Chapter 31: Flash Floods - No Stopping for 5 Miles

One of the many things that living on a farm had taught me was that no matter what problems I was dealing with in my personal life, the animals on the farm had to have food and water. Actually water is the primary need because every form of life on earth is dependant on it, so when Carissa had noticed that the flow of water in the creek was reduced I became concerned.

Every drop of water used on the ranch, no matter what it was used for, came from that creek in one way or another. The major source of water for the creek was the artesian well that Grampa Bender had dug in 1907, which was when he first filed on his homestead at the top end of the upper valley. In fact the whole lease for both the upper and lower valleys was dependent on water rights and almost all of that water flowed from Grampa Bender’s artesian well. I wasn’t sure what the government would do about the lease if that water supply failed and I didn’t want to find out, so that morning I needed to check why there was less water flowing than normal. I had high hopes the flow was being reduced by a buildup of sand in the outlet of the artesian well, since that was something I could fix, otherwise I was unsure how the problem could be solved.

So as soon as the girls had left that morning, I fixed a small thermos of coffee just the way I liked it and loaded some tools I’d need into the Jeep. Then it wasn’t long before I was driving the Jeep along the trail to the upper end of the lake at the top end of the ranch, but as I drove I was thinking of how the place must have looked when Grampa Bender had first seen it. He’d told me about how much it had changed, and I had a good imagination, so in my mind’s eye I was imagining myself back in 1907. Well actually I was thinking of Grampa Bender and the tales he had told me.

Back in 1907, Grampa Bender, his father, his two brothers, and his brother’s wives had moved to Canada from the United States. They’d been sharecroppers in the US, either renting farmland or working for others, but they came to Canada to homestead on property that they’d be able to call their own. All they’d brought with them were some horses and a few cattle, other than that their worldly possessions were carried in four heavy duty ‘trail’ wagons, each pulled by a four horse team.

Great-Grampa Bender and his two older sons had planned on farming, so all but Grampa Bender filed on homesteads which stretched across the southern edge of a long valley and along a road allowance. The valley floor they’d chosen was relatively level, but well drained and had great potential for mixed farms. They’d chosen to file there because backing their new homesteads was a stretch of rougher land which was unsuitable for plowing and planting, but had the potential to be good grazing land. The family had high hopes that they could somehow find a way to obtain the rights to use that land for ranching. Grampa Bender did more than hope though and since he wanted to be a rancher, not a farmer, he hadn’t filed on a homestead when the rest of his family did.

William Tobias Bender wanted a ranch and once his family members were settled on their individual stakes, he saddled his horse and loaded a packhorse with gear. Then he set out to explore the rougher and drier country stretching up the valley above their homesteads, warning them that he planned on being gone for at least a week or two.

The first thing Grampa Bender did was check out the two creeks that ran along the western edge of his father’s new homestead. Even in early June one of those two creeks was almost dry, so it seemed likely that creek was only fed by spring runoff from the sloping area around and above it. However the other creek showed promise since it was still running slowly, but steadily, so he followed that creek upstream. About ten miles upstream from his family’s homesteads the valley walls had narrowed to only a few hundred yards wide and Toby found that the waters of the creek cascaded down a steep sided ravine. That ravine was so steep that it was almost impossible to climb, particularly since he was riding one horse and leading another. He spent most of one day trying to find a trail that a horse could follow up that cliff. Although the vertical distance between the upper and lower areas wasn’t that great, that drop-off was steep and although the cliff was only made up of sandstone and slate, it was still solid rock. He’d had to trace out a long convoluted route on foot before he could lead his horses up that cliff by following steep slopes and ledges that were relatively unsafe. Even then he had to blindfold each horse, then guide each of them up the trail individually.

When Toby Bender saw that upper valley though, he fell in love with the place. Naturally fenced by steep cliffs on the sides and relatively flat bottomed, that upper valley was a ‘natural’ ranch where stock could graze freely, but could still be easily confined to a limited area. Even though it was early summer the creek was still flowing, so it seemed as if water would always be within easy grazing distance for either cattle or horses.

Toby thought he was in heaven; the place was perfect, well, almost perfect. Water still might be a problem though, since there was a chance that the creek might not run year around. He hoped he was wrong, but it seemed that the creek might also be dependent on drainage from spring runoffs off the slopes of the foothills and mountains to the west of the valley. That lack of a year-round water supply might put an end to his dreams of a ranch since he didn’t have the money to build flood control dams which would provide a year round supply of water.

However, as he investigated further, he noticed a small lake surrounded by stands of willows and marshy ground near the farthest cliffs of the upper valley. Then in amongst the willows he found several spots where ground seepage drained into the little lake. After some digging with a camp shovel at one promissing spot he found a small spring where water was seeping out of a sandstone layer sandwiched between two layers of shale. Scratching away at the sandstone with his small shovel, he found he could increase the flow slightly and he had thoughts of opening that gap to try to increase the flow of water. But, first he wanted to know if that was the only source of water, so he decided to check out the rest of the valley before he tried to do much more.

It had taken him two days to trace the creek back to the lake, but he’d warned his folks he might be gone a week or more, so time wasn’t a worry. He spent two additional days checking for water sources, but by the end of that time he was convinced that the ground seeps, the spring and the tiny lake were the true source of the water in the creek. As well as that though, the more he saw of the valley, the more he liked it and the more he wanted to live the rest of his life there, however that thought lead to worries about the problem of access. He had to have a better means of getting anything in or out, something other than that steep path up the cliff at the bottom end of the upper valley. The obvious place to look for a possible trail in or out of the valley would be one of the water eroded gullies that cut their way down through the surrounding cliffs. Luckily for him there was a coulee less than a mile from the upper edge of the valley that had a manageable grade. Toby was convinced that a trail wide enough for a wagon could easily be cut into one bank of that eroded gully.

Toby led his horses up the grade and across the exceptionally dry plateau above the cliffs in hopes of finding a road that would lead him back to his family. Soon though he felt as if he’d wandered into a desert because the area was baking in the sun and the ground was parched. Everything was covered in saw grass, scrub willows or low brush, but it was also cut up by erosion gullies, so it took some time to work his way through the area. Yet before long he found himself on the edge of what looked like a poorly farmed field, and he realized that someone was trying to homestead that dry barren area. Following the edge of the field he soon found himself riding along a narrow strip of unplowed ground between two rough fields. Eventually that unplowed track led him to two poorly built sod homes and in moments he was meeting two French Canadian men and their families. They had been trying to scratch a living out of that dry ground, but were failing miserably. They had lost their plow horses, used up their money, shot the last shells of their only unbroken rifle and they were worried that their well was going dry. If the two men hadn’t been married to native women, everyone might have starved. As it was the two women and an older daughter were feeding both families on what small animals they could snare and what native plants they could find.

Grampa Bender never told me much more about that family, other than that he shared the supplies he had on his packhorse with them and that he went hunting to get them a deer for meat. However, homestead regulations of that time stated that single men could only file on 160 acres of land. Yet I had seen a copy of the original homestead documents that stated “William Tobias Bender and wife“ filed on 320 acres of land at the head of our valley. I’ve come to assume that the older daughter of that family became Grampa Bender’s first wife, Nettie.

Grampa Bender said Nettie was with him when he brought back a pick, a shovel and a few sticks of dynamite and they opened up one of those springs to increase the flow of water. After that, they filed on the homestead and negotiated a lease with the government for the whole valley - clear down to the homesteads that his family had previously filed. Needless to say, the respect level he received from his family was a lot higher than it had been. They were especially appreciative once the level of the creek rose, even though there had been no recent rains.

The original lease agreement that he and the family worked out was a direct result of a large herd of cattle that had been driven into the area from south of the border. A rancher had driven four hundred cattle in from Montana, but didn’t have any range for them yet. Grampa Bender and his family had the range that could be used to pasture them for a short time, but they had very few cattle. A deal was soon struck, and while the rancher moved on to find an area to set up as his ranch, his cowboys and Grampa Bender’s brothers agreed to pasture the herd in the lower valley for a few weeks. Part of the charge for pasturage was paid in cash, but another portion was settled with several head of cattle. Suddenly the Bender clan had a source of income and a small herd of cattle, but both were due to Grampa Bender’s foresight.

Knowing that winter was going to be rough, the first thing Grampa Bender did after he had filed on the homestead and lease was to help his father and brothers to build soddys. He’d had to explain to me that a soddy is made by taking the sods plowed out of the field and stacking them like oversized bricks to make walls. Built right, they could be warm and cozy. However, soddys got a bad reputation over the years, because they were often thrown up quickly and as a result they were often drafty and cold. Then too, since wood was hard to come by on the flat prairie and glass was relatively expensive, it was hard to build windows into a soddy, so they were often dark and dingy inside. Because of that, more than anything else, Grampa Bender disliked soddys, but he was skilled with woodworking tools and he had no problem finding or felling timber. Since he couldn’t talk his family out of building soddys, he convinced them to at least build a timber framework, then build their sod walls using that frame so they were able to mount proper doors and windows.

