Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  I flew home on the weekend. I made her vegetarian lasagna. She read me her poems at length. When I finally got the nerve to ask her if she wanted to talk about her letter she said, “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m firm on it. Either you pay me back the $120,000 immediately or I am buying you out.”

  This was not the same Dani I had known on the river. When I pressed to know what had come over her, she admitted her grandfather had put her up to acquiring the ranch. He was the one, of course, who had set up her trust fund, and he owned property all over the American West.

  It is also possible Dani was a little bit in love with me. Cowboys made lots of people fall a little bit in love with me, and two things I can say for certain are, it wasn’t really me and it wasn’t really love. But Dani was twenty-two, and on the river I had taken her seriously in a way maybe no one in her life ever had. I could imagine her complaining about my absence to her grandfather, and her grandfather seeing an opening, seeing a way to acquire one more piece of beautiful land. This all happened more than twenty years ago, but one thing I remember with perfect clarity is how much Dani feared her grandfather, how terrified she was of disappointing him.

  I drove to town to clear my head and so I wouldn’t say anything I might regret later. Maybe, I thought, buying the ranch had been a giant mistake after all, and maybe this was a clean way out. For two years I had been running ragged trying to make the payments. I had given the $120,000 Dani gave me straight to Dona Blair, which had lowered my monthly payments from $4,000 to $2,500, putting them into the realm of just barely makeable if I took every single job that came along. My work was all contract work—a freelance article here, a ten-week teaching gig there. No bank in the world was going to give me $120,000 to pay Dani back.

  I parked my car in front of the post office and ran immediately into Ann, Dale Pizel’s wife.

  “Pam!” she said. “I didn’t know you were in town. Dale was just asking me about you. He needs you to sign some papers about water rights.”

  I got the mail and walked down the street to Dale’s office. “How’s the world traveler?” he said. Dale is a cowboy from his ten-gallon hat to his shiny silver buckle to the steel toes of his leather boots. The walls of his office are covered with rodeo photos and fancy saddles—his affect is more horse trainer than real estate man.

  “Grounded in California for the semester I’m afraid,” I told him. “Trying to earn a little money.”

  “I’ve finally got these water rights papers from the original sale,” he said. “They basically say you know you don’t own the water in Lime Creek and you won’t dam it up for your own purposes. But you can take them home and look them over if you want. How long are you here?”

  The question tugged at my heart. “Two more days,” I said, which was the immediate answer. But what if that was the answer for all time?

  “Just take those home and read them, and I’ll be here Monday morning if you have questions. Or you can just drop them in the mail before you leave town.”

  I picked up the document, thanked Dale, and made to leave. “Oh, and Pam,” Dale said.

  I turned to face him.

  “I also have these other papers, the ones I drew up to put those forty acres into Dani’s name. I haven’t filed them with the county yet. So since you’re here in person, you might look them over too.”

  My heart started pounding in my ears. “You mean . . . ,” I began, but everything I could think of to say next seemed unequivocally self-convicting.

  “The sale isn’t official until we file the papers with the county,” Dale said. “Since we did it all over the phone, I thought you might want to lay eyes on them before it’s—you know—permanent.”

  Now my heart was beating so hard in my chest I was sure Dale could hear it. “I’ll do that,” I said. “Thanks, again.” I gathered up the rest of the papers from his desk and walked out his door. Once outside I sank onto the bench in the town park. It had been at least ten days since I had deposited Dani’s check in my account, since I had written a check for the same amount to Dona Blair. And now, I was pretty sure the only papers in existence saying Dani owned part of the ranch were in my hands.

  I drove back to the ranch feeling significantly more empowered.

  I walked into the house and sat down on a kitchen chair facing her. “You may have inherited more money than I will earn in my lifetime,” I said to Dani, “but I spent six months of my life looking for this place and it is psychically mine. I don’t know right now how I am going to pay you back, but I will, and with interest. Now I need you to gather up your things and get off my property. Tell your grandfather to go find some other beautiful piece of land.”

