William Holden and Ryan O’Neal in Wild Rovers (1971).
It came on me suddenly like the violent sneezes brought on this time of year by my allergy. I didn’t expect it, I didn’t even want it. It doesn’t fit. If someone asked me about Westerns, I would say that I have no use for those macho posturings.
I would lie. Many things in my life don’t fit my politics or my moral stance or my history.
But as with all passions, it doesn’t matter.
It all began a few years back with Lonesome Dove, first the two novels, then the movies which I saw at home, long after their release, on DVDs rented from our invaluable Video Library.
I think it was the friendship between the two main characters that drew me, grumpy but loyal to the end. I may have missed that from time to time with my woman friends who are seldom grumpy but drift in and out of my life—or I drift in and out of their lives—with little conception of loyalty and less passion.
Or it may have been and might continue to be my absurd fascination with horses and the men (not the women) who ride them, a fascination that began decades ago when my freedom, growing up, depended on my solitary rides on my old mare, back into what seemed like wilderness, long since eaten up by development. I haven’t had the opportunity as an adult to escape on horseback which may be why those rides shine so bright in my memory, even my one bad fall when a passing motorcycle frightened my normally docile mare into throwing me.
Landing on pavement—I’d been riding along a paved country road—I “did something to my back.” I didn’t want to find out what, since it would have meant a temporary or permanent end to my escaping so I said nothing, took a lot of hot baths, swallowed aspirin and waited for the pain to pass, which it did.
Perhaps this is a better way to go than the hysteria of doctors’ offices, over-prescribed pain pills, too much bed rest and so forth.
Anyway, no matter what, I went on riding until I let the too many options of adulthood close that door.
But really, my own love of horseback riding probably doesn’t have much to do with it. I am mesmerized watching the development, violent disruption and resolution of friendships between men who, except for a few random pairings, have no need or use for women.
Why would they? We don’t offer the rough and tumble, the excitement and the risk of those galloping cowboys on the lone prairie.
Now I try to ration my secret passion, or rather its secret satisfaction, like a love affair I don’t want anyone to know about: only one western a night—and I’m indiscriminate, I like all of them, though the old ones are best—no more than four or five a week, after supper, with some guilty twinges about the way my passion interferes with my reading.
Well, I’ve always read a lot, several books a week, but it’s a rare novel that I find “I can’t put down.” Right now I can only think of one, Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, also a movie which I don’t need to see, the novel is so satisfying.
I don’t think I would be fascinated by written westerns although I haven’t tried any so I don’t know.
Why these cowboys and not us?
We women are a little more frugal with our energy and our sense of risk is well-tuned. This is evolutionarily essential since we are often responsible, willy-nilly, for many other people, not all of them children.
And so leaping from the ground onto a horse’s back, bareback, as I’ve seen a cowboy do, would be perhaps physically impossible but also hindered by our keen sense of “what if…” A sure curb to adventure.
Is what often seems our innate conservatism the reason our bonds with other women seem primarily emotional rather than physical, and possibly lacking in weight and force? Or is it what sometimes seems our innate focus on judging? After all, these wild cowboys put up with murderous behavior—or close to it—from their horse-partners, whereas a scrap of overheard gossip will often sink female connections.
And how good we must smell and how nice we must be to put together those connections at all, whereas a sweating stinking horseman seems to gather attractiveness from his very un-attractiveness.
Well, enough analyzing. I am as delighted to continue to pursue my passion as I am to go on eating whipped cream, guiltlessly, whenever I have a chance.
William Holden and Ryan O’Neal in Wild Rovers (1971).
Bard AI wrote this new poem about horseback riding and whipped cream:
//
Astride my steed, I ride away
Through fields of green and flowers gay,
The wind is in my hair,
The sun is in my air,
And all the world seems fair.
I feel the horse beneath me move
As if he knew my every love,
He knows my heart’s desire,
He knows my soul’s fire,
And he will take me where I tire.
We ride across the open plain,
The wind is in our manes again,
We gallop through the trees,
We race across the seas,
And all the world is ours to please.
We come to a clearing in the wood,
A table set with white and good,
A feast of whipped cream,
A feast of dreams,
A feast for me and my steed.
We eat and drink and laugh and play,
The sun is setting, time to go away,
But we will come again,
To this place of dreams,
Where all our wishes come true.
I reread your blog Adventure/Adventurer. And I reread (for the 4th time) “What I learned from Fat Annie.” And now, your passion for the wild western movie. I hope I am not too bold to say to you – go for it – leave the privileged place of academia. Ride anew into that culvert of youth and remember what you wrote about it : ……and I sailed through triumphantly. Real country on the other side was now open to me.”
I can’t waut to read the new stories you promised.