https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/486668263d89ecee4b5a6d861c5a192d.pdf be1f96a0293a66091ff58dc52db3abf2 PDF Text Text Chad Hanson Wild Horses, America, and Me It is important that wefind animals to Zoue.—thomas mcguane I’ve been missing get-togethers. The day after a neighborhood poker game, I learned that my friend Tim had asked about my absence. “Where is Hanson?” In response, my colleague, Brad, sang a line from a song by Jonathan Richman: I ain’t seen him much .. . since he . . . started with horses. It is true. During the past three years, I’ve spent my spare time on the prairies of Wyoming with a camera pointed at bands of mustangs. Sometimes I go by myself. Other times I travel with my wife, Lynn. Either way, if there’s a blank spot on the calendar, I don’t have to think about how to fill the days. I load the car and drive to places where I’m likely to find horses. Wild mustangs are not my first obsession. I spent two decades fly­ fishing for trout in a fashion that felt essentially out of control. At one point, I also thought I would retrace the canoe routes of the French fur traders and explorers. I paddled a lot of water before I gave up on that ghost. I became a bird watcher. In my late thirties I invested in a pair of binoculars and a bookshelf full of field guides. Over time my home be­ came a warehouse for equipment that I take with me when I leave home. That’s typical. American lives, more so than most, unfold in the form of arrivals and departures. We wander to a degree that can feel nomadic. In the middle 1900s we left the era of agriculture. By the end of the last century, few of us lived on farms. The production of food had become an industrial process along with manufacturing. In the past, we put more into our land when we wanted to get ahead. Today, we move to find new opportunities. Our careers keep us in motion. Then—when we are free of our responsibilities—we go. We take a vacation. Some of us leave in order to escape. I know families that take annual trips to Walt Disney World in Florida. I can’t think of a better way to take 45 �flight from contemporary life. The attraction is the absence of reality. Critics charge the Walt Disney Company and its customers with living in denial. They accuse Disney of providing a distraction from the injustices that we perpetuate as a nation, but the Disney critics miss the point. The purpose of a trip to Disney World is to take a break from wrongdoings and injustice. It’s the “Magic Kingdom.” It is not the “Kingdom Where We Give Thought to the Sober-and-Sometimes-Sad Reality of Life in a Post­ Industrial Society.” The culture that we live in makes us feel like escaping, but we travel for reasons other than to flee. Americans are seekers, too. We search when we travel. Many of us put ourselves in motion as a way to make a “pilgri­ mage,” whether or not we use that word to describe our journeys. As opposed to tourism as a diversion from the day-to-day, the pilgrimage offers a way to add a meaningful chapter to what, eventually, becomes a life story. We set the largest share of our chapters at home. We connect our identities to the places where we live, but travel-as-search allows us to expand the edges of the self. Away from families and jobs, we forget the memories we don’t want to recall. Then we replace them by adding para­ graphs, even whole chapters, to our stories. We don’t come all the way back from a pilgrimage. We return different. Wild horses go wherever they want to. They roam across deserts, through forests, and on top of mountains. You find them in all of these places, but they favor prairies. Horses browse. That means they can eat a range of plants, but they prefer grasses. When I watch them, sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to walk on a landscape that is edible. When they are hungry, horses lower their necks and bite off a piece of food. But horses are also prey. Foals and yearlings fall victim to cougars. That’s another reason they prefer the wide open. Horses can run. Open space gives them room to dash away if they are chased. On the grasslands, their bellies are full and they are free. Horses gravitate to prairies. It took me years to appreciate the plains, however. I’m an elevation chauvinist. I moved to Wyoming for the moun­ tains. They are easy to love. We have been socialized to see beauty in high country—pine forests, snow-covered slopes, and jagged peaks. We’re taught that landscapes are worthy of our attention when they are broken and tilted upward. For instance, you can cross five hundred miles of Wyoming plains without driving by a single designated “scenic” point. When you reach the Tetons, however, you find roadside parking lots every two miles, spread along the whole base of the range. The lots are full of 46 PRAIRIE SCHOONER �cars and the sound of shutters clacking behind the lenses of cameras. Willa Gather is rumored to have said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” It took a while before I started to see grasslands as a destination, as opposed to someplace to race through on my way to mountainsides. The change involved a reeducation. In reading about the river routes of fur trappers, I happened on an account of a conversation between a French explorer and a member of the Cree Nation from the northern part of Saskatchewan. The two had just met, so the trapper took time to explain where he had been. He depicted the forests and peaks of the Canadian Rockies. He did so with enthusiasm. Imagining the landscape the trapper described, the Cree man asked, “Is it as beautiful as the land-with-nosticks?” The line forced me to wonder. No trees? No sticks? Beautiful? On her first visit to Wyoming, a friend from Minnesota mentioned in a somber tone, “It’s treeless.” I replied, “No. It’s tree-free. Look. You can see for miles. There is nothing in your way.” We spend our lives negotiating social boundaries. For example, we live