Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  The car turns onto Cross Bay Boulevard and moves toward the middle of Jamaica Bay. “We’re about out of the opportunity to set aside wilderness areas,” Hartzog says. “What we need to do now is to set aside areas close to or in the cities. City people are dying of social pollution, and they need room to move in.” Park Service projects like New York’s Gateway are planned or are already under development in Washington, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Corpus Christi, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Rangers used to spend nine months of their one-year training period assigned to a national park; now they spend the same nine months in a city, and rangers and administrators throughout the system get a Lewis and Clark feeling whenever they contemplate asphalt jungles and urban skylines. Their enthusiasm to bring the national parks to the people may entail the removal of some people—such as, quite possibly, the people of Broad Channel, an island community in Jamaica Bay. Hartzog’s car is cruising down the central street of Broad Channel, past Audrey Murphy’s Lounge, the St. Virgilius Parish Hall, and dead-end streets that reach like fishbones into the bay. The people of Broad Channel lease city land. They and their predecessors have been there for over seventy years. The community has a population of five thousand now—in a thousand houses, most of which are covered with tarpaper decorated to resemble brick or stone. The outermost houses are on pilings. Sewage, untreated, goes into the water. Ultimately, the Park Service would like to depopulate Broad Channel altogether.

  Adjacent to Broad Channel is the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Hartzog stops and takes a walk. “This is the world’s only wildlife refuge that has a subway station,” he observes, and this is true: the IND stops there. Moving along a sand trail with the midtown-Manhattan skyline in clear view, he sees egrets, bitterns, black ducks, ruddy ducks, a muskrat, rabbits, quails, and phalaropes. More than two hundred and fifty species of birds inhabit Jamaica Bay, and various kinds of mammals, and uncounted varieties of fish. Jamaica Bay embarrasses the ecological crisis. Jamaica Bay is in all likelihood one of the most polluted bodies of water in North America. It pulses with wildlife.

  A ranger walking with Hartzog says, “Those fellows out in Yellowstone don’t know what they’re missing.”

  “They haven’t learned that all the wilderness isn’t in the woods,” Hartzog tells him. “Good Lord, what’s that?”

  “That’s a horseshoe crab,” the ranger answers. “It’s one of the oldest forms of life.”

  Hartzog slaps his way through a cloud of mosquitoes, then stops to watch two Canada geese land in a freshwater pond that is isolated from the saline bay by grass-covered hummocks. Twenty minutes later, he registers at the Hotel Taft and sends the ranger out for a pint of whiskey. They have a drink in Hartzog’s room before going to Mamma Leone’s for dinner.

  Responding to the buzzer, Hartzog picks up his office telephone, speaks his name, listens, smiles, and the smile widens into a grin. He draws deeply on his cigar, No. 11 today, blows out a billow of smoke, and at the same time reaches for a fresh cigarette. He puts down the receiver, picks it up again, and asks his secretary to call various senators. “We won the Everglades hands down,” he tells her. “Isn’t that fabulous?” The Senate Public Works Committee has just put the mark of Cain on the Army Corps of Engineers.

  Hartzog calls the Secretary of the Interior, tells him the good news, chuckles once, guffaws twice, wreathes himself in puffed smoke, and afterward says, “That man is saltier than fat pork.”

  An architect from Louisville is waiting outside the door. “He’s got some ideas on how I ought to run Mammoth Cave, so I’m going to let him come in here and tell me how to run Mammoth Cave,” Hartzog says. “Send him in.”

  The architect is a tall man with a weathered face, and the distillate of what he has to say is this: “There’s a commercial hub developing on your periphery down there, and it’s all junk and crud.”

  The Park Service owns land in something like a five-mile radius around the entrance to Mammoth Cave. Near the property line—as on the edges of many parks—honky-tonk agglomerates. “I talked to those people down there about zoning,” Hartzog says. “‘Zoning?’ they said. ‘Zoning?’ I had the impression that I was in a foreign land.”

  Mammoth Cave is so mammoth that it reaches underground even beyond the boundaries of the park. The architect now tells Hartzog that surface pollutants from the junk and crud of the commercial hub are seeping down into the cave. Hartzog thanks the architect for this unattractive news, and for alerting Washington to still another threat to the environment—speleological pollution.

