from the tyranny of stratigraphy
He was an old man with very large features. His eyebrows were dark and ran most of the way across his forehead. His hair was white and not well cut and hung loosely down below his ears and over his brow and sometimes across his eyes. He brushed it back from his eyes with thick gnarled fingers that were stained a little white and were cracked with some dried blood. His nails were bitten short and were torn. His gut was large beneath his broad chest. He wore a slightly-yellowed white cowboy shirt with a satiny finish. This was tucked loosely into a pair of new blue-jeans in the front, billowed somewhat from one side and hung out loosely at the back. His boots were ancient black cowboy boots that were stained evenly white to above the ankle with water and salt. He climbed out of his pick-up truck and walked the width of the embankment down to the meadow before he went to open the gate and noticed that the fence was gone.
Paul Winder had been building the sewer line beside the length of the road. The old man had been gone for a week. The Wyntels had been making good progress. The dirt road that ran out into the meadow was still there but it was a little torn up where it crossed the path of the sewer line. He walked back up to his truck and drove it down the embankment and on to the dirt road, across the torn-up, sloppy soil and past where the gate had been, and out into the meadow.
The few last sheep were gone now. He thought they’d probably been trucked up to the high passes for one last time, but he hadn’t asked Dorothy when he got back because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The meadow was very small now. It had filled most of the whole valley when he was a boy. It had been a high grass meadow, planted in rectangles here and there with alfalfa; but mainly it was a natural grass. In parts of the year, it was dotted with large wild stands of small bright flowers. Over the last twenty years, the edges of it were rimmed with rows of brown houses that hunkered down on all sides but one. They were low and seemed somehow to be beneath the wide curve of the meadow. So that if you stood in the middle of the meadow and looked out to the houses you’d only see the very tops of them. Now the meadow was very small with the houses large along the sides of it.
The dirt road followed the old irrigation channel which was something like a stream. It was diverted from a larger stream on the far side of the meadow and the channel meandered in wide sweeps along the east side of what was left of the meadow. Now it passed the large brown houses and some cottonwood and it ran just a little through the meadow and out to the highway. In the meadow, the channel was low and full of ducks and red-wing black-birds beneath the highest grass and a tall thick shrub that followed the water on both sides. The water was black and there were paths that went from where the gate had been, down to the channel where boys used to come and fish it. Beyond the fence, the dirt road consisted of two lines of reddish-yellow dirt that were elevated up from the black wet soil at the base of the meadow but were usually hidden by the high grass that grew along and between them.
The old man drove past a pile of rolls of the old fence. He remembered putting it up, replacing the rotten wooden fence, with his boy when the boy was in high-school. After he got off the morning-afternoon shift at the mine he’d wait for the boy. The boy would get off the bus and they’d drive out to the meadow from town and work until dark pounding little steel posts into the soft soil. The old wire fencing was rolled into fifteen or so rolls and these were stacked in a big loose pile out in the grass. The wire was covered with something like a hundred cow birds. They were black and large. They all flew off when he drove past them. Then they circled up above and landed back on the pile of fence wire.
On three sides of the meadow, above the brown houses, were the mountains. In early June these were still very green with hints of snow beneath the ridges. The grasses in the mountains were emerald and the timber stands were a much darker olive. The mountains were nearly level at the top, like a curving wall that surrounded most of the meadow. It was far to the beginning of the mountains. Maybe five miles from the middle of the meadow. But, because they were so large and their top surface was so even and level and ran continuously around, they seemed like a vertical wall that you could almost reach out and touch. The intricate patterns of the light grass on the ski trails in the dark woods could be seen here and there along the range. The sky was light blue and spotted with small round clouds. The old man reached the end of the dirt road. He walked a short way, perhaps five hundred feet, out to his tractor. The tractor sat low in the grass with its wheels sunk down into the black soil and small pools reflected the grass and slivers of sky around each of the wheels.
The tractor didn’t look like it ever had been of much use the way it was sunk into the meadow. It was a low tractor to begin with. It was green and the paint was faded and rust showed in several places where the old sheet metal parts had been joined with rivets. It had wide fenders over the wheels and the seat was a simple low metal seat with an up-curved lip around three sides.
The old man walked through the meadow with his feet sinking beneath the grass into the soil. Water welled up around each step. He walked with his feet spread wide apart. He carried a small leather backpack that he used to carry on hikes in the mountains when he was much younger. When he reached the tractor, he set his pack down on the seat and pulled two levers into place beside the steering column and the black worn steering wheel. He walked on to the front of the tractor and swung open one side of the engine compartment. He reached inside and pressed a button and the engine started with a mild tremor and some black soot rose in one small puff from the tail pipe. The old man stood back and watched the tractor for a few minutes. When it began to run it was jerky and tremulous. But, with a little time it calmed and ran smoothly. He then walked back to the front of the tractor and felt the warm air around the engine as he reached above it and pulled another lever and the engine slowly stopped.
He walked back to the seat and lifted his little pack and climbed clumsily onto the deck of the tractor and lowered himself onto the seat. He opened the pack and pulled from it a small stack of books that were wrapped with an old leather belt, a silver thermos bottle, a child’s notebook, a black miner’s lunch-box, and a pair of binoculars. He set the books, the thermos, and the lunch-box on the deck of the tractor, wiping aside some mud from his boots with one boot wiping the mud from the other. He then placed the notebook in his lap and he began to scan the eastern part of the meadow with the binoculars. The old man rotated stiffly in the seat of the tractor. There was no seat-back to lean against and he sat up straight and pushed with one hand against the lower part of his back. He paused after one or two turns and froze looking out at one of the meanders of the irrigation channel.
From the highway, if anyone were to have noticed him, it would have looked as if he were watching the large vaulted back windows of one of the big brown houses, or a wooden swing set that sat behind it. But his view was of two small brown mounds that moved slowly in the grass a few hundred feet behind the house though closer to him than the house. After a long wait, a long thin neck rose up beside one of the mounds. The face above the neck was brown on top with a red stripe and long sharp bill. The neck was brown also and extremely thin. It raised it’s head for just a moment, looking west and at the old man on the tractor and lowered its head and neck into the grass again.
Myra Wyntel was, as she liked to put it, just slightly beyond Lycra. She held her upper body still, in a black t-shirt blazed with a golden reflective butterfly, above a pair of a black sweat-suit bottoms enclosing her thick churning legs. Each step rose and fell and rose and fell and she did not move but stared straight ahead at the paperback book open beneath the small rectangular plexiglass sheet that rested on the top of the machine. Beside her, on a stationary bicycle, Doug Wyntel pedaled similarly. Age had been much kinder to his musculature than it had been to hers. He was already sixty-five and remained somewhat lean, with well conserved muscles in his legs. Though he noticed, with considerable sadness when he held his arms aloft, the soft flaying tissue that had once been a considerable part of his biceps. His stomach hung down just a little, stretching his black t-shirt somewhat awkwardly above the spandex ring of his bicycle shorts.
“He was out there again,” he said. “He is obviously back from St. Louis.”
“What is it with that old man?” she said in an exasperated manner, it being unclear as to whether her sour expression was due to her husband’s reference to the old man or her efforts at exercise.
“I don’t know. It has to do with the kid.”
“Is that why he was in St. Louis?”
“Yea, the kid’s got cancer. He was a construction inspector or something like that in St. Louis. The kids like thirty-five or forty, I think.”
“Well what’s that got to do with watching the birds. Those, what are they? Sandhill cranes?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Doug, if you don’t start moving on that land were going to loose the whole deal. You know that. No matter what, we’re already into it for the property. The way things are going we need that construction loan to hold us through the rest of the year. Things haven’t been selling for three months.”
“I don’t know what to do. If it were a kid who chained himself to a bulldozer, I’d know exactly what to do. But it isn’t. It’s an old man with a dying kid that clomps out to an old tractor and watches sand-hill cranes all day long. How do you move that out of the way.”
