Incident in San Francisco

Chapter 1

The early morning sun felt very good on Monty’s face as his horse took the last few steps to the top of the hill. The late October morning held a strong hint of the coming winter, and he had noticed the small puffs of breath visible as his horse worked its way up the shadowed side of the mountain. When they had left the corral in the valley down by the ranch house it had been too early for the sun, although out here in the Peachtree Valley the sun rose almost every morning unobstructed by the fog and clouds which were so prevalent thirty miles to the west at the Pacific.

Because he wanted to soak up a little of the sun’s warmth, and also because he liked to let his horse catch his wind after starting his day hauling a fifty-pound Western saddle and a one-hundred-ninety-pound cowboy up a mountainside, Monty gave the almost imperceptible tug on the reins which let the horse know that he could stop. To give them both more benefit of the sun’s rays, Monty moved the reins against the horse’s neck at the same time as he nudged the horse’s side with his heel. In response, the big buckskin gelding shifted so that he had his side toward the sun’s rays.

To a casual observer, it might have seemed that the horse had decided on his own to stop once he had reached the top of the hill, and then to turn sideways on the trail. On television or in movies, horses were controlled by great violent motions. Riders clapped both legs wildly against the saddle skirts, leaned far forward in the saddle, slapped the reins, and yelled when they wanted to start off. Turns were made by yanking hard on the inside rein so that the horse’s head was pulled around in that direction: stops always involved hauling back suddenly on both reins so that the horse skidded to a stop, its haunches hunkered down low to the ground. Monty always shook his head, partly in amusement and partly in disgust, when he saw riding represented that way. It bore as much resemblance to the way horses are ridden by real cowboys as the movies’ depiction of car chase crashes, in which vehicles could seemingly leap into the air and perform several barrel rolls, caused only by striking an empty garbage can.

Monty and Buck, his favorite horse, had been together now for over eight years. Buck had been well trained originally, and those lessons had been imprinted on his mind. Monty recalled reading once that a horse was about as smart as a three-year-old child, and that habits learned by a horse tended to stick, whether good or bad. Buck had no bad habits. Monty’s consistent treatment of him, and his consideration evidenced by this morning’s rest stop, made it very easy for Buck to respond as he had been taught. By now, neither horse nor rider was consciously aware of the cues given to communicate the rider’s desires. Monty rode with slack reins held in his left hand, which usually rested on the saddle horn. When he needed to direct Buck to the right or the left, a movement of his hand a mere inch to that side caused the reins to touch the horse’s neck on the opposite side, and horse and rider took a new path. A squeeze of both legs was all that was required to start up, and a slight tug back on both reins was enough to effect a stop. Over the years, the familiarity of the routines of ranch work had made Buck well aware of what he was supposed to be doing, so man and beast seemed to be of one mind as they moved about the ranch.

As always when he sat on a hilltop, Monty let his gaze slowly sweep the entire panorama. It was partly force of habit as a rancher, checking the landscape to see if anything out of the ordinary was going on. Were there any trespassers’ vehicles visible, any signs of smoke from a fire, any coyotes stalking calves, any wild boar in the cultivated fields? The specific dangers changed with the seasons - fire in the summer, flood in the winter, cows having trouble calving in the fall, and poachers in all seasons. He didn’t need field glasses: this was his world, and his life had been spent here with those great distances always in view. Although his eyesight tested just in the normal range, years of experience gave him abilities which would seem superhuman to a city dweller. A small brownish dot on a hill a mile away could be readily identified as a large jackrabbit, a young deer, or a coyote. To someone unaccustomed to this world, if the tiny, distant dot could be located at all there would be no way to guess whether it was a stone, a bush, or an animal: certainly, no novice would hazard a guess as to what kind of animal it was.

Beyond the pragmatic purpose of his observation of the scene was another, wholly impractical reason. Monty just plain loved this ranch, and he never tired of taking in its views. He knew that a lot of city folk considered the country to be just something they had to drive through to get to another city, and thought that it all looked the same. A buddy who had worked as a guide on a dude ranch had told him a story which illustrated that perfectly, although neither of them could quite believe that it could have happened.

