Site Fidelity Read online

  Site Fidelity

  Stories

  Claire Boyles

  For Matty,

  the reader I love best of all

  One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

  Rachel Carson

  Contents

  Ledgers

  Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars

  Early Warning Systems

  The Best Response to Fear

  Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012

  Man Camp

  Flood Stories

  Natural Resource Management

  Lost Gun, $1,000 Reward, No Questions

  Chickens

  Acknowledgments

  Ledgers

  WE LET THE DUST settle for a month or two after Pop had his stroke, and then we sold the family ranch all in one piece to a cattleman from Montrose, Henson, whose name Pop didn't recognize. I had been living on the Farallones, studying site fidelity of ashy storm-petrels, birds most people probably haven't heard of and might not ever. An ill-timed oil spill or other catastrophe on the central coast of California could wipe the whole species off the map. It was a plum research gig, every ornithologist's dream job. But I love my pop, so I gave it up and came home. That closing was the only time I've been happy that Pop lost his speech, because I didn't want him to say out loud how much he wished I'd taken an interest in the damn cows instead of the damn birds.

  Pop refused to let a subdivision be his last crop, so he gave Henson a good deal. We closed at the end of September. Henson signed the papers with rancher's hands, leathery and sun-weathered, just like Pop's. Henson is my age, plus a few years maybe—divorced, one young daughter—and I'm flat suspicious of the guy. How does anyone in their thirties come out of that recession with the kind of money it takes to buy a quarter section on the river, water rights attached, outside Gunnison?

  Pop's stroke stole a lot of things from him that I miss too, some more precious than his ability to manage cattle—verbs, for example, and with them, anything resembling sentences. Also the use of his entire right side and all our savings in medical bills, though that last resolved just fine when we sold the ranch. The worst is that he can't say my name, Norah. Instead, Pop calls me Vera. I've stopped bothering to correct him. Vera, my mother, died in a puddle of her own blood and placenta the day I was born, waiting for the ambulance that turned down County Road 68 instead of County Road 68½.

  Pop's not confused the way you'd think. He knows the difference between his dead wife and his living daughter. For the first month or so, he'd wince every time he said it, “Vera,” shake his head sadly, look down at his shoes—New Balance sneakers with therapeutic elastic laces, not the boots he wore his whole life. A baseball cap has replaced his Stetson. He's nearly unrecognizable. My friend Julie is his speech therapist, and she tells me that he still thinks Norah when he looks at me, it's just the signal gets lost in the aphasic fog that has settled somewhere between Pop's brain and his tongue. When he thinks-Norah-but-says-Vera, it sounds like “Vvvvveera.” He gets stuck on that first v sound, which, according to the manner of articulation chart Julie put on our fridge, is a labiodental fricative.

  “Sounds dirty,” I said to Pop. “Labiodental.” I adjusted the magnets so I could see the whole consonant chart—the nasals and the alveolars, the voiced and the voiceless.

  Pop laughed, and my heart fluttered a little, which I took as proof that it's not broken all the way. When Pop laughs, it feels like we're having a conversation instead of a series of Norah monologues, which are far less graceful than the stories Pop used to tell. There is no real prognosis for Pop, no clear number of months to live, no percentage of independence he'll regain. Pop appears at once fragile and strong, like an egg. Every morning when I tie his shoes I think, This might be the last time I tie his shoes, and also I wonder, How many more times will I have to tie his shoes?

  I've seen Henson exactly five times since he bought Pop's ranch. I know because I started a page in my ledger just for him. I keep track of a lot of things in my ledger, how often I've turned the compost over, various downy woodpecker sightings, the fact that there were maybe five thousand Gunnison sage grouse left in the entire world last spring. It's a habit I picked up from Pop, the same way I got my head for numbers and my love of Oreo cookies. On October 30, Henson and I nodded hello to each other in the Safeway. He was pushing one of those double-decker small carts instead of a family-sized one, and he was buying cornflakes and vanilla ice cream and other plain, sensible foods. On Christmas Eve, he showed up to church for the first and only time. I swear I caught the candlelight reflect off tears on his cheeks when we all sang “Silent Night,” but I can't be sure. By the time the deacons turned the sanctuary lights back on, Henson was gone. He rode a horse in the New Year's Eve parade, his saddle strung with tiny white twinkling lights, and he tipped his hat and smiled at me when he passed by.

  The other two times I saw Henson, he didn't see me. I was out birding, well hidden by willow and brush, silent, patient, on the public land that runs adjacent to the west side of our old ranch property, federally managed by the Bureau of Land Management. On March 24, I saw Henson cutting wire on the property line fence that separates our ranch from the BLM land. On April Fools' Day, about a hundred yards down the fence line, he did it again. I got pictures of that one. I went down and checked for new grazing leases, and Henson's name wasn't anywhere. BLM land belongs to all of us and none of us, all at the same time, and grazing it without paying fees is the same as stealing feed. Worse, he'll be sending cattle across Pop's and my secret Gunnison sage-grouse lek in the middle of breeding season, which is just as bad for those birds as a real estate development would have been.

  THE GUNNISON SAGE GROUSE have as much to do with the woman I am today as Pop does. In 2000, they became the first new species of bird to be officially recognized in the United States for over a hundred years. I was twelve years old. The whole town was talking about them. Part of our landscape. Part of our character. That kind of thing. I was doing all the ranch chores with Pop by that age, every day a chance to test my courage rounding up cattle, test my strength pulling wires taut on fences, test my stamina working every last hour of light in a day. I knew by the smile in Pop's eyes that he was proud of me, which is how I learned to be proud of myself. In my memory of Pop's voice, he is always saying, because he always was:

  Nice work, Norah.

  You keep after it, Norah.

  That's it, girl, well done.

  While we worked, Pop told me stories about his life, before me, on the ranch. My grandmother sucking the poison out of snakebite. My grandfather taking the waters at Waunita Hot Springs. The creamy sweetness of my mother's homemade ice cream. It comforted me to know that Pop and I had other people once. The stories let me blame time and bad luck for the missing members of my family—stop worrying we were alone because something was wrong with us.

  The sage grouse had lived on the ranch all along, Pop just hadn't known, none of us had, that these ones were threatened especially much. The first time I saw them we were out predawn, fixing the same fence I'd seen Henson cut. The morning was overcast, sprinkling rain. The sun rose but invisibly, behind the cloud cover, light fading in by degrees rather than streaming up in oranges and pinks from behind the east ridge. I heard their calls like bubbles popping—staccato air-sac percussions, saw the males strutting, virile. They were so full of themselves, so full of life. I knew I was witnessing something important and rare. I felt then, for the first time, the mix of emotions that fragile species have always evoked in me. Precious awe. A preemptive sadn
ess of loss. Anger and indignation at humanity's deep apathy. Surges of what must be a sort of maternal protectiveness.

  “We'll come back tomorrow,” Pop said, “and camp out here while we get a fence around this meadow. If we can keep it out of grazing, at least in the spring, we can help save these birds all on our own. We don't need to tell anyone they're here. Don't need a government handout to do the right thing. We just need to take care of our own.”

  We did care for them. We'd camp there for a week every year, counting the high males and females, recording the numbers of viewable copulations (not many), evidence of predator interference (coyote, owl, hawk, golden eagle). Pop would write it all down in his ledger.

  “It's not a diary,” he'd say gruffly, tousling my hair, when I'd tease him. “It's a ledger. Diaries are for feelings, and I'm not keepin' track of my feelings. I'm keepin' track of the facts.”

