Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  “Broken valve.”

  “Can’t he talk to you tomorrow?”

  “He isn’t sure.”

  The Albaughs lived a few miles from town on Pittville Road. Their house overlooked Fall River Valley and had a good view of Mount Lassen. Some wash was hanging on a clothesline behind the house, flapping in the breeze and smelling fresh and soapy, and there were a few head of cattle, Herefords again, in a pasture.

  Two pickup trucks were parked by the back door, which is usually the front door on ranches. It lets you stamp the mud off your boots and wash your hands in the kitchen sink. The front door was for social visits. The minister came through it, and so did stiff-necked relatives, those far-flung aunts and uncles.

  Mrs. Albaugh checked me over before opening the door all the way. Albert Albaugh was in the living room, sitting in a lounger and gazing out a picture window. He was in his seventies. He had a strong-featured Germanic face and wore red suspenders over a blue work shirt. His shoes were off.

  There was the most incredible smile on Albaugh’s lips, a smile of utter contentment, as if all his passions had been played out, the light and the dark, leaving him without a single grudge against existence.

  “They tell me things are changing in Fall River Valley,” I began.

  The smile didn’t budge. “More people than cows now,” Albaugh allowed.

  That was all he had to say to me about the cattle business. He wasn’t being curt. It was just all he had to say.

  Mrs. Albaugh snatched up the conversation. She was a proud, intelligent woman, the mother of three grown children, all college graduates, a fact that seemed important to her. I thought she might have mentioned it so that I wouldn’t mistake her family for country bumpkins, an assumption that city folks sometimes make about anybody who lives in rural California. Farmers and ranchers are sensitive to such slights, and Mrs. Albaugh was no exception.

  The Albaugh family had worked their ranch since the turn of the century, she told me. They had 550 acres, but they were gradually phasing themselves out because of Albert’s age. They were down to about 20 head of beef cattle, all Herefords, but in their prime they had run 450 head northwest of Big Valley.

  The cattle had grazed on a spring range starting about April fifteenth and had been transferred to a summer range in June. In the autumn, Albert and his hands would round up the fattened cattle and bulls and drive them home. The best steers and heifers were sold at local feeder sales in and around Fall River Valley, while the old cows and other stock had to be transported to the big auction yards in Cottonwood, near Redding, in Sacramento Valley.

  During the years when the Albaughs had been serious ranchers, the game had become much more difficult and complex, Mrs. Albaugh said. In order to hold on to the pasture land that they leased, they had to pay fees to four separate parties—the Bureau of Land Management, two private timber companies, and the Pit River Indians. Their costs kept rising, particularly feed costs, and they kept losing stock. The cows got hit by trains and by cars. Predators killed them and rustlers even stole a few.

  You had to be smart and hardworking to succeed as a cattleman now, Mrs. Albaugh asserted. That was another song I’d heard before.

  One of the Albaughs’ sons had bought them out and still did some fairly large-scale ranching, while another boy was growing wild rice, garlic, and mint in the valley. The Albaughs’ daughter lived up in Oregon, and when Mrs. Albaugh started describing a trip there and praising the state, I said, “But it’s not California, is it?”

  “Sometimes I’d rather not be from here,” she said heatedly. “When I travel and say I’m from California, everybody thinks it means Los Angeles. Los Angeles! That’s nine hundred miles from here. There’s more to California than Los Angeles.”

  Her outburst puzzled me. I guessed that there must be something beneath it, something as yet unsaid, so I asked her, “What else don’t you like about California?”

  “The political thing gets to me,” she answered. “People in rural areas like this one, our votes hardly count.”

  Mrs. Albaugh thought that the state government discriminated against farmers and ranchers. Its policies were formulated to serve urban and suburban constituencies, she believed. She had no kinship with such people, no political bonds, no shared interests. The issues that were of concern to her, such as water rights—water for pastures, for alfalfa—were seldom properly addressed at the state level. She felt disenfranchised from the political process, virtually unrepresented.

