Building Buck's Flat
Short Fiction (with audio) - Not very short and hardly fictional
This one really is long. Might even be too long for the email you receive it in. Here’s a PDF version:
Here’s the audio version, read by Leor Bases:
And here’s the story:
Leor and I always budgeted five hours for the drive to Buck’s flat, door to door. I don’t know if it ever took exactly that long. Our arrival time wasn’t important. If Tim was up there, he’d be working. As soon as we arrived, he’d have work for us too. “There’s always work,” he’d say.
The first time we drove up, Tim emailed us written directions. The first few steps told how to get from Berkeley to the town of Payne’s Creek, which is about 30 minutes East of I-5. The turnoff is at the small city of Red Bluff, which most people blow through on their way to Redding or Oregon. At Payne’s Creek, the roads became smaller, and Tim’s steps became specific.
“6. Right on Payne’s Creek -- it is winding and a short distance.
“7. Right on Plum Creek -- plum trees on right side. Go past Cal Fire and Georges Christmas Trees.
“8. Then right on Ponderosa Way. Dirt road with green street sign.”
It would have been impossible to be lost up to this point. But Step 9, the final step, veered sharply impressionistic.
“9. 16 miles on dirt road -- keep on main road, at water going over road just drive thru, that’s how it’s always. At any fork, go right. Look for signs that say Buck’s Flat and at gate look for key in post.”
Leor turned onto Ponderosa with conviction. We entered a wood of tall pines and red fir trees. Soon, the road proved difficult. It curved, dropped suddenly, kicked noisy hell back up at your car’s hopefully titanium undercarriage, and required all available focus from any driver hoping to avoid sharp rocks and potholes. Meanwhile, as passenger-navigator, I tried to map Tim’s words onto the reality of the road in front of us and decisively communicate maneuvers to Leor, who was still engaged body and soul with keeping his vehicle in shape to do anything.
“Water going over road.”
“‘Just drive thru.’”
“Really?”
“Tim says that’s the way it always is.”
“But does the car always make it?”
The two instructions for turn-making were “keep on main road” and “at any fork, go right.” Both commands seemed clear and final, but we couldn’t figure out how to obey one without offending the letter of the other. It was a question of semantics: At what point does a small driveway become a fork? If we took every right we could imagine, we’d end up well off anyone’s idea of a main road (plus probably back where we started, having made a circle of endless right turns). If we instead stuck obediently to the main road, we’d have to make some impermissible lefts. It was a gray area and required quick binary value calculus even as sharp stones threatened to pop all four tires.
And yet, we made it to the gate. We looked for the key in the post, as we’d been told. For a couple minutes, the question of “which post?” was on our minds. When we found the key, it became obvious: the post we were looking for was the one with the key in it. From this perspective, with the elegant logic of self-evidency, the whole trip looked straightforward. Of course we would find the ranch, and we did.
Inside the gate: Buck’s Flat Ranch. Free blackberry bushes grew along most of the driveway. Their branches drooped almost to the ground with fruit-weight the first time we saw them. Even by late summer, they still had more berries than we could pick.
Beyond one final turn in the driveway, the property opened up and you saw why they called it Buck’s Flat. After 16 winding miles through thick forest that extended presumably forever in every direction besides the one you came, Tim’s ranch was almost completely open on a flat plane extending about two miles wide and long. At the end of the flat, there was a drop. Below the drop, in the ongoing expanse, trees and all other life prevailed as far as we could see. This was a Northern California we didn’t know about, one that was as large and free of human buildings as the whole earth had once been. But smack in the center of that secret, unpopulated continent, Tim’s ranch held on. Why was this specific tract of land, by appearances the only of its kind in the area, empty of the growth surrounding it? Either by some ecological anomaly or clear cutting long ago. We didn’t know.
Bramble and bushes could go wild from the gate to the edge of his clearing. But if they approached Tim’s projects, he would chop them indiscriminately, maybe a little careless of where their seeds fell, where he’d curse and clear them again next year. While he rarely let the blackberries and other weeds bother him, he ignored them as fertile food plants and looked at our berry enthusiasm as a child’s diversion. It was that way throughout the land: if something lived without him putting it there, it either stayed out of his way or died by his hand.
Empty of wildlife as it was, Buck’s Flat was busy. From the high vantage point on the driveway, it could all be seen, spread out on the flat: a pond filled with floating smarm, the old barn and stable, long plastic greenhouses we learned the purpose of soon enough, a barn for driveable equipment, a few other buildings largely unused, materials in piles anywhere, old wooden rundown fences, wire fences low enough to be stepped over, tall fences made sturdy by both wood and wire, scattered ladders, hoses, stuff like that. In the center of it all on either side of the driveway: the ranch house and the orchard. I’d tasted fruit from that orchard before I knew anything else about the ranch. As for the house, it was over 100 years old and Tim’s main project starting a few years before, continuing through the months we worked there, and ongoing until, well, ongoing, I guess.
Our regular schedule the summer we worked there was to spend two to five days at the ranch, working like dogs, gratefully. On the last evening, we’d drive home slaphappy, carrying fruit, a few hundred dollars of untaxed cash richer. In Berkeley we had other things to do, supposedly. Leor, at least, had another job. We’d both just finished college that May and still wanted to be around. Few days home, though, and we’d head right back to the ranch. This was between June and September, 2020.
Tim didn’t live at Buck’s Flat full time. He was a 66 year old electrician and contractor in San Francisco. He also had a doughnut shop, a wife from Vietnam, and a son from a previous marriage.
We knew him because he had lived in our Berkeley house when he was in college, 45 years before. It was an old house that had been a National Historic Landmark. Tim worked on repairs at the house under the assumption that it wouldn’t be any sort of landmark much longer if no one took care of it.
Someone would alert me: “Tim Moran is here.” I would find him trying to lug a new toilet up the back stairs by himself or eyeballing the old smoker in the backyard which had collected musty standing rainwater and was only still there because, as college students, we weren’t yet self-assured enough to not be hoarders. I guess out of a sense of duty, I would grab a corner of the toilet or stand back as he took an angle grinder to the rusty smoker, then carry the dripping pieces to the dumpster.