  I wasn’t surprised when Dani’s face flooded with relief. She had done this to please her grandfather. Maybe somewhere in there she wanted my love. But what she really didn’t want was to live by herself on a 120-acre ranch in Creede, Colorado, and now she didn’t have to.

  On Monday I went back to Dale’s office and told him the whole story.

  “We can loan you that money, Pam, at an interest rate that won’t kill you.” I had forgotten Dale was also the president of the local bank.

  “We’ll get Dani her money, and I’ll write to her on your behalf and ask for a quitclaim deed. She doesn’t need to know she was never quite the owner of that land.”

  The First National Bank of Creede loaned me $120,000, to go with the $250,000 I already owed Dona Blair. Miraculously, that winter, I was hired by Michael Shamberg at Jersey Films to write a screenplay (never made), which knocked the Bank of Creede loan down to almost nothing. Just like that, I was back in the realm of barely manageable.

  In the months after Dani’s departure, several people in town told me stories. That Dani had been rude on multiple occasions to Conoco Connie at the gas station and Bertie the postmistress, who is possibly the sweetest woman on the face of the earth. That she refused to make eye contact when she ordered her morning coffee at Cafe Ole. That she had called both the Soward Ranch and the county offices to complain about the dust the trucks were making going in and out of the Soward gravel pit. And while it is true those trucks make a lot of dust, everyone in town knew that gravel pit was the only thing allowing seventy-five-year-old Margaret Lamb to pay her county taxes.

  I would never have had the ranch in the first place had Dale Pizel not talked Dona Blair into the idea of me, and I wouldn’t have kept it without Dale’s decision to lend my overextended self another $120,000. In transactions with Dani, he was my realtor, my banker and my lawyer all rolled into one.

  I knew better than to ask Dale if he had heard stories about Dani, and if that’s the reason those papers sat for ten days on his desk. I knew better than to read too much into it when he would say things to me in the months to come about Creede magic, about how the valley spits some people right out like a pit, and welcomes others, gets under their skin and never lets them go. He probably has no idea how often I think of him, or how grateful I am to him every single day.

  I don’t see Dale around town very often. He rides in the Fourth of July parade, and I see him at the Elks Lodge dance on New Year’s. We wave and smile, but we’ve barely had a real conversation in years. I did bump into him going into the post office the day I wrote this book’s proposal, the day I first put down on paper his role in changing my life forever.

  “Hey, Pam,” he said, opening the door and smiling broadly. “It’s such a funny thing to find you here, because for some reason I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

  Ranch Almanac: Donkey Chasing

  When the mini-donkeys first arrived at the ranch, there was some—I would have to call it good-natured—chasing. And to be fair, the wolfhounds were used to my returning from work trips with a squeaky toy for each of them. When I brought home the mini-donks, they probably just thought I’d outdone myself.

  I hadn’t considered, when I agreed to rescue the bonded pair, that my pasture was fenced to keep horses and cattle, but nothing
much shorter or skinnier than that. My corral, especially, was not mini-donkey-proof, and neither were a few of the pasture corners that had been left with a small space open so people could slip through. Also, the donkeys really liked people. They would follow me around the yard while I did my chores. They’d pick something up in their mouths—a hose, a rope, a stuffed-lobster dog toy—and play tug-of-war with it, mostly, it seemed, for my amusement. They had no problem negotiating with their little high-heeled hooves the three steps that led up to the dog porch, where they would spend several minutes sniffing the bowls and beds as if solving a great mystery. If I had let them, I believe they would have followed me right through the front door into the living room, and curled up with me on the couch.

  The wolfhounds at first were curious about the donkeys and then affronted at their hubris. Fenton, especially, had a strong belief system around animals staying in their place. He felt Mr. Kitty belonged outside, in the mudroom or in the basement. The sheep and the chickens belonged in their indoor/outdoor enclosure. Horses belonged in the corral, the barn and the pasture. Who were these newcomers, who’d been given the run of the place?

