The Long Trail: My Life in the West (17 page)

I remember when you couldn’t easily buy a pair of Levis or a cowboy hat or boots. That’s how it was when I was a kid in B.C., and that meant there was no easy access for the wannabes of the world. I remember buying my first snap-button cowboy shirt — in Seattle, strangely enough. It cost seven dollars, a lot of money at the time. The shirt was green and I hated that colour, but I was going to buy that sucker because it had the snap buttons.

Now there’s a massive western apparel industry for people who want to play cowboy. The reality is that, economically, the West needs that wannabe element. If you allowed only the remaining cowmen to be part of the West — the hardscrabble on-the-land ranchers raising their
cattle — there wouldn’t be much here. I certainly need that element. My concerts absolutely won’t happen if I don’t have the wannabes. I love it when the authentic guys come, but there aren’t so many of them anymore. My songs allow people from all walks of life to enjoy the West vicariously.

Near the Oldman River in Alberta, in I999
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

With
Cowboyography
I became one of those people who portray the romance of the West. Some would say I also became part of the problem. Someone once told Kurt Markus and me, “The West is fucked now, and it’s your guys’ fault. You put the final nails in the coffin.” They meant that we had blown the cover of the hidden West of the buckaroo and inspired all these idiots to move in on the terrain. But that view is kind of selfish. Everybody wants to be the last one in, the last person to discover the West before it disappears.

I
’ve always liked Scotch, but in 1990 my days of drinking it appeared to be over. I got very sick while touring the Maritimes, and by the time I got back home from the tour, the illness had developed into pneumonia. Soon I could hardly function.

“You’re going to the hospital,” Twylla told me.

I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with me, so I followed Twylla’s advice and went to the High River hospital, checking into Emergency. Turns out I had a group A streptococcus infection. It scared the hell out of my doctor, Keith Spackman, because that same virus had killed Muppets creator Jim Henson the previous week. (Jim had got pneumonia and died in a matter of days.)

I was pretty out of it, and Dr. Spackman was terrified. “I just treated you like a steer,” he joked later. “I ran you into the chute and didn’t know what medication to give you, so I IV’d you and gave you everything.”

It was a close call. I don’t remember anything about
those days when I was hooked up to the IV. Whatever Keith did obviously worked, because I slowly recovered. But I’d developed asthma from the experience, so Keith sent me to see a diagnostician up in Calgary.

Riding Bighead (Second Summer) at the Tropicana Futurity in
Las Vegas in I988
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

“It’ll probably go away,” the diagnostician said of the asthma.

Wonderful
, I thought.

But he had a few questions for me. “What do you drink? Scotch?”

“Yeah.”

“No more.”

Shit
.

“Wine?”

“Yeah, some.”

“Red or white?”

“Red.”

“No more. The tannic acid is bad for you. Vodka’s probably your best bet — or a nice Chardonnay.”

The rest is history. My asthma lasted for four or five years and then it was gone. White wine became my drink of choice because it’s easier on the body. All my buddies thought I was nuts back then, but they’re all drinking Chardonnay now too.

After I got out of the hospital in High River, I set about starting a beautiful filly given to me by Dan Lufkin. She was an own daughter of Doc O’Lena, one of Doc Bar’s most famous sons, and we called her Roanie.

I used to be able to swing the saddle onto Roanie with one hand. Now I could barely lift it.
If Roanie breaks in half
, I thought,
I’m in trouble
. Somehow she didn’t, which is very strange, because Roanie always seemed to do the wrong thing. Later that year she bucked off the woman I’d hired to work for me — twice. But she never did buck with me. Maybe she was taking pity on me in my weakness.

Not all our horses were that kind, however. Old Pin Ears jumps to mind. Of the many colts raised on the Tyson ranch in the 1980s and 1990s, Pin Ears was one of the most colourful. Dan Lufkin, breeder of the great horse Missin’ Cash, had given me a breeding to one of his young studs around 1989, and the result was a bay colt foaled at my ranch, outside on a raw, wet March morning. The colt was okay and nursing well but I could see that the tips of his ears had frozen. Other than that, Pin Ears was fine.

I started him at age two when he was a green colt — a little on the slow side. He’d buck a little but it was nothing to lose any sleep over.

Then, in his third year, on July 9, 1992, Twylla was riding Pin Ears in the round pen when he started bucking. She flew off, landing stiffly in a manure pile. It happened in an instant and there was nothing we could do to change it. The fall broke her back. We were all traumatized by the accident. Adelita was six at the time, and we didn’t know if her mom would ever walk again. But Twylla’s surgeon did a miraculous job of putting pins into her back. In a matter of weeks she was up and walking (thank God for Canadian health care).

