The Frontier Stoic by Mark Hatmaker

 

Well, talk about tootin’ one’s own horn.

I offer the snippet below from my own tome of western nonfiction: The Frontier Stoic: Life Lessons from Those Who Lived a Life.

A Frontier Phrase Worth Resurrecting

If a friendly [or merely polite sort] asked one “How’re doin’?” You might hear from gregarious hombres, “Well, I’m livin’ in the shade of the wagon.”

To declare that one is “livin’ in the shade of the wagon” is to say, “Life is all right by me, no matter which way she bucks.”

To pull this wee little phrase apart and have a look at the context reveals more than a quaint colloquialism.

Crossing “The Great American Desert” [The Great Plains] and actual deserts was no easy feat. The Oregon Trail, the Bozeman, the Santé Fe, the Applegate, the Gila, the Upper and Lower Roads of Texas, and all the other lesser known routes for the adventurous, determined or downright foolish and unprepared to cross were rife with dangers.

All of these early trails were riddled with the graves of the hopeful and the discarded belongings of people who continually lightened their loads jettisoning what they thought they “couldn’t live without” to what they really needed to survive and thrive.

Dangers were incessant. The elements, the indigenous folks, the non-indigenous that had gone rogue, disease, the never-ending struggle for food, potable water, and hardships a bit beyond the grasp of we pampered folk reading this on a screen.

Such challenges and privations spawned a philosophy all its own. A creed with its own informal chapters and verses.

Many of these terrains had zero trees, bluffs, hills, anything to block the sun.

The wise walked on the shady side of the wagon when travelling.

The wise walked on the shady side of the horse when afoot.

When it was time to rest, the wise slacked against a wheel in the shade or stretched out under the wagon to provide relief from the sun.

“Livin’ in the shade of the wagon” meant that “Sure, there may not be a shade tree in sight, but I got my own shade right here and she’s just as good.”

It meant that you were amenable and adaptable.

It meant you kept your sunny-but-shaded disposition wherever you went because you knew how to enjoy what was at hand no matter the circumstances.

The shade was both the actual wagon and the metaphorical cool spirit of the individual who displayed coolness under duress. [Hemingway’s “grace under pressure,” long before Hemingway.]

To be a shade enjoying sort also meant that you were a shade provider.

Your calmness of spirit and Yankee Ingenuity demonstrating how to “use what you got at hand” in turn acted as a sort of calming shade for others around you.

The man and woman who was able to stand tall and stay cool no matter what was valued by all.

“Livin’ in the shade of the wagon” was not a mere colorful retort.

It was a declaration of intent.

It was a philosophy.

It was a valued goal to shoot for.

May we all live in the shade of the wagon!

If suchness strikes your soul you can snag physical copies in our store here.

Or grab a Kindle version here.

Scouting on Two Continents by R. R. Burnham [Part 3] by Mark Hatmaker

 

We continue with the lessons we can reap from master scout of the Southwest American Frontier & Africa, Mr. Burnham. See Part 1, and Part 2 for full immersion.]

“At this time, I used to practise incessantly with the pistol, with both right and left hands, and especially from a galloping horse.”

·        How you train is how you will fight.

·        Static range time was not the way of these early Hosses.

·        Movement and chaotic movement at that.

Mr. Burnham advises that we learn more from rough times than we do the every day nice and easy times we wallow in, day in, day out.

“In order to know life as it really is, it is necessary once in a while to be the under dog.”

Ask yourself, who is the wiser, the man in the field doing it or the man on the couch viewing the how-to video?

“As compared to Arizona, California seemed a free and happy country where Law reigned but, at that time, was not carried to the point of prescribing what one should say, write, think, eat, drink, love, or hate. The Reformers had not arrived, but if a crime was committed, the offender was usually captured and punished.”

·        Proscriptive laws/mores were hard and fast for the Universal Ethical Standards.

·        The hewing to party creed and punctilios of this or that fashion, not so much.

·        Freedom, responsibility and disdain of lockstep were of higher value.

On lessons learned from the stark Apache Ways.