We had a dog, Bodhi, a German Shepherd mix on the smaller side of possible mixes but with sharp teeth and an unbreakable jaw. He put these to regular use on human flesh, including, once, Tim’s right arm, in our backyard, with at least eight of us standing around as witnesses. For one long moment, no one did anything. We were all shocked into stillness and sure someone else would jump first. Tim raised the attacked arm and shook it a few times, trying to loose the dangling dog, who was still holding on by both rows of teeth, two centimeters deep into old working skin and soft tissue. Eventually we woke up and moved to pry Bodhi’s mouth open. Frantic and apologetic, we washed and wrapped the bloody puncture wounds in the kitchen sink. Tim stared at the whole operation with detached surprise and said, “That god damn dog bit me.” He didn’t seem interested in either scolding or forgiving us. I guess it was these types of episodes that told him Leor and I had the makings of ranch hands.
Though we knew he left, it seemed Tim was always at the ranch. We would arrive and he would already be up on the roof. Alone in the only clearing we knew of for miles in any direction, and bookended by five hours of complicated driving, Buck’s Flat seemed outside of time. Tim was always there, even though he went home. Our lives became two lives, each pausing when we dipped into the other and resuming when we returned.
When our Buck’s Flat life unpaused, we got to work. A moment to put on your shoes and then go. Hydrate later, catch up with Tim this evening. It made no sense to waste workable daylight.
Some days we mowed. Leor drove the sit-mower. It had two bars that controlled steering and speed, jerkily. He blazed thick, coarsely-cut swaths across the bumpy expanse, nearly jumping the thing over rocks he didn’t have the patience to go around. I got the detail work, mowing rounded areas with the push-mower, or trimming tough spots with a handheld edger, that tall tool that cuts plants with quick-whipping orange plastic strands. I felt proud to have been pegged as the detail man and took care to raze every last wisp of unwanted plant.
Details or not, my job required almost as little concentration as Leor’s. Neither of us wanted to think and Tim didn’t want us to. We mowed to push, to cut everything in our path so long as it wasn’t a living horse or a planted fruit tree, like Sherman’s march to the sea, with brutal resolve under sweltering conditions.
It hardly felt like work. If you stepped outside for a few dreaded chores and ended up doing what we did to those lawns, you’d be right to complain. But we knew what we were here for, and it wasn’t just a hard-fought means to the end of 20 dollars an hour. It was the main event, a spiritual session, healthy purging of those instincts inside our 22 year old bodies that told us to struggle completely against every enemy, real or imagined. And once we finished the yard, Tim handed us a glass of watered-down pedialyte and put us to work on the house.
We rebuilt nearly all of that house, surface by surface. It seemed like distinct projects: roof, wall, wall, wall, wall, attic, bedroom, etc. But looking back, we decided we’d slowly put a new house where the old one stood. What’s a house if not the walls, the rooms, and the roof?
I guess there’s more to it: the frame, the floors, the foundation. Most of that was left how it was. You can’t very easily keep a house standing if you remove the components that bear its weight. When something foundational needed fixing, like a rotting beam or crumbling slab, Tim gathered the repair materials and told us what to hold where. So, it was not a complete demo/rebuild, but, pridefully, we told ourselves we were building a house.
First was the roof. It was a classic roof, the type a kid draws as an upside-down V, though a bit less steep than that. From the ridgeline down on both slanted sides, we peeled off the old roof. It had originally been a layered thing. Our job was to remove the layers one at a time, then lay new ones in their place.
But the layers, we learned, had changed on their own over so many years. As weather and other natural forces had their continuous way, the roof pieces morphed and fused. Some lost claim over internal integrity. Strong chemical bonds formed between materials that had once seemed sovereign. Wooden slats rotted in harmony with the thin composite board beneath them. Rusty nails, cotton candy insulation crumbles, feltpaper wrapping, and foreign organic materials amalgamated and coalesced in stubborn spots and repulsed and forgot about each other in others. In effect, you never knew how much or little of the roof you’d remove with every prying motion.
We attacked the surface with blue metal catspaws and hammers. Conceptually, removing all the nails on a board would allow the board to come off, and yanking hard enough under the edge of a board could remove all its nails at once. In practice, who knew? Sometimes a nail would crumble on the lightest hammer impact and sometimes it would remain, come fire, fury, or flooding. Our usual brute-force techniques were dangerous here. You could end up inside the attic if you dislodged the entire piece of roof you were standing on, or you could summersault off the roof if you attacked with too much backwards force without meeting sufficient opposite resistance. But in the face of stubborn nails, force was all that could be called on.
Tim, as ever, worked just as fast and ten times more elegantly than the two of us combined. He wore jeans that went down not quite to his ankles, stepped rigidly into a wide stance beside a beam, got down to the nailhead with his catspaw, wiggled the nail loose with strength that probably began back down at those exposed ankles or in the soul of his land or in 1975, flung it clattering somewhere onto the rooftop to be collected later, and moved laterally onto the next one. We tried to follow his pattern, but, for us, each section of wood was its own new project.
Complicating our struggle to remove the roof: mud daubers. Due to the mud daubers, you couldn’t really plug into pulling boards away with complete abandon. Even if you got one loose and remained upright, you released vicious flying friends who had minds to retaliate. The roof’s layers were their home, the 8 inches between sunlight and ceiling their ancestral estate. They bred, fed, and enacted complex wasp society in there. Now the lid was coming off and war was about the least we could expect.
Leor and I feared the daubers. Their stings stung. They weren’t like bees, who often have just one card to play and do so judiciously. The mud daubers inside Tim’s roof could sting and sting again without any refractory period to reload their venom or diminishing returns on the amount of pain each sting could inflict. Their fellows and family members could also sting, and, to their credit, they had plenty of motive.
Our strategy was to let a resting board lie until it was fully denailed, then pick it up and fling it off the roof in one movement, hoping it’d carry away any sleeping wasps lodged in their mud homes affixed to the bottom of the beam. Tim didn’t like the mud daubers any more than we did, saying, “Goddamn mud daubers.” But he kept on pulling nails out as we skittishly worked behind him.
Evenings, we would sit in the dayroom. The dayroom was also the house’s foyer, one of many storage closets, about the best place I’ve ever found to watch a sunset, and Leor’s bedroom. I had an implicitly designated wicker chair, Leor sat on his bed, and Tim’s chair in the corner was his throne. We’d take off our shoes and Tim would light a cigarette. He smoked in the dayroom but nowhere else on the property. He kept his pleasures kennelled.
