The Way of the Cowboy

The Way of the Cowboy

Samuel Bird

For some event I can’t recall, the ranch house was full of people eating and celebrating. The laughter and talking was more than I was used to since the whole ranch was usually just occupied by myself, the foreman and his family, and a host of cattle. My isolation drove me to slip out of conversations and then the door. I hopped in an old diesel truck that was caked in mud, and headed to the old red barn. Under the brand of the ranch painted high above me, I caught the racing gelding I wanted, threw on the old roping saddle I liked best, and cinched him up. He gave me some grief, trying to move on me, but I kept my orders clear and didn’t take his sass. We rode down the fenced alleyway between the stockyards until we got to the rustic wooden gate that lay before the foothills. I tried to get him to sidepass so I could open the gate without getting off, but it was clear he didn’t want to and I hopped off all the same. We started at a walk, but between him and I, something called me on. With a gentle tap of the heel, his hooves were more than happy to bound forward and carry us increasingly forward and upward into the hills. The sky was gray and brooding for as far as I could see it, and the clouds came down to kiss the earth in fog that peppered the landscape. I usually went straight and found myself in the canyons that were all next to each other as if God scraped His great fingers across the earth. However, Something called me to the West lands of the ranch. At thirty six thousand acres, there were parts the foreman and I never got to. I pulled my reins and his head to the side as we bounded uphill. He struggled to maintain his speed and footing as I struggled to not bounce off him onto the sedimentary rocks we flew by. Sage brush and stone became a blur until we found ourselves at the top of a hill. I looked around to see the fog’s blanket cover and uncover the landscape. The small town below me was revealed as the house lights lit up the fog. It was nothing much to look at. The whole town had three hundred people, two bars, a church, and a gas station. It certainly was no bustling city, but relative to me, it symbolized something. It symbolized people. That thing that I was, but scared me most. Like any good cowboy, a series of events led me here, and they had their tragedy. I thought to my family. A few hundred miles across these mountains to the West, was my own blood. I had tried as best as a fifteen year old kid could, but I had failed to be a part of them. In fact, I was here to get away from my father and be safe. Did I have any friends from back home that wrote me letters? Not a one. I was as lonesome as I could get. The longing seemed to pull me toward the little town and its people, but something that sought to keep me safe pulled me away. I felt these two forces build in me as I considered which one to act on. “Geeeeyup!” I hollered as the heels came and my reins pulled that same horse across the hill tops and back into the wild country. 

There is some degree of inseparability from a philosopher and his philosophies. I am attempting to write a memoir of my life in terms of Esse Maxim, but it seems to take more than I can currently offer. More than just what other thinkers inspired me, I want you to see the experiences and choices that created and instantiated Esse Maxim. This could not be done without a bit of my heritage and history. In my day, there is a breakdown between shared values and experiences between generations. I was not without impact from this intergenerational loss. The degree to which I took part in heritage was just enough to learn what I needed, but never enough to have a crutch. I still had to think for myself and go about living deliberately. Still, when I consider myself, my values, and my future, I can’t seem to appropriately seperate myself from the way of the cowboy. If you may not be familiar, a cowboy is someone who cares for a herd of cattle. You may wonder why this has any more romance and mystery than a cobbler. However, it somehow managed to become something more than what it was (sorry to all you analytical philosophers). The wandering on plains, traversing mountains, fighting the elements and caring for creatures that could be foolish, made a caliber of person seldom seen among our kind. While there could certainly be wild drunks who became cowboys because society couldn’t stand them, there were also great and powerful men who had let the conquering of themselves spill out into them conquering the world around them. There was great humility in their lifestyle as the best of them I knew, subsisted on wages well below poverty. It wasn’t dollars or prestige they sought, but to live full, free, and for their families. There are limits and caveats to what makes sense to honor in your heritage, but I take honor and reverence that the iron in my blood was forged under the sun. Circumstance limited how much I could access this part of me, but I found it of enough consequence to be worth sharing with you.  

If you tell me the degree of honor a society possesses, I can tell you the health and the vitality of that society. I define honor as consistency playing the character you write yourself to be. I also add that honor is knowing that you are bringing about value in the world and being deliberate about it regardless of the circumstance. When a cowboy is in a field and miles from the next soul, he could scream out obscenities, curses, or flail around like a madman. Outside of the immediate perception of others, who is he? How does the cowboy stand, express, and execute on his values hence impacting the world at large. You can attempt to remove morality and ego, but the reward to the self for being good as that the self can know that it is. This ranch foreman I worked with, there came a time that I had destroyed one of his tools due to negligence on my part. He had rebuked me for the behavior that had caused it before and I knew him finding it out would cause a great deal of conflict in one of the only faces I would see for the next few months. Weighing my options, I recalled what it was that I was becoming. This new thing I was, what would it do? It had become a part of me to do what I was about to do. I knew I could hide it and then tell him he had it last when he became angry. However, my self’s relationship with value didn’t allow this. I went to him and told him what I had done. As it turned out, my willingness to take my lashings was no hollow intent as he let me know his anger and expected his repayment. However, when he chose the context of our relationship and the role I played in affecting him, his family, and the ranch. He would always recall what I had done. A cowboy has honor as a desire to bring value into the world. 

Cowboys spend their days outside in the rain, sun, and snow. The world around them is always trying to burn them, freeze them, or starve them. That is not even to include the perils of trailing cows next to cliffs, the pouncing of a puma or bear, or the betraying violence of a bull or mare. Staying alive in the places they go is its own feet, but that is not even to speak of doing all the things they are trying to do. He sees a line in the ground and wishes to make a fence. He sees a trail and seeks to push his heard down it. He sees a rabbit or snake and hopes to catch it for dinner. His own life's perpetuance is at stake, but he rises above that to also attempt to bring about his values as his vision. His answer to all the nay-saying the world hollers at him is to grit his teeth and work all the harder. Fortitude is his answer to making the world as he sees it. This grit is the pinnacle of the fighting fate I have referred to prior. When his will is avalanched by the forces in the world outside of himself, his loss and failure is only an occasion for some cussing and a chance to try it again. I remember boiling heat on sunbaked clay, trying to dig down to use an old, rotten log as a fencepost to hold up a few rusty strings of barbed wire. Sweat dripped from my brow, blood from my fingers, but not a tear from my eye. I didn’t allow my circumstance, nor myself, to get in my way. Later that same year, a freakishly early snow storm led us to try to bring the cows down to the valley in the snow. Along canyon walls we rode as the snow whipped us in the face. As we traversed the thin canyon cliff, the colt I was training slipped and began to fall. I jumped off, knowing I couldn’t help, and watched as he fell. He rolled one time, another, and I think one more, before landing on his feet at the bottom of the ravine. He was shaking so badly, the snow had nowhere to stick. I climbed down, gave him a pat and an “ataboy,” before we headed on our way. We did what we did despite all efforts of fate to stop us. A cowboy has grit as the follow through of bringing value into the world. 

Why have you read up until this point, and what is this feeling you feel? Something about the mythos you are hearing is enlivening something within you. Perhaps a silhouette of a lone cowboy in a field, riding his horse, comes to mind. Perhaps the sound of an old acoustic guitar being plucked or the whistling of one of those old songs I’d whistle on the trail. The essence of a bunch of wild, uneducated, and rough people raising cattle for food becomes more than just the painful necessity it starts as. Something about the myth becomes beautiful. A beautiful story is paramount in making sense of my life. When romantic prospects were few and my wild ways made it hard to keep them around, I was just pathetic, I was a lone cowboy. Of course she wouldn’t understand me, only the mountains, fields, and open sky could do that. This story was a way to respond to the desperation we meet life in and to find it something valuable. I think often if it was ever a mistake I left the ranch and am working now to find my way back to this part of me I left there. As a philosopher, I am stuck not just being, but being aware of being. I have models and theories for every moment I experience, choice I make, or emotion I feel. This part of me allows me to bring these ideas to paper and to step into your mind to infer their response. However, there comes a point that my doing of being a human is eclipsed by that being. At some point, I don’t expect the snake to write poetry or the bird to design buildings. I expect them to slither, hiss, sing, and fly. To me, the part that longs to be a cowboy, is that same part that seeks not to think what I am, but to be it.