Caught Again

It was a crisp winter day on the Cold Springs Ranch. Most of the snow in Copper Basin had melted, but a lot of the hills were pretty slick with mud, and in Copper Basin, there were plenty of hills. The Cold Springs Ranch was owned by Eddie and Madge Balmes who are my wife’s parents . It was located just west of Prescott and covered a large area starting in the high ponderosa pines and ending in the scrub oak almost to Skull Valley.

It was a good ranch if you were young enough and tough enough to endure many hours in the saddle, fighting your way through the scrub oak, following some old spoiled cow that knew she could squeeze under and through places that a man and a horse could not. But with a couple of trusty dogs things got evened out. I had only been married a couple of years and thought I was a pretty good cowboy, little did I know what being a cowboy in tough country was.

The ranch was dissected by one bladed dirt road that started on the west boundary of Prescott wound up climbing up through the pines past Cold Spring and the old ranch house. It contuned to the top of the rim which looked out over Copper Basin. Copper Basin is a large deep valley, with a creek in the bottom, the valley is filled with old mines and mine shafts. Phelps Dodge owns most of the mineral rights now, but it has been mined for years and has produced lots of gold. An old hermit couple lived in a shack on the north end of Copper Basin. Bee White and his lovely lady Belle were an interesting couple. When I rode horseback by their place, I always let them know it was me, and they still met me with a gun. Bee always would me show the gold he had found, but Bee and Belle could be a whole story in themselves.

At the rim of Copper Basin the road split, one followed the rim passing the interesting geological formation called Thumb Butte and eventually wound up back in Prescott. The Copper Basin road dropped off the rim and was literally cut out of the side of the mountain. It was the type of road often is called a white knuckle road , this road was the type of road you would highly recommend if you immensely disliked the person you were sending over it, especially in the winter. It was usually impassable in the winter, when we got a lot of snow on the mountain.

As I stood there in the crisp afternoon air, I had a lot of thoughts, but the most pressing thought, was how the hell do I allow myself to get in these predicaments. I could tell by the position of the sun it wasn’t too long until it went down. I wondered how cold it would get be for morning, I was dressed in a Levi shirt and Wranglers, and knew my warm coat was on the seat of my pickup, but may as well have been hanging at the ranch house for all the good it was going to do me when it got down below freezing tonight.

As I stood there contemplating my predicament, I thought of a funny story my brother Link had told me about him and Grandpap. They had been hauling cattle from the livestock sale in Phoenix to St. Johns. It was funny, but possibly it could be of use in my situation. Link said they had a flat tire on the trailer with a load of cattle on a busy city street in downtown Mesa. They had jacked the trailer but when they tried to let it down, the jack wouldn‘t function. There are a few items that every cowboy cannot live with out and one is a “cowboy jack “, the other is a good pocketknife. For you that have not had the pleasure of using a cowboy jack, which are wonderful when they work, but a tool of the Devil when they decide to be obstinate, I will give you a little information to help clarify the rest of the story.

The jack was originally called a Handyman Jack, it was first produced in 1905, and the name was later changed to HI -Lift Jack. They are 48 inches high and will lift several tons, today nearly anyone that gets off the road or in the backwoods has at least one with him. They are really good for a number of functions, but getting you out of the stuck is what they do best. To still be in production 105 years later and be very much in demand they must be good.

Well, Link’s Handyman Jack was siding with the devil that particular day, any one that has used one much knows is there are certain tricks to persuading them to cooperate. One that usually works is giving them a drink, water is usually the best choice, but anything will do in an emergency, and this trailer stuck on the jack in heavy traffic was an emergency. Lacking any water the second choice is right handy and usually readily available. Now out on the ranch, it is nothing to unzip your pants and give the jack a good hosing down, but in city traffic it is another matter. The thought of the old man standing there hosing down the Devil brought a smile to my face. Link had told me the story and we had had a good chuckle, but I had not thought to ask Link why he didn’t do it himself. Possibly to the do-gooder city folks, an old man could get by with it, where a young man might get arrested if some bible thumping, man-hating biddy happened to see some young cowboy watering his jack while his nervous load of cattle painted their fine city street green.

