In Plain Sight

“The rumor is that she collects enough money from float fees—as she calls ’em—to buy a new Cadillac at the end of every summer,” Tommy Wayman had said while cracking the top off a bottle of beer he had pulled from his fishing vest. “She’s been collecting money for years, but nobody turns her in because, well, she’s Opal Scarlett.”

Wayman told Joe that Opal collected her fee by standing on the bank near her house and calling to passing boats. Since Opal was white haired and tiny, most boatmen assumed there was something wrong when they heard her cries and beelined to help the old woman. When the boats pulled to shore, she pointed out to the passengers of the boat that they were now technically on her land and subject to fines or arrest. She would let it go, however, if the passengers paid a fee of $5 per person. Later, the fee was raised to $10, then $15, then $20. Word got around among fishermen to ignore Opal Scarlett when she hollered, no matter what she said.

Which led to more escalated measures on Opal’s part, and for a few years she got the attention of passing boats by firing a shotgun blast into the air and making it clear they were next if they didn’t pay up. That worked, Wayman said, for a while.

In order to avoid the embarrassment of paying fees in front of their customers, the outfitters and guides had learned to pay Opal up front and therefore pass through her ranch without trouble. Wayman told Joe he had done that for years, but Opal was getting forgetful and half the time couldn’t recall that he’d prepaid, so she would stand on the bank, shooting her shotgun in the air, demanding her tribute.

Joe noted at the time that Wayman had not brought the situation to his attention until it was literally out of control, only when Wayman was forced to double-pay Opal.

That was when Wayman first told Joe that Opal had threatened to string razor-sharp piano wire across the river, neck-high.

“If she does that she’s likely to kill somebody,” Wayman said. “She thinks everybody on the river is trying to shaft her by not paying the fee, even though most of us already coughed up. If she strings that wire, somebody’s going to get seriously hurt.”

After his meeting with Wayman, Joe drove out to the Thunderhead Ranch, feeling that his case against Opal Scarlett was remarkably cut and dried. It was his initial experience with the Scarlett mystique, his first real look into how deep the family roots were in the county and how something as straightforward and simple as river access turned out not to be that at all.

He found Opal working alone in her magnificent vegetable garden on the southern side of the massive stone ranch house where she lived. As he parked his pickup in the ranch yard and walked toward her, she leaned on her hoe and sized him up with a kind of interested, professional detachment that resided somewhere between a friendly greeting and a trespass warning. The set of her face seemed to say, “I’ve been dealing with your kind for sixty-odd years and have yet to be surprised.”

She had opened with, “So you’re the game warden who arrested the governor for fishing without a license?”

Joe nodded, already on the defensive.

She was small, trim, and wiry, dressed in a kind of casual western outdoor elegance that seemed reserved for people like her—faded jeans, Ariat boots, silver ranger set buckle, an open canvas barn jacket over a plaid shirt, silk scarf. Opal was a remarkably self-assured woman who had no qualms about charging a fee to boaters who passed through her ranch, and who seemed to make it clear without saying that she had thus far tolerated him being there in the county but there was a limit to her time and patience. She explained to Joe how her father-in-law and grandfather had established the ranch. Over the years, they had graciously maintained the flow of the river even though it was their right to divert as much of it as they pleased to irrigate their land, since they had the very first water right. By maintaining the flow over the years, she told Joe, the family had not only assured a supply of drinking water to the town of Saddlestring, but had preserved the natural ecology of the valley and also allowed for an extensive guided trout-fishing economy that would have otherwise not existed.

“In a way,” she said through a tight smile, “if it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t be here, and neither would Mr. Tommy Wayman.”

Without a hint of remorse, she led Joe down to the bank of the river and described the “tollgate” she wished to build in the future. She started by pointing across the river at an immense cottonwood.

“I want to tie a wire off over there on the trunk of that tree, and stretch it all the way over to my side. I’ll attach my end of the wire to a big lever I can work by myself, so I can raise and lower the wire as necessary,” she said, demonstrating how she would pull on the imaginary handle.

“What if you kill somebody?” Joe asked, incredulously.