She’s trying to turn most of her place into lush green pasture for her horses, and she’s been out fixing fences and irrigating and pulling weeds and filling holes since she came here a decade ago. A couple of years ago she hired a trapper to get rid of her gophers and this year bought an industrial-strength mulcher for the sagebrush. It hooks onto the back of her small Ford tractor and when I first heard its whack-howl this last spring it sounded like a P-51 trying to take off from the middle of a stand of lodgepole. Something like that.

Sonic violence, anyway, which we’re mostly comfortable with, here near the highway in Sawtooth Valley. Such violence is usually in the form of summer flocks of unmuffled Harley riders making the Boise-Sun Valley-Stanley loop or giant semis hauling D-9s down the road at 70 mph. In the winter, it’s the stuttering grind of the big snowplows bouncing on asphalt. In the fall it’s the gunshots of the elk hunters in the dying forest across the river. Spring here is mostly without sonic violence, unless you count the sandhill cranes that fly low over the house, letting loose with their loud mutters just about the time you’ve stepped out on the deck with a cup of coffee. You can get bad burns from that sort of thing.

Anyway, my neighbor’s a good neighbor, and the sound of sagebrush being ground to bits just upriver reassures me that she’s working away on her place and tends to spur me toward working away on mine. We share a meal every three months or so, trading hospitality and tips about getting along with the Forest Service, the agency we deal with as property owners in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.

Her efforts have improved the green looks of the neighborhood. Her irrigation run-off augments the spring-fed ditch that waters the pasture between my house and my mother’s house a quarter mile downstream. That ditch ends in a pond, and it’s hard to keep it full if my neighbor isn’t doing her irrigating.

The pond provides great pleasure for my mother. It’s just across the driveway from her kitchen window. It’s a sky mirror when it isn’t being a wind gauge. Sometimes you can see mother ducks and baby ducks on it. Brook trout swim down into it from the springs, and mark the pond’s surface with rings until the local blue heron uses those rings for bulls-eyes. The heron’s hard on the frogs and salamanders, too. But unless you’re heron food, the pond is a mostly safe place.