Excerpted from Lyman Hafen's recently published book Roping the Wind
Available from Utah State University Press, 1-800-239-9974
At the time I didn't know a fresh Edward Abbey essay had just appeared in Harper's a long polemical piece which brutally assassinated the character of anyone who ever swung a leg over a saddle and rode in the dust of a cow. I suppose I should have expected it. I knew nothing was sacred to Edward Abbey, not even cows. But I possessed a monumental weakness where Abbey was concerned: in spite of the fact that I took issue with much of what he wrote, I greatly admired the way he wrote it. That's why I went to Moab.
Edward Abbey was backlit by midafternoon sun as he stepped into the lobby of Pack Creek Ranch. He was taller than I remembered and not quite so lean. I arose from my seat on the nauga-hide couch and could almost feel him size me up with eyes that wore a permanent, scrutinizing squint. I had met him once before. It had been a quick, small-talk session that began with a limp, halfhearted handshake. This time the interview was prearranged and the venerable writer seemed to offer me a bit of benefit-of-the-doubt credibility. His elfin face transfixed into a full smile as he shook my hand, firmly this time. His salt-and-pepper-beard was fluffy like a not-too-serious rain cloud, and he had on a short-sleeved western snap shirt, beige Levi's and plain bullhide boots with some miles on them.
He came across as very kind and I caught myself wondering if this could be an imposter, if this outwardly cordial fellow could truly be the curmudgeon who brazenly bashed so many of our national icons. The two of us sat down on the lobby chairs-along with our host Ken Sleight and my friend Milo McCowan, the real estate developer and book collector who had arranged the meeting-and began a conversation that lasted for six hours.
Right out of the gate, any lingering question of false identity was left abruptly in the dust. Abbey slipped to the rail and settled in our issues of particular interest to him at the time. He criticized the National Park Service for transforming many of our most popular parks into mini metro centers. He damned the damnation of Glen Canyon and lauded Larry McMurtry's recent Lonesome Dove. He praised another novelist, a fellow from El Paso named Cormac McCarthry whose work he had just discovered (this a full five years before All The Pretty Horses and the ensuing Border Trilogy). He also set forth his proposal for legislatively limiting population, suggesting we seal off all our borders to immigrants.
It was inevitable that on the backstretch and final turn, our conversation would ultimately grind down to cattle and the public lands. It was Abbey's race and he held his half-length lead wire to wire. He knew I was the son of a rancher who, like most others in our region, depended to some degree on use of the public range. Still, he held nothing back. He plowed down the homestretch with the same reasoning, the same vitriolic rhetoric, and many of the same patented Abbey phrases that I would read a short time later in his essay. "There's the cowboy and his cow," said Abbey. "Some of these cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites. They've been getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor of putting the public lands livestock grazers out of business."
I had figured I was prepared for most anything Abbey might throw. But this one brushed me back. My throat went dry as a desert wind. Obviously I did not agree. I wondered if he was testing me. I knew that Abbey was always one to rile things up-throw a fly in the ointment-just to get your attention. Surely he was joking. But he didn't flinch. He was serious. "We don't need the public lands beef industry," Abbey said. "The vast majority of our beef in grown on private land in the Midwest and South and East-where you can support a cow on half an acre rather than the twenty-five to fifty acres it takes to sustain a cow on the public lands of the West." I'd heard his facts before. It was not the facts I disputed so much as the way he strung them together-and the facts that he conveniently avoided.
"Furthermore," Abbey went on, "we'd save money in taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public lands cattlemen. Subsidies for things like range improvement-tree chaining, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control, predator trapping, fencing, wells, stock ponds, roads."
It was my turn now. "The last time the Bureau of Land Management cleared any sagebrush for my father, a rancher from Texas was president," I countered. I added that the only range improvements made on his public range allotment in the last ten years had been made largely at his own expense-to the tune of more than $20,000.
But Abbey was on his soapbox now. "Cattle are doing intolerable damage to our public lands," he said. "Almost anywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinky, fly -covered, sh**-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague."
My chest swelled. No wonder the tables were turning. No wonder the BLM was cutting range rights every year, putting range improvements on hold, and generally making life miserable for folks trying to hold onto their investment and to a way of life in the public lands. No wonder so many ranching families were selling out after four or five generations in the business. I couldn't come up with an eloquent counter to Abbey's diatribe. My defense floated in some vague notion at the heart of the myth he was talking about: that we are choking out one more productive way of life, leaving the land and flocking to the office where the only thing we produce is paper for the recycling bin.
I suppose Abbey was reading my mind. He came back with this: "It's not easy to argue that we should do away with cattle ranching. the cowboy myth gets in the way. But if all of our 31,000 public land ranchers quit tomorrow, we'd never miss them."
