Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

Chapter 4: Gavilan Canyon The Last Summer of Love

Gavilan Canyon: the Last Summer of Love

It was beneath the forest canopy near the Gavilan cabin that my mother showed me the fawn, its camouflaged form slowly becoming visible, the little chest rising and falling. Lorene was the reason I loved these mountains and had taken up cabin life there. If my father was all Western Slope, Colorado, she was all Pecos Valley and Capitán and Sierra Blanca, New Mexico. She was born on a farm near Portales, New Mexico, on the Llano Estacado, while her father Carl endeavored successfully to fail on the last of the homesteads he ventured. He was a farmer who once gathered his neighbors on the prairie to move a house he and his sons had framed up over the basement they had dug. When the collected team set it down, it fell in. In Portales, my grandmother made it clear that farm was the last farm.

Inept at cultivation, he possessed an urban talent: he could sell anyone anything. Part of his comical fame was that he periodically showed himself susceptible to the same stratagems he used on his customers. The Johnson family left the wide-open prairie and ventured the 90 miles to Roswell, a bigger town, on the Pecos River, within sight of the Sacramento range. Carl set up a second-hand furniture shop, and a second-hand auto shop, and a second-hand whatever shop, all labeled "Carl Johnson, of course." He did all right. And he became greatly loved by that town's citizens. My father told me that when his funeral entourage went down the Main Street, "the policemen wept."

He was greatly loved by his daughter Lorene, a boon companion on his hunting and fishing trips and on his misadventures. They went up to Santa Fe because he loved all those pueblo ways: "hey darlin' we'll trade the Navajo rugs the down and out braves left in my shop for some pretty jewelry for you and pots for your mom." He naturally miscalculated, they ran out of money, and camped out halfway back to Roswell on the windswept plain. Food was short. He went out into the dark and came back with a cottontail in hand. In her dying days, she remembered that moment with absolute clarity: "He cut that rabbit a long stroke with his knife, twisted it sharp just once, and tossed one part into the brush. In his hand another thing emerged, nude and ready for the spit."

From Roswell's seat above the muddy, alkaline Pecos, one could see the great mountain ranges to the west that ended the great flatness ranging across Texas. When I was a kid, as sunset drew near, my mother would look out the kitchen window and call out, "Let's go see ole Capitán." We drove a few blocks to the western edge of town. My mother and sisters and I would watch the sun set down gently on the shoulders of El Capitán's perfect triangular form. The last waves of the Llano Estacado broke against that ancient conquistador. He gazed at Texas with justified suspicion. For a century, before automobiles and good roads, travelers from that eastern horizon had gazed at him with joy. Weary horsemen crossing the endless plain celebrated the peak with the elation of mariners returning from the New World and seeing the Picos de Europa.

Capitán's fame has not faded in the automobile age. In the old postcard bin at your 'antiques and other things' store, in the Wild West section, you are likely to find our mountain. The Kodachrome image cheerfully captures the handsome, bronzed cowboy and the Veronica Lake cowgirl. The perfect blue peak stands behind them, standing straight up out of the prairie. They sport bright scarves around their necks and a little Stetson perches neatly on the back of the girl's blonde tresses. She has a Palomino between her legs. The cowboy's big brown quarter horse rears back. Our rider throws an arm into the air, holding his wide-brimmed hat aloft, saluting the romance of the West.

Peter Hurd's paintings give a better reading. Capitán stands guard over his egg tempera images of hard-scrabble ranches, where men and women struggled to get a living out of skinny cattle run on arid public land. Two ranch boys, white as flour save for their brown necks and sunburned faces, have tied their lean mounts to the Chicago Windmill's frame. You can hear the creaky turn of the mill blades in the light wind. The mill pipe spurts cold water into a tank filled to the brim. The boys have pulled the saddles and watered the horses; currents run down their muzzles while they chew on apples. The hard-used Levis and long-sleeved shirts have been stripped off, battered boots stand up and fall down next to the saddles. The boys have thrown themselves into the tank. One lad sits in the cool flow from the windmill spout; the other stands, streams of water glistening on his skinny frame. Out on the Llano, that was the swimming pool they knew.