(Jake the dog...LOL)
J.x
July 15th 2006
THREE FOR THOUGHT WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ABOUT . . . COWBOYS
Don't fence me in
Everyone wants to be a cowpoke at Calgary Stampede time, PETER SHAWN TAYLOR says, but life in the saddle is a solitary one
PETER SHAWN TAYLOR
It's Stampede time again in Calgary. And that means everyone from TV personalities to oil-industry lawyers are wearin' big hats and pointy boots and lookin' like cowboys.
You should never underestimate the sartorial aspects of cowboy life. Debates over how to wear your pant cuffs can be as hard fought as anything experienced in high school. But the most significant characteristics of being a cowboy are, by my own experience, far more ascetic.
In 1987, I spent the year working as a wrangler at a ranch south of the Wyoming town of Cody. Because I lacked a work permit, I couldn't get a guide's licence; so while my fellow wranglers spent hunting season trekking through the Absarokas looking for deer and elk with rich American hunters, I was the one packing out their dead meat on a four-hour ride to the highway. My other job was to chop wood and guard the hunting camp from predators between hunts.
As experiences go, it seemed rather authentic. And it was damned sure solitary. Jake the dog, my only companion in camp, wasn't much of a conversationalist. So whenever a new group of hunters and guides would show up, my mouth seemed to take on a life of its own, jawboning the newcomers before they even had a chance to dismount. And my ride back to civilization was such a long, slow plod that I would occasionally fall asleep in the saddle, only to wake up when my horse stopped at a gate that needed opening. You don't get that kind of alone at the Stampede. It's noisy, messy and crowded. The midway might be a good time, but it's no place to learn about being a cowboy.
To discover the practical foundations of the cowboy, start with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales (Library of America reprint in two volumes, 1985). A series of five books written between 1823 and 1842 and set in pre-American Revolution New York and Ontario -- the most famous of which is probably The Last of the Mohicans -- may seem a strange beginning. But Cooper's Natty Bumppo --a.k.a. Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Deerslayer or any of the other names that Cooper called his most famous character, consistency not being his strong point -- is the unquestioned archetype for the traditional cowboy hero.
Bumppo's home is the wilderness, and he's uneasy when walls and rules get too close. His actions are guided by a personal code, what Cooper mysteriously calls "the white man's gifts," that covers honour and bravery and respect for nature.
Cooper's hero also forsakes conventional female companionship, preferring the company of his Mohican sidekick Chingachgook and his never-miss rifle Killdeer. In The Deerslayer he is aghast at the advances of the beautiful Judith Hutter: "What you've offered can never come to pass!" he says when she suggests they hook up.
The Leatherstocking Tales were the first recognizably distinct works of American fiction, and they gave birth to the cowboy figure of Hollywood movies and pulp novels. To find this mythology in full bloom, Jack Schaefer's novel Shane (Houghton Mifflin, 1949) and the faithful 1953 movie version are as good a place as any to look.
Often listed as young adult fiction because of the spare writing style, Schaefer's Shane was once voted the best Western novel of all time. Again, our hero is mysterious in name and origin. He appears from the mountains, lives by a code that only he understands and departs when civilization threatens to swallow him up.
After cleaning up a Wyoming town, Shane refuses to indulge in any softer pleasures. The famous final words that echo across the valley at the end of the movie as the boy narrator shouts to Shane, "My mother wants you . . . wants you . . . wants you," serve as another reminder of the sacrifices required to live the cowboy life.
There's no shortage of works on the tail end of the myth, where the traditional cowboy is finally crushed by society's advance. Annie Proulx's recent collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Scribner, 1999) features 11 short stories set largely in the 20th century with the solitary pursuit of the modern cowboy serving as its unifying theme. "There was nobody in his life to slow him down with love," she writes of an itinerant rodeo rider in The Mud Below.
The best-known of the stories is a certain Oscar-winning tale about the cowboy love that dares not speak its name. But even in Brokeback Mountain, it is the sacrifice and solitude of cowboy life that drives the story. The simultaneous attraction and loneliness of working with livestock in the hills pushes Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist into their unconventional relationship. And even as Brokeback Mountain provocatively pricks traditional cowboy mythology, it is still remarkable for its close-eyed observations on life in the saddle.
Proulx makes it even plainer than Cooper or Schaefer how important desolation in both landscape and personal space is to the Western myth. Being an authentic cowboy is a choice that entails living outside conventional boundaries and pleasures. The poverty -- and sex -- in her stories is rough and grinding. Emotional connections few and far between. Freedom has its price.
And perhaps that's why the cowboy myth has always shone brightest on the screen. It's the kind of life that can seem quite appealing for two hours at a time. Or maybe even 10 days a year. Stretch it out over a lifetime, however, and it gets powerful lonely.
Peter Shawn Taylor is a freelance writer based in Waterloo, Ont. If he had to, he could probably find his big belt buckle.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060715.BKREAD15/TPStory/Entertainment
