Almost thirteen years ago I retired from the University of South Dakota where I had served as a professor in the English Department since 1968 and where also, during my last four years, as Chair of the Department of Modern Languages. On my office door in the English Department I tacked a little aphorism I had written: I don’t know what reality is, but nobody escapes it. That statement occasioned quite a few written responses from passersby’s who defined reality for me. These were also taped or tacked to my door. One person even tore the paper from the door, by stabbing it with a pencil, and left it on the floor. Naturally I just returned it to its original place, and it elicited more commentary over the years. I still don’t know what reality is; but I know that nobody escapes it; and I believe it’s showed itself a few times over those years.
My specialty area in the arena of academia is/was British and French Literature of the 19th century, which is/was an extremely important period in the development of our present day thinking and mindset. During that period, theories regarding reality were hotly debated; Reason v. Imagination; Christian Deism v. Atheistic Pantheism, Relativity v. a fixed Platonic Good, and so on. In the 60’s and 70’s of the twentieth century reality came to be thought of as something you made of it. It was whatever the individual believed it to be. Personally I could not think of anything more ludicrous; so I tried/try in my teaching, to stay as objectively and as closely as possible to what the language of the literary piece indicated. During the 80’s and 90’s of our last century that became what might be called “old fogeyism.” Even so, I’m not convinced that the new theories regarding the ‘old literature” moved any closer to the reality of literature or to reality itself (assuming there is such a thing); so when the time was right for me (and all my numbers were in order, age plus length of service, etc.), I retired from academia.
Some few years later I received a phone call from my old friend, Dan, who made me an offer I could not refuse. On January 3rd of that new year, I relocated my reality to this western South Dakota buffalo ranch. Since those first two years here, when I was the only person who lived full-time at this ranch, my job description and matrix of responsibility has changed immensely. They have evolved from general ranch overseer, herd caretaker, and host for ranch house guests (all of which was part-time work for a retiree), to a lot of additional things as the ranch and its buffalo restoration business grows. Now four people live here full-time. Our situations have changed, but I’m not certain that those changes have altered whatever reality may or may not be. We all seem to be the same people, doing different things, trying to do something right, trying to accomplish something real–with no sure guidelines for either.
In the spiritual belief of the Native American of the Great Plains, the American Bison, whose existence was the foundation upon which the life of the people rested, would offer itself, its life, to the hunter whose heart and spirit was pure. In exchange the hunter honored the buffalo’s spirit and life with prayer and a smoke offering of sage, sweet grass, or tobacco. That was only the beginning of the process of offering and honoring, if we include the hides for housing and clothing, the meat for food, the bones for tools and implements of all kinds, the fur for papoose insulation, the sinew for sewing and for uses on bows and arrows, the skulls for religious rituals, the horns for cups and ladles; and the list goes on. A person could in no way ignore the buffalos’ reality on life itself.
Then the existence of the American Bison was, for political and military reasons brought to near extinction, severely altering the situation of the native peoples’ life on the Great Plains. That was then. In the immediate present of our new century more than a few people strive to restore the presence and influence of the buffalo into the lives of the American people and it may well be that in order to thrive, the American Bison offers itself to us for that purpose. That is hard to know but easy to believe. The buffalo gives us health when we give it a healthy existence. It restores us when we restore it. This I know–even if I may never know what reality is; I still know I will never escape it–and I am comfortable with that.