by Rinker Buck
Good. This guy was swift. Instead of signaling me back with a blast of his whistle, which might frighten the mules, he waved his ball cap out through the cab window and then flashed his big grimy center light several times. Black exhaust billowed from the engine vents as the engineer flooded his turbines to make them inefficient, to slow the train down without applying his screeching brakes.
The train was coming, but I felt composed, resigned to fate. The diffused history of the Oregon Trail felt spiritual now. The path of purpose and hope that spanned the plains had joined everything—tracks that followed the wagon ruts, churches rebelling, fur trappers and dreamy adventurers, wagon millionaires, new irrigation ditches, the magnificent folly and stoic sacrifice of a land joined by a route through South Pass. And now, line hand to throttle hand, mind to mind, I was joined with that engineer like the bonds of man celebrated by a Walt Whitman poem.
The rumble of the train was louder now, with the echoes of the rear cars thundering out of the tunnel. The tracks beside us vibrated and groaned from the approaching load. I took the lines back from Merri and spoke to the mules above the roar just behind us. They had to know that I was aware of the hazard coming, and that I would protect them.
“Just a train, Team. Just a train. Jake! Be my boy, Jake! Be my boy. Hold them back, Jake. Hold them back.”
A whoosh of noise, turbine exhaust, and compressed hot air blew past as the grimy yellow engine approached. Beck started to dance in her harness, lowering her neck to leap into a run, but I caught her as hard as I could with the right line, double-wrapping the leather against my hands. Jake turned his head to quickly look back at me and then leaned sideways and nipped Beck hard just behind her ears.
“Thataboy, Jake. Eas-A, Eas-A, Team. Jake, that’s my boy. Just a train, Team. Just a train. Eas-A. Eas-A.”
As the locomotive went by my left cheek I gave the engineer the “A-Okay” with one hand while still holding the lines, and the engineer looked down and smiled from his open window. Two thumbs up in a red Carhartt T-shirt. Whooooosh, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, metal to metal clanging, the long freighter began to pass. The boxcar doors just a few feet from my face rattled on their mounts.
“Just a train, Team. Just a train. Jake, Beck. Eas-A, Eas-A. Hold them back, Jake. Walk, Team. Walk.”
Beck danced in her harness a few more times and threatened to bolt, but Jake was sick of her shit by now and arched over with his neck and planted a big feral bite on her neck. Once she could see more train ahead of her and realized it wasn’t a threat, Beck calmed down, and Bute looked so relaxed that I thought she might fall asleep in harness. Jake had one ear flopped backward to listen to me and one ear forward following the train. He was pulling backward against the yoke with his massive neck and chest to keep the team at a walk.
“You’re my boy, Jake. You’re my boy.”
Ka-plunk-ka-plunk-ka-plunk, for more than ten minutes, the train rumbled by.
I was still guarded about a runaway, but thrilled by the sight of the narrow canyon walls, the plodding mules, and the long curving outline of the train, sound and image merging against the orange triangle of light where the canyon ended ahead. While the locomotive and the front cars disappeared around the end of the canyon, the rear cars were still screeching and lurching beside us. The tracks cracked loudly with iron tension.
The train was gone by the time we reached the end of the Union Pacific access road, leaving behind the rail yard smell of brake fluid, grease on rust, and bleached paint. The canyon seemed strangely quiet as we reached Sisley Creek and then turned northeast to follow the Oregon Trail up onto the ridges again, toward Gold Hill.
“Good team! Good team! Jake! Beck! Bute! You’re my team! I love you, Jake!”
We rose through hills striated with basalt rock ledges, and then green short-grass pastures—the fairyland contrasts of the trail. Far away, the train moving north across the plains blew three short blasts of its whistle, probably at a road crossing. But I told myself that the engineer knew that his caboose was safely past the wagon now and happy about it. He was shrieking his whistle as a good-bye to the mules and me.
