Growing Up Amish - Ira Wagler [37]
The Aylmer people, too, I’m sure, smirked silently. David Wagler moved far away for the sake of his sons, and now look at how they repay him. Better he had stayed in Aylmer and confronted the problems there instead of uprooting his family in such a futile move.
As for our little gang of six, well, we had done it. Done what we had claimed we could do, back there in the safety of our Amish world. Many Amish kids threaten to leave and never do. They never have the nerve or the guts to go. We did, and no one could ever take that away from us. We were far away, safe in another world. Safe and free.
15
We quickly settled into the cowboy life, though the reality was a far cry from my idealized childhood perceptions of it. It was tough work, with long and dreary hours. We rode the range for days on end, herding cattle. Within two months, I was walking bowlegged—and not because I wanted to. Even when everything else was done, there were always endless miles of old, rusty fences to repair. Sometimes Allen and I worked together, and sometimes I went alone, driving the fence rows in an old four-wheel-drive pickup loaded with fencing tools and rolls of barbed wire.
It’s a harsh and desolate land, the sand hills of north central Nebraska. Remote and empty, and brutally lonely. The people who live there and scratch a living from the land are tough and hard. They have to be to survive and keep their sanity. It takes many acres of sand hills to sustain one cow for one year, but the very desolation, the emptiness, is a thing of beauty, too. The hills are alive with mule deer, jackrabbits as large as dogs, and coyotes.
And, of course, cattle. On many a day I worked alone, sometimes riding miles through vast empty stretches to retrieve a stray bull or a few cows.
In late May and early June, it was branding time, and the ranchers all got together and helped one another, kind of like the Amish do with their threshing. We loaded the trailer with our horses and headed out, arriving shortly after daybreak. All the cows with calves were corralled and ready. Amid much frantic bawling from their mothers, the calves were then separated, roped by their hind legs, and unceremoniously dragged to where the brands were heating on a fire.
Two cowboys grabbed a calf and stretched it out, helpless, on the ground, while a third approached with the red-hot branding iron and applied it to the calf’s rump. Once branded, all the calves were vaccinated, and the bull calves were castrated.
The air was filled with smoke, the smell of burning flesh, the sound of crying calves and bawling cows, and the riotous shouts of the cowboys. It was all quite exciting. Usually by noon or a bit later, the task was done, and we all assembled at the ranch house for the noon meal. After the meal, we sat around outside, and a bottle of whiskey was passed from man to man. Any cowboy was free to take a few swigs. It was an exciting time for the six of us. We were young—kids, really. At sixteen, Rudy was the youngest. Willis was the oldest at eighteen. He was the only legal adult among us all. Such a thing would probably be impossible, not to mention illegal, today, to hire minors to work a man’s job. Back in 1979, though, life was a bit less complicated.
We wore jeans and Western shirts and cowboy hats, and we felt cool. That summer I began smoking cigarettes for real, a habit that would stay with me, off and on, for almost ten years. From what I’d seen and read, the ideal cowboy smoked, so I did too—filterless Camels, the real deal. In my mind, I can still taste them—not an altogether unpleasant memory.
On Saturday nights, we all hit the town. Allen and I usually met the others there, and we would all hang out at the drive-in movie theater, still a staple of small towns back then. That’s where all the action was. Teenagers converged every Saturday night and hung out, drinking beer and socializing.
We got to know the fairer sex too. I’d never