CANE BEDS

This morning, here in Kanab, I watch the late winter winds snarl the branches of barely budding trees, each branch is like a witch finger twisted by both the pregnancy of buds and distress against the ripping wind crazy season of change. Final winter storms are creeping up unexpectedly and a day of slight sun turns over under the oppressive overhang of dark clouds and the snow just drifts down,down, sometimes joining with a force of wind that cuts power and leaves the landscape a dark evil grey. Even the seemingly indomitable buttes of red rock are shouldered in a coat of white snow and oddly spectral moving grey dark clouds. Early spring is here in southern Utah. The high desert where every change of the season is slightly unpredictable and full of temperate changes the palette of geology, biology and botany responds to. After all the storms of this past hard winter the desert flowers will probably, hopefully, put up a strong show of survivalist color. So the environment may be like all other relationships in life – owning a predictable degree of unpredictability and often showing the best results after stress proves its worth.

I’ve lived here in Kanab for just under two years. Having come from just below the Adirondacks near the Canadian border there is something that feels just fine here although I can’t say exactly why. Maybe the roughness and integrity and an enormity of physical beauty as well as an insulated culture. I still don’t know but everyday life here speaks to me and somehow harmonizes.

The Cane Beds are my personal route past our minimal civilization here in Kanab to something a little more opportunistic up there 90 minutes north in St. George where groceries, medical care and those other good and sometimes necessary things of life are available. Like a good dentist and sushi. There is an undeniably dignified, gentle and challenged quality of life here where I live in Kanab, this 1-traffic light town I am now settled in. I love the Quilting Society (a great provider of gossip and local history going back many generations) and the Back Country Horsemen, the Native Plant Society and the single small town movie theatre that now boasts its own smoke machine sure to thrill the crowds. I suspect it is the only movie theatre in America that allows pets, unofficially of course, at the ticket counter they look the other way as they scoop your butter popcorn and hope the Mayor, Cowboy Ted, doesn’t catch them. My dog Snuffles has put on a few extra pounds by snorfing for dropped popcorn between the seats. Every Sunday morning in Kanab there is a $4 all-you-can-eat brunch at Parry’s Lodge. The wallpapered halls of Parry’s host signed black & white photographs of the most famous stars featured in over 300 famous Western Films & TV series produced here in the Little Hollywood of the West, from Glenn Ford and Chuck Connors to Whitney “Whit” Pony. Mornings, on our way to do salutations to the sun in Tom’s Canyon, me and Snuffles jog past the cabin set for Gunsmoke and do a brief dry snuff at the empty trough where a sign still hangs offering “a hat full of water for $1.00”. At Frontier Town, the remnants of a movie set on the edge of town, the first Friday of each month is set aside for local talent playing to a local beer crowd; everything from Cowboy Poetry to Spanish guitar and Red Rock Rocksters and sometimes the Zion gospel Singers.

To find anything else demands a 90 minute drive to St. George. Could do it on the general route thru Hurricane (pronounced Hurr-i-kun, not hurricane like the storm) but my personal preference is to do it thru this side road just north of Route 15 and across the quiet Cane Beds on a rutted dirt road where very few people and lots of open miles are at. Miles of mediation on this quiet road separated by just a dozen miles or so from easily accessible civilization and the one major road across this desert. Rutted ranch road passing Pinyon Junipers, running briefly alongside the Coral Pink Sand Dunes and through big ranch country where sage and outcroppings of red rock rule.

And it is genuine cowboy country, God, I wish my beloved big red horse Tony Pony was here to share it with me but I lost him across a cattle guard before leaving California. In a lightning storm he went a little too crazy as we exited the paddock for the barn, bolted and ran across a cattle guard. The first time across he made it in a huge big thunderous leap. Then he came running back to me in a panic for the safety of his stall and didn’t make the second time across the cattle guard. I will never forget the sound of his leg as it was ripped out of him when he fell and was caught in the deadly teeth trap of the rails. I still have nightmares over losing Tony and shudder, grit my teeth every time I cross a cattle guard. I don’t want to say anymore on Tony. Simply can’t, an important moment of my soul and conscience went out with him the moment we put him down.

Life does this thing of going on, I miss him and every time I see a cowboy tip his hat from his saddle on the Cane Bed road I feel both happy and sad knowing we’ve probably shared at least a little something between us about horses even if we don’t know what it is. Today a herd of cattle are moving across the road to new seasonal grazing grounds, and an older cowboy confidently walks his big horse in front of my car, guiding us thru the herd with a hand resting on his jeans and chaps. His stocky big-headed bay horse moves ahead through the herd, its head bobbing confidently like a metronome, his rider largely shaded by a cowboy hat except for a silvery moustache appearing below the dark rim shadowing the brim of his hat. A small boy trots by, looking like a Teddie bear in his saddle. Other ranchers ride by, a little uncomfortable with the presence of my big old SUV on this back road that belongs to them but nodding when they see my dog, and the reins & bits dangling from inside my age-beaten white beast of a rough road vehicle. A young woman nods, touching her cowboy hat and within a few miles their passage inside this shared time of ours in what is still ranch country is gone.

