had the sense to be quiet. And after a few weeks he got his first job – grocery packer at Sandman’s. In addition to his wage check he got meat and vegetables, eggs and fruit past their prime. So they lived on almost-spoiled produce and high meat, with frequent bouts of diarrhea.
The morning after the celebratory steak dinner Bob was heading south down I-25 in a Global Pork Rind company car, a blue, late-model Saturn, watching out for escaped prisoners in white vans. He stopped for gas in Trinidad, got a dripping chile dog to eat while he drove, pulled over at a roadside spring below Raton Pass to clean his hands and wipe off the steering wheel.
On the passenger seat were the packages his uncle had handed him outside the restaurant.
He took twisting, climbing roads through northeast New Mexico, high dry ranchland empty of everything but cinder cones and cows and an occasional distant building surrounded by corrals. An elderly horseman herded forty cows down the middle of the road, not deigning to hurry them or turn them out of the right-of-way.
He climbed a switchback road lined with tough-looking shinnery oak. He guessed he was about an hour’s drive from the Picket Wire canyonlands along the Purgatoire River, south of La Junta. When he was thirteen, he, Uncle Tam and Bromo Redpoll had rented a car and driven down to the Withers Canyon Gate, planning to hike in to the fabled dinosaur track bed.
It was a hot day, over a hundred degrees by late morning. Bob and Uncle Tam each had a canteen of water. Bromo carried a daypack of cold beers, Bob and Uncle Tam clutched plastic bottles of water. Bromo and Bob wore hiking boots, Uncle Tam his old black and stinking sneakers. The road in to the gate where the trail began was a gauntlet of washouts and boulders. At the gate a posted sign said the round-trip hike was 10.6 miles.
“Damn,” said Uncle Tam, “that’s almost an eleven-mile hike.”
“Two hours in, two hours out,” said Bromo, draining the first of his beers and tossing the can behind a rock. “Leave it alone,” he said when Bob ran to pick it up. “We’ll get it on the way out. You’re too damn picky. Don’t be such an old lady.”
They set off slowly, climbing the rocky trail. The sun beat against Bob’s face and within twenty minutes he knew he was burning. He’d forgotten his cap. He said, “Uncle Tam, did you bring any sunblock?” He thought they were in a terrible place, bristling with cholla, yucca and purple prickly pear. Scraggy junipers clung to frying rock. The canyon walls rose around them, shooting out heat as from ray guns.
“Shit. No. Would have been a good idea. You got any, Bromo?”
“Back in the car. Want to run back and get it, Bob? We’ll wait for you.”
“No.” The idea of running anywhere was repulsive.
They walked on, Bromo in the lead as if he were heading up a safari. Every step raised a puff of yellow dust from the trail and their boots and Uncle Tam’s sneakers, their stocking tops and lower legs were soon coated with the stuff setting off an itchy sensation like hay chaff At first Bob tried to make the water in his twelve-ounce bottle last but he was parched and his throat clicked painfully when he swallowed. It felt as though his throat were bleeding inside. Bromo finished his fourth beer, carefully standing the can beside the trail.
“Get it when we come out,” he said as he had every time he finished one. He straightened up and a thin, arid rustle shivered the heat. Bob thought it was a cicada or a grasshopper and walked up, intending to pass Bromo, but Uncle Tam thrust out his arm with hard suddenness, hitting Bob in the face.
“Ow. What’d you do that for?”
“Shut up. That’s a rattlesnake.” The landscape lurched.
They couldn’t see it. They stood very still. The buzzing surged until it seemed the loudest sound Bob had ever heard. Still they couldn’t see it until Bromo shifted position.
“There it is,” said Bromo. “Right next to the beer can. Christ, I was two inches from it.”
“I want to get out of here,” Bob whispered.
They backed up slowly and when they were fifteen feet away Bromo picked up a rock and threw it at the rattler. He missed.
“Well, what do you want to do, Tam, try and find a way past? The damn snake’s right on the trail.”
“Hell, let’s go back. I got blisters, Bob’s sunburned and who knows how many snakes we’ll run into? Could be hundreds in here. Not all of them rattle. People have killed so many of the ones who rattle that it’s the silent guys who reproduce. One of these days they’ll all be nonrattlers. Plus it’s too hot. This is the kind of place you tackle in November, not June.”
They left and did not come back in November or ever. But Bob had thought many times that someday he was going to make it in to the dinosaur tracks, maybe on a mountain bike, and certainly in cold weather when the rattlesnakes were hibernating. Now, remembering the aborted trip, he thought maybe he would try again on one of his trips between Denver and the panhandle. On a cool day.
North of Clayton he found a yellow-dirt road that carried him around hairpin bends, over humpback bridges and through mud ruts deep enough to scrape the bottom of the car. It was midafternoon when he came out at Teemu, not far from Black Mesa, in the Oklahoma panhandle, piñon-juniper-mesa country with cholla, hackberry, scrub oak all through the rocks. He stopped at a general store for a bottle of water and a ham sandwich, got pinned by the garrulous proprietor, a baggy man whiskered with white bristles recently arrived from California, who explained his ambitious retirement plan to make the place into another Santa Fe.
“See, my grandparents left here in the thirties. Dust bowl days. I thought I’d come back and see what they left behind. It’s a beautiful place. Great potential. Got electricity too, more than you can say for California. We got craft people here, carvers and painters, we got Indians, we got people with sheds full a antiques, we got a small tourist trade that just needs working up. It’s mostly a Christian tourist trade, there’s the Cowboy Bible Camp that packs them in all summer. Over in Kenton they got the Easter Pageant, brings in the thousands. We even got a vineyard now, Butch Podzemny’s ranch out east has went over to vines. With a little luck Oklahoma panhandle could put Napa Valley in the dumpster. Pretty good climate for vines, high, dry, plenty sun, clean air, light stony soil. The new county agent thinks we got a chance to make a real nice regional varietal. The old agent couldn’t see past cows.”
Bob thought the man was trying to puff the place up to himself, to smother his regret at leaving California for the bull’s-eye of the dust bowl.
“I figure if we can interest Oklahoma Today, get them to come out and do an article on us, we’d improve business about fifty percent. But we’re kind of forgotten out here. Right now I try to keep everything loose, keep a little of everything on hand so I can see what people want. I got calendars, a few groceries, lunch counter. I got the gas pump, only gas pump for thirty miles either direction. Next year is the big year. I got a friend talked into remodeling the old hotel, open a nice restaurant. Butch’ll have the first wine ready to sell then. If he makes a go of it there would be a hundred others love to get out of the damn cow business and into something nice like vines. The boom is coming. Teemu will be the next Santa Fe.”
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