  Pop kept neat and orderly notes of daily events in a series of 99-cent black-and-white composition notebooks he'd pick up every year with my school supplies. He was almost famous for the way he could tell you he sold only 152 head of cattle in 1993, or that the Blue Mesa Dam generates 60,000 kilowatts of energy every year while the Crystal Dam only produces 28,000. These days, quantifiers are slippery for Pop and he drops them easily. He can't get his numbers straight at all. It's not a difference in his thinking, just his speech, but it changes everything about how people see him—even how I see him, which makes me ashamed of myself.

  Pop's ledgers are how I learned the difference between practical thinking and emotional thinking, the way lots of people who love one way of seeing things have contempt, or maybe fear, for the other. He used to mark my growth on the kitchen doorjamb every six months, copy it into his ledger. If I did that now, to him, I'm afraid I'd find he was shrinking, that the marks would run, gravity-fed, in the wrong direction. Pop writes grocery lists using his left hand since everything that used to be dominant in him is broken. It's like he's in kindergarten, the poor spelling, the shaky, uneven handwriting. Pop wants bananas, Grape-Nuts, and orange juice. He writes: Bababas. Ceral. Joos.

  There are boxes and boxes full of Pop's ledgers in the detached garage of the old Victorian we bought in downtown Gunnison. His notes from the lek over the past three seasons document a 55 percent drop in the high male population on our land. He never mentioned it before his stroke, and now he won't talk about it at all.

  “Pop,” I said, dropping the open ledgers on the pinewood table he built the first winter I was away at college, “what happened?”

  Pop looked at the ledgers and then at me, surprised, his face tensed, lined. He was my favorite storyteller. Now, he is barely interested in simple conversation.

  “Dunno,” he said, shrugging his left shoulder.

  I tried again. I don't know how much I'm supposed to adjust to this new, more limited Pop, how far I should allow him to recede. “Why so few birds? Is something wrong with the lek?”

  Pop was examining his pill bottle, counting his purple morphine pearls, trying to pry the lid off with the thumb of his one working hand. He wasn't listening, or he was trying to look like he wasn't listening.

  “Pop,” I said.

  He shrugged again, then lifted his left hand into the air, annoyed. “Dunno.”

  Conversations are hard for Pop, but they're hard work for me, too, so much relentless effort to connect, to relate, to love and to feel loved by him. I wanted to yell, to grab his shoulders and shake the news out of him, or at least shake him into being interested in me, in the sage grouse, in anything. But I can't do that. He's my pop, and I love him, and what good would it do exactly?

  “Fine,” I said. “Boring conversation anyway.”

  Pop glared at me, hummed a few bars of the Star Wars theme, and ran over my foot with his electric wheelchair as he rolled toward the bathroom.

  I DECIDED TO DRIVE out and ask Henson's permission to do the spring count myself, to try to get eyes on the lek. Henson was sitting alone on the porch swing, drinking from a can of Bud in a green foam cozy. A tiny pink bike, the training wheels bent so crooked they didn't sit flush with the ground, leaned against the porch steps, but there was no sign of a child. Henson is a tall man, broad-shouldered, but the way he had his back to the ribboned beauty of the sunset behind him, the way the house loomed dark, surrounding him, the way the porch spread out, empty, in front of him, he looked impossibly small to me. He took another swallow of beer, and I saw a pale strip of skin, tender-soft, right where a wedding band would be. For a fleeting minute, I felt sorrier for Henson than I did for myself.

  Henson stood up as I approached. He smiled, but it was guarded. “Norah,” he said, nodding a greeting.

  “Sorry to show up unannounced,” I said. “I didn't have a number.”

  “All right,” he said, motioning toward a plastic Adirondack chair. “Take a load off.”

  He reached into a small cooler and offered me a beer, which I took, even though I don't much care for beer. I heard an echo of Pop's advice: When you're trying to sweet-talk someone, Norah, you take what they offer you.

  He asked about Pop. I shrugged. “Dunno,” I said.

  We sat silently for an awkward minute, drinking beer.

  “Feels like you're here to ask me for something I'm not likely to give.” He looked at me directly. He had eyes like robin's eggs, blue speckled with brown. They softened the rough of the rest of him. “I've seen the sage grouse out there. I guess you probably want some kind of easement.”

