Ian Tyson - The Long Trail: My Life in the West

Copyright 2010 Four Strong Winds

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2010 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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Lyrics reprinted by permission of Ian Tyson and Slick Fork Music.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Tyson, Ian, 1933
The long trail : my life in the West / Ian Tyson.

Also available in electronic format.

eISBN: 978-0-307-35937-7

1. Tyson, Ian, 1933-. 2. Country musiciansCanadaBiography. I. Title.

ML420.T977A3 2010 782.421642?92 C2010-901859-1

v3.1

I ts darker than three feet down a Holstein. Six a.m., Alberta daylight savings. Waking from a dream of Cabo San Lucas to a March north wind and five below. Everyone with half a brain and a Visa card has gotten out. Only us drones left to feed the livestock, so I make the coffee double strength and prepare to get at er. Fifteen minutes stumbling around on frozen manure should do it.

So begins the day.

Used to be a rancher wouldnt divulge the size of his operation, nor the numbers of his herd. Its a longstanding tradition in cow country thats based on making as little information available to the tax people as possible. Suffice it to say, my outfit is a modest spread near the southern Alberta town of Longview, just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

During the ranchs heyday in the 1990s, I ran between twenty and thirty horses. They were mostly mares, which meant there were lots of babies each year. That was back when my ex-wife Twylla and my daughter Adelita were still here. But they left a few years back, and these days its just me on the ranch and only five horses to feed. Theres Bud, my cutting horse, a solid professional cowhorse, all business all the time. Then theres Pokey, a bay mare, with all her feminine wiles, who loves to be the centre of attention. Every morning theyre lined up for their grain.

On Pokey at the ranch. (LEE GUNDERSON)

I feed my gentle grey mare and her half-broke daughter. The mare ran under the name Lika Pop back in her racetrack days and won her maiden at 350 yards. Shes eighteen now and crippled with a bad knee, but shes been a good colt producer. Her daughter Doris is a big, pushy adolescent whos never been properly schooled because I dont have the time to do it. Finally theres a new colt, a trim, good-moving two-year-old. Hes a blank canvas.

As for my two big longhorns, Kramer is laid back and Billy is more snuffy. While I pour their crushed barley into the rubber feed tub, their great horns sway slowly around my head in the darkness. Im damn careful because I never know what Billys going to do. I bought Kramer and seven other yearling bulls in the mid-1990s from the late Mitford Beard, who ran one of the last American open-range outfits (no fences) on the Utah-Colorado line. Billy came a few years later, from rancher Bill Cross.

Billy and Kramer are my last two steers, and when its warm enough, theyll wander out of their lot onto the prairie like a couple of old outlaws. Longhorns are like pets for ranchers, reminders of a bygone era when the trail herders drove cattle across the unfenced West. Theyre almost conversation pieces nowadays.

Kramer sure gave me something to talk about when he got his horns stuck in a round-bale feeder a few years back. I heard all this banging coming from his pen, and when I went up to see what was going on, there was Kramer waving around this 200-pound bale feeder like a damn party hat, repeatedly crashing it into the fence. Those feeders arent small. Theyre five feet across, with diagonal steel struts around the sides above the base. I guess hed stuck his head and horns between the struts, right inside the feeder he was more than happy to get closer to the hay. But when he wanted to get out, he couldnt. Then the wreck was on.

I didnt know what the hell to do. I called my neighbour Pete Wambeke, and he didnt know what to do either. I couldnt rope Kramer, because hes too big and a horse couldnt hold him. I considered getting some tranquilizers from the vet, but then I thought, Im gonna take care of this myself. I got my hacksaw and approached Kramer warily, talking to him for almost half an hour before he finally let me stand beside him and start sawing away at the struts to free his horns.

I knew Kramer had only so much patience and then hed lose it again and start waving his party hat around he was already stepping on my feet. But hes intelligent, and I guess he understood that I was going to get him out. I kept sawing, sweating like crazy. Christ, I muttered. If I dont have a cardiac arrest, its going to be a miracle. Finally I got two struts cut and out he came, horns and all. He wandered off, thankful for his freedom.

Then the silly son of a bitch did the exact same thing the following year, and again I had to cut him free. After that I carefully eliminated all round-bale feeders from the longhorns pens.

After feeding the horses and longhorns in the early-morning dark, I give a few leftover wieners to the kitty-cats in the barn and head back inside for breakfast. I live in a cedar-log house built in 1975. Thats a big reason why I bought this land in 1979, when I was forty-six I liked the rustic feel, as well as the huge basement. (The romance fades, however, when you realize that logs are great dust-catchers.) I also liked the big living room with its west-facing windows looking out on the shining mountains.

Today both the main floor and the basement are decorated with Navajo rugs, Mexican tile, eagle feathers, Indian artifacts and the western paintings, photos and horse sculptures Ive collected over the years. In the kitchen hangs a framed poster from the inaugural 1961 Mariposa Folk Festival a poster I designed and theres a brand new dishwasher, my pride and joy.

Im a bacon freak, so I fry up some bacon, boil a couple of eggs and have a grapefruit before taking my vitamin pills. I also have to take naproxen and hyaluronic acid for my hands and wrists old cowboys have lots of aches and pains, and Ive been dealing with arthritis for the past twenty years. I keep my fingers limber by practising the guitar for at least an hour a day; otherwise my hands might shut down entirely.

Guitar practice is a daily discipline for me. I never was a night writer, never could pull a Hank Williams and stay up all night drinking whiskey and writing songs. In my world, mornings are for music and afternoons are spent doing the many chores that ranches require moving hay bales, picking up feed in nearby Okotoks and making runs to the post office.

The only way to get any real writing done in the morning, though, is to get out of the home place and away from the phones. So after breakfast, at around 8 a.m., I pull on my hiking boots and begin the walk south down the gravel road to my stone house, where I do my songwriting.