Off Into the Sunset: My Doomed Love for a Cowboy

When I was five years old, I decided that I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up. A cowboy, not a cowgirl. I wanted to wear chaps and a 10-gallon hat, not a skirt and ruffles. I wanted to live out on the prairies, eat meals cooked on a campfire, and learn songs that could be played on a guitar as I sang to the cows. I wanted to sleep outside beneath the stars. I wanted to see antelope and buffalo wandering the open plains at will. And most of all, I wanted to have my own horse. She would be strong and beautiful and steadfast, and we would gallop together beneath sunny blue skies. I’d keep carrots and sugar cubes in my pockets; when we returned from our rides I’d offer them to her, flat-palmed, and she’d nuzzle the treats from my hands.

There was little chance for any of that, growing up as I did in a small Pennsylvania college town. Its edges were fringed with farmland and pastures spotted with placid dairy cows. There were a few wooded hillsides, but no wilderness. No places where the horizon went on and on, unbroken. Still, I never gave up hoping, in the way that some of us hold onto childish dreams because to let them go would mean that we have grown old.

And those dreams followed me. I read the Little House on the Prairie series until the paperback spines grew cracked. I learned how to twostep by watching John Travolta and Debra Winger in Urban Cowboy. I found cowboy memoirs and followed along on the adventures of yesteryear had by men with names like Andy Adams, Jack Bailey, and “Teddy Blue” Abbott as they drove cattle on the long trails north from Texas.

Because somewhere, between the tumblers of whiskey swallowed and episodes of Deadwood watched while seated on my apartment’s uncomfortable futon, I was looking for truth. My family came late to America, born along in a tide of Eastern European immigrants arriving from the violent wreckage of dying empires For better or for worse, we’d played no direct part in America’s past triumphs or in the sins committed during her founding. My family owned no slaves, laid claim to no frontier, fought in no battles until the ones waged – in a full circle of irony – back in the European conflagrations they’d hoped to escape.

And so it was that legacy, perhaps, that I wrestled with. My family undoubtably reaped benefits from our Caucasian skin. Yet we seemed tenuous appendages to much of what had gone into the making of American identity.

So what were we? What was I? The answer, it seemed to me, lay in the West. If America was the land of re-invention, of hubris, of self-made dreams, then where better for me to go but in the direction in which so many others believed they’d discover their destiny?   

If I could find the West – and somehow cleave bits of truth from the mists of legend – I could find the heart of America.

Thus went my ruminations. I read and dreamed and researched. Planned routes, evaluated supplies. Stared at historic firearms behind panes of museum glass. Yes, my interest was deep and longstanding and personal. It was also academic; from nights spent holed up in a library reading room, where the staff kept a shelf of books held for me, I approached my journey with the detached rigor of an anthropologist beginning field research.

Until the day I met a cowboy. Jake was the friend-of-a-friend, tall and lanky with an easy smile. We spoke over pizza and craft beer, and I listened, wide-eyed as any teenager, as he described growing up with his brother on a Montana ranch. The land had been in his family since before my own arrived in America. You’re it, I thought, staring at his hands as he lifted the glass to his mouth and swallowed. Legend incarnate.

We talked history and politics and how the demographics of the West were changing as billionaires and Hollywood celebrities spent millions on properties they’d occupy for only a few months out of the year. Ranches were owned by fewer and fewer actual ranchers. Districts which had once been predictably red now turned purple. I admitted my aspirations for a cross-country roadtrip: west to Texas, and then from Texas north to Montana. I wanted to see it for myself. Perhaps Jake sensed the yearning in me, for he issued an invitation.

“My dad’s the real cowboy,” he told me. “You should talk to him. Come by the ranch when you’re out this summer.”

And so I had. I’d driven 4,000 miles, slowly falling beneath the West’s spell the entire way. I was smitten with the quiet of the Oklahoma prairie on a summer night. I felt the call of the lonely beauty of the Texas Hill Country. I’d been awestruck by the wild magnificence of the Rockies and their snow-capped peaks that clawed their way into the sky. Now I was here, in Montana. The end of many of the old cattle trails. And the end of my own, as well.  

I called Jake. We confirmed a time for my visit. Before hanging up, he said, “Just turn off the road, open the gate, and drive up to the house. I’ll have the horses saddled and ready.”

In all my life, no one had said anything like that to me. Now that someone had, my heart suddenly sprouted feathers and went flying around inside my chest, looking for a place to land.

As the pavement led to gravel roads and from there onto dirt, my heartbeat grew wilder. I’ll have the horses saddled and ready. I swiped mascara onto my lashes and smoothed on pink lipstick. I pulled on my boots (purchased in Texas). Eventually I spotted the ranch gate that Jake had described and hopped out of the driver’s seat to unlatch it. After moving through, I refastened it behind me; somewhere I’d learned that leaving a gate open is bad form. At the top of the long drive, I recognized Jake’s tall silhouette. Beside him, good as his word, stood two horses. My destiny awaited.

