Cowburnt: The American West

2020 Trip to Southeast USA

After leaving Amarillo Texas, heading southwest, we drove through cattle country. The first town in fact was called Hereford and claims to be the Herford Capital of the World. And it smelled like it too. It smelled like one huge feedlot operation, which is more or less what it was. A GIANT feedlot.

All of this reminded me of what Edward Abbey said in a famous article he wrote for Harpers Magazine in  1986.  Abbey did not appreciate cattle.  Like me, he did not believe that cattle were an adequate replacement for the bison that we lost. This is what he said about cattle:

“Most of the public lands in the West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call “cowburnt.” Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestem and grama and bunchgrasses, leaving behind jungles of prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cactus. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheatgrass. Weeds.”

Sometimes I wish Abbey told us what he really thinks. Of course he did not stop there. He described the American West of the cowboys this way:

“Even when the cattle are not physically present, you’ll see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don’t see it, you’ll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle. Along every flowing stream, around every seep and spring and water hole and well, you’ll find acres and acres of what range-management specialists call “sacrifice areas.” These are places denuded of forage, except for some cactus or a little tumbleweed or maybe a few mutilated trees like mesquite, juniper, or hackberry.”

Of course as much as he hated cattle, he did not like cattlemen or ranchers or cowboys any more. He thought they did not respect the land, and to Abbey that was the big sin. He believed they had devastated the west all as a result of their greed.

“Anyone who goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of them will not give reliable testimony. Some have too much at stake: their Cadillacs and their airplanes, their ranch resale profits and their capital gains. (I’m talking about the corporation ranchers, the land-and-cattle companies, the investment syndicates.) Others, those ranchers who have only a small base property, flood the public lands with their cows. About 8 percent of the federal-land permittees have cattle that consume approximately 45 percent of the forage on the government rangelands.”

Abbey called the product of this desecration “a cowburnt wasteland.” And I have to admit much of what we drove through in and around Amarillo and Hereford Texas looked exactly like that. The land looked to me, a neophyte tenderfoot, overgrazed. That was why most of the cattle had to be fed as if they were on a feedlot. Abbey thought that overgrazing was as bad as strip- mining, clear-cutting, and damning of rivers.

Abbey also decried the false mythology of the cowboys of the west:

“The beef industry’s abuse of our Western lands is based on the old mythology of the cowboy as natural nobleman, the most cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work. Some ranchers are also cowboys, but many are not. There is a difference.

There are many ranchers out there who are big-time farmers of the public lands — our property. As such, they do not merit any special consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000 ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That’s less than the population of Missoula, Montana.”

Abbey also had little good to say about ranchers:

“The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West. Cowboys are also greatly overrated. Consider the nature of their work. Suppose you had to spend most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what it does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised amid the bawling of calves and cows in the splatter of mud and the stink of shit.“

Finally he was unimpressed with the work ethic of cowboys. They claimed to be working hard all the time, but Abbey thought differently about them:

“Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don’t work very hard. They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching. Anytime you go into a small Western town you’ll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks. Is a cowboy’s work socially useful? No. As I’ve already pointed out, subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quit tomorrow, we’d never miss them. Any public school teacher does harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more valuable work than any cowboy or rancher. The same thing applies to registered nurses and nurses’ aides, garbage collectors, and traffic cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or ranchers. We’ve carried them on our backs long enough.”

The American west–not quite what we thought it was.

The Invaders of North America

Indigenous People After Contact

The invaders of North America represented (sort of) the Holy Roman Empire. Europe at the time of 1492 and for a couple of centuries after that was filled with tribal territories often with boundaries that were not fixed or agreed upon. At the time there were few countries. Nationalism really came later. At the time there were mainly city-states and small nations. Napoleon was really right when he said, “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”

When two imperialists from worlds apart met, the Castilian of Spain and the Aztecs of Mexico, they represented two expanding empires that both had a tribal origin. Both had gained control of other people. Mexico of course was much larger. The Aztec capital on the site of what is now Mexico City contained one quarter of a million people. That was 4 times as many as Tudor London.  About 20 million people were under their control. At the time the British islands had about 5 million people and Spain about 8 million.