30
THE OREGON TRAIL WAS MY home now, and the rhythmic sights and smells of the trail country were comforting and familiar. Through the first weeks of September we harnessed and hitched the mules early every morning, drinking coffee and pulling on extra shirts against the cold. Nick had his pickup now and often drove ahead to scout our routes and make fried chicken stops, and I enjoyed the solitude of driving the mules alone up through the old mining district of Sutton Creek and Quartz. Drawing deeply on brisk autumn air scented with sage, I sang to the mules and gave wagon rides to children waiting by their mailboxes to wave.
I didn’t want my wagon journey to end and deluded myself into thinking that if I procrastinated about it, I wouldn’t have to make a decision about stopping. But as we approached Baker City, the nights were getting colder and it was often raining, and new snow had fallen overnight on the Elkhorn peaks to the west. I knew that I would have to stop by October to avoid getting trapped by winter weather in the mountains. The trail from here was mostly on heavily fenced small farms where we would never get through, or paved over by Interstate 84. I had proved my point by reaching Oregon and couldn’t push the trip much farther.
Besides, as far back as Idaho, I had been tortured about what to do with the mules when the trip was over and often lay awake at night in the wagon worrying about it. Closing up the trip and finding a decent home for the mules required stopping somewhere long enough to think about it and make calls, and I berated myself for lack of planning. But that’s what the trip was all about. We’d done quite well all summer living spontaneously day by day, allowing events and the surprises of the trail to guide us. I had no plans. I lived in a covered wagon. I relied on the generosity of trail family and slept like a hobo in public parks and rodeo arenas. It was too addictive and satisfying a life to toss away for domestic habits like planning.
At Baker City, Nick had driven ahead in his pickup along the Powder River to find the ranch belonging to Vince Holtz’s brother-in-law, where we had been told we could camp. But he got lost in the maze of ranch roads up there and didn’t return. As I pushed the mules north on Highway 30, I realized that I had badly miscalculated the sunset. The Elkhorn Mountains rise abruptly to the west after Baker City, blocking the evening light, and the road was pitch-black by seven o’clock. As I pushed north in the darkness of the highway, the only thing lighting my way were the headlamps of passing cars.
But I wasn’t driving completely blind. Pickup trucks and minivans started pulling over ahead of me, and everyone had a suggestion about where I could stop and camp—a sister’s place here, the parking lot of a church there. As I passed a very sweet-looking ranch on the right, the rancher was pulling out of his drive in a four-wheeler with the lights on. I asked him if I could camp there and explained that I might need to stay for a few nights to rest the mules and resupply in Baker City.
“My other place just north is better,” the rancher, Mike Williams, said. “I’ve got four acres of fenced grass for the mules, and a big watering trough. If it rains you can sleep in the barns.”
I yelled ahead to a minivan driver to ride in front of the wagon slowly with her emergency flashers on. A pickup was parked right beside me, and I asked that driver to follow me with his flashers going and high beams on, to light my way from behind. My rear LED strobes were flashing too.
That is how I arrived at our final camp, in the middle of a mixed transportation parade of wagons and cars, with three sets of flashers bouncing light off the yellow divider line on the highway. The purple-black rim of the Elkhorns was etched in the sky to the west as I turned up the ranch road. My trail family escort of ranchers in pickups and mothers with children in minivans followed the wagon in.
The Williams ranch was ideal, if spongy underfoot from heavy irrigation. I pulled the team up against a corral fence to unharness in the dark
and gave a few of the trail family kids rides around the corral on Jake. When Nick finally found me we used his pickup lights for illumination to bathe the team. One by one, when their baths were done, the mules happily galloped off into the broad green pasture.
It was cold that night in the Elkhorns, and when I stepped from the wagon in the morning Nick and Olive Oyl were huddled together on a wet patch of grass, shivering with a soaked blanket wrapped around them. God. I still couldn’t believe that they had slept outdoors this way, no matter the conditions, for four months. I had to get them under shelter soon.
“Yo, Sidekick,” I yelled. “Coffee coming right up. We’re out of bacon and eggs. How about Hormel chili, no beans, for breakfast?”
“Great. Put on an extra can for Olive Oyl.”
