It was a sultry, end-of-June weekday, I suppose somewhat comparable to Gatlinburg in mid-July, which the late Johnny Cash put on the map (written by Shel Silverstein originally) with his “A Boy Named Sue”: Gatlinburg was where he finally met his estranged father who had given him that awful name. Not at a saloon as referenced in the song, I was at Sammy’s gas station on the Dedham-West Roxbury line for a fill-up when I noticed a pick-up at the next pump with an elliptical ranch logo on the driver’s door encircling two horses.

“So, what’s a cowboy like you doing in Boston these days?” was my opening salvo to a six-foot, tanned, lean but not mean middle-aged man dressed in dungarees and aviator sunglasses. He replied that he had driven up from Texas to visit his son and drop off some rescue horses in Norton, thus depriving them of an early demise at a meat-packing plant in Mexico.

There was no horse trailer now attached to his pick-up with a Texas “Ranch1” license plate. He admitted that he had been a bronco rider and had suffered broken bones up and down his whole torso, many of them snapped back into place by him rather than wait several hours in a Lone Star emergency room.

Advertisement

His long drive was punctuated by stops at various ranches on the way, whose kind-hearted owners let the nine transported horses roam around at night, get some exercise, and eat some hay: “Twelve hours is all that I drive each day.”

We soon parted ways after a few more pleasantries. It was my first encounter with a real cowboy. I was duly impressed.