BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 82

AUGUST 2012

DAVID AND KALI

"You're not coming?" Gilbert asks.

"You'll be fine," David reassures him. "You've got this." He has procured the van, set the itinerary, posted the tour on the Internet. Three more people signed up, making six.

"What about that Kali woman? She asked for you. Specifically."

David is silent for a moment, conjecturing the chasm between what Kali expects and the actual. "She'll be fine," he says summarily. "Worse things have happened."

He gets in his pickup to leave but a minivan pulls in, blocking his way. He pulls forward and the van tails him, parks behind. Three women get out. "David Burgess," Kali falsely says. Putting on a show for her companions, he thinks. "You're not getting away."

He feels her assumption of a continued kindredness and immediately resents it. "The van, ladies," he says, resigned. He shows them toward the tour bus. He returns to the trailer. Gilbert opens the van's side door to let them in.

They chat with Gilbert, take turns emitting light laughs. They're waiting for the other three passengers now, David is inside reformulating his original plan. He hears a car up the road, it's probably them. A few moments later an old Mercedes that has seen better days pulls in—one side window has plastic taped on as a substitute, the front side panel is a different color than the rest of the car, the rear bumper has a substantial dent. A young couple dressed semi-Gothlike, each with what he assumes is a newly invented haircut to supplement tattoos and facial hardware. This tour mix would normally amuse him but his mind is tending otherwise. He coughs hard—it's sounding more like a cement mixer all the time, he thinks—collects himself with two deep breaths and goes out to start the ordeal.

"Our third isn't coming," the girl announces. "Can we smoke?"

"Sorry, not in the van."

They all get in, and David introduces himself as the driver, Gilbert as their guide. He hands Gilbert, who looks shellshocked, the microphone setup.

Kali sits where his rearview mirror catches her visage when he looks back to measure traffic. After the first connection between their gazes and her wink he doesn't look again.

The three women chat with the two young people, taking pressure off him and Gilbert to entertain. Just as a radio interviewer fears air silence, a guide's nightmare is a dull quiet. It feeds on itself. He has spoken with Gilbert about this so they exchange knowing glances.

Time moves slowly in his head, his internal timer set at an hour and a half but he thinks he can shave that by ten minutes. They come to polygamist Rufus Wright's rock shack, in shambles now but still recognizable, and Gilbert starts a spiel that almost perfectly emulates David's delivery word for word. He's been listening, David thinks. From there they drive down a dirt road to show where the Boone Creek Canal Company passed through, its ditches long inundated by the reservoir but its inlet still intact up at McTucker Creek, where they'll finish the tour.

He had set the tour itinerary for Gilbert as having the old Tilden Bridge pilings next but David makes a three-point turn. He half-whispers to Gilbert that he's changed the plan. He makes his voice loud enough for all to hear: "Next stop, the Rockford Pumping Station."

He sounds exuberant, like a game show host, but he has a searing anger that is looking for victims—is this what soldiers are addicted to? It's new to him. At least at this level of intensity.

They get back to the gravel road, then to the state highway. They pass Pingree and reach the Liberty turnoff. A mile west they take the canal bank, bumpy as it is, eliciting Connie to giggle as if on a fair ride. Five minutes later the Pumping Station comes into view and they park on the opposite bank. "Defunct since 1959," Gilbert tells them. The rock building that housed it still stands. Hidden far from the road, inside the canal bank against a hill, not even locals know of its existence. "The canal brought water to higher elevations on the west side," Gilbert says, "About six thousand acres, much of it behind the Pingree townsite." He directs their attention to the other, near side of the canal. "And as much, if not more, to areas not served by the United on the east side." The new highway cutting through the canal, in conjunction with the onset of sprinklers, spurred the government to exchange surface for ground water rights without the farmers losing priority, Gilbert tells them.

He gives a full account of water appropriation doctrine in Idaho while David formulates his own speech for the next stop—he'll take over there. He has something to say and only he can say it. Resolve has eliminated his mind's warring factions, focus has overwhelmed his roiling emotions. There is a lot crashing in, but he has found the thing to say, through this conduit made available to him. He will summarize, at the next stop, the Skeen-United conflict that will educate the tour attendees and, more importantly, send a personal message to Kali.

When Gilbert finishes, David drives on. The next half mile of canal road slows the trip, it makes Connie, riding on the side closest to water, jump at every bump, fearing they might overturn into the canal. When they get to the paved road, David says, "Next stop, the First Terminus, a little known crux of County history."

It's not theatre but it mildly excites the passengers. He smells the vape smoke on the young couple, something like clove and peach mixed together, pleasant enough but it makes him cough, reminding him of his diagnosis and a decision not yet made.

Two miles up the highway, he turns west on the old Rockford Limited, crosses the railroad tracks and immediately takes a right onto the Skeen canal bank. "Note here," he says, after a stretch of bumpy bank, "Up ahead—between those two little hills there's just enough room for one canal. That was enough to seal a fight between two competing enterprises around 1895." They pass through the mini-gorge, David tells them about E.T. Malcom, the Skeen enterprise investor, who signed a right of way for his company but not the United. They continue on, the United now full in view. Ahead, railroad tracks cross it. He stops, has them step out.

On the bank, he situates himself so he faces the canals but the passengers face him. "Behind me," he says, sweeping his arm and turning, "In the distance see the Big Southern Butte. This was a beacon for early settlers, they could see it from the peaks of the Portneuf Gap. It allowed them to situate their travel progress, gave them a landmark amidst the unknown." He looks at Kali directly for the first time, unflinchingly. What he cannot say to her he is saying to the tour members, is personal history disguised as County history, private prejudice masked by past events. He will deliver truth, but it will contain much more.

