Rough Around the Edges: Vincente

(The following is an excerpt from "Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands." Copyright RK Henderson.)

Humans are a novelty in the borderlands. At most you see a dormant pickup, careened on the shoulder, awaiting an anonymous driver off on who knows what mission. And even that's uncommon. Which is why I was startled, corkscrewing down a high-centre track in the Umatilla National Forest, pushing for yet another called the Kendall-Skyline Trail, to see a man, statue-still and silent, standing by the side of the road. No truck in sight; he'd just come to stand.

Shooting past I also saw the proverbial ten foot pole, its slim, flexible shaft propped against a fir behind him. This was either one of those dreams, or a story.

Skidding to a halt, I jumped down, camera in hand, my Man Friday watching with the liquid eyes of a deer prepared to dart back into the forest at the first alarm. I grinned and waved, and his round, olive face relaxed into a shy, almost childlike smile.

A small, compact fellow, scarcely five feet tall, with worn jeans bloused into black gum boots, and a thick woollen cap pulled down hard over his straight black hair. His pole, I now saw, was actually a long hook, and that, together with the bleating chorus from the woods and a whiff of wet wool on the wind, explained everything. His flock remained unseen, but three deadpan border collies skulked out of the undergrowth, halted at regulation distance, and scanned me up and down. They continued staring, rigid and mute as cast iron, for a good half-minute, then wheeled as one and disappeared back into the bracken.

"Mind if I take a picture?" I asked, hefting my camera.

The shepherd nodded once, and I squeezed off a shot.

"Thanks." I snapped the lens cap back on. "How long you been up here?"

Again the timid smile, and an apologetic shrug. Once, many years ago, I met a Basque shepherd in these mountains. My French had bailed me out that day. Now I instinctively reached for it again, but the man's dark skin and almond eyes caught the parlez-vous in my throat.

"¿Habla español?" I ventured.

His face split into a wide grin.

His name was Vincente, and he was from Peru. His awkwardness was not entirely dispelled by my lousy Spanish, and I learned that he'd been tending these sheep, with nought for company but three unilingual dogs, for several weeks. His features I now recognised from countless Inkan friezes; if a single Castilian corpuscle fouled those veins, it was damn quiet. I didn't press for specifics, but he'd apparently followed the same trail that led Scottish shepherds to New Zealand, Welsh ones to Patagonia, and Basques to Chile and the far American West.

I felt gifted for the accident, and privileged to have met him. Solitude is a skill, practiced professionally by very few in this age of robot lighthouses and flying fire watchers. If the wheels of commerce have ground most of us solitaries to dross, it was a comfort to know that there was still a place in these mountains for Vincente.


(Border collie photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons and a generous photographer.)