The Secret Life of Cowboys

As a young suburbanite from Chicago, Tom Groneberg first falls in love with horses and the rural West during a stint as a guide on a Colorado dude ranch. In this affecting memoir, he traces his decade-long attempt to shrub all evidence of his strip-mall roots through a series of cowboy jobs--mending fences, baling hay, and disposing of dead calves while working as a cattle hand. Later, he tries to command nearly 10,000 acres of inhospitable land as a way-over-his-head owner of a cattle ranch in Miles City, a tiny eastern Montana town so cold in winter, Groneberg writes, that "the clear night freezes the stars in place."

In an ever more desperate need to prove himself to "real" cowboys and himself, Groneberg briefly attends rodeo school and insists on entering a bucking bronco competition, clutching on to his three seconds of saddled glory as if it were an Olympic trophy. What saves The Secret Life of Cowboys from cliché--big-town boy learns important life lessons from craggy Marlboro cowboys--is that the more "authentic" his life becomes, the more miserable he is. Eventually, he falls into a depression so deep that he seeks the help of a psychotherapist and anti-depressants.

After a particularly disastrous year, when an alarmingly high percentage of his cows remain "open"--free of calves--he and his ever-patient wife sell the ranch and Groneberg seems destined to a particularly humiliating brand of failure. Fortunately for him, he discovers a different kind of satisfaction leading a semi-nomadic life with more modest expectations and even simpler pleasures, which he captures in his beautifully spare prose. --Keith Moerer