ESTESBOG

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TANGLED TRAILS

 

Peter Walker

 

 

I grew up a-dreamin’ of being a cowboy,

and lovin’ the cowboy ways.

Willy Nelson “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys”

 

Dreams of riding the range are not restricted to kids in the western North America. Nor are they limited to little boys. In my rural Maine grade school in the 1950s many of my daydreams were of going west when I grew up. My big loves in those days were hunting and fishing. Maine is a big timber state and, in those days, moose were still relatively scarce, and deer hunting for the most part consisted, it seemed to me, of wandering around in dense cover hoping for a chance encounter with an equally disoriented buck. I wanted to go west where the animals were abundant and the land so wide open that every hunt resulted in success.  

 

Pursuin’ the life of my high-ridin’ heroes,
I burned up my childhood days.

  

 

 

From sixth through eighth grade, Joanie Welch and I always sat in the rear of the room near the window (Walker then Welch). Joan was a down-to-earth country girl as naïve about the world as me. Joanie was a horse woman (and the best dancer by far of any girl in our school). So Joan had the same types of romantic notions about the West as I did. We shared our dreams a lot – usually when we should have been paying attention to the lesson. She wanted to go west to ride horses all day. I wanted to go there and shoot grizzly bears. The cumulative hours that we spent speculating over the relative merits of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho were many. But then, the lessons, dummied down to the lowest common denominator by our middle-aged former one-room school teachers, could have been made a lot less boring.

 

 

One of those teachers was in fact my Aunt Glenys. Glenys and my dad’s older brother, Uncle Bob, lived almost within sight of the consolidated school in Poland Corner. They had three children – boy-girl-boy – with the oldest, my cousin Bobbie, nine years older than me. Bobbie was adventurous, with an infectious laugh bordering on a giggle. He was an accomplished hunter and angler and I idolized him from the day he gave me my first fly-tying lesson when I was in the 2^nd grade.

 

Aunt Glenys and her oldest son always had a very tense relationship. In the 1940s the Poland school system consisted of half a dozen one-room schools scattered around the 36-square-mile township of 1,200 people. Bobby started school in the classic white frame schoolhouse in Poland Corner presided over by Alice B. Mitchell. “Old Lady Mitchell,” called that (behind her back) by every student who ever had her, was very stern. On the other hand, she was far more intellectual and a far more effective teacher than any other in the district. Glenys, a beautiful woman in her day and an only child, was well read and highly opinionated in her own right. Early on she clashed with Alice Mitchell over Bobby’s education. I don’t know the circumstances, but Glenys, after some sort of blow-up with Mrs. Mitchell, pulled Bobby from Poland Corner School in his early years and, from then on through high school, drove him 14 miles to the City of Auburn School District where she and Uncle Bob paid his tuition.

 

By the time he was in high school Bobby had become a likeable renegade. For at least fifteen years the hollow ball at the top of the flagpole in front of the Poland Town Hall sported an arrow compliments of Bobby’s marksmanship. The grandson of a Maine Game Warden, Bobby’s skill at catching trout or shooting deer, not always by legal means, was well known.  Gifted at anything requiring manual dexterity, Bobby’s gasoline-powered model airplanes were the envy of us younger cousins. By the time he was halfway through high school Bobby completed a one-room cabin on an island owned by my grandfather at the head of the middle lake.

 

Bobby had only one girlfriend through high school. You could say that he and pretty Faye Allen who lived just a few doors away were childhood sweethearts.  Bobby graduated without distinction from Edward Little High School about the time I finished fourth grade. Sometime during the following year Bobby joined the Navy. I remember the day he left because Aunt Glenys called my mother on the phone and burst into tears and cried for an hour. I was super proud of my older cousin in the U.S. Navy!

 

Bobby came home on leave the following fall and Dad and I accompanied Uncle Bob and Bobby on a late season duck hunt to tidewater near the mouth of the Kennebec River. It was on that hunt that I sat with Bobby on the edge of a tide flat and shot at a pair of black ducks, my first such experience. Of course I missed, but Bobby got one of the big birds and I was, as always, mightily impressed. Little did I know it would be the last time I would see him for many years.

