Watching

Prologue

Scene [4]

Watching

Younger Farm, Provolt, OR
1982/06/06 09:00-10:00
    After another cup of coffee, Cathy resumed her look for Oreo.  The air was still cool from the night but the sun had already cooked off the dew from most of those south facing fields.  The Applegate valley runs generally east-west here at the farm.  Cyrus and Cathy had 172 acres on the north side of the valley.  All of it was tilted a bit, nothing perfectly flat, but Alfalfa can grow fine with a little grade to the field.  Alfalfa was their main crop.  They sold it locally to the horse, cattle, and dairy farmers nearby.  They grew a little corn for themselves and a few hogs, but the nine goats, they kept, didn’t need much special feed.  They’d eat almost anything, even the darn blackberry vines that grew everywhere.  And goat’s milk was prized by the yuppies moving into nearby Jacksonville lately.  They could get over a dollar a gallon.

    Cathy walked for half an hour to get to the top twenty acres near the ridge.  The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owned the majority of the forested land at the ridge and beyond.  On the backside of the ridge mostly pines grew, and was great for the logging companies.  Every thirty years or so, they could pull a lot of timber off the far side of the mountain.  The BLM maintained a series of rough roads used for fire access and periodically by the logging companies.  The roads to the farm fields came off that BLM road.

    On this side of the ridge, scrub oaks and open hillsides were the norm.  Their ‘Top 20’ was the first semi-flat area down a bit from the rocky and parched ridge itself.

    I hope you haven’t wondered over the ridge.  Too bad we haven’t put a fence up there.  Maybe next year.

    Crap.  Next year...  who am I kidding?  I don’t intend to be here next year.

    Hell, why wait?  I should just walk down to the highway and thumb my way to the coast today.

    I haven’t loved Cyrus for years.  At least not since Phil danced with me at the Grange two years ago.  Darn, why can’t Cyrus be more like Phil?  Phil has plans.  He thinks about the future... and he holds a woman the right way when he dances.

    Where in the dickens has that beast gone?  Plenty of grass around here.  And shade.  The sun gets hot after noon.

    Of course, while Cyrus was boozing with the boys, Phil paid me attention out by the bridge.  Yeah... attention.  Too bad the dance ended so soon.  We’d have done more than hold hands and rub noses.

    The predominant feature of the ridge from this side was a pair of large sandstone outcroppings at its lowest point.  There was a cleft between them only a couple feet wide, but it was snarled with brush, poison oak, and blackberry vines so thick that no man or sizeable animal could pass through it.  If you wanted to go over the ridge, you’d best go around to the east end where the sandstone submerged into the sandy dirt a little higher up.

    Cathy went to the farthest end of the field and made her way back along the upper edge.  Every minute or so she’d stop and listen for the tinkle of the bell hung around the goat’s neck.  She hadn’t heard anything but bird and bug sounds by the time she got to the foot of the Sandstone.  It was after 10:00.

* * *

    The faint tinkle from the goat’s bell and her almost continuous bleating became apparent as Cathy approached the cleft in the rock.

    “What happened, Oreo?  You get stuck in somewhere you can’t get out of?”

    “Bah.”

    You sure enough did.  “Hum... let me see.  How can I get to you?”

    “Bah.”

    Oreo was unhurt but standing in the only open spot between the sandstone walls.  Vines, poison Oak, and blackberries blocked the exits at both ends.

    “Bah.”

    What’d you do?  Walk out on that ledge and fall off?  “No, you jumped, didn’t you.”

    “Bah.”

    Cyrus was right.  You are dumb.

    “Bah.”

    Cathy crouched down and pushed her way under a big bow of green blackberries.  She had been doing this since she was a girl.  She and Burt built a huge fort under the berries behind their house when she was eight.

    After growing wild for thirty years, leaf fall each autumn builds up a spongy blanket underneath that is difficult for anything else to grow through.  The main canopy of branches, leaves, and fruit are suspended a couple of feet above on massive spiny stalks.

    I always had to go first.  Since I was so small I could wiggle under and break off all the big spines, so the other kids wouldn’t get stuck.  Cathy had always been proud of that ‘Path-finding’ she could do.

    If you know how, you can crawl your way under most of the vines to the open area where you’re stranded Oreo...  Just, uh, have to be mindful of the spines and go slowly.

    It took over ten minutes for Cathy to get there.

    “Bah.”

    “To keep you from wiggling around too much, I’ll have to cover your eyes with my coat to get you outa here though, Oreo.”

    “Bah, bah.”

    Two other eyes had found the goat that morning.  But with Cathy’s arrival, took greater interest in her.


Pages:      5
Words:    909