An Unexpected Meeting
September 30, 2010
I
set out on a road trip recently from Denver to Albuquerque. Still
hopelessly in love with the American West--even though I have spent my
entire adult life close to the Rocky Mountains--I reveled in the
spacious vistas and open skies of the high plains and Front Range. The
interstate highway south of Raton, New Mexico, follows the route of the
legendary Santa Fe Trail.
I reflected on a new book I’d read recently, Empire
of the Summer Moon, by S. C. Gwynne, about the Comanches and the
Western frontier. A cycle of violence, which included torture as well as
murder and plunder, went on all across the Americas for centuries before
Europeans arrived, and for centuries after, before it culminated in the
genocide of the native American tribes. Another genocide--of the
American bison--was carried out at the same time. In just a few years,
many millions of these gentle creatures were shot for their fashionable
hides, their flesh left to rot. It was the largest human-caused
near-extermination of a warm-blooded animal in the history of the
planet.
And what’s happening now? Well, we don’t have
intertribal raiding and killing going on across our land. We don’t
have bounty hunters shooting millions of animals for their skins. But is
it better? Now we have billions of animals bred and raised to be killed,
and an all-out human assault on the planet’s ability even to sustain
life at all. This was getting depressing to think about, until something
unexpected happened.
I stopped at a roadside rest area to eat the lunch I’d
packed. When I was about finished, an elderly man drove up, got out of
his car, and took his lunch to a nearby picnic table. My path back to my
car took me past his table. "I’ve got the same bumper sticker you
do," he said. I looked at his car and saw a "Be Kind to
Animals, Don’t Eat Them" sticker, like I have. Could it be? Here
in the middle of nowhere, another person shares my concern? We talked
for awhile. He’d been a vegan for 40 years. We traded suggestions for
vegan road food.
After we said goodbye and I pulled out onto the highway
again, my thoughts took a different direction. Two vegans crossing paths
on the Santa Fe Trail--that would never have happened in its heyday,
because there weren’t any vegans then. That two vegans could meet at
random in an isolated region confirms that many more like us exist. Just
as we know that the evolution of species is slow but certain, perhaps
the evolution of consciousness proceeds likewise. The fact that vegans
and others are sincerely practicing nonviolence gives hope to us all,
and encouragement to continue.
