Tag: cowboys

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On Tax Day, Auditors and Cow Manure

Tuesday last was tax day and as I usually do around April 17, I ponder taxes, money, accountants.

All of this, of course, fuels imagery that erupts from the past: characters, events, some funny, some sad, some unwanted, some I am glad I remembered.

In 1979-1980 I worked for a big corporation in the ag business; cotton, lettuce, ranches, feed lots. I was part of a team who ran a feedlot on the Gila River Indian Reservation at a place called San Tan, southeast of Phoenix.

When somebody from the Phoenix corporate office called and said “Audit,” images of three-piece suits came to mind. Imagine a suit (an auditor) on a cayuse. A twirling lasso cutting the breeze, stirrups, chaps, saddle (an auditor?).

When you work outside at a feed yard you fight manure dust biting the eyes, the ears, the nose. Flies, sweat, cattle wild with fear. Frightened cattle don’t eat. That stops them gaining weight. It costs money when they don’t gain weight.

Not making money…hmmm…the thought of an auditor causing loss of money seems an oxymoron, but a lot about the cattle feeding business is strange. Somewhere the task of providing protein for a hungry world gets caught up with the drive to make a buck. We all understand making a buck, but when keeping track of making bucks hinders the efficiently production of a t-bone steak, it causes a buckaroo to pull off his Stetson and scratch his head.

They’d be out on Saturday morning. That’s what they said. “Saturday.” It was going to be 105 degrees so that meant a dawn start. We’d need to chouse the cattle before they had time to eat.

My cohorts, Robert, the manager, and Ed, the cattle boss, showed up before the sun sliced the eastern horizon. We copied lists and lot numbers and waited for the auditor.

A dark blue BMW pulled up. Two men, one whom I recognized as the corporate controller and who was wearing fancy orange and gold Nikes, and another whom I had never seen, got out and stomped up to the front door. Both looked rough…hangover rough, pallid skins. A day’s dark whiskers glooming their faces. When the controller walked in, those orange and gold Nike’s cut the dim like the glint of coin in a counting house. I thought to myself, those shoes are a bit brash for knocking around in cow manure.

Robert said, “It’s going to get hot fast. And it’s hard on the cattle. We best be moving now.”

Two cowboys showed up on horseback. Flies began what flies do: eat, lay eggs, die and bother horses, cattle and humans. The sun grew surlier as the day swelled.

As soon as the auditor and Mister Controller picked a pen of cattle (we were trying to see if the actual count matched what the records said) the cowboys drove the lot into an alley between the pens and we’d count. Dust rose with the temperature. The auditor broke an early sweat and Mister Controller complained about everything: the heat, the flies, the dust.

If the count was off, we’d run the lot out into the alley again and count them a second time. The cattle didn’t like it. Once or twice, big hump-backed smoky-gray south Texas steers hurdled the sucker rod fences which dismayed the auditor, messing with his tallies. Ed and the cowboys cackled. Mister Controller spent a lot of time pontificating on cattle, especially south Texas, half wild smoky-gray hump backs. It sounded like a bunch of…how should I best say it?…like a bunch of manure.

We had eight or ten lots to tally and were keeping pretty close on our counts which made Robert happy…less chousing the cattle. It was hard to tell what the auditor thought. He looked to me like he needed a cool place to vomit up his hung-over guts. Mister Controller kept babbling about cattle this and cattle that.

On the last lot, we drove the steers out into the alley and threaded them back in. In the middle of the pen, a big wet spot about ten feet across marked the tan dust a dark brown. All of us, the cowboys, Robert, Ed and me, avoided that spot. There was a leaky water line down below the four or five feet of dried manure.

Robert and Ed told everyone to stay clear of the wet spot. As we finished the count, Mister Controller crossed the pen, wiping his hands like he’d just finished a big chore.

He yelled at the auditor, “What’s the count look like?” as he stepped into the big wet spot. Ed yelled, “Hey, don’t go there.” Mister Controller frowned and said, “I don’t take orders from…” and he began to sink. As if it was all a fantasy, he walked on into the middle of the spot with a look on his face like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He sunk past his knees. Robert yelled, “It’s like quicksand.”

