Shortly after responding to Sharon O’Toole’s comment to my September 22nd post below, I realized just how ambiguous ‘boys without authority’ sounded. Mulling it over since, I offer the following:
I remember the exhilarating feeling of leaving the house as a boy with a .22 rifle in hand, visually plotting various routes over foothill cowtrails to the near ridge and into the next watershed. Whether after school or an all-day, weekend adventure, I went alone but had to be home before dark.
At an early age I was my own man, free to roam unsupervised under the auspices of shooting ground squirrels, but more often than not I’d return with rattles or a snakeskin that I’d shot along the way. Worried and chagrinned, my mother understood them as a measure of my impending manhood. By September of my twelfth summer, I had killed twice as many rattlesnakes that year as any man on the ranch.
Years later reading Gary Snyder’s “The Incredible Survival of the Coyote,” it was not difficult to place myself within the ‘heroic and epic West’ played-out as a boy away from home and the influence of my parents – “…beyond the reach of the law, which is to say the Nation State patriarchal figure archetype,” Snyder goes on to say, “the West is psychologically occupied by boys without fathers and mothers, who are really free to get away with things for a while, and that’s why there’s so much humor and lore in the West.”
In retrospect, it is not surprising that I created my own myths early-on, trailed by buzzards and watched by hawks, I garnered a natural ethic as I got in touch with a wilder world, ‘grandfather’ oaks acting as my conscience. It was indeed another dimension, my reward beyond my chores and homework, and from this I attribute my early sense of place.
Much later during the ‘90s while fighting a rock and gravel operation within the channel of Dry Creek, I was dismayed by the ‘outlaw’ behavior of the operators and lax enforcement by the County as I watched the microcosmic exploitation of California, and the West, unfold before me. As they changed the landscape, I realized that some of my personal stories were triggered by certain trees, certain landmarks, and once removed, so too were my memories. It cut me deeply.
Unfortunately for many today, the icon of the cowboy unjustly represents this irresponsible mindset of the West. And as we in this cattle culture face public and political pressure for more accountability, i.e. the National Animal Identification System, any reluctance to comply merely reinforces their misconceptions. Furthermore, we have failed to tell our story – we have failed to communicate beyond the meaningless political divisiveness that infects much of this country.
Only now, on the shorter end of my string, do I realize that the political aspects of nearly every issue are simple-minded diversions enhanced by the media to keep people from thinking, on-going dramas that tend to desensitize us to real issues at hand. Somehow, to get beyond this ‘non-sense,’ we Westerners need to get back in touch with our nature, both wild and human, to relocate that sense once common to us all.
