Cowboys and Truckers, Part 3

“Myths are public dreams…”

Joseph Campbell

“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.”

D.H. Lawrence

When I was a sophomore at Valparaiso University, my roommate and I got into a loud argument one afternoon about a chapter in the book The Things They Carried. It’s a book by Tim O’Brien, based on his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War. As the book begins, it’s easy to assume that the narrator is the author: they share the same name, the narrator speaks in first person, and he writes about Vietnam with a certain knowledge and understanding that could only come from a person who lived it. I can remember being enthralled with the stories the narrator was sharing and being amazed at O’Brien’s ability to remember all the details. My father is a Vietnam vet, so I’ve always been fascinated with the war, why it happened, and how it affected people. I was really into The Things They Carried until a chapter halfway through the book entitled “How to Tell a True War Story.” In this chapter, the narrator says, “For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” I read this chapter and came to the horrific conclusion that I had been duped by the author. As this realization swept over me, I know that I must have been thinking in exclamations: His stories aren’t true! This whole time I thought he was telling the truth! What a jerk! I can’t believe I thought Tim in the book was Tim the author! Then, I got angry at Tim O’Brien and began thinking in questions: How can he sleep at night knowing that he’s sucking readers into his web of lies? How am I supposed to figure out what’s true and what isn’t? Why would he want to make his readers believe something that wasn’t true? I really felt indignant over how I had been treated as a reader, and I even think I went so far as to say that I thought it was wrong of the author to make it seem like his stories were true and then, in the end, be lying to his readers. (This is where the loud argument happened with Elly. She didn’t agree with me.) (She also may have had the wherewithal to look at the title page of the book where it said: “The Things They Carried, a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.”)

I stayed pretty mad at Tim O’Brien until I started to understand why he had to weave truth and lies together to tell his stories. The Greeks and Romans did it. The American Indians did it. We do it, too. It’s called “myth.” The definition of “myth” is as follows: “a traditional story serving to explain some phenomenon, custom, etc.” So by definition, the made-up story helps to explain the true occurrence that people feel they cannot explain. O’Brien was creating mythology about being a soldier, and he knew that good mythology always carries a bit of truth in it. Myths help people work through their own stories (as in the case of Tim O’Brien), but they are also crucial to society as they help create culture, preserve history, and clarify what it means to be an individual within that society. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is what we’ve done with the American cowboy, as well.

According to one book I read, cowboys were more than happy to create mythology about themselves. Many of them were expert story-tellers and since most story-listeners never actually saw what happened on the range or on the long drive, cowboys could paint a picture of themselves that couldn’t easily be refuted. Buffalo Bill Cody, a man who never even worked as a cowboy, also help to disseminate the myth of the American cowboy with his “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show” that toured the country. Think of how cowboys are pictured in movies, and this is the image that Buffalo Bill created. Even the cowboy-Indian hatred myth came from Cody’s show. Buffalo Bill sought to create the typical good vs. evil dichotomy during the dramatic parts of his show and Native American caricatures were easy to create. He needed a “villain” and apparently he felt that Indians were the natural enemy of the cowboy. (Note: Many cowboys, in fact, were grateful to the Indians along the way who helped them navigate other Indians’ territory and would not have wanted to make trouble since the Native Americans outnumbered them. Indians were helpful – they knew the land, practiced useful medicine, supplied local information, and traded for food. Often, Native Americans were cowboys themselves.) Eventually, the movies put Buffalo Bill out of a job and both movies and books took up the cowboy myth torch. However, movies did their own type of damage to the reality of being a cowboy. Many of these movies mixed together the wildness of the Old West with the cowboy lifestyle. As I’ve already mentioned, most cowboys weren’t the dashing, debonair sharpshooters that the movies often portray. Cowboys were cow-herders. It’s the outlaws that have been romanticized to be larger than life. Men like Jesse James and Billy the Kid have gained a popularity in our culture, and we often lump outlaws and regular cowboys together.

Creating myths about themselves helped cowboys make it through the hardships that came along with their day-to-day existence. Perpetuating those myths throughout society created picture of what it meant to be an American. Multiple sources I read talked about how very few people actually wanted to be a cowboy. The work is dangerous, dirty, and difficult. But people are drawn to what being a cowboy means: individualism, honor, toughness, freedom, joy in hard work, courage, love of adventure, restlessness, skill, a spirit of independence. Even the outlaws have a niche in our mythology because there’s always the chance that the outlaw will do the right thing and then it feeds into our belief that every person has something redeeming to offer, every person has a chance to do the right thing. The historic figure of the cowboy (not the outlaw) helps us see the best that America has to offer (even if many of those cowboys were not particularly brilliant or influential men). It’s the job itself that elevates the men who did it. So, really, the mythology is about the job, not about the person. The individuals who were cowboys are just naturally swept into whatever great stories get told about what it meant to be a cowboy. On the flip side, while the job of being a cowboy is mythologized (is that even a word?) in our society, the true nature of the work of the cowboy is never really discussed, just the meaning behind the work. Job vs. work. Does this seem circular to anyone else? It’s in the midst of this circle that we find the trucker.

I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to do an entire post about the job of being a trucker. In the end, I decided not to, not because I don’t want my readers to have all the facts, but because being a trucker is pretty much what you probably already think. Truckers usually work for a company that hauls a particular type of product. They are assigned jobs to take their product from one place to another; sometimes those are short distances and sometimes they are long distances, depending on the company and on the desires of the particular trucker. Once their truck-full of product is unloaded at the proper location, truckers rinse and repeat. The actual work of being a trucker isn’t terribly interesting. Sorry, truckers. It’s the mentality behind being a trucker that I find fascinating and it’s in this mentality that the connection with cowboys can be found.

***
A short note from me:

I realize that this topic is being drawn out for a long time. My original plan was to do somewhere in the ballpark of two posts about it. But as I’ve thought about and wrestled with this particular set of information, I’ve realized that it’s bigger than I ever anticipated and I need to make sure all the details are on the table before I can sew it up, nice and compact. I hope you haven’t lost interest!

My other goal is to never make a post so long that a person can’t read it during a mental break during the work day or in the moments while they’re waiting for the train to show up. So, part of my goal here is to keep this to a manageable reading level. As I said before, I don’t sit around believing that my thoughts and ramblings are the most important thing you ponder all day. However, I do promise that I will wrap this all up in one more post. And the topic I have planned next is a one-parter. Your patience and interest are golden to me!  :)