Mister Controller stopped and glanced down as he sunk an inch at a time. He stuck out his hand. “Help me.” The auditor looked at me and I shrugged. Mister Controller looked at me, too, but I shook my head. He almost sobbed, “Why?” One of us, I don’t remember, said, “Because you’ll pull us in.”

One of the things a cowboy loves to do more than anything is build a loop and rope something. They will rope anything…a dog, a goat, a horse, a set of horns on top of a saw-horse. I don’t know if one of us suggested it, but before you could slap a blow fly off the side of your face, the two cowboys had their ropes in their hands building loops. Mister Controller sank deeper, his face paralyzed by the realization he was caught in the nefarious grip of cow shit.

One loop, then two, whirled in the hot air. Somebody chuckled, and then laughed as one loop, then two, flopped over the torso of Mister Controller. Drawn tight, trapping his flailing arms. He yelled, “Hey, wait a …” We laughed, even Mister Hung-over Auditor, as the cowboys pulled Mister Controller out.

I don’t know how much weight gain was lost as a result of the audit. But there were other rewards, wastes and squanders. Mister Controller lost one of his fancy orange and gold Nike’s. Sucked right off his foot into that manure sinkhole. I have often wondered what else he lost.

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On Honky-tonks, Wild Folk and Newborns

Our daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Baruch, are expecting their first baby in July. We have grandkids already. One, Justyce, is already zooming her way to young adulthood. The prospect for the arrival of a newborn is damned exciting.

As I think about this new granddaughter, the season is Spring and outside the daffodils are smiling the color of the sun. Down the streets, pear trees’ white blossoms balloon the moods of commuters. Pink and reds and purples emerge. It is a season of birth, re-birth, new growth.

Then I think about the old days and how mothers produced sons and daughters that were cold as stone when they emerged from the womb. Youngsters died of measles, mumps, smallpox, scarlet fever before they had a chance to mate, get drunk, find Jesus, get old. Those were the days of small farms where women and men hoed rows of corn and dug their spuds. Milked cows, sheared sheep, cooked oat cakes over cast iron stoves that threw heat like the halls of hell. Chores galore; stirring dirty clothes in a big cast iron pot full of boiled water and harsh lye soap. Candle making, quilting, sewing; all created a dire need for lots of hands. Lots of children were needed to help out on the farm

In 1971 my father and I took my son, James, to see the movie Man In the Wilderness, set in the Northwest during the early 1800s, with Richard Harris and John Huston. The characters in the film were fur trappers and one of them, the Richard Harris character, voyeured a Native American woman giving birth to a child. Out in the thick woods, she just squatted, without help, as her man kept watch from afar, I suppose to keep grizzlies and wolves from attacking her as she birthed that baby.

At the time, I thought that scene was a little over the top in terms of dramatization. I remember my now-long-deceased friend Richard Madewell scoffing, “That’s all a bunch of BS to sell movie tickets.” I tended to agree. Son James, who was about three years old, seemed more interested in the bear that attacked Harris’s character and didn’t have much to say about the on-screen child birth.

That was back in the honky-tonking days of my youth. I spent spare time down at the bar on Main Street where the skid row drunks sat on the high curb and waited for the sun to come up and the bars to open. My watering hole was a rough location, a bar as old as any of the businesses in town.

Big fans beat the air around the pressed tin ceiling with its fancy curlicues and circles. We listened to Dire Straits and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, tunes from the Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South.

We downed flat draft beer and shots of cheap tequila, Bloody Marys, Spañada, wine coolers, bad Scotch and VO with Seven, not to mention more nefarious substances. We shot nine ball and eight ball, got in fights, in shootouts. We got drunk, and not drunk. Hippies, cowboys, college professors who taught Español, drug salesmen of both the legal and the not legal, ag teachers, baseball glove vendors, miners, cotton farmers, plumbers, sheepherders, butchers, house painters, short order cooks in Mexican food restaurants, wives, daughters, they all made their way to sit on the tall stools at the ancient bar.

