The Buffalo of My Soul
By now we all know that the proper name for what we all grew up knowing as a buffalo, is bison. Technically they are Bison Bison in scientific terms and are a subclass of Bovinae or large, even-toed ungulates (hoofed creatures) that are native to the Great Plains of North America. We all know Tatonka (the non-specific Native American word for the buffalo) from Dances With Wolves fame, and know that they used to cut huge swaths of herd track through the plains as they migrated from one feeding ground to another. When you look for a Google image of a buffalo and you Google it with that name you get that nasty African and sub-continent beast we know as the Water Buffalo. I don’t mean to speak ill of the noble Water Buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), but it is known to be one of the meanest MoFo’s on the savanna. Even the Hippopotamus shows some respect for the Water Buffalo when their paths cross. About the most violent thing you will ever see from an American Buffalo is the goring of a silly and interloping tourist who can’t heed the Rangers and stay in his car in Yellowstone. But the fact is that it is commonplace to reference the American Bison as a Buffalo. Like so many etymological things, popular and common usage eventually overwhelm historical or scientific propriety. I suspect it is time to let bisons be buffalos if that is what people want to do.
I don’t have a particular relationship with the buffalo, but I have had several interactions over my life. Back in grade school, after my maternal grandfather’s death in 1963, coincident more or less with the assassination of JFK, I was given a gift from my mother from my grandfather’s cluttered garage. She gave me an old cigar box filled with antique coins, mostly American, but some foreign as well. As a proprietor of both a road house and a gas station, he was in the habit of tossing odd or old coins into the cigar box, where they accumulated and then sat for years in the attic of his dusty, greasy and cobwebbed garbage. My mother gave me the box along with a book about coin collecting. It was the start of a hobby that I pursued along with my mother during my grade school years. At that time there were several coins in circulation that were generally known to be going out of circulation soon and were therefore worthy of collecting. Thus, in addition to the base inventory of cigar box coins that dated as far back as 1805, I began a program of gathering all the Mercury Dimes, JFK Half Dollars, solid silver Quarters and Buffalo Nickels that I could chance upon. I keep them in little clear plastic tubes that were about the size of normal coin rolls. The idea is to seek volume and worry about quality later. Other than the occasional cash crunch that caused me to deplete my stash (I hate to think of all the historic coins that got spent on Baby Ruth emergencies….mostly Quarters and Dimes and less Half Dollars and Nickels), I kept those coins and they sit in a safe deposit box under the control of my ex-wife Mary, held for safekeeping for my oldest son Roger. Those Nickels were Buffalo Nickels with a standing Buffalo on one side and a Native American brave on the other side. They were minted and circulated from 1913-1938, when the Nickel got redesigned with Thomas Jefferson and his home, Monticello. That design was used from 1938-2004. But they were not Bison Nickels, they were Buffalo Nickels.
In 2005, Kim and I took Thomas and my cousin Pete and his family to Yellowstone Park for a summer vacation visit. There we saw several buffalos and while they wandered very closely to the park roadways and looked imposing, we were careful to keep our distance and respect the advice of the Park Service that buffalos are not to be taken lightly. This zoological wisdom was further enhanced during a visit to our favorite Western Lodge, the Lodge at Red River Ranch in Teasdale, Utah. The Lodge regularly maintains a small herd of buffalos in the front yard (sort of the front 20 acres). It adds to the western ambiance to have wandering buffalos roaming the plains and visible through the windows. There is also a great big bull buffalo head mounted over the main fireplace in the Lodge’s great room. Buffalo is part of the whole lodge experience. One day during breakfast, I was sitting with the owners, Dave and Charlene, when we noticed one of the members of my motorcycle group walking out to the front corral fence where a baby buffalo was standing. The intent was just to photograph the cute little baby buffalo, but Dave jumped up and ran outside to warn the photographer to back off. He had seen the bull, who was keeping an eye on his little ward by the fence, start to move closely in the direction of the interaction. Dave gave a short lecture to the photographer who sheepishly backed off right away. When he returned, he explained that to a bull buffalo, protecting the young of the herd was a primal instinct and an electric fence was no more than a mild suggestion which would be unnoticed if he felt the need to protect his calf. This gave me newfound respect for the noble beast.
So, when I decided to place some outdoor art on our western hillside, it was not a coincidence that I chose to make it a buffalo. I already have one buffalo statue made in miniature of stone and copper. It is a specially prized piece to me and stands on a huge stump in our entry hall. It was this statue and this artist that gave us the idea to do something combining stone and metal for a large outdoor statue. When I scanned the back yard that day with buffalo on my brain, it took me five seconds to see a siting buffalo in the gathering of large boulders directly downhill from our deck. It was freakish how well our natural boulder-scape lent itself to a buffalo statue. One photograph and one Google image later of a sitting buffalo and Kim and everyone else immediately saw what I saw. I went out to Aguanga and negotiated a deal for a huge, 3-4X life size, buffalo head, a right front hoof and a tail. The choice of body parts (other than the obvious head) was somewhat arbitrary and driven by the lay of the boulders and my experience with several of these stone/metal statues. The rest of the process is still underway, with me trying to adjust the sculpture with spray paint, fake fur and metal appendage placement through an iterative process to try to make the sculpture look as buffalo-like as I can. This is an eye of the beholder bit of artistry with differing daylight and angles figuring into the equation. As they say about pornography, I may not be able to describe it, but I will know it when I see it. Art is a very soulful endeavor, so this sculpture is quickly becoming the buffalo of my soul.