San Diego Wildfires Education Project. Researchers have posted a 2005 map noting the numbers of threatened and endangered species in the U.S. Listed Species By State/Territory as of Thu Feb 3 01:00:04 MST 2005 Omits “similarity of appearance” and experimental populations. Does not map whales and non-nesting sea turtles in state costal waters.

Alaska

Hawaii Outlying Islands

Puerto Rico

U.S. V.I.

Total U.S. Species is 1264. Numbers are not additive, a species often occurs in mulitple states.

Source: The San Diego Wildfires Education Project, http://interwork.sdsu.edu/fire/resources/ThreatnedandEndangeredSpecies.htm; obtained from: U.S. Department of Fish & Wildlife Service (2005). Species information; Threatened and Endangered Animals and Plants

TO LIST, OR NOT TO LIST Researchers with Wild Earth Guardians, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, reported in 2009 on the most endangered species in the U.S. The report confirmed that the most endangered species were in the West. In 2011 the organization entered into a settlement agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that will require the Service to make a final determination on Endangered Species Act status for 252 candidate species by September 2016.

The majority of the Top 40 endangered species are in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific Region (Region 1), which includes Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

The region with the second-most Top 40 species is the Southwest (Region 2), which includes New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and Oklahoma. Utah is in the Mountain-Prairie Region (Region 6)…. Most of America’s Top 40 are plants or invertebrates; only two are vertebrates (one fish and one bird).

156

WEBER

THE CONTEMPORARY WEST

FALL 2014

Geography of America’s Top 40 Region

Number of Top 40 Species

Percentage of Top 40 Species

Pacific (Region 1)

34

79%

Southwest (Region 2)

6

14%

Great Lakes/Big Rivers (Region 3)

1

2%

Southeast (Region 4)

2

5%

Total

43

100%

Utah has 14 candidate species for listing as being endangered:

8 Animals Coral Pink Sand Dunes tiger beetle Greater sage-grouse Gunnison sage-grouse Gunnison’s prairie dog Least chub Relict leopard frog (not found in Utah since 1950) Wolverine (contiguous U.S. Distinct Populations Segment)—Utah officials have delayed the reintroduction of this species into Utah Male greater sage-grouse

Yellow-billed cuckoo (western U.S. DPS)

Darrell Pruett

6 Plants Frisco buckwheat Frisco Clover

UTAH

Gierisch mallow Goose Creek milkvetch Ostler’s peppergrass White River beardtongue Female greater sage-grouse Darrell Pruett

Source: Rosemarino, Nicole. America’s Top 40: A Call to Action for the Nation’s Most Imperiled Species, April 2009; http://www.wildearthguardians.org/site/DocServer/report-top-40-4-30-09.pdf?docID=791&AddInterest=1059.

Also see: http://www.wildearthguardians.org/site/PageServer?pagename=priorities_wildlife_ESA_listing_ milestone&AddInterest=1262#.U6mXVZRdV8E. Prettyman, Brett. “Western States Want to Delay Wolverine Listing,” Salt Lake Tribune, 2 December, 2013, http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57164747-78/species-wildlife-wolverine-wolverines.html.csp. Illustration Source: http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/literatr/grasbird/grsg/grsg.htm

R E A D I N G

T H E

W E S T

NOT TO LIST Despite settlements requiring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review the status of hundreds of species currently listed as candidate species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), conservation groups continue to file lawsuits to force listing decisions. Westerners continue to resist. The Western Governors’ Association recently adopted a resolution urging the federal government to defer to state conservation efforts and to prioritize funding to avoid new listings under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The resolution calls for state conservation plans to “give rise to a regulatory presumption by federal agencies that an ESA listing is not warranted” and purports to provide clear guidance to states regarding minimum requirements for state and multi-state conservation plans.

It also notes that states “should be included as partners” when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) makes an ESA listing determination.

While WGA’s resolution applies to all species considered for listing by FWS and NMFS, it makes explicit reference to the greater sage grouse, a species that FWS must decide whether to list by September 2015 under a court order requiring listing determinations for approximately 250 candidate species by 2018. The greater sage grouse inhabits 11 western states, all of which are represented by the WGA, and all of which have developed conservation plans or “other authorities” for conservation of the species.

Source: Percival, Kelly, “State Governors Urge the Federal Government to Defer to State Conservation Efforts When Deciding Whether to List a Species Under the Endangered Species Act,” posted 16 June 2014, Endangered Species, Law & Policy, hosted by Nossaman law firm, http://www.endangeredspecieslawandpolicy.com/.

EDITORIAL MATTER

ISSN 0891-8899 —Weber is published biannually by The College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah 84408-1405. Full text of this issue and historical archives are available in electronic edition at https://www.weber.edu/weberjournal Indexed in: Abstracts of English Studies, Humanities International Complete, Index of American Periodical Verse, MLA International Bibliography, and Sociological Abstracts. Member, Council of Learned Journals.

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ANNOUNCING the 2014 Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Essay Award

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in the Spring/Summer 2014 issue The Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the best essay published in Weber during the previous year.

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