Between the cigarette smoke, our daily dust and grime, 100 years of unrecorded episodes, and maybe some other olfactory factor I never identified, the smell of that room was specific and permanent. By the end of my tenure at the ranch, it impacted me powerfully. It reminded me of being done. It came with a last and flimsy charge of energy just exactly when I no longer needed it. It was the smell of the gratification I’d been delaying all day. If I ever get another whiff of that mixture, I’m sure I’ll take a load off and forget everything at once with gratitude.
Leor or I would eventually leave the dayroom to shower. I looked forward to that shower all day, but it was usually less satisfying than you thought it’d be. From general sleeveland to sharp circles at sockline and gloveline, I found a coat of grass clippings, engine fuel, dirt, debris, and general ranch grease. My arms tingled and I knew the only thing that could bring me back from full physical frailty was immersion in warm water and maybe a whole night to soak everything off. But this was an old ranch showerhead and there was stuff like soap to deal with, which didn’t mix well with the new ingredients.
After showering, the clean one would return to the dayroom and the other would take their turn to wash up. Tim talked, as he looked through the dayroom’s wall of windows onto the flat where the sun had gone down behind his piles and barns. The horses were out there too, but they were nothing to worry about; we’d fed them before coming in. Tim had finished his work for the day, just in the time of the day. Now that it was evening, there was no reason to think of it. Evening wasn’t time to rehash or renounce the day’s work. It was its own event. There was so much to do and plenty to talk about. He got going, speaking freely to whichever one of us wasn’t showering, then to both of us together as the last light left. We’d been with him all day, but he saved discussion for the dayroom. When he found a good stopping point or needed a moment to consider some aspect of the conversation, he sighed and went in to take his shower. We stayed in the dayroom, clean now. While Tim was gone, we played backgammon and spoke sparsely in the course, adaptive code we were developing unconsciously over those months.
Sometimes Tim had us sheetrocking. Sheetrocking also involved layerwork, similar to our roof rebuild but in the attic, a slightly less perilous setting. We were converting the attic to another guest room: removing all cobwebs and eccentric stockpiled artifacts to create a white-walled and windowless loft like an unlocked loony cell. As we were building it, Tim indicated that we could someday stay there with our spouses and kids and whoever else wanted a ranch retreat. If our roofwork held and we sheetrocked properly, we’d have a place to visit for generations to come.
We tetris-carried large sheets of white drywall up the narrow stairway. Tim said, “me pappy was a sheetrocker” and boasted hereditary sheetrocking virtuosity. We cut the sheets to fit the setting, considering obstacles like beams and outlets. We jammed new pink pillow insulation wherever it could fit and Tim dealt with the wiring. Then all three of us placed the unwieldy sheet just so. Whoever could reach fumbled with screw and impact driver while the others held the sheet in place. Tim said “drive that fucker in,” but we didn’t find it so simple. If the screws finally bit without cracking the fiberboard’s usually delicate eggshell, Tim said, “I didn’t realize Jackson was a sheetrocking boy too.”
Once, wedged in an extremity, I stepped off an attic floor beam and ended up with the lower half of my left leg through the drywall ceiling of the living room below. Leor and I turned, wide-eyed, to Tim. He raised his eyebrows right back at us and said, “Good thing you’re both sheetrockers by blood.”
We went downstairs to fix it straightaway; there was no time like the present in sheetrocking. As the main offender, I was chosen by justice to be the main fixer. The first step was to cut a uniform hole in the ceiling, rather than make a perfect foot-shaped piece of drywall to fill the existing one. I stood on the very top rung of the 6-foot indoor ladder, arching back and sawing away with rectangular intentions. Leor stood on the ladder’s other side, ready to catch the falling pieces. Tim held the ladder firm, looking forward instead of up to save his neck and checking our progress by the material that landed on him and the sounds of hesitation we exchanged.
I do not know how many people would be particularly fit to cut straight up into two-inch ceiling board with a battery-powered sawzall, but I proved not to be the world’s undisputed champion. My line veered determinedly away from where I aimed. In distress and out of control, I kept cutting past where I planned to stop. The resulting hole-shape was something of a lengthened Missouri. I’d let my ancestors down. Tim finally looked up. He saw my work and said, “They don’t call him the Butcher of Buck’s Flat for nothing.”
It rolled off his tongue and I doubt he ever thought of it again, but to us it was a marvel. The Butcher of Buck’s Flat. Leor and I repeated it out of Tim’s earshot. For me, it was an identity. Butcher. Soon, tapping as best we could into Tim’s own vein of genius, we came up with one for Leor: Bronco. In secret and only on the ranch, that’s who we became: Butcher and Bronco. So named, we considered ourselves initiated. We held our new identities proudly (though we didn’t dare mention them to anyone else). Tim, of course, the original initiate, was Buck. Butcher, Bronco, and Buck.
The lore of Buck’s Flat grew. Though the central narrative was still just us three and our endless work, other characters emerged. There were “Meth Heads,” a general squadron of boogeymen anywhere (often, undesirably, in Tim’s San Francisco stories) but also, apparently, a specific group who had somehow resided at Buck’s Flat until recently. The history of how they came to be there was murky and Tim cleared them out before we ever arrived, but their mark remained. If we came across anything rundown or out of Tim’s natural order, he would shake his head and curse, “Meth Heads.”
As a cautionary image, he took us up to the shack where they used to live. “Never let Meth Heads live on your property,” he said, “This is what happens.” We weren’t too shocked. The house was mostly empty, if pretty dirty, but there were no clear signs of scandal.
Now, in place of the Meth Heads, there were, “the Mexicans.” “Mexicans are saints compared to Meth Heads,” Tim said. We’d never thought to make the comparison. This group was actually five or six men employed by Tim’s son to tend his crop. The crop was two 100-foot-long cloth greenhouses full of weed plants, which Tim said would yield half a million dollars of product.
The men who worked on the crop lived in trailers near the out-of-use Meth Head house. The house was so tainted that they chose to bring their own dwellings rather than risk it. They seemed to operate on a separate plane from Tim. He had his work and they had theirs and neither concerned the other. In odd moments away from Tim, Leor and I developed an ongoing bit with one man, Francisco. He was old and in search of sly fun. We or he would say, “Tequila!” and the other would laugh. As if!
