Okay, so I already told you one big thing that happened in Big Headache that turned out poorly, and, so, here's another:
So, late summer 2007 I quit down at Diamond right as soon after we covered the hay because Wilsons had sold it that spring to the goddamned Silversteins from L.A. and they were a fucking nightmare to work for all summer. They come in and fired my uncle Spence Lyman, who was the manager, when he told them he wouldn't dig their illegal wells nor oversee whoever was going to do it and they wanted to change from whiteface beef to Angus stud bulls and it was all summer pulling out all that new fence we just finished to of put in to replace it with that picturesque but useless lodgepole-rail shit hobby ranchers like, working chainsawing all day every day for minimum. I said fuck that shit and saw the hay put up then quit and only a couple hard-up locals stayed on, Ez the Bishop's boy the whiner and Kade of course always doing the work of any three men for the price of one half a man and too retarded to go on strike, and the rest of us replaced with Mexicans they hauled up from Arizona in a stakeside truck. So I was pretty fucking pissed. The Wilsons having been my family's employer since Brigham Young traded them that sick ranchland for a teenage girl or two and my family farming sand. Anyways, Wilsons' own kids went away for careers and whatnot and the land down there wedged between Black Bear and Cedar, those greenest pastures in Kolob with the whiterock cliffs all around and Navajo Mountain just perfect framed away south, just looks like a postcard, like if Kolob had a Chamber of Commerce that is what they would put on the website, no Photoshop required. So Wilsons put it up to sell and got a couple local bids, like from Old Man Ferral and this weekender who owns the dealerships wherever who is buying up ranches, and these bids were all under Wilsons' asking price so Wilsons listed it on the internet on this one site with ads for Bugatti or some such vehicle with these like chiseled fags in tuxes getting out in a urban nighttime all squarejawed and these Photoshopped perfect-ten vixens in tight dresses backlit looking wetly at the fag in that lordotic model-vixen posture like they're on the trembly edge of orgasm, not the kind of ad that's aimed at for-real ranchers. And so the Silversteins saw the ad and put in their last-minute bid at asking and got it and right away the changes. Their whole plan relied on a huge new well a hundred feet from Lower Cat Creek, illegal as the IRS, and they run that pump just one week and the water table dropped so much Cat went underground and not a drop makes it to the canyon anymore and it was just dead trout in the sand all the way down. Anyway, so: like I said I quit right after putting up the hay and hadn't saved for winter so I went out to the rockfall at the bottom of Big Headache to find some income. Way the fuck out there. I was pretty sure there were pots out there. When my father was a boy some men of Kolob had rappelled down onto the granary ledge to get to the Big House and found it pretty much intact, as it had been stranded up there for all those years after the cows ate down all the canyon grass in the '30s and the floods washed out like forty feet of sand. They got one of the great pothunter finds of all time, thirty intact pots, corn still sealed in the granary, even some stick figures and dolls and baskets. That find paid off some tractors in Kolob, tell you what. Anyways, with the new rockfall I was reminded of how many ledges remained out there and there was one place I had been looking at for years where old dry juniper roots stuck out of the cliffwall way up high above the ground, and I figured, because I'm that kind of genius, that those roots had been in dirt once upon a time and probably indicated that the ledge had been right above ground level before the erosion in the '30s, so I went out there to mark the spot and I roped down to the ledge. Sure enough, there was an old fireplace and a mano and some broken points and I eventually made a few dollars, but it was there I had a windfall, I guess you could call it.
When I roped down to the ledge it was afternoon and I had my eye on a big cloud sitting on the mountain. I was high enough above the wash to be safe, but I didn't want to get wet. It started raining while I was still on the ledge, so I moved back under the overhang and got comfortable. Lit a fire on the old spot. The first fire there for a thousand years, probably. Sitting warm and dry in a desert storm is the sweetest thing. Ravens hissing by. The facing cliffside turning dark as it soaks, then the hail bouncing everywhere and the thunder doing that special migraine crash it does, why they named it Headache, as well as the light that is purple and yellow both, which what the fuck? Where can you see purpleyellow that's not the desert in a rainstorm? Pretty soon the canyon starts flowing. Just some red in the water, then with some rocks in it, then a tree or two, then it really got wound up with a big swell of everything from upcanyon that wasn't nailed down. The rain wasn't much where I was, but upmountain it must of dumped because the stream come up to a mad rapid. You could see the cottonwoods shake when rocks got tumbled against them. Those big rafts of floaters, all grass and cattails, get hung up crosswise in the willows. The water red with rock looks like tomato soup some big willow-mustached motherfucker is slurping at. I love that shit, watching a desert rainstorm. So there I sat watching God TV, when I see this white thing coming down. I kept hearing this like drumming sound and then this white thing, some big bucking heaving rectangle spinning downcanyon. It keeps getting hung up in the trees and damming the flood, going slower than the water so if you sorta squint it looks like it's going upstream. Anyway, but pretty soon it gets to below me and I will be goddamned if it wasn't a 1997 F-250 Powerstroke, so O.B.S., 7.3-liter diesel of course, just doing a fucking lovely pirouette down the canyon. You understand this is out of context in the extreme. Not a road for miles. Not even a driveable surface of any kind upstream til you get to 144 near where it summits. That's I guess 2,000 feet up and five, six miles north. Imagine my surprise and how fucking entertained I was. Just laughed my ass off, got a new story to tell drinking at the Small 'm'. I watched it out of sight bobbing down to the confluence. Slept on the ledge that night and roped out the next morning with my bag of illegal injun goodies, and decided to walk around down to the confluence to see if that truck had washed up. Sure enough, it was there in the mud where the flood broadened out, up to its doors in red muck. It had a bunch of dents, of course, and no mirrors, and a cracked windshield, but it looked pretty much like any goddamned ranch truck, except no heeler standing on a bale in the back. Walking back to 144 up the wash I come up with a plan.
