by Jane St. Clair

Cowboys have symposiums, which is a fancy word for gathering together to share songs and stories and such, and maybe do some roping and riding. This is what the Western Heritage Cowboy Symposium in Sonoita, Arizona was all about this weekend.

Cowboys live their lives in a lonesome way on horses and outdoors all day in the wide open spaces, and maybe that’s why they like to gather together from time to time with others who understand what they’re talking about.
Cowboys are used to making their own entertainment with stories and guitars, anyway, without computers and televisions and DVDs.  Okay, there is such a thing as a cowboy riding while talking on a cellphone, but this here article is about the romance of the West, so we’ll play that down even though we’ll allow a picture of it.

Cowboys sing about little moons that smile over mountains, and stars that dance in black night skies.

They sing about the smell of cattle flesh searing during branding,

and little doggies with tears in their eyes after they get caught in barbed wire. They sing about desert days so hot that your pony refuses to keep going, and desert nights so cold that your feet freeze in your boots. They sing about going into Nogales and how good Mexican food tastes, and how beautiful the senoritas are, and how hard it is to say goodbye to your Mexican amigos and hit the trail once more.

Cowboys sing about trusting your compadres as if your life depends on it because it does. They sing about how being dog tired at the end of the day makes you appreciate things other people look down on — like a mess of beans seasoned with coffee and chili peppers, a little whiskey and your bunk under the stars.  They sing about a life led outdoors under the sun, in the rain and snow, under a sky too big to understand.
A day at a cowboy gathering makes you think about what it must be like to be a grounded human being, someone who has real work to do not paper-pushing, and someone who shares his life with nature and animals.

Without cowboys, there’d be no American West.  We celebrate cowboys, the real working ones of today, and we celebrate their art and poetry and music.

Happy trails to you and keep riding, cowboy.

by Jane St. Clair

Out West it is easy to be by yourself, truly by yourself, the only person for miles with a wilderness stretched out before you.  The landscape is not as friendly as back East, and yet its strangeness and foreboding only adds to the sense of solitude.  You don’t see mammals with big brown eyes — those animals that are our closest relatives.  You have to get used to the alien ways of reptiles — slow-moving turtles struggling with the heaviness of their homes on their backs, slithering surprising snakes, and the ever-present lizards that belong somewhere in the Triassic past.

The desert is much lower to the ground than a forest –  most of the time you literally walk above it all, and you are not encircled and enclosed in greenery.  A forest is more giving, more ready to present you with gifts of food and water,  and a forest appears abundant and benevolent as you walk on its soft moss and carpets of leaves and flowers.  Desert earth is hard, strong and exposed. As you walk tall above the hostile plants that prick and sting and cut, you feel more alone than ever, as if you landed somewhere no person has ever been.

There is very little color in the desert.  It is way more subtle than the kindergarten palette of a Midwestern autumn.  The desert colors are subdued, as if the dust of eons of erosion left everything softer, grayer, subtler.  Mostly you see shades of pastel green, so many greens you wonder at the number of varieties.  The mountains behind you stay soft pink and soft purple except when the setting sun turns their faces bright red.  You see gray decaying plants that never seem to die. Nothing dies on the desert, or so it seems. A few cacti are purplish brown, some are dull yellow, but mostly everything is pastel green. shades and shades of pastel green.

In spring, though,  you may encounter a tree … newly budding and backlit in the morning light … and this tree is friendly and gives you colors .. ..

But most startling of all is to come across a patch of desert wildflowers!  They always seem to jump at you suddenly — red, pink, purple, yellow– all of a sudden, like a too bright light in a theater.  Somehow they grow amid the cacti, at the bottom of this sandy pebbled earth so much like a dry sea bed. Suddenly, a patch or bush or tree full of desert wildflowers!

Natural bouquets just offered to you ..

And, if you are lucky in March or April, you will see more than just little patches of wildflowers — you will come across an entire field of them, a host of them as Wordsworth said … a host that –like unexpected angels– sing to you — and you wonder, how can it be?

Such a great gift, a gift of light and music, suddenly presented, suddenly received — just when you thought you were most alone.