At dinner, Tim said, “I don’t mind Mexicans.” Speaking broadly, now. He’d say, “The way Trump talks about them is disgusting.” Tim supported Biden in the current election but had come around to that position sometime since 2016. Every time he mentioned Trump, as if it was a red letter he was compelled to advertise in shame, he’d say, “And I voted for the guy!”
A rural Californian by birth and disposition, Tim had firm and righteous, though never overly crotchety morals. Leor and I weren’t familiar with political perspectives like his and could never predict how he would feel about any given topic. Anti-Fox and -CNN, but a regular ABC and NBC News guy, he considered himself balanced and informed. A San Francisco resident for 40 years, he had a perspective on things like urban decay. Cheeky through his severity, you could never tell how serious his stance really was.
He told a story of a raided homeless encampment in San Francisco. Agents of the city confiscated all the residents’ belongings. Now, he said, the victims of the raid were suing the city for damages and property loss. He said they were collectively asking for three million dollars.
“Three million dollars?” he said. “I’m not saying the city should have stolen all their stuff. But what did they have worth three million dollars?”
At this point, with a grin, his story took on the rogue tenor he’d been working towards.
“What’d they have,” he wondered, “irreplaceable memorabilia? I seriously doubt those homeless people were keeping precious family photo albums.”
Tim showed us framed photos and newspaper cutouts about the original owner of Buck’s Flat Ranch. Buck Senior. I never read the articles, but, thinking back now, I wonder how he made the news. I guess not much else was going on. “Man Takes Control of Flat Tract Deep in the Woods Past Payne’s Creek Settlement. Reason Unknown and He Hopes to Keep It That Way.”
Tim had no ostensible connection to that first pioneer, besides perhaps a spiritual one. As if it was his duty as successor, he studied and passed on the lore of the ranch’s builder. Dead many years now and ranch sold to a stranger, who else would tell of him?
A century ago, he had gathered wood around the flat and milled it himself, brought other materials through 16 forested miles by means I can’t imagine on a road that even now turns stomachs, and put the whole thing together. The nails and other metal pieces he used, when we found them still clinging where they were put, stirred in us an appreciation of the sturdy primitive. It seemed every nail had its own personal dimensions and bends, as if they’d all been forged by hand one at a time. Maybe they had. The house was built in the same century we were born, but Buck Senior’s metal had the longevity and significance of ancient arrowheads. In rebuilding the house, were we replacing the last of the prehistoric structures?
I can’t say if Tim revered Buck Senior because of his clear victory of will over natural factors. It’s presumptive to think he drew motivation from his predecessor, saw him and his still-standing structure as one true example that the battle could be won, for a time. If he ever thought about anything like that, it wasn’t something he would share with us. If he did feel that way about Old Buck, I guess it was too obvious to be spoken, or too embedded in his own perspective that he wouldn’t be able to name it. There was too much work to be done to spend any time thinking about why we were doing it.
Immediately after we removed the roof, we started putting on the new one. This, as you can imagine, was a matter of necessity. Even in a dry California summer, a house wasn’t fit to stay roofless for much longer than a few hours.
For every layer we removed, it felt like two had to be added. Once all supports were shored up, we cut and set pink fiberglass insulation sheets. On top of that, we screwed down plywood, then caulked the cracks. Caulk evoked compulsory jokes from Tim. He’d been on enough construction sites to know someone had to say it. “Speaking of Caulk, Leor, how’s the old lady?” After caulking, we painted the wood with weather-proof stain, then laid tarpaper in rows.
Later in the summer, we spent two weeks stapling triple-overlapped cedar shingles all the way down both sides of the roof. Topped with tough wood above everything else, the ranch house would stand for at least one more century, and look good doing it. Any industrious wasp or rain drop hoping to nest itself in the insulation would have to penetrate six layers of protective material. Good luck.
We used air compressors to staple the cedar pieces in. Long, strong staples ejected with the loud power of compressed air are dangerous weapons. We motored down the line with our machines, fixing shingles to each other, thunk, thunk, thunk. Unharnessed, it was a thrill when you reached the edge. But falling off never felt like a likely danger. When you realized you were about to fall off, you simply turned around and stapled the next row in.
We wondered what Tim would do if one of us did fall to our death. We decided his only option would be to euthanize the other and carry on with his life, a bit put out. No one in the outside world would know. If they did find out, they’d understand that Tim was only following standard procedure. He’d been left with no choice.
Maybe it wasn’t wise to, but Tim trusted us up there. He left us on the roof and prepared other projects. There were always more. He got the South wall ready for the same rehaul we’d given the roof. He repaired tools, filled propane tanks, threw together windowframes, and tended to uncooperative pipes and wires. In the evenings, we turned off the air compressors and met inside the fenced orchard to harvest peaches and plums. The trees were young, so it was easy to reach their fruit from the ground. Leor and I once tore out the old broken garden, which was full of sharp growth and splintered wood. We rammed the backhoe straight into the thicket, then pulled back and checked, with gloves, what had come loose. With this method, we unfurled the barbed knot and leveled a pile that had been gathering for longer than Tim had been alive
From time to time, Tim would walk us over to the old barn, to collect certain tools or lumber from his overflow storage. Near the barn, we were in range of the pond and the rocky flat, the extended zone where the horses hung out. Every time he got close to their stomping grounds, Tim would neigh at the horses as loud as he could. “Luh-uh-uh-uh-uh-ucky! Sta-ah-ah-ah-ah-ar.” We’d all three pause and wait for a response. Usually there wasn’t one, but Tim would stay still for a moment, seeing the Northern half of his home. Leor and I would stay frozen behind him like followers in a silent game of Simon Says. Then he’d resume his walk to the barn and we would unfreeze.
Tim used to have just one horse, a 25-year-old mare that lived in Tehama County her whole life and came to Buck’s Flat for an easy retirement. She grew old and died a few months before Leor and I would have met her. Tim dragged the body to the edge of the flat with his truck. That evening, he sat alone in the dayroom and watched a black bear come up from the canyon and consume the offering.
