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"Too Many People." Anton Obermayer, a 75-year-old Bavarian-born brewmaster, plans to take the service, too, but he will use it only on a limited basis. He is proudly self-sufficient. He built his own home, cabinets and furniture, grows his own vegetables. His wife Mary Monica, 74, makes her own soap. "When I came here in 1917," says Obermayer, "it was a wilderness. It is not so good now. There are too many people, and they are making too many roads. They kill all the animals. Oh, well, when electricity comes, we will get an electric stove and put it beside the wood stove."
Torjus "Gunnysack" Johnson, 66, was not so sure he wanted electricity. Gunnysack and his wife, Mamie, subsist on social security money, and they did not know if they could afford the $10-a-month minimum charge for electricity. Besides, says Mamie Johnson, 79, "I'd rather have spent the money for a game license. I do some fishing, but I'd like to get me a deer this fall, and a bear. I'd sure like to get the juice from a fat bear. Makes a fine oil for salad." Nevertheless, the Johnsons have signed up.
Similarly, Charles Fields, 80, and his wife, Martha, 79, sense that the coming of electricity will intrude on their remembrances of long-gone times. Says Charlie Fields, slapping his thigh: "Back when I was a young fellow, I lived in southern Colorado. I was a gunslinger." Today the Fields' combined income is only $99 a month and a memory a day. But, says Martha, "we're going to go ahead and get the house wired. At our age, anything can happen. We don't have any electric appliances, and I guess we won't get any. But we'll have lights."
The lights in the Fields' place—and appliances and television and all the rest in the valley—may illuminate much that has lain dark and shadowy for the people of the Yaak. At the Fields' place, for example, the lights will brighten walls that are hung with old rifles, a couple of powder horns, pictures of relatives in high lace collars and, of course, a photo of the President of the U.S.—Abe Lincoln.