Author Archives: somewhereoutwest

Yellow Willow River

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The willow are waking up along Camas Creek in the Warner Range. On a windy spring day their glowing stems undulate down the drainage, a yellow flowing river.

The willow are the first to talk about the coming of spring. Sometimes their stems color up before the snow is gone. They’re thinking about catkins and leaves. They’re thinking about trailing their roots in the thawed creek and the yellow-headed blackbird tickling their upper branches with its song. They’re thinking of the Paiute basketmakers harvesting their straight stems before the leaf nodes swell. Will the elders come with their sharp knifes and old ways?

Buckaroo Style

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If Winnemucca isn’t prime Buckaroo habitat, it’s pretty darn close — especially during Ranch Hand Rodeo. Town fills up with big trucks, big hats, big mustaches, and big fun on the first weekend in March.

Part of the fun is the shopping. Western trade items line the upstairs balconies and front aisle of the cavernous Winnemucca Events Center. Outside, it’s still Nevada winter — gray skies, hard-used snow, and brown dirt — but inside it’s another story.

Check out this booth selling wild rags. (For the uninitiated, these are the generous, billowy, silky scarfs worn by Buckaroos and Buckarettes — and you thought they just wore plain old blue bandanas?!?)  If you lived in a landscape of monotones all winter, by early March, you’d be after color — any color. And patterns? Wild is where it’s at. Don’t worry if the colors clash. This is no time to be subtle.

For you Fashionistas, here’s how you put the style together. This upstart Buckaroo may not have won the kid’s roping contest this year but he sure looked good swinging a loop in his square-toed fancy-stitched orangey-colored boots, plaid sweater, and polka dot wild rag. And looking good is a lot of what being a Buckaroo is about. Although, if your team can win the Calcutta while you’re at it, so much the better.

Passing the Bota

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Have you ever tried drinking out of a bota bag? The Basques make it look easy, but believe me, it’s harder than it looks. My brother and I had botas when we were kids. They weren’t the “real” ones made of goat skin sealed with pitch but a modern version with a plastic liner. We mostly used them to carry water on hikes but sometimes Mom would let us fill them up with grape juice and practice drinking Basque style. There were rules, though. We had to wear our worn out clothes and take the botas outside — yeah, we got grape juice stains everywhere.

This weathered painting on the side of the famous (or infamous) Winnemucca Hotel shows the basic technique for drinking from a bota. At arm’s length, you squeeze wine from the bag into your mouth without spilling. With wine, there probably comes a point where the longer you practice, the harder it gets!

Once you master drinking from a bota, you can attend any traditional Basque affair with confidence. In case you haven’t experienced one firsthand, Basques really know how to party. There’ll be eating, drinking, and dancing with gusto. And everyone is super friendly. It might be helpful to know a few Basque phrases, like Zer moduz? (How are you?), or Zatoa pasatzen? (Can I have a pull off your bota bag?) With practice and luck, you’ll fit right in. And if someone tells you, Nire amumak zuk baino mila aldiz hobeto dantzatzen du, (My grandma could dance you under the table,) don’t take it as an insult. Considering the Basque grandmas I know, it would just be a statement of fact.

Night Horse

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One of the entertainers we’ve invited to Shooting the West this year is Brenn Hill, a singer/songwriter out of Hooper, Utah. My favorite song he sings is “Night Horse”, written by fellow cowboy Chuck Pyle. The song describes what can happen when cattle stampede in the dark. The cowboys mount up in a hurry and run with the herd until the cattle tire. Then, if they’re lucky, they can turn the herd back toward home.

But finding home can be a tricky proposition when you’re too far away to see the campfire and all around you it’s black as cats. So the chorus of the song tells the cowboys …

Turn it over to your night horse

Let him bring you back on home to the fire.

Now your night horse probably isn’t the flashiest horse in the remuda, but it’s the one with a sixth sense about where he is, and where he’s supposed to be. As Chuck Pyle says about one such horse …

He must use somethin’ other than his eyes

Whatever birds fly south on

I guess that’s what he counts on

Little Joe could carry me through to sunrise.

