Inkwell Journal

Age

SID GUSTAFSON

As he aged I would pick him up and drive him around the countryside to wherever he wished—backroads, backwaters of the Montana we once traveled together. He would make me stop if we spotted action along the road, say we happened upon someone digging postholes or moving cattle horseback. And of course we always pulled over if someone looked like they needed help. The stop often became long and talkative, and frequently we ended up at the person’s home on what was left of the 21^st century prairie. Eating, drinking coffee, exploring the past, lost lives and almost-lost memories, rural Montana memories. Exploring our own lives, really, the leftovers at least. This daily travel became his interest, such goings on beyond the pale of an electronic world. His adventures soon became mine.

And he was my father.

I, having failed the world I set out to conquer, became his caretaker at the turn of the century. My life had broken down and the family—my sister mostly—appointed me his caretaker. She took over my maligned financial and legal affairs freeing me to take care of him, covering my debts, cleaning up the mess I’d made of my life, a life I’d become quite tired of, a life too bleary to talk about here. It is the eldest daughter who does such things, takes care of the aging parent, the strayed brother—in Montana it is anyway. I was more than happy to oblige her request to be his keeper. In my youth my father and I had seldom seen eye to eye. I thought being his constant companion might be a good and even necessary opportunity to excavate the experiences of the man who produced me. Maybe it would help me merge with the world with which I’d become such a stranger.

Each day we retooled the country of my childhood, the countryside of his prime. We drove a long old boat of a Caddy, an ancient Coupe deVille that traveled too low for our needs. I don’t remember its year, but the radio had a ‘Wonder Bar’ that automatically found Canadian AM stations that played real music. I had to maintain a good supply of chewing gum in the jockey box to repair gas tank leaks caused by the rocky roads we preferred. Fresh-chewed Juicy Fruit worked best.

In his day Dad was a veterinarian, the only veterinarian around. We’d traveled this landscape together many years before and both knew it well, he of course better than I. And in these new travels we were able to—for once, at last—think together. I would see something, a broke down shed or barn, and he, he would reminisce about the building—how a heifer had jumped through its window. A window to small to seem possible for her to escape through. A window she indeed somehow scrambled through after she had arisen from a caesarian surgery he’d performed. I, silent witness to this all back then as his meticulous and underappreciated assistant, remained silent once again as he recapitulated it all for me as if I hadn’t been there with him.

I remember how the farmer had no horse to go get the heifer, and how my father (and I) lured the cow back into the barnyard with her calf, preying on the mothering instincts we knew would soon overcome her fear, her fear of surgery; a normal, even practical, fear for a young cow. Now only the barn remains, its window still small and impossible. The house where we were served hot apple pie, homemade cheese, and cocoa afterwards is toppled. A tilted lonely woodstove remains rising above the rubble it once heated. With the right ears you can hear it humming better times in the wind, its music a pleasant remnant of that meal. Farmer gone, livestock gone, everyone gone but the wind that sweeps time around the world.

On we’d go, past another memory, another whisk of recollected landscape—the wind urging us on as ever. Even when the land and people get worn out and old, it knows no rest. Not here.

I like driving my father thus, mainly because he allows me to dream freely. Recent others we’ll not mention here have not been so kind. These days he never chastises me for my thoughts or dreams, and I still cling to a hope that someday I might begin my life over. A hope he doesn’t dispute or criticize. This is a different situation than when I was his child, when he in his all-knowing stance that comes upon fathers of teenage children, told me repeatedly what would be best for me, for my life. But he is over that now and—nearly over his own life—doesn’t tell me anymore what he thought or what he knew to be best for me. He gave that up. Finally. And it pleases me immensely. Every mile a different dream.