“Most amateur sleuths and scouts would quit the vigil after three days, and many after one day, but an Apache will lie on a rocky point for many days and make no trail or sign. His whole equipment consists of a gourd of water, a piece of dried meat or jerky, and a little mescal, mesquite beans, or a handful of parched corn meal. Every film of smoke, dust cloud, or glint of light on the desert below will be noted, as well as the flight of every bird and the movements of the few desert animals. Patience, patience, and then more patience! The Indian scout will make a little buried fire of smokeless dry twigs, warm up the ground all the afternoon, bury the embers under the earth, and then lie on the warm spot until toward morning, when it will have cooled again. Then he will make a tiny fire of two crossed sticks, wrap his blanket around him, if he has one, and doze and freeze by turns until the sun once more brings warmth and another day of silence and watching.”

Ask yourself, many of us think of ourselves as Hombres/Hombrettes with grit for a core, how do you stack up against this standard?

On the Apache and like cultures he admires.

“What the white scout has to learn from the Indian is the power to endure loneliness, as well as stoical indifference to physical pain. The Boers of the high veldt, the Tauregs and Bedouins of the desert, and the Apaches, have this power in a superlative degree.”

On making gear choices based on Indigenous experience.

“You keep with you your light shoes or Mexican tawas (a kind of moccasin and legging combined, and very useful in a thorny country.)”

·        I can vouch—I have tested top-rated desert hiking boots in desert and cactus country and moccasins.

·        The moccasins won hands down for contact, comfort and raising the attention game.

A trail-running hack from Mr. Burnham. [Hundreds upon hundreds of such tips and tactics in our upcoming book on El Camino del Hombre del País [Way of the Man of the Country.]

“Again my legs took command — and no Apache could compete. I ran with a strange sense of strength, clinging to the trail, and at dark I reached a sandy arroyo where I doubled on my trail for a hundred yards and then threw myself flat on my back and put my heels on a bit of driftwood a few inches higher than my head. This relieves blood pressure better than anything else I know, and eases the breathing.”

[On the lost art of Indian Running—we revive this skill in the aforementioned book El Camino del Hombre del País [Way of the Man of the Country.]

 

“It was my good fortune to find service, at one time or another, under such remarkable men as Al Sieber, Archie McIntosh, and Fred Sterling. Every commanding officer in the Apache wars suffered from lack of information as to where the Indians were and from the difficulty of getting in touch with them. It was for this reason that Crook, Miles, Chaffee, and Lawton made frequent use of fast-running Indian scouts. It is a mistake to suppose that a cowboy is a fleet man in the mountains. He is a superb horseman, but he will trudge miles to catch a horse so that he may ride a mile. There are very few white men who can or will make long runs on foot, and no horseman can overtake an Apache on foot in rough mountains such as those of Arizona. Through the Indian games of my childhood and my hunting afoot in the mountains of California, I had developed a swift and silent pace which enabled me to scout in the Apache, country without fear of being caught, even if sighted. For an untrained white man to be seen in an Indian country is to be caught if the Indians so mind. There were a few old-time trappers who could out-foot the Apaches, but they were already old men when I was on the frontier.”

[See our article on Apache Running for more insight.]

Much more to be learned from Mr. Burnham and others of his ilk…another day.

Resources for Livin’ the Warrior Life, Historically Accurate & Viciously Verified.

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Tales of Soldiers & Civilians by Ambrose Bierce

 

The fighting of the day before had been desultory and indecisive. At the points of collision the smoke of battle had hung in blue sheets among the branches of the trees till beaten into nothing by the falling rain. In the softened earth the wheels of cannon and ammunition wagons cut deep, ragged furrows, and movements of infantry seemed impeded by the mud that clung to the soldiers' feet as, with soaken garments and rifles imperfectly protected by capes of overcoats they went dragging in sinuous lines hither and thither through dripping forest and flooded field. Mounted officers, their heads protruding from rubber ponchos that glittered like black armor, picked their way, singly and in loose groups, among the men, coming and going with apparent aimlessness and commanding attention from nobody but one another. Here and there a dead man, his clothing defiled with earth, his face covered with a blanket or showing yellow and claylike in the rain, added his dispiriting influence to that of the other dismal features of the scene and augmented the general discomfort with a particular dejection. Very repulsive these wrecks looked—not at all heroic, and nobody was accessible to the infection of their patriotic example. Dead upon the field of honor, yes; but the field of honor was so very wet! It makes a difference.—“One Kind of Officer”

Tales of Soldiers & Civilians first appeared on the scene in 1892 with 16 tales, more were added later. This volume contains the rightly famous and well-known “An Occurrence at Owl creek Bridge.”

