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    The Secret Life of Cowboys
    The Secret Life of Cowboys
    The Secret Life of Cowboys
    Ebook268 pages6 hours

    The Secret Life of Cowboys

    By Tom Groneberg

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "One of the stories I tell myself when I am trying to fall asleep is that I have tried. I've tagged along after myself in the pages of my own modern Western, and every few years is another chapter to the story. The myth of the cowboy. I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth. Yet I find myself falling for it again and again."

    Across the rugged and beautiful landscape of the contemporary American West, Tom Groneberg paints an unsparing portrait of his flawed, funny, and sometimes triumphant efforts to become a cowboy. It is a classic tale: a young man, facing a future he doesn't want to claim, has an inspiration -- Go West.

    Leaving behind his friends and family, Groneberg follows his heart and heads to a resort town in the Colorado Rockies, where he earns his spurs as a wrangler leading tourists on horseback. Like an old saddle blanket, the tale unfolds, revealing the clean threads of a new story. Groneberg moves to Montana, working for wages at a number of ranches before getting a chance to become the owner of a sprawling ranch, fifteen square miles of grass and sky.

    In lean but passionate prose, Groneberg demystifies the image of cowboy as celluloid hero and introduces us to the tough and kindhearted men who teach him how to be a real cowboy, the woman who teaches him how to love, and their son, who teaches him how to be a man. The Secret Life of Cowboys is both a coming-of-age story as stunning as the land itself and a revealing look at America's last frontier.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateNov 1, 2007
    ISBN9781416593249
    The Secret Life of Cowboys
    Author

    Tom Groneberg

    Tom Groneberg is the author of The Secret Life of Cowboys and has written for a number of publications, including Men's Journal and Sports Afield. He lives in northwest Montana with his wife, three sons, and his horse, Blue.

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    Reviews for The Secret Life of Cowboys

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Impulse grab from a thrift store (? garage sale?) because of the cover image of the cowboy in the grocery store. Turns out to be more of a memoir of this young man finding his place in life, trying to be upright and honorable despite the fact that he could easily have become a drunk or a neurotic on a couch. Surprisingly mesmerizing - even though we never do learn a whole lot about the secret lives of other cowboys and ranchers. I just gotta say, though, that his wife Jennifer is an *amazing* young woman and I have hope they're still very happy together.

      ETA quotes:

      Men secretly fear a death that will reduce their lives to an anecdote. You don't want to be out riding one day have your horse step in a prairie-dog hole and throw you.... there is something more romantic, more acceptable, about breaking your neck in a rodeo arena. There are identical deaths, but very different ways to die. So, too, similar lives but different ways to live."

      When Tom goes to a psychologist, he explains:
      "In my family, we seek our own counsel. There is very little time devoted to emotional temperature-taking.... so when I finally decide that things are beyond my control, I am confessing to myself that I can no longer grit my teeth and muscle my way through the problems.... I know that I am hurting myself and those closest to me and that it cannot go on without doing some lasting damage."

