Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
A spring ritual utterly untouched by war

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

E-mail this article Print this article Search web archive

GOODNOE HILLS, Klickitat County — Halfway up the mountain, the Pepperoni Cowboy parks his Dodge truck, opens a barbed-wire gate, squints into the icy wind and sweeps his big hand in an arc over a slice of heaven.

"Welcome," he says, "to Goodnoe Hills."

Below us, six or eight cowboys, a couple of cowgirls and one cowkid are driving 100 head of stubborn Herefords up a steep, lush hillside above the Columbia River Gorge.

The herd of plodding, bellowing cows and calves make brown and black specks on smooth hills that tumble downhill like creamy frosting poured from a bowl, ending hundreds of feet below at the Columbia, which cuts a steep, rocky swath as far as the eye can see.

In April, this sage and grassland is in its all-too-brief Technicolor phase, with clusters of spring wildflowers bursting through the drab, rocky soil. From a distance, the surrounding hillsides seem spray-painted with green velvet.

Aside from the occasional yips and "hee-YA's!" from the cowboys and the protesting moos from the cattle, there is no sound. From this grand divide, Eastern Washington is left, Western Washington is right, Oregon is south and Iraq is clear off the map. Everything, in other words, is just as it should be.

"Big country, isn't it?" our host asks.

Huge.

It was, we decided, even more spectacular than he had advertised it the night before at Reno's, a pizza joint along U.S. 97 outside Goldendale, where a large man with a soft manner had sauntered over to our booth to collect our pizza pan.

"Name's Reno," he said, introducing himself to the Seattle news guys everybody knew were in the area. "Where you boys headed next?"

"Not sure," we said, telling the truth.

"Ever been on a cattle drive?"

Well, not this week. But what, we wondered out loud, did moving cows have to do with what everyone's been watching on CNN?

He shrugged. "Maybe just life goes on."

Fair enough. The restaurant proprietor, Delos "I Don't Use My First Name" Reno, picked up a pizza box and sketched a crude map on the lid: Go south on 97, turn east here. Keep going to the pink barn. Look for horse trailers. They're pulling out at 8 a.m.

The next morning, we followed his crew — in pickups and horse trailers — down an impossibly steep, rocky cow trail masquerading as a road to Gorge bottomlands owned by local rancher Bruce Davenport.

The task was simple: Move the cows from their winter range a few miles up over the hill, down the road and into their spring grazing lands.

The herd belongs to Charles Hoctor, 80, known to everybody in the crowd simply as Grandpa. The crew is made up of Grandpa's family members and a small assortment of Reno's friends and hunting buddies: the Scott brothers, Lanny and Don from Snohomish County, and other acquaintances from Ellensburg and Cle Elum. They're joined by Davenport and his son J.J., 10.

In these parts, it only takes a couple of phone calls to put together a coalition of the willing. This crew was assembled by Reno, a nearby horse/cattle rancher who has helped Grandpa with a lot of ranch work during the old man's "semi-retired" years.

It happens every year, no matter what. March arrives, calves drop, fruit trees blossom, the spring chinook roll up the Columbia, and Grandpa Charles Hoctor's cows are driven up to Oak Flat. It's a tireless cycle of life, interrupted, in Hoctor's more than five decades of ranching, by absolutely nothing.

Grandpa is a little too far down the trail to saddle up himself these days. As his herd is driven up the hill, he'll ride in the command center — Reno's flatbed, which will putt on up ahead, in places trucks really shouldn't go, opening gates and pointing the way.

Ideally, a cattle drive is a fluid thing. You want to keep the cows moving, flowing in more or less a straight line, like a giant, liquid blob of beef. If a gate's not open when the cow tide comes in, the herd floods sideways, backs up, congests and gets ornerier than mid-level managers denied bonuses.

This year's drive goes mostly as planned. Reno, even while minding us Toyota city slickers, manages to get most of the gates open on time. At one point, though, he falls behind, and the herd starts to drift. Nobody is sure where to go. The cows stare blankly at the cowboys. The cowboys stare blankly back.

This cattle drive clearly has lost its command-and-control.

Fortunately, Reno appears forthwith, his red truck bouncing over lava rocks in the grazing land and eventually pointing the way. With only a few loud bellows of protest — most of these from the cows — the beef tide rolls on.

At one point, disaster almost strikes. On the top of the ridge, nearing Oak Flat, where a series of tall, experimental, Boeing-built windmills stand, an Arabian horse ridden by Raeleen Dodge of Ellensburg gets spooked.

It rears, whinnies and throws Dodge high in the air and down to the gravel, where she lands with a "thwack" like a sack of spuds. Everybody's breath is sucked in as she lies, motionless, while the crazed horse exorcises his demons by racing up and down the banks of the roadway, kicking and leaping.

A few minutes later, the horse is collared and Dodge is up. She's OK, but will ride in the truck the rest of the way.

"All I saw was hooves and dust," she says later, rubbing her backside and cursing the horse.

At the end of the line, the cows wander out in their new, lusher surroundings, and the crew gathers in a small stand of oaks.

Within a few moments, Mrs. Reno, Malinda, comes down through the pasture in another truck to deliver a hot lunch, which is spread out on the flatbed.

As cowboys in chaps perch on plastic-resin deck chairs eating lunch, Reno comes sauntering out of the oaks, pulls his collar tight against the bitter wind, and offers up an idea.

"Let's get a fire going," he says, nodding at the Arabian. "We're gonna eat that sonofabitchin' horse."

Over by the truck, Grandpa, who has lived his entire life in these hills, is smiling, happy to have the job done — again.

He drove the cows up these steep, stunning hills in springs when the only wars the U.S. knew were "good wars." He drove them the spring before and the spring after John F. Kennedy died, and all those springs during all those years filled with all those events that define a nation: the simmering Cold War, Vietnam, the moon landing, the fall of Richard Nixon, the smashing of the Iron Curtain. Every spring before, and two springs after, Sept. 11, 2001.

More than 50 years of springs, same time, same place, same technique.

What's changed about this day over all that time?

"Nothing," Grandpa says, without even having to think.

We thank them all for the experience, shake hands and get in the truck to head up the road toward the next story. The key turns, the radio comes on, and reality comes crackling back in the static: Fierce resistance in Baghdad.

Somewhere out there, there's a war on.

For half a day out here, where time stands still, it never came up.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com.

Harley Soltes: 206-464-8145 or hsoltes@seattletimes.com.