  A schoolbus stopped on the Pittville Road, its red lights blinking, and the Albaughs’ grandson, who was about six or seven, dashed up the path and through the back door to join us in the living room. He had some ghoulish, plastic vampire teeth in his mouth and ran around trying to scare us, but we were too old.

  When Mrs. Albaugh left to make us some coffee, I glanced over at Albert Albaugh, who was wriggling his toes inside his socks, looking out the picture window with a pair of binoculars, and scanning the horizon. He was still smiling his incredible smile, the soul’s sweet rising into flesh, and still had nothing else to say.

  “More people than cows now.” Those were Albaugh’s final words on the subject of change in Fall River Valley.

  SPANIARDS HAD BROUGHT THE FIRST CATTLE TO CALIFORNIA, the missionaries initially, followed by the explorers Gaspar de Portolá and Juan Bautista de Anza. Their herds ranged freely and consumed all the native grasses, a sea of grass reduced to stubble. Around the practice of ranching there developed a class of people, Californios, who were of Mexican or Spanish descent, and whose lifestyle combined an air of ease and grace with a sensual appreciation of their plentitude.

  Californios were terrific horsemen, dancers, and singers, and they loved to throw lavish fiestas at which they slugged back wine, performed steamy fandangos, and disconcerted straightlaced tourists from abroad. Sir George Simpson, the governor-in-chief of Hudson’s Bay Company, put it this way in his Narrative of a Journey Round the World (1843):

  The population of California in particular has been drawn from the most indolent variety of an indolent species, being composed of super-annuated troopers and retired office-holders and their descendants.… Such settlers were not likely to toil for much more than the cheap bounty nature afforded them, horses to ride, beef to eat, with hides and tallow to exchange for such other supplies as they wanted.… The children improved upon the example of the parents through the influence of a systematic education … which gave them a lasso as a toy in infancy and a horse as a companion in boyhood.…

  It was the hides and the tallow that kept the Californios and their rancheros going. They were exporting enormous quantities of both by the mid-1830s, primarily from San Diego, where the cargo was loaded onto ships bound for the newly industrialized East, for Boston. The hides were used in the manufacture of leather goods, and the tallow for soap and candles. As many as a million hides may have been traded during the era.

  For a time through the 1850s, ranchers controlled most large parcels of land in the state and dictated their use. Farmers had to fend for themselves. If they didn’t care to have cattle grazing on their farm, they were responsible by law for putting up fences.

  There were about 3 million head of cattle in the state at the peak of the ranchers’ power, in 1862, but the count dropped swiftly after that as the rancheros went bankrupt, done in by taxes, mismanagement, and loss of title to their land. The railroads also encroached, as did federal grants to homesteaders. Only about 630,000 cattle were left in California a decade later.

  Eventually, it became essential for some agency to address the question of pasturage rights on public property and what to charge for them. The job was assigned to the Bureau of Land Mangement (BLM) under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934.

  In administering the use of government land, the BLM had to walk a very thin tightrope. For instance, it had to offer habitat to such threatened species as desert tortoises, bald eagles, bighorn sheep, and wild burros, while also dealing with (and
hoping to profit from) the companies that were pursuing timber, minerals, oil, natural gas, and water.

  Of all the activities that the BLM supervised, it earned the least from grazing rights. The federal government owned about 61 percent of the land in California, but its 225 or so livestock allotments made only $370,000 a year, three times less than the agency got for granting simple rights-of-way. The BLM had been pressured for ages to up the ante, but a block of U.S. senators from the West, some of whom sat on pertinent committees at the Department of the Interior, had deflected any such legislation, as well as most attempts to minimize the damage that cattle did to public lands.

  A grazing allotment from the BLM was typically overstocked with cows. The cows soon stripped it of vegetation and layered it with manure. The manure washed into rivers and creeks, inflating the nitrogen and the coliform bacteria levels and harming the fisheries. Other animals felt the effects of overgrazing, too, especially wildlife such as the mule deer, whose survival range in California had been turned into a cheatgrass barren that could support only jackrabbits, horned larks, and cattle.