A middle-aged matron from Chicago, a friend of the family who owned the dude ranch, had come out for a week. She preferred the afternoon bridge games in the air-conditioned ranch house, the cocktail hour around the pool, the wonderful dinners, and after-dinner drinks on the patio as the evening cooled down from the hundred-degree temperatures of the summer days. But she wanted to experience the West, and so had gamely gone along on a trail ride for an hour or two every morning. The guide knew she was a friend of his employer and went out of his way to make her rides enjoyable, taking her down along the river under the leafy cottonwoods once, high along a ridge where you could see for forty miles in any direction another time, along the tractor trail which skirted the hayfields another day.

Finally the last day of her visit came, and the guide, wanting to make it special for her, asked “Since this is your last day here, why don’t you pick the place we’ll ride today?”

“What do you mean?”, she asked, clearly puzzled by the question.

“Well, since we went to a different part of the ranch each day, I thought for your last ride you might want to go back to whichever place you liked best”, he replied.

“Oh,” came her reply, “I thought we just went the same way every day.”

Monty knew that he could live to be a hundred and never tire of seeing everything that there was to be seen on the ranch. Although Easterners sometimes asked how Californians could stand living with only one season, Monty knew that they were thinking of the coastal California depicted in Baywatch. Whether this area was the southern end of Northern California or part of the Central Coast was subject of debate, but Monty knew that it definitely had seasons. The temperature in the summer usually reached 110 Fahrenheit daily for several consecutive weeks, and when a particularly cold storm system swept down from Alaska in the winter it was not unusual to find a sheet of ice on the horses’ water trough on the valley floor. At least once a winter, snow glistened on the tops of the ranch’s highest peaks, and three times in his 29 years Monty had seen the entire ranch smothered with a white blanket. True, it was all gone a day or so later, since the mid-winter daytime temperatures often hit the high 70’s or low 80’s on a calm, sunny day - but there certainly was a wide range of weather conditions throughout the year.

The changing seasons also brought varied scenery from the same viewing point. In the summer at midday the relentless sun seemed to park directly overhead for hours, and its merciless rays shone directly down into the deepest crevices of the draws and canyons. In the winter, when the sun rose so late over the mountains to the east, traced a shallow arc low across the sky, and slid behind the western hills in mid afternoon, those same canyons stayed in dark, cold shadow all day. If there had been any rain, little streams would be trickling or cascading down from the mountains through those ravines, and the vegetation would be lush and green. After the rains, the hills would be covered with grass so green that it almost hurt to look at it: but three or four weeks after the last rains in March, the grass would start to turn that intense golden yellow which helped make California “the Golden State”: and finally, for a month before the first rains in November, the dead grass on the grazed-over hills would turn the landscape to its present faded dun color.

This morning, Monty marveled again at the impacts on the ranch years caused by 150 years of cattle grazing. The early morning sun, as its rays first washed over the steeply-sloping hillsides, clearly delineated the horizontal terraces created by the hooves of the thousands of cattle which had crisscrossed those hills. These were a foot wide, a couple of feet apart, making the hills look as though they had been wrapped with giant bolts of wide-wale corduroy fabric. While these were visible only when the slanting rays of the sun highlighted them, the actual cowpaths could always be seen. These were narrow, darker lines which snaked down from the hills to the valley floor, ending at the river. Monty had read letters in the newspaper, denouncing ranchers for the way they ruined the land by allowing cattle to graze it: but he knew that those horizontal terraces on the vertical hillsides slowed the runoff during heavy rains, and prevented erosion. As to the cowpaths, he had never seen any signs of erosion along them: since the cows used those paths for ascent as well as for descent, they had chosen routes with a shallow slope. Monty had never seen animals damage the landscape the way man did when he cut bulldozer paths across hillsides, or carved out pads for homesites.

