“We are doing something, Norah,” Pop said. He rubbed his head, which has always been his act of frustration, then he tugged my braid and smiled sadly.
“They need us to do more,” I said. “We can do more for them.”
“The government can't protect them better than I can,” Pop said. “Grazing has hurt these birds, no question, but so did those dams, which the government built. Our birds, Norah, we keep for ourselves, keep secret. That's how we keep them safe in the world.”
My pop has always been the North Star of my life. I set my moral compass by his worldview, consider always how my choices will affect his good opinion of me. I see Pop's heart for ranching and his heart for the environment, and I'm grateful for the clear land ethic I learned at his knee. Pop read me Ed Abbey and Aldo Leopold, taught me to use willow like aspirin, kept me outside on a horse for fifteen hours every day. But Pop sprinkled his distrust of government on everything he taught me as a child, like salt on every meal. It felt like critical thinking for most of my life, but I realize now it was just seeing everything that one way.
I PREFER CAMPING WHEN the full moon brightens the midnight world into something warmer, more welcoming. The starlight seems brighter at full moon, even though I know that's not how light works. New-moon light is thin, muted, the distant shrill coyote yipping amplified, every crack of sagebrush an invisible threat. Even the temperature, which can be recorded objectively, felt colder than it should. I wasn't a quarter mile from the campsite Pop and I used every year, but I was on the adjacent BLM land. It's the same runoff stream I was camping next to, the same species of willow along its bank, but the patterns of the limbs, the music they made in the breeze—it was all off, somehow discordant. This landscape should feel familiar, safe, but at new moon it didn't quite.
I only knew I slept because I woke up disoriented and confused around 4 a.m. The inside of my tent was crusted with a layer of frost that sparkled a bit when my headlamp caught it at the right angle. It took a minute before I remembered that I was not a girl-child camping with her pop on land they owned free and clear to count the mating Gunnison sage grouse, but a grown-up lady scientist sneaking alone onto land she sold to pay her pop's medical bills.
If Pop dies, I won't go back to the Farallones. I will be the only one who cares about this lek, and these Gunnison sage grouse will be the only ones who really know me. I study endangered species that love their land so much they'll die without it, and I feel all the same emotions of twelve-year-old me, but lonelier somehow. I'm watching something beautiful pass away, the weight of the inevitable end heavy on my shoulders, and I know my best efforts to save them will never be enough, but I know now that I will stay and try, always and forever.
I was wiggling into my coveralls, which are warm but difficult to maneuver, when I heard the truck on the fire road. I turned off my lamp and grabbed Pop's old field binoculars. It was still dark. I couldn't see much, but I recognized Henson's old Ford. That truck has seen better days. It whines like it needs power steering fluid, and there's a quiet, rhythmic tick in the motor. It has a stocked shotgun rack inside the cab. That truck has all the wrong kind of noise, noise that could disrupt the lek, keep the birds from doing their mating dance.
I followed the runoff stream as I moved steadily closer to the truck, crouching low under cover of the willows along the bank. Nature might seem all peace and quiet, but she's deceptive that way, and I was thankful for how loud she really is. The noise of the stream covered the noise of my breath, my footsteps. I wanted to take pictures but didn't want to risk the glow of my phone. Henson was leaning against the truck bed, looking up at the stars. When he poured his coffee into the lid of his thermos, I was close enough to smell it. There were fuel cans in the back, shovels and rakes. It takes balls to burn public land, but plenty of ranchers have done it, claiming later that the fires on their own land just went a few acres wild. The one thing those birds need is abundant sagebrush, and getting rid of sagebrush is the whole point of a rancher burn in sage-steppe habitat. The fire makes room for cattle forage by erasing everything else.
“Hey girl,” Henson said, and my body panicked, blood on fire. I thought to run, but he wasn't talking to me. He had a little girl with him, probably kindergarten age, wispy pigtails curling around her ears. Her coveralls were patched and worn, all her movements muted by the quilted fabric. She grabbed Henson's hand, and I wondered if she had the same egg-delicate eyes as her father.
“Can you carry this shovel?” Henson asked her, half whispering.