  But it was the cattle ranchers’ sponging of water that caused the greatest controversy. Californians went through about 11 trillion gallons of water each year, and about 85 percent of it was reserved for agriculture. The biggest agricultural users were cattlemen, whose irrigated pastures drew off more than 4 million acre-feet of water per annum—about as much as 21 million people might use at home.

  Irrigated pastures sucked up one-seventh of all the water in the state, but the cows fattened on the grasses accounted for only one five-thousandth of the economy. After irrigated pastures, alfalfa—food for cows—was the second most water-intensive crop. Some of the cattle ranches in places like Fall River Valley and Big Valley were in near-desert environments that could not have sustained even a tiny herd without irrigation.

  A statistic that critics of the BLM often cited put everything in perspective. If you were to eliminate irrigated pastures and alfalfa from California’s agricultural profile, along with such thirsty crops as rice and cotton, you’d save enough water to accommodate 70 million new residents—music to a developer’s ears.

  Despite such controversies, the business of cattle-ranching went on pretty much as it had always done. There were still buckaroos who rode the range, a pinch of Skoal between lip and gum, and remained faithful to upholding the rituals of the mythic West. The beef cattle still got sold in Cottonwood at roundup time, at Shasta Livestock Auction Yard, where Ellington Peek presided over the bovine transactions.

  Peek’s weekly auction was the fanciest this side of Amarillo. Buyers came from every western state and purchased about 140,000 cows annually. A sale of about 250 head could gross Peek about a million dollars. His corrals were usually packed with steers and heifers ripe for the slaughter, the stuff of T-bones and Big Macs, but he also handled the stringy old bulls whose fate it was to end up as an ingredient in Oscar Mayer bologna.

  AH, THE WEST IN CALIFORNIA, its dying gasps! At a variety store in Fall River Mills, while I was ransacking the bins for a new notebook, there came parading through the door a fellow in an off-the-rack suit of no particular flair, who carried a sample case and had the abject manner of somebody still fumbling to find his purpose in life. A drummer he was, a poor traveling salesman advanced into the wrong century and covering a territory that probably stretched all the way to Boise.

  In the past, our drummer might have dabbled in a welcome commodity, gingham or lace or Dr. Headbanger’s Magic Elixir, three parts diluted molasses to one part grain alcohol, but now he was selling oilcloth shades, an item whose continued manufacture was a mystery to me. Opening his case, he pitched his wares to the store’s buyer by saying, “The Latin type of people enjoy these in their homes.”

  She looked at him doubtfully, parsing “Latin type” and translating it into “Mexican fieldhand.”

  Later, I went by Sportsman’s Liquor, where the marquee advertised Beer, Boats, Bullets, and Booze, an afternoon’s entertainment anywhere in America.

  At the Fall River Hotel, a half-timbered, Tudor-style building that surely was once a home away from home to countless drummers, all of them carefully attending to their rooms at night, setting out the framed photos of the wife and the kids, I ran into a nasty little man behind the grill, who, without provocation, called me a “flatlander” to my face, another city person who was spoiling a previously unspoiled corner of Shasta County.

  The little man had been a musician and a bronc rider and might have broken something in his head. He said that I must be one of those post-World War II sissies whose misguided parents had brought him up on Dr. Spock, that Communist.

  “You didn’t get punished enough, is all!” he yelled. “Nothing else is wrong with you!”

  In the morning, getting ready to leave Fall River Mills, I turned on the motel TV and listened as Pat Robertson, the evangelist, encouraged his audience to support more prisons and harsher penalties for criminals.

  “There weren’t many repeat offenders in the Old Testament,” he said, with a chuckle.

  By Fort Crook, on the irrigated, green links of Fall River Country Club, I saw a battalion of electric carts conveying elderly duffers over the front nine.

