Call it a draw

Call it a draw is Pops’s formula for ending the confrontation over whether he and his daughter should leave the canyon ranch. It sounds like a negotiated settlement, but his repeated use of the phrase also acknowledges losses and expectations that cannot simply be settled.

The Refusal at the Ranch

Hig asks Pops and his daughter to fly back with him to Erie Airport and live with him and Bangley on the plains. Pops declines: he wants to remain where he is and spend his remaining years in peace with his daughter. He calls the whole episode a draw, turning a refusal into a proposed stopping point rather than an argument to be won.

The phrase does not mean that the two men have reached an ordinary compromise. Hig has offered a different future, but Pops names his own priority: staying with his daughter. His answer closes the immediate question without making either man’s circumstances disappear.

A Repeated Reckoning

Pops uses the phrase again while describing his return from military service to the ranch. He had expected the life he knew on returning to be very different from the one he found. The repetition links his present refusal to a longer disappointment: the choice to remain is not presented as proof that life has matched his hopes, but as a way to accept what it has become.

The ranch itself carries a history older than Pops’s return. It belonged to his grandfather, who ran cattle there in summer before the Bureau of Land Management existed to lease the land. That inheritance gives Pops’s wish to stay a concrete setting and a family past, even as his account makes clear that familiar ground cannot guarantee the life he once imagined.

Meaning and Limits

The phrase offers a modest, personal boundary: the episode can stop here, and Pops can choose peace with his daughter over leaving with Hig. Yet it does not erase the disagreement or repair the gap between expectation and reality. Its repeated, plainspoken finality is therefore both a settlement and an admission that some losses cannot be reversed. The text leaves the balance unresolved; Pops can call the matter a draw without claiming that everything has been made even.