I decided to feature a lesser-known story so that one could get a feel for the fact that Mr. Bierce was no one-trick pony.

His own harrowing wartime experience and dyspeptic [realistic] view of life is to the forefront in this tale.

The war images smack of the real. No romanticism. Stark—terse, brutal.

The interactions with humanity come off no better, perhaps worse in this tale.

What never fails is Bierce’s gimlet eye.

Captain Ransome sat motionless and silent on horseback. A few yards away his men were standing at their guns. Somewhere—everywhere within a few miles—were a hundred thousand men, friends and enemies. Yet he was alone. The mist had isolated him as completely as if he had been in the heart of a desert. His world was a few square yards of wet and trampled earth about the feet of his horse. His comrades in that ghostly domain were invisible and inaudible. These were conditions favorable to thought, and he was thinking.

Many a fine critic has offered that Bierce’s Civil War tales are the best example of American war writing, exceeding that of Stephen Crane and Hemingway [Clifton Fadiman being a dissenting opinion—I myself, dissent from Fadiman—so much is done with so little text, it’s rather remarkable.]

In the next offering there is a cynical humor in this muddled exchange made all the more, well, horrifying, when one has read the tale and understands the import of what is being communicated and horrifyingly ignored.

Here, during the hottest of the fight, he was approached by Lieutenant Price, who had just sabred a daring assailant inside the work. A spirited colloquy ensued between the two officers—spirited, at least, on the part of the lieutenant, who gesticulated with energy and shouted again and again into his commander's ear in the attempt to make himself heard above the infernal din of the guns. His gestures, if coolly noted by an actor, would have been pronounced to be those of protestation: one would have said that he was opposed to the proceedings.

All told, brief tales, sparsely written, dripping with a cynicism likely borne of experience.

The only heroic characters here are the peripheral ones who must suffer the mistakes of those who point and say, “Go.”

Strong brew.

If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor

 

A young staff captain, Hubert Gaines, had the presence of mind to swing from his horse to run forward, drawing his revolver in the same moment. He fired two shots into the animal's ear and the great beast lay still. Then Grant could be remove--his uniform covered with clay, and blood issuing from his nose and mouth. Mr. Charles A. Dana himself escorted the white-faced little Frederick Grant away.

This slim volume from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Andersonville begins with a simple premise—General Grant dies beneath a recalcitrant horse.

Kantor then proceeds to detail the ramifications in billiard ball fashion what follows from this single mishap.

It is written as if it were true history, complete with mighty convincing footnotes throughout.

My copy clocks in at a brief 112 pages but that does not mean this is not a jam-packed work.

Kantor tells us not just how the South prevailed but then follows along with the seldom considered aftermath and how a successful secessionist nation might regard future such attempts.

Our alternative history takes us through until the 1940s as we see just how far ramifications may reverberate.

I found this a remarkably well-informed thoughtful work.

An easy read, yet there is nothing “easy” about what the piece insinuates.

Fascinating.

Calico by Lee Goldberg

 

‘You’re probably right, but you have to admit this case is weird,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s like he walked out of the 1800s and into the path of a motor home.’

A curious one here—an author I’ve enjoyed before offers us a neo-Western and a kinda/sorta traditional Western at the same time.

I tip nothing to say we have twin timelines: literally.

One—A police procedural in the Michael Connelly mode, or even in the mode of the author’s own Eve Ronin series [a few of which I have read and enjoyed.]

Two—The second timeline, a time-travel to the Old West tale.

Allow me to state, I have enjoyed other work from this author and was looking forward to this tale.

But…this one strikes me as either rushed or as a prose draft of an idea intended to be a television script.

Exposition is fast and to the point, but, again, but…many chapters feel as if, “Yeah, this is where the commercial break would be.”

“This is where David Caruso would slide off his sunglasses and deliver his out-the-door line.”

