14
Wednesday, July 27, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
You can’t see ’em
from the road
Saturday, July 23, marked
the National Day of the
Cowboy. I was unaware there
was such a thing. Most cow-
boys (we call them buckaroos
where I come from) probably
don’t want their own national
day — it’s a touch immodest
— but there it is anyway, and
like a bad meal, sometimes
you just have to eat it and say
thank you.
That word, buckaroo, is of
course a derivation from the
Spanish vaquero, and it has
mostly to do with preserving
some of the Californio tradi-
tions, a quieter way of work-
ing cattle, which is essential
on the big deserts where there
are no corrals or fences, and
4,000 calves still need to
be gathered and sorted and
branded. It has to do with
horsemanship, and tack, and
of course a much-better-look-
ing hat.
For me it came naturally.
I was born into it. My grand-
father was a working cowboy
until the day he died. That’s
something like 75 years in the
saddle, even after subtracting
his time in the Marine Corps
during World War II. When I
was born he told my mother,
“Well, he’ll make a cowboy
for sure, he’s all shoulders
and no butt.” That might be
apocryphal, but it still makes
me smile.
Naturally, as I came up, he
tried to warn me off of bucka-
rooing. He promised I would
end up broke, and broken,
with nothing to show for the
effort but a collection of old
tack and memories nobody
cares much about.
He was right and wrong.
The pay is terrible. The hours
endless. The work largely
thankless, and hazing cattle
out of the rocks can be quite
dangerous. But there are
some jobs you don’t do for
money or praise. There were
days horseback out on the
desert so good, so perfect, I
wouldn’t sell the memories
for Bill Gates’ money.
My own circle started on
the 10X Ranch in Arizona,
east of Flagstaff, a grand
swath of land stretching from
the Mogollon Rim to the
edge of Meteor Crater. We
ran a Hereford-Brahma cross
for a rugged cow that could
survive tough conditions and
still pack on weight.
We rode every day. The
cowboss on that outfit was
from Newcastle, Wyoming, a
cranky, wiry, wind-wrecked
puncher assembled from
juniper and rawhide who
could C-section a struggling
cow in a blizzard blowing
sideways. He was absolutely
humorless, unless it involved
a joke about his mother-in-
law, whom he regarded with-
out fondness.
From Arizona I circled
north into northeastern
California and Nevada, my
home country, and on those
ranches we had a lot of
ground to cover. Some days
we would trot out 10 miles
just to get to the cows and
start working. I tell people
that and they roll their eyes,
assuming I’m exaggerating.
I’m not. It was true horse-
back work, and we took a lot
of pride in our inheritance,
some measure of the lore
handed down by guys like
Teddy Blue Abbott, and Will
James, who wrote so well
about the life. In many ways,
working on those big out-
fits was like living in a time
machine.
Somewhere out there,
in the heat and the dust and
the biting flies, or riding in
the deep snow and the cold
at night, when your mus-
tache turns into ice and your
mecate is frozen stiff, you
have a chance to learn some-
thing about your own char-
acter, that place where your
ambitions run straight into
your limitations. That’s what
I loved about the work. Those
kinds of lessons can only be
won in hard places, and mov-
ing 300 cows through the
desert, alone in a thunder-
storm, can be a hard place.
I don’t know if it will last.
True riding outfits are harder
to find each year, and by that
I mean a traditional horse-
back ranch, where cowboys
still hold fast to the notion
that if it can’t be done from
horseback it isn’t worth
doing. An awful lot of people
are mad at ranchers and what
they call “welfare ranching,”
and would like nothing more
than to see ranchers and their
crew of buckaroos thrown
off the desert for good. In the
end, I suppose they will prob-
ably win out. That’s the way
of the world.
But folks like that will
never see the country the
way I‘ve seen it, and if they
win out they will have killed
a dream that fueled a good,
productive culture that can-
not be recreated. It’s a mod-
est way of life, for certain,
and it’s not for everyone, but
the romance of riding for a
brand in unsettled country
photo provided
still stokes the passions of
young men and women in the
rural West, who want to carry
forward that inheritance with
honor.
For now, they’re still out
there, those hardy bucka-
roos, and now they have
their own national day. I sin-
cerely doubt they know it,
because they’re out riding
this very minute, on places
like the ZX down in Paisley,
or the Spanish Ranch out of
Tuscarora, or the Winecup,
or the mighty IL. They’re
still out there, doing it the
old way — no four-wheelers
or helicopters, just wiry kids
with a lot of heart and heads
full of desert dreams. They’re
still out there, those real cow-
boys, but as Chris LeDoux
sang to us, “You just can’t
see ’em from the road.”