The trouble with Lake Leon began, as trouble around Fort Stockton often did, when somebody decided to improve it.
For years the lake had existed a few miles outside town without asking much from anybody. Calling it a lake required a certain generosity during dry spells, but West Texans have always understood that bodies of water are entitled to the occasional exaggeration. In wet years Lake Leon spread itself respectably beneath the cottonwoods and willows, collected ducks, mosquitoes and the occasional fisherman, and reflected enough blue sky to look considerably deeper than it was. During drought it retreated toward the middle and left behind cracked mud, discarded fishing line and several hundred yards of shoreline nobody remembered owning. Nobody complained. It was water in Pecos County. You learned early not to criticize miracles.
Then the war ended, the boys came home, building materials became available again, and people began putting little weekend cabins around the lake. They weren’t much. Most consisted of two rooms, a screened porch and a roof assembled by men who considered a carpenter’s level evidence of insufficient self-confidence. There were barbecue pits made from oil drums, docks built from surplus lumber and clotheslines strung between cottonwoods. Somebody hauled out an old refrigerator and buried it halfway in the ground to use as an icebox. Somebody else erected a sign proclaiming his place LAKEVIEW, although the lake could only be seen from the roof. Within three years, Lake Leon had acquired everything necessary to become a respectable recreational community except plumbing and respectability.
Unfortunately, it already had residents.
Beavers had been working the drainage around Lake Leon since long before anybody thought to put a screened porch there. They had done so quietly and with considerable competence. Water that otherwise would have run away was detained. Small ponds appeared. Cattails spread. Willows flourished. Cottonwoods found enough moisture to grow tall enough to shade the banks. The beavers had accomplished all this without issuing a bond, forming a committee or requesting matching funds from Austin, which should have warned everyone that eventually government would become involved.
The problem was that beavers have very different ideas about property.
A cottonwood belonging to Mr. Leland Pruitt was, from Mr. Pruitt’s perspective, a shade tree. From the perspective of a beaver, it was inventory.
A willow planted beside Mrs. Haskins’s dock was landscaping.
Inventory.
The supporting post beneath Walter Clevenger’s fishing platform was structural lumber.
Inventory.
By the summer of 1948, Lake Leon’s beavers had begun conducting what amounted to an aggressive acquisition campaign against anything made of wood within dragging distance of water. They took trees first. Then fence posts. Then part of a dock. A picnic table disappeared one night and was discovered two days later incorporated into a dam fifty yards downstream, still recognizable by one red-painted leg protruding from the mud.
The Lake Leon Improvement Association began keeping a tally.
Nobody had formed the association until there was something to complain about.
That was how everyone knew Lake Leon was finally becoming civilized.
At the July meeting, held beneath the cottonwoods beside Pruitt’s cabin, the secretary reported thirty-seven damaged trees, eleven missing fence posts, three sections of dock, one clothesline support and the lower half of an outhouse door. There was also an unverified report involving a wooden toilet seat, although discussion of exactly how the beaver had obtained access to it became sufficiently uncomfortable that the item was removed from the minutes.
The state was notified.
Two weeks later, Orville Treadwell arrived from the Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission in a state sedan carrying three notebooks, two steel traps, a roll of survey maps and the unmistakable air of a man whose college education had taken a surprising turn. Treadwell was tall, narrow and so thoroughly khaki that when he stood against the caliche road he nearly disappeared. He spent three days examining dams, measuring water levels, counting lodges and explaining to cabin owners that the animals destroying their property were actually improving the watershed.
This information was not received with enthusiasm.
Treadwell tried again. Beaver dams slowed runoff. They reduced erosion. They raised water tables and created habitat. The ponds they formed could preserve water through dry periods and provide refuge for fish and wildlife. In the right place, he explained, a healthy beaver colony could accomplish work that would otherwise require men, machinery and money.
Mr. Pruitt pointed toward the stump where his largest cottonwood had stood.
“Then put ’em in the right place.”
That, unexpectedly, became the solution.
