by Tim Cahill
The villagers finally agreed to perform their fire dance for the camera. “I still don’t know how they do it,” Nick told me, “whether they go into a trance or whether their feet are just so callused they can stomp the fire out. Anyway, the head fire dancer goes first, then his assistant comes on, then a trainee comes out and stomps out the rest of the fire.”
It was a difficult lighting situation—shooting into a fire, at night—and Nick was worried about the shot. He asked his friends to give one more walk-through the next night. “I think,” Nick said, “they thought I was disappointed at the size of the blaze, because this time they built a bonfire. The head dancer didn’t stay in very long, and neither did his assistant. The magic wasn’t there that night. Something. When the trainee came in to put the thing out, it was still blazing away and I could tell he was definitely getting burned.”
And so they learned in Surinam what it means to have a photographer as a friend.
Far and away the worst of the breed are underwater photographers. I’ve got enough scuba experience to know that in any given group, the person with the camera is likely to be the best and most knowledgeable diver. Just don’t get buddied up with him. The scuba photographer drops down the anchor line, swims ten yards, and finds something to engage his or her interest. As likely as not, the fascinating stuff involves a couple of tiny organisms the size of your thumbnail swimming around a coral knob no larger than a coffee cup. The rest of your group is off hanging on to the backs of manta rays or watching green turtles mate, but the inflexible rules of diving won’t let you leave your buddy, the motionless photographer. No use even swimming over to see what it is the camera is focused on. You’ll stir up the sand or frighten the organisms and spoil the shot.
After the dive, the photographer will be in a state of near sexual excitement. “A feeding phenomenon no one has,” he’ll mutter in ecstasy. “No one’s ever seen it before.”
“Especially not me,” you point out.
“Hey,” the photographer says, “I’ve got it on film,” as if photography is somehow superior to experience. “I’ll send you a copy.” The shot, when you get it, will be beautiful, suitable for framing, a photo you could label “the conservation of underwater experience.”
I was thinking about the treachery of photographers—some shots of me actually make it look as if I might be a few pounds overweight, a rank distortion I firmly believe can be corrected in the darkroom—when Paul said it was okay. I could go ahead with my practice rappels. When I was just about at the end of my rope, he called, “Hey, Tim, could you hurry back up here? There’s a big raft coming down the river.”
I clipped out of the rappel rig.
“They’re coming pretty fast,” Paul called. “Could you run, please?”
The Purple Sage, at 180 Miles an Hour
Four or five years ago, I was interviewed by a Swedish photographer who leveled what I considered to be a bizarre accusation. “You are cowboy,” he told me.
Hey, smile when you say that, pardner.
The man was visiting the small Montana town where I live. He was working on a photo essay about the American West and seemed to believe that anyone who’d want to live in some tumble-weed tank town, of necessity, had to be a cowboy.
I endeavored to set my Swedish friend straight on those individuals who labor in the field of bovine animal husbandry. Cowboys, I said, are men and women who work with cattle on horseback. Such persons tend to share a certain philosophy; a courtesy; a prickly pride; and a tendency to, oh, sometimes exaggerate events, often to humorous effect. Many of my neighbors are, in fact, ranchers or working cowboys, and yes, you can tell them by their outfit. Wannabe buckaroos always get it wrong: wrong hat, wrong length pants, wrong boots, wrong life, big pathos.
So no, I told the Swedish photographer, I am not cowboy.
Oh sure, I ride horses now and again, but the awful truth is I keep falling off the sons of bitches. It happened again just last spring. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, I failed to stop when the horse did. Just kept going right over the horse’s neck and landed, boom, on my back in a cloud of dust.
It occurred to me then that I was rather like those English seamen of a century ago who, shipwrecked in the Arctic, failed to adopt Inuit survival techniques and consequently froze to death. Just so. If I ever wanted to ride a horse with any degree of dignity, I was going to have to learn from a cowboy.