 

With boot camp out of the way, Bobby was about to make a clean break with his domineering mother. Bobby went back to the Navy and never wrote or called again. For years. Glenys tried to contact him through the military, but they could do nothing except tell her where he was stationed. He simply dropped from sight. Meanwhile Faye found someone else and married.

 

In the spring of 1962, Joan Welch and I, along with about 25 classmates, graduated from the 8^th grade at Poland Community School, where we had suffered, or so it seemed at the time, through three years of classes under Old Lady Mitchell. That one consolidated school was the full extent of the Poland, Maine school system at that time. We then had our choice of several public high schools in neighboring towns. Joan chose Casco High School, a little 4-year school of about 150-200 students. I went to junior high school in Auburn and then on to Edward Little, a 3-year institution of 1,500 kids. We wouldn’t see each other again until our senior year.

  

Cowboys are special with their own brand of misery,
From being alone too long.

 

 

When I was seventeen, one evening at the dinner table I heard the explosive news: Bobby had surfaced. He called home. On leave near San Diego two years previously he’d had a bad accident in which he and a rider had parted from his motorcycle on a sharp curve. Bobby ended up with his badly fractured left leg literally wrapped around a guardrail. While recuperating in a naval hospital in California, he’d contracted a terrible staph infection in his mangled leg. The doctors were able to save it at the expense of the muscles in his lower leg. In effect he was left with a living “peg leg” and a free-flopping foot which he’d had to adjust to through months of therapy in a naval hospital. In the year or so since he’d left the Navy he’d made his living as a cowhand on a big ranch in the interior of northern California. Now he wanted to come home and visit.

 

Wow! A real cowboy! I couldn’t wait to see him.

 

Two weeks later Bobby stepped off the plane onto Maine soil for the first time in many years. Nothing was ever said, at least in my presence, about why all of this should have been so. Aunt Glenys glowed. Uncle Bob was swelled with pride. Here was this lanky, good-looking man with sandy hair, high-heeled cowboy boots, and a huge silver belt buckle. He talked with the slow, slightly southern drawl so common among military noncoms as he answered all my awe-filled questions. Yes, the deer hunting on the ranch (blacktails) was fabulous. Yes, they had mountain lions. What did he do in the Navy? He’d been a radio operator and third crewman on an A3D reconnaissance jet that flew missions from Alaska to Japan and back.

 

Three weeks at home and Bobby’s accent disappeared entirely. He announced he would return permanently and flew back to California to settle his affairs. Uncle Bob went with him. When next I saw Bobby, he and Uncle Bob had driven back across the country with a prolonged stop in Cody, Wyoming to visit his sister Judy and brother-in-law, Dick Day. While there they had gone antelope hunting. (Wow!) They arrived in Poland Corner in Bobby’s bright red 1956 Chevy pickup with straight pipes behind the cab, a lariat in the back window, and a western saddle draped over a bale of straw in the truck bed. (Double Wow!)

 

 

Old worn-out saddles, and ‘old worn-out memories….

 

Something happened in the months following Bobby’s return. At first I hung on every word he uttered. I visited him evenings just to ask questions and learn of all the exciting adventures he’d had. Then, gradually, it dawned on me three-fourths of everything he said was complete embellishment. Likeable as my cousin was, he was completely full of baloney and deliberately playing upon my gullibility – or so he thought. Quietly I began to pull away in favor of seeking my own path. I was never really close to him after that.

 

Not so Joanie. When she met Bobby a year after he came home from California, she fell head over heels for this handsome older man who shared her love and talent for horsemanship. They quickly became “an item” around town and, in another year, became engaged. From that point on it was never “Bobby;” it was “Bobby and Joan.” My Grandmother Walker invited Joan to the Walker family gathering on Christmas Eve, a sure sign that she’s been accepted into the clan. But trouble loomed for Joan. Glenys resented her and often sputtered to family members that Joan was somehow not worthy of her favorite son.