Some wild individuals denizened the joint. One pair I recall—it was just around the time I went with father and son James to see Man In the Wilderness—showed up one day and joined right in. They usually arrived for tamales and red beers…that was breakfast. He had long, stringy hair and wore a beard a foot thick. He donned a stained and battered New York Yankee hat and claimed to be from Manhattan but his deep Texas accent belied that. His mate was wild, too, wore fringed buckskin shirts and trousers, blue and red and yellow beaded buckskin moccasins that looked like they were made before Geronimo went to Florida under guard of the United States Army. She claimed she made all her own clothing and I did not doubt that.

For some reason they liked to drink around me and I’d have to be pretty toasted to stand the scent of lard and mesquite-coal smoke that hung all over them. She bragged about cooking over one of those old cast iron stoves my grandmother used back before my mother was born. I didn’t doubt that, either. They rented a falling-down adobe building with rotten wood floors that was about as old as our town. The adobe sat behind Ronquillo’s Radiator Shop…I think I remember this right…at the corner of Sacaton and First. I always knew it as the Prickly Pear House because a prickly pear sat out in front of the old adobe. The cactus had big flat paddles wrinkled like the face of my grandmother and probably as old.
This particular wild bunch would also show up in the afternoon and drink their favorites….shots of Jose Cuervo with draft Coors back. One, two, three.

I always thought it was strange that she drank like that…as well as smoking unfiltered Camels and no telling what else…because she was heavy with their first child. Heavy….hung out like a hot air balloon. But one, two, three, down the hatch, she’d laugh and dance to Dickey Betts’ guitar riffs in “Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Awkward and scruffy, she shuffled and puffed on her smoking Camel.

One hot August afternoon under the cooling click of the ceiling fans, a few of my friends and I sat and sucked down cold glasses of draft as the two of them, both of this wild pair, pirouetted and wheeled to the tunes blaring out of the juke box.

She suddenly stopped and yelled, “Honey, it’s time.”

Without another word they stomped out the front door. A moment later his thick-bearded face showed back in the doorway as he yelled, “Be right back.”

The barkeep chuckled and mumbled, “Right. She’ll be lucky if she and that kid survive, as much poison as she puts in her body.”

Two hours later they were back. That hot air balloon was suddenly gone and the leather blouse with the fringe on the seams looked almost big enough for two of her. She held a red, wrinkled baby in an old wool blanket. Her man began handing out cheap stogies with a cigar band that announced, “It’s a Girl.”

I said, “They let you out of the hospital that fast?”

She twanged, “Didn’t need no hospital. Done it myself.”

We all looked to her man. He grinned and nodded, “I watched, but that was all. She just squatted and spurted that young’un out.” He grinned and hugged her. “She’s one hell of a woman.”

The baby squalled and the mother giggled. The father let out a roar, “Barkeep. For my lady-love, a Jose Cuervo and cold Coors back”

He spun around, his long hair whirling like a jigging woman’s skirt. He yelled, “I’m a daddy.”

I sure hope Sarah and Baruch experience a different kind of delivery.

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Real Cowboys Didn’t Go to “Cowboys”

Last weekend I attended a workshop given by teacher, raconteur, cowboy poet, rope twirler, guitar picker, yodeler and warbler extraordinaire, Ernie Sites. The event was held in downtown Boise and sponsored by Elaine Ambrose of Mill Park Publishing in Eagle, Idaho.

I like to write poetry but the cowboy poetry genre often confounds me. I’m not sure if it’s the rhyme and meter of it or something else. When I first started penning poems I guffawed at rhyme and metrical schemes as flighty and unavailable to me in terms of expressing true, angsty meaning…mine or any other poet’s. But after some time studying Shelly and Wordsworth and Yeats’ poems and cowboy poet Buck Ramsey’s masterpiece of the cowboy genre, “Anthem,” I have changed my mind. Not about writing such poems, but about rhyme and meter’s importance in the larger genre of poetry.

Rhyme and metrical schemes place restraints on the composer and like so much in life, constraints of many kinds force us to be creative. That doesn’t mean I’m going to write rhyme and meter, but it does mean I appreciate the poems more for what they say and how they say it.

I wrote a poem in that workshop and although it was metrical and had internal rhyme, I wouldn’t name it cowboy poetry. There were some good poems composed by almost everyone in the session and some of them fit the classic definition of cowboy poetry.

