🔵 By Matthew Boivin. Photo by lauragrafie.
I’ve said before that a cowboy’s work is never done, and it remains true. Every day is a new adventure with many a dull moment working to keep the ranch moving forward. After we got the gate fixed to the weaning pen, we still had to sort the mix out. I said Tuesday was chaotic for entirely different reasons, which may have piqued some curiosity, so I’ll explain. Tuesday dawned like any other day, only distinguished by the added anticipation of knowing the work piled up after an unplanned Monday off.
Breakfast came a little late – 3:45 a.m. instead of the usual 2:30 a.m. – so I stayed up to write. The rest of the open barracks I live in doesn’t start stirring until around 6:30 a.m., so I take advantage of the solitude provided by the sleeping bodies. It’s hard to wake up in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning to eat a meal, but prison life hardly makes sense on a good day; we adapt and carry on.
One of the adaptations that helps me maintain some semblance of a grip on my own sanity is my morning routine. Every morning, regardless of the day of week, it is essential that I perform a set routine. I sleep in a pair of white sweatpants and realize it’s a throwback to the days I had to sleep fully clothed because we woke up at all hours to fight. There was a time when anything was subject to happen at any time so I had to always be ready. There’s no worse vulnerability than having to fight naked (which I’ve also had to do), but being prepared means surviving the insanity. When I step off the right side of my rack, I slide off any sweats only to replace them with white cotton uni-sex pants tied with a drawstring. Something triggers in my brain that the day is starting, might as well get on with it. I slip my feet into my personal all-leather Reebok Classics (all white of course). I reach into my locker box that holds everything I own (mostly books) and grab my toothbrush holder first. I squeeze a dollop of generic green toothpaste on a 3-inch “safety” toothbrush and hold it in my mouth while I grab a face towel, comb and cup of instant coffee, heading to the restroom. I set the coffee cup on the top of a low cinder block wall, separating the bathroom from the living area and place the face towel beside it – the comb has to rest in the center of the folded towel perpendicular to the edge of the wall. I brush my teeth, wash my face and comb my long hair. When I finish my hygiene, I put the comb and toothbrush holder in my back pocked and fill the cup with hot water to dissolve the freeze-dried coffee grounds for a bitter dose of instant black coffee. Very little else can go wrong in the day after two cups of that drought-cowboy coffee indeed!
I only take one sip, though, placing the cup on a stainless steel table bolted to the concrete floor with four stainless steel seats welded to the frame. Before I became a prison cowboy, I made these tables for the prison industry, but that’s a distant memory. I put my cup on the same table at the same seat every morning; partly out of habit, partly because of the security light always shining, and partly because my back is to the wall letting me see the entire barracks. I’m likely to have a panic attack when I’m out and can’t sit with my back to a wall – the little pieces of prison that never let go, much like the tension that always stays in my shoulders.
After I walk away from my cup at the table, I head to my rack to finish my routine. I tuck my sheets under the 2-inch foam mat and smooth the wrinkles out of the white cotton blanket folded lengthwise to match the width of the mat. Once the bed is made, I begin to feel a sense of togetherness. I could look at making my bed every morning as a mundane chore inspiring drudgery, but I choose to view it as one step toward starting my day on the right foot. A little shift in perspective can change my entire outlook. When my bed is made, I untie my laundry bag and fold my clean clothes. My laundry bag has the same contents every day – one face towel, one bath towel, one pair of boxer shorts, one t-shirt, and two pair of socks. I wear two pair of socks to work so I can fit an old pair of cowboy boots one size too big for my feet. I fold my t-shirt first, then boxers, towel, and face towel, pairing my socks last. This makes it easy for me when I come in from work to shower. I can grab my already folded clean clothes, take a 10-minute shower, and my work day is done. I use the face towel in the shower, dry off with the towel, pull on the boxers, and finally, the t-shirt. It’s the reverse order I fold them in, and I know the question on everyone’s mind: OCD much?
Once my obsessive compulsive disorder has been satisfied with a complete morning ritual, I can sit down to write in the quiet of the morning. A typical morning routine for me starts around 4:00 am, and work call is between 7:00 – and 7:30 a.m. mostly. There’s a sense of completion and preparation in my morning ritual, and if I wake up late or miss a step, I feel rushed and hurried all day. Every task seems to build up when I don’t have that solid morning foundation, but those days are few and far between. The vast majority of my days start with a completed routine that lets me face the day as Marcus Aurelius wrote:
Be like the rocky promontory of the sea against which the waves continually crash, yet it stands form not capitulating to their fury but rather stills and quiets the swells around it. Unhappy am I that this has happened to me? Not so, but delighted am I though this has happened to me because I can continue without misery, neither wounded by the present nor fearing the future… live by this maxim: not that this is tribulation, but to bear it nobly is providence.
And so Tuesday started on a solid note, and I was ready for work call at 7 a.m. After the normal count-out routine where my supervisor has to sign a log, accounting for us for the day, I hop in the back of the truck prepared for whatever the day brings. I said Tuesday was chaotic for entirely different reasons and at 9 a.m., my supervisor slid his truck into the office in a cloud of dust, yelling, “Load up!” the irony of the same command we use for the dogs and horses used on us was not lost on me, but I loaded up as ordered.
We rushed back to the Sally Port to be logged back in. Security conducted an escape drill, and it was after 1 p.m. before we went back to work. Emergency preparedness drills are required by institutional policy, but it was no coincidence security waited until after the harvest to conduct a drill requiring every prisoner to be brought back to the unit, stopping work for the day.
