Cowboys, Indians, & Outlaws

It was such an honor to write this piece for Cowboys & Indians magazine, a publication focusing on the mythos of the American West. It is a special thing to have your work appear in a proper magazine, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to share with their audience why I think that puttering around in an old school bus may just be the ideal way to really get to know the wild country that makes up so much of our Western public lands. Here’s a link to the full Cowboys & Indians article, if you’d like to give it a read.

In the preamble to the article they referred to me as a “culinary outlaw,” which is a fun turn of phrase, but also brings me to the recent death of one of my favorite authors, Tom Robbins. One of the protagonists of his book Still Life with Woodpecker is a self-described outlaw by the name of Bernard Mickey Wrangle (also known as the Woodpecker). His outlook on the world is undoubtedly questionable, as is his habit of using dynamite to challenge the status quo (“Life is like a stew,” he says, “you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top”). But there are some excellent passages in the book about the slow failure of American society toward the end of the 20th century (that apply equally well to the first quarter of the 21st), as well as the mythos of the outlaw. Here’s a favorite of mine:

“The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. (I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law—many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that—we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the ‘nature’ of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.

When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare. … ‘When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.’”

We’re living in a time when criminals are in charge of just about everything. The incredible public lands that make the West what it is are on the chopping block. People across the country are being stripped of their jobs, rights, and freedoms. Seems to me like a time when we could use a few more outlaws.