Look out there. You can see them. Coming down out of the mountains. Coming across time and the shimmering plains. Through the tall prairie grasses wavering in the gentle early summer breeze. A cowboy and his sidekick riding out of the west. The majestic Rockies looming at their backs. The sun orange and rising somewhere over Kansas. The sky still so blue and so clear and so clean you have to think the Industrial Age hasn’t yet seen the crack of dawn.
The cowboys wear tall hats and leather vests and dusty chaps. They ride a pair of faithful and sturdy mounts. A stallion and a gelding. The stallion, as white as the fair clouds overhead, stands broad and proud. The gelding, a mottled gray, offers a more modest posture. He might not be the best looking horse in the herd, but he’s strong and smart and loyal. Thunder and Mexico. Just ambling along in a nice easy gait.
And everywhere, for as far as the eye can see: open space. Vast, endless acres of unspoiled earth.
Thousands of buffalo graze to the north. Tens of thousands. They have heads as big as stars, bodies as big as pickup trucks. No pickups out in this neck of the woods. Not yet. Too early for pickups. Just the buffalo living fat and happy off the fruit of the land, off the wild grass stretching all the way to Canada.
And to the south: deer and antelope, prairie dogs and jack rabbits the size of teenage boys. Jack rabbit so big and fast they could probably play point guard in the N.B.A. If there was an N.B.A.
And birds, birds everywhere, popping out of the grass, swooping and darting and soaring across that indigo sky: swifts and hawks, swallows and thrashers, meadowlarks and purple martins. It looks like some kind of circus. An aerial carnival featuring the west’s most acrobatic flyers.
While the sidekick sings in a low and melodious voice:
“I wanna be a cowboy’s sweetheart,
I wanna learn to rope and to ride.
I wanna ride o’er the plains and the desert
Out west of the Great Divide.”
The cowboy, who never sings and rarely strings more than a few words together at a time, sits high in the saddle. He smiles as his good buddy continues to serenade.
“I wanna hear the coyotes howlin’
As the sun sinks into the west.
I wanna be a cowboy’s sweetheart,
That’s the life that I love best.”
I went to see Bob and Mary Lou the other day. They were thinking about buying a house in Endicott, NY, a suburb of Binghamton, where they currently have an apartment. The amazing thing about the real estate market in this neck of the woods is the price of residential property. The house pictured here, a two-family job with large living and dining rooms, multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, has a nice yard and is just a short walk from downtown. Guess how much. Nope. Guess again. Wrong. This house, which could use a cosmetic fixup but is very livable as is, currently sells for $28,000! In spite of the low cost, Bob and Mary Lou have decided to remain in their apartment, at least for the time being. They would prefer something more rural.
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