Chapter 6
The line cracked on a Tuesday, forty feet from the hydrant, in the one stretch she had not pressure-tested because she had run out of daylight in December and told herself it would keep.
She found it at seven in the morning as a spreading dark patch in the frost.
"Well," Renee said.
She spent four hours on it. She dug it out by hand because the backhoe was a hundred and eighty dollars a day and she had four thousand one hundred, minus the hoop house, minus the propane, minus a fencing quote she had not accepted.
She got down to it on her knees with a trenching shovel and found a split the length of her thumb, and she cut it out and glued in a coupling and sat back on her heels in the mud with her hands aching.
It held.
She turned the hydrant on and stood there and watched forty feet of line not leak, and something in her chest went up like a flare, and there was nobody there to tell.
That was the thing about February.
There was nobody there to tell, and she found — this was the part she could not have predicted in December, the part she would not have believed — that it was better.
Not easier. Better. There was no version of that four hours where she had to explain to anybody why a woman with access to eleven million dollars was on her knees in the mud with a trenching shovel.
She ate a sandwich standing up and went back out.
The solicitation had gone out on the first.
It was forty-one pages and Renee read all of it twice, at the fold-down table, with a pencil.
Boulder County — Emergency Watershed Protection and Native Revegetation, December 12 Fire Perimeter, Phase I.
Phase I was the workable ground. Forty-odd thousand acres had burned and almost none of it was ground you could get a drill onto — it was hogback and drainage and slope you would have to do by hand or by air.
Phase I was nine hundred and forty acres in the flats and the low benches, in eleven non-contiguous parcels, and it wanted a native mix specified by ecological site, sourced with certified origin, drilled and broadcast per site, with an establishment guarantee at eighteen months.
Renee read the establishment guarantee three times and started laughing.
She laughed out loud, alone, in a trailer, at nine at night.
Because that was the whole thing. That was the entire trick of this work and always had been, and every outfit that came out of Denver to bid Front Range reclamation got it wrong the same way: they bid a seeding, and the county was buying a stand.
You could put a beautiful mix in the ground in April and have a bill of lading and a signed drill log and eighteen months later have nothing but cheatgrass and a lawsuit, and the reason was never the seed.
It was the ecological site. It was knowing that the bench above Twenty-Six Road was not the same ground as the flat six hundred yards south of it, and that one of them wanted western wheatgrass and the other one would kill it.
She knew that ground.
She had known it since she was fifteen years old in a truck with her father.
She walked four of the parcels before she wrote a word of it.
That was the fifth and sixth of February, two days, in the truck at six in the morning with a soil probe, a hand lens, a roll of flagging, and a thermos.
The county had the parcels mapped and posted and anybody could walk them, and as far as she could tell from the sign-in sheet at the gate, nobody had.
She had not been on the burn since the twelfth of December.
It did not look the way people thought. That was the first thing.
Two months on, a grass fire scar is not black — it is gray and buff and rust, and the ground is bare in a way that ground is never bare, and you can see the shape of everything.
Every drainage. Every old two-track. Every rock.
It had taken the whole vocabulary off the land and left the grammar.
She got out at the first parcel and stood there a while with her hands in her pockets.
Then she got to work, because that was available and grieving about it was not.
She probed the flat and got four inches of ash-fouled duff over a loam that was in better shape than it had any business being in.
She walked the bench above it and the ground changed under her boots inside of forty steps — coarser, shalier, a different animal entirely — and she flagged the break and wrote the GPS in the notebook and said, out loud, "There you are. "
She found cheatgrass already up in the disturbance along the two-track. Two inches of it, green, in February.
That was the whole war in one sentence and she wrote that down too.
At the third parcel she came over a rise and there was a foundation.
Just a foundation and a set of concrete steps going up to nothing, and a metal swing set with the paint burned off it standing perfectly upright about thirty feet away. Somebody had been out here since: there was a plastic tote by the steps, and a rake.
Renee stood at the bottom of the property with her notebook against her leg.
