Cowboys and Protests
Protests and Cowboys
I did not make it to a No Kings protest. Instead, I went to the memorial service of my friend Chuck Bailey. Until the memorial, I did not know the extent of Chuck’s itinerant cowboy life. Chuck owned nothing but a team of horses, some horse drawn equipment, a people mover wagon and a truck and horse trailer. A daughter was at the memorial who had just found her father 5 years ago. She had been adopted and had to search high and low to find him. She found out at some point that his name was Chuck Bailey, lived in a town in Colorado with the word springs in its name, and he used to do chuck wagon races. I smiled. Chuck lived in Pagosa Springs.
“Do you know how many towns in Colorado have the word springs in them? “No”, I said. “A lot?”
“Thirteen to be exact,” she replied. She managed to find him through a blind call. She described how it was one of the first times that she felt the click that comes from being with family. She had not felt that with her adopted family.
The other time was when she found her mother 10 years before that.
I lost touch with Chuck during the Pandemic. I imagine how happy he would have been to have this daughter find him. She asked him, “Do you remember having a fling with a woman on an outfitters ranch 55 years ago" She said he would reply, “I can’t confirm or deny this” We all smile because Chuck was a man of few words.
Being at the memorial was to cross the increasingly guarded border between “the radical left” and poor whites. My sister and I did not tell anyone that we were running off the catch the end of the No Kings protest in Durango. I am sure such a confession would have been met with contempt. At least by some.
I never talked about politics with Chuck Bailey. I don’t know if he finished high school. But I have met very few people with the wisdom of Chuck. He knew horses and horses knew him. They understood each other. And he worked hard to teach Keith and I that language. My team of draft horses would be tossing their heads until Chuck came over and barked their names.
I know that we are all struggling with this divided world in which we live-where people with similar values hate people with similar values. And I am not talking about democrat verses republican. I am talking about being kind to each other. Taking care of the land. Taking care of animals.
Of course, I find it heartbreaking to see people struggling economically support a president who undermines their entire way of life not to mention their values. Yet, I know that they are not stupid. Nor are they uneducated. But they are rural people who have not been belittled by this world-my world. They are people, who because they speak horse better than most of us speak English, means they are uneducated. He is in the Cheyenne Days Cowboy Hall of fame. But that doesn’t mean anything to my world of advanced degrees.
I don’t know what to do about this Border wall that goes through our country and through my own experiences. But I do know that there was not a finer man than Chuck Bailey and I will never have the privilege again of working with a man like Chuck.
A man who would hitch any number of horses together.
A man who described the lines between the horse and driver as a telegraph.
A man who told me “Don’t say whoa like you mean it tomorrow. Say whoa like you mean it today!”
A man who wanted to be buried by the Pine River near his team Joe and Chief.
Though the protest was mostly over by the time I arrived, I was happy to see a young woman holding up her sign to honking cars that read, “Chinga la migra”.