The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  So far, Trailblazers has been shown only on KHQ, but other stations around the country have expressed an interest in seeing the series, possibly with the idea of using it as a model for their own low-budget historical productions.

  When word was put out that KHQ would be producing Trailblazers, a Spokane utilities company put up $7,000 for production costs, and many people donated services, skills, and props. Horse owners supplied horses, including feed and transportation. Gun clubs provided muzzleloaders. Women from the nearby town of Rosalia sewed costumes, and the men built a workable cannon, using wagon wheels and a length of sewer pipe. A church and a rancher each donated a covered wagon, and the Eastern Washington State Historical Society came through with a couple of tepees.

  The KHQ staff was flabbergasted by the response. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Munk. “We had horses worth more than our whole budget for the series!”

  The enthusiasm of the volunteer performers provided a few problems. In one scene, 100 war-painted “Indians” were mixing it up with the cavalry. Leading the attack, through rifle and cannon fire, through billowing clouds of dust and gun smoke, was a beautiful Indian princess.

  “Cut! Cut!” screamed director Jim Johns. “What’s the beautiful Indian princess doing leading the attack?” Upon learning she had merely been carried away by the excitement of it all, Johns turned philosophical. “Oh, what the hell,” he said.

  According to Johns, one of the secrets of producing shoestring historical extravaganzas for TV is to say, “Oh, what the hell,” almost as often as “Cut! Cut!”

  Whenever possible, the re-enactments were staged at the original sites. With the help of volunteer historians, museum curators, and archivists, great care was taken to make each show accurate in historical detail. But the twentieth century kept showing up in cameo appearances. Shooting was constantly interrupted by jets, helicopters, and other aircraft. The Indian chief would show up wearing a digital wristwatch. The brave slithering through the grass with a knife in his teeth would be wearing sunglasses. When the Indians ran out to taunt the soldiers, there would be a strange kid in jeans and a white T-shirt hurling insults of his own. And every so often the camera would pan past a barbed-wire fence. “Oh, what the hell,” Johns would say.

  For authenticity, it had been decided to darken the white actors with body paint when they were to play the part of Indians. Producer Munk (who prefers the title “Chief Instigator”) came up with the idea of applying the body paint with a spray gun. He envisioned walking down a row of extras and painting them like a picket fence. But the paint kept clogging the gun, and the idea had to be scrapped in favor of white Indians.

  Aside from white Indians wearing wristwatches, sunglasses, and T-shirts, the extras turned in some remarkable performances. In one scene, a young man was so delighted with his part as a trooper that he grinned continuously, even when he was in deadly hand-to-hand combat with an Indian brave. As for the brave, he had fallen wounded, blood streaming from his side.

  “Hey, where did you get the ketchup?” a fellow actor asked, envious of the realism.

  “Get out of here!” the brave muttered. “You’re ruining my best scene!”

  It turned out that the red stuff wasn’t ketchup at all. The brave had somehow stabbed himself with his own lance.

  Another bit of nice realism was added by the chilling yells of an “Indian,” as he and a trooper slid down a pine-clad slope, the Indian on the bottom. Upon being complimented on his performance, the Indian explained, “Performance nothing! Sliding over pine cones in your naked skin is murder.”

  Even the production crew could be counted on to mess up a few shots. At one point, Chief Instigator Munk got in KHQ’s pickup truck and drove down the road to keep sightseers out of the scene. As the wagon train struggled past the camera, there, bouncing along in the background in pursuit of some relatively unobtrusive spectators, was the pickup, with the station’s call letters emblazoned on its side.

  Experienced production companies use only “empty” horses for westerns, but the Trailblazers’ gang did not. There wasn’t enough time and, according to Munk, besides “nobody knew how to empty them.” The frequent indiscretions of horses ruined many a take, but leading actress Joan Welch managed to save one shot. She blocked the offending part of the horse from view with an ad-lib sweep of her cloak.

  “Now that is what I call an improvisation,” said Johns.