The book is a bit of a déjà vu in the sense that when it is set in the modern era, I am reminded of Michael Connelly’s Renee Ballard series without the complexity.

And once we have the time-travel timeline I kept harkening back to Michael Crichton’s Timeline which dealt with the mechanics of how this would occur with far more conviction. That novel also deals with the time-culture shock in an interesting manner.

Here, our time-traveler arrives in a new timeline and seems to go “Wow, I’m in the Old West. Weird.”

We have none of the cognitive struggle that I would presume ensue as one slowly comprehends the anomaly that is occurring.

Here, the move from realization to coping is staggeringly blithe.

I end with, Mr. Goldberg is a talented author and an indulgent man [he was kind enough to correspond with me on a topic years ago—Thank you, Sir!]

This is simply a misfire for this single reader as many seem to enjoy this one very much.

Let us assume the majority has it right.

“The Sky Sheriff” by Thomson Burtis

 

“And listen, son: the old days in this country meant that a man had to have guts or go under. Because they was men ridin’ the range and maintainin’ their necks as good as new by their own gun-play, the same red blood which showed in them things was responsible for what's known now as the old ‘wild West’ stuff.

“I reckon your boys are pioneers, Cap’n. To my notion, any man that picks up this here flyin’ as a profession ain't ever gonna get no kick out of a ten-cent limit poker game. Where would yore air service be if the men in it was playin’ things safe?”

I found this story in an issue of Blue Book Magazine, April 1923

This old piece trades biplanes for horses, but all other elements remain.

Six-guns, John B. Stetsons, thrilling chases and all the other tropes.

What takes it out of the formulaic realm is its deep reverence and knowledge of the early seat-of-your-pants days of flying.

The author knows of what he speaks, a former lieutenant in the US Army Air Service and then pilot for the border patrol, his flying lore shows. We spin props, adjust carburetors, feel the pull of G’s as we skew in a slipstream.

Yes, the plot may be formula, but for this reader, this ride-along with a true flying Hombre more than paid for the ride.

Empire “The Day the Empire Stood Still”

 

This is the pilot episode of the 1962 TV series.

My entry point was to view the work of guest star Charles Bronson—quite able here, as a matter of fact.

It is a “modern” western set on a large ranch in New Mexico in 1962. A ranch owned by Constance Garrett [played by Terry Moore] and oversaw by square-jawed ranch foreman Jim Redigo [played by Richard Egan.]

We also have a young Ryan O’Neal playing Constance’s son Tal Garrett.

I was unfamiliar with the show but was struck that it reminded me of today’s Yellowstone franchise.

All the elements are there—powerful family, the pressures of running a ranch and still making it profitable—add in some outside soap-opera elements [in this episode a trial for murder] and allow Western can-do, stick-to-itiveness to be the backbone of the narrative thread.

It may lack the large production values of Yellowstone, and the narrative approach is a bit less overtly garish, but…I’ve never quite connected with Yellowstone, whereas I found this time-capsule of a “modern” Western a bit more compelling. There is something reassuring in its commitment to ideals with no amoral overlay.

I shall watch more. It is no classic but neither is Yellowstone.

Biases revealed—judgement offered.

Make of that what you will.

When Will This War Be Over? “by Emma Simpson”

 

Sunday, May 29, 1864

There is talk of a terrific battle just east of here-- near Spotsylvania Courthouse. Terrible casualties are feared on both sides.

The full title of this volume is When Will This War be Over?: The Civil War Diary of Emma Simpson, Gordonsville, Virginia, 1864.

It is the war time experiences as recorded by a 14-year-old girl in the war-ravaged Confederate South.

Or is it?

After one has finished the volume, we are tripped to the fact that this is no diary at all, but the concoction of author Barry Denenberg who decided to compose this piece not as verisimilitude fiction but present it as fact and then make the “reveal” after one has plowed thru the pages.

I read many a first-hand account of Westerners, frontier folk, and memoirs of the Civil War. Sure, some of them are not up to literary snuff [some are] but even those that are not have a compelling drive to them by dint of being true. Life as lived by those in the midst.

I cut slack to spending time with a young girl attempting to grapple with her circumstances in her broken “young girl” prose as she is simply a human being recording her soul to the best of her ability.

