It's an image that suggests ruggedness and wildness, cockiness, a
sense of fun and an intimate power over animals. Until the summer
of l993, however, I did not associate this image with a fine-tuned
intelligence. I did not expect a cowboy to be articulate and well
read, I expected him to possess a crude, right-wing dumbness, so that
for a woman with a certain education, a romance with a cowboy would
be a misalliance.
I was intrigued, then, when I heard about cowboy poets. I was writing
and producing a Western t.v. series, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, when
one of the wranglers on the set showed me a poster for a cowboy poetry
and music festival in Elko, Nevada.
The wrangler, Earl McCoy, had puffy jowls and a stomach that pooched
out over his belt, but the cowboys on the poster were lean, muscular,
perched on a fence rail with their Stetsons tipped down over their
foreheads.
"These men write poetry?"
"Hell, yes," Earl said. "Good poetry."
"Where is Elko, Nevada?"
"About four hours East of Reno." That was four hours East
of not much.
He gave me tapes of them singing and reciting their poems, and after
listening to them, I knew I had to go. I talked my friend, Jeanne
Davis, a colleague on the show, into coming with me, and arranged
to write an article about the festival so that if it proved a disaster,
I wouldn't be wasting a weekend. The other producers on the show joked
that we were going to Elko "to get laid by cowboys," and,
of course, there was a seed of truth in this. I had an instinct something
might happen in Elko but I did not put much stock in that instinct;
I didn't pack any form of birth control.
Two weeks later, I stood in my closet trying to decide what to wear.
Jeans, obviously, but I had Calvin Klein jeans, I would look like
a city slicker but that was unavoidable. I washed my hair and let
it dry, fluffing it with my fingers. My hair was curly and when I
was younger I'd spent painful hours trying to tame it, straighten
it with crimpers, blow it dry or wind it on giant rollers with Dippity
Do, but now I left it natural. Everything in my grooming routine was
honed for efficiency and speed. I wore no makeup. I smoothed on skin
moisturizer with sun block, pulled on the jeans and a teal-colored
shirt from Banana Republic and Italian shoe-boots and I was ready
to walk out the door.
I drove my daughter, Sophie, who was eleven, and my son, Gabriel,
ten, to their dad's house, opening the back of the station wagon to
let Sophie out with her cat, Butterball. She was wearing a brown tank
top, brown corduroy jeans and brown nail polish with gold polka dots.
"Why can't I come with you?" she said.
"You know why. It's your weekend with Dad."
"If it's all right with him, can I come?"
I hugged her. "I'll be back Sunday night. I'll bring you a present."
Gabriel was dragging his skateboard out of the car, along with a
bag full of CD's. "Can I have money instead of a present?"
"No."
"I'll take a present then." He leaned forward and kissed
my cheek. "Love you, Mom."
"I love you too." I watched them walk to the door and waited
for it to open. "Don't forget your reading!"
When I pulled up to Jeanne's house, she was waiting on the sidewalk
with two large tote bags. She'd once been a flight attendant and I
knew that in those tote bags was everything we could possibly need:
a travel alarm clock, three boxes of bandaids in three different sizes,
containers of healthy Sun chips, regular and barbecue flavor, herb
tea bags and an electric coil to heat water for the tea.
"Why are we doing this?" I said.
"It'll be a hoot," she said, buckling her seat belt.
"We have no idea what we're going to find."
She switched on the radio to KZLA, the country music station, to
set the mood. "Earl goes every year."
"Earl's strange."
Heads turned as we walked through the airport in Nevada to pick up
our rental car. Jeanne was five feet ten, with that long, dazzling,
bright blonde hair you find on women in Sweden, and I was equally
tall with dark hair and neither of us wore a bra. We did not look
as if we came from Elko.
We drove across town, passing the Red Lion Motel which had two giant
plastic steer in front, the Commercial hotel which had a white king
polar bear rearing up over the door, numerous feed stores and Brenda's
Wedding Chapel, where you could get married with no blood test and
no waiting.
When we arrived at the Elko Fair Grounds, however, we saw that the
bleachers we'd expected to be filled with cowboys were packed instead
with families--tourists wearing Bermuda shorts and carrying Big Gulp
drinks. On the stage, a group of geriatric cowboys were singing "Tumbling
Tumbleweed," and one broke into yodeling. Jeanne looked at me.
"We're having an American experience."
We left the stands and walked through an exhibit shed where people
were selling cowboy crafts and gear. We bought tooled leather belts
and silver necklaces, looked at hand-made boots and saddles and were
nearing the end of the exhibit when a man called to me.
"New York Times," he said, reading the badge I'd pinned
on my shirt. "What's that?"
I turned and looked at him. He was wearing a tan Stetson and dark
aviator glasses, and had brown curly hair that tumbled to his collar.
Did he really not know?
"A newspaper."
"Oh. I thought it was a mathematical problem."
I looked at Jeanne and rolled my eyes.
"What do you do for the newspaper?" he asked.
"I write."
He nodded. "Figures. You've got those beady eyes."
"Beady?"
Jeanne said, "Don't you mean, piercing?"
"That, too," he said.
I turned away, saying softly to Jeanne, "This guy's a jerk."
She took a closer look. "I don't know. He may be deep."
