Big Dreams (13 page)

M
ODOC COUNTY
was the last frontier in California, almost 3 million nearly empty acres tacked onto the far northeast corner of the state. The earth was so rocky, porous, and strewn with lava that only a tenth of it could be cultivated, although sagebrush grew lavishly and gave the local ranchers fits. They believed that it crowded out the bunchgrass that was supposed to nourish their cattle, so they burned it, drowned it in herbicides, or chopped it down.

A rancher in Modoc County could be a lonely man. He had to know how to control things, how to get around things. He had to value action. If some government ecology scientist-type person told him to quit shooting the ground squirrels that were tearing up his pastures, he had to walk on the dark side for a while and kill the scroungy bastards by stuffing some poisoned lettuce down their holes. It came out the same in the end.

Alturas, the county seat, was a town of about three thousand. It sat on the North Fork of the Pit River at an altitude of about 4,500 feet. It was tough, bare-knuckled, and not a little mean. In its rawest neighborhoods, it looked as though it had been the site of a colossal demolition derby whose promoters had skipped away without bothering to clean up the wreckage. All manner of metallic waste, from
mufflers to hubcaps, was slowly disintegrating on the perimeter of the Great Basin Desert.

An undercurrent of savagery seemed to swirl through the streets of the town. Almost every public phonebooth was trashed, the glass broken, the directories ripped apart, and the receivers yanked from their wires, as if the very idea of communication were somehow ridiculous on the frontier. You could feel the frustration of the many midnight calls that had never got answered, all the furious venting of steam that had followed in the wake of perennial misunderstanding.

Alturas was built on extremes. To live there, you needed a healthy dose of self-reliance. The climate was a deadweight on the notion of California as one big garden spot, a near match for Cheyenne, with the temperature in winter dropping at times to twenty below. You could count on just seventy-six frost-free days a year. The cold weather started in September, and the ground could still freeze hard in late spring.

Escape from Alturas was almost impossible. The Sierra Nevada and the southern Cascades cut it off from the rest of the state. When you couldn’t find something special in town, you went to Oregon to buy it, to Klamath Falls, more than a hundred miles away. Somebody itchy for adventure—a cowboy, say, who was sick of punching cows—thought nothing of highballing it to Reno on the spur of the moment and turning around to speed home the same night, a round-trip of some four hundred miles.

True Alturans didn’t mind the loneliness or the harsh weather. Their landscape satisfied them the way an ocean satisfies a sailor. They spoke readily of its beauty—a beauty all the more valued because most outsiders failed to see it. A true Alturan had a wide streak of pride, the hallmark of a survivor.

Basques had first come to Modoc County to tend sheep, as they had done in other regions of the state, and there were old Basque hotels and restaurants in most settled places. At a Basque restaurant one night, I had a long, haranguing talk with a rancher who’d been
running stock in Alturas for twenty-nine years. He and a pal had been making the rounds of bars, downing vodka since noon.

The rancher had icy blue eyes and a scar or two from barroom brawls. With each new vodka, he would lean over and say to me, enunciating the words precisely, “You have got to … get your ass … over the Warner Mountains … to Surprise Valley.”

Surprise Valley was his personal temple. He went there often for solace and to be even more isolated and alone.

“If you don’t do anything else here,” he’d say, “get your ass … to Surprise Valley. Just do it!”

The rancher had an honest affection for the natural world, but he despised those who drooled and gaped and were sentimental about it. He despised anything sentimental and hated people who painted rosy pictures of all God’s creatures, those Sierra Clubbers who stooped to protecting such lowlife animals as the coyote.

“They ought to see a young sheep that’s been torn apart!” he railed, stirring his vodka with a pinkie. “Or a colt with its legs and its bowels chewed up, left on the range to die!”

He believed that it was foolish to poison ground squirrels, though, because eagles and hawks ate them, and the poison spread through the food chain. He knew of a much better solution.

“We’ve got all these goddam deadbeats in town, why not put ’em to work? Give ’em all twenty-twos, pay ’em the minimum wage, and let ’em shoot the furry little sons-a-bitches.” He glared at me with those icy blue eyes. “Man
is
a killer by instinct, you know.”

Although Modoc County was one of only two California counties where the population had declined in the last decade, the rancher still felt put upon. The deadbeat newcomers were not true Alturans and didn’t understand a single principle of ranching. They lived in low-income housing units and worked at service-related jobs or merely collected food stamps and welfare benefits.

Sometimes the sense of being put upon got so bad for the rancher that he considered selling his land and leaving California altogether to start fresh in a Nevada town near Winnemucca that was still
western and wild, where the horses were broken properly, in the old style, and the cattle still had rights.

“Yes, sir, I might just move the whole operation to Denial,” I heard him say, but when I looked at my atlas later, I saw that he had meant
Denio
.

I
N THE MORNING
, I got my ass to Surprise Valley. It was a level expanse of ground shimmering with salt flats, lakes, streams, and some wavery sand dunes that leaped out and surprised you as you came down from the forested slopes of the Warner Mountains.

To the weary emigrants who had baptized it after a trek across the Nevada deserts, it had resembled an oasis. Their log cabins still stood in Cedarville, arranged in a semicircle like Conestoga wagons as a barrier against Indian attacks. The tillable land, a verdant strip about fifty miles wide, was all ranches and pastures now.

In a Cedarville park, I read an issue of the Modoc County Historical Society’s journal that was devoted to Surprise Valley. It carried excerpts from settlers’ writings and afforded a painfully honest account of nineteenth-century wilderness life that my rancher friend would have approved of.

