Around the time I was entering the 5th grade the movie “Radio Flyer” came to the Home Box Office, my brother and I immediately became hooked. We watched this movie countless times and I can’t quite put my finger on what drew us in. The story is rooted around two brothers who live in an abusive household. The step-father is particularly awful to the younger brother so the boys hatch a plan, based upon a local myth, to turn their Radio Flyer wagon into an airplane. The final scene in which the Radio Flyer rolls down a hill, up the roof of a barn and soars up into the sky is truly moving and worthy a few tears, but the scene I always come back to in my memories involves a buffalo. Towards the beginning of the movie the boys’ mother is driving them across country, to find a new life and start anew, somewhere around Kansas, they come across a sign for a Wild West show with real live buffalo. As they get closer and closer the boys get more and more excited only to arrive and find an old cowboy with a single buffalo enclosed in a pen.
Mikey (the older brother) : “Do you think he’s the only buffalo left in the world?”
Mom: “Maybe he is”
Mikey: “Oh gosh Mom, he looks lonely.”
(The Buffalo moves towards them)
Mom: “I’m sure he is.”
Bobby (the younger brother) : “Mom, what’s gonna happen to him? It’s so sad.”
Mikey: “Why?”
Mom: “I dunno Mikey, I guess that’s what happens when you’re alone. There’s lots more to see, c’mon.”
The camera zooms in on the buffalo and I shit you not a single tear falls from the animal’s right eye. It’s simply a heartbreaking moment; you feel terrible for everyone: the mom, the boys, the old man but especially the buffalo. The magical crying buffalo re-occurs throughout the movie as a spiritual guide for the boys as they create their magical Radio Flyer. He is their inspiration to fly off into the unknown.
I guess maybe we were simply attracted to this movie because the younger brother’s name was Bobby, just like my younger brother, but I think it was the buffalo. We grew up where the buffalo roam, whose silhouette is emblazoned on our state flag. The flagrant symbolism wasn’t lost on us. The animal spirit of Wisdom and Strength who had nearly gone extinct was somehow tied to our culture and the myth of the American West.
Last month I took my boyfriend to my home state where we visited the great Yellowstone herds of buffalo, which have not yet lost their power over me. Why did they still seem so sad? Was it their stoic faces? Were we anthropomorphizing our guilt on their blank stares? We have been so unkind. When whites first started introducing horses and guns to the plains Indians in the 1500s their numbers began to decline from the millions that once ruled the continent. By the time of the iron horse shooting buffalo from a moving train became a popular pastime (the record being 120 bison shot in 40 minutes). Who could forget Buffalo Bill, who has a town named after him in Wyoming, conscripted to kill as many as he could and within two years had killed at least 4,000. Then came the Indian Wars where the US Army decided that the best way to defeat the Indians was to destroy their main source of food and began exterminating the creatures en masse. The action of our ancestors has rendered the American Buffalo the spirit animal of the west. A spirit who now represents our sin of expansion and progress.
In the buffalo we see all the horrors of Manifest Destiny, the destruction caused by our immigration across the continent and the decimation of the American Indian. The largest mammal of an entire continent practically wiped out for sport, power and influence. The west still retains its expansiveness—even now—and to see a large herd of gigantic animals stretch across the endless plains mirrored by an infinite sky reminds us of how the west was ‘won’ and where it got us, as the old REM song goes. While watching the herds and their babies fatten up for the ensuing winter I thought of Bobby and Mikey, escaping their own destruction with the help of this wise old spirit of the plains. I wished, in that moment, to do right by that Buffalo spirit to heed his warning and the story of his past and to fly away from this sad history in a radio flyer of my own.
