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Scouting Out The Trail Unknown |
I've heard it both ways--in remembrance you only think back on the good times, but then I've also  heard--no, it's just the bad times that stay in your head. I'll venture to float my stick midstream and tell you I remember it all. The escapades through the years so firmly etched into my being that I will never forget, unable to get shed of the visions that color my dreams every night--the Ghost Dance of a life lost to the modern world. I'll have to backtrack at some point to fill in the rough spots of how it came to be in the summer of 1976 that my brother, Raleigh, and I rode out of Taos, New Mexico like a couple of 1840's trappers, decked in buckskin, Hawken Rifles across our saddles, all that we owned in the world on two pack horses we trailed. But for now I'll just write and hope that you can see it like I did.
It had been almost two years since my divorce, and other than a four and a half month stretch the previous winter in Montana with a mountain man named "Wild Bill" learning how to brain tan skins, my brother and I had been constant companions  busily preparing to leave civilized doin's forever. We both were working jobs, making money so we could buy what outfit we needed. We went camping every weekend practicing our increasing primitive skills, at night during the work week we'd sew and make things we figured we'd need, pouches, bags, clothing, doing beadwork, reading every spare moment, testing the tidbits we'd glean from the old journals and stories of our heroes, the Rocky Mountain free trappers of the early 1800's.
The Montana stint came as a fluke. A Fish and Game officer in Kalispell mentioned a mountain man named "Buckskin Bill" when I'd asked about trapping, so I felt obliged to look him up and had headed to the Montana/Canadian Border on the North Fork Road out of Kalispell to where he was supposed to be living. I'd planned on heading west into Idaho and then north towards the Upper Priest Lake country. I had no idea this slight deviation would steer my course for the next year.
In the spring of '75 I'd quit my job, finally fed up with the wage-slave bullshit whether I needed the money or not and took off, hitching through the Rocky Mountains scouting the land, feeling out the lawdogs for what they had as rules and regulations on God's fish and game, looking over the country to assess if it was even possible for Ral and me to find country wild enough to live off the land. All we wanted was to be masters of our own fate. It wasn't until much later in life that I finally came to terms with realizing we may be captains of our ship, but there is only one that is master to our fate. But none-the-less at the time I still thought I was in control and so far it was working out pretty good.
Even hitchhiking, most days I'd managed to poach a fish or grouse around nightfall without getting busted, and felt well satisfied in my brother's and my plan of escape. The last phone call I'd made to Ral, I'd told him it was certain we'd be able to live off of God's bounty and what little money we'd need could be made by trapping fur like in the 1800's. We were getting excited, it was all coming together, as we were planning on leaving that summer. What we planned was being nomadic horseback mountain men, with no tie to oil or cars. Camping and living on horses we didn't figure to need much cash.
In our mind money was for what's called durable goods, i.e., clothing, tools, guns, lead and powder, an outfit. The idea that a person needed to pay monthly for the necessities of living had become absolutely abhorrent to our free sensibilities. But all the same, inspite of not wanting to be held hostage for living, I managed to always be in need of extra cash for beer and whiskey if I happened to run into some cute little earth muffin when passing through a town. Hence unlike my brother, I always managed to piss away a good amount of dollars and was often broke and in need of a loan. Jeez, I'd been known to bail from a long two-three-hundred mile haul in a comfortable ride just to try my luck. Seldom worked out, the girls mostly getting freaked straight off with my wild Indian dress. Or if they didn't scare with that and I had a chance to get in a word or two, once they heard of my wild, primordial life-view that pretty much shut down all but the incredibly brave or crazy.
But there were a few, the back-to-the-land movement spawned from the hippie culture had churned out a crop of anti-utopian fluff tails that had a notion the wilderness was what they wanted. Most times once they realized it didn't match the dogma already steering the ideology of those thinking they were breaking free they'd go back to the mainstream-counter-culture--but that's not to say our ilk, the new mountain men gathering in the wild places in ones, and twos and threes didn't get them all worked up. Yet it was still a rare hookup no matter how you throw it--most too brainwashed to truly bust out of the box.
It just wasn't "cool" killing things by that period of our history, the brainwash even worse now, far easier to stay on your proper rung of the middle-man ladder and let an underpaid workman cold-cock a steroided chicken, package it in cellophane and have you over-pay some store clerk for it like we've been taught from birth. The "civilized" men particularly a sad spectacle, dismissing our breed as no account escapists, albeit, we could always tell, even in their sneer, a certain respect and a hint of longing, along with a tall dose of jealousy most every time for those of us roaming free of the hamster's wheel.
Around five o'clock I finally made it to Polebridge on the North Fork of the Flathead River--a little over halfway to the border. It had taken the entire day to make the thirty-five miles from Colombia Falls where I'd camped the night before after heading out of Kalispell. The traffic had been almost nonexistent so I'd walked most of it. Being late and with civilization (such as it was, population 10) close to hand I was at the General Store splurging on necessities and a can of beans so I could eat that night.
I was debating what kind of tobacco to buy when an old pickup pulled in splashing water from the fresh puddles of a squall just passed. An older guy and a cute younger girl around  my age, both in full buckskins, jumped out and bounded to the porch, hesitating for a moment to check out my pack-strapped bedroll and Hawken leaning against the wall--the beautiful patina of oiled Curly Maple and browned metal glinting, the brass headed tacks in medicine symbols on the butt and forearm catching the low slivers of sunlight breaking through the scud of clouds laying to the west.
We all acted coy, as if it was natural as elk gathering in the fall to run into others of our kind when there were probably less than a couple hundred in the whole country that were truly pursuing what we saw as a way of life. Other than the echo of our feet on the rough wood floor there was no other sound than my heartbeat--
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By W.J. Lynus O'Brien
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Read by 723 People, Thanks
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