"It was promise amid threat, survival amongst possible death. There was water there, if minimal, when there was no water within twenty miles. But even more, it was a comforter, just a bit of knowledge to break the monotony of the bitter desolation of the plain." He tells them to face the canal. "Here, roughly, is what the United called their First Terminus." He tells them about the three year court struggle, emphasizing the historic fight between Mormons and Gentiles in the political arena for the thirty years prior, culminating in the Skeen-United conflict. "The United intended to take the same route as the Skeen canal, though the Skeens had already filed on the water and land. Even after the government deemed it to be under the purview of the Skeens, the Mormons continued to work the canal defiantly."

"This will be difficult to talk about. Uncomfortable. But important things are." He looked to his audience, pausing, particularly at the LDS women. "I know some of you are LDS, I may offend you with the truth. The LDS faction, it can be said, tried to steal the Skeen scheme. They pretended to be done with the project, throwing a completion celebration for four hundred, just after Christmas 1895. It was conveniently timed to sway the Land Board's opinion regarding the land. It didn't work. The Skeens got the Carey land."

"But the Mormons kept digging. They appealed. Momentarily won the appeal. The appeal was overturned almost immediately. This was in March. The United President, Benjamin Cluff, who just happened to also be the President of what is now Brigham Young University, told the governor he would agree to a compromise. A meeting was set for May. The governor showed up. The Skeens showed up. Cluff failed to attend. There was no compromise. The governor was furious. He let the matter go up the judicial ladder for an October decision before the Department of Interior."

"Now," David looks directly at Kali. "Cluff was not an honest man. So it appears. He sent a fake map to the Land Board early on, which the United's lawyers agreed to send but refused to attest to. He submitted a signed affidavit to the Department of Interior, which his cohorts wouldn't sign, attesting to his reason for not meeting with the governor for the compromise." David pauses, looks at his audience, careful to eye them all. "He swore he had received a telegram from the governor, said telegram asking him to meet in Boise. So, Cluff swore, he went there instead of to Blackfoot—" he looks again directly at Kali"—which is difficult to believe, considering we have so much else he saved, including telegrams, yet we don't have that piece of evidence."

The governor suggested the United was a Mormon ditch, David tells them, and thus able to keep non-Mormons from filing on public lands. The United responded—"Again, all show," David emphasizes—by electing three non-Mormons to their board—not enough to sway any votes in a quorum of seven but enough for appearances. "They misrepresented their canal's grade." He looks specifically at Kali and says, "They lied. Pretended. Again and again the Mormons hid behind their religion to further their practical existence. Just as they told their membership they were free to vote as they wished and then told them how to vote, which is why they were so despised by the Gentile population."

The Goth couple, smoking again, were only half-listening, their hands sometimes touching not inappropriately but suggestively, with a contentedness they understood and which David—unfortunately, he feels at the moment—remembers. Connie and Ilene are gracefully silent, but Kali, who he glares at now, has a face full of uncertain expressions. She is almost twitching, shifting from one emotion to another, one response to another, escape and thrust alternating, instinctive recoil intertwining with an intention to joust. Then she wilts. David looks at Gilbert, who looks shocked. Embarrassed.

But David goes on. "The Mormons accused the Skeens of duplicity and profiteering, but the Skeens claimed to be innocent of those charges. The Skeens had no mask, no one thought of them as anything but businessmen, while the Mormons, just as business-oriented as the Skeens, used religion as a blanket not only to cover their actions but as a kind of amnesty against adverse judgment." He is in full professor mode now. "'We will show you this face' they seemed to say 'but we know our face to be otherwise.' This gave the membership solace, any falsity justified. It allowed them to support not just the Church and the Canal Board but their own—" he fumbles for the words "—for their own, not their own greed, but their impetus to get and to take what they want. What they wanted might not have been unreasonable, but it was no more reasonable than that which their opposition wanted, and yet they pretended it was. Because they were who they were. The righteous, the chosen."

He has stared at Kali during the entire diatribe, so obviously so that her friends have ceased listening and instead watch her response, the way she shrivels and pulses, ever so slightly except to those she knows. And once knew, long ago.

The couple are closer now. David understands, suddenly, that their vapes included THC. It makes him want to laugh. He looks to Gilbert, whose face is pale, and says, almost apologetically, "Here, in 1898, the two canals, with the government's aid, parted ways, accepted the compromise. The United got the land to the east of the Terminus and the canal heading nearly straight south, the Skeens got the land further on. In a year, water was flowing in both canals to here, both of them still without a headgate but both sharing water dumped in via an agreement with the Great Western from Idaho Falls. The United was nearly fully operational by the turn of the century."

"But the Skeens," he says, sighing as if for the deceased entrepreneurs. His eyes go southwest, focussing on a point he imagined the Skeen canal followed. "They were troubled for another ten years, the next thirty miles difficult work through rocky areas and requiring money, rather than scrip." He smiles wryly. "Scrip. That's another story. We can talk about it on the way back."

There are no questions, just silence until they reach the road, turning off the canal bank. David exceeds the speed limit to shrink the time, turns the radio on low, then raises it slowly, then raises it some more. Fifteen minutes of silence, he thinks, that should be appropriate.

He feels drained but in a good way. While normally he would be mortified by expressing his fury, the fact that he was telling truth—even while it covered an underlying anger—justified his speech, he feels. And he is tired. He thought he would be less tired coming 'home' but he was only more tired. The notion of closure, of sewing up loose ends, is yet another promoter's fiction and he'd fallen for it.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston