Iron Buddhas 8

 - 8 -

THE NEXT couple of weeks are like a dream to Steffi; the jelly rolls are so heavy, and the days so hot, that she has little sense of living in a camp in general, or in her house in particular. As she's putting in a tree, she must find a rock or stick, as required by the contract, to put next to the south side of its little trunk. This will give it a spot of summer shade later in the year. She wonders if she remembered to water her little jade tree that she bought for her 'kitchen' windowsill, or to close the doors behind her as she trudged, in the gray dawn, to the shade house to bag up.
    She unbuckles her web belt, slides out of the punishing tree bag and places it in the shade of a tall stump, then digs out a shallow hole in front of the bag to sit in and dangle her feet downslope; an impromptu chaise lounge.
    Burt is planting through along her line. Yoder, not carrying a dag and bag, is following along watching Burt and asking questions. He spots Steffi and comes over to sit with her.
    "What are you up to?" asks Steffi.
    "I'm trying to learn how he does it. He's putting in a thousand trees a day, and I'm only at, like, three hundred. Even you, you do six sometimes."
    "So, did he show you anything new?"
    "Well, he has no wasted motion. Makes every step count. And doesn't seem to stop for lunch." After a moment of silence, Yoder looks at Steffi imploringly. "I try to do those things. It doesn't seem all that complicated. But I feel like I'm just stumbling around out here."
    "Burt grew up on a ranch, Yodie. You're from, I think I heard, Newark?"
    "Yeah."
    "And you're how old?"
    "Seventeen."
    "Bet ya've never been anywhere but school till you got that van."
    "Uhhh, yeah. Well, I've sailed a boat some, on the Chesapeake."
    "Well, then, nothing time won't cure. From what I've seen, tree planting is just like being on the water. Any sailor has to get his sea legs on the first voyage. Burt has hill legs. We all do."
    "It's your first year, too, Stef, how come you caught onto it so fast?"
    "Lots I don't know yet. But I'm a country girl from the red hills of Georgia ... and ... "
    "And?"
    "I'm an 'only.' And my dad really, really wanted a boy."
    "Oh. I think I know what you mean."
    "Well, put it this way; if you've shot squirrels and cleaned them for Brunswick stew, you can adapt to a lot of things."
    "I'm a vegetarian."

:::

