Cowboy Coffee: A Micro Chapter
It is not yet dawn as the man stretches out atop his makeshift blanket. The air is barely above freezing and arid as the inside of a parched bone. The chill has created a vacuum of near-silence around the campsite: the only sounds heard at this hour are the murmurs of other cowhands beginning to stir and the gentle clamber of metal being filled with spring water. The striking of a match, the sound of big ears flapping and tails swishing. Mostly, it is the absence of things that the cowboy finds himself straining to hear. There is no light, and no one to see the downturn of his mouth.
He sits up like a bolt of lightning, denim crusted with dirt. His forearms and bad knees ache like a bloodless insect. It is not so difficult to rouse on a morning this cold. And his skin, though still young enough, seems to be desensitized and calloused to all, save for the changes in weather. His light-colored hair, sometimes clean, is now the same harsh color of the silt that falls from the sky, mixed in haphazardly with the wind and rain. The high desert plains and valleys of New Mexico and Colorado have seen fit to mark him. He has become the landscape. His throat is gruff from words he swallows rather than speaks.
At the furthest corner of the camp, a fire is lit. It smolders just enough that the deep purple silhouette of the outlying mesa deceives his eyes. One of the other cowhands, a genial man with deep lines in his face, is stirring coarse ground coffee into a pot.
No matter the make, it’s the aroma that begins to fill in the gaps between the scent of cows, stale sweat, river water, and sagebrush. The words are hard for him, but it calls to mind something nutty and oaky. It makes him remember digging deep into the earth on a Sunday afternoon, years ago. There’s a mineral quality that brings him to a different time, in a dank cellar as a youth, stealing plum preserves; also, miraculously, to the taste of tears spilled on her cheek.
It is earlier than when the man usually awakens. The scent of coffee unmoored him.
“What’s that?” He notices that the older cowhand is generously tossing white flakes into the boiling liquid.
Egg shells. He didn’t require an answer just then, watching the shell pieces float and swirl.
“Why don’t you find out?”
A ladle dips deeply from the heavy pot and feeds into his tin cup. When the coffee hits, his lips feel like a leather saddle getting oiled after ages of use. No need to worry about those eggshells.
It is his first ritual of the day, and his days are nothing if not monotonous. It is this first ritual that feels the most important to him. He doesn’t have long to savor, unfortunately. No, a few gulps to burn down the throat and then it is up and go.
The last time he'd seen her, she asked if during a crisis he could take shelter. What shelter? Weather, river crossings, and constant threats were just a part of existence out here. What shelter?
“You shouldn’t like to call this thing you're doing a life, would you?”
Yet, he was surrounded by life, a part of how it played out around him. Life teemed, even in the silence and the distance between home and himself.
If the mist rolled in thick while they were on higher terrain, it settled against him, not just on him. He was such a part of this place that a straggling coyote runs right alongside him, seemingly not from a desire to prowl, but for want of company. The horse, the coyotes, the man: they're all doing the same thing. Only the man thinks about the measurement of time. And that time is measured by work completed. All other things, the man forgets. The man forgets his hat, his sloppy bandana, and even the feeling of the animal he sits on as it saunters like one hypnotized through the endless desert. It doesn’t matter if you are many miles from where your body and your horse expect home to be.
Thus, the first ritual reconnects him to his own humanity — it enlists him to feel.
It is his version of pen and paper, apologetic letters to a woman, his jumbled thoughts compressed and neatly sealed, then imaginarily sent — whoosh — by an unsettled homesickness for a person he would never admit by any other means than this. As he glances at the slackened faces exposed by the sun’s growing light, he wonders if all their reasons for being out here are really not that different. The first ritual is what helps him endure the rest.
