The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  2

  AFTER THAT TRIP TO DEATH VALLEY, I WENT DESERT CAMPING EVERY CHANCE I GOT. My zealotry now exceeded my boyfriend’s, but I didn’t let that stop me. If he wouldn’t go, I invited other friends to join me. If they declined, I went by myself. Most of the desert belonged to the federal Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. I could camp anywhere I wanted, the more remote, the better. Although I sometimes had to share the scant shade of a Joshua or piñon pine tree with a cow, never once during that period did I sleep in a developed campground. This was one of the things I loved most and which still amazes my nonwestern friends when we go camping today.

  Still, I did choose campsites carefully—not for proximity to other people, as there usually were no others, but for the ability to see headlights approaching from far away. Seeking beauty, adventure, and meaning in the wilderness is a time-honored American tradition, but I was undertaking the quest in the body of a woman. I had to take precautions. After stopping at a small-town gas station or café, my eyes strayed instinctively to my rearview mirror. If anyone followed me for long, I slowed down so they would have to pass. I bought a little .22 pistol and kept it beside me at night, reaching out often to assure myself it was there.

  Although I was frightened and lonely at times, I found it increasingly more difficult to stay home. In the desert, I had discovered the West of my imagination, my childhood canyon infinitely magnified. I went there for inspiration and insight. When I returned home and stepped back into my city life, the more authentic Julene stayed behind. I daydreamed about that shack my boyfriend and I had visited. Just remembering it, I could feel the landscape’s profundity seeping into me. I thought I could write in such a place, and a writer is what I’d decided I wanted to be. I had enough money from selling my house that, if I was thrifty, I could live for two years without needing a job. I’d seen other abandoned cabins in my travels. Gradually, an idea took hold. What if I could find out who owned one of those places and they let me fix it up and live in it?

  To realize that dream would require a vehicle that could go anywhere. I traded my little Honda in on a boxy oxidized-red Toyota Land Cruiser. My best friend, Beatrice, who was both an artist and a carpenter, installed a false wood floor in the back of it for me. The floor had two hinged doors into compartments big enough for a week’s worth of food and clothes. Onto the outside of the Cruiser, another friend and I fastened mounts for gas and water cans, and onto the front bumper, a locking army surplus ammo box for storing tools that same friend had taught me to use.

  I went down to the U.S. Geological Survey office in San Francisco and bought topographic maps of every western desert, from eastern Washington all the way to the Chihuahuan in New Mexico and the Anza Borrego in Southern California. The maps were beautifully detailed, with symbols for everything from windmills to mines. A solid-black square meant an occupied dwelling, while a hollow square meant a vacant structure. A miner’s shack perhaps, or a failed homesteader’s cabin. Sometimes the squares had little tadpole-shaped squiggles beside them, indicating springs. Most of these oases belonged to ranchers. But there were some squiggles that had no squares beside them, or only hollow squares.

  Those hollow squares beside squiggles became my prime destinations. Whenever I got within a few miles of one, I didn’t need the map anymore. On a mountain where all else was pale and muted, there would appear a splash of dark green. Many of those jeep trails were so steep that, driving up them, I could see only sky over the Cruiser’s hood. But the reward for taking such treacherous roads, through hundred degree heat without an air conditioner, were these miraculous glens of trees, sedges, rushes, wildflowers, butterflies, and birds. I would take off my clothes, sink into a bath-sized pool, and look down at the valley I’d come from—as broad as San Francisco Bay, ringed in craggy mountains, with no dwelling or other human in sight. There was no beauty so complete, none so sensually intense and satisfying. Here, together, were the two elements I craved most. Water in the desert.

  • • •

  MY FANTASY OF A HOME IN THE desert fueled my travels for two years. I saw many possible candidates in that time but none so perfect as the little rock house in the middle of what, today, is the Mojave National Preserve. A hundred miles south of Death Valley, the 1.6 million-acre wilderness, although unique and deserving, had not yet received Park Service protection. It was still just BLM land. A generous ranching couple owned the private inholding. They consented to my living there for as long as I liked. In exchange for my fixing up the house, they even promised to give me a couple of horses.

