“I’m not telling you it wasn’t a difficult road. It was a very difficult road because I burnt a lot of bridges. I had stolen from people. My gambling addiction was out of control. I had bled my parents dry of money. The whole thing was a train wreck.”

Tom Rogers is a tall, sturdy man. Dressed in black shoes, a blue striped dress shirt, and black slacks, Tom Rogers greets me in a thunderous voice and puts a strong handshake into my palm. Like the unwavering confidence of a salesman, Tom Rogers looks as though he could never break.

But the truth is that Tom Rogers lives in a world where the past is not just broken, it is shattered, and yet the Missouri man somehow manages to keep his present – and the present of others – full of life.

That is, after all, his profession.

During the interview, Tom Rogers crosses his legs and rests his hands on his knees. He appears calm and collected. He doesn’t talk with his hands. His face is serious and controlled. Well kept, his voice is relaxed even though there’s something of a fiery growl that rears its head almost as if the man possesses a demon that wants to get out.

The Watered Gardens Gospel Mission sits behind Joplin’s main street. It is housed in what looks like a former brick industrial building. Outside, in the parking lot, there are members of the mission lazing about. Some look at me, some don’t. Some are smoking Pall Mall cigarettes and laughing like cuckoos.

Then one calls out to me, “Hey! It’s Elvis Presley!” It’s a sure gesture to my slick style hair cut. Unfortunately, he is wrong. Elvis is dead. The faces in the parking lot appear bent, twisted, and deflated. These could be the saddest faces in America.

There’s little anger in them. No palpable aggression. Instead, I see hopelessness. A magnificent loss.

 

The sadness that wells up around the mission is a sadness that Tom Rogers knows cold. In fact, defeating hopelessness is his mission. And at his best, Tom Rogers transforms the deflated faces I see in the parking lot into people who feel and want to be alive – people with purpose.

 

Tom Rogers describes himself as a life coach. “Some describe what I do as Evangelism,” he says.

 

But Tom Rogers says that he is not so keen on the sort of religion practiced by Joplin’s Evangelical mega-churches. Instead, he has formulated his own sort of spiritual healing. After defeating his own personal history of brokenness borne out of drug and alcohol abuse (including a near-death experience), Tom Rogers dedicates his time at the mission to repairing the broken lives of others.

The sting of manure is strong.

The only noise I hear is the crunching of tires against earth and the rattle of metal against metal. Soon the clanging and clattering that resounds through an open lot filled with rows of tired, mud-stained trucks surrounds me. Their carriages are vacant, but the sting of the manure tells me that cattle were here. As I step out of my car, my shoes crunch against hard dirt.

A woman in the Stockman Commission Company office tells me where to go. She tells me to follow the hallway to the end, then take a right. Go to the final door. Then exit. The stockyards are across the lot. You’ll need to take the catwalk.

 

“Look for the auction house,” she says, “…just follow the smell.”

 

She says it in that bumpy deep-in-the-middle-of-American-heartland accent. I am following a scent. I am finding the auction house.

 

The auction house is at the center of a maze of cattle and people and fences and horses and mooing and manure, making up an industry that marks the heart of America – livestock. Oklahoma City’s stockyards and auction houses are the places where thousands of head of cattle are bought and sold by ranchers from all around the Great Plains every day.

The smell of manure is stronger now, but not as sharp, as I pound my boots up the steps that carry me to the top of the catwalk. I reach the top. In front of me what spreads out in every direction is a labyrinth of bobbing-up-and-down cowboy hats, gates and pens and rusty steel cages, and three or four galloping mahogany-red horses circling majestically around the static of what must be thousands of mooing heads.

I walk the catwalk.

Greg Griffith, I am told, is somewhere inside the brick building, an auction house that towers above the stockyard, where a fast talking man rambles prices to an audience of straight-faced ranchers in one of Oklahoma’s largest cattle markets.

Greg Griffith, I am told, owns the show. And boy is it a show indeed.

Finally I find the auction house. Greg Griffith has explained to me that he will be the only one in the auction house, rambling away from his post at the auction stage, which sits high above the pen. He says it will be easy to spot him. He has told me it will be easy to know which one he is because he will be the only one who wears a cowboy hat.

I enter. What feels like one hundred cowboy hat brims shift their shadowy gazes lazily toward me.

 

“My first job was working here at The Oklahoma City Stockyards. My grandfather owned a commission company here. But back then it was a four-day sale and that was before they had automatic waters and concrete water troughs. And there were always a lot of kids who worked here. Most of them – their fathers worked here. And our job was to water the cattle all day long… I started in 1974.”

 

Speaking in a genial drone Greg Griffith explains how he earned a degree in Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University and took a job with Oscar Mayer foods company in Sherman, Texas, right after college. But he quickly learned that factory work wasn’t for him, so he came back to Apache, Oklahoma and entered auctioneering school.

For twenty years using that hard, melodic ramble that Oklahoma owns has been the profession of Greg Griffith.

 

“Well, you know I always had a pretty good voice. The pay was always pretty good and it’s a pretty competitive, intense-type job, and it fit my personality.”

I enter the auction and sit down.

Almost everyone wears a cowboy hat and several fellows have kicked up their legs, put them across one another, and rest two muddy boots on the paint-chipped railings in front of them. Some younger hands wear baseball caps and sneakers. It is as if the wide brimmed hats and heavy leather boots are a mark of status and heightened respect.  The distracted faces remain for only a second as the whirring din of the rambling stereo voice of the auctioneer sucks their focus back into the market.

 

A bell rings. And then the massive beasts come rumbling into a tight space where cowboys swat the cattle hides with a wire rod. The auctioneer begins to ramble hard. Next to me an old man with a trimmed white beard and a modest hat absorbs respectful handshakes from passers-by in his thick, meaty palms. One after the other the hands come swooping in for a hard shake. There is a distinct hierarchy among the members of the audience. Some are young and watch and listen. The young ones are quiet. Their faces look on, following the scribbling of numbers and notes on worn out notepads clutched in the hands of older, more seasoned boots and hats.

Greg Griffith is more than just an auctioneer now. He has retired his fast rambling voice and instead moved on to other, more entrepreneurial adventures.

“We operate Stockman’s commission company here in Oklahoma City. We also operate Apache auction market in Apache Oklahoma. And then we have a video company where we sell cattle over the Internet. So we have film representatives that go out and film people’s cattle at their ranch. And then they email the films to us and we write out all the parameters and all the delivery conditions, and when we deliver, what they will weigh, and then we auctioneer them live over the Internet on Wednesday.”

 

Mr. Griffith’s company deals business with ranchers from all over the Great Plain states.

Out on the catwalk, I meet a man clad in a bright red prairie shirt. It is pleated and clean. He wears an austere cowboy hat, but on his feet there are extravagant red cowboy boots. The man comes from a ranch 50 miles away from Oklahoma City to buy and sell at Greg Griffith’s auctions.

“We’ll see how the prices are today,” he grunts. The red prairie shirt seems tough to satisfy.

Greg agrees. Finding satisfaction in his clients is not only hard work – it is a precarious business.

“There in about 10 minutes we sold 404 head of cattle that probably averaged around $1,000 dollars a head,” he says, referring to the last ten minutes of rambling that I fail to comprehend, “… and so that’s $404,000 dollars of cattle that we probably did in under 10 minutes…. And well, you know, these people have bank loans and operating expenses and household expenses…”

“And you’re the one representing their livelihood, right?” I ask.

“Exactly,” he says serious as stone.

 

The way Greg thinks about his hard work is that his success depends not so much on his skills, but on how much stress he can take on.

 

“As you get older, the more you handle people and the more stress you can manage, the more profitable your work is to you.”

 

Below the auctioneer’s stage, there is a pit of dirt where the drafts of cattle that come thundering into the ring are guarded off from the cowboys by two narrow spaces separated from the ring by a worn out metal fence. One young cowboy in a mud-colored plaid shirt uses a long rod to swat the cattle as they come pounding across the dirt.

He looks scared, timid and fresh. No more than fourteen years old.

Later, on the catwalk I see the young boy. Hanging out from a straight, tight-lipped face a cigarette is burning. He breathes it in hard. The kid is staring across the maze of pens and cattle and cowboys, out toward two lone skyscrapers that poke up from the middle of downtown Oklahoma City. You can barely seem them behind the gray. The young boy has dirt on his hands and under his nails. His blue jeans are stained. He doesn’t look me in the eye. I can’t tell if it’s because he’s intimidated or tired. Whatever he is, the kid looks worn out. And this is only 14 years in.

In Oklahoma’s stockyards, it seems that just plain growing up can be hard work.

“The toughest part,” says Greg Griffith, reflecting on how he started out, “is finding out how terrible you really are. How intimidated you are by what you’re trying to do.”

I start to pity the boy a bit, watching him smoke hard, covered in dirt.

I start to pity him for the mindless swatting of manure-crusted cattle that make up the boy’s existence down there in the cattle pen. I pity him for the ramble that he does not yet comprehend.

And then I halt myself, remembering something Greg Griffith said just moments ago inside the auction house.

“Work’s not the enemy,” he said matter-of-factly.

 

I look the young kid up and down again.

Then again maybe he’s not worn out at all. Maybe he’s just getting hard. Maybe the sort of boring pain that comes hand in hand with the hard work that we put ourselves through is the way we appreciate our successes. Maybe this is just simply what it looks like to grow up in the heart of America. Maybe this young cowhand is just another young Greg Griffith, breathing it all in, getting used to the sting of manure, getting used to the mundane swatting of hides, and trying to understand the incomprehensible ramble that comes from underneath the shadowy brims of older hats – maybe this is just a young boy growing accustomed to the stink and the ramble and the gray and the fragile patience and determination to palate it without quitting early.

Breathing it all in.

Indeed, there might be a day when the young boy needs to breath in deep and ramble out every bit of what he possibly can.

As I stomp across the creaky wood boards of the catwalk, the sounds of cattle mooing fall in on each other and become a low moan, but there’s something about the sound that comes from the yard that still feels clear and honest and strong – it’s the sound of the auctioneer’s voice rambling on.

May, 2012

“Combat is not fun,” the ex-marine says crossing his arms tightly in front of him.

I press my thumb into the map and observe. It does not fill the gray patch of area that represents a massive drag of dessert in southern California’s Mojave where young men outfitted with weapons learn to gamble their lives all inside the vacuum of a humongous playground where the trials of war are understood as best as they possible can be.

I move my eyes southward across the map, and see that there is a space roughly equivalent in size. Another swath of government land.

Joshua Tree National Park is a 1,235.37 sq mi property where Californians arrive in droves to feast their eyes on the natural beauty of the park and wonder over its alien-like Joshua Trees.

What I learn from David Denslow, the man who I meet in the desert, is that the land underneath my thumb – that gigantic gray patch – is not the same paradise that Joshua Tree National park is. The gray patch on the map is a different sort of desert – another desert that David Denslow used to know all too well. The gray patch on the map is Twentynine Palms US Marine Base, Twentynine Palms, California.

The gray patch on the map, according to David Denslow, is more like controlled hell.

“The base is the world’s largest base. 944 square miles of training area. So they can actually do a mini-Afghanistan over there. The only thing they don’t have are camels. They got oil. They got … They have an Iraqi village built out there so they can practice combat insurgency and all that. The only thing they can’t do is drop nuclears. They can shoot drones out of the sky. They can drop 500 lbs. bombs. It’s real life training.” David Denslow tells me in an empty auditorium at Joshua Tree National Park.

When I walk through the door I spot him. David Denslow has his hand raised high above his head. He does not look at me. He ignores me. Or maybe he’s simply absorbed in his own train of thought, a concentration magnetized by a soldier’s discipline. Raising his hand, David Denslow stares down two young boys in front of him. He says a pledge. The boys recite it.

David Denslow does not smile.

David Denslow wears sand-colored canvas, a moustache, and commands a wiry figure. His hair is silver and straight. And it seems that the blood is always rushing to his beat, red face. Maybe it’s just the Mojave and the sun and the dust and the West, I think.