Federal conservation officials were looking for inexpensive ways to restore damaged watersheds in remote parts of Oregon. Much of the country was difficult to reach by road. Creeks ran hard in spring and dwindled later in the year. Erosion had stripped vegetation from some drainages. Beavers could slow the water, spread it across the landscape and create wet meadows without requiring bulldozers, concrete or anyone drawing federal per diem.
Fort Stockton had beavers.
Oregon needed beavers.
Somewhere between Austin and Washington, several government offices exchanged enough letters to transform this coincidence into a program.
The Lake Leon animals would be trapped alive and relocated.
There remained the minor question of how.
The first part was simple enough. They would be trapped around the lake, placed in wooden transport crates, hauled into Fort Stockton, taken to the municipal airfield and shipped north. Once in Oregon, however, the animals would still have to reach remote mountain watersheds inaccessible to trucks. Horses and mules had been considered, but the trips were long, rough and hot, and keeping beavers confined for days presented difficulties.
This eventually produced a suggestion so unreasonable that it became inevitable.
Parachutes.
When Orville Treadwell first explained the plan at the Pecos County courthouse, nobody interrupted him. That should not be mistaken for acceptance. The people in the room were simply attempting to determine whether they had heard correctly.
The beavers would be placed in specially designed wooden boxes. Surplus military parachutes would be attached. An airplane would carry them over the release area. The boxes would be pushed out, descend beneath the parachutes and open automatically upon landing.
The mayor leaned forward.
“You’re going to bomb Oregon with beavers.”
Treadwell corrected him.
“No, sir.”
There was a pause.
“We’re going to parachute them.”
The mayor considered the distinction and sat back.
The Fort Stockton end of the operation required transportation, and that was where the 1941 Pontiac Custom Torpedo Eight station wagon entered history.
The Pontiac belonged to the West Texas Northern Timber Company, which maintained a small district office outside town and had purchased the wagon during the war. It had hauled surveyors, foremen, tools, salesmen, lunchboxes and once, after a bus failure near Alpine, nine members of a church choir who had discovered that Pontiac’s advertised eight-passenger capacity was more theological than mechanical.
It was an imposing automobile even seven years after it had been built. The hood stretched forward in deep Marlboro Blue, dark enough to turn almost black in shade, while the Hercules-built station-wagon body behind it was a magnificent framework of exposed wood. Ash framing surrounded broad wooden panels along the doors and rear quarters. The roof was black. Blue-painted steel wheels carried chrome Pontiac hubcaps and wide whitewall tires. Chrome bars filled the broad grille, and the hood mascot rode above the centerline with considerably more confidence than anyone involved in Operation Beaver Drop.
The wagon sat on a 122-inch wheelbase and carried three rows of brown bench seats. Inside, wood covered the doors, roof structure, floors and cargo area until sitting in the Pontiac felt less like riding in an automobile than occupying a small cabin that had somehow developed headlights. The dashboard was painted steel, the steering wheel ivory with a semicircular chrome horn ring, and the speedometer promised 100 miles per hour with the optimism common to Detroit instruments of the period.
The clock did not work.
Nobody cared.
Under the long hood sat Pontiac’s 249-cubic-inch inline eight, rated at 103 horsepower and 190 pound-feet of torque. It was connected to a column-shifted three-speed manual transmission and produced its power without drama, urgency or any apparent interest in what the speedometer claimed was theoretically possible. It was an engine designed to begin running in the morning and continue until somebody remembered to shut it off.
The rear of the wagon featured a clamshell tailgate.
Made of wood.
This should have concerned someone.
It did not.
The first beavers were trapped during the last week of July. The state carpenter built stout wooden transport boxes with ventilation holes and hinged lids. The animals were loaded two to a crate, and the crates were lashed inside the Pontiac after two of the rear benches were removed.
At dawn on the first transportation day, the wagon stood beside Lake Leon with eight crates aboard. The morning was already warm. Mud smelled sour beneath the cottonwoods. Mosquitoes hovered in the reeds. Somewhere across the water a surviving beaver slapped its tail hard enough to send the sound across the lake like a rifle shot.
Orville Treadwell climbed behind the Pontiac’s ivory steering wheel.
