The Border of Money

There are all kinds of borders. I like to walk along what could be called a socioeconomic border in nearby Everett, WA. In about 15 minutes I can be on Grand Avenue. At the north end it has grand houses, towards the southern part of my walk the houses are working class. The street runs along the top of a bluff overlooking a part of Puget Sound called Port Gardner, which used to be pretty much a working port and waterfront. Now, not so much.

The biggest of the big houses are multistory and have views, although not today. It's raining and there is a heavy mist between my eyes and the yachts moored at Everett Marina and Everett Naval Station, where only a hint of our big carrier suggests itself. Hat Island seems to be there and Whidbey Island's coast appears and disappears. That view west is as gray as my thoughts.

A couple of hundred feet below at the bottom of the bluff are the train tracks used as a switching yard but the clanks and groan of humping rail cars are also muffled in the mist of January. The tracks hug the bottom of the bluff north under the big houses and run south to the paper mill that dominates the shoreline and the views of the raggedy houses where its workers once lived. They now house poor people from all walks of life.

A few of the relatively smaller north end houses are for sale: $695,900, price reduced. Of course the really big ones do not include prices or a plastic box stuffed with Xeroxed full color description sheets screwed to the For Sale post. They cost what they cost. Scoop Jackson's house is on Grand Avenue so, you know.

I like to walk on Grand Avenue. In the rain. In January. On the first day of the year I'll probably go broke. Which is another story and one that certainly isn't and won't be original.

Snow, Wet and Wind

Trapped by weather, am I. Not a new thing so I follow in a long list of those who waited out the weather. Like Polar Expeditions I can do nothing about it but pass the time without going nuts. Unlike Polar Expeditions I am not looking at starvation but the opposite. I could die of a food overdose. Not that I probably won't anyway. That won't be listed as the official cause of death but food tends to cling to me unless I can out-distance it. Even then it runs after me for a while. When I'm home I'll fiddle around in the kitchen. It is a place from which I should ban myself. So I hunker down with put-off reading or construct long musical play lists usually titled Rainy Jazz. And make lists for the next foray to the borderlands.

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, Diamondfield Jack

Edward Abbey loved to make word songs from map names. One chapter in Desert Solitaire comes to mind in particular partly because Abbey titled the chapter "Tukuhnikivats," which became a mantra for me during rough times, but which at this date also resonates because that area around the Sierra La Sal contains many of the gas and oil leases the Bush Administration will auction off as it gives the finger to us all in its waning days. Abbey's desert is the red rock of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks where the human habitation is the biblically referenced Moab.

Abbey gives attribution and credit to the folk poetry of the pioneers and then goes on for 17 paragraphs of assigned names, the imprimatur of the newest conquerors, the labels of ownership like those new names given to Israelites by the conquering Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar in the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah. Like Nebuchadnezzar, the pioneers were renaming, not naming; claiming ownership from a soon-to-be-displaced population.

And so it is for the landforms of Nevada. Maps of Elko county hold precious few of the ancient names and of the pioneer replacements, too many are bland cliches: Fivemile Gulch, Cedar Mountain, Bald Mountain, Rocky Peak. So when your searching fingertip traces its way across Deadline Ridge your eyes swing up from the map and out onto the landscape. The ridge is a noticeable 400 foot uptick from the surrounding scrubland desert. It runs more-or-less north and south with one or two draws cleaving its flank. The California Trail swings to the south of it, probably more in deference to the water of Goose Creek than to its elevation. Why Deadline Ridge?

It could be a knot on the map string of trail progress, a point to reach by a certain time. Failure to do so might signal coming trouble in the high passes of the Sierras ahead, a backward-looking waymark to future Donner Party candidates? Something to look into.