But…to have made those emotional allowances and to discover that one has plowed thru sub-standard prose for “literary effect,” well, I feel deceived.

It is not the mere deception that leads to my distaste for this volume—it is that the deception did not allow me to pass judgment in an honest manner.

If I knew it were fiction going in, I might have stopped earlier and felt no need to comment.

I don’t finish many a volume as they are not to my taste but feel that it would be a disservice to “review” what I have not consumed in full.

There is always the possibility that the next page after my stopping point the work in question becomes startlingly brilliant and it is my lack of fortitude that means I miss out.

The present work—I read because I assumed it awas authentic. No hint at deception until the last page is turned.

My take on this is one of a “burned” reader. One going in with foreknowledge of the “trick” may enjoy more.

But…the false sentiment of a grown man aping a 14-year-old girl, still strikes me doubtful.

Riverboat: “Zigzag”

 

This is the penultimate episode in the Two-Season run of this 1959-1960 Western series set on the riverboat named the Enterprise.

Darren McGavin played captain Grey Holden, and Burt Reynolds played his partner Ben Frazer for the first 20 episodes but…

The two stars did not get along at all.

Season Two sees Reynolds exit the show and Noah Beery, Jr. is added as Bill Blake.

I chose this one as my first foray because of the guest star, Charles Bronson; we also have a young Stella Stevens on hand.

The plot is meagre and redolent of 1950s episodic television, and my guest star of choice is given little to do. To be fair, McGavin is hardly used here either.

Perhaps a sign of a show that knows that it only has one more episode to shoot before cancellation and the steam is no longer there.

It might be unfair to judge the shows run off of this single episode but…it doesn’t have me running after another one immediately.

Scouting on Two Continents, Part 2

 

We continue with the lessons we can reap from Mr. Burnham. See Part 1, for full immersion.]

[On one attribute of “Old Man Lee,” one of Burnham’s mentors in reading the land as an Apache Scout.]

“Lee had made a careful study of the air currents that sweep through the deep canyons, and although the Indians found ways to conceal the tell-tale smoke clouds, they could not prevent the odour of burning mescal from hanging in the air and drifting for miles up and down the canyons. By tracing these odours, Lee could mark the most secret hiding places of the Indians.”

·        I can vouch for an aspect of this craft.

·        I have made two sojourns into canyon country seeking Sinagua ruins and camps off-the-beaten track—another adventure/exploration scheduled for this January.

·        I have used many a tip and tactic from these Old Hosses to help locate what is no longer mapped—from using “High Eyes” and “Mouse Eyes” to spot lost trails to watching for cairn remnants.

·        At the foot of canyon face, if one is paying attention to the eddies of wind and the growth swirls of juniper you can get a handle on wise areas to place campfire high on cliff face that would both be wind-resistant and concealed.

·        If one is paying attention, you can spot where the ancient soot may show darker in lines of manganese oxides in the cliff face.

·        Walk that down, pay close attention—and just maybe…magic.

[On the boulder hopping/rock-stepping of Apache and Sinagua.]

“…if the Apaches were suspicious of pursuit, they would not drop a single thread of mescal and would step from boulder to boulder, leaving so faint a mark on the rocks that only the most highly trained eye would ever notice the trace.”

[A remarkable observation in the next passage. One that anthropologists, and mere readers of history don’t quite touch, whereas a man of action who lived it understands that we must understand a subject as a whole not piecemeal.]

