I WANT TO BE A COWBOY

Real Cowboys: Vicente Soto, Andres Garcia and Roberto Soto on horses with
Alfred Schletze, standing, at the Schletze Ranch
Reprint from the Encinal News, produced by Mayor John Harvey

One day Otto and my mother went to Encinal, he was wearing a cowboy hat and boots.  He’s not a cowboy, he’s just a regular guy.   He was from Indiana.   He didn’t know about horses.  He said, “I came to go to some ranch to ride horses.”   My Grandfather said, “We can go to Nuevo Laredo where my sister Paula lives, they have a ranch and they have horses.”   “Okay,” Otto said, so we went across to Mexico to the ranch. 

We were standing out side and Otto got on a horse.  He figured he had seen cowboys ride horses on TV and in movies, so it’s no big deal.   He got on the horse and got the reins.  He figured just kick them with your feet and the horse will take off.  So he kicked the horse and the horse took off, and there goes Otto, tuck, de da tuck, tuck de da tuck, tuck de da tuck.  And he’s going sideways, leaning, leaning, leaning.  And the horse is going tuck de da tuck, tuck de da tuck.  We’re watching him thinking, “Oh my God, look at Otto.” And then he falls off, “Auff”, he goes.  He throws his hands up in the air.  He lands right in the middle of a big cactus plant.  A really big cactus plant with those big stickers on it, like two inches long.  He lands right in it.  He’s lying right on top of the cactus, right in the middle of the cactus, face down. 

My grandfather and my mother and I take off running to him.  He’s like going, “Oh boy, I fell off right into the cactus.”   They managed to pull him off and that hurt a lot right there. My mother said she spent most of that day with him lying on the ground there.   She had to be taking stickers off one at a time.  And they have those little barbs so when she pulled them out, it would pull the skin up to pull them out.  It hurt every time to pull them out.  She said she took out thousands of those stickers, all over the place, on the arms, the hands, the chest, the legs, the neck, the face.   The only part that didn’t have stickers was his back. 

For a whole week he didn’t go to work, he was so sore from those cactus stickers.  He couldn’t walk for two or three days, it was so painful.  That was his adventure as a cowboy.   Later his parents came from Indiana to visit.  He had wanted to show them that he could ride a horse.  He didn’t get to do that.  But he still wore his cowboy boots.

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