Some part of the ridge's story is tied to the 1890's, after the railroad made wagon travel on the California Trail unneccesary. Deadline Ridge, it turns out, was the boundary between sheep herders and cattle ranchers. Sheep to the east, cattle to the west of the ridge was the gentleman's agreement between the two factions, and at least one infamous western "character" was hired to make sure the agreement was kept. Diamondfield Jack Davis unfortunately bragged about earning $150 a month shooting sheep herders around the time a double murder was being investigated involving just that. He was eventually caught, tried and convicted of those murders, but his story doesn't end there.

Diamondfield Jack was tried in 1897 in the courthouse in Albion, Idaho, a borderland town near where I went to high school. He watched his gallows being built there but the day before he was slated to be hung he was granted a reprieve on the basis of confessions from two other men who had confessed to the murders but were found innocent of the charges. Then the Idaho Legislature said all executions had to be performed in Boise at the State Penitentiary, so Jack, still under a death sentence, was transferred to Boise. That was in February 1899. By December the Idaho State Supreme Court overruled the legislature and returned Jack for execution on July 3, 1901. But Jack had friends in high places. That death sentence was delayed and the sheriff only found out three hours before the execution was scheduled.

Jack was shipped back to the state pen to serve a life sentence but received a pardon in 1902, moved back to Nevada, made a fortune there in mining and lost it. He finally was killed, in Las Vegas in 1949 - by a taxi cab. Part of Diamondfield Jack's story was featured in season 12, episode four of Death Valley Days on October 1, 1963. He was played by Frank Sutton, the actor who played the nemesis sergeant of Gomer Pyle.

Jack also was remembered by the USGS. Diamond Field Jack Wash quad is a topographic map in Nevada, located at latitude - longitude/GPS coordinates N 39.18742 and W -118.56347 to the north of the Walker River Indian Reservation and quite a ways south and west of where I'm looking at Deadline Ridge.

David Grover wrote a book about Jack subtitled, A Study in Frontier Justice, and has a little different take on Jack's innocence. He also brings in the anti-Mormon and the cattle v. sheep sentiments of the times.

Deadline Ridge. I'll leave the connections to you.

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, Badges

Still August 15, 2008

Silence is one aspect of border walking. Or at least a reduction of human-induced noise. Another is aloneness - you don't usually run into many people or critters. But the Nevada borderlands were about to get almost crowded with both.

As I squatted on the knoll measuring the distances a decked out 4WD appeared, coming up the dirt road very slowly in an apparent nod to its accompanying dust cloud. It had a rack of spotlights on top framed by a pair of blue law enforcement flashers, currently off. I stood up and walked over to my truck which was half in and half out of the roadway. When I parked it, there didn't appear to be any traffic to worry about. The big-tired vehicle coming at me had 'Sheriffs Department, Elko County, Nevada' writ big on the side. It pulled in behind my truck and a large, handsome blond woman got out.

"Trouble?"

So we ended up chatting a bit. She was much younger than I first thought, probably late twenties. Her name was Stephanie and her assignment was to cruise the back roads and do law enforcing and Samaritan rescues. That seemed a bit risky for a young woman but remembering details - when she came around her vehicle to greet me she had her hand casually atop her holster and her thumb on the release snap, she had her knees slightly bent and legs spread a little wider than her shoulders, she moved to a position that kept the sun out of her eyes and more in mine, her smile was big and her eyes without fear - I figured she could probably handle herself. She had also undoubtedly already called in my license plate as she approached.

I told her what I was up to and she seemed genuinely interested and helpful. She thought my GPS unit was pretty cool but also cottoned on to its weaknesses. We spread my topographic map on the hood of her vehicle, which brought it pretty near eye level, and she traced some possible routes to the corner.

"But," Deputy Stephanie said, "I don't think there is a road like this shows that goes that close. You may have to walk it." She offered up a couple of more possible routes and then folded up my map and returned it to me. "Good luck, I hope you get there," she said, and climbed back up to her driver's seat perch, turned on the engine and idled around my truck and down the road to the south. I was alone again, but not for long.