Sometime in his life every red-blooded American male dreams of living the savage life. It’s part of our national DNA, and by the time I reached manhood I had a short bucket list.
Ride—like an Indian: naked, on a horse, bareback, at a full gallop.
Run—like the Wolves: naked, barefoot, across open ground.
Fish—like a Polynesian islander, with a handmade spear.
Other young men my age dreamed of a Tutor home and a Mercedes in the driveway; I dreamed of gnawing buffalo hide in a sod hut.
I completed number 1 on my list when I was 21 on a horseback trip into the Tetons. When I told Clarence, the owner of the horses, my dream of riding “born free” and all, he cocked me a cowboy’s skeptical eye, as if to say: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
He gave me a horse, and I walked it up to a big open field that I had spotted on our way to camp. It was perfect. I undressed, and for a moment I stood there, just naked me and the mountains. I swear that horse knew my mind because when I leapt up on her back in my birthday suit, she took off.
“I’m doing it. I’m really doing it,” I thought, as I galloped across the mountain meadow.
Reality, however, soon rose up to meet my fantasy in the form of the bushes and trees at the far end of the meadow. As I slowed the horse into a canter and then a trot, I suddenly found myself in the nutcracker of his bare back.
I hadn’t yet decided if I wanted a family, but I wanted to keep my options open, so I leapt—well, actually, half fell and half jumped—into a bush of nettles. I didn’t really stick the dismount, but no one was watching, and I felt satisfied.
Bucket List #1: Check.
I completed number 2 when I was 25, on a lonely stretch of Oregon Coast. I didn’t want try to explain to an highway patrolman how my bucket list came to include indecent exposure. So I found a large grassy area off the highway, surrounded by rocks, high above the beachcombers below.
It was early fall, wet, grey, and chilly. Over the grassy knoll lay a foggy mist turning to drizzle. I took off my shoes, my shirt, then my pants. It felt good: the ocean in the air on my skin, only my blood keeping me warm.
I was young and strong, and before me lay the Path of the Wolf.
I took off and steadily turned up the speed until I was running as fast as I could, my bare feet barely touching the ground, young Wind-In-His-Balls. I felt like a primitive man, and I learned why jockstraps are so important.
And now I could say I had run with the wolves.
The next day, however, I caught the death of a cold, and my wife had to tuck the Wolfman into bed with a hot water bottle, a cup of tea, and some chocolate chip cookies. When I told her about my run with the Wolf, she looked at me with that wonder wives reserve for such moments.
She shook her head as if to say, “How could I not fall in love with this goofy man?”
Bucket List #2: Check.
I checked off number 3 at 29, on a hiking trip with my wife in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. As soon as we set up camp, I announced my intention of putting food on our table caveman style: just me and a stick against a fish.
A practical Oregonian farm-girl with the patience of Job, she was resigned, by this time, to letting my fantasies run their ridiculous course. She wished me luck with a have-fun-storming-the-castle wave of her hand.
I found a sturdy stick, bone dry and hard, took out my Swiss Army Knife, and sharpened it to a deadly point. Then I scouted out the river for a fishing place. I picked a spot between two rocks with the water pouring into the pool. I straddled them, raised my spear in readiness, and watched.
I hunted for over an hour—still as an Iroquois, patient as a heron, peering into the water for a flash of fish, then plunging my spear at it, over and over. Then, on one attempt, I pulled my spear from the water, and there it was: a four-inch fry squirming on the tip of my spear.
“I got one,” I yelled, and ran to show my little squirmer to my wife.
“But we can’t eat that!” she said. “It’s too small.”
“It takes even more skill to spear a small one!” I replied.
Size didn’t matter. I had proved it. I could be deadly. I could live off the land!
Bucket List #3: Check.
The mind picks up ideas like a coat picks up lint, from the most unlikely places. I picked up this gem—that real American men live the savage life—from Elton John, a flaming queer from England.
The closest Elton John ever came to a savage life was slurping oysters and sipping Dom Pérignon in French penthouses.
But at 13, I worshipped this day-glow Queen. Through headphones the size of baseball mitts, I listened, over and over again, to “Indian Sunset,” a mournful dirge about the last days of a defeated Indian tribe.
Oh, great father of the Iroquois
Ever since I was young
I've read the writing of the smoke
And breast-fed on the sound of drums
I've learned to hurl the tomahawk
And ride a painted pony wild
To run the gauntlet of the Sioux
To make a chieftain's daughter mine.
Among the discontented children of Woodstock, this shit sold like hotcakes.
The song told us that long ago, before suburbia, the 9-5, and Pop Tarts, life was real. We, America’s youth, the privileged heirs of a post-war boom that would make us all rich by any reasonable global standard, were actually a defeated and harried tribe, dispossessed of our birthright to nature.
We greeted any arrival of our parents like the coming of the white man, mainly because invariably they were about to drag us to someplace where we had to wear shoes, and all we wanted to do was run free.
The Real. How we all long for it—even in our fantasies.
If my dream of the Savage Life expressed itself in the ridiculous playacting of my bucket list, it was out of that longing. Laugh if you will, but every contact with it, even a bit of a piece of it, is like the heart of the buffalo to our savage hunger.