On the Horns of Mourning, Part 3 (End)

Mid-October at the ranges of Chimney Butte and Elkhorn. The cusp of winter on the plains and work is underway on a ranch house made of cottonwood logs. The main house would be finished by spring of 1885. Other buildings would follow, including a barn, a blacksmith shop, and a chicken coop. Theodore Roosevelt had ambitions to raise about one thousand head of cattle. One wonders how much of that ambition was driven by the relatively successful cattle raising season of the year before, and how much was driven by the need to grow something new from the ashes of grief.

If I could ask Teddy a question, it would be, from what was he running when he arrived on the ranch? He had a reputation for forthrightness which leads me to believe he would give honest answers to honest questions. He also does not appear to have talked much about losing his mother and wife. Perhaps his own version of the “man code” advised him to lock up the pain so as to not feel it. Certainly as a way to avoid displaying personal damage to the world. Displaying pain has often been taken as a sign of weakness, in personal and societal mores. History shows Theodore Roosevelt as the kind of man who placed great value on personal strength and courage. Given all that, my questions to him most likely would have been met with polite demurrals.

I have a clear idea of what he was escaping, though. Pain such as that is relatable. It is translatable. My respite from it would have to happen within. With limited exceptions there was no place to go but to the wilds of the mind. More so than usual, I began to live in my head. I ventured into the dense benighted thickets that became my emotional landscape in the months that followed. I had nowhere else to go and was at a loss to find anything better.

The soul as animal kept for study. Cranium as vivarium, the only safe place for that animal to roam. Its security I augmented by undertaking long walks in the woods and by water. Hiking provided relative solitude in what was far from frontier country. Birds and deer and the occasional fish became my herds of cattle, free ranging through the the parks and river. Boulders served as impromptu rocking chairs on riverbanks serving as porches. I took counsel from wind in the leaves and water flowing over rocks. Voices such as theirs beckoned me back from the black edge at the end of the universe. It is safe to say that nature had a direct role in preventing my dissolution.

Solitude in conjunction with the natural world allows hearts and minds seeking respite from trauma to find their respective levels. Solitude and nature are undeniably restorative, a gift that is integral to what they offer to human beings. I conjecture that Theodore Roosevelt understood this, and he was fortunate to have the resources to act on it in such direct, spectacular fashion out on the western edge of the Dakotas. My circumstances were more modest, but no less worthy and helpful. I never made it to the Territories in the physical world. I wish I could have done so. In my mind I have a different story. I would join our past President on the porch of his ranch house, with a rocking chair and a good book. Out there in the gold light of summer afternoons, Teddy and I would share our experience on the surviving of grief, with nary a word having to be spoken. We both understand being gored by the horns of mourning.

On the Horns of Mourning, Part 2

I have never possessed a ranch in the middle of solitude. There was a time in my life where my need for that ranch was desperate.

The light went out of my life in August of 2003 on the day my son died, hard on the heels of the death of my daughter not much more than two weeks earlier. What light there was flickered wanly in my heart, to be replaced by suffocating darkness, cold and infinite. The shock had me frozen and paralyzed. As it slowly abated a singular thought ice-picked its way into my mind: run from the dark, as fast and as far as my shattered heart would allow. There was no destination other than to find a place away from the world and its obscenities.

The Elkhorn Ranch was unknown to me at that time. If I had been aware of its existence, while engulfed in the miasmata of grief, I almost certainly would have mounted an expedition to visit. What I know now is how much I needed a ranch then.

Wide open spaces and time to explore them: true luxuries not within my possession. I called a truce with my job, and my employers were sympathetic to my need for time away to grapple with the fallout from grief. The tether remained. A journey to big sky was not possible. Temporary respite manifested in the form of a week-long trip split between western Massachusetts and Nantucket Island. The Berkshire Mountains embraced my soul with verdant arms of arboreal grace, while the deep aqua green waters of Nantucket Sound laved away some of the pain that patinaed my heart. I dreamt often of uprooting, of selling off possessions, and moving to where the sea and forest would insulate me from the outer dark.

The sabbatical was not to be, of course. No ancestral lands, or manor house, or second home to be found. There were no territories offering sanctuary, those places having been subsumed by statehood in the intervening years between myself and Teddy. As the days wore on I came to understand that I would have to explore the territories within in order to attain peace without. My habit of long walks in the woods and by the water would become the proxy horseback rides away from civilization. As such, I rode far and often in search of that place where I could hang my hat by the door. The Elkhorn Ranch I needed was somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

To be continued.