“I can see your breath, Daddy,” the girl said. “It's steamy, like your coffee.”
Henson smiled, and I did too. The girl threw her arms around his neck. I felt my heart fluttering again, my pulses warming. The sky lightened with the approaching dawn.
“Next time I come we should bring the horses,” she said.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.” The two of them crossed to the other side of the truck, walked some distance away from it. Henson was stepping off an area, measuring it. The child was laboring at cartwheels, trying hard to work her limbs against the confines of her coveralls.
When Henson turned his back to the truck, I pulled the fuel cans and started dumping them into the dirt behind the back tires. The diesel fumes made the ground shimmer and shake, go blurry, filled up my nose so much that I thought no clean air would ever get in again. I couldn't take the ranch back from Henson, but he couldn't burn anything down without diesel. I heard a shout that might have been my name and dropped the cans. I snapped a picture for evidence and got out of there as fast as I could, tracking my way along the runoff stream deep into the BLM land. When the fumes cleared my head, I came back to myself. I tried to turn a cartwheel, but my center of gravity was all wrong.
BY THE TIME I got home the sun had cleared the range, burned the frost off the two-by-four railings. I spent the better part of last month building ramps, one out the back door of the house and one off the covered porch in the front. It's important to me that Pop can get in or out any door, not just for safety now that he's stuck in the damn wheelchair most of the time, but for dignity's sake. I'm no carpenter, but when you have YouTube and a garage full of tools you can teach yourself to build just about anything.
I squatted low to mount the binoculars back onto the rickety tripod I keep on the porch. The whole setup is asking for breakage and disaster, but birding is the only thing that has kept me sane in this house. I heard Pop roll over the threshold, felt the porch floor shudder just a little under the weight of his chair.
“Vera,” he said. He put his hand between my shoulder blades. The warmth radiated down through my heart, my belly, my heels. I imagined it vining like roots down through the porch slats, breaking up the hardpan ground below.
I stayed frozen in place, kept Pop's hand on my back. I'd been short with Pop since I talked to Henson. I knew it. Now, I wanted to ask him whether I should take my pictures down to the BLM office, press for charges about the fences, the possible burn. I wanted to know where Pop's loyalty was, which side of his heart was bigger. I wanted to see how he'd react if I said, out loud, Henson's cutting fence. He's going to graze the BLM and our lek. I could turn him in if I wanted to. He has the most precious little girl.
I turned toward him, kneeling next to his chair. “There are only fifteen of our birds left,” I said. I don't cry much, but I was crying then. “You wrote it down yourself, in your ledger. Why didn't you tell me?”
“Umm,” Pop's brow furrowed. His hand moved toward his brow, but I caught it in both of mine, bringing it to the wet of my cheek. He shook his head sadly. “Dammit.”
Pop can still swear like nobody's business. He can also sing every word to “Along Came Jones” by the Coasters and a number of other novelty tunes from his high school years. He sounds like the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show, but he gets all the words. Julie tells me this is normal too, that profanity and music endure beyond
prepositions and names, which feels like it must be an important fact about humans even though I can't exactly say how. It is very endearing and I marvel, with every crystal-clear Pop cuss, how much we don't know about the world of our own brains.
“Vera,” Pop said, his tone serious. “Oreos.”
I don't know what to worry about most, what to cling tightly onto and what to let go. Will too many Oreos give Pop a heart attack? Will Henson burn the lek? Will his beautiful pigtailed daughter find a way to love both the damn birds and the damn cows? There, on the porch, I wanted Pop to help me. I wanted him to teach me, better this time, how to untangle emotion from carefully recorded facts, how to reconcile the things I feel when they aren't the same, exactly, as the things I believe.
But instead, I said, “How many?”
He lifted his index finger and drew numbers in the air in front of his face, but I didn't catch them. Finally, he said, “Fifteen,” then “No!” but I was already laughing, tears streaming down my face.
“Me too,” I said. “Let's have fifteen.” I wiped my nose with my sleeve. I felt greedy, ravenous. I wanted the most of everything.
“No. Ummm,” Pop held up four fingers and said, “Two. No! Son of a bitch!”
