Creekside Conspiracies
by George Ivey
As we walked side-by-side through the pasture’s knee-high grass, I paid more attention to Claude than where I stepped and soon set foot into something soft. I looked down. Cow shit. I continued walking, trying to keep pace on our short trip down to Bear Holler Creek.
I had first met Claude at a county commissioners’ meeting the week before. When the general public had their chance to address their elected officials, the commissioners had visibly stiffened as they braced themselves for the latest round of complaints.
A man in his sixties took the podium, neatly dressed and angry. “I’d like to know which group of sixth graders you hired to pave Shuttles Road last week. Or unpave it, or whatever the heck they did.”
The three commissioners leaned toward each other, comparing notes, and then Commissioner Earl Patton spoke. “Mr. Shuttles, what we did there is called ‘tar and chat.’ A new layer of asphalt costs an awful lot, and puttin’ down a layer of tar and toppin’ it with that chat—that real fine gravel—that extends the life of the road without costin’ us nearly as much.”
“Well, it’s worse than it was before,” Mr. Shuttles complained. “It used to have a nice smooth surface. Now it’s more like a gravel road. I want my paved road back.”
“It’s still a paved road,” Earl argued. “Give it a few days for the chat to settle in.”
Mr. Shuttles vented a while longer and then sat down in a huff.
For my part, I was glad to have Earl Patton focusing again on saving taxpayers some money. Anything was better than his repeated efforts to frame me as the central character of some global plot to ruin the lives of anyone anywhere close to the Akwanee River or any little stream tumbling toward it.
Sometimes I wondered if the surrounding mountains stood so large and tall that they made some people feel like the world was ready to cave in on them. Over a lifetime, some of those people, like Earl Patton, might then see their doom ready to come crashing in from any direction, whether from on high, from outside, or in the form of a struggling river conservationist. It was just a theory, though.
An elderly woman spoke next, complaining about local drug use in general and a neighborhood meth house in particular. The commissioners promised to look into it.
Then Claude jumped out of his seat and approached the microphone. He had the leathery face and hands of a full-time farmer, and his thick brown hair was matted down by a full day under a baseball hat. He took a deep breath and then let loose. “I want to follow up on Mr. Shuttles and his concerns ’bout that tar-and-chat job out his way. I was on that road just yesterday, and I have to agree with Mr. Shuttles that they did awfully poor work out there. Awfully poor work. If you ask me, they tired awful quick and then spent the rest of their time just chattin’. I’m not sure you got your money’s worth, Commissioner Patton.”
Everyone but the commissioners got a good laugh out of that one. Claude’s mouth twitched like a smile might break out, but he played along deadpan. “Now, irregardless of all that, my son’s in the sixth grade over at Cloud Valley Middle School, and I hope you’ll give him a cut of this tar-and-chat business next time around, ’cause he could use a little extra spendin’ money for baseball cards and whatnot.” More smiles and laughter from the audience.
Earl Patton snarled and started to turn red. “Claude, it’s called tar and chat, not tire and chat. And you know we didn’t use any child labor for that work, so why don’t you just sit your…self down, and let the next person speak.” Claude returned to his seat with a frown on his face but a sparkle in his eyes.
Claude walked over to me at the end of the meeting. “You’re Peter Bailey, right? The river man?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Claude Wagner,” he said, sticking out his hand and then shaking mine vigorously. “I’m interested in learnin’ more about those conservation projects you keep hawkin’. Why don’t you stop by sometime?”
I nodded my head and quickly agreed to visit, all too eager for any opportunity to help protect the area’s rare fish and mussels.
It was only a few days later that I was walking beside Claude with one boot covered in fresh, moist manure. We walked down a gradual slope until we reached the creek, a small tributary about ten feet wide, its banks free of sycamores or any other likely trees, heavily eroded, and pockmarked by the hooves of cattle. A fence stood another thirty yards away, paralleling the creek, with a dirt lane running along the far side and a high ridge looming beyond.
“Well, whuddaya think?” Claude asked.
I had learned by then not to speak my mind regarding a farmer’s land management practices or what I thought needed changing. “Maybe if you tell me more of what you have in mind, then I can tell you what might be possible.”
Claude looked around for a few seconds. “How ’bout some brook trout? Could we do here like you did higher up in the mountains last year and restore brookies along this creek?”
I jumped down into the creek bed, looked all the way downstream and all the way up. I leaned down and stuck my hand in the water to check the temperature. “Well, Mr. Wagner, down in this valley here, the water’s a bit too warm for brook trout, so that might not work.”
“First off, call me Claude, not Mr. Wagner,” he directed. “Second, I’d say you’re a lot smarter than most people give you credit for.”
It was a backhanded compliment, but I accepted it anyway. “I’m learning as I go.”
Claude joined me in the hot, shadeless sun of the creek bed, looking it over and scratching his head. “How ’bout those stream buffers? What might that involve?”
I looked around again, thinking about all the conservation practices I had learned about. “You’ve already got a boundary fence down the other side of the creek. We could run another fence down this side, with maybe one gap to give your cattle access to the water.” I looked again upstream. “Actually, you might have enough fall in the creek that we could put a pipe in upstream and let gravity take the water to a tank out in the lower end of your field.”
Claude looked at me like I might be crazy. “What good’ll all that do?”
I explained the values of keeping the cows from pissing and shitting directly in the creek and how excluding the cattle would allow the streambanks to grow up with grasses and weeds, which would help filter the runoff from the pasture. “You could put trees in, too, to help return more shade to the stream. That might not make it cool enough for brook trout, but it’d still be good for some of the other species of fish that prefer these small valley streams.”
“But what good’ll it do me?”
He was right to ask. I should have started with the benefit to the farmer, not the benefit to the river. “Your cows will spend less time standing in the creek and more time grazing, and that makes for a larger cow to sell later on.”
“Yeah, okay, that may be.” Claude massaged his chin with his thick left hand. “Now, if you would, repeat all that about what’d be growin’ between the fences.”
I was slowly learning not to be too pushy with any landowner. Soft sell. I gave him options: keep it in grass and cut hay off it, let it all go and let nature heal itself, or give nature a jump start by planting a few trees along the banks. “It all depends on what you want,” I said. “If you are interested, though, I’ve got some grant funds to help pay for the trees, and the fencing.”
Claude shook his head and held out his hands like two stop signs. “Hold your horses a second. Don’t go buyin’ any fence posts and barbed wire just yet. I’m still tryin’ to figure you out.”
“Me? What do you want to know?”
“Well now, as I’ve heard it told, the United Nations prefers a forested stream corridor as the ideal way to move their troops through an area without ’em bein’ noticed. So if we ain’t got trees to provide cover, those soldiers would be as obvious as those telephone poles over yonder. If you really want those troops here, Mr. Bailey, it seems like you should be insistin’ that I plant lots of trees, instead of you makin’ that part optional.” Claude leaned forward and studied me a little closer. “I might have to take back what I said earlier about you bein’ so smart.”
It had all seemed so promising. “Sorry, but I don’t have anything to do with the United Nations or any invading soldiers.” Was I really apologizing for that? I didn’t believe a word of those United Nations rumors. I just tried my best to stand apart from them.
“I suspected you’d deny it, but don’t you worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
“I don’t have any secrets,” I insisted. “I’m here to offer what’s good for the river system—and good for your farming, too. The rest of it’s up to you. Your choice.”
Claude squatted down, picked up some small stones from the dry part of the streambed and tossed them one by one into the nearest pool of water. Then he stood back up and faced me. “Tell you what. I’ll do the fencin’, and the trees, too, but I want a ride in one of those black United Nations helicopters first.”
He was nothing if not persistent. “I don’t have any access to any black helicopters, Claude. Frankly, I don’t think the United Nations does either.” I tried not to sound exasperated.
Claude shook his head. “This sure is a disappointment.”
I was thinking the exact same thing. I thought about the cow shit I had stepped in earlier and couldn’t help but think it symbolic—some sort of omen I had failed to recognize.
We had reached an impasse, and I settled on watching a water strider pulsing along in the slack water at the stream’s edge. Then I heard a vehicle coming down the gravel road beyond the fence. I looked up and watched as the dust drifted behind the approaching red-and-white pickup. As the truck drew closer, Claude and I politely waved. Only then could I identify the man behind the wheel. It was Earl Patton waving back, but his expression was less than friendly.
Claude smiled. “Well now, I don’t think my neighbor looks too happy to see the two of us here today.”
Once the truck had passed, I turned to Claude. “Commissioner Patton’s your neighbor?”
“We’ve been neighbors since we were born. And he was a thorn in my side even then.”
“Yeah, he kind of has that effect on me, too.”
Claude nodded. “And that man is chock full of conspiracy theories. What a lunatic!”
The pot was calling the kettle black, and I couldn’t help but say something. “You don’t think all that talk about the United Nations and troop corridors and black helicopters might possibly qualify as a conspiracy theory? I mean that’s exactly the kind of stuff Earl Patton’s always talking about, with me somehow in charge of it all.”
“No kiddin’.” From the tone of his voice, he might as well have said, “You think I don’t know that?”
My head started to hurt. “Okay, I guess I’m missing something. Why were you asking me about all that United Nations stuff?”
Claude elbowed me in the side, perhaps meaning to be gentle, but nearly bruising me. “I was just havin’ fun with you is all.” He started laughing. “I really had you goin’, didn’t I?”
