Man of Straw

Honest talk: One of my first real nightmares as a child – at maybe seven or eight – was about our scarecrow (this will make sense in several minutes). We grew a sprawling garden in the middle of a forest and I dreamed our friendly scarecrow, bound in half-torn blue jeans, got shot in the heart by an assassin in black. It bled real blood as it died in my mom’s arms, by the strawberries. I seriously haven’t told anyone that, except those reading this now, so feel free to analyze wildly.

To the point: I don’t think much about guns. It’s very easy, when you’re an American boy growing up with guns teeming around in all sorts of quiet ways. They’re just there, like the small shadows of chairs. I don’t think much about Ebola, either. Or schizophrenia. Or anything else that hurts too much.

But now, when I do think about guns, I realize I do not know much. So, I made a list, and looked it up, and this is about what I don’t know.

***

I don’t know what if feels like to be shot.

Most people don’t. Amazingly, those shot in wars and mass shootings are often dead. The survivors walk carefully between their own ghosts, ravens roosting on their shoulders, and speak little. Sometimes random (ordinary?) shooting victims talk about it, though.

The shock hits first, they say. That makes sense. For a little wad of lead to pierce skin and rupture organs, it has to hit like a baseball bat swung by somebody high in the batting order. People die just from that, like a candle gutted by the wind. Those left alive sport massive bruises when they start recovering.

After that is usually a feeling of intense heat or cold. Sparkling nerves in a driftwood blaze, all trying to make sense of sudden impalement. Then comes the ache, octaves deep, sweeping across the body, the crashing wind when a bomb goes off. If you are lucky, later on, the metaphors pass and the real pain will begin.

Remora-like, other problems latch on afterwards – blood poisoning, bloody lungs, internal bleeding…lots of sanguine themes.

They used to clot blood with stuffed straw, ripped pants, anything they could get their hands on, just to make it stop. Clara Barton, who founded the Red Cross in America, tended battlefield bullet holes in the Civil War – and wore an excellent bonnet, often at the same time. In 1862, she wrote about a bullet that had pierced her sleeve and swiped through the chest of the soldier she was trying to save, killing him (shockandcoldachepainblood) almost immediately. “I have never mended that hole in my sleeve,” she wrote, ”I wonder if a solder ever does mend a bullet hole in his coats.”

Ms. Barton, you were being kind to us. You knew that a soldier does not.

***

I don’t know what it’s like to be afraid of guns.

Not much, anyway. Through his life, my father was a soldier, a cop, and a deputy. Guns lingered softly in our home, and he made sure I knew how to use them – in the kindest way, all love and Miyagi. So, like moving through puberty, I graduated from BB gun to pellet rifle to 22 firearm, and on up the calibers. It was fun, an easy way to show off to boys and girls alike.

We used to trek through our northwest forests to find good spots for posting up shooting targets – hanging them in trees or perching them on logs. Sometimes targets stuffed full of straw, which truly can stop bullets if packed tight enough. I was an okay shot. Not bad. The only time I didn’t like it was when dad let me fire his sidearm, which was incredibly loud and difficult to aim, pissing off my young expectations. I liked the smell of gunpowder, though, which is strangely enchanting to humans – I mean, it’s just piss, ash, and fertilizer in the right combination. But there you go.

The problem – well, sort of – is that I know nothing about guns because I never hurt someone with one. Never was big on hurting things outside video games, although these days even that seems to come with baggage. The most I ever did was burn ants with a magnifying glass, and kill some chipmunks with a tiny caliber rifle (please avoid this, one shot does not end them and they take a while to die). I’ve read about America’s manifold shootings of course, but it’s no good talking about those – we’ll have forgotten the latest ones before I finished editing this. It all seems so distant.

In a strange way, when a person shoots another person, they are the first to do so. Neither party truly conceives of it before then. It’s a first birth, rough and slouching. We like to talk about concentrated gang violence or incidents per capita, but it’s mostly just all the first times someone has been shot, in scared little spaces, mounting up over again into a rising tide. [1]

So it goes.