On the Horns of Mourning

There is nothing like death to stoke the engines of escape. Shock is the fire, grief is the gasoline. To lose one beloved is catalyst enough. To lose two in succession is to inject pure oxygen into the roaring furnace of the soul. Experience this and watch the world turn from cherry red to arc-welder white. Survival is possible, but not guaranteed.

Consider the life tragedies of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1884 while serving as an assemblyman in the New York State legislature the future President was called home because of the severe illness of his mother Mattie. On February 14th, she died of typhoid fever not long after Theodore’s arrival. In the afternoon of that same day his wife Alice, who had given birth to their daughter Alice Lee Roosevelt two days prior, died from undiagnosed kidney failure. In his daily journal for that day, Theodore inscribed an ‘X’ above the terse entry “The light has gone out of my life.”

To say that light has gone out of life is quite an understatement. That dual tragedy appears as a cosmic gut punch with a fist to the back of the head on the way down. Anyone would be forgiven for collapsing under the force of such a terrible blow. A small mercy to be had in embracing the floor or ground or whatever one finds to grasp. Is it the hyperabundance of gravity or the lack thereof that impels us to seek an anchor, to avoid getting sucked in or drifting away? Thus is the pressure of grief.

Theodore Roosevelt undoubtedly felt the gravity that threatened to tear him apart, counteracted only by an anti-gravity that reached out from the west. It took him from New York to the far western reaches of the territory that would eventually become the state of North Dakota. On a quest for solitude, the future President ventured out to a ranch he already owned, the Maltese Cross Ranch, and ended up purchasing the land for a second one about thirty-five miles north of the town of Medora. He planned on raising more heads of cattle, and he dubbed this sanctuary the Elkhorn Ranch.

It was there that Roosevelt, it may be surmised, wrestled with his grief and how it framed his life. He kept the ranch until 1890. The fate of the Elkhorn is in itself an interesting reflection of the effects of mourning on the soul.

To be continued.

The Fire Behind

Seeker knelt at the edge of the prairie, retching his guts out with volcanic intensity. Slow poison and spiritual exhaustion had taken their toll. His arms trembling with the violence of the possessed, sheer force of will kept his head from dipping forward into the foulness polluting the ground. Behind him, roiling smoke besmirched the horizon of the sea of grass that once held his heart. Seeker could feel the heat even at the miles he had put between he and it. He spat. Pain radiated from the stone behind his breastbone.

The heaves subsided. Seeker rocked back on his haunches with hands on his hips. Hot, it was under that furnace sun. He sucked in grateful lungfuls as a cooling breeze sprang up. He thought maybe the wind spirits still held affection for him if they deigned to grant such a mercy. There had been precious little of that in the many moons of running from a hole that had opened in the sea.

Ticking in the grass. Cricket choruses bidding him farewell, or perhaps composing a dirge. Seeker did not know. The high keening of a red-tailed hawk broke the symphony of crickets. Crusty eyes opened and he could see the hawk circling a short distance away. Towards the east a sprinkling of trees congealed into a dusty forest crowding the terrain that stretched out before him. Green. The color made his heart twitch, memories of who he once was crowding to the fore of a kaleidoscopic hallucination that tumbled like the ocean he remembered lay far beyond those trees.

Seeker made to go, gathering up a sweat-stained hat, a battered backpack, and a heavy walking stick burnished by months of use, sweat, and tears. The backpack bowed his back under its weight. The hat he settled down over his filthy brow. His trembling hands gripped the stick tightly as he willed motion into legs that ached like the throb of an earthquake.

Sunlight like molten copper beat down on Seeker's neck. He resigned himself to the burn, it was nothing new when he compared it to the tannings of his youth. A few hundred steps onward a raspy mewling caught his ear. "The cat!" he muttered to himself. He stopped to unload the pack. Sitting on top of some rags and an iron pot was a small bobcat. Seeker had found him in the grass by a stream crossed miles ago. The mother was nowhere in sight. Little ribs poking through a matted robe of fur had given him pause. Even through the despair and fatigue, Seeker felt the gravity of the feline.

Small paws grasped at his finger. A raspy little tongue licked at the tips. Seeker scratched the animal behind its ears, then rested it on his left forearm as he stood to go. He spat again to rid his mouth of the bile and spite. He looked back one last time. The horizon writhed and curled, the smoke a giant serpent in his garden of Eden. It was closer than he realized. He turned away from the setting sun and the heat. The sea of grass would hold him no longer. There was walking, nothing more under a gargantuan sky to keep him moving towards the unseen ocean he hoped would buoy his sinking heart.

