A fine essay is a thing of functional beauty — like a fine rifle or a guitar that plays good and fills up a dark and empty room (*nod to Guy Clark*). A fine essay is an aesthetic pleasure that delves deep, beyond entertainment, to instruct and uplift — and sometimes, perhaps, to prod and trouble the soul. A fine essay is, to my mind, the pinnacle of the writer’s craft.
My friend Craig Rullman has been on a roll with some exceptional work at Radio Free Rullman on Substack. I bid my fellow Frontier Partisans visit his campfire.
The deserts of the Great Basin are a Muse for Craig, and he writes beautifully of the landscape and the people, and the vastness that is at once liberating and intimidating. This is really good stuff, and sharing really good stuff is important to me. His most recent essays, The Road of the Dead: Being an Account of an Expedition on the Desert, will stir the soul of the Frontier Partisan, evoking the shade of Sarah Winnemucca and Shoshone Mike and the obsidian-hard posseman OD Van Norman.
A sampling…
In the old days, in those camps, a cowboy always had a calendar on the wall of his shack. He would mark off the days, one by one, so that anyone visiting or bringing supplies would know how long he’d been out. Too many days without an X could spell trouble. The desert circles were big and a buckaroo might be out for long stretches at a time. In Duck Flat, Nevada, where I held down a camp stretching far into the rugged country of Wall Canyon, I never went more than three days between X’s. But when I came back in, my circle closed, and saw those blank days on the calendar, I filled in my X’s cleanly, with a sense of pride and gratitude that I’ve never fully realized since.
A cowboy I know of died out there, riding the hard empty, on a calendar day without an X. His horse went down on a slick of rhyolite. The cowboys who went looking for him found his body when they started seeing dollar bills blowing across the desert, hung up in the brush, scudding over basalt in the wind. They followed the money in a zig-zag pattern, the way a dog follows a scent-cone. That cowboy didn’t trust humanity to leave his camp alone, and so he wore a money belt when he was out on his circle. he died quickly when his horse went down, his neck broken. The coyotes had ripped through his money belt to get at the soft tissue of his belly.
*
As we drove out of the canyon onto the scrubby tableland—another black storm throwing lightning and rain and rumbling through the desert on our back trail—I was thinking how short the historical arcs have become in that country. In the winter of 1843 Fremont plied a terrified woman with trinkets, probably worthless, and soothed her tremors. Sinewaves crossed at this moment: the long arc of continuous exploration of this continent by strangers from some other, and 14,000 years of native history sparking at the point of a howitzer. Only a few years later they sparked again with a tin plate made into a hat.
And a mere 68 years after that, in 1911, Shoshone Mike and his family—the last holdouts of a dead way of life, who fled the corruption of their reservation in Idaho to live peacefully on the outskirts of remote Nevada ranches, would be driven from their redoubt and slaughtered in the snow and ice, near a frontier town ironically named Winnemucca, and where only a few years after that the bank would be robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
There are riches here, for the cost of maybe a beaver plew. See you there.
Craig Rullman says
Thanks for the nod amigo.