The Very Un-Ranch

We have spent nearly a year away from campgrounds for any length of time. At the RR museum in Campo CA, we had two neighbors, at Pocket Creek, we had none. Now we are back at Hart Ranch Camping Resort which is a mini city of big motor homes and big white trailers. The 460 sites are large and well spaced, everything is green grass or paved, trees, the monster pool, 6 Laundromats and 6 “comfort stations”. This is a 5 star resort, probably one of the top 10 camping resorts in the whole USA. And I don’t like it.

Way too many people, and I feel as though I am always under inspection. Everything has wheels, but it might as well be suburbia. There are as many rules as a homeowner’s association, and a security patrol and lots of nosy neighbors to enforce them. Heaven for people who are afraid that “camping” might be too rustic and uncomfortable, or that RVing is too close to trailer trash for comfort. Maybe I am imagining it, but I feel a sense of competition here, which I don’t like. Smells like rat race to me. Plus everyone here is old………

Along with that, some friends are no longer here, and there have been two disastrous attempts to hire a new resort manager, leaving us back at the mercy of a woman who technically knows how to run the place, but is rude and abrasive and plays favorites. This is not a good thing in the hospitality world, and hard on the employees. Since I have never just vacationed here, but always worked, I have a very different knowledge of the back stage workings. Back stabbing, political maneuvering and bad behavior are always going on in large organizations, but it seems to be running wild here. Maybe those who are just playing here don’t even realize the drama that has gone on. I was treated very rudely by the fall back manager, which hurt me more than seems sensible. This is supposed to be “home”, whatever that means.

We are here for our annual check ups, and to order up our absentee ballots. All that is done, we have passed all this with flying colors. It has been rainy and cold, too nasty to go geocaching or even touristing.

Today, we drove up into the Black Hills in the rain anyway, there has been lots of rain here all summer, so everything is very green. The rocks are dark with the wet, and sharp and shattered and tipped by forces more dramatic than the slow, soft erosion of the sand rocks of the Yellowstone Valley. We are aimed for Pactola Reservoir, which holds back Rapid Creek. In 1972, a thunderstorm sat up here in the mountains and dumped 17” of rain in 4 hours. Rapid Creek tore the heart out of Rapid City that day. Now, what was destroyed has been replaced by beautiful parks and recreation areas all along the creek, so the gutting has been good in the long term. The reservoir has a huge dam to keep this from happening again, but for the last two years of drought, it has been shrinking. Now it is full, marinas where there were grassy mudflats, surrounded by mountains, and even on this cold rainy day, there are two boats out fishing.

Tomorrow, we will hitch up and head for the Grand Canyon, north rim. We met the HR guy for the concessionaire at the North Rim Lodge at a workamper job fair last winter, and he said he loses a lot of his workampers after Sept 1 and so we are headed there to work for pay for 6 weeks. We have no idea what we will be doing, working in the store, at the front desk or in maintenance. I’m looking forward to a chance to see the Grand Canyon in all sorts of lights and weather, although we will almost certainly see cold and maybe ….snow.

And I’m looking forward to getting off this un-ranch, and on the road.

Paradise at Pocket Creek

I was sure that I had written about Pocket Creek when we went there for weekends, but I can’t find it.

My friend Ellen and her husband live in Custer MT, about 40 miles north of the Custer Battlefield, on the east side of the Bighorn River. There they have 40,000 acres of rough, dry country used mostly as summer cattle range, along with several hundred acres of irrigated bottomland.

Ellen’s mother, a graduate of Bryn Mawr from Illinois, came out west, loved it, bought a ranch in Montana (Lodge Grass) and married Ellen’s father, Wailes Wolfe. He was a handsome charming man, a cowboy, an airline pilot, and polo player. They mostly lived at a small and lovely ranch in Wolf, WY, close to Sheridan and civilization. Pocket Creek Ranch in those days was all dry, and so isolated that a trip to town took 3 hours on rough dirt roads. The ranch foreman’s children had to move to town for school.

Ellen was send back east to Concord Academy by her mother, in hopes that culture travel, and education would broaden her horizons and keep her from becoming “just” a ranch wife. College was next, but as we can see, Ellen had her sights on being a ranch wife, and here she is. Someday I should write more of Ellen’s life, the parts I know anyway.

