Iron Thumb, Beavers, and Me

            In the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, beavers started building dams in front of three culverts where Lone Pine Creek flows under the dirt road that winds up the ranch I took care of for The Girl Scouts. I visited the culverts several mornings in a row to see how much the beavers had built during the night and to see if their slowly rising pond was going to create problems for the road. The fourth morning, water flowed over the dam and down the outside of one culvert. If it ran that way for long, it would wash the culvert and the road out. I removed enough of the main dam to lower the water level.

            I drove back down the ranch to the office and phoned Iron Thumb, a trapper and historian, and asked him to come up, look the situation over, and see if he could trap and move the beavers.

            Iron Thumb performs at schools, festivals, and fairs, dressed as, carrying the equipment of, and doing the work of a Mountain Man, teaching by his performances how early trappers worked and lived in these mountains. Early in his career, he worked a design of porcupine quills into moccasins. He jabbed the sharp quills painfully into his thumb too many times. He thought he would have to develop an iron thumb to continue his work, and he adopted his nick name

            Iron Thumb drove up the east slope of the mountain just after sunrise and parked his car in front of my house. We climbed into the Girl Scout truck and drove up the ranch through forest and meadow. Granite rock thrust toward mountain blue sky along both sides of the road. We drove into open meadow, stopped, climbed down from the truck, and looked at the beginning of beaver dams the upstream end of three big culverts.

            Iron Thumb said, “Department of Wildlife will try to move beavers to a creek that needs em, but I don’t know anyplace needs beavers right now. You got to move em spring of the year to give em time to build their lodges and store food. It’s hard to live-trap beavers. Best way to trap em is set the trap underwater, and they drown before you can get back to the trap and get em out.

            “These’ll be young beavers. Their parents are kicking them out of the lodge somewhere downstream. They’re exploring upstream every night, but they’ll go back to the lodge during the day. They’re trying out this part of the creek. They cut willow branches and let em drift in the current. Branches stopped right there, against the culvert, so they looked it over, ‘Yeah, that’s a good place, so we’ll build a dam there.’ If you convince em it isn’t as good a place as they thought, they’ll move upstream. Any beavers above here?”

            “I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody’s maintained dams and ponds for at least two years.”

            Iron Thumb said, “Let’s take a look.” We walked through meadow grass to where willow bush began. We struggled through dense willows so we could stay close enough to the creek to see it. Spring sunshine warmed the morning at 7,700 feet. Granite ridges forested with juniper trees, ponderosa pine trees, fir trees, brush, grass, and flowers rose steeply both sides of us. The creek, eight feet wide and two feet deep, crowded close to a steep, red granite bluff and forced us onto the trail worn into meadow and forest by scouts and their leaders and by wild animals.

            I said, “I vote we climb this bluff and try to see most of the creek from up on top.” I couldn’t keep up Iron Thumb’s brisk pace along the creek. Injuries I suffered when a drunk driver hit me 28 years before had begun catching up with me as I aged. Diminishing strength and stamina and a deteriorating sense of balance slowed me down over rough ground.

            Iron Thumb said, “Yeah. Let’s try that.”

            White, black, green, grey lichen, red and pink lichen grew from the red granite we climbed. Bushes, flowers, grass, and small trees grew from every crack in stone. Iron Thumb scrambled to the top of the bluff and stood in mountain sunshine. I followed him up, walked past him, and sat down on a boulder. Lone Pine Creek reflected mountain sunshine. I said, “That’s the way I thought it was. All the beaver dams washed open. Three years ago, beavers lived along here, but every place I’ve gone to the creek since then, they’re gone.”

            “Tularemia. An epidemic spread up this part of the creek and killed the beavers.”

            “More reason to encourage beavers to come farther up the creek.”

            Iron Thumb said, “Beavers do good work. They keep the willows thinned down, and their ponds create habitat for a lot of other wildlife.”

            “Yeah, you have a soft heart for beavers. Me too. When they get the dams built up a ways in front of the culverts, water runs down the outside of the culvert. Those culverts weren’t packed in tight enough. Keeps washing down the outside of the culvert like that, it’ll wash the road out. If it comes to saving the road or saving the beavers, my supervisor’s going to tell me to kill the beavers and save the road. Girl Scout motto is, ‘We care for the earth,’ but Nancy never read that part of the contract. I’ll see who’s more persistent, me or the beavers.”

            We walked back to the truck, and I drove back down the ranch. Iron Thumb and I stood in the parking area in warm sunshine. I said, “I’ll pay you for your time.”

            He said, “No you won’t. Call me if you need me.” We shook hands. He got in his car and drove back into the world. I got the All Terrain Vehicle out of the shop, rode up the ranch, and took the beaver dam out.