Both of us loved Baker City, which reminded me of a miniature Eugene, Oregon, or maybe Leadville or Telluride in Colorado. It was a graceful and gentrified old mining town that had been built a few miles from the trail during a precious metals boom after the Civil War. There was a palatial robber baron–era hotel, the Geiser Grand, and a trail museum run by the BLM, the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, built on a high bluff above the ruts three miles out of town. The breakfast joints were great and there was a wine bar, and a good bookstore, on Main Street.
I couldn’t stand the thought of another layover on the trip with Nick and Olive Oyl sleeping outside in the cold, on wet irrigated ground no less, so I rented him a room at the Oregon Trail Motel and told him to splurge on meals across the street at the Oregon Trail Restaurant. I found a laundromat, washed our clothes, and then wandered into the spacious library a block off Main Street to check my email.
One of the first emails in my inbox had no subject heading but it was from Sue Holtz, back on her farm in Idaho:
Hi Rinker,
Vince and I have been talking, and we would be honored if the wagons and mules remained here and a part of the ranch.
We would love for you to let us know what your plans are for them, and we’d like to have the opportunity to talk with you about them.
We were really touched by what you have done.
Please contact us, we’d appreciate it.
Thank you!
Sue Holtz
My heart raced and I had almost no interest in answering the other emails that had accumulated in my box. Sue’s language—“a part of our ranch”—indicated that she wanted to keep the team together, and since I knew that the Holtzes were not experienced horse people, the only thing Sue could mean was that she essentially wanted to buy the team and treat her ranch as an equine retirement farm. But I had no idea what they were willing to pay for the wagons and team or even if they had the right pastures, barns, and the wherewithal to care for the mules.
Sue’s email jolted me back to reality. After four months of the trail with my Amish mules, I was philosophical about them and pragmatic about what I had to do with the team. Yes, Beck was a phobic mess who had given me nervosa extremis all the way across the trail, and she hated me so much that Nick always had to harness her. Bute had bad feet and was chronically allergic to work. I loved only Jake, and passionately. But together they were a great team of Andalusians, the first mules in a century to cross the Oregon Trail, and I had watched them as a threesome for four months now, huddling together against storms, affectionately nipping at each other when competing for feed, kicking up their hind legs with joy when they were let free in the high pastures at Signal Bluff or Poison Spider Creek. They had pulled like the bejesus and never given up over California Hill and Rocky Ridge.
Mules are very social and fraternal, they often bond together for life, and I had heard stories about an animal completely breaking down and spiraling off into prolonged mule depression when a partner died or a team was broken up and sold. Beck and Bute had been together all of their lives. Jake was a blessed soul of the earth and loved his mollies. I owed it to the mules to find them a decent home, together. I would be the cad of the century to break up this team.
It had never been my plan to keep the mules. Shipping them back east would cost almost as much as I paid for them, and my relatively small spread in New England wouldn’t support a big draft team. Philip Ropp was so enamored of Jake that he had offered to buy him back after our trip was over, but he had shown no interest in reacquiring Beck and Bute. I was determined to keep the team together but knew that it might be difficult. In Idaho, pictures of us driving the team across the trail had appeared on the front pages of several newspapers, and the television stations in Pocatello and Boise had broadcast stories about us. Two mule brokers from the northern part of the state had tracked me down through the TV reporters, and they were anxious to buy the team. One of them offered to meet us anywhere I wanted in Oregon to buy the team and the wagon and said that he would bring $25,000 in cash. Not including the expensive Trail Pup repairs, this was pretty much what I had invested in the wagon and team, and I was tempted. But both brokers acknowledged that they would probably break up the team, saving Jake for the big fall mule auctions in northern Idaho, where they expected him to fetch a very high price, and selling off Beck and Bute to outfitters, who would use them as pack animals for the fall hunting season into the Rockies.
The team was attractive to the brokers because the mules were obviously in prime condition. After four months of thirty-mile days, they were muscular but not at all underweight, with shiny black coats and plenty of energy. All of the horsemen we passed on the trail were surprised at how athletic and healthy the mules looked after almost two thousand miles of hard work.