A Thousand Channels, 24/7

On bright mornings, the traveler was caught off-guard by ghosts. Memories of the past washing ashore on the beach of his mind. It was the driving, really, that did it. The road stretched out before him full of promise. He would smile and choke down a few tears. The piquancy of his brother's ghost, the never-heard cries of his first born children, all gone except for that irreducible block of memory. Searing pain and ecstasy make a curious couple intertwined in the mind and heart. It was the road. The one that started a thousand miles away and led him into a sea of grass and remembrance.

"Did you see that?" (laughter)

"See what?" (Momentary befuddlement)

"That sign back there."

"Just now? No. What did it say?"

"Get this: MICHAELANGELO'S LIQUORS."

"Say whaaat?" (Giggling fit)

" I know, man! Who knew that he liked to get his drink on here?" (More laughter)

"Seriously, man, look how far he fell from the Sistine Chapel."

(Pensive silence)

Once more on the road, I have to do it, it's part of the job. I'm used to it now. Except for the run-down parts of town. Or towns, I should clarify. No, towns and cities. There is a lot of them out here and there are quite a few where it seems like the inhabitants have been ground down by life. Or the landlords were ground down. Or maybe everyone just stopped caring. Too many buildings possessed of gray dinginess, decrepitude and crappy signage. There is still cause for amusement, though. Passing through one such area, driving past Legs Party Bar ("Open 'til 2 AM!") I saw that the Knobtown Strip Center has added a new tenant. It's a "spa" offering"massage". I had to laugh. What, "Cheap Smokes and Liquor" from the joint next door aren't good enough?

A RECORD OF COMESTIBLES PURCHASED FOR THE MIDDAY REPAST

Dine In  9/23/2015  12:33:28 PM

Order # 132156  Cashier: Destiny M.

1 LG Steamer $8.49

 Mayo NO

1 Reg Combo  $2.59

 Medium Drink*

 Chip For Combo

Sub. Total:    $11.08

Tax:                 $1.04

Total:             $12.12

   Visa:            $12.12

   Change:       $0.00

The Kansas City Royals baseball team won their division this year. They will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their first opponent is the scrappy Houston Astros, who made the playoffs for the first time since 2005. The inhabitants are looking forward to a great series, hopefully the Boys in Blue will get to go to the World Series again like they did last year. Everyone is talking about them and tuning in. One thing is for certain: the Royals seem easy to like, even if one is a fan of another team.

No matter how many times I have seen it in the course of my job, I still find it annoying that most people seem to think that tissue boxes with shiny colors or "art" on them are true interior decoration. They aren't, and never will be. The amount of time I waste in the course of a typical day hiding those boxes, so I can shoot a better picture, may not be huge on an individual basis, but it adds up. Every time I move one I think of French author Honoré de Balzac, who after a night of sex, allegedly lamented "There goes another novel!"

Did You Know? Collared lizards can run on their hind legs with a stride that reaches more than 3 times the length of their bodies.

Excerpt from the National Park Service's Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve webpage:

     Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America. Within a generation
     the vast majority was developed and plowed under. Today less than 4% remains, mostly
     here in the Kansas Flint Hills. The preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of           

     the once vast tallgrass prairie and its cultural resources. Here the tallgrass prairie takes     

     its last stand.

A Typical Day of Carnage -

 Raccoons: 5

 Opossums: 1

 Birds (species unknown): 3

 Squirrels: 8?

 Deer: 1

 Mouse: 1

It was the mouse that really threw me. To date I had never seen one in all my rounds. I nearly trampled it on my way back to  the car.

I-70 gets it start back east, and not very auspiciously. It begins in a Park-And-Ride in Baltimore, Maryland. It runs 2,151 miles to the west, passing though St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver until it peters out in an interchange with I-15 just outside Cove Fort, Utah. The distance from Cove Fort to Kansas City is 1,106 miles. The distance from Kansas City to Baltimore is 1,060 miles. It is a new life in the center.

I am home now. It was a busy day, lots of photos to be shot, lots of pavement to be traversed. I was able to drive with the windows down all day. No A/C. The rush of air through the cabin of my small SUV provides a white noise that allows me to follow my Zen. I think a lot while driving. Sometimes I talk to myself. Other times, especially on long drives away from the urban clutter, I stop and listen to the insects in the grass.

