Youthful misadventures: Lewis and Clark and Buffalo Cowboys

[Jeff]

Who hasn't been on a youthful misadventure? While I never attempted to lasso a bison (really?), an enclosure was destroyed when my brother and I tried to catch some raccoons when I was perhaps 10 years old (don't tell my father). And there was that comical springtime backpacking trip with my buddy in the Sierra Nevada as a teenager--he'd somehow never seen snow and was apprehensive about it. Let's just say that after a gentle nudge sent his backpack sliding all the way down the snow covered north side of the pass he eventually discovered the confidence to continue onward. Below are my thoughts on the chapters detailing Fenn's youthful forays with nature. I posted a small part of my reflections below previously--at that time Robjohnson told me I was just scratching the surface and I have no doubt that I still am.

In the first of these two chapters detailing youthful misadventures, Fenn tells a story of his trip with his friend Donnie in the Gallatin Range north of Hebgen Lake, Montana. Although the scenery was majestic, their poorly laid plans had them cold, hungry, and lost (incredulously, they burned their map). Fenn’s horse, Lightning, “didn’t have the power to get out of his own way” and was supremely uncomfortable to ride. Donnie loses all patience. Although Fenn “applied some mountain man wisdom to the situation,” they remained lost. After following a stream that “got narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper until it developed vertical sides that nothing could get through but water” they turned around and allowed the horses to lead the way out.

In the second of these chapters, the three “cowboys” Fenn, Skippy, and Donnie lasso a buffalo, whom they coin “Cody,” who proceeds to pull Skippy’s car into a stream; the three “cowboys” lose shoes, a car, and credibility. Skippy’s car gets is thoroughly destroyed; the scene, which includes an image of the engine fan “throwing sprays,” mirrors that of the failed homemade washing machine helicopter we learned about in My Brother Being Skippy.

Both these stories juxtapose Fenn’s youthful misadventures with historical explorers, adventurers, or mountain men. In Looking for Lewis and Clark, we are explicitly told about the mountain man Osbourne Russell and, of course, we have the expedition leaders Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the title. In Buffalo Cowboys, there is word play in the phrase “buffalo bull” and the buffalo’s nickname of “Cody,” which are clearly references to the famous cowboy William Frederick Cody who went by the stage name Buffalo Bill. Both stories also have Fenn confronting nature--“Gallatin National Forest” in the first and a “big buffalo bull” in the second. There is a solipsistic naiveté about their place in the natural world--“the whole place is there just for us” and it “would be grateful for our company” yet “the bull looked at [them] with total disinterest.” Contrast these words with Fenn’s statement as he transitions into his revelatory soliloquy at the end of My War for Me: it “made me wonder how important an average individual could be in the whole scope of life.”

The similarities between the two chapters is also found in their general structure. After Fenn applies “mountain man wisdom” and takes up the reins in Looking for Lewis and Clark, he and Donnie “follow a fast-running stream” that “got narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper until it developed vertical sides that nothing could get through but water.” After Fenn lassos Cody and the buffalo bolts in Buffalo Cowboys, Skippy’s car with Skippy, Fenn, and Donnie onboard ends up in “a stream of fast-moving water” and “stopped with a terrible jolt.” In both scenarios Fenn acts and both of these actions lead to failure. Both failures occur in association with fast-moving water and this water serves to put an effective halt to his injudicious decisions; in the first instance, as the creek enters a gorge, Donnie cautions that continuing downstream will cause them to “end up where we’re going” (a very Yogi Berra like statement) and in the second instance Skippy’s car is dragged off a bank and comes to a sudden stop in the creek.

Does Fenn’s use of water or a creek hold any further significance? I’m unsure. The creek can serve as a metaphor for the course of life, similar to how the “Road” is used in the Omar Khayyam poem quoted in My War for Me. Water has a dangerous connotation in some parts of TTOTC--Skippy’s fatal scuba accident in The Long Ride Home and the “sinister” South China Sea in My War for Me. Although elsewhere it is more benign (e.g. Flywater) or associated with emotions (e.g. tears in the The Totem Café Caper and My War for Me). In my estimation there is no usage of water across TTOTC that allows us to assign it a consistent symbolic meaning (contrast this with the striking eye symbology).