  Mrs. Welch, a professor at a Spokane college, is not fond of horses. When her part required that she ride one, she overcame her fear sufficiently to sit on one with the understanding that the horse was to remain stationary. But someone had forgotten to tell that to the horse, which galloped off over the horizon, taking Mrs. Welch with him. Her “Whoas!” over her remote mic gradually faded into ominous silence.

  “We were terribly worried,” Johns recalls, “about whether she would make it back in time for us to finish shooting the scene. Luckily, it took her only half an hour to walk back.”

  To economize, the series was shot with only one camera. As a result, many scenes had to be performed repeatedly to achieve a variety of camera angles. The Indian encampment and the wagon train provided their own special camera problems, Johns says. “When your Indian encampment has only two teepees and your wagon train only two wagons, you have to choose your shots pretty carefully. And they’re all close-ups.”

  To create the impression of a long wagon train, Johns would have a pioneer man and woman drive a wagon by in front of a teepee. Once the wagon had passed out of the frame, the camera would be shut off, the wagon would circle around, a different pioneer man and woman would climb up on the driver’s seat, the camera would be turned on and “another” unit of the wagon train would pass by. And so on, until the impression of a wagon train was completed.

  Munk said one of the things that amazed him the most about the series was how well the cast got along. “We have 200 people on location for sixteen-hour days, and I don’t think there was a single argument.”

  The station has been flooded with letters praising the series, including one from Governor Thomas Judge of Montana, who said his state is interested in using Trailblazers as an educational and research tool.

  But even beyond the public impact of the series, the project will remain a warm personal experience for those who participated in it. Larry Gants, a KHQ staffer who played a colonel in one of the military episodes, says, “My cavalry company actually developed an esprit de corps in a single weekend. When we were leaving to go home, nearly every man walked over and solemnly shook my hand, just as if they were being mustered out after a long and hard campaign. Damned if I didn’t feel the same way myself.”

  Wild Life in a Room with a View

  E

  ach June, about the time most people think of vacations and many begin moving to the seashore, a few hundred strangely assorted Americans head for the high mountains and great forests of the land. Their stated purpose is to help prevent forest fires. But what they really have in mind is the ultimate get-away-from-it-all, an escape into the blissful solitude of a delightful little wilderness penthouse—a U.S. Forest Service lookout station. Helping prevent forest fires is merely the price they must pay for their room with a view. Early each September, out they come again, and from their stories one wonders if the solitude is all that blissful, the price that mere, or the penthouse that delightful; there are, it seems, a few trials and even some tribulations.

  To begin with, the living quarters are cramped—twelve to fourteen feet square—and are nestled atop towers anywhere from ten to 100 feet high. Fuel, food, water, and all other supplies needed to sustain an easy life must be toted by hand up the stairs, which can seem interminable. The sanitary facility is fifty yards off in the bushes, and the nearest source of water may be a mile or more down the mountain. During storms the higher towers have a tendency to sway sickeningly, lightning strikes with unmonotonous regularity a few feet from where the lookout is sitting (or kneeling), and balls
of weird blue “fire” from time to time sizzle about the place like water on a hot skillet. The lookout is assaulted by insects, besieged by beasts, seared by the sun, chased by forest fires, and, perhaps worst of all, tortured incessantly by the monstrous silence. This is to say nothing of the work, but, as one lookout suggests, the work consists largely of being there.

  The experience of the Forest Service suggests that no particular kind of individual is ideally suited to life in a tower suite, and the recruits who show up for training early each summer prove to be a strangely mixed lot: prim lady schoolteachers, college professors, ministers’ wives, loggers, vacationing businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, coeds, honeymooners, old marrieds, beauty queens, students, female truck drivers, ex-marines, and cookie-baking housewives; in short, just about anyone who can shake off the fetters of routine life for three months.

