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Golf
And The Cowboy: By Ray A. March Getting to Elko, Nevada is not too difficult. There is a little connector airport and there is the highway. People who have been pushed into valuing their time to the split second fly in from Reno or Salt Lake City, but they miss the space in between, that vastness called the Great Basin high desert that makes Elko what it is. A close to the bone kind of town. A town surrounded by desert which is really ranch land. A town that sits not far from the Ruby Mountains, as pretty as their name. It’s been told that Elko is perfect for the Poetry Gathering because it’s a ranching town, one that resembles the last of the cow towns in the West. It has also been said that it is the town that spit on the visiting high school football team from North Tahoe back in the early 1980s when the kids ran by the bleachers. Feelings run hard and off the cuff in this northeastern Nevada town out on Interstate 80 between the two extremes of Reno and Salt Lake City, and once a year at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering it’s a town with growing pains. “You know what their slogan was when I cam here back in 1961,” a retired school teacher told me. “It was, ‘Where livestock is a business and life is a pleasure’. Not anymore. They stopped using it.” I had never heard the particular use of the word gathering before coming to the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. A gathering. I always thought cowboys rounded up cattle; they didn’t gather them up. But they do, they gather them and they sort them and in the saying of the word and in the use of it, there is a soothing, passive, come-to-me beckoning so as not to disturb or maybe stampede. Cattle or people. People hear the Elko call each winter and they gather from all over, but mostly from those states in the upper left hand corner of your map. Western states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Nevada, or so it seems by the regional-style cowboy hats they wear. One year there was every style of hat imaginable at the bar of the Star while Ian Tyson and his guitar guided them through an impromptu chorus of “Goodbye Old Paint” and the folks under those hats sang so soft and low it was like a silent hymn hovering in the smoky, beer-filled air. A whisper could have broke the spell. This is a gathering not just in the Western spirit of shared love for range song and poetry and the romantic perception of the pioneer spirit, this is a gathering in the old fashioned melting pot sense of the word: A gathering of divergent ideas, but not ideas of diversity. Ideas that can add to and galvanize the whole, not segment and weaken its part with unproductive, look-at-me-I’m-different counter currents. In their songs, their workshops and panels these people are looking for answers. I’ve come to Elko to find meaning in this celebration of the West and its most colorful resident the cowboy, for I, too, am a westerner by birth. John Collett is a Poetry Gathering volunteer who takes visiting writers out to see the ranches and countryside of Elko. Steering his big, diesel-driven dual axle truck with the fold-down camper-on-the-bed east on Interstate 80 to a sideroad turnoff, Collett and his wife Janice talk golf and organic drugs. He’d been to the Masters the year Tiger Woods won. I met Collett the previous night at a G Three Bar Theater show. He sells insurance but now is pioneering into Rexall products on the Internet and he knows this country and its people intimately. These ranches are where as a youngster he worked baling hay. Four ranches are on the tour and that’s a lot of country. It’s a clear, dry air day, but cold, below freezing cold. No wind. The fields are covered with snow and the fence posts, barren trees and occasional cattle stand silhouetted against the white around them. First stop is the Glaser Ranch, fifth generation. Not a soul in sight. Next the Hooper Ranch, goes all the way up to the mountains, the Rubys in the far distance. It, too, is quiet. This is a mid-week work day. Then the 71 Ranch, used to be the Marble Ranch, same Marble family that ranched in Carmel Valley, California where I live. A lone man is driving a tractor, stops at the gate while Collett explains we’re visiting press and then we drive on. It’s also empty of people. In between looking at bunkhouses, barns and tack Collett says you can buy a year-long season pass to the Ruby View Golf Course for $350. “All year long,” he says. “Bet you can’t play Pebble one time for that.” He’s got that to-the-point logic that comes with the country and he’s right. You can’t. Then again, playing golf all year long in