James Buckhouse - Selected Works - Biography - Bibliography

 

Western Mythology 2004-2006 - Statement 1 Statement 2

Statement 1 (Rangeland)

Riding in a truck with my father, when I was young, back from an isolated section of rangeland in the high desert region of eastern Oregon, my father calmly, but suddenly, stopped the truck and pulled over. It was almost evening, and the sky was moving towards an orange-brown color that caused the fence posts along the outer edge of the road to appear dark blue.

He got out of the driver’s seat, walked around the front of the cab and stopped in front of the fence. He placed his right hand on one of the sturdy, waist high wooden fence posts, and then in a moment of strength and grace, heaved his body upwards and swung his legs out to the left, pivoting on his right arm, which locked as an upright extension of the fence post, and vaulted over the fence. He walked about 60 feet into the rangeland and picked up an old, decaying, coyote skull.

Coming back to the truck, he put the skull in a paper bag and placed it in the back. It was a good skull, he explained, as it had almost all of its teeth.

Years later, I sat in our family’s garage and looked at the skulls hanging from the rafters. None were completely cleaned, but most were clean enough. Looking up, I ran my tongue over my teeth. It was hot in the garage. I found a bottle of RC cola, and brought it inside. Cracking off the bottle cap, the warm cola foamed up and out of the bottle and onto the kitchen floor.

This was the same kitchen where we had installed a wood stove (not for cooking, but for heat and decoration). This was the same kitchen where I would prepare the grasshoppers my cat had caught, mixing them in with her canned food. This was the same kitchen where years later I would dream of a new art, still only partial formed in my mind, based on the overlapping and re-ordering of ideas, but to me as a thirteen year old boy, it seemed complete enough, in that it dared to imagine a system of meaning, even if that meaning remained partially a fantasy.