For born-again cowboys, it's all an open range

For my ninth birthday, I requested a cowboy shirt and a pair of jeans. By then we had lived in the United States almost three years, and I had become a regular at the Saturday afternoon matinees at the Gibson Theater where I sat entranced as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers or Johnny Mack Brown rode their horses over the bleak boulder-strewn Western landscape.

In Latvia, children were not allowed in movies until the age of 16, but shortly before we came to the U.S., the Displaced Persons Camp had buzzed with talk about everything the U.S. held in store for us - including movies, so imagine my excitement when I discovered there were no age restrictions here!

My birthday came, and I did receive a cowboy shirt - a blue and white plaid soft flannel with cowboy-style pockets and a row of white fringe on the chest. There were no jeans, however, for they were a forbidden item, and I had to settle for a navy blue flared skirt, which was as out of place with a cowboy shirt as anything I could imagine. I dared not complain, of course, and wore my shirt until it fell apart.

For Christmas a year earlier, I had received as a gift a small red record player and three matching red 45-speed records that played cowboy music: "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," "Red River Valley," and "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain," among others. My favorite was "Red River Valley" and I sang it with the record and as I walked to school or rode my bike to Melinda's to play cowboys in the big barn behind her house.

It was in fourth grade that the entire class was enrolled in the Look-It-Up Club which, in fact, introduced us to research. So it was that I came across a map of Nevada which I took home and pored over for hours, wondering how to pronounce the name Ely and noting that the only other city on the map, clear on the other side of the state, and marked by a star, was Carson City. Surely Reno and Las Vegas must have been on the map too, but they made no impression on me.

This map did not show the many mountain ranges or any other topographical features, but it did suggest Nevada's vastness, its desolation, which somehow ignited my imagination. I did not know how to picture vastness unless it was the ocean or a great lake. Nor could I imagine desolation, earth as uninhabited, townless, uncluttered.

But looking at the map of Nevada, I sensed what I could not put into words: there was beauty in emptiness; it was something like possibility, something like my coloring book in which the shapes are drawn but the empty spaces wait for me to do as I will.

This past weekend in Elko, I attended the 21st annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering and thought about my early fascination with everything cowboy. There was the Western wear, from elegant to strictly functional; the cowboy fare, too, the chicken pot pie, the barbecued sandwich. Even tender buffalo meat, donated by the Crow Indian tribe, the buffalo's head itself mounted and stuffed and on display at the entrance of the convention hall - as if letting us know he was complicit in the sacrifice and we should thank him for his bounty.

There were the poets, cowboys and cowgirls, and the troubadours, all those singers of ballads and laments; the wonderful guitarists, fiddlers - even an accordionist and a group of Grammy-nominated musicians from Colombia, South America, who wore flat, thin, cut-out sandals and were from eastern Colombia's ranch country themselves.

There were members of the Shoshone and other tribes displaying costumes and artifacts. At the museum, Wild Women artists displayed their pottery, jewelry, paintings and hand-woven, hand-knitted clothing. We were all immersed, baptized once again into Born-Again Cowboys.

For that is how it is. A friend of mine, a writer, poet and cowboy, tells me "There are no real cowboys," but this does not deny the existence of ranchers, of guys who ride horses and rope steers. What he means is that there cannot be a "real cowboy," because the cowboy has become our cultural and psychological archetype.

In a sense that means we are all cowboys, all of us who grew up imagining and dreaming we could be both hero and scoundrel, wear either a white hat or black. The archetype lends itself to the liberal imagination as well as the conservative. It accommodates all of us, from George W. Bush to John Kerry.

We don't have to wear the jeans, the shirt, the hat and boots, to love the idea of who we might be or become. Yet every time I wear jeans or drive through the desert, I reaffirm somehow the person I wanted to become when I was in fourth grade.

n Ursula Carlson, Ph.D. teaches writing and literature at Western Nevada Community College.