Toes Out

"Toes out, spurs in his neck first jump out."

That was my cousin, the chute boss for the Fourth of July rodeo, telling me what to do as I stepped over the top rail of the chute and on the seat of the borrowed bronc saddle to let Sea Biscuit know I was about to get on. He was one of the rankest broncs in the string, named after the legend, one of a bunch of horses owned by the Rodeo Association that had been formed long before I came along to put on a show for the community I grew up in. At the time it was one of the biggest amateur rodeos in the state. Most of those horses had ended up there because they hadn't worked out on the ranches around us. Our own place had even made a contribution. We called him Buster. In the bucking string he went by Sand Draw.

It was my debut as a saddle bronc rider. I had been on a couple out of the practice pen a few days before, which is not the same thing as climbing on Sea Biscuit in front of the whole town. I was young and dumb and convinced I was about three rides away from world champion.

Everybody with a cowdog had tried to talk me out of it. My folks had that sideways, tilted-head look that says what happens if you get hurt. My friends had it too. My employer, the rancher up the creek from home, was out in the arena in front of me on Brownie, one of the horses he'd hauled to town for arena cleanup, and I'd heard his opinion on the matter more than once.

I was as sure as they were worried.

I made it to the second jump. Then I saw the soft dirt of the arena coming up fast, tried to hit and roll the way you're supposed to, and felt my collarbone snap. My saddle bronc career ended about as quickly as the chute gate had swung open to start it.

They were right. Every one of them. It went exactly the way they said it would.

And I'd do it again.

I want to tell you why, because it's the reason this book ends the way it does.

I could saddle my own horse when I was five years old. I was a small kid, and some of my family called me Shorty for a while. My brother was a couple years older, and I remember him heading out the door with his friends to do big kid stuff while I stood there and got left. That sting is one I can still feel today. I didn't want much. I wanted to go with them. I wanted to be included, to be one of the big kids.

Size wasn't the problem. I could hold my own in a fight. My namesake uncle had a plaque hanging in his kitchen that read, It isn't the size of the man in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the man. Strange the effect that had on me. It came to mind all the time when I was young, right up until I started to grow.

But a saying doesn't do much for a little kid standing in a doorway watching the big kids leave. What did a little for me was a promise I made myself.

When I get big, I'm going to do whatever I want.

Of course it wasn't that simple, and the day did come. It's an old cliché that time drags when you're young and flies when you're older, and it's true. Waiting to be a big kid felt like dragging a ball and chain. But when the day finally arrives that you get included, that you get to go, that feeling has never left me. It's one of the best I've ever had.

What I didn't understand yet was that being let in is one thing, and choosing is another.

Somewhere along the way I'd made decisions before. But when I look back, the Sea Biscuit ride stands out as one of the first times I remember it clearly: the choice was mine. Not my folks'. Not my boss's. Nobody had handed it to me or talked me into it. In fact nearly everybody who cared about me had tried to talk me out of it, and I heard every word of it and climbed on anyway.

That was the first time it felt like my life was really mine.

It didn't turn out how I wanted, and I'm not going to pretend the collarbone was anything but a lesson in gravity. But here's what I've come to understand in the years since. Being told you'll get hurt, and then getting hurt, doesn't mean you were wrong to try. They were right about the outcome. I was right to go anyway. Both of those things can be true, and I've spent a lot of years getting comfortable with that.

A safe life isn't necessarily a life well lived.

I've known plenty of people who got to the end of a long, careful road with every box checked and nothing broken, and if you sat them down and asked what they'd do differently, the answer was never I should have been more careful.

I’ve been through some hard times living my life.

Some of them I wouldn't wish on anybody, and I've said so more than once. I've come out of things that I'd call flat awful and said, out loud, to whoever was nearby, that I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Yet I wouldn't trade the life on the other side of them.

That's the paradox I can't get around. What gets built out of the worst of it lets you reach a little higher and go a little farther than you would have otherwise. Some of what happened to me, and some of what I did to myself, made it rough at times. It's been, and still is, a wonderful life.

I mean, who else can say they’ve been on Sea Biscuit? Even if it was only two jumps, and even if he wasn't actually the racehorse.

I think about the things I've gotten to see and be part of. Some of it horseback and some of it not. Some with family, some with people I worked for, some with people I loved. Sunrise on country most folks only see on a calendar. Cattle strung out on a trail with the whole day ahead of us. Nights so quiet you could hear your own thinking, and sometimes that was the best company available.

None of that came free, and none of it came easy. But it didn't come in spite of the hard times, either. It came alongside them, out of the same pasture.

Hard times aren't something to shy away from. Getting through some of them can be miserable, and I won't tell you different. But they make a life bigger, and a good deal sweeter, because they give you something to measure the good against. You never really know what warm is until you've been cold. You don't know what a full plate means until you've skipped a few.

There's a dangerous word in a man's vocabulary once he's old enough to know better.

Someday.

Someday I'll take that trip. Someday I'll go see that place. Someday I'll have time to sit down and visit. Someday I'll do the things I always said I wanted to do.

I've learned that someday is a pretty good place to bury a life.

I've seen it done. I've watched good people put off the trip, the phone call, the afternoon fishing, the long way home, until the trip wasn't something they could make anymore, and the phone number belonged to somebody who was gone. Nobody plans to do that. It just happens a day at a time, and each of those days seems reasonable.

The cure isn't recklessness. I'm not telling you to go get on the rankest horse in the string. I'm telling you that if there's something you've been meaning to do, and everybody who loves you has good reasons for you not to, and the only thing standing between you and it is the fear of how it might turn out, that's worth taking a hard look at. Because how it turns out isn't the only thing you get out of it. You also get to be the person who did it.

I was nineteen, or close to it, and I couldn't have told you any of this. I just wanted to make a ride. It took fifty-some years and a whole lot of hard miles to figure out what that decision meant.

So this is where I'll leave it.

I don't know what horse is in your chute. Maybe it's a move, or a business, or a person, or a road you've been staring down for years while telling yourself the time isn't right. Maybe it's something small. Maybe it's just the ride you almost didn't take.

I can't tell you how it's going to go. You'll probably hear about all the ways it could go wrong, and you'll probably get the sideways look from people who love you. Some of them will turn out to be right.

That's all right. Being right about how it ends isnt’ the same as being right about whether you should have tried.

I think about that hot July afternoon sometimes. The dust, the noise, the smell of horse and the hack rein in my hand, my cousin's voice just behind me. Toes out, spurs in his neck. Brownie standing out there in the arena with Johnny in the saddle, wondering how it’ll go. The half a second after the gate swings open, when nothing has gone wrong yet and nothing has gone right, and everything I'm going to be for the rest of my life is still somewhere out in front of me.

I'd give a lot to feel that again.

Go on and get on.