No Country For Old Men, The Last Roundup - How A Reasonable Man Believed He Could Cheat Death

Not all old people get the picture - life is not endless and theirs is coming quickly to an end. Instead of facts we all were given a willing suspension of disbelief.  Death is supposed to happen to us, but maybe it won't. 

 

L. Peter Barnes was a rugged old coot, born and raised on a ranch.  He learned how to ride the back forty before he was ten, rode herd on the hundred head rustled from Texas, and managed the tribe of Utes who worked the crops in harvest season to pick strawberries and rhubarb, fish for salmon on the Columbia river, then head south to California for the big pick in the Sacramento Valley. 

Petey could fix anything - tractors, backhoes, small motors, and diesel engines.  His ranch was an Indian burial ground of fenders, brakes, wheels, and pistons.  Nothing went to waste, not a screw, nail, or grommet.  He was a parsimonious man and  carried his spare practicality with him when he left the ranch and the West for greener pastures.  He got a an appointment to West Point, graduated, and was commissioned; but was retired in the final year of the war when the Navy did not need any more Second Lieutenants. 

 

Petey's life was unremarkable, but successful - a Fulbright to London where he studied physics at Kings College, Cambridge; was deployed during the first years of the Marshall Plan to North Africa, and with his practical and academic engineering he was able to set himself up in business.  Pacific Tool and Die grew by leaps and bounds as American industry turned civilian, and before long he was secure enough to sell the business, join the faculty of the University of Virginia, and settle down to a good, quiet life in suburban Charlottesville. 

He had four children, three girls and a boy, all of whom followed in their father's practical, sedate, mature, and honest footsteps.  Petey never had to worry about them or their future.  He could rest assured that the life he had built for them would carry them through. 

As he grew older, Petey became more and more preoccupied with his health, and took extreme measures to assure that he would live well beyond his allotted four-score-and-ten.  He stripped his meals of all fat, bulked up on raw vegetables, whole grains, unfiltered molasses, and organic spices.  Thanks to his engineering background, he installed industrial-strength air filters, triple-filtered water purifiers, and the most efficient electric stoves. 

He ran ten miles a day, worked out at the gym, kept trim and to fighting weight, and consulted medical advice for every aberration of the norm.  His calendar was filled with dermatologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and orthopods.  

Now, Petey Barnes was not a stupid man, and knew that when the Grim Reaper came calling, one had to invite him in; but still there must be, there had to be a way for delaying his visit, deferring the inevitable, for even...denying him. 

Petey so believed in mens sana in corpore sano not simply as a credo for healthy living but as a firewall against death.  If he tried hard enough; if he willed body and soul into defiance of death, if he showed God his determination to stay on earth, and do whatever was was asked of him in exchange, then he might be granted deferment or even exoneration. A death-defying bargain with Mephistopheles.

    

Accordingly, his life became a hamster wheel of revolving intent.  He cleansed his body of foul pollutants, filled it with the stuff of organic life, tempered it with proper weights and measures,  aligned his mind with purity and good will.  If anyone was going to live to one hundred and beyond, it was he 

To an outsider Petey had become an unhinged, emotional mountebank loony.  'There he goes, poor man', said Mavis Purdy to her next door neighbor as the watched neurasthenic, stringy, gaunt Petey Barnes do another lap around the neighborhood.  

Mavis' husband Alphonse had been on a similar punishing treadmill until she pulled him off it, yanked him back to the here-and-now, and told him to fire up the grill and not be late for dinner.

Petey had no Mavis in the wings, no hook to pull him off stage when his routine got tiresome; and so he banged on about clean air, proper and correct blood levels, and a good outlook without restraint.  His jousting with Death went from a medieval event to a fight to the finish.  He woke at night seeing images of nothingness, that vast, immeasurable void that we are told awaits us. 

Most men of Petey's age deal with the forthcoming end of existence with equanimity, poise, or cavalier bonhomie.  The bell curve fits all.  Harvey Flint drew down the last of his IRA and offshore accounts, threw his grandchildren's inheritance to the four winds, signed off in Floriana on his way to the Marquesas with just this note in the log. 'Sold the house, sold the car, liquidated the accounts, and soon will be far from you all'. A last gasp but one full of rich, tropical breezes.  

Billings Philby, long widowed, said goodbye to family and friends, bought a young Filipino wife and lived out his days in East Timor.  

 

Petey had neither the gumption nor the will for such extravagant behavior, and could only continue counting calories and joules of energy.  He looked around him and saw only treadmills, shelves of organic vegetables, bins of frozen, inedible innards, cases of almond milk and not a beer in sight. 

The clock was ticking.  He had far fewer years on earth than had gone by.  His life was cluttered with the tools of longevity, but without warranty. He would soon be gone, and the machinery of exercise and promised happy aging would be sold at auction. 

Yet he could not help himself - up at 4, on the treadmill by 4:15, tiger's milk, beet and radish juice by 4:45, a cored pear, melba toast, and a fermented sardine by 5, and the long day had barely begun. 

Yet each day was one of victory, one with lungs-full enterprise.  He had squeezed another 24 hours from The Reaper, but was at sixes and sevens to know what to do with them. Oh, for a yacht in Rimini or a Filipina concubine. 

'But I could have had both' he said, and so he could have; but therein lies the lesson of Petey Barnes.  Life has a way of cheating you out of your birthright, snookering you into corners you never would have chosen, dragging you down paths leading nowhere, tidying up odds and ends in later years, but never completely fulfilling. 

Petey had enough insight to know that his life of grouting, 1/4" screws, old washers, brake jobs, resurfacing, tiling, and recalibrating was not exactly what he would have wished.  Where did this dutiful obligation to physical righteousness and order come from?  Why hadn't her been born with some dolce vita?  

All his figuring, his calculations of omega-3, hem-iron, saturated fat, purification, and determination to live forever amounted to nothing.  He sat at his workbench surrounded by cannibalized motors, pieces of sheeting, coils of wire, piles of gypsum, wanted desperately to go into the kitchen and cook himself a big, rare, ribeye steak, but couldn't. Too many years at the grindstone, too many hours taking care of things, righting them, and not enough....

Here he was stumped, for he like everyone, the inevitable product of genetic imperative and a tampered environment could do nothing else.  And the thought that he had spent so many hours trying to extend his prescribed, determined life was the worst of all.