Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

ON THAT TEMPESTUOUS day of the fire at the Rent Trailer I found myself thinking about my old man's seething inner world and wondering if the dark side of his character might have been reincarnated in his bellicose son. Looking back at a decade of acrimony, I sensed that if I were ever compelled to defend my own incendiary behavior before some celestial judge, there's a chance I might need a lawyer. Maybe I was daft from all the smoke in my lungs, but I decided on the spot that in order to gauge how good this lawyer ought to be I would go to my neighbors, waving a white flag, and ask them to tell me their side of the story—no matter how bad their version of events made me look. Nothing would be lost, although it was possible that I would make a hasty exit stage left, my butt peppered with rock salt. But perhaps a bold move like this would write the postscript to our feuding, freeing all of us to concentrate on saving our places from a disaster like the one before us now.

The next morning I called Junior Dugan, my old adversary in our feud over zoning.

"Don't think of me as someone you've had a quarrel with," I told him. "Think of me as a reporter. It's a chance to say what you want to about that jerk down the road."

Ol' Junior found the idea amusing. But decided against it. "I think it's better to just put it behind us," he said.

"Because you won?" I asked.

"Because I have nothing more to say."

I gave up trying to get more, wondering what I was missing. I ordered a transcript from the hearing that allowed Dugan to finish building his house. And there it was: The county health department had screwed up by issuing him a septic permit without asking to see a zoning permit. If the Board of Adjustments had turned down his appeal he could have sued them from here to Sunday.

Next I called C.R. Copeland, who agreed to talk to me face-to-face. Sweating on the drive over, I wondered again what the hell I was doing. But Copeland, who was recovering from food poisoning, moved carefully and talked quietly. He said his decision to fence the whole of Copeland Land was the result of years of abuse. Trespassers used to drive trucks onto the place to build bonfires and shoot guns and party and harass his cattle. "Went down there one day," he said, "and there was a lady roping my calves. 'I ain't herdin' 'em,' she says. 'I'm just practicing roping.'"

Although members of his clan objected, C.R. had allowed people such as me and Kitty to ride on Copeland Land if we got permission. But he was finally pushed too far the day he confronted Jay Zank, trespassing, mounted on one of his worthless horses. As Copeland recalled, "He said, ÔI'm going riding over on the river and you can't keep me out.' And he told me to fuck off. But he was right. If it's not fenced you can't legally keep somebody out. Because they don't know where the line is. Now they do."

I looked at him. "I'm going to tell you something that might piss you off." Bracing for the worst, I said that it was me who ratted him out to the health department about the dead pile. But he already knew—after all, people in the Squalor Zone talk, and very little remains secret.

"What do you think about me doing that?" I asked.

"If you had come to me and discussed it I would have picked up that stuff or buried it," he replied reasonably.

And that was it. No heat, no oaths, no payback. I was vaguely disappointed. After we commiserated about assorted local irritants such as the Gravel Pit—C.R.'s irrigation pipes had been shot, and he'd found bullet holes in the door of his shop—he told me he was currently feuding with a neighbor whose dog he'd shot because it was attacking his calves. He said he'd complained to the owners about this animal's predation and made certain they understood what could happen. After he had dispatched the cur, his neighbors called the sheriff, who confirmed that Copeland was legally entitled to protect his herd.

Ah, I thought, will the circle of spite ever be unbroken?

Next I tried to get Zank's side of the story, but he wouldn't agree to talk. In fact, he wanted to scream: "You're pushing your goddamn luck, asshole!" I tried to keep him on the line, but he finally slammed down the receiver so hard it made my ear ring.

Before I visited Emmitt Hooper, I picked a box of Goodland apples from our tree to bring as a peace offering. Tensions had already eased considerably; the Mabel was now gushing with more water than we had ever seen during the summer. But Hooper had not forgotten the night of our fight.

"You come out the door like a raving maniac," he told me as we sat in his living room. "All you would have had to do was to say I don't have time to talk to you right now." Still, he advised me that if the flows petered out again I would have to lower my culvert, implying that he would have no choice but to employ the power of the state to bend me to his will.

So why didn't he avoid all this trouble and just irrigate from the river, I asked.

"Oh, I used to do that," he said. "Had a gas pump down there. But someone kept putting sand in the engine and wrecking it." As I headed toward my truck I asked him what he spent so much time working on in his shop. "Toys," he said. "Wooden trains. You know, for the grandkids."

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