Which is how, some months later, I made my way to the All ’Round Ranch, in Utah, where Al Brown runs a kind of horseman’s clinic on the sage-littered slopes of the Blue Mountains. You don’t need any experience; you don’t need to know the first thing about horses. Al swears he can have you galloping around barrels in an arena within a week. He’ll have you herding cows. Rounding up strays in brushy draws. Running down obstreperous calves at a gallop, through knee-high sage.
So there I was in Utah, three months after my spring horse-wreck, galloping along on Josh, a horse that had once run at Ruidoso Downs, home of the richest horse race in the world. Josh was a quarter-horse gelding, eleven years old, and just coming into his prime as a saddle horse. He was easily the finest and fastest horse I had ever ridden—Dios mio was he fast.
It was pouring down rain in the Blue Mountain plateau, near the border of Utah and Colorado. There was a rainbow behind us to the east, some blue sky to the south, and a black thundercloud directly ahead. Bolts of lightning danced on a distant ridge that marked the horizon. The trail was a narrow rut, running with water, and the horse’s hooves threw up clods of mud. Al Brown, galloping easily beside me, shouted some words of welcome instruction. “Settle down a little deeper into the saddle,” he called. I did that, and it smoothed out the ride some.
Josh was steadily gaining speed, however, and I was steadily losing confidence. Unfortunately, I know this drill well: The horse just keeps running, faster, then faster still—it’s really a barely controlled runaway—until a kind of dumb terror informs me that it’s time to stop or die. The stopping process involves pulling back on the reins and shouting “whoa” several dozen times as the horse shifts down through several bone-jarring gears to a final stop.
It’s like driving some kind of hot sports car—a Ferrari, for instance—but the car is rigged in such a way that once you punch the accelerator, you have to run it all the way up to 180, or hit the brakes in a panic stop. There’s no cruise control, no way to drive the beast at a safe and sane 85 miles an hour.
As Josh gained speed, Al said, “Hey, give him a little tap.” By which he meant: Pull back once, quickly, gently, on the reins. Josh immediately settled back into his previous pace. If the horse had been a Ferrari, we’d be doing, oh, 55 or 60 and—hey, what’s this?—I could keep him right there, with an only occasional tap on the reins.
“All right,” Al shouted. “Now touch his ribs.” That’s what you do on a horse like Josh. No need to kick. You just touch his ribs with your boot heels. When I did, my head snapped back and we were doing a figurative 85, instantly.
“You get unbalanced,” Al shouted, “grab your saddle horn.” Al didn’t buy into the dictum that a “real cowboy” never grabs his saddle horn. He’d worked with cattle, “a-horseback” all his life, and was, he said, always grabbing the saddle horn.
He pointed off to the right, to a place where the trail probably branched to the north. We were going to turn “just beyond that big stand of sage.” Which was probably hiding the trail.
And I thought about what Al had said about turns, about how a horse running in the wild turns in a sinuous curve, winding its body into the motion. In contrast, a horse carrying a rider will turn stiffly, all in a block. The back end of the animal tends to come around too far, like a car losing traction on an icy curve. “A-horseback,” as Al would have it, you correct the tendency to come around by touching the animal far back on the ribs on the outside of the turn.
Which is what I did, and pretty well, too. Josh wound around the stand of sage, which st
ood five feet high, wrapping the turn so tight that stiff branches scraped against the outside of my thigh, and I was glad, for a moment, that I was wearing leather chaps. I say for a moment because rather quickly after that, I wasn’t glad about anything at all. We weren’t on any trail but were galloping at 85 over a gently rising plain littered with sage so thick that if I fell off, no part of my body would actually hit the ground.
You can’t ride horses through thick sage. This ought to be self-evident to anyone. It’s not possible. The horse is going to get its legs tangled up; he’s going to go down, hard, and take you with him. This was dangerous. It was irresponsible. I was maybe a little scared.
