Dewie’s Gone

     On the morning of December 13, 2005, Charles Durward Lovelace took that long last hard ride out of this life and into whatever awaits him across the Great Divide. He left behind a wife, Carolyn, a few grown kids, nineteen horses (down from thirty-three only weeks before) and a collection of stories that will be told across many a campfire to come. I never knew his birth name until he was dead. To me he had always just been Dewie Lovelace, my close friend for 33 years. 

    We met in the summer of 1972 in Burgdorf, Idaho. Five of us mountain hippies had burned an hour attempting to move a large log outhouse fifty feet to a fresh hole using only man strength and awfulness. Dewie showed up in a second-hand green Forest Service pickup, reached in the back and carried three log chains over to us, smiling all the way. At that point, when Dewie was in his early 40’s, he had already shod a few too many horses and, even when not carrying a hundred pounds of log chain, walked slightly bent-over like he was constantly falling forward.

     He introduced himself as the owner/operator of a gold claim over on the Secesh River and asked if we minded a whole lot if he helped us with our task. The offer took much longer than it takes to tell. Talking with Dewie usually meant a lot of hooking of boot heels into corral rails or leaning on the hoods of trucks or squatting in the shade of a barn. Dewie could move mountains, but never in a hurry. He always took the time to talk things out. 

    In the case of the outhouse, he suggested that it might work to chain around the third course of logs and drag the whole building over to the new hole with his truck. Dewie got things done but never jumped right into the middle of a problem with a surefire solution unless someone was about to get hurt.  He had a knack for teaching a kid to open a pocket knife just by opening and closing it a few times himself while pretending to be paying attention to something else. He was a gentle coyote. Fifteen minutes later the outhouse was over the hole.  The rest of the afternoon was like most of the rest of our friendship, drinking beer, telling stories, and getting acquainted with strangers.

    A couple of weeks later, Dewie showed up again and asked if some of us could come over to his claim the next morning and help him put a new roof on his cabin.  Sure we could.  It took three days to put a whole new second story on the cabin, then tin the roof with flattened sections of irrigation conduit that he had salvaged from an old pipeline down by Ontario, Oregon, where he kept his horses.  

    In September, when the sweet corn was harvested down along the Snake River, Dewie hosted the first of what became thirty-three annual Cornfeeds. The format of these parties was simple. The day before the gathering, Dewie went to a corn farmer and asked to pick the ends of the rows that the mechanical equipment missed, then bundle it up in gunnysacks and haul it into the mountains. 

     The Cornfeed was advertised by mouth across the central Salmon River Mountains and was open to all.  “Sure would like to have your company,” he would say.  “Bring whatever you want to drink, whatever music you have, and some trading stock. We’ll have plenty of corn.”  Dewie brought eight hundred pounds of fresh sweet corn to that first party.  It took the better part of two days, but we got it eaten.

     And in the early years, there was plenty of beer, maybe too much. Dewie piped a cold spring into a clawfoot bathtub for a beer and watermelon cooler. There is a scar on my left thigh from being gored at midnight by a picnic bench. There was plenty of music. 

     Restoring the salmon run forced Dewie from his mine. We tore down the cabin and moved the Cornfeed into the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. The music dwindled.  On the last Labor Day, up on the summit above Cove, where Dewie was raised, it was only me with my not-so-hot guitar, singing “The Strawberry Roan” to a sore and hurting Dewie, in the last stages of bone cancer. 

     Dewie never was a rich man, and never intended to become one. He knew how to make proper use of what he had right around him. He manufactured two fresh pairs of wooden stilts every Cornfeed and demonstrated their use himself. There was no need for fancy silver saddles and hundred-dollar spade bits when you could train a horse to come to a whistle and then be bridled with a piece of hay string. 

     Dewie was at heart a horse trader, so it was the swap meet segment of the Cornfeed that tickled him most. Folks brought their stash of white elephants, spread them out on a blanket and a barter fair would evolve from there. Dewie would wear an old hat or pair of boots that he didn’t want anymore, then act as though they were his most prized possessions. He would annually produce five pocketknives and two watches, most of which were intended as gifts in the first place. 

     If a young person wanted a knife or a watch, Dewie would ask what in the world they possibly could produce to trade for such a sharp knife or valuable watch, then pretend that it was a great swap if the kid showed up with a branch that could be made into a slingshot or with a heart-shaped piece of gravel.

     Dewie was a storyteller. He could spin out a tale about the littlest thing and make it into a full-blown story, a kind, gentle story about the human condition.  He would often preface his telling with “What I am about to tell you is the truth, but it makes a pretty good story anyway.” They were campfire stories.  The one about the rancher who started the forest fire so he could earn enough money to go back to Brazil. The one about his wife pushing the drunken neighbor into the carp pond. The one about tossing the neighbor’s dog into the horse trailer to breed his cocker spaniel, then having the neighbor find the dog in the trailer.  And on, and on, way late into the starry night until the pictures in the fire sent us to bed.    

      I worked ranch jobs with folks who are probably better cowboys than Dewie, but never someone who was a better horseman. He claimed he always had a few more horses than he could afford and that about half the time you can be smarter than a horse, but you will never be stronger.  When my daughter was twelve and spent most of her time drawing pictures of horses, Dewie showed up at our house, backed a sorrel quarter horse mare named Mary out of a two-horse trailer, handed the kid a couple of pieces of orange hay string, saying that she shouldn’t need much more tack, and showed her how to fashion a hackamore from the string. Mary was the kind of kid’s horse that would move back under the rider if she felt that the rider was in danger of falling. 

     Dewie called me twenty years ago and informed me that, since I had stopped drinking, I was no longer expected to pull a pint of whiskey out of his boot and pass it around at his funeral, but he had some not-so-good news. Cancer was getting the best of him, so would I build a dovetailed box for his ashes?  It was delivered it to him at our last corn feed. Three months later he was gone. 

     His funeral was a potluck affair in the park by the Cove, Oregon, hot springs pool. After folks had eaten, his wife Carolyn motioned to me and their grown kids. We carried the little box up to a set of rocks above the park and without words to express our sorrow we began sprinkling Dewie’s ashes over a small basalt cliff. A pack of six-to-ten-year-old kids spotted us and came stampeding up the hill. Carolyn explained that we were giving Dewie back to the land. They asked if they could help. Dewie Lovelace was sent into the winds by the little hands that meant the most to him. He is up in cowpoke heaven, sitting slack-reined on one of his grey geldings among the pines, leaning forward with both hands on the saddle horn, smiling, and trying to swap an angel out of its wings.