“I'll just bring the whole bag,” I said.
Pop can have as many Oreos as he wants.
IN 2005, SCIENTISTS BELIEVED they had confirmed an ivory-billed woodpecker, a single male, alive in the woods of Arkansas. Reports by amateur birders had been rejected for years by ornithologists, who insisted that ivory-bills were extinct, that the birders, lacking appropriate training, were simply encountering the luckier and still-in-the-world pileated woodpecker, an ivory-billed look-alike, and projecting (as humans do) their desire to see something both rare and lovely, declaring it ivory-billed. There are still, now, both believers and doubters. This, too, I'm supposed to read as a sign of hope, but again, I don't see it that way. I know exactly how lonely that poor bird must be, small in the world, the only one of its kind.
Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars
RUTH KNEW SHE WAS pregnant, but they'd driven the hundred miles from Gabbs to Tonopah anyway, for confirmation, she guessed, or for the change of scenery—though everywhere she looked there was desert and mountains, more desert, more mountains. At any rate, she was enjoying the small luxuries of the doctor's office—the glossy pages of a Good Housekeeping in the waiting room, a chalky mint from the reception counter bowl, a vinyl-cushioned chair that expelled air.
“Congratulations,” the doctor said. “Looks like late February, early March for this one.”
“Number four.” This from Del, her husband, who scratched at his ear, grinning. “Great news.”
Ruth couldn't pin the news to one side or another with any honesty at all. She'd been nineteen when she'd climbed into Del's old Falcon, left Colorado for glamorous nights in Vegas, stylish dresses she didn't have to make herself, sets of matching jewelry—but the only thing she'd accumulated since was children. Nothing made Ruth appreciate the existing simplicities of her life like the impending arrival of a new baby, lovable and helpless and full of need, spiraling everything into chaos.
“Spring baby,” Del said, grabbing her hand. “Brand-new when the world is.”
Ruth thought of her other children. Charley, eight years old, sensitive, was prone to tantrums and odd rotating fascinations—cloud formations by day, constellations at night, and now, because it was October, migrating tarantulas. The girls, Nancy and Brenda, seven and six, were all whisper and giggle, the bounce of their pigtails tapping gently, relentlessly, against their delicate shoulders. She loved her kids, but she'd been working to stop at three.
Outside the office, Ruth squinted against the desert sun glare. She considered the dusky greens and deep blues of the mountains outside Tonopah—Mount Butler, Mount Oddie—the subtle complexity of what had seemed, at first, a toasted desert monotone. A few errant cumulus clouds had formed over the mountains, and Ruth, despite her doubts, searched the sky for signs. Catholic school had taught her to imagine the saints sitting on clouds with the well-meaning ghosts of her dead ancestors, watching over her life, offering protection, guidance, intercession. It was both comforting and disconcerting. She wanted to believe in it more than she actually did.
It was hard to accept that the world she'd left—her sisters whispering in her ears, her mother knitting her sweaters—was better than the one she'd run to. She'd been taught all her life that her future was sure to be brighter than her past. But yesterday's future had turned into a vaguely bleak present, which made the past seem especially shiny. In Ruth's daydreams, Colorado was just as she left it. Amber-colored goblets arranged in her mother's kitchen built-ins. An orderly line of three girlish peacoats draped over the mudroom's Shaker pegs. Coffee and Irish cream swirling in milk-glass mugs. In her daydreams, Ruth cooled her bare feet in the South Platte River.
“I've got to call home,” she said. “Let Teresa know.” Teresa, one year older than Ruth, had gone off to marry God the same year Ruth left with Del. She moved to the convent, changed her name to Sister Agnes Mary. Ruth saw Teresa as she had been, flirting with the boys at her sweet sixteen party, her green dress swirling around her shins, her hair in pin curls, lips stained punch-red with Kool-Aid and 7Up. Ruth had trouble remembering to call Teresa “Sister,” could not conjure this new woman she had never met face-to-face. Only when she remembered the way Teresa had turned her appraising eyes toward Del, all those years ago, the way her head had bent under the weight of her disappointment, could Ruth picture Teresa in the gray habit and veil of their childhood teacher nuns. “That one's no good,” Teresa had said. “So of course that's the one you want.” Teresa, like the nuns Ruth had grown up with, was a confusing blend of compassionate love and harsh judgment. Sisterly, Ruth thought, embarrassed to be smiling at her own silent joke.
