by Louy Castonguay

Created on: August 08, 2009   Last Updated: August 09, 2009

COWBOY LOST

(An Excerpt from the book Cowboy Poet)

Joe woke early, as the sun slanted into his hotel room. After a quick wash and morning prayers, he eagerly left to explore Philadelphia. At a restaurant, he scanned the menu for unfamiliar foods, something he'd been doing since running from his dad's ranch in South Dakota almost a year ago. He found scrapple to be sausage-like and the sweet tartness of the pineapple juice was refreshing. After breakfast, seventeen-year-old Joe wandered the city, walking at random. The zoo seemed cruel, but he knew the animals wouldn't survive freedom, like paddock raised colts and like the mill and factory workers. Captivity was the price for handouts. Did people agree to the bargain? Was independence what had drawn his mother to his father and pulled her from her comfortable Bostonian surroundings to the West?

He wandered into a library, seeking answers, especially why his father had become a raving madman, raising a hand to his Ma, throwing him out of the house bodily and screaming at him to never return. After a year away from home, he still didn't know any more than the questions. Maybe the answers were in those Western books his dad was always after him to read, like Olmstead's Texas. Maybe Pa was scared he'd have to move here, associating education and culture with captivity.

He'd show his Pa when he returned. He didn't need to be part of the East to enjoy good books and other fine things. Though horses would always be around, at least on the range, trains and automobiles would link the nation, colleges would spring up in every state and they could teach the classics, right beside animal husbandry and crop management, so Westerners could stay put. The young men who had participated in the big World War had seen the wide, wide world, and it would grow smaller at their hands. Being isolated down on the farm would no longer suit, even for those content to farm for a living.

He found a section of the library labeled Science. Dizzy with the learning surrounding him, he discovered a book about horses, with pictures of different sizes and shapes, showing their bones, and took the book over to a table. Seeing the names Darwin, Morgan and DeVries and Mendel, whole chapters with words he couldn't decipher, Joe scanned quickly to the part with the pictures. He could link the pictures and captions into a story and understand. Parents carried traits and passed them on to their offspring, obvious in horse breeding,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>