TOWNER, N.D. When I graduated from high school, someone told me I'd have to pick cowboy as my career of choice. I was 6-foot-2 with a 28-inch waist, and they said anyone that tall and skinny just had to be a cowboy.
They were typecasting me for a career, of course. If a cowboy crook was on the loose, police profilers would start by looking for tall, skinny guys.
Not every cowboy is tall and skinny. Even my waist has expanded to a hearty 32 inches in the last 20 years. But, for some reason, a lot of cowboys are tall, skinny fellas.
Cowboy poet Baxter Black lays out the small-waisted phenomona in his poem, "The cowboy and his tapeworm."
In my case, it's purely genetic, not parasitic. I have two tall, skinny parents, and the genetic process worked. A rancher's diet and exercise doesn't hurt, but I have to give the lion's share of the credit for my twiglike, slivery physique to my folks.
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I suppose the iconic image of the lanky cowboy is in jeopardy, though, as everyone's waistlines grow and grow.
Supersizing of America
Modern diets, modern conveniences and modern lifestyles have everyone in expansion mode, it seems. In the last 20 years, U.S. obesity rates have grown 36 percent.
But we're doing our best to engineer an answer to the changing population. As we get bigger, we try to make everything we need bigger.
Old-time saddles for old-time skinny cowboys had a 14-inch seat. Today's saddles come with a 17-inch space between the horn and the cantle for the new age cowboy's gut and the belt buckle hiding underneath.
Movie theaters are coming out with bigger seats to accommodate bigger movie watchers. Fewer seats in the same space means fewer ticket sales, but the theaters are making up the lost revenue in increased sales of candy, popcorn and jumbo sodas to the big seat sitters.
Even tractor manufacturers are bragging about having "the biggest cab on the market." I guess it ain't just the farms that are getting bigger these days.
Tight-fitting placesNot much on our ranch has been supersized, since my rate of gain has been so pitiful. Maybe I've consciously kept my boyish figure just to make sure I still fit in to the tight spots on the ranch.
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Like every other year, when the weather got cold, I found myself with water trouble. A heater quit in my pump house, the water froze, and when I thawed things out the brass fittings burst.
My pump house obviously was built by a skinny cowboy. Why else would a ranch have a structure the size of a phone booth, but half as tall with an entry point the size of a pet door?
I squeezed through a door that was just a couple inches bigger than my 32-inch waist, popped in one shoulder, then the other and pulled in my plumbing tools.
The only thing comfortable about the situation was the temperature. The windchill was 50 below zero outside and 50 degrees on the right side of Fahrenheit inside the little hut.
Hunched over with a flashlight between my knees and a pipe wrench in each hand, I turned pipes, twisted my back and got the water flowing again.
I told my wife she was lucky to have such a skinny cowboy for a husband or she'd still be without water.
She assured me that if her husband weighed 350 pounds instead of 175 pounds, he probably would've built a bigger pump house.
Probably.