  Fenton would watch them nervously for hours until his outrage got the better of him, and then with no particular provocation, he would leap up and chase the donkeys around the yard. And because William did everything Fenton did exactly one half-second later, the donkeys found themselves on the run a couple of times each day.

  The wolfhounds are just about a head taller than the donkeys, and the donkeys were younger and maybe even a little smaller back then. I don’t believe the dogs had any intention of hurting the donkeys, but wolfhounds are bred to chase fast-moving objects, and those little donkeys can turn it on, in spite of their super-short legs.

  Sometimes Isaac, the bigger, brassier, donkey, would manage to turn the tables, would reach out his big square teeth and take a nip at a wolfhound haunch, and then the chase, for a little while, would go the other way. This strategy back fired of course, because the dogs thought that game was even more fun than the original, and so did everything possible to encourage it. On the one hand, everyone was getting lots of exercise, but on the other, said my nascent rancher voice, someone was eventually going to get hurt.

  I could fix the spaces in the fence given a little time, but I would need poles, and a bag of cement and a few days when I didn’t have writing deadlines, so I decided to give communal living a try. I rewarded peace when it occurred, and was vigilant about calling off the dogs, bringing them inside with me so the donkeys could enjoy some quality yard time alone.

  After a couple of weeks, I needed groceries, sheep feed, a mineral lick and about a million other things I would think of once I got to the Monte Vista Coop, a little over an hour’s drive away. I locked the dogs in the house and left all the gates but the front one open, so the equines could graze in the yard together where the grass was greenest and sweet.

  Five hours later, the truck loaded down with a month’s worth of barnyard supplies and groceries, I got out to open the gate at the end of the drive. I heard Deseo whinnying and whinnying as he trotted nervously up and down the fence line. Deseo is a worrywart, the fussiest of all the animals on the ranch—a little like someone’s urbane great-uncle set loose against his wishes on the farm—but he’s also a very good alarm clock. When anyone or anything is threatened, Deseo makes sure to let me know.

  I wrenched the gate open and went flying up the driveway to see who was injured or dead. I took a quick head count. Six chickens, five sheep, two horses, two donkeys and, pressed up against the kitchen window, the noses of two interested dogs. I caught Deseo with a lead rope, looked him over and petted his neck. He was all frothed up but seemed unhurt. Everyone else was strictly business as usual, Roany ingesting as much tender yard grass as he could before I turned him back to his 120 acres of pasture, Simon and Isaac on either end of a knotted rope dog toy, pulling each other across the driveway.

  I let Deseo go and turned back to the truck to unload the groceries. When I carried the first bags up the walkway to the dog porch, I didn’t at first comprehend what I was seeing. And when I tell you the dog porch was covered in donkey shit, I want to make sure you don’t picture two or four or even ten piles of steaming donkey pucks placed here and there on the wooden decking. The dog porch is roughly eight by eight, and every square inch of its surface was covered in donkey poop. I mean to say those donkeys shit and shit again and spread it around with their little hooves, and then they shit some more and spread that around, and then they shit again. They shit on all four dog beds, and in the case where there was more than one bed piled on top of another, they had pulled or kicked the beds apart so they could shit on the ones underneath. One of them shit into an open rectangular cooler I had washed and put on the dog porch to dry. They had upended the trash can that lives on the porch and kicked the shit and the trash together. They had even somehow smeared shit on the porch railings.

  It had to have been a premeditated attack and it seemed utterly impossible it had been committed by only the two of them. Had they somehow saved up for days? And if so, how had they known I would pick that day to go to the valley? The transgression had the scope and feel of a well-executed fraternity prank, though there wasn’t a college within three counties.

  I had always heard donkeys were smarter than horses, and I imagined how much satisfaction they must have taken, shitting away, kicking stuff around, while the dogs’ noses were pressed tight to the kitchen window. I believe Isaac wanted me to understand there was no insult directed at me personally, because nothing that was not on the dog porch had been tampered with.

