I've always been drawn to the myth of the cowboy. A lot of it has to do with horses. My mom loved horses and grew up on a horse ranch in Loveland, Colorado. Her dad was an Ob doctor, but also loved horses - a sort of cowboy/doctor. When we say "cowboy", I think what we mean in essence is "horseman" for its not the cows that make a cowboy, its the saddled animal underneath his seat.
When I was framing all the time, I thought of that as being a kind of cowboy. We worked outside in all kinds of weather and there's a requisite skill set that goes along with walking the plate line, nailing off trusses and there's this cocky feeling you get with your hammer hanging by your side, a certain tilt of the hip and a fast draw. Not to mention the frequent use of a gun. Nail gun, but nevertheless. I used to sing or hum that Willie Nelson tune, My heroes have always been cowboys, but I substituted "framers". A special breed of cowboy. The complete opposite of a "settler" who worked at one office building all his life. Like the cowboy, we moved around, wherever the work called us. We didn't work at offices, we worked on offices. A cowboy is always moving on; a framer leaves something behind - an unfinished something, it's true. An open and open-end something that later becomes a finished structure. And I noticed when I was working in ND, that it felt good getting back to framing. A lot of guys would grumble and gripe about not being rich and having to come out and work and I'd always tell 'em. I like it. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't like it. I like creating structure. Permanent, sound, structure. And when I finish, I can stand back and say to myself, "there it is, well done." And it's really, REALLY nice, to have others around me, like my boss and his customers, heap praises upon my ears. I like that. I don't think I'd get quite as much of that truck driving. Nobody applauds at the end of the day when you get your load in. There's nothing to see. Thus in retrospect, the way things turned out, I'm glad ole Marvin led me on a wild cattle drive to the heartland of the northern plains. But at the time I was stuck up on that pass? Not so much. At the time, I was thinking more dark thoughts about cowboys. For there was another sense of the word I'd grown up with - "Jes' cowboy 'er on in there" - an expression that denotes "get 'er done". Often a fast and dirty repair but considering the usual conditions of cowboying - working with the tools at hand, whatever they be, and accomplishing the task, you see there's a certain value there. The value of Focusing on Function. Another thing they are called is Baling Wire Fixes. They don't make baling wire anymore, and I miss it. Very ductile yet very strong. I use rebar tie wire now, and it's ok, but just not as strong as good ole american baling wire. I should market the idea and sell it in the same aisle with duct tape. If you wrap your baling wire fixes with duct tape, they don't rust and could last a long, long time. White trash millionaires strike again. (Tell ME about beer can shims, he mutters...) But Marvin just took this to an insane limit. He had (has) the lifetime of experiences which give him the confidence that it worked before... and a bunch of stories about the times they didn't. See, I think that's what I discovered about cowboys as I got to know Marvin. Herding cows is boring and needs a good story to spice things up, and in order to have a good story, things have to go a bit awry. And That, is the cowboy song. Right there. Purposefully creative self-destruction, just so you you can howl to the sky, "why me, why me". It's a bit scarier though when that attitude is behind the wheel of a big rig and my trepidations were beginning to mount when I saw the extent of Marvin's operation. My dad's old roomate, was living in a double wide in Kamiah, ID, married to a mormon woman and somehow with a whole extended family of failed earlier pairings, was the center of help to a vast network of step kids, ne-er do wells and indians. His tool set (I'd heard it was a great mechanic) was a cardboard box in the back of his sedan. His plan for getting me to the jobsite - some 900 or so miles away still - was to hook me up to the back of his empty water tank, and have me drive this bastard triple across the Idaho mountains and through the entire state of montana. On the weigh scale, the RV (full of my tools, btw) was just over 11,000 and any recent trucking school graduate (ahem) could tell you that you most carefully put the heavier load in front and I don't know how much his empty tank weighed, but I was nervous about it. As long as there weren't any winds across the Northern plains in the spring, we'd be fine, I'm sure. What do I know? I've been a cowboy, but a California cowboy isn't quite the same. Ain't had our boots on the ground long in the new situation. I so I mostly followed Marvin's lead. heck this was my new boss. But I was beginning to wonder. The incident which convinced me that it was not going to happen, my precious RV and livelihood