The Ranger and the Rider

I've seen plenty of rangers lose an argument. Only one I know of went and married it. One day in nineteen twenty-eight, Margaret James took a horse out of East Glacier with three others from her hotel. The two young fellows along knew horses were banned on the Mount Henry trail, and they kept that to themselves. At a fork they slipped away. Margaret and her friend rode on up, square into a stern young ranger named Hugh Black. Now, Hugh Black patrolled the east side of this very road, and that meant tending the outhouses at Logan Pass, two-holers, the only facilities up there. That's the man who pulled up in front of her and read her the rules. She answered back. A spirited rejoinder, the book calls it, and the book says no more. I'd give a month's pay for the words. By nineteen thirty-two they were man and wife, with a lease on a twelve-by-eighteen-foot gas station and grocery at Saint Mary. Hugh started building one-room cabins. They put up a big sign, Hugh Black Cabins, and tourists kept marching into the store demanding those huge black cabins. All I see, they said, is little white ones. After the war, the old Going-to-the-Sun Chalets on Sun Point had to come down, seventeen buildings, and the contract said to leave no sign they'd ever stood. As Hugh told it, he'd scorch the trees burning that much on shore. So he waited for ten inches of ice on the lake, pushed the buildings out with a Cat tractor, and set them off in the first good snowstorm. What's left lies on the bottom of Saint Mary Lake. Years on, as Hugh told this one too, Ronald Reagan came early to shoot Cattle Queen of Montana and wanted to go fishing. So he helped the motel's head man clean the toilets, to get him off work sooner. A fellow who started out tending two-holers lived to see a future president do it for him. In the nineteen fifties a car wreck nearly finished Hugh Black, and left him a limp and a pain that never let up. His daughter Sally remembered the lodge lobby evenings, the light on his glasses so you couldn't tell if he was awake, and how that quiet kept the lounge calm. Margaret was up before seven, with a hundred and forty employees to run. They lost Hugh in nineteen eighty-three, and she kept going. She learned to ski at seventy-four and the computer at ninety-five, drove this road in her mid-nineties, and ran the books until she was ninety-seven. After a hundred she took two birthdays a year, with cakes that read one hundred point five on your dial. She lived to one hundred and five, and she lies beside him on a hill above Saint Mary. He went first, which gave her near twenty-five years of the last word. Leave her young, on a steep trail she'd been tricked up, with a stern ranger square in front of her horse. She looks him in the eye, and she takes a breath.