This 18 mile dirt road across the velvety sagebrush and thru flat lands then towering red rock is a place where elk, horses, and cattle still live. It’s quiet, intent with some current purpose that may be passing and the underlying peace of everything that has gone before for thousands of years we will never really know about. Goes from pancake flat to gnomish strange shoulders of vivid red rock postured in those odd poses only the ancient metamorphic rock forms of this region can possibly offer. Beautiful,strange. Don’t drive here in the Cane Beds in a rain, an unforeseen flash flood can carry you away to heaven in a minute – I guess, so I hear. Hope to never see it unless that big red Tony Pony comes running down along the waves so we are born away together.

Powell

Pushing back Wisconsin woods so cold
Follow him down, follow him down
Laying tracks for Muir and Leopold
To open up their way
Fighting for the Union and he would not yield
Follow him down, follow him down
Till he lost his arm on the battlefield
Follow him down that river

Chorus:
Then it’s faretheewell to the one-armed major
Faretheewell to the noble crew
Faretheewell to the dory fleet
Swallowed into the raging flow
Of the Green and Colorado

With a soldier’s skill and a scholar’s vest
Follow him down, follow him down
Leading expeditions to the West
For grand ol’ Illinois
Long’s Peak offered him its first ascent
Follow him down, follow him down
And a glimpse of the maze where the river went
Follow him down that river

In the spring of 1869
Follow him down, follow him down
With the buffalo gone and the railroad line
Just reaching Frisco Bay
Kitty Clyde’s Sister in the swollen Green
Follow him down, follow him down
With the No Name, the Maid, and the Emma Dean
Follow him down that river

In the burnt rock canyon of Ladore
Follow him down, follow him down
With the watchword gagged by the river’s roar
The No Name took a wave,
Spilt her cargo as she split in two
Follow him down, follow him down
Save a whiskey keg and a soggy crew
Follow him down that river

Left for dead three times in the eastern press
Follow him down, follow him down
To the Virgin end was Powell obsessed
But murmuring vexed the men
Ever christening the rising view
Follow him down, follow him down
As the rations waned and the tension grew
Follow him down that river

Out of fear at Separation Falls
Follow him down, follow him down
Three mutineers watched from the canyon walls
Two boats pass safely through
Then bore their caution up the cliffs to trade
Follow him down, follow him down
For death on the ridge in a Shivwits raid
Follow him down that river

After ninety-nine days of dread and doubt
Follow him down, follow him down
Ten men when in and six came out
To hear the hero’s praise
Brave men guided by the river’s best
Follow him down, follow him down
They opened a door to the unknown west
Follow him down that river

Stephen Trimble recited parts of Egan’s tribute and several of your comments at the Stegner Symposium here in Salt Lake City yesterday. Wendell Berry read from his own work to open and close the two day event, serving as bookends that embraced a collection of second and third generation classics- presentations on the life and work of the Dean of Western Writers by valedictorians whose own work is partly Stegner’s reflected light.

Trimble concluded his remarks with a post here by JR predicting that Stegner will continue to be celebrated a hundred years hence. After two days of peeking through many of the windows in the house Stegner built, we were also left with the renewed conviction that, despite a few cracks due to settling, it is a sturdy homestead, well-situated, and will endure. It remains to be seen however, whether Stegner’s house will be a place to celebrate or mourn the sufficiency of our response to his warnings against turning either landscapes or writing into mere commodities.

John Daniel has a fine Stegner essay posted this centennial week at writersdojo (along with pieces by Will Bagley, Casey Bush, and myself). Here is what John has to say about Wallace Stegner and God: In “Wolf Willow,” Stegner “spoke of the uncanny doubleness one feels beneath that enormous sky, a sense ‘of observing everything else the way God may be observing you.’

Wallace Stegner didn’t refer to God very often. I don’t know what God meant to him. But I suspect that the sense of being transcendently observed would come easily in the Plains country, and with it a sense of being inevitably known, of being a question mark unable to hide, and I suspect that such an awareness contributed considerably to the healthy hunger of Stegner’s eighty-four years. A targeted man, a man in the sights of a power he respects and fears and loves, is likely to work as hard and as well and as long as he can.”