Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  We had climbed the fissure, Patty and I, precisely to see whether there were any leads. Our job was done. It is bad form to scoop booty and not map.

  Patty Kambesis, who is the chief cartographer of the LCP, was particularly sensitive on the issue. Mapping an area that has been scooped is not nearly the same as mapping "virgin passage." The "map as you go" policy was sometimes annoying—no caver I know is a great fan of rules—but it meant that difficult passages

  had to be mapped before people couid get to the more spectacular rooms.

  Still, we would map this room later, and I couldn't help myself: I had to see what was on the other side of the gypsum rim.

  "You want to come?"

  Patty shook her head and smiled.

  And so I scooped the rim, alone. There was a concave block of gypsum on the other side of the keyhole. When I glanced at it from the side, I saw that it was very thin, sculpted by the wind into an upward-sweeping curve. It looked like a cresting wave. Beyond that was a small room with one high lead that didn't look promising. I sat and studied the cresting wave for ten minutes. Something that felt very much like victory expanded inside my chest, and I thought I could hear my own heartbeat echo off the walls. Neil Armstrong stuff.

  When I came back, Patty asked me what I had seen, and I told her that there was a block of gypsum that looked like an ocean wave.

  Later, along with Rick Bridges and Anne Strait, we mapped the area. The fissure Patty and I first climbed (first climbed!) intersected with a passage that ran above the Rift and slightly parallel to it. Some clever cavers named it the Parallel Universe. When Patty sketched the area beyond my (my!) gypsum-rimmed keyhole, she nodded to me and named it the Ocean Wave Room.

  Several days later, Rick Bridges entered the information from Patty's sketch pad into the Lechuguilla Cave Project's computer, using an ingenious program written by LCP member Garry Pe-trie. It was Friday night, the last day of the LCP's weeklong summer expedition. There were now, Rick Bridges said, 51.6 miles of cave mapped.

  And the next night, we sat at the gala fifty-mile celebration dinner in good conscience. Mike Currier was there, representing the mayor, who was away on business. Members of the Mayor's Task Force on Lechuguilla were there. Wallace Elms, the superintendent of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, spoke, and he congratulated the cavers on their achievement. Rick Bridges spoke.

  Ron Kerbo gave the most moving speech. He talked about knowledge and poetry; he talked about the heart and soul of exploration. I felt gooseflesh rise along my arms and across my back. The Ocean Wave Room.

  lated prairie, littered with sage and bereft of trees. It is said that the turn-of-the-century photographer L. A. Huffman was the first to call this combination of marginally fertile prairie, high desert, and badlands the Big Open. The distances seem vaguely hostile, alien to outsiders, and the major river is called Big Dry Creek. Buttes, like great wind-whipped symbols of erosion, rise against an impossibly immense expanse of indifferent sky. Except for a pair of two-lane paved highways that "T" at Jordan, the roads are cruel graveled jokes. When it rains, pickups founder in the greasy red clay of those roads. It is a clinging mud locals called gumbo. Infrequent rain pounds the land, and water runs on the surface in violent washes, forming small canyons and gullies called gunions. In places gunions carved into the earth seem to swirl around some bit of land left standing like a misshapen pillar. These badland formations are called gumbo knobs.

  It's been a hard decade for ranching and farming in the Big Open. The bad winter of '78-'79 killed off hundreds of stock animals; there was a plague of grasshoppers in the summer of '86; and there has been drought around Jordan since 1980. Worse, while expenses have risen with exponential absurdity, farmers are getting less today for a bushel of wheat than their fathers and grandfathers got during the Depression. These are hard times around Jordan: Four counties in the Big Open area have been named "hunger counties" in a Harvard School of Public Health report. Many farmers, deeply in debt, are facing imminent foreclosure. It's called getting bucked off the ranch.

  In late February Robert Scott, a Hamilton, Montana, man, a former petroleum engineer who was bucked off his own ranch in central Montana, proposed a bold plan that would allow the farmers and ranchers to hold on to their land and nearly double the average household income. Under the Big Open proposal, people would sell off all their sheep and cattle, tear down the fences, and reseed fields with natural grasses. The Big Open— about fifteen thousand square miles of it: an area the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined—would become, over a period of perhaps fifty years, a vast prairie game reserve rivaling those in Africa.

