Tunesday : I Wanna Be a Cowboy

I Wanna Be a Cowboy

(Seopardi, J / Chatton, B / Ramsden, N / Richards, N) Performed by Boys Don't Cry

Riding on the range,
I've got my hat - on,
I've got my boots - dusty.

I've got my saddle
On my horse.
He's called....T-t-t-t-t-trigger
Of course.

I wanna be a cowboy
and you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy
and you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy

(woman's voice)
Riding on the chuck wagon,
Following my man.
His name is Ted,
Can you believe that?
Camping on the prairie
Plays havoc with my hair.
Makes me feel quite dirty,
Though we all do sometimes

I wanna be a cowboy
and you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy
and you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy

Looking like a hero,
Six-gun at my side,
Chewing my tobacco.
Out on the horizon,
I see a puff of smoke.
Indians on the warpath,
(Indian voice) White man speak-em with forked tongue.
Or not.

I wanna be a cowboy
and you can be my cowgirl
I wanna be a cowboy
My name is Ted,
And one day I'll be dead yo yo

Here we are in August, and I'm feeling all summer vacationy, so I thought to write about the sorry history of my family's summer vacations. When I was really little and we lived in New Brunswick, it was a short hop for us to drive over to PEI and Nova Scotia to visit with both sets of grandparents. What I didn't realise until my Mum told me as an adult was that the Nova Scotia part of our summers were very hard on her because my Dad basically spent that time off camping and hunting with his own father; leaving Mum to take care of the three of us kids, on her own, in her inlaws' house. I don't remember the menfolk being away at all: all I do remember about Nova Scotia was being afraid of my Grampy (he had several wind-up dolls -- like a bartender and a juggler -- that were kept on a high shelf, and although they were the closest things to toys at that house, only Grampy was allowed to touch them and none of us kids would have dared cross him on this) and loving my Grammy's lemon meringue pie (and when I told Mum later that I remember the good food in that house, she scoffed and said that Grammy was a terrible cook; but that pie, though...)

We moved to Ontario when I had just turned nine, and in the six years we lived there, we drove back to PEI and Nova Scotia once, when I was twelve. There was a bit of a family reunion happening on my mother's side, and while I can remember that one day that we were all together as fun, there was a fog of grim duty over the whole trip that kept me and my brothers on edge -- funny that I have no real memory of my Dad being in PEI with us (and I wrote before about a bonfire we had on the beach -- a great time that I can't be sure my Dad attended, but where would he have been otherwise? I also wrote before about this trip in general and the latter part in Nova Scotia in particular, so I won't repeat myself.)

I have also noted before that I had an aunt and uncle in Ottawa, and while we were with them for Christmas a couple of times, we drove to their house at least once in the summertime -- because I remember they had a pool and Uncle Dennis threw each of us into the deep end to teach us how to swim. Maybe we went there a second time? If we did, that would add up to three vacations in those six years. Sometimes family from down East would come up to Ontario and we'd take them sightseeing, but I don't remember more than a quick trip into Toronto to see the CN Tower; I think I was at Niagara Falls just the once. Most of what I saw of Ontario the first time I lived here was on school trips.

We moved out to Lethbridge when I was nearly fifteen, and in the six years we lived there, we had two actual summer vacations. We went to Great Falls, Montana for a weekend one year (and I was certain that I told this story before, but since I can't find it, I'll risk repeating myself). Ken had already moved away by this time, so it was just Mum and Dad, and me and Kye. We spent the whole of the Saturday shopping at some mall there (and I think they attracted Canadian shoppers back then by accepting our dollars at par and this was my first experience with cross-border shopping and the insanely low prices at American stores; I bought tons), and that night was the first that we had ever spent in a hotel together that wasn't moving-related. Kyler and I were in one double room and we were connected by a locked door to my parents' room. As I wrote about last week, I was a big Stephen King fan in high school, and even though I thought it was the scariest story ever, I was laying in bed there in Great Falls, Montana, reading 'Salem's Lot and describing for Kyler the creepiest bits. When I got to a word I didn't know (eviscerating), I figured that with my mother next door, I'd just get up and ask her to define it for me. I knocked on the connecting door, and when my Dad finally answered it, he was laughing and hiding behind the door, and keeping it just closed enough that I couldn't see into the room. I told him that I needed to talk to Mum, and when he asked me why, I explained that I needed a definition. He was all, "Maybe I could help you, what's the word?", and I was all impatient (because my Dad wasn't the reader; not the one you go to for definitions), and not even knowing how to pronounce it, I pointed to "eviscerating" on the page while trying to squirm through the door and get to my mother. Now, my Dad is no fool, it was stupid of me to assume that he couldn't be my dictionary, but as a man in the meat industry, he was the ideal person to ask for a definition of this particular word, and he gave it to me, and I turned around, satisfied and further creeped out. It probably took me twenty years to remember that night and to realise that if I was sixteen at the time, my parents were thirty-six (and staying in a hotel for pleasure for the first time in a long time), and oh my God, with Dad laughing and hiding and trying to block my view of Mum, just what was I interrupting? 