            I checked the culverts every few days. I took the dam out every time the beavers rebuilt it. I didn’t give them time to pack mud over the limbs they built into the dam. I climbed down in front of the culvert in my number ten rubber boots, stood on the dam, grabbed a willow branch, pulled it free from the tangle, and threw it up on the shoulder of the road as far away as I could, so there’d be room for more later, grabbed the next branch. Willows still growing hung into the running stream and crowded me one side. The culverts are five feet in diameter, and I had to work inside to get some of the branches. I’m five ten. Working hard, pulling branches out of a tangle, stooped over, unable to stand up straight and stretch back muscles, wore me out fast. But part of the reason I lived on that ranch was to protect wildlife.

            The third time I wrote, “Took out beaver dams.” on my weekly work report, Nancy said, “You can’t use any more of your time taking out beaver dams. You’ll have to come up with another solution.”

            “Do you have a suggestion?”

            “Don’t you want beaver coats for your daughters?”

            Before we moved to Magic Sky ranch, where the beavers dammed the culverts, we took care of Tomahawk Ranch, farther south in the Rocky Mountains. Swallows built 56 mud nests on the house Girl Scouts provided us. We loved watching the swallows catch insects from the air in their swooping, dodging, darting flight. We watched them pick up mud by the pond, fly up to the eaves of the house and build their nests, a regurgitated swallow of mud at a time.

            When Nancy noticed the nests, she said, “Put a nozzle on your hose and wash those nests down. The swallows make a mess.”

            “Not me,” I said. “There’s babies in those nests. They’ll die if the I destroy the nests.”

            “You shouldn’t have let them build on the house in the first place. They make a mess.”

            “Nobody told me to keep swallows from building nests on the house. I like having them there. For one thing, they keep the insects down. We clean up the mess as we go along. If you have a policy like that, you have to let me know about it ahead of time. I’m somewhat psychic but not that much.”

            “Okay, I didn’t tell you before, but I’m telling you now. Wash the nests down and keep the swallows from rebuilding.”

            “When the young fledge and leave the nests, I’ll wash them down. Nobody’s going to remove those nests until then while I’m ranch manager.”

            Nancy gave in and said I could wash the nests down after the young fledged, but our friendship ended then and never got started again, though I worked for the scouts another eight years. She never forgave me for crossing her. She made our work and our existence more unpleasant than it needed to be, but we only saw her once a month. She stayed busy enough managing all the Girl Scout property, she couldn’t devote enough attention to unpleasantness to make it really effective. We lived in beautiful country and felt very much in contact with the earth and the abundant wildlife around us, so working for the scouts was still a good experience for us.

            We kept goats, horses, donkeys, rabbits, chickens and ducks at Tomahawk Ranch. At a staff meeting early in our time with the scouts, I said the goats needed their hooves trimmed. Debbie, program manager, said, “That isn’t part of your job, Jon, to interfere in managing the animals. Those goats are on lease, and we’re not going to pay for hoof trimming. You just do your own job and don’t worry about the animals.”

            I said, “You can’t tell me that anymore than you can tell me to mind my own business if someone abuses one of the campers. If nobody trims their hooves, the goats can’t stand or walk right, and that causes deformity of their bones. It’s abuse to neglect animals and allow them to suffer deformity. If you aren’t going to call anyone in to trim their hooves, I’ll do it.”

            I did. Laura, Juniper, and Amanda held the goats down while I carved their hooves. I wrote the time down on my work sheet, and nobody objected, possibly because I was working sixty hours a week without overtime pay, so if a small part of my time went to work I thought was necessary, who could object? But I wasn’t very popular with the management anymore.

            I rarely saw women from the Denver office, even less after we took over Magic Sky Ranch, farther from the Denver office. The halftime job gave me more time to write and allowed me to keep working through more and more trouble with old injuries trying to interfere with the completion of my work.

            I kept taking out the beaver dams, but I did it on my own time, and I didn’t write it on my work report.

            Every second or third day, I strapped my rubber boots, pitchfork, and shovel onto the ATV the scouts provided for my work, and I rode up to see if the beavers had built anything new where the culverts let the stream flow under the road. Beavers didn’t want to understand what I tried to tell them, “Don’t build your dam here. Move upstream.” They built. I pulled willow bush limbs from the dams and threw them up onto the edge of the road, shoveled out decomposed granite at the bottom of the dam, half an hour, an hour’s work each time.

            When the stream ran unobstructed, I climbed out of the water, up the steep bank, mounted the ATV, and rode farther up the ranch. I left the ATV, climbed granite, looked miles in all directions, east through low areas in mountain ridges to the plain, a concrete plant down there twenty-five, thirty-five miles, the only sign of humans from where I stood high in sunshine above steep rock canyons, rough rock ridges. Rock wears away, breaks, tumbles and slides, seeks lowest ground. Trees grow, brush grows, currants, rabbit brush, low bush juniper and juniper trees, pine trees, firs, aspen, spruce, grass, flowers, Indian paint brush, lupine, wild roses; all seek the mountain blue sky.

            The elk herd browsed grass and brush in a slow circle through rough canyons, open meadows and forest, far down the mountain and then back up to high country and down again, in their own time and their own way, long legs, beautiful colors, wild wisdom of a kind rarely touched by humans.

            Fool hens froze, blended into background. Grouse and partridges got the name “fool hens” from the mountain men Iron Thumb teaches about. The birds’ wise practice of becoming totally still protected them from predators for millennia but would not protect them from hungry human vision. Mountain men saw them standing very still and killed them with a rock or a club and ate them. I saw them move, then lost them against their background. They became lichen-covered granite. Were I starving, I would find them. They have trouble enough from hunters with shotguns. They blended into background, and I walked away from them.

            I could no longer walk all the way up the ranch. Sometimes I walked from our house down to the lodge and then up through the low pass in granite ridge and part way down the trail near the stream in the small canyon. Tiredness interfered with my control of my legs. I had to stop and rest, and I had to reserve enough energy to walk back home.

            Scout leaders wanted a table moved, I told them, “Get several of your people together and gang up on the table. Move it yourselves. Make it part of your Girl Scout training. Do heavy work with small hands in groups.” Six small Girl Scouts on each side of the table, a twenty-four-legged wooden caterpillar crawled through tall grass. Most of the scouts who came up from the city loved me, and most of them would do things like move a picnic table. A few leaders complained to the council in Denver about the way I worked or didn’t work for them. The people who work in the office didn’t like complaints.

            I crawled under the lodge and replaced part of the kitchen drain pipe. I squeezed under the floor joists, cut the pipe, and pushed it out of my way, glued in new plastic pipe. One of the two-by-six joists compressed my chest. Cold, hard rock pressed into my back, hips, butt while I worked. I was sore when I crawled from under and tested the plumbing. Soreness lasted a week and slowed me down on other work.

            I cleaned, waxed, sanded, and refinished floors. More and more, working on a floor on my hands and knees hurt like crazy, knees, lower back, thighs. I wired my brush to a stick and made a brush with a long handle. I varnished the sunroom floor in the lodge while I sat in a chair, scooted the chair along and brushed from sitting down.

            Fierce, early spring wind scourged the mountain. In tent site two, wind picked up a picnic table, slammed it into a pine tree, smashed the table to broken pieces of wood and splinters. Wind blew the door off the latrine. Wind roared across two hundred yards of open meadow and slammed into trees in tent site two, blew down the biggest ponderosa pine tree. Roots blew up toward the sky, threw dirt a hundred feet into the wind. Branches smashed into the ground, broke, scattered branches and needles into violent wind.

            A month later, I cut the wind-thrown pine into firewood lengths, loaded eighty pound rounds onto the truck, hauled them to the woodshed, and split them with the hydraulic splitter. Raven stood in the top of a pine tree, watched me work, and made hoarse comments, “Silly human. Look at me. I neither spin nor toil nor split wood into woodsheds, but my needs are met day by day in joyous existence.”

            I used the Girl Scout’s yellow tractor with a back blade and bladed the packed decomposed granite ranch road. When winter snow storms came to the mountain, I would mount a plow on the front of the truck and clear snow from the ranch road and parking areas. I needed to smooth the road while spring and summer allowed the work. Winter days, blading snow off the road could be pleasant, heater in the truck going, music from the radio if I wanted it, window up or down according to where the snow I’m casting into the air flies, but hitting a rock and bouncing the blade or slamming the truck to a stop wasn’t fun.

            I shut the tractor off, stepped down in dusty sunshine, and my knee gave way. Hurt like crazy. I hit the dirt I’d dragged smooth and dusty in hot summer sunshine.

            I’m afraid to climb a ladder very high lately, afraid I’ll get up there, and my knee will give out. I can climb a ladder safely if I hang on with both hands. Hard to get any work done when I’m hanging on with both hands.

            I rolled onto my back and lay in warm sunshine. Pain in my knee eased. I smelled granite dust and damp dirt from beneath the surface. The tractor clicked and popped, cooling. My rake, shovels, and a bar to pry out rocks leaned against a fir tree and waited for me. It soaked into my awareness like sunshine soaking into my physical existence: It’s time for me to leave physical labor behind. This time, I ride insurance, worker’s compensation, whatever there is, out of this physical labor I’ve been doing.

            It took a while. The doctor said work but wear a brace. The plastic and cloth brace encasing my leg and holding my knee straight threw me so far out of balance, pain in my knee spread everywhere. Exhaustion overwhelmed me earlier every day. I wore the brace if people from the Denver office were coming up. Otherwise, I quit using the brace.

