DESPITE THE POPULARITY OF THE BITTERSWEET COWBOYS, HIGH school felt rather like a colonoscopy—a necessary though barbaric experience that doesn’t quite seem to make sense. I graduated high school with admonitions never to set foot there again from teachers, staff, and my associate principal, who, in a moment that I thought painted a particularly ungenerous portrait of the odious little Napoleon, said as he handed me my diploma with a mean, tight smile, “Didn’t think you were going to make it.”
Before my time with Outward Bound, I headed out west to seek my fortune. I worked at a ranch in Colorado with a group of degenerates like myself. I had dreamed—abstractly—of living the open-range life personified by the Lonesome Dove novels of Larry McMurtry. I also blame Steinbeck, whose books often portrayed the down-and-out as these noble types, who by dint of circumstance may have been simple laborers or farmhands but possessed some inherent goodness or wisdom. I bought into that idea entirely, and wanted to live a life of hard work and sun, work my body into a lean whip instead of going to college to become some soft-handed peely-wally aesthete.
The official cowboys on the ranch I ended up spending a few months working for actually carried guns—though they were typically automatic pistols tucked in the waistband of their jeans rather than old Colt revolvers—but I was not allowed to participate in any fundamental way in their daily activities. I was, instead, part of the maintenance crew.
This was before the internet, and I had gotten the job by sending away for tourism catalogs, ranching newsletters, livestock guides, anything that might have the address of ranches out west. I applied to work at ranches in Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. I was eighteen, and my previous work experience was, I thought, decent curriculum vitae for working with cattle. I had worked in orchards, as a dishwasher, as part of a landscaping crew. I had what I considered a bona fide resume of the lumpenproletariat.
I desperately wanted to be a ranch hand. In fact, I had some experience with horses, as my family had owned a few when I was kid. When I was still in elementary school, we kept a pony named Jewel in the lopsided shack out back.
Jewel was bombproof. She could jump, though not very high; she could ride Western, English, pull a cart, a sleigh. She didn’t spook. She was a fat little sausage of a pony, part Shetland, and mostly white with a faint pattern of little gray highlights. She was a hand-me-down from my sister, who rode hunter ponies competitively growing up. My sister was Vermont’s state champion in equestrian events before she was even in junior high. I got Jewel for my very own when Kirsten moved on to a larger pony, a beautiful chestnut-brown mare—a mountain and moorland New Forest pony—named Green Mountain Honeysuckle. We called her Honey.
Unlike my sister, I was not a competitive rider. Or I should say that I competed, but was not competitive. In the standard events I entered, there were six kids from my region. All of us showed up early in the mornings to fairgrounds and horse corrals across the state, walking and trotting and cantering at the will of the judges who assessed our technique, form, and gait. I got sixth place—last—almost every time. First place was a large blue ribbon, second a red, third a yellow, and so on. Sixth was a green. My room was positively wallpapered with green ribbons, a verdant meadow of mediocrity. My sister’s room was like a blue ocean.
There was one event Jewel and I excelled in: the “trail ride.” You had to maneuver your pony through an obstacle course of sorts, stepping over hay bales, delivering a letter to a mailbox by riding close enough to lean down out of the saddle. We won first, and often, in that particular event (we fared better in the costume event as well—Jewel as Silver, me the Lone Ranger). We did well in trail riding because that’s how we spent our time together. My father built a corral for my sister, who would practice jumping with Honey. But I had little desire, skill, or patience for riding in circles around the ring. Instead, Jewel and I would plod gamely around the fields and forests along Leicester Hollow, stopping to eat fresh green grass. We’d ride through dark pine forests, dripping water wetting my back as I ducked under rain-soaked boughs. We trotted up and down logging roads, Jewel’s big steady hooves clip-clopping all the while.
Just as kids today seem to have forgone the childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, so too have they moved on from cowboy fantasies. I was part of the last generation of children who imagined themselves as lone, dusty riders of the pioneering trail. Raised on Little House on the Prairie and reruns of Bonanza
I was drawn to the image of the cowboy, slouched in the saddle, staring out over a hard-baked desert plain. The reality, of course, was much different. Taking care of a horse is tough, and early morning slogs out to the paddock, with a heavy bucket of oats banging against my leg, were ammunition for plenty of whining. Plus, Jewel could be stubborn. She would sometimes just stop while we were out riding; arching her neck down, she’d crop grass, and no amount of hauling on the reins could stop her. She would eat her fill.
And so I felt—riding on my little pony, guiding her into a pond where she’d swim with me on her wide back, or galloping through a field—like I was a cowboy, that I was consistently working toward a life where “bed-roll” and “leetle doggies” would be standard phrases in my vocabulary.
