Cowboy Up

Today I went to the Boulder Horse & Rider to buy a pair of jeans. It's Boulder's version of a feed store. In Texas, feed stores are generally huge and carry all sorts of farm and ranch supplies, clothing, animal feed, hay and some sell tractors and other machinery. Boulder's version isn't quite that. It's a very small shop with bagged "specialty" horse feed, a small selection of grooming supplies and clothes, some books, saddles and a few other odds and ends for the discriminating Boulder horseperson. It's locally owned, and they're one of only two clothing retailers I know of in the entire city that don't sell $200 designer jeans - and they're the only retailer that sells Wrangler (which are made in the USA.)

The owner is usually there when I drop in. She's nice, at least from what I gather in our short chats during my irregular, infrequent visits. She's the outdoorsy type, though I get the impression she's a bit pretentious and probably a gossip. She was there today. I walked in and she immediately started chatting me up. "So are you enjoying this gorgeous fall weather!?" she said with a big grin. I smiled and nodded. She kept talking but I wasn't really listening. I'm normally more chatty but I wasn't in the mood today. Eventually the chatter faded and I found my jeans.

I browsed some art she sells by a local farrier named Andrew. He's a young guy with a gift for painting. When he's not shoeing horses, he paints himself, his wife, horses and his cowboy friends in watercolor. I've been collecting his art, but there was nothing new today.

I browsed some saddles. I know of one saddle maker on the entire Front Range who still makes saddles the old fashioned way by hand. I haven't met him yet, but I'm keen to interview him and get a tour of his shop. These were not those kinds of saddles. They were all shiny, mostly made of synthetic materials, amply stuffed with synthetic padding so that they ride more like a pillow than a proper saddle. They were machine stitched and I could picture them rolling off an assembly line in China. They looked like something you might find in a furniture mega-store; lots of black pleather and chrome-esque bobbles. They were godawful ugly and modern looking and had no personality. They don't even look like they belong on a horse.

I was about to checkout when a book caught my eye. It was a book about packing, and there were several photos on the front of cowboys packing up horses and mules in some dreamy mountain wilderness. I perused the pages for a long while, looking through black and white photos of cowboys, probably in the 1970's, demonstrating the various stages of packing, leading, trail clearing, tracking, camping, cooking. I didn't see anything terribly modern in the photos. From the canvas bags on the mules to the hats on the cowboys, these guys and their equipment looked "all natural." To my great pleasure, I noticed they specifically mentioned what we today refer to as the "leave no trace" philosophy. They may have been just a bunch of horse-packin cowboys, but they had respect for nature and keeping the land clean and minimally impacted. I had to buy it.

At the register the owner asked, "Are you a packer?"

I didn't look up. "Just dreaming," I mumbled.

"Oh you need to go! I just came back from a packing trip up in Montana! It's so gorgeous! You need to take your horses up there! This is the prettiest time of year!"

Her words grated on me, probably because I don't have any horses to take anywhere. She was a publisher in her previous life. She made a lot of money then decided she wasn't happy, so she sold everything and moved to Boulder and bought herself a million dollar ranch, a herd of horses, and opened this little store for something to do when she wasn't riding. It's people like her that keep people like me out of the running for land around here. She doesn't have to work. I do. But instead of buying her dream ranch out in the wide open spaces of West Texas or Montana or Wyoming or less populated parts of Colorado, she's right here playing in my back yard keeping property prices higher than working people can afford. Consciously I can't blame her, but subconsciously I'm ripping her a new one. I'm just being a crybaby.

Just then a BMW pulled up and a short thin 40-ish woman dressed in expensive synthetic riding clothes came in.

"Babs!*" the owner cried.

"Sweetie! It's been too long!" Babs replied, opening her arms wide. Kissy-kisssy, huggy-huggy.

"Oh Babs, how's the new darling treating you?"

"Oh," Babs exclaimed with a comically dramatic exasperation, "I've been riding Sasha now for what, two weeks? Well, you'll just never believe blah blah blah..."

I walked out the door. These people have every bit as much right to own land and horses as I do, and it isn't their fault or their problem that they ended up with the riches to do so and I haven't (yet, anyway.) I still can't help that it pisses me off, and I can't help feel that I'd make better use of the land and appreciate it more than these spoiled Californians who just come out here to play. That doesn't justify anything and nobody ever said life was fair. I realize it's irrational and wasteful to let it piss me off. These people don't deserve my scorn, so I just brood quietly to myself or let it leak out in this blog. This weekend when Babs is out being frustrated with the nuances of her new $100,000 polo pony, I'll be reading my little book and dreaming that I'm one of those cowboys in those old black and white photos, packing up a $300 mule and a $1,000 horse for a long trek into the serenity of some distant mountain wilderness.

*Babs wasn't her actual name, though it was something equally cutesy and pretentious. I just can't recall it.