While he’d helped them build the soddys, Grampa Bender had been buying, selling and trading various goods he had hauled north on the trip for the tools and equipment he needed for his ranch. When he’d come from the US, he’d owned a heavy duty wagon, a four horse team, two well-broken saddle horses and three half-broken broncs. Since he’d been a skilled trader, the wagon had been almost half-full of various western gear and paraphernalia which he’d collected during his short lifetime. Because he had different needs now, he traded away most of his cattle-driving gear, a rifle and two revolvers, two saddles and two of the horses. He even traded off the heavily built ‘trail’ wagon to a man who ran a cartage business. However before all three of the soddys were finished, he ended up with a lighter wagon, a plow, a pot bellied stove, a bed and mattress, a mare in foal, six Hereford cattle, a young Shorthorn bull, a pregnant sow, five hens and a rooster. That list doesn’t mention a small wagon load of hand tools and dried food that he had either owned previously, traded for, or bought in a nearby town.

Once his father and each of his brothers had a place for their families to live, he convinced his two brothers to help him move his menagerie up to his new ranch. They not only agreed, but insisted that they wanted to give him a hand for a week or two, which meant he could get established before the winter. Once his family drove the wagon load of goods and the animals down the rough trail through the water eroded gully and into the upper valley, they understood why Grampa Bender wanted to settle there.

Over the next two weeks and with his brothers’ help, Grampa Bender built a tiny, one room cabin, a lean-to pole barn, a couple of temporary sheds and several short fences to pen the pig and chickens. He was used to living alone, but after his brothers left, he and Netty found out just how lonely and isolated their new ranch was. So they worked from early morning until late night, but they also visit his family every few weeks and they made trips out to the tiny town that had been established just a few miles away.

They also explored the valley, closing off and fencing the cuts that water had worn in the cliffs in order to prevent their stock from wandering away. Not far up one of the larger coulees Grampa Bender found a small seam of coal, so he and Netty hauled several wagon loads back to the cabin, building another log-walled lean-to in order to store it out of the weather. However, most of that first summer and fall were spent in making sure they could care for the stock during the winter.

One of the things they had done was to return to the spring that they had opened up, to check how that was doing. To their surprise, a fair amount of sand had built up around the outlet, in fact, enough had built up that it was actually slowing the flow of water. They spent most of the next week expanding the hole as much as they could, often working waist deep in the cold water. Finally Grampa Bender lost his temper when he found that the water was actually forcing its way through a tiny slit between two layers of shale. He made a trip to town to buy more dynamite. When he returned and set off the blast, he was astounded at the results. The water now came out of the hole so forcefully that it welled up a few inches above the pool that formed in the hole they’d dug. In fact it was flowing so strongly that the flow carried most of the smaller rocks and rubble from his blast right out of the hole. Now the ranch didn’t have a normal spring; it had an artesian well. However at least once a year from then on someone had to go clear the sand out of the well, either that or the water flow gradually slowed.

Clearing out that sand and hopfully increasing the water flow from the artesian well was the job I had set myself and I knew the job would take a while. There is simply no way to scoop fine sand out of flowing water unless you do it slowly and carefully. If you rush the job you lose more sand than you remove on your scoop because the flowing water washes it away, instead you have to move your scoop at the same speed as the water is moving and that happens to be slowly.

As I dug about a half-ton of wet sand from the pool around the artesian well, I carefully tried to steer my thoughts away from the problem concerning the two young women who seemed to both want to live with me. Instead I tried to think about the ranch and what needed to be done during the upcoming days, prior to the time when I had to rush off to Calgary and begin my studies. Of course, trying not to think about the girls made it impossible for me to do anything else.

Resigning myself to the fact that they were the prime worry in my mind, I decided to review my thoughts about each of them. The first thought that came to mind was the fact that I couldn’t see why either of them wanted to have anything to do with me. I was younger than they were and ... wait a moment, they said that our ages didn’t matter. Okay, trying to look at things from their view, what else was a negative for either of their involvement with me? Over the last few hours, I had just heard them sing my praises, so at the moment my mind was blank toward negative thoughts they had about me.

Instead of thinking along those lines, I began to think about the negative points of their characters. Carissa could be very pushy and so could Sandy, but I was as stubborn as they were pushy. Carissa even said I could almost always convince her to see things my way in the long run. In fact she claimed that I dominated her and most other people, but she seemed to like that particular character quirk.