The inspectors are difficult at first. They keep wanting to look in everyone's bag to see if anyone's unrolled their trees and hidden the burlap somewhere. But, while nobody's perfect, the Hoedags, as putative self-employed persons who want to take pride in their work, and who think of themselves as environmentalists to some extent, want their trees to live. They look for stumps and logs to plant a tree to the north of, nestled between roots and stones, with all-day shade on the all-important root collar. They argue for a looser interpretation of the specs in order to wide-out or tighten down the spacing to find such spots. The CO, who putt-putts round the unit on a green ATV, gets it and relents. With morale improved on the hill, the crew, which had fallen behind, begins to make up ground.
    But there's still an issue; it erupts at a camp meeting.
    Amy leads off. "There are some people here, you know who you are, plant a lot of trees all the time and make really good money because it's by the piece. But some of us feel like it should be by the hour because, even though we're slower, we help the crew meet quota every day. If there were just you six or eight fast ones, you couldn't work. So we're vital. But we get penalized for it for not being built like football players."
    "Is this a girl-guy thing?" asks Murray. 'Cuz Stef makes good money and she's a girl."
    "I'm only average," puts in Steffi. "When you make eighty bucks, I make sixty-five, and I'm okay with that, s'all."
    "But," says Amy, "I've been here like forever and I put up the yurt 'n take it down 'n make town runs 'n split kindling and make a lot of the breakfasts ... "
    "Which are always eggs 'n broccoli," someone shoots back, "'n I hate eggs 'n broccoli."
    "Don't interrupt, I have the floor. But I'm only making, like, thirty dollars a day, and I gotta ask, am I digging myself a hole just to be here?"
    "Look, if it's by the hour it's not worth it for me to be here," replies Burt. "Why should I make, like, fifty a day when I can be on a crew where I'd make eighty or a hundred?"
    Jerry-up has been listening quietly. He raises his hand.
    Like Steffi, he's not a huge producer, but has been making out okay. He's in it for some aspects of the lifestyle, she thinks. And she's learned to pay attention to what he has to say. Almost thinks of him as her Guru from Brooklyn.
    He gets the floor and stands up from the hay bale where he's been sitting. He spreads his hands. God, the guy really does look like those old paintings of Jesus. "Hey! I hear where everybody's comin' from." He gestures around the room. "Each of us is a body in the crummy, like Amy says. And we help out around camp and keep it from becomin' a nightmare, even though that doesn't pay nothin.' On the other hand, without at least half the crew putting out eight hundred to a thousand trees each, we'd fall so far behind the Forest Circus would shut us down. So high production is high value too, but it's gotta have an incentive. Burt's got a little place out near Greenwood an' so do the Magruders; they're gonna run cows some day. Crew loyalty is not gonna buy those cows all by itself. They could be doing other work, like Burt says."
    "You got a motion?" asks Chuck.
    "Sure. Have the treasurer take the total payment for each unit and divide it in half. Pay out one half by the hour and one half by the tree."
    "Huh?" asks Burt, who sees dollars signs being flushed away. "How th' hell's that an incentive?"
    "It's called being a cooperative. Look ... you pay your  low-rollers something to be in the crummy. Keeps the contract open. Your low-rollers pay the high-rollers to stuff the hillside with trees. Also keeps the contract open. It's better than by the piece for Amy, but better than by the hour for you."
    "I dunno." Burt is trying to work out how much he'd lose by being here.
    "Was there a motion in all that?" asks Chuck.
    Juneen, who's secretary, chants from her scribbled notes. "Have treasurer take total payment for each unit and divide it in half. Pay out half by the hour, half by the tree."
    "Is that right?" Chuck asks Jerry-up.
    "Uhh, yeah."
    "Discussion to the motion?" Chuck asks the circle of dirty faces round the interior of the yurt.
    Jerry-down, a bigger and slower-thinking guy than Jerry-up, rises in place and is recognized. "Umm ... every unit is diff'rent. So, y'know, like ... we get to th' landing, look it over 'n vote right there. Lots of slash and non-plantin' spots? By th' hour. Kinda average? Half-'n' half. All gravy? By th' piece."
    "That an amendment?" asks Chuck.
    "Uhhh. Sure, why not."
    Chuck looks at Juneen.
    "I make that pay out each unit by vote of crew on the landing, hour, half-and-half, or piece."
    "Wow, good job, Junie. That about right, Jerry?"
    'Yeah. Umm, yeah."
    "Discussion to th' amendment?"
    "I like it," says Isaiah. "Gravy units will help th' Magruders buy cows. Slash units will help Amy get paid to crawl through slash, which is a thing she does, like, a lot, without fussing. It's equitable." Anything Isaiah says tends to wrap up a discussion. People can feel consensus building. "And ... I call the question."
    "On the motion with the amendment?"
    "That is cor-r-r-rect."
    The motion, as amended, passes. The treasurer is going to have a lot to keep track of, but Steffi thinks it will be worth it. Well, she hopes it will. She was elected crew treasurer only a week ago, and math is not her strong point.
   
:::

The sun angles down among the larches on the western ridges, lengthening the shadows. There's an evening star.
    "What are you gathering up all that orange stuff for?" Steffi asks Willard. Willard, a quiet guy who's at every contract but has little to say and has apparently no legal address, is dragging a bunch of "orange stuff" off a stump into his empty tree bag.
    "It's, it's called 'calf's brains' -- it's a - a - a mushroom. Almost. Almost as good as morels and, and it's, it's all over the place here, fuh-fuh-free.. Try it, you'll ... you'll like it."
    Willard's recommendation carries some weight. He's always returning to camp from somewhere with a grouse or a trout in his tree bag. He seldom seems to need to make a town run. A peculiarity of the guy is that he forages, hunts and fishes in this rugged region year round.
    Barefoot.
    Plants trees barefoot, too. Some people give him a wide berth but Steffi likes him. Something about him reminds her of her own childhood, especially the part where she ran away from home and lived in her own handmade wigwam in the dead of winter.
    Steffi finds her own orange-crowned stump and rakes the fungi toward herself with her dag. She's got a plastic bag left over from lunch and dumps the goods into it, tying the end off. She's got fifty trees to go and doesn't want to get the mushrooms all gritty.
    In the evening, Steffi builds up the fire from the morning's coals in the Airtight and puts on her Cold-Handle skillet with the usual sliced potatoes in olive oil with Italian seasoning. Then she brings over the baggie from her tree bag, snips the calf's brains into the skillet with scissors, and stirs it all with a chopstick, listening to the sizzle.
    When dinner's done, she brings the skillet, with a fork, over to her desk, where she has a book open on a kind of easel. The book is by Ed Abbey, and she's got it open to the page where he climbs to a spot in the desert, atop an almost totally unclimbable pinnacle, that he's sure no one has ever reached before, only to find a clearly delineated arrow, made of small stones, pointing to absolutely nowhere.
    This, she thinks, savoring the calf's brains, is the life.

