The Jism Trail

The Jism Trail

       by Dan Gerus Doug

ride rails

carry pails

eat snails

furl sails

pieced tails

heavy hails

lost grails

white males

hazy trails

snore maize

Wesley grew up reading cowboy stories such as Riders of the Purple Sage and The UP Trail. When he turned sixteen, however, a tractor tipped onto him at a culvert and he died, so this proclivity had done him no good.

       He learned many lessons of value in these Westerns, some of which came to their meaning in him slowly. A girl riding bareback did not mean shirtless but saddleless. This discovery--and thus value--featured in his education. He thought of the bareback girl regularly. But let me dwell not on matters animated by their sexual content and I already regret making the above my first example. Others abound, which many I will attempt to present without that appeal to the libido of readers that makes writers susceptible to criticism of the sort that belittles their intelligence, and for good reason since writing sex is the easiest means by which writers of fiction entertain and teach.

       Sometimes in stories sex hardly appears and in fact is inferred without being shown. Then again, often sex plays a pivotal though arbitrary role in the narrative. Too frequently sexual material enhances a text. But, then, at times, it hardly appears except as a moment the reader approaches and is not allowed to witness in its completion. When sex "enhances the text" the text suffers the danger of becoming episodic, becoming simply a graphic series of pictures that leaves the reader irate and unsettled for its prevalence.

       I will make only one more reference to this subject for I wish to illustrate Wesley's cowboy narrative schooling. This example is of the 'absence of information' variety. Wesley found himself pondering a young cattle herder's "activities" on the range when Zane Grey had him spend a "breathless" hour alone behind a copse of poplars, emerging "satisfied" as if he had just come down the Chisholm trail with the long labor of bringing a herd to market completed.

       Wesley also learned that old men of sturdy build and lonely constitution excite general interest, as if such characters live here and there in a world of their own making, solitary, savvy, wily in survival, and loved by all good people though satisfied to have nothing to do with them. Further to that, Wesley discovered that young women socialize always and always come away with the heart of the lonely cowboy devoted to them from some critical moment of first encounter onward with an unbridled though unspoken passion, one fierce as ever can be imagined in our ordinary passage through this life.

       Tobacco, and especially hand-rolled cigarettes, makes the solitary life bearable. Tobacco pipes remain the solace of the old, the lonely old Indian matriarch outside her far-flung cabin or adobe hut, and the frontiersman who knows little of the culture to which he comes.

to be continued.   

  

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