Secret Life of Cowboys by Tom Groneberg

Author:Tom Groneberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

THE LAST DOG AND PONY SHOW

It is twenty below zero at noon. I leave the ranch and drive south on Highway 59, through the frozen landscape. Past the communities of Volborg and Olive. Broadus, the seat of Powder River County, offers hot coffee and communion with others. But I press on, to Alzada, the last town in Montana. Originally named Stoner and once home to bandits, Alzada is now an unlikely biker town, with a bar and a Laundromat. I feel like an outlaw, escaping the responsibilities that I leave behind on the ranch. Jennifer is in charge of the cattle and the hay and the unreliable tractor. She said, “I’ll be all right,” and we both knew it was a lie, but it gave me my escape. The highway cuts through a corner of Wyoming, and the bentonite mines begin here. Bentonite is an ingredient in cosmetics, grout, and clumping kitty litter.

I pull over from time to time and scrape portholes in the frost-covered windshield. I am dressed in my blizzard gear—wool Scotch cap with earflaps down, insulated Carhartt jacket and flannel-lined jeans, tall leather Sorel boots. I don’t look very cowboy, but my outfit keeps me going, traveling past the cattle that are freezing in place. The cold starts at their ears and their tails and their feet, then moves inward, toward their hearts. The snow drifts, piles higher than the fences, covering grain bins and houses.

I wish I could unbutton my Carhartts, the quilted shirt and union suit underneath, and strip back the wrapping of my heart. I would do it, even in this killing cold, if it let me see clearly the thing that is driving me to ride broncs when everything—the weather, the cattle, Jennifer—is telling me not to. I can’t explain why I feel compelled to do this, except to say that it is all a part of my horse story.

There is a photograph in a book at the Custer County Library, a grainy black-and-white photo of Teddy Kennedy riding in the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale. In the photo, he is a few years younger than I am now. It is 1960, and he is campaigning for his brother Jack’s presidential bid. Teddy, like all good politicians with a nose for crowds, sniffed out the Bucking Horse Sale, which was then in its early years. He borrowed a cowboy hat, chaps, and a pair of boots and climbed onto a bareback horse named Sky Rocket. Teddy is a blur of teeth and legs and leather. He rides for the Kennedy brothers, for love of country, for votes. But maybe he rides for something else. Maybe he rides for having done it. I can almost hear my mother’s voice asking, “If Ted Kennedy jumped off a building, would you?”

And my answer is, “Maybe.”

It was just after Thanksgiving and I was reading a local livestock weekly that covered eastern Montana and the Dakotas, looking for cheap hay advertised in the classifieds. And there, sandwiched between

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