The Blue Tractor

Interview

At a certain angle, from the lens of a drone, Sedona and Middleburg share superficial features of topography.

Both, viewed from above, present rural landscapes, the one being more arid, both with a conspicuous body of water flowing nearby. Here and there are patches of greenery, fields, and a close look reveals the emergence of the regular north-south pencil lines that suggest grape vineyards.

As the view closes in from above, horse farms reveal themselves, and trail riders may be found at some points in the landscape, depending on season and weather.

The winter back East was extraordinarily cold as Christmas passed, and unseasonably hot by the end of February, unsettlingly so. The first year of Trump had also passed, and the esteem in which the public held elected officials, and the once-exalted media, had dissipated in a gust of seasonal bluster.

While it is rare to catch a glimpse of denizens from above, the nature of their past can be gleaned from the nature of their vehicles, and the residences they inhabit.

Then there were the estates, what the press liked to refer to as compounds when owned by politically prominent statesmen.

The global imagery rendered privacy and exclusion things of the past, especially for these indicators of wealth and prominence. Municipal databases and public tax records for real estate, made any landed inhabitant, easy prey for the intrusions into the once unassailable privacy.

It had become the era of the virtual sleuth, and it always came as a shock to learn what closely held secrets and assumed identities, were shameless breached. There was even a novel digital verb, to dox, that described revenge taken by publicizing heretofore private facts of one’s habits.

Such details as diet, the trace fingerprints left on residence and vehicle handles, the contents of discarded rubbish, and the comings and goings of clandestine visitors remained out of reach, but not beyond the grasp, of the motivated computer literate investigator.

Trust was an old-fashioned term describing the withholding of personal views, opinions and facts except to those assumed to be friends.

These things also presented a challenge to those whose intention was to scam the casual visitor to either wine region of Arizona or Virginia.

It was with these things in mind that the satellite images attributed to John McCain’s Sedona estate jogged a memory. While visiting a Yavapai County winery on a job prospect, there arose in the drop down menu a certain wifi network neighborhood, that any wifi network supposedly confidential and private, could be accidentally accessed by those trying for the winery network.

Later, someone affiliated with the winery laughed: they had made the mistake of logging into the McCain Compound south of Sedona. Of course, McCain was a favorite target of political scandal writers and hacks who seemed to run into misleading and often mysterious dead-end lines of investigation in the effort to track down the various McCain residences.

They appeared in tax and real estate records in and around Sedona, when in fact it was clear his Hidden Valley Ranch was within local network microwave reception of Cornville, the official address of the winery.

In fact, of several wineries.

The hillsides bordering Oak Creek, that Tigris and Euphrates-like waterway of cool, clear, desert water that coursed through the eastern low lands of the arid Verde Valley, were featureless, at least to Eastern eyes.

The hillsides running west of House Mountain across the Valley to Sheepshead Canyon, bore the relics of the ancient volcanic granite, cracked and shed downhill over the ages. Up the western slopes grew scraggly islands of mesquite, live oak, and Arizona cedar, and dangerous-looking patches of prickly pear ocotillo, bristling with spines.

There was little in the way of the prairie or woodland straw tufts left to dry over the winter months, remaining from the previous season. The ground underfoot was littered with sand and coarse rock, nothing like the fertile loam of Northern Virginia.

Trees towering over the scrub landscape, could be seen far below. For example, across the neatly groomed landscape of the estate called Dancing Apache Ranch, the staging area for western trail rides. In the style of a Western film from the 1940s, there were tall posts with a looming rail above the road from which swung a sign etched with the ranch name and emblem.

Dancing Apache, perhaps in a nod to political correctness, was mostly referred to locally and signed as “DA Ranch”. Rumor was, some cattle baron family owned that sumptuous spread of horse pasture, vineyard and large, impeccably kept barns and outbuildings.

The countryside on either side of the few roads, 89A running northeast from Cottonwood to Sedona, and Page Springs Road tracking due southeast next to Oak Creek, was spare. Only the base of that triangle of roads, Cornville Road, was much developed to the eye of a passing visitor, and where lower Page Springs Road crossed Cornville, were numerous modest homesteads with attached cattle corrals, rust-free antique automobiles set off by chain-link fence. Perhaps it was the solitary grazing longhorn inside a confined pen that gave the whole a somewhat forlorn appearance.

