Chapter 1

Home on the Range

"We'll take it," I said to Ann, as we stood peering in the broken window at the insects, by the hundreds, swarming the walls and windows inside the vacant cottage. A tattered screen fluttered in the breeze around the jagged hole in the windowpane. A flying beer bottle had ripped through the screen and glass and lay on the dusty floor of the empty living room in the small one-story shanty.

Ann, as anxious as I to find a house we could call home, said cheerfully, "It'll take some work:"

The house was located six miles from Toppenish, Washington, a genuine Western town complete with cowboys and dirty pickup trucks. We learned later that the house was situated at a place the locals called Three Bridges. The infrequently traveled road to Three Bridges, judging by the dusty cans and bottles that winked in the roadside weeds, was evidently motor party heaven. As for the little white house, it desperately needed a new coat of paint on the outside. The inside wasn't too bad, except for the bugs and broken glass, since the walls had been given a fairly recent cosmetic renewal with paint. The facelift was enough to make the plain, four-room cabin look like heaven to us. It was to be our first real home as newlyweds.

The environment we chose for our first home was dramatically different from the ones Ann and I had grown up in. My dad had been a research biochemist, and we had lived in the suburbs of Eastern university towns. But during my last two years at college in Denver, where I met Ann, I lost my heart to her and to America's wilderness in the high mountains of Colorado.

I would have been stupid and blind not to understand her parents' initial opposition to our marriage. I was a bearded, unemployed college student, lacking any material assets. Out of the blue I had captured the heart of their daughter who had been involved for a year with a young man whose social and economic standing was beyond question. Ann's family was affluent; her father was the CEO of a bank in Seattle. Ann's parents disapproved of me instantly and opposed our marriage.

But with Ann and I, it was love at first sight. We saw each other for the first time on a Tuesday. We talked to one another for the first time on Wednesday; I walked her to class on Thursday; and then we flew to Seattle to meet her family on Friday. A week later I asked Ann to marry me. Without hesitation she said yes. With the grudging approval of her parents, we married in June.

Ann and I agreed that I would defer graduate school in anthropology for a year, so that we could see America before we became enslaved to careers, mortgages, insurance payments, or dirty diapers. At the end of that ten month trip of discovery, covering thirty-seven states, we were convinced that we wanted to try life in rural America first hand. The cabin at Three Bridges was our opportunity.

I think that my yearning for the open spaces was the result of being raised in a housing development among the potato and barley fields of New Jersey, near the Princeton Junction train station. Every morning, five days a week, suburban-dwelling executives parked their cars for the forty- mile commuter train ride into their office buildings among the skyscrapers of New York City. At night, they arrived back home clutching their Wall Street Journals with worn looks on their faces. I wanted something different, less constricting.

Ann, a Western girl by birth, loved the outdoors, and as a child growing up in Seattle went skiing, camping, or horseback riding at every opportunity. We both had aspirations of waking to the sounds of birds in the air and wind in the trees. We dreamt of living in a place where the night sky filled to overflowing with blazing starlight. It was a dream we knew was only possible if we lived in the country.

Optimists that we were, all the while we searched for a place to settle down, we avoided the question of how we would support ourselves once we landed. Being young, vigorous and impractical, we concluded that we were smart enough to sketch in the details when we got there.

Ann and I felt lucky to find the little white cottage near Toppenish. It was part of a deal that made us caretakers for a duck-hunting club. We were to do maintenance chores, and for our labor we would earn the princely sum of $1.90 an hour applied to the rent for our little four-room house.

It wasn't until a week later, on Memorial Day weekend, when Ann and I arrived with the first of our two pickup loads of housewares, that we actually realized we were moving into a mosquito-infested swamp. That was the same weekend when a record heat wave settled into the Yakima Valley and all of Eastern Washington.

Three Bridges, where we took up housekeeping, was located at the southern end of the Yakima Valley, an area famous for apples, pears, hops, wine grapes, and a long growing season. While it is high desert, it is well-irrigated and surrounded by mountains and bisected by a river. Dominating the valley are the distant, snow-clad glaciers on Mount Adams and Mount Rainier.

Regardless of the Yakima Valley's reputation as one of the premier apple-growing regions in the world, there were no fruit trees of any kind within sight of the duck-hunting club. In fact, with the exception of a tangle of willow brush along the banks of Toppenish Creek and a lone poplar tree in our backyard, .the view from our cabin was unobstructed. Ann and I could see for miles in most directions across an expanse of sagebrush and bunchgrass. We were smack in the middle of cattle country, with real cows complete with honest-to-goodness cowboys and Indians.

Soon after we finished transferring the first load of our belongings from our truck into the barren little cabin, Ann suggested that we take a drive look-see across Toppenish Creek. We needed to explore what was on the other side of the wall of willows. We had two fairly close neighbors on our side of the creek: one, half a mile to the west; and the other, three-quarters of a mile to the north, but we had no idea of who might live on the other side.

The county road, after crossing the first of the three bridges for which our area was named, wound through a tangle of underbrush and chest-high, canary reedgrass islands that teemed with insect life and the birds feeding on it. The landscape past the third and final bridge was pancake flat, sagebrush and grasses running to the horizon both east and west. Straight ahead to the south, about a mile away, Toppenish Ridge towered above the surrounding openness.

