Rock-tober 14, 2017

You'd easily be able to discern my favorite authors from the amount of shelf  and closet space they occupy. Casa Capuyan's nooks and crannies are stuffed to the gills with books I've read or that I tell myself I intend to read. Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy take up a lot of real estate, especially in hardback format. You'll also find a smattering of titles from John Eldredge and Charles Dickens. However, the sheer number of titles by far belong to Louis L'Amour.

Many people mistakenly believe L'Amour only had one speed - the western. While it's true the cowboy was usually his hero of choice, he's also made use of sailors, medieval adventurers, and even ghost busters. Check out Haunted Mesa for that last one. He's also authored nonfiction and poetry and the wisdom in his writing is still relevant today. From Education of a Wandering Man he says

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Still, it's the cowboy that's most associated with L'Amour and his writings. Quintessentially American, apart from perhaps the Argentinean gaucho, the American cowboy has no other counterpart in the world. Next to my desire of sailing the open ocean, living with the vistas of a cowboy's life would be a dream. Who wouldn't want to wake up, walk out their front door, and be greeted by a mountain view or the lushness of a fertile valley? In my quest to touch all 50 states, the bulk of the remainder are in cowboy country - Montana and Wyoming. I'm looking forward to these trips. A coworker of mine bemoaned the possibility of his significant other getting a job offer in Wyoming. He saw the spark of excitement on my face and knew me well enough from our past conversations, "Wayne, I know you wouldn't mind living in Wyoming, but my Jamaican-born hiney ain't going anywhere near it."

Desperado, from 1973, was the Eagles's second studio release. The album followed a western theme from the group dressed as cowboys on the album cover to the titles of the album's tracks. Its title song, "Desperado,"  became one of the essential songs of any Eagles anthology. Ironically, it never charted as it was never released as a single. According to the SongFacts website, it was also the last song performed by the Eagles in concert before Frey's death. I don't know if Louis L'Amour was an Eagles fan, but "Desperado" could easily be the theme song for many of his novels.