The Value of Literature

Riggins, Idaho

     During a late-Summer thunderstorm, I herded a Dodge Powerwagon along the Salmon River road upriver from Riggins, Idaho, crept up ten miles of switchbacks, lunched at a spot that once was a freight transfer station, eased along Toller Ditch, floated down the Lake Creek drainage, and arrived in Burgdorf, Idaho. I stayed there for a few years in the high country, thirty miles off the road, with my wallet in the cupboard and chickadees landing on the brim of my hat. A wad of my memories soak in those hot springs.

    It was before the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness was established, before the Forest Service burned several “unpermitted” cabins that existed on both shores of the Salmon River. Interesting folks lived in those cabins, folks like Sir Rollie Hammel who logged the river for driftwood with a chunk of rope during peak flows from an open twelve-foot fishing boat. Folks like the extended Jones family at the bottom of Carey Creek who literally counted coup on bears with a switch in the old orchards, and like Lum Turner, an loner who eventually drowned in the river after years of threading the trail to town.

    I met Lum only once, in Summerville’s Bar in Riggins, on a Saturday night when coincidence, or his cantankerousness, provided an empty stool at his left elbow. As soon as I ordered a shot of Jim Beam, with a beer back, he waded into me.

    “Where you from, son?”

    “Well, I’m living up at Burgdorf.”

    “No, I meant where you from, son?”

    “Grew up in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Got here by the way of Massachusetts, Italy, Mississippi, Illinois, California and Montana.”

     “How do you make your living?”

     “Right now I’m rolling logs to the headworks in a houselog mill.”

     “Oh yeah, for Little Bill up on the school section. You can’t do that forever. What do you want to do when you grow up?”

      “I’m thirty-one-years-old with a kid and figure I’m just about grown now, but, if you really want to know, I’d like to make my living as a writer before I stop living.”

     “That’s a good one. Somebody’s got to put it all into words, I guess. I do some reading myself, but I never realized the true value of literature until the winter of 1953. Buy me a shot, and I’ll tell you the story.” 

      I bought the shot. What follows is Lum’s assessment of the true value of the written word.

     “I was wintering four mules, two of mine and two from the Owens’ ranch, in a little set of corrals behind my cabin fifteen miles upriver. It was a heavy winter for this part of the world, maybe a foot and a half of snow at river level that seemed to stay forever. I hadn’t got a whole lot of hay put up the Summer before.  

     “Sometime around Christmas I belled one of my mules and turned all four out to fend for themselves. The river is gentle and quiet in the winter months, so I could hear the bell good. When the mules got too far away from my place, I’d ski out to find them, chase them back home, and hay them a little, just enough so they would remember the joys of civilization and not wander completely off.  I worried about cougar too. Just about every critter in Central Idaho comes down to the river during the winter.

    “A month or so before it started to snow, I was in Riggins to pick up my government check and get a few supplies. While I was here a lady friend forced me to take darn near a cord of her old used Readers Digests back up the river to my place. I didn’t want them but I was taught to accept gifts gracefully, so I hauled them home and stacked them in boxes beside my bed.

     “Along about January I got lonely and bored enough to read one. It was a Sunday morning, a pretty nice day, and I was sitting at my table with the window open, a pot of coffee and one of those magazines. The more I read, the more disgusted I got. The one that really torqued me was an article about this feller named Raymond L. Ditmars who was working to save the American rattlesnake. I’d lost two dogs to snakes the summer before. I pitched the book out of the window, out into the slop and snow of the mule corral.

     “A couple of cups of coffee later I decided it was time to do some sort of work, so I went out to bell the mules and let them wander for feed. While I was out there, I got to thinking that it would be just my luck that this would be the day that the lady friend would come to visit and find one of her books out in the corral, so I’d best retrieve it. You know, I could not find that Readers Digest anywhere. And when I opened the corral gate, the mules just stood there looking at the cabin, didn’t want to leave.

    “That’s when I discovered the true value of literature. Those mules had literally digested the Readers Digest and were waiting for more reading material. That bunch of literature solved a lot of my problems that Winter. I was out of hay, but not out of feed. Didn’t even have to bell the leader anymore. Once every morning until the snow melted, I’d pitch a wad of Readers Digests out into the corral and watch the mules chew them into fodder. They’d come home every night. I don’t know whether it was the ink or whatever, but all four of them shed off their winter coats early and were plenty slick and fat by mid-March when the grass started growing again. Yep, you go ahead and become a writer. You never know when a book is going to come in handy.”