From my favorite Funny Frenchman, VinVin (of the sadly abandoned but still hilarious Bonjour America!), came the pleasure of this video. I realized when I saw his post heading, "j'adore", that Europeans really romanticize the American West.
I remember my British husband was desperate to be a cowboy. The minute he got to Arizona he bought the requisite boots, hat, belt, snap-buttoned western-tailored shirt. He already had the suede fringe jacket (I pretended I didn't know him when he wore that), and the bow legs too. Not sure how he got the legs, having never been on a horse in his life.
Anyway, suddenly, after living in Europe for a while, I watched this video through European eyes, and I could grasp the romance, the rustic, desolate openness of it all. And I realized that the "cowboy way" isn't really a myth - made up in the minds of outsiders, or manufactured in John Wayne's Hollywood. I've personally viewed all those scenarios in the video. The bronco and bull riding, the dust from the arena settling on the trucks in the parking lot and the steel-bar corrals. I've leaned on the fence and smelled hay and horse sweat. I've watched the horses' heaving sides, their flexing muscles, listened to their snorting breath, as they flummoxed by me on the way to skirting the next barrel.
I've been both pilot and co-pilot in many versions of that old GMC truck.
You can look at the video images of undulating, golden dust prairie and imagine that these places hold a steady silence. But all you have to do is stop your truck and stand on the side of an empty road, just for a minute or so, to let the world settle around you, and you'll know that this is a silence chock full of sound. Pebbles scuttling down mountain sides, birds cawing in the distance, wind - hot or cold, depending on the time of year - wafting against your ears, stirring your hair. In Arizona there are large hawks who work in pairs, with one in a tree top or telephone pole, the other on the ground. As soon as the lookout spies a mouse or other prey, she makes a sound the likes of which I've only heard at 3AM in dingy honky tonks when some guy is puking in the bathroom. At the sound of the puke, the hawk's partner takes off after the prey on the ground and catches it for both he and his partner to enjoy.
And when it's 120 degrees in these parts, you can almost hear the pavement sizzle, the cicadas rub their legs together at amazing speeds and the rocks slowly crack. At night, the desert comes alive, with hooting owls and coyote howls.
I don't miss America. But I had a little stirrin' in my heart for the peacefulness of this certain kind of nowhere, this plentiful nothing.
(If you're viewing this post from an email, please click through to my blog to view the video)
Source: omywordblog.blogspot.com
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