  Newlyweds long ago discovered that lookout towers make private places for honeymoons, and each forest usually has at least one couple launching its marriage atop a peak. Rangers, reluctant marriage counselors that they are, generally avoid pointing out to couples that if a marriage can survive a summer in a lookout tower, it can survive almost anything. Their fervent hope is that the rocks the marriage may be headed for aren’t those at the foot of the tower. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt, but there is no doubt that the tiny cabins breed profuse amounts of familiarity. Paul Wilson, dispatcher for the Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) National Forest, recalls one couple that stopped speaking to each other fifteen minutes after being moved into their cabin. “Right then, I knew it was going to be a long, hard season,” says Paul. “And it was, for all concerned.”

  But whatever small apprehensions the honeymooners may create for the rangers, newlyweds almost always turn out to be highly competent and dedicated fire lookouts, not to mention a source of considerable humor. Visitors to one of those bridal towers listened in fascination recently as a blue-jeaned bride gave her impressions about honeymooning on a lookout platform. “One thing I’ve noticed is that the days seem so long and the nights so short!” Her stricken husband hastened to explain that this was because the tower was the highest point in the mountains and was, consequently, the first thing the sun’s rays touched in the morning and the last in the evening. The nights actually were shorter.

  The Forest Service likes to man its towers with married couples whenever possible. For one thing, the lookouts are not so lonely; they can break the monotony by making either love or war. For another, the government gets two pairs of eyes for the price of one. The husband is paid for the five weekdays and the wife for Saturday and Sunday. In practice, of course, the husband and wife are both in the tower most of the time. As one official points out, “There just isn’t that much else to do.”

  Sometimes the lookouts are single women. Last summer, twenty-three of the 233 stations in the Northern Region were operated by female fire spotters. The consensus among rangers is that they do an excellent job, frequently surpassing the men. “They are more observant,” says a ranger. “They hold their interest well in what can be a monotonous job, and they keep meticulous records. They also keep their quarters in much better condition.” One girl, a coed from Idaho State University, “who didn’t know a meadow bottom from a ridge top,” was assigned to an observation cab atop a 100-foot steel tower overlooking a vast area of the Nez Perce Idaho National Forest. Not only did she adapt quickly and well to this awesome place of work, but within two weeks she had memorized the names of every ridge and water drainage in sight. Other women operate the complex network of stations that serve as the communications center for the Forest Service and various other state and federal agencies.

  Although men are preferred in stations where smoke chasing and fire fighting may be part of the duties, the Lava Butte station in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon was once manned by a lady who did all her own fire fighting. Having formerly worked on a tugboat, she was known, naturally, as “Tugboat Annie.” She further endeared herself to the foresters by smoking cigarettes in a long, elegant holder, which she would use to point out various features of the landscape to the occasional visitors.

  Many of the women returned year after year. Mrs. Carol Sopher, the only woman lookout in the Bitterroot National Forest of Montana last year, has spent seventeen summers in fire towers, and Dorothy Taylor, a former schoolteacher, has worked for nearly twenty years in Montana’s Lolo National Forest.

  Not only are the rangers pleased to see the ladies return, but so are the squirrels and chipmunks that live in the rocks around the stations, for they receive a lot of maternal care. One lady fire watcher baked sugar cookies every day to feed to the golden-mantled squirrels around her station, and by summer’s end she could bring them running by calling, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” Another lady lookout fed her chipmunks hotcakes daily. “By the end of summer,” says a ranger, “they were so fat they looked like marmots.”

  Larger wild animals, although seldom dangerous, contribute their full share to the tribulations of lookouts. Porcupines are fond of the salt in rubber and will eat the tires, and even the fan belts, off a lookout’s automobile. Mountain goats like to gather in the middle of the night for a playful romp on the catwalk the surrounds the lookout’s sleeping quarters. The goats so successfully upset the night of one lookout that he kept falling asleep during working hours, an offense that the Forest Service ranks about equal to that of the Army sentry who dozes at his post. He finally built a barricade to keep the goats off the tower stairs.