[1] Look I usually hate most footnotes, but if you want a subconscious link to my mind, about now it’s screaming, “Why are we doing this? Are we fucking IDIOTS? How do we worship little tools of destruction like CAVEMEN?” But this is arrogant, presumptive, and doesn’t further the narrative.

***

I don’t know what makes guns special,

You wonder when they prayed to Ares in his pretty Mediterranean temples – or Tyr, or Chiyou, or anyone – if guns were the thing soldiers ultimately prayed for. The swift, undefeatable kill at a distance, piercing armor, sounding of thunder. It has to be one of the few prayers with a real answer, right? “Just wait a few hundred years, kids.”

We are the only species with guns proper. Monkeys may use sticks and birds may use stones, but not many harness physics and flame like we do. It’s a silly human thing. We’re posted up, hanging between angels and demons.

There’s the “pistol” shrimp of course, Alpheidae, which is born with enormous claws that, by stretching certain muscles like taut bands, can release a massive snap of bubbles – funny-looking and, underwater, nearly as deadly as a lead bullet. They snap prey out of the water like clay pigeons, then devour them like real pigeons.

Or consider the archer fish. It’s a small river fish that no one cares about. In my hunting days I caught trout and salmon and once, on a tiny riverside in the middle of Oregon forests, I put my hand in a huge pat of coyote diarrhea and spent the whole fishing trip sulking (smelling). But I hadn’t heard of an archer fish until I learned about them in college.

This fish spits water from its long-lipped mouth to strike insects resting on the overhanging leaves. Plop! Into the water. It’s far more entertaining than, say, mass shootings. Plop! A little splash. David Attenborough narrates from somewhere above. It’s not really like anything is dying, just falling helpless below the surface, limp and wingless. Plop! A very small sound.

The difference, obviously, is that humans are not born with guns fused to their arms and mouths…though that might make it easier in the long run. Humans are born with fewer weapons then almost anyone in the animal kingdom. Maybe it really is overcompensating, in the end.

***

I don’t know what guns are doing to the earth.

Not to life. Guns kill things, they aren’t lonely in that. But to the earth itself – a planet outstretched before us, hanging and delicate, stuffed and dry.

Lead is poison. It poisons the soil, the plants, the groundwater, the brain. It doesn’t go away easily, it doesn’t fade with hard work, like Ebola might. It’s more like schizophrenia. It stays. Add up all the practice bullets and target bullets and freedom bullets from all the good-smelling guns in the world, and you get a lot of lead, seeping into everything. What’s not to love? Lead makes you mad. It’s illegal in gas. It’s heavy, and replaceable. Okay, that’s all I know about lead.

My father (after being a soldier, cop, and deputy) worked at a bullet manufacturer before he retired. Their slogan – which feels cheap, stolen, and untrue – was “One Shot, One Kill.” The reason they and all the others like them make bullets with lead is not because it’s cheaper, but because gun collectors won’t buy them otherwise. It’s a free market, and they are people in love with the idea of lead. Eat lead. Fill them full of lead. You know.

And the earth dies a little more. A flash in the pan.  

The funny thing is, the United States Military isn’t a fan. There is a program continuing in various bases around the world that replaces U.S. training bullets with eco-friendly earth-based bullets that literally litter the ground with seeds to encourage natural ecologies. Hopefully.  

The eco-bullets fall a little differently from here to there, maybe decrease some barracks accuracy charts, but that doesn’t matter much when everyone switches to high-powered military ammunition for a real battle. It’s a small amount of good I can get behind, like a 70s shroom dream come to life. Not exactly levitating the Pentagon, but one step at a time.

After all, you’ll never meet a better supporter of gun control than a soldier. Some soldiers. Well, a few. Look, it sounded good in my head.

