My memories of Dry Fly ranch are fueled by discovery, by the sometimes gentle and sometimes abrupt unveiling of landscape, of the natural world peeled from its shell. It was as if wonder lay just beneath an enormous rock that I was able to turn over again and again, just waiting to see what hid beneath its cool surface. Some of these discoveries were soothing and nourishing, and you could count on them. A quiet walk up to the big pond above the headgate always held the promise of living things. If you crept quietly enough, padding along the dirt road along the irrigation canal leading to the headgate, and then paused at the last rise just before the pond, you could step out of hiding and take in the scene: the still water cut cleanly by the casual paddling of a muskrat. He’d leave a thin wake in his going, and you could just see his oily wet coat slicked back smooth as a seal’s. Then, the water still dimpled by departure, you could sit on the bank and wait until fish began to rise; they’d feed slowly and tentatively at first, then gain confidence and enthusiasm, the water starting to boil, dorsal fins easing above the surface, then slinking below. These images were dependable, as natural as breath or rain.

Other phenomenon were more mysterious, even frightening. Certain places on and around the ranch unnerved me, especially at particular times of day. There was an enormous lone cottonwood that rose from the center of the east pasture and seemed to loom as some craggy old anachronism I could never fathom. It stood so incongruously, a solitary old man leaning against its cane of time in the boggy bottomland. A bald eagle nested there every spring, and I always gave the tree and the bird a wide berth, especially at sunset, when the shadows of each, the branches of the great tree lurching in the wind, the ancient-looking bird perched warily, would spill across the pasture for endless distances. I avoided those shadows. Their looming silences, coupled with the evening howling of coyotes, seemed to wail into the sunset like sirens, and I would scurry back into the cabin, shutting the thick doors firmly behind me.

Once I was scouting around the east end of the ranch, having followed the irrigation canal to the marshy lowlands just near the road to Kilpatrick Bridge. Cattails and rushes grew in thick bunches along the ditch, then parted in a path or game trail and opened into slight hollow. Using my forearms, I pushed the reeds aside and nudged my way into the space, finding the remnants of an old abandoned well. There were weathered boards across the ground, faded and bent by sun and rain and snow. They curled grotesquely at the ends, like bones. Curious, I plundered in and began ripping away at the boards until I unearthed a slab of coarse lava rock about twice as long as it was wide. I yanked at a few more boards until I’d revealed the big rock, and I stood back, my breath heavy. The lava slab was as long as a door and a few feet wide, recessed into the ground, and sod had grown tight around its edges. The surface was knurled and pocked, rough and ancient and dark. I kicked at the sides to see if I might reveal enough edge to lift it, then reconsidered. Redwing blackbirds whirred past, skimming the cattails, and a rush of wind halted me. I realized the lava was roughly the shape of a coffin, or the cover of a coffin, and I backed away a few steps. The sun was directly overhead, and the place became uncomfortably quiet, just the slight rustling of the rushes and the sound of my own breathing. I tossed the boards back onto the lava and hurried away.

When I got back to the cabin I sat on the porch swing for a while, remembering an experience long before in a place not so far from Dry Fly Ranch, my first close encounter with lava.
***

One autumn my Dad loaded us into the Toyota Landcruiser and we left Dry Fly Ranch and Silver Creek, striking out toward the east. After a few dry alfalfa miles we passed Picabo General Store and Post Office, its great grain silo and feed shop visible on the horizon from far away. The road snaked up and skirted the Queen’s Crown, a coronet-shaped slab of uplifted basalt that stares regally towards the Silver Creek valley to the west, the great Arco desert far to the east. We rolled down a long hill and idled through the sleepy little ranching/farming community of Carey, Idaho, and then, still steering east, we eased into the flats, the sage fields and lava flows, coarse black remnants of surface violence that undulated beneath the plateau floor a couple of thousand years ago, becoming the feet of the Arco desert and finally the Craters of the Moon National Monument. It was a place my father wanted us to see. I was only half awake for this journey, but I remember the smell of alfalfa curling through the partly-opened window, the occasional headlights coming the other way in the pre-dawn darkness. My brother Lance snoozed in the back as the dogs panted and shifted.

The car came to a halt just about sunrise, gravel crunching beneath the tires as we pulled into the Visitor’s Center. We were the only ones there, and we got stiffly out of the car and onto the cold ground, stretching. Dad watered the dogs and let them run around to do their business, then kenneled them again and lead us to a little observation point where we stood and gazed out into endless miles of blackness, burned ground the color of charcoal briquettes. I had never seen anything like it. The land appeared dead, barren, as desolate as the Nevada desert but jet black, and menacing. A strange feeling came over me as my Dad breathed in deeply, exhaled, and said how beautiful he thought it was.

