The real thing about being a cowboy, besides all those things you hear about all the time, is the time you have to just think. It's mostly a solitary job, and mostly a physical job. The mental faculties can, most of the time, be otherwise engaged. This it the reason so many of the great thoughts of the last two hundred years have come from the cowboy sector.
"My ass hurts," thinks Rusty.
Rusty likes to remember the little creek that ran beside the house where he grew up. There was a thicket of trees behind the house, and the creek took a sudden turn there around the thicket, cutting a high bank into the crumbly, black, clay soil of the Texas hill country. Through a miracle of trees and water and sun, the spot was always shaded. At one point in the afternoon, you had to pull your toes in close to keep them in the shade, but the rest of you was always shaded. If there was rain, you could hang your feet in the water off the edge of the big, flat, limestone rock that served as a perfect bench. Rusty can imagine no better place on earth. He used to sit out there and dream about being a cowboy. At the time, he could imagine no better life.
"No man is an island," Rusty says to himself. He read it from a sermon book that his father had borrowed from a neighbor in order to teach his son to read. Rusty never read much after those lessons, but he struggled through words that sermon probably twenty times. He didn't understand all the words, but he liked the sound of it, so it stayed in his head. Rusty wasn't one to talk much but, when he did, he often would reply to various questions with, "Well, you know, no man is an island." This seemed smart to him, and others didn't seem to mind it.
A whistle from the boss caught his attention, and Rusty turned to see him pointing back to the left at a couple of stragglers. He reined the horse around and went to herd them back in. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls," he thought. "It tolls for thee."
Yep, there's lots of time to think out on the trail. Many great thoughts were born, lived out their days and died out there under those wide skies.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love.
