In
a few days, all those rhymers who lived in
Tin Pan Alley back when Gertie was a pup will be fulfilled
once again. How’s
that you say?
Was a love song ever
written that didn’t have
both moon and June in it? And the full moon will be here in a
couple of days
and it is our responsibility to go look at it.
A full moon is
probably the basic cause of
most superstitions and spooky stories and maybe even a
religion or two. And
that’s because it shows us our world in an entirely different
light than we’re
used to. A moon softens the hard edges of our everyday world.
It casts a pall
of loveliness on rocks and water and even old cowboys. And you
know this is
another reason so many people are married. In moonlight, even
a cholla cactus
looks friendly.
Many years ago a few
of us from the bunkhouse
used to go to a place in the southwest part of Death Valley to
catch wild
burros. It was legal then, of course. Now keep in mind this is
Death Valley in
the summer. The lizards only came out at night and they each
had a canteen.
Yes, it was hot.
So
what
were supposedly human-type cowboys doing out there in that
kind of heat?
Sleeping in the shade of the stock truck. If we could. Because
we only went
jackassing there during a full moon, and only at night. This
limited our burro
roping possibilities, of course, because we wouldn’t run our
horses through the
lava beds or in the shadows. The shadows were pitch black, and
those lava beds
could turn you and your horse into ground round, and becoming
two acres of
cowboy burgers didn’t appeal to me.
So
we’d
hide in the shadows and watch the open valley before us. It
was dotted with
sagebrush and some other types of puckerbrush, but it was safe
to run a horse
there.
And
soon, here would come the wild burros, wandering out into the
valley, and we’d
build a loop and come boiling out of there like the dawn of
doom.
And if we were
successful, we’d lead a wild
burro back to the stock truck, talking to them all the time
and letting them
know that we had no intention of eating them.
One night I roped a
little foal, put it up in
front of me on the horse, and rode back to the truck. Along
the way, I named
him Barney. When the sun rose the next morning, I changed HER
name to
Barneyetta. We were the best of pals for years.
So why does this
memory carve so deeply into
my soul? Probably because it was done under a full moon. A
full moon in the
desert makes it almost light enough to read by, and at the
same time making
ugly objects become steeped in magic and mystery and beauty,
even old cowboys.
Don’t miss the full
moon. Full moons and baby
burros are good for us.
xxx
(BF)
Brought to you by all the wild burros in Butte Valley and
Death Valley in
eastern California, except for that one-eared old stud jack.
He’s too mean.