Actually my mind wandered off at that point, thinking that I was going to have to talk to my folks about that domination thing. I wondered if they thought I was as forceful as Carissa did. I knew they often respected my opinions, and I knew that both Will and Beth listened to what I said. Heck, even Tom and George respected my views. Maybe Carissa was right, maybe I did have a dominant personality, but if I did I didn’t think I took advantage of people. After a few minutes thought about the subject, I sighed and shook my head. I’d worry about that later.

Right now I had two young women who were going to be coming back from town soon and they’d be expecting me to have an opinion on whether or not I wanted to be involved with both of them. Somehow I had to make up my mind what I was going to say to them.

My next thought was spoken aloud, “Dammit, I’m too young to be thinking of things like multiple marriages and crap of that sort.”

Looking around somewhat sheepishly at having started talking to myself, I went back to thinking quietly about the problem at hand as I worked. First off I wasn’t ready to settle down and stop looking at other women. Sure having Carissa live with me for the summer had been wonderful, but did I want to be involved with her for the rest of my life? Having sex and working with Carissa had been great. Even our bad times, when we were both blaming ourselves over Corinna’s suicide attempt hadn’t been that bad because of our support for each other, but was she someone I wanted to be with forever? Especially now that she’d told me she’d like to have sex with women too?

Was the idea of Carissa having sex with another woman a big thing to me? In other words, would I regard her having sex with a woman as cheating on me? What about if I was able to have sex with the other woman too? Wouldn’t we be cheating on each other?

Whoa, I was getting carried away, just asking myself questions, or was I? Maybe I should think of all the questions I wanted answers to first?

What about Sandy, what did she think about the idea of having sex with Carissa? Heck, what did she think about having sex with me or with both of us? In fact what did I really feel about having sex with both Sandy and Carissa? On top of that what would my family and my other friends think if ... no, make that when they found out? What would the neighbours say if they knew I was living with two women and did I really care? Carissa had bad mouthed the Bible, but what about religion? What did I really believe?

About then I realized that I had to stop and take the time to think things through one at a time. It was time to let the water in the deep pool settle a bit anyway, so I took out the thermos of coffee I’d brought along and leaned back against a tree. Sipping on a cup of coffee, I thought about what I was faced with and made up my mind that first of all that I should really decide who I was, what I wanted, where I was planning to go and what I was planning to do.

For one thing, I was only sixteen years old and there was no way I was ready to settle down in a marriage. There were too many things I wanted to do before I settled down to spend my life with anyone and I was definitely too young to start a family. As I thought about the situation, I realized that Carissa and I hadn’t made any pronouncement of being mutually exclusive in any way either. That should answer my first question about cheating if Carissa had sex with anyone else, but did it? In actual fact, we’d been living together, almost like a man and wife, so in a way, we’d come to feel we were a couple. I’d actually enjoyed that very much. The sex was great, but the mutual support during the day and the cuddles that happened every night when we slept together was even more satisfying. I felt that both of us had gained a lot from each other and if anything I knew that I owed Carissa a huge debt for her commitment to making my life so comfortable for the last few months.

Now it seemed Carissa wanted to branch out and expand her horizons. She wanted to explore her bisexual feelings and she was actually inviting me to play along. In several ways, that alone was a huge WOW factor for me. I’d never realized that Carissa had any desires to be with women, but then she admitted that she’d hidden those feelings from everyone. The fact that she was comfortable enough with our mutual situation that she would trust me with that knowledge was quite a compliment, but I wondered if it changed my feelings toward her? The fact that she had desires for people of the same sex didn’t really bother me, but I didn’t know why. It wasn’t that I had any desires toward any guys, but for some strange reason it seemed different for a woman to feel that way, at least it did to me.

I paused and shook my head after wondering why I felt that sex between two women wasn’t the same as sex between a woman and another man. However, I decided that I’d have to think about that idea another time because that wasn’t a question which would take a short time to resolve. I already had enough personal questions on my mind and I needed to focus on the problems that I might be facing in my present situation rather than going off into a philosophical fugue.

As I swallowed another sip of coffee, my mind wandered to Sandy and her statement that she had an aunt who was married to a man with umpteen wives. That pretty well established where she stood about having sex with me even if I was involved with Carissa. However, it still begged the question of what she thought about the idea of having sex with Carissa. That was a question only Sandy could answer.

Of course thinking of Sandy telling us that her mother had been raised as a Mormon brought up the question of religious beliefs. Exactly what was my personal feeling about the church and its attitude toward adultery, because that’s exactly what I was thinking about. Of course since none of us were married, it really wasn’t adultery, not legally. But even though I wasn’t a regular participant in the church and its religious rites, I knew that any sex outside of marriage was considered adultery, at least in the church my family sometimes attended.