Europe was not really as civilized as Europeans might want us to think. Ronald Wright in his book Stolen Continents described Europe this way,

“European secular government was a tangle of decayed feudal loyalties and personal ambition.  The last proper roads had been built by the Romans more than a thousand years before.  The rapidly growing cities were unplanned, ramshackle, without sanitation, seething with poverty and disease. If famine struck a region, the state was quite unable to provide relief. Life expectancy oscillated between the high teens and low thirties, lower than in the most deprived nations of today. The achievements of Europe were technological, not social. It had the best ships, the best steel, the best guns; it also had conditions desperate enough to make its people want to leave and use these things to plunder others. Spain, in particular, was scarcely touched by the Renaissance; 700 years of war against the Moors had produced a warrior culture filled with loathing and contempt for other ways of life, not a new spirit of inquiry.”

The invaders of North America  were dirty, hairy, uncouth, and, let us be clear about this, savage. I am not saying the Indigenous people were angels, but the Europeans were certainly not.

Making a Big Splash in Arizona

2020 Trip to Southeast USA

 

We did not plan on it but we made a big splash in Arizona. After our first full day in Arizona, at about 9 p.m. a neighbour came and rapped on our door. Our door bells don’t work.  We found that out in a big way. We had not been introduced. He said water was pouring into his yard from ours.  How could that be?  Well it turned out water was gushing from our pool pump over the concrete fence into our neighbour’s yard. It was dark and we hd not noticed it. And he was not very impressed. In fact it was a volcano of water spurting about 10 feet into the air.

Of course I had no idea what to do about it. Panicking I ran to the back, picked up a flashlight, and, of course, could not figure out how to shut the pump off. I could not find a  water shut off valve or switch. Chris phoned the  owners in Oregon. Even though it was only about 8 p.m. in Oregon where they live, they were asleep when Chris called. They were not impressed either.  But the owner explained to us how to shut off the pool pump and mercifully the deluge stopped.

What a great introduction to the neighbourhood. It was not exactly  a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.

Lies, Damn Lies and History

Indigenous People After Contact

 

Mark Twain got it wrong. It is not true that there are ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics,” as he claimed.  There are lies, damn lies, and history. I said that.

The facts of the invasion of the western hemisphere by Europeans are to a large extent unknown by people who make no effort to find them. Which of course means they are largely unknown except to scholars. The rest of us have a learned a very one-sided history—the history of those who saw themselves as victors.

Yellow Wolf, of the Nez Percé, an indigenous nation of the western United States, put this accurately in 1877: “The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true.  Only his own best deeds,, only the worst deeds of the Indians, as the white man told.”

I want to look at both sides, but the fact is that the side of the whites has been well told for centuries.  I learned their stories in school. For example, I learned how mean and cruel the Iroquois were to those nice kind priests from France. I never learned the other side the story at at all. It took me many  years to learn otherwise. So I want to redress that. I want to look at all sides.

As Ronald Wright said in his wonderful book Stolen Continents,  “Few things are so dangerous as believing one’s own lies”. The first lie, a vital part of what I have called the Original Sin, was that the Europeans were civilized and the people of the Western Hemisphere were savages. That is a lie we should stop believing. It was a convenient lie. It allowed the Europeans to ravage the western continents with a clean conscience.

For example, and this is just a beginning, it is not true that most of the people living in the western hemisphere were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Many of them were exactly that. But many of them lived settled lives in towns and cities.  There were some amazing cities in North and south America.  One of those cities was Cahokia. I will talk about that later. According to Wright, “Hollywood may have convinced us that the ‘typical’ Indian was a nomadic hunter, but in fact the majority had been living in villages, towns, and cities since long before Columbus.”

In fact there is a lot of evidence now that the real barbarians, the real savages, came sailing in on big ships!

A New World

Indigenous People After Contact

 

The Europeans that followed Christopher Columbus to the western hemisphere referred the western hemisphere as “the New World.”  Of course it was no more a new world than it was India. The people of Europe were wrong—again.

The history we learned in school taught us that this “discovery” was one of the  greatest achievements of mankind.  The people that were “discovered” had very different views.  The people in the western hemisphere, as it has come to be called, with a little more justification, believed that their world was the only world. They were also mistaken. They believed that they lived on a great island floating on an ancient sea.  Some of them referred to this world as “Turtle Island.”

These people on the western hemisphere were amazing people. They had occupied all habitable areas of this hemisphere  (and some like Manitoba are arguably not really habitable at all) from the Arctic tundra, to the plains, mountains, forests and deserts of North America. They occupied the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central America and the incredible rainforests, deserts, plains and mountains of South America. They developed many different kinds of society. They included nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities and cities as large as any in the rest of the world. Numbers vary, but by 1492 there may have been 100 million Native Americans in the South and North combined. This was about 1/5 of the entire human race.