  This was what Deseo had been trying to tell me as he trotted up and down the fence line while I fumbled with the gate. “Ohhhhhhhh. . . . she’s gonna see the do-o-o-o-o-g p-o-o-o-orch,” he whinnied, at the first sight of my car coming down Middle Creek Road. Closing up those spaces in the pasture fence moved to the top of the chore list. It was a brief but effective revolution, and the donkeys maintain their sovereignty to this day.

  PART TWO

  Digging In

  The Season of Hunkering Down

  By the first of October, the aspens are done showing off for the year. First dusting of snow on the peaks, then first dusting of snow on the pasture. The color is almost gone and with it the tourists. My neighbors from the Soward Ranch have moved into town for the winter. For the next seven months, I’ll be the last occupied house on my road. The horses hang around the corral, looking a little grim. They know what’s coming.

  I’m just back from a fourteen-day research trip to the eastern Canadian Arctic on an icebreaker, and three separate weeks teaching—on the island of Ile de Ré off the Atlantic coast of France, on a 140-year old schooner out of Rockport, Maine, and at the Omega Institute in the beautiful Hudson Valley. I have two weeks at the ranch before I have to leave again.

  I’ve all but missed this year’s color change in the high country, so even though there’s much to be done to prepare for winter, this morning Fenton, William and I take a hike up to Phoenix Park—one of the most wind-protected places in the valley—hoping to find a few groves of aspen still holding their leaves. We climb for an hour in light drizzle and under my boot soles is a carpet of green and gold. We surprise a mule deer buck, a four pointer, at the place where the forest gives way to meadow. When we reach the waterfall at the top of the park, the sun peeks through the clouds just long enough to turn the whole scene Kodachrome: the heavy gunmetal sky, the ghost aspens, with only a fraction of their leaves left glowing like a fluorescent pencil sketch beneath it, the water tumbling down the face of the cliff, beads of it lit up against the dark rock and spinning earthward like fireflies.

  In the summertime this trail sees a fair amount of use, from hikers and horsemen, sometimes four-wheelers, and even the occasional 4-x-4 truck, but summer feels long over and we are between hunting seasons, so the dogs and I have the place to ourselves.

  Years ago, on an August hike righ
t at the tail end of the monsoon, I got caught in a thunderstorm halfway across the big meadow that leads to Phoenix Park. I was new to the valley and had not yet learned how a bright white micro-puff in one corner of the sky can morph into a cumulonimbic monster in the amount of time it takes to go around a couple of bends in the trail.

  If you have never gotten caught in a thunderstorm at high altitude; if you have never felt your long straight hair stand on end as if someone above you has strings attached to it; if you have never smelled sulfur in the air just before a crack you can feel at the center of your ribcage splits the sky in two; if you have never run between lightning bolts that are hitting the ground on every side of you, your brain racing to determine whether you will improve or diminish your odds of surviving if you take five seconds to unbuckle your pack and throw its contents, including your stainless steel water bottle and your waterproof camera to the ground; then you might not understand what a pleasure it is to hike that same trail in October, on a cool dry day where the odds of a thunderstorm, while not impossible, are about 10,000 to 1.

  After a snack and a long drink out of that same, time-tested steel water bottle, the dogs and I make our way back down the trail, smelling not sulfur, but the slow rot of dying leaves in a dry climate and the occasional tang of pine pitch. An immature bald eagle rides a thermal down canyon, and it’s windless enough that I can hear sun-warmed rocks—newly freed from last night’s frost—slip and settle in the big scree field across the creek that rises up toward Wason Park.

  In the house I grew up in, fall marked the start of the most dangerous season. My mother dreaded the snow and ice and the perpetually gray skies of a Mid-Atlantic winter. Either she never learned how to buy a serious winter coat, or her vanity wouldn’t allow it. She played indoor tennis but the reservations were expensive and in high demand, so she didn’t get enough exercise for her to justify the few food calories a day she normally ingested and her perpetual hunger was the loudest thing in our house. The shortening days meant she drank more and started earlier. By the end of September she was headed into a tailspin from which she would not emerge until the crocuses came up in the spring.