Headshot 2013 by David Robinette 

The first essay in Urban Native: The Musings of a Queer Navajo Cowboy in Hollywood:

The Owl of Griffith Park

Folks back home in New Mexico consider Los Angeles to be the throne of Satan. Why do you think it's this cowboy's permanent address? My sister once said during a brief visit to the City of Angels that she wore an aroma of marijuana. This evening her statement rings true as the evening breeze blows down from the San Gabriels into the streets of Burbank, networking its way to the LA Equestrian Center and Viva Cantina Restaurant while bringing along cool mountain air saturated in the sweet whiff of the ol’ Demon Weed. The Cantina's outdoor patio holds my bony Navajo ass in a faded white wicker chair while a whitewashed railing perches my aching feet clad in tired leather ropers painted with dried horseshit.

The year is 2015 and my sweaty salt-encrusted straw Stetson drapes over both eyes, masquerading the illusion of a cowboy taking a siesta. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With arms loosely crossed, I'm actually peering through the aerating vent woven 360-degrees around the crown of my hat. Like all of us, horses are more themselves when they think nobody's watching. A snoozing cowboy is an easy target for horses to take full advantage.

The dirt alley next to the patio has multiple rows of steel hitching posts where almost 40 horses are tethered, 13 of them belonging to Steve Smith, owner of Sunset Ranch, the last remaining ranch in Hollywood Hills where back then I worked as a wrangler. The ranch offers a dinner ride in which I take paying guests on horseback from the ranch at the head of Beachwood Drive in Hollywood up over Mount Lee, then down past the LA Zoo through Oak Canyon and across the swinging bridge spanning Los Angeles River, arriving finally at Viva Cantina. The ride both ways is just over 12 miles and takes 4-5 hours including dinner, unless of course the guests get wasted at the Cantina's bar. There's nothing more challenging than getting drunks safely home via a 19^th-century version of Uber, which is the reason my feet are tired and need propping up.

I'm watching the horses through the aerating vent in my hat because horses are as good at untying knots as a challenge course facilitator. The old-timers who still work for Steve have great stories of the past when they came out of the Cantina with their guests only to find all the horses had untied themselves and made the 6-plus-mile journey alone back to their corral in Hollywood. Guests always ask the attractive wranglers to join them for dinner, but I always defer to the patio escaping the boring idle chatter inside but more importantly ensuring our mode of transportation doesn't abandon us. Do we really want self-driving cars?

Two of my favorite things about Viva Cantina are that wranglers eat for free—I mean it's the least the restaurant could do since we're bringing them business—and I also love the live music playing every night by great local musicians. The outdoor server refreshes my 7-Up, chips and salsa, then sets the biggest ground-beef burrito in California before me. Hungrier than a tick on a New Mexico coyote, I satisfy the appetite another honest day's work LA has created. Roxy whinnies at my miraculous resurrection and I blow the beautiful mare a smooch.

On the ride back after dinner, crossing the river then traversing the tunnel beneath the 134 freeway, our journey passes Forest Lawn Memorial Park – Hollywood Hills. The cemetery is naturally haunting on horseback at night, surrounded by ancient oak trees bathing under a full moon whose reflected luminosity casts long shadows upon the massive branches fingering over the trail as an owl hoots from somewhere in the canyon. One of the guests asks about the owl, but sadly at the time I still didn't know enough about the Owl of Griffith Park to introduce her to my riders.

After becoming the challenge course director for Griffith Park Boys Camp two years later in 2017, I would learn exactly where the owl lives who was hooting that night in 2015. She has a huge nest next to the boy camp's zipline tower up Crystal Springs Canyon above the golf course, where multiple scientists study her story of survival as urban wildlife. In 2015, I still hadn't been around long enough to know where she lived, but now I see her every time I climb up onto my Hollywood Hills challenge course. She is the nicest and sweetest friend! I'm so happy she chose to live in an old pine tree on camp property, which luckily has restricted access to the public. I would have to become an employee for the great City of Los Angeles before getting the chance to formally meet her, but even on that night in 2015 riding back to the ranch after dinner, I knew without a doubt this hooting gal was a kindred spirit whom I had way more in common with than the humans riding my horse friends.

Today in the year 2021, I'm friends with a lot of the city park rangers, all of whom worship the work being done at Boys Camp. Ranger Tom is the head honcho ranger. Tom's a good guy. He doesn't wear a gun despite the city's new attempt to make the department more law enforcement oriented. Ranger Tom leads our weekly hikes during the nine weeks of summer camp as we take the campers to the top of LaBonge Summit. On the hike sometimes the kids will get Ranger Tom to share his ghostly encounters experienced during his years of service to the city's parks.