  Three men from the General Services Administration come in, ushered by one of Hartzog’s assistant directors. The General Services Administration is about to demolish the office buildings on Constitution Avenue that were put up as “temporary” structures during the First World War. The three men try to make a deal with Hartzog for a small piece of land they would like to use for a U-turn for trucks. “That’s like trading a bucket of coal for two buckets of ashes,” Hartzog says. “I gave that up when I left the Ozarks. I want a quid pro quo. If you help me get the entire U.S. Congress off my back by opening another access to the Key Bridge, I’ll happily give you your U-turn.” When the office buildings go down, the Park Service will take over the land they now stand on. The assistant director says that lawns will fill the space. “The hell they will,” Hartzog says. “Nat Owings wants to put rose gardens and a restaurant there. The last thing we need in downtown Washington is more grass. We’ve got grass coming out of our ears in this city, and in summer we let it turn brown. We’re up to our noses in horticulturists who don’t know enough not to water grass when it gets hot. We need more vistas like a Buick needs a fifth hole. I don’t think this is Paris. The strength and heart of Washington is to reflect this country, which is virile and informal and friendly.”

  Alone again, Hartzog punches a button on the telephone console and says to his secretary, “I want a copy of the language that the Senate Public Works Committee passed today.”

  Representatives of the Student Conservation Association file into the office. Hartzog settles into his armchair and lights a cigar—No. 12, 7:20 P.M., the last working smoke of the day. The Student Conservation Association is more or less a private, contemporary version of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Its members labor for the Park Service, building trails, building cabins. Hartzog watches them with a recruiter’s eye, looking for rangers. Most of them are in high school, and he tries to nudge them toward his kind of curriculum. “I’m looking for social scientists, not just natural scientists,” he tells them. “It’s not enough just to interpret the natural phenomena of Yellowstone. I want people to staff big recreation areas near urban ghettos.” One thing that emerges in this interview is that some members of the Student Conservation Association are paid five hundred dollars a summer for doing the same work as Park Service seasonal employees who are paid fifteen hundred dollars. Hartzog explodes, picks up the phone, and orders that a supplemental one thousand dollars be given to every student in such a situation. After the S.C.A. representatives leave, he blasts away at one of his assistants, who answers, “But I staffed it out with Management and Budget, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the Department of Labor, and the Hill!”

  “You’re missing my point—I’m not articulating my point,” Hartzog says. “I’m concerned about these youngsters. What they’re trying to say to us, if they’re trying to say anything, is that the Establishment is a bunch of hypocrites, and I kind of agree with them.”

  There is a buzz in the console. One of his calls to the Senate Office Building has gone through. He picks up the phone, and says, “Senator, I just called to say I deeply appreciate what happened on that south-Florida vote. I detected your fine hand in there, and …”

  All afternoon, he has been on the Buffalo under five-hundred-foot cliffs, catching nothing and caring less. A hawk swoops across the blazing sun. It is a day of high, thin cirrus and pale-blue sky. “Look at that old buzzard sashaying around,” Hartz
og says to Cal Smith. “Now he’s just a speck a-riding away. My Lord, what a beautiful place this is! We need this river real bad, and we’re going to have to get it. There ought to be something around those bushes, Cal.”

  “Well, there sure had ought to be. This is a pretty deep pocket back down through here.”

  Smith puts a crawdad on Hartzog’s hook, and Hartzog releases a high, soft shot toward the bushes. Splat.

  Thirty minutes go by. Nothing whatever happens.

  “There ought to be something where that little stream comes in there, Cal.”

  “Well, there sure had ought to be. There’s always a pretty deep pocket in there by those little streams. There must be an old boy out there huntin’ and makin’ the rounds lookin’ for crawdaddies. I just know it.”