Elko means maybe April to October. And the conversation switches obliquely to the pressures on people for space, the pressures on the land for its space. “People get more and more crowded and pretty soon there’s no way out,” Collett says. “So what happens? They get militant.” The Shovel Brigade of last year, when the Forest Service dug in its heels over road improvement to a wilderness district in the Jarbidge area and set in motion a knee jerk reaction throughout Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Oregon that is still twitching, is mentioned as an example. The final ranch stop, arranged by a cell call ahead, is Jack and Irene Walther’s ranch. (“Don’t ask how many cattle they have.”) Their home is a double wide trailer with endless corridors of little added-on rooms. Jack, who is 81, recited his poetry at the G Three Bar Theater the night before. Standing in Walther’s trailer-sized living room and seeing his suit of clothes on the floor where he dropped them when he came home, strikes an incongruity that comes when a rancher talks about poetry and writing in the middle of ranch country. He gives me a short, typewritten draft of a story about a horse. “My wife thinks the boy should be the main focal point,” he says handing the sheet of white paper to me in his thick, strong hands. “But I think it should be the horse.” I scan it quickly. The story is about a horse that has a longing to go home to Oregon and in the end breaks free. The last he is seen, the horse and a mate are trotting toward the Oregon border. I agree with Jack. Irene Walther is built just about like Jack. Still solid in old age. I imagine the two of them working their ranch as physical equals. When one of the young Hooper women came over to help tag calve ears, Irene, who says she has a bad back, pops out of her chair as nimble as a kid heading for a Coke in the refrigerator and quickly pulls on a huge outer winter-wear jumpsuit and boots to lend a hand, lecturing as she dressed. “The Gathering is not like it used to be,” she says in a plain, firm voice that sounds like it isn’t used to any back talk. “At first it was real informal. Now, it’s commercial and it’s getting political. I don’t know why they invited Udall. He’s against us.” There’s a history in her voice that has its genesis in the “lords of yesterday,” Charles F. Wilkinson’s description in tracing back the land use entitlements of hardrock mining, public rangelands and first come, first served water rights in his work “Crossing The Next Meridian.” The lords of yesterday, the laws that began in the late 1800s and led to the gross misuse of public lands today. And why not, Irene Walther might ask? Possession of public lands, as in her voice, is nine points of the law, the Crook County’s Sheep-Shooting Association of Eastern Oregon like to brag in the early turn of the twentieth century. Her voice comes deep from within, a generation unremoved from the days when ranchers asserted their right to graze herds without regulation by making their own laws about grazing, fencing, size of herds and who is entitled to what water – a form of home rule that came to symbolize and mythicize the Western frontier. The gall of Udall, as if the Cowboy Poetry Gathering had just one brand on it; a brainlock that doesn’t let much inside when a meeting of the minds is required. She has some side space off the kitchen where there is an easel set up and before going to tend the calves she shows me her paintings. They look much like folk art. Unsophisticated, no hidden meanings, no abstractions. A barn, a path. Therapy. There’s a new intellect joining the headliners’ voices of Michael Martin Murphey and Don Edwards at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering; poets Linda Hussa and Merrily Wright, playwright Andy Wilkinson, singing poet Richard Elloyan and the Hot Club of Cowtown. They talk, sing and recite about roping and riding as a form of art, an artistry. They’re more to the point, capable of laughing at the drawbacks of ranching as well as the good points. They see the earthy colors of the range and express what those colors mean to them. They see the hardships of raising a modern-day family, not a pioneer family, out in some remote canyon and they speak with feeling about those hardships. They’re younger and not as “entertaining,” if entertainment is the proper description, as the main headliners are, but they are the newer generation with a feel for the past, a grasp of the time and an imagination for the future. Thursday afternoon at the Elko Convention Center theater, the main stage for the poets and singers, Michael Martin Murphey starts off his set with a trilogy on the James Brothers, but