“It’s because of how you talk, Taylor.”
The Cowboy is revealing the secret to how people know I’m not from here, as our truckload of hay leaves a wake of dust trailing behind us on the 93 highway. I hate receiving this information.
I gaze out the window melodramatically, critiquing my own performance in the passenger side wing mirror, as I love to do. I see my own absurdity in this moment, crestfallen, here in my mesh Murdock’s snapback, zip-up hoodie, and knotted periwinkle handkerchief. I am a pouting child of California, ostracised from my new Montana playground. I may look the part - barely, as I’ve refused to buy Wranglers - but this voice, unfortunately, isn’t going anywhere.
Minutes prior, I let an exasperated “DUDE!” slip while leveraging my bodyweight to secure banding around the semi truck of alfalfa, which is something I have never done before in my life. The process is simple: after hearing a muffled warning from The Cowboy, who I can barely understand in regular day-to-day correspondence, an 8-pound winch hurls through the sky from behind two stories-worth of hay. The apparatus, attached to a relic of a slack line, careens blindly towards the shining faces of myself and the ranch-hand next me, which we are to gain control of, attach to the eyeleted framing of the truck bed, and crank firmly into submission. Unfortunately, these components do not wish to connect, and I am left penduluming from the tether, realising sweet surf-vernacular from the motherland. I receive a quick and entertaining glance from the ranch-hand next to me, and my dignity becomes a distant memory.
The fact I am disillusioned enough to believe I have been blending in any form of the imagination here is absolutely ridiculous. I am no farm girl. Despite my formerly described attempt at Montana drag - this is a far cry from the woman I was just a year ago, clicking around the streets of San Francisco’s Financial District donning a silk Equipment blouse, pencil skirt, and a bad attitude. And now I am here, overstaying my welcome on a road trip with my best friend, and parading around as, they call, “a blender.” The bad attitude remains.
The good hearted folks of Montana have a problem with this former version of me, and rightfully so. I have arrived in their state, as of late, in droves, after mainlining episode after episode of Yellowstone, prepared to conquer this new frontier. The grind of the city, excruciating traffic, and nests of hypodermic needles have inched me towards my proverbial edge, and my lab-rat quarantine accommodations have tipped me well over it. Here I stand, bravely, with my IPO cash to burn (not me, personally - I wish), trends that mean nothing to them, and opinions they didn't ask for. I’ve attempted to order an oat milk latte. I want to take a spin class. Bitch about the one meandering Uber in the county. I find myself wanting to recreate exactly the place I have s0 publicly renounced, in front of just the people whose sanctuary I haved elbowed my way into. My theater of war is now this untouched slice of heaven, where man and nature and God, somehow, still exist. And me challenging that, unconsciously or not, has rightfully pissed some people off.
I consider the implications of this word “Dude” that has just slipped - and acknowledge the very irony of its Western derivative, (ie; dude ranch) and how this appropriation has repelled me exactly from the place I wish it would magically attach me to. I’ve been doing this all summer, noting phrase after phrase from the West that I use every day; I’ve gotten “back in the saddle,” asked The Cowboy to “hold your horses,” accused someone of “chompin’ at the bit,” and quite literally mounted a horse, proclaiming “This isn’t my first rodeo!” The people here are often non-responsive to these micro-atrocities, offering the subversive and cracked mirror of silence - worse than any roast imaginable.
The Cowboy also stays stoically quiet while I’m here in Montana working with him at his ranch, in the deep, open country - save these concentrated crystallizations of wisdom. He is a time capsule of a simpler, harder working, handshake kind of world. And he looks at me, this California parasite - and knows I, and millions of Americans just like me - could very well be the end of him.
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Back home between my month-long stints, I meander a local shopping center with my mother, noting today’s fast fashions. Beyond the washed tie-dye aesthetic and roomy streetwear of the 90’s that Gen Z has revived demand for, I see some familiar, albeit, surprising friends. Capped with tiny, shiny concho detailing on the toe, pairs of oxblood and bone cowboy boots stare at each other on the showroom floor. Over here, Daisy Dukes. Over there, a felted Australian Cattlemen’s hat, with a tawdry shock of feather in its rim. What in tarnation...?
Hollywood is an easy finger point, always. There is the undeniable success of Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone series, set on the 500,000 acre Dutton Ranch - now the #1 show on cable television. Even though so few of us have cable, it seems - we do have Amazon Prime! And plenty of time to gorge in quarantine. Every time I go to Montana, and share a post, an inevitable Yellowstone inquiry surfaces in my DMs. I notice all my friends in Los Angeles are donning cowboy attire, with their tan legs and impossible thigh gaps. Diplo has dazzled us in his disco cowboy ensembles for the past few years - although he now seems to be transitioning to the Bass Pro-duck-blind-Miller-lite-before-noon aesthetic. A TikTok of Post Malone reveals him jam seshing something you’d hear in a honky tonk. This obsession with the West, our country eats like candy - yet still - this cowboy who sits next to me has never felt more repelled by America in his entire life.
A lesson gleaned within the walls of the women’s restroom of The Silver Slipper bar in Missoula bolts to mind. As with most whiskey-fueled breakthroughs between strangers in restrooms, these words circulate regularly through my mind. “With every big swing in the market, people come out here. They think they can handle it, that they want the space. In 3 or 4 years, though, they’ll be gone, and we’ll be stuck with whatever is left behind. Which we couldn’t afford to begin with.” This encounter makes this bathroom oracle sound like a huge bitch - she was not. The lesson was very matter of fact and educational. She cast a hypnosis over my friend and I, propped there against the sink and draped over the bathroom’s black pleather furniture (disgusting?), completely entranced with her perspective. I have never forgotten it. Ultimately, it seems, this manifest destiny-esque movement is a notch on a string, before another previous and similar notch on the same string, that extends indefinitely through this strip-clubesque bathroom in either direction.
