Heart Earth by Ivan Doig Page B

Townsend with my mother. Deep Creek engorged us as quick as we returned from Arizona in 1945.
Took us 4 hours to come home
after a supper visit to our relatives in Townsend, my mother wrote to the young Pacific version of Wally.
The gas line on the car was plugged and we'd go about a mile, then get out and blow the thing out with the tire pump,
all this to be imagined in blackest night with other cars hurtling around Deep Creek's blind curves at our gasping Ford.

    My father has never been rapid to credit any Ringer except my mother, but he swears that Wally could drive this treacherous canyon blindfolded. He gets a particular charge out of Wally's latest stunt with the canyon plow. The highway safety engineers have busily installed reflector posts to mark the shoulders of the road all through the canyon; these are in the way whenever Wally goes to shove a snowdrift off the road, so he has demonstrated to Dad how he is eliminating Deep Creek's new metal posts one by one, accidentally-on-purpose dropping the wingplow at just the right instant to clip a post off at its base and send it zinging up into the timber like a phosphorescent arrow.
    At the head of the canyon, my father sits forward to watch, and my uncle gears down the tons of truck and blade. The snowplow starts down the brink beside Grass Mountain into the first curves of Deep Creek and commences zigzagging.

    ***
    When the German half of World War Two was taken care of in May 1945, V-E Day couldn't even find my father and my mother and me by radio.
    As you can see from our address,
a map speck called Maudlow which actually was seven miles from us,
we have moved again,
on into my father's second season of sheepwork that spring,
lambing for Frank Morgan.
Our chosen land this time was that eye-taking rough horizon where the Big Belt Mountains and the Bridger Mountains butt up against each other.
    The Morgan ranch buildings nestled on the Bridger side of this colliding geography, which is to say the prosperous side. Out the back door of the ranch stood the northmost Bridger peaks, Blacktail and Horsethief and Hatfield, but at its threshhold the land took a running start down to the Gallatin valley, fertile as a green dream. Based there on the rim of the broad Gallatin, the Morgans could afford to use the high country only for summer pasture and the rest of the year simply be thankful they were down out of the mountains' commotions of weather. To my parents, whose Big Belt history had been high country or higher, bad weather or worse, this was velvet ranching.
    Charlie wrangles bunches, spends some time with the drop band, works in the lambing shed, in fact anything there is to do.
Naturally my father is going like a house afire, but he isn't the only one who feels the green vim of the Gallatin country.
Ivan goes wrangling sheep with Charlie after sup
per.... He is growing, getting tall.
My mother herself is in charge of the Morgan cookhouse this staccato month of May.
I have
7
to cook for.
Twenty-one appetites a day don't faze her—
seem to have plenty of time so far
—but our mute radio does.
Sent for a battery. A person hates to be without a radio when there are so many things happening.
Elderly Frank Morgan and his son Horace are wonders to work for, ranch bosses who pitch in at all tasks themselves in a style that shames the baronial Smith River country.
Mr. Mor. hardly stops a minute, sure gets a lot done for a man his age.
Because the war is still on, the Morgan lambing crew is short-handed and my mother views a couple of them as short in the head, too.
The kid herding the drop band,
the maternity ward of ewes,
has a saddle horse and he never gets off all day long outside of to eat lunch.
I fabulously come into wealth when Frank Morgan promises ten dollars to anybody who kills a coyote, Dad's rifleshot bowls one over, but the corpse can't be found.
Charlie said he didn't want the money as he couldn't produce the coyote, so Mr. Mor. gave the money to