Soon after, someone gave Tim Lucky and Star, sisters both under 10. They had no responsibilities other than to keep Tim company when he was up there alone. No bears came to prey on the living horses; I think Tim used gunshots to establish this understanding early on.
Once when we were due to head up, Tim said another guy would meet us at the ranch. Todd. He was a friend’s son, in need of money. Tim said he could always use the help.
Leor and I weren’t eager for a new character. Todd was 30, which meant we’d surely have to give him the bedroom. There wasn’t a chair for him in the day room. Would he try to talk too much, interrupt Tim, ask if backgammon was a three player game? Most importantly, could he work?
But when we got to Buck’s Flat, Tim was alone.
“Where’s Todd?” we asked.
“Todd,” Tim said, not looking up from the hose he was unrolling. We walked with him, sensing there was more to the story. After a few steps, Tim said, “I guess Todd couldn’t handle it.”
Todd had driven up from Sacramento, spent the night, joined Tim for an hour of work in the morning, said he was actually all set and was sorry to have wasted Tim’s time, and headed home.
Leor and I exchanged a look and tried not to let our pride show.
After that, we had a new archetype in our arsenal. Toddness was contagious, ever-knocking, dangerous if you didn’t resist his infection every moment. If I hovered a moment on the ground with my water bottle, Tim, on the roof, would say, “How is it down there, Todd?” It’d be well past noon and I’d ask Leor what time he thought it was. He’d say, “I don’t know Todd, 9:30?”
At dinner, Tim said, “You’ve got to do something.” He was speaking to the general “you,” but we knew that group included Todd and both of us.
“You can’t do nothing,” he said. This statement meant the same as his last, but somehow contained new angles. We thought about it.
“It doesn’t matter what it is, at some point you just have to do it.”
Tim had done many things and still was. Even though he was old enough to retire, he maintained regular electrician business, spent about half his time at the ranch, somehow ran his doughnut shop, and still worked on our Berkeley house when everything else got slow. He had arm scars from removed tattoos and dog bites and kept up with news from his hometown. In the 90’s he had owned a restaurant and now he was sober. We took his word as well-considered and hard-learned truth.
He went on, “It doesn’t have to be any specific job, it just has to be something. If you want to build a house, build it. Some people say they want to be writers.” I bit my tongue. “That’s fine,” he said, “But you’ve got to write something.”
We heard him. He spoke as if it was a stray observation, but he knew we heard him.
“There’s always something to do.”
A few times Brad joined us at work. We’d met Brad before. He was Tim’s associate in Bay Area electrical and construction jobs. He looked a pock-marked 40, in camo pants and a bandana, running his mouth in a way that bothered no one but in the end meant nothing. He knew how to work with cables and circuits and took our presence warmly in stride and although he was a bit feral and left cigarette butts all over the place, Leor and I looked up to him, in a way. Both Brad and Tim had the assured quickness of experienced builders, while Leor and I still alternated between the extremes of hesitant bottlenecking and reckless overexertion. Tim liked to get Brad talking; he’d mention that one of us had a sheetrocking pappy and Brad would spill paragraphs about sheetrocker family lore. Brad was a clear Buck’s Flat initiate and his secret name was pretty easy to come up with because it was the same as his normal name, just Brad. Buck, Butcher, Bronco, and Brad.
Brad was there when we tore off the South wall. We started at the top. To reach those top wooden beams, we set up a network of rickety scaffolding along the whole wall. It went: 20 foot ladder, double-stacked scaffold, single scaffold, 10 foot ladder. Along the metal scaffolds, we built a platform of three running 2x12 beams with a small gap between each. With this setup in place, you could traverse from one side of the wall to the other without ever touching the ground. It took complete concentration, but it could be done. With Brad, we were four up there; four prepared for maximum wall-ripping, but a bit of a crowd up on the narrow platform.
We pulled off a few panels. The seal was broken. Mud daubers took to the air.
The roof had evidently been their pastoral sprawl; this wall contained mud dauber metropolis. The infrastructure was expansive: beautiful domed adobe homes with natural heat, wasp childcare centers and highrise apartment complexes, dugout trench highways in the rotting wood and insulation. And, of course, mandatory military service in the national guard for every male, female, and youngling who god had gifted with poison in their stinger.
Duly provoked, the legions attacked. Tim cursed them but Brad wailed, equal parts enraged, amazed, and tickled by the swarm. It was one thing for him to find amusement in the airborne enemy; he was surefooted 15 feet high on loose wood and ladder-rungs. Leor and I didn’t have that luxury. It took complete effort to not flail ourselves off the edge with every dodge or body-spinning force of sting-pain to a tender forearm or ankle.
We regrouped on the ground to consider the scope of the enemy’s power. Forfeit was not an option. While the wasps did not necessarily have to die, the wall did have to come down. Someone had to do it, and who else was there?
Aware of what we were up against, we gathered weapons: two mega-sized, pressure-loaded aerosol cans of spectracide spray. Heavily toxic, advertised to kill wasps on contact. It was our only defense against the airborne menace whose each soldier could sting repeatedly and leave welts. Tim went up first and gave one thorough coating of the offending area. You could see healthy daubers drop where they flew, falling to rest on the scaffold platform or all the way down on Earth.
When the coast seemed clearer, we got back up there to pry out more nails. Back at work, stings came less frequently, but Leor and I knew to remain alert. I held a catspaw in one hand and a finger on the big, orange trigger of a deadly spray can. Tim kept on. Brad was reaching new ecstasies with the danger abated but the memory fresh and ridiculous. He pantomimed that first battle, reenacting every defensive twitch and jerk. We didn’t laugh. Another offensive could come at any time, silent and vengeful.
Sure enough. Leor saw it and shouted. I didn’t think about friendly fire, didn’t think at all. I held down the trigger and flailed left, killing at least 4 wasps and jetspraying poison point-blank into Leor’s open face. Brad laughed about that one for the rest of the day.
In August, lightning and excessively dry conditions caused a number of wildfires to burn uncontained throughout Northern California. At first, the largest fires stayed in Mendocino County and wind carried smoke South along the coast. In Berkeley, we couldn’t go outside. The air quality was far worse than was safe for human lungs at any duration of exposure. The sky was light red or orange for weeks and for a few days it remained dark as dusk all day. For one stretch of ominous days, the city of Berkeley issued three concurrent shelter-in-place and curfew orders: one for the smoke, one for the ongoing covid pandemic, and one in response to Black Lives Matter protests that had continued strong until the smoke became a tangible hazard.
