Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.

Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. Owen Wister and Zane Grey helped establish the archetype, and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert a powerful pull.

All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of Luccheses—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:

I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with a certain professional football team based in Dallas.

Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the Great Plains of footdom. My footprints resemble the round tracks of a hippo rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s Kings Road, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.

A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.

But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.

How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like this guy than this guy. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.

The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.

Next on my shopping list: a Nudie’s suit!

What we’re reading
Heather: William H. Eddy, The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature
Martin: Philipp Meyer, American Rust

Funny how things turn out sometimes.

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, went to college in Massachusetts, and grew up (to the extent that I grew up at all) with fairly liberal political views. I am neither a hunter nor a serious fisherman. I have owned a series of foreign cars, but never a pickup. I have never owned a cowboy hat, either, and the first pair of cowboy boots I ever bought was from a hip boutique on the King’s Road in London. And I really, really hate the Dallas Cowboys. I am, in other words, a Yankee.

And then I fell in love with a girl from Texas, and everything changed. I have lived most of the last three decades—virtually my whole adult life—in the Lone Star State, a fact which still astonishes me and no doubt puzzles many of my childhood and college friends, to whom Texas is a vast desert filled with cacti, rattlesnakes, and gun-totin’, snuff-dippin’, rip-snortin’ Republican rednecks. Dangerous, in other words. But, almost thirty years later, here I am.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at that Massachusetts college, and we fell in love and/or lust during the spring of our senior year. Not only was she gorgeous, smart, and funny, but, being a native Texan, she was exotic, too. Her family lived in San Antonio until she was ten, when her father got a job with the gummint and they moved to the Washington DC area, but her father’s father still lived in the Alamo City, and she had a job lined up after graduation as a reporter for the late and not-terribly-lamented San Antonio Light.

I, on the other hand, had no job prospects whatsoever—planning ahead has never been my strong suit—and figured I might as well follow her to Texas. (I actually wrote to the San Antonio Spurs offering my services as a short, untalented point guard who couldn’t shoot, pass, jump, or go to my right, and received a surprisingly gracious rejection letter from Bob Bass, who was then the team’s general manager.)

After graduation, we embarked on an epic cross-country journey, driving in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel from Williamstown to San Francisco, by way of Washington DC, New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, and Aspen, to visit my (divorced) parents, and then back to San Antonio to begin what we naively thought of as our adult lives.

The trip was full of incident, but the high points were our stays in Houston, where we visited Heather’s formidable maternal grandmother, and San Antonio, where we spent a week with her even more formidable paternal grandfather.

Boppa took one look at me, with my bushy beard, long hair, and earring, and decided, not unreasonably, that I was Bad News. The famous family story is that when we left San Antonio to push on to the West Coast, he called Heather’s father and asked, “Now where are those two going again?”

Heather’s father replied that we were heading to San Francisco to see my parents before eventually returning to San Antonio. There was a thoughtful pause, and then Boppa observed, “Lotta motels between here and San Francisco.”

When we finally made it back to San Antonio, we took him out to dinner twice a week, on the nights when “the help” was off; on Thursday nights we went to the Argyle, and on Sunday nights to the San Antonio Country Club. I drove the car, opened the doors, fetched him the one weak Chivas and water he was allowed per night, and generally did my best to ingratiate myself, but for the rest of his life (he died about six months later), he never called me anything but “Whiskers,” as in “Whiskers, get me a drink,” or “Whiskers, go git the car.” I’d tug on my forelock or fetlock or whatever that thing is and say, “Yes, sir,” and go off wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

That was a tough year, in a lot of ways. I found work as the editor of a little weekly newspaper, the San Antonio Citizen-News, that served the southwestern part of the city around Lackland Air Force Base; since we were living in north-central San Antonio, I neither knew nor cared anything about that part of the city, so my job was not terribly fulfilling. I bought a used Fiat 128, which consumed several quarts of oil a week and was (in the way of all Fiats) almost comically unreliable, so twice a day I’d set off to drive across the city never knowing if I’d actually arrive at my destination, which didn’t exactly help my frame of mind. One hot afternoon the Fiat conked out in the middle of Broadway, and Heather and I had to push it several blocks to my apartment.

My most memorable co-worker at the Citizen-News was Oscar, the sports editor. He was a bald, stocky retired Air Force sergeant, and he cussed constantly and with amazing creativity. He also had a notorious temper; I was told that he carried a baseball bat in the trunk of his car, and if another driver cut him off or otherwise offended him he would pull it out and go to work on their fenders and taillights. Oscar was also apparently a creature of habit; the story was that once, when he came home to discover that his wife had rearranged the living room furniture, he wordlessly got out his toolbox, moved the furniture back to its previous positions, and nailed it to the floor. In fact, he was always perfectly nice to me, but I definitely tried to stay on his good side.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heather and I broke up after a year or so in San Antonio. She moved up to Austin to begin graduate school, and I, once again flying blind, decided to move to Washington DC, where I landed a job on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley. I enjoyed my time in Our Nation’s Capital, at times perhaps a little more than was good for me; I’m not sure my liver has ever forgiven me. But I got my feet under me a little bit, found out I could more or less survive on my own in the world, and eventually, a year or so later, Heather and I patched things up. I moved back to Texas, this time to Austin, where I too began grad school, in American studies. We got married a couple of years later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And now here we are, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I find myself the would-be co-proprietor of an enterprise that seeks to celebrate and emphasize the unique character of Texas, or at least the beautiful part of it known as the Hill Country. Our kids have grown up in Austin, and while all three have elected to leave the state for college (the youngest, a high school senior, is bound for Ohio next year), the older two have already come back. They’ve come back home.

What we’re reading
Heather: Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution
Martin: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane