Magdalena Mountain. Robert Michael Pyle
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guess,” I offered. “Does your family generally come to Jackson to cool off?”
The porky Ottowan looked impatient, his tomato face crinkled at the corners in irritation, as if this was not exactly what he would have chosen to discuss. “Nah, usually Estes Park, or sometimes Glenwood Springs. They’re cheaper’n this hole.”
“Jackson Hole, you mean?” He didn’t catch his own pale pun. “But always somewhere in the mountains?”
“Damn right,” he said, “if I have anything to do with it.” Carson guessed he did.
At that his wife broke in with a tentative plaint. “I’d love to stay in Kansas one summer and see the prairie flowers in the Flint Hills down around Cottonwood Falls, or go to the beach—any beach, even Lake Michigan would do fine.” She sighed. “But as Elbert says, it’s always the mountains.”
“Now don’chu start, Ruth . . .”
Just what I didn’t need on my boat, a family spat. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
“Elbert’s family are Okies,” Ruth continued. “And Okies reckon there’s no vacation that IS a vacation unless it’s in the Rockies. Texans are just as bad. If it isn’t over a mile high, it doesn’t count.”
“We just lahk the mountains better . . . ain’t that raght, kids?” Elbert said.
The Wheeldon children, inured to their parents’ topographic dialectic and not about to get sucked in again, grunted as one and mumbled something about Disneyland. They knew they’d pay for taking sides, and they didn’t really care where they went, as long as it was far away from school. The rushing river and the movements among the shore grasses were far more riveting than this ancient argument.
Ruth changed the subject. “And how about you, Mr. Carson? Are you a real mountain man?”
A taunt as much as a query?
I knew the trap. To describe my life only boils the husband’s wanderlust, if it’s still alive, and offends his wife’s sense of security, or else confounds his propriety while piquing her curiosity. But I’d already managed to do all that, so I said, “Well, I’m not a trapper. My grandpa used to sum up Sunday dinner by saying that it was mighty fine, what there was of it, and plenty of it, such as it was. The Snake River is like that for me.”
Elbert was fixing to ask me what the hell that was supposed to mean, when the current took the boat and swung us about. The hiss of the Snake in full spring runoff drowned out his further remarks. Slipped out of that one, you old codger.
An hour later, with our bow rope wrapped around a snag like a small python hungry for hardwood, I pulled the raft to shore. Beside a lime-green meadow where the tall white candles of corn lily screened the edge of the forest, I proposed lunch. I was hoarse from pointing out ospreys and moose over the river’s voice and telling about the trappers’ rendezvous that used to take place in Jackson Hole (“Now those were mountain men,” Ruth had interjected, for Elbert’s benefit or mine, I wasn’t sure). So I grazed in silence, wishing I could slip off to search for morels beneath the chartreuse cottonwoods.
Ruth Wheeldon, wife to Elbert o’ Mountains, stood and brushed the dust off her not unsightly bottom, walked over, and planted it on the grass beside me. Owner of a pretty face from a Penney’s catalogue and a summer Sears sundress, she did not offend with her sunny Kansas presence. Elbert ignored us and snoozed some way off as the kids explored the shore, every now and then bringing back a bug or a snail to be admired and identified. I kept an eye on them, but they refused to fall in and take their dad with them.
“So what is it really about mountains for you, Mr. Carson? Your granddad’s saying was charming, but a little obscure for a farm girl like me.”
Not off the hook after all. I tried again, and said something like “Mountains soothe with horns and bones, make you rich with rocks. And they’re the best place to spot a puma by far, except for some carnivals I’ve seen.” Or perhaps I just said, “Maybe we should talk about rivers.” I expected Ruth to be miffed at my seeming to take sides with Elbert and liberties with logic, and I was prepared to say that I loved oceans too, and prairies. But she surprised me.
“Not just the way I’d have thought to express it. But it sounds better than Elbert’s my-way-or-the-highway reasoning. You know, I don’t have anything against the mountains. This”—she waved a chapped but shapely hand around—“is lovely. It’s just his damned bullheadedness about it. He’s so seffish with our little bit of vacation time. John Deere only gives him two weeks off. He’s got a right to enjoy them as he wishes. But ah work too . . . and I should have some say.”
So here it comes, I thought; and it did. She asked if I worked (besides this), didn’t I have a family to support, and . . . then stopped. “Sorry,” she said, her slender neck pinker than before, “it’s none of my business.” And turned her sunflower face toward the river.
Elbert, disturbed by the deerflies, had risen from his nap and was struggling with a worm and a hook for an impatient daughter. He was paying us no attention.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind your asking. It’s just hard to explain my way of life these days. I’ve been rafting only a little while, and it might not last much longer.” Then a brown butterfly, one of the spring’s first, caught my eye. “See that butterfly?” Ruth said she would not have noticed it, but she caught a glimpse as it nectared on an early arnica. It was a cocoa-colored, silver-threaded satyr called Hayden’s ringlet. I told her a little, how its larvae nibble the fresh young grass and how its name came from the Hayden Geological Survey expeditions of 1871. We crept up on it.
“My, my!” said Ruth. She liked its blue, yellow-rimmed, silver-centered eyespots.
“Its relatives fly on the high mountain tundra,” I said. “The river’s rising means snowmelt upstairs, and the alpine butterflies can’t be far behind. I’ll be joining them down in Colorado.”
“Why? Butterflies are beautiful, and very nice, but can you live on them?”
“That’s another thing Grandpop used to say,” I replied. “ ‘Is there any money in butterflies?’ I’d reply, ‘I doubt it, Grandpop.’ And I was mostly right. Actually, there is a little. I collect uncommon species and peddle them to museums. This is where I am sort of like those old mountain men—I just trade in butterflies instead of beaver pelts. I make enough in season to buy beer and ground beef, and it gives me an excuse to be up in the high country.” I tried to tell her about the intoxicating fragrance of the tundra, the utter enchantment of the glacial peaks above timberline.
“And in winter?” she asked.
“I work the beaches for glass floats and other salable flotsam, as well as clams. My needs are few and easily met. It’s mostly just to be there in the storms. So you see? I like beaches too! I’m not just a mountain guy. And certainly no Jim Bridger.”
“No,” said Ruth. “And maybe just as well.” Then, something like this: “I sort of see. It does sound exciting, in a way, and certainly not boring. Scary at times, I’d think.” Maybe I nodded. “But what do you do for insurance?” (She emphasized the in-.) “Or retirement, or next month’s mortgage payment?”
“Well, I have none of those things,” was all I could think to say.
“So you’re one of those . . . you’re homeless?” She said it with a slight but perceptible little shudder of fear or loathing, I couldn’t tell.
“Can’t take my shopping cart on the river,” I said, “or up the trails.” Trying for levity in case it was loathing. It worked; she laughed.
“Maybe all this traveling and poking about . . . maybe what you’re looking for is a home, and a family . . . I assume you haven’t got one of those, either?”
“Correct. Never reproduced, not presently married. And I don’t want a home, Ruth, at least not right now. I’ve had one