The Leatherstocking From Brooklyn
Whether the hunting experiences recounted by Grogan actually happened is
another matter. He was an inveterate liar. As Peter Coyote wrote in the
introduction to a posthumous edition of Grogan's autobiography in 1989,
"Don't believe everything you read." But, he immediately added,
"don't be too quick to doubt either."(102)
What matters about Grogan's odyssey into the wilderness is not its status as
history but its role as mythology. Grogan retreated into the wilderness, and
embraced the prospects for savagery, death, adventure and freedom it offered, as
a means of transforming himself. And of distancing himself from the sterility of
contemporary American society. In effect, Grogan inadvertently fashioned his own
twentieth-century version of a James Fenimore Cooper "Leatherstocking"
tale.
Before leaving San Francisco, Grogan (who referred to himself in the third
person in the autobiography) and Little Bird purchased clothing. All "the
clothing was bought with the silence of the hunt in mind, and Little Bird
painted the sneakers green and brown and spotted the same colors in the pants
and shirt to make them blend even more with the background of the Springtime
forest, as their wool texture would soundlessly harmonize with the quiet of the
forest."(103)
[p. 130]
During their first days in New Mexico, the garrulous Grogan and the reticent
Pueblo "seldom spoke." They spent most of the time wandering in the
hills, with Grogan watching Little Bird's "every quick but careful
movement, learning as much as his Indian brother wanted to teach him." In
the evening, they returned to Little Bird's cabin, where their female companions
(Little Bird's wife and Grogan's "Digger woman," known by her hippie
name, Natural Suzanne) cooked for the men. After dinner, each couple shifted to
their respective areas of the cabin where they made love "for an hour or so
until it was beautiful to stop and fall asleep to dream about what the next day
might bring."
Emmett followed Little Bird's eyes during their first week . . . and saw the
many different creatures who lived there, who sensed their presence but were not
alarmed because of their quiet way and the scent Little Bird spread on their
camouflaged clothing—a scent that came from tiny sacs of liquid above the hind
hooves of deer. Little Bird had acquired and saved this liquid from the many
deer he had slain over the years. It was Little Bird's knowledge of the ways of
the wilderness and Emmett's careful attention to his teacher's planned style of
movement that allowed them to approach and get within yards of the splendid
animals of the land.
Grogan was especially attracted by the deer. "Each one of those
magnificent stags was strikingly individual and solely responsible for his small
herd—and the sight of them charged Emmett with a deep feeling that one of them
was to be the answer to the question that brought him to New Mexico."
One deer in particular caught his eye. Almost every night after dinner Grogan
thought about this "buck":
He picked the buck from dozens he saw on his walks with Little Bird through
the woods, because there was something about the stag that told Emmett it was
him. Emmett would sometimes stand outside under the stars and listen to the
howling of the coyotes and the whistling of the mating calls and understand that
whatever it was he was about to discover, it would be soon. This made him feel
warm and open to the smells carried by the brisk, dark air, but nervous, that
there was so much to manhood and being a man.
Ten days after their arrival in the hills their food was nearly gone. It was
time to hunt. They would hunt like Indians rather than white men, and observe
Native American's traditional reverence for their prey.
[p. 131]
Of course, they had always carried their weapons with them on their walks,
but even though they sometimes had been only a few feet away from an animal,
Little Bird had never used his bow or Emmett his rifle, because no meat had been
needed for the table. However, now there was a need, and the rabbits they had
only been watching they now were hunting.
At first, Grogan and Little Bird hunted for snowshoe rabbits. They shot the
rabbits, and Grogan noticed that his gun, with its terrifying thunder and the
odor it emitted when fired, was unnatural in that place. It was very different
from the "clean sound of the snapped string" of Little Bird's bow.
After the kill, Little Bird cleaned their quarry.