it makes little sense. I am listening for clues, symbols of unrest that will give meaning to the issues of today, not yesterday. And then he sings his protest song. Ride rangeland rebel Murphey closes his performance with a light humored reference to his willingness to sing more “songs of sedition,” and the audience laughs just as lightly and he exits stage right. Now gather around cowboys Ride for your land before it’ll be a golf course. Is this blasphemy? Anarchy? No, it’s a metaphor for verse with a ring of truth that a cowboy singer feels deep down. Golf and the land. We’re losing our land, not just our rangeland but our open space, our foothills, our shorelines, our natural grasses, trees. All ours. Golf has become synonymous with greed, and here’s a cowboy who sees the truth in the metaphor. On the inside cover of Murphey’s “Cowboy Songs Four” he expands the obvious in his protest song. “The rebels of the range always deal with the same problem. Outsiders move in with a different agenda, often ignoring the needs of the ecosystem. We must resist the temptation to sell out our rangelands for short term greed. The rangelands’ health depends on adequate numbers of grazing animals. Cattle are the only animals capable of grazing in significant numbers in the foreseeable future, although bison are slowly on the rise. Subdivisions are ruining the range. Trophy homes in resorts sit empty most of the time, creating a ghost town atmosphere.” At the Northeastern Nevada Museum there is a photo exhibit by Paula Morin of wild horse roundups called “Honest Horses.” The exhibit is part of a series of workshop panels on mustangs in the culture and ecology of the Great Basin. One photo is called “Basin, Range and Mustang Trap.” It shows a fence trap that looks remarkably like one of those innocuous but temporary Cristo landscape sculptures from the ‘70s, the kind where he hung up white sheets for miles, but it isn’t. Read the title again. “Basin, Range and Mustang Trap.” Another photo shows a bubble helicopter being used to round up wild horses in Elko County. The photo is called “Pony in the Sky.” Another title “No Quiet Death” is of a rotting skeleton of a horse, its head still alive looking. How did he die? Scared to death? Or starved to death because there wasn’t enough feed? Because there are too many horses? The message is, “as cute as you sob sisters think mustangs are, they are dying an ugly death and for plenty of sad, seemingly unavoidable reasons.” No water, no feed, for starters. Not enough adoption homes to keep up with the wild, natural breeding. On a portion of Nellis Air Force Base, a Nevada test site, a wild horse range was established for the displacement of 10,000 horses. It was an attempt to bring the horses into balance with the rang, but it looked frighteningly like the same kind of program the federal government set up for Native Americans when they were removed to reservations. Neither work. Both Indian and wild horse are on the hard road to extinction. Paula Morin writes: The Hot Club of Cowtown is young and handsome, upbeat, frenetic, swinging, like they’re working their way through the audience, and not at it, on their way from Austin, which is where they are from, on their way to orbiting, new innovators of old cowboy swing, country western music like their Austin compadres Jerry Jeff Walker, Bob Livingston, Freddie Steady Krc and a whole bunch more out there. You can’t break my heart, Playing to a half empty house full of background talk at the G Three Bar Theater downtown, they were the younger generation representatives pounding it out on fiddle, electric guitar and stand up bass, instruments that looked older than these sexy, unguarded kids singing songs that melted under the heat of their unbridled enthusiasm on a stage far from the headliners. Just pure western swing music, lifting the “Joe-Bob Rag” and flinging it out over the heads of the sparse audience like an untamed Frisbee. At the Great Basin College community stage cowboy balladeer Don Edwards finished up a thoughtful “Blues on the Range” program with “Hard Times in the Country, Hard Times Everywhere,” his own protest song. Hinting at the political correctness wave that’s flooding over the land, he said he couldn’t find someone to write it for him so he wrote it himself. Hard times everywhere. Come listen a while, goin’ sing you a song In the parking lot of the Red Lion a bumper sticker on a new 4 x 4 black Ford pickup from New Mexico sang its own song: “Politicians Prefer Unarmed Peasants.” Paula Morin at the wild horse workshop panel. “We’re using creative resources to discuss the meaning and impact of the wild horse program, therefore we are apolitical.” I