***

I don’t know what the future will be like.

Weapons are a continuum. Stretch time back to crossbows, and marvel [2] – then stretch time out to the future, and wonder when people will look at guns as we do swords and spears. Antiquated collections and limited sports, bundled up in some faint sense of reverie. And perhaps all our wonderful school shootings will go the way of the blood eagle.

But I’m begging for the question: What’s going to replace guns? There’s a smorgasbord of options, a tree of apples. Most of them involve stabbing the human senses in the eye with a rusty spear – light pulse weapons that blind you and give you nausea like the worst weekend ever, or microwave guns that fry your eyeballs until you back away.

Or smells. We’re really inventive with smells. A good militarized stink shell has everyone puking their guts out, which makes for a much better high school story than another assault rifle.

Even our explosives are getting replaced by railguns (as opposed to the ralfguns) and satellite bombardments. Reach hundreds of years into the future, and maybe none of this will matter. Guns, the moon landing, Napoleonic Wars, alchemy, the Internet – all sort of lumped into the same burgeoning chunk of human history, before the Great Climate Floods came.

Kids will memorize a few dates, learn about automatic magazines, and move on. After all, they’re sure to have much worse ways to kill each by then. Or much better, I guess.

[2] Another thing: You wonder, hundreds of years ago, how the knights felt when they first encountered crossbows. These strange, seductive, armor-piercing things. And then boom: Guns have been around for what, 400 years? Statistically, most of us have an ancestor who got shot, for one reason or another. Thoughts and prayers.

***

I do know quite a bit about scarecrows, and not just because it’s thematically timely.

I grew up with farmers’ kids. I’ve helped make scarecrows, post them, watch them, even study them as part of mythic literature. They’re simple, melancholy, elemental. Stuffed straw into shapes and jeans. You give them funny little hats and sometimes buttoned eyes, and tie their arms to sticks. I’m a little surprised you don’t sop their mouths with wine and vinegar.

People create scarecrows out of fear, to cause fear. They raise up images in their image, like fetishes, all nailed up to scare away the flocks. Leave hunter-gatherers alone long enough to farm, and each tribe of them will invent scarecrows, independently. The Native Americans did it for waving fields of corn. The Greeks did it in representation of Priapus, said to scare off animals with his huge dick, which is a little dramatic irony for you. Japanese farmers dressed scarecrows in rags and raincoats to watch over rice fields. Everyone tries it, eventually.

The problem is that scarecrows don’t actually work. Well, they always work at the moment you set them. The birds stare, askance, worried for a day or two: Then everyone gets used to them. Scarecrows prove a pleasant roost, once the fear is gone. What good is that?

Not much good. But it’s traditional. And I can attest, they are fun to make, like gunpowder is fun to smell. You just have to lie to yourself, every time, about whether or not it will work. About how cool it makes you. A little trick of the mind. And sometimes you have nightmares. [3]

According to the experts, the phrase man of straw came about in the 1600s to describe someone who was unreliable or fake. It took a while, but people can spot a good idiom, given enough time.

I don’t know what good a deterrent is that doesn’t deter. At least scarecrows are harmless. You don’t need a concealed scarecrow permit. No one hangs a double-barreled scarecrow in the back of their truck. No one mongers scarecrows in desperate nations to foment destabilization – but don’t get me started.

Maybe the metaphor is a poor one in the end. Failed scarecrows, I mean. I am scared, after all.

At the moment.

[3] Okay last thing: I eventually moved to bowhunting, for what that’s worth. There is a whole book called Zen and the Art of Archery, written about a hundred years ago, so that saves time. “Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself.” See?

CONTRIBUTOR

Tyler Lacoma

Tyler Lacoma is a writer and editor from Oregon. When he isn't running his business QuillandInk, Tyler works on creative nonfiction and fiction alike, always trying to get a little better. You can contact him @CaptainWords to learn more or offer him an amazing book deal.