The Last American Man Read Free

cussin’ and droppin’ all my g ’s and basically puttin’ on a classic act of phony authenticity. When strangers in Wyoming asked me where I hailed from, I’d
     say, “Lubbock, Texas.” As long as nobody asked a single follow-up question, I was generally able to pass as an authentic cowgirl.
     The other wranglers on the ranch even had an authentic cowgirl nickname for me. They all called me Blaze.
    But only because I’d asked ’em to.
    I was a complete and thoroughgoing faker. But this fakery, I submit, was merely my right and privilege as a young American
     citizen. I was following the national ritual. I was no more counterfeit than Teddy Roosevelt had been a century earlier, when
     he left New York City as a cosseted dandy and headed West to become a robust man. He sent the most self-satisfied and self-conscious
     letters back home, boasting about his rugged experiences, as well as his macho wardrobe. (“You would be amused to see me,”
     Roosevelt wrote to one Eastern friend, “in my broad sombrero hat, fringed and beaded buckskin shirt, horsehide chaparajos
     or riding trousers, and cowhide boots, with braided bridle and silver spurs.”) I know this letter. I wrote it myself, dozens
     of times, to dozens of people. (“I bought a pair of rattlesnake boots last week,” I wrote to my parents from the ranch in
     1991, “and I’ve beat them to shit already doing chores in the corral, but, hell, that’s what they’re for.”)
    I met Judson Conway the first day I came to the ranch. He was the first thing I set eyes on after that long drive up that
     big Wyoming mountain, and I kind of fell in love with him. I didn’t fall in love with Judson like “Let’s get married!” I fell
     in love with him like “Mercy!” Because here was Judson Conway at that moment: slim, handsome, hidden slightly under a cowboy
     hat, and appealingly dusty. All he had to do was stroll by me with his sexy swagger (classically executed, in the Hollywood
     manner of Pardon-me-ma’am-but-I-just-came-off-a-long-ride), and I was a believer.
    I was attracted to Judson because I was a girl and he was beautiful and I wasn’t friggin’ blind, but I also recognized in
     him an immediate commonality. Like me, Judson was twenty-two years old and a complete and thoroughgoing faker. He was no more
     authentically Western than his new friend Blaze. Nor were we more authentically Western than Frank Brown, the other twenty-two-year-old
     cowboy working on the ranch. He was a college kid from Massachusetts currently going by the moniker Buck. And then there was
     our head cowboy Hank, who’d always holler, “Let’s pound leather, y’all!” when it was time to ride out, but whose father happened
     to be the assistant attorney general of Utah. We were all putting on the same show.
    But Judson was my favorite, because he enjoyed the show better than anyone. He did have the slight cultural advantage of at
     least being from the South, so he could drawl. He was so damn cool. Walt Whitman would’ve loved how Judson was living. He
     was mastering marksmanship and oarsmanship, but he had also traveled across America in boxcars and hitchhiked back, had kissed
     girls from everywhere, and had learned to be a great storyteller and a talented hunter. And so lucid a horseman! He’d taught
     himself tricks like swinging his body up and off his horse while it was running along, and many other diversions that weren’t
     entirely practical for ranch work but were most entertaining.
    He and I had a ball together two years in a row, out there in Wyoming, and then we went our separate ways. But we stayed in
     touch. Like a good Civil War soldier, Judson corresponded eloquently and loyally by post. Never called; always wrote. And
     he had a lot to write about, because this was the excellent life he’d made for himself: he spent his springtimes dove-hunting
     at home in North Carolina, summers as a fishing guide in Alaska, autumns as an elk-hunting guide in