Wednesday brought a cold November rain, but a little drizzle wasn’t going to stop us. Besides, it was 38°F (3.3°C) – good sweater weather and not nearly cold enough to keep the cows from pushing through another fence (or, in this case, a gate left open). When I put Bow on the trailer, I noticed Moody was shivering but once we got to working, all that mattered was the cows. Bow didn’t let the gray weather faze him, so I wasn’t too worried about it, either. I did put on a pair of latex gloves under my now-soaked leather gloves, though. By the time we got the cows and calves rounded back up, the rain had stopped. It was time to really go to work, and Bow was ready. It was his turn to hold the cut gate, and he didn’t disappoint. A group of cows and calves came to the gate and Bow shifted to send the cows out, turning his head to cut the calf back. There’s a certain subtlety to peeling a cow away from her calf that Bow has down to a science. Both the cow and calf are scared, trapped, and ready to get out of the sorting pen, pushing and jostling against each other trying to get away. Bow is the release valve, controlling the rate of escape. A group of cows may bunch together and Bow sidesteps to the opposite end of the gate, letting the cows file out in a mad rush. A calf may be hiding behind a group of cows and Bow slides his hindquarters over, allowing the cows to slip under before darting forward to check the calf. He swings his hindquarters back the other way, allowing the cow behind him to slip out the gate while holding the calf in check.
We work together, and I serve more as a guide directing him toward a particular cow or calf. Sometimes, that direction is a spun, but other times it can be a look. When I focus on a certain cow, Bow picks up on the subtle movement of my body, following my concentration to focus on the same cow. How can he know what I’m looking at from his back? Might as well ask how he knows when a fly lands on his side, sending his tail around to swat it away.
He feels every shift of my weight, every turn of the rains in my hand, and every twist of my head. I may not be consciously aware of how my body shifts or how my breathing changes when I focus on a particular cow, but I guarantee Bow is fully aware of every single change. Not only does he process all my movement on his back, at the same time, he reads that cow’s body language, shifting his body just so in order to move her according to his will. It’s this delicate communication between me and Bow – a cowboy and his horse. There’s so much more to a well-defined relationship between a horse and rider than just sitting a saddle. Bow knows from the moment he sees me what mood I’m in. He instantly reads the set of my shoulders, the weight of my step hitting the ground, and a thousand other signs I’m not even aware of.
I can read the stiffness in his neck, the perk of his ears, and the amount of white in his eyes, but, his perception is so much greater than my own. He teaches me something every day about paying attention to the behavior of others. Every day is a lesson about my own behavior. The communication we share made quick work of sorting the cows off the calves, and we only had one more task to call the weaning complete. During a drive in late summer, we found a fresh calf that sounded like he was blowing a bellows with every breath. Poor thing was struggling to get air so we pushed him into the office corral to keep an eye on him. We bottle-fed him and gave him shots of antibiotics, but it was too much work for the supervisors. They decided to send him to the dairy to do the same thing we were already doing. To me, there’s very little worse than shirking responsibility or putting something off on someone else when I have the ability to do it myself. A man is responsible for his own, and a cowboy stands up for his responsibility; but, I don’t make the decision, I just do the work. The calf was healthy by the time we started weaning the other calves, but still young and scrawny. He was tossed in with the other calves, but when I saw him pressed against the gate by the other calves and bawling like the hungry baby he was, I strongly suggested we should put him on a nurse cow we keep in the office pasture. Hence, our last task before the weaning was complete. Making a cow take a calf not her own is a tricky business. I’ve seen a big momma cow in the pasture feeding three calves at a time, but that was her choice. We planned to intentionally put a calf on a nurse cow whether she wanted it or not. We penned them together, letting them introduce themselves, but every time he went for an udder, she kicked him away or pushed him off with her head. Well, then, since she wanted to play it tough, I played tough right back.
I ran her into a chute, trapping her before dropping a pan of oats in front of her. That took all the fight out of her! I kneeled behind her and hand-milked a quart for the calf’s bottle. I let him drain the bottle to get a taste of fresh milk, drawing him to the udder when he wanted more. He found the teat I guided him toward, and I got out of the way. He knew exactly what to do then! I let him drink his fill, then opened the chute to let momma out. He followed her around like a puppy after that – exactly what he was born to do! I came back after to watch her let him eat, so that task wasn’t too hard to accomplish.
You know, I realize I’m a prisoner – a slave to the state for crimes I am duly convicted of. I earn no money for my labor contributing to an annual 9-million-dollar revenue generated by the Farm. Arkansas takes full advantage of the “except as a punishment for crime” slavery clause in its constitution. In spite of all the legal arguments used by civilized society to justify state-sponsored slavery, I refuse to capitulate to the prison mentality. I cannot and will not surrender to the stigma that I am somehow less of a man because of my incarceration. Conversely, I also refuse to submit to the erroneous assumption against the prison structure. The only true way to beat this system is to overcome it. Smuggling contraband into prison or swapping urine for the parole officer are all great and snazzy little tricks, but are only a touch of the thousands of ways we fool ourselves into thinking we’re getting over on the system. In the end, it’s only ourselves we beat. Cutting corners, making excuses and looking for the easy way out are habit-forming and seep into a man’s personality, robbing him of his full potential.
From the time cowboys become cowboys, there was always talk of a Cowboy Code – a specific set of rules a cowboy lived by. In prison, there remains talk of a Convict Code regulating the distinction between an inmate and a convict. As a prison cowboy, I have a few simple tenets of my own: a man is only as good as his word; tell it like it is, even when it hurts; finish what I start; whatever I do is worth fully doing, done right the first time; and, face all things with a positive perception.
I hold myself to my prison Cowboy Code. As a man, the last thing I need is another person telling me how to think or act. My mind is my own – I can decide for myself. The catch is that I also accept the responsibility for the consequences of my actions. One day, I can drop the prison from prison cowboy, and when that day comes, I choose to be a man worth knowing.