(Oatman) Other Items That Need To Be Left Behind

Leave old friends prisoners —for now— in their assigned gated ghettos for the rich. Play along with children “worried about you,” by listening patiently to their advice, just as they did to you back in the days when you where the authority of what was right, or wrong.

Grandkids. Well that is something else. Have extra money to spend, then pay for a dedicated cell service to keep in the loop. Or pay for a ticket to have a grandson, as Ryan, a student at the Brooks Institute of Photography, help work on a project, as interpreting what there was to see at Oatman.

I had missed Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie until swapping paperbacks at a Forest Service volunteer camp hosts bookshelf. In his travel book (blog) Steinbeck found visiting local waterholes was a great place to meet interesting characters. I and my barely of age grandson spent an afternoon in a Oatman saloon, listening to a trio who had worked out some interesting ideas about what had happened to the “free born” American.

Being that these members of an ‘endangered species,’ were fixated on the looming water crisis in the West, I let them know that we only carried 70 gallons of water, that lasted a week when dry camping — or enough for one day, for one person, in Vegas.

I also stirred the pot by telling them that ranchers outside of Ely, Nevada, 200 miles north of this important economic center — after having the BLM cutting back historic grazing rights— were actually selling out the water rights of their home ranch for shipment to keep a LV Strip fountain flowing!

One ‘drunk’ told me in return, that 8% of the water used in Nevada, was along eight miles of LV Strip. Another ‘drunk,’ hearing I was Alaskan, suggested the Sierra Club was behind all of our problems, and that the oil companies were funding them to pressure Congress to vote down ANWR exploration, so to increase profits on diminishing reserves.

The ‘drunk’ that really got my attention was an unemployed cowboy (quick to point out that those Brokeback guys were really sheepherders) who asked the question a bureaucrat wouldn’t have the experience to realize — “So, close down the cow/calf operations. Then where are we going to raise healthy, hormone and mad cow free, feeders?

Ryan, used to dorm discussions as to what hot cleb was dating who (male or female), and “big city” television bias, confessed to me that he had not realized, before the experience, that discussing politics was so much fun!

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