In olden time, sailors navigated by staring up at the stars; some still do. Similarly, many folks help chart a life course simply by observing others.
It would seem that if we’re fortunate and remain watchful, we meet people who—just by an example they set—can steer us toward a safe port in a wise manner. For me, one such guide was an old rancher in Northern California named Clifford.
The day we met came not long after I’d been evicted from a cabin near Mendocino. That bungalow was far out in the woods and plunging into collapse before I rebuilt it. Grateful for my remodel, its owner let me dwell there for free. But then he got divorced. And his Ex announced my deal was kaput, ‘cos she planned to boost her income by renting out my fixed-up cabin—for more than I could ever afford.
During that period, I led a perilous, hand-to-mouth existence. I worked as a freelance reporter seeking to build my rep by covering resource use, ecology, outdoor sports and adventure. I fantasized that sharing such stories would be my most effective way to build a career while helping to heal the world.
But then that Ex’s chilly reckoning provided me with a swift kick in the pants. It made one fact obvious: at my age (early 30s), I should aim myself at a more lucrative career, not keep limping along, year after year, on this shaky journalistic crusade. Yet, even in the face of that perception, I continued to trek down the exact same path. Seeking to tell (and sell) stories was all I’d ever wanted to do—no other option looked like a decent fit for me.
RED ROVER, COME OVER
I’d long used a hands-on approach to addressing my preferred topics. Truth be told, at heart I was a “greenie.” Still, if I never grasped how resource use appeared to those who labored within the rural industries, my stories would lack genuine perspective. So, I pursued jobs in these fields.
To study fisheries, I worked on river restoration projects and as a “puller” on a salmon boat. To research timber, I cleared brush and whacked limbs for a gyppo logger (a “gyppo” is a small, independent operator). For ranching, I joined round-ups to gather stock in from the hills then performed castration, dehorning and branding on the critters. Plus, I tried to handle chores even grubbier, if you can imagine it.
After my involvement with all this activity, I found myself better able to communicate with my sources. Also, I was never able to look at a strip of lox, a board, or a steak again in quite in the same way.
To underscore this, allow me to point out that if all you know of ranch life is based on what you’ve glimpsed in the movies, I need to say, not much is like that. There’s very little of strutting about in a freshly ironed, pearl-button shirt, or galloping off into the sunset. (But galloping into a sunrise? Well, sure, if you find out somebody has left a gate open or a fence got knocked over last night.)
That said, I did discover romance in some parts of ranching, such as the breeding and training of savvy and energetic working dogs, and the great history of such pooches in ag sectors like the Anderson Valley. It’s one reason why I began to dream about moving there, to do more research on the topic.
The fact I had possessed no funds to pay for a move made it challenging. (Understatement, there.)
A MOVE ONTO DOTTIE’S SPOT
Clifford and his wife Joyce were fixing up a cabin themselves—a small, clapboard unit near the entrance to their ranch. Another rancher named Floyd tipped me that I ought to speak to them, right after I’d helped him “tag” his sheep one day. (Tagging is one of the grubbiest of all chores; don’t ask, you won’t really care to know.)
I clearly explained my precarious position to Cliff and Joyce. Told them I’d do chores at their place in exchange for lodging. They glanced at each other, seemed to mutely confer, then told me ‘yes.’ (Long-married couples can display a keen kind of empathic/telepathic capability, true?)
Soon I discovered why they’d been prepping that cabin for a woman named Dottie, and also found out why she’d be unable to move into it.
A true Valley character, Dottie had arrived toward the end of the Great Depression, by riding the rails Westward with her hobo hubby. The pair invented jobs for themselves by slicing redwood logs into thick planks, then splitting those into “grape-stakes”—rough poles used to make ranch fences in the region.
However, after her partner up and died, Dottie couldn’t coax anyone to work the other end of her “misery whip”—a hand-operated crosscut saw used to turn out the planks. So, she moved on and became a rural mail carrier, under contract to the post office.
For years, Dottie thrashed an old VW bug by roaming all over the dirt backroads of Mendocino County. In her unstinting, gregarious and generous style, she decided her mission ought to mean a bunch more than just stuffing letters, packages, catalogs, or postcards into mailboxes. So, she also agreed to pick up medicines, groceries, gifts, tools and tractor parts for folks, as well as visit and comfort the rural elderly and ill on her own hook, and—most especially—deliver as many steaming liters of hot local gossip as she could manage to tote.
As a result, Dottie ended up a beloved citizen, with a cohort of best buddies and fans scattered all over the county. However, her careening career came to a (literal) screeching halt the day she sought to make a left turn into the lot at The Oaks Café in Yorkville, and promptly got T-boned by an oncoming car that she’d never seen. This tough ol’ bird did survive her crash, but she faced a long hospital stay followed by many months in a nursing home.
