The two cowboys from Wyoming who fall in love in the current rave-rated movie Brokeback Mountain may surprise many cinemagoers, but the tender heart of the cowpoke has long been recognised in Elko, Nevada. Every year around now, the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering takes place in tiny, remote Elko, 290 miles north-east of Reno, writes Peter Cunningham
In this long-abandoned railhead of clapboard houses, hotels with wall-to-wall slot machines and a spanking new convention centre set down in a place so remote that Thomas Jefferson was convinced the Woolly Mammoth would be found here, cowboy poets congregate each January.
The highway from Reno winds up through the town of Lovelock and onwards to Winnemucca, taking in half-a-dozen mountain ranges on the way. Silver was mined widely in Nevada in the late 19th century. Mining towns with names like Eureka speak of transient rapture; the headstones in the local cemeteries carry the names of Irish men and women from Clare and Kerry and Cork who finished up here.
In downtown Elko during Poetry Gathering week it seems as if every wardrobe department of every western ever made have all hit town at the same time. Strolling down the sidewalks, thumbs hooked in the pockets of their tight jeans, are black cowboys, Chinese cowboys, bright-eyed ranch girls, vaqueros from Argentina and dudes from Mexico in magenta shirts, scrolled rodeo belts and high-heeled boots with bolts of lightning. Gay gunslingers and born-again Christian cowboys and rodeo men and chuck wagon guys take up every inch of space along the bar at the Cattleman's Hotel. Go into one of the half-dozen apparel shops to buy a belt made from the skin of a rattlesnake and you take your turn behind broncobusters, cowpunchers, Marlboro men, lasso artists and low-hipped buckaroos.
This is moustache heaven. Cowboys spend a lot of time away from electric shaving sockets and use that time by the camp fire to wax their taches into elegant shapes with saddle soap. Walruses, handlebars and apparitions that make it look as if some saddle-hands have got a buzzard trapped between their chin and nostrils float along beneath tilted Stetsons. They're making their way to Elko's purpose-built auditorium for one of the daily sessions of cowboy poetry, where stars like Waddie Mitchell or Montana poet Wallace McRae are performing.
There's an ongoing debate about what constitutes cowboy poetry, with some purists sneering that it ain't poetry just because it rhymes, and real cowboys cussin' and spittin' in the sawdust every time free varse is mentioned. My own impression, having sat in on a few cowboy poetry sessions, is that it's better heard than read and that if it brings together folks who share a love of the prairie and the husbandry of animals, then that's OK.
Nearly everyone agrees that in order to be a cowboy poet, you first must be a cowboy. Cowboy poet Slim McNaught puts it like this: "If you've had frozen spots on your face from winter chores horseback, rope burns and broken bones, rode up on a ridge and watched a bitch coyote teach her pups to hunt, ate trailing dust from summer to winter pasture, fought prairie fires and drought, sweat the birthin' of your favourite mare and then lost the colt. . .then you can write cowboy poetry."
On the trails around Elko, some of the views are so vast that you can see the curve of the earth. Instead of soccer after school, Elko kids learn rodeo. Folklorist Hal Cannon, a bear-sized man and a founder of the Poetry Gathering, took me down one night to Elko's Star Hotel. Here in permanent residence live a group of elderly Basque shepherds descended from families who came up from California during the Gold Rush. A bell sounds every evening at six and the Basques file into the dining-room and eat their supper. Later, when Hal and I had dined on lamb chops as big as fillet steaks and twice as juicy, we went over to the Cattleman's Hotel to hear a music session. Cowboy music is inspired by Irish and Scottish ballads with a strong influence of Mexican guitar. We left at four the next morning.
These lariat men and calf-branders and Rhinestone cowboys who walk as if they've all just ridden in from Reno can't get enough of poetry. Thousands of them come every year to Elko to hear rhyming couplets that deal mainly with the fate of city folk who stray into a muddy cow barn, or chisel-chinned stockmen who wind up in a bar in New York. Cowboy poetry has its own wry humour and its own philosophy.
Here's Reincarnation by Wallace McRae. I heard it read on my final evening in Elko:
"What does reincarnation mean?"
A cowpoke ast his friend.
His pal replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box Away from life's travails.
The box and you goes in a hole That's been dug in the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside.
And then yore just beginnin' on Yer transformation ride."