BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE BITTER MARCH WIND. The bitter March wind stirs the red oak leaves on the hillside, leaf litter heavy in the late afternoon. The sky has cleared, temperature dropping quickly. Thankfully, the cab of my F-150 is warm as I navigate the going-home traffic. I turn the wheel north, north through the sugar loaf hills where late winter sunset brightens the very tops of the mountains, leaving the remaining valleys and oaks and hills in a deepening shade of gray. Far off, a jetliner crosses the clear, soaring off to someplace else. My mind checks off the list of possible destinations, a litany of cowboy Americana: Wichita, Omaha, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco.
America is still full of cowboys. No man is an island but the mythos remains, stockaded not only by myth but real men who lived and breathed and died to build the West as we have come to remember it. Beyond the trappings and pastiche of the cowboy, I know that ethic was real. My grandpa was a cowboy.
The lonely highway miles roll past, lights of the city still yet ahead. Ahead, there will be beer and bar stools and music both gritty and bluesy, haunting the soul, reminding of things forever lost and always reborn. Beneath the watchful eye of the “World Famous Dr. McGillicudy’s Mentholmint” lighted sign, I will listen to the music where mountain meets American West, and American river meets farm. I turn the high collar of my green wool coat against a chill both felt and remembered, the smell of the wool taking me to other places and other times.
Americana is a strange thing, solid as a rock, masculine, yet evanescent. My grandpa was 70 years old when I was born and in unspoken ways he was always my hero, a mentor with few words. Grandpa always had a lot to say, being a true storyteller. But such was not a conversation. I listened. Grandpa talked. But every word was worth listening to, poetry stripped of flowery melody. Farmer, cowboy, carpenter, pragmatist, union man, his hard hat and striped overalls hung in a garage that smelled of sawdust. His stories were infused with death and hard work and whiskey. Grandpa did not suffer fools well.
The end of things leaves us bewildered. Far better are beginnings. “Puppies begin with laughter and end with tears,” the melancholy saying goes, and cursed is the man who outlives everyone else. I think of such things often. My grandpa was the youngest of his family, as am I. His brothers, his sisters, many of his nieces and nephews, he buried them all. I could see the loneliness in his gray blue eyes when he, at 95, would look my way. I could see the thing, but could not reach through. I was a foreigner in his landscape, an outsider carrying his blood on into a new world entirely.
The wind was bitter too, the day we buried him and I turned up the wool collar of his long black overcoat, an overcoat that was now mine. The smell of the good wool was the same as his closet where I had played as a boy. My own long journey of loss had already begun, sunglasses dark to hide any tears as I helped lift his casket to a brown grass cemetery plot in a bleak southern facing Iowa hill.
Cowboy boots. A song on the radio. The hero in the books. The ache of absolute sadness transcending tears, of words left unsaid beneath a winter blue sky. Any idea of filling his shoes, of carrying on his tradition, was impossible. The great wheel of time would indeed turn, taking the edge off the profound hurt that touched us all, his family, his grandchildren. In time, the sun would warm the earth again but deep down, the harsh poetry remained, dead leaves blowing though, a cold wind always in the back of my mind.
The dark winter air is even colder on the drive home, the stars bright. The red oak hillside is dark and weird, shadows blacker than black. I stare briefly, rounding the curve in the truck. Beyond the line of oaks, beyond the leaf litter, there is movement, something stirring in the darkening night. For a moment time folds, strange reminder that the past is often not nearly as long gone as we tell ourselves. And that a wealth of tradition and grit and hope lies just barely within reach, each time, over and over again, should we choose to see.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
