I found my first bicycle in a ravine filled with other trash when I was ten. It was a rusted blue color, a Montgomery Ward bicycle missing both wheels and tires. The chain was fused, welded by rust into a tangle of links, the sculpture of a frozen snake in agony. “I can fix this,” I told my grandfather from the bottom of the ravine. Around me was the discarded flotsam of a society that he abhorred. Because of his world-view our family was slow to accumulate these things of the twentieth century and the electricity to run them! Agüelo which means grandfather in the Judea-Spanish (Ladino) that our family of crypto-Jews spoke, was smoking a cigarette of harsh tobacco hand rolled in coarse paper. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and carefully ground the ash he had shaken from its tip into the red earth. He pushed his chapao back on his head and pointed with his thumb at two saddled horses we had in the truck behind him. “Why,” he asked. “would anyone kill their legs to give their ass a ride when we have horses with us?” Indeed!
Had it not been for an afternoon temperature of 40, the 20 mph tail wind blowing out of the canyons of Glacier NP, could have pushed me at least halfway across Montana. I watched in envy as last summers tumbleweed and tumble mustard rolled across the prairie. During other wind events I'd experienced on this tour, like when I was crossing the wheat fields of Washington, I had given some thought to designing a sail to take advantage of a tail wind. But I know nothing about sails and even less about sailing. But I do know a little bit about the instability of two-wheeled vehicles at high speeds. So, it might save some brain power wasted in designing a sail and simply throw a grappling hook at the rear of a passing semi and hope for the best! But given all of the givens it is probably more prudent to get my bicycle re-tuned and return to this point next summer and pedal east. But there is something to be said about my idea especially if there is as much up on the short-grass prairie, east of the Rockies, as there seems to be in the wheat fields of Washington.
Montana looks larger than it is looking down at it from the east edge of the Rockies. Instead of being the fourth largest state what I can see could represent the remaining landscape that circles the rest of the earth; a broad band of rolling flat making Montana the largest state and largest land mass. In the mountains, above, there are trees, cascading rivers, steep rocky slopes on both sides of narrow canyons and then, like stepping out of a narrow hallway onto a large field, you ride right into the Great Plains or what some pioneers crossing this expanse named it: the Great American Desert. Less than a hundred miles north of the point that Highway 2 exits the mountains is Canada. Montana is the northern extent of the short grass prairie in the U.S. But the flatness goes north, way into Canada, past the curvature of the earth.
The rolling hills of the prairie seem boring to casual observation but here, in the grasslands and hidden draws, there is a broad diversity of life. Indeed this ecosystem has significantly more diversity than do the Lodgepole forests that carpet the steep mountain sides above it. The Rockies have a habit of ending abruptly all along their eastern flanks until you reach east-central New Mexico. There the Rockies end in the Llano Estacado, a broken country of rough hills, rocky ledges, broad mesas of piñon and juniper, sagebrush, grasses and forbs.
This place is also highly diverse when unmolested. The Llano, instead of being located on the prairie, could and should instead be located inside of the mountains that ring the Colorado Plateau. There it would blend in to the fractured lands of narrow canyons, broad mesas, and even the flat-earth part of the Plateau; the shale and volcanic landscapes of the Plateau. The Plateau is likewise a highly diverse landscape but is in serious peril from unmitigated over-use exacerbated by a drying trend well into its fifth decade.
In a car driving across the wide spaces of our globe: the short-grass prairie, the Great Basin, central/eastern Washington state, visiting the Serengeti, or watching a documentary about Mongolia, it is easy to think that there is a whole lot of flat going on across the planet. It isn't hard to imagine how the flat-earth thinkers got to their belief. I could have bought into this idea when I was a child. The broad mesas of the four-corners were generally flat. And the blue shale seemed to stretch endlessly from the toe of Sleeping Ute Mountain well past Shiprock to the south. Crossing east-central Utah, on the old highway between Crescent Junction and Price, the land between the escarpment of the Book Cliffs and the red rocks is likewise endless.
The Colorado Plateau is the confluence of sedimentary rock leaping into the sky to form a mesa edge, layers of shale deposited in deep primordial seas, the basalt and lava flows of long-extinct volcanic activity, and a conspiracy of wind, water, and time that work slowly on the mountains that ring the Plateau to flatten them.
This where I grew up: riding after cattle in the valleys of the San Juan mountains, chasing wild horses with my grandfather in the deepest canyons of Mesa Verde or the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Reservation, or exploring the flat red earth of piñon covered mesas. Agüelo was a hard man to the rest of the world. He was a man made even harder by his stubborn reluctance to let the twentieth century into his or our family's life, a man made hard by his resistance to government, change, and people in general. To me agüelo was the model of the love a grandfather should show his grandchildren.
He and I, as his quiet saddle partner, rode quite a bit of the heart of the Colorado Plateau; both the mountains and the arid lands common to the province. He was a livestock man who raised sheep and cattle and grazed them in the summer on the high pastures of the San Juan mountains managed by the USFS. Agüelo and the employees of the Forest Service—the agency that John Nichols named “the pendejo factory (means pubic hair or congenital dumb-ass, your choice) in The Milagro Bean Field War— had a relationship built on fear of Agüelo and their big hammer: regulatory intimidation and distrust and disdain on my grandfathers part. He finally sold his grazing permits after the USFS issued him a “trespass” for putting out to few cattle.
My grandfather said the range couldn’t support full numbers and only turned out about half. The USFS “specialist” told him (my agüelo) that he didn't have the data nor the right to make that decision. I remember my grandfather standing, staring at the ranger who after a few uncomfortable and silent minutes lowered his head and said: “I guess that's all. If you'll excuse me I have other work to do.”
That was the last season we grazed on public lands. Agüelo said we couldn't make money grazing forest lands for several reasons. Our fellow grazers on the allotment wouldn't provide the day-to-day herding needed to prevent unhealthy concentrations of livestock on stream-banks or fragile soils, wouldn't fix fences or repair water holes, and frequently turned out more cattle than they were permitted to. And last that the FS employees weren’t managing a resource but were managing a process built to serve the illusion of preserving custom and culture All of this added up to costs to us that negated any profit made even though grazing permits were sold at significantly less than fair market value.
I wonder what my agüelo would have thought about the continuing issues on public lands. He would have said something like: “we're pissing into our own cup of coffee and can't admit it.” He would also have said:” . . .time to pull the cows off. If we don't it's like you taking the principle out of your savings account to spend today and going broke collecting the interest tomorrow.”
And I wonder what he might have said about the short grass prairie; a landscape that I don't think he ever saw. But I know had he ridden his horse into the prairie from the Rocky Mountains he would have gone into the Tribal headquarters of the Blackfoot Indians and before very long he and the elders would have been in a coffee shop swapping stories about another century.
