Sinister: i'm in love with cowboys and sailors

[Kyla Schuller]

for months after i had met him, my eyes filled with
tears whenever i thought about our encounter. not
sadness, but not quite happiness either -- simply the
ache of awareness, the sense that somehow our meeting
had significance i wouldn't be able to decipher.

when my mother told me he had sent me a letter which
was promptly lost in the mail i quickly hid my tears
in a musty pillow. it's embarassing enough to be
caught crying. but over someone i'd met for four
hours?

but i'd never quite seen the land as it flowed through
someone's veins. his tanned leathery skin barely
concealed the mountain cornices and talus pilings
laying beneath. i was captivated by him. my cousins
and sister huddled in the kitchen, but i had his
attentions monopolized. we talked about coal mining,
about deadly explosions 100 feet below ground, about
how cold the wind can be sweeping down from 9,000 foot
mountain peaks.

he's been a cowboy for 80 years. my grandmother and
her siblings have always amazed me: the socialite, the
stone mason, the bishop and the cowboy. finally i was
meeting the cowboy! he lived in a tiny shack in a
virtually uninhabited valley near tonopah, nevada for
35 years. alone, save for his cattle. he didn't heat
his home: if his cows didn't get heat, neither did he.
when the winter came he'd be snowed in for months at a
time. in spring he'd head out on his horse for 6 weeks
at a strech, placing raw eggs in the flour-filled
saddlebags at his side.

at night, he would painstakingly paint color on black
and white photographs of his beloved ruby valley. in
the 1940s he sent away for a 16mm movie camera. at my
insistence, he pulled out some films. here's a bobcat
i caught. here's the ranch in january. i gasp at the
ridge peaks jutting valiantly into an ice blue sky.
here's the town 30 miles away burning down. here's
your grandparents when they were just married, 63
years ago. here -- here's some explosions in the night
sky. i think, please, please don't tell me those
glowing shapes in the 1940s nevada sky are what i
think they are. oh yes, those are the atomic bombs
being tested 60 miles away. fallout all over my ranch,
all the time. here's my best friend charlie, a native
american who taught me how to hunt for fish by weaving
sticks into dams in streams flush with late spring.

finally, this week, only six months later, i sat down
to write him a letter. but how do you write a love
letter to your grandmother's 80 year old brother? how
do you say he's one of the most beautiful people
you've ever seen in your life? how do you tell him
you've heard he keeps collapsing off his horse and
that maybe he's too old to work 7 days a week. how do
you say i feel the mountains in your blood and it
fills me with tears. how do you say please tell me
every story you have about being a cowboy
cinematographer. but i choked out a few lines,
trusting that perhaps he'll understand them as well as
he seemed to understand the watery eyes i turned away
from him everytime he stepped into the kitchen for a
glass of water.

**************

in other news, to add to the indie emo hip hop
discussion, i would like to second joe and archel's
opinion of emohop. it certainly exists, and the boy
i'm currently dating is a rapper in one of the groups
archel mentioned, anticon, and i can report that not
only does he wear thrift store tshirts and navy wool
cardigans but that he owns every b & s lp and ep and
that we get into spirited arguments over the nature of
twee. and that he raps about things like being an
office temp. 

love to all.

-- kyla

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