"Would you like to see my work?" he asked. He showed us
bridles and reins he had made out of rawhide, which he cured himself
and braided into intricate designs. To my uneducated eye, they looked
like all the other rawhide items I'd seen on display, but one of his
pieces caught my attention. It was a comical piece, which I would
later come to look on as conceptual art: a fly swatter, with three
shocks of hair from the tails of three different horses--sorrel, palomino,
black--fastened together with rawhide knots and beautiful pieces of
old reata. "Works good, too," he said, flicking it against
a post, making a sharp, swishing sound.
He handed it to me, and I fingered the fine woven knots encircling
the switches of hair. "How much is it?" He thought a moment.
"Two hundred dollars." I smiled and put it back on the table.
"There's two weeks' worth of work in that," he said.
"I'm sure that's true."
"It's fabulous," Jeanne said.
"You ladies stop back again. My name's Zack."
"I'm Sara. This is Jeanne."
He touched the brim of his hat to us, and we walked on.
###
The next morning, Jeanne and I tried to change our plane reservations
to leave Elko early, but that was not possible. We decided to skip
the fiddling workshop, the cowboy a cappella singing and the open
mike poetry session, and drove up into the Ruby Mountains to hike.
The mountains were covered with snow fields, although it was June.
Water was running everywhere, and we could hear it purling over rocks,
squirting down creeks and shooting into waterfalls that flowed right
over the hiking trails.
We stopped to eat at the Pine Lodge, where, beside us in our booth,
was a diorama: a stuffed mountain lion crouched on a rock, poised
to pounce on a stuffed white-tail deer. We ordered the Sunday buffet--chicken
fried steak, barbecue beans, hash browns, ham, bacon and biscuits
with sausage gravy--an orgy of grease that put us in a state of shock.
By the time we returned to the Elko Fair Grounds, the moon was rising
and the mood had changed. There were many more cowboys now--"buckaroos"
from Nevada and Idaho--and they did not look like the cowboys on our
set. They had long, thin mustaches that stood out from their faces
and curled up in sharp, waxed points. They were wearing shocking pink
and purple scarves around their necks, tall hats with horsehair stampede
strings that dangled down their backs, and freshly ironed Wranglers
tucked into knee-high boots.
In the dance hall, the cowboy singer, Ian Tyson, was performing one
of his hits from the Sixties, "Some Day Soon." Tyson's voice--honey
golden, laced with sadness--cast a spell over the hall and people
flowed onto the dance floor to do the two-step. I was working my way
across the room when I saw Zack. Months later, he would tell me that
when he watched me coming toward him, he thought, "Trouble on
the hoof. Keep your head down, maybe she won't see you." Then
he was on his feet.
"Hey there." He pointed a finger at me.
"How're you doing?" I said.
"Oh, I'm sort of in shock.
"Why?"
He was wearing a pale blue shirt with black Western stitching and
jeans tucked into baby blue boots. "I'm not used to going anywhere
outside of Casa Grande."
"Where's that?"
"Arizona. Down South, by Mexico."
He asked me to dance. Ian Tyson was singing about the girl whose
rodeo cowboy was driving in tonight from California. Zack was not
wearing his sunglasses and as we danced, he kept his green eyes on
me, direct and unblinking. His eyes were an intense green that's rarely
seen outside the cat kingdom, and he stared longer than was socially
acceptable. I stared right back; who the hell did he think he was?
His face was attractive, though, all straight lines like the faces
in Greek statues except for a nub in the nose where it surely had
been broken. But he was a yokel, an insolent yokel. When the song
ended, I excused myself, hoping to discourage further contact, and
spent the rest of the night interviewing poets and singers, while
Jeanne, I noticed, sat with Zack on the steps outside, drinking beer
from long-necked bottles.
When I was ready to leave, I beckoned her.
"Do me a favor?" she said. "Say goodnight to Zack.
He's been asking about you. He's got quite a crush..."
"I know, I'm avoiding him. I'm sorry if you were stuck."
"No, I was having a good time talking..." Jeanne stopped.
Zack was walking toward us.
"We're just leaving," I said.
"Can I walk you to your car?"
"You don't have to. It's close."
He took hold of my arm below the shoulder. "Then come with me,
just a minute. I want to show you something."
I looked at Jeanne, who gestured with her head. "Go on. I'll
meet you at the car."
As I walked with Zack toward the craft shed, he told me he was living
in a trailer on a cutting horse ranch with his son, who was twenty.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Thirty-nine."
"Do you know how old I am?"
"No, ma'am. That's none of my business."
I laughed. "Older than you."
"You've vintaged well."
He switched on the lights in the shed and we walked back to his stall.
He picked up the fly swatter and held it out. "I want you to
have this."
"Thank you, but I couldn't accept that." I didn't want
to be indebted.
"How 'bout we trade?"
"For what?"
"Something you wrote?"
I offered to send him one of my articles, but that didn't seem a
fair trade for the fly swatter. He said he would make me a belt in
exchange. "Let me measure." He took a string of rawhide,
looped it around my waist and cut it with his knife. I wrote down
my address for him, but not my phone number. He did not have a phone,
he told me, as he walked me to the car. "I'm not rich. I drive
a '68 Chevy truck."
"That's none of my business," I said.
He laughed and put his arm around my shoulder.
We found Jeanne perched on the hood of the rental car, singing "Jingle
Jangle Jingle" with a group of men in cowboy hats. Zack began
massaging my shoulders. His fingers were unusually large, solid, strong.
"You have good hands," I said, turning my head so our eyes
met.
"Humbly speaking," he said, "I have magic hands."
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