Cima and Her Father Leave the Canyon Ranch is the departure forced by drought from a place Pops had devoted his life to preserving. As the creek dwindles and the ranch’s animals die, staying no longer means safety; leaving means risking a journey without reliable water. Hig’s plane offers a way out, but only through a difficult evacuation that separates father and daughter briefly before bringing them together again.

Drought and the Decision to Leave

The immediate cause is the drying landscape. When Hig asks why the family would leave its green canyon, the answer is drought: the previous summer, the creek nearly ran dry, and the family had to dig into its bed to collect enough water for drinking. Half the cattle died. The worsening heat had made the ranch’s apparent refuge increasingly untenable, while the same water shortage raised a larger uncertainty: if the mesa was drying, conditions beyond it might be worse.

The decision had been forming before Hig arrived. Pops and Cima expected they would have to leave, probably in spring, but did not know where to go. Their fear was practical rather than abstract: travel without water could be deadly, yet waiting at the ranch meant facing another dry season with fewer animals and less water. The creek and green meadow still offered the appearance of an Eden, but that appearance could not outweigh the losses already underway.

For Hig, environmental decline carries a wider history of disappearance. He remembers trout vanishing as streams grew too warm, and fears the loss of creeks as well as the loss of fish. His memory of surviving green woods and the sensory familiarity of flowing water make the ranch’s drought more than a logistical problem: it belongs to the same unfolding loss of the natural places on which he has relied for sustenance and solace. The departure therefore joins the family’s immediate need to move with the book’s accumulating evidence that familiar environments are changing beyond recovery.

A Plan Built Around the Plane

Hig proposes taking Cima and Pops to Grand Junction to inspect the tower and airport, obtain aviation fuel, and then fly back to Bangley. The plan depends on The Beast, a Cessna 182 whose limited fuel and ability to take off from the meadow shape what can be attempted. Pops has worked out the aircraft’s approximate fuel capacity, consumption, and distances, and recognizes that Hig is near the flight’s return-fuel limit. His calculations do not remove the danger; they establish how narrow the margin is.

The evacuation also has to account for the ranch’s remaining animals. Cima and Hig decide to take two lambs, treating them as essential cargo rather than leaving them behind. They weigh one in a sling made from a shirt against a bucket of water; the balance indicates that the lamb weighs about seventeen pounds. The improvised measurement turns a tender, practical choice into a loading calculation. With Pops not aboard for the first takeoff, Hig judges the plane can manage the load, though the uncertainty remains.

Before departure, Pops leaves the canyon alone, before full light and without ceremony. He looks over the remaining cattle and their calves, the sheep and lambs, takes a light pack and his rifle, latches the gate, and walks downstream through the brush fence. The act is spare, but its cost is explicit: he is leaving the only life he has made for himself, bound to his family’s lineage across generations. The gate closes behind him on a ranch that cannot sustain that inheritance any longer.

Cima’s First Flight and Pops’s Reunion

Hig loads Cima and the lambs and prepares The Beast on the meadow strip. The takeoff demands more than simply opening the throttle: the plane gathers speed across the cleared track, stays close to the ground to build airspeed, and lifts only near the trees at the end of the meadow. Cima signals readiness with a thumbs-up. Hig’s response is concentrated on the narrow physical demands of getting airborne with the animals aboard; the successful climb carries them out of the canyon, but does not yet reunite the family.

After crossing the river, Hig spots Pops sitting beside the road with his pack and rifle, waiting in the open. He lands across from him and brings the plane to a stop. Pops climbs in behind Cima, acknowledging the lambs as part of their new undertaking. The family is together again, now traveling west toward Grand Junction. This reunion changes the departure from an individual escape into a collective relocation, though their immediate destination remains a reconnaissance and fuel stop rather than a guaranteed permanent home.

Significance

The sequence turns ecological deterioration into a concrete break with home. Drought first kills cattle and threatens drinking water; then it forces the family to abandon a ranch whose value is measured not only in shelter but in a way of life inherited across generations. Pops’s silent walk out through the gate gives that loss its most direct form, while the later pickup shows that leaving the place need not mean leaving one another.

The Beast’s role is correspondingly double. It is a fragile machine operating at the edge of its fuel and takeoff limits, yet it becomes the means by which Cima, Pops, and two lambs can attempt a future elsewhere. The animal cargo recalls the biblical Ark without making the journey secure: it is a small, improvised effort to carry life out of a failing refuge. The departure offers movement, not certainty, and ends with the family reunited in flight toward Grand Junction.