The Knife

Another Tragedy

The Knife

Everybody … Nobody

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Perhaps it would have been best if only Governor Greg Abbott had spoken at the Santa Fe School news conference Friday.

            Abbott has enough visceral aptitude to put things into as much perspective as the Santa Fe tragedy could allow. The chants from the peanut galleries were simply not useful nor were they helpful. They were hollow and woefully lacking.

            Too many questions are unanswered in this school shooting melee that plagues us. This time it wasn’t an apparent malcontent or a committed jihadist that will eventually have to meet his maker. It wasn’t an AR or a BAR or a Gatlin gun that did the dirty work, either. The smoke poles that were used for the death and destruction were from the most sophisticated side of the firearm ledger, a shotgun and a .38. It does appear there were explosives. There was a car, too, which could have been an effective killing tool, but it was rendered interesting only on the basis of finding another piece of evidence.

            There was no hammer nor was there a pole axe.

The only commonality in this killing and those before was the trigger animal. As it turns out, we are told he is nothing more than another … stupid kid.

The Knife

I’ve known it all my life.

It is a big folding hunter that fits uncomfortably in a front pocket in a pair of Levi’s, but it was there that it was carried during many, many hunts in the life of my maternal grandfather. I always assumed it was a Case, but that couldn’t be confirmed from the escutcheon because it was worn completely smooth. When the knife came to me recently, I was surprised that Western States could be made out on the heel of spay when inspected with a magnifying glass.

Hmm!

My memories of it began with 3:30 mornings when I would get up after a sleepless night prior to the opening day of deer season. It would be placed there on the kitchen table alongside the “car’tidges” that were to be carried that day. It was already stropped and oiled and placed there to observe, but never unsupervised at that point.

So many stories were told during those precious minutes before any interruptions began. They were all life lessons, and I knew that knife was along for the conclusion of some of them.

I surmise it was along, too, the day of the grizzly bear. That was April 1931. Afoot because they couldn’t ride any further down the rocky, precipitous Rain Creek Divide, the Rice brothers, my grandfather and his brother, Blue, followed the dogs that finally ran the big bear to ground and barked “treed”. When they climbed over the rock which shielded them from the view of the terrific battle that was then underway, the verbal history got suspenseful.

“The bear immediately looked up, saw us, and came to us,” my grandfather remembered. “He was shedding dogs like he was raking bees.”

“He never blinked and he never took his eyes off us.”

When it was over and the smoke and the dust still hung heavy in the air, the bear was on the rock with the brothers where they had taken their stand. Between them, there was one loaded “car’tidge” remaining.

In several accounts, I have related the question, “Were you scared, Boppy?”

“I didn’t think so,” he began. “But, when I tried to roll a smoke, I couldn’t

keep the tobacco on the paper!”

            Years later, I was with him when we finally hauled the moth-eaten hide to the hand dug pit on the mesa. He had brought a five gallon can of gasoline and doused the garbage pile. When he lit it, my memory suggests it was the biggest explosive discharge I had ever heard. Just how big the discharge was must have equaled the collective gunfire of the day of the bear.

            How do we know that?

            “If you were looking just right, you could see daylight between the top of the pit and the garbage blown sky high!” he had laughed when he admitted to his brother what the ruckus had been.

            Another Tragedy

            Today, I have that beautiful old knife.

In fact, it is laying on the desk beside the laptop as I write this. It is one of several generational responsibilities that I cherish. It is an immense gift of family history, and it represents all the collective mentorship, the role modeling and the forebearer counseling that makes me who I am.

It is obvious that isn’t the case of too many today.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but, until each step of the process is corrected, there will be more tragedies. There would be no circumstances short of threat to our lives that this sort of nonsense would have happened fifty years ago. None of the peripheral paraphernalia would have offered any tendency to kill wantonly. We could have packed guns into school and the entire issue would have been made safer by our presence. We wouldn’t have just policed ourselves. We would have policed the adults. The fact of the matter is, we knew more about guns than the majority of our teachers!

It was the teachers we respected in other ways. If there were conflicts, we needed to conclude them in the classroom rather than to be marched down the hall to see the principals Ms. Jones, Ms. Schumpelt, or Mr. Grounds.

Worse yet, we had to go home where our parents had been served notice!

No, today the problems are as extensive as they are seemingly complex. The only problem is they are not complex. We have simply lost the collective will, the responsibility, and the fundamentals of fixing anything.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “What does an old knife and a school shooting have in common? The answer is … more than you think.”

I think it would be appropriate here for me to re-share one of my favorite tunes by Guy Clark: The Randall Knife.

https://youtu.be/CxWTWz9kS8I