County agricultural agent Calvin Meeks rode beside him.
They pulled away shortly after seven.
For the first several miles, the arrangement appeared almost sensible.
The straight eight murmured beneath the hood. Dust rolled behind the whitewalls. Sunlight moved across the ash framing as the Pontiac followed the road toward Fort Stockton. Inside, the smell was an extraordinary mixture of warm upholstery, old wood, engine heat, wet fur, lake mud and the accumulated biological opinions of sixteen beavers who had not volunteered for interstate travel.
Then Calvin heard chewing.
It was faint at first.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Scritch.
He looked over his shoulder.
Nothing.
The crates sat exactly where they had been tied. A few black noses appeared at ventilation holes. One beaver stared back with the flat expression of a passenger who had already decided the accommodations were unacceptable.
Calvin turned forward.
The chewing resumed.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Crunch.
There are sounds a man recognizes instinctively. A rattlesnake buzzing beside his boot. A connecting rod beginning to knock. His wife discovering a receipt in a shirt pocket.
A beaver eating the vehicle in which he is riding was not yet among them.
It would be.
A small sliver of wood appeared from beneath the rear seat and slid across the floor when the Pontiac rounded a bend. Calvin picked it up. It was fresh. Pale. Damp along one edge.
He looked at Orville.
Orville looked at the wood.
Neither said anything.
Behind them came a crack.
By the time the Pontiac stopped, one beaver had enlarged an air hole in its crate to the dimensions of a serving platter and was squeezing through it. Orville climbed over the front seat while Calvin opened a rear door. This created the first tactical error. The beaver, suddenly presented with daylight, moved toward the opening with considerably greater enthusiasm than Calvin had anticipated.
The door slammed shut again.
The beaver changed direction.
This was worse.
The animal paused in the center of the cargo area, surrounded by wooden crates, wooden floorboards, wooden doors, wooden roof supports and a wooden tailgate.
For a beaver, it must have resembled room service.
Orville reached for it.
The beaver selected the tailgate.
By the time Calvin found a feed sack beneath the front seat, the animal had removed a strip of Pontiac approximately the length of a man’s hand. It worked with astonishing speed, bracing its front paws against the wood while its incisors peeled away curls that dropped onto the cargo floor.
A second crate began making noises.
Calvin stared at it.
“Orville.”
“I know.”
“No. I mean another one.”
The second beaver came through its crate while they were still negotiating with the first.
For several minutes the interior of the Pontiac ceased to function as an automobile and became a very small wildlife refuge moving nowhere. Orville used the feed sack. Calvin used his hat. Neither was particularly successful. The beavers demonstrated no respect for state authority.
That was when Deputy Virgil Croft arrived.
He pulled the county pickup onto the shoulder, stepped out and approached the Pontiac carrying coffee in a Thermos cup. He looked through the open rear door. He looked at Orville. He looked at Calvin. He looked at the missing section of tailgate.
Virgil took a sip.
“I never met a beaver yet that didn’t give you trouble before it was all over. Chewing through a tailgate is probably getting off easy.”
Then he stood there.
This was not helpful, but it was accurate.
The fugitives were eventually returned to their crates. Wire was wrapped around the damaged boxes. A feed sack was stuffed against the tailgate. Orville examined the fresh tooth marks in the ash and understood, with the clarity available only after something has become obvious, that they had loaded wood-eating animals into wooden containers and then placed those containers inside a wooden automobile.
Government planning had overlooked a variable.
They continued.
Ten miles later, another beaver escaped.
This one worked downward through the floor of its crate, discovered the Pontiac’s wooden cargo deck and apparently decided to investigate whether the entire world was edible. Calvin heard it before he saw it. The animal squeezed beneath a folded seat, traveled forward and emerged between the two men.
Orville felt whiskers against his elbow.
The Pontiac moved toward the centerline.
Calvin shouted.
Orville corrected.
The beaver placed its front paws on the dashboard.
The Pontiac corrected again.
For several seconds all three occupants faced forward together, Orville behind the wheel, Calvin beside him and the beaver sitting upright between them with the solemn concentration of someone learning to drive.