  There are, at present, 363,000 sheep and cattle grazing this land, or about a hundred head for each of the three thousand people living in the area. Scott estimates that the Big Open would support wildlife herds numbering 320,000 animals, including 75,000 bison, 150,000 deer, 40,000 elk, and 40,000 antelope. The hunger counties of the Big Open would become again the land that staggered Lewis and Clark with its bounty in 1805.

  A game reserve of this magnitude would draw tourists from all over the world. According to Scott, "Huge herds of free-roaming buffalo would be an unrivaled attraction." The game park "would be unequaled by any other place on earth, save possibly the Serengeti plain of East Africa," which, not incidentally, produces annual gross tourist receipts of $300 million a year.

  The Big Open might be operated as a wildlife-range cooperative system that would incorporate both private ranches and the five thousand square miles of land that are government-owned. Receipts of $50 million annually would be generated from hunting fees alone. And while farmers and ranchers would retain their land, the average household income would rise from $15,000 annually to about $28,000.

  Scott presented his proposal in late February at a conference sponsored by the Institute of the Rockies, a Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit organization of academic and business leaders. The idea was so appealing—to those of us who don't live in the Big Open anyway—that it was widely reported. One area rancher told The New York Times that local folks were likely to be suspicious at first. He suggested that Scott "play this scenario in the Hell Creek bar in Jordan."

  So I was sitting in the Hell Creek one Saturday in March, talking with farmers and ranchers about the idea. It was hard to convey the idea that this plan was not something to be imposed on them by the government. "If they want my land for a park," John Cooly said, "they can buy it out from under me, and I'll go somewhere where ranching's fun." I tried to tell John there was no "they" involved. "It's supposed to be your choice."

  "Look," Cooly said, "I don't want to deal with tourists. I don't want 'em around. If I wanted to see people every day, I'd move to

  town. And I'm not the only one feels this way. People here are furiously independent. You'll never get the ranchers together."

  Terry Murnion, sitting on another stool, was a good example of Cooly's point. Terry's cousin, Nick, was getting married that night, and there was a reception at a hall down the street. Terry didn't go, "because I been to one marriage in my life, and I expect to go to one funeral."

  Terry heard me out on the economic benefits that would accrue to him under the Big Open plan. Scott had estimated that a twelve-thousand-acre farm like Murnion's would clear a minimum of fifty thousand dollars on hunting permits alone. The numbers didn't seem to impress Terry Murnion. "If my old granddad was tough enough to come here broke," he said, "I should be tough enough to stay here broke." It's been hard, Terry said. "One old Ford pickup and a pissed-off wife is all I got," he said. Still, "I got a lifetime here, and I'm paying taxes." As for the foreclosures looming on the horizon, well—"There's more heart in this country than the bankers can handle."

  Terry was drinking beer, and others in the bar were drinking bourbon neat. The most popular drink in Montana has always been a "ditch," bourbon and water, but no one drinks ditches in Jordan. The water is alkaline, it causes diarrhea, and most people distill
their household water before drinking it.

  And while there is little locals can do about the water they get from their wells—the century-old problem has something to do with minerals in the bedrock—they can do something about the quality and quantity of the surface water. The land around Jordan suffers from heavy erosion, the result of drought and a century of overgrazing by cattle and sheep. They are destructive grazers, these domestic animals, and the native plants that once held moisture, that provided a spongelike watershed, are gone. Creeks that once ran almost all year are now mostly dry. Those that do run carry great loads of sediment. In contrast, elk and antelope and deer, wildlife species that evolved on the prairie, consume native flora across all species and seasons. They are biologically in tune with the area: Their modest foraging does not destroy the watershed. Additionally, dryland farming in the area,

  143 A THE NATURAL WORLD

  it can be shown, exhausts the surface organic material as well. Overgrazing, dryland farming, and the resultant erosion combine to produce a process scientists call desertification. They point out that the Sahara was once the granary of the world, until human mismanagement turned it into dunes.