At this time, triply compelled not to interact with anyone or anything outside of our own household, going to the ranch was a relief. The air was better up there and around Tim we weren’t expected to wear a mask or take a political stand one way or another. In Berkeley, it felt like we were on the front lines of an upheaval that could, at any time, for one of many coalescing reasons, spill over into proper apocalypse. We weren’t scared and even found it a bit exciting. But, at the ranch, it was nice to breathe.
Later in August, the fires moved inland, towards Glenn and Tehama Counties, straight towards Red Bluff and Buck’s Flat.
Leor and I once drove through a fire on our way to the ranch. It was a smaller one, not yet connected to the huge complex of fires burning still Northwest, but it was also uncontained. We drove through a canyon of flames flaring on both sides of I-5. Approaching, we speculated nervously, but when we got to it, we were silenced. To our right, it looked like a larger version of a normal fire, but, to the left, it was mostly black. There was a fierce stream of new flame, like a pipeline adding ever exponentially more, ensuring the wall would not be extinguished until it decided to be. It cycled flames into its mass more rapidly than any natural movement I’d ever seen. Leor and I looked out the windows, protected from extreme heat within the car’s shell and apparently safe to use the road, considering every other car doing so. But as long as we were next to the billowing, we didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
Tim came to own an old firetruck from Orland, the town he grew up in. I don’t know how he became its owner or how he got it all the way down Ponderosa Way, as thin as that road is in places. I think someone at the Orland Fire District felt afraid for him, out there in the forest, 16 winding miles from outside help.
Tim kept the tank full, but the firetruck was mostly a prop. He used it for its siren speaker, to proclaim frivolous information with the scratchy voice of God out over his land for any creatures in earshot. We’d be stapling shingles to the roof and he’d command: “Dance monkeys, dance!” Or else he’d give full-thrill commentary of Lucky and Star’s mundane afternoon behavior, as if grazing on the flat was the main attraction at Churchill Downs.
It was a nice firetruck, though, and Tim was proud of it. At the very least, it was lawn art and a warning to any stray flame that had the guts to threaten Buck’s domain.
We got an email from Tim a few days before we came up:
“Hey I just got back from Buck’s Flat and it’s pretty smoky up there. Let me know if you can make it or if the smoke bothers you….. whatever it is, I understand. We’re still a ways from the fire but I’m keeping tabs on it twice a day to monitor. The fire doesn’t scare me, it’s the winds that do…. put them both together and it’s a recipe for disaster.”
By the morning we left Berkeley, the edge of the fire was 20 miles away, according to Tim’s tracker. Leor and I drove straight towards the potential peril with giddy resolve. We told Tim that if he had two extra hoses on his firetruck, he’d have two extra firefighters.
This was September and the so-called “August Complex” of fires had become the largest in recorded California history. It was smoky when we got there, but less so than some days we’d seen in Berkeley. Things were calm, considering this was by far the closest we’d ever been to becoming victims of a world famous natural disaster.
Tim came out of the house and handed us our gloves. He sort of laughed and shook his head. Here we were, same as ever. We got to work painting the new wood on the South wall of the ranch house, which by now no longer looked 100 years old.
We painted for two days and worked on whatever other projects there were. In the evenings, we took the four-wheeler to a high point above the flat, but we couldn’t see the flames. The tracker maintained that the closest point of the fire was still 20 miles South of us, still down in Glenn County. For some reason, the county line seemed like a less permeable boundary than ordinary thin air. Once the fire crossed into Tehama County, then we’d worry.
Tim left on Monday afternoon. We were in no rush to get back to Berkeley, so he left us a list and paid us in advance for an extra day.
When we woke up on Tuesday, the tracker had changed. After three days of keeping its distance, the fire had crossed into local forest. According to the map, it was now only 6 miles away.
Leor and I buckled down and prepared to take our final stand. This felt right, to go down in a blaze with the ranch. If the fire was 6 miles Southwest and had traveled 14 miles overnight and the only road out snaked for 16 miles North and West to civilization, then it was only a matter of time before it burned our connection with safety. Even if it missed the ranch, we’d be locked in.
We had more nervous energy than ever. We finished Tim’s list by early afternoon, even as all our attention was devoted to devising increasingly farfetched heroic endings to our time at the ranch.
Should we inflict a prescribed burn around a reasonable radius? We would bring pails of propane to the safety perimeter, spark the doused brush, dance inside the circle of flame like pagans, then put it all out with the firehouse and be safe inside the scorched earth. But no, we couldn’t be sure that an intentional burn wouldn’t be interpreted as a fire-beckoning ritual or cause a whole new wildfire. In fact, we were pretty sure it would.
We could flee like cowards, like Todd would have, leave Lucky and Star to perish alone. No, we’d take the horses and leave the car. By now the road was surely impassable any other way. We’d have to ride out bareback through swirling sparks and falling branches at an urgent gallop on horses who had never yet had to act decisively a day in their lives. But instinct would kick in for them as it would for us, who had only ridden horses three times in our lives, combined. We’d wind through the woods, hurdle flaming logs, cough through the particulate clouds, and bring back help: Tim, a whole fleet of Red Bluff firefighters, Governor Gavin Newson, to face his just desserts.
Or, most realistically it seemed, we’d fall with the ranch. Before the flames got us, we’d etch “Butcher and Bronco” into the eternal concrete foundation of the house. At the last minute, Francisco would appear with that bottle of tequila he’d always promised and we’d all burn laughing, knowing the pain couldn’t get us, drunk as we were, and remembering with savage satisfaction that at least the mud daubers would be dead too.
Weeks later, Tim would find our charred remains and bring us out to the flat for the bears. He’d say “God damn it they got my ranch hands.” But he’d know we died righteously and did all we could.
But it never came to that. The road back to Payne’s Creek showed no signs of burns when we drove out. By the next week, although the Doe and Elkhorn fires continued to burn massive areas elsewhere, Buck’s Flat proved to be out of the path of destruction. In retrospect, the tracker seemed pretty sporadic. I doubt it was ever actually as close as 6 miles from the ranch.
