Looking back through the archives, I realized I’m coming up on 200 posts for this substack, which is kind of a surprise. I started this thing about 10 months ago, not having any clue whether it would generate any interest. But thanks to everyone who has been reading these. I’m very grateful. I decided to re-post one of the stories that generated the most hits.
This is the intro to a memoir I’ve been working on for many years, called Be a Man: Raised in the Shadow of Cowboys. I would be more than grateful to anyone who shares these posts on other platforms.
I have always kind of loved the fact that my middle name is Charles. It wasn’t because of the artist, though. My father’s name was Charles, so my parents named me after him, but the fact that my name is Russell Charles Rowland has always been a source of pride.
Two eight-year-old boys, both wearing straw cowboy hats, make their way toward a dusty corral. The smaller of the two, Kelly Kornamen, leads the way; this is the ranch where he lives with his parents Donny and Esther, friends of my grandparents for decades. Kelly’s boots are well worn, his jeans show signs of work—bare patches, mud. His face is round, a baby face that he will have even when I meet up with him forty years later.
The other boy, the eight-year-old version of me, wears boots that are clearly new, as is my straw hat. I try to walk with the same bow-legged swagger that Kelly has, but mine is forced. The Kornamen place is just a few miles from the ranch where my mother grew up, so whenever we come to visit Grandpa and Grandma Arbuckle, which is at least twice a year, my grandparents bring me to visit Kelly. We’ve known each other our whole lives, and we’ve always had an easy friendship. Kelly is shy but has the same dry, self-effacing wit that so many of my rural friends share.
“You ever ridden a calf before?” Kelly asks.
“’Course,” I say. This…is a lie.
“Good. I got one all lined up for us.” The Kornamen corrals are close to the house, and we make our way through the straw-covered barn, thick with all the aromas of ranch life.
Kelly leads me into the tack room, where he pulls a pair of his chaps from a hook and hands them to me. I strap them on, ignoring the fact that they’re too short. While I’m buckling the chaps, Kelly kneels down and fixes some spurs onto my boots. He stands and steps back.
“Perfect. You look like a real cowboy.”
We laugh, and I follow him into the chute, my belly fluttering. It can’t be that hard, I think to myself, but I’ve also been to enough rodeos to know better. What if I make a complete fool of myself? I try to bolster my confidence by remembering that my dad used to ride broncs and even bulls. It should come naturally, right, being a cowboy? It’s ingrained in you when you grow up in Montana.
“Climb on up there,” Kelly says, his grin wide, his blue eyes gleaming a little. I can’t help but wonder whether he knows I’m lying.
I climb the slats to the top of the chute, then lower myself onto the back of a big Hereford calf. Kelly has fastened a rope around the calf’s torso, an improvised flank strap, and he hands me a pair of gloves, which I don before tucking my left hand under the rope, palm up. I grip the rope tightly.
“Ready?”
I’ve also been to enough rodeos to know to raise my right hand high, then give a slight nod, which I do, and the gate swings open. This is apparently not the first time this calf has been in this position, as she bolts straight ahead without hesitation. My right hand quickly drops from above my head, grabbing the rope, and for about twenty yards, I manage to hang on, my head jerking with every stride. But after those twenty yards, the calf stops dead in her tracks. And I go flying.
One of the great traditions in the West involves great photographs of bronc and bull riders flying off their mounts, caught in mid-air in poses that could be mistaken for ballet or gymnastics. We have a great photo of my father on a saddle bronc, his right arm straight above his head, a strap twisting next to his head in a snake-like curl, and a big cigar clamped tightly between his teeth.
When I think of flying over that calf’s head, I like to picture myself in one of these graceful poses. But chances are, I looked a lot more like one of these unfortunate people who get captured in what have become known as ‘fails,’ flying through the air with an ugly mouth open horror, my arms and legs stretched out like useless wings.
I land like a sack of grain, flat on my stomach, and for the next several minutes, I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. Every effort to speak comes out in a choked gasp. Kelly rolls me over, and kneels by my side. He seems equally convinced that I’m about to die, as the tears run down his face. My hat is crumpled next to me, never to be crisp and clean again. Kelly crawls down to my feet, where he pulls my boots off, for reasons I don’t understand.