Of course back then I never followed his advice. I never became the banker he suggested I become, nor the cattle buyer. No, against his advice I became a musician. Jazz. I still think my failure is at least a noble failure, somehow better than my father’s unrewarded success. Yes, music was perhaps a mistake, and in a way it was a huge mistake, but after all, it eventually landed me here, where I’m sure I presently belong, driving him over the stouthearted life I tried to create for myself, but never could, not blowing smoke through a saxophone. No, time took care of that life, time and space and some other things I don’t wish to mention. We do this peregrination routine most every day. My sister has made arrangements for purchasing gas and the only rule was that neither of us drink alcohol or take drugs, pastimes in which we had both become quite accomplished. One day we came over a rise. In the middle of a bleak landscape, a place where shortgrass prairie had somehow missed the plow, an old cowboy was fixing fence. He led a horse with the rein tucked in his back pocket. The horse faithfully followed. Each time the cowboy stopped to mend the fence the horse grazed the last of the summer dried grass. The man seemed surprised we stopped. He later remarked it didn’t happen often. It was one of those stops I must tell you about.

—

“Hello,” the cowboy says.

“Lo,” my father responds as he struggles out of the deep leather seat, grabbing onto the door and tugging himself up into the fresh air. He manages his left elbow to the roof and levers himself upright, wavering a bit before catching his breath and moving away from the mufflerless rig. I shut down the engine and a welcome silence delivers us both from the car. The horse pricks his ears, he too, amazed we stopped. “Need any help?” my dad asks.

“Help?” the last rancher in the county asks. He looks to me as if I might be in charge of my decrepit father’s words, as if my aging dad couldn’t help if he tried.

“He wants to talk, that’s all,” I offer, throwing an arm in the air, as if to send my father his way. My dad hobbles across the barrow pit, a precarious effort in the wind.

Ol’ dad did pretty good physically until he was 80, when the real physical wasting began. Each month he gets thinner and drier. I, alone with him, witness it all. Despite the progression of this frailty, he uses the wind to balance rather than let it hinder, one thing a lifetime spent in this blow allows. I wander to the other side of the road and do some stretching exercises while my father does his old-timey thing with the cowboy. It used to embarrass me, his forthrightness with strangers, but now at his age I find his practice of conviviality a fine thing for him to do. It keeps his mind sharp. It helps anyway. Others his age, old cronies we stop to visit regularly, rot in their sofas ensconced in the smell of old age, piss and sour milk. Forays in the wind, however ill-conceived, keep my father from smelling that way. And his thinking, his thinking is clearer than theirs. This roadwork keeps it so.

The Sweetgrass Hills are to the north, the near north. Did I tell you the wind here magnifies mountains as well as life? We are somewhere north of Galata, MT, a squalid ghost town along the HiLine. Most of the country is farmed. No one, hardly anyone, unlike the good ol’ days of the 20^th century, keeps cows anymore. The old cowhand my father approaches is an exception, despite no cows being in sight. If he doesn’t really have cattle, at least he’s still out pretending, and I can relate to that. Dad and I seldom stop to visit farmers that solely farm. We tried, but they did not cotton to my old man snooping into their grain business. That turned out okay though, because dad never liked monocultures. A veterinarian wouldn’t, you know. That and he can’t fight anymore, not like he used to when he drank.

I gaze through the wind to the Hills, sacred Hills to the Indians, and today it is apparent why. They are green and blue and silver. Their diversity floats above a mirage of waviness beyond the rolling dirt of farmland, jewels of wilderness. Three hills—mountains by any standards other than Montana’s—where cattle and elk and deer and swift foxes abound, unlike the wasteland we now find ourselves upon, wasteland but for the unfarmable coulee that the cowboy fences.

A wire is down, broken, and my dad wobbles along the fenceline to gather the broken end from the dirt. The cowboy retrieves the other end and they lean toward each other trying to bridge the gap the broken wire has left. They do not talk, but strenuously attend to the mending task at hand. My Dad amazes me. He deliberately wraps a piece of splicing wire to his end while the cowboy retrieves the fence stretcher from the horse. Cowboy hooks the stretcher to his wire about the time my dad has the extension connected to his. The cowboy opens the clamp, my father drops the added wire in, and the ratcheting begins. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Two ends come together as the wire slowly lifts its length out of the grass and dirt that has imprisoned it. When taut enough to hold cattle, my dad weaves a splice and the cowboy pops the stretcher off. A few staples pounded into the weakened fencepost wood. A mended fence.

The rancher sights down the fenceline. “Necessary evil,” he says. He wiggles an aging post. The rusted wire creaks and moans, but their splice holds true.

