Driving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane

Author:Thomas McGuane [McGuane, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-59446-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

13

IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the long northern evening; the dust devils had died in the fallow fields and off to the west a small island range of mountains floated in shadow. I had a tall bourbon and water with lots of ice tinkling in a handy holder between the seats, and as I passed the empty old country schools, grain elevators on abandoned spurs and glimpses of creeks running through brush that slowly reclaimed homesteads, I thought I could feel the lives of the missing population like so many sad, if amiable, ghosts. As usual when faced with troubling things I seemed unable to understand, I resorted to fishing. I had a favorite fly rod with me, a nice, leisurely old glass Winston, and Dr. Olsson’s English aluminum case that had gone on so many trips. My plan was working: I was in a very good mood.

I took a two-track road used by irrigators and crossed a cattle guard, culverts, and a wire gap before getting into the field I intended, at the far edge of which was a slow mountain creek that held lots of cutthroat trout, vigorous spotted beauties with orange slash marks at their throats. A crop duster was flying in the distance, just at the ledge of mountain where yellow panels of grain extended toward the valley bottom. As it pulled up at the end of each run, clouds streaming behind it, the changing pitch of its engine carried all the way down to where I could clearly hear its whine. I parked under a power line that angled off toward the town of Wilsall and heard the dense murmur of summertime insects as I got out of the car. I saw clouds in the hood of the Olds in the late light, the crop duster rising and falling in the distance. The plane was treating wheat fields right at the edge where the foothills broke elevation, reversing direction by a dangerous maneuver called a hammerhead stall, sending the plane straight up at the end of each field right in the face of the hills for a falling turn down the next row. Suddenly one wingtip caught a juniper ridge and the plane tumbled.

I wasn’t absorbing the scene quite as I should. What seemed implausible was the complete lack of movement from this so recently dashing machine, which at the slightest contact with the earth had turned into junk. I got back into my car and drove recklessly until I was close to the accident. I got out and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I smelled fuel and heard a voice—“Get away before this thing catches fire!”—a woman’s voice. With the smell of gasoline and the word “fire,” I admit that I nearly bolted. Instead, I approached the cockpit—the propeller was wrapped back around the nose and fuel was running onto the ground—and discerned the torso of the pilot somewhat pinned under the plane. I began to pull her out,

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