      "
    • 4/5
      I read this book for "One Book Billings" for May 2014. This is a story of a young man who strikes out to learn about cowboying and actually learns about himself and his place in the world. Along the way he marries and starts a family and this adds to his search for his place. He has several starts and stops along the way, but finally finds how he fits into the bigger picture.
    • 3/5
      What little boy doesn't think about becoming a cowboy when he grows up? Tom Groneberg actually did it; he left his home near Chicago and took a job as a ranch hand in Montana. Even if you are not interested in ranching, you may be surprised to find you have an unexpected urge to relocate to the West and raise cattle after reading this beautifully written book. Favorite Quote: "It begins with a poem, a haiku: 'Hard work with horses in a beautiful setting. Write for more info.'"
    • 4/5
      A good but strange book. He's always feeling like an inadequate outsider, though he has an apparently wonderful wife and his parents buy him a ranch in Montana. After one hard year he decides he's failed and goes into therapy. But he writes the book from such a distance we don't see many feelings, much less anything about his wife. Good nature/animal descriptions though.
    • 5/5
      I grew up in the fifties when Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Rex Allen were Saturday matinee heroes. So of course I wanted to be a cowboy too. I had the sixguns (cap pistols) and the hat and my brothers and I rode the range of the local sandpit on our imaginary mounts. Then I graduated to Peckinpah and adult westerns and eventually forgot about being a cowboy. Tom Groneberg never did. After finishing college in Illinois he headed west and chased his dream of cowboying, first as a dude ranch trail guide, then as a real ranch hand. He rode broncos a couple times He even had his own ranch for a while, but found out there was a lot more to ranching than meets the eye - too much pressure, too many heartbreaks. So he went back to working for wages. And he wrote it all down - all the stories about horses and hay crops and cows and rodeos. And there's a love story in there too. He loved the land and cowboying, of course, but most of all he loved his wife, Jennifer, who was with him through all of this stuff. And he learned about being a father. There's plenty of great prose here about riding the range and branding and just plain working his butt to a tired nub. But here's a passage that nearly made me cry, about being there when his son was born - "I hold Jennifer's hand the entire night, through the contractions and the fears. And then, after seventeen hours, it is time. I have seen so many cows give birth, witnessed the bloody miracle of a calf's first breath, but when the nurses coax me to look at the crown of my son's head as it pushes into the world, I cannot. Instead I watch Jennifer, her beautiful and weary face. I don't know how to explain why I can't watch the birth, except to say that it is too much." There it is. It is too much. Montana, cows, calves, love and baby boys. Groneberg writes about all these things and more with extraordinary grace and an eloquent simplicity that sometimes made me want to weep. Gene and Roy and Rex taught me about honesty and how to treat ladies and babies - and horses. Those guys would have been proud to know Tom Groneberg. This is a profoundly moving story. I recommend it highly and am looking forward now to reading Tom's other book, One Good Horse.
    • 3/5
      Groneberg's non-fiction account of his love affair with the West, its land, and its people, is an enjoyable read for anyone who has ever thought, even for a second, that "I shoulda been a cowboy." An English major from Chicago, Groneberg chronicles how his love for the ranch life evolves from the romanticized West of myth to an honest admiration for the hardscrabble existence that actually exists in its place. In the process, Groneberg himself evovles as he is forced to confront his definition of himself, his status as the eternal outsider, and the daily struggle with life and death that is part of ranch life. While the book lagged at times (I found my mind occasionally slipping into a sing-song litany of "Cows, and horses, and hay, oh my!"), it was an overall entertaining read. I would have enjoyed it more if I had also read a novel in conjunction with the book and alternated between the two.
    • 4/5
      I read the dust jacket and saw that this was largely about the author's life in Montana. I've always been fascinated by the idea of Montana, so itlooked like an interesting way to spend a weekend. I wasn't disappointed. This is a rough chronical of the author's experiences with ranching and 'Cowboy-up' times just out of college.
    • 5/5
      When I was growing up in Wyoming, I was surrounded by cowboys. My high school classmates were evenly divided into three cliques: the hippies, the smart rich kids and the cowboys. There was also, I suppose, a fourth social order: the outcast weirdo loners. That was my group. From my position—flattened against the lockers between classes, books hugged to my chest, eyes downcast—I'd watch the sneakers and the boots passing by. The sneaker-set always seemed to walk on the balls of their feet, as if tip-toeing through life; the boots, scuffed and manure-stained, always swaggered down the halls. If I'd raise my eyes, past the fancy leather belts with "Clay" or "Pete" or "Wanda" tooled across the back, past the back-pocket can of snuff which left a tell-tale faded ring, past the Wrangler shirts with their pearl snaps, all the way to the faces, I'd be met with impenetrability. The mouths, the eyes, even the nostrils were hard, tight, closed-off. Those sons and daughters of Wyoming ranchers, with their bony elbows and snuff-packed lower lips, were a mystery to me. I could discern nothing behind their eyes except rodeo bravado and grossly exaggerated tales of Saturday night drinking in the cabs of pickups. Reading Tom Groneberg's memoir, The Secret