Cowblogs

One of my favourite Ottawa area bloggers has been detailing her visit to Calgary, where she is doing research, and also looking out for cowboys. I wish her luck in both pursuits.

I have two favourite cowboys, when I look back. No, wait, make that three. I almost forgot Marshall Dillon from Gunsmoke. I still remember one episode when the good marshall got shot and I was so young I didn't yet know the good guys always come through. I was really worried he wasn't going to make it!

But in the modern idiom, there is Curly from City Slickers. Curly is a man of a surly few words, but what he does say lingers (sort of like an onion or an ogre, with layers.) He lingers in the film and in the characters' minds long after the trail boss keels over.

Then there is Clint Eastwood's anti-cowboy in Unforgiven. He understands where he has fit into the scheme of things, and it is not a pretty picture. He tells us that it is a "helluva thing to kill a man. You take away everything he's ever had and everything he'll ever had." But when the time comes for him to do just that, he does it unflinchingly, and unmercifully. Not exactly a role model, but Eastwood plays the character hauntingly, at once sympathetic and repulsive.

My niece, who came back into town last week for her mother's funeral, is an expert rider and works outdoors all the time. I suppose in some ways she is the closest real-life person I know to a cowboy. She brought her horses up to the cottage once. When they saw the frozen lake covered with snow, their eyes lit up like kids in a candy store, and they tore off galloping as fast as they could. She had to run them down on a snowmobile. :-)