Ridin’ the Rimrock with John Vanbelle

By Joann vanBelle

This is a book I have written from stories that John has told through the years, and I felt that if something happened to him, they would be lost forever. John is pretty shy and didn’t want me to write them, thinking some people would think he was showing off. So I told him it would be a thing for his family to have through the years. I have heard a saying that says, “Each time an old man dies, a library is lost.” He is the author; I am the writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984549785

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Copyright © 2018 by Joann vanBelle.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-9845-4979-2

           eBook          978-1-9845-4978-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/04/2018

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Contents

1. Otis

2. Haulin’ Logs

3. My Son Tom

4. A Big Man

5. Joann’s Bronze

6. Dad

7. The Candy Caper

8. Lucille

9. Tough on Ellen

10. Fly

11. No Mares

12. Family History

13. Dad’s Horse Wreck

14. Rough Sport

15. Diabetic

16. My Daughter Ellen

17. A Helping Hand

18. The Gorilla

19. Camp Kilmer

20. The goober Patch

21. Gittin’ Out

22. Klages’ Model Plane

23. Eddie and the Grapes

24. Good Ole’ Boy

25. Not a nice Cat

26. Walt Coder

27. The Local Barber Shop

28. Half-a-dog

29. Jim Beebe

30. John’s Poem

31. Basque Sheep

32. The Hill Country of West Virginia

33. Bill Tuve

34. Dave Murrill

35. False Teeth

36. Doctors

37. Doc Steel

38. Mom

39. Wanna be cowboys

40. Bucked Off

41. Frank’s Horse

42. The Cabover Truck

43. A Lot of Bull

44. One Big Sliver

45. New Jacket, Big Sign

46. Gettin’ Cows Outta the Crick

47. My Dad

48. Never Bucked Me off, but Almost

49. Let Me Fix That Fer Ya

50. Glen’s Pickup

51. Joe Garrison

52. The Killin’ on the Mountain

53. The Pool Boy

54. Goin’ Too Fast

55. Missy

56. Pretty Smart Cats

57. Rick Fisher

58. Amos’ Glasses

59. When Amos Got Stuck

60. Grandpa van Belle

61. Ring-tailed Dog

62. Auntie Coba

63. Bill Poulson

64. Ropin’ Club

65. One Eared Bull Rider

66. Git ’em Boys

67. A Little Snakey

68. The little Lambs

69. Tom’s Lamb

70. Tim Johnson

71. Lew’s Dogs

72. Bill’s Porcypine

73. Glen’s Cat

74. Joann at Cheyenne Café

75. Kenneth Huffman and Jess Rudder

76. Loud Eatin’

77. Huntin’ with Bill

78. Little Tinky Cricket

79. Ain’t that Purdy

80. Orville McCann

81. Pet Fish

82. Tom’s Raccoon

83. Pete Maybore

84. Not Cinched Tight

85. Skip and Bud Henderson

86. Fred Wagner

87. The Hay Stack

88. Mud Balls on the Pigs Tails

89. Poulson’s Pup

90. The New Ranch at Outlook

91. Moved Out

92. Ted Grote

93. Stormy Burns

94. Dad

95. Midgy

96. Tight Corners

97. Haulin’ Water

98. The Little Snake

99. Bald Tires

100. The Cooks and Bill George

101. Lee Cook

102. Didn’t Want Work After All

103. Goat’s Milk

104. Couldn’t keep ’em Buried

105. You Gotta Git Tough

106. Fred

107. Bud

108. Roger Nedrow

109. Heavy Hair Dryer

110. Joe Baze

111. Doug and Biden

112. Jack and Eddy

113. Some Hay Hooks!

114. Snipes Mountaiin

115. Jess’ Elk

116. Fightin’ Fire

117. Stolen Pickup

118. A Real Cowboy

119. A Ram Watchdog

120. Nosey Neighbor

121. Bears at Shamrock

122. Easy Keeper

123. Give er a Half Hour

124. Pretty good Card Game

125. Marvin Lovell’s Sheep Dog

126. Allen Shockley

127. Doctor vanBelle

128. Bald Mountain

129. Cimmiatti

130. A Really Mean Cow

131. I found His Diggers

132. Here’s a Shovel Boys

133. Earmarked

134. Uncle Bill and His Bear

135. Now and Then

136. Not my mustach!

137. School at Elk Mountain

138. Glen’s Ol’e Cat

139. Open the Gates

140. Canter’s

141. He’ll Load Up

142. Plumb Hurt

143. Bornsted’s Dogs

144. Norman Pratt’s bull

145. The Air Rifle

146. A Pig for a Friend

147. Snakes on Shamrock

148. Anna’s chicken story

149. Swattin’ Fly’s or Bidin’?

150. Save Me Boys

151. Paul Beck

152. Did you Fall John?

153. Howard Johnson

154. Jack

155. Tough ol’e House

156. Shoulda’Give ’em His Head

157. Three Cougar

158. My brother Jim

159. Army days