  Another crawdad sails through the air. Splat. Thirty minutes go by. Nothing happens. Hartzog talks, almost to himself, about his parks. He talks about the big trees in Sequoia in the early morning, about the eerie moods in the rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and about rangers’ airboats in the Everglades—the worst way to see the park. “You’ve got to be still, and in being still you see everything,” he says. “The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a national park is snow falling into the Grand Canyon. Reds, oranges, pinks, and browns come through the white snow. It falls quietly. It really helps you sort out all of life.” He is silent for some minutes, watching the tip of his rod. “We’re building a Museum of Immigration inside the base of the Statue of Liberty,” he goes on. “Some of the things young people are protesting about are the very things that brought people to this country—personal involvement, achievement, commitment, the worth of the individual. We haven’t perfected the system. It’s a good system. A birthright. Youth today has its opportunity in perfecting the system, not rejecting it. ‘Tear it down,’ ‘Burn it up’ is the antithesis of what they are trying to say. The same things motivate them that motivated the people who established the system.”

  Slowly, the tip of his rod bends toward the river, then nods rapidly, four times.

  “Snag?” says the riverman.

  “No.”

  The line begins to run. Hartzog lets it go. He feeds it out through his hand, waiting, guessing, judging his moment. The line runs on. Then Hartzog, after five and a half hours of almost complete inactivity, makes his move. He stops the line, lifts the rod, and sets the hook. The line is taut and moves quickly across an arc of the river. It moves back. It moves in, and he reels the slack. It tightens, and the rod bends, throbbing, to a symmetrical U. The fish makes a final lateral dash, breaks the surface, and flies through the air—deep cordovan brown with a broad black tail, a two-and-a-half-pound wild bass.

  Ruidoso

  IN JUNE, 1973, a blue Ford pickup, freckled with mud, moved down out of the Ozarks, dragging a four-horse trailer. It crossed Oklahoma, and it crossed the Texas Panhandle. The weight of the horses—even though there were only three—was too much for the power of the motor. Miles came slowly in flat land, where the view from the cab—uninterrupted in every direction—ran over the curve of the earth. In the back of the truck was a big can of disinfectant and an even larger (tengallon) milk can full of gasoline. There was, as well, a cardboard box full of bottles and cans of vinegar, alcohol, Epsom salts, Bigeloil, Vaseline, Canada brace, flybait, Traileze, Louisiana leg brace, Absorbine senior. Eight hundred miles west of home, truck and trailer reached the beginnings of the Sacramento Mountains, in southern New Mexico, and the driver—Bill H. Smith, of Pea Ridge, Arkansas—had no choice now but to gear down and crawl uphill. He had come out here on a kind of dare. There was a lot of jealousy in Pea Ridge, where Bill Smith was one among a thousand people. No dignity could be perfect in a town that size. About his horses, people liked to—as they say it there—gig him. “That stallion of yours, he isn’t much, that old stallion, Bill.” No one, on the other hand, was in any sense competing with him. If strangers came to Pea Ridge and asked, as they often did, for “the quarter-horse man,” they could be asking only for Bill H. Smith. The semidesert fell behind, and the Ford slowly pulled the trailer up through the Hondo Valley—ponderosas rising from steep mountainsides, a clear stream flowing past cotton-woods and orchards (apples and apricots). Haciendas. Small wonder so much gunsmoke had hung there. With altitude, the temperature was markedly cooler. Four thousand, five thousand, six thousand feet. Smith intended to spend the whole summer up in the high country, so his horses would have ample time to get used to thin air. Gigs or no gigs, all of Pea Ridge was with him now, in his journey into the center of the quarter-racing world, where—fifty-six years old—he was still an unknown.

  Bill’s father was a horse-and-mule trader. In the nineteen-twenties, before the era came when horses and mules were shipped by rail or truck, Bill’s father and other traders would make up a great herd of animals and drive them—“trail them”—for six months, from spring to early fall: “trail down plumb through the southern part of Arkansas into Louisiana, and then swing back into Texas, then up through Oklahoma.” When Bill was eleven, twelve, and thirteen, he made the trip each year. Head to tail, fifteen animals would be tied together in a unit. Bill rode a horse at the head of such a unit. There might be as many as forty strings—six hundred head—on the move. The drive went from town to town, county seat to county seat, eighteen to twenty-five miles a day, trading animals all the way, camping by a stream at night. In every deal, the horse trader tried to “draw boot”—swap animals with a farmer and get some of his money to boot.

  There was, of course, a chuck wagon, and tied to the back of the chuck wagon was a horse named Windmill. He belonged to Bill’s father. As the drive approached a town, Windmill was taken from the back of the wagon and around to the front, where he was put in harness. Sometimes in the evenings Bill’s father streaked Windmill’s shoulders with peroxide so it would appear that Windmill had spent all his travelling days in the harness. Now the drive came into the town. People gathered to say hello, to talk, to stare, to look over the horses and the mules. “Windmill had a collar on him a size or two too large. Standing there in the middle of town, he would drop his head, and the collar would fall down on his neck. He’d let his lip go down. He’d drop his lower lip and hang his head. He just didn’t look too good.”

  Sooner or later, somebody in the town would walk up and stand around for a while looking at all the animals and finally look Bill’s father in the eye and say, “You got a race horse?” It was expected that a trader would carry a race horse.

  Bill’s father would say, “No.” And he would look off down the street and not say anything more.

  In time, the man might say, “Oh. I was hoping.”

  Smith senior would turn and just look at him.

  In time, the man would say, “I’ve got a race horse.”

  This was known as “jumping the trader,” or “bouncing the trader for a race.” And there would be no immediate reaction from Bill’s father. After a while, though, he would say, “Well, let’s see your race horse.”

  A finger pointed at the town race horse. Every town had at least one. There followed a long look in its direction. Bill’s father then pointed to the front of the chuck wagon. “Well, that old horse I’m a-workin’ up there can outrun him,” he would say.

  “How much would you want to bet on that?”

  “Not very much. But I’d run you four hundred and forty yards for twenty-five dollars.”

  (“My dad’s idea was not to scare him.”)

  “Hell, I wouldn’t run my horse for twenty-five dollars,” the townsman said, and spat off the curb into the dirt.

  “Oh. Well. How much would you run him for?”

  The crowd that had inevitably collected by this time was a small one, but interested, and crowd enough to get up fifty here and twenty-five there until as much as a thousand dollars had been assembled on each of the two sides.

  Windmill, as it happened, was “a practically straight Thoroughbred horse,” so close to pure that in th
is context the difference was irrelevant. He was “a big roan bald-faced horse,” and in his lifetime he never lost a race. If the town was a county seat—Arkadelphia, El Dorado, Nacogdoches—it would have some sort of race track, and if there was no track the crowd headed out to the edge of a field, a section line. Bill—eleven, twelve, thirteen years old—was Windmill’s rider, and all the horse had on him was a neck rope and Bill, wearing overalls and a homemade shirt. “Windmill had a nice personality until that neck rope went on him. He was a running horse—a typical modern quarter horse. He was heavy-muscled, yet he showed a lot of Thoroughbred.” Bill was too small to stop him, and after Windmill had shot across the finish line he would run on for two miles for the sheer galloping joy of it. The Smiths owned him until he died.

  The pickup and the four-horse trailer finally made it all the way up the valley, and far into Lincoln National Forest, near the edge of the reservation of the Mescalero Apache—among the tribes of the United States, the last to give up. At elevation sixty-four hundred feet, Smith came to his destination, where a big sign by the roadside said, “Ruidoso Downs, Home of the World’s Richest Horse Race.”

  Smith turned his truck in at a drive marked “Horsemen’s Entrance.” He clattered downhill and across a trout stream into a broad spread of barns. He found the racing office and got an assignment of stalls, went to them, and sprayed them up and down from his can of disinfectant. Then he opened his trailer and took out his horses. One was a pony horse. The two others were quarter-horse colts.

  In Ruidoso, at the end of the summer, ten horses would sprint a quarter mile in pursuit of seven hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars—this by far the largest purse in horse racing, any kind of horse racing, anywhere in the world. It was a sum almost twice as large as the combined purses of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. The winner’s share alone would be three hundred and thirty thousand dollars—awarded after a blur of a race, hard to follow, a flat-out cavalry charge that would last a third of a minute, start to finish. The quarter-racing horse was bred specifically for this kind of dash. At short distance, nothing equine can touch the quarter horse—not even the Thoroughbred. New Mexico is one of the few states in the United States where quarter-horse races and Thoroughbred races can be run on the same track on the same day, and the difference is considerable. After a race in which the quarter horses come cracking down the big straightaway, all bunched as they flash across the line, Thoroughbreds, making their plodded rounds, disconcert the observe. Furlong upon furlong, they seem to lope along, panting, and one wonders anxiously if they will make it to the end.