She had come up here to write a technical narrative about ecological sites and she was, she realized, standing in somebody's yard.
She did the parcel anyway. She did it thoroughly, and she flagged the break at the drainage, and she noted that the soil on the house side was contaminated with about a century of somebody's ash and would need a different call, and she wrote all of that down in a professional hand.
And on the way back to the truck she stopped at the tote and squared it up against the steps, and got the rake and leaned it upright where it would not blow over, which was not nothing and was also not anything, and she knew it, and she did it.
She sat in the truck at the gate for ten minutes before she drove out.
Ninety houses on this side. Nine hundred in the county. She had spent two months being the woman from the newspaper and she had, somewhere in there, quietly begun to think of the twelfth of December as a thing that happened to her.
It had happened to everybody up here.
The difference — and she made herself look straight at this one, sitting at a gate with the engine running — was that every other person who lost a house on this scar was standing in the same fire as the people they loved.
She wrote the bid over two nights.
The first night she got the mixes done — eleven parcels, four distinct sites, four mixes, pounds per acre, PLS by species, with a written rationale for each because the scoring rubric gave twenty points for technical narrative and she had spent six years watching people leave those points on the table.
She wrote the rationale by hand and typed it in the morning at the library on Arapahoe, at the same table where she had written the letter, which she noticed and decided not to make anything of.
The second night was the money.
That was harder and it took until three. She had no equipment. She had a lease, a hoop house, eleven acres and a repaired water line, and she was bidding a nine-hundred-and-forty-acre job.
So she did not bid the equipment. She bid the thing she actually had, which was the only thing in that county nobody else could buy: she bid herself as the seed source and the site call, subcontracted the drilling to an outfit out of Wiggins she had used eleven times before she closed, and priced the establishment guarantee like a woman who intended to make the stand rather than a woman insuring against it.
She was eleven percent over the low bidder and she knew it while she was typing.
She submitted it at 4:52 p.m. on the tenth of February under the name Tolliver Native Seed, which had not legally existed in six years and which she had reinstated online for fifty dollars with her own card.
Then she went out and pulled fabric until it was too dark to see.
Kyle Whitcomb drove out on the twelfth with the seed samples.
He was a supplier's rep out of Fort Lupton, mid-forties, a big square guy in a Carhartt with a company logo on it, and he had a tailgate full of sample bags and a laminated price sheet and forty minutes of patter he never got to use.
He got about ninety seconds into it before Renee said, "Where's the blue grama from?"
He stopped.
"That's — hang on." He checked the bag. "That'd be the Nebraska source."
"Then no."
"It's certified."
"It's certified Nebraska," Renee said. "I'm putting it at six thousand feet on a south bench that gets forty inches of wind and eleven of water.
It'll come up beautiful the first year and be gone in three.
" She handed the bag back. "What else have you got.
Anything out of the Arkansas Valley or south? "
Kyle Whitcomb looked at her for a second.
Then he put the laminated sheet away, which she appreciated more than anything anybody had done for her in two months, and got a different notebook out of the truck, and the two of them stood at his tailgate for an hour and forty minutes going through it species by species while the wind tried to take the pages.
He was good. That was the pleasure of it. He knew his origins and he knew when he did not know, and twice he said "I'd have to check that and I'd rather check it than tell you wrong," and by the end they had built most of two mixes on the hood of his truck.
He packed up at four.
"Can I ask you something," he said.
"Sure."
"You're not new."
"I'm not new."
"No." He shut the tailgate. "I've been doing this nineteen years and I have had about four conversations like the one we just had, and three of them were with men over seventy." He said it plainly, without any weight on it. "You want to tell me who you are, or you want me to keep guessing?"
"Renee Tolliver."
"Tolliver." He thought about it. "Tolliver out of — there was a Tolliver Native Seed."
"That's right."
"You closed." He looked genuinely put out about it, which struck her as the funniest thing that had happened in weeks. "I was maybe two years in. My boss at the time bought off you. He used to say your name like it was a brand."
"He did?"