160. Lieutenant Harrick

161. Couldn’t See for Talkin’

162. My Horseshoer

163. Dunked

164. Shoulda’ Took the Mare

165. My Fish!

166. The Pack Rat

167. Mom’s Car

168. Bill Sheets

169. Who’s Callin’ What?

170. About John

171. Denny Kehl

172. Dale Dodson

Ridin’ the Rimrock

With John vanBelle

Otis

One time, probably around 1977, I was goin’ down into Joseph canyon. It’s about two thousand feet deep along through there in the Flora country. My youngest boy Glen was out to the ranch for some reason. By that time he wasn’t at home anymore. He was maybe seventeen or eighteen. Anyway, he comes out and we caught a couple of horses. I rode Otis and he rode another horse I had over there. We went down to Joseph Creek, about two or three miles ride down into the bottom of the canyon, and we’d crossed the crick. There were a few cattle up the other side that we wanted to look through and bring ours back.

There had been some homesteads down along the crick and there’s lots of old fence wire layin’ around. Well, I was ridin’ along there and my horse hit this little ol’e chunk of rusty wire and he went plum goofy. He run off and got caught in another barbed wire. It was stretched along to some old rock jacks and so on, where there had been a fence at one time. He jest kept a-runnin’ and I thought he was gonna fall right off the bluff into the crick, so I started gittin’ offa ’em and he kinda fell down. I grabbed the bridle reins and held his head over so he couldn’t git up. There was a set of wire pliers in my saddle bags, but I couldn’t reach ’em. I couldn’t hold em’ down and git to em, so I kept a-hollerin’ for Glen. He was somewhere else up there gittin’ after some cattle.

Glen finally heard me and come down and we cut the barbed wire loose from around the horse and it never even cut ’em, but boy, he scared me to death. And, he did that more than once. He was kind of a counterfeit sucker. Let me tell you ’bout how I come by that horse, years before.

I was living north of Enterprise at one of the so-called hard scrabble ranches I always lived on. Talkin’ to Dad one day, he said, Boy, I have a good lookin’ buckskin horse here. That was my dad’s weakness; he really liked a good buckskin horse. When he had his rodeo string, his pickup men rode buckskins. Dad told me the horse was gentle. He said A woman had ’em and it was kind of woman broke, and he was plumb gentle. He would make a good horse with a little use.

Well anyway, we made the trade. I don’t know if he sent ’em over from Outlook with somebody or if I went and got that buckskin horse. And, he was a good lookin’ horse, but he was different. One time I was out there at the ranch and he was in the pasture. I had crawled in underneath the pickup and was workin’ on somethin’, and here the ol’e horse come a walkin’ up. I could see he had stopped right there. I thought, Wonder what he’s got in mind, because he’d do some strange things. He wouldn’t do nothin’ mean, jest odd, you know. Well, purdy soon he reached down and took ahold of my boot by the toe. Not hard, jest enough to hold it. He picked my foot up and dropped it, three or four times. He jest wanted me to crawl out from under there and pet ’em. I remember the first time I rode the horse. I was down in the brush, chasin’ some yearlings, and we come to a log. Maybe he had never been in the brush before, but anyway Otis got to that log and stopped. I spurred ’em in the belly and he jumped over the log and stopped again. He looked around at me like, What are you doin? That woman never did spur me like that!

The kids, they got quite a kick out of ’em. He never did make a very good rimrock country kind of horse, so they named ’em Otis. Otis was the name of a horse in a cartoon book my folks had up there. That Otis wasn’t much of a horse either. So the next time we went to see my dad, he asked the kids, How do you like the new horse? They said, Oh, you mean Otis? He asked why they called em Otis, and they said, He’s jest like Otis in that cartoon book you got." Kind of hurt my dad’s feelings a little. He didn’t like that horse bein’ called Otis, but the horse sure fit the name.