---

If anyone is perplexed by the passages above, you should know they are a tribute of sorts, my offering to a literary form previously unknown to me. The form is called biji, and it is of Chinese origin dating back to 220 AD, surviving up until about 1912 AD. I came across it in a fascinating book published by McSweeney's, titled "Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed"*. I bought the book at a book store specializing in overstocks, trade-ins and other forms of second-hand volumes. Great buy, wonderful stuff. According to McSweeny's, biji can be translated as "notebook" and is characterized by "Musings, anecdotes, quotations, 'believe-it-or-not' fiction and social anthropology". They go on further to say that biji also can contain legends, scientific notes, and bits of local wisdom. Lists of interesting objects and travel narratives are also quite common. After reading the examples in the book (and being somewhat disturbed by the 'modern' take on it by Douglas Coupland) I was immediately smitten by the form and the idea. Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time can probably see why this is so. I think it is because biji finally, after all these years, puts a name to the things in my head.

*Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed, as curated by Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 2009 by McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Magpie Tales 240: Dawes County Meditation

Photo by Tom Chambers via Tess at Magpie Tales

Wide open here in God's country

That means hearts as well as range

Loneliness not the sole province of cowboys

Rim of her world defined by stone

Scratching its defiance of the sky
She knew the legend of star-crossed love

Romeo and Juliet of a different hue

Whispers of their mad leap from the butte

But all she wanted was to escape

the barbed wire of her heart

A Game of Pooh Sticks on the Bridge of Sorrows

"Daddy, will the Sun ever burn out?"

Her voice quavering, my daughter questioned the very life of stars. The Sun is not the certainty to her that it is to me. It was there by creek side, under a luminous smear of galactic dust, she spoke to me of Death. 

I inhaled crisp air lashed with the tang of woodsmoke from the fire at our feet. A little creek, crossed by a tiny footbridge, bisected the yard in front of our cabin. It burbled and whispered as I craned my head back to contemplate the stars overhead in the clear South Dakota sky. Her questions were unexpected. The truth seized hold of my tongue before I could shush it.

"Yes, it will, sweet pea."

Her eyes as those of a wounded doe, she asked "When?"

"A long time from now, so far away we won't know about it when it does," I said.
She paused. Her face a sphinx before the flicker of the flames. 

"Could it happen tomorrow?"
"No, dear."
"But when will it happen?"
"Billions of years from now."

That stopped her cold. I swallowed the tightness in my throat, a metallic tinge of regret burning my gullet. The truth as I knew it was maybe not the best of revelations for a thoughtful kid who wants to see around corners. Just like her Da. I could tell. It was there in the shining eyes beyond the firelight. We held our breath, teetering on the fulcrum of a hard question, she wanting to know the truth and me wrestling with shielding her from it.

The dam broke. Questions spilled from her lips. Tell me about stars, she said. How long does it take for them to burn out? What happens if I get sick and die? she asked. What happens if you get sick? Is that what happened to my brother and sister? I don't want that to happen to us, she said. Will it? Will it, Daddy?

My mind reeled. The sediment of memory was stirred up, and thick. I did my best to describe and explain, without going to deep into details. Assurances were made, platitudes delivered, at best it was a redacted version of wisdom and history. There was no hiding from the direct questions. She is too smart for me to pull the wool over her emotional eyes for too long, so there was no trying.

The sutures on my heart throbbed and ached when tears welled up in her eyes. How to explain these things without breaking someone's heart? Compassion and regret were duking it out in my head.

But she asked. I wanted her to know. We drifted off into a conversation about the stars, again, their colors and what they mean. She impressed me with what she already seems to know about those things. I asked her if she knew of an easy way to remember the colors and the sequence. She did not. From some memory vault last accessed long ago, I dredged up the mnemonic I had learned as a kid.

"O-B-A-F-G-K-M, sweet pea. 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me." I laughed. She blushed, I think, hiding her grin behind her hand. 
"That's funny, daddy."
"I know, but you remember it, right?"

She asked me for the third time if I was certain the Sun wasn't going to burn out when we would know about it. I responded again that I was certain.

"Are you sure?" she asked, her arching upward in that 'I-do-not-quite-believe-you-yet' sort of way.
"Yes, I'm sure."

We lapsed into silence. A slight breeze stirred the trees. For some ticks of the clock, I watched the stars wheeling over the ridge line to the north. It was beautiful in the night. My eyelids drifted downward, the murmurs of the creek and the dying of the light exerting the gravity of sleepiness. She surprised me with another question.

