 |
| Old Blue's Grave circa 1900 |
This
Sunday the Rev. Sean Parker Dennison of
the Unitarian Universalist Congregation now
in McHenry preached from the text of
Joshua
3:1 - 4:24. Several readers here
will now have to pause to pick themselves off of the floor and recover from the
shock of hearing of a UU minister preaching from the Bible. For those of you who are not aware of
our ways, although it is not uncommon to include biblical snatches and
citations in sermons, it is rare to “preach to the text.” The text of a UU sermon is just as likely to
be taken from other world religion scripture,
a poem by Mary Oliver, a book suggested
by a congregant, a New Yorker article, or a Little
Golden Book.
And
of all Bible stories the barely remembered tale of Joshua’s copycat miracle.
You may be forgiven if you forgot or never knew that under the detailed
instructions of the bossy Lord God Jehovah,
A/k/A Yahweh, Moses’s former ramrod stopped the flow of the River Jordan so that the Priests could carry the Arc of the Covenant into the Promised Land without getting their
feet wet. They were followed by the
whole of the People of Israel.
Once
on the other side Joshua would eventually lead his people to nearby Jericho. You probably know what happened there because
of a song wherein Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho and the “walls came a
tumblin’ down.” In other words the Israelites were invaders who ousted the former
residents of the territory. Although a
sermon could clearly be constructed around that and how it echoes in violence
to this day, that’s not where Rev. Sean wanted to go with his sermon.
No,
he wanted to talk about what happened just after the whole nation, which had
been wandering in the wilderness without benefit of a GPS for
forty years in punishment for one lousy wild night with a Golden Calf.
When the whole
nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord said to Joshua, “Choose
twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the
Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you
and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.”
So Joshua called
together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each
tribe, and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the
middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder,
according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign
among you. In the future, when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones
mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the
covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were
cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
So the
Israelites did as Joshua commanded them. They took twelve stones from the
middle of the Jordan, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites,
as the Lord had told Joshua; and they carried them over with them to their
camp, where they put them down. Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in
the middle of the Jordan at the spot where the priests who carried the ark of
the covenant had stood. And they are there to this day.
The
Bible, New International Version
The
Book of Joshua, 4:1-9
Rev.
Sean wanted to talk about miracles now that the Great
Sky God does not come down and personally lay them on the table before us. The absence of such showy stage craft leads
many cynics to dismiss miracles all together.
Of course, looking at it another way, our very aware existence in the Universe is a miracle. Everything and everyone we encounter every
day is in some way a bleepin’ miracle.
The
trick, the Preacher suggested, is remembering it. For that we sometimes need reminders—like that
pile of rocks by the Jordan. He challenged
us to go home and pick our own 12 miracles and in some way build a monument to
remind us of them.
Well,
I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that.
Twelve was too many—or too few.
But it did start my mind on a rifle through some musty file cabinets in
the old cranium. And lo and behold I
hauled this one out…
My
Mom, Ruby Irene Mills Murfin, was Den Mother for our Cub Scout Den of eight or nine squirrelly, squirming kids in
blue shirts and caps and yellow bandanas.
I was a Bear so that made me
what, eight or nine years old? That
would make it about 1957 or’58.
Mom
liked projects. Big projects. Projects that were not necessarily in her Den
Mother’s manual. Projects that helped us
learn about the country around us, which happened to be the environs of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Once
she had cut up a prized possession, an old mink
coat that was out of style with its Joan
Crawford shoulder pads. A furrier
could have used the pelts for a fashionable stole or evening jacket, but she
gave them to us. We made Indian war shields trimmed in fur and
lances dangling pelts like trophy scalps. We all whooped it up, terrorized siblings
and neighbor children, and massacred settlers to our hearts content for days.
We
made all sorts of things from pine cones
she collected every summer on picnic trips along Happy Jack Road.
But
this day she heaved a peck basket
full of rocks she had collected from the bed of a fast, high country trout stream that my father had fished
the summer before. They were smooth and
oval or oblong all rough edges long ago knocked off by some old glacier and millennia of rushing icy
water. They were about the size of a
good big Idaho potato. They had satisfying weight and heft in a
boy’s hand. Our minds naturally went to
what we could heave them at and satisfactorily break because we were, after
all, boys which meant we were as wild and vicious by nature as any pagan hoard.