These misadventures involved “loosen[ing] our grip on the reins” of their horses in the first and “throw[ing] a loop” of rope that “wrapped around both horns” of the buffalo in the second. The events in these stories conjure up the idioms “hold/take up the reins” and “take the bull by the horns.” The former means to be in or take up control of a situation and the latter means to deal with a difficult situation, often in a brave manner. In the metaphorical context of TTOTC, these idioms apply to the now young adult Fenn venturing out into an often dangerous world and experiencing some degree of failure. These experiences have evolved throughout the chapters; they are somewhat more dangerous now and he isn’t receiving oversight or help from his mother or a mother-like figure as he did in No Place for the Biddies, My Spanish Toy Factory, and The Totem Café Caper.

This pair of chapters is connected to the chapters Blue Jeans and Hush Puppies Again and Teachers with Ropes. The theme of both pairs is hands-on education and the educational value of failure. The failed adventure in Looking for Lewis and Clark takes place in the Gallatin National Forest and the failed business deal in Blue Jeans and Hush Puppies Again is over a Gilbert Gaul painting (i.e. we may have some synophone-type wordplay). The failed adventure in Buffalo Cowboys involves throwing a rope around a bison and, in Teachers with Ropes, Fenn represents the constraints put on children in typical school education by them holding fast to a rope. Perhaps serving to reinforce the connection, Skippy’s car comes to a jolting halt in the Buffalo Cowboys and the teacher is telling a car to halt in the illustration in Teachers with Ropes.

The Looking for Lewis and Clark misadventure figuratively spanked Fenn’s butt; after they “used up most of the fun,” he “put [his] handkerchief over the hardest part of the saddle” to ease his “saddle sores.” Literal spankings are a recurring feature in the TTOTC. Fenn is literally spanked in Jump-starting the Learning Curve and Surviving Myself; the pun is found in title of the radio show title “Your Hit Parade” in Surviving Myself, a chapter that features much spanking. Later in the Epilogue, his father’s spankings are brought up again in the context of positively affecting people’s lives. In addition to that within Looking for Lewis and Clark, figurative spankings occur in Bessie and Me (Bessie knocks him off the stool onto his butt) and later in Blue Jeans and Hush Puppies Again (learning the art gallery business). Tangentially related, when Fenn is rescued from the Laotian jungle in My War for Me, he is told to “sit on a flak vest,” perhaps a nod to the phrase “saving your butt” and hence no longer being spanked. The idea of spanking is associated with the images of soiled pants in No Place for the Biddies (“wear clean underwear in case there was an accident” as Fenn is encouraged by his mother to explore the world), Jump-starting the Learning Curve (an iron pole “marked the tail of [Fenn’s] britches pretty good with a heavy brown color” as Fenn escapes from non-experiential classroom confinement), and Bessie and Me (Fenn fell into a “fresh cow pie” after the cow “spanks” him during his out of the classroom chores). These literal and figurative spankings relate to a major theme of the book succinctly addressed in the Epilogue as: “only an experience can teach thoroughly and with a speed that is not always available in the classroom.”

A slightly different version of Looking for Lewis and Clark was published in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle several years prior to the publication of TTOTC. While there are many small changes, one potentially noteworthy change, given the use of the word “wise” in the Gold and More poem, is “mountain man logic” to “mountain man wisdom.”

With the preceding thought in mind, Looking for Lewis and Clark contains a potential reference to the fourth stanza’s “if you’ve been wise and found the blaze.” When lost, Fenn applies “mountain man wisdom” by determining direction with the sun--an obvious “blaze.” Eventually a different “blaze”--his horse Lightning, whose name evokes the image of a blaze and who has a literal blaze on his head--is the one that directs them out of the wilderness. Less convincingly, lightning may also symbolize gaining knowledge and hence refer to wisdom. The irony of Fenn and Donnie “very wisely” wadding the Forest Service map to make a fire--another “blaze”--on the first night of their adventure is blatantly obvious.

Continuing with the thoughts in the preceding paragraph, the next line of the Gold and More poem could be connected to the “mountain man wisdom.” By applying this “wisdom,” Fenn was trying to find south, which he thought would lead them “out,” reminiscent of “look quickly down, your quest to cease.” As south is conventionally represented as down on a map, looking “down” would lead to the end of the “quest”--the “out” that would end their misadventure in the Gallatin National Forest.

Thank you for listening. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? What have I missed?