Emmett watched with a certain amount of amazement as Little Bird deftly moved
his fingers around the insides of the rabbits, examining their innards and
skillfully handling their entrails, searching for some trace of disorder. His
amazement was caused by the obvious excitement that Little Bird was experiencing
as he dealt with the warm bodies of the freshly killed animals. His eyes were
wide and alive with a sort of spiritual enthusiasm, and in fact his whole body
seemed involved in a climaxing orgasm that wasn't sexual, but rather religious.
Sweat poured out of him and his muscles trembled and his mouth watered and his
face jumped and twitched, while his whole body shook with the death experience.
They did not speak, but Little Bird's "reaction to the kill," his
demeanor while cleaning the rabbits, spoke of its "enormity." Grogan
began to understand something about the hunt. Its real object was the hunter,
not the hunted.
The words of an Indian song which Little Bird had translated to him one
evening started to beat their message into his brain: "I aim my golden bow;
I pull on my golden string; I let fly my golden arrow; and it strikes the heart
of the target, and I fall dead. For I am the target. And the target is me."
"The target is me." Grogan felt himself becoming "more and
more one with the creatures he hunted." He treated the animals with the
"same respect" he would have for himself had he "been the
target." Sensing this change in Grogan, Little Bird realized his
"pupil" was ready "to learn what he brought him there to
teach."
Finally, nearly a month after they left San Francisco, Grogan was
ready to hunt in the hills. He hunted alone. He and Little Bird knew that was
the only way. Walking for hours, wandering far from the cabin, Grogan did not
rest until [p. 132] he reached a spot where he "sensed the presence of his
buck." He stayed in the spot for some time, waiting.
He would do absolutely nothing to startle the buck to his feet. . . . He
didn't want it to be that way. He wanted to hit the animal as he calmly rose
from his sleep, so that the kill would be the cleanest of kills, and the deer
would not have to suffer a moment's shock of apprehension. Emmett loved this
stag he had come to hunt. . . . Emmett wondered whether animals like his young
buck felt loneliness in some way at all. He didn't feel silly in supposing that
they did sense something similar to man in their instinct toward life, and he
looked up at the clouds and watched them roll and lumber around the blue sky for
what seemed like hours until a formation appeared in the mass of white billow
and separated itself from the rest of the cumulus puffs to stand alone and apart—a cloud shaped like his antlered stag deer.
It was the buck. Grogan observed the "handsome face and taut-muscles
beautifully framed in a hard body." As he prepared to "squeeze off the
round," the Pueblo song resonated in his mind. "For I am the target.
And the target is me." He fired and the explosion "momentarily blurred
the vision of himself falling, gracefully, but hard, dead to the ground, the
target of the bullet he had just fired." Grogan looked at the deer
"and saw himself," how it would be "when the time came for
him." He waited at a distance, respectfully, allowing the "splendid
buck to die in peace and in private." Assured that "the magic of death
had ended," Grogan knelt beside the fallen creature and felt "an
overwhelming oneness with the deer."
Grogan, the good pupil, remembered how Little Bird taught him to clean his
kill. He "slit the animal's belly neatly open and gutted him like a good
surgeon." Then he tied the deer's legs and hoisted the two-hundred-pound
animal onto his shoulders. Grogan was not a particularly big man, but the past
month of "stalking in the woods" had "strengthened his body to a
point where he could feel the difference in himself." So he lifted and
carried the deer. He walked haltingly and painfully for three long hours back to
the cabin. Like a modern Jesus he carried his cross of redemption, the
instrument of his own death. Grogan pushed on, refusing to stop despite the
agony that suffused his body. He was fortified by
the enormous energy which Emmett Grogan has discovered within himself that
seemingly timeless afternoon. A vital, spiritual energy which surged through
his body, filling him with an invisible physical strength from the moment he
aimed his rifle at the wilderness within himself and fired on the target of
his own animality.