Jewel and Honey were loaded into our little trailer one summer day to head down to the Addison County Field Days fairground, a sprawling complex of livestock barns, horse corrals, exhibition buildings, and bare patches of earth that held the agricultural fair. There was a horse show that day, and Jewel and I were to be in it. The sky was dark with clouds; it felt like rain.
The first event I was scheduled to be in was “show,” a kid’s version of dressage. The goal was to make horse and rider look as smart as possible. I was confident Jewel and I were about to fail miserably. I was slovenly, and Jewel, though a great little pony, was not known for her sharp looks or stately bearing. She was a hedonist who overate and looked it. She loved a good roll in the grass or mud, kicking her four legs up in the air and reducing her hair to a dirty, dusty carpet snagged with bits of straw, bur-docks, and mud. Jewel would permit us to groom her—to be rubbed vigorously with a curry comb, beribboned and glossed until she shone—but it wasn’t in her nature to be haughty. She was a grubby work pony meant for the mucky heath and boggy lands of her Shetland side.
But I was resigned to participate in the competitions. I started braiding her tail and mane with my father and mother’s help. My sister was already warming Honey up, looking quite the English lass in her blue blazer with shiny brass buttons, jodhpurs, and high, black boots. I wore my standard riding outfit of a checkered shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, and a nice, white, high-crowned cowboy hat. I finally got Jewel looking presentable and headed corral-side to watch my sister ride in the hunter pony competition. She really was a marvelous rider, balancing on the balls of her feet, heels down, as Honey leapt over jump after jump. My sister leaned out, stretching over Honey’s neck as she cantered around the ring. Horse and rider working together—horse’s ears forward and eager, rider poised and balanced—is a beautiful thing to watch. As I admired my sister riding her way to another first-place finish, I feared that Jewel and I didn’t quite cut so fetching a figure. I had a feeling we looked dumpy, silly, as we bounced along—straw-thin boy atop fat pony. Uncoordinated, slouching ruffian riding surly work horse.
But perhaps it would be my day of redemption. I walked back toward the barn where I’d left Jewel contentedly eating hay an hour or so before.
Jewel, small as she was, had plenty of room in her stall. She must’ve gotten an itch—one of those you can’t quite reach, up between the shoulder blades in the middle of the back—and decided to scratch. She dropped and rolled, no doubt loving the crispy, fresh scrub of sawdust that was heaped on the floor as she twisted and rubbed, grinding her broad white back into the earth.
There were several piles of fresh, steaming, green road apples in the stall. Jewel had rolled right over them, smooshing and painting herself with her own turds. There was now a big green stain of horse manure on her shoulders, back, and sides. She didn’t even look guilty, eyeing me afterward as she munched her hay.
Thunder grumbled as my parents and I set about furiously scrubbing her all over again. We used towels, brushes, swatches of hay—whatever we could. Not only did the green stain of manure cover her white hide, but she had embedded untold thousands of particles of sawdust in her hair, mane, eyelashes, and tail.
We did the best we could—got her looking nearly as smart as she had before she rolled, then hurried out toward the show ring, the announcer’s tinny, staticky voice announcing the lineup for my event. As he read off our names and the names of our ponies, we rode in one by one. The event was a stupid one, I thought, because all you did was file in, make a couple of circles, and then stand there, beside your pony, and get ranked on how clean and well-groomed you both were. Something in my boy’s nature rebelled against this judgment every time.
I stood holding Jewel’s reins in the center of the ring. As the thunder boomed overhead, a light rain began to fall as the judges walked officiously around me and my competitors, all of whom looked a sight better than I. My parents and sister watched from the stands, crowded with all the other families and horse people hurriedly snapping open umbrellas and donning coats.
The rain began to produce a curious effect on my little pony. Shetlands have coarse, thick hair, bred over generations to withstand the freezing wet chill of the wild and stormy north seas of Scotland’s coast. As the rain began to soak Jewel, a large, amoeba-shaped green stain began to appear. The rain’s effect on the manure, which had been ground close to the skin, was to bleed it out, make it run, and change the hue from the brownish, earthy olive of horse turds to a lighter, more effervescent and verdant color.
Jewel turned leprechaun-shit green as the judges eyed my pony with evident curiosity.
I looked at the ground, my face hot with shame. And my felt cowboy hat, with its high crown and sharply turned-up sides, disgorged the reservoir of water that had collected on it, spilling down in a neat little waterfall onto my muddy cowboy boots.
Jewel died a few years after that, and I never really rode horses again. But I still remember the mornings I spent with her. I would stand in her stall, warming myself by leaning my whole body into her bulk. Back then I could practically walk right underneath her without bending over. I’d hang out with her, eat the same oats she ate, right from her bucket. On cold mornings she’d bow her head, closing her eyes, and I’d stand directly in front of her, with her big long forehead against my chest, warming my frosty hands in the hollow crook of her throat.