I once had a horse I could trust like that. He was black, with a white star on his forehead. Every time I hear the Night Horse song, I think of that old gelding. When I imagine riding through a dark night, miles from home, it’s not my horse’s abilities I question. It’s my own. Could I give the horse his head and lean back in the saddle? There’s always the temptation, as soon as I’m not certain of the direction things are heading, to snatch up those reins again. You know what I mean?

I’ve been working on that. It says on the quarter in my pocket, “In God We Trust.” That takes more practice than I care to admit, but I do realize the value in trusting someone other than oneself — beyond oneself. God makes a good night horse. Chuck Pyle’s song reminds me I’m not alone on the journey. When I trust, the reins lay slack.

(The illustration comes from a rubber stamp I picked up a few years ago. Thanks to “MD,” whoever you are.)

Shopping with the Madame

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Brothels are legal in most rural Nevada counties. The bordellos are fairly discrete, often tucked away on a dead end street. Even in a small town you may not notice the red light district. But I’ve run into the madame at the grocery store a few times — even sporting girls have to eat.

You might wonder how to tell an off-duty madame from any other shapely middle-aged woman. The most obvious clue is if she looks vaguely like her picture in the local yellow pages. No kidding. A few years back the full-page ads under “Brothels” were hard to miss in our phonebook. Of course, in real life, a madame’s face might look a decade older than the picture. In fact, even under generous make-up, her face might look a decade older than the rest of her body. No one ever claimed the world’s oldest profession was easy on a gal.

The next clue might be if she’s dressed to show off her well-proportioned figure in ways that seem a bit racy for a rural town. We’re not talking Las Vegas-over-the-top-glamor. Just boots with a heel a little thinner and higher than most women would wear to go grocery shopping. Or jeans a size tighter than a real cowgirl could tolerate astride a horse. And of course there’s the cleavage.

But the indicator I find the most interesting is how the experienced checkers act around the madame. This is a dead giveaway. The checkers treat a madame with an uncharacteristic formal distance. Their interaction is all business. They don’t joke around with the madame, or chit-chat, or ask her how her day’s been going. None of the usual friendly banter. This change in their manner is enough to alert the next person in line that something is up. And there’s a quality about the interaction that seems timeless, as if this is the way that the working women have been treated in small Western towns since the Gold Rush. Or at least it’s one of the ways they’ve been treated — I’m sure there’s been far worse.

The madame pays for her groceries and heads out the door as the sun sets. Almost time to go to work. I watch her walk across the parking lot, curious about what kind of car she drives. Curious about how a life lived so differently can intertwine with mine and it doesn’t seem so strange — and then it does seem very strange.

I’m relieved when the checker turns to me with a smile, starts unloading my shopping cart and asks how my day’s been. I can stop thinking about the madame and her next shift. But later that night, under a sleepless moon, I wonder if I’m cut out to be a Nevadan. My feminine soul has a tough time making peace with this economic need for sacrificial lambs.

Stock Dog Saves Cell Phone

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We have a Border Collie named Switch who came from a sheep ranch outside Yerington, Nevada. He’s a big, rough-coated dog who is fearless when it comes to herding animals ten times his size. But let a horsefly get within twenty feet of him and he runs for his dugout under the porch. Poor guy. Somehow those horseflies find the tender skin under his hind legs and inflict horrible, nasty bites. Switch hates anything that buzzes.

I don’t know if you folks keep your cell phones this long, but my husband has an old relic that just won’t quit. First, its screen went blank. Then the ringer gave out. If he set it on vibrate, and kept it in his pocket, he might catch an incoming call. He limped along like this until one day the phone turned up missing. I helped him look for it. I called his phone and put my ear next to the laundry basket. I listened for it in every room, inside the truck cab, out in the garage. No luck.

Several days went by. We were about to give up and buy a new phone, but we tried calling it one last time. I happened to be looking out the window when Switch dashed from the patio and disappeared. Hmmmmm … I went out the back door and looked around. There sat the phone, on top of the barbecue, buzzing like a fiend.