[p. 133]
When he finally reached the cabin, Little Bird saw "the
magnificence" of the buck and how effectively Grogan had eviscerated the
animal. He was proud of his pupil. "'Good,' was all he said." The
women also admired Grogan's prize and "were proud of Emmett for now he was
a hunter—which was what his being there was all about."
After skinning the deer and treating it, the women cooked steaks and the four
of them ate what Grogan believed was "the finest meat he had ever
tasted." The taste lingered:
Afterwards, each couple went to their section of the cabin's divided main
room where they lay down together. Emmett was too completely exhausted to
talk with his woman, but she understood and kissed him with her juice-filled
mouth, softly raising his cock hard with her lips and tongue, easing forth
an ejaculation that burst full-loaded wet against the inside of her cheeks,
splashing like a hot wave down her slender throat and sedating Emmett into
the slumber of a long, deep sleep.
The following morning Grogan knew it was time to leave. He had to return
"to the valley where the earth is covered with cement and where the people
lived their lives hoping for a moment's relief, and show his brothers and
sisters what he saw." Grogan packed, but he left behind the gun used for
hunting and killing his former self. Instead he took the bow and arrows Little
Bird had given him. Grogan was now a native to America, and "satisfied that
he had made no mistakes in picking and choosing what to leave behind and what to
take with him." For all we know, he left Natural Suzanne behind as well.
Nor did he say goodbye to Little Bird. "He didn't have to."
It took him four days and all the eighty-five cents he had in his pocket to
get back to Frisco with only the heavy deer scent on the Black-Bear, Rain-tite
jacket Little Bird had given him to protect his senses from the immediate, hard,
cold, unnatural assault of the city and its streets. Emmett kept one of the
lapels tucked under his nose, using the perfume of the wilderness to defend
himself against the industrial smell of progress and modern civilization. . . .
Emmett walked because he wasn't tired and because he wanted to let the feel of
the city work him over and massage him back into the shape he would need if he
was going to pick up where he left off.(104)
Grogan's strange adventure distilled the ways in which the counterculture
reprised an imagined preindustrial America. His odyssey was a symbolic union
between the desire of cultural radicals for unfettered autonomy and the freedom
[p. 134]
of the solitary, "self-made" mythic American male. Grogan had to
temporarily retreat from the constraints of organized society in order to taste
the freedom offered by the savagery, adventure and struggle for survival in the
ancient American wilderness.
Grogan told his story in the self-consciously dramatic fashion appropriate to
the heroic process through which his identity and "manhood" were
reinvented by means of the hunt. Whether Grogan was aware of the American
literary traditions associated with these themes is an open question. There is
no way of knowing whether he was familiar with nineteenth-century literary
works, such as the Cooper tales, that portrayed a tension within American
"character" between the settled, civilized ways of the East and the
lures of freedom and primitivism represented by the forest or the West. Nor is
there evidence that he knew about the history of the mountain men of the first
half of the nineteenth century (except, perhaps, as portrayed in television
westerns), whose actual wilderness experiences might not have differed
significantly from the one he described.(105)
And it is altogether unlikely that Grogan had knowledge of the historiography
of the American frontier, even though he reenacted Frederick Jackson Turner's
late-nineteenth-century belief that the European is transformed into an American
when he "strips off the garments of civilization" and dons the
"hunting shirt and the moccasin."(106)
The idealization of Native American culture was, however, a primary feature
of the counterculture and the Haight-Ashbury hippie community. Obviously, Grogan
was keenly aware of this.
One thing is certain. Grogan was a thoroughly urbanized son of the city
streets who consciously orchestrated his ascension to manhood by plunging into
the wilderness. And when his travail was over, he saw himself as a sort of Moses
of the counterculture. He returned to San Francisco with the "scent"
of the hunt, the unmediated odor of pristine American freedom on his clothes,
ready to be sniffed by his "people." The rebirth detailed in his
story, then, is not only Grogan's. Symbolically it is that of a generation that
needed to connect with primitive sources of individualism and freedom that were
alien to contemporary American society.