As he turned his gaze from the familiar scene and back to the detail of the fence line which he was supposed to be checking, Monty’s thoughts grew somber. It was eight years ago, when he was a 20-year-old just finishing his senior year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, that the accident had happened which had made him the owner of this 16,000 acres which he loved so much. His parents had been returning from a trip to King City, and the bed of the pickup held two 55-gallon drums, one filled with diesel fuel, the other with gasoline. Like many ranchers, his father chose to haul his fuel this way rather than have it delivered to the remote ranch, since fuel suppliers required high minimum purchases in order to make the trip out. As a cattle operation with farming only a sideline to produce hay for supplemental feed in the fall, the Bar A required fuel only a couple of times a year. Besides, with hand-operated pumps in the drums, the refueling could be done in the fields. Driving the pickup truck out to the swather or baler was often simpler than moving those big pieces of equipment in to stationary tanks at the barn, just for fuel.

The one consolation Monty had was the knowledge that his parents had certainly not suffered, and probably had not had more than a second to realize that their deaths were imminent. As nearly as it could be reconstructed, the horrendous accident, like most accidents, had simply been the result of several actions and events which, by themselves, were quite ordinary. The mangled carcass of a freshly-killed doe, flung up onto the embankment where the roadway was cut narrowly through the little hilltop, told a too-common story of a deer which had suddenly leapt out of the manzanita brush into the path of a vehicle. Paint on the carcass indicated that it had been struck by, or had struck, both the dark green Ford ranch pickup and the white GMC truck tractor which was hauling the loaded double set of trailers in the opposite direction: but no clues could tell what the exact sequence of events had been. It had all happened too quickly for there to even have been skid marks.

There were no clues to tell which driver had crossed the solid yellow line, or why. Presumably one or the other, or both, had either swerved to avoid the deer or had struck it and lost control due to the impact. Similarly, forensic experts were unable to determine if the truck driver‘s ability had been chemically impaired, due to the total incineration of the bodies in the fuel-fed fire. His fellow drivers, who also made that boring run a half dozen times a day hauling Clear Creek asbestos to the plant in San Ardo, knew that that driver chose to break the boredom by nursing a fifth of Scotch. It was a tedious job driving that route, and the area was so isolated that the big trucks normally had the narrow, winding two-lane road to themselves, and so some of the younger drivers did use drugs or alcohol to get through the day. But of course that information was not given to the CHP investigating the accident, although it was common talk in bars from down in Paso Robles up to Salinas for several months after the accident.

And so Monty had inherited the ranch from his father, as his father had inherited it before. Although Monty’s grandfather had not listened to his doctor, who told him that his cigarette habit would kill him, he had listened to his accountant who told him he had to plan for the future of the ranch. He had worked with a very good local attorney who specialized in inheritance tax laws, particularly as they related to ranch land. Unlike many other children who inherited from large landowners, Monty was not put in the position of having to sell the ranch to pay taxes. The attorney had warned Monty that taxes could at best be postponed, and that he needed to think about producing some offspring if he wished to have any hope of not having a large part of the ranch sold for taxes some day. Monty had smiled, and said that he’d take that under advisement and that he was working on it. Thinking of that now, he winced, realizing that he would be 30 on his next birthday and that there was currently absolutely nothing going on in his life which would lead to his ever having children to inherit the ranch.

