West of Ahloso
Friday, November 11, 2005

Burning

The leaves are coming down in bushels around here, all yellow, red and brown. Autumn has finally crept into southern Oklahoma.

The returning harrier (a.k.a. marsh hawk) arrived yesterday, right on schedule, and this morning she was busy wheeling and diving across the pasture in front of my house, looking for mice in the boot-high brown grass. This is a big, gorgeous, lady-hawk; mostly gray with white feathers on her underside and black feathers on her top, and a perfect white ring around her fuselage like the Red Baron had. I sat on the fence and watched her through my old WW2 Japanese field glasses for the better part of an hour and never saw her land to take a breather. That's strenuous flying she does; fast up-wind, wings pumping hard, and then wheeling to go speeding lickety-split down-wind, three feet above the grass; then turning suddenly back into the wind to hover with beating wings less than a foot off the ground for a closer look. Poor old bre'r mouse. Then away again, down-wind like a loose kite.

Around here a few of the citizens still burn off their fields at summer's end, the way the farmers in Europe did centuries ago. I once read an essay written by Ben Franklin condemning the practice. Yesterday evening; with clear skies, no wind, and Mars, Venus and a gibbous Moon all hanging in the sky like fires, the moment must have seemed auspicious because everywhere I looked there was smoke in the cool layered air over the low spots in the meadows, from fires deliberately set and tended to by the good nesters—my neighbors. I saddled up Button and rode down the section line between my farm and the place to the south of me, to mingle with the crowd. The people had gathered along the right-of-way, abandoning their usual reticence by turning fire watching into a kind of country social. It looked for all the world like a Brueghel painting; smoke, fires and busy, laughing, people.

Henry Day and his daughter Aeriel (she spells it with an "e") came up to say hello, wearing black faces and carrying wet gunnysacks that everyone was using to beat the flames. They looked more like possums dressed up like people than real people. Henry owns a ranch a mile and a half up to the north and he and Aeriel run it. They had come over to help with the burning. The attraction, for them and lots of others, including me, was meeting people we hadn’t seen in a while, but they were also here in self defense; an out of control grass fire can be very bad news on these dry prairies and there was a south breeze. Aeriel tossed me a wet sack and laughed as Button, who does not like having gunnysacks waived in her face, sat back on her tail. I declined the invitation to join the black-gang, saying that she had made my horse too antsy to leave tied to a fence. Some excuse, but it was better than nothing.

Lou Heinemann and John Flemming were there; friends from the feed store crowd. They had been over at Norman all day attending a livestock seminar at O.U. and were on their way back to Stonewell in John’s two-seater biplane. When they flew over and saw the fires the fools landed on the road to see what all the activity was about. Their plane was parked on the side of the road a couple of city blocks away and there they were, black faces and all, helping out.

They planned to take off in the dark later and fly home. John said he could follow the lights on the highway.
"You could call Fern and tell her when she hears us to come out and shine her car lights on the strip for me to land by."
I asked him how he was going to know, dark as it would be by then, which direction was which and he mumbled something or other so then I asked him if he thought he knew what he was doing. He mumbled again and sniggered; that was when I realized that John and Lou were both drunk. I told John it would be safer if he and Lou doubled up on Button and rode her the rest of the way down to Stonewell; that way they could be home by morning and nobody around here would bother the plane, except maybe me. I even offered to trade him Button for the airplane, even up, but he said no-thanks. It was just as well; Button had won a couple of quarter-horse races in her time and was worth a good deal more than that clapped out old Stearman.

Finally I said: "How about let's go back to my place and have a drink. You two can have something to eat and then you can sleep in the kids' old double bunk and fly home in the morning. That way Ella C. and Fern won't have to know anything about how you both been flyin' around the state sloppy-ass drunk all day long.
“Who’s drunk?” John said.
"What you got to drink?" Lou said.
"I got Jack Daniel and Jose Cuervo, and about three fingers of squirrel."
John said: "Sh-ee-it. I'd rather stay here and fight fires than drink that sheep dip."
And so, on and on. You know how it is with drunks.

The last I saw of them they were lifting off with 2 feet to spare over the treetops. They swung back around and flew over us at about 100 feet wobbling their wings, and whoever was in the back seat was waiving a bottle over his head. Then they turned south and crossed in front of the big yellow moon. Somebody said it looked just like a picture postcard.

I borrowed a cell phone from Jesus Chavez and he showed me how to use it. Stonewell has a population of less than 1000 and they have a private phone company with a PBX operator named Laverne; she has the board in her living room. I never met her, but I have talked to her; she sounds a lot like Lily Tomlin did as Ernestine in Laugh In. You don’t need to know phone numbers in Stonewell; you just tell Laverne who you want to talk to and she’ll run them down, no matter where they are. Or you can give her a message to pass on; its real handy. I called Laverne and asked her to let Fern know that her fly-boys had just taken off and about the car lights, and to call me back if they weren’t home in about a half hour so we could start looking for the remains.

I guess you could call this year's burning of the fields a success, but it wasn't one entirely. They burned up one line shack and a couple of pastures that didn’t belong to them, and they burned up the old Studebaker Champion Harry Ryan had put up on blocks years ago for his chickens. I'm probably lucky that what little breeze there was blew the fires away from my place.

Mr. Fixmer stepped on a sharp bois d’arc stob and it put a hole in his foot. Those little spikes are like steel and will go right through a shoe sole, or a tire. Mr. Fixmer owns the feed store in Stonewell. He is the widow Biddy's youngest brother. Her field was one of the ones they were burning off and he came up to help her out. She said she would put some stuff she'd made up on his foot. I hope he survives it.

These are resourceful, capable, people and they rely on the idea of community. I won't say that "never is heard a discouraging word"; there are a few disagreements from time to time. There have even been a couple of barn burnings that I know of, and a really great fist fight over a basket-full of catfish, between Henry Day and a turd named Jack Redland; but by and large they depend on one-another to get a lot of things done that other people expect the government to do for them. All things considered, I'm glad I came here to live. It beats hell out of the big city where the cops would come if you tried to burn your grass.

And the smell of that smoke in the evening reminds me of something in the past; I wish I could remember what it was.

Alex Coyle

Some Thoughts About Gun Control

In 1804, when George Washington was barely cold in his grave, our third vice president provoked a duel with, and subsequently shot and killed, the country's first secretary of the treasury and principal author of the Federalist Papers. In those days such killing was tolerated as a form of political debate and so went unpunished. Our nation was off with a bang.

In about 1899, my mother's family brought some mares and a couple of stallions from Berea, Kentucky to Dow Oklahoma where they established a farm for the purpose of breeding and selling horses. My grandfather was named Sheridan Alexander Coyle after the Union General, Philip H. Sheridan. He had a big, droopy, "cavalry" mustache and was acquainted with Geronimo after the old Indian was placed under house arrest at Fort Sill. I never knew my father or his father so my grandfather on my mothers side was the only man in my family who could have kept me in line while I was growing up, but unfortunately he wasn't allowed to stick around to do it. One night in January, 1908, when my mother was six years old her father heard noises out in the corral and went to investigate. An intruder, later officially declared a would-be horse thief, name unknown, shot him dead. Back then Oklahoma had been a state for less than a year and nearly everyone, especially ranchers, carried guns, but my grandfather went out that night unarmed. He had had some experience as a peace officer and was familiar with guns, so I think he could have stayed alive to support his wife and three children, as well as ride herd on me as I was growing up, if he had taken a gun with him that night.

One Saturday evening in the summer of 1932, when I was in the fifth grade, two of my friends, boys my age, were playing cops and robbers with an "unloaded" .32 caliber Colt automatic they had found in their parents' closet. One shot and killed the other with it.

In the 60's, when we lived in the big city, a ninety-eight pound spinster-friend of my wife's was raped in her own upstairs bedroom by a midnight intruder. When he had done his thing he knocked her nearly unconscious, ripped the telephone out of the wall, went down to the kitchen and came back with a carving knife. She shot him four times in the chest with a Colt .38 revolver and then, for good measure, shot him once in the head from close range. When the police asked her if she had meant to kill the man she said: "Yes." No charges were filed. The doctor who treated her and her assailant at the hospital emergency room told me that he could have covered all four bullet holes in the man's chest with one hand. I don't think she had ever fired a gun before in her life.

A have an acquaintance who is a lawyer in a town nearby. In 2003 he was instrumental in sending one of the county's no-goodniks to federal prison for murder. The rest of the no-goodnik clan, over a dozen men, put the word on the street that they would "kill the son-of-a-bitchin' lawyer" for it, and their reputation was such that he had very little reason to doubt that they might. He asked the local police for help. The police told him that the county was full of Clantons (that was not their real name) but there were really only three kinds: those getting out of prison, those in prison and those on their way to prison. They said they were sorry, but they could not protect him. Their advice to him was that he should buy a gun and get a permit to carry it. They promised that if he did so they would put the word on the street that he was not only armed but was a crack shot. He did so; they did so, and so far so good.

Over the last 10 years the coyotes around my place have killed five of my dogs, and badly mauled a sixth. I recently set out bait and bought a Remington .243 caliber rifle with a telescope sight. So far I have killed five trespassing coyotes with it and taken a strip of fir out of a sixth. I haven't lost any dogs since, nor have I had to go through the heartbreaking task of nursing a badly wounded dog back to life. The coyotes have not returned, although I often hear them late at night letting me know they are out there.

