John Monroe lived on Lost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a big cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John would hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom said John was the best lion hunter in the county. Tom said they’d start off together and split apart in opposite directions so their hounds would not get mixed up during the chase. Improving the family income with bounties on the big cats every winter as each lion brought $50 from the state, and $10 from Jackson County.
John would not have electricity in his home until a short time after a man walked on the moon. He then gave in to his wife and got electricity and a modern phone. They’d had a crank phone for a time, when Lloyd and his brother were kids. In 94 years, John, had only been to Medford six times which was 24 miles away.
Once, John’s sister decided to take him to the ocean in a car and they were gone for 3 days. John saw the Redwoods and went to the beach.
Everyone had a distinct cattle call; each owner’s beasts knew his masters call. Many of the neighbors knew each other’s call. According to Emil Pech, John’s call was a good one, with a “Whoopee! “on the end of it.
John gave up on horses when he got old and drove an International Diesel tractor. John was up the South Fork looking for cows and didn’t make it back one evening. Lloyd, John’s son went looking for John with his brother-in-law. After finding the tractor at the bottom of a steep grade, that went up to Conde Creek, they began calling out for John in the dark, pretty far up the South Fork of Little Butte Creek and up on Hepsie Mountain, past Grizzly Canyon.
Eventually they heard his “Whoopee! “and followed his call in the dark about a half mile from the tractor. He was cold, wet and muddy and had the big hat pulled over his ears with a plastic sack tied round his head to hold it down. Each of the men got a shoulder under the old cowboy and got him off the mountain.
“I think I had a stroke,” John said to Lloyd on the way home in the car, long after midnight.
A few weeks later, John fell while feeding calves, the calves tromped the old man until he crawled under a flat bedded wagon, he hauled the baled hay on.
For a brief time, they put him in a nursing home in Medford. John became so sorrowful because he was embarrassed when they took his clothes away. One day, he found his overalls and his flannel shirt and made a break for it out of the nursing home. After that escape his sons took him home and cared for him there. At the age of 94 John passed, three months after his wife Ida Marie had died. Lloyd said, John would say, of his one trip to the ocean:
“Oh, that’s a mad thing to look at! That’s a mad thing—those waves coming in!”
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.