It’d been years since I sat in the saddle. Earlier, when Jake asked if I could ride, I’d said yes. Of course I’d said yes. Now I willed my body to remember. Mount from the left side. Set your foot firmly into the stirrup. Swing your right leg up and over in one motion. Be smooth. Don’t be afraid. Keep your heels down. 

           We rode up and through a series of grassy pastures, slowly climbing into the mountains. I could feel the rigid leather of the saddle underneath me, feel the warmth of my horse, Dutch, through the fabric of my jeans. Jake spoke of being in up in those hills, of mountain lions, of camping with friends and swimming in cold lakes. I was speechless with joy, afraid that any words of mine would break the moment and cause it to vanish forever. Instead, I watched the angle of Jake’s shoulder blades beneath his plaid shirt as he rode ahead of me, leading me into the unknown.

           Jake stopped when we reached a small meadow. We turned to face the wide valley below us. Yellow sunshine spilled over the fields. Across the valley, mountain peaks rose up against the pale blue sky. The land below us spread out and open like a great golden bowl.

           I let the hot afternoon stillness settle over me. I’d done it. I’d made it West. I’d met a cowboy. And I was looking out over it all as God intended: on horseback.

           And I found myself desperately wanting. Desperately wanting to prove I could find words big enough for the experience, to find some way of showing that I could belong. That whatever this land – and this man who’d come from it – had to teach me, I could learn.

           I slipped from my horse and stood in the meadow. If ever there was a place and a moment with the power to connect two people, surely this would be it. I looked at Jake. I waited.

Kiss me. I thought. Please.

He didn’t.

I couldn’t.

The space between us proved unbreachable.

I took a last look over the valley and climbed back onto Dutch. Jake and I turned our horses and began riding down the mountain. Shadows spread slowly across the fields. As we rode, I felt my chance slipping through my hands. Like Cinderella, I’d fallen under an enchantment. And like her, I was battling time. 

Jake turned around in his saddle and shouted a question over his shoulder.

“You wanna pick things up a little?”

“Yes!” I shouted back.

He and his horse flew forward, and I kicked Dutch into a gallop. Ever since we’d begun our descent off the mountain, I’d been wanting to charge through this meadow. I wanted to feel a rush of speed, wanted to release all that had come to a silent boil within me out and away into the open air. Tall grasses whipped around my boots, hissing as their tendrils scratched across the soles. Purple lupine and summer wildflowers passed in a blur underneath me.

At last, I was literally riding off into the sunset. And my heart slowly shattered and broke.

We reached the barn. I offered to help unsaddle the horses and put the tack away – I would have brushed them down as well, figuring that I might at least walk away with that – but Jake waved me off.

“Let’s talk with my dad,” he said.

And so we did. We sat outdoors at a picnic table as purplish dusk began to settle over the hillsides. A few deer stepped from the meadow and bit at the summer grasses. I asked questions and got answers; a few of them I jotted down into a notebook.

Jake offered to show me a little more of the place before I left. We walked into a cottage adjacent to the main house. It hadn’t been occupied for a long time; odd pieces of furniture stood haphazardly in the rooms. Still, I liked it. Liked the yellow and white kitchen. Liked the tall grandfather clock that stood beside the front door. For a second, hope rose in me, stubborn and foolish. We were alone again. But again, I was disappointed.

At the top of the driveway, I spoke my thanks and we said our goodbyes. I heard gravel crunch beneath my tires as I followed the long driveway back to the main road. I glanced backwards and saw Jake’s hand raise in farewell.

I knew then that I’d lost. I could read all the books I wanted, camp in the wilderness alone, hike in grizzly bear country, load and fire a gun, dance in a Texas honkytonk - and none of it could atone for the vague and whispering shadow of a dream that didn’t quite come true.

Outside the car window, a wild sunset flamed above the horizon to my right. I tried to drive on and ignore it. But it called, and called again. I surrendered and stopped the car.

The sky was gloriously lit with fuchsia and purple. The grass glowed green and gold, and slowly became blue-grey where the shadows fell across it. For a moment I stood still. Then I started walking.

I don’t know whose fenced field I stepped into that evening. But I didn’t care. There was a divinity at work. Something was parting ways, beckoning to me to be both trespasser and pilgrim. Whatever this moment was, whatever strange gift the universe was offering, I needed to sink myself into it.

So I did. My knees touched ground and I knelt, overwhelmed and anchorless, as my heart spun. For I was witness to a revelation.

It was this: what I sought could not be found. America was not only the giver of dreams. She took them, too. The West of my imagining had never existed. I might look backward at those stories, might catch the odd reflection here and there, but I would never hold them as my own.  

As I would never touch the sunset whose colors painted the sky more beautifully than any other I’d ever seen. It disappeared, even as I approached.