I met Ellen in 1958 at Concord Academy where my mother had sent me in hopes I would amount to something. We lived on a working dairy farm then and had horses, and barbed wire fences. Ellen had said in a response to a welcome letter that she would miss both of those, so I was very intrigued, and invited her to visit me. She thought there were way too many trees, and roads and fences, but we had a good time anyway, and she got to escape dormitory life.

Concord Academy was a very good school, we both got an excellent education and were directed to go do something besides find a husband. But Ellen and I, along with Penny and several others felt we did not fit in with the sophisticated, well-turned-out upper crust girls there. After revisiting some of my classmates, I guess most teenagers feel kind of hopeless and out of place, but with two long pigtails, spots, glasses, a big mouth and few social skills, I felt like a miserable disaster. As it was a girl’s school, boys were a mystery, and my few contacts with them were discouraging to abysmal.

Ellen invited me to visit her out west that next summer. That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship, the beginning of my love of the west, and the beginning of my personal journey to becoming a grown-up who is pretty comfortable in her own skin, if not always properly behaved.

The social standards for girls at Concord Academy were impossible for me to even get near, but out here on the ranch, I discovered to my great joy and relief that riding well, working hard without complaint, and having a sense of humor were all anyone cared about. Here at last I felt like I was OK, and that what was eccentric and tiresome back in Massachusetts, was actually an asset.

I came out nearly every summer for a month or so from 1958 until 1963, riding, branding, moving cattle around, and actually going on dates with boys !!. We had many adventures, got into some very minor trouble, and I felt as though this wide open, dry, windy treeless place was where I belonged. I had a few moments when marrying the nearest willing cowboy looked like a great idea, but saw that would lead to a kitchen full of hungry people, not riding the wide open.

College, city life, family came along, but I never forgot. Sometime in the ‘80’s my kids and I went on a train ride and visited Ellen, she was living in Sheridan then, but we did a ranch tour, and I remember being overwhelmed by the sight of it all and the smell of sagebrush.

Now, after a summer on Pocket Creek, I have even more love for this place and these people. Ellen and her wonderful husband Harry have been great to live with and work for, the guys that come in for lunch think I am hilarious, and once again as long as I work hard, don’t complain and am amusing, that is all there is. I can be me, in the way that is most comfortable. It is a clean, and a safe place emotionally. Some of this feeling is just plain nostalgia, age will do that to you, and since I am far away from the more recent turbulence of my history, that has all retreated into the far distance.

There is a knoll against the sand rocks south of the main barn area where there was once a trailer. There is power, a well and a sewer system, and a view of the river and the bottomlands. My heart longs to put the Airstream there and just leave the real world. All a fantasy of course, we have commitments waiting for us, and Don is not cut out for ranch life. And there is lots of stuff to see and do down the road.

All well and sensible, but I found myself brimming with tears for the last two or three days before we left, still do. When we drove away in the rain, when we crossed Harry’s engineering triumph bridge, when we pulled out onto the main road, and even when we crossed the state line out of Montana, I had waves of sadness catch me.

This is really the first time I haven’t been ready to move on, to hit the road with all the possibilities and freedom out there. I know I would not be happy here in the winter where it gets cold, and snow blows, and everyone just sort of hibernates, at least not in a trailer. I also know that my sort of ad hoc assistant grandmother and colorful character roles might wear thin after a while. But Lordy, I do love this country.

Salida

The Denver Unit of the WBCCI and the westerners in the Vintage Club put on a Rocky Mountain Vintage Rally every year in August. This time it was an all boon docking rally, with the trailers all in a circle around a tent. I signed up immediately, and so a week a go we set out.

Don’s trailer went in for some repairs while we were gone, so much had to be removed from it, and my usual and apparently unavoidable need to stock the Airstream for a 6 month trek went on at the same time. I know there are stores everywhere, I just hate to spend fun time looking for them and shopping.

We dodged the pivot and went on our way, down through the rolling hills which are now the soft brown furry rolling dunes of late summer. Barley is being cut, pivots running for the second hay cutting, and all manner of irrigation is being put to corn, and sugar beets.