It inspected the radio.
It inspected the glovebox.
Then it turned toward the steering wheel.
Orville tightened his grip.
“No.”
The beaver leaned closer.
“Absolutely not.”
Calvin grabbed it before it could determine whether an ivory Pontiac steering wheel had acceptable nutritional value.
The horn sounded.
The wagon swerved.
The beaver objected.
Calvin objected more.
By the time the Pontiac reached the Fort Stockton Municipal Airport and Feed Lot, the trip had taken almost twice as long as scheduled and everyone aboard had reconsidered his relationship with nature.
The airfield occupied a flat stretch of ground where aviation and livestock had reached an informal accommodation. A hangar stood near the runway. Cattle pens stood beyond it. Depending upon the wind, arriving pilots could determine which side of the property they were approaching without consulting their instruments.
Word had spread.
It always did.
By the time the Pontiac arrived, the mayor was there. So was a reporter from the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch, three county employees, two ranchers, six children on bicycles, the airport manager and several men whose connection to the operation consisted entirely of not having anything more interesting to do before lunch.
The Marlboro Blue Pontiac rolled onto the field.
Dust followed it.
The straight eight idled.
Orville switched off the ignition.
Silence settled.
Then everybody saw the tailgate.
One corner had been chewed into a scalloped hollow. Fresh wood shavings covered the cargo floor. A vertical piece of trim beside the right rear door showed another set of tooth marks. One crate had been reinforced with wire. Another had a feed sack wrapped around it.
The mayor walked slowly around the Pontiac.
He stopped at the rear.
“Beaver?”
Orville nodded.
The mayor examined the missing wood.
He nodded too.
“Well,” he said, “you can’t say he wasn’t properly equipped.”
That was the entirety of the official investigation.
The beavers were unloaded and placed beneath shade while the transportation crates intended for Oregon were tested. These were more sophisticated than the boxes used at Lake Leon, although that was not saying much. Hinged wooden panels were arranged so that tension from the parachute kept the crate closed during descent. When the box struck the ground and the parachute collapsed, the mechanism released and the sides fell open.
At least that was the theory.
The first test used weights.
The crate hit hard enough to suggest the future occupants would arrive in Oregon as considerably flatter beavers.
Adjustments followed.
The second drifted into the cattle pens.
More adjustments.
The third landed beautifully but did not open.
This produced a long silence among the assembled engineers.
Eventually they selected an elderly male beaver for live testing. Somebody named him Geronimo, because the government had not yet discovered risk-management departments. Geronimo was loaded into a test crate and dropped over the airfield.
The parachute opened.
The crate descended.
It landed.
The sides fell away.
Geronimo emerged.
He sat in the grass for several seconds, looking toward the men responsible.
Nobody knew precisely what a furious beaver looked like.
Afterward, they did.
Geronimo was tested again.
And again.
He survived every drop and acquired, one assumes, a complicated relationship with the sound of aircraft engines.
By August, the system was ready. Seventy-six Lake Leon beavers passed through the Fort Stockton Municipal Airport and Feed Lot. They were flown north, transferred closer to their destination and eventually carried over remote Oregon watersheds in small aircraft.
Then they went out the door.
Crates tumbled briefly before the parachutes snapped open. White canopies blossomed above the mountains. Boxes containing creatures born in the mud and cottonwoods of West Texas drifted toward green country they had never seen.
One after another they landed.
The crates opened.
The beavers emerged.
All but one survived.
There were no speeches waiting for them. No signs. No Lake Leon Improvement Association. No one explaining that they were ecosystem engineers or agents of watershed restoration or participants in an innovative federal conservation initiative.
There was water.
There were trees.
That was enough.
They went to work.
Streams slowed behind new dams. Water spread into meadows. Sediment settled. Willows thickened along the banks. Ponds formed where there had been narrow channels. Birds arrived. Fish found deeper pools. The landscape began retaining water longer into the dry season.
Everything the beavers had been condemned for doing at Lake Leon became useful somewhere else.
That was the joke nobody in Fort Stockton had intended.
The animals had never changed.