  Never mind that the place had been sitting vacant for years or that it needed a new roof and all new windows and doors. Its beauty trumped those minor drawbacks. The World War I veteran who’d homesteaded the Rock Springs section had built the cabin from large yellow-granite stones he’d quarried from the Gold Mountains—one of four ranges that rose above Cedar Canyon Road. The house sat on a hill on that washboard-gravel thoroughfare, halfway between Cima, a little railroad town where nine people lived, and a phone booth that stood all by itself at the other end. This was before cell phones, so the pay phone would be my only link to the outside world. The ranchers who owned the rock house warned me that there would be days when I drove ten miles to make a call and the phone would be out of order, but I viewed this as just another minor disadvantage.

  Sweet and inviting, humble yet commanding a view of a cordillera that fell away into blue distance, ridge on ridge, the flat-roofed, rectangular cabin reminded me of the Hopi dwellings I’d seen in Arizona. Like those houses, it fit into rather than reigned over its landscape. If anything dominated on that hill above Cedar Canyon Road, it was the big juniper tree beside the house, its branches hurled eastward by the prevailing wind. The natural vegetation was more beautiful than any intentional garden. Yucca and bunchgrasses. Hundreds of wildflowers and blooming forbs. Blue sage, purple sage. Shoulder-high pancake prickly pear and beavertail cactuses, their heart-shaped pads crowned in fuchsia blooms.

  On a boulder-strewn hill behind the cabin, pink barrel cactuses fended off would-be munchers with whorls of bright-pink spines, and in the gorge between that hill and the cabin, water trickled. The pools were too tiny to immerse myself in, but a mile upstream stood a windmill beside a six-foot-tall stock-water storage tank where I could go swimming! Well, dunking anyway. Neither the water from the windmill nor from the spring was potable, so I would have to haul my drinking and cooking water from my nearest neighbor’s house, two miles away. Again, a minor drawback.

  Recalling my first several months at the rock house, I see myself wearing faded jeans and a ragged white cowboy shirt and driving Dorf, my white 1959 Ford pickup, down a wide, sandy wash. I’m returning from a dilapidated mining shack where I pried up the weathered tongue-in-groove floorboards with a crowbar. The plan is to nail the boards over the cracked linoleum in my cabin. Then I will drive ninety-five miles into Las Vegas, where I’ll rent a drum sander and, since I have no electricity, a generator. After sanding down the boards, I plan to cover them in polyurethane.

  I’m steering the pickup with one hand, the way my father used to steer his pickups, while he absentmindedly stared at some field or another. My elbow is resting on the windowsill just as his used to do. It’s October, the air starting to turn crisp. The leaves on the cottonwoods near the windmill flutter like millions of yellow butterflies, and the rabbit brush is in full bright-yellow bloom, scattering pollen onto Dorf’s dash as we squeeze past. I don’t care that the rabbit brush is scraping Dorf’s already scratched and dented sides.

  I call my pickup Dorf because someone who owned him before me switched the “F” and “D” on the hood. I’d found him in a used car lot in Needles, on the California-Arizona border, my unlucky town. Just after I bought him, I was driving home when I heard an unmistakable noise. A few years before that, I’d been approaching Needles in my Cruiser when my passenger and I heard that very same clanking sound coming from the en
gine compartment. We lost all power and rolled to a stop on the interstate’s shoulder, flinching as the engine continued to gurgle, hiss, and steam. The Cruiser had thrown a rod bearing. A local mechanic charged fifteen hundred dollars to rebuild the engine. I couldn’t afford spending that much again.

