Woody and I sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table sipping our Dos Equis' and dipping taco chips in the dish of salsa sauce that his wife, Tracy, had set out earlier. Although almost 20 years my junior, we hadn't needed long to become good neighbors - helping one another on DIY projects, taking over animal care when one or the other was away, the occasional invite for coffee or even a cooked meal.
Neither of us was saying anything. In itself that wasn't unusual, we often had a coffee together without exchanging more than a few words. It was just that there was a certain tension in the air. Woody had made it clear what he and Tracy wanted. All the same it's like when you need to have some serious surgery done, when it's finally time to show up at the hospital, there's still butterflies in your gut.
Tracy had gotten up and left us 20 minutes earlier. Finally, to get me moving, Woody said, "Hank, no use putting it off any longer."
I couldn't think of a timely response so I just looked at Woody.
He didn't say anything more either, just nodded slightly, squinted and flashed a really faint grin. Essentially the final confirmation. I got up and headed down the hallway. My heart was pounding and I felt like I was about to hyperventilate. What if this didn't work, meaning 'what if I couldn't?'
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I'd met Woody and Tracy right before buying my 33 acre ranchette a couple miles off Highway 93 and some 25 miles north of Missoula. For the past half year, a realtor had been showing me properties and nothing had been right -- mostly too expensive, a few too close to town, a few with really dicey neighbors. This place though, had a lot going for it: water rights, a big meadow for pasture and hay, on a minor county road. Only downside was that the house and out buildings were very badly run down. Considering everything, the price was right though. I still wasn't sure because in a state like Montana where zoning laws are lax and enforcement can be even more lax, there's always the danger of getting neighbors who make you wish you'd never come to Montana. The neighboring places did look pretty decent, but you never can tell for sure. After the realtor drove away, I hung around the area and then drove over to the nearest house and knocked.
The mid- to late-twenties woman who opened the door impressed me as one of those no-nonsense, outdoorsy types: tanned face that looked like it hadn't seen much makeup and slender body that couldn't have been carrying a surplus ounce of fat. Otherwise appearance-wise, handsome rather than gorgeous. Maybe 5-4 to 5-6, light brown hair in a pony tail, no lipstick. Her sleeveless, below-the-knees summer dress showed protrusions that indicated A cups, or at the very best B.
I knew there was a disadvantage to introducing yourself to a neighbor as a prospective buyer of a neighboring property because it might just spur that neighbor to bid against you for the property. All the same, my budget didn't allow me to take chances. She patiently heard out my introduction and then answered that I ought to come back that evening when her husband was home from work and they'd had supper.
Before I left, I introduced myself as 'Hank' and she answered with, "I'm Tracy. My husband's name is Woody. I'm sure he'll be glad to meet you."
When I came back that evening, Woody, a lanky, late 20's with curly red hair, and Tracy were sitting in the swing seat on their front porch. Prospective neighbors couldn't have been more hospitable. Pointing to a lawn chair, Woody said, "have a seat, how bout a beer? Oh, Dos Equis' okay?"
It seemed right off that they really welcomed my interest in the neighboring ranchette. Gradually I found out why. The previous owner from whom it had been repossessed was one of the kind that you really don't want as neighbors: alcohol, drugs, attack dogs, motorcycle gang connections, buildings run down, you name it.
Before I even mentioned my Navy career background, they volunteered their CV's. Woody had grown up in some little town in Kentucky and after high school went to Murray State University where he studied civil engineering. Freshly graduated, he took a job with the Corps of Engineers in Missoula. Tracy, a native of Missoula, taught 5th grade in nearby Arlee. They'd bought their 22 acres 3 years earlier with the idea of having plenty of room for a bunch of kids to run around. They'd met at the Missoula County Fair a few months after Woody started his job with the Corps. Apparently it had been love at first sight. They'd married less than a year after meeting.
Of course they wanted to know about me too. I told them about my 25-year Navy career -- in lots of detail so there wouldn't be much time for questions about my failed marriages.
I was so sold on having Woody and Tracy as neighbors that I signed the purchase contract for my 33 acres the next day and we closed a month later. Then the work started. The house was so bad, I had to sleep in the barn while I put in new windows, repaired the roof, replaced flooring, etc., etc. Not that the barn didn't need work too, it just wasn't as serious a problem as the house. I got the house ready before winter set in and then went to work on the barn so I'd have place for a couple horses come spring. Winters in Montana might be cold, in fact really cold, but there's a bright side. It's a nice dry cold with plenty of sunny days. I was able to get the barn in shape before spring and by June, not only was the barn in shape, I even had the fences around the meadows all fixed and was ready to take on a horse or horses.
With my budget, buying real high class horses never came into question. No matter, I'd long settled on adopting a couple mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management where you get a yearling or two-year-old for a $25 fee plus transport. The catch is that these horses need breaking and that was one thing I hadn't learned in the Navy. But what my 20+ years of shuffling around various 30+ ton combat aircraft did do was to turn me into someone who wasn't afraid of work and figuring out how to do stuff I'd never done before. To make up for my lack of knowledge and experience, I got advice and help from a Kootenai woman who was known for the magic she'd worked on errant horses.
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When I graduated from high school in Seymour, Indiana, and went into the Navy, none of my classmates or anyone in town would have dreamed I'd one day be a rancher in Montana.
