Straw hats and new ropes harken to spring

By Julie Carter

Ranchers, ropers, and pretty girls are all getting ready for spring. Fruit trees are bursting in bloom and yes, everybody I know is sneezing and sniffling with the annual pollen attack.

There are a few other signs of the impending season.

Dan has decided the winter wheat horses are about worn out and yearling cattle are about ready to ship.

His top pasture mounts, Slats and Thin Rind, have been used to doctor cattle, ride and work every day all winter.

It's time to take the cattle to town, get a check, rest the winter horses and get down to the business of summer team roping.

Cue Ball is the professional rope horse on the outfit and is entirely too important to use in regular rotation with the wheat cattle.

Having spent the winter unemployed, he's fat and ready to win everything Dan can enter.

The practice arena has dried out, all potential headers and heelers have been invited to practice sessions and they have shown up in every state of readiness.

Some have new ropes, a few have new horses and the dedicated spent the winter watching the champs on roping videos in an attempt to absorb some winning skills while running the remote control from the recliner.

Others simply outlasted the cold months by staying in shape with holding up their end of the cold mountain brewery distribution.

When Dan was looking for a new heel horse, Tex, the horse-trading uncle, told him to find a "blown-up" head horse and they would make a heel horse of him.

When Tex went to look at the horse Dan found, he agreed that Dan had done a find job in the "blown-up" department.

It took Dan all winter riding the new horse the 8-miles roundtrip to and from work every day, tying him to a tractor all day (Dan works at an implement dealer) to get to him to quit rearing in the box.

Miles and wet saddle blankets are quite dependable training methods.

Jeff had a little different worry than the other twine-twirlers. Last year he got caught in a bind, a little short of funds, and had to settle for less than the George Strait-special straw hat.

Everybody gave him a hard time all summer long for wearing this hat with a less-than-becoming crease that fit like a box stuck on his head.

Feeling like his buddies were being unjust with their taunts and jeers, he decided he wasn't going to let it happen again this year.

His friend Grady told him the local flea market had a new shipment of straw hats and were just what he needed at the right price.

Grady was impressively familiar with the local flea market.

Why, just last week he had bought a complete set of bowling pins at a wonderful bargain price. He had put them with the shower seat he had bought just the week before for a ticket price too good to be true.

Jeff recalled that last year his hat, the box-fit special, had blown off in the arena during a roping.

Two ropers, making a fast run at a steer, ran over the hat before Jeff could get it picked up. He also recalled that Grady had been one of them.

With this remembrance, Jeff became quite suspicious that Grady might have an ulterior motive to suggesting the flea market bargain straw.

He decided he would not let spring exuberance get him to just throw away his roping money, so he settled for a gimme-cap to start the season.

This is quite possibly the reason team ropers are traditionally not known for their cowboy fashion sense.

Let Spring begin!



A cowboy's last trail

The bright, dancing eyes behind the big, almost comical smile, stuck on the ruddy face of a perennially tanned rancher will never leave my memory. Neither will I forget the soft, attractive features of a city-girl-moved-west, a woman who fell in love with the image of a man astride a horse, working cattle and telling wild tales, a woman who brought such images to life in her quest for happiness.

I suppose if you analyzed it, it could make your head hurt. He got to Denver once a year in the fall, at shipping time for his cows. He rode in the Rio Grande caboose, just 'cause that's the way it was done. That was back in the days when Denver was a true cow town - the rows of stockyards and meat packing houses located over by the Coliseum. Those were party times, and as a poem more or less says, the days when a "good cowpunch could oil up his insides."

She found his rough life fascinating - the broncs, the wild cows, the mischievous smile and the generations of ranching his family represented in the valley - and it created a romance in her mind that she could not shake. And you have to know that the tender touch of a woman's love, the brush of her soft, blonde hair against his cheek, the pad of her light footsteps through his lonely house, the wetness of her kiss and the sigh of her surrender had to light him up like he was the most important man in the world.

It might have been the whirlwind romance of the area some years ago, something to still be talked about, but routine surgery at a city hospital back home turned into a nightmare for the young woman, leaving her paralyzed on one side. Such rare events are traumatic not only physically, but also mentally, and her recovery required a lengthy residence in the big city, close to her family. It's difficult, especially when the love affair is new and no real commitments have been made, for two people to continue through an illness of such magnitude, particularly with hundreds of miles between them.

But, and as perhaps no one knew, they kept the thread between them alive and didn't let go. It was different afterwards, to be sure, but two people once touched by the unique vibrancy of a burning passion found it impossible to surrender it to the harshness of reality.

In the miraculous continuation of a conversation put on hold 40 years ago, shortly after this story began, the woman recently confided to an intimate lady friend of mine that the relationship was still on, even in their 80s, and that he called her religiously from the ranch every Sunday morning, although he hadn't called for a while now. "Do you think he's OK?" was the tentative query.

As it sometimes happens, an old friend stopped by to see how he was doing, not so much because he liked him, but more from the fact they both belonged to the old-time ranching fraternity, a group so small anymore as to be almost nonexistent, and hell, you've got to take care of each other, if for no other reason than who else will?

It's not pretty, but old cowboys die kind of like their horses - hard and alone, their cries unheard. Oh, his buddy got him to the clinic, all right, bloody head and empty eyes, and although he lived a couple more days in the hospital, it was, in a sense, a tragedy to move him from the horse pasture in which he fell, for that is where his spirit left him.

She'd give a lot for one more Sunday call, I reckon.

Tony Vagneur sometimes wishes he didn't know stories like this. Read him here every Saturday and send comments to ajv@sopris.net.