Latino Cowboys in Idaho | Outside Online

You Are Here:

Home >> El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine, August 2004

Page:

El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding

DURING THAT SAME VISIT, René and I met on a Sunday afternoon at the Lincoln Inn. He was 25 now. Eighteen months after quitting his ranch job and marrying Kellye, he was clean-shaven and wore his receding black hair clipped nearly to the scalp. He looked much older, but also more handsome. He wore Wranglers, a denim shirt, good boots, and a belt with a buckle you could have fried eggs on.

René, in the modern American way, had become a cowboy. He lived in a small town with his wife and worked construction. He listened to country music and, on weekends, put on his good boots and walked down Main Street. But the dream, such as it was, had failed him. More than ever, he longed to go home to Patagonia. "Sometimes," he said, "I wish I'd never left in the first place."

At the moment, René and Bryce were working construction, building a big house on a quaint road up in Ketchum, 70 miles north of Gooding. For René, it was the best way to make ends meet—he could legally work now that he was married—and for Bryce it was a kind of drying-out period after the pot bust. He and René would leave Gooding at five o'clock on Monday mornings, drive to Ketchum, and put in 10- to 12-hour days. They spent Monday and Tuesday nights in the sheep camp of a Chilean and Peruvian with whom René felt more at ease than anyone else. On Wednesdays, they'd drive back to Gooding, then spend Thursday nights back at the sheep camp. Bryce, though he had no experience, started out making two dollars an hour more than René.

Bryce was tall and thin, with soft eyes and freckled skin. He was smart and bluntly articulate; he explained his complete lack of ambition by saying, simply, "Ranching families are the only someones in Gooding. Everyone else is fucked." Of his new stepfather, Bryce said, "I don't get him. It's just a totally different culture."

René's marriage was itself a case study in culture shock. "This was a big step up for René," Kellye had told me, "having indoor plumbing and electric lights for the first time. I mean, he's from nothing—nada. It took him a week to figure out what a coffee machine did."

Unfortunately, the differences that had seemed exotic were now driving the marriage south. Kellye said she thought René was a machista, and that he thought she was loose. "He doesn't understand," Kellye said, "that if you think you can go out and party alone and leave your wife at home ... that this is America, not Chile. Your wife is going out to dance on the tables, too."

That afternoon at the Lincoln Inn, René looked at a bumper sticker behind the bar that read WANNA GET LAID? CRAWL UP A CHICKEN'S ASS AND WAIT and told me he and Kellye fought almost constantly. The most divisive issue was that René still sent most of the money he earned home to Chile, where his father was using it to buy cattle for him. Someday, René said, he'd start sending money to buy land to run them on. Kellye resented this deeply.

What René wanted had not changed much since he'd first come to Idaho. What had changed was what he was willing to do to get it, and once again he was thinking hard about running away, this time from Kellye. He was thinking, he said, of going wet.

René ordered another Budweiser and, as he always did, pushed his index finger into the neck of the bottle, where it was briefly stuck before coming out with a pop.

"I think sometimes about going back to Chile with Kellye," he said in his thick gaucho Spanish. "But then I think about the three of us, Kellye and Kelsey and me, che, all alone with the cattle." He made a face like he was smelling feces.

"That dog," he said, "would shit on his leash."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.