 

By coincidence, as Bobby and Joan’s wedding date approached, old flame Faye’s marriage blew up. Glenys and Faye’s stepmother Emily worked behind the scenes to get Bobby and Faye together. The old flames were rekindled and suddenly Joan and Bobby’s romance was on the rocks.

 

The breakup was classic “Glenys.” She broke the engagement between her son and Joan. With Bobby and Joan at the dinner table just two weeks before the planned wedding, Glenys “casually” reminded Bobby that he and Faye were to have dinner at the same table the following evening. Bobby would not look up. Joan sat in shock. She had been replaced. Maybe fired was the better word.

 

 

So Bobby and Faye were married. Although he never got around to finishing it – a practice that became his trademark for the rest of his life – Bobby built a home on a lot that our grandfather gave him in the woods a mile south of the Walker family homestead in Poland Spring. They had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, which they raised in the house with no front porch steps surrounded by half-finished projects.

 

Bobby tried a succession of trades but was always stymied by his refusal to take written exams. He tried plumbing, but refused to take the journeyman test. He was a skilled pilot, but dropped out of ground school on the last day when it came time to take the written exam. Two years after I married Nancy and began working as a fish culturist at Wade State Fish Hatchery in Casco, Bobby and Faye came to visit us just once. Bobby confided in me that I had the job he’d always dreamed of. (Glenys’s father, Mendell Conant, had been a career Maine Game Warden of considerable fame). I was struck by the irony that Bobby envied me. Bobby ended up managing a small town airport for more than twenty years.

 

My career with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife progressed through a series of positions from fish culturist to hatchery management to fishery biologist to graduate school to fish pathologist. Nancy and I moved about every year or two and, finally, we left Maine altogether for, of all places, Colorado. At last I’d made my way to the West!

 

Every now and then when I’d be up on the Great Divide or waiting for a bunch of riders to push a herd of cattle across the road, I’d think of my childhood friend Joan and wonder if she ever broke free of Maine orbit and come West like me.

 

More then 20 years after my own westward migration I received an e-mail one evening from “Hiline Ranch.” It was Joan Welch Wilfong contacting me to see if I was indeed the same Peter Walker who used to sit in front of her in Poland School. She’d spent much of her adult life in western Maine as the lone paid employee of a horse rescue league. She and her husband Gary decided in the late 1990s to make a trip out west and, once here, knew they could never go back to Maine and be happy. They made a trip home only long enough to settle their affairs, then head back to Colorado with baggage in one pickup and a 4-horse trailer full of rescued critters behind the other. They settled on land near Saguache where they built a beautiful home looking across the San Luis Valley at the Sangre de Christo Range.

 

My heroes have always been cowboys.
And they still are, it seems.
Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of,
Themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams.

 

Bobby never finished the front porch steps. As he grew older he became more and more eccentric and more and more reclusive. After their kids were grown, Bobby and Faye went through some rough times and split up for a time during which they officially divorced. Glenys, ever ready to launch all missiles, declared that it was all Faye’s fault and severed all ties permanently. When Bobby and Faye patched things up and resumed life together, that left Glenys on the outside looking in. Bobby rarely if ever had contact with his mother after that.

 

Glenys died almost 20 years ago after quarreling with nearly everyone in the Walker family. Uncle Bob survived her by 12 years and, at 83, became the oldest person to ever bicycle the length of Pennsylvania. He had dinner with Bobby and Faye weekly right to the last.

 

By the time he reached 60, Bobby was a total recluse and weighed over 300 pounds. The VA doctors advised him to have his damaged leg amputated, but he refused to go back to them. At the age of 66 he contracted stomach cancer and died.

 

One evening last fall I pulled into a driveway in the San Luis Valley and was reunited with my old friend Joan. During the course of the evening Bobby’s name came up. It’s funny how things have a way of working out. I advised Joanie to enjoy the Sangres and never look back.