No Man's Land?

By: Sam Engelman

Time is different for me now.

Twenty years ago, I’d thought twenty years was a long stretch. I guess maybe it is depending on who and what you might be. The red-tail hawk above me turning a circle against the washed-out late summer sky probably figures that’s a long time. That Hereford bull out there amongst the rolling sage might think as much too. But somehow to me, on this particular day, it sure doesn’t feel like much. Twenty years ago, I’d have been coming home from a day of cowboying on this same blacktop road connecting two little ranching and farming towns in the panhandle of Oklahoma. No Man’s Land, they once called it. But that wasn’t true. It did belong to men. Either by blood-right or spiritual kinship, this land belonged and still does belong to men. They were men like the man that was put to rest today at the cemetery in Laverne, Oklahoma. The population of the town is round about a thousand and the population of the funeral must have been at least five hundred. Standing room only, me and my brother leaned against the wall in the overflow fellowship hall along with several other men and boys who had cowboyed either with or for the man in the casket in the sanctuary.

Probably my dad would have been driving twenty years ago and I’d have been watching out the window and seeing a different red-tail hawk, and a different Hereford bull, ancestors of these now. Here these twenty years on, as I drive home in silence seeing these same sights I took in as a younger man, I reflect on these old cowboys that we’re burying in the very earth they put their claim to.

He is yet another in a personal list for me from the last few years. They were all men that had a hand in shaping me in my youth. Cowboys all. All of them the same and all of them different. I watch as my father puts his many friends and neighbors to rest, and they fade off like riders in a morning fog. What must that mean to him? I can’t puzzle it, but it must be a much heavier thing than I in my mid-thirties can quite grasp yet. Still, I watch and I wonder, growing more pensive and poetic with my years. These were all men that shed their blood, sweat, and tears into the actual earth on which they stood and, to them, that shedding must have meant a claim of great magnitude. This “No Man’s Land” belonged to them by the most ancient and primeval rite that ever a man might claim. A stewardship they performed as best they could, directly from their worn and yellowed Bibles. That concept belongs not just to my little slice of the American West but is a notion that many rural Americans share. From Texas and the Plains, to the Deserts out west and the Rocky Mountains, the Western Cowboy culture is monolithic in this and many other things.

You hear “blood, sweat, and tears” often as a sort of idiom, but that is not what is meant here. It is meant in the actual and in the literal. Up on the Cimmaron River, just north of where I live, there is a little bend along a creek that feeds down to the river that I’ve driven by many times over the years. I’m not certain exactly the location, but in the 1870s a group of surveyors was attacked by Comanches and slaughtered. One of them had his brains smashed in by his survey transit on the banks of the creek. Just south of there an entire family was murdered in their home, also by Comanches, just a couple years later. There are hundreds of stories such as this, both recorded and unrecorded, of this land. This spilling of blood during the westward expansion of settlement is no trivial thing in my mind. It laid a claim to this land that most people can’t grasp.

Just a few years later, along Clear Creek (just a couple hundred yards from where I killed my first deer) one of the Healy Brothers, who had brough a herd of cattle all the way up from South Padre Island in Texas to No Man’s Land to start a ranch in the 1880s, wintered with his horses in a little sod dugout and subsisted off of potatoes he buried in the floor while accosted the winter long by blizzards and wolves in a time where the latter outnumbered men in the country. I’ve no doubt there is a trace amount of blood and sweat beneath the ruins of that dugout, the foundations of which are still visible to this day.

There was never a full day of working calves that I can recall that ended without at least a couple drops of a man’s blood. Needles, knives, and rambunctious calves. Sweat was, of course, a given. And tears? The tears were not the frivolous sort. The tears of these old cowboys, rare as unicorn blood, held weight and meaning only to be measured in the cosmic sort of sense. In those sort of tears, a young man might see the weighty truth of sin, death, and the human condition from the Garden of Eden and the fall of man until the year of our lord circa about 2005. There’s a lot of historical real-estate between creation and now is what I’m getting at and the precious few times I saw my father, or these other old cowboys shed a tear in my youth it was like the thing was comprised of tungsten. They fell with a weight you might feel through your boots if you were paying attention.

And so, I think about that. About that blood and sweat and tears. About the land and the earth and the dirt. I think that this ancient claim that these men have laid upon their land means something. Hell, it means more than just something. Not only for themselves, but it means as much to their children and grandchildren and their neighbors and anybody who ever came to their branding fire to share their work with them.

It strikes me that this concept is not something everyone instinctually understands. Perhaps they come from a place where they can’t see the rolling hills of grass and sage, or the mountains, or the deserts, and instead they only see concrete, buildings, and asphalt, or perfectly manicured lawns and golf courses free from any yucca, sagebrush, or native buffalo grass. Maybe if they bleed it is a rarity and that blood drips on a sidewalk to be washed into a storm drainage system, never to touch the dirt beneath them. Maybe they see frivolous and copious amounts of tears, where the sheer volume waters down the weight of them. I’m not sure. But whatever the reason, there is a sort of mystical and romantic quality to the land that they are ignorant of. It seems a language they can’t even perceive, let alone read. Or like one of those pictures you have to focus on the correct way to see the image…and they can’t see it.

I am sure though that it does mean something to me. At the funeral I also see other men my age and younger that understand these things as well. Two, three, generations of them and more to come. I see it as plain as I see the blacktop road turn to dirt a mile before I hit the house, and I am filled with reverence and hope for what has been and what will be. Time bleeds together from then to now and I know to a certainty that, although the old cowboys of my youth are now giving their bones to the ground to bookmark their investment of blood, sweat, and tears, there are men standing there to continue that tradition for another hundred years at least. This warms my blood and lightens my heart. We are going to win.