listen but think back to a few days earlier when we were told a story over in Eureka, Nevada about a deer hunter years ago who saw a wild stallion that had stolen away some of his mares. “I’ll take care of you,” he shouted and he shot and killed the horse. Sixty percent of the wild horses running free are in Nevada, but the state receives less than ten percent of the $30 million or so budget administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The goal for 2001 is to remove 6,500 head of the estimated 26,000 that Morin writes of. The occasion for the panel is the thirtieth anniversary of the 1971 National Free-Roaming Wild Horse and Burro Act, a federal legislative step that has gone about as wild as the horses. A statistic: in 1971 one Elko ranch had an “allotment” of 52 horses. Today there are 1,400 wild horses on the same ranch. The problem, most of the panelists agree, is there are management programs for everything but horses; horses are victim of a politically correct Congress. My, God! Friday night at the Ruby Dome Ranch, an evening for cornering high rollers into bidding on live auction items coaxed by cowboy poet star Waddie Mitchell, and the Hot Club of Cowtown (again!) is playing its heart out for a mostly uncaring bunch of Republicans waiting to show off in front of their trophy wives. A tall blond from Moss Beach, California, on her way to the washroom stops at a press pod containing us and KPIG radio folk where she lapses into a story about the time she got bit by a bee on her neck while playing golf. “You see,” I turn to my favorite KPIG disk jockey Laura Ellen, “this is what I mean by the whole fucking world going to hell in a hand basket. Here we are in the middle of the Great Basin on a ranch at the foot of the snow-covered Ruby Mountains and we’re talking golf.” I turn back to the bee-stung blond and in serious commiseration tell her I am a golf writer and she is the only person I know who ever ever got stung by a bee on the golf course. She said that was ok, in fact she got her swing back after about three holes and she heads for the open door of the wash room. Hot Club of Cowtown obliviously wails away, already in flight to who knows where but we’re taking the ride. The guitarist is an emaciated-looking throwback to the ‘40s. He slumps over this guitar, his black hair falling across his pale forehead and down over his eyes. Where’s his shot of whiskey? Doesn’t everybody old enough to have a past love the good old days? The guitarist sings into his guitar. Chinatown, my Chinatown. “Elko’s full, or they say they are, of radicals.” Udall was scheduled to give the humanities lecture on Saturday from 2:30 p.m. to 3:10 p.m. in the Turquoise Room, one of those side rooms that’s separated from the room next door by a folding panel door. The scheduling in a side room that held maybe 150 people and not in the main auditorium where lesser entertainers than he had appeared seemed an insult directed at the former Secretary of Interior. Forty minutes for a humanities lecture. Time is running out. The panel on diversifying ranch income, in other words, how to keep the ranch and stay alive at the same time, wrapped up on Saturday. They see ranching as a culture, as art, saddle-making, it goes beyond cattle. Estate planning is discussed. Water. “Water’s being traded around today like oil stock and will be in the future.” Not discussed by the panel is another culture, one of stereotyped hardheads, religiously fundamental in their thinking, church or no church. Been this way, why change? In this culture there is an openness to buying a new tractor, but not a new idea. Ranch fencing and intellectual thought become identical hurdles for both sides to clear. The panel talks on. “Socially are we ready for holistic ranching?” “Tear the land up and rest it. Tear it up and rest it.” “The net farm income in Montana is equal to the net federal subsidies.” “From 1992 to 1997 there was a loss of 16 million acres of agricultural land to development.” The golf industry, those riding the unconscionable money train, are among the bad guys in these statistics. Listen to the words of Murphey’s rangeland rebel song. Golf’s another form of development that threatens open space, rangeland, ranches, the displacement of people. The golf industry is one of the many competing for the land base, or what’s left of it. Building instant ghost towns of golf condos. Till the land for profit and call it greenskeeping. Tear the land up and rest it. Tear it up and rest it. Some of the workshops such as diversifying ranch income, financial planning for ranchers, managing in the black both economically and ecologically and securing ranching’s future deal