"Daddy, do you remember the bridge? The one back in Maryland close to the apartment?"
I snapped my eyes open. "Yes, I do."
"I liked the bridge. Remember when we used to play pooh-sticks from it?"

The tightness in my throat returned. Boy, did I ever remember. "Yes," I squeezed out.

"That was a fun game. I liked watching the sticks in the water. We could play it here!" she said while pointing to the footbridge. The shine in her eyes was pure joy. Much better than the existential sadness I had glimpsed earlier. I chuckled.

"I reckon we could, sweet pea, but it is a bit dark for it."
"I know," she sighed, "but we could when it is light." 

With that, she announced that she wanted to go inside the cabin, because she was tired and it was getting cool. She fetched water and I doused the embers of the fire. Watching them fade away, I felt untethered from the earth, but comfortable with floating. My daughter hugged me, briefly, in that skittish animal way that kids have sometimes. The realness of the affection convinced me that sometimes, the best way to handle the infinite is to play games on the bridge of sorrows.

Obsolete

Jonas felt his hands getting numb. Too much driving with a balky heater left the cab of the truck warm only in name. The truck, like the man, was getting old. With age came the pains that took up residence in the bones. They waxed and waned, but never quite left. Good news that always made Jonas grin was that he owned both the truck and his bones. Nobody but God could take them away from him now. The old man had no idea that God was thinking the same thing.


Jee-sus, I don't wanna die alone, 
Jesus, oh, Jesus, I don't wanna die alone,
My love wasn't true,
Now all I have is you...

The words spilled, tinny and faint, from the radio on the dash. Jonas sucked in a lungful of cold Nebraska air to say "No, sir, Mr. Cash I don't wanna die alone neither. Nothin' good to come of that, I reckon." Highway 26 stretched out under the dead January sky. The snow stuck to the windshield had the glow of pearly ashes. The wipers had gone on strike miles back, working in fits and starts. Jonas thought he might stop soon to brush the glass clean.

He drove on, drifting into a daze. The truck stayed straight. Not hard to do out here where the flatness was damn near end all and be all. No traffic for what seemed like hours, unless the snow snakes whipping across the road counted. Not much in the way of animals except for the rare bird or two that telegraphed across the sky. He thought he saw an antelope, once, but it was too far away to be sure.

The featureless gray of the clouds made a riddle of time. The light came from everywhere and nowhere but it did seem to be getting fainter. His belly grumbled, as if to confirm his suspicions about the lateness of the day. There was a thermos jammed into the passenger side seat, wedged in the crease between the back and the upright. It was half-full of tepid coffee leftover from the last century when he had left his trailer, perhaps for good. The only food in the truck was half a cheese sandwich and a almost new box of beef jerky laying on the dash.

Jonas. sighed and belched. The sandwich, entombed in a crumbled paper bag along with a crushed empty beer can, lay down on the opposite floor board. He could not reach it without ducking so far down he would lose sight of the road. The thought of it made him really tired. He surprised himself at how lazy he felt. Unusual for a man that had near wrecked his body working hard, hard, for most of his adult life.

The ache in his knees and wrists never let him forget. But he had to eat something. The plains stretched out for miles around him, empty, lonely, with no signs of hospitality anywhere in sight. It could hours, or never, until he might find a place to stop, get warm and fill his belly. Resignation wheezed out between his chapped lips. He reached out for the beef jerky. Setting the box on the seat beside him, Jonas slid one of the strips out of the pack, fumbling with the plastic wrap.

The jerky filled his mouth, salt mixing with grease and a low tang of rough chilies. The meat was blood warm from having sat on the defroster. The warmth momentarily threw the old man, reminding him too much of a punch to the mouth he took one night long ago, in a bar the name of which had faded from memory. Blood and two teeth, shiny on the winter gravel and looking garish in the neon of the sign. He grinned and laughed to dispel the ghosts. "Hell, man," he cackled, "that fella's fist looked ten time worse!" His voice got swallowed up by the close air.

He swallowed hard. It was getting dark. Crinkles on the horizon told him that Wyoming was getting close. Or was it Colorado? Smile collapsed from his face, and sadness took its place. He knew now he had lost track of where he was, and sure as hell was not turning around.

Light drained from the sky. Wind buffeted the weathered truck, shoving it gently from side to side in the lane. Jonas cut on his lights and sent up a prayer. Miles ahead, the temperature was dropping further. The clouds unfolded into rain. Night fell, and with it black ice lay claim to the road.