“You okay?” The voice of an adult comes from somewhere behind me, and suddenly the bigger but equally round face of Donny Kornamen peers down at me. “You gonna make it?”
Even in my altered state, I can see that Donny is struggling not to laugh. And once I’m able to regain my breath, I lie there for a while.
From that day forward, Donny Kornamen loves to tell this story, always ending with the perfect punchline: “Kelly was not about to let his friend die with his boots on.”
So much of my childhood in Montana can be summarized in this story. The effort to appear as if I know what I’m doing. The fear of looking foolish. And also the pressure of being tough enough. Not being cowboy enough. When you grow up in the West, there is a constant voice, questioning whether you’re going to live up to the cowboy image.
I have told this story often through the years, and for a long time I ended it by saying that I never climbed on a calf again. But I recently realized that this wasn’t true. I had created that ending to support a certain narrative. We all remember things differently, and tell ourselves stories that serve a purpose, and sometimes they outgrow that purpose. For a long time, I felt the need to prove that growing up in the West damaged me. I convinced myself that the simmering fear and anger that defined me for many years could be blamed on incidents like this.
But like most examples of our past, the truth is more complicated than that. The truth is, I rode calves several times after that. The truth is, it was probably one of the incidents from my childhood that taught me an important lesson about perseverance.
Somewhere along the way, I had to decide how much of the ‘get back on the horse’ mentality served me well, and which incidents fell under the ‘stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’ category. Because there is no question that many of us who grew up in the West had the idea pounded into our heads that we have to swallow our pain. That asking for help is a sign of weakness. There is a balance in all this, and it’s not always easy to find the middle ground.
And the messages we have gotten and still get from books and films about our region often add to the confusion. For example, in the very first episode of the popular series “Yellowstone,” which I despise, one of the main characters fixes a full-sized cattle brand on another man’s chest in order to convince him that he needs to come to work for the Dutton ranch. It’s the kind of injury that would potentially kill a man in real life, but the next morning, the man who received the brand is there bright and early, not only ready to go to work, but not showing the slightest hint of having received a life-threatening injury.
Some people claim that this is just harmless entertainment, but I have never agreed with that. Men here grow up with this notion that we are obligated to endure physical pain, not to mention the abuse from our fellow men. It’s part of the code.
But Montana has ranked in the top five for suicide for the past forty years, so there are messages that we get here that contribute to that trend. But there are also positive lessons we learn from living in a place where we are exposed to the cycle of life in very real, visceral ways.
Bill Moyers once asked writer Barry Lopez how he approaches writing a new book, and Lopez responded by saying “If I’m not scared to death when I start a new book, I know it’s not going to be worth a damn.”
I don’t know whether I’m exactly scared to death about writing this book, but I do know that I want this to be the hardest book I’ve ever written. I believe there is sometimes a wide gap between the truth we tell ourselves and the truth that really happened. And I know for a fact that there are often huge crevices between how we remember the events of our own life and the way others remember them. I am hoping to find some footing in those spaces as I clasp a headlamp on my forehead and duck into these caverns, looking for some semblance of the truth. Not because I think I have anything to teach anyone, but because I believe I need to learn as much as I can about my own story before I’m done. I hope to never stop in that quest.
This is wonderful - and so thoughtful about the "code" that so many men grow up with, that is so harmful to them and ultimately to those around them as well. You're the expert on growing up male, obviously, not me, but from my experiences and observations, "swallowing pain" is rarely helpful. I had my English Comp students write papers essentially about this topic and there were so many gut-wrenching stories. The following semester l had my students write about it from the viewpoint of "trauma in childhood" rather than as a gendered topic, and there was an even greater out-pouring of painful stories. (Then l got in trouble from the English Dept because one male student complained about the required "personal" writing. Lots of students tried to counter his complaint, but now if I'm going to do that l also have to offer a choice to write about something else. I can see how that makes sense, but l also feel like young people need many more "self-awareness" opportunities than they are currently getting in educational settings.) Anyway, your book sounds terrific, and I'll be looking forward to it!
This is just wonderful Russell — I often question why the romantic notions of "cowboy culture" have made such a resurgence, when the truths you speak of here still sting sharply and ring loudly. However, I'm hopeful the revisit is evidence of the next generation upgrading that ethos.