  CHAPTER 6

  MODOC COUNTY was the last frontier in California, almost 3 million nearly empty acres tacked onto the far northeast corner of the state. The earth was so rocky, porous, and strewn with lava that only a tenth of it could be cultivated, although sagebrush grew lavishly and gave the local ranchers fits. They believed that it crowded out the bunchgrass that was supposed to nourish their cattle, so they burned it, drowned it in herbicides, or chopped it down.

  A rancher in Modoc County could be a lonely man. He had to know how to control things, how to get around things. He had to value action. If some government ecology scientist-type person told him to quit shooting the ground squirrels that were tearing up his pastures, he had to walk on the dark side for a while and kill the scroungy bastards by stuffing some poisoned lettuce down their holes. It came out the same in the end.

  Alturas, the county seat, was a town of about three thousand. It sat on the North Fork of the Pit River at an altitude of about 4,500 feet. It was tough, bare-knuckled, and not a little mean. In its rawest neighborhoods, it looked as though it had been the site of a colossal demolition derby whose promoters had skipped away without bothering to clean up the wreckage. All manner of metallic waste, from mufflers to hubcaps, was slowly disintegrating on the perimeter of the Great Basin Desert.

  An undercurrent of savagery seemed to swirl through the streets of the town. Almost every public phonebooth was trashed, the glass broken, the directories ripped apart, and the receivers yanked from their wires, as if the very idea of communication were somehow ridiculous on the frontier. You could feel the frustration of the many midnight calls that had never got answered, all the furious venting of steam that had followed in the wake of perennial misunderstanding.

  Alturas was built on extremes. To live there, you needed a healthy dose of self-reliance. The climate was a deadweight on the notion of California as one big garden spot, a near match for Cheyenne, with the temperature in winter dropping at times to twenty below. You could count on just seventy-six frost-free days a year. The cold weather started in September, and the ground could still freeze hard in late spring.

  Escape from Alturas was almost impossible. The Sierra Nevada and the southern Cascades cut it off from the rest of the state. When you couldn’t find something special in town, you went to Oregon to buy it, to Klamath Falls, more than a hundred miles away. Somebody itchy for adventure—a cowboy, say, who was sick of punching cows—thought nothing of highballing it to Reno on the spur of the moment and turning around to speed home the same night, a round-trip of some four hundred miles.

  True Alturans didn’t mind the loneliness or the harsh weather. Their landscape satisfied them the way an ocean satisfies a sailor. They spoke readily of its beauty�
�a beauty all the more valued because most outsiders failed to see it. A true Alturan had a wide streak of pride, the hallmark of a survivor.

  Basques had first come to Modoc County to tend sheep, as they had done in other regions of the state, and there were old Basque hotels and restaurants in most settled places. At a Basque restaurant one night, I had a long, haranguing talk with a rancher who’d been running stock in Alturas for twenty-nine years. He and a pal had been making the rounds of bars, downing vodka since noon.

  The rancher had icy blue eyes and a scar or two from barroom brawls. With each new vodka, he would lean over and say to me, enunciating the words precisely, “You have got to … get your ass … over the Warner Mountains … to Surprise Valley.”

  Surprise Valley was his personal temple. He went there often for solace and to be even more isolated and alone.

  “If you don’t do anything else here,” he’d say, “get your ass … to Surprise Valley. Just do it!”

  The rancher had an honest affection for the natural world, but he despised those who drooled and gaped and were sentimental about it. He despised anything sentimental and hated people who painted rosy pictures of all God’s creatures, those Sierra Clubbers who stooped to protecting such lowlife animals as the coyote.

  “They ought to see a young sheep that’s been torn apart!” he railed, stirring his vodka with a pinkie. “Or a colt with its legs and its bowels chewed up, left on the range to die!”

  He believed that it was foolish to poison ground squirrels, though, because eagles and hawks ate them, and the poison spread through the food chain. He knew of a much better solution.

  “We’ve got all these goddam deadbeats in town, why not put ’em to work? Give ’em all twenty-twos, pay ’em the minimum wage, and let ’em shoot the furry little sons-a-bitches.” He glared at me with those icy blue eyes. “Man is a killer by instinct, you know.”