Glad I read it. ( )

I've had this book - David McCumber's THE COWBOY WAY - around for five or six years now, and finally got around to reading it. I think I bought it around the same time I read - and deeply enjoyed - Dan Aadland's wonderful western memoir, SKETCHES FROM THE RANCH. While McCumber is obviously a very good writer - that background in journalism shows - his book documenting his year as a ranch hand on Bill Galt's sprawling Montana ranch is nowhere near as engaging as Aadland's Montana memoir. And I think the difference is that Aadland's book is a true 'memoir,' while McCumber's is more in the nature of a documentation of a distinctly separate year from his regular life (as a writer).

It's all in here, of course, all the back-breaking and gritty work that a modern 'cowboy' does on a working ranch - calving, fencing, irrigating, haying, moving cattle, branding and vaccinating, fighting weeds and fire, and an endless round of mechanical servicing and fixing of vehicles of all sorts. And McCumber makes it all pretty interesting, maybe mostly because he is a forty-something year-old guy, divorced and immersed in a mid-life crisis of sorts, a guy out of shape, who gradually hardens to the physically demanding work, losing thirty pounds and inches from his waist.

The first couple hundred pages are indeed fascinating, giving the reader a ground-level look at all this dirty work, much of it learned on the fly from demanding foremen and bosses. Smashed thumbs and fingers, aching back, shoulders and muscles, broken toes - not the kind of job for the faint of heart, certainly. McCumber learns a lot about cattle and machinery as he progresses through all the seasons of the ranch. But I got the sense that his boss was very aware that McCumber was a journalist and was going to write about all of it, so Galt took him along with him in his plane, flying over the ranch's vast mountain acreage, and into his office, showing him the myriad bills and expenses of running a ranch.

But I found it frankly disappointing that so little work was done on horseback anymore, most of it now done with pickups and bigger trucks and machinery, and even moving and rounding up cattle is often now done with four-wheeler ATV's - Kawasaki cowboy work. What was really missing, however, was the personal stuff that makes memoirs so fascinating. There is almost nothing here of McCumber's boyhood or earlier life or any details of what exactly precipitated this strange mid-life turnabout. So by the time I got a couple hundred pages in, somewhere around the irrigating chapters, I began to get tired of the book, causing me to skim. Sorry, David. You're an excellent writer, but omitting the personal from the narrative, well, it just finally became tedious, all those oil changes and mechanical repairs and getting stuck and/or wallowing in manure and mud. I mean I got it. Ranching is hard, filthy work.

THE COWBOY WAY is a pretty good book, but it's not as interesting as Aadland's story. But if you only want to know what modern ranching is like, okay, this is a good book to read. Recommended for that. ( )

...written with simplicity and candor, this book gives a true glimpse of the "ranching" life in ranching country. A MUST READ for all you wanna-be ranchers...a bit of a reality check should be had by all before wandering off to be "a cowboy"...sometimes it ain't pretty, romantic or clean, but it's the truth, and there's very few books out there that tell the truth about how hard ranching can be. Don't miss it. ( )