Primal Nutrition Cowboy

First I read ‘The Road.’ Not much of a western, but quite a good read. Then I read “No Country For Old Men” which I’ve posted about and favorably, it was a true modern western, hard and thick with the country.

But my most recent read, “Blood Meridian,” tops everything. It’s as hard as ‘No Country’ but with all the dust and heat and blood of the American desert of a hundred fifty years ago. The book is just plain mean.

‘Blood Meridian’ follows the tales of a young boy who strikes out west for nothing in particular and gets caught up in a group of cowboy and soldier raiders trecking across Mexico and western America slaughtering and scalping indians. There aren’t many likeable characters in this bunch, and that’s a cow bleedin’ fact.

The beauty of ‘Blood Meridian’ is the way McCarthy makes his topography into a poem. The descriptions are steep and harsh and epic. The kid heads out through an America described something like the land you might have seen on a cross country trip. But by the end, the wastelands wrought are damn near the descriptions of Hell. The kid has a showdown with true evil, portrayed as a naked sociopathic judge, in the dunes reaching to San Diego. Cormac McCarthy fills his dunes with the skulls and bones of dead animals, the blood and wretch of half eaten creatures baking in dry heat. Everywhere is redness, the subtitle of the book being ‘the evening redness in the west,’ and the showdown is only in America metaphorically, we’ve physically travelled all the way to Hell.

There was only one confusing point in the novel. The ending. I just wasn’t entirely sure what happened. I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you read the book, please chime in with your thoughts on what the hell went on in the outhouse.

And now for the healthy part of this post. I wouldn’t be a healthy cowboy if I didn’t mention the vitamin shoppe where you can find the best multivitamin on this wasteland or any other.

There’s a lot of controversy over who the best cowboys were.

If you boil the term down to its truest meaning, you are looking for the men who steered cattle across the plains from ranches to slaughterhouses in the days of the wild west which begins around the 1840’s and trails off in the early 20th century, closing out around World War I.  Basically just historical figures here, Wyatt Erpp, Billy the Kid, etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can define a cowboy as anyone of any era who is a pioneer, a lone gunman with a cause, a man who dwells in a new territory, orderless or lawless, and makes something of himself and his land. Buzz Aldron could be called a space cowboy. Donal Trump a sort of real estate cowboy, forging paths and taking risks. Is the man who designs a fuel efficient car a cowboy? Or the man who searches for and creates the best multivitamin? Is Bill Gates the cowboy of the wild wild web? Maybe, but I’m a bit more of a traditionalist myself.

And finally there are cowboy symbols. John Wayne. Was the man really a cowboy, or did he just play one on the screen? And Cowboy poets like Gene Autry. I say yes, these men had just as much strength and soul as men like Erpp, with the right amount of real cowboy grit too.

So, who is the best Cowboy? One man fits all three categories. He was a real ranchman, he lived in the west, ate beans, and hunted bears. He was a pioneer, charging into lawless territory, and eventually changing the face of the world. And he was a symbol, an American soul, and a country’s figurehead. The man was Theodore Roosevelt, and I consider him to be the best cowboy living or dead.