Haulin’ Logs

I hauled logs quite a bit in my lifetime. I drove for some other guys and you’d make purdy good money haulin’ logs. Then spring breakup would come to the Wallowa country. You’d be off awhile, you know, and that was in the days before unemployment. So it was either chicken or feathers. You’d make purdy good money and then you wouldn’t. I had a loggin’ truck of my own for awhile, but all it was good for was to break me.

I always worked on a percentage of what the truck made. That way, you know, you done all the maintenance you could. You’d change your own oil, you greased your own truck, and so on like that. Well anyway, I drove for a guy named Orville McCann years ago, we called him Mac. I knew Orville before this. He was a great big sucker, I mean he was big and he was all man. He probably weighed two seventy-five, and he was about six foot six. He was jest one big fella.

I was haulin’ logs for Mac, drivin’ his truck. This was back in the late fifties, and they was shut down for a few days, ran outta logs. Well, I found out there was a place I could go git a couple loads, up on Powatka Ridge. I went up there and I had a load of logs on and we were goin’ down to Minam. The State hardly ever weighed us goin’ to the Minam mill, so you wooded down purdy good. It was goin’ to be, you know, late in the evenin’ by the time I got into the mill down there. We’d stack the logs high enough so you could jest fit under the ole’ underpass. When you look at it now you can’t quite figger out how it was, but the highway used to go under the railroad right there before Minam. Then you went across the river on the ole’ bridge that’s still standin’ there and come around to the mill.

I was comin’ down off Powatka grade. It’s a fairly steep gravel county road; parts of it are real steep. Of course this was back in the days before jake brakes. It was winter time and we weren’t carryin’ any water for our brakes. The road was purdy narrow; a lot of places you jest couldn’t meet another rig.

I’m comin’ down the hill and my brakes were a little warm, but I’m crawlin’ about as slow as I can go. I come around a corner and here’s a pickup comin’ up. Well, that pickup stopped right there, I don’t know why. I could tell, man, this was gonna be trouble; I wasn’t goin’ to git stopped in time. I was hopin’ he’d throw it in reverse and back up a little bit and give me a little room, but, he jest set there.

Well, I got the nose of my truck by, but I kinda hooked the pickup with my bang board, and pulled it around. I missed it with the drivers on the truck, but I pulled their pickup backwards a ways down the road and it turned sideways. The trailer tires come, and both axles run up over the hood. I mean, they jest dropped off it, boom, and I was stopped. If that guy had backed up a little bit nothin’ would’ve happened.

I got out of the truck and run back there. I didn’t know whether I’d killed em or what. All I could see in the mirror was my trailer goin’ up over the nose of their pickup. Well, they were OK, but it had mashed the fenders and hood and motor and everythin’. The ole’ pickup was settin’ down purdy close to the ground. Two guys were already out, and I knew em. The one standin’ there, I won’t tell ya his name, he had a whiskey bottle in his hand. It was about half full. He was tryin’ to talk, but all that was happenin’ was his lips were a-movin’ and there wasn’t any words a-comin’ out.

Well anyway, there was one guy still in the pickup. He was drivin’ and he’d slid over, but it had mashed the dash down and his legs were pinched. It didn’t hurt ’em, but anyway, we got ’em outta there.

Another truck come along behind me, or one comin’ up there, I don’t remember which. We got a-hold of that pickup and drug it down the road. There was a wide enough spot we could shove it over so you could git by. Then I went on down the hill. It never hurt anythin’ at all on the truck, except the reech on the trailer got bent a little. The reech is a straight piece of steel tubing. It hooks to the truck and slides into a box at the rear axles and bunk of the trailer. When you’re empty, the rear axles are loaded up on the back of the truck, and the reech sticks out over the cab like a cannon barrel.

So anyway, I went down and dumped the load of logs. It was a Friday evenin’, so the next day we weren’t workin’. I left my trailer down there so we could work on it. Well, Mac and I got to Minam Saturday mornin’, lookin’ at that reech, figurin’ out what we’d have to do to take the kink out of it, and by golly, there was another truck settin’ there.

That log truck belonged to a woman: it had been her husband’s. He’d died or got killed or they’d split up or somethin’, and she wound up with it. She drove it for quite a while, and she was a purdy good truck driver. You’d see er goin’ down the road with her hair up in curlers and a bandana on her head. I know one guy said she pulled in somewhere to load and he thought he’d help her a little. So, he climbed up on the load of logs; when she went to throw the wrappers he was gonna catch em. Then he’d throw ’em on over the load for her. He said, Boy, zing!, there went the chain right by my ear and clear across that load of logs. So he said, I jest got down and stood outta the way after that. I could see she didn’t need any help at all. But she got in kinda tough shape financially. She was goin’ to lose the truck, and it was bein’ re-possessed.