Al Brown was out about fifty yards ahead, shouting cowboy shit like “Yee-hah” and “Ya-hoo,” and he wasn’t on any trail either. Rain was sluicing off his oilskin slicker, and his horse was moving smoothly, splashing through standing water and kicking up dry dust underneath. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and there was no way, at this speed, that I could direct Josh through the sage. He was making tiny adjustments that I could feel in my inner thighs, moving miraculously through the heavy brush, and I kept my right hand close to the saddle horn, just in case. It occurred to me, in a panicky way, that I ought to discuss responsibility with Al, and I touched Josh once, gently, on the ribs so that, instantaneously, we were doing 120 and closing in on Al Brown. I realized with a start that Josh had at least two more gears in him and that he could do 180, easy. Even through the sage.
Josh wanted to run, to leave Al’s horse in the rain and dust, but I tapped back on the reins so that Al and I were riding side by side at about 100 miles an hour, through the deadly sage. I wanted to tell him that what we were doing was impossible. It didn’t occur to me at the time that such a statement is ridiculous.
“Al,” I shouted. “Hey, Al!”
He turned to look at me: Al Brown with the front brim of his cowboy hat blown flat against the crown, Gabby Hayes style; Al Brown with his goofy mop of a mustache mostly covering a maniacal grin; Al Brown with the rain in his face, the rain running in sheets down his slicker; Al Brown at 100 miles an hour, sitting his horse like he was part of the animal. We were topping a gentle ridge, and out ahead, in the distance, a sea of silver-green sage fell down toward the Green River in a series of long, gentle swells.
“Al,” I shouted into the wind, “there’s no damn trail!”
The man regarded me for a moment. He was squinting against the wind and rain, but there was a strange luminescence in his eyes, something that seemed to transcend joy altogether and to rise up into realms of spiritual ecstasy.
I thought perhaps he had misunderstood me.
“No trail here,” I screamed.
“Yeah,” he shouted back. “Ain’t it grand?”
The point here is that I completely missed the point.
There were seven of us riding with Al Brown that week, including three women from Switzerland. One was a good rider, the other two were experts, and they had all read about the All ’Round Ranch in a German magazine specializing in, yes, Western riding. The style, they said, was all the rage in Europe. In Switzerland, the women rode English saddles. In the English tradition, folks ride with their legs folded up under them like jockeys; they hold their reins up under their chins, in the manner of a squirrel with a nut.
It’s a tough, demanding way to ride, very stylized, but the women wanted to learn Western riding—the buckaroo style—because it allowed you to sit in the saddle all day. It seemed to them “more natural.” In Switzerland, they told me, there are plenty of places to ride, but it’s all trail riding. What the western United States offered was vast tracts of prairie and desert and mountain meadow. It was ranch land or public land, and you could ride anywhere. You were not confined by trails. This was a freedom not available anywhere in Europe.
So the women had come to “ride the range”: to do the very thing that had frightened me that day. Which is to say they wanted to get off the trail. To go loping at 150 miles an hour through the sage.
We were sitting around a campfire, discussing the matter, and Polly Golins, Al’s partner in the business, pointed out that wild horses live, and run, through sage-littered landscape every day. Horses didn’t get tangle-footed in sage any more than B’rer Rabbit gets tangled up in the Briar Patch. Sage was a horse’s natural medium.
Oh, sure, you had to look out ahead. While the rider made major decisions in terms of direction, the horse micromanaged the ride. Which meant, in essence, that if there was a big stand of sage looming up in front, you had to be prepared for the horse to zig right, zag left, or simply jump the brush. You had to pay attention.
If I was embarrassed by my expressed fear of off-trail riding, Polly and Al pretty much made me feel at ease. They did this by purposely making complete fools of themselves in the bad joke department.
“Say, Polly, I heard you had to shoot your dog.”
“Yep.”
“Was he mad?”
“I reckon he weren’t too pleased.”
The next morning, our third with Polly and Al, we were all up at about seven, building the fire and making ourselves breakfast. At the All ’Round, clients are not called dudes. Dudes, Al explained, get waited on. By contrast, we enjoyed the privilege of setting up our own canvas tepees, digging rain trenches around same, and making breakfast. Help was always available, but in general, we caught our own horses in the corral, cleaned their hooves, and checked the animals for saddle sores or suspicious swellings in the legs. We saddled them ourselves, and there was none of this single-file trail riding, the horses all bunched up nose to butt.