Twylla didn’t ride much after her accident. Over the years I’ve been bucked off horses many times, and although I’ve broken my wrist, ankle and ribs, I’ve never been that seriously hurt — I know how to fall. But in September 2009, one of my colts got mad and came apart on me in the round pen. On the fourth stiff-legged jump, I knew I was in trouble. I took a big spill and my boot hung up when I came off. Thankfully I shook it loose. I was okay, but that scared me. It’s the first time I remember being seriously scared about riding. I’ve been bucked off lots of ranker horses, but this was different somehow. It finally made me understand why Twylla had stopped riding after her back injury.

Everybody involved with horses gets injured eventually. It’s the law of averages. You can’t spend your life with them and not get hurt, even if it’s just from the wear and tear on your body. I had my left knee replaced not long after Twylla got hurt.

Years later I got pretty beat up at the same spot where Twylla had her accident, thanks to a buffalo I kept at my ranch. I had about eight of them at the time for training cutting horses. Buffalo are great for training because when you put them in a round pen, they move in a predictable pattern. Unlike a cow’s turns, a buffalo’s turns are pretty much in the same place every time. That repetition and predictability help a horse learn how to cut.

Buffalo enjoy doing bluff charges: they’ll run twenty feet towards you and then stop. But as far as my cutting horse Bud is concerned, there’s nothing fake about a bluff charge. To him it’s the real thing, and one of the buffalo came at him while I was riding in March 2004. Bud panicked and, because he wasn’t shod, when he spun around, he slipped on some ice and went down with a bang. When he scrambled back up, I was hung up in the stirrup.

Here we go
, I thought. Sure enough, Bud started dragging me across the prairie. I was using heavy brass oxbow stirrups, one of which flew up and whacked me in the face, swelling my eye closed and gashing my forehead. (Cowboys love the narrow, rounded oxbow stirrups because they have a good feel, but they’re dangerous because you can’t get your foot out easily.)

I finally came loose when my boot came off. I asked myself the usual question:
Am I alive?
Quickly followed by
What’s broken and what’s not?
I staggered back to the house, took a big double shot of vodka and said to myself, “Well, you’ve survived another one!”

For the next few days I looked like I’d been through five rounds with Evander Holyfield. The tissue around my replacement metal knee was all beat up too. I called my sister
Jean in Victoria and asked if she had any plans for the next couple of weeks. No, she said. Within days we were on a plane to Barcelona, Spain, where I hobbled around on crutches, visiting the museums and tapas bars until I could walk crutch-free again.

With horses you have to make a decision: is it worth getting hurt or not? I certainly believe it’s been worth it.

After Twylla’s accident in 1992, a Montana saddle-maker friend of mine, Chas Weldon, invited me to a calf branding to be held at cowboy poet Wally McRae’s ranch at Forsyth, Montana. This convivial May affair, aptly named “Beef, Beans and Bullshit,” brought together about a dozen artists in the western disciplines — saddle makers, rawhide braiders, painters, assorted shady characters — for three days of riding, roping and raconteuring. Everyone brought along his own horses. The gathering quickly became an annual tradition, something we all looked forward to every year.

Because of Twylla’s injury, I wanted to find Pin Ears a new home, and what better opportunity than Beef, Beans and Bullshit? I had Wally McRae in mind as a potential buyer. But, having had a Scots mother, I should have known that McRae would be as Scottish as his name and that selling Pin Ears to him would be tough.

Pin Ears killed the sale for good by blowing his cork as we trotted up the ridge the next morning to begin the gathering. If ever there was a time for an Ian Tyson bronc ride, this was it. Horse sale or no horse sale, I didn’t want to get bucked off in front of these guys. So I stuck my feet up front and made a ride, spurring the shit out of Pin Ears. All the
guys — Chas, Joe Beeler, Les Best, Bill Reynolds, T.D. Kelsey, Hank Esp, Bob Douglas and Don Butler — looked on, oohing and aahing as Pin Ears farted around in a circle. I got him rode, and I was feeling jazzed about it.

At the Beef, Beans and Bullshit gathering at the OW Ranch in Montana. I’m the one holding the branding iron
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

Giving a concert before supper at Beef, Beans and Bullshit
.
(COURTESY IAN TYSON)

But Wally said, “You’re not injecting that bronc into me, laddie!”