The Bighorns drift by, obscured by smoke from fires, still spots of snow on the highest peaks, then we are out on the vast cattle plains. Sometimes a set of rocks will appear jutting out of the smooth hills. They cast sharp shadows, have unsettling silhouettes, and grab the eye tired of endless rolling grass lands. I tend to have a second’s though that they are man made, ancient battlements, or temples, because they appear so abruptly, and so singly.

At Douglas WY, we pull into a city park that has free camping, parked around the grassy islands. There is even a bath house with brands burned into all the wood trim. Free camping brings in other drifters too, a thin gray bearded man living in his van, and three youngsters in a tent. There is a limit of 2 days, which may explain why the van man was keeping a sharp eye out and periodically driving off. The youngsters went for a walk downtown and were told by the police to stay in the park and off the streets. I suspect the police don’t like the free parking. In addition, the sprinkler system comes on in the night making the lush lawn a bad place to pitch a tent.

We roll on south, into Colorado where the Rockies rise vaguely from more smokes, and we are soon in the Ft. Collins-Denver version of Rte 128. Like a piece cut out of the urban eastern seaboard, suddenly the drivers are all in a terrible hurry, rude, aggressive. A side trip to a Ham radio store in Denver leads us through detours and traffic which would be a pain in a car, towing a trailer it was no fun at all. ( Don has recently taken and passed the first two levels of his Ham License, and talks to other hams about their radios mostly ).After that we head up towards Evergreen where my friend Penny lives. More aggressive folks in SUV’s passing me, rushing, competitive, elbowing me and my trailer aside so they can get up the mountains faster. So why live up in the tranquil mountains if you are going to drive ( and probably behave) like you live in Brooklyn?

Penny and her husband welcome us, and we set up in a pasture above their house. A nice evening, and get together, it is remarkable how little we have changed in the 50 years we have known each other, well, inside that is, we are both wider and grayer. It is very reaffirming to talk to someone who has known you that long.

Next day we head over to the South Park, a wide plain of grass with the mountains all around. It lies at 10,000 feet and covers 1,000 square miles, not too many people live up here in this magical place, no doubt a nasty winter and no jobs to speak of, but it is remote and very beautiful, a lot of cattle out on the lush mountain grass. And quiet, and no SUV’s.

Over another pass and down into Salida where the Arkansas River tumbles out of the mountains and makes giving river raft rides the going business. I have followed the Arkansas River for several long trips, so it feels like an old friend. It occurs to me that while Don knows all the route numbers and where they go, I am more oriented toward the river drainages. Up on the Yellowstone and the Bighorn Rivers, they were the highways of history, and everywhere the rivers are the carvers of the rocks, and the water in them brings life to the valleys. The highway numbers seem sort of peripheral information.

We are here for the Rocky Mountain Vintage Rally, one of my favorites because of the congenial folks and terrific planning.. Our Airstreams were born and bred to rally like this, and us die hards take great pride in our ability to be happy off the grid, no water, no electricity, no sewer. We happily join in an endless round of feasting and talking about our trailers.

One afternoon we went off in a geocaching foray and wound up 4 wheeling up on the slopes of Mt Shavano, an amazing place. The name of the cache was 360, for 360 degrees of mountains, all around a wide-open field of late summer flowers. Coming down another way, we followed a creek bed as the walls got higher and higher, and finally it dead-ended. Turning my truck around was a bit of a trick but we had a grand time.

Back in Montana, we go back to ranch life. My friend has two granddaughters, 3 months and 15 months that spend a good deal of time with her. It is hard to get anything done with them around, and sometimes hard to handle both, so we have been double teaming the grandmother deal. Fun unless you are trying to get something else done, so I hold the fort while she gets lunch. Nice to know I can still burp a baby, and interesting to see them grow by leaps and bounds.

The big project, stripping and restaining the 400 square foot deck is nearly done. I had no idea a wooden deck was so much work. Another reason to be glad I am trailer trash. I also made 4 raised bed vegetable plots in old tractor tires, and cucumbers and tomatoes are really starting to bear. That’s the only part of being a rolling stone that I don’t like is no vegetable garden. I do carry 4 large pots of cooking herbs with me and one house plant.