  My heart sank a little. Not all ranchers are Pop's kind of rancher. Some find these birds obnoxious. Some refuse to pay grazing fees out of some misguided idea about their frontier heritage, about what the nation owes them. Some have organized, call themselves “sagebrush rebels.” They've threatened BLM agents at gunpoint. They've invaded National Wildlife Refuges. They've elected sheriffs all over the West who believe the Constitution gives them full rights to ignore federal and state laws. Even Pop, no friend of the feds, thought the sagebrush rebels were a dangerous fringe. If that's who Henson was, I already had my answer.

  I took a slow, relaxing breath before I answered him. “I do want an easement,” I said, “but I'll settle for access to the land. I'd like to just do a count.”

  Henson's brow was furrowed. He didn't answer right away. I heard the screech of an eagle and rifled through my bag for my binoculars. I'm never without my bag, my binoculars, my ledger. Sure enough, I spotted a bald perched in the familiar gnarled old cottonwoods that lined the riverbank.

  “Bald eagle,” I said. “Want to take a look?”

  Henson shook his head no with a sort of bemused expression, like he was indulging a child. It was the same with Pop, who supported birding as a hobby but could not understand it as a dead fucking serious science career.

  “They're not exactly rare anymore,” he said. “I've been watching that one for days now.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Old news, bald eagles.”

  “Yeah, you won,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your people. Environmentalists,” he said.

  I lowered my binoculars, sat back down. “My people owned this ranch for sixty years. We're not so different from you.”

  Henson sniffed, looked away. He was right about the eagles. They've recovered. There was a time I found that hopeful, some sort of proof that we humans could still find our environmental emergency brake, as if we'd finally felt the loss of the passenger pigeon, of the Carolina parakeet, of the Labrador duck, of the thirty pages of birds under the Wikipedia category “Extinct Birds of North America,” which you don't have to be an expert to google. But not anymore. I'm older and maybe wiser and I know better now. We only saved the bald eagles because we want to see ourselves in them—they are our national symbol, after all, which makes them exceptional in the same way we believe ourselves to be exceptional, the default lens for our worldview.
Ordinary birds, like the Gunnison sage grouse, we shrug and let disappear. Which is more proof, if I needed more, that we are not, that we have never been, all in this together.

  “Land didn't come with an easement.” The sunset was fading. Henson turned on the porch light. “Which tells me your dad knew better than to invite the government up here, give up good grazing for the sake of some ridiculous birds.”

  “Pop left that land alone because it was the right thing to do,” I said. “He loves those birds.”

  Henson snorted. “He was dodging the government, or I'll eat my hat. No easement, no mandate. Old ranchers are all the same. You know that. Or you should.”

  I knocked my empty beer can over when I stood up to leave.

  “I'm sorry. I don't really want to say no to you, Norah,” Henson said. The apology seemed sincere. “I've put all I have into this place. I won't risk any limited use.”

  Tears prickled the back of my eyes as I drove back toward Gunnison, because Henson was right, I knew better about Pop. He only saved the birds to indulge me. The minute I left him, he let them go.

  SITE FIDELITY IS A beautiful, romantic idea, but it's also dangerous. The Blue Mesa Reservoir filled in 1965, and the following spring a few hundred Gunnison sage grouse descended on the reservoir ice in March, right above where their lek had been, slipping around and falling and failing to mate. The year after, half as many returned. The next year, even fewer, and so on until there were none. They didn't move to other leks, didn't find solid ground on the shore. The entire family just died out, pining for their land.

  It's one of the saddest stories I've ever heard, and the first time I heard it, I asked Pop for the same thing I wanted from Henson, to get a conservation easement on the ranch, to give the birds some official, enduring government protection.

  “We murdered almost all of these birds before we even knew they existed,” I said. “Building those dams. We have to do something.”