Only the address had.
The Pontiac eventually went back to the West Texas Northern Timber Company.
Its manager came outside when Orville returned it.
He walked around the wagon once.
The Marlboro Blue paint was dusty. The whitewalls were gray. Mud had dried along the running surfaces. The interior smelled powerfully of wildlife. One section of rear trim was damaged.
Then he reached the tailgate.
He stopped.
He touched the missing wood.
He looked at Orville.
“What happened to my car?”
Orville had spent the drive back preparing an explanation involving transportation complications, unforeseen animal behavior and damage incurred in the performance of official duties.
None of it survived the question.
“Beaver ate it.”
The manager looked at the tailgate again.
Then at Orville.
“Beaver.”
“Yes.”
“Ate the Pontiac.”
“Some of it.”
The manager walked around to the right rear door and found the other tooth marks.
“This too?”
Orville shook his head.
“Different beaver.”
The carpenter who repaired the wagon found wood close enough to match, although not perfectly. A section of ash went into the tailgate. Another piece replaced the damaged door framing. The repairs were sanded, varnished and blended into the original Hercules body as well as anybody could manage.
But they never disappeared completely.
The Pontiac returned to ordinary service. Years accumulated. Its brown upholstery cracked and tore. The ribbed black floor mats hardened and split. Rust began nibbling at the steel beneath the wood, demonstrating that beavers did not hold a monopoly on slow destruction. The straight eight kept turning. The column-shifted three-speed kept selecting gears. The ivory steering wheel yellowed.
The clock still didn’t work.
Eventually the wagon became old enough that people stopped considering it merely old.
That is one of the strange promotions automobiles receive if they survive long enough.
Old.
Used.
Outdated.
Obsolete.
Then, without changing anything themselves, they become historic.
Some later owner learned about Operation Beaver Drop. Somebody found photographs. Somebody remembered the strange summer when Lake Leon had been emptied of its troublesome engineers and a Marlboro Blue Pontiac had carried them toward an airplane.
The story grew.
Of course it did.
By the 1960s, according to some versions, one beaver had eaten half the tailgate.
By the 1970s, it had eaten the entire tailgate.
By the 1980s, two beavers had escaped completely, entered town and consumed a porch behind the Cattle Baron Hotel.
Eventually someone claimed one of them had taken the wheel and driven the Pontiac down Dickinson Boulevard.
That version was generally rejected.
The Pontiac had a manual transmission.
There are limits.
But the true story needed very little assistance.
Seventy-six beavers had lived around Lake Leon until people decided they were causing trouble. Men from the government had trapped them, packed them into crates, loaded some of those crates into a magnificent 1941 Pontiac Custom Torpedo Eight Woodie Wagon and driven them to an airfield beside a feed lot.
Along the way, the cargo had begun eating the transportation.
Then somebody put parachutes on the beavers.
And dropped them from airplanes.
The ridiculous part is that it worked.
Years later, their descendants were still doing exactly what their ancestors had done in West Texas. Building dams. Cutting trees. Backing up water. Flooding low ground. Creating ponds.
Only now people called it restoration.
There may be a lesson in that, although Fort Stockton has never been a town inclined to ruin a good story by extracting too much wisdom from it. Perhaps the beavers had not been the problem at Lake Leon. Perhaps Lake Leon had simply been the wrong place for those particular beavers at that particular moment.
Or perhaps the lesson was simpler.
Never transport a beaver in anything you aren’t willing to have eaten.
Either way, somewhere in the history of Fort Stockton there ought to be a photograph of that Pontiac sitting at the Municipal Airport and Feed Lot in the August heat. Marlboro Blue hood gleaming. Whitewalls dusty. Hercules wood body glowing honey-colored beneath the sun. Tailgate freshly chewed. Crates lined up beside an airplane. Men in khaki standing around pretending the situation had developed according to plan.
And somewhere behind them, one old beaver named Geronimo ought to be staring at the airplane.
He has been trapped.
Crated.
Driven across Pecos County.
Dropped from the sky repeatedly.
And he has learned something about human beings.
Nothing good.