The first two days, we had walked our horses, mostly in deference to John, a young insurance executive from New Jersey who had never ridden before. The afternoon of the second day, Al had taken me out for a run through the sage. My stirrups seemed to be too short. I had figured this out when Al said, “Your stirrups are way too short.”
In buckaroo-style riding, the stirrups are run long, leaving just an inch or two between you and the saddle. I had always ridden with the balls of my feet in the stirrups, carrying a lot of the weight of my body in the knees. My knees have always ached after riding.
With the longer stirrups, the knees barely bend and they never ache afterward. If you have a good pair of boots—a pair made with heavy leather, a steel shank in the sole, and heels at least an inch high—you can use hoop stirrups, which are simple metal rings. Slip the smooth-soled boot into the ring, right up to the heel. When you stand to smooth out the ride, you are standing on the bottom of your foot, on the steel shank.
With good boots, hoops, and stirrups at the proper length, you feel welded into the saddle. Secure. There’s no talk about posting or cantering at the All ’Round. Al and Polly start you off in a slow lope, riding beside you, offering advice—“settle back a little deeper into the saddle”—and things seem to progress naturally.
This day, we’d be riding mostly at a stiff trot, a gait that has always been problematic for me. Al explained that it was, in fact, the gait favored by men and women who work cattle on horseback. Walking is too slow to get anything done; a gallop will tire any horse; but the animals can trot all day long. You smooth out the jarring ride by watching a shoulder of your mount. It’s a little like dancing. The horse sets the beat, and you adjust from side to side, walking along in your stirrups to a rhythm that is more easily felt than described.
We were trotting out over the range when half a dozen sage hens rose before us and fluttered off to the east. Al and I were chatting about hats. I asked him why he seemed to disdain stampede strings, strips of rawhide that are tied under the chin to keep the hat from blowing off at full gallop.
Al Brown thought for a moment, than launched into a full half hour on the philosophy of cowboy hats. The shape of the crown and brim, the curl, would all be expressive in some way of a rider’s personality. And although Al didn’t precisely say it, there was an element of initiation—of real pain—involved in any hat. It
is purchased small, and should, brand-new, feel like a band tightened around the skull. A week of constant headaches will stretch the thing out a bit, especially if there are rainstorms involved. Sleet and hail.
The hat becomes a part of the rider. It keeps the rain and snow out of his face, shades him from the sun, and keeps him warm in the cold. If the rider has to do some brush-popping, that is to say, ride through high, thick brush rising up over his head—service berries or choke cherries—he ducks down, holding the hat on his head with one hand. The wide brim protects his face from snapping branches.
The hat, as Al saw it, was a mystical thing. Kings wear crowns, Indians wear feathered headdresses, proper Englishmen wear bowlers. There was a weight of symbolism invested in any hat, a character and a philosophy. Cowboys understand this and associate their headgear with good fortune. No buckaroo ever lays his hat brim down: Hey, the luck just runs out of it that way.
When there’s difficult work to be done, a cowboy wants to pull the hat down low, tight. If it still blows off his head, he has to understand that nothing is accidental. The missing hat is a matter of some significance, a signal winging in at him from the cosmos. Maybe it blew off because he was cocky or unprepared. Maybe he didn’t need to be in that particular place at that particular time. When a cowboy’s hat blows off, he is obliged to think about it. To philosophize.
With a stampede string, however, Al said finally, and in answer to my original question, your hat never blows off. Therefore there is never any need to review your life, such as it is. Al seemed to believe that persons who wore stampede strings failed to live sufficiently contemplative lives.
A cowboy’s outfit is all cotton and wool and leather. Nothing much has changed in 150 years, primarily because the system works. This is a lesson those shipwrecked English seamen never learned from the Inuit. There’s a reason and a purpose for everything. Cowboys wear boots, for instance, because boots slide off the foot. This won’t seem important until you fall off a galloping horse with one lace-up shoe caught in a stirrup.