Nick deserved all of the credit for this. From his sleigh business days in New Hampshire, he knew how to work a team hard all day and then baby the mules at night with high-quality feed and fastidious care. Nick was usually worried about how much money I was blowing on the trip, but not when it came to the best raw grain and expensive vitamin supplements for the mules. He bought them boxes of gelatin mix at supermarkets because gelatin is known to promote nail growth in humans, and it would help keep the mules’ hooves firm. To ward off the muscle soreness and mild inflammation caused by her bad feet, he kept Bute comfortable by administering two doses a day of liquid equine aspirin. The mules ate the best alfalfa hay we could find, and we bought them apples and carrots whenever we could so that their diet was balanced with vegetables and fruit. We ate like shit every day, subsisting on Hormel chili, no beans, Slim Jims, and canned chocolate pudding, and never took showers. The mules ate like royalty and got a long relaxing bath every night. All of this showed when we reached Oregon. The team was as buff as race horses at a track.
I was enjoying myself in Baker City, and even went on a date with a saleswoman I met at the D&B Ranch Supply store. But my joint obligations to Nick and the mules weighed heavily on me, and I knew that I couldn’t enjoy the satisfaction of finishing the trip until I made the right decision about the mules. Nick was reluctant to discuss selling the team, because he knew the pressure I was under and didn’t want to crowd a decision that involved my ability to recover some costs from the trip. But I knew that he was particularly fond of Beck and would worry about her if the team was broken up. We talked about the situation one afternoon outside the implement shed at the Williams ranch, where Nick was helping Mike repair his disc harrow.
“It bothers me that I still don’t know what to do,” I said. “I should have planned better than this.”
“Stop worryin, Boss,” Nick said. “The thing I’ve always said to people is that Rinker is completely fucked up. But things work out for him.”
I walked over to the wagon to sit on a camp chair and think about things. The mules were browsing comfortably in the grass of the pasture and I stared west beyond them to the white peaks of the Elkhorns.
• • •
I called the Holtz Ranch in Idaho from a bench under a tall shade tree at Geiser-Pollman Park in Baker City, which overlooked a winding stretch of the Powder River. I reached Vince, who told me that he had
dozens of acres of fenced pasture at his Oregon ranch, where he and Sue lived for long stretches during the winter to protect their land from elk poachers. He and Sue would love to buy a work sleigh and use the team on their winter patrols protecting the elk herds. If I sold him the team, he would also build fences for a seven-acre summer pasture, and walk-in barns, on his Idaho farm. His brother-in-law on the Powder River had a stock van and equipment trailers to haul the team and rig down to Idaho, more or less right away. When I told Vince what I had invested in the wagons and mules, he offered me $21,000 for the whole package. He could wire the money to my bank account right away.
“Sue has always wanted a team of mules,” Vince told me. “When we saw you ride across the trail on our ranch, we were very moved by what you’ve done. It just seems to us that mules that have crossed the trail all the way from Missouri deserve a good home.”
Vince and Sue were also attracted to the symbolism of owning the team. Both of their spreads, in Idaho and Oregon, sat on the Oregon Trail, and they had always enjoyed this pioneer legacy. Nick and I, Vince said, could visit Idaho anytime we wanted to drive the team, and he had already moved one of his RVs down to the spot on his farm where the mule pasture would be built. He was hoping that we’d visit for as long as we wanted on the way home.
Trail family doesn’t get much better than this, and I knew that I had just been handed a turnkey package. I would not have to break up the team.
I told Vince that I would give him an answer by the end of the day, explaining that I didn’t want Nick to feel I’d been hasty about a decision or failed to consult him. On the way back to the Williams ranch in Nick’s pickup, I received calls from both of the mule brokers, who gave me big sales pitches about why they were the best ones to buy the team. “Hell, the only mules to cross the Oregon Trail in a hundred years?” one of the brokers said. “Everybody will want to buy that.” They were anxious to drive down to Oregon to haul away the wagons and mules.