:::

The crew wants to finish the contract in the next two days. They offer to split into two groups, if the CO will allow them to work that way. He will; what's more, his people need to go to a fire training and they are willing to drop off the trees in the shade at the units and let the Hoedags finish the job without "supervision." They'll be inspected later, after they've already long gone. The last two units are very far apart; one is eleven acres and the other is twenty. The low rollers will go to the eleven and the high rollers will go to the twenty, and both groups will camp primitively on site, staying till the unit's done, then rolling back to the crew camp to pack up and go away.
    Steffi's not a high roller by any stretch, but she's encouraged to go to the twenty with them, so in the afternoon she puts together some stuff in her Kelty backpack, rolls up her sleeping bag and a tarp, bungies them onto the frame, and throws her load in the back of the crummy with everyone else's. The other crew will use Juneen's Ford six-pack, which is practically a crummy in its own right.
    The twenty-acre crew hop in and drive for about two hours to reach their job, and find it pancake-flat. As promised, there's a tarp over a snowbank with thousands of jelly-rolled trees, mostly baby lodgepole pines, waiting for them.
    "Shall we do this one by the piece? Buy some cows and retire to our mini-ranchettes?" grins Burt. Heads nod.
    Camp is made right out in the open clear-cut, with a small fire. Sleeping bags radiate from the fire, cowpoke fashion. Steffi thinks of the crackling-cold night under the frozen stars in Arizona. A lot has happened since then.
    Not long before dawn, she's awakened by a cold nose. No, wait, it's somebody else's nose! right against hers. Mildly disgusted, she wriggles her arm up out of the bag to shove the interloper away.
    Hairy. Tiny hands grip her finger and the cold nose shifts to sniff her hand.
    Okay, now she's awake.
    It's a raccoon.
    "Go. Git!"
    The animal nibbles at the heel of her palm.
    "No, seriously, bug out or I'm gonna bean ya." She digs out her flashlight and tries shining the creature away. It just grins in its bandit mask and sits up, waving its paws in the light like someone making a shadow play.
    "What's  up, Stef?" asks Chuck sleepily.
    "Fracking coon won't leave me alone. Gahh! Now it's in my hair!"
    Chuck and one of the Magruders rise up and prod the raccoon off into the dawn with sticks.
    "Wow," says Chuck. "It's light enough to work. What say we hit it now and see if we can do the whole thing today?"
    "With six people?" asks Burt, sitting up.
    "Why not? On this ground you can do one to two hundred trees an hour, even with th' shade blocks."
    "You can. I dunno about me," doubts Steffi.
    "Aw, let's at least have a go. We can be back in camp tonight, all the comforts of home."
    With a groan, Chuck's companions lift themselves into the chill air. The raccoon anxiously watches from a safe distance as the now alarmingly tall animals mill about, eat, drink stale coffee made the night before, wander off to the bushes one by one, then drag their dags and bags from the roof rack of the crummy and head over to the jellyrolls.
    "Oh, these are a hundred to the roll!" someone says.  
    "Yeah, with pines you can do that."
    The roots cling to a pencil-straight taproot. Definitely made for fast planting. Steffi loads herself with four rolls, a quart of water and a tin of sardines. She can use twigs as chopsticks to eat brunch, then bury the can underneath one of her trees.  This should see her through to lunch time.
    Step, step, step, step, swing, draw tree, poke it into the hole, tamp, shade block with a stick or stone, repeat.  
    The sun rises over a far ridge and begins shortening stump shadows all around her. Birds are singing. With her gloved right hand holding lightly onto the end of her hoe handle, Steffi reaches for a tree from the left pocket of her bag. Whoa, empty. She moves the right-pocket bundle, chilly to the touch and heavy, into her left pocket. Wow, a hundred trees already. She looks along the line; the guys are way ahead of her, planting like machines, grinning.
    She can feel it in her bones. This is going to be her highest production day. As in, never again a day like this. It will be all downhill from here.
    That's fine. Nobody lives forever.