The next summer, we went on our first and only actual actual summer vacation and drove out to Vancouver (and again, Ken no longer lived with us, so it was just the four of us). I remember saying to my Mum that I was for sure going to get my hair cut in the big, fashionable city, and she thought that was hilarious and kept teasing me about it all the way there. And, yes, we went to a mall and I got my hair cut in an expensive salon: not that it really looked better than a haircut I could get at home; so Mum had fun teasing me about this for weeks after as well. I remember staying in some motel, and for whatever reason, Dad putting on and watching Risky Business; as I had already seen it at the theater, I was squirming, knowing that it would eventually be a movie about pimping and my Dad would eventually know what I had been exposed to (le gasp!). I don't remember too much more about Vancouver except for driving around in all the traffic, seeing the waterfront and Stanley Park, but I do remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of Victoria when we got there (perhaps I've always been an island girl after all). The "order anything" seafood dinner we had there (at which Kyler ordered the frog legs and made them dance around his plate before he actually ate them) sticks out in my memory as one of the finest meals I've ever had.

And that is the complete and sorry list of every family summer vacation we had. Living in Alberta was exotic enough, however, that we had even more family come out and visit us, so there were sightseeing day trips. We lived only an hour away from Waterton National Park, so I was there in the mountains many times: that's where the trail rides were where that picture of me at the top was taken. I went horseback riding there maybe three or four times, and even though they had a few dozen horses, I was assigned a huge white horse named Colonel the first time I went, and when I'd go again, I'd ask for him by name (and trail riding through the foothills, with a sheer drop to the side of you, is a frightening thing; I was happy to put myself in Colonel's steady control). Mum would take everyone who visited out to the B.C. border and show them Frank Slide (where an entire town was covered by a middle-of-the-night rockslide a hundred years ago and now you can walk atop the rock pile, knowing you're treading on entombed homes and bones). I was taken to the Calgary Stampede twice (and maybe it counts as a summer vacation to stay at my uncle's in Calgary for a few days?) Mum took me once to see the Hoodoos at Writing on Stone, maybe I once accompanied her to Banff (yet that's a trip I seem to remember only doing on my own). When I was in university, a sortof friend of ours, Lisa, was planning to be a guide at a tourist info centre over one summer, so a bunch of us spent a day driving around local landmarks -- the only thing I really remember was going to see the orchids at Cypress Hills on the Saskatchewan border. How lame it feels to have lived in four provinces before I was an adult and to have explored so little of them.

By contrast, Dave likes to mildly complain about having had to go on long driving and camping summer vacations with his family every year: the four of them plus Grandma Topham squeezed into a string of family cars, hauling a used, homemade popup trailer, and exploring in every direction (east, west, and south to the States), seeing as far as they could while still being home within two weeks. And they saw a lot. And more than that, they bonded and have all these shared memories of their Dad stopping at every Civil War battlesite; him "accidentally" missing the turnoff that would have taken them into Nashville; them using the pie irons over campfires in several states and provinces; that time Ruthann fell out of the gap in the tent and thudded to the ground in the middle of the night. That's the real point of family vacations, and that's what I most regret missing out on. I'll also note that Dave's summer also included going to the cottage at Sauble Beach whenever they weren't hauling the trailer: his family had even less disposable income than mine, but where you spend that income all comes down to priorities, and what me and my brothers always felt growing up was that we were not anyone's priority.

I chose this week's song before I even knew what I was going to write about -- just another favourite song for me and my university gang -- so while it has no deep meaning, I did like the opportunity to remember riding the old Colonel.