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From the Ground Up, or the Head Down
I expected it to be snowing this morning when I woke up for good. I had driven into northeastern New Mexico by what was for me an old and one-time standard way for me to reach this retreat. It was well past dark when I began the roughly 60 miles through the canyons and mesas that follow the Cimarron back toward its origin along the rims and bank cuts of Johnson Mesa. It might have been too dark to see the colors of the “Spanish Shirts” below the rimrock that lays between Black Mesa and Cotton Mesa but they have been pretty well stamped into my mind for more than what is now a decade and half. Just the dark outline against a gray-banked sky is enough to bring life to a mental picture and touch someplace well below skin deep.
The predictors, who are rarely exactly right, had forecast snow by 5 a.m. and the skies seemed to confirm it. But when I stopped somewhere on the 16-mile stretch of gravel road that interrupts the “blacktop” to step out of the truck, there had been a break in the cloudy mass to the southeast where the stars were still clear and set in a coal-black sky. I know there are probably places in the world where the sky is blacker and the stars more sharply defined on a clear night than along this tract – but I can’t tell you where it is. I have no way to correctly count the number of times I have driven it in the darkest hour of the night and can promise you that there are few places better to stand with just your most important thoughts and miles of openness in all directions while you empty the bladder or refill the cup – or both.
There was no snow to greet me when I detected the beginning of daylight, only a gray bank of clouds and a north wind beginning to pick up. I had stepped outside about 4 this morning and it had been abnormally still so I was sure the weather was on the way. My friend and I had visited til about 1 that morning when I had arrived.
Somewhere around 10:30, a light dance of flurries started and it is now a twisting cloud as the wind has returned to a more violent pace. I have made a clearing on the table which now serves as not just a dining site but is mostly a workbench for various beadwork and primitive leather projects and set up my laptop. Of late, I have too many notes and outlines and nothing resulting from them.
I fixed breakfast and have camp-cleaned the kitchen area. More than a half a century of cowboying, rodeo clowning, and guiding hunters has taken a physical toll on someone who I coached in high school, schooled on saddle broncing, and ending up guiding for at a time when I really needed it. We all have seasons of life, as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Where those seasons lead us is important, not just for us but for those who follow.
With a recent bout with blood poisoning, a knee operation, then another infection, my friend’s long-standing injuries have been enhanced. He gets around on a single crutch but just barely and his beadwork and leather work, which is first class, is inconsistent because his right hand is numb quite often. Either shoulder is subject to “jumping out” but between the two of us, they are popped back in pretty easily. Practice makes perfect. Those are just some of the physical wounds but we all know that they are sometimes the easiest ones to manage. We should also know by now that our wounds of all types are mostly of our own making. But so is the healing. At least, we have to take the first, decisive step.
While I was busy cleaning the kitchen, he pulled on a coat (which isn’t easy with those shoulders) and stumped out the back door on that one crutch to gather wood before I could get to it. As he worked his way back toward the kitchen door an inch at a time carrying wood and operating that crutch, I opened the door and tried to take the wood. “Hell, the least I can do is carry a little wood if someone is dumb-ass enough to drive 500 miles just to cook and wash dishes for me!”
There are those who would consider my friend stubbornly independent, perhaps needlessly so. There are still a few of us who consider that streak normal.
My friend is now leaning back by the fire with a little bit of Irish comfort and a faithful blue healer’s head in his lap. It is only a few minutes till noon here and well past noon anywhere east of here.
The break has given me a chance to sit at a keyboard while looking out the window at a swirl of wind and flurries and put a final wrap on something that I loosely tied together yesterday morning. It is more or less a simple theme that I am sure has been detected before. And one that I hope is made clearer as time goes on, despite my simple and limited abilities.
An old saying concerning fish and nations is that they rot from the head down. I am willing to accept that blindly for my own purposes of illustration.
I will not bother to comment on the wide range of rot that we all comment on from time to time (at least for now). But I will suggest that if the rot travels from the top down, the healing has to come from the ground up.
It is at the most basic levels that our most important, fundamental traits are formed. It is from the grassroots of foundational truths that not just our lives, our societies, our cultures, and our nations can be built but it is from them that these can be healed after they are corrupted and the rot begins to travel down through the body.
These essential elements of human life and achievement begin within the individual. They are what create bonds between distinct individuals and preserve those bounds despite all our mistakes and weaknesses. They are what can make individuals into families, real families. It is the strengths, values, and visions of those individuals around which a society and finally a culture is built. They define how healthy the bodies of that society and that culture are. A healthy nation cannot grow from a sick culture.
I want to be clear that rot at the top certainly needs to be cut out and replaced. But that is just the emergency measures of the moment. The healing comes from the ground up. It comes from a grassroots level that will accept only the clarity of the proven foundational elements of its birth. Without them, we are without purpose. Without them, we are only filling time.
There is now a thin layer of white across the horse pens and the flurries seem to have the promise of becoming flakes. The noon hour has struck and I will poke the fire some and join my friend with a touch of the Irish. Perhaps over the next few days, I can turn those notes and outlines into something with a little more form and meaning.
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The only night sky I have seen better than N TX / E NM is the Indian Ocean, south of the equator. I imagine that the South Pacific is better still, and perhaps the Antarctica, depending on the view.
My wife had never really been away from civilization and its lights, so when I pulled over for the cause (since I was the one drinking all the coffee), she got out and was just STUNNED at the sky. She didn’t think it was possible.
Same reaction a friend of mine from Tennessee had at a daylight scenic vista of painted valleys and distant mesas somewhere east of Post, Texas.
I will look forward to seeing your next post, but do not underrate what you’ve shared with us here. Beautiful, Ole.
As the Irish, or the Scots might say in Gaelic a lovely post. Have lived in a rural part of Arizona you can see the stars through your windshield. You can see the stars outside your door, but be careful where you step, but the Irish in the cupboard is good for snake bite.
We were out at Ayers Rock in Australia for a dinner outside in the open spaces. I’ve never seen a sky so spectacular, and in the southern hemisphere, no less.
We had taken the Cub Scouts to Meyer Observatory near Waco after sundown but the fast moving clouds disrupted an otherwise wonderful tour. As we drove back to camp at a lodge somewhere between Hico and Cranfills Gap the sky cleared and there, for a time before the fire was restarted, there was a moment…a wonderful moment of extreme clarity with our home galaxy. I will never forget it.
Good for him, may he remain stubborn and independent for a good, long time.
I have had several trips up into the Mountains west of Cimarron, shepherding boys becoming men as they test themselves for 10 days of wilderness hiking the trails that boys have been trodding for over 70 years at Philmont. One of my privileges is to find a meadow somewhere above 7500′ of altitude, in the hours well after sunset, so we can lay back in the grass and I can show them the marker stars that men have been using for guidance since the beginning of recorded civilization.
The added feature for them, of these recent generations, is I can show them how to find, and track, the many satellites we have flung into space. These are easy to see in such a dark and uncluttered sky devoid of the interference from modernity, and are a hallmark of men’s ability and achievement for the last 60 years.
I hope when they are taking their boys to Philmont they remember those evenings, and share the possibilities of what we can do when we use our imagination.
Beautiful piece, Ole, and wise.