Bothered by that thought more than he wanted to admit, Monte swung Buck around onto the trail with rougher motions than he normally used, and the horse, sensing that his master was upset about something, responded by moving more briskly than usual as he started down the trail. As he had on the way up the mountain, Monte let his gaze drift along the straight line of the 4-strand barbed wire fence, looking for the tell-tale signs of trouble: a sagging wire, a fallen tree near the fence, a gap between two fence posts where there should be taut wire. One of the worst fences he had ever seen had been built around a little 40-acre parcel some city people had bought nearby. They had wanted to fence out the neighbor’s cattle, and had gone to all the trouble and expense of buying and installing fence posts and a 4-wire barbed wire fence, like the ranch fences they saw around them. Unfortunately, they had not noticed nor learned that the wire had to be stretched guitar-string tight to have any value: they had pulled it by hand, and the neighbors’ cows soon found no problem in putting their heads, then their necks, and finally their entire bodies between the sagging wires. For cows, the grass really is always greener on the other side, and if a cattleman was interested in keeping cows on the right side of his fence, he had to constantly check to ensure that there were no breaks or sagging spots which would allow some aggressive cow to reach under, over, or through to the extent that the minor break would soon be enlarged so that an entire herd of cows could go where they didn’t belong.

So far, the fence had been as good as when he had last checked it, and Monty nudged Buck to step up the pace. There were still miles to check, some of it in pretty rough country, and Monty wanted to get finished by early afternoon. He needed to know that there were no fence problems before he left early tomorrow morning, and he still had other preparations to make for his trip. Today was the last Tuesday in October. That meant that Wednesday and Thursday would be Cattleman’s Days at the Grand National Livestock Show and Rodeo in San Francisco. Thursday would be the annual range bull sale, and Monty needed 4 or 5 new bulls, so he wanted to get there on Wednesday to check out the selection. It was time for his annual trip up to the Cow Palace.

Chapter 2

San Francisco has the crappiest climate in the whole world, thought Ranny. Sure, there were times when the sun shone and the fog stayed away all day, and if you didn’t have a hangover and you didn’t have to go to a stinking job, it could even seem like a nice place to live. But Ranny had lived here all his life, except for that year in the Army, and it couldn’t fool him. Those sunny, warm days were just to suck you in so that you’d think that maybe the global warming crap they were always whining about on the TV was really going to kick in and make this a place fit for a human being - and then it was back to the same old rotten, stinking, cold, nasty-ass fog. It wasn’t fog that just sat there and didn’t do much but make it hard to see clearly. No, San Franciso fog came blowing in off the cold northern Pacific, or in under that Golden Gate bridge the tourists were always oohing and ahhing over, and it was bone-chilling cold.

Ranny was definitely not in the college-bound group at Potrero Hill High, and English Literature was not a course he’d gotten a great deal out of, but he had never forgotten that one memorable passage about fog. Not that he had memorized it, but he sure as hell remembered what that fool poet had said.

The teacher was an idealistic young man who’d moved to San Francisco from Billings, Montana. Apparently he felt that the climate, both weather-wise and socially, might be easier to take for one of his somewhat delicate makeup. As Ranny recalled, the young man had decided after Christmas break that teaching a bunch of uncouth, ungrateful young fools was not for him, and he had simply not returned to school. One night later that year Ranny had seen him again, but the circumstances were such that they hadn’t spoken. A couple of neighborhood punks had decided to cruise Castro Street and invited Ranny along, only because they believed in strength in numbers, not because Ranny was a popular fellow. Telling his mother that he had to go to the branch library to get some information about a History project, Ranny eagerly joined the expedition. Harassing gays was a popular sport with high-school boys eager to prove that they themselves were all male. Whether they were trying to prove it to their peers or to themselves was not something that they reflected on. These were boys not much given to reflection.

Before searching for easy prey on the outskirts they had slowly driven through the main part of the district. The blocks just south of Market were like a street party every night. Music poured out of the bars, with their windows open onto the street to let the air out, the air superheated by the energy pouring out of the laughing, never-still young men inside. Big black Harleys, shining with chrome and leather, stood in clumps of three or four, their noses angled in to the curb like strange bionic horses from a time-warped Western movie. Their riders were not the long-haired, big-bellied men one saw astride those bikes elsewhere, nor were they the slightly-built young men strolling the sidewalks who attracted the scorn and hatred of the high-school bullies. No, these men caused distinct, but unvoiced, unease in the young toughs. They were hard-bodied, well-muscled men, and they stared out at the world from under their leather motorcycle caps with cold, appraising eyes. The boys’ eyes were attracted to the bikes, but when they took in the figures lounging on the seats, feet propped up on the handlebars, they found that they could not face down the menace they felt radiating out from that pool of leather, metal, and flesh. And flesh there was - many riders wore only a leather vest on top, open to display nipple rings, possibly joined by a chain. Others were shirtless, clad only in black leather cap, pants, and boots. Ranny had even seen one who wore not leather pants, but only chaps with the seat cut out so that his bare butt cheeks were pressed against the seat of his big Harley.

