Rugged Mountains and Wild Horses

Over the course of a man's life he may pause from time to time to reflect upon what has changed and what has remained the same. In the summer of 1960, on a dusty, dry lake bed east of Dayton, Nevada, a sweaty and uncomfortable Hollywood film crew was filming scenes for a movie to be entitled "The Misfits." The actors involved in those scenes were Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach. The action in these sequences called for the male stars and their stuntmen counterparts to rope several wild horses from a moving flatbed truck and then wrestle them to the ground and secure their legs. In these scenes, in the immediate background, are bare foothills, and behind these hills are higher, more rugged peaks. Yesterday, out of a serendipitous sense of idle curiosity, I stopped at that dry lake bed to look around. Forty-eight years had come and gone since that notable group of talented actors and their equally famous director John Huston had worked there. Who can say how many whirling dust devils have swept dizzily across that flat and barren desert floor in that almost half a century? Or how many dark and ominous thunderstorms have hammered and pounded unrelentingly upon its bleak and forbidding surface? Yet, in all that long passage of time, little had changed. Everything that was important was still there. Only the flighty and insubstantial aura of Hollywood had fled away, like a tumbleweed driven by the fickle whims of the desert wind. Surprisingly, on the northern edge of the lake bed, in an area of dry grass and scrub brush, were seven wild horses; and they were not phantoms, they were real. And behind them were those majestic hills and peaks, exactly as they appeared in the movie, not looking one day older than they did forty-eight years ago. If they had a little white upon their heads, it was only because the winter's snow had not all melted away. I was but a backward and empty-headed boy, barely on the threshold of adolescence, when that transient film crew passed through our remote part of the world. But I well remember the excitement their brief visit caused and the fanfare that accompanied it. How consoling and comforting it was yesterday though, after all those many years, to pause where Hollywood royalty once had stood, and to reflect upon the fact that there still are some things a man can count on, even if they come down to a few ordinary things like rugged mountains and wild horses.