"You wouldn't," I said. "But I miss a whole bunch of them already. Guys like Waldo Simkins, Aaron Leavitt, Mark Cannon, Levi Snow. They're all gone now, and nobody replaced them. Their sons headed into more promising futures; the cows were sold off; their private property was optioned for real estate development; all those generations of ranching, of production, of wealth generated from a renewable natural resource-all of it ended just like that." I could think of dozen sons of ranchers I graduated from high school with in 1973. None of us stayed in ranching. Not so much because we didn't want to, but because we could see easier and more lucrative ways to make a living. Over the past twenty years, cattle numbers on the public ranges have fallen by the thousands as one ranching operation after another has faded. My father, and others like him, saw it coming for a long time. they sent their sons to college and trade schools-talked them into dentistry, diesel mechanics, financial planning, medieval literature. "There's no future on the ranch," my dad once told me. "If cattle prices or drought don't bury you, the government will."
Abbey railed on and I was stuck there like a trapped coyote. No choice but to listen. He suggested a few methods for reducing cattle on the public ranges-Abbeyisms like declaring a hunting season on range cattle or stocking water holes with alligators. I figured he had said just about every disparaging thing possible.Then he started to get more personal. "Most ranchers don't work very hard," he said. "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 drug, sitting around all morning drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks."
It was obvious now that Abbey's cowboy and mine were two different breeds. After reading his essay later, I learned that the cowboy image he had fixed upon was cut from the pattern of a no-account, drunken New Mexican he had known back in 1947, who took potshots at jackrabbits and road signs with a .44, and let his 40 acres go to tumbleweed. My image came from somewhere else. It was shaped by men like Levi Snow, a slight, gentle, competent man who spent his days eking a living off the desolate range along the Beaver Dam Slope in Southwestern Utah and Southern Nevada. Abbey's cowboy was expletive, lazy, and antisocial. Mine was a hard-working man with a set of ethics, some civicmindedness, and a modest fear of God.
I had sense enough to know that most cowboys fall somewhere between the two extremes. I also knew, and was willing to concede, that there have been plenty of cowmen who have made mistakes, who whether through greed or ignorance or even laziness have damaged the land and left behind a sad legacy. But I believed that more of them fit my definition than Abbey's. Of the two dozen true cowboys I had known, all of them built in the mold of Levi Snow, none vaguely resembled the slouch Edward Abbey planted in the minds of a quartermillion Harper's readers.
I wanted somehow to share Levi Snow with Edward Abbey. I wanted to tell him that I didn't believe Levi ever sat at the counter of a drugstore. That he wouldn't have had time for politics or bellyaching. That he had cows out on the slope which he tended like children, hayfields to mow and rake and bale, fences to mend, calves to wean, ditches to dig, horses to break, strays to gather, ice on ponds to break, grazing fees to pay, taxes to catch up on, rain to pray for, buyers to see, cattle to move, trucks to load, flats to fix, and bills and bills and bills to pay. But I didn't know how to tell him; or maybe I just didn't have the courage.
Yet the image was there, alive and burning on the ridges of my mind. The image of a good and caring man who started every day before the sun, whose quitting time was when everything was done. He had a home and a family in town, but he spent most of his days on the range, camping in a dugout or a line shack or under the stars. He grazed his cattle mostly on the public range, when and how the BLM and Forest Service mandated, and tried his best to make an honest living.
Abbey, I was certain, would have been unaffected by my description. He continued with zeal, "We don't need cowboys or ranchers anymore," he said. "We've carried them on our backs long enough."
I sank into memories. Struggling to protect myself from Abbey's flaying, I recalled a dark rainy spring day nearly twenty years earlier. Where I came from rain's the greatest gift, the only gift I ever heard my dad ask for. (I do remember one time when he wished for a million dollars. "What would you do with a million dollars?" I asked. "I'd run cattle until it was all gone," he said.) We were pushing cows up the mountain, up the steep road through Ash Spring toward Bunker Peak. We had two hundred head of bolly-faced cows ahead of us, the best horses in the county beneath us, and a million gallons of water toppling down upon us. Soaked to the bone, we drove those cows up the mucky winding road to summer pasture and the old cowboys hummed and told stories all the way. Levi Snow is the one I remember best from that day. He was short, lean, wouldn't have weighed more than a hundred and a quarter. Kindest eyes I ever saw. Levi was so small some of the other cowboys complained that it wasn't fair; he could weave between the raindrops and not get wet. he wore a tan slicker that covered his frail frame and hung down over his saddle like a dress. His wide-brimmed hat, water trailing off the back, kept his face and ears dry. It was cold and uncomfortable and not an easy thing to be doing. But he was happy.
"We don't need ranchers anymore." The force of Abbey's voice hit me like a two-by-four across the side of the head. "They've had their free ride. It's time they learned to support themselves." When Abbey finally finished, I mustered one last question. He had earlier complained about his modest earning as a writer, and I wanted to know what he would do if he fell into a large sum of money. He thought for a moment, undoubtedly mulling over the paradoxes that underlie his legend. His face, lit by an old wagonwheel lamp, slowly formed a facetious grin and finally he said, "I'd probably buy myself a ranch."
--Roping the Wind
Lyman Hafen
Published in Utah Science Magazine, Fall 1995
Reprinted by permission