“It is imperative that a scout should know the history, tradition, religion, social customs, and superstitions of whatever country or people he is called on to work in or among. This is almost as necessary as to know the physical character of the country, its climate and products. Certain people will do certain things almost without fail. Certain other things, perfectly feasible, they will not do. There is no danger of knowing too much of the mental habits of an enemy. One should neither underestimate the enemy nor credit him with superhuman powers. Fear and courage are latent in every human being, though roused into activity by very diverse means. If, as a nation, we had the courage to write the pages of history as the events really occur, there might be some changes in value very startling to our cherished beliefs; but many errors are so firmly planted in the public mind that it is sacrilege to disturb them, and where they are harmless, it is probably better to let them rest. The idea that the Sioux Indians could fight the modern soldier without any training is an error of the same cloth as the recent pronouncement of the late William Jennings Bryan that “an army of a million men can leap to arms between the rising and the setting of the sun.” Armies are not made in that way. The old Sioux warriors who pitted themselves against such generals as Custer, Reno, Miles, and Crook all passed through much preparatory training. To begin with, they hardened the body systematically. They controlled the mind and set it on a definite object unswervingly. They well knew the uses of both love and hate in all their shades and degrees. Around the council fires, traditions and tales were poured into the ears of the Indian boy until the time arrived when he demanded to become a warrior. Each spring, a class of candidates would come before the medicine man for physical examination. If not strong enough, the youth would be sent back to the care of the squaws for another year. Those who passed the tests were put in close training, both mental and physical, until, on some clear, sunny day in June, the whole clan or tribe would gather on a slope of the prairie near a stream and pitch their tepees for the Sun Dance of the young braves.”

[On how “we” might fare with “savages” or other guerrilla factions if armament were equal.]

“When the exhausting test was ended, the youths were carefully tended by the squaws and nursed back to full strength in a few days. They were then passed over to the hands of older warriors for training with bow or gun, lance and horse, and in all the intricate lore of the plains. When they became proficient, they were divided into bands and sent to ambush each other’s horses and equipment, also to manoeuvre on a large scale under the orders and eyes of the great chiefs. If to the qualities and training possessed by these men had been added modern artillery and weapons, one would hesitate to guess how many of our troops would have been necessary to conquer them.”

·        We must not assume victory is always because “’Merica, damn right!” than it is, the armorers and quartermaster corps are up to superior snuff.

·        Never underestimate the Spirit of those who war with “less.”

[On the MUST of hard Physical, Emotional, Spiritual training. The MUST.]

“In the literature of the West, the hero, bad man, or sheriff is usually endowed by high Heaven with superhuman powers and has not found it necessary to go through long dreary months and years of training, like ordinary mortals; but I have never, in my experience, met either savage or white man whose natural traits without careful development would have made him distinguished. There are, however, great differences in ability, even among Indians. Those who become famous add to their natural inheritance long training in many things, especially in the hardening of the mind and body to stoical endurance. The great Indian chiefs were men of iron will as well as iron bodies.”

[In the next, I find it intriguing that Mr. Burnham, an “uneducated” man of the Southwest seems mighty familiar with the ways of “Oriental” calming disciplines. A man who left nothing unexamined!]

“I have often thought it would be well for the nervous European to cultivate a little of Oriental calm and self-control and with “Kismet” as his password, relax both mind and body at times and learn to sleep soundly even in the midst of danger.”

“To sleep at will is a fine art.”

·        A man who slept uncomplainingly on hard ground on two continents in harsh conditions.

·        Wonder what he would make of sound machines, CPAP Machines, melatonin, and water cooler “I slept horribly” stories?

[I offer a personal shaming of myself after this next passage.]

“I have often been asked how it happens that I neither drink nor smoke. My answer is that both liquor and tobacco have their uses, but I am of a nature that has never required a stimulant or a sedative. As a scout, I needed all my five senses and every faculty of my mind at highest efficiency at all times. There is nothing that sharpens a man’s senses so acutely as to know that bitter and determined enemies are in pursuit of him night and day. In many lines of endeavour, errors may be repeated without fatal results, but in an Indian or savage war, or in a bitter feud, one little slip entails the “Absent” mark for ever against a man’s name. I recall one scout who forfeited his life by his neglect for one instant to keep in the shade of a small oak tree. He was safe from sight so long as he kept in its shadow, but he became so intent on using his field glasses that he allowed a shaft of sunlight to betray him to the enemy.”

·        Despite photos to the contrary showing a stogie in my hand or in mouth—I no longer partake.

·        I recall reading this passage and several like it approximately 5 years ago and dumping my supply of “sensory killers.”

·        Just one more step in my “Grown Ass Man Who Wants to Be One of These Hosses when He Grows Up” journey.