  This is the kind of argument, however, that is not to be advanced in the Hell Creek bar unless you want your head runned through a wall. Several men in the bar suggested that instead of using eastern Montana prairies as a game reserve, the western part of the state should be "turned into a zoo." Most of these gentlemen saw the mountains of western Montana (where I live) as a place full of colleges, liberals, and people in waffle-stomper boots. Sierra clubbers and coyote lovers. Maybe tourists would pay to see a zoo full of such weirdos.

  One man, John McKeever, made a telling point. "You want to be a farmer?" he asked me. I told him I didn't have the knowledge, the skill, the grit. Most of all, I had no desire to work a farm. "It's been twenty years since I bucked a bail of hay, and I hope I never buck another," I said.

  "You like what you're doing then?" McKeever asked, and I told him I did. "I like what I'm doing," he said. McKeever raises prize bulls. "You're asking me to stop doing something I like and start up on something I don't know anything about. Something I don't want to do. It's like me telling you, you have to be a farmer, you'll like it, and it's for your own good."

  So the scenario didn't play well in the Hell Creek bar. At least not the first time around. It would take some time for the idea to sink in.

  The next day I drove forty miles through the gravel and gumbo to Claude Saylor's ranch. He was out in the barn, castrating pigs, but knocked off for a chat. Like a lot of other area ranchers, Claude has always worked a second job to make ends meet. For a time he traveled Montana and Wyoming shearing sheep in the way that other ranchers work as carpenters or mail carriers. Then, several years ago, Claude discovered that some city dwellers envied his life. There were people who would come out to the ranch and work ten-hour days mending fence with him. "And

  they'd pay me sixty-five dollars a day for the privilege," Claude said.

  He stopped shearing sheep and turned over part of his ranch to a tourist operation. "I run two hundred head of cattle," Claude said, "and I make about fifteen thousand dollars. In the fall I get between twenty and forty hunters, and I average about twenty thousand dollars off of them. They're here five days a week, and then they're gone. The cattle cost me money every single day."

  Claude's grandfather had come out to Montana in a covered wagon at the turn of the century, and that old Studebaker wagon was still around. Claude spent about two thousand dollars restoring the wagon, then went looking for the remains of others, old wagons you can find rusting in piles on the prairie. He now has twelve of them, and runs wagon-train trips for paying guests. The nostalgic summer trips have been featured on national television, and The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about Saylor, about how he was using recreation to save his ranch.

  Somehow, the very idea of paying guests annoys many of Claude's neighbors. A letter in the Jordan Tribune about The Wall Street Journal article asked if maybe there wasn't "too much recreation and not enough riding or too much play and not enough work."

  Claude showed me the letter and said that anyone presenting the Big Open plan would have a hard row to hoe. "People around here are tough," he said, and mentioned that there seemed to be more foreclosures west of Jordan, on much more fertile land. "That's because people around here have always had it tough, and they know how to weather bad times. They think they can hold on to their ranches." Claude shook his head sadly. "They'll think that right up to the day of foreclosure."

  Maybe. Sitting here in the safety of western Montana, I can say the Big Open proposal looks like a good deal for local ranchers. For many, it may be the only way to save a ranch that has been in the same family for three generations. I think, as the idea sinks in, many—especially those in the deepest trouble—may even welcome the idea. These ranchers and farmers don't want to change,

  but they are not suicidal. If it comes down to losing everything or turning the ranch into a wildlife range, many of these independent, hardworking people are going to opt for survival. In the end it's their choice. You could get your head runned through a wall telling them that, but it's their choice.

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  I was hanging from a rope affixed to a diaper, which was, in fact, a ten-foot-long runner made of nylon webbing wrapped about my legs and crotch in a manner most familiar to mothers and climbers. The ends of the runner were hooked into a pair of cara-biners, which, in turn, hooked into a small device called a figure eight.

