Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? | Outside Online

Outside Magazine July 2001

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Won'tcha Be My Neighbor?
Who hasn't dreamed of clean country living, of owning your own green acres? Bill Vaughn bought his piece of rural heaven a decade ago, and began a new life of peace and quiet, of starry nights and days on horseback. And of gunfire, angry words, barbed-wire diplomacy, trespassing, rotting carcasses, and proliferating grudges. An insider's journal of the Feud Years.

By Bill Vaughn

AS THE DROUGHT of 2000 ground on forever like the invader in some perpetual Eurasian tank war, the forests of the West burned to ash, the broasted air filled with smoke, and everywhere was the growl of bombers flying off to heave slurry at the fires. Tensions, as the anchorpersons say, escalated, both those that sprang from reality and those confected by delusion. In late July, when 350 Hells Angels roared into Missoula, Montana, to party hardy at their annual bash, the chief of police countered with 170 reinforcements. One sweltering night after the bikers withdrew from the bars downtown to the ski hill they'd rented, a phalanx of cops in body armor attacked a noisy crowd of civilians gathered in the smoky streets to let the good times roll and to protest all the cops, and blasted everyone in sight with pepper spray. South of the city a minister's son, a father of five, was charged with beating to death an older neighbor who had brandished a pistol to illustrate a point about the younger man's incessantly howling hounds.

For me, these dramas were simply atmosphere, no more than scrim, I admit, for my own private passion play—the simmering feuds with neighbors I'd lived among for a decade, squabbles petty and not so petty that were finally coming to a boil under the weary ocher skies. But such is the nature of what I call the Squalor Zone—the rural sprawl surrounding Missoula and most of our Republic's cities, that unsavory low-rent sediment layered between suburbia on one side and, on the other, the sweep of farms and big ranches and finally the wilderness—that folks just naturally like to get in your face. The topics of debate are standard: "Resolved: Whereas your [dog, mule, horse, cow, child, fence, hunting ethics, conservation practices, respect for private property] could stand improvement, sir, mine is above reproach. You fucking asshole."

Even my wife, Kitty, and I had begun to annoy each other by skulking around on tiptoe and checking over our shoulders. The forest at Dark Acres—our little slice of Shangri-la on the Clark Fork River, a five-hour float from the heart of Missoula—is so littered with wind-sheared timber that any combustion in this parched jungle would have erupted into a firestorm consuming our house and shop and corrals. We stopped riding in the forest or putting out our four highbred quarter horses back there to graze because their steel shoes might strike a rock and throw a lethal spark.

Every afternoon during the peak of the wildfire crisis I shimmied up the angled trunk of a toppled ponderosa to peer through the smoky-yellow glare like a mad gibbon. I issued myself binoculars, a walkie-talkie, a professional-quality slingshot, and a bag of inch-wide stones from the river. At the first sign of fire I would radio Kitty, who was working back at the shop on one of the books she designs for publishers. If I got into a skirmish with a trespasser or spotted one of the many unknown, demented persons who enjoyed reckless gunplay in the ridges above our place, Kitty would call in the sheriff. The slingshot, I told myself, was for protection.

On July 31, when the thermometer hit 100 degrees, I was catnapping in my hammock, mustering the energy for sentry duty, when the shouting began. My first groggy notion was that a neighbor was challenging me to come out and fight. But it wasn't a feudist causing this ruckus. It was a fire. And it wasn't the forest that was burning. Under an angry funnel of greasy black smoke, flames were devouring several shacks on a cluttered four-acre tract we dubbed the Rent Trailer, whose owners leased a stained and battered mobile home huddled in a clot of elms to one family after another. The fire had started when a frayed electrical wire jury-rigged from the mobile home to the woodshed had shorted out, showering the shed with sparks.

"Bring more!" Kitty yelled, dragging a pair of garden hoses behind her as she ran down our drive toward the flames.

I did as I was told. By the time I showed up, a disorganized crew of Squalor Zoners had gathered, and they were frantically attempting to connect a series of hoses in order to squelch the fire with water. The trailer was still unscathed, but the flames had leveled two shacks, destroyed an old tractor, and were feasting on the mounds of junk you always find in the weedy yards of netherlands like ours.

The current occupants had escaped unsinged. Mom herded her three kids and a pair of vicious rottweilers into the old family van while Dad saved the chickens and the inferno raged on. A big-voiced four-year-old, whose singing was a daily serenade during happier times, hung her head and wept. We backed away, utterly defeated. In the distance, sirens began to wail.

The next thing that happened was the arrival of deputies and firefighters, speeding up in a dozen trucks, circling the homestead like Comanches in some ancient oater. They doused the inferno in short order and even managed to save the home (whose shell-shocked occupants moved right back in).

I glanced over and caught the eye of Junior Dugan,* a diesel mechanic with whom I had exchanged not one civil word in seven years, not since our bout over zoning featured him in one corner, building himself yet another house on the nine-acre principality of Dugania, facing off against me, a meddler from the property next door, who was lobbying the county to shut him down. Crew-cut and fit, Junior was wearing one of his trademark white T-shirts, still gleaming despite the sooty mess.

Kitty and I stared at the parade of midweek gawkers idling by in their pickups on the county lane. Would Emmitt Hooper show up, I wondered, the retired postal worker with whom I had nearly come to blows over our conflict about water rights? What about C. R. Copeland, the lumber-mill employee who had enraged everyone by erecting a barbed-wire Berlin Wall around a delectable parcel of open range in order to keep his cattle in and the world out? And where was the neighborhood's loosest cannon, Jay Zank, a chronically underemployed road-construction gofer who trespassed at will by cutting fences, encouraged his bony horses to graze on other people's pastures, and shotgunned the No Trespassing signs I threw up in defense?

What is it about the Squalor Zone, I wondered, that compels people living here to quarrel all the time? Why does it seem that the chief form of exercise in these pastoral outbacks is jumping to conclusions? After all, each of us has clear title to our corner of the garden that has become the American Dream yet again, the small landholdings that Thomas Jefferson figured would make even the most loutish wastrel a contributor to the commonweal. Is there something about that most counterfeit of vanities—the pride of land ownership itself—that makes us so imperious? Or could it be that all the feuding I'd been party to wasn't about other people at all—it was about me?

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