We never see the open road the morning following the parade, thanks to that little dog. When the cowboy picks me up to take me home - after the boot is excavated from a junk lair under a bush - I know its time to go back, to pack our things and make room for Uncle Frank's next guest. It's time to say goodbye to this slice of heaven.
I barely make it down the hill before telling him, calmly, coolly, that I just don’t want to go. The cowboy knows what he has to do, and does it.
“You can stay here as long as you need.”
I normally would tip toe around this for the next day or so, pressure testing the offer for authenticity, providing a gentle way out. But the cowboy always means what he says. I know this. He has barely finished his sentence before I speed dial Emma with our death sentence pardon. Emma finishes her nap following the smooch and the pancakes, and packs up our things.
Pillows and fishing rods and cast iron skillets tumble out of the truck on our move in. We prepare the house to the ceilingless standards of women, scrubbing and cleaning, swiping his precious things off of countertops, into cardboard boxes, and moving them to places he can’t find. We place fresh cut hydrangeas the color of dusted limes in the bedrooms, black eyed Susans on the dining room table, and fill the closets with well-made clothing from cities and the smell of Le Labo. We turn, and leave, every light in the house on.
We stock the fridge and the bar. There is fresh summer produce, blocks of sharp cheeses, liter bottles of Pendelton whiskey put out on display. We take a flinty sauvignon blanc to the porch in the late afteroon while we wait for the roaring diesel truck and the pups to return. The cowboy usually has fresh picked sweet corn from the field or Russet potatoes just out of the earth. He puts them on the countertops nonchalantly as he continues a phone call or goes outside to finish a cigarette. We pour his whiskey once he’s rinsed off the sweat and dirt and the day of hard work and we start on dinner. Over the meal, we cover topics of the heart - forgiveness, sacrifice - that filet you clean open.
Before he leaves us in the mornings with a simple “You two be good,” the cowboy pulls something from one of his 2 and a half freezers and leaves it for us to discover in the sink. We spend the day considering the artful ways we’ll build a meal around it - wagyu ribeye, hamburger meat, elk backstrap, thick slabs of bacon, line-caught fish. Most of these animals he’s raised himself, some he has hunted after tracking for days or weeks. The rest are hand delivered from friends who roam the mountains and oceans for a living. To honor this food is to build a meal around it worthy of its sacrifice.
Hardy meals are the lifeblood in Montana; a fabulous requisite for the promised day of labor to follow. We find natural synergy with the three of us in the kitchen - the cowboy cooking his hunts or ranch harvests over the fire of the grill, me, capitalizing on my ability to make something from nearly anything. Emma, leveraging her familial catering roots, is our finisher - with a critical eye for task management, detail, plating, and creation of order and beauty. She alternatively specializes in cocktail refreshment and is the chief commissioner of dairy.
Breakfasts are served with sizzling millionaire’s cuts of bacon, farm fresh eggs with cracked pepper, flapjacks drenched in a cocktail of huckleberry preserves and butter and maple syrup. Everything, always is washed down with black coffee, and on Sundays, a sweet glass of cold orange juice. Hangovers elicit the promise of the cowboy’s famed sausage sandwich - spiced patties atop sourdough english muffins, broiled with cheese and envelopes of hashbrowns, served with Tapatio and fat trickling down your wrist. Lunches of parchment wrapped salami sandwiches on fresh sourdough, cleaved slabs of sharp cheddar, red radicchio leaves collecting piled pepperoncinis and their vinegar. But late dinner, almost always, and as a surprise to no one, the cowboy cooks what he knows - steak and potatoes.
On the days I miss him, I tagalong for rides in the truck. Me and the dogs with my boots on the dashboard, both of us telling Doc to get out of the front seat. He compromises by coiling his tiny body onto the center divide - a place he won’t fit in half a year’s time. The four of us check on cows, dislodge irrigation pivots from muck, singing along to the radio or saying nothing at all. The cowboy takes phone calls and tells me everything he knows. Sometimes I go for a walk and watch the knapweed catching wind, stretch my legs, or pretend, like Charlotte taught me, that I am a map maker. I’ll hear rustling in the grass and look down at Bat staring up at me, concerned I’ve left the pack and acting as security detail until my imminent return.
The times where I am exhausted before I have begun, I’ll camp in the backseat with the dogs and AC blasting to catch some shut eye. I’ll wake up to the little one sitting on my head and the cowboy checking on us, as heat, union worker pejoratives and dusty fragments of hay pour through the open door. There are times I look at him working in the sweltering heat - and eventually, the numbing cold - knowing I could not will my body to do the things he does every day, ad nauseum, so efficiently and focused and strong. He is the toughest man I’ve ever known.
I’ll learn that on the spectrum of America’s cowboys - albe a dying breed - Montana’s are the toughest. To me, they have created a category at the frightening intersection of brute strength and mentally unsound- sharing the gradual wear and tear of nicotine, Northern weather and bouts of bad luck. They emerge broken, but not beaten - buffed and reflecting the dazzling patina of true grit. And when they are ready, a piece of them will soften for you.
On one of these sticky hot days, looking for a break in the heat where we can find it - we split a chilled gas station roadie in the truck. We've pairedit with thick deli slices of horseradish havarti, fresh from the Amish store, off of the dashboard. The notion of this sweet, little country charcuterie platter thrills me. We guzzle the cold drink. The AC isn’t enough, and we both know it. “You want an ice cream?” my now-host asks, bamboozled into this surprise week of pro-bono entertainment. I up the ante, not wanting to feel full on top of hot, asking instead for a body of water. He acknowledges the request silently - in a way that I don’t know means yes or means no. This is typical for these types - you are lucky to get a sentence of any kind of direction. We head toward home, and right around where we should make a left turn, we turn right. He unlocks a gate in front of us to a wide open field, shouldered by a small ravine. He parks the truck near a bend in the ditch, deep with gentle water, where the tall grass flows on the bottom. He lights a cigarette while he leans against the truck, staying put, and lets me float in the cool water in my underwear - free of any care in the world.
In this short time together, this very first visit, I cry 6 times with the cowboy. I cry when he quietly sings that hot summer day in the truck. I cry on our first date, when he tells me he sees me, in the way I have always needed, and again at the dinner table when he recounts the painful process of learning to love himself. I cry when he rides away into the sunset on his horse, with Bat trailing, to gather a stray. I cry in his lap one evening, in my slip dress on his leather couch, shedding past versions of myself. I cry on a Sunday morning in bed where I, for the first time, felt the heaven that is a man gathering you and his dogs in his arms, and the comforters seeping through all the spaces in between. The cowboy never asks me why I am crying, he just lets me.
And by the end of it, he has welcomed us strangers in his house for a week. We’ve met his friends and his family. We’ve forged allegiances and made enemies. We’ve hosted dinners and swing danced in the living room. We’ve caught fish and worked calves and stolen the puppy whenever the cowboy was distracted. We’ve settled on a theme song. We've completed most of the Montana To Do List. We’ve added scars to our bodies from horses charging through thickets, that remind us so fondly of this place we hope they never heal. We’ve golfed on a the first Sunday in a long time of absolutely nothing, and watched Westerns together, assigning ourselves as its characters. We’ve counted down our time left in paradise - flipping our shampoo bottles from up to down - as the days march steadily on. We’ve gazed at stars and the moon and the city down below, unsure how we could truly make the choice.
And on the most magic of these nights, crawling his cattle under the sunset the colors of snow cones, we feel as if we’ve spent a lifetime together on our horses - syncing with these animals who can feel the joy in our bones.
We are so thankful that this man has shared the biggest piece of his heart with us he can offer - the place where he's from.
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