What's Over Thattaway?

The last rat-assed piece of logic has been filed away in the electronic netherworld. Whether it all hooks together is somebody else's problem now. I've stuffed my head for half a year with arguments about this and opinions about that, some of it written down and all of it running from room to room in my head.

It's time for the great beyond. I've got places to go where nobody knows or cares if I'm wearing pants. That big white moon, the smell of hot dirt and thirsty sagebrush, a dicky hen running like a dinosaur, covered in the brush, making sounds like a damn rattler.

I expect to be hot. Hope to be. Maybe blister up a bit along the neckline, tempt cancer with the naked top of my ears, eat some grit. Then toward sundown when all that heat is still shimmering up off the desert flats but shadows are lying down to bed I'll pull some beer from the galvanized tub wrapped in gunny sacks under the trailer - two, maybe three. The tops pop and the first one goes all the way down without a rest. That pain grows in a knob there between your eyes so you just shut em and breath the rest of the heat of the day up through your nose hairs and you smell night. It ain't arrived yet but it's comin'. And when your head stops throbbing you crack open your eyes with the next beer and think about dinner and through the slits of your eyes you look out where you ain't been yet.


Looking West Near Hickison Pass, Nevada. Toiyabe Range on the Horizon

Searching for the Corner, endroit éloigné

There are technically six corners to the borderlands I have chosen to walk. Four of those corners touch three states, one touches two states, one touches four states. The map to the right illustrates this cartographic fact. (The pushpins are stuck in the actual corners but that is hard to see on a map this size - those are relatively huge pushpins.) All geographic corners are fully packed with much more than the two dimensional turnings of a map, as you would guess.

Wyoming, one of the closest to straight-sided square states, pushes its southwest corner deep into the natural corner of high mountain plateaus formed by the foothills of the north-south trending Wasatch Mountains and the (unusual for the U.S.) west-east trending Uinta Moutains. The legal description coordinate is just a short stroll from a road, hardtop gravel driving northeasterly and paved driving in the opposite direction (blue pushpin). Utah frames Wyoming in this ell, the borderlands there are either in one state or the other.

Some 97 miles due east then 276 miles due south is the quad state corner where Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona surround Utah and tourists can drive to the marked nexus of the cross to put alternate feet and hands in four states at one time, the only place in the United States where this is possible (green pushpin).

The corner for which I now search, where Idaho touches both Nevada and Utah, has no easy access and no tourist signs, no emblazoned cardinal directions and arrows pointing to the otherwise invisible borderlines that radiate from it. Four states touching is freakish, three states a more common trinity. More common and more complex at the same time. Trinities are not easily polarized whereas dualities are by definition polarized: yin and yang, gee and haw, toola rah and toola ray.

That last bit of foolishness comes courtesy of an Easter visit to le Barroux on the southeastern foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail for what was supposed to be a morning of Gregorian Chants. That particular combination of French geography, historical timekeeping, and aesthetic vibration seemed a worthy trinity for a morning meditation from a former believer turned atheist. But although not recognized, God would still not be mocked, and his robed servants instead provided the full three hour plus service. Good and evil took full sway and the elocution of straight rail benches with steady calls to the naked prayer board made the message, though counterpointed by the French and Latin mass as clear as though through a dark glass: We rejoice to suffer. The chants felt truncated. What few escaped evoked the pure clear water of righteousness flowing from the tree of life. But truly, those brief moments? They were something. The rest was toolah rah and toolah ray

Searching for the Corner, Not Vagrancy

Pointed east and just through an open gate in a fence line I met a white pickup truck. Or parts of it were white showing through a gray-brown coat of dust. It was a Pinto looking truck - not like the Ford model but like the spotted horse model. All the dents, and there were many, had half-moons of dust and rust traced the upper boundary. The drivers'-side window cranked down and two eyes under the bill of a 400-year-old ball cap looked me over.

"You lost?"

And that's how I met the vagrant of Texas Spring. I will call him Larry here, although that isn't the name he gave after we talked for some time back at his camp. Larry was living off the grid and I had to respect that effort. He wasn't totally off the grid as he worked for the county from time to time, grading the rock/dirt roads that meandered through the borderlands and plowing snow off the public routes that eventually ended at somebody's ranch. He had a '58 trailer home - 1958, not 58 foot - squatting at the other end of the ruts by a spring. There was no power or phone line "and no god damn celler phone, either" I learned. No, Larry lived unconnected, thank you. He did have a diesel generator, which he used sparingly to recharge the batteries in his shortwave radio or for other unnamed emergencies.

He drove into Wells "at regular intervals" to pick up any mail sent his way care of General Delivery. The short wave and experience told him when to report for road patrol duty at the county. Scattered ranchers, Sheriffs Deputies and BLM folks turned a blind eye to his minor poaching. "I get along pretty good," he said.