Along with poems and music, there were cowboy hats and boots one would expect at a celebration of something cowboys call “Cowboy Halloween.” The boots especially, bright red boots, Lucchese boots.

I really like how things cowboy keep working their way into milieus that are not western at all. I wonder if the cowboy scene is making a comeback, like it did in the mid-sixties when I was, to quote an old cowboy homily, feeling my oats. A lot of us bought boots and wanted to bronc around on wild horses and not knowing fear, threw ourselves into the world of rodeo, bull riding and calf roping and bull dogging.

Non-cowboy cowboying made another comeback with the general public in 1980 with John Travolta and Debra Winger as Bud and Sissy in Urban Cowboy. People who had never owned a set of cowboy boots or hat were now walking into their offices hoofed in Tony Lama full quill ostrich leather boots with a riding heel and widebrimmed black Stetson cowboy hats. Mammoth honky-tonks with mechanical bulls opened all over the country. Charlie Daniels and Merle Haggard and the Statler Brothers, among others, were wailing Country and Western music out of radios and boom boxes. Folks thought it was Cowboy Music. It wasn’t, but it didn’t matter to the consumers as they danced the Cotton-eyed Joe and the Texas Two Step.

I lived in Arizona at the time and they opened a big cowboy bar in Tempe called “Cowboys.” I was working in the livestock business then and had been for a number of years. I figured the joint had nothing to do with the real cowboys I hung out with and worked around. But still, it was a bar, and still, I was curious.

One of my best friends at the time was a real cowpoke named Ray Fred Kelly. Ray, who passed on to the Happy Roping Arena late last year, much to my sadness, was raised in the cattle business and could build a loop and throw a Houlihan with the best of them. At the time, Ray was managing, among other things, an animal health wholesale outfit in the Valley of the Sun. One afternoon I went up to argue bid prices on health products with him for a feedlot I was helping run. After we argued in his office, we began to argue in a local bar, and as the argument went on, we proceeded north for several hours, hitting most of the bars he knew about. Arguing all the way.

About eight in the evening we got tired of wrangling and decided to head home but before we did I said I thought we should go check out this joint called “Cowboys.” I wanted to see some cowboys in downtown Tempe.

Fred chuckled and said, “There aren’t any real cowboys in ‘Cowboys.’ Real cowboys don’t go to ‘Cowboys.'”

But I was fired up and liquored up and, since I was driving, demanded that we go to “Cowboys”. He chuckled again and I drove over there. The parking lot looked like it could serve the needs of a college football stadium and the cars were Chryslers and Fords and Camaros. As I parked my pickup in one of the only open spots, I noticed a paucity of pickups, and deep down inside I probably knew right then that real cowboys didn’t go to “Cowboys.”

At the door, two very large men stood in fancy boots and hats, western suits. They didn’t smile and they had their hands crossed in front of them like undertakers do when they are running a burying.

Ray Fred wagged his head as if we were walking into an ambush, but I stomped right up to the front door and pulled it open. The men each threw their long and massive arms up and held the door closed.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

Ray Fred stood back.

One of the bouncers barked, “No Levis.”

I said, “What? No Levis? What kind of cowboy doesn’t wear jeans?”

Both the bouncers looked at me, then one of them pointed at Ray Fred and said, “Besides, he’s wearing tennis shoes.”

I looked at my manure-caked boots and said, “What about these?”

“Nope. They are not clean.”

I snorted as Ray Fred cleared his throat. I walked up to the one who was doing the talking and wagged the index finger of my right hand right beneath his nose and said, nodding back at Ray Fred, “That man is a real hand. He can build a loop and doctor sick calves, he can sort and brand and castrate and…can you do that? And,” I said, “he can throw a Houlihan.”

The man just frowned at me. As Ray Fred cleared his throat again, I went on, “You gunsel SOBs wouldn’t know the butt end of a steer from its head. You wouldn’t know a bull from a cow and you ain’t ever sat a horse that knows how to cut and sort.”

Earlier in this essay I talked about constraints and how we are forced to adapt our actions to reflect those restraints.

When neither of those gunsel bouncers moved their arms from barring the door, nor wore any kind of expression other than no expression at all, we left, me throwing cuss words and indignities over my shoulder as Ray Fred said, “See, I told you. Real cowboys don’t go to ‘Cowboys.'”

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A Day at the Races

I cleaned my office this last weekend and as I straightened the bookshelves, J Edward Chamberlain’s, Horse (Blue Ridge, New York, NY), fell on the floor. Horse is a narrative that laymen can read about how mankind and the horse have developed a somewhat unique, symbiotic relationship.

As I hefted the book, an image of the racetrack vaulted into my mind. Not just any racetrack, but the racetrack at Ruidoso, New Mexico where they specialize in American Quarter Horse racing with the distance being a quarter of a mile, the money pot being in the millions.

Ruidoso crouches beneath the shoulders of Sierra Blanca, a twelve-thousand-foot peak in the southern part of the state. A lot of big Texas “awl bidness” money hangs around the restaurants, boutiques and honky tonks. There is a ski area and more important to horse folk, a racetrack.

One of my father’s younger brothers, Hugh, and his wife Lona Beth, owned a house on the Rio Ruidoso in the older part of town. They had box seats at the race track, too. Betty and I, for a time, lived thirty miles south in the more modest village of Cloudcroft. But we got invited to the track and we sat and watched the races and we bet from the sheet and lost money until Aunt Lona Beth pointed out that one shouldn’t bet the horses. They should bet the trainers and the jockeys and the owners. I thought, but geez, that means you have to know them. She read my mind and smiled as she went back to her racing notes, and then to the window to get her winnings.

The rest of the day I imagined I witnessed(or maybe I really did see it) the jockeys on the favorite horses in particular races pulling back on the reins so that one of the other horse owners could win some money and pay a feed bill, pay the veterinarian, pay for his daughter’s wedding in Telluride or Steamboat Springs.

Right then, I understood what was meant years earlier in the palaver I heard in Prescott, AZ about jockeys holding the horses back. That was in1976 when I summer-long hung out at Bruno’s Buffet just across the main drag from the racetrack. Bruno’s was chock full of horse owners and trainers and jockeys, not to mention the other gambler denizens. I was more interested in the vintage pinball machines against the back wall and the homemade tamales and burritos and of course the Coors and the schnapps and the Dewars and water. But I do recall the men sitting at the bar winking and giggling about shenanigans at the track. Drugs to speed up a steed or slow him down, or her if she was a filly. They fought, too, bringing their competitive natures from the track into the bar where the liquor started doing the talking and then fists started cracking faces and the pointed toes of ostrich skin cowboy boots bomb-shelled into opponents’ soft groins. Humans are a competitive bunch and they sling their drive to win onto the shoulders of all kinds of things: their hands, their feet, their fellow man, their brains tied to poker hands of aces and queens, the back of a horse, a pinball machine.

Back in the early 1970s I used to hang out on Sunday afternoons outside of Casa Grande, Arizona at the weekly races sponsored by the Los Conquistadores, a local Hispanic caballero club. Cars would line up along a makeshift track, their trunks open and loaded with Corona and Dos Equis and Coca Cola and orange sodas from Fanta de Mexico, or Jarritos, and better yet, fresh tamales and burritos, lots of jalapeño and Serrano chile slices laced among the beans and meat. The kind of food that made your mouth burn and your nose run and your head sweat and goosed you so you felt like you might just get out there and run beside those elegant caballos whose owners let them strut and kick up puffs of dust to whet betting appetites. A lot of cash changed hands out there one race after another, the green hundred-dollar notes flapping in the breeze as one man agonized and another rejoiced. Sometimes the tempers flared and men threatened others, but then one of the gentes managing the race stepped in and refereed, negotiated.

Back then I used to work at a large agricultural concern out west of town in the flat Sonoran desert plain below Dick Nixon Mountain and Table Top. One of the owners’ sons, whom I will call Butch, loved racing horses and bought a fancy prancing young dun stud he hoped would win him money and fame. He didn’t ride it himself; he hired one of the hostlers who worked for the company instead. That man was a slight Vietnam Vet whose seamed and ruddy face told stories he would never relate. He sat a horse like he was part of the animal; they reminded me of a centaur. The dun stud and the hostler would lope across the flat, greasewood-pocked ground leaving their caliche clay signature on the wisps of the wind. That dun was a moody, cranky thing and the only man who could handle him was the hostler.

Late one Saturday evening a strange pickup truck and horse trailer pulled up outside the office and some Chicanos I had seen all my life, but did not know, unloaded a big dapple gray gelding who stood around and sniffed with suspicion the eighty-two-thousand head of Hereford, Brahma, and angus cross-bred cattle in the feed pens.

I asked a cowpoke what was up and he told me there was a match race for big money. Of a sudden, cars and pickups began to arrive and the hostler brought the dun out and it snorted and cavorted sideways as the hostler talked soft words of comfort in its ears that reminded me of radio antennae the way they checked out the hubbub building with the powdered dust of the parking lot.

All of a sudden too, big white Panama-hatted cowboys and long-haired hippies and Chicano dudes arrived in large groups, drinking Dos Equis and speaking Español; also a couple of Yaqui Indians who hung back, leaning against some sucker rod fence as they laughed at all the proceedings. And yes, the greenbacks started to flash and a lot of harsh talk, as if words of intimidation from one man to the next would make a difference in how a horse would run. One man had a .357 Magnum six-shooter sticking barrel first in his left rear pants pocket. I hoped it wouldn’t fall out, go off and hit me.

The jockeys jockeyed their horses to the line. A cotton farmer with a long-barreled .22 Magnum said something about the race, although I was more interested in the array of weapons I saw sticking out of boots, hanging on belts. I wondered when the war might start. Was this a horse race or were we going to invade Baja California? All the Chicanos and most of the hippies sided with the owner of the dappled gray. Most of the cowboys and some of the hippies sided with Butch, the hostler and the young dun stud.

A stocky man stomped back and forth between each group, swearing in English and Spanish as the horses snorted and jumped around as if infected with the sense of competition. The bets continued. I kept my wallet in my pocket.

The stocky man flexed his fists like he wanted to hit someone and I heard talk that he liked to drive sixteen-penny nails into railroad ties with those fists. I doubted he could do that and smiled, but only on the inside, as I thought how that might feel, to pound a nail with the fist. Why in the hell would someone want to do that unless to show somebody else up, I reckoned as I inched my way to the back of the cowboy crowd.

While I was watching the hammer-fisted dude slinging his vernacular of violence around, the .22 Magnum reported and as I stood on the toes of my boots I saw those two horses, the muscled dapple gray and the young dun stud, erupt like funny cars at the drag races. They were gone and each of the jockeys, especially the hostler, leaned off his ride, slapping at the other jockey with his quirt. A lot of the men in each crowd were busy hurling epithets at counterparts on the other side and missed Butch’s dun win the race by better than two lengths. An anti-climax, for sure.

I moved back and stood next to the Yaquis, anticipating the fireworks to come. My heart sped up with the thought of some fist fights, a knifing, a shooting; but while the winner’s crowd ganged around Butch, the hostler and the dun, the loser’s crowd quickly sneaked off, leaving a lot of hot-tempered talk about welching on bets and the like.

It’s amazing, I think, how a man and an animal can symbiotically interact and create an entire industry—horse racing—that so perfectly corrals some of the essential best, and worst, of human emotions. The horse usually being the one that does most of the heavy work. The humans creating the rest—the hubbub, the competition, the hate, and yes, the love.

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Leap of Faith

 
Ruby Mountains at Dawn

Betty and I just got back from the 27th Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada not too long ago. As always, the event was a moving, powerful experience that I learned long ago to not try and describe to people. The only way you will know the power of the event and your reactions to it is to make a leap of faith and go. 

Most years when we travel to Elko, we try to go through the country with the least amount of traffic and the best scenery.  If the road conditions and the weather permit, we travel the truest route, south from Mountain Home, Idaho, which is not in the mountains, to Duck Valley, where a Shoshone and Paiute tribal community resides and then through Mountain City, Nevada, the Owyhee River Canyon, Wild Horse Crossing, Wild Horse Reservoir and then down the long, wide valley bordered on each side by north-south running mountain ranges, that, depending on the weather, might be draped in white, or partially snow-covered with their naked aspen ghosting the cold spots. Finally we drop into the Humboldt River valley and the town of Elko. And even if the weather and the road conditions aren’t optimal we take a different kind of leap of faith and travel the byways regardless of snow pack and ice. 