“He sold the land.”
“He says he knows that and he doesn’t object to our moving on the land.”
“Then why don’t you. Interest rates aren’t going to stay down forever.”
“Because he’s an old man with a dying kid and he goes out there everyday and watches birds.”
“Is it a tactic? Is it a tactic to get us to kill the project?”
”No, I don’t think so. It’s an old man and two birds.”
“Why don’t I talk to him?”
“What is there to say. It’s the damnedest thing. He says he doesn’t object to our starting construction. He says he knows he sold the land. How can you argue with somebody who doesn’t disagree with you.”
“What exactly does he say.”
“He says the birds have been in the meadow for ten-thousand years. Not those birds. The ancestors of those birds. He says the birds used to come every spring over by the creek where Franzen just put up those apartments on the other side of the highway. But he says now they’ve moved over to his land, our land. He showed me a couple of books. One had an article about sand-hill cranes, sand-hill cranes in general. It said how they’ve been around for ten-thousand years, since the beginning of the ice ages. The other book had a picture of what the meadow was like in the ice age. Really interesting. The picture had all kinds of weird miniature camels and horses and saber-toothed tigers, really big wolves called dire wolves and mammoths. It was stuff like that. It was based on animal skeletons they found buried in an old swamp when they excavated for the highway right over by where Franzen’s apartments are now. I guess they built the highway back in the seventies. The old man claims the birds were in the meadow with all those other animals ten-thousand years ago. He said that all the other animals are extinct and now with our project the sand-hill cranes will be extinct from the meadow too.”
“The cranes will be extinct. Isn’t that a regulatory problem.”
“No, they’ll be extinct from the meadow. He says there are lots of ’em up in Idaho and Nebraska and other places. They only come in the spring, you know. And there’s only the two of them.”
“So it isn’t an extinction issue then? Not endangered species. What is that law, title 404 or something?”
“I don’t know. That’s your thing. But, the old man says that with us using the last of the meadow they’ll be extinct from the meadow. When he says it, he says it kind of like its inevitable. Kind of like he’s saying were all going to die someday or something. Not like he’s pissed or anything.”
“The whole thing sounds a little like he’s trying to manipulate us. He sold the land. He knew all this about the birds when he sold the land. Didn’t he know?”
“He knew.”
“Well what’s the deal with the kid?”
“The kid’s fine right. Maybe a couple or three months ago, the kid is fine; and he goes to the doctor with a cough. It turns out the kid’s all laced with cancer. It’s everywhere. It’s been growing inside for months, years, who knows? So the kid’s just holding on now. Won’t make it another month. So that’s when the old man starts going out into the meadow and sitting all day looking at the birds. Really sad. Really strange how something like that can just start to grow and without the kid really knowing that he’s sick, it’s taking over his whole body. Then as soon as you find out what’s going on, it’s too late. The kid’s gone.”
“How do you know all this.”
“The old man told me a little. I asked why he was going to St. Louis so much lately.”
“Yea.”
“Yea, and I talked to Tubby Warrant then. You know him I think. He works for Franzen. Well, he says that the boy left for St. Louis when the mine closed and property values started to go up. It was before so much construction here and I guess he couldn’t find a job. And with the cost of living going up so much here, with the local wages for what he does, he couldn’t come back. You know. Tubby and him went to high school together. So the kid’s wife called Tubby when they found out about the cancer.”
“Well what can we do to get the project going. I know you’re sensitive about the old man. I am too. If we don’t get that project going we can kiss the construction loan goodbye. Without that loan. Well you know none of the lots over at Bald Eagle aren’t selling at what we’re asking. The market’s gone south. Without that loan we’re not going to be able to weather this soft period.”
“I know. It isn’t that he’s stopping us. He says he doesn’t even want us to stop. He says he sold the land and with the land we have the right. It’s the damnedest thing, you know. If he were yelling at me and making speeches to the newspaper, it wouldn’t bother me in the least. I’d be out there tomorrow with bulldozers.”