To the people of the Americas, their encounter with people from Europe was not a discovery, it was an invasion! It was an invasion with profound effects for both sides.  As Ronald Wright said, “Within decades of Columbus’s landfall, most of these people were dead and their world barbarously sacked by Europeans. The plunderers settled in America, and it was they, not the original people, who became to be known as Americans.” “Unlike Asia and Africa, America never saw its colonizers leave.”

The original people did not however disappear.  As Wright put it, “Many survive, captive within white settler states that built on their lands and on their backs.”

 

Mining Towns

2020 Trip to Southeast USA, Environment, Pollution

 

As we drove to Arizona we listened to CBC radio. There was a story about Lynn Lake. In many ways it is a familiar story. It is a story about mining towns. And it happens over and over again.  A valuable mineral is discovered, a mining corporation or international conglomerate gets wind of it, scoops up the rights, usually along with some “incentives” from various levels of government, and establishes a mining town.

For a while the town booms. Everybody is happy. Everybody makes money. People move in to work in the mines, others to support the miners. Life is good. For awhile at least.

Then the industry collapses either because the rich vein of minerals is exhausted or prices drop so low it is no longer economical to keep the industry alive. Profits dry up and so does the town. The mining corporation of course, gathers up its chips and moves out. Ordinary people are left holding the bag, in more ways than one. People who owned homes in town find that their homes are worthless. No one wants to move in. Most want to move out, not in. Some die-hards want to stay. After all this is their home. They want to live there. Even though it no longer makes economic sense to stay. This can work for awhile, until the population is so low the town just can’t keep going anymore.

Then sometimes–as in Lynn Lake–remnant problems remain. Often these are environmental. The corporations leaves a mess behind. A mess that someone else has to clean up. This is what happened in Lynn Lake. According to the former Mayor who was interviewed on CBC, the contamination of the water was caused by tailings from the mine. A fund has been created from mining taxes but for some reason can’t be used to clean it up or pay for the Lynn Lake Water Treatment Plant upgrades that are required. So poor citizens in a dying town are left holding the bag. The townspeople don’t want to pay more for water they are told not to drink. That is understandable but who should pay?

I would say the polluter should pay. If that was the mining corporation they should pay, but often it is costly and time consuming to pursue legal uncertain remedies. The townspeople want the province to pay, but why should the province pay? I am all in favor of the collective helping out a group down on their luck, but does it really make sense to keep a town like Lynn Lake going? Is this going to be a classic case of throwing good money after bad?

The town of Lynn Lake now has a population of about 500 from a high of near 4,000. Now it has many abandoned houses. Such homes are not easy to deal with. There were at one time more than 230 abandoned lots in the town and 50 of those have vacant homes that are an invitations to rodents and vandals. They also pose a fire threat to the rest of the community. The town has taken to burning them down or pushing them, literally pushing them, to the dump. After that their foundations have to be covered up and sewer pipes closed. All of this costs money, for a community that does not have a lot of money.

Is this the best the mining industry can do?  Can it just cut and run without any heed to the consequences. Is this how our mining industry works. Often it seems that is exactly how it works. If so is it time to abandon the mining industry? I admit I don’t now squat. I just raise questions. Awkward questions.

Grandma Joy

2020 Trip to Southeast USA, waterfall

I  had an extraordinary start to a new year (or depending on how you count, a new decade). The Watertown television station had a story about an 89-year old Grandmother, Joy Ryan, taking a trip with her grandson Brad Roy, around the US to visit each of the 61 National Parks and Monuments in the country. Today, she was filmed ecstatically rolling down a sand dune in Great Sand Dunes National Park. Her name was Joy and she was filled with irrational exuberant joy. Her grandson explained that in some countries where she has become known thanks to the social media, she is called Grandma Pleasure rather than Grandma Joy and she is not sure if this racy name is appropriate but she is accepting it. Grandma Joy. That’s what we need!

Today Chris and I bumped our heads together. She said it was a “meeting of the minds.” Wishful thinking?

As we headed south we loved the Pink and blue sky in the east, reminiscent of the same colours yesterday evening in the west. Beauty as the sun sets and then rises in the morning.

