In cowboy country, a father and husband troubled by suicide reimagines American masculinity, one conversation at a time.
In cowboy country, a father and husband troubled by suicide reimagines American masculinity, one conversation at a timeBill Hawley, left, speaks with a veteran in Buffalo, Wyo. As the prevention specialist in Johnson County, he helps people struggling with addiction and mental health issues. Bill Hawley believes too many men are unwilling or unable to talk about their feelings, and he approaches each day as an opportunity to show them how.
On paper, Bill is the “prevention specialist” for the public health department in Johnson County, a plains-to-peaks frontier tract in Wyoming that is nearly the size of Connecticut but hasresidents. His official mandate is to connect people who struggle with alcohol and drug abuse, tobacco addiction, and suicidal impulses to the state’s limited social service programs.
Bill, who is 59 years old and White, is working out his own theory. It has to do with the gap between the expectations men have for their lives and the reality of their individual experiences, worsened by cultural norms that discourage them from expressing any emotions besides anger.
If the myth of the American cowboy was forged in frontier towns like this one, why can’t it be broken apart and put back together here as well?Bill’s reflections on what it means to be a real man are rooted in part on the kind of life he wants for his 16-year-old son, Jeremiah, who is just beginning to claim some freedom for himself. The two argue over the usual father-son things. How fast Jeremiah drives his car now that he has his license. Math assignments.
But it was during those years that his expectations for his life collided into reality and human fallibility. An alcohol-fueled affair with a subordinate in Myrtle Beach, which he tried but failed to hide, left him with no choice but to resign as principal. That marked the beginning of the end of his first marriage. By 1997, he ended up in Baltimore where he began a rock-bottom fall out of the middle class. He essentially abandoned his children, he says with regret.
He speaks in a Wyoming drawl, low and slow, the kind that could turn into a growl at any moment but doesn’t. He is known to tell a terse joke or two.When he was a boy, Ozzie recounts now, he was sexually assaulted by a male cousin. During his adolescence he was again sexually assaulted, by a construction worker one summer while he was working.
Ozzie, on the other hand, likes the former president, who he believes behaved as “a man of his word” when it came to his campaign promises. White men still exert more power and influence over the country’s politics, corporations, academic institutions and trade organizations. Yet White men are twice as likely to kill themselves as Black and Latino men.
“The cowboy-up mentality is part of why you don’t say something,” Ozzie said toward the end of a recent visit. “You can have a story, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t burp it out.”“You know, you can’t actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps, that was actually a joke,” Jeremiah interjected suddenly. “And now we use it as our slogan.”The love poems began almost right after Bill and Denise went on their first date in February of 2003. They were extremely cheesy.
Their triggers persist. Bill has mood swings because of his bipolar disorder, and in 2017 it got so bad they took all the guns from their house and locked them up. He looks from the driver’s seat at a stand of Aspen trees in the canyon below. Underground, all of the trees are interconnected by a single root system, he remembers Jeremiah telling him, and so the entire forest is considered a single being.He passes the spot where he, Jeremiah and Denise go camping in the warmer months.Bill is once again thinking about what it means to be a real man. Of all that is at stake in that question.
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