But
before we could commit mayhem, Den Mother Mom sat us in a circle and read to us
from a picture book—Old Blue the Cow Pony by Sanford
Tousey. [Note—I had to refresh my memory of this book by a Google search and was delighted to find a copy on Amazon beat up but intact of $80!]
Blue
was evidently a ranch horse of extraordinary talents. Rounded up among the free and wild horses of
the high plains he was an Appaloosa, a
nimble, sure footed horse preferred by the Shoshoni
and the far off Nez Percé. From a dark, almost black rump, his coat
shaded to blue-gray in the forequarters.
Once
broken and tamed, he took to the rigorous demands of working cattle—the
intricate dance of cutting calves or steers from a herd for branding, running
at full speed over broken ground as his rider threw his lariat, knowing just how to taut the rope so that the cowboy could
leap from the saddle and throw the critter to the ground. He had endurance for long days and nights of
constant work and the speed to win the Sunday afternoon races at the home
ranch.
Blue
was also extremely loyal to his cowboy.
Together they rode through many seasons until the horse’s muzzle grew
gray. He was the stuff of cowboy
folklore yet he kept working.
Then
one year—could it really have been 1886 the year of the Great Blizzard that buried the high plains from Colorado all the way up into Canada in several feet of white death?—Blue
and his rider were caught in the high country near the Great Divide searching for strays when the storm hit. As I recall the tale, if they could not make
it to the safety of the home ranch, they would surely die.
Through
the raging storm with winds blowing icy pellets sideways, in the dreaded white out the man lost all sense of
direction. But Blue knew. He kept plodding on breasting drifts up to
his shoulders. Two, maybe three days,
the rider insensible and barely clinging to the saddle. When the storm finally broke they were in the
midst of a featureless plain far from the Mountains.
Finally
they encountered riders from the home ranch not more than two or three miles
away. When they reached Blue he gave up his burden to them—and lay down and
died.
They
had to leave him where he lay. The body
quickly froze and was covered by drifting snow.
But
as soon as it cleared the cowboys rode out with their shovels and buried Blue
where he lay. But now there was a new
danger…the hungry coyotes that would find the shallow grave and dig it up. So they began to haul stones from a distant
stream to build a cairn over the
grave to protect it the same as they would do for any fallen comrade.
A
small pile a couple of feet high would have done the trick, but they wanted
something more—a monument. They built
the pile high and fenced the plot with split rails. And on a tall board stuck into the ground
they painted, “Erected to the memory of Old Blue, the best old cow pony that
ever pulled on a rope. By the cow punchers of the 7 X L Outfit Rest in Peace.”
When
Mom finished telling the story to us she said, “That was a long, long time ago
and some of the stones on Old Blue’s grave have fallen. But we are going to help. We are going to bring new stones!”
She
let us each pick a stone and broke out the Tempera
paints and brushes. She had us each
paint our rock and decorate it with the brands
we had designed for ourselves the week before. Mine was the P-standing-A-T, the capital
letter A standing on the top of letters P and T with a leg on each.
At
our next Den meeting Mom loaded us into my Dad’s Wyoming Travel Commission station wagon and drove south of town
onto the giant Warren Ranch. We found the grave by a rutted dirt road not
far from the Colorado line. It was a raw and blustery day, the sky
leaden, but the frozen ground clear of snow.
It must have been March. The grave was there just like in the picture
but the stones slipped along the ground on one side, the sign had faded, and
the rail fencing long since replaced with wire.
One
by one we each solemnly stepped forward and placed our stones on the pile. Mom took some pictures with our old Kodak Brownie Box camera. We may have said a prayer for Old Blue, or
sung a song. Or not. We piled back into the station wagon and
drove back to town in an odd silence, not a single boy trying to start a round
of Ninety-nine
Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
And
that’s the story. Make of it what you
will. There may have been miracles
involved.