During the 2019 summer camp season while hiking the boys back to camp over the landfill, our procession approached a significant fork in the trail—significant in that choosing the right fork would return us to Amir's Garden and boy camp, while the left fork drops into Oak Canyon along the cemetery where my guests and I heard the owl hooting after dinner in 2015. Stopping at the fork I ask Ranger Tom if he had ever seen a ghost at this spot in the trail. Tom grew quiet before asking, "You saw a guy sitting over there on the boulder next to that eucalyptus tree, didn't you?"

Back on that night in 2015 with the owl hooting overhead I rode point, in front of the group, as our horses climbed out of Oak Canyon emerging onto the abandoned landfill. Industrial orange lights speckle a powerplant turning the landfills escaping methane into electricity. With the dark forest behind us my guests become more talkative. They chatter about the Cantina's amazing vibe before segueing into me sharing my Griffith Park ghost stories.

City rangers and horse wranglers see some crazy things in the park at night. Ranger Tom once came upon a naked man brandishing lethally sharp Samurai swords. A fellow wrangler guiding a group through the park at night came upon a naked woman lying in the center of a pentagram that she had drawn large-scale on the trail. While riding back on a different night after dinner, my group came upon a mountain lion prowling a section of the trail in Bronson Canyon. Rangers and wranglers will concur, ghosts are the least dangerous spirits you'll encounter at night in the park. As we rode across the landfill, I didn't need to share any ghost stories, because we were approaching the same spot where Ranger Tom, four years later, would ask if the ghost I was about to see was a man sitting on a boulder next to a huge eucalyptus tree overshadowing this infamous fork in the trail.

The closer we came to the fork and eucalyptus tree, the more jittery all 13 of our horses became. I was riding Ben, a $12,000 international champion roping horse who has performed in arenas surrounded by thousands of people. Still, whatever lay ahead absolutely shattered Ben's unbreakable resolve that night. By the time we reached the fork, Ben was rearing up, bucking and scaring the crap out of my guests whose horses were becoming unnerved as well. The dark shadow of the eucalyptus tree had until then caped its surroundings like a shroud enveloped in darkness, but now standing at the fork Ben and I both could finally see at the trunk's base an odd-looking man sitting upon a boulder looking perplexed. Politely asking the stranger if he would step out of the shadows to stop scaring our horses gained me no response. The stranger sat immobile while the horses went insane. I subsequently would encounter this haunting man on three different nights.

On the night of this story, Ben nearly reared over on me and I was finally forced to dismount and lead him by the reins, beyond this statue of a man sitting beneath the eucalyptus tree at the fork in the trail from which Ranger Tom, 55 boys and myself descended onto four years later returning from LaBonge Summit. As Tom and I talked about this haunted part of the trail, all the boys grew as quiet as the ranch guests had in 2015 while riding our horses past the cemetery. One of the boys listening to Tom and me discover a shared ghost encounter suddenly heard the Owl of Griffith Park hooting. The owl sent a shiver through the boy and instantly I took a knee, patting his shoulder reassuringly before introducing him to my best friend in the whole hooting world, that lovely timeless old owl who just as this Navajo cowboy is simply urban wildlife, equally as harmless as a ghost.

I say to the boy with confidence, “Ghosts mean us no harm, nor do owls. Tomorrow up on the zip line tower remind me and I'll point out the tree house of the Owl of Griffith Park."

Fire still burning hot in my heart and loins

Love is life's intention

It's okay to be needed

I make a living at that

But to be wanted is something else entirely

For someone to want you in their bed with them

For them to want you at their side

Want is my desire

Want is true love

Nothing in existence can want you

In the way only a man can

Sex is great

But love is what makes it great

And to have such greatness is possible

For love is strong enough to be walking into year 11

Give me someone who wants my love

As desperately as I want his

Love made strong through years of tender sweetness

— April 10, 2023

Not sure fascinating is the right word but whatever the right word is that word describes the irony of living in a society perpetuating love while you and your partner get through a year of cancer treatment and no family ever asks, "Hey how's Travis doing?" This is how I know blood is skin deep. Another good example of modern irony is when folks invite you, but just you not you and your partner, like maybe if you were with a woman or a man with a socially acceptable age you'd get an invite as a couple, but instead only you get invited despite being in a 12-year relationship with someone.