I look to the sun balancing in the southern sky, not quite to the top of the day. “What time is it?” I ask. The cowboy looks at me. Expressionless he looks. “The time, you know,” I gesture to my wrist and then to the sun.

“Time?” he asks. “I don’t believe in time.”

My dad chuckles and starts walking down the barrow pit along the fence. The cowboy mounts and rides on the inside of the fence. And I, I hop in the deVille and drag slowly down the road, get ahead a ways to stop and wait and look and dream myself another life. Fall quibbles with summer, a dulcet air frolics about, a clean crispness to the breeze. The arcing sun chafes the periwinkle blue sky. I return my gaze at the hills as the two fencers approach, marionettes in the rear view mirror. I can see them talk and gesture, my hobbling dad afoot, the cowboy atop his horse, pointing to the sky, to the earth, nodding in a communal knowing of the land, how it was. They catch up. I check on my father. Is he winded? No, not terminally anyway. We repeat this to and fro process. Occasionally they stop and mend, but it seems after awhile they just walk and talk, the fence is good enough. Secure my father is in good hands, I drive way ahead. Next time I look back dad is riding the horse! Did I tell you he’s a cowboy?

The next spurt I come upon a missile silo cordoned off in a wheat field that borders the last shortgrass prairie. It is surrounded by a ten-foot-high cyclone fence with coils of kill wire along the top. I step out to inspect the eyesore. Yellow and red warnings everywhere. The missiles went in when I was little. Nuclear warheads. As far as I know, one still has a home here. We all three eventually meet at the edge of the missile site.

“What do you think will happen if we were to touch the wires?” the rancher asks in abeyance of all the nasty warnings. He speaks to neither me nor my father in particular, but more to the wind, his most constant companion.

The wind answers with a little dust devil as we three contemplate the signs about trespassing. Government Property it says. Keep Out. Stay Away! DANGER.

“It used to be my land,” Ike says. My dad introduced me earlier to him as Ike, a patriotic name I thought.

“Nice fence,” I say as I look up to the gyration of razor blades. The two look at me like I’m a child. My father struggles down from the horse.

Suddenly he limps to the nuclear fence and begins clipping the wires with his fencing tool. It takes all of his strength and he is only able to clip through a few.

“Enough,” I say. Being the well-behaved obedient father he is, as I once was as his son, he stops.

Stranded with nothing more to do, Ike invites us to his house. He turns his horse loose in the field where they just fixed the fence. He throws his saddle in our spacious dust-riddled trunk and we detour around the hydrogen bomb launch site to the old ranch house. He makes cowboy coffee. About the time we start sipping the brew an Air Force surveillance van pulls in the yard with its gumball flashing. A Military Policeman enters unannounced and asks us, “Who cut the hole in the missile fence?”

No one speaks but the wind. He storms out and brings back two baby-faced airmen. They handcuff us all three. Dad sneaks me a smile, a genuine leer with twinkle in his eye I’d not notice sparkle recently. They lead us outside and put us in their vehicle and drive us to Great Falls. A nice trip after I convinced them, because of age, to let Ike and dad be handcuffed with their hands in front (and, of course, myself as well as long as they had the keys out). Did I tell you I was a sweet talker in my sax days? Just wasn’t able to sugarcoat my life like I had originally intended, that’s all.

The trouble gets a little taller when they strip search us and put us in jail at Malmstrom Air Force Base. I finagle a phone call to my sister who lives in town. Did I tell you she’s a lawyer?

She springs us after a few hours. By the time we are released it’s dark outside.

“Were you drinking?” she asks.

“No,” I say. My father nods that I am honest, his eyes by now twinkling like quasars.

Sis drives us back across midnight Montana to our car parked at Ike’s ranch and drops us off in the middle of nowhere where we belong. We stand outside and watch her taillights fade into the nothingness of the Big Open. We look up. My dad takes us through the stars. Deneb, Vega, and Altair highlight the Milky Way.

“Pathway of souls,” he says, waving his frail arm across the universe.

We stay overnight.

The wind blows.

Ike lives alone, all hat and no cattle.

The next morning we drive south after the sun rises.

INKWELL Magazine
Manhattanville College
2900 Purchase Street
Purchase, NY 10577
Phone: 914-323-7239
Email: inkwell@mville.edu