in communities largely made up of rules: don’t turn left until you see the green arrow—don’t wear flip-flop sandals to work—don’t let your boss know what you really think. We build identities that bind our potential: “I’m a nurse, I don’t have time for poetry,” or “I’m a salesperson. I’m not a scientist.” We also carve our world into compartments: this is a bedroom, a living room, office, store, park, restaurant. On large swaths of the prairie there are no such distinctions. No lines to cross. It’s all periphery: you, grass, and the horizon. In the context of our limited lives, we’re offered only a handful of glimpses into boundlessness: the sea, the stars, and the prairie. In one of the lessons passed down by students of the Buddha, a long-suffering man was said to have asked him, “What is paradise?” The Buddha replied, “Emptiness.” I grew up in the 1970s watching the tv show GrizzlyAdams. Once a week, for an hour, I sat down to watch Adams make his way in the West of the 1800s. In his hometown, he was accused of a crime that he did not com­ mit, so to avoid an unjust punishment, Adams escaped to the hills. He lived in a log cabin. He befriended miners. Native Americans, and ani­ mals. In particular, Adams shared his life with a grizzly bear named Ben. Adams rescued the bruin from a perilous fate on the side of a cliff when he was just a cub. From then on, Adams and the grizzly were inseparable. Stories about the relationship between a man and an animal offered viewers a contrast to the suburban sprawl growing in circles around them. Some decades are reflective. In the 1960s and ’70s, many of us started CHAD HANSON 47 �to assess the future offered to us in our culture. We started questioning what we call the “establishment.” Americans were reading books like The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. As a group, we started to wonder if we wanted what the US economy had to offer— namely, lives tethered to either a desk or an assembly line. At the time, when we looked at our collective self in the mirror, we saw single-minded, corporate types. When we looked at our surroundings, we saw the ruin caused by those same single-minded corporate types. News reports de­ scribed litter, smog, and pollution. The songwriter Neil Young captured the spirit of the day with a lyric that implored us to Look at Mother Nature.. .on the run .. .in the 1970s. The words resonated. Real estate developers were gobbling up land. We were driving animals to extinction. The surface of a river in Ohio caught on fire. During the 1980s, lust for profit reclaimed its status in the United States, but in the two decades prior, we questioned the corporate agenda —for ourselves and for the world. In contrast to business suits, people aspired to wearing cut-off blue jeans and T-shirts. An entire generation became interested in getting back to nature. Many saw the outdoors as a kind of haven where people could take refuge from self-interest and com­ petition. Grizzly Adams appealed to viewers. He didn’t compete. He coop­ erated with everyone. He didn’t drive anything to extinction. He treated animals with kindness. Creatures walked up toward him without fear. It’s an old story, one that predates the 1970s. For as long as human beings have been the dominant predators on the planet, we have dreamed of a scenario where we could commune, peacefully, with other species. It is Biblical. The lion lies down with the lamb. Horses evolved as prey. Their oldest ancestor lived 55 million years ago. The height and weight of the “dawn pony” matched that of a medium­ sized dog. Over the ages, the animals became larger, faster, and more powerful. At each step horses grew more capable of protecting each other. By the time they walked out of North America, heading west on the Bering land bridge, they were so big the people of Asia started to think about climbing onto their backs. The eyes of the horse had become the largest of the land mammals. They can see on both sides of their bodies. The only blind spots they possess lie right in front of them and directly behind their tails. Apart from those two spots, their field of vision includes 340 degrees of longi­ tude. Horses also developed the ability to remember. Their recollections last for years. From an evolutionary standpoint, the capacity to store 48 PRAIRIE SCHOONER �memories has served horses. Ifthey are threatened in a specific place or by a particular type of animal—they don’t forget. When Lynn and I started making photographs of mustangs, the horses appeared as small colored dots on the landscape. None of the stallions would allow us near their bands. Over the course of a year, however, two of the families near our home grew to accept our presence. We’re careful to wear the same kind of clothes each time we hike out to see horses. For example, I wear a wide-brimmed hat. I even wear it on cloudy days. I want the horses to see me and remember, “That’s the guy with the hat. He’s all right. He never tries to attack anyone.” Over time, the plan started to work. Bands that used to run or walk away now allow us within thirty feet, as opposed to fifty or a hundred yards. Horses are bigger than we are. Standing alongside a wild animal that can weigh in excess of a thousand pounds feels profound. When I hike onto the prairie toward a band of wild horses it feels as if I am traveling back to the beginning of the world. When I spend time in their company I am often overwhelmed by a sense that I stand at a crossroads where the legends of the West meet the blood and bone—reality. I’ve spent my adult life searching, in a variety of places, and by a range of means, for the mythical West. I have fished high country lakes for cutthroat trout. I’ve paddled whitewater rivers. I have climbed to the tops of mountains and I’ve descended into canyons, too. It turns out the West of my imagination is the one with a mustang in the foreground. I grew up with horses, but