(To be continued)

Iron Buddhas 7

 - 7 -

EVERYBODY'S PACKING camp yet again.
    Steffi's snow vacation has convinced her she needs a little more space -- crew food, for example, is okay up to a point, but twice the bucket brought down into the bottom of a unit has contained nothing but onion sandwiches, and while communism is all well in its place, she'd like to have her own fire to sit by some evenings. A step-van, or maybe even a school bus. She's done well enough in the Olympics to afford something.
    The Magruder brothers know just the thing. "Talk to Murray. He has a friend on the Stones crew, wants to get out of the woods, has a nice rig."
   Murray, thin-faced, mustachioed, and intellectual, is half out of the woods himself -- wants to go back to school after this season and be a professor of music or something. Afraid the planting will dull the talents in his brain and hands. He lays aside his guitar as Steffi comes up to him in the yurt, listens a bit, and rubs his chin.
    "Cat Man has a rig, yeah, but he wants fifteen hundred for it. A little steep, maybe. How about my truck?"
    Murray's truck has a taller camper than Steffi's, and with a stove and stovepipe, too, but it looks like an outhouse, is even darker than Rocinante inside, and stinks of dogs and cigarettes. She winces, but he's not offended. "I'll give yuh th' number. Y'get to Eugene, try him."

:::

Cat Man is a little guy, about two-thirds Steffi's height, shaggy-maned and a bit of a showman.
    "Here she is, ain't she lovely?" He extends his arm in a sweep that's like the raising of a theater curtain.
    It's a two-ton flatbed truck with dual wheels on the back, very tall. On the truck bed there's a house.
    A real house! Cat Man shows off his carpentry: maple flooring, cedar interior, skylight, double doors with divided lights, windows ditto, cedar shake exterior. Airtight stove with pipe flashed through the ceiling. A set of six steps, made from two-by-eights, provides access. One entire side wall folds out to make a stage; he'd kept an upright piano inside at one time and had entertained notions of traveling with a band, medicine-show style.
    The business end of the rig is a deep blue blunt-nosed cab with much of the engine underneath the floorboards. The cab's height is a bit intimidating for Steffi at first. Cat Man shows her how to stand on the running board, grasp the chromed grab bar, and swing herself up onto the seat. The steering wheel, which is huge, nestles right up against her rib cage almost. There's no seat belt.
    "Your windshield wipers are vacuum-powered; they go slower at low revs and faster at high revs. There's five forwards and, get this, three reverse. She can't go very fast but the gas tank is huge; you can run her all day without stopping."
    "What ... what year is this thing?"
    "Nineteen Forty-seven Chevy, but the engine is newer and has just been rebuilt. Here's all the receipts."
    Steffi likes it, but at fifteen hundred? She smells mechanic work in her future "What do you drive?"
    "Nothing right now; I need to downsize. Believe it or not, this has been my sole source of transport, along with a motor scooter."
    "Well ... what about we look at my pickup?"

:::

Steffi looks about. She's gonna need a little more stuff. In here she's rattling around and she's not quite used to it. She's never actually owned a home other than Rocinante's homemade canopy.
 Cat Man was not much for shelves and cabinetry, even though he's obviously a much better carpenter than she.
    They'd dickered only briefly, then swapped titles on the vehicles. Steffi's new house cost five hundred dollars and Rocinante.
    It had felt like a betrayal. The faithful yellow pickup had tugged at Steffi's heartstrings the whole time she was unloading.
    The foam mattress, queen size, had fit perfectly into her new bedroom, an extension of the house built over the cab of the ancient truck. On the mattress she'd piled not only her sleeping bag, blanket and pillow but also very nearly all her possessions, then closed and padlocked the glass doors, swung herself into the cab, and rolled tentatively away with a hoot of the quaint horn and a wave.
    First stop, Goodwill. She finds a wall bracket for her kerosene lamp, a copper bottomed pot, a Cold Handle skillet that looks like it should just fit the eye on the Airtight, three bowls, a replacement tablespoon, a tea kettle, three mugs, and six nice brass coat hooks.
    Also from the book section, an acceptable Three Pillars of Zen with only one corner of the cover chewed off. She's hoping it will help her survive this move toward the middle class.

:::

After the coat hooks are installed, and Steffi's chore coat and rain gear and dulcimer hung, she starts building "window seat" cabinets and a desk. The corners are crooked, but everything is stoutly hinged and stuff can be stored away.
    At the desk, by lamplight, she will write in her journal and read, on good days, Paul Reps, Gary Snyder and D.T. Suzuki, there being a shortage of Zen nuns getting published.
     On bad days, Plath.
    Herr Lucifer, Herr God.