Life of Cowboys, I begin to suspect that there was actually very little separating me from those hard Wyoming kids—apart from bronc busting, a few broken bones and an addiction to Copenhagen, that is. Cowboys are just regular people, Groneberg writes. A bit battered by weather and the occasional broken heart, but good folks all the same. They are neither gods nor ghosts. They raise dust. They cast shadows. These men bleed and they smile with teeth rotten from chewing tobacco. The dust settles on their clothes, in the folds of their skin, in their lungs. Their hearts are as big as dump trucks, full of the land and the life they love. They are beautiful. The Secret Life of Cowboys is a first-rate account of men and women whose lives revolve around hard land and stubborn animals. Through his portraits of ranchers, wranglers and rodeo champs, Groneberg goes beneath the stereotype of saddles, saloons and sagebrush. Good-bye, John Wayne. So long, Gary Cooper. It's time for you to ride into the sunset of mythology. This a book that tells it like it is, showing both the joys and the dark agonies of life in the modern American West. What Frank McCourt did for Irish poverty, Groneberg does for Montana ranching. Truth be told, this book is not so much about the hidden secrets of cowboys as it is about Tom Groneberg, disillusioned kid from Chicago who goes west in search of purpose. "I chased a dream and it kicked me in the teeth," he writes. "Yet I find myself falling for it again and again." It's a cliché from the Me Generation, but Groneberg does "find himself" in the hard work, the unforgiving land, and the company of horses. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in English, he suddenly found himself adrift in a sea of indecision. I was sick of myself and couldn't imagine that I had much to offer anyone. I had to do something big and dramatic and drastic to break the force field of the couch and the glow of the television set and the way the top of a beer can had begun to look like a face to me. And so, he answers an ad in the back of Utne Reader: "Hard work with horses in a beautiful setting. Write for more info." Soon, Groneberg is playing out a childhood fantasy of living the cowboy life. He gets the job at a Colorado dude ranch, leading tourists—often arrogant, ignorant city slickers—on scenic trail rides. Though he admits he doesn't know hay from straw or gelding from mare, he's a quick study and soon falls in love with the cowboy way—especially the animals they ride: I inhale horses. They fuel my heart and my head and my whole self. We watch as this Chicago college boy tries to fit in with the other men, the ones with hard faces and snuff-can rings on their back pockets. We watch as he learns how to saddle a horse without spooking the whole corral into a stampede. We watch as he and the other trail guides endure their clients, the loud, spoiled dudes: One woman wears jeans tucked into some high-dollar suede boots. It starts drizzling while we are riding, and by the time we return to the stables there are mud puddles everywhere. Kirk walks up to the woman and says, "My name is Kirk J. Moody and I am here to assist you in the dismounting process." She says, "My boots will get ruined if I have to walk through the mud." Kirk replies, "It's not all mud. There's some manure down here, too." Before long, Groneberg grows sick of the manure of dude ranching and he heads north to Montana where he finds work on a 29,000-acre ranch, herding a thousand head of cattle for $210 a week. Along the way, he marries his college sweetheart and the two start drifting around the state—first to a small cabin without electricity or plumbing but plenty of isolation, then to a ranch near Miles City where Groneberg becomes part owner and full-time manager of the operation. Each chapter recounts a different phase of his experience: at thirty, he enrolls in a three-day bronc riding school so he can compete at least once in the famous Miles City rodeo; he rides out with a group branding cattle but stands by helpless, unsure of his place among the men; he fights to keep his ranch from going under due to fire, blizzards and starvation; he observes the ranching rituals with a poet's eye: Calvin has a yearling in the head catch and is working a saw across its horns. The blood arcs through the sunlight, making a pattern on Calvin's shirt. So much spilled blood. So many stories about what a place like this can do to someone. The lost limbs and broken hearts, the many ways that ranch life can cripple you, then kill you. A cow, turning herself inside out by giving life. The baby calves that run in gangs, all heart and legs, just days old, destined for the feedlot and then the dinner plate. A bull with a horribly fractured leg manages somehow to drag itself from some distant pasture to the front door of the house and bellows for mercy, screaming to be put out of its misery. The ranch is life and death balancing in this grass and sky. At every step of the way, Groneberg tells his adventures and misadventures with the kind of frank honesty you'd usually only find in a psychiatrist's office (where, in fact, Groneberg has had a few sessions and winds up popping Paxil to cope with a particularly tough winter). The cowboy admits he's overambitious, prideful, stubborn, insecure and dozens of other conflicting emotions that make up our human chemistry. At times, Groneberg errs on the side of self-analysis, but those passages never drag the book down, thanks to his graceful way with language. He ropes words with the ease of a professional bulldogger and brings us his story of Western wanderlust with equal parts humor and heartbreak. This is a book for anyone who's ever wondered what makes men tick behind their façade of Stetson hats and hard, unyielding faces. Groneberg knows all the secrets because he's been there and returned to tell his tale without, as one character would say, "a load of boo-shit."

    Book preview

    The Secret Life of Cowboys - Tom Groneberg

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