Are you ready to be a legend? Just go ahead and be one

Next to being easy-going, I’ve always wanted to be hearty. Hearty like a can of beans at a campfire in the middle of bears in the middle of a thunderstorm all alone in the wilderness.

Enter Josie Brown, or Chuck Norris with female parts. Next to Josie Brown, I’m a sandpiper skirting the waves at the beach. Josie Brown would pummel the shore.

Josie Brown’s not her real name because I can’t beat her in a fight. She’s a Colorado person I met this summer, the kind who doesn’t live near a town or even a Wendy’s. When I ask for a dinner recommendation, she says simply, “I don’t eat out.”

I see Josie Brown on an empty road — is that Annie Oakley, Belle Starr, Big Nose Kate? — hitching a ride after a weekend camping trip with a 50-pound backpack partly filled with empty wine bottles.

Josie Brown can be alone in the wilderness and drink. I can tolerate a glass of wine supervised at a bar.

I say aloud to my companions — “If I were a man, I’d marry someone like that. Enough of this skinny, weak, high maintenance model stuff. Josie Brown’s the kind of person you want covering your back, a woman who’s more beautiful where it counts — behind you than in front.”

I watch Josie strut toward the car like a cowgirl to a horse and remember working on a ranch myself which lasted 3 weeks and 4 days because I fell in a hole I was digging and broke my foot.

Josie Brown wouldn’t have broken anything but the neck of the shovel.

“I understand women like that,” I say. “I’ve been a cowgirl you know,” beginning a story I’ve told a dozen times.

“I rounded-up cattle and drove bulldozers and helped shoe horses and like a Big Mac or a Hungry-man meal, I was quite hearty on that ranch, the manager said I was his best worker.”

I didn’t tell them I was the only one who showed up on time. The cowhands were always sick drunk.

“I wore cowboy boots and cowboy hats and thick blue jeans with no designer logo and spent nights on the range swapping stories of raging bulls and death-defying stampedes.”

In the back of my mind floats a quote from another famous female of the wild frontier, Calamity Jane: “I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one.”

“And every morning at 8 a.m., no 4 a.m. before the sun come up, I would climb the hayloft, high as a mountain in snow, and stick that pitchfork into a dry fat bundle and fling it one-handed right on target to a flatbed truck below. ”

I didn’t mention I would fall backwards along with the bale.

“Then we’d take off and drive cattle.”

I didn’t mention I could barely ride a horse and the saddle itself was so heavy it brought me to my knees when I picked it up, or the guys gave me jobs like rounding up lost cows, or sweeping old hay, or fixing fences in the back 40, then ditched me to hitch back home myself.

But, like Calamity Jane, I was determined, meaning I was dumb. Calamity Jane got into lots of trouble in the Wild West and so did I that Colorado summer.

“And that broken foot, it coulda happened to anyone. That hole I dug was 6-foot if it was an inch and it was damn lucky I didn’t end up a goner. A giant wind come up and sent the whole state reeling this way ‘n that. I tell ya, I was between here and the Good Lord.”

I puff myself up behind the steering wheel, straighten my pink baseball cap, suck my pearly whites, cock my head, and stare long and hard at Josie Brown as she stands outside my door.

“Howdy pardner,” I nod. “Nice weather ain’t it? Looks like you’re fixin’ for a beer and a ride.”