On the sidewalks, between the bars and the curbside loungers, couples, trios, and a few single men strolled along through the pools of amber street light, reveling in the freedom they felt. Many had migrated from small towns or less tolerant cities and could hardly believe that they could not only be open about their homosexuality but could flaunt it. But even more, they exalted in the knowledge that in this area of many blocks, they were for the first time not a minority but were instead the overwhelming majority. The minority were the straight people who ventured in, whether they were conservatives slumming, liberals being tolerant, bigots hating, or just people who enjoyed good restaurants.

Ranny had spotted his one-time teacher by accident. It was the cowboy hat which caught his eye - apart from the motorcycle riders’ leather caps, bare heads were the rule. In fact, most men in this area affected the close-cropped hair and small mustaches that were referred to as the “Castro clone” look. But Ranny’s one-time teacher had found that, in order to be noticed amongst so many young men who looked the same, he had a much more active social life if he reverted to the dress of his youth. Although he had not actually been a cowboy, he had learned enough about that life in Billings to use that knowledge now to his advantage. A great many of the émigrés in San Francisco were from Eastern cities and towns, and were strongly attracted to the sight of a handsome young man who looked as though he had stepped out of a Marlboro ad - and better yet, he was in this part of town, which meant that he could be available. Leaning back against a wall in his faded, tight jeans, one heel of a pointy-toed alligator cowboy boot hooked up behind on a ledge, he had plenty of reason to smile as he chatted with the two young men who had stopped to talk. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the eventual outcome of that pleasant meeting would be his death from AIDS within ten years.

It gave Ranny a jolt to see his former teacher in such a setting - but not because he, like his classmates, hadn’t considered the possibility that that their new English teacher might prefer boys to girls. It was just the dislocation that comes when seeing a familiar face in an unfamiliar setting - like meeting one’s dentist in the grocery store. Besides, Mr. Ryan had attempted, unsuccessfully, to instill some feelings of respect for authority by always wearing a jacket and tie. This laughing young cowboy in the heart of the Castro looked quite a different man than the nervous, well-dressed teacher who had tried, and failed, to communicate his love of literature to Ranny and his peers. But Ranny had recognized him instantly.

Again this morning, the fiercely-driven fog outside his window reminded Ranny of Mr. Ryan. He flashed first on that brief glimpse of the Castro Street cowboy, and then on the other image of the earnest young man, just out of college, standing at the front of the room in his dark brown tweed jacket. As always, his tan slacks were perfectly creased, his light green shirt and tie matched the slacks and jacket, and his brown loafers had just the right degree of polish. In sharp contrast to most of their male teachers who affected the same clothing style as their students - T-shirts or sweatshirts, depending on the season, blue jeans, and the latest Nike or Adidas running shoes - Mr. Ryan could have stepped out of an ad in GQ. Or at least, out of an ad in Playboy, as that magazine was much more familiar to his students. His manner of dress, however, was not enough to command respect from those tough teens. He wore clothes with so much class and style, but without any of the affected mannerisms of many of those of his sexual orientation, that the boys did not openly make fun of him. In fact, most of them secretly admired the way he dressed: but in that school, at that age, it was unthinkable for anyone to voice a favorable opinion. And so they had merely behaved as uncouth louts, and Mr. Ryan had decided that he’d really rather be an editor at a textbook publishing firm in downtown San Francisco after the Christmas break.