Cowgirl Sass & Savvy (revisited)

Camp cookie and the fire truck

By Julie Carter


“You ain’t never seen a hawk on the wing,
ain’t never heard old camp cookie sing.”

Ranchers are not immune to the romance involved in cowboying. Many of them spent years working up from the hired-hand to owner status.

Some cowboys, not wanting to give up enough of their freedom to become owners, have gone down other roads.

Tommie was such a cowboy. However, even Tommie needed to make a living, and so at some point in his cowboy life, he took an honest job as a firefighter in town.

But even in that, he never quite got away from the cowboy spirit and recalled that there was a tradition among ranch and rodeo hands. Many of them became cooks on the wagons at the big ranches.

This enabled them to still be part of the atmosphere, take their part in the fun, and not have to ride the broncs or flank the calves.

The bonus of the job was that nobody, or at least nobody in their right mind, ever crossed the cook. Everybody who wanted to eat would listen attentively to Cookie’s stories and praise his abilities as a cowboy and a cook. Tommie thought that would fit him just fine.

Incorporating his former cowboying with the town job seemed easy enough. He would cook from a fire truck and capitalize on the mystique of the cowboy and the firefighter.

Kids and adults alike would be fascinated with the truck as well as him. He just knew he would make a fortune. All that was required was his own personal fire truck.

There was only a slight problem with the one he found to buy – it was in Missouri and that was a far piece from home. Seemed like a small step for a stepper because his wife Sally had a nice big pickup truck that could easily pull a trailer loaded with the fire truck.

He had somehow miscalculated. While focusing on the usefulness of the truck, he not factored in the detail that it belonged fully to Sally.

It took some begging and pleading, but cowboy charm prevailed. Sally finally agreed to make the trip, drive her truck and haul his personal fire truck home so Tommie could enjoy cooking.

She had done her share of “camp cooking” and figured the fire truck would also come in useful watering the arena down faster than her current methods. While planning the trip she also hoped her kid would be over his stomach virus before it was time to leave for Missouri.

The trip was 13 hours long, one way and the stomach virus seemed to last about 100 hours. To top that off, the weather produced the proverbial hundred-year snowstorm. There are no words to describe the tension felt by the fair-weather cowgirl driving that distance on black ice.

The trip back with the fire truck loaded on a flatbed trailer didn’t seem to be any shorter. Again, driving every foot of the way with a sick kid, a sleeping husband, a snowstorm and a too-heavy tow package did not put Sally in a happy mood.

Everything seemed to be going pretty fairly well until Tommie, waking up just as they arrived at the driveway to their home, stretched and told her, “I think I’ll treat myself to a big breakfast this morning – I’m tired.”

We may never find out how cooking from a fire truck would have worked out, but there is a new big red water truck for the arena with Sally’s name painted on the door.