"No one who has studied the history of the West can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide."

                                 -Wallace Stegner

 

I just witness the loveliest blood red sunset in my front yard as I was discussing history with my Vietnam-crazed neighbor.  He’s wound pretty tight, improbably surviving three tours on a PBR (Patrol Boat - River) in the Mekong Delta.  He then spent many years as a deck hand aboard cargo freighters.  We tend to have long and surprisingly fruitful discussions, improbable given the fact that he’s a tea party libertarian and I’m a God-knows-what, bleeding heart from the Great Plains. 

Sometimes we have discussions about maps of distant highways and other what-not’s on the tail gate of my pick-up, while I drink beer and he chain smokes Marlborough’s.  But last night it was about fly fishing, because he’s getting ready to drive to the Yellowstone River.  So I showed him my worn-out  antique split-cane fly rod, a worthless piece but with grace and precision will place a fly within inches of a rising trout. 

 

We tend to talk about things like the brutal history of the West and the Indian Wars.  We also talk about the Civil War (he’s from Cape Cod but for some reason sympathizes with the Confederacy), the subtle beauty of distant places like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, and the rolling hills along the Niobrara River. 

He told me he’s going to drive by Castle Rock in Nebraska on his annual vacation to Yellowstone in his woebegone camper bus.  It’s a converted ’65 greyhound bus and still has a placard on the front reading “Special”.  He said “she’s only got about a million miles even though rated for three million”.  So every year about this time he’ll add another two or three thousand and an equal amount for repairs along the highway. 

When he said he was driving by Castle Rock in Nebraska, I pulled out a book of sketches my great-great-great Grandfather made in 1850 on his wagon train journey back from the gold rush in California.  In there was a beautiful pencil drawing of Castle Rock, most likely the first ever drawn by a westerner.   

 

I pity the string of petty thieves plaguing our neighborhood, because my neighbor always “packs a pistol” in the side pocket of his cargo shorts.  He refuses to lock the doors on his hodgepodge car collection, saying it’s “un-American”, thus seeing their share of pilfering.  It is just a matter of time before he sends one of these small-time ruffians to an early grave, which means he’ll probably be thrown in the slammer for the rest of his life.  Such is the logic of what most rednecks think is still the American Frontier.