Why I Cry Over the Buffalo

Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam

Where the deer and the antelope play

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day

I spent my first week in Kansas crying, about many things, but among them the slaughter of the buffalo. I was struggling to adjust to this new and open landscape, so flat and dry, and this time of year mostly brown and gray - straight out of the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. I couldn't understand why people would live in such a place, land that used to be free and open prairie, now subdivided into monocropped acreage dotted with oil wells. "We weren't meant to settle here," I thought, through images of dust bowl farmers and folks who didn't have whatever it took to make it further along the Santa Fe Trail. Then, at the top of Pawnee Rock, looking out for miles in all directions, I read a quote on a plaque describing the view of buffalo, so thick the prairie was black with them as far as the eye could see.

And where are they now?

I cry over the buffalo because they are a symbol, to me, of all the violence we have done to this vast and magnificent prairie, to the regenerative biodiversity, to the people who made their homes here, moving across the land, migrating like the birds, and the buffalo. I could cry about the people, but that pain is too great for my struggling, aching, heavy heart. So instead I cry about the buffalo.

The buffalo are an apt symbol of my sorrow for more reasons, too. Because I know why we killed the buffalo. I've played more than my fair share of Oregon Trail. A large, slow-moving, easy target, when you're hungry, and stressed for time. If you can shoot a buffalo, you do it, even if you can only carry 200 lbs back to the wagon and the rest goes to waste. (And is it really waste if the vultures and bugs get to east, and eventually it all goes back to the soil? It is only that we humans are not maximizing the benefit of the buffalo to ourselves...) So there's that perspective. But then there's a scene in Lonesome Dove, where a character on horseback spots a herd of buffalo and goes charging into it, because he can, because it's fun. A few months ago, out on Lake DeGray, we spotted a bald eagle flying ahead of our boat and chased after it, because we could, and because it was beautiful, and endangered, and we may never get another experience like that again. It was thrilling, and exhilarating, and I could understand why one might shoot a buffalo, even once they were endangered, even if you knew better.

So in truth, my tears are guilty tears, for I would have been complicit if not an active party in the slaughter of the buffalo, and I am currently complicit in more destruction than I can even imagine. But we keep living and so we keep killing and I am feeling that guilt on my heart.

But I know why people live here, too. The beauties the Native Americans saw on their migrations, and that can still be found in pockets, and in the sky. The sunrises, and the sunsets, and the stars. And because children love playing in the prairie. They always have. They always will.

And so we chase after joy, and take what money we can to survive and allow those simple pleasures to perpetuate, in whatever form the current age dictates. And we grieve the cost, but there is always some cost. And we learn to live with ourselves.