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Wednesday, August 2, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Lashed to
the mast
If you were ever lucky
enough to live out on the
great sagebrush sea, like I
was during a certain van-
ishing era, you might have
enjoyed a slice of old
Americana in perhaps the
rarest of ways: trailing cattle
and working horses.
The outback was, in those
days — and still is to some
degree — a kind of under-
world, a parallel universe,
richly populated with char-
acters and stories both real
and imagined. Most folks, I
think it’s fair to say, travel
through the desert without
much pause. They might
admire some dazzling vista,
or stop at a favorite greasy
spoon, or even camp for
a night or two on a lonely
butte, but mostly they pour
coal to the fire and yawn at
the empty miles.
But there is a real-enough
daily life out there on the big
oceans of desert, and it was
out there, last Friday, that I
was blessed to spend some
time with a real American
legend, Len Babb.
I first started hearing
about Len and his mag-
nificent saddles in the long
ago, when I rode the big
empty with another leg-
endary buckaroo named
Bert Lambert. Bert was a
Mescalero Apache, up from
New Mexico, who could
rope a tick off of a dog’s
ass at a dead run, and whose
stories were so outlandish,
so outrageous, and so thor-
oughly questionable that I
actually started writing them
down. I have an entire note-
book I titled, way back then,
“The Bert Lambert Lies.”
An example from the
notebook: “Bert said today
that he once rode an ostrich
somewhere near Christmas
Valley, up in Oregon. ‘Not
much buck,’ he said, ‘But
they sure do run fast.’”
Imagine my surprise
then, all of these years later,
when I finally met Len Babb
in person, and was enjoying
a fine lunch prepared by his
wife, Gloria, and learned
that so many of Bert’s imag-
inative stories of mayhem
were actually true.
What makes Len Babb a
hall-of-famer in the bucka-
roo world is not just his
wonderful artwork, his
appreciation for fine horse-
manship, or his work for
storied ranches such as The
Padlock out in Wyoming, or
the ZX here in Oregon. It’s
the longevity of his career.
Most buckaroo careers look
more like mine did: a deep,
and altogether too short, dive
into the depths. With wages
stuck forever in the 19th
century, that’s really just a
matter of economics, and
very few ever accomplish
what Len and Gloria did, let
alone raise six children.
Sipping root beer under
the wind chimes on his
porch — Len told me he had
real beer, but we agreed the
interview might go awry — I
asked him the obvious ques-
tion: Why did you stick it
out all these years?
“Because I love it,” he
said.
Simple as that. And it
filled me with a certain hard-
edged, inexplicable personal
remorse such that I couldn’t
find a way to the next part
of the interview. Len, merci-
fully, gave me an out. Bills
are bills, he said, and then
told a joke about his friend
John Adamson, who was
being interviewed by pho-
tographers out documenting
the life. They were curi-
ous about the changes John
had seen in his decades as a
working buckaroo.
“Well,” John told them,
“the wages are the same.”
I’ve long held a thought
in my head, maybe too sim-
plistic, that as soon as they
start paving the roads, a
mostly unexplored and unfa-
miliar and wide-open chunk
of country is more or less
finished. The mystery runs
all out of it. At least for the
folks that once enjoyed it for
its demanding, and beautiful,
remoteness. That’s possi-
bly stupid, but when you’ve
lived mostly horseback on
a country, and learned its
moods that way, there is
more than a bit of remorse to
see how easy it suddenly is
to get from here to there.
PHOTO BY CRAIG RULLMAN
Len Babb in the studio where he paints and sculpts Western art.
We commiserated, just
a little bit, on how the big
ranches are breaking up and
disappearing with increasing
speed. We talked about how
the country was filling up
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— August 2, 1946 to October 9, 2016 —
Th anks for the kindness and support during Bjarne’s battle
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