Review by Ed Quillen
Mountain Life – March 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
More Life with Pickle
by J.C. Mattingly
Published in 2005 by Mirage Publishing Co.
ISBN 0-9710430-1-9
THIS IS A CONTINUATION of Life with Pickle, which came out in 2001. Both are collections of short tales that originally appeared in The Fence Post (a magazine whose motto is “celebrating our rural lifestyle”), and they’re insightful while producing a chuckle with almost every paragraph.
The protagonist, Robert E. Dill, is from Los Angeles, and somehow ends up as a hand on a mountain ranch. In the first book, he evolves from the greenest of greenhorns into a competent cowboy who inherits the ranch. In this one, he has to figure out how to keep it running.
Keeping any enterprise in operation these days is a challenge, and for Pickle, there are some personnel problems. Specifically, he’s got to boss the guys he used to work alongside, and they’ve got some attitude problems. They’ll do what they’re told, but they don’t put any thought into their work – namely, they don’t report what they’ve seen, such as fences in need of repair, so Pickle can’t assign work in a sensible way.
How to get them to think, rather than force Pickle to do all the thinking without enough information?
“Pickle felt a rage rise within him. He wanted to tell Cap to get his tools off the ranch in the next five minutes or the sheriff would be along to put a boot print on his butt.
“Instead, Pickle sat down at the shop table, mustering courage to bring forward his responsible strategy. He had thought long and hard about how to deal with Cap and Larry D. when they intentionally withheld important information from him. The last three days, he had waited until after quitting time, when Cap and Larry D. had gone home, to drive around the ranch, making note of the miserable jobs that needed to be done.
“After a long silence, in which Pickle gathered the courage needed to take the quivering out of his voice, he said ‘…I want you two to go up and clean the dead skunks and rodents out of the four culverts on the Catacomb Ditch.’ Pickle stood. ‘That’s an order.’
“…Just before lunch time, the two men returned to report that the job was done, and there was proof of their accomplishment in the way they smelled…. Cap and Larry D. did not ask Pickle for further direction as to the day’s activities. They were, in fact, veritable fountains of helpful suggestion.”
Pickle’s adventures here include the acquisition of another ranch through circumstances so bizarre that they must be based on a true story, marriage to Shalayla, run-ins with his relatives, and a run for county commissioner – a story that emerges as a sharp commentary on modern politics, wherein Pickle refuses to have an opinion on divisive national issues that have nothing to do with local government like “maintaining the county’s 185 miles of dirt roads, snow removal from those same roads, and decisions about which sections of road to blacktop over what time,” along with “more complicated issues, such as septic tank variances.”
Pickle’s accomplishments may be too good to ring totally true, but the pleasures and pains of rural life come through here, from the daily challenges to a marvelous panoply of characters, many with four legs. This collection was as much fun as its predecessor, and we can only hope that Pickle will continue his thoughtful and entertaining life on that mountain ranch.
