The hat that Juan Morales made.
By M. Shane Aquârt. Shane is an artist, and sometimes writer who is from, and lives in the Caribbean.
I was in Telluride, Colorado and I bought myself a cowboy hat, to hide from the sun, ‘cause I didn’t have one.
Thing about cowboy hats is, even if, like me, you’ve actually been a cowboy and a sheep boy and a ranch hand, that they don’t really translate well to universal public life; and so people, dressed like cowboys, who aren’t sitting a horse on a ranch, with a rope tied to the saddle can often end up looking a little like assholes … anyhow, I went with the rancher-wide-flat-brimmed not turned up, and hoped that I didn’t look like an asshole: somebody else will have to judge that for me, but Telluride seemed like the kind of place a cowboy hat might work.
A friend, who had worked on the set of ‘Dances With Wolves’ once said, “I worked with a lot of cowboys, Shane, I know cowboys.”
The same, and then some, applies to me:
Old J had ridden from Montana, as a young man in his 20’s, in the late 1920’s, and ended up eight years later there in that backwater. I asked him why, but he wasn’t really sure by then, 40 something years later; it started with a cattle drive south, he said (to Tulsa, Oklahoma, I think it was), and he just never stopped.
He’d ridden a horse the whole way, leading another.
Old J wasn’t a young man anymore, as his nickname might imply, when I knew him, and he came to work every day, not on a horse, but driving a small, orange, Kubota tractor from his house, at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the ranch. He wore a felt cowboy hat in a kinda tan-grey, narrow brimmed, stained where the crown met that brim. He didn’t cowboy anymore, but he was surely still a cowboy.
JLJ was long and lanky, wiry and strong, and had buckteeth, light brown hair, sun streaked through with blonde, and pale eyes, that stood out in his face. His family had come there from Tennessee. If you were to conjure up an image of a cowboy, in your head, from reading Louis L’amour, that would be JLJ: his Wranglers pooled where they met the front of his boots, spurs out the other end, his two-pocket shirt was tucked neatly in, his belt buckle a little large, his hair always marked by the band of his hat; his forehead white and his cheeks and neck tanned. He wore a standard crease and dent soft cane cowboy hat.
Bejito was Guatemalan, amiable, very short, the colour of old oak, with a fluffy moustache, white hair, and an easy little smile. Although well gone 50, he was a bachelor still when I met him: but he had charisma and women loved him.
His hat was more sombrero than ‘cowboy’ – something like a Dakota style; wide round brimmed, shot through with a weave of black cane, but with a Guatemalan kind of crown, creased but not dented. Not a sombrero but of that vibe.
He always wore short length water boots, rubber boots, wellies; he polished them up to a shine, with diesel oil, when he went to town on a Friday night. His spurs were Spanish style rowels.
Bejito, as befits an old cowboy, died in a gunfight … with G; like a showdown at the OK fucking corral.
G, thin, thin, with jet black hair, oiled and slicked back, as was the fashion in his parts, and a jet-black little moustache.
He wore Khaki trousers, not jeans, and always rolled the sleeves on his shirt up above the elbow.
He liked to wear a wide brimmed hat, with a low crown, the crown had venting in in it, an area of less tight weave; the brim was turned up at the back and rolled at the edges, and he wore it at a slight angle toward the front right, in what novels would call rakish.
G went to jail to be hung from the neck until dead, probably not for the gunfight, but for reloading and standing over Bejito, who was still alive, before he put one last shot into him just to make sure.
It seemed incongruous, radical, strange, eh; Bejito had been such a jolly man, who seemed unthreatening to me; a simple argument, a threat casually tossed out.
“…but he threatened me,” G had said, in Spanish, with a touch of incredulity, to the policeman who came to arrest him.
M had come from Honduras; he was movie star handsome, and sat a saddle like it was his favourite chair, he preferred a wide pommeled Mexican style saddle. I used a Circle Y. We worked cows together in the traditional way, by rope in the field, for two years of school holidays, and the most part of two straight years at a trot after I had graduated.
M’s hat was, plait and stich, also tightly curled at the sides, folding back in on itself, but with the front coming together almost, to more of a point, than most cowboy hats.
I would run into him again, years later, when I went to work on a ranch in the middle of New Mexico, in a town that had used to be a watering hole, probably as much for the Utes and the Navajos as for the cowboys on cattle trails north; he’d snuck across the border with his family and was living in a hovel hidden from view, out the back side of town. I had come by car from Florida and was living in half of a house, with a colour TV and a rack full of guns.
Both of us were ‘aliens’, but different sides of the same coin.
M was working for one of the ranches next door.