Navajo society was inclusive to homosexuals, two spirit people and many other forms of human sexuality long before colonists came along whose spoiled rotten descendants are now pretending to be Navajo (Dine word for human) in order to hide the stories of American hate told by Rosa Parks, Geronimo and Chief Justice John Marshall. Today gay marriage is illegal in the Navajo Nation which is why California stole me from Dinetah (Dine for Navajo homeland). Despite Americans using centuries to make Navajo as hateful as them, I refuse to kneel before Manifest Destiny.

TRAVIS' RESPONSE:

Although it initially took a lot of eye-rolling and "Oh, Travis, you old fool" moments for my friends to accept our love, literally everyone in my life changed their minds when they met you and saw the love in our eyes we share without trying. Of course, there have been other less approving peripheral people who have proven themselves to be more jealous of us then happy for us, but not the real people, the special ones we've chosen as our "family" of friends. We are so lucky for them but in the last analysis, our love has created a force field around us that has survived all the naysayers. The destructive judgmental nature of societal rules and mores have no room in our lives together.

My Zeus

To trust is human

Found within thee

Love of pure goodness

Good not of religion

Nor deeds unto eternity

Goodness of moment

Moment after moment of my life

Spent safely in your arms

Thy great love

True firmament of trust

Divinity of my worship 

May 13, 2019

I’m slowly moving into the seventh year of a relationship with the love of my life. Does seven years make you a viable expert in something? Expert means being talented in a hard situation. Seven years of love isn’t hard work, so I don’t rightly consider myself an expert on love. All love requires is two souls with time for each other. Have you ever dated anybody my age these days? The young dating pool of 2019 is filled with mini versions of my father. Of those born between 1981 and 1996 more than half think they’ll become millionaires. Specifically, 70% of millennial men and 38% of women believe they’ll become millionaires.

Thankfully my successful father spared me from this delusional millennial state of consciousness, because almost none of my father’s friends who got into the oilfield industry with him after high school succeeded at the same scale as him. Counting my dad, maybe three became owners of their own companies capable of turning a profit and surviving the Great Recession. The vast majority of my dad’s friends wound up dead or in prison, because that’s just what happens to the losers in New Mexico. 2019 is a dating pool of losers convinced by the American Dream that they’re winners.

The only type of person harder to date than a loser convinced they’re a winner, is dating an actual winner. Mom revealed to me by my ninth birthday that nobody can compete with the American Dream. My father is in love with America; hence he has no time for anything or anyone else. You cannot love someone who is in love with America for this country requires a person’s lifetime, which means they have no time left to love their families.

I cannot compete for the love of those who as my father are already in love with the sweet promises of dear Lady Liberty, because love simply requires two souls with time for each other. I have no problem with a relationship involving more than two people, but there isn’t time now for a two-person relationship. How could a tribe possibly exist in a world with modern expectations such as they are? Finding one soul with time for me has more than sufficed my dire need to receive and share love.

I’m not saying I’m rich, but I definitely didn’t grow up poor. For this reason, I cannot deny the need for wealth in this world. But at what cost? The deck is already stacked against me regardless of how successful my father is, therefore, millennials make me laugh. My success in gaining a debt-free college education, runway modeling, acting study in Manhattan and LA, working as a Hollywood horse trainer, and progress in Outdoor Leadership Education are all success resulting from being able to afford doing them.

Over 90% of Americans cannot afford success, and that is the statistic that makes me laugh at my peers. Nothing greater exists than being the cowboy cleaning horse manure with a shovel in Hollywood, and experience millennials (convinced they’re about to become millionaires) looking down upon me as a common laborer. The reason nothing greater exists than being that cowboy is because I can afford to shovel horse shit. Young people do not realize that one must be wealthy to live the luxury of being a cowboy, because working with horses doesn’t pay anything. I have the money to stick around long enough to see those judgmental millennials realize life in America first requires money, be it runway modeling or shoveling horse manure.

I’ve been around long enough to see millennials realize they’re no different than my dad’s loser friends who never made it into the 1% club. Nothing a shit-shoveling cowboy enjoys more than ordering a millennial to make his coffee at Starbucks in the morning. Money is so divisive, which is why seven years of loving my boyfriend wasn’t a day of hard work.