Despite the heady distance west toward where the Mingus Mountains cut off the setting sun, the valley seemed large, distant, and vacant.

It was almost its own western kingdom set apart from outside influences.

To the north was the City of Gold, named for an original settler’s wife, Sedona Schebley. To the southwest, the abandoned Victorian-era pit mining operation called Clarkdale where the Clark family had made a very large fortune, duly commemorated in a small, dusty museum occasionally frequented by retired vacationers.

The southeastern corner of the triangle was more difficult to define by what was there, and more easily known by what was not.

The maps all proclaimed a small airport named Solair, just south east of the intersection that defined Cornville, but a search on the ground revealed nothing but housing developments in and around a wash, hardly a fit, level field adequate for aviation of anything more than helicopter traffic.

It was during the casual tour of the area in 2012 and most recently, that the hillsides and gullies began to assume a social presence.

It was hardly what might have been anticipated, however.

In response to an ad in one of the social media advertising sites, a modest place to reside was offered for the newcomer to the area.

It had a significant advantage in that the future tenant could walk to the job offered at the winery. That would be an advantage to avoid unnecessary commuting from Sedona, Cottonwood or Camp Verde.

The conditions of rental were attractive, except the one that required payment of rent prior to physical inspection of the premises. It seemed that neither the owner nor the agent were anywhere near the property, a furnished detached guest house several hundred square feet in floor plan.

The agent, if that is what he was as he the responded to emails for more specific facts, sent a few digital photos of the inside but not the exterior of the building. After several email exchanges, he remained adamant about prepayment to “reserve” the rental, and earnestly promised to refund every penny at first sight, if the rental proved unsatisfactory.

There was a wide range of accommodation available elsewhere, but until the final contractual details of the job were settled, further action was premature.

After a few weeks near Cornville, it appeared that the address of the rental house was identical to that of a nearby modest business which had inspired equally modest reviews, called Oak Creek Winery. A brief personal inquiry at the tasting room within, revealed no employee familiar with any such rental being offered, and left the prospective tenant puzzled and shaking his head as he passed a woman returning inside from the bright February sun.

The puzzle continued as a dormant issue for a few weeks until the date of return to Phoenix and Sedona from Virginia, drew nearer.

An internet search revealed that both the rental property about which the employees were in total ignorance, and the Oak Creek Winery, were at the identical numerical Page Spring Road addresses.

The owner and original winemaker of Oak Creek Winery, which had been founded in 2002, was one Debra Wahl, age 59, who apparently lived at the family house on site with her son Florian who later, in his 20s, became the winemaker.

The back story on Ms. Wahl was compelling, noteworthy and exotic: Croatian-born, trained in South Africa and Germany, and trained in winemaking near Lake Constance after a career in importing and trading in many of the most unexpected locations across the globe. Her former addresses were Big Pine Key, Florida, in the tony districts of Scottsdale, and in Cape Cod, and Boston.

The son had a record of arrest for multiple traffic infractions by age 14 in 2009, for driving without insurance, passing in a no-passing zone, failure to obey a traffic signal, and for display of unauthorized and improper windshield decorations, the details of which could only be imagined by a casual visitor.

To make the story more interesting, there was a website of recorded pop music by a young man of the same name living in Latvia. A further dive into public records revealed several associated women with names like Dubravka G. Wahl and Olga Alekseevna Vorobyova, as well as a man who lived just down the road named, Michael Warren Pearce, of the same age as Ms. Wahl.

Mr. Pearce was also associated with a Big Pine Key in Florida, a 1300 block of Long Beach Avenue address. Another name, C. Mercier, was also revealed at the same Cornville address.

Pearce was also associated with Clearsky Ranch down the road toward Cornville.

Over the past five years, the Oak Creek Winery had been offered for sale off and on the market at a range of $1.5M to $2.3M for the winery and ten acres including a small vineyard. From customer reviews, the wines offered at the winery, were unremarkable. The tasting room was panned as having little ambience but enthusiastic employees, however, one reviewer complained she had been neglected in favor of three tall, willowy and young blondes. Although the reviewer had posted no image of herself, her own appearance could not have been clearer from her comments.