  Many of the lookouts are from large cities and at first have some difficulty identifying their wild animals. A lookout once radioed that he had a coyote hanging around his tower. For several days, he entertained the boys back at the ranger station with descriptions of the antics of this friendly and daring animal. When he told one day of the coyote trying to claw its way into the cabin, the rangers decided they had better have a look at the critter. It turned out to be a bear. Another lookout, obviously nervous, reported, “Big, hairy beasts are ganging up around the foot of my tower.” He went outside for another look, and quickly returned to the radio. “Now they’re coming up the stairs!” he shouted. The local ranger leaped into his four-wheel-drive and flailed it all the way to the tower, his imagination conjuring up the wildest of Alfred Hitchcock scenes. The troublemakers turned out to be a family of pack rats.

  Most of the lookouts develop their own methods for dealing with animals that make nuisances of themselves, as did the lady who observed a large bear ascending her tower stairs. When the bear did not heed her vocal threats, she went inside, heated a pot of water, and dumped it on him. He was not seen in the neighborhood again. This procedure, though it may seem absurdly domestic and urban, is now the approved procedure for discouraging bears that like to climb towers.

  Occasionally, a bear will threaten a lookout with bodily harm, but only when the lookout is accompanied by a loyal and courageous dog and armed with much good advice is he likely to be in danger. Doug McFarland, a young lookout in the Primitive Area of idaho, was clearing a trail during one wet period when the fire danger was low. He was accompanied by his trusty Irish setter and had been told that if he saw a large bear preparing to mount an attack the best thing to do was to give a loud whoop. A couple of miles down the trail from his tower, McFarland noticed the first sign of a bear: the silent, reddish blur of his dog passing him, fleeing in the opposite direction. Shortly thereafter, the bear emerged from the brush, cleared the field for battle by ushering her twin cubs up a tree and charged. Quickly recalling the good advice, McFarland let out a loud whoop. The bear rushed on. McFarland whooped again. Still, the bear didn’t stop. “My third whoop was entirely involuntary,” McFarland recalls, “but apparently I at last had whooped authentically.” The bear skidded to a stop a few feet away and returned reluctantly to her cubs. Shakily, McFarland made his way back to the lookout tower, where his dog awaited him under the bed.

  There are other fire-watching hazards. The safest place to
be during a lightning storm, rangers like to explain as they sit comfortably in their office swivel chairs, is a lookout tower. This, they claim, is because the towers are decorated with such a formidable mass of lightning rods that it is virtually impossible to be electrocuted there (rangers do not entertain the possibility of a person’s being frightened to death). When lightning does strike a tower, the lookout is, of course, sitting at the point of impact. To fully appreciate the stimulating effect of this, you must recall the last time you saw a great ragged bolt of lightning split the sky and counted—1,001, 1,002 . . . until the sound of thunder finally arrived. In a lookout tower struck by lightning, the thunder and flash are simultaneous, creating an effect that is presumably like that of sitting inside an exploding bomb.

  The rangers consider the first lightning storm as the qualifying exam for their new lookouts. “Up to then, they’re amateurs,” says one forester. “After it, they’re pros.” Last summer a new lookout became a pro his first night on the job. His tower was struck nine times. Asked if he would like a few days off to pull himself together, the lookout said no, he would stick to his post—an obvious case of shell shock.

  In addition to lightning rods, the Forest Service supplies the lookout with a chair that has a glass insulator on the bottom of each leg. If the lookout sits in the chair, first making sure that it is not situated between two pieces of metal—electricity might arc between them—and if he avoids touching the radio or telephone, puts in his earplugs, and does not leap off the tower, he has an excellent chance of surviving strike after strike with nothing more serious than jangling nerves, psychedelic eyeballs, and recurrent nightmares.

  Less spectacular than lightning but much more haunting are the weird balls of blue fire that sometimes are seen dancing about the lookout stations during electrical storms. This phenomenon is called St. Elmo’s fire and is caused by harmless static electricity.