No, Tim’s bad luck that Fall turned out to have nothing to do with the fires.
We came up a few weeks later, end of September. It was our last planned trip to the ranch, the last trip of that four month run. Leor was about to move to LA and pretty soon it would be getting cold at Buck’s Flat. Tim’s big push had paid off: the roof and two of the walls were finished. The house would withstand the winter.
Our idea for this last trip was somewhat sentimental. We figured we’d head up just to help Tim tidy things up and maybe marvel at the work of our summer. There was always more to do, but now was not the time to bite off any huge new projects.
When we pulled up to the ranch house, though, Tim came hauling down the steps, straight towards us, with purpose. We panicked for a moment, thinking it was our fault, whatever it was. Had we left a hose on or lost a key?
But when I opened my passenger door he said, “They fucking raided it.”
Leor poked his whole body out of the driver’s door and above the Subaru’s roof.
“Broke into the tractor barn, flattened the greenhouses, broke my goddamn doorframe.” By his tone, this last offense seemed worst.
“Your doorframe?”
“When I got here this morning the whole side and top of it were busted up.”
“The front door?”
“The door to the kitchen. Busted up and they tracked mud all over the floor.”
He led us to the kitchen and showed us the damage, talking quick and showing attention to detail, bitterly impressed by every mark they had left.
“Luckily they didn’t take anything except the key to the tractor barn.”
“Well that’s good,” we said, trying to see the bright side.
“I wouldn’t say it’s good.”
He pointed out more differences between the kitchen’s current state and its usual order.
“The bastards had no right,” he said, “No right to even be in here. Much less break the doorframe to let themselves in. As if they had any right.”
When he arrived that morning, the gate was open. He pulled in, went into the house, saw the broken doorframe, knew he’d been violated. After tromping around the kitchen, the intruders opened the tractor barn and took the backhoe, lawn tractor, and four-wheeler out to ride wild all over the property. The focus of their excursion seemed to be the cloth greenhouses, which were now shredded. They had confiscated, burned, or trampled the plants.
“Who did this?” we asked as Tim toured us through the waste.
He turned to us, evidently surprised we hadn’t deduced.
“Cowboy goddamn deputies,” he said.
He said it with a sour smile and put equal emphasis on all three words. We silently thrilled to learn of these backwoods foes. The cowboy deputies. Roughnecks legally enlisted to carry out the county’s meanest wreck jobs. The way Tim mentioned them, it was as if he’d been plagued by these same sanctioned thieves all along. He’d always known they’d be back. He’d done everything he could and it had just been a matter of time and the time had come, right when he thought he’d avoided it.
“Cowboy god damn deputies. With little badges. Got to break and enter and go for a joyride.”
Along with their telltale mudprints, they’d left a notice on the kitchen counter. Two pages, signed by the Tehama County Sheriff, that lousy office man with a pen. The notice cited an illegal crop, too many plants without a commercial license, which happened to be true.
According to Tim, Tehama County’s marijuana regulations were unusually harsh compared to those of nearly every other county in the state. If you followed, paid, and jumped through every statute, tax, and hoop, it wouldn’t be worth growing any more than a couple personal plants. But for a couple years, growers like Tim’s son had gotten away with it on the delicate principle of “don’t ask, don't tell.” As long as they were smart about it, Tim always said, the danger was negligible.
Yet, here we were. Overhead surveillance, Tim thought. During the wildfires, they must have flown over and got curious about what was happening down on the flat. Then, bored, the sheriff sent some eager local dudes out to enforce the strictest letter of the law, just because he could.
Tim’s son and his team had just started harvesting. That, according to Tim, was no coincidence. With demoralizing cruelty, the sheriff and his boys had waited until the last moment, so that the maximum number of work hours would be wasted.
The growers, those Mexican men we’d worked parallel to all summer, left right as the raid started. I’m not sure how much money they made for six months of work, but they were wise to split. They wanted no part in a war with destructive actors empowered by the law.
“Cowboy deputies,” Tim reiterated, “Absolutely no right.”
The crop was his son’s enterprise, though, and if they had just come in and destroyed that, it would have stung, sure, but not like this. To Tim, the real disrespect was the smug flair they’d done it with. He felt they were taunting him. They knew he wouldn’t fight back. Sure, he could sue them. They’d broken and entered and damaged property that had nothing to do with the plants they were authorized to seize. He could go to the mat over that, but they still had a lot more to throw at him. The county could take an illegal grow of that size pretty far. Destroying the crop was the lightest possible sentence. The cowboy deputies came in on some big adventure to fuck up his home and he was supposed to say thank you for the mercy they’d shown. That was what pissed Tim off.
We fixed the doorframe, cleaned up the boot tracks, added another lock to the tractor barn, brought the tractors back to where they belonged, and decided the summer was officially over.
At the trampled greenhouses, Leor and I noticed there was still plenty of smokeable weed on the ground.
“It’s a lost cause,” Tim said, “Take as much as you want.”
So we filled up two black trashbags and drove them back to Berkeley, where we hung clippings from the water pipes and rafters in our basement, trimmed what we thought might be useful, kept the dried bud in three air-sealed glass jars, and gave it away to whoever wasn’t bothered by its strange history. I still had some a year later, after I’d left California. I passed out handfuls to people I met and tried to explain how I came into so much shabby weed. I tried to tell it like Tim would, but it usually came out weird. No one really understood.
“Your boss didn’t want it?” they’d ask.
“He didn’t care. He was mostly upset about the cowboy deputies.”
“The cowboy deputies?”
“Yes. From Tehama County. Not even real cops, I don’t think.”
“Tehama County?”
“Not only did they destroy the plants, they broke his goddamn doorframe.”
“Did they take the weed for themselves?”
“They burnt most of it I think. And they left boot tracks in the kitchen. We cleaned those up right away.”
“What a waste of weed.”
“Yeah. But the house was mostly ok. It was mostly a matter of principle. That house is over 100 years old. We helped Tim rebuild the roof.”
“Ok,” they’d say, “Well thanks for the weed, man.”