with the perplexing and complex pressures ranchers face from outside development or absorption by corporate-sized mega-ranches and resorts. Some of the entertainment performances like Murphey’s and Edward’s are platforms for both myth-making and lightly veiled political commentary. There are no objections from an audience free of constraining politically correctness. Regardless of what’s on it, they speak their mind. Saturday afternoon arrived and it is Stewart Udall’s moment. Security guards avoid upsetting an overflow crowd by removing the sliding panel door to enlarge the Turquoise Room. The so-called radical group from the Shovel Brigade quietly lines up along the far right hand wall. Udall enters unobtrusively from their direction. There is a bookish look about him. His gray hair is collar length. The old hawk profile softly feathers into a moss-green corduroy suit and brown loafers. No boots, no tie down the plaid shirt. His skin has the speckled look of aging like he might have fallen and scraped his forehead and it wouldn’t heal, but the wounds are sun spots. He moves into his talk right away and only after he’s spoken a few moments is it apparent there are no opening remarks, no jokes to ease the tension. Instead he quotes Emily Dickinson’s “to make a prairie it takes a flower and a bee,” and along the way he tells the crowd that some news arrives slow in Elko, that he’s an environmentalist and we’re all entitled to our opinion. His voice has a firm softness to it, an understanding of the years he has seen as a public man. He says he is 81 and from Arizona where they like to “think they straight talk.” And then he speaks of Robert Frost, his friendship with the poet, his influence in Kennedy naming Frost our first poet laureate and he compares Frost’s poetry to the cowboy’s, the vernacular, the country. He alludes to his Kennedy days, his later books, and repeats his admiration of cowboy poets. He talks of ranching, the bringing of horses to Native Americans by the Spanish. He talks of his favorite Nevadan Robert Laxalt. He talks about Laxalt’s “Sweet Promised Land,” and he talks about settlers and the old west. He speaks in the form of a sermon, without sermonizing, saying that supposedly he is not a religious person. And he talks about Mormon settlers. He speaks as a peacemaker and his voice fades into a James Masonesque soft, calming tone that embraces the listener. He talks about tolerance and mutual respect, intrinsic values and he quotes Emily Dickinson again and in respectful humor of King Solomon and King David. And he speaks with great humility. He says he fled Phoenix a ways back when it was trying to successfully becomes another Los Angeles. And he say despite the quarrels about grazing, he respects the rancher’s love of the land. He quotes Wallace Stegner and says they were in agreement over the Mountain Massacre, (“My middle name is Lee.”) He is apologetic and asks that accusation be put aside and forgiveness be expressed, “It haunted Utah and it haunted my family, I can tell you.” He is a Nightingale healing unhealable wounds. And in the end the audience, at first one and then two and then all of them, stand up and applaud. Afterwards I asked Udall if he was apprehensive about coming to Elko to give the humanities lecture. “No,” he answered quietly. “I’ve been in rough and tumble politics. Some people thought I was going to give a political speech but I didn’t want to be criticized. I came to give the talk I gave.” And he continued: “I understand this is a hot bed of opposition, but ranchers in other parts of the country are sitting down and talking.” “If you get people talking you can come up with solutions.” “It’s silly in your old age to try and tell people what to do.” He alluded to hoping that he is not hostile to what their (the ranchers’) beliefs are, saying he prefers quiet talk to argument. In the lobby of the convention center, a few steps from the Turquoise Room, I run into Jack Walther and tell him that Udall asked that people get together and talk out their disagreements. Walther answers, “The federal government has asked us to cooperate before and that’s how we lost everything. No, it’s not mutual cooperation.” Did he hear Udall’s talk? He says he did not. “First they stand because they don’t have the strength to eat. They stand because they’re too weak to get to water. Then they lay down. Crows pick out their eyes. Coyotes start to back into them, eating them while they’re still alive.” A member of the wild horse panel is describing the death of a mustang. The discussion shifts to the need to put down sick and lame horses, and the Nevada director of the Bureau of Land Management from