Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern life – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors,
It was great to read the June entry of Tony Malmberg. I’ve lived 22 of my 55 years in ranch country but haven’t often got inside the mind of a cattleman, and Malmberg is articulate and insightful. I envy anyone born to property like that.
Most of the world’s population seems to live in refugee camps, which we call cities. At some point in history they were evicted by what we call market forces from their roots as farmers, hunters or herders and stuck in boxes crowded on busy streets. To take the pressure off, they send out the cavalry to grab some farmland from the neighbors and send out a new generation of cowboys. Maybe it has to do with survival of the fittest, it’s a universal pattern.
A third-generation city-kid marching off to school with a satchel of music books, I must have seemed a curious critter in a neighborhood of semi-literate, banana-republic refugees just glad to be alive — and as a refugee myself now I look in awe upon these third-generation ranchers, as one might look on the hookah-smoking caterpillar. You grow carefree in that you’re not bumping into an armload of strangers every time you leave your little box; still you’re a slave to your claim, your spread, your stock. You plow and wrangle up and down the chutes and ladders of living and everyone you know does the same. You become resilient, resourceful, decent, intelligent, even open-minded.
But in a curious way you also become a bit smug and myopic. If most of the world was suffocating for lack of elbow room, that couldn’t be your problem. Let the cavalry go out and annex some more land for those unfortunates; meanwhile you have your work cut out for you.
Well, market forces could blow me down on my little 1/8 acre too, and we all have to dig in and adapt, and try to stay solvent. But market forces are also what plaster our public schools with Pepsi ads and what turn a perfectly good female into a hideous proving ground for Joe Blow’s mascara-and-dippity-do factory. I sometimes wish for a better arrangement.
Just before this recent colony of buckshorts got their grip on this territory it was the domain of a people who were smart enough to see land and critters as just plain sustenance — not hallucinate up some hare-brained, private-property-and-market-forces bramble thicket so they could proceed to lose themselves in it. In a sense those pioneers who got that incredible boon of open country, thanks to the US Army, had the last clear chance to avoid a collision with market forces. If they’d only just said no, gone native and lived on camas root and venison instead of building such a big bonfire of an economy there.
Build national capitals on swampland and raise livestock where there’s no water; I’m trained in music, it’s not my affair.
The ultimate blind irony is right there in Driscoll’s cartoon of the farmer hoping the government will put fish in his reclaimed stream so he can sell recreation. Hornswaggle begets hornswaggle; just eat the fish, dude. You don’t have to pay for your kids to go off and become hydrologists and eat cafeteria burgers and run up a string of parking tickets with the campus police. The shortest distance is still a straight line.
It may be that good folks like the Malmbergs can diversify and get along, but in the long view it may be windmill farms and jojoba plantations which make better sense. Meanwhile if the country fills up with all shades of refugees, we have only our markets and our reproductive drives to thank. Resilience ought to go a step beyond economics-of-the-month; we need to scale down our dreams to fit our shrinking planet.
Talent without ambition may be a bird without wings, but a penguin that can’t gain altitude to poop on your clothesline might be a blessing.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
(Slim Wolfe is a third-generation busybody and second cousin to the Butt-inskis, but he’s trying to break with the mindset.)