Of the dozens of ranches I applied to, only one offered me a job. Horton’s Ranch, a tourist destination dude ranch, in the high country around Gunnison and Crested Butte, called me and offered me a job as a bike mechanic. But only if I could repair bikes. The conversation is one that would be echoed throughout my life as I gained access to jobs I was completely unqualified for through the delicate and pervasive use of outright lying.
“Can you work in our trail bike repair shop, helping ranch guests with their bike rentals and ensuring the bikes are in good condition?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you know how to repair bikes?”
“Absolutely.”
I had no more idea how to repair a bike than perform triple bypass surgery. But they offered me the job, and off I drove in Mr. Basic, my little car so named because other than the engine and steering wheel, the car offered little in terms of amenities. My thought was that I would start out repairing bikes, and once I was entrenched in the organization, I would transfer to working with the horses, buy boots and hat and gun, and live out my cowboy dream. The entire issue of actually knowing how to fix bikes would be solved on the job, I decided. Actual preparation would be far too time consuming.
When I arrived, it became abundantly clear that I was not going to fix bikes. Whether they saw through my lies, or decided that my resume suited me better for less sophisticated labor, I was assigned to maintenance.
I pulled into the ranch parking lot after a few days of endless driving, Mountain Dew, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made on the dashboard of Mr. Basic, and turned off the engine. I got out and stretched, long and languorously, looking around at the ranch. I saw a bunkhouse in the paddock with the horses. I could hear the lowing of cattle, and saw the lean figures of men in cowboy hats over by a horse barn. Scrubby, sage-covered mountains rose all around me.
A large guy in his twenties approached me from what looked like the main building of Horton’s Ranch, enclosing the general store and a restaurant. He wore a beaten, dusty, leather cowboy hat. It looked authentic. He was obviously working on a large wedge of chaw, and spit accurately and professionally into the dust of the parking lot, never taking his eyes off me. I introduced myself, and his smile seemed friendly enough.
“Y’allwunt sumptin’ ta et?” he said.
I am from New England, and though Vermonters can have some pretty thick woodchuck accents, I thought that maybe this guy was foreign, from some place I only knew about in theory, like the Baltic region.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Y’allwunt sumptin’ ta et?” he said again.
Ah, right. Did I want something to eat. It turned out Jeff, who I had mistaken for a flinty-eyed, six-shooter-slingin’ ranch hand, was actually a Southern-fried frat-boy volleyball player from the backwoods of South Carolina. He was to be my counterpart on the maintenance team, and I would spend ten hours a day with him over the summer.
Jeff showed me around the ranch that first night. I met everyone except the head of the maintenance crew, Mike, who Jeff informed me was “sleeping it off.” I assumed “it” meant a hangover. I would later discover, though, that in order to be hungover you must first be sober, a condition I never observed Mike in during those three months.
Jeff was a handsome enough guy, tall and broad in the shoulders, with blue eyes and the sort of tousled surfer hair that you see on every poster in American Eagle and Billabong advertisements. He was gregarious to the extreme, popular with the other staff, and on good terms with the ladies, to whom he was courteous, innuendo-heavy, and apparently very enticing. He was also—and I say this at the risk of condoning a stereotype of southerners, which is not my intent—an abject racist. He broached the subject with me that first night as he showed me the stables where the actual cowboys kept their gear.
“Y’all got a lot of Black folks where you’re from?” he asked.
“No, I’m from Vermont. Hardly any,” I said.
He considered this. Turning to face the breadth of the ranch in the fading light of day, he seemed contemplative, as though the strange and ill-formed thoughts of others would always be a mystery to him.
“People around here say I’m a racist. But I ain’t. I just hate Blacks and Jews,” he said.
The logic of this, I must admit, rather escaped me. But, considering he was in possession of a357 magnum handgun with a six-inch barrel, which he had shown to me on the tour of the bunkhouse, I decided to say nothing and store that bit of wisdom away in my “why Jeff is crazier than a shit house rat” file drawer I had just hastily constructed in my head.
Mike, our boss, would drink a mixture of Mountain Dew and Southern Comfort all day, and dip tobacco and smoke cigarettes at the same time. The man was a walking carcinogen. He had a three-legged dog he’d found feral somewhere out in the canyons around the ranch, and named it Ol’ Stink. We sometimes knocked off early for the day, a process Mike would always initiate by looking wan and thirsty and saying, through his tobacco-stained mustache, “Well, it must be five o’clock somewhere,” and when we did, sometimes Mike treated us to Ol’ Stink’s talents.