The implications of Grogan's tale and its significance for understanding the
counterculture are tied to issues that go beyond them. Grogan's self-invention
through his "performance" as a symbolic American hunter in a pristine
forest is linked to a number of historical issues. These include traditional
American attitudes toward the wilderness, Native Americans and the significance
of the hunt.
As we saw in chapter 4, from the beginning of European settlement,
confrontations with the wilderness and frontier were invested with profound [p.
135]
cultural significance and ambivalence. American attitudes toward the western
migration, and the progressive recession of one frontier after another in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were deeply ambivalent. On one hand,
movement west suggested the inevitable march of progress. It symbolized the
triumph of "settlement." American farmers and their plows replaced the
Indians, hunters and trappers who wandered in the wilderness. Each town settled
or farm staked negated the "savagery" and "anarchy" of the
frontier and eradicated the moral dangers it represented. In the eighteenth
century, Crevecoeur described hunters and frontiersmen as "unsocial"
and "ferocious" individualists immersed in a "sort of lawless
profligacy." He believed these Euro-Americans had sunk so low on the scale
of civilization that they made the customs and manners of the Native Americans
appear "respectable" by comparison.(107)
On the other hand, by the late nineteenth century the taming and settlement of
the West inspired a feeling of loss in some Americans, especially easterners.
The "conquest" of the West extracted from American life a symbolic
arena of adventure and freedom. This sense of loss was intensified by the
emergence of an urban, industrial, hierarchical and commercial civilization. The
industrial city created the potential for widespread security and affluence. But
its regulated, "settled," sedentary and congested way of life seemed
to limit the horizons of American individualism and manhood. To some degree
those qualities had been linked to the encounter with the wilderness and
westward expansion. Masculinity and individualism had been cultivated by the
struggles and dangers inherent in pitting oneself against the formidable dangers
of frontier and forest.(108)
By the turn of the century some Americans tried to recapture this sense of
danger by hunting and vacationing in wilderness settings "preserved"
by acts of Congress. A Congressman of the time said that after a
"kill" the hunter felt like "a barbarian, and you're glad of it
to. It's good to be a barbarian and you know that if you are a barbarian, . . .
you are at any rate a man."(109)
As historian R. W. B. Lewis pointed out, perceptions of the West and the
frontier as symbols of a descent into moral anarchy were challenged somewhat by
writers in the nineteenth century who viewed the wilderness as a boundless and
timeless "arena of total possibility."(110)
The historian Francis Parkman, James Fenimore Cooper and Thoreau, among
others, viewed the existence of an untamed, unsettled West as a necessary
antidote to the intellectual, physical and moral limitations created by
industrial progress and urban congestion.(111)
One hundred years before Grogan proudly carried the scent of wild animals
back to San Francisco, Thoreau said he "would have every man smell so much
like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person
should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence. . . . I feel no
disposition to be satirical when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash
even; it is [p. 136] a sweeter scent to me than that which exhales from the merchant's or
the scholar's garments."(112)
To a remarkable degree, Grogan's approach to his wilderness experience mirrored
these perceptions of the West and the wilderness as an escape from the
constraints of a settled, secure life. Grogan's adventure and his attitudes
toward the wilderness recapitulated some of the sentiments of Cooper's Natty
Bumppo in the five "Leatherstocking" tales, as well as the
nineteenth-century narratives of Daniel Boone's career as a hunter and pioneer.
Slotkin suggested that the mythological elements of the Bumppo and Boone tales
revolved around the hero's ability to extract "moral value from the
wilderness ordeal." But this would happen only if the individual possessed
an innocent receptivity to the experience. He had to be willing to immerse
himself in the wilderness environment and put aside, at least momentarily, his
ties to the past.(113)
From the beginning of Grogan's narrative, he indicated the need for an
experience modern society could not provide, something "every" Native
American "already knows" but that eluded middle-class whites. Upon
meeting Little Bird, Grogan put aside his past (and present) and rather
innocently and naively placed himself in Little Bird's hands. The Native
American taught Grogan how to become a "man." In effect, Little Bird
was a cultural bridge between the settlement and security offered by
contemporary society and the primitive, unfettered freedom supposedly harbored
within the American wilderness. Natural Suzanne is Grogan's only tie to his
urban world. But her dramatic function in Grogan's narrative is merely to give
domestic feminine witness to his manhood, a characteristic attitude of radical
males toward women in the sixties.(114)
The most important link between sixties radicalism and the mythic elements in
Grogan's tale was Little Bird. There was a logic of sorts in the fact that
Grogan and Little Bird met in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The
hippie-commune-drug culture lifestyle that took root there before penetrating
the rest of the country was heavily influenced by white middle-class stereotypes
of the American Indian.
Few symbols of unity between people, or between human beings and nature,
captured the imaginations of cultural radicals as powerfully as that of Native
American tribalism. A few months before Grogan and Little Bird met, the first
"Human Be-In" of the sixties was held on the Polo Grounds of Golden
Gate Park. The Be-In was sponsored by a coalition of Berkeley political
radicals, such as Jerry Rubin, by counterculture figures associated with
Haight-Ashbury and Beat writers, including Gary Snyder and Alien Ginsberg. The
Diggers provided thousands of "free" sandwiches for the event. The Be-In's
official poster called it "A Gathering of the Tribes." The center of
the poster contained a drawing of an Indian on horseback. A press release on the
Be-In called it a "pow-wow" convened by "every tribe of the
young" who were dedicated to forming a "new" American
nation."(115)
[p. 137]
To a considerable degree, the ideals of this new nation were associated with
Native American tribalism. Cultural radicals admired the communalism and
communism of Native Americans, the supposed "simplicity" with which
they lived and their respect for nature. Most of all, perhaps, they were
intrigued by the noncoercive, apparently voluntary nature of Indian communalism.(116)
Two centuries earlier, Thomas Jefferson noted much the same thing. Indian
society was bereft, said Jefferson, of "any laws, any coercive power, any
shadow of government. Their only controuls are their manners, and that moral
sense of right and wrong."(117)
For these reasons, many of those who lived in Haight-Ashbury saw themselves
as "the reincarnation of the American Indian," in the words of the
editor of the district's underground newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle.(118)
Grogan's perception of Little Bird reflected these views. But the real
"role" played by Little Bird in Grogan's life-act was to be the
instrument through which Grogan recreated himself. His identification and
kinship with the Indian, whom he called "my brother," allowed Grogan
to blend certain elements of American and Native American cultures into his new
identity, while remaining independent of both.
In the end, Grogan is neither a Native American nor an American attuned to
the values of contemporary society. His relationship with the Pueblo had an
affinity with that of Hawkeye and Chingachgook in Cooper's The Last of the
Mohicans. At the end of this tale Chingachgook, forlorn over the death of
his son and the end of his tribal line, cried, "I am alone." Hawkeye,
the white man who felt more at home in the forest and with the ways of the
Indians than with his own people, replied, "No, no, not alone. The gifts of
our colors may be different, but God has so placed us as to journey in the same
path. I have no kin, and I may also say, like you, no people."(119)
Grogan had "no people" either. He and other cultural radicals embraced
a version of American freedom that inevitably marginalized them in their own
society. Little Bird, like Chingachgook, a symbol of pristine America, was the
instrument through which Grogan articulated his rejection of modern American
culture and reasserted the claims of a primitive American liberty. Grogan's new
identity was concocted from selective elements of both cultures and suggested
something entirely new. It can be said of the relationship between Grogan and
Little Bird what D. H. Lawrence said of Hawkeye and Chingachgook: "This is
the new great thing, the clue, the inception of a new humanity."(120)
The American.
Grogan earned the right to claim his new identity by becoming a hunter. The
actual target of the hunt, as he made clear, was his former self—the buck was
Grogan. The danger inherent in the hunt was not just that the hunter could be
injured or killed, but that he might fail to summon the courage necessary to
prove his "manhood." In this context, the manhood to which Grogan
referred [p. 138] symbolized the courage necessary to confront and destroy what he viewed
as a morally decadent society. Put another way, the bravery necessary to combat
and topple contemporary American society was forged through an adventure in the
primitive American wilderness. The weapon used to destroy modern America was its
own history.
The hunt was a parable in which an avatar of sixties radicalism
ritualistically severed his ties to society by "performing" an act of
mythic renewal and rebirth. It was an old American tale. As Slotkin pointed out
in his extraordinary study of the mythology of the American frontier, Regeneration
through Violence, the "myth of the hunter. . . is one of self-renewal
or self-creation through acts of violence."(121)
Notwithstanding his admiration for both Little Bird's culture and its reverence
for nature, Grogan's views of the wilderness and the hunt were typically
American. They were instrumental and "white," not inclusive and
"red." When ready to kill, he repeated the words of the song Little
Bird taught him, "the target is me." But Grogan missed the point of
the Indian song. For Native Americans, identification with the target reflected
their belief that all creatures were spiritually related. The act of killing an
animal, even for food, was symbolic suicide. But for Grogan, he, rather than the
buck, was the issue. The deer was merely the means through which Grogan enacted
his ritual of self-creation.
In the end, Grogan made it clear that his "weapons" of choice for
combat with contemporary America were those of the primitive American forest.
His rebirth as a hunter was a sign that, if necessary, he could shoot and kill
as effectively in the city as in the hills. At the same time, however, Grogan
left the gun behind. This symbol of the Euro-American conquest of the continent
was replaced by the pre-Columbian bow and arrow given him by Little Bird.
Leaving the gun behind expressed the counterculture's ideals of
"peace" and "love." But keeping the bow and arrows, the
killing of the buck and the savage relish with which Grogan dissected and
devoured the venison spoke of something else. Thoreau captured this American
ambivalence in a passage in Walden:
Once or twice . . . while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the
woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some
kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too
savage for me. I found in myself. . . an instinct toward a higher or, as it
is named, spiritual life . . . and another toward a primitive rank and
savage one, and I reverenced them both. I love the wild not less than the
good.(122)
Grogan's wilderness adventure enacted the repetitive process from
civilization to frontier that occurred during the first three centuries of
American history. "American development," suggested Frederick Jackson
Turner in 1893,
[p. 139] has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to
primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new
development for that area. American social development has been continually
beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity
of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its
continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the
forces dominating American character.(123)
One needn't agree with Turner about primitive forces "dominating"
the character of Americans to perceive the San Francisco scene beginning in 1964
as an attempt on the part of young people to reinvent or rediscover an American
frontier of their own. Thus the archaic qualities of Digger life-acts, the
free-fall plunge into psychological and social frontiers by Kesey and the
Pranksters, the centrality of Native American tribalism for cultural radicals
and Grogan's odyssey into the wilderness. Radicals needed, as Coyote said, their
own "wild turf."
Middle-class child rearing in the forties and fifties placed extraordinary
emphasis upon autonomy, independence, exploration, risk taking and
competitiveness—in other words, on "testing." In the sixties,
millions of young people, with varying degrees of commitment to the hippie
movement, took up this challenge. They attached themselves to culturally
sanctioned myths or primitive experiences that tested their abilities to respond
to challenges and to take the risks necessary to explore their world and
themselves.
Digger "life-acts" and Grogan's wilderness experience were
improvised performances suggesting that the sources and means of expressing
these needs resided within the culture itself. American liberty could be
rediscovered simply by heading "west," metaphorically or literally.
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