Jenny Odell supports this in “How to do Nothing: The Resistance of the Attention Economy” spotlighting the mental exhaustion of the 70’s, amongst the wrapping of the Vietnam War and creation - and polarization - of birth control. People took refuge in the countryside, many joining communes, only to realize sustainability was a pipedream behind familiar issues of funding, cultesque human dynamic experiments, and our old friend, politics. The post-quarantine awakening mimics parts of this - as I collect story after story of family friends fleeing their lifelong suburbs and cities to find peace in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and of course, dear Montana.
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Despite the swift and undeniable rise in pop culture popularity, today, business is bad for the rancher. Meat is inherently evil - we’ve all seen the documentaries. After spending two nearly-vegan months in Bali, flirting with that self-obsessed mania following a breathless, gorgeous moment of extreme thinness - I bought into the program, even if flexitarian. Six months following this Indonesian escapade, I would intercept The Cowboy at a swing dancing bar on a road trip through the West, asking him with frank, gotcha-style journalism, “What’s it like being in the business of death?” As both a rancher and avid hunter - he’ll argue that nobody understands the meaning of life, its fragility and preciousness, quite like he does. Certainly not you, my dear, cooped up in your apartment in the city. I stare at him.
Acknowledging death every day leads him to honor not only the quality of lives of his animals, with their breathtaking mountain views and wide open spaces, but his own. And over the coming weeks in that passenger seat, just beyond the cross hatched wooden fencing surrounding his land, I witness the circle of life that plays out so elegantly and regeneratively under his watch - and wish I had known about all of this before.
With plant-based food locked firmly in the nation’s crosshairs, it is clear that meat-eating trends, at least for now, have swung out of The Cowboy’s favor. If the market has spoken, it has sounded like a Rupaul “The Library is Open!” read-to-filth session. He gets it. A recalibration needs to happen for the industry at scale, especially those with less-than-ethical practices. But his heart stands with ranching. As you can deduce, the dilemma is obvious.
There are folks who still eat meat, of course. But despite this, unfortunately, The Cowboy remains at odds within a cantankerous subset of his own industry. For what meager shekels remain for beef as a whole, packaging plants (think; the middleman!) scavenge the lion's share of. To give you some hard figures that you may gloss over as I have so many times before - The Cowboy sells his choice cattle for $1.46 a pound, the packaging plant turns around after some light networking to sell to conglomerates for around $5 a pound, and as I Google very loosely this moment, a Costco Prime Rib Eye goes for $17.99 a pound. Yikes.
As boring as the sight of numbers in my own writing is even to me, the burden of this information I must share, and tie it together the only way I know how - with an ingratiating pop culture reference. To simplify; The Cowboy is Taylor Swift and the packaging plants are Scooter Braun, and any boxed meat subscription or farmers market butcher you see out there hustling, is an attempt to re-record the discography at 31. Unlike Miss Swift, eventually the packaging plants will slowly asphyxiate these family ranches, as they have so gracefully in the pork industry already. (Most of America’s pork is now grown with one major manufacturer). Cowboys as we know it, will be a distant memory, save the Urban Outfitters window display.
So, to back out of this - the scoreboard is as follows. The West (Montana) does not like the far West (California) for trying to make us out of them. The far West (California), loves the West (Montana) for its beauty, space, and core values, but not it’s industry of choice, cattle. So, what’s the beef (Sorry)? If I step into my own shoes, which as the author of this piece, is all I can do - I think we want the gray area. We want a better world for ourselves and the next generations, undoubtedly, with the innovation of one side and the core values of the other. But can you have both? Aware of the breakneck speed innovation moves in, I look at The Cowboy’s reality, the future of his industry on the verge of obsoletion, either from inside or outside threats, and think he’d better kick it into gear. There are people who want what he has - sustainably raised food that lives more freely than they do - in lieu of a laboratory-processed plant-based byproduct burger with no synergistic place in the natural world. And he can do it. He is wise, strategic, and certainly more hardworking, than most I know. I have faith in him.
Revealing the final relationship charting in this web of unrequited love, as I plan to do now, will maybe get me killed. If I do, the police’s first suspect is the name that I have left with my editor. There is a small sliver of these beautiful, kind-hearted traditionalists of the West, who, above all odds, love us too. The number of couples I’ve met where a California girl has paired with a Montana mountain man is staggering. And I look at the micro-habits The Cowboy has picked up from this California representative - relenting his daily pack of Camels (a tough road, I will tell you), grimacing as he takes a self-elected Arbonne vegetable supplement each morning. He calls skipping breakfast, “fasting” and is in the market for “weekender” sunglasses. And for the first time in his life in February, he came to visit California, and found that he quite liked it.
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A number of weeks ago, The Cowboy shared an image with me with the sole purpose of picking a fight, which he proved himself extremely proficient at. From his green text box in iMessenger (I die), stared an image revealing a tacky, caustically humored (if we can call it that) t-shirt, reading:
“DON’T CALIFORNIA MY MONTANA”
I am seized by mania. Blinded by a white-hot rage, I eventually come-to, finding my fingers in the process of purchasing him one of these cheap absurdities. I consider, sadistically, the humiliation of this act - The Cowboy, a victim at his own hands, shoved into an elementary, ironic, touristesque t-shirt, purchased by a California woman. I, in this scenario that will never happen, stand next to him - a vision and sartorial masterpiece, swathed in something absolutely gorgeous, tailored, expensive. I cannot wait. But before I buy - I have to explore, quickly, a nagging curiosity.
Under a drop down menu, labeled “SHIP TO: STATE,” I scroll, not far.
I smile at the two letters available to deliver to, should I so choose: “CA.”