Phase one of my plan was: haul it out. Trusting that nobody would find the truck, first I hitchhiked up to Old Man Ferral's to do some fence work for him. I waited a couple days for the water to sink away and the mud to dry out, then I borrowed his camera, his 4WD Massey-Ferguson, some chain, and a tow-bar. I drove the tractor half the night down from the ranch, down to where the main wash crosses 144, and down the sand those miles to the confluence. It is bumpy but drivable. No pouroffs or nothing. I took a picture of myself by the truck, taking care to capture some Utah postcard in the background. I had to do some digging to break the mud suction, but I did get the truck out and towed it all the way back to the shed behind Ferral's linehouse where I've been living at. Very slow going. I got the tractor all clean and put-away like Ferral likes it. Then I started hosing off the pickup. The mud was in everything. That truck was just one big fucking blob of red stucco, I shit you not. I kept at it til the truck stood there all bashed and gleaming in a big puddle of red mud. All day jetting that hose into everything. Old Man Ferral rode out to see but didn't even want to know what the Sam Hell I was doing, just shook his head and spit and kept riding. I kept at that truck all fall. Cleaned everything. Took a close look at it all.
Phase two of my plan was: fix it. I pulled the strarter, alternator, distributer, [carb?], and cleaned and dried it all. Flushed the fuel line. Took off the manifold and got the sand out of there. Anyway, long story short is I just about rebuilt that truck til it was dry, oiled, and tight. I bet I spent 500 hours on it. I banged out and pulled most of the dents and gave it some Bondo and spray primer. And before Christmas I got the fucker running. Ran pretty good, too. I celebrated by driving down to the Small 'm'. Never owned a vehicle before. So up I chugged in that big diesel and all the boys come over to see it. Of course I was noteworthily afoot for years, hitched ever damned place when I couldn't borrow a ranch truck. Always had. So they wanted to know where I got it. I said over to Youngville. Kade knows all the specs, that goddamned retard will surprise you with what he knows. Anyway, a O.B.S. Ford is an admired rig in Kolob. Fielding, who knows diesels from his daddy's shop was there and he said Even though it looks like it falled off the mountain it sounds like it's running good, and that got me a wee bit paranoid thinking Fielding knew something about its provenance, but maybe that was all the grass I was was smoking that day.
I moved onto phase three of my plan: get paid for all that work I did on it. I went to the Town Hall and logged onto the internet and found some Ford truck forums, and posted my before and after pictures and my story of the truck getting washed away and still running great, and I called the dealerships and told them, and pretty much spread the word and finally --long story-- reached the ad agency that does all the Ford Truck ads and they were interested in doing an ad. Got my before picture and they sent out a photographer and she special-lit the scenic overlook up at the top of Strike Valley with the Tortugas all pink in the sunset back there and they buffed up the remaining paint and the primer and the Bondo and they took a picture of me sitting in there with my elbow out the window and a nice new hat, that one I had on at the dance the other night, and then Photoshopped the fuck out of my teeth and made me look halfway to Robert Redford, and they gave me five grand and they ran the ad. That comes out to $10 per hour, which not bad considering I got the truck, too. Who gets paid $10 per hour to work on his own truck, I ask? Yours truly, motherfucker. Yours truly. It was one of my harebrained schemes that pays off better than work. Then, so maybe May of oh-eight I got pretty fucked up out at Spade's bonfire and I was driving Fox and Lauro out to the canyon after, like twothree in the AM, and fucking Sheriff Shumway is lying in wait and we blow by at like 85 without no mirrors to speak of and the muffler still not staying attached right and no headlights pointing at the road so he goes and pulls us over. To his credit he hardly never pulls over a local, only tourists, but this he just could not countenance nor condone, so he pulls me over, asks for licence and registration, which of course I don't have either of, and he puts the VIN in his laptop and it comes up stole. In retrospective hindsight, I do not know what I expected would happen with the truck with the Sheriff, but it had not recurred to me that it would of been reported stole. I figured washed away, act of God. Not stole. Anyway that prick the Sheriff I guess he had no choice. He arrested me, had to drive me clear to Sandwichville that same night, and him with ranch chores he had to call and get his wife to do while I sat in the back drunk off my ass listening and him not allowed as a Mormon to drink coffee, just Diet Coke, so not at all happy with yours truly Handy Whitehead. Plus the whole two-hour ride there I did not hardly shut up I was so drunk but he never put alcohol in the police report and I did not get the DUI I deserved, bless his heart.
As it turns out, this one guy from Loa had been up on the mountain spotting deer in the windup to the archery season when the rain took the whole paved pulloff his truck was parked on right off the mountainside into this swale and the truck just floated from there all the way down Big Headache. How it went over those pouroffs I do not fucking know. It was a miracle. Anyways, of course he got his truck back in very fine mechanical condition thanks to yours truly, Handy Whitehead, and my meticulous, not to say downright fanatical attention to mechanical detail and my turbocharged need to make all machines run like fine German automobiles and I got to sit in jail three days then tell the judge more or less the truth, that I found it in the canyon and fixed it up, but not about the pothunting you can bet your ass, and he threw out the auto-theft charge and fined me $nnn for driving with no license and no registration and no mirrors and he told me I needed to write a letter of this story to help the truck's real owner get his insurance figured out. Anyways, as you now know, this is why I walk everywhere and it is why I insist I am not paranoid, that every interaction I have with the government ends up with them taking from me what I have earned and leaving me to fend for myself in a world not made for walking or for hitchhiking with bad gray teeth and clothes that look like I stole them from a halfway-house mop closet.
HA! maandpa
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