GIVE WHAT YOU CAN, GET WHAT YOU MUST
Her history, plus all that Cliff and Joyce did to get Dottie comfortably situated again, were my initial clues about the Valley’s traditional ranching culture. At its core, mutual interest seemed to score higher than self-interest. Thus, the more you gave away, the more you seemed to receive. Not merely in terms of stuff, but in terms of energy and regard.
Naturally, there was a bottom line; any exchange needed to appear equitable when cash was involved. If a cheating attempt seemed to occur, anger and social judgment lay demonstrably close to hand, looked easy to seize, and subsequently proved difficult to reduce. That far-flung Valley community had quite a l-o-n-g memory. And as it was inland, so it was all the way out to the coast.
But a reckoning of value at a far deeper level endured, and sometimes it even included forgiveness. You ranked high in regional esteem if you came across as not just fair, but generous. If you couldn’t achieve this impression by loaning equipment or sharing possessions, you were still admired if you substituted a bit of time, effort, hospitality or kindness. Proving any competence at tough, hands-on chores was a major plus, particularly if you demonstrated that skill for a neighbor’s benefit.
Over the 18 months I lived there—as well as during the 40-plus years when I returned rather often to visit the place—I came to see that in the Valley your most prized possession had to remain your reputation. Always, and in all ways.
Amongst these local apostles who mutely preached the creed by the way in which they lived, none seemed to stand as a better servant or savant of it than good ol’ Clifford. Which proved so fortunate—I’d lucked into a catbird seat.
THE WAY OF THE CARETAKER
I began investing in his ranch’s well-being by yanking a brick fireplace out of the main house to install a more efficient wood-burning stove. I followed up by constructing an equipment shed in Clifford’s famous tomato garden. Meantime, he and Joyce shared with me many home-cooked meals, long chats, and rounds of cocktails.
I’d apprenticed on chainsaws with those gyppos, but Clifford proved an absolute wizard of a tutor on saws, showing me how to fine-tune each aspect of their motors, bars, chains, fuel, tunes and operations. And once that man commenced to “making wood,” the chips truly flew. Nobody was better at dissecting a huge downed oak in an efficient and methodical way. I learned more at each outing simply by watching and trying to fit myself snugly into his scheme.
Finally, we reached a point where we could pull on earmuffs, work gloves and chaps and run at such tasks for hours, cutting on opposite sides of fallen trees, communicating wholly by glances and hand gestures. Once we had a log down in big rounds, there followed a bout with hand mauls and wedges, and/or a hydraulic splitter. Stove-ready wood—only awaiting a period of curing—soon grew heaped up in high mounds.
Which was fortunate, since Clifford loved not only seeing his own woodshed stuffed up to the rafters, but also handing out some heaps of our labor to locals in need.
MISTER SURE SHOT
When I arrived in the Valley, I had good experience as an angler but hadn’t done much hunting. Clifford kindly took me under his wing; that’s why I’ve got a couple dozen antler racks hanging in my garage right now. I plan to make them into something, someday. Probably, knife handles and coat buttons…
His first big lesson was simply how to see game in the woods. Now, it seems like a predictably dim error, but when I first hiked out in search of deer, I kept striving to see a whole deer. Clifford taught me that, no, one must develop a keen eye for even the smallest deer parts. That Y-shaped twig out in the brush? Actually, the tip of an antler. The black stone you see atop a boulder? The nose of a deer lying down—and hiding—behind it. A small, spade-shaped thing that flicks occasionally isn’t a leaf quivering in an upcanyon breeze. It’s a tattletale, a giveaway, that some big blacktail buck has thrust himself into a pool of deep shade to render his overall shape almost undetectable.
His most important lesson was stillness. Clifford was a master at achieving the supple immobility (not a stiff freezing) required before you ought to squeeze a trigger. This means shrugging off the heavy breathing and pounding heart and shaking limbs of a rank greenhorn’s “buck fever.” Instead, one needed to calm every nerve, steady the crosshairs, and not take a shot till you were sure you could make it count.
As a result—although his rifle of choice was a heavily worn, old-school Savage .300—whenever Clifford hunted, a second shot was rarely required.
And, naturally, him being him, the final part of any successful hunt was seizing an opening to give away some venison, even the more valuable parts, such as the backstraps.
TIME CLOMPS ON, CLAD IN HEAVY BOOTS
Clifford embodied a simple principle: the longer a man stays vigorous and active, the longer he can keep on being active and vigorous! But death and decrepitude creep up on us all, and eventually, these insidious forces snared this stout fellow, too. Yet he remained brave, stoic and humorous over the long period he had to endure its relentless assault.