Washington, D.C. says, “we’re not talking about putting down one or two horses, We would have to put down hundreds.” The exchange between panelists would have been meat for pro-mustang romantics, but it wasn’t because they weren’t there to hear it. Down at the end of the table is Michael Martin Murphey, another panelist. This is the wrap up session over at the Northeastern Nevada Museum. Murphey speaks. “We have a right to die. And animals in animal shelters have a right to die. Help me understand. Who got in control to allow horses to die on the range? Humans have more to say about how they die. What are their names? We’ve all gotten up here and given our names.” His question is directed at the BLM man in the crew neck sweater. “The biggest problem we face in government is trust,” the BLM director replies and he goes on, not answering Murphey’s question. “I don’t have a person’s specific name because we’re in a transition now. If we weren’t, I could give you some names.” “How about Bush,” someone suggested. Afterward, Murphey says he knew the BLM guy couldn’t give him any names. If he did he would lose his job. I ask him where I can find the lyrics to “Rangleland Rebel” and tell him that I am a golf writer, that last year when I saw him at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering workshops I didn’t know who he was. “I play golf,” Michael Martin Murphey tells me when I say I write about golf. “I’m not against more golf courses, I’m against more of these golf communities. I play golf on a muni course in Taos. They use gray water to irrigate it. We got a golf course community down to 40 houses from 400. They build these resorts with condos that are empty all year. What we need are more muni courses.” There’s so much here that it takes me rather than my taking it, and only the writing of this gives me a sense of security that it is I and not it that remains under some stretch of the meaning of control. Saturday night we are invited by John and Janice Collett to Sarah Sweetwater’s for an Italian potluck. Sarah is the co-founder of the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering but now she takes a quiet, unpretentious back seat in her crowded living room. Musicians and poets drop in and out all evening, jamming with guitars, mandolins, bagpipes, a deerskin handheld drum and it comes full circle on one evening: Off stage, the singers, poets and musicians go back to where they started, together, harmonizing. Cowboy fiddlers playing waltzes. Serious, old ranchers writing and reading poetry. Talking about storyline in their double wide trailer. Where else today can that social phenomenon be found? What other grouping of working men and women, what other form of American cultural force, begs a comparison? A fiddler playing a cowboy waltz is not that far removed from a concert violinist playing Straus. What separates them is a culture of range, cattle, open space and probably socio-political mindset, but what binds them together is the music. If the two met in Walther’s trailer they would share a deep, common love and play for one another and then finally together. On the way out of town Sunday morning we drive up to the Ruby View Golf Course, in February a winter playland for cross country skiers. Most of it is under snow, but there are some patches of buckskin-colored grass. The snow accents the terrain, a landscape that otherwise might become monotone under a different seasonal light, but the snow highlights the peaks in the distance, the nearer canyons, the angles. The trees are out of leaf and there is a frozen creek. Without its summer-green dressing it’s easy to see the course follows the rise of the desert; it doesn’t collide with the sagebrush hills. The snow gives the course an unimposing look, as a golf course should appear in winter or any time of year. It’s a golf course accessible to all, perhaps even more so under its mask of white as three men traverse a buried fairway that slumbers under the tracks of joggers and cross country ski tracks. If cowboying were solely a recreation it would surely require the largest pieces of open land for its use, but it isn’t. Golf is recreation when it’s not being big business. There is no other game that requires as much land for its playing field than golf. Falling victim to the spreading of golf courses is the particularly vulnerable desert, the cowboys’ yard. Chinatown, my Chinatown, hearts that know no other land, how we fought
and died for the land of the free. Now the home of the brave is all
lit up with greed, but you can’t break my heart, it’s
been broken before, so gather around cowboys, saddle up a good horse
and ride for your land before it’ll be a golf course. |