In 2021, the Dixie fire burned almost as much of Northern California as the August fires of the year before had. Tim got shoulder surgery and Leor got covid, but the fire once again missed the ranch. I was in Utah, trying to do something. Leor was in LA, teaching and working at a law firm. Nostalgia pulled us both back to the ranch for one work visit in August. That trip was originally supposed to be the whole summer, then a whole month, an extended return to Buck’s Flat. But it ended up only being a couple days.
In 2022, Leor and I saved up money and in early 2023, we traveled for three months in the Middle East and Europe. It was the most time we’d spent since our summer at the ranch. In some ways, it reminded us of that time. Instead of stapling shingles to a roof, we walked 25 miles a day through the Negev Desert. In the evenings, we didn't have Tim to talk to, but we still played back to back backgammon games to shed the day’s dust.
When we got back to the States, I went to Colorado and Leor went to law school. I was about to turn 26 and all too aware that I hadn’t started building anything. Tim’s words were with me: “You’ve just got to do something.” But somehow it’d been three years since he taught me that and I hadn’t done anything.
Tim and Leor stayed in touch by email. I was curious to know how much progress he’d made but I never reached out. Somewhere in my mind I figured Leor and I would be back at the ranch any day now, but we never discussed it and as time went on it felt unlikely.
Another Fall, Winter, and Spring, and then it was fire season again in California. I spent time in many places: Texas, Mexico, Washington state, Yuma Arizona, back to Berkeley for a few days here and there, then back to Colorado where I still hadn’t built anything but at least I had a car and some friends. That was this summer.
On June 26th, Tim sent Leor and I an email:
“The Park Fire is coming dangerously close to my ranch. The oldest ranch in Tehama County and a place where Ishi was known to have visited but I don’t have to tell you that. Anyhow I’m heading up today and hopefully will be able to make it in and make sure the horses are ok. Wish me luck. I’m not going up to fight a fire my old Orland engine is too small but rather to save a D4 bulldozer and a tractor and two horses.”
I was out of service and didn’t see his message. If I had, I might have said something half-frivolous about how that ranch had stood through closer calls than this. Or I might have dropped whatever flimsy purpose was keeping me in Colorado and driven 16 hours straight to Buck’s Flat to help hold the line.
But I didn’t see his email and I was too late. The next day, he sent another:
“I am sorry to report that my entire ranch was lost to the Park Fire. I was absolutely devastated as I watched from my cameras as the flames slowly crept up and at that point I had to turn away. Ten years of my life and a lot of history went into that place and now it’s all gone. Tim.”
I have never lost a parent, sibling, or close friend, thank God. I have cried when a grandparent or pet died, but grandparents and pets are supposed to die. I’ve lost my wallet and made bad bets and messed up relationships and rooted for things that never happened and felt the sting of “If only I could go back and know not to get my hopes up.”
But I’ve never put ten years of my life into anything. I’ve never stood still at 5pm looking for my horses and forgetting for a moment that it’s only a work in progress. I haven’t had such abundance that I could share it without limit with younger people who will appreciate it.
My first thoughts were of things that didn’t matter. Who would pay for this? What about insurance? (Impossible: Fire insurance in that part of the country is such a losing bet for the insurance company that they don’t offer it for any rate.) Does any of it stand? Can any be salvaged? (No: Tim said his entire ranch was lost.) Who started the fire and do they know what they’ve done? Who can we rage against, where are the cowboy deputies? And what about the perennial blackberries? Would they grow back after burning? What about the dayroom, is its long-earned odor gone? What about the disintegrating methhead house, cursed as it was? The old barn and the orchard? What about the precious family photo albums?
Tim got up there in time to save his horses. No one else was there when the fire arrived; no one went down with the ranch like Leor and I had once been prepared to. But everything once standing had burned.
When I was 22, the ranch reminded me of eternal things I didn’t yet know. If I ever started to think I knew the place, tricked myself into thinking I understood what it was made of, or foolishly felt any ownership over it, I would later remember the man who built it with his self-milled wood and self-forged nails and unknown methods. When I thought of Tim, he was always halfway through his renovation, he was always up on the roof ripping out boards when we drove up. He would never quite finish, but he had, as far as I knew, always made progress.
He was also once beginning, though. Once, he came to Buck’s Flat for the first time and wondered if this was the spot. Before that, he spent 35 years in San Francisco making his way there. What happened back then? What made him decide to buy the ranch? It wasn’t my business. Most of it had happened before I had any business at all. I will never know everything that went into Buck’s Flat, everything that was lost when it burned.
I texted Tim. I wished I could convey what it felt like to hear it was gone. But what could it mean to me that it hadn’t meant to him plus so much more I would never know?
He said, “I used to sit in the dayroom and just think what a lucky person I was to be able to own it. I would sit there by myself because I went up there by myself quite a bit and I thought every time of how lucky I was so part of me is gone I suppose life goes on. Hope you’re doing well my brother and I always remember you and Leor coming up and spending time up there.”
He was clearly tapped into a flowing nerve of sensible grief, a spout of stinging grace that allowed him to churn out prophetic run-on sentences, and he had earned every bit of it. He had fed himself until he was full; he had set out and done it. It had been an idea, a making, and a life. It had been taken away but he knew enough while it was there to appreciate it. Next to his words, anything I said collapsed in the slightest breeze.
I said, “Even though I was only there for a little while, I have strong memories of the feeling. You inspired Leor and I to work as hard as we could. I hope to be as lucky as you have been and to know how to work towards deserving it.”
He just said, “You will. Trust me.”
Tim also turned 70 this year. A month after the ranch burned, he decided to rebuild. Once the danger had come and gone, he brought the horses back up and built them a shelter. 70 isn’t nothing, but his shoulder has healed and his skin is still tough. He can surely still do more alone than Leor and I can combined. But lord knows we will try to help if we can.
I don’t believe he would have stopped working even if the ranch hadn’t burned. He would have finished the house, then started a new one, or even scrapped the old one and rebuilt it by choice. Buck’s Flat was his retirement home, but what is retirement? How many more old movies and evening editions of ABC News could he have watched? Would cigarettes in the dayroom and hot dogs for dinner satisfy if they didn’t come after a hard day of work?
We thought he was telling us, imparting wisdom on two just setting out. We figured at his age, with a family and a ranch, he already knew. But he, like everyone, always needed to know, might forget at any time. He was also reminding himself: “You just have to do something.”