Ethical Dilemmas for a Redneck

by Bruce Peterson

The downpour of rain ebbed and flowed, never really stopping, but quieting now and then before another deluge blurred the murky Bitterroot forest.  The mud in the forest trail grew in depth as the twelve-mule string dug and churned the muck into a chocolate mass of goo.  The mule in front of me sank to its fetlocks in the sludge.  My ass hurt.   Twenty miles on horseback, at  the rear of the pack string, where I supposedly watched for signs of an impending rodeo of mules, mantied packs, myself and Redneck Joe had taken the fight out of me.  I looked for any sign in the forest gloom that we were coming close to our destination, the Indian Hill trailhead.  As always, Joe guided the string; I watched in fascination.  Very few packers would try hookup twelve mules in a row.  The string should be divided up: me with six and Joe with six, but I’m not a licensed Idaho guide.  An outfitter could lose their permit if an unlicensed guide got hurt leading a pack string.  I just sat on my sore butt marveling at the skill and audacity of my little brother.

Suddenly, the pack string halted.  Joe yelled back,

“Get down and see what size those underwear are.”

There, up the hill was a pair of white, cotton briefs lodged in the branches of a Huckleberry bush.

“Are you nuts?” I yelled back.  “It’s muddy and wet!”

Stubborn as one of his mules, I knew Joe wouldn’t move ahead until I complied, so I jumped into ankle deep muck, climbed up through the brush and retrieved the white rag.”

“What size are they?” he asked.

I just silently tied them on the rear of my saddle and remounted.  When we arrived at the trailhead, before he even looked at his mule string, he ran to my saddle and shouted,

“Alright, they’re my size!”

My brother Joe is a scavenger, dumpster diver; it’s true, but when it comes to wild places, Redneck Joe is at home.  I’m eight years older than my little brother, but even when he was twelve and I twenty, I followed him through waist deep snow chasing jackrabbits.  When it comes to hunting, I follow Joe.  Years ago he worked for me as my foreman, but now I do what he tells me to do..

One day, he came to the bus I used as headquarters at construction sites.  We were building a six-story hospital in South Texas.  Joseph led my employees as the foreman of my construction crew.  His communication skills with Mexican block layers far outdistanced my abilities.  Once, when we wanted to hunt ducks and geese on a particular swampy pond we saw from the road, we went up to the ranch house to ask permission.  I knocked.  A black-bearded Hispanic gentleman answered.  I tried English first.

“Would it be alright if we hunted your pond for ducks?”

He just stared.  I tried my very limited college Spanish.  “El Pato?”  He looked at me like a cow at a new gate.  There is a fantastic breakfast burrito place in Tex-Mex land called El Pato.  Maybe he thought I was asking for breakfast?  I’m not sure.  Redneck Joe looked at me with his “College is a waste” look, turned to the Patrón and asked,

“Quack-quack, bang-bang,” while lifting his arms in a shooter’s stance?

“Ahh. Si, si, claro” the land owner replied,

As usual, Joe’s clear and to the point communication style, trumped my academics.

That is not to say he is good with words.  At our brother’s funeral, I asked him to say a few words. Standing and moving forward, he teared up and said, “Unlike my brothers, who have the ability to talk, . . .”  And here he broke and had to sit down.  The strong emotion emanating from him said more than all my words as officiator of the formal ceremony.  Yet, when Joseph does talk, people listen.

I have heard it said over and over, “What he says is right on.”  Joseph may not be eloquent, but he is a bastion of individualism and personal ethics.  He once called me and asked, “Bruce . . .”  No, that is not accurate; he never starts a conversation with any form of introduction.  He just jumps into the middle.   I picked up the phone and heard,

“If you find a rusted pliers in an old garage on the place you are renting, and you loan it to a friend.  And, when the friend returns it, the rust is gone; it’s oiled, and it has even had the handles dipped in plastic, so it’s insulated.  Does that make the pliers yours?”

Of course I said, “No, it still belongs to Mr. Bowels,” his landlord.

Twenty-five years later, Joe still works for Mr. Bowels now and then.  Not for the money; Joe has much more money than he needs.  He just wants Mr. Bowels to be taken care of well.

Bob Dylan once wrote, “. . . you search in vain to find just one law abiding citizen[1]”

Dylan has never met Redneck Joe.  Joe drove fifty-five miles an hour back when fifty-five was the speed limit on freeways.   This wasn’t so bad, because all the floorboards of his dilapidated, blue Toyota were rusted through.  He once picked up a hitchhiker in Montana who, after riding a few miles, asked to be let out back into the snow on the side of the road where it was warmer.  Anything over fifty-five miles per hour with winter wind climbing up out of the floorboards might even be more intolerable than Joe could stand.  He stoically endures any form of hardship.