:::



Steffi finds a scrap of one-by-six and carves on it: Ritz Hotel. This she nails up over the back door.
She pats the housetruck on its fanny. "Let's go."

:::

With the Olympics done, and the weather changing, crews are spreading out to contracts in the Rocky Mountains, a phenomenon known as the Spring Tour.
    Face Crew is off to Idaho. Steffi stops at the "almost wholesale" grocery and picks up five boxes of canned this-n'-that and a fifty-pound sack of rice. With rice, dandelions, chickweed, miner's lettuce, and the like, she knows she can go a long time without having to come in to town. The contract, she's heard, is a day's drive from anywhere. She climbs into the blue-and-chrome cab of the Ritz and heads up the Columbia Gorge.
    Wind is coming downstream today; the Ritz's big blunt nose is an easy target for a headwind and, heavy as it is, the housetruck sways a little, bucking its way east. Steffi would like to be thrilled at the scenery -- Rooster Rock, Multnomah Falls, the giant dams, the rimrock -- but she feels she's hanging on for dear life. And fifth gear seems to top out, here, at forty miles an hour. A hill appears in the distance and it hangs there on her horizon for what seems like ages. A seagull passes, making better time than the chugging engine.
    Steffi misses her tape player. A little bit of Blue or The Low Spark of High-heeled Boys would help her pass the miles. She sings to herself, bits about Carey getting out his cane and she'll put on some silver.
    Night falls as the Ritz drones on; a town's lights creep over the horizon and just hang there, seemingly unable to come closer . Steffi checks the gas gauge; it's leaning on empty. Damn! She'd meant to get jerry cans at the army surplus, but it was a stop she hadn't manage to make. Ease off on the throttle; lower revs. Climb the grade. As soon as you top the grade, take out of gear and freewheel, idling. As you bottom out, slip back into fifth, listen for the sweet spot in the revs, take it down to fourth, repeat.
    The town's lights reappear, still no closer by the look of them. An eighteen wheeler groans past with a red VW "bug" drafting in its tailwind.
    The engine coughs.
    Coughs again. Starts dying.
    O-o-o-kay, that's it. Steffi takes it out of gear and drifts into the emergency lane on a faint downgrade, nursing a few hundred more feet out of the big truck's inertia.
    What to do? She doesn't want to hitch to the town at night. Or walk. Much of what's going going by is pickup trucks with a couple of cowboy hats driving; too much to handle if it's the wrong color hat.
    She remembers the warm springs. Oh, yeah! Sawgas! It can get her closer to town, maybe a safer walk by the light of the mercury vapor lamps on the rampway.
    She climbs in the back, pulls the bolt pillow off the tool locker, lifts the lid, and picks up the bleach bottle in which she mixes and keeps the stuff.
    Aww, empty.
    Oh, hey, the saw! She hefts out the old McCullough, climbs down and runs around to the big square gas tank.
    Oops, can't reach with the saw; the leading edge of the house is in the way.
 Hmm.
    Back to the house, grab hard hat from locker.
    It's a blue plastic one, cap style. Steffi doesn't like it much, prefers her Sou'wester rain hat, but has it along for any saw work, such as 'falling' small snags to get dry firewood for the yurt. Looks like it'll do.
    She runs the hat round to the fuel tank, empties the saw into the hat, empties the hat into the gas tank.
    Puts her house in order, jumps on the running board, lifts herself into the cab by the grab bar, turns over the engine. It catches. She checks the big driver's side rearview mirror, stays in the emergency lane, ascends through the gears, babies the throttle, thirty five miles an hour all the way to the ramp, gears down, climbs the ramp, crosses the highway to the station, and runs out of gas right at the pump.
    She's definitely gonna buy a couple of long-necked gas cans here, price no object.
    Gas station attendant eyes her up and down. "Where's your guy?"
    "Guy?"
    "Big rig like this, had to have a guy drivin.' Did he go in th' back?"
    Jerk doesn't know a Hoedag when he sees one. Maybe she'll buy the cans at the next place.