“The senses and actions of every animal, bird, and insect, if studied, can be made to pay tribute to our store of human knowledge, and our own rather dull wits can be wonderfully informed. Solitude intensifies the perceptions. The herd with a thousand eyes trusts itself to a solitary sentinel with only two. Yet there comes a point where solitude, which entails total repression of the social instinct, turns upon its victim and destroys the alertness of brain it has built up; when, like a great wave, it uplifts only to engulf. I have met solitary sheep herders in the West whose eyes clung to the ground and who mumbled unintelligent words for hours at a time. Solitary confinement in prison brings insanity. Overtrained athletes become muscle-bound, and solitude in excess may make one thought-bound.”

·        Brilliant observation.

·        Crowd source sensory input by affiliating with our fellow creatures—“dumb animals” and humans alike.

Two Stories of Sensory Affiliation

Story 1

·        On my last canyonland trip, I’m on Day 3 of looking for a particular Sinagua camp my reading tells me is tucked in a particular slot canyon.

·        After more than a few false starts on cliff ledges that peter out the same time my fortitude at that height says, “Surely, to God no one would choose to place a camp here.’’

·        I come to a narrow alcove in the ledge where shadows have left the snow unmelted.

·        The snow above is trickling water to a small pool on an 8” ledge hundreds of feet above canyon floor.

·        I spot a small puma track in the snow around the pool trickle.

·        First, I think, “Hmm, narrow ledge plus puma—time to go.”

·        Then I see that the tracks lead from the snow in an untried direction—I think, “Hell, just 20 more yards of shimmying along this ledge then I’ll turn back.”

·        I break around a corner and…there it is a Sinagua camp embedded in cliff face.

·        That puma’s post-water path told me that semi-accessible ground had to be that way.

Story 2

·        Another day, I leave one Sinagua ruin high up canyon wall—a gorgeous Eastern Sun facing location that just allows the Rising Sun to illuminate perfectly the precisely placed rock doors.

·        Canyon base is a tangle of manzanita, every step is stop—untangle from the brush—take another step.

·        I’m on the track of a ruin my readings say that runs beneath a snowmelt waterfall.

·        In the midst of one of my entanglings, I come face to face with a lean and haggard face wearing an ancient backpack and carrying a gnarled walking stick.

·        We are both surprised—likely thinking the same thought, “What sort of madman leaves curated trails and ventures here?”

·        I say what I’m looking for.

·        He sorta grunts, “Yeah, there’s stuff like that around here, but they can be hard to find.”

·        I say, “Yeah, I just came from that one above us.”

·        He looks up then back at me, says, “You found that one?”

·        “Yes, it was glorious.”

·        “That one is hard to get to, most don’t do it, let alone know about it.”

·        We get into a conversation about my love for such things.

·        He goes from “tourist disdain” ala Edward Abbey to, “Perhaps this is a kindred spirit.”

·        He then says, the snow waterfall is hard to find.

·        I say, “I’m willing—my guess is that it has to be ensconced in a west wall to protect the snow and provide the fall.”

·        Him: “That’s right.” Pause. “ Want me to take you?”

·        “Hell, yeah.”

·        We go and after another hour of tangle—there she be! Glorious!

·        He then says, “There’s another one back here that most of the locals don’t even know about.”

·        “I’d love to see.”

·        Another trek—another glory.

·        While sitting in the midst of dwelling stones placed more than 2,000 years ago, I point to the piece of wood protruding from his pack wrapped in felt.

·        “That’s my Indian flute. Sometimes when I’m back here, I play.”

·        “Will you play for me?”

·        “I play for my friends.”

·        “Are we not friends? We have trekked together.”

·        He considers, smiles, says not another word and almost shyly pipes a 2–3-minute freeform etude that resounds mournfully off the canyon walls while we sit in an ancient abode.

·        The impromptu concerto is organic and mystical.

·        I never asked his name.

·        He never asked mine.

·        When I tell that story I call him Sedona Johnny.

·        Well, just like Mr. Burnham’s advice, Sedona Johnny allowed me to “borrow his eyes” so to speak to see more than I might have seen on my own.

We will return to more Lessons from Mr. Burnham in Part 3.

[Look for a Lifetime of Such Scoutcraft Lessons in our upcoming book Hombres Del Campo: Scoutcraft Lessons from Men of the Wilderness.]

Go get ‘em, Crew! Get after that Life, Burnham Style! Right Now!

For Old School Combat Ways and Livin’

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