Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

IN OUR TENTH SUMMER at Dark Acres the water war began. When we bought the place, which came with irrigation rights to the river, we also acquired water rights to the Mabel. Our portion of this marsh had been partially dammed in 1971 to create a reservoir for thirsty cattle. But over the decades it had been hopelessly clogged with tires, farm implements, rotten hay, and dead animals. After I finished cleaning it, which took three years, we not only had a trophy skating pond, but a whole community of wildlife began returning to its former haunts. And the babbling of the Mabel through a steel culvert in the earthen dam was a sweet sound indeed.

Emmitt Hooper did not share our pleasure. As the endless drought baked Montana, the Mabel's seemingly inexhaustible flow dwindled. One day Hooper paid us a visit to demand that we hire a contractor to extract the old culvert and bury a new one deeper in the dam. The new culvert would send more water to his place, but it would completely drain the Mabel. Since Hooper was allowed to irrigate from the river, just as we were, I didn't see the point of ruining our sumptuous, restored wetland just so his mangy sheep could have even more to eat. I did nothing, hoping Hooper would go away.

Radish the garbage hound—whose appetites compelled him to sit under our apple tree for hours in the fall barking at fruit in the hope it would drop.

As the Godfather said, I tried to get out, but they kept pulling me back in. One morning in the winter of 2000, Radish wandered over to Copeland's place and discovered a dump full of his favorite thing besides bananas—animal parts. He came home so bloated he waddled, and as I put down a bowl of water for him in the yard he barfed. In the vomit were crushed bones and two halves of a cow's ear. Radish the garbage hound, whose appetites compelled him to sit under our apple tree for hours in the fall barking at fruit in the hope it would drop, gorged at the dump whenever he could, filling the house with night smells that yanked us awake, seized by the conviction that the septic tank had burst. I could have chained him up or run to town for a kennel. Instead I called the county health department to see if property owners are permitted to warehouse rotting flesh on the back forty.

"No, it's not legal," a field agent from the health department told me. "It's a health hazard."

Not many days later I walked to the dump to fetch Radish and found him staring at the place where his beloved offal had once been strewn. "Please accept my condolences for your loss," I said, directing him home. The county had ordered Copeland to clean up the mess.

When the ground thawed that spring, the hills were alive with the sound of Copelands pounding on steel posts. Within 48 hours the clan had strung a four-wire fence bristling with No Trespassing signs from the river to the road, almost a half-mile of barbs. Although Zoners everywhere will hotly defend their right to fence out the world, they're never happy when someone else does it.

Then, one hot night in June 2000, Hooper showed up at our door to deliver his water demands again. The Squalor Zone is not the sort of place where one arrives unannounced (no Welcome Wagons have ever brought around fine products from local merchants, and not one child has ever braved our darkened drive to come begging at Halloween). So when Radish began to howl his Intruder! howl, I reached for the nearest weapon.

"I'm telling you again, dig up that culvert!" Hooper demanded when I threw open the door.

I showed him my old Ping five-iron. "Don't come back here," I said, adding, "You idiot redneck jerk."

He retreated, with me on his heels, down our long lane, through our fence, and back into his pickup parked on the county road. As he drove off, we exchanged more pleasantries, and flipped each other off.

And so it was that by the late summer of 2000 all relations between Dark Acres, on one side, and Hooperland, Zankland, Copeland Land, and Dugania, on the other, had been severed. The balkanization of the floodplain was complete. Were there ambassadors, they'd be recalled. Not only were we barred from Copeland Land by his barbed-wire Berlin Wall, but Hooper, still smarting from our fight about water, had banned us from his property as well, which meant we could no longer run our horses along the river. We felt like we had lost a loved one.

While the drought wore on and temperatures rose I began interpreting natural events as avatars of doom. The herbs in my kitchen garden starting bolting faster than I could pinch off the seeds. The cottonwood leaves turned yellow and dropped. One afternoon I ran back to the forest when I heard screeching and found a red-tailed hawk fighting in the middle reaches of a cottonwood with a gargantuan raccoon. When the coon's weight snapped a branch he fell soundlessly, hit the ground, bounced, and hit the ground again. I assumed he was dead. Poor little fella, I thought. But as I approached him he shook his head, hissed like a cat as he feinted angrily in my direction, snatched up the whitefish he'd won in the fight, and vanished with an indignant snarl into a briar patch of hawthorns.

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