  With my diapers and carabiners in place, I could run a dou-bled-over climbing rope through the figure eight, step backward off the lip of a cliff, and slide safely down the rope. This is the fastest nonfatal way to get down off a mountain. Since most cliff faces are higher than the average climbing rope is long, numerous slides are required to reach flat land. Ropes are expensive, however, and in order to retrieve them after each slide, they are usually wrapped around an anchor—a tree, a horn of rock, a sling affixed to a chock—and dropped double down the face of rock below. The ends of the rope should at the very least dangle over a stand-up ledge. There the climber can pull on one end and bring the rope down after him. The process is called rappel, a French word meaning "recall."

  I was out recalling over the side of a cliff this spring day be-

  cause the summer was shaping up heavy on rope work. I'd been invited to help some people place a pair of peregrine falcons on a rocky ledge rising high over the Pacific Ocean. I'd also promised to join a caving expedition where we would be expected to slide down a rope in absolute darkness some four hundred feet. "You can rappel, can't you?" I was asked in both cases.

  The last time I slid down a rope was six years ago. As I remember, it seemed a painless procedure after the first-time terror of trying to scale a 5.7 climb called the Grack in Yosemite. Slide down a rope? No problem. Rappel off a cliff while holding a delicate peregrine falcon in a sweatsock? Piece of cake. Drop off into the darkness of the earth's abysmal depths? I could handle it. But what the hell, a little practice with the rope wouldn't hurt.

  My friend Paul Dix, a photographer, has been climbing for almost thirty years and owns all the requisite ropes and hardware. As it happened, Paul didn't mind taking an afternoon off for some rope work. In fact, he said, I would be the perfect subject for "some rappelling photos." Paul said he would be happy to supervise my practice sessions if he could shoot pictures of me.

  Which is how I came to be hanging over the lip of a cliff in Yankee Jim Canyon, just above the rapids of the Yellowstone River. Other men have hung from the neck until dead: I was hanging from my diapers and dying of boredom. This is the curse of going anywhere with an outdoor photographer.

  "Just hold it right there," Paul said, diddling with his Nikon. "Okay, now drop down about two feet. Good. Now turn your face out of the shadow. Lift your right foot about four inches. Perfect. Hold it. Look natural."

  For me,
a natural look would have been one of intense apprehension, but after hanging for some time in a position one sees only in East Indian sex manuals, a certain ennui takes hold of the soul.

  "Can I go now?" I called. The diapers were beginning to chafe.

  "Uh, wait just a minute, please. I'm changing film."

  Using Paul's gear and relying, as I was, on his expertise, I was in no position to argue. I was in no position at all. I was hanging

  by my diapers, thinking uncharitable thoughts about photographers.

  "Oh my God," Paul called. "Could you hang for another few minutes? Five more minutes. There's a couple of kayakers upriver." Paul was in a lather of anticipation, scrambling up the side of the cliff, dragging thirty pounds of camera gear in a frenzied quest to find the perfect angle. "If I can just get you and the kayakers in the same shot . . ."

  Someday Paul will be sitting at home, in his office, and his agent or some magazine art director will call and ask, "You wouldn't have a photo of a fat guy rappelling down a cliff with a couple of kayakers paddling by below, would you?"

  And Paul Dix will say, "Of course," in a way that suggests all good photographers have that shot.

  There was a nice little stretch of rapids upstream, and the kayakers had no idea that I was hanging in the wind, waiting for them to pass so that Paul could be nonchalant with art directors about his rappelling photographs. The kayakers were probably nice guys. I bet I'd like them if I met them at a bar. What I didn't like about them from this angle was the way they kept fooling around. Drop into a big hole and paddle furiously in order not to move. Anybody who would work that hard to go nowhere, I thought, twisting slowly in the wind, was an imbecile of heroic proportions.

  "Can you drop below the overhang so you hang free?" Paul asked. So I hung there, working hard to go nowhere and feeling as vapid as a kayaker in a rapid. The diaper was cutting into my thighs, and paralysis had overtaken my legs. I mean, I was hurting. I began to think of Paul as a Kodachrome sadist.