Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I took a two-track road used by irrigators and crossed a cattle guard, culverts, and a wire gap before getting into the field I intended, at the far edge of which was a slow mountain creek that held lots of cutthroat trout, vigorous spotted beauties with orange slash marks at their throats. A crop duster was flying in the distance, just at the ledge of mountain where yellow panels of grain extended toward the valley bottom. As it pulled up at the end of each run, clouds streaming behind it, the changing pitch of its engine carried all the way down to where I could clearly hear its whine. I parked under a power line that angled off toward the town of Wilsall and heard the dense murmur of summertime insects as I got out of the car. I saw clouds in the hood of the Olds in the late light, the crop duster rising and falling in the distance. The plane was treating wheat fields right at the edge where the foothills broke elevation, reversing direction by a dangerous maneuver called a hammerhead stall, sending the plane straight up at the end of each field right in the face of the hills for a falling turn down the next row. Suddenly one wingtip caught a juniper ridge and the plane tumbled.

I wasn’t absorbing the scene quite as I should. What seemed implausible was the complete lack of movement from this so recently dashing machine, which at the slightest contact with the earth had turned into junk. I got back into my car and drove recklessly until I was close to the accident. I got out and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I smelled fuel and heard a voice—“Get away before this thing catches fire!”—a woman’s voice. With the smell of gasoline and the word “fire,” I admit that I nearly bolted. Instead, I approached the cockpit — the propeller was wrapped back around the nose and fuel was running onto the ground — and discerned the torso of the pilot somewhat pinned under the plane. I began to pull her out, expecting screams, but I was met with only a weird silence, made even more inexplicable when I finally had her clear and saw that one foot was pointing in the exact opposite direction from the other. “ Keep moving. Get farther from the plane. ” There was such urgency in this command that overcoming my aversion to moving her at all I kept pulling until we were both many yards from the wreck. The plane went up in flames and a rush of air. She said, “Was that the plane?”

The burning airplane spewed a column of ugly smoke into the clear, windless air. Whatever chemicals that were aboard in addition to its fuel combined with the wiring plastics and other petrochemical elements in the craft to lend the smoke a greasy industrial quality that soon towered against the foothills.

The pilot lay faceup on the grass in front of me. She wore the sort of crash helmet you’d associate with motorcycles, and since one foot was still headed the wrong way, I declined to move her any more than I’d had to in order to get her clear of the coming fire, now a small throbbing inferno that made an X-ray of the airframe. With great delicacy I removed the crash helmet. A surprising mass of auburn hair spilled out. Physical anguish had transformed her features, and so I had no idea what she looked like. I knew she mustn’t be moved. I had seen results of accidents like this before, and I was well aware that the internal injuries could be anywhere and anything. There was always a list of things you hoped not to find, and the sometimes mad process of elimination during a race against the clock of declining vital signs was life’s most awful rush.

A ranch hand on an ATV arrived first, turned straight around and headed back downhill for a telephone. I wedged my coat and sweater on either side of her head to immobilize it; the worst things I knew were when the victim was vomiting or choking on blood and it was impossible to move the head without knowing if the neck or spine had been injured; you could only lift the jaw forward and with your fingers try to clear the airway. But no signs of head injury presented; the woman was not losing consciousness nor had she lost control of her bowels or limbs, the familiar signs. If she expressed anything, it was exasperation, but her discomfort prevented much of that. In a spell shortened by my obsessively checking vitals with squeamish glances directed at the upside-down foot, a compact four-wheel-drive ambulance from the small med center nearby arrived, and the pilot was lashed in place and rolled inside it. This whole while, though clearly conscious, she made no sound. I watched the ambulance ease its way down the two-track, before hitting the pavement, when its emergency light popped on and it was gone, heading west.

Thus my fishing, the vaunted evening rise, went right out the window.

Not a week after I saw Enid at the car wash I saw her again. I had paid a visit to one of my elders — mature folks in my first practice who had grown old — up the Shields River valley, and I’d stayed late, deciding to stop off at the Wilsall Bar for a drink before boarding the Oldsmobile for home. The only other customer was Enid, who this time saw me before I saw her. She motioned me over to the table, and I called my drink out to the bartender to save him the trip. Enid must have had a few drinks already, for she wore a mellow look I’d never seen on her face before, and it was quite becoming; one drink and one drink only was what I had in mind, but Enid’s demeanor suggested we were both headed for last call.

“Doctor, how nice to see you. I don’t like drinking alone but that’s what I’ve been doing. It certainly beats not drinking at all.”

“I was looking in on some of my old patients.”

“God’s little waiting rooms, all over the county.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ve been doing much the same thing, and now I’m treating the pain. I always thought agricultural banking suited me. Times have changed. Now they call me the Grim Reaper.”

“It must hurt.”

“What about your old car? Did you ever get it clean?”

“I did. How are your ranchers? Some of them doing okay?”

“Very few. The ones that stayed away from machinery on credit. On the other hand, their backs are gone.”

“What’ll they do?” I had some of these people on my customer list too.

“In some cases they’ll face the fact that ranching doesn’t pay, take someone’s ten million for the spread, and move to Scottsdale. The rest just dry up and blow away.”

This was where her posture changed and she started sizing me up. “But for the moment anyway, we’re not so different from everyone else who’s got no place better to be.”

We ended up using her car because it had four-wheel drive and I could take it out into a CRP field no one ever visited. There were wires running all over the ground for a methane exploration project and I tried not to drive over them until I found the creek bed I knew from my hunting, followed it into a grove of junipers, and turned off the engine. I’m still surprised at how tenderly we made love. This sort of car-borne episode is associated in everyone’s minds with something feral, but it was as if we had met in ideal circumstances and this was the result of substantial courtship. Partly, it was the warm air and the smell of prairie flowers and the remnants of grain farming really sort of caressing us, and the odd light coming from the dashboard instruments was quite becoming to her flesh. It struck me as grown-up, knowledgeable sex — you might say respectful sex, unsentimental, detached from any larger context. I wished all need could be addressed so directly. We didn’t stare at each other with theatrical grimaces at the familiar crescendos but struggled around in a grateful knot, welcoming all the fluids as we went. When we were finished, Enid sat straight up, thrust her hands into her hair, and stared through the windshield in thought. Then she turned to me with a mischievous wordless look. We gathered our clothes and dressed under the stars as though at public baths, as though merely acquaintances, which of course we were. It had been such a big success that there was not the smallest chance we’d try it again.