  In Dorf’s case, I would have to do the work myself, especially since he was just my beater work truck. When I’d begun exploring the desert, it had seemed necessary to learn some basics about engine repair. Otherwise, if I were stranded during one of my forays, I might have to walk more miles than I’d walked in all of the years of my life combined. The friend who had taught me the essentials came for a visit shortly after Dorf broke down. He helped me free the engine and winch it out of the truck, then, before leaving, reminded me of the main precepts. You have to throw yourself into mechanical work and not hold back. Don’t worry about getting greasy. You can buy this product in an orange bottle that removes grease. If you aren’t strong enough to loosen a bolt, use a cheater bar—a length of pipe that fits over the end of the wrench and gives you leverage. And a company called Chilton’s puts out a manual for every American vehicle ever made. The instructions are easy to follow and accompanied by pictures. When in doubt, ask the parts guys at the Napa store in Needles.

  I looked at Dorf’s engine, dangling by chains from the beams of the old roofless carport attached to the rock house. Truly, learning the rudiments of engine maintenance had reminded me of sewing, which my mother began teaching me when I was only seven or eight. Both were just mechanical processes, involving skill with tools and parts that you fit together. I’d done my own oil changes and tune-ups for years now and had performed a number of minor repairs on the Cruiser. I could do this. And with some additional advice and tools borrowed from the same neighbor who had lent me the use of his well, I did.

  Compare this woman with the girl who got married just so a man would take her where she wanted to go. Compare her with the young woman who resentfully climbed that trail in the Desolation Wilderness behind a man who was not, in fact, forcing her to do anything. Not since I’d been a little girl running around the farm, dragging ladders that weighed twice as much as I did up barn stairs to see into pigeons’ nests or busting quartz nuggets with my father’s sledgehammer to ponder the shiny crystals inside, had I been filled with more volition. For the first time since that childhood, I was at home in my body in a place that felt like home. Because I’d had to rewin that centeredness, I was not likely to lose it ever again.

  There was just one problem.

  Now I’m stuck with myself, answerable to myself, and the future is nothing more than more of myself. That’s what I wrote in one of the countless spiral notebooks I filled by kerosene lantern light. In satisfying my yearning for wild land, I had reopened myself to the loneliness I felt after my divorce. Like any animal who had strayed from its bevy, brood, flock, or clan, I yearned for my own kind.

  I recalled the warning look in the eyes of the ranchers who owned the rock house when they’d said that the pay phone didn’t always work. Years later, in 1997, that phone booth would become famous when a desert wanderer’s account of it spread through print news stories and over the Internet. People from far away would journey there in order to camp beside it and answer the calls that poured in, from random places around the world. But for me, “the phone in the middle of nowhere” was not a quirky anomaly or just a camp place to camp. Predictably, I now realized, I had become as addicted to it as I was to the cigarettes I was constantly trying to quit.

  Most often I called my friend Beatrice in San Francisco, the one who had built storage compartments into the Cruiser for me. She’d done me more favors than I would ever be able to repay. She’d helped me move to the rock house, even though it had been January and cold weather was not her thing. When it began to snow, she had intrepidly dug a long four-by-four out of the remains of the caved-in barn. Using my sledgehammer, she’d whacked the support into place under my buckling roof to keep the weight of the new snow from collapsing it completely. Before leaving me to fend for myself, she’d drawn plans for the outhouse I would later build.

  Talking to Beatrice restored my spirits when I was feeling alone. But sometimes, as I’d been warned, I put my money into the phone and got nothing, not even a live hum. The receiver sounding as dead as a rock, I would slam it into its cradle, start the Cruiser, and head in the other direction, driving right past the turn to the rock house.

  “Just need a carton of milk,” I would say to Irene, who ran the Cima store and adjoining post office with her rancher husband. I always did my best not to eye the red-and-white, rectangular packages on the shelf behind the counter.

  Irene would give me a kindly look. Most of her clientele were lonely desert rats. “Your timing couldn’t be better. Truck just left us ten half gallons. So how’re you? Keeping busy up at the rock house?”

  Whether it was her chitchat or her husband, Bob’s diatribes against the BLM, those conversations entered my veins and soothed my nerves like Valium. Sometimes I even managed to resist saying, as if it were an afterthought, “Oh, and give me one of those packs of Marlboros too.”