I wasn't a good student, actually barely average, and in no way college material, even if my family could have afforded to send me. My dad was a repairman with a local appliance dealer so we weren't poor but so that Mom and Dad were able to buy a home, go on vacations and have enough money for a few nice things, my mom had to work too. Like my dad, she had only a high school education so her opportunities were limited too. However, she was clever enough to get and hold a job as a receptionist-secretary-typist-legal assistant for a one-man attorney practice.
Fortunately I hadn't gotten into a whole shitload of trouble like lots of my high school classmates so after graduation, the Navy let me enlist. At some point I'd seen the movie 'Top Gun' and like lots of other lads at the time, was real impressed with Naval Aviation. Long story told short, after boot camp, I ended up in Naval Airman's School at Pensacola Naval Air Station and did well enough in that 5 month school that I got orders for a berth on CV-64 Constellation. And not just any berth, I started out on the flight deck, nothing glorious, just a green jersey tugging cables and such but I knew what I wanted. My dream was to wear a brown jersey -- that is be a plane captain, the guy who in Navy parlance owns the aircraft and loans it to pilots to fly. Eight years and a divorce later, my dream came true. I was one proud swabby the day when I put on a brown jersey and took ownership of my own plane -- an F-18B Hornet flying off CVN-69 Dwight D Eisenhower.
The first divorce had its origins in a blitz romance, a too-soon wedding followed by two long deployments. We'd been married a year and 7 months when I came home to a wife who no longer wanted to fuck me. It seems that she'd met a local insurance salesman who was ready to please her every night of the week and every month of the year.
Closing in on 17 years and getting close to retirement, the Navy put me on permanent shore duty transforming new sailors into air crew at Pensacola. It wasn't long before I met my second wife, Kelsey, a trainee in the Navy Airman School. By marrying me, she got to move out of the trainee barracks -- an advantage that somehow escaped my thoughts at the time. At twenty, she was almost that many years my junior and a real exciting thing between the sheets. But the downside was related to exactly that. After she graduated from the Naval Air School and deployed on CVN-76 Ronald Reagan, her juices kept right on flowing
Several months into her first deployment, my CO called me in. With a stern but sympathetic look on his face, he informed that Kelsey had been kicked off her ship and was coming home. That was a real shock, but not as big as the one I got when he told me why. It seems that she was caught in flagrante delicto with three sailors in an equipment locker in the hangar deck. Sex among the crew on a Navy ship being a big no-no, she and the three sailors lost their posting.
Not everyone has luck with marriage.
I retired with the rank of Senior Chief Petty Officer with 22 and 3/4 years service and a second divorce under my belt.
Lots, actually most, military retirees tend to live near their last duty station. Not me. I'd always had another dream -- being a cowboy/rancher, something that don't really fit if you live near Pennsacola, Florida. Years before I'd bought my 4x4 pickup truck with trailer hitch - obligatory for a cowboy. The day after my retirement ceremony, I was on I-10 headed west towards Mobile where I'd turn onto US-45 and take it north through Mississippi. My research over the past few years had led me to settle on Montana as the state where my ranch was going to be. The drive there was a 2300-mile road trip through 7 states.
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Already that first fall and winter I got better and better acquainted with my neighbors, Woody and Tracy, especially Woody who helped me with my renovation work whenever a task just wasn't possible working alone. He wouldn't take any pay and so I tried to return the favor by helping him. I don't know if the work we traded was even up, but they seemed happy and even invited me over for the occasional meal. All in all it seemed a pretty good neighborly relationship, just that, not a deep personal friendship -- at least not at first.
Their ranchette was smaller than mine, only 22 acres. In late summer, I'd seen a dozen or so yearling angus grazing and by fall they were gone so I figured they were in the business of fattening up beef for sale to a feed lot. When I asked how that business was going, I learned that a local rancher hayed off the meadow in early summer and then put in some yearlings to graze it off in the fall. One night over dinner I brought up the subject and asked why they'd bought such a big property if they didn't have stock or even horses of their own.
Woody answered: "You see, Hank, when we got married we'd intended on having a bunch of kids and wanted them to have space to play and grow up. Well, as you can see, intending to have kids and having them, that's two different things."
They'd been married for a number of years and with their jobs, seemed to be financially nicely above water so I had been wondering why they hadn't started a family. I tried to think of something to say that showed sympathy and understanding but the best I could come up with was, "yeah, sometimes stuff just don't work out the way we want it to." Then the conversation switched to something else and that was that.
Then one Saturday that winter, I was working on my barn and Woody dropped by. It was mid-afternoon so I asked him to come in the house and join me for coffee. Over coffee we talked about one thing or another, like my Navy aircraft carrier experiences, stuff he was doing with the Corps of Engineers, and so forth.
Finally at one point he let out what was really on his mind. "You know Hank, we told you how we're not able to have kids. Well, it's not 'we' that can't, it's 'me' that can't." I just looked at him and he went on. "It was in high school. I had this problem, like my nuts always ached. And not just when I was out with a girl and couldn't get her to do it. Turned out it was testicular cancer, fortunately quite treatable and I sort of forgot all about it. When Tracy and I got married, she got pregnant right away."
