My old friend Pat O’Toole has ridden on up ahead of the herd to scout a new countryside for water and good grass. You can bet your bottom dollar that, when we catch up with him, he will have picked out the perfect spot to rest.
It will have plenty of shelter and no deerflies. It will look a lot like a mountain valley in Wyoming in springtime.
I just heard that Pat passed away recently. The Cowboy State and, in particular, Carbon County are emptier with his passing.
Pat wasn’t born here. If fact, he attended high school in Florida at what was the largest high school in the nation at that time.
But he was a distance runner so he got here as fast as he could and married into old line Wyoming ranching royalty when he married George and Laura Salisbury’s daughter, Sharon, from the Little Snake River Valley.
Pat settled into his new home with his new family and, as she has done to us all, Wyoming went to work on him. Engaged in the pastoral sheep business, watching the seasons pass, learning the rhythms of the Big Empty, Pat began – as Aldo Leopold suggested – to “think like a mountain.”
In the late 1980s, Pat was elected to the Wyoming House, occupying the seat from which his father in law, George Salisbury (and we’ll doff our Stetsons when that name is mentioned) served his friends and neighbors in Carbon County.
Pat, as a legislator, had more in common with classical philosopher/statesmen like Solon and Marcus Aurelius than he did with the knee-jerk ideologues that we have too many of in the Wyoming Legislature today.
He had a set of balance scales in his mind that he trusted to make decisions, instead of using mere dogma.
A word about Pat O’Toole’s mind; the man could think around corners and over ridgetops. He had a visionary’s mind.
When he was in Cheyenne for the session, Pat would play touch football on the weekends with me, my sons and a bunch of neighborhood ruffians.
Over a halftime beer one Sunday, Pat said to me, out of the blue, “The greatest threat to our environment is human poverty.”
I thought so hard about that statement during the second half that Pat’s team scored six or seven touchdowns and beat my team like a rented mule. And Pat’s words are as true today as they were back then.
Pat dedicated his life to his family and to the notion of sustainable agriculture. He worked hard in the halls of power and in the meadows of his home to make sure that agricultural families wouldn’t be driven from their farms and ranches by poverty, leaving the productive lands to the hands of megalithic agri-corporations that don’t give a rat’s ass about people, small communities or the landscape.
He was out front, riding point for us, making sure the trail was safe for the herd.
The Ladder Ranch, his home place in the Little Snake River Valley, is proof that Pat’s vision of a sustainable, mindful agriculture was more than just theory. That way of doing business sustains generations of Wyoming citizens.
It leaves enough grass on the ground and water in the creeks so that great-grandchildren can raise their own kids on family ground.
I’ve had the opportunity to know a few Irishmen in my time, and they’ve all been good ‘uns. Pat’s love for Irish heritage was so deep that he named his son after Eamon de Valera, a father of modern Ireland and a revolutionary poet.
When another Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, slipped the mortal coil, his good friend, W.H. Auden offered the eulogy. I’ll borrow from Auden’s eulogy and pay my deepest respect to my friend this way:
“Earth, receive an honored guest
Pat O’Toole is laid to rest.”
Rod Miller can be reached at: rodsmillerwyo@yahoo.com