He laughed more at his little joke, and I offered an obligatory smile.
Claude was clearly pleased with his efforts, and he wiped a tear from his eye. “Oh, that was fun. You really take things too seriously. You know that?”
I nodded because it was true. The possibility of extinctions weighed heavily on me.
“If you’re gonna do any work with me here,” Claude said, “I’m gonna require that you have some fun.”
“I have nothing against fun,” I admitted. “What do you have in mind?”
“I figure if we do it just right, we might could sign Earl up for the crazy house.”
“Huh?”
“We protect the creek of course, but we can also drive Earl a little more nuts by makin’ him think a United Nations troop corridor is runnin’ up the southwest border of his property.”
The whole idea made me nervous. “I don’t know, Claude. I don’t want to provoke him.”
“Wake up, Pete. He’s already provoked. It can’t get any worse for you. Or me either.”
Despite Claude’s reassurances, I couldn’t help but cringe.
“Listen here, Pete. Even if I gotta take out a loan to pay for the fence and the trees myself, I’m gonna do it. I might even hire someone to fly a black helicopter over his farm a few times. I just thought you might enjoy gettin’ in on the joke.”
He let the offer hang out there, and I looked around for some sort of guidance. Cicadas buzzed rhythmically in the distance, and like the stream and every other natural thing nearby, they showed no interest in my predicament.
The smart thing to do was walk away. Why wave a stick at a hornet’s nest?
Or maybe the smarter thing to do was to add one more project to my very small list of accomplishments. The water would get a little cleaner. Earl Patton might see that a few trees and some stream fencing wouldn’t ruin his world. He might even calm down in the long run. Sure, it was wishful thinking, but it sounded good at the time.
“When should we get started?” I asked.
Claude smiled. “No time like the present.”
We paced off the stream from one end of Claude’s property to the other, then figured out the number of posts required, the number of H-braces, the yards of barbed wire, the length of piping needed for the off-stream watering source, and the number and types of trees to plant.
I advised Claude that we should wait until fall to plant the trees, but he wanted them in the ground right away. Claude also kept introducing every military term he could think of, and I simply bit my lip and played along. After a while, we settled on planting eight “scouts” that would prepare the way for the “tree army” that I would “deploy” in a cooler season.
Then Claude all but begged me to pay for a black helicopter to fly over the property of his “nemesary.” (I guessed the word was some amalgam of “nemesis” and “adversary.”) I refused his pleas. He pouted. I still refused. He agreed to the rest of the work anyway, and we finalized the deal with nothing more than a handshake.
For most of the next week, I spent my time helping Claude install the water line and tank, place the fence posts, and run the barbed wire. Then I planted four maples and four poplars from a local nursery, and with a little bit of extra watering, the scouts adjusted well to their new surroundings.
Every time I returned to Claude’s farm, though, I expected to find the trees cut down or simply dead from some sort of poison. I didn’t think Earl could possibly sit back and do nothing. But one day Claude assured me that although Earl might talk up a storm, he would never cross their boundary, because Earl held property rights as something almost sacred. In Earl’s world view, even a nemesary like Claude had the right to do something dumb on his own property.
Foolish or not, we had blocked the cows from the stream, and their shit and urine, too. Free from the daily beatings of hundreds of hooves, the bare streambanks began to turn green with grasses and weeds. And so what if Claude showed more interest in needling his neighbor than in protecting the stream? I had to take what I could get.
Several weeks later, as I sat in my office writing up quarterly reports, I heard a persistent thumping from outside—the percussive rhythm of a helicopter. The noise grew louder, then softer, then louder again as it carried out a grid pattern search for plots of marijuana hidden in corn fields and isolated mountain coves.
I wouldn’t have known the chopper’s purpose if I hadn’t run into Deputy Dwight Crawford in the grocery store earlier that week. Dwight was serving on the local drug control task force, and he mentioned the planned flyovers to me almost accidentally, really only long enough to confess his surprising fear of flying. I didn’t give it much thought at the time.
I walked outside as the unmarked helicopter flew overhead, and I waved hello to the pilot and Deputy Crawford. The chopper disappeared over the treetops, and I went back inside.
A half hour later, the phone rang. Claude Wagner shouted zealous words of thanks for the helicopter flying over his farm and Earl Patton’s.
“Claude,” I told him, “I’ve got nothing to do with that helicopter.”
He laughed big and replied, “Don’t you worry, Pete. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Born, raised, and again living in Western North Carolina, George Ivey has spent more than eighteen years protecting rivers, farmland, and other natural resources in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and elsewhere. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including Nature Conservancy, Iceland Review, and Smoky Mountain News. He published his first novel, Up River, in 2009. Find out more at www.georgeivey.com/upriver.
Peri Gordon Flohr, writer (took most of these pictures, except for a few stolen by N.S. )