Many years ago a close friend of our family's, a doctor, stood up too suddenly in a duck blind. His hunting companion, a lawyer, accidentally blew his head off with a 12 gauge shotgun. My mother, who was partial to doctors, said it was just like a damn fool lawyer.

When I was in college, the campus cops, carrying .45 caliber pistols, shot and seriously wounded a student late one night because he was drunkenly playing around with the telephone at a campus taxicab stand.

When many of you, dear reader, were in college, a platoon of young men of the Ohio National Guard were issued M-1 Garand rifles loaded with live ammunition and turned loose on demonstrating students at Kent State University. The troops lost their cool, panicked, and killed four students and wounded thirteen others. One wonders who the rocket scientist was that approved the issue of live ammunition.

I live a long way from the nearest county road. The Sheriff, if he could be contacted fairly quickly, and if he could find my place at all, might arrive in, say, thirty minutes. I have had three midnight prowlers. One said he had run out of gas and insisted that I let him in my house to use the phone, although the nearest road of any kind was a half-mile away and he had passed several other houses closer to the road than mine. I followed him, at a distance, back to his car which he got started without any trouble. Another guy, business unknown, stood in my yard and when I told him to stand under the chicken light where I could see him he moved into the shadow of a bois d'arc tree instead. Then he actually disagreed with me as to whether or not he should leave after I had told him to do so. I told a third trespasser, a coon hunter, that I liked my raccoons and he should go hunt somewhere else. He replied: "Ol' coon, he don't care nuthin' 'bout fences and propity lines and neither do I."

Calling the sheriff during any of those events was never a real option. I once hunted dove and quail and I still keep a little 20 gauge Ithaca pump shotgun around the house. As I talked to each of these men I carried this gun in my left hand without actually pointing it at anybody. The man who wanted to use the phone got too close and I finally had to chamber a round for emphasis, at which point he shouted: "Jesus Christ, Mister!" and backed off. Now I shudder to think I had actually confronted someone with a gun in my hand, but each man left without further argument so all was well. I'm certain that in at least two of the cases it was because of the gun.

I grow weak in the knees at the thought of ever being forced to use a gun on another human. I would almost rather get shot myself. Gun control makes good sense if it can be counted on to stop the senseless killing in our streets and in our schools, so why not legislate it? Although I like guns, I would gladly get rid of mine; my 20 gauge is worn out and I never liked the .243 anyway. But in an undisciplined, unenlightened and indifferent society, where responsibility and moral rectitude are haphazardly observed at best, incidents like these will go on happening. For this reason many of our citizens, encouraged by the National Rifle Association lobby, insist on the freedom to own guns. Some of these people are well meaning and genuinely believe that gun ownership is their right; others are hoods even if they do wear suits and ties and walk the halls of Congress. As for myself, I will give up the particular, and peculiar, freedom of gun ownership in a wink; let's legislate guns completely out of existence...well, maybe.

But if we do so then while we are at it let's ban every kind of modern weapon, and wars too. If I have to, I'll protect my homestead from drunken intruders and terrorists with the samurai sword I brought home from Japan - it's more terrible than a gun anyway, and I'll get dogs big enough to kill their own damn coyotes. I don't know what the ninety-eight pound spinster will do when Jack-the-Ripper comes up the stairs, butcher knife in hand; die I guess, like my grandfather did because he didn't have a gun handy. And what will my friend the lawyer do when he's at home, reading by a lamp late at night while his family sleeps upstairs, and he hears a twig snap outside his window.

I am not sure how I feel about trying to make gun ownership illegal. I think I'm for it, but given the reality of man's natural contempt for the rights of others and the mindset of some of our citizens, not to mention the vigor with which the measure would be fought by political "conservatives", does anyone in his right mind think for an instant that the total extinction of firearms could ever be realized in America? Does anyone think that guns could ever be made to go away, or that the satisfaction some men derive from killing other men and seizing their property will ever be replaced by common sense? If the answer is yes, then lets try it.

Look at each of the above incidents; all are true. In every case the malevolent factor lies in a few warped minds in a partly insane society. Our culture is such that the ownership of guns can lend a crude, albeit somewhat dangerous, form of safety to the millions of rural Americans, like myself, who are out of reach of immediate help from the law. But I, for one, would be willing to live without them.

There is another large group of (male) citizens to whom gun ownership lends a sense of pride, an assurance of manhood, a feeling of status and validation. If, before trying to outlaw guns, we could successfully educate against these misconceptions then guns could be banned and the firearm industry with its gun control lobby would not even be an issue.