I could talk about the excellent Basque cuisine we eat, and the wild “Cowboy Halloween” characters we meet, about the music old and new, and the poetry old and new, but I’m not going to. 

I am going to talk about the Honda CRV rides we take. While everyone else is jammed into tight auditorium seats listening to Don Edwards or Wylie and the Wild West sing cowboy songs, or Paul Zarzyski and Vess Quinlan and Henry Real Bird read and recite poems, we often climb into the Honda and venture out on one of the roadways out of town. Hinterland is just as close as the last subdivision in this part of Nevada; very little transition country exists. Up north you can find the Independence Mountains, the old mining town of Tuscarora, and the famous Spanish ranch, which all the locals and the cowpokes-in-the-know call “The Span.” To the southeast lies the Ruby Valley, a long wide expanse of snow when we’ve been down there, with a surprising population of bald eagles sitting in the naked willows and  cottonwood trees along the banks of Franklin Creek—and that’s pronounced, “crik” in this part of the world. At the foot of the valley lies the Ruby Valley National Wlldlife Refuge where we sat one evening several seasons back and watched coyotes hunt trumpeter swans on the channels carved in the swampy, red-willow-infested breaks catching the late light of the gloaming. 

Last year we went down there again with a carload of friends, hitting the trail just before sun-up. The light trapped in the ground fog and on the tips of the frosty sage made for great pictures, and the sun on the peaks when the lower ground was still dark created a stark idea of what the difference between life and death might be—or good and evil—in a metaphorical way. The A M light on the east side of the craggy and majestic Ruby Mountains glared back at us and one would think the glare might be too stark, but instead it was like somebody slugged you in the solar plexus with its immensity. 

This year, Betty and I dared ourselves again and went down the west side of the Rubies for an evening run to see if we could find out if the Rubies really were like rubies. The quality of evening light that time of the year is like the gold they still chase around in the rough hinterlands of Nevada. It comes in low, and streams parallel to the surface of the earth, its shine tinted a bit crimson, a bit silver, a bit bronze as it caroms off the juniper trees, sage and mountains like x-rays from outer space. 

 

Ruby Mountain Muley

We stopped where the road from Spring Creek to Jiggs intersects the south fork of the Humboldt River and watched water ouzels bicker over prey beneath the flashing surface of the river. They called and crashed, then dove below the water, then emerged to dance along the surface, as an immature bald eagle floated overhead. The willows and the water, the rugged trunks of the cottonwood trees, all caught the last brash bang of sunlight just before Old Sol’s setting. 

There are a lot of deer out along the east side of the Ruby Mountains. Big mule deer that browse alongside the roads in great gangs that warily watch approaching Hondas, then leisurely leap barbed wire right-of-way fences, then stop and curiously spy as we drive by. The bucks still had their horns and were running with the females which indicated to me they were still in the rut. 

West Side of the Ruby Mountains

At the hint of last light we got the Ruby Mountains on camera, and we now know exactly why they are named that. They were ruby. 

Then we climbed back in the Honda and drove back to the G Three Bar for a sarsaparilla and a visit with our cowboy poetry friends. 

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Puszta

Hungarian Drovers
South of Aguila we rode out horseback in the evening sweetness of early fall. The mountains north of the ranch jutted up like busted incisors. The ground was pocked with gopher holes and we let the horses pick and choose our route. A covey of Gambel’s quail erupted and sputtered into a mesquite thicket and overhead a Harris hawk hunted in the late evening light. The horses snorted and the creak of saddle leather hung with the ambient desert dust that helped make the sky a rosy tint. Along a rocky arroyo, palo verde and ironwood crowded against the edge of the wash. We rode the north bank and looked for a cow, absent without leave.
And that was the last time I tried to emulate a cowboy on horseback. Since those days, forty years ago, I’ve herded cattle on foot, been kicked in the groin by a frightened calf while sorting, herded cattle in a pickup, weighed truck loads of fat cattle, sat on the hard, splintery seat at the Roswell auction and bought calves, been choused up a sprinkler stanchion by wild-eyed Angus-Brahma cross; I’ve seen cow droving accomplished on four-wheelers that zipped around like bugs on a dung pile, but I’ve not been a real horseback hand since that time at Aguila.