It was getting colder by the minute and I was soon going to be in the dark and cold. The little side road I was on sometimes didn’t see two cars a week, so my chances of someone helping me out of this fix, were pretty slim. The thought of my finger in the coyote trap as a kid came to mind. This story, which I wrote for my Grandkids for Christmas this year, also talked about a three-legged muskrat, the option of the three legged muskrat. Thinking of that muskrat saving himself at the expense of one leg, I instantly felt for my pocket knife, thinking if things got really desperate, I may have to shorten that poor unlucky digit that always was the one that got beat up. I had sick feeling remembering my pocket knife was on the seat of the pickup where I had had my lunch. My options were getting slimmer by the minute.

I tugged on my index finger, hoping that by some miracle it would come free from the working mechanism of the jack. The jack had the full weight of my pickup on it and my finger felt like it had a lot of the pick up weight on IT. It looked like the jack may have won this round.

I had slipped off the road on a slick muddy hill and was using the jack to get me out. My problem was, in my haste, I had manipulated the wrong pin in the working mechanism of the jack and now had that same dang index finger solidly trapped, as it had been in the coyote trap when I was eleven years old. The weight of the pickup was holding the jack firmly in place. At least the finger was getting pretty numb, which gave me a thought of one more option, I thought that if I put enough pressure on the jack handle maybe it will sever the finger and I will be free (like the three-legged muskrat). This may sound like I was getting pretty desperate, well I was, I knew how freezing cold it would get in a few hours. I really thought losing the end of my finger was better than the other option which was very likely freezing.

It sounded like a great idea, but the infliction of pain on yourself is not really my thing. As I exerted pressure, the mechanism moved just enough for me to extract the poor abused finger out of a trap one more time. This time, I wasn’t as lucky as I was as a kid with my finger it the coyote trap. It didn’t take a doctor to see the first joint of my index finger was smashed and mangled. Little did I realize this time would be a lifetime reminder of keeping fingers and other body parts, like your nose, out of where they should not be.

However, lessons in life sometimes take some of us a lifetime to learn, if we survive that long. In my sixty years I have known many who died learning their lessons. I have had a much harder time in learning some lessons than most, because my job paid me to know everything that was going on. My “have to know” personality drove me to the wide open jaws of danger, teasing them to snap closed on me. My quest for excitement took me on adventures that more cautious individuals would never experience. I am not advocating this course of action, in fact, I am urging my children and grandchildren and any person that would like to live a long and happy life, to avoid this path. Too many risks taken and you are destined to get into that fatal trap from which there is no return.

I am not so much speaking on the obvious crazy risks, but more so on some of those we may not readily see as traps, like running with friends that are making foolish mistakes, and will attempt to have you join them in those mistakes. A large portion of why I retired and let some younger adventurer put his life on the line, is that I had that inner premonition that the odds were getting slimmer every time I tracked some killer or crazy person, and that the next trap would be the fatal one.

Often when following some armed, crazy person, who had just murdered someone, my left index finger would get to throbbing (usually because of the cold), and that lifelong reminder was throbbing its’ warning. This throbbing would initiate that familiar concern of stumbling into that one last final trap.

I had, and I still have that daily reminder on my left hand, of what happens when we get reckless and don’t pay attention, whether out of ignorance, or more often, because we fail to slow down and think it through before we hastily jump in.

If there is a lesson to be learned from my poor index finger, it is that we will all have to pay for the consequences of our actions. My quest in life has been, “What adventure lies just around the bend or over the next hill“, it always has been, and appears that maybe it always will be. The key is to know when we have reached the limit and be smart enough to not let ourselves be drawn over that line. We must remember, with some things in life there is not that second chance that we all grow to expect to be there waiting for us like our faithful dog.