The world only seems big when you step out your front door on the high plains and see nothing in every direction for miles and miles. But the world has trails; they lead to watering holes and mountain passes, they lead to pastures and lakes, and silks and spices, and wells in Jericho, and ports on the Indian ocean, where people fished for fish and pearls; they are the trails that we walked from Asmara, when we were just a few small humans in a sea of game, back down into the Serengeti, there are trails that travel from Juarez in Mexico to Medicine Bow and on to Lodge Grass, in the Cheyenne’s old lands. And the whole world has passed along these trails for millennia, seeking food and trade and new blood to stave off inbreeding, and if you walk them, in a certain way you will meet others like you, doing the same, and if you do it twice you already know the one you will pass going along in the other direction.
The longest ride I ever took was 16 miles out and the same back: in the days before I could drive, I rode a horse to see some friends. I was wearing a stiff straw ‘pinch front’ hat, what I would think of as a standard issue cowboy hat, that had come off the rack at Sunset Feeds, in Miami; the dogs came with me.
In New Mexico, I didn’t wear a cowboy hat; I was working the sheep, mostly by myself, by motorcycle and truck and jeep; visiting the cows by horseback over in the arroyos to the north, only occasionally. I did that in the company of E; it was his ranch; he’d been born out there. The cows were a rare visit, but the sheep needed almost daily looking after, to make sure the water was running, the windmills were turning. I had to feed the big Pyrenees guard dogs that lived with them, and bring the sheep the molasses and grain blocks – big 500lb towers of compressed molasses and grains - and the salt and vitamin licks.
It was a dusty, empty, middle of fuck nowhere crossroads town where the sign used to say welcome to X, pop. 700 and something people - I never saw them. Never, never saw more than about 100; I saw a lot of sheep.
When it snowed, we had to find the sheep and bring the feed to them; sheep don’t forage in the snow, they just wait to die. “You put the wind behind you, Shane, and follow it to a fence-line, then you follow the fence line to a corner and that’s where you’ll find all the sheep, huddled, waiting.”
There was no use for a cowboy hat on a 650 Honda – I had had a beaver felt Stetson, that my dad gave me for a Christmas, but I gave that to C before I left Florida to drive west. He moved to Maine. He used to wear that hat in Maine. He was a big man and nobody was going to trouble him for it.
I looked out from the gas station, at the far outside edge of town when I was leaving Telluride. It was as still as a stage set, this life-empty landscape - broken down buck rail fencing, grassland that looked like it was often wet, a tree line beyond, along the river, and behind it a low hill with a patch quilt of greenness: this had once been somebody’s ranch; a tumble-down series of corals and falling down sheds were off to the left, marking where cattle or sheep would have come to be gathered …
Come time, in the bushes of my yesteryear, we used to bring all the cattle into a quadrangle of four corrals, the centre of which was a race and cattle press: worming, branding, tagging, shots, weaning, castrating; we’d light a fire for the brands and on it put a cast iron pan to roast the testicles; somebody would slice up onions, throw in some hot pepper, salt and seasoning – a loaf of bread would appear.
You’d throw a calf, like you see in the rodeo, someone would tie off its feet, your hat would be hanging down your back on its leather stampede strap, that you’d cut yourself from cured hide, and put through the brim of your hat. You’d put your hat back on to hide from the sun, someone would bring a hot iron from the fire … the circle M
Treating the brands was another job, in the field, for other days ahead. We had to work the cows every day in the field; we had to rope and drop them – you’d take off at a leap, push your hat off and the stampede strap would hold it, you’d shuck your rope - little scratches got infected, Bot flies burrowed into hides and laid larvae, which caused weeping wounds that you had to pop, like a pimple, and then spray with gentian violet, or pack with wound powder; shit happened, cows got stuck in weird places, care was needed, calves could die, fences could break – and the pastures were big.
The sheep in New Mexico came into a central ‘shed’ on the south side pastures, come shearing time, but only then, otherwise they stayed out there on the high plains … the pastures there were vast, not big, vast …
The world has these trails, and the trails lead to places: and if, say, you rode north, from where I wore my first cowboy hat, along the ‘turquoise trail’, like a Pochteca, you could find the ‘camino real’ or further east the ‘ruta de agua’, along the Rio Grande, and then from there picked up the ‘Ute trail’, you might pass through that watering hole town in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, where I had worked, and just beyond that, near Santa Fe, you could chose to go right and carry your goods on through past Denver into Wyoming joining the Cheyenne trail, or left and up through Dolores, past Telluride, and into Utah …
I still have my spurs in the cupboard at home, and my casting rope’s in a bucket in the warehouse, I’m not a cowboy anymore, but I do have a new hat - I bought it in a shop in Telluride, Colorado - it was ‘hand crafted of palm leaves in Guatemala’, was shipped along those same old trails, the ones that men and women had walked for 30,000 years, and beasts forever, by Juan Carlos Morales … who had written his name on the label in it.
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