When I Grow Up ... and It Could Happen Any Time

When I Grow Up—and It Could Happen Any Time

I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up. When will I grow up, you ask? We’ll call it done at the undertaking where speakers undertake to say nice things about me (hopefully). Until then, I want to be a mountain man. No, not like the buckskin-clad outdoorsmen with muzzle-loader and traps, but like … well … me.  Disappointing perhaps, but I love being in the mountains.  Besides, what is a mountain man? Or does anyone really care? If not, I qualify … and might anyway. I have lived in the Rocky Mountains since age 13 and have walked or run in the Rockies a total distance of nearly 4 times around the earth. Thirty-five miles used to be a day’s walk; now twenty is plenty. My wife prefers that I maintain some semblance of loose ties with civilization, so I do middle-class yuppy as well as mountains—trying to stay versatile, you know. I grew up in Honolulu and Los Angeles, so I’m acquainted with big-city life too—part of why I prefer the rural Rockies.

Do I trap beaver? Of course not! Even the yester-year yahoos raced through those resources so fast that they had to become guides, traders, or whatever else after a brief flurry through the furry. I merely started with the whatever else, doing other jobs seasonally and on the side (as most 19th-century mountain men had to do too) to get by until I could get back to the mountains, where I feel more at home. I’ve done garbage collector, janitor, composer, writer, linguist, and teach college to pay the bills, but those have all been temporary subsistence patterns to hold me over until I can get back to the mountains, though teaching has annually taken a frightful chunk (9-months) each year out of two and half decades. Even the yester-year mountain meanderers left the mountains for the winter and came into town (Taos) from time to time. I just happen to have to stay longer.

The dangers that the yester-year mountain men met were grizzly bears, bullets, arrows, and nature. Black bears are not so dangerous, but grizzlies—they were the only animal that the Native Americans feared and for good reason. How many arrows did it take to kill a grizzly? Did anyone sticking around to count live to tell about it? So I stay south of grizzly country. Black bears I’m not so afraid of ... unless they don’t run away from me. Then I suspect I’d become dreadfully alert, but so far they have done the running away so that I don’t have to. Of course, one doesn’t run from a black bear, but stand and fight. Like everything else in life: easier said than done.

So am I fearless? Nope. Am I a coward? Yep. A common sense coward, like most people are or should be. Courage is submitting to calculated risks for good reason, but clumsily clambering into need-less uncalculated risks for no good reason is stupidity. Weighing the reasons and doing the calculations will vary per person, but hopefully we get better at it with time—which is why we get more cautious with age. So I carry pepper spray and a knife in case a bear or cougar figures out that I’m slower, fatter, and juicier than any deer; otherwise, the hand-to-claw combat would be pathetically unfair. However, men always have been the greater danger. Of mean men, the Old West had plenty, every race contributing some, but today the mean men are mainly in the cities. Of course, there are good people in cities too, mixed with the mean, but having grown up in big cities, I feel safer in the mountains with the black bears.

           Whether the early-30s life-expectancy of the old-time mountain men was due to men being more mean or due to different cultural approaches to conflict resolution is hard to say, but today is a much better time to be a mountain man. It lengthens life instead of shortening it. One can’t earn much at it any more, but it’s a most pleasant life-style with health benefits galore. Yet I do earn a little in the mountains (writing, researching), in case one insists that earning be part of the job description. So when you see me walking the mountains with a shoulder bag of books and rough drafts, I’m working. Honest! Just because it’s in beautiful scenery, in delicious fresh air, and is healthful relaxing mild exercise doesn’t mean that I’m not working. And it costs next to nothing—an occasional pair of shoes! Consider the savings of a day in the mountains, drinking from mountain streams and eating greens, vs. a day at the mall handing over greens. And the mountain’s greens are as good and nutritious as a grocer’s greens (if you care for either). Like a line from my musical Paradise Lost and Found: With inflation and the stock market’s swings up and down, my best hope for a retirement plan may be a good book on edible plants. So I’m practicing.

Also like the old-time mountain meanderers, I’ve learned a little of some Native American languages, but can converse in none. (Linguists mostly learn the basics of several languages relevant to a research area vs. fluency in a few.) Instead of hunting beaver, I hunt knowledge and new discoveries. Instead of exploring the West, I read and explore languages’ pasts while walking the West. So with only a little exaggeration, maybe I’m as much a man of the mountains as this day and age allows, albeit a self-styled one—but weren’t they all. Yes, walking the mountains is so much more beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant than the hustle, bustle, and guzzle of civilization.