The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

At the end of it you would have paid a man in town to tell your own family what decent used to do for free.

The second thing was simpler. My grandfather would have been ashamed to be the reason a deputy drove up his gravel to stand between two of his grandchildren.

He had built that gate to keep his cattle in, not to keep his people out. I was not going to make the law finish the fight.

If I called the sheriff on Lane, then the ridge really would belong to nobody. The thing that made it ours was never the deed.

It was that we had never once needed one.

So I did not call. I drove the gravel home the long way, past the low end of the ridge where the timber came down almost to the road.

I slowed down, and I looked at the hill the way you look at a thing you are trying to remember.

And I remembered the logging grade.

The Old Grade and the Clearing of It

My grandfather cut ties on the whole hundred and sixty back before any of us were born.

To get the oak down off the top he had bulldozed a grade, a wide gentle switchback that climbed the north face of the ridge the slow way.

It came out on the shoulder along the color, not fifty yards from where Grandpa used to stand.

The point is this. That grade did not start on Lane’s third.

It started on the low forty, down along the creek bottom, on the piece everybody had always called the hollow. And the hollow had come to me plain and clear in the one thing that was settled on paper.

When Doreen had her stroke two years back, she deeded me her share of the bottom in exchange for me taking her into my house and caring for her.

We did that one properly, with a man in town and a stamp and everything, because Doreen had insisted on it.

So the creek bottom was mine. And the grade ran up off the bottom.

The trouble was that forty years of nobody using it had let the ridge take it back. Sumac and blackberry and little cedars had closed it in.

A big white oak had come down across the second switchback in an ice storm and lay there rotting.

I walked it that afternoon in my barn coat with a hand saw, just to see. It was there.

You could feel it under the brush, the old cut bench of it, the gentle grade a dozer leaves.

In the places where the canopy opened I could see up through the branches to the color coming on at the top.