 

Each year when we travel south we do not meander. It pains me to admit that. Generally, we drive with determination to get as far south as fast as possible. We are trying to escape the cold. And I am always worried we will get caught in a winter storm. Last year that is what happened and we spent a day and half in Watertown. So meandering is not allowed.  Normally, that would be against my religion. Meandering is in my DNA. Straight lines don’t exist in nature for a good reason.

This year I persuaded Chris to allow one meander–we drove to Falls Park in Sioux Falls South Dakota. Last year I had seen a photographs of this fabulous waterfall in the city. This year I was determined to see it. One meander had to be permitted! To deny this would be monstrous. Chris graciously acquiesced.  Later she even admitted it was a good idea. That was because the falls were so beautiful. Neither of us had ever seen a waterfall in winter. This was a special treat.

To add a cherry on top of this Sundae of day, I was interviewed by local NBC television station. They showed up in the park hoping to interview people and unfortunately for them, I was one of the interviewees. They wanted to know what my New Year’s resolution was.  My resolution was particularly lame. It was to improve my health. When I watched the show on YouTube I was shown up by a little boy with a dog. The kid resolved on behalf of his dog that the dog would be potty trained this year. Now that’s a resolution!

This was a magnificent start to our holiday. This was the good life. We were filled with Grandma joy.

 

Religious Violence

2020 Trip to Southeast USA, religion, violence

Our first day on the trip was incredibly interesting. To me travel is about learning. I love to learn about new and interesting places and people.

There was a lot of news this weekend about violent attacks by so-called domestic terrorists in the U.S.  Both incidents were deliberate attacks on religious groups. One occurred in New York, the other in Texas.

In New York a man was accused of stabbing 5 people with a gruesome machete at a Hanukkah party at a rabbi’s home.  It left the Jewish community in Monsey New York reeling, not only because of this attack, but because this was the 13th attack on Jewish people in New York in recent weeks.

In Monsey there was another attack, about a month ago, when a 30-year old Rabbi was attacked  on his way to synagogue just before dawn. It seems like Jews are under attack. Why is that? The alleged attacker in the most recent incident had a journal at home that contained references to Jews, anti-Semitism, and Adolf Hitler.  Internet searches on a phone recovered from his car included repeated searches for “Why did Hitler hate the Jews” as well as “German Jewish Temples nears me,” and “Prominent companies founded by Jews in America.”  Clearly, he had a special interest in Jews. Yet he has no known history of anti-Semitism and  according to a family member was “raised in a home which embraced all religions and races.” They also claimed he is not a member of any hate groups.

New York Mayor Cuomo was quick to denounce the crime as “an act of domestic terrorism.” President Donald Trump tweeted referring to the stabbing as an “anti-Semitic attack.” Trump also said, “We must all come together to fight, confront, and eradicate the evil scourge of anti-Semitism.” Of course, Trump ignores the fact that he has enabled haters in the past by statements such as his equating White Supremacists with people who resisted their venomous ideology. He claimed there were “good people on both sides.” Statements like that gave encouragement to the White Supremacists.

In a city called White Settlement Texas near Fort Worth a gunman identified as Keith Kinnunen who was unknown to the police, attended a church service at the West Freeway Church of Christ Parishioner Isabel Arreola said she sat near the gunman. She had never seen him before and began to feel uneasy about him when she thought she noticed he was wearing a fake beard as a disguise. Then she saw him take out a shotgun and starting firing. Abruptly within seconds members of the congregation approach the gunman and in fact one of them shot him dead with one shot.  Arreola said “I was so surprised because I did not know that so many in church were armed.”

In September the laws in Texas were changed to permit weapons in places of worship unless the facility bans them. This church was reorganized once the law was changed and now Texans are praising the effectiveness of the new law. Church security became an important issue in Texas after a previous gunman walked into a church in Sutherland Springs 2 years ago and fatally shot 26 people and wounded 20 others.

This time Texan parishioners believe that the church responder saved “untold lives.” I don’t know if the new Texas law is good or not. I know I was surprised when Texans took that approach after the previous attack. But it seems to have helped in this case. I always think a bunch of vigilantes are about as dangerous as a lone wolf domestic terrorist.

What really interests me about these 2 incidents however, is trying to understand what is happening in houses of worship that is putting parishioners at such risk. I always tend to think this is an American problem because it is such a violent society. But similar incidents have occurred in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, France, German and elsewhere.  Why is religion leading so much to violence? Are the perpetrators also led by religious zeal? What is going on in modern society? Does anyone know? I wish I did.