There were a number of cabins on the property for guests, mostly Texans, to stay in. Oftentimes, due to the foundationless nature of the structures, various animals burrowed into the cool, shaded areas under the cabins and made homes there. Most frequently, these squatters were feral cats. Mike would bring Ol’ Stink out to a cabin with the feline interlopers, and he’d get the dog all riled up and ferocious, and then set him on the cats. The tripodal canine would fire off into the hole under the cabin, where the most god-awful shrieks and hisses could be heard. Mike and Jeff would chuckle and laugh as Ol’ Stink ripped apart the cats under the cabin, and I would try not to vomit and stand there feeling out of place and very dandified, like Oscar Wilde at a NASCAR race.
Ol’ Stink, it should be noted, got his name because one time a similar escapade was initiated and it turned out not to be feral cats, the males of which have a spray that can be rather skunk-like, but the actual article itself, a skunk, that Ol’ Stink ripped to bits. And it was true, though I was informed that this skunk killing had happened years prior, the smell of it clung to the little heeler, and whenever I dared to pet the googly-eyed dog, my hand would come away smelling like putrid skunk glands.
This job of maintenance involved some of the most horrific labor-intensive tasks I’ve ever had to endure. One was patching the horribly pitted and potholed little roads that ran through the ranch. Jeff would shovel smoking-hot blacktop patch from a wheelbarrow into a rut or hole in the road, and I would tamp the steaming pitch down with a seven-foot length of fence post. Oozing pitch and full of splinters, the pole weighed practically as much as I did, beanpole that I was. We never got to switch jobs, and as I stood there breathing in the toxic fumes and tamping the holy Christ out of the black and oily patches, my shoulders would burn and my lower back felt like it was full of broken glass. Due to the code of male stoicism, however, I dutifully completed my job, and at the end of the day would get ice from the mess hall and soak my blistered, aching hands.
One of the more unpleasant aspects of the job involved garbage. All the garbage we collected ended up in our own private dump on the property, a shallow hole out of sight of the paying customers. All the garbage, that is, except the food-related kitchen garbage, which Jeff and I would put in a twelve-by-twelve-foot shed so it wouldn’t be torn apart by critters. We’d empty the shed once a week. Imagine the leftover bones of fried chicken, gravy and biscuits, plate scrapings, eggshells, all the stuff of a kitchen left to rot and simmer in the high plains Colorado sun in the middle of summer for a week. When we had to haul the thirty or so bags, once a week, to the town dump, it was a brutal experience.
My first time performing this task was memorable. Jeff and I drove the dented and battered maintenance Chevy truck to the on-site gas tank, where we filled a little five-gallon container and put it in the truck bed. We then drove the bouncy and rutted road to the horse pasture, where the dump shed was. Jeff got out of the driver’s side, I the passenger, and we stood together in front of the shed.
“Go ahead and open it up. Ah’ll git the gas,” Jeff said.
I opened the latch on the shed. The smell was ripe and bad just outside with the door closed, but when I opened it, the reek was incredible. Fat, garbage-glutted flies by the hundreds flew out in a swarm and slapped clumsily trash-drunk against my face; they felt like hairy airborne grapes. The smell was overpowering, a hot wave of rot. I could see the whole mass of bags almost vibrating as they seethed and ballooned in the sweltering confines of the shed.
I lurched to the side, stumbling away, trying to draw air into my lungs that wasn’t fetid and stinking.
“Pretty goddamn awful, ain’t it?” Jeff said.
Jeff doused the pile with gasoline to help with the smell. The fumes from the gas, plus the heat of the shed and the reek of the garbage, made it hellish to hoist the wet, slimy bags from the ground and hurl them into the truck. The first one I tried was heavy with god only knows what, and as I tried to quickly lift it up and toss it into the truck, it smashed against the tailgate and splashed and spilled hundreds of trash-fed maggots all over my bare arms. I turned aside and threw up so hard I ended up dry heaving in the dust while Jeff laughed.
We rode into town to dump the trash, my head a swollen, noxious balloon from the fumes. Jeff happily drove, chewing a wedge of tobacco. I remember dully questioning, in the part of my brain that hadn’t been completely erased by inhaling fossil fuel vapors, why we used gasoline to cover up the smell of rotting garbage, as it seemed both wasteful and expensive, but mostly I hung my head out the window and tried to gulp in huge breaths of dry air.
“You gonna stay fer winter?” Jeff asked. The manager of the ranch had asked a few of us if we wanted to stay on past the tourist season. Keep the pipes from freezing, plow the driveways. Run the boiler and shovel snow. I looked over at Jeff the racist. Glanced back at the swollen bags of garbage flapping in the open bed of the truck.
“Maybe,” I lied.