The noise of the city never seemed to really settle for him.  There was something about the constant sound, the endless rush of things moving at speeds he couldn’t understand, that all blurred together into an endless crash.  The constant blaring gave him a headache and he hated it.  It was almost crazy how the noise never seemed to end, even at night.  He longed for yesterday and found himself thinking about it often, not that he could do anything about the longing now.

“There was a time,” he thought, but the moment was fleeting.  No sense living in the past, that much he knew.  But still…

This place was once his home and that’s probably the only reason he hung around, not that it mattered much to anyone else.  People around here changed; more strangers, fewer friends.  True, he had outlived his time—he buried his buddies one by one until he was all that was left.  The last of a dying breed.  Yet in his own mind he couldn’t understand why there were not new friends.  In his younger days he had friends of all ages, the old, the young, time didn’t matter then.  The world was once big, and unless people decided different, everyone was your friend.  Now, people’s worlds were about three inches in front of them and their stare, cripes, they look right through you, as if you weren’t even there.  They went to work without a sound, did their jobs, and went home as fast as they could, only to repeat the process the next morning.  He may be old, he thought, but he wasn’t stupid; this isn’t living—in this fashion, at least, one merely exists.  And no matter how many times he went over it in his head, the next thought was always, “What is the value of living when the fire of life leaves the eye?”  But he was too old to be thinking about moving on; regardless of the people and the noise, this is the only home he ever really knew.

As he ambled down the concrete sidewalk he kept his eyes cast slightly downward.  He had long ago given up scanning the passing people for a friendly face.  Now his only concern was the uneven footing that would catch his boot and send him crashing to the earth.  He had to laugh, worrying about falling all the time; in his younger years he had been tossed from more horses than he cared to remember and coming home drunk from the bars had cost him many a spill.  Back then there had always been someone to help him to his feet (after some good-natured joking about his landing) but the people today simply step over him and continue on their way.  No care, no concern, he was simply another bump to be avoided.  On their way to and from work, people are worse than cattle; once, when he was working a herd and slipped from his mount the cattle at least stopped to sniff at him before moving on.  One could only believe this uncaring attitude if witnessed first-hand.  But he knew it was true, no matter how sharply it cuts through the belief of human compassion.

He really wished he had someplace to go, someplace to belong, but those times were long past.  Once, when things were easier to understand, he would ride his horse for hours, just to see what was over the next hill.  A man could ride for hours without seeing another human and that was just fine for him.  City people used to ask him about being lonely, but the old man never really felt alone.  Out on the open prairie, long before five acre “ranches” and summer cabins raped the land of its majesty, a man could feel a certain kinship with God.  Some people fear such openness, but that was never the case for the old man; it was where he belonged.  He would ride for hours and some days, since he would have nothing better to do, would shoot a rabbit or a prairie chicken for supper and watch the sky until sunrise.  On the open prairie, he answered to God alone; otherwise no man could control another.  Often he could hear the land speak to him and he would listen as the story was told.  He loved to hear the stories of the Lakota and their doomed struggle to keep their land, the stories of countless buffalo and elk, of Lewis and Clark and the mountain men, they were all here and all whispered to him.  Their voices once carried on the breeze and echoed across the waters—once, they all walked together, the living and the dead mixed into one great concert played by the land.  But he no longer knew the prairie, the elk and deer he once hunted disappeared long ago and the buffalo grass was plowed under for lawns; the voice of the land silenced by cars and tractors.  True, his friends were dead but he never would’ve imagined the land could die.  No, too many things were changed for him and he knew one certainty; only in the city, with its concrete, cold gray buildings, and colder people had he ever known emptiness and sorrow.  In all the noise of the city, the silence of the land was even louder.