Pure Mojave Man. That’s my guess.

I’m wrong.

“Michigan Man.” David Denslow spells it out and lets it sink in like hot steel, and then he continues. “I was born in Lansing Michigan. 1954. Middle class family. Nobody rich. Nobody poor.”

David Denslow’s life began to unfold fast when he became a rifleman for the US Marines. Between years of 1973 and 1976 he was on active duty and completed tours in South East Asia.

“In the fall of 73’ I was stationed in the Phillipines. That’s where I met my first wife. Then we moved back to United States. From there we went to Hawaii. Things didn’t work out. We got divorced.”

After the pledge, David and I enter an empty auditorium and pull up two chairs. The walls around us are plain. Tightly wound, David Denslow talks bullets. He talks sharp. He talks hard, like Michigan steel.

But what he says takes me by surprise. David Denslow is not the aggression-crazed man one might expect to find wound up in an ex-marine. In fact, David Denslow is very much his own man.

“In the marine corps we don’t have black, white, Mexican… there was never a color difference in my 20 years of experience. If you stab him in the arm and me in the arm, then what color is the blood? It’s the same!,” he exclaims passionately.

But then the ex-marine tells me about his duties, not as a soldier, but as a human resources manager, as if those times were the golden years of his military tenure.

David Denslow was a personnel manager during the US Military’s Desert Storm operation, where he was responsible for processing thousands of marines for training at the base in Twentynine Palms.

“It was the uncertainty that was tough. I was getting the emergency stuff set up. Wills set up. Power of attorneys set up. Making sure service records were current. And I was an office manager at that point. So I was running an office with 50 marines in it.”

“So when desert storm hit in 1990, 50, 60 thousand marines would be called up. They’d have shoved them through Pendleton, but then they realized, oh wait, we’re going to be sending them to a desert, so maybe we gotta give them some desert training, so they’d send them up to us. Camp Pendleton got all the glory for the activation process, but all the training happened here, and Twentynine Palms didn’t get anything, but we’re the ones that trained them for our country,” he says vigorously.

David Denslow holds a Masters in Human Resource Management. He says that he believes he has out-educated himself. Now, in addition to his Ranger responsibilities, David Denslow oversees the Operation Wounded Warrior and Post to Parks Program at Twentynine Palms, which helps young former marines unwind and cope with the monsters that often come hand in hand with traumatic tours of duty as well as help them find jobs. The Post to Park program works by letting tired, troubled, and anxious soldiers wander the deserts of Joshua Tree National Park.

“Some of these young marines – now even though they’re not physically damaged, they’re mentally damaged.”

David Denslow says that the purpose of the programs is to prevent disturbed marines from ending up on the street.

“This is a place for you to unwind, a place for you to forget about it, a place for you to relax.”

The aspiration to join the marines followed from observing his older brothers’ choices, David Denslow explains.

“Growing up in HS I didn’t really have a specific aspiration. But after seeing my older brothers go into the military… I didn’t want the Army, Navy, Airforce because the other three were already there. And the Marine Corps is a challenge. It’s not an application it’s a commitment… so in 1972 I entered the Marine corps.”

“That was one of my aspirations. I knew it would be hard work.”

David Denslow says it without hostility, without arrogance. He says it with a calm, somber, but tired-as-hell satisfaction. He says it as though he is happy it is over, but he is happy to own it as part of his history.

It was hard work, too, explains David, when it came to growing up in Michigan as the son of two alcoholic parents, whom David says caused damage, but that he only realized that later in his life.Both of his parents died of alcohol-induced dementia, he says.

“At one point, I just knew I had to get away from Mom and Dad. I had to get out of dodge,” says David Denslow pensively, thinking about his decision to join the corps.

He also remembers how his father used to believe in the parks and how they kept David and his brothers away from the ubiquitous drug-use that became a normal for kids growing up in the 1970s.

And he also remembers how his father liked to hunt.

“My dad hunted. My Dad liked pheasant. He owned a gun,” says the ex-marine.

And then he shifts his posture and puts his head up in the air, as if trying to present a dignity others might not let him have.

“But I never owned a gun,” he says.

May 2012