We got into the car again and started down a windy loop road, curling our way into the sprawl of black ground all around us. After a while we were right out in what seemed the center of a vast lunar landscape, only the ground was black instead of white, the way I imagined the moon to look. We paused at landmarks, road signs—North Crater Flow, Devil’s Orchard, then stopped and got out of the car at Inferno Cone Viewpoint. I could hear the ground under my boots squeak like dry ice as we walked from the pavement and onto the volcanic surface, the landscape of spent cinder cones spreading like an enormous obsidian quilt before us, unfurling to the distant mountain ranges far beyond. Towering in the center of the plain stood Big Cinder Cone, which the sign describes as one of the largest purely basaltic cinder cones in the world. I stared at a lone pine tree, its branches twisted and grotesque, which leaned hard to one side. I imagined what wind must blow through here. I was staring at a wood-framed sign when Dad slid up next to me and began to read aloud, his voice deep, his breath smelling of coffee.

During an eruption, he read, giant clouds of ash would have darkened the sky, steam explosions hurling clumps of molten lava into the air, delicate airborne cinders searing down like fiery rain, and splotches of ground, in semi-liquid state, would inch along like melting taffy. I looked out into the vastness, engrossed in my imagined world of volcanic eruption. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“Some things are worth preserving,” he said, and scuffed back to the car.

We drove an unmarked road—a shortcut, my Dad called it—straight out into lava flows. There wasn’t a building in sight on any horizon. Nothing but rolling burned ground, hummocks and spatter cones and deep craters that appeared to swallow the ground around them. Lance snored. We stopped again and Dad and I got out and walked across a massive carpet of parched cinder floor. Dad knelt and motioned to me. There, on the gradual hillside sloping from our feet, was a bunched, brushy plant growing in this harsh, alien landscape. And then another, and another, tufts of grass dotting the floor as far as I can see. Buckwheat shrub, Dad said, and smiled. There is life here after all.

We cruised out into the vast wildness, and Dad began to explain that there is plenty of life out here, you just can’t see it from the road. You have to get out in it, amongst it, he said. The trees here and there, smooth bare trunks and thick, brushy green branches, were limber pine, he said. Lot’s of shrubs have found home—sagebrush, antelope bitterbrush, rubber rabbitbrush. None require much water, which is a good thing. As we drove a red-tailed hawk scoured the ground just in front of the car, and I asked what it would be hunting for. Marmots, maybe, Dad said. Or pikas. I nodded, pretending to know these names, and we drove on. Dad said that in the spring the black ground, fueled by the rains, erupts again, this time with wildflowers: Indian paintbrush, blazing star, bitterroot and balsam root, but looking the way it did then, parched and foreboding, I had a hard time imagining it.

We tooled around out in that landscape during the heat of the day, alternately driving and then getting out of the rig to hunt sage hens in the sagebrush fields which lined the lava. It was pretty slow going, but I remember making one long shot that surprised me as much as it did my Dad. We had been spread out, fanned across a sagebrush plain, when a small group of five or six birds had flushed ahead of Dad, their gray, blimp-like bodies slow and cumbersome. They had veered from the dogs and turned and come straight at me, then shied again as I knelt down. From a kneeling position I pulled up and fired at the trailer of the group, and down it came, its big body kicking up dirt as it hit the ground. Drake, Dad’s favorite Golden, lumbered over and retrieved it for me. Lance and I stood and looked at the great gray bird, patting down the ruffled feathers.

By late afternoon we had made our way to the old Elsworth place. The farm looked so old and abandoned there seemed a tinge of sadness to it. Crumbling outbuildings leaned toward the ground, their tired, sun-faded walls sagging as they gave up. Strips of tin roofing flapped in the wind, and weary farm machinery lay augured into the earth where it had apparently sputtered its final death throes, so that it now took on a skeletal appearance, giving the place the look of an implement graveyard. We spread out and started hunting, and though I’m certain Dad knew exactly where we were, all I felt, when I looked out across the dead lava flows beyond the farm and fields, was small and unsettled. Once I stopped in a little hollow and felt suddenly frightened and alone. There was an intense smell of sage and just the hint of wind in my face and the scene began to appear before me like a mirage, so that I couldn’t tell what was real from what was imagined. I hurried up the next rise, my heart racing, and tried to get a glimpse of my Dad, or maybe hear him whistling to Drake, and I would be connected to them again.

That afternoon we had good luck on the sage hens. They sat real tight, until we were right up on them, and then they lumbered into flight, their flecked-gray bodies rising slowly from the ground. Both Lance and I made clean shots on singles. Dad made two doubles that I saw, and I heard him shoot another time when I was down in a swale, just as the cool evening breezes were starting to filter through. Dad rounded us up and said we’d better get going. It was a long drive home.
Then we were seated comfortably in the Landcruiser again, winding along a dirt road, the smell of dust, feathers, spent powder, coffee and Nibs circling through the chamber of the vehicle. We were aimed directly into the sunset, which seemed inflamed to anger, flaring out along the horizon and then dripping down in marrow tones and growing purple like bruises at the edges. Dad was ripping along, leaning back, stretching his neck from side to side and burrowing himself into the seat when a strange feeling came over me. We began to rise up a steep hill and at the top the road made a severe turn to the left and as the car crested the sharp rise we were still humming along at a serious clip but we were out of road.
Realizing his mistake, Dad turned hard, clutching the wheel as tightly as he would the reins of a runaway horse. We turned, slowly at first, then grudgingly as our tires began to slide sideways in the sand and gravel and cinder edging the road. The rig straightened out for an instant and I eased my grip on the seat, thinking we might come out of the skid, but we were still traveling sideways when the tires hit the lava.