As he walked he passed a glass window with a reprint of a Charles Russell painting.  He stopped, transfixed by the work, a herd of bison down in the Missouri River, “Where the Great Herds Come to Drink.”  As he stared he became an island in a flood of traffic, but he didn’t mind them and, like always, they didn’t mind him.  Charlie was already an old man when he first met him but it didn’t seem to matter.  Till the day he died, Russell had that light in his eyes, a fire somewhere deep inside that yearned for adventure and excitement.  The great thing about the painter was that spark, that passion for life, was contagious and spread like wildfire to everyone around him.  And the stories, God, those stories were amazing—comedy with a hint of sorrow, say what you want about his ability to cowboy but the man could tell a story.  Montana could never replace a man like that, heck, mankind could never replace a man like that, never in a million years.  But his ways were the old ways and those days have long since faded.  “Too bad,” the old man thought, “The color Charlie brought to the world is turning to gray,” as he shuffled away from the window and his memories.

As he made his way to a bench he was bumped by a man wearing a bucket hat, bandanna and brand-new cowboy boots talking loudly on a cellular phone.  See a lot of folks around here like that these days.  Far too many, as he was concerned; all talk but never very dependable when something needed finishing.  As he sat down he let his mind drift back through all the bitter, fall nights when the boys laid awake because it was too cold to sleep.  He slid his old hat from his head and looked at the weather-beaten material.  These days it didn’t have much purpose; if the sun was too hot, he sat in the shade, and if it rained he waited in a shelter.  He supposed habit made him take it from the peg each morning but the old man considered it an honor to wear the thing.  As he slowly turned it through his calloused hands he had to think back to the time he had to fish it from the Missouri River when his horse stumbled or when cattle almost trampled it to dirt after a bolt of lightning sent them running.  The nice thing about the hat, he thought, was if his eyesight ever failed him he could always find it by the smell.  The stink of 10,000 cattle, a thousand summer days along some dusty trail and a handful of horses all left their distinct odor.  He figured some people would call it “character” but if he really had to explain it, he was just too stubborn to get rid of something he’d had for so long.  Each stain was a hard-earned memory dating back far more years than he cared to think about.  “It’s a shame,” he thought and he looked at his broken-down boots and replaced the hat on his head, “Today these clothes would be pretty stylish if they weren’t so beat up.”  He could remember a time when it wasn’t popular to look the way he did—cowboys were rough and edgy and the “proper” gentlemen wanted nothing to do with his kind.  Now, everyone wanted to be just like him, minus the work.

“Money,” he thought.  He had known some Indians once and they had a tough time understanding the concept of ownership.  His friends wondered why gold and paper could mean so much to a man.  How could someone have so much money while so many starve in a land of plenty?  Personally, the old man had a tough time fathoming hunger when the mountains and prairies had given him so much, but now the city taught him other lessons.  Money is the great mask worn by many in society, but he supposed it was fairly normal anymore; money, like so much talk, reveals nothing about character.  The greatest people he had ever known had very little and those few things could be given away easily and without remorse.  A man can always get another horse or shirt, but he can never replace the loss of a friend.  People like him learned long ago the more things they have means the harder one has to work to keep those things—and the more time a man spends working means the less time he has to hunt and fish, to laugh and live. 

Once, he always needed to be somewhere but these days he seemed to be a ghost and was needed nowhere.  Like always, his walk took him down to the river—sure ain’t the way it used to be, that’s the truth.  Then again, he doubted the river would recognize him as well; the hands of time hadn’t been kind to either.  But, from one old hand to the other, the old man sat with his memories and there beneath a cottonwood listened to the river talk of the old days.  This was always how it was, anymore—he could talk of trails and bandits, cattle and cowboys and Indians, but the only one who would listen was this old river.  Looking back, he spent the better part of his life dodging Death’s icy grip, but that was a long time ago.  These days, death wouldn’t come fast enough.

As the sun began to drop in the western sky and the long shadows cast across the water, it was time to head back.  Once, this was a time when the darkness of life was split by a warm fire and hot meal on some long-ago prairie but now he had nothing to bring light to the shadows.  For him, nothing waited—life held nothing anymore.  “What a busted day,” he thought.  He was sick of the pretenders, sick of loneliness, sick of life.  Perhaps tomorrow he would make “The Journey,” and they would all be there, waiting, where his presence would complete the council fire.  And then he would be home and everything would again make sense—the prairies, the cattle, the friendship; miles and miles of living.  As for now, like a long and dusty trail, life must simply be endured.