This week’s column is by Scott Thybony.
Before heading up the mountain to help brand cattle, I stop at a café on the edge of Flagstaff. Some ranchers are having their morning confab, and the cowboy next to me stares into a cup of coffee nursing a hangover.
“What’s that?” asks a man watching something move across the floor. Turning, I see a huge insect crawling along in no particular hurry like it had the run of the place. A month before, news reports warned of an exotic cockroach that had appeared in the Phoenix area. This one must have climbed in the back of someone’s pickup and hitched a ride north. A guy in an Arizona Feeds cap shouts to the waitress, “Call that thing back in the kitchen where it belongs.”
Suddenly the pointed toe of a cowboy boot stretches out from another table. As casually as putting out a cigarette, it steps on the bug with a crunch that can be heard across the room. “What’d you do that for?” someone asks. “That was meat on the hoof!” And another, still in awe, adds, “You could’ve put a saddle on that one!” The cowboy next to me keeps sipping his coffee, looking straight ahead. “Terrible way to start the morning,” he mutters to himself.
Many of us who make Flagstaff our home started here as strangers; we’re exotics of one sort or another, transplants. Some end up fitting in, while others get stepped on. The place itself seems to have a way of selecting those who stay. Even people whose families have been here for generations trace their origins to a migration story of some sort. It might be a Hopi clan searching for the center of things, a busted homesteader heading west on Route 66 keeping one step ahead of the dust, or a Mormon family lumbering south in a covered wagon searching for the next Zion. By chance or choice some stayed and others moved on.
The river drew me to Flagstaff originally, and within a few years my wife and I moved from south of the tracks to north of the San Francisco Peaks. We lived in an old homestead where we heated with wood, hauled our water, and read by gas light. The nearest rancher, Pete Espil, lived eight miles away and didn’t pay much attention to us until we’d made it through a couple of hard winters. I suppose he was waiting to see if we’d stick it out. Then one day he knocked on the door needing some help, and we realized we’d become neighbors.
After leaving the café I drive up the Hart Prairie road on the west side of the Peaks. The way to Pete Michelbach’s ranch takes me through high meadows bordered by groves of quaking aspen where the leaves flicker hypnotically in the slightest breeze. His friends and family are gathering this morning to help with the branding, and I’m planning on lending a hand.
Reaching the corral, I find Pete sitting effortlessly in the saddle, wearing a sweat-stained Stetson and still going strong after 84 years on the mountain. During that time he’s watched his old way of life begin to die out, and I overhear a horseman next to him suggest he might think of moving to Montana. “No,” Pete says in a gravelly voice, “this is my bailiwick. I’m staying here.”
We tend to think of Americans as a restless people always wanting to move on to something bigger and better. But now and again someone stays in one place long enough for the heart to become rooted.
Scott Thybony has traveled throughout North America writing award-winning articles for major magazines. His book for the National Geographic Society on the canyon country sold hundreds of thousands of copies. As a river guide he won the coveted Colorado River Jerry-Rigging Award for fixing a broken motor mount with beer cans and driftwood. His commentaries are heard regularly on Arizona Public Radio. Listen at www.npr.org/podcasts/381444137/scott-thybony-commentaries.