“I'll wait here,” Del said. “Have a beer or two.”
Ruth believed the nausea she felt then was as much homesickness as it was morning sickness, some result, certainly, of the difference between what she had and what she wanted.
Ruth dawdled. She bent down to pet a stranger's dog. She ran her fingers over the glass of the drugstore window. She picked up a piece of litter that turned out to be a crumpled brochure for the nursing program at the community college, smoothed it, considered it, put it in her pocket. Ruth had always wanted to be a nurse. After the blood and breath of birthing three babies, tending their fevers, bandaging minor wounds, she felt half a nurse already. She watched a lone tarantula pick a delicate path across the asphalt. She took deep breaths, counted the seconds between her steps.
IT TOOK A MOMENT for the women of the order to find the right nun, but finally Sister was on the line. “Everything okay, Ruth? The kids?”
Ruth closed her eyes. “Everyone's fine. It's me. I'm pregnant.”
Sister made a joyful noise and Ruth settled. She could count on Sister to love her babies just as much as she did. “Congratulations,” Sister said. “Ruthie, another baby! What blessings!”
The line crackled and popped. Ruth pressed her fingertips against the phone booth wall, felt the heat from the desert sun in the glass.
“I want this one to be born in Colorado,” Ruth said, “but I still can't afford to get there.” Ruth saved cash in an empty creamed corn can in the back of the pantry, that $3.72 the only secret she had in the world.
“The creamed corn can is low?” Sister's laugh was bright, cutting, like she knew something Ruth didn't. “I wish I could help you bring those babies home, Ruth, I do. But you know, vows of poverty. And Mom and Mano are barely getting by as it is.”
Ruth knew what Sister wasn't saying out loud. You made all the decisions that led to this. “I wasn't asking for help.”
“Weren't you?”
Someone Ruth didn't know was waiting outside the phone booth.
“I'd like to
get a job, save my own money, but Del's not thrilled with the idea.”
Del had, over the years of their marriage, lost a string of jobs dealing cards at cut-rate Vegas casinos. Not the big names, where he could have made a real living after Paul Anka or Tom Jones shows, but the trashier ones, daylight hours, penny-slot locals feeling flush on payday, a few low-stakes poker hands. Mining would be different, he'd told her, just before he moved the family from Vegas to Gabbs.
“It's 1970, Ruthie,” Del had said, handing her a beer and then clinking his against it, as though she was as thrilled as he was. “New job for a new decade!”
“Plenty of mines in Colorado,” she said. If they were going to leave Vegas, Ruth wanted all of Nevada in the rearview.
Del rolled his eyes, but still they sparkled. He pulled her close, tried to dance her across the kitchen. “You're missing the point, Ruthie. This is ground-floor luck. Magnesium is the mineral of the future!”
The stranger outside the phone booth looked impatient. “Does he have to know?” Sister asked. “About your job?”
Ruth tried to imagine a world in which she could have a secret job. It was ridiculous. Impossible. Sister didn't know anything about husbands. About kids. About the way a family was always around you and on top of you and inside you. About the ways it was possible to be surrounded and loved and crushingly lonely all at the same time.
“What do you mean does he have to know? Where would he think I was?”
“All right.” Ruth heard Sister whisper to someone nearby, but she couldn't make out the words. “But if you found a job, you could tell him you got paid a little less than you did. Set a little by every week.”
“You've got a lot of advice about how to lie,” Ruth said, “for a nun.”
“Would a creamed corn can full of money change Del's mind?”
Recently, Del had started telling stories about the incompetence of his direct supervisor and the generally dirty nature of work in the mine. It was a familiar pattern—complaints about the minutiae of the work, railing against workplace politics. Any day, he'd come home telling her he'd quit on some obscure principle, which would mean, of course, that he'd been canned.
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