My rodeo career was over, but I continued partying like I was on tour. I ran through my money pretty quick, and so I started looking for work after school. I found a job in a lumberyard as a delivery guy, dropping off wood and other materials.
I was a decent worker, and I guess it showed. One day a fellow came in and started talking to me.
“I know a guy who owns a ranch and he’s looking for a hired hand,” he said. “I wonder if you’d be interested.”
“Holy hell,” I told him. “I’ll go out there right now.”
And so I became a ranch hand—a real cowboy—even though I was still going to school full-time.
Life as a Cowboy
I went to work for David Landrum, in Hood County, Texas, and quickly found out I wasn’t near as much of a cowboy as I thought I was. David took care of that. He taught me everything about working a ranch, and then some. He was a rough man. He would cuss you up one side and down the other. If you were doing good, he wouldn’t say a word. But I ended up really liking the guy.
Working on a ranch is heaven.
It’s a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it’s an easy life. You’re outside all the time. Most days it’s just you and the animals. You don’t have to deal with people or offices or any petty bullshit. You just do your job.
David’s spread ran ten thousand acres. It was a real ranch, very old-school—we even had a chuck wagon during the spring round-up season.
I want to tell you, this was a beautiful place, with gentle hills, a couple of creeks, and open land that made you feel alive every time you looked at it. The heart of the ranch was an old house that had probably been a way station—an “inn” in Yankee-speak—back in the nineteenth century. It was a majestic building, with screened porches front and back, nice-sized rooms inside, and a big fireplace that warmed the soul as well as the skin.