Over the course of all the decades during which I came to visit, we transitioned from Clifford awarding me a box of his homegrown tomatoes surmounted by a sack of pears, to a situation where I cooked meals and served him food while he sat in his bathrobe on an easy chair over by the warm stove. We shifted from breaking a good sweat out on the hillsides together as we “made wood,” to just watching repeat after repeat of old “Gunsmoke” shows on a big screen TV in his living room.
But I’d seen how tender and kind and caring Clifford had been to his wife Joyce when she began a precipitant decline—and right then I’d vowed to show him the same sort of treatment should he ever need it. And during that period, I began to see that he did.
A parade of days further on, one of his daughters wrote to tell me that Clifford had passed over. It was only a few weeks after I’d last knelt down by his easy chair to say, “Cliffy, if you get to see Joyce and Marvin and Claude (the latter two were local cowpokes who’d once been among his buddies) before I do, please tell ‘em that I said ‘Hi.’” And Clifford enthusiastically replied that he’d do so. And that was the final time we spoke.
The next time I saw him was right after his family had done me the honor of asking me to be a pallbearer at his service. Which I did, clad in a buckskin coat I’d sewn from the hides of deer we’d hunted together some thirty years prior.
AN AFTERLIFE WE CAN LIVE WITH
Now, I don’t subscribe to the same view of an afterlife that a good Christian man like Clifford endorsed. In my type of Buddhism, however, we have an invocation to, “not deride the hearer vehicle.” Which means: if people feel that they need some guardrails or reliable props or rules from an organized religion or its doctrines, you won’t do them (or yourself) any favor by attempting to boot these things out from under them.
Should they wish for a try at traipsing through existence without these constructs, they ought to do it only if they feel that they’re fully prepared. And otherwise? It’s simply better not to bug ‘em.
So, to speak to these folks about any matter of the mind or spirit, try to use language they’ll get. And one should listen with care to their preferred lingo, too. Here’s another way to put it. Her ardent Catholicism delivered my own mother safe and sound through many a harsh challenge. A tiny crucifix from her rosary is a relic that I’ve kept and now wear hung on a silver chain. Whenever I drop this necklace over my head, I start to feel close to Ma and her way of seeing things. It’s not an awkward fit at all; in fact, I find it utterly comforting.
But, to return to Buddhist basics. In my view, if you take a grand term, “The Universe,” then use it to replace the word “God” in any equation, you’ll pretty much wind up with the same result. I’m not sure what we gain by seeking to personify our cosmos. Makes that whole vast whirligig seem a tad more human, I suppose… even if not altogether humane. Is there a downside? That kind of notional buffer can distance us from a mind’s clean, simple, and direct perception.
Plus, every metaphor can easily be manipulated or traduced. Just like all the rest of our language. Take a moment to consider how marketing or political speech is used to beguile and befuddle. Purveyors of belief are capable of doing much the same.
Similarly, the notion of an afterlife where human bodies soar on high fully resurrected to wallow in an eternity of strumming harps and playing bouncy-house on cumulus clouds may look attractive to some, but it sounds almost as tiresome as hell must (also) be, to moi.
Well, can I posit any better alternative? Not exactly.
All I know is what I see: only two types of afterlife appear to be close, accessible, and devoid of any of the classic brain sprains needed to visualize them. The first is recycling, which seems omnipresent and omnivorous throughout our cosmos. Nothing is lost, but everything changes. All forms arise and fall then rise again, migrating through many a shifting guise.
And the second is a fabulous and magical way that our beloveds continue to live on within us. This results from a charming, natural function of mind.
I had so many wonderful interactions with Clifford, I can easily invoke his presence, and do so in a broad array of situations. I have ready answers for questions like, what would Clifford think, what would he say, what would he do? I can still hear his wry jokes, his advice, the distinctive chortle of his laugh, and easily invoke the reverberations of his charity. Yeah, rumor was he could uncork a terrible temper at times, but as often as I was around the guy, I never saw it pop up—so he must’ve kept it under a certain level of control. At least, I must’ve never done anything to truly piss him off!
As I forge on, interacting with all of us who remain alive at present, his moral influence continues to rub off on me, and I’ll try to share it with you. It’s what I meant when I told members of his family, yeah, I’m going to miss good ol’ Cliffy. Yet not too much, since I’ll always feel like he’s right here alongside of me. Maybe even still trotting on in some ways through time, due to his fealty and gifts to that Valley ethos… A mindset I figure is now somewhat mine, too.
