They Came Like a Ragged Circus

They came like a ragged caravan, clowns and grotesques and desparate ones too long-gone to think on their goal, as well as pregnant girls and beaten women and fugitives from state and church and family, but over years, spread so thin upon that scant mountain two-track that only their gradual pooling in the town told of their dripping arrival, as though at a drain at the bottom of the world.  One came while the outer country burned, that long hot summer before they put men on the moon, the summer of love and of riots, while he was young, jerking against the stakes every sun-baked rut the cattle truck rattled and bucked, his backback and mandolin case lashed into a steer-shat corner with baling wire.  Some weeks later the first couple, starved-looking and sunburned, retching, it seemed, some fell language and heaving like luggage an enormous, black, bawling infant, the first of its color the ranchers had ever seen, arrived by Volkswagen, also a first.  Through the Nixon years they came, one lurching displacement after another, exhausted, alone, despirited, mostly secretive and afraid.  Some looked for houses.  Some slept in caves.  A few built remote cabins in the woods, and these still dot the area, but most were so poor-built and exposed to weather they no longer serve as shelter. Most camped around the town. 

For a few years a strange transaction seemed to change the place: young men, all Mormons, left the ranches and took their shooting skills to Viet Nam, while a shadow-town of long-haired and talkative, strange and effete men of the same age came and lived and worked and bartered, and the old order seemed to come apart, an unravelling at first, and then a rending, because the old people saw the new people as a mockery of their sons' service overseas, as a challenge to the order of their church and families, as parasites and freeloaders of a kind never welcome on a frontier.