Baxter Black

SWEET MEATS
Chocolate-covered chicken kidneys, beef liver or sliced pork tongue, expensively and individually wrapped in foil.

PENCIL-THIN MEATS
The closest thing you can get to jerky and still pay fresh meat prices.

I went to America last week …the middle of America, Kansas, to a county fair. I flew into Denver and drove across miles and miles of green prairie. If America has a heart, it’s out here on the Plains. It’s not an easy place to live.

When you hear cowboys tellin’ stories, it’s common for a listener to say, “It’s a wonder you weren’t killed.”

“Well, all I did was rope that sorry, no good, fightin’ bull with the crooked horn and tie him to a post in the corral, then throw another rope on him and tied it to the other side, then pulled him tight ’cause I was by myself, you know.

I have been a travelin’ man a good part of my life. Most of my speakin’ jobs are Friday and Saturday nights, so Sunday means I’m usually on the road and headed home.

For me, Sunday morning on the road is a good part of bein’ me. Nine times out of 10 I’m in a rent car drivin’ to an airport where I board a flight to a major hub where I connect to another flight that gets me within an hour of bein’ home.

Sometimes, when we go to our livestock meetings and see all the technology, we forget about the cowboy and the horse.

It was just another camping trip with friends. A gathering, a return to nature, to get a taste of what life was like in the Wyoming forests and plains before Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.