hitched to the back of his, was when after I got done bolting on a flat bed that some guy gave him for free (and it wasn't worth that, imo - rotten, bent and rusted - except of course, he wasn't paying me anything either so I guess it was a good deal) he insisted on driving with a borrowed welder without chaining it to the bed properly. Without chaining it at all, in fact. Just laying there, flat with a chain draped over the top and a bunch of tires heaped around it. I'd tried twice to convince him that we oughta chain the thing up. I mean, we had the holes for the chains to go through the flat -bed - the stake holes out at the edges - right there, the logging chain, right there. I'd done this countless times with my old boss up in the woods, in our log harvesting days. But he insisted that we were just going a short ways, and there was no need. I figured maybe it was some kind of test over my pickiness so I heeded my new boss, and got behind the wheel of his old beatup dodge (cummins, so deep down good, but really old and thrashed) and very carefully drove those oxy acytelene cylinders right across town, and down main street where Marv hopped in and got a few things, and then back across the top of town, through a school zone with a marshal parked right across the street eyeballing everybody who was passing by as the kids were let out of school. At the time, I didn't think that much about it, but after we'd unloaded some tires at some junkyard, Marvin took the wheel and very soon after, a corner. And whether he wasn't being as careful or just too fast or we'd unloaded the tires that were holding the welding bottles, whatever reason, off those bottles clattered onto the road, throwing up sparks. I had visions in my head of the valves snapping off and that mixture of explosive gas and oxygen ending up under the gas tank of a nearby parked car. Fortunately it just broke off the regulator from the valve and the valve was fine. And that's when my mind flashed back to going through a school zone, and my brand new license in my pocket which I could lose for the slightest infraction... suffice it to say, that it was at the moment, that I decided I was not hooking up to Marvin's wagon. And I decided that perhaps cowboys smell better on billboards than they do in real life. Marvin is only half the story. There was another cowboy involved in the picture - a guy with a white hat, dressed in uniform almost as fancy as hop-along cassady's with his cool gun in his hip and his glint in his eye. Deputy glen, we'll call him. Mty wife's brother, back in Missoula. But I don't want to go into all that. Already wrote most of that up over on the lilasquad and I hate repeating. Suffice it to say there are two sides to the cowboy way, and it took both of them to get me stuck on that ridge. Where I'd left my lights on while contemplating cowboys and indians, east and west. ZAMM is journey from the hearland to the west. A road story. Lila companioned that by going east, by boat and thus the whole story is told. >From west to east, from bike to boat. And what is a boat but an RV that floats? Or to put it another way, what is an RV but a boat that runs on dry land? What I was contemplating on that ridge, is that you find a sort of antipathy for the extremes in those books. On the west coast, a "fuck you" disinterest that sheens every face is described at the end of the journey, in the farthest west. In Lila the New Yorker is described differently, its a flicker of sneer and cynicism "I won't be taken in by you" which distances one heart from another. I think I see what he meant, but I have a different perspective having grown up out here on the edge. Out here, there's a sort of self-aggrandizement that is bequeathed by the love of Cali for her animals. "I am the one!" seems to be the undercurrent. Eureka, I have found it, is what made this place from the beginning. The easterner is more steeped in a classic and static social pattern that recognizes almost immediately in every transaction "you ain't the one." When they meet in the middle, you get some real crazy misunderstandings. But in the middle, in the heartland, what I found mostly in the faces of the people is openess. The land is open, so are its people. To an extent. Nothing beats a farmer for conservatism when it comes to new ideas. But there is an openess that is willing to listen. At least, that's what I found. But what finally got me down off that divide, was not AAA road service (they put me on hold forever) was not some cowboy/macgyver fix. Nor pleading for the tender mercies of busy truck drivers, it was angelic help in the form of southern hospitality and friendliness. My favorite things in the world. Tourists from Georgia, stopped at the rest area to photograph something they rarely saw back home - the snow. With a brand NEW cummins turbo-diesel and big battery under the hood. Jumped me right up and down that mountain, and on into the Walmart parking lot in Bozeman, where I lived for about a week. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
