Boudicca
It is 0700 on the Figure 8 Ranch as I write this, dead-calm and coal mine dark. I’ve got a cup of tea on my desk and just came in from feeding the horses. My face is still cold. From the window where I work I can see the merest outline of the ponderosas, and a yellow light spilling out of the barn where I leave the stall lights on. The light glows on the ice in the paddocks. I can’t prove it, but I think the light works for the horses the same way a night-light works to settle the nerves of children afraid of the dark. And there is something ancient in the light that works for me too, something in my cellular composition drawing me to the promise of a campfire or a torch, a refuge against the wolves in the woods.
We still have wolves, of course, and highwaymen, and it is likely that despite our efforts to make better generations of human beings we will always have them. What’s also true is that good cops aren’t just sheepdogs. They are also big game hunters; they say to each other before a shift: “Happy Hunting”.
I am proud of the hunting I did. Over the course of my career I hunted and hooked rapists, child molesters, murderers, dope fiends, gangsters, the whole spectrum of American big game predators. But I am most proud of those moments along the trail that required a different kind of service. I am proud that every Christmas I took bags of clothes to the bums who lived around Dwight Murphy Park. I’d put two trash bags full of clothes in the trunk of my patrol car and drive down to the softball field where they camped and slept in the bleachers and the dugouts. I’d call them over and give them the bags of clothes. We would yuck it up while they tore through the bags. And then I would drive away, knowing that as they tore deeper toward the bottom they would find a bottle of good wine in each. Judge that however you want, but it helped them get well in the morning and maybe gave them something to laugh about as they camped outside in the holidays. And maybe it helped them see cops as something other than the enemy.
I am proud of answering a call and discovering an old man alone in his apartment — and then making him breakfast. I don’t remember why I was there in the first place, but I remember whipping up a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, and pouring him some orange juice from the refrigerator. It may have been a simple “Check the Welfare” call from a concerned and distant relative, but there is a difference between making sure someone is alive and doing something to keep them that way. I’m certain that old man is long dead, but I’ll never forget the hour or so I spent with him, scrambling eggs and talking about his life, bringing some needed levity to a long-liver whose apartment afforded him only the narrowest view of the cold pacific.
The Father
I bring this up because I’m no longer in the hunt. These days, I’m the old warrior who walks out some distance on the trail, measuring the young lads in their confidence as they ride off, hearing them sing their trail songs and knowing the fading melody of my own. But now I must stop outside the village. I’ve earned all the coup feathers I’m going to earn in this life, and my warbonnet hangs in my lodge as a nod to the past and the work the warriors of my generation performed when we hit the trail together.
I recently finished reading Pekka Hämäläinen’s brilliant book “Lakota America,” and this passage, which is taken slightly out of context for my own purposes, struck me:
“Succesful parties returned home with blackened faces, and the people rushed to seize their weapons and booty, symbolically stripping the leader of his power. It was understood that its concentration in his hands had been but a temporary necessity.”
My power has long been stripped, I no longer blacken my face when I return from the warpath, and my wife no longer hoses the blood out of my uniform in the back yard.
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