Nits Make Lice

Note: This is a map of Fort Halleck, along the Overland Trail in Dakota Territory, where Silas Halsey Cooper (my maternal great-grandfather) was stationed during the Civil War. It was hard duty, because it was thrown up in a rush to protect traffic along the Overland Trail, which was being used as an alternative to the Oregon Trail to the north due to hostilities with the local tribes. The men were inadequately-clothed (check out those calvary ballcaps the next time you watch a John Wayne movie) were sent out on long, pointless missions in sideways blizzards, and suffered high incidents of frostbite and death from exposure. It happens that he was under the overall command of Col. John Chivington, who perpetrated the Sand Creek Massacre south of this fort in 1864. My great-grandfather left in 1863. Still...

Late fall, and the high winds on top of Trapper Peak lift a day’s worth of snow, wrap their fingers around gnarly bark, deposit cornices hair-triggered to launch slab avalanches down slick voids and skier’s prayer pockets.

Local fronts always raise the hair of these peaks first, while the mountain valley below remains calm as civilized glass, awaiting its share, which is always less. Just below the cut of the scissor-wind a nutcracker ducks her grey wings down toward the valley and the south-facing slopes where she has memorized the exact locations of thousands of needle-scattered seed caches. She spent the summer and fall depositing these caches, moving the protein-rich whitebark pine nuts from the high elevations down to levels more accessible in winter. Now she rests below the forming cornices, her craw full of the season’s last seeds, head feathers blown backward and skin chilled, much closer to the immediate danger above than to the people down below, who have no comparable sense of spatial memory. Satisfied, she offers her call to the wind.

I am a military veteran and a descendent of Pilgrims. My family’s history is not much different from those whose ancestors have been here for as long as mine, a mere 500 years or so. Spatial memory for me conjures up puritan intolerances, colonial wars, western expansion, Indian wars, farming and community-building, the Civil War, the Alaska Gold Rush and riding freights. The Great War, the Dust Bowl, and then the Good War when the nuclear age yawned into the Cold War, the Vietnam War, hippies and rednecks, wars and wars, the Iraq War and more wars. 

As a western-flowing river, which is what my family history is the essence of, it has run through all the significant canyons of arrogance and misunderstanding jumbled with enlightenment and good intentions that are the very rapids of our current nation. And so it isn’t that I don’t understand bigotry. Nor that I don’t suppose that it won’t always will be with us. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about it, a lot these days. The whole country seems headed for a windblown cliff of wars and disasters that may never end this time. Founded, nominally at least, on democratic principles, we seem willing to be led to that chilly cliff by those stripping our freedoms off us whole cloth while grandly speaking of the day coming soon when the world will be patterned after a new, more perfect fascism for the sake of our continued creature-comforts. Is it just me?

Well, the river below that particular cliff, my river, has always been western-flowing. It’s the only perspective I have, given my family history, and so I have always seen bigotry and its cousin, rugged individualism, as two kids on the same carnival ride that spins them to pleasure, makes them dizzy and then deposits them onto uncertain ground, where they throw up. The mouth of such rivers, so the standard American narrative goes, flows into the seas of righteous wars. You know the ones, fought in name of American ideals scripted from those Grade-B western movies from the ‘50s, the ones Reagan came from, only a picture, really, when you think of it, never more than a distraction and an entertainment to a people who seem to value imagery far above substance anymore. 

My people have been those real farmers and cowboys and housewives, housewives, housewives, and so I feel I have the creds of all who came before me to say to all who come after that, as a descendant of pilgrims, none of this is making any sense to me anymore. Nowhere do I hear our real story being told, not even from those who hate cowboys, and that I feel as qualified as anyone to say that the bigotries of Manifest Destiny and Rugged Individualism have found their final angle of repose when leaders who are elected on platforms of xenophobia and polarization speak openly of 'usable nuclear weapons'. Nits make lice, indeed.

I'm far from making claims that, by virtue of my pedigree, I can speak for Nutcrackers, even though I'd like to try. I would say that none of this is intuitive, nor is it meteorological or metaphysical. It's not even rocket science. It’s a simple observation made by someone who's simply been around long enough to see it, that this storm passing over us now was planned long ago.

Here’s how.