insight pared

KNOWLEDGE SHARED

outdoor bold

To access Roland's weblog and column archives

 

 

Tip o' the Day

"How could someone do this," my friend asked.

I shook my head. I always struggle when confronted with conclusive evidence there are jerks among us. My friend's wife exhibited more eloquence by calling the unknown creeps, "booger-eating poop stains." Her passion surfaced when we discovered someone had ripped a log from a deteriorating Missouri Breaks homestead cabin to use for campfire wood.

The cabin itself was about ten-by-twenty, with low ceiling and a shallow-pitch sod roof. There were no remaining doors or windows. The remnants of a barn thrust against a flat sky a hundred yards to the east. Two collapsed dugouts, or root cellars beckoned from across a tiny grass-filled draw to the west.

More precisely, the abandoned homestead squatted on a bench some hundred yards back from the broad and muddy Missouri at a place called Greasewood Bottom. The bench is a hundred miles from our launch site a Fort Benton and fifty from our take-out boat ramp at Kipp's Park. The night before, we'd camped just upstream. Our friends spotted the ramshackle homestead while on an evening hike. So, shortly after our morning launch, and with their direction, we put into shore to explore what was certain to be a historic site. Then we dound the ripped-out, half-burned log.

I walked a short distance in the deep grass and found the fat-bodied remains of two fish. Their heads had been removed, but the entrails were still in place. What was left was at least 16-inches long. The big encircling red and black side dots said "char" to me: brook trout or dolly varden. I muttered a curse. Colleen was right; somewhere ahead of us floated "booger-eating poop stains."

You reckon such people even thought of the hours, days, weeks, months and years that men and women similar to them put into that homestead? Those settlers harbored end-of-the-rainbow dreams, too, just like you and me. They smiled with a good planting and laughed with plentiful harvests, slapped at mosquitoes whiile rolling an evening smoke, cured the river-bottom mud and shed tears during floods and fires and hail and drought. They worked hard and played but little. And their legacy of dreams and work and disappointments live on in the crumbling remains of that isolated homestead.

A time will come when its last evidence will melt away, returning to the soil from whence it came. But until then, our own lives can be enriched by contemplating their passage.

It is that opportunity for contemplation that thoughtless people steal. If each passing individual burned cabin lags from dilapidated homesteads--and left rotting fish for others to bury--soon nothing would be left. Then we could all revel in showing our kids faded photographs and brag about how good it was "back in the old days."

I have just finished The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou. Wow! It was wonderful! I was transported from my stateroom aboard a destroyer to the wilderness I roamed as a teenager. Your tales were well told, enlightening and dead on the money. The open ocean on a calm clear night is beautiful, but I'll never hear the hoarse bellow of a rutting bull. Driving a warship from the bridge into heavy seas and tailing green water is exhulting, but not nearly as much as stumbling across grizzly tracks that haven't begun to fill in. Thank you for sharing with me. My dad sent me the Thursday Great Falls Tribune, no matter where I am in the world for the last 13 years. I have always enjoyed your writing, but this book was special.

FAMILY ODYSSEY: SPANNING A CONTINENT

My kids cannot recollect life before television; their kids can't imagine how civilization existed before computers. I grew up with Buck Rogers comic strips depicting imaginary rocket ships; they saw pictures in real-time of humans walking on the moon.

My first memories are of a home without indoor plumbing or electricity. Schools of my early years were small, housing multiple grades in single rooms. Athletic facitilities were nearby farm fields where we kept the grass worn to dirt.

My father told of seeing his first automobile when he was eight years old. He also told of how, another time, he and his brothers and sisters leaped from their farm wagon to hide under a mesquite tree when their first airplane buzzed overhead.

His father saw the first railroad laid through Georgia, and his father--my great-grandfather--predated steamships.

His father--my great-great-grandpa Cheek--was 74 years old when his youngest son was born to his third wife. Our records show that my great-great-grandfather fought in the American Revolution. (Well, the records say he served alternate three-month hitches for four years, always in the same blockhouse "On the South Carolina Indian frontier." The records also show: "He was in no battles."

That means my great-great-grandfather was half-grown when Braddock and his redcoat army was destroyed by French and Indians in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. Civilization, as it was then known, consisted of a few settlements scattered along the Atlantic Seaboard. Beyond a few outlying farms was trackless hardwood forest, limitless plains and towering mountains.

Many years passed between Yorktown and when my great-great-grandfather died at age 93. His youngest son--my great-grandfather--was born during an age when American settlement was established east of the Mississippi, but only tenuously further west. True, a few hardy fur trappers pushed up the Missouri River and the government was busy establishing a meager military presence in the region; but it was surely wilderness further toward the setting sun. My great-grandfather died only a few decades later, but by then the first wagons had rolled into Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley to span a continent with settlement.

Interestingly, my great-great-grandmother applied for a Revolutionary War Widow's pension in 1850, receiving it until her death in 1860, during our Nation's runup to the Civil War. I've always regretted that the lady didn't live for at least a couple of more years, just to see if Abe Lincoln would've sent Revolutionary War Widow's pension payments to a South Carolina woman after Fort Sumter.

What was, was. But her grandson--my grandfather--fled reconstruction Georgia to settle on a lonesome homestead in Texas, where he carved a precarious livelihood from a brush-filled wilderness.

My father left those parched lands to follow earlier pioneers to an Oregon of rushing water and endless forests. There he made a living milling lumber from the country's limitless trees.

Those "endless" forests had largely disappeared when i left Oregon for Montana over four decades ago.

To me, Montana was the land of unfettered, untouched, untrammeled wilderness. Wild environments have, for my forefathers and mothers, been either sought-after or dwelled-in since the first Cheek stepped ashore in Virginia, when all America was wilderness from sea to shining sea. Perhaps unfettered landscapes are imprinted in our DNA. Maybe we simply prefer places where we can square our shoulders without bumping others on commuter trains. Perhaps we dislike rules or regimentation. Maybe we simply like to shout in exaltation without disturbing someone else's peace and tranquility.

Maybe, on the other hand, we've had to keep moving in order to stay one step ahead of the law. Whatever the reason, we've been, like many other Americans, a mobile family. We came from one ocean to dip toes into another, then washed back across half a continent to find a niche amid its furthest mountains.

But I must shed a tear for my great-great-grandchildren, for I wonder if they will have such opportunity.

 

 

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

Comments

Click Here

for detailed info about each of Roland's books

Read Reviews

Read their first chapters