From the Land of Cowboys to You; or, The Modern Buckaroo’s Guide to the World
Cowboy boot hunting is a lot perseverance and a little luck. You have to have boot-mind. You have to have patience. You have to have a high degree of tolerance for cheap-ass mall-rat boots. You have to have a discerning eye, and the feel for boots within your fingers.
Some of my jillion boots were picked up in […]
To cowboy up means to get going. Get the job done. Get into gear. No matter what.
Sundown Jim, by Ernest Haycox
Cover illustration by Jerry Allison
Pocket Books, 1958
from the collection of es
A good friend of ours has cancer–the late-stage, not-very-posterchild-like kind–and he and his wife have to cowboy up on a daily basis. I can’t always […]
The Grand Canyon has been ruined by T-shirts, mugs, and calendars. It’s easy to dismiss the vast chasm if your eyes have been tricked by two-dimensional snapshots. But even the best photographer can’t capture that scariness that is the presence of the West. It’s big, and if you stir from the confines of the concrete […]
All it takes is some spaghetti western soundtrack woo-woo, and my eyes refocus to squint into the distance–which invariably becomes dry, dusty, prone to wavy mirages that look like tall trees or figures, and super far away. With mountains or buttes. Way off there. Way, way, way…way far away.
Whatever I’m dealing with at the moment shrinks to the […]
A recent sojourn to Idaho revealed another essential cowboy truth–cowboys still exist. You just have to know where to look for them.
Oliver’s in Pocatello: Deep into a thick omelette and excellent coffee. Along the counter are seated several men, all with sneakers and jeans and polo shirts or button-down shirts and baseball caps (the new […]
In honor of Day of the American Cowboy, I hereby proclaim New York City the official Urban Cowboy State. Someday to join the real Cowboy State, Wyoming, and receive a parade of cowboys up Madison Avenue (fuggeddabout astronauts and sport teams). This day should be for cowboys of all creeds, genders, ethnicities, sexual persuasions, or […]
A patriotic theme for a patriotic day—Happy July 4th!
On July 1, 1898, Roosevelt was cursing the fact that he had to dismount from his steed, Little Texas, to lead the cavalry charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in Cuba. But he knew that if he could get up to the top and strike […]
Used to prop up many a political point, the Cowboy Hero risks being seen only as a monolithic feature on the American landscape, like those iconic buttes and pinnacles in Monument Valley.* Connoisseurs of westerns know that the Cowboy Hero splinters into impressively variegated types, such as bounty hunters, cowboys (from Jack Elam to Gene […]
Historical museums take pride in displaying the good, the bad, and the ugly of Americana (cue spaghetti western soundtrack). They collect and preserve objects that are sometimes significant, but are usually the kinds of things found in the back of someone’s untidy closet. I admit that I was a voyeur at first, drawn to their quirks like a […]
Having a Cowboy Moment on the eastern shore of Long Island is impossible. It took me a full two days plus a conversation with an astute writer friend to realize that yes, indeed, it had happened.
A Cowboy Moment doesn’t need the sound of spurs jingling or the
wa-wa-waaaa spaghetti western soundtrack. With honed perception, a Cowboy Moment […]