that did not prepare me for the things I’ve seen on the prairie. There is a difference between domestic animals and those bom free. Domestic horses live in a constant state of having their nature bent and tempered by a master. In contrast, horses born into the wild possess the same tendencies that the species developed over the course of its evolution. One such tendency involves the establishment of a hier­ archy, with regard to the dominant males and females in a family. Wild horses bite and kick, and they collide. In the process, they determine leadership roles and breeding rights. Another of their behaviors includes watching for predators. Horses have been known to increase the size of their herds, even negotiating the joining of separate bands, in areas where they face a threat from cougars. It is this orientation—toward the welfare of the group—that strikes me most. As herbivores, mustangs do not have fangs. They do not possess claws. All they have going for them in a fight is size, their speed, and each other. It is not an accident that they form bands. They draw strength and CHAD HANSON 49 �comfort from their place in a group. During the spring, wild horses battle to establish levels of dominance, but when the roughhousing is over, and families are established, they turn toward their relationships with each other. I’ve been astounded by the bonds of affection that bind horses. They put their long, artfully chiseled faces next to each other. They nuzzle with their noses and lips. They use their teeth to scratch each others’ backs. They know the spots that are hard to reach on an equine body—withers and shoulder blades, for example—so they help each other by nibbling in all the right places. Siblings and parents stand side by side. Then they swat flies from one another’s faces with their tails. Bands of mustangs spend entire afternoons preening and caring for their families. There are few sounds. Horses whinny if they need the attention of the others. They blow out through their noses as a way to sigh and maintain contact, especially when foraging carries them afield. A stallion will some­ times shriek in the presence of a rival. Apart from these examples, and the sound of the wind in the grass, horses live in a quiet world. As prey to carnivores, it behooves horses to maintain stealth. From an evolutionary standpoint, silence suits them. It’s adaptive. They communicate—but they speak the language of the body. Wild horses fasten themselves to the herd. They use their physical presence and their eyes to choreograph their position and movements. We are accustomed to seeing flocks of birds flying in unison. We are familiar with the idea that groups of fish form schools and coordinate their move­ ments through currents and tides, but on this continent, we see few cases of large mammals sprinting together. When you see a band of wild horses run, it forms a striking image. The oldest or most dominant female, the lead mare, usually begins a charge. Other members of the family step into formation. Then the stallion falls in behind. Legs churn. The group floats over the prairie as if they were wrought from one body of metaphysical horseness. Mustangs are other-centered. Out of necessity, they focus their atten­ tion outward, into the workings of the band. We’re social too, but not like horses. Our capacity to manipulate words gives us an inner life. We live inside our heads as much as we live in a family or culture. Horses use their memories to recall threats or places of danger. We have little to fear, so we use our brains to craft personal narratives. It’s our memories that make us who we are. No matter where you go or who you spend time with, you can find human beings telling and then recounting the story of themselves, inside their minds. We’re so vigilant about maintaining our stories that we 50 PRAIRIE SCHOONER �become preoccupied. We think about ourselves to the exclusion of others. Our evolution was atypical. We’ve turned into the rarest of creatures: self­ centered but, at the same time, bound to live in groups. Standing on the prairie with the last remaining wild horses on the conti­ nent is riveting. The animals capture your attention. It takes all of your senses to absorb the setting: beauty, peace, and motion. You strain your eyes. Your heart beats, notably, inside your chest. You have to remind yourself to exhale. Such moments arrest your attention. They lock you in the present. The past, the future, hopes and recollections—gone. In such a moment, when all of your memories vanish, you disappear, too. You can try to hang onto the stories in your head. I’ve tried that once or twice, but I find it’s better to give in to the spell. I use my time on the prairie as a way to forget myself. I spend summers and a good part of the other seasons standing on the plains in the company of wild horses. During the time I pass on the grasslands, there are other tasks to which I should devote attention, but my obligations have to wait. Still, there are people with whom I ought to spend more of my time. I regret the trade-offs. It is true that my friends have not seen much of me since I started with horses. As a consolation, however, I also see quite a bit less of me. CHAD HANSON 51 � Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Print Magazine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wild horses, America, and Me Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"><a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2017 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chad Hanson Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Chad Hanson Journal Publications, CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01_ChadHansonPapers_53 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Searchable PDF Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <em>Prairie Schooner</em> is published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln