Living the Cowboy Life for a Day

Aug. 12, 2006 — -- At some point, probably every American male has dreamed of being a cowboy. It's part of our culture, our history, our national mythology.

Think of the imagery: The rugged outdoorsman on horseback. Cowboy hat and boots. Rifle and revolver. Well, let's skip the rifle and revolver.

For most of us, it's just a dream and it fades as we grow into adults.

But this summer, I had a chance to live my dream, if only for one day.

I was assigned by "Good Morning America Weekend Edition" to attend a cowboy camp. Producer Alexa Pozniak went on the Internet and found the Forest Hill Farm in Muscatine, Iowa.

It fit just what we were seeking. It offers week-long camps where campers get to ride horses, feed horses, tend to horses … you get the idea. They sleep in tents on the sprawling grounds overlooking the Mississippi River. And in addition to all the horse play (pun intended), there's instruction in such cowboy activities as roping -- make that: ropin' -- and driving cattle.

We arrived just after dawn. This was the second day for the other campers, who turned out to be a dozen teenaged girls. They were sitting at picnic tables, chowing down on a strange, creamy substance that resembled nothing I had ever seen before.

Dave Skipworth, who has run the camp for nearly 20 years, explained that it didn't really matter what it was. All cowboy food is called the same thing -- chuck.

Whatever this chuck consisted of, it was so greasy it immediately soaked through my paper plate. But it wasn't half bad -- or else I was hungrier than I realized.

Next, Dave took me aside to give me some lessons in roping. For practice, a mock cow's head with horns was attached to the end of a rectangle of straw. Dave took a lasso and explained the over-the-head windup. The key, he said, was in the toss. The idea is for your arm to point toward the target as you follow through.

"When you throw it, point it," he said.

Dave then tossed the rope 25 feet and it landed around the mock cow head. He yanked it and it tightened around the horns. Very cool!

But my attempts failed. The first landed next to the head. Each subsequent one was farther and farther from the target.

"Well," said Dave, "that's not bad for the first time."

I spent the next few hours -- perhaps as punishment -- feeding the horses in their stalls, removing their droppings, and then laying down new bedding. It was grueling work on a 100-degree day.

The horses -- truly enormous beasts when you're a few feet away -- were fairly timid. They tended to stay away from me. Some seemed mildly curious. Others were oblivious to my presence.

In the afternoon, Dave brought a semi-wild horse named Sam (I'd fed him) to a round corral in a barn. Sam was 8 years old and gorgeous, but he had been a stallion, a breeder male, all his life. He had never been ridden, never even tolerated a saddle for very long. The one time they'd tried to saddle Sam, he had bucked wildly until it was finally removed. Dave was a little wary of Sam.

The lesson this time would be communicating with a horse -- how to take command and persuade a horse to obey. Dave explained the meaning of the various sounds a horse makes, and how certain hand signals, or head nods or the shaking of a length of rope establish your mastery. In no time, I was imitating what Dave had shown and was making Sam go this way and that. It was amazing.

Of course, all of this was preliminary to the true art of the cowboy: riding a horse. For this I was given an older, steadier horse named Little John. I've been on horses before, but not often and never at any velocity more than a slow trot.

Dave showed me some basic moves. The most critical was how to post -- or move up and down in rhythm with the horse's jolting up-and-down movement. I did it, but it wasn't easy and sure didn't help when Little John stumbled and almost threw me.

The candid assessment of one group of girls sitting on the corral fence watching me was, "He's doing good with the walk and the trot, but he doesn't post very good. But he's a beginner. He can learn."

Exactly.

The cowboy camp is ultimately about having fun -- and along the way learning something about the cowboy tradition.

"I've always done cowboy work," said Dave. "It seems like a dying breed. I wanted to pass this along to some of our kids. Every guy wants to be a cowboy, and in a way every man is a cowboy in their heart."

Yup. There's a little bit of John Wayne in all of us. Cowboy camp helps bring him out, and let him run around for a while -- before we go back to our "real" lives.