On The Trail

Sunday is soaking down into the soil like the day’s rain, and it will soon disappear completely, and Monday will sprout during the quiet hours when the spring drives our ticking clock with its relentless pendulum, while we are unaware that the work week has already blossomed.

Unless I am going to be off the next day, I spend part of every Sunday dreading Monday. Dreading the brusque, self-absorbed people with whom I work, them and their shallow chitchat and their endless references to current popular culture figures of whom I have no knowledge and even less interest. Dreading the curdling hypocrisy of working in a field driven by profit yet claiming to care about human beings. Dreading the time spent away from my home and my wife and my animals and my books and my music, my notebooks and pencils, my chairs and icons, my candles and tools, my floorboards and rugs, the sweet air inside and the birdsong outside.

I dread on Sundays, and I dream on Mondays…and all the other days of the work week. I dream of freedom, of independence, of fulfillment, of all the things I once vaguely thought were just over the hill, just around the next crook in the road, just behind that far stand of trees. I dream of the things I will likely never have, and in the midst of those dreams, I remind myself that, all things considered, I live like a king, and am deeply loved, and am healthy, and can dream my dreams while waiting to return to the little country paradise where I hide from the uncaring, fanged things of the world.

In recent weeks, my old interest in cowboys and things of the West have resurfaced. My wife comes from real Texas cowboy stock, and the lives and times of those hard, sunburned men will forever fascinate me. I was reminded that in the prologue to his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry included a marvelous quote:

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.—T. K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

My head shakes in wonder when I ponder the implications of Mr. Whipple’s statement. Could it be that some future generation will look back with fascination and even respect for the wage slaves of today?

When I was a boy, I galloped many a mile on my stick horse, with my little nickel-toned cap guns strapped around my skinny waist, a red felt cowboy hat hanging from its cord on the back of my neck as I eluded attacking Indians, chased cattle thieves, and outran prairie thunderstorms. I pestered my mother until she agreed to let me eat beans and cornbread outside in the back yard, squatting on my boot-heels and staring into the campfire I’d made with a few dead leaves and a Diamond Match while holding my plate like Stoney Burke held his on the black & white television. I tried to live out the dream of being a cowboy, a gunslinger, a loner from the Lone Star State, pointing a herd north. I kept a stoic face many a time while removing a Kiowa arrow from my thigh.

And so it makes my mind dance to think of the scant possibility that someday, a little boy will mimic getting ready to go to work so that he can pay bills, that he will pretend to stop at the gas station on the way to the office and buy a lottery ticket from the clerk. That he will fight imaginary battles with petty office managers, outsmart hordes of hostile and incompetent Human Resources offices, or keep a stoic face while enduring mandatory training sessions that are neither needful nor sensible.

And what are the dreams I have that might become reality in decades or centuries to come? Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I have dreams, but I don’t for a moment believe that any future generation will bring them into living existence. Such is the difference between the era of the cowboy and the era of the wage slave. There are no more frontiers, and those of my kind will never be left alone to sit on our mount and watch a sunset over a stretch of land we haven’t yet explored. We will never be left alone, period.

But for now, I can set aside Monday morning’s brutal sameness, and I can gallop. I can gallop tonight, even with arrows and lightning flashing close around me. I think I can make out the trail just ahead.

~ S.K. Orr