All a country boy needs is someone with time to love, and today that is a rare quality to find. It is hard to find someone who can see a cowboy shoveling horse manure as a man and not a laborer. The result of being star-struck with America is it turns the entire world into laborers forever divided.

The problem with living in a world of laborers is that sometimes the cowboy shoveling horse manure is more worth the time of day than millennials promising to one day be the next Jeff Bezos. The problem with a divisive world is that it allows age to blind us from seeing someone well worth the time to love. The problem with the present is nobody sees anything except the American Dream anymore, which means millennials are in a relationship with a colossal lie.

I don’t need a lie when all I crave is a man. One able to hold me tight for seven years, not as a bragging right, but because seven years of love beats seven years of clinging to illusional grandeur.

Story of Runaways

Being self-aware of the journey

Does not reassure the destination

For destiny's road is tread by mortal sole

All seeking to fulfill their hearts

Voids of lonely desire in need

Like dreams of night concocting images of men into gods

Transfiguring us into taillights beneath the setting sun

Vanishing and reappearing with each new bend in the road

Taillights of the future that are always just out of reach

Set between solid lines of paint on asphalt

Boundaries not meant to be crossed

Forever determining fate's hold over us

Abandoning mankind to his fantasies

Always leaving the heart aged tho still in want

Having never set foot upon the imagined destination of gold

Far ahead down this road laid beneath the black night

Somewhere between these painted lines of civil mediocrity

Concluding that nobody can write their own ending

No more than Coronado could find a city of gold

For destinations no longer exist in this world of ours

Paved over long ago in the quest to catch up with those distant headlights

The transfixed illusion of self awareness

Never able to change course

Despite the passionate desire to one day arrive

Driving us farther and farther down this road in a dream of night

Till at last we all wake up in time

To realize that no one has ever left home

Because as surely as the sun shall rise tomorrow

All dreams like roads eventually return us home

 Home Of My Heart

 I hear you breathing softly,

As wind whispers through leaves;

Music to my mortal ears,

Stirring my heart into flight,

Barking as crow's wings upon the breeze.

I kneel to take you in my hand;

I cry as you fill my soul with peace,

The mountain is but a reflection,

Of your most beautiful face.

The intoxicating aroma of your essence,

Like pine needles after rain,

Smell like marshmallows roasting;

My childhood memories return.

Life is the embodiment of your figure.

I am but returning home.

May you forever take me,

And overflow my broken vessel

With the powerful magic of love.

LA

Embrace better days

Forgetting the past

Casting away tomorrow

It's better here

Inside the moment

Slipping gently by

Come take refuge

Be my guest

Herein lies reality

Place SoCalians abide

Despite fantasy destinations

Concocted starting points

Imagination versus insanity

We are LA

Do you dream?

Are you insane?

Or in between

Just like LA

My lovely home

Quaint isn't it

Nothing too fancy

Borders on loud

Me humble abode

Es tu casa

Welcome inside friend

Better isn't it?

Than being outside

Land of outsiders

Where is outside?

Wasn't the clouds

Nor father moon

Perhaps maybe Mars

I doubt it

Outside isn't real

Real is LA

Yes indeed friend

Embrace better days

Outside isn't better

Better is here

Inside the home

Realm of freedom

Where you’ve arrive

Welcome to LA

Where dreams die

Insanity lives homeless

Still some survive

Embracing better days

Come share them

For a while

What is change? Fighting for civil rights? Reclaiming one’s Native American culture? Buying a new car? A career?

As one gets older it gradually becomes apparent that change is less of a state of mind and more of a spectrum that encompasses the broad unfolding of one’s life here on planet earth. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the earth is in trouble, that things need to change. The million-dollar question is how do we as individuals affect the world around us in a way that actually matters.

Maybe the problem lies in the fact that it’s a million-dollar question. As a teenager, the idea of change sounds easy, because rebellion is an idea rather than a reality. Smoke, drink, have lots of sex, skip Political Science 101 for a day at the lake with your young beautiful friends. The problem with new idealistic eyes is that they haven’t yet seen the consequences of living in our current reality. Live long enough and eventually we all see unplanned pregnancies, STDs, alcoholism, a fast-paced economy that’s fast replacing all of us with technology, age deteriorating livelihood. Reality makes life much harder to change.