We entered the realm of slow motion, my view through the windshield looking like one of those old cartoons that spins the entire picture to the next chunk of chronology, the next scene. Real time hung weightless as downfeathers and I felt like I was on a carnival ride. I remember hearing all three of us, in unison, say something resembling “whoa.” The came a slow but certain crashing of metal and glass the grating of iron on rock as the Landcruiser rolled.

We stopped moving. All the sounds bled into one: the tinkling of glass falling in fragments, Drake scratching to free himself from beneath a cooler, and Dad’s voice.

“Buddy, you okay?” He was shaking my leg. I was too stunned to answer, or to cry. He shook my leg again. “Yeah, I think so.” I felt fine, just a bit dizzy. As we struggled free ourselves from the wreckage, I could hear Lance whimpering outside the rig, which was now lying on its side. We crawled out the windshield and were on the ground, the lava sharp and warm against my palms.

Lance had been between us in the front seat, and apparently, when the Landcruiser hit on its shoulder in the first part of the roll, the windshield had shattered and Lance had been pinched between us like a watermelon seed, squirting out and landing on the lava. His back was shredded from the coarse rock, and he was sitting upright on the ground, bawling. Dad checked his legs and spine for injury, asking him to move his limbs by himself, then made him stop crying long enough to focus his eyes on the duck call which hung from Dad’s neck. As I stood up and shook myself off, I realized that Lance was sitting precisely in the spot the car would have been had it rolled one more rotation. Finally, in the fading light, Drake hopped out of a window and panted next to us, licking Lance. But for bumps and bruises, we were all fine.

“Help me hide some of these birds,” Dad said.
It seemed somewhat odd at the time, given the circumstances, but later, as we walked along the empty dirt road in the rising moonlight, I understood the problem. We had abandoned the vehicle, and would have to report an accident, and Dad figured we were at least a little over the limit one way or another. I helped him stuff sage hens and doves into the cooler, the bodies stiffened now, and we pushed some into plastic bags and Dad tucked them under the back seat. He crammed a few doves in the hubcaps and into the glove box, and we carried the rest of the sage hens with us.

Night grows cold quickly in the desert. The moon hung limp in the sky, and we plodded wet and scared and helpless down the dirt track, toting our dead game birds. Dad’s glasses had broken, and without them he was beyond legally blind, so Lance and I led him along. Shards of moon light bounced off the lava, creating a dull beam in front of us as we limped and shuffled. After a time we were so utterly alone that it became nearly peaceful out there, the cool breeze curling over us, the shrieks of night birds far into the lava. There came a time when I was so tired and numb that I nearly didn’t care whether Dad knew where we were leading him, and just then the lights of a truck broke the blackness. The pickup rumbled up next to us with the choleric cough of a diesel engine, and the driver didn’t really need our answer when he asked, rhetorically, “need a hand?”

He idled his big Club Cab, then backed his rig into a wide spot in the road. He and his family had been on their way to Richfield or Dietrich or someplace, perhaps the only car traveling the lonely lava road that night. As we climbed into the cab I noticed that he was so loaded down the axles strained to the weight of their belongings. Even in the dim moonlight the bed of their truck looked like a yard sale on wheels, piled with mattresses and children’s toys and ancient appliances. A long couch, lashed by ropes across the top, hung a few feet over the tailgate. Somehow we all squeezed inside the truck and accompanied by the incessant cry of an infant we limped back to Carey. He dropped us off at the Loading Chute, and Dad pressed some money into his hand for his pains, which he took without argument. As he pulled away and lurched down the road I noticed a tail light out. The rope holding the couch on the roof slapped the side of the truck as he pulled out of sight.

At the Loading Chute we ate burgers and fries among rough-looking men who drank beer, smoked, and shot pool. Lance and I nodded off on a big sofa pushed against a wall littered with the heads of elk and deer and moose, smoke sifting into the rafters. We nodded, half-awake as Dad loaded us into some truck out front whose owner he’d negotiated to take us back to Dry Fly Ranch. That night, restless, tossing and turning in one of our sheepwagons, I dreamt about lava.
***

For the most part Dry Fly Ranch was a tranquil place, fresh fields of grain and streams of fond remembrance. I hold it in my heart as a place of learning and discovery, of mystery and epiphany. But I left that long plank of lava alone from then on. I shelved it into memory, knowing it was there for a reason and hoping that was enough. Once Dad and I were out scouring the old railroad line for dilapidated snow fence we used for building, and I noticed the little tuft in the clearing off in the distance. I considered pointing it out to Dad, maybe asking him about it, but I decided not to. Perhaps mystery was one of those things worth preserving. Redwing blackbirds were flitting about, congregating in the cattails. Thunderclouds were forming in the west, above the mountains. Looked like a storm was coming. We loaded up some wood and rode back to the safety of the cabin. As we drove, I leaned my chin on my forearm, resting on the window well. I held my face to the sun as the wind blew from the east and I caught, for the briefest moment, the scent of lava in the air.