Bank account, credit cards?

"Cash."

What about paychecks?

"Anybody will cash mine out."

TV, internet, Email?

"Not interested."

Jail?

"Some."

Sex? (Now I admit I did not asked Larry directly about his sexual habits. It came up in conversation more gradually and in pieces.)

"I've got some friends. Girl friends. Otherwise, I can get by."

Larry was not the Nevada edition of the Unabomber . He wasn't, it turned out, a great reader, not a great writer. He read some Louis Lamour and liked Max Evans. Larry had even read Evans', The Mountain of Gold, and remembered it. But he also read local history and auto mechanics, stuff he said he needed to know about. He had some political opinions but he was not the radical you might expect for a loner of his quality.

"I'm not particularly obsessive about any one thing. I smoke a little, watch the sky if it's good weather. I've got chores. Things tend to fall apart rather than the other way around so I keep busy."

Larry gave me what turned out to be very good directions and I headed out of his camp still intent on finding the corner I was looking for. When I was about 200 yards away I turned around and looked back. Larry was leaning against the side of his trailer with his arms crossed. He waved.

Searching for the Corner, Wild Horses

August 15, 2008

Elko County, Nevada, had 1,505 wild horses in 2003, by count of the Bureau of Land Management. Wild horses are a pain in the ass to modern ranch outfits and together with wild burros were even legislated against back in 1971 in something called the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act. The picture to the right is not my own but was taken by BLM Wild Horse Specialist Shawna Richardson to illustrate the 2003 Elko Resource Management Plan for the four herd areas (HAs) recognized in the county: Little Humboldt, Rock Creek, Owyhee and Diamond Hills. These hosses don't know it but the BLM has a population control program in place.

The official HAs were all west and south of where I now was but straight ahead of me appeared a herd of about sixteen horses and no fence in sight. Their group photo is on the BorderWalking sister blog. They didn't look wild but they were skittish and wouldn't let me close enough to see whether they were shod or showed evidence of having been in the past so I can't say if they were a wild bunch or a domesticated string on holiday. What I can say is you could almost believe in God when you run across horses like these where the sky touches the horizon with no sign of intelligent life, including your own, in any direction.

This will offend the horse people among us but even they will eventually admit the truth that horses are not particularly smart (especially so when they stop defensively recounting the handful of examples that demonstrate supposed exceptions). It isn't how smart a horse is that crowds in on your emotions and puts that catch in your throat when you talk about them after they are gone away - either from you or from everybody - for good. More often, in fact, it is some example of particular knotheadedness rendered in graphic detail at length that begins a story of horse love. Some, but definitely a minority, start with a grudging admiration for skills. But here's the deal: Horses are catlike not doglike. Even the best-trained roping or cutting horse does its work aloof from a rider's supposed control. Even in the most synchronous performance between horse and rider, where they act as one unit, one vector of flow, one couple in a dance of motion, the horse keeps a superior presence apart.

Yes, we worked together well in that but only because I allowed it to be so, the horse all but says out loud. Noblesse pouvoir, rather than noblesse oblige, not a noble obligation but a noble power deigned for human use by a being that could as easily crush. I will dance with you because I allow myself to do so. Sadly, as with so many things, humankind has managed to crush, in their turn, submission from some of these animals but I met none of those this day. This day, alone under the sky, I was allowed into the presence of horse.

Searching for the Corner, Dust

August 15, 2008 - Friday

Driving south on Highway 93 from Twin Falls, Idaho toward Wells, Nevada is hot work in August. The air conditioning in my truck hasn’t worked since I bought it. You pay $3,000, you take some chances.

The map shows a maze of roads leading eventually to the northwest corner of Utah. Or the northeast corner of Nevada. Or the southern border of Idaho where it meets Utah and Nevada. Such tri-part borderlines on a map are mysterious, beckoning. On the ground, especially in the big emptiness of the west, such corners are marked only by an embedded pipe with USGS runes and maybe the butt post of a fence line.

The landscape is open, what movie cowboys might call wide open, and brown shades predominate. All of the shades of brown are washed with a hot chalky white. Even the fault-block battlements, purple in the distance, are striated by chalky veins. The sky, normally indigo or blue-black, is tan.

Turning left from the Highway onto Shoshone Basin Road the truck immediately pulled dust around itself. I stopped to check the GPS. I use a Garmin Colorado handheld and it takes its time coming on, then I have to fiddle with the screen lighting if it’s daylight to see what’s there. I get a fix on my position and orient the topo. Between me and the border is a lot of grazing land. All the dirt roads go to new graze, most to scattered water troughs where the water is hauled in, but the roads are also used by semi’s pulling filled livestock trailers. The roads are rock and gravel based to support the weight in rare rainy weather and to give some permanence to these minor transport arteries. But dust blows in from topside and works its way up from the underbelly. There won’t be a way to avoid it.