In my youth, I wanted to be a cowboy, but over the years I drifted towards management first and then on to other industries that have nothing to do with cowboying.

Yet the interest still resides and that’s why Betty and I are here in Elko, Nevada, for the sixth straight year celebrating the 27th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering at the Western Folklife Center. There is always a lot of genre music and verse and art at The Gathering, and the camaraderie with cowboys, wish-they-were cowboys and curious non-cowboy folk. It is infectious and exhilarating.

The last few years, The Gathering has highlighted some global aspect of the drover milieu. They have honored the cowboy or herder or drover traditions from the Camargue region of southeastern France, the vaqueros of Mexico, the cracker cowpokes of the southeastern United States and this year, the herders of Hungary’s puszta—or plain—fifty-two thousand square miles of livestock land where pigs, sheep and cattle are all herded on foot, and horses are herded horseback.

Drover status in Hungary is apparently governed by a hierarchy related to the species one droves. Swineherds—or kondás—are at the bottom of the status ladder, followed by sheepherders—or pásztor—followed by cow herders—or gulyás. At the apex of this drover hierarchy sits the horseman, the horse herder—or csikós. The hierarchy reminds me of the sheep and cattle wars of the 19th century and the scorn I’ve often heard muttered between cowboys, sheep men, hog producers and the like here in our own country.

It’s easy for me to sit here and see these drovers from Hungary as quaint and interesting and not really relevant, but a fact that got my attention was that as early as the 12th century, Hungarian gulyás and csikós drove cow herds across Europe to Germany and Amsterdam and Spain in journeys that rival the droving exploits of the likes of Texans Charles Goodnight and Jesse Chisholm.

Along with Hungarian horsemen and cowmen, this year’s Gathering also features music from the puszta. It reminds me of Liszt and Bartok in the wild nomadic lyric that drives the tunes. I hear a bit of Classical, too, and for just a moment some Blue Grass strains, and then some fiddle work I recognize in cowboy music—not Country and Western, but American drover folk music. And of course there is the voice of the Magyar peasant. Fifteen-hundred years of elation and agony erupting in the wild violin tunes. The violin is important and it seems to me the craft of the puszta musician sits somewhere between Folk and Classical. Wild and frightening and sometimes sardonically funny.

Betty and I visited for a while with the string ensemble’s leader, Mr. Janos Csik. Janos lives on the puszta and travels to Canada and the US fairly often to share his music. He performs at schools to introduce children to Hungarian music. He speaks some English and he and I shared our likes and dislikes about music. We both like Bach and Beethoven, and B. B. King. One of Janos’ albums has gone double platinum.

Besides the music of the Hungarian puszta, The Gathering has allowed us to meet some of the folk who work in the livestock world there including a csikós and a gulyás robed in traditional garb. The photo that leads off this blog entry will give you an idea of how they dress. The hats and robes remind me of uniforms I might have seen in troop formations at Poltava, Russia when King Karl XII of Sweden faced off against Peter the Great.

Janos’ three-piece ensemble—his violin, and a viola and a bass that bump against each other in contrapuntal eruptions to form the bottom of the beat—played some Hungarian folk tunes as the herders danced traditionally with their female companions. They circled around and around and around, never missing a beat, never slowing or wavering and when they stopped, they seemed not to be a bit dizzy which I knew I would be if I were to dance like that.

As they danced and the music wailed, I closed my eyes and imagined back to 896 AD and wild Magyar warriors swooping out of central Asia, driving their high-horned cattle herds over the Carpathian Mountains and down into the broad, fertile puszta. I heard twelve centuries of agony, love and elation. I heard a little Bach and Beethoven, some Bartok, a little bit of Hank, and a little B. B. King.