Well, her truck was settin’ there parked with the trailer down, so we pulled the reech out of Mac’s truck. Then we go over and pull the one out of the other truck. That was in the days before the complicated heads on the reeches. They jest slid in and outta the box on the trailer, and by golly, we slid the old crooked reech in. Then we put the reech from her truck in Mac’s truck, and we were ready to go to work again. Everything was fixed up. I suppose the guy who came to repossess that truck jest figured the reech was bent and he didn’t know any different.

My Son Tom

My oldest boy Tom was really quite a hunter, and he’d go out to hunt, say, when he was nine or ten years old. Later on, when he was in high school and so on he run track. He run the one mile and the two mile, and then he run cross country in the fall, and he could cover more ground on foot than I could on a good horse.

Anyway, he always loved to hunt, and when we were livin’ out on Elk Mountain I got ’em a little old Daisy b-b gun. Anyway, one day he come in and he had this sparrow and he said to his mother, I had to kill this sparrow because it was suffering. We had always told the kids not to let somethin’ suffer, put it out of it’s misery. His mother said, Why was it suffering? He said, Well, because I had jest shot it.

A Big Man

Ole’ Mac came to Enterprise once, when I was out of town. I don’t remember what I was doin’. I think it was when I had a couple of bull wagons and two sets of trailers and a couple of trucks. I think I was gone haulin’ hay or somethin’. Mac had moved outta Wallowa County and hadn’t been back for a couple of years. The guy I happen to live neighbors to, Ray Repplinger, and him were good friends. They had logged together at one time.

Well anyway, Mac stopped to visit with ’em and he said, Somebody told me John lives right next door here. Ray said, Yeah, he’s gone, but his wife works at the Sheriff’s office. Mac knew my first wife, Joanne; later I married the gal I’m married to now, and her name is Joann.

Joann was civil deputy at the Sheriff’s office at the time. So Mac goes over there, wantin’ to see Joanne van Belle. When she came over he said, Well, I knew a Joann van Belle, but you’re not the one. Well, they had them a good visit there anyhow, then he had to git on his way. He was headin’ back home, I think he’d moved to around Forks, Washington. That’s where he was from.

But he was a good guy to work for, because, man, he was a goer. He was a highballer, because when you drove for him he wanted the logs to go to town. He worried about the trucks on the weekends, but durin’ the week he wanted those trucks on the road haulin’ logs.

I know he told me when him and his wife were first married, he drank some. Her name was Jean, and she was a really nice little ole’ gal. They had a bunch of kids, maybe a half a dozen. The last little one they had after I knew ’em; they already had the others before. The little ole’ guy, he was probably five or six months old. Mac would jest sit there in that chair with his hand open, with that little ole’ kid sittin’ in it. He would bounce ’em up and down. He was big enough that he could hold that little guy right there in the palm of his hand. He was real gentle with them kids.

But anyway, he said he used to booze quite a bit and fight and charge around when they were first married. Later he had become a Christian and kinda mended his bad ways. But, he talked about one time when he was still drinkin’ purdy heavy. They were livin in the Forks, and him and another guy went out somewhere. When they come back they was both about half drunked up and anyway, he goes, Come on in. Set down there at the table.

I think it was like three or four in the morning and they had to go to work that day. Anyway, he hollered at Jean and said, Git in here and git us some breakfast! Well, she took it purdy well at first. She got up and put on her housecoat, she come out and got a skillet and some bacon and eggs. But, he said, she was jest puttin’ that skillet on the stove, it was a great big ole’ Griswold skillet. And he said, Come on, hurry it up a little! And - boy, here come that skillet and took ’em right alongside the head and jest laid ’em right out on the floor.

And, he said, when that other guy saw her lay him out, he jumped up and run for the kitchen door. Well, the main door was open, but they had the screen door hooked, ya know, to keep the bugs and stuff out, and he said that guy run right through that screen. It was a long time before he’d ever come near that house again.

I asked him, Well, what happened? Oh, he said, I jest got up and apologized, and set down and she cooked me some breakfast. He said, I was flat in the wrong. After I hit the floor she should have beat on me a while with that