[1] Bob Dylan, Down in the Grove, “Death is not the End”, Columbia Records, May 1988.

I once watched him sit, leaning against an aspen, in the Great Northern Swamp of Minnesota.  We were hunting whitetails.  He quietly moseyed into view where I could see him from my perch in a tree.  He didn’t appear to notice me up high and camouflaged.  I watched him sit, waiting.  He didn’t move a muscle for hours.  I thought he was asleep, but even then people move, especially at ten degrees Fahrenheit.  Finally, He stood up and turned to walk toward me.  As he approached he asked,

“Haven’t seen anything either, eh?”

“Nope.  You knew I was here?” I asked.

“Yup, just thought we might get blessed when a deer saw you up in that tree and ran toward me,” with a sheepish grin on his face.  Some days he gets my goat.

Joe is a political animal.  I gave up on effecting social justice through political action back in the late 1970’s, after Reagan took office, and the hippies turned into yuppies.  Don’t think I’m a liberal, lower-case “l”.  I am a Liberal upper-case “L”.  Joe and I debate over e-mails with most of our family and mutual friends listening while we use the “Reply to All” button.  The other day we took a, “What kind of Republican are You?” on-line test.  Joseph scored a little right of Tea Party.  I scored just left of average Republican.  I hate being average at anything, but I think the test was bogus.  I do have degrees that qualify me to critique Likert Scale survey questions and results.  Nevertheless, Joe is far right of me philosophically.  Even so, a while back he did admit to moving a little toward my view,

“I think you are right Bruce.  The rights demanded in the Declaration of Independence don’t just extend to citizens; they extend to all humans.”

Yet, even with this change of opinion toward a more Liberal philosophy, he doesn’t extend his Liberalism any farther than to the human species.  On safari in Africa, Redneck Joe shot a primate, a baboon.  He has its skull on his desk.

Personally, I hope to get through my life without shooting any primates.  This goal is not so easy to obtain.  I got lucky having my birthday drawn number four in the 1972 draft lottery, but  Nixon decided to start withdrawing troops from Vietnam that year, and he abolished the draft.  I didn’t have to flee to Canada to obtain my, don’t shoot primates ideal.  Even though I prefer to be intimately acquainted with who I eat, I do buy meat from the grocery store.  I just realize I hired contract assassins to do the killing for me.  I do consider killing animals murder; I have just drawn my vegan, vegetarian, carnivore-line at primates.  I don’t murder primates; at least not yet.

Redneck Joe shot his baboon a couple years ago in Tanzania.  Nevertheless, I got an email from Joe one day describing how he tracked down a wounded Elk for one of his clients that didn’t shoot as well as Redneck Joe demanded of himself.  When he approached the dying animal, he decided he shouldn’t shoot it again and mess up more meat and the cape (Part of the elk taxidermists need so people can look up at who they murdered).  Joe decided to smother the animal by holding his hands over the animal’s mouth and nose.

“I watched his (the elk’s) spirit leave his body through his big brown eyes.  I thought, ‘How is it that someone who has such love of animals and respect for the life God endowed, make his living killing animals?’”

It is a paradox Joe.

Redneck Joe lives in a little cabin that barely makes it across the line from “shack”.  All his cars have holes somewhere and he has never sold one.  They just get driven until the wheels fall off.  He runs a hunting and fishing operation that employs upward of sixty people.  He cares for five-thousand acres of private land and is the only lower forty-eight outfitter with three National Forest land permits totaling three quarter of a million acres.  His log, hunting lodge has eighteen guest rooms, is an Orvis endorsed wing-shooting and fly-fishing lodge that serves the best single-malt scotch to its guests for the taking.  Yet, he stops at every public dumpster to see if there is anything worth taking.  He subscribes to The Tightwad Gazette.  In an email I once sent him describing the activities in the day of an average Republican (just to get his goat), he wrote this reply to one of the sarcastic ”Average Republican’s” activities described in the e-mail:

“He (the average Republican) gets in his car for the drive to dad’s; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards.”

In response, Joe wrote, “I would not call my cars the safest in the world.  They were built before seat belts were mandatory, or the safety equipment has fallen out through the rusted out floors.  My truck is currently parked on a hill and has been for months because the starter is out. Who needs a starter in Idaho for a car with a manual transmission anyway?”

Extraordinary ethics and frugality are ever present in the life of my little brother, Redneck Joe.