by Ian Tyson
Ravens are terrible nest builders, so a few years back I asked my old ranch caretaker, Norman Ring, to install a plywood platform for them. Being an old-fashioned rural Albertan, he thought I was nuts. He was raised to shoot ravens, not build platforms for them. But I like having ’em around, even though they can be noisy as hell.
To the west the coyotes are yipping up on the ridge. Past the ridge, in the mountains, the glaciers are slowly disappearing, but when the plains run out of water, the coyote will survive us all and move on. I’m told they have proliferated well into the east. Perhaps they have grown tired of the diminished West, figuring it’s time to leave the countryside and become urbanized. (Carrying this idea of a coyote diaspora to absurdity, one can imagine them preying on the chicken coops and vegetable gardens that are springing up in Detroit and Brooklyn.)
In my round pen, on Purple Pop. (SHANNON LAWLOR)
Old cowboys have always lamented the West’s passing, and I’m no different. The West I fell in love with — herdsmen on horseback riding the open range — is all but gone. There are a few isolated pockets in Alberta where it still exists, but not many. It will likely survive in the real hardcore desert country — New Mexico and northern Nevada — so long as extractive industries don’t destroy the land the way they’re doing here in Alberta.
It’s a tricky paradox: for years I’ve done my harangue on the disappearing West, but people have been claiming they’re witnessing the last days of the West for almost 150 years. Montana photographer L.A. Huffman saw the end way back in 1870 when he visited Yellowstone-Bighorn country, “unpenned of wire.” To Huffman, the railroad was the death blow: “There was no more West after that. It was a dream and a forgetting, a chapter forever closed.” Then Charlie Russell saw the last of the old West in the 1880s. My old man saw the last of the old West in the 1900s. Ian Tyson and Kurt Markus saw the last of the old West in the 1980s, a full century after Charlie. And Corb Lund is seeing the last of the West today.
The West constantly reinvents itself, like an organism that keeps dying out and being reborn in some new form. Who knows, maybe the grass-finished-beef trend will kickstart cowboying again in certain areas.
Just because my West is compromised doesn’t mean that’s true for everybody. People from Manitoba and Ontario probably come to Alberta today and think, This is the real West. They fall in love with the open spaces and the Rockies, just as I did in the 1970s. Or maybe they get drunk watching the bronc riders at the Calgary Stampede in July and think they’ve discovered the real West there. I may not agree, but the West has always been in the eye of the beholder.
These days I don’t find anything particularly romantic about the modern rodeo or chuckwagon racing. For me the romance of the West is the Rockies. Simple as that. If you took away the Rockies, I’d basically be living in Saskatchewan shooting gophers — and there’s nothing romantic about that, no matter how you define it. The Rockies, on the other hand, are so aesthetically over the top — changing every morning, orchestrated by the light — I never get tired of ’em.
These Hutterite ladies are serenading me with “Someday Soon.” (BARRY FERGUSON)
My life sure ain’t all beer and skittles, as my old man used to say, but I’m hanging in there. I’m still heading out on the road, still selling out concert halls after fifty years in the business. That’s my salvation. The fact that I can still move people with my stories — I live for that. I get a couple of hours of real bliss on stage — until the pain in my hands gets bad. Old age is not for wimps.
When I look back on my life, I can honestly say there’s not a hell of a lot I would change. I’ve certainly had my share of failures, but life is a series of mistakes and corrections. The best you can do is honour the truth. That sounds real easy, but somehow it isn’t. We all have different interpretations of the truth and we all mould the truth to suit our needs. It’s part of the human condition. Go back to Will Shakespeare and it’s all there. In the end, you’ve got to be honest and truthful, because that’s all your fellow travellers have to gauge you by on the long trail. It all goes back to the lessons I learned as a bandleader and as a horse trainer: consistency is of paramount importance. There’s no room for anything less.
But inevitably we all make mistakes. You’re going to wipe out and hit the ditch. It would be a cop-out for me to blame my indiscretions on the music business or the cowboy way of life. In the end you just have to hope that the lives of the people you’re closely connected with — family and friends — will turn out okay down the line. You just hope that everybody closes the circle, that everybody rides home the best way they can. Only the wind is forever.
IAN TYSON has long been one of North America’s most respected singer-songwriters. A pioneer who began his career in the folk boom of the 1960s, he was one of the first Canadians to break into the American popular music market. In the years that followed, he hosted his own TV show and recorded some of the best folk and western albums ever made. Tyson is a recipient of the Order of Canada, and has received multiple Juno and Canadian Country Music awards. He tours constantly across Canada and throughout the United States, and continues to live and work on his ranch in the foothills of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.
JEREMY KLASZUS is a Calgary writer and the winner of two National Magazine awards. A former resident of the Banff Centre’s literary journalism program, Klaszus has written for Reader’s Digest, the Calgary Herald, Fast Forward Weekly and Alberta Views magazine.