THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
“If you can cowboy in this country without breaking your fool neck, you can cowboy most anyplace!”
–My Grandfather
THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO:
Those words came back to me as I picked my way through the rocks, boulders and slides, working my way through a slot that led down to an old Indian camp I first found as a kid.
The thought occurred to me that Granddad’s exclamation, mixed richly with disgust as well as near reverence, could apply as truthfully to anyone hiking this land.
Behind was Tule Mountain and to my direct front some miles away were the Rattlesnake Mountains. There lies some tough country too, as most of the lower Big Bend happens to be in one way and another.
On the northern fringes of the Rattlesnakes and just beyond the park boundary sits the Valenzuela, a small place my family leased and utilized as a base camp to chase the wily wild burro.
And chase them we did, over these miles and miles of broken, desolate malpais between the two points. Right through this gap, matter of fact, and why I knew of that long-abandoned Indian camp somewhere below.
Yet it is one thing to walk out this craggy, corkscrewing land at a leisurely pace with a pack on your back, and quite another to be running across it hell-bent for election astride a half broke horse.
Gazing toward Lajitas Mountain in the far distance, I can still taste the barely controlled fear, the reckless tenacity and sheer exultation of a twelve year old already trying to prove himself as a cowboy, and as a man.
That was a long time ago, and those childhood dreams have gone the same way as those wily donkeys, as well as my grandfather. I haven’t sat on the storm deck of a, sure enough, the desert horse in decades and likely would fall off the first time he jumped one direction or another.
The last real English cowboy was my little brother Barry, and he has been dead three years now. This was the land where he started learning his trade and like my grandfather declared, he could cowboy most anyplace.
Yet I can still remember, still wish and still dream for those times now gone on and away.
And ponder about that twelve-year-old, who was trying to prove himself a man…
God bless to all,
Ben
Ben H. English
Alpine, Texas
USMC: 1976-1983
THP: 1986-2008
Author of ‘Yonderings’ (TCU Press)
‘Destiny’s Way’ (Creative Texts Publishers)
‘Out There: Essays on the Lower Big Bend’ (Creative Texts Publishers)
‘The Uvalde Raider’ (Creative Texts Publishers)
Facebook: Ben H. English
Webpage: benhenglish.com
‘Graying but still game’
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