As a rodeo cowboy in college a majority of the young cowboys I met only rode bucking animals because of some misplaced ideal of rebellion. Most of them were trying to get out of abusive homes, working in the oilfield, or simply trying to win the jackpot to pay child support. Unfortunately, none of us saw the outcome of our stupidity: death, broken necks, blood, tears, pain, medical bills. Ultimately the majority of us wound up right back where we started, only now bearing scars, and scars don’t signal anything except defeat. The world keeps spinning regardless. Thus change becomes more and more elusive as new eyes begin to age. Settling for reality by simply accepting one’s place in a pre-established social hierarchy ruled by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Trump is just easier. Vast overpopulation and drones have made us all expendable, except the select few owning fast food and fracking corporations.

I’ll never forget my college years. College was one of the best parts of my life and not because a paper diploma magically elevated me to a state of being that was far above my less financially fortunate peers. Rather it allowed my new eyes to see the world for what it really was, teaching me the most important lesson of my life. That lesson was that earth is a big terrifying place that gobbles up people on a daily basis without so much as even shedding a tear. My professors taught me that as adults our greatest gift is that we are able to do whatever we want with our lives. Anyone can join an anti-Wall Street protest in Manhattan that blocks bridges and Subway stations that keep college kids like myself from making it to 9 a.m. drama class at the Union Square campus—or just as easily anyone can go to work in the oilfield shoveling out Frack sand tanks to pay for tuition like I did.

Perhaps you are beginning to see how arbitrary life is in an uncaring world that desperately needs change. I soaked up sociology and political science like a sponge, I was a master of debate with a grade point average of 4.0 but in the end, I realized that winning arguments can still lose debates like my buddy that dropped out of college to move to Denver to claim his sexual identity that later ended badly. You can use facts, yell, discuss, whatever, and still be unable to change another person’s mind. The only thing that college did for me that Denver didn’t do for my buddy was that my professors cared enough about my future to always help me get back up on my feet when I fell.

Mortality is the Achilles Heel of change. I think that’s why liberals are losing. Sure we had Obama, but we also had Sitting Bull at one point in history too. Great men whose life efforts were destroyed by single elections, which makes the idea of change a million-dollar question. Change doesn’t pay anything. You won’t make a million dollars fighting for change. So how can anyone afford to answer it? Truly loving someone doesn’t reward you in the same way that having sex to advance your career does; just like saving the environment doesn’t reward you in the same way that destroying it can. Our reality is ruled by social perception and dinging bells on Wall Street.

The only other reality to ever have existed was the Native American world, where nature provided an alternative, but mass extinction and logging have swept that away leaving us with an out-of-control economic empire. How do you fight for a reality was losing before you were even born? How do you champion as cause that has already been so badly defeated that it isn’t even strong enough to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office? How do you fight climate change when you need fossil fuel and iPhones to survive? Both of which are polluting our planet at rates not seen in millions of years.

The million-dollar question sucks, because its answer still eludes us. As I get older that answer becomes less apparent and more obscured as I watch young people at Trump rallies chanting with euphoric new eyes or as I see hate crimes against the LGBT community rise instead of decrease and witness friends give up. Just like a bucking horse the world has once again left me face down on the ground in agonizing pain that makes me want to never get up again.

Then for some unknown reason I get up for the hundred millionth time and fall in love with an amazing man who has given me the greatest most fulfilling years of my life—and I use my Outdoor Leadership Education skills to teach kids with new eyes how to ride horses and see the treasure of nature. Suddenly I see the world anew with the same eyes of my old liberal college professors, and just like them I too have realize that change may simply be reminding others just how incredibly wonderful life is. Perhaps the liberal affects the world by reminding the future why it’s worth saving, because the day that our species once again learns to care is the day that we shall see change.

Brilliant splendor adorning thee

Taking me ever so gently

Surely pain comes unnaturally

Hostility a bedfellow to bitter hate

Indeed your taste is sweet

Sweet and salty

Cradle of my longevity

Sustaining me deep within the soul

Pulsing in rhythm

Our hearts beating one beat

Herein lies my manhood

Where for better not worse love abounds

Better than any alternative

Indeed the world mystifies me

Where boys are taught to destroy

But shamed for love

Hate is a plague of damnation

Trepidation ruled by religious vengeance

Not in this house

I am a man of love

Heaven is not my aim

Sweetness is all I have

Bitterness results from not sharing it

I am still too full of life for sourness

Blood of my great ancestors fills me

Not the blood of Christ

I may only be inseminated with love

Who possibly could be man enough

Very few so it turns out

Reason I count myself lucky

Here in your cradling arms

Lapping at life's sweet nectar

Fearless as nature intended