:::

Idaho! The Rockies! The mountains, the trees, the smells through the open window are different. The soil, full of mica and pyrites, glitters. The firs are dusty, and in place of the ubiquitous cedars of the Cascades and Olympics, there are light green conifers,all putting out new needles, which Steffi learns later are called "larches."
    She pulls into Pierce and it's night again. All the cars in town are at the only two-story building, which is covered with Christmas lights and a big sign, "Grand Re-opening."
     Hungry. Might be a meal to buy in there.
    The front door has those swinging shutter-like thingies like in the movies. Steffi can't believe it. She climbs down and crosses the street with a little trepidation, images from "High Noon" going through her head. What's it gonna be, a brass rail, spittoons, and poker?
    Steffi looks in. No, it's about a hundred people, all ages, and there's a huge buffet, long tables laid end to end. The room is exuding immense affection. An older guy, all paunch and walrus mustache, notices her. "Gonna stay out there all night? S'okay, all on th' house for th' grand openin'."
    No kidding? Steffi comes in and gains three pounds.

:::

The road from Pierce to camp is only ninety miles long, but requires almost as much driving time as from Portland to Pierce. It's purely a jeep track.
    Ritzy doesn't like it. She's fourteen feet tall and ten wide, and leans out alarmingly on the curves.  Something has come loose in the back and is rolling around seasick. Steffi tries second, tries third, tries second, tries third again. No gear is happy. Dust, glittering with mica, rises in the rear and is pulled forward by a tailwind, covering everything inside and out. Steffi can feel the grit between her teeth when they're rattled by the washboarding on the grades.
    Here's a corner so tight someone's hung up a polished hubcap or something so drivers can see if anyone's coming around from the other side. Ritzy has to jocky back and forth five times to negotiate it.
    Steffi finds a wide-out a little farther along, gives the truck a needed break and steps over to the drop-off. River's about two hundred feet below. In the middle of the current, there's a little raft using fifty-five gallon drums for flotation, with a tiny cabin on one end and a mess of chuffing machinery on the other. Two guys are running some kind of bucket chain from the river bottom into a gadget that rocks back and forth.
    One of the guys grins up at her. He has only one leg. Maybe he's dredging for a new one. The pursuit of happiness in the Land of the Free.

:::

 One unit is most of this contract. Camp is squeezed onto the landing; its a high place, and there are snowdrifts.
    At sunset, Ritzy shoulders her way, barely breathing, past the yurt. Juneen and the Magruders come out to help block Ritzy up level. Steffi's home again.
    She drags the steps out of the back doors with Juneen and bolts them to the doorstep. "What have we got?"
    "Three hundred twenty acres. It's a short job; we have to make twenty acres a day and there's only going to be thirteen of us."
    "We can do an acre and a half average, can't we?"
    "Some places we can, but these trees are jelly-rolls."
    "What's that?"
    "See that canvas shade-house behind the yurt? The suspectors put a slurry of vermiculite and water in the barrels, dip the trees, spread them out on burlap and then roll up the burlap and pin it with a nail, like a diaper. Those rolls are heavy and it means more bag-ups. Slows us down."
    "What's it for?"
    "I know you won't believe it, 'cuz there's all this snow, but it's not like the Olympics. It will get hot out there at midday. This will cool the trees till they're in the ground."
    "Well, live trees beat dead trees."
    "Yeah, but th' slurry hurts yer back. Worst part is, th' suspectors get grumpy rolling th' trees, 'n they're apt t'take it out on us."
    "Oh. Oh well, we're here. Seeya in the morning?"
    "You bet."
    Steffi climbs in through the double doors and checks out the damage. Not too bad. Mostly cans and potatoes rolling around, books dumped. She steps up on the window seat nearest the bedroom, digs her lamp chimney out from under her pillow, and brings it over to the lamp. Crank wick up, light with match, install chimney, roll wick down to the sweet spot.
    Yellow light floods the room. It's a little chilly; she loads up the Airtight with a few splits from a cedar shake and some newspaper, gets them burning merrily, and adds a couple of chunks of fir that hitched with her all the way from western Washington.
    As Steffi is sweeping the glittery dust out the back door, Yoder squeezes past the yurt in his widebody step-van.
    Steffi's at his door before he has rolled to a stop. "Gonna put up that tent?"
    He leans wearily out the window, surveying the scene glumly. "Where?"
    A Magruder arrives from the yurt. "It's pretty tight here; and we have to leave room for the suspectors to park, too."
    "Maybe I'll just sleep in the van."
     "Hang on and we'll level you up right there."
    "You will?"
    "'Course we will. Still kind of a newbie, are ya?"
 


(To be continued)