Sunday, November 02, 2014

A thousand miles away from home … they have rejected us




All around the Water Trough
Searching for Refrain
A thousand miles away from home … they have rejected us
By Stephen L. Wilmeth


            I can’t swim.
            For years I was ashamed of that. There is no use debating or casting blame, though, because I have come to believe there are more important regrets. I suspect I am not alone in that conclusion.
In fact, there are a cast of characters just like me. A number of us claim the Gila River as home, and, on occasion, we talk about that. Our plight isn’t because we never had water around us. We had the river, but our anecdotal response has long been, “we never had enough water to cover our heads”.
There is a degree of truth in that.
It wasn’t because we didn’t spend time at the river. We spent a lot of time there. We fished often and most of us became pretty fair fishermen.
If there is a singular thread it came from our predecessors. We share common traits. They may have been fair mentors in things that mattered, but, in the shortcomings of this aspect, they failed. They couldn’t swim either.
Visually, the commonality can be seen in our exposed skin. Aside from our hands, necks, and faces up to our eyebrows, we have become varying shades of fluorescent white as we have aged regardless of our genetic configuration.
The fact is we come from a community of Americans who didn’t arise within or adhere to mainstream. We had grandfathers who shocked us when we witnessed them rolling their sleeves up to fix a float on a water trough or making ready to assist a first calf heifer trying to have her calf. We didn’t see that exposed skin very often, and, when we did, it was clearly apparent it had been protected from the sun for all the reasons implicit in the heritage they lived.
Across the country, we are a distinct minority.
Too often, we find ourselves misunderstood or in the crosshairs of public controversy. Most of the time, the conflict emanates from matters regarding the gradual encroachment and diminishment of access affecting our investments on federal lands. As the issues are elevated, the results don’t just affect us. Each is a skirmish that is revealed to be less about our impact on the land than how the decision making was handled by Washington.
I have become more brazenly proud of the life I live. If a marker happens to be the fact I can’t swim, so be it. The greater hallmark is that I am a linked to an American underpinning that doesn’t have to rely on abstract values to justify its existence. As American ranchers, we exist by our wits.
If you don’t believe that … try it.
Searching for Refrain
As the November 4 election looms, we seek not what is faddish or politically correct. We seek realism.
No doubt Nevadan Grant Gerber sought the same thing in his decision to organize what the nation came to know as the Grass March. An attorney who dedicated his life to the matter of access to public lands, Gerber didn’t come to the game with opinions garnished with intentions to diminish somebody’s character or extract revenge on their existence. He came to the conclusion there is broken communication between western states and Washington, and there is nobody repairing it.
The straw was broken when the rancher evictions took place under drought demands, but his actions had long been building. They started with wilderness access issues for the handicapped. Thereafter it was an agency conflict over a pipeline installation. Then, in succession, it was road closures, wildfire mismanagement, sage grouse listing, more grazing restrictions, and even camp ground closures.
He, too, recognized it was less about the land itself than it was about Washington, but something had to be done. So, Mr. Gerber and a handful of Westerners committed to his Grass March, a parallel to Gandhi’s Salt March opposing the tyrannical British dictates over the acquisition of salt. The group rode horseback from the California Coast to Washington for the purpose of delivering petitions of redress of grievances that have been imposed on Americans whose customs and culture necessarily depend on federal lands.
Yes, something has to be done. Somebody must affect a repair of the disconnect that exists between Washington and the West.
Interestingly, Gerber foretold of what his endeavor would bring. He counseled of the need to succeed in the march even if he was killed.
Just beyond the halfway point, his horse fell. He pushed himself away but his head struck the ground. He recovered enough to complete the ride and deliver his appeal, but the damage was done.
With severe headaches on the way home, he checked himself into a Wyoming hospital. Thereafter he was transferred to a Utah hospital where he suffered complications from the surgical procedure attempting to correct the trauma.
Grant Gerber died.
A thousand miles away from home they continue to reject us
 Change the names, but the plight of Nevadans represented by Grant Gerber is no different from ours in New Mexico. Ours is no different from our colleagues in Arizona. Theirs’ is no different from any of the other western states where federal land agency management dominates.
Indeed, November 4 is an important date.
Our hopes, however, shouldn’t be pegged to expectation of substantive change. Our biggest problem is our existence isn’t politically correct. We can continue to try to alter that predicament, but the odds are not in our favor.
What we have is each other and the intimacies of our way of life. It can be seen in our bleached arms each and every time we roll our long sleeves up to work in depths of a trough or reach inside a heifer to help her with her calf. Every one of us can stand around a trough and know it is us who pays for that water and it is us who expended the cost and effort to get it there and keep it there. We know what our presence on this land means, and we need no accolades.
We do, though, need realism.
It remains our charge to figure out how we continue. Like any business, we need to be able to plan for longer horizons than our resource management plans allow and dictate. We need to be free to develop parallel enterprises, and we need the freedom to continue to perfect the matter of stewardship we have chosen. The agents of such change are not a thousand miles from home. We are those agents, but the American government long ago lost touch in matters of individual freedom.
The elections of 2014 are a stepwise referendum. There is no trust.
Our message to the leaders who will be elected is simplistic. Take us as we are … you are directing an American tragedy of grandest proportions, but you have no right to orchestrate our demise.
        
Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “Read the transcripts of the ranchers evicted in the Tularosa Basin during and following WWII. Pleading for their way of life got them … nothing.”

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