It was good to remember that the Indians had some murder in them, that they hadn’t simply rolled over at the first approach of white men. So much harm was done to them collectively that histories sometimes glossed over the fury of certain tribes and how they had lashed out against settlers, even the innocents among them. They could put their fury to advantage, turning it into a psychological weapon that let them fight valiantly when they were outnumbered, as the Modoc did during the Modoc War of 1872–73.

The conflict had its origins in governmental stupidity. The United States had pushed the Modocs from their ancestral land in 1864 and forced them onto a reservation in Oregon, where they had to live next to their traditional enemies, the Klamaths. Trouble was bound to occur. A Modoc subchief, Kintpuash, killed a Klamath shaman and absconded from the reservation with fifty-three men and some women, children, and elders, fleeing to the lava beds by Tule Lake, northwest of Alturas.

Kintpuash was “Captain Jack” to the whites. He and his men used the rocks of the lava beds to build defensive walls. The ensuing battles were fierce and bloody. Although the Modocs had no real firepower, they held off more than a thousand federal soldiers for about six months before surrendering. Captain Jack was in hiding, but some of his men betrayed him, and he was caught and hanged.

The Modoc defeat came at a moment when the spiritual underpinnings of Indians everywhere in California were being destroyed.
One Modoc would tell later about how the war had cost him his faith. A tribal doctor, a visionary, had drawn a boundary around Captain Jack’s camp with a long cord painted red and had insisted that if the soldiers tried to cross it they would all die, but the soldiers did cross it, and the Modocs had died.

“This is the last time we will believe in doctors,” John Sconchin, another Modoc, would say. “We’ll ask them no more.”

The Modoc tribe had unraveled after its losing battle, and some members went back to Oregon while others wandered obliviously into Oklahoma.

A
FTER GETTING MY ASS TO SURPRISE VALLEY
, viewing a Drinker-Collins Duplex Respirator iron lung at the town museum, and eating too much roast lamb and drinking too much raspy red wine with ranchers and Basques, there wasn’t a lot to do in Alturas, except to stand on a corner and watch the fleet of beleaguered automobiles that were sure to disassemble in the desert someday. The cars seemed to be held together by the will of their drivers, whose faces, passing on parade, had a lean and hungry look, both sad and threatened, a record of abuses given and abuses received.

The word was that Alturas got lively and even madcap when the goose and duck hunters were around, but hunting season was a long way off.

So many drifters, the flotsam of the frontier. At the California State Employment Development Corporation, three clerks were shuffling paper in an antiseptic environment at odds with the very fabric of Alturas while they waited for a client, any client, to walk in. It happened to be me. I asked what kind of jobs were available in the county.

The head clerk had a deadpan manner. “Well, let’s see,” he said, peering down at some index cards and rifling through them. “We got two yardwork jobs tomorrow, three and four hours apiece. We
got a minimum-wage job pouring concrete for six hours. That’s about it.”

Another clerk yelled from his desk. “Hey, Ralph, you forgot about that construction job! Four to six months, putting back together an apartment building that collapsed.”

“So when somebody moves to Alturas, where do they work?” I asked.

“They don’t work,” Ralph said calmly. “They eat up their savings, and they go home or they go on welfare: We’ve never had any industry here but for a mill. It’s always been seasonal jobs, ranch jobs.”

“Nothing steady in the cattle business?”

He shook his head. “The ranchers are just starting to recoup from bad times. We had three big ranches go under last year. The banks wouldn’t carry them.”

The money budgeted for Modoc County’s general relief fund seldom lasted for an entire month, Ralph told me, but that wasn’t uncommon in rural California. Most counties were broke and couldn’t provide the public services that were mandated by the state. They were resentful about being held to account, too. People expected services, and when they brought their expectations to agencies where the door was locked, they sometimes got a little overheated and kicked at the door.

Every service in the county was stretched to its limits, from mental health to transportation, but Ralph seemed proud that at least the Alturas library was still open on occasion.

“Mount Shasta,” he said, “they just closed theirs.”

The other clerk yelled again, “Hey, Ralph! Tell him about Redding. Redding
is
booming!”

“That’s all subdivisions. Houses going up. Same thing in Anderson. All around there, north of Sacramento.”

I recalled the golf course in Fall River Mills and sketched a scenario for Ralph whereby second homes and golf links might transform the sagebrush. He rejected it with blithe disdain.

“Lot of miles between here and Fall River Mills,” he said and laughed. “But if it came to that, I guess we could build us a Modoc wall, like Captain Jack.”

Spoken like a true Alturan.

B
IRDS
. At the Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, a series of manmade sloughs, ponds, and canals outside Alturas, there were birds by the thousands, flocking, nesting, and flying about, creating with the flap of their wings the crackly sound of a tarpaulin rippling in a gust of wind.

All alone in the refuge, I looked toward an overcast sky and watched Canada geese take to the air. They rose awkwardly at first and then, higher up, acquired a graceful symmetry as they shaped themselves into a V and became a pattern of dark spots against the clouds.

In the ponds, ducks floated and bobbed, red-breasted mergansers, blue-winged teal, and a pair of ruddy ducks in mating plumage. The male’s beak was an extraordinary blue, all the fibers of pigmentation boiled down and concentrated in a little piece of bone.

Coots were everywhere, plain-feathered and acting dumb, seemingly the most plodding of waterfowl but maybe the most cunning, always foraging inoffensively, their heads pumping like cartoon characters, too ugly and banal to ever attract a shotgun shell.

The distant hills were a blackish purple. There were lush pastures and wispy grasses in light-colored tufts. The birds sang and sang, a dissonant chorus of trills, honks, and arpeggios. In my solitude, I saw what it must have been like to stand on the Modoc plateau before the settlers and the railroads came, when the Far North was still a virgin wilderness, its amplitude undiminished in any way.