Eventually, a sales brochure surfaced that offered both Oak Creek Winery and Clearsky Ranch for sale.

A woman of the name Zilpha Daveann Pearse, also appeared in the record, an elderly woman in her 90s who had lived in West Palm Beach, the Keys and many of locales comparable to the other actors featured in this drama.

Olga was currently residing at East Bow Maker Trail, in Cottonwood, associated with one Marisol Padilla, and Alex and Alexandra Rodriguez. Her prior residences had been at 946 Main Street, Chatham, Massachusetts, 1157 Chapel Street in New Haven, and an apartment on Seaside Drive in Key West.

Dubravka, just a year or two younger than Debra, had lived at Big Pine Key and Summerland Key, as well as in Harwich Port and West Harwich, Massachusetts.

There were no validated photographs of these people, but it was tempting to imagine who, and what, they were from the likes of similar families known to many in the winery industry of Loudoun County, Virginia.

The imagination reigns and ranges over the sketchy facts of these lives and locales, and informed by a lifetime of watching interesting people, there were a few trends along which the assumptions drifted and tumbled like uprooted coils of Russian thistle.

* * *

The tiny New Holland tractor sat quietly in the shade of the cut of the dry mountainside, as if it had been waiting for him all along.

“Ever drive one of these things?” the taller man asked with a glint of humor and a touch of challenge in the corner of his eye.

It took a minute or two to circumnavigate the vehicle that seemed of all the wrong proportions. It stood very tall at first glance, that is, until its narrow stance was walked off just under at two paces, about five feet.

Narrow for a field tractor. Perhaps even dangerously narrow.

He remembered the look of unease in the eyes of another vineyard hand who had described spraying with the New Holland between trellis rows along the steep hillside of Dos Padres vineyard. Even with a wide stance and ample suspension, much larger tractors felt slippery beneath one’s boots on steep terrain.

The door popped open and he leaned far into the plexiglass-enclosed cab. The seat was new and almost spotless, with a faint hint of new tractor aroma left to overwinter.

“When was this thing last lubed and oiled?” he asked the Vineyard Manager, who scratched his chin in the folksy, amiable way big men have, who have always felt secure in life.

“…oh, I guess back about November-December sometime.”

“You said the mechanic is Harry?”

“That’s right. He looks after all the equipment here…”

With the engine hood snapped open and propped up, he poked a knowing finger here and there among the hydraulic and oil lines. It would be good to have a ride that was this clean, this well-kept, he observed to himself quietly.

“Hmmm…” he muttered squatting next to the left side. Harry had been professional enough to write the date of the new spin-on oil filter which was, in fact, 11/17. He would have to meet this guy.

“Why’ncha jump up there and we’ll try ‘er out?”

It did not take much urging and in a single movement, he was mounted up, systematically scanning the control panels, instruments, the levers and knobs that bring joy to the heart of any mechanical man.

“They propose to pay me to operate this beauty?” he grinned, saying nothing except to himself as he groped under the seat for the adjustment lever. His feet seemed to magically slip to the right pedals and clutch and his hands caressed the black plastic knobs at the end of the stick shift levers.

His head swung to the right, taking in the controls for the radio, across the dash behind the wheel, and to the quadrants at various levels that operated the PTO, the hydraulics.

The dust from Jason’s old red pick-up was just settling down into the road seen in the review mirror as he nudged the New Holland into low gear and lurched forward in the opposite direction along a completely deserted stretch of Dancing Apache Road.

Instinctively, he found the combination of gears and levels that produced the fastest lumbering, bouncing gait as the tractor rumbled over the washboard gravel and uphill. A glance in the rearview showed he, too, was kicking up a choking dust, but only behind him where the road stretched down, winding slightly into the distance and across the Verde Valley, the morning sun began to brighten the purple shadows of the Mingus Mountains to the west.

God, he loved the feel of a new tractor beneath him, rumbling along in the fresh desert air of Arizona in February. It would be too hot in another hour or two, then the hoodie and jacket would be shed for a teeshirt. To the right uphill rose House Mountain, whose slopes were said to be an ancient volcano.

(…to be continued…)