The road appeared seemingly by magic just as the sun was going down – one of those rare moments when the universe conspires to bestow a fleeting gift of beauty for your eyes only. A brush with the sublime then, as occasionally happens, and somehow always when I’m alone. Attempting to capture it in pictures is only ever partially successful – you cannot feel the wind or the sun, you cannot smell the leaves or the air, you cannot become part of this fall day – you can only sense it, and then it is a mere approximation of the enormity of the feeling. The feeling of fall. The feeling of an ending.
I am just a cowboy lonesome on the trail
A starry night, a campfire light
The coyote call, the howling winds wail
So I ride out to the old sundown
I am just a cowboy lonesome on the trail
Lord, I’m just thinking about a certain female
The nights we spent together riding on the range
Looking back it seems so strange
The road looks tempting. It disappears into the light and we all, well most of us, want to follow the light – but it is the dying light of a day, the end of a cycle, while the promise of night is less a promise and more of a threat. Foreboding, it leads one on in dangerously seductive tones, flattery of beauty and dangling delight. Night, barely dented by moonlight or starlight or candlelight, looms ahead – right about where the road leads off from what the human eye can see.
Roll me over and turn me around
Let me keep spinning ’til I hit the ground
Roll me over and let me go
Riding in the rodeo
A road leading into the woods is often enticing that way, and for some souls the idea of night is a draw as well, provided they can guarantee their safety, that it’s only a passing thrill and imaginary danger – the way we seek out scary movies or amusement park rides. Danger with a safety net – exciting, thrilling, but never life-altering. I’ve played with such imagined dangers and lived in such entertaining fears. It’s a cop-out for real risks like telling the truth and being completely honest all the time. We humans require our petty distractions, our silly and shy objects to keep our eyes off the real horrors of the world. The older I get, the more difficult it becomes to shut out those horrors. They wind their way back to you, they show up on the most benign of roads.
I was took in Texas I did not know her name
Lord, all these southern girls seem the same
Down below the border in a town in Mexico
I got my job busting broncs for the rodeo
A cowboy faces those fears head-on, because honesty and integrity are part of the cowboy code, skewed and strange though such a code may seem. It bends and morphs into a different moral plane, one not bound by societal terms or social pressure, one not contained by law or restriction. It’s a trip into the night, where clear lines and boundaries cannot as easily be seen, where the road becomes something you have to feel, a ride of instinct and intuition. The very worst sort of road for those who like to know where they are going.
Roll me over and turn me around
Let me keep spinning ’til I hit the ground
Roll me over and let me go
Running free with the buffalo
Here I go!
Roll me over and I’ll turn around
And I’ll move my fingers
Up and down/ Up and down
It’s OK amigo, just let me go
Riding in the rodeo
Roll me over and turn me around
Let me keep spinning ’til I hit the ground
Roll me over and let me go
Riding in the rodeo
Cowboy walks away; cowboy walks into; cowboy walks back. Cowboy walks between shadow and light, day and night, meekness and might. Cowboy walks with freedom, the only constraint being whatever heartstrings he allows to be plucked. Cowboy walks…
Roll me over and set me free
The cowboy’s life is the life for me