On the bank of the creek beside the last bridge sat a large, windowless, two-story Victorian house. It had been grand in its day, but judging from its sun-bleached wooden siding and gaping cedar shingles, that day had been long ago. Howie Wright, the duck club owner, said that the Victorian had been an old stage stop. We could easily imagine a freshly watered team of horses and coach pulling out for the trip over the ridge to Goldendale, some fifty miles away.

On the opposite side of the road from the defunct stage stop was an irrigated pasture of sixty acres, punctuated by a small, lonely, red clapboard house whose front doorstep practically rested on the shoulder of the county road.

"I bet they don't miss a thing that goes by," Ann joked. As if on cue, as we passed the red house, a curtain pulled back and unseen eyes inspected us. Beyond the tiny outpost, there were no more dwellings - nothing but sagebrush and saltgrass in alkali patches surrounded by mats of thick fescue grasses thriving in the sub-irrigated low spots.

As we drove along the county road we noticed fresh evidence that Three Bridges was cattle country. Cow tracks were visible in the gravel, and the still juicy cow pies meant they had been deposited by critters who had recently passed this way. A hawk spooked from a power pole as we drove by circled off to the west towards Mount Adams. At the foot of Toppenish Ridge, we turned around and headed back along the way we'd come, this time noticing the signs National Wildlife Refuge - that hung from the fenceposts on the east side of the road all the way back to the old stage stop. It struck me then that the obvious plan of the duck club next door to the refuge was to pick off all the ducks who were too dumb to read.

We recrossed Three Bridges, past our new home, and continued the six miles into town to buy some window putty, a new piece of glass, and a few cans of Raid. Toppenish, we discovered, was the headquarters of the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Indian Nation. The duck club was on deeded land within the reservation. In the shimmering heat Toppenish was every inch a cowboy town, where every third vehicle was a pickup truck, and Toppenish's inhabitants seemed to be mainly men who wore straw hats with a weave that allowed for ventilation.

We drove past Logan's Feed and Seed, standing on one corner at the main town crossroads facing an old movie house on one side and a drugstore on the other. The June sun blazed down with an intensity that Ann and I weren't accustomed to, and my lily- white forearm, hanging out the window of the truck door in the noonday sun, was growing pink from exposure. The bank thermometer read ninety-six degrees.

There was plenty of parking in front of the building supply store. We pulled up next to a battered flatbed truck carrying enough road dust to grow a crop of potatoes. Waves of heat wiggled across the blacktop. The sun glinting off a stack of brand- new thirty-gallon galvanized garbage cans; made my eyes water from their reflection.

A few hours later, back at our house with the window repaired and our gear unpacked, I lay exhausted, neck deep in a bathtub full of cold water, trying to evade the omnipresent heat. A newfound feeling of self-reliance crept over me as I thought of the gassed mosquitoes and flies that buzzed and spun on their backs in all corners of the house as they succumbed to the vapors from the insect bomb.

Having spent my whole life, except for a couple summer jobs, behind a desk, I wanted a change. I desperately wanted to learn to work with my hands, to produce some tangible product at the end of the day, not just to be some loop on an office paper trail.

The next morning as dawn was breaking, we left Three Bridges for the long drive to Seattle to get our last load of belongings: some secondhand furniture, a stereo, and a stack of wedding presents that had been in storage for a year while we had been off seeing America. Once in the city, we hurriedly loaded our pickup and returned to Toppenish late the same day. Ann and I were finally housekeeping on our own. We were as giddy as newlyweds, though we'd been married almost a full year.

As we pulled into our fenced yard, after the three-anda-half- hour drive from Seattle, it seemed that the little white cabin had shrunk in our absence. The sun was hot and the wind blowing ten to fifteen miles per hour from the west. There was just enough air moving to keep the mosquitoes down hiding in the grass. Ann and I started unloading the truck. We had a long list of things to get done before dark. While we unpacked, we joked with each other that we no longer would put our worldly possessions in a backpack to head off to see faraway places. We were finished with traveling. We were getting settled. We were raring to buckle down and get to work.

As I headed out the door to get another armload of household goods, a car slowly pulled into the driveway. The gravel barely made a sound under the balding tires of the '56 Oldsmobile. By the look of the sedan's paint job, it had been driven through the brush more than once. I recognized it as the vehicle which had been parked in front of the neighbor's red house across the creek.

Smiling in anticipation, I said to Ann, "Here we are barely moved in and we've got our very first visit from any of our neighbors, our first dose of good old country hospitality:"

Anxious to make the acquaintance of our visitors, I walked over to the car. The passenger side window rolled down, revealing a weathered and rusty-looking old man. He had week-old stubble on his face and down his leathery neck. A cigarette dangled from his near-toothless mouth and dropped ashes on his filthy, grease-stained workshirt. Next to him, behind the steering wheel, sat a large Indian woman in a cotton day dress, with a Little Orphan Annie hairdo and rhinestone-studded glasses. The man waved a gnarled and dirty finger in my face. Then, in a blast of whiskey-soaked breath, he demanded, "Just who and how many of you is moving in here?"

I stood in stunned silence for a moment, and then before he could repeat his question, I answered, "Just my wife and me:"

He squinted his red eyes at me as if to answer, then he spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the driveway. He turned and mumbled something to the woman at the wheel, who then backed the car out on the road, and they headed across the creek for home.

If this was the welcoming committee, I guessed we weren't likely to be invited to taffy pulls or quilting bees at the local grange hall anytime too soon.