            The doctor said, “It’s a medical miracle that you’ve been this active this long, as messed up as you are. I never saw a leg so messed up.” He called in fellow doctors and students and pointed to my leg. “Isn’t that a mess of a knee?” I didn’t tell him he was over the line on personal sensitivity. I figured he was doing the best he could and didn’t know any better.

            He referred me to an orthopedic surgeon. The orthopedic surgeon asked me, “What about the brace they gave you? Does it help?”

            “It cripples me every place else.”

            “Yeah. I don’t think they help. Don’t use it. I’ll write that down. Start physical therapy. I’ll write that down.”

            Beavers completed their work shift before I drove up the ranch in the early morning. Summer frost clung white to trees, brush, grass, stone, refracted sunlight into crystalline rainbow colors radiating into morning. I pulled the beavers’ new work apart, threw willow limbs up on the bank. “Come on, you guys. Move upstream. Get your act together. I’m leaving soon. For all I know, the new caretaker will follow suggestions and kill beavers. I’m doing my part, now do your part.”

            I checked in scouts, told them rules and recommendations for use of the ranch. When the troops were ready to return to the city, I inspected the facilities they had used. If necessary, I asked them for improvements in cleaning and leaving everything in order. Troops headed back toward Denver in a convoy of automobiles, gone by noon, and quiet on the ranch. I cleaned, painted, built window screens, tried to get the engineer to use common sense to get the new reservoir filled with water from the creek and to stop the leaks.

            The orthopedic surgeon said, “You’re going to have to change occupations. You’re going to have to get out of physical labor.”

            Paperwork and more paperwork. Wheels turned slowly. I spent a lot of my time way up the ranch, far away from people, closer to elk, deer, hawks, eagles, partridges, grouse, bluebirds, trees, grass, wildflowers. I saw a beautiful rattlesnake, green, tan, and white, with deeply radiant yellow eyes. I watched the snake until it got bored with my company and crawled away into deep grass.

            I don’t want to leave this beautiful place, 750 acres of meadows, forests, huge formations of Rocky Mountain granite, with national forest on 3 sides, without motorized access, so few people go there. Our daughters finished their home schooling on this ranch and loved their adventures here. They fledged and flew away to college, then into the world from this ranch.

            I climbed the high mass of granite, one with the earth, with huge boulders eroded from parent rock, trees, low ground cover, cacti, flowers growing from eroded rock. Every summer, in dry times, I climbed up here after lightning storms, stood in mountain wind and sunshine and looked miles all directions for smoke from lightning strikes. Now, I look across forest and meadows, across the aspen filled drainage, dry this late in summer, to the tall spires of granite Juniper named “Wizard’s Fingers.”

            Intense tears from the core of my existence flow down my face. Deep melancholy tries to overpower me.

            I reach hard for joy, appreciation, peaceful, beautiful memories, gratitude for everything we’ve experienced here. Tears dry on my face in sunshine and small mountain wind. Sunshine soaks into me and fills me with fluid power.

            Two weeks passed, no dam in front of the culverts. I walked up the meadow from the culverts, beside the running stream. Tall, dense grass dragged at me, tried to trip me, tried to tire me out. No hurry. I kept going.

            I walked up the creek, above the meadow, well into dense willows. A new beaver dam spanned the creek. Water seeped through tangled willows coated with mud and wood chips. The beavers had made a good start on a second dam, fifty yards upstream. A jumble of sticks above the surface of the new pond was the top of a beaver lodge. My legs were too tired and out of control to dance, but I did it, I danced in tall grass growing in dense willows, a wild, beaver dam jig. “Whoopee, whoopee, you guys finally got the message and saved your own lives, and I am so pleased, you better dive deep and stay down, because I could kiss a wet beaver, buck teeth and all, just grab you and hug you and give you a big, sloppy, happy kiss. Whoopee, whoopee, whoopee,” until I’ve about overdone it.

            I lie down in tall grass in hot sunshine, rest, and drift into sleep. I dream beavers swim through millennia of streams, forest, and meadows, building dams and ponds since before humans walked these mountains. I wake, get up from the earth, and walk back toward the road.

            Hard times ahead of me, I know that. It turns out harder times than I can imagine from where I walk through tall meadow grass in Rocky Mountain sunshine, but a long time later, a thousand miles from the beavers of Lone Pine Creek, I pull through hard times, thanks to power of the life force. Sometimes, when I struggle through hard times, I see the new beaver dam of willow limbs, mud, bark, wood chips, and leaves, ponding Lone Pine Creek deep. Mountain water falls over the dam and flows down the mountain toward the plain. Beavers live uncounted centuries in wild mountains. Memories, images, and dreams power me through.