The thing I remember
most about winter in the mountains above a town in New Mexico
called Las Vegas was the silence. At times, it was so quiet that,
as a sheepherder from Montana pointed out, you could hear
snowflakes slap against the pines.
The sheepherder and I
were fellow pilgrims whose lives intersected along the interstate
in the early 1970s. He was hitchhiking south to a rendezvous in
southern New Mexico. When I gave him a ride, I was nearly out of
gas, low on money, and in desperate need of a job.
Work
came, thanks to a dude ranch near the headwaters of the Gallinas
River. From sunup to sundown, the days revolved around splitting
firewood for tourist cabins, rolling big rocks into rivers to make
pools for trout fishermen, caring for livestock, corralling runaway
calves. Lodging consisted of a cabin with only a fireplace for
heat. Still, it seemed like the Taj Mahal. I was young and my
sleeping bag fairly decent Army surplus. At night, stars big as
truck headlights offered companionship just outside the window,
illuminating a chattering stream.
Weekends in town
provided the company of a mongrel collection of fellow drifters,
ranging from the spiritually malnourished to the bizarre — shaman
wannabes, cattle-mutilation investigators, a very white man from
New Jersey who claimed to be the incarnation of various Indian
chiefs, alien abductees bearing messages from interplanetary
outposts.
Back on the job Monday morning, hard work in
the woods provided a lifeline to the real world. The woodpile grew
under sunny days interrupted by clouds draping themselves over
white mountaintops, the stillness broken occasionally by horses,
nickering for hay.
I remember that winter better than
most because I learned to love that landscape like no other. Yet in
retrospect, I’m sure folks throughout the West were relieved
when the nationwide pilgrimage of young people to the region during
the late ‘60s and ‘70s began to wane. As the years
passed, many of the country’s disillusioned either settled in
to become a part of their adopted place or returned to where
they’d drifted away from, there, as one Haight-Ashbury
veteran put it, “to become their parents.”
Recently, my son, back from Arizona and New Mexico and his own
coming-of-age meandering, regaled us with his adventures. It made
me think that today’s young seekers have strayed little from
the tie-dyed blueprint that my generation followed West. We talked
of the “coolness” of places where he’d paused for
communion, and my mind drifted back to a time when I, too, was
young, eager and mostly unafraid, watching in awe as a bear ran
over the mountain, and ravens gathered for a game of tag in a sky
the color of blue stone.
Like so many of my generation
who actually did become their parents, I complain nowadays about
how former shrines are filling up with ranchettes, real estate
agencies and expatriates from urban areas; it’s all driving
prices far beyond my retirement fantasies. Of course, what I see as
travesties have become native to my son’s concept of the West
today, even though they make my blood boil.
But my son
doesn’t feel cheated in the least. For him, there’s
still a lot of cactus flats and pine forest tucked away amid the
West’s ample vertical rock; enough, anyway, for him to go
there, absorb the experiences he sought — and many he didn’t
— and return home a better and perhaps more tolerant person for
having made the trip.
As an aging expatriate pilgrim
whose time in church currently gets filed under the term vacation,
I long to retain and eventually regain as much as possible of my
old wild West. It seems sacrilege to price out people from places
where young people yearn to migrate and the old seek to die,
landscapes of our hearts and minds that call us to play, to pray,
to grow and ultimately seek some sort of wisdom.
After 40
years of giving the subject ample thought, it just seems right that
a nation prone to brag about a spiritual birthright ought to also
keep its wild places holy — places where silence still lies deep,
and snowflakes can still be heard when they slap against the pines.
Gary Lantz is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He lives now in Norman,
Oklahoma.
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