  Irene and Bob’s kindness normalized my loneliness. They conveyed acceptance, an understanding that the state of mind was not a weakness to be overcome. You couldn’t get accustomed to it or get through it, emerging tougher on the other side. It was as real as hunger and grew out of a similar but emotional need for nourishment. They were in the business of satisfying the physical need with the staples they sold—American cheese, Wonder Bread, ketchup, tins of Spam and tuna—and the emotional need with free conversation.

  “Are you ready for the dance?” Irene asked one day as I lingered in the post office after buying a book of stamps.

  I gave her a questioning look.

  “Didn’t you hear? It’s gonna be at the general store in Goffs.” Goffs, twelve miles south of the pay phone, was the big nearby town, population twenty-seven. “They’re thinking of having them from now on. On the first Saturday of every month.”

  “Guess what,” I said during my next call to Beatrice.

  “Maybe you’ll meet a man there,” she said.

  “Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen.” Imagine! Men’s voices. Men’s eyes. Hands that had the potential of crossing intimate boundaries.

  Beatrice was more practical and less idealistic than I was. Like Irene and Bob, she normalized my longing for companionship. I’d moved to the desert thinking I could prove I didn’t really need anyone else, including men. Men especially. They were like cigarettes. I thought of all the packs I’d crumpled and thrown out my Cruiser window on my way home from Cima, after smoking just one. I hated litterers, but that was the only way I could keep myself from having another—unless I was able to find them when I drove back later and walked up and down the road, peering beneath bushes and risking being bitten by a Mojave green, whose venom was worse than any other rattlesnake’s.

  • • •

  IT FELT STRANGE DRIVING THE CRUISER IN dainty shoes and a dress. The parking lot was overflowing with vehicles, so I parked behind the Goffs Bar and General Store, freshened my lipstick in the rearview mirror, got out, stopped beside the propane tank to remove a rock from my sandal, then continued walking with fateful determination toward my destiny.

  I had no idea the place could hold so many people, most of them strangers. There must have been twenty couples bouncing to George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” I scanned the crowd, looking for Connie, who owned the store with her husband. I’d stopped in to fill my gas tank the week before and had confided that I didn’t know how to dance western swing. “Don’t worry. Come on down,” she’d told me. “The cowboys will teach ya. It’s part of their code to dance with every woman. Don’t matter if you’re twelve or eighty.”

  I was hardly in the door when one of the Overson brothers—in a crisp, white, pearly-snapped shirt and a
black string tie, his face beer reddened—began proving that cowboy dictum. He didn’t bother asking. He just grabbed me and, with confident, muscle-taut guidance he’d perfected riding horses and roping calves on his ranch, reeled me around the floor.

  Soon I was dancing and drinking with the best of them, having a much better time than I’d imagined possible. But I was also disappointed that most of the men wore wedding rings. Of the two who didn’t, one had a scar where his left ear should have been, and the other had tobacco stains in a yellow-white beard. Then a guy in a classy sports jacket and jeans that fit just right appeared beside me. “Want to?” He didn’t hold me any closer than the other men had, yet the dance was more intimate, his movements more suggestive, like notes played on a slide guitar rather than the banjo twang I’d bounced to with the others.

  The broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, hazel-eyed charmer cowboyed for the ranchers who owned my cabin. “So you live up at the rock house,” he said. “I’ve heard all about you.”

  “What’d you hear? No one knows me well enough to tell you much.”

  “That there’s this looker up there and she has a truck she fixed up herself.”

  “His name is Dorf.”

  “Think you could work on my truck when I get one? I’ve never been much of a mechanic.”

  “I don’t know. What’s going to be wrong with it?”

  “Probably everything. I tend to go for the glitter. Just show me chrome and big tires, and I’m a goner.”

  He sent me away from him, spun me half around, then pulled me in so my back was to his front. For an instant we danced as if to rhythm and blues, not Merle Haggard. Turning me again to face him, he seemed to check himself. I could tell he’d felt it too.