Paul Marchant

Some of my earliest memories from growing up are of riding on the front of my dad’s saddle as he rode to and from the hay fields to irrigate.

I have a good friend who is a genuinely good, generous, down-to-earth kind of guy. Like a lot of us, he bounced around a few places at different jobs before he settled in in southern Idaho.

I grew up on a diversified outfit. We didn’t have a whole lot of anything, but we had a little of a lot of things. Besides the herd of a couple hundred beef cows, we – like many of our neighbors – had a little herd of milk cows.

Like any good subculture worth its salt, the buckaroo community of America’s Great Basin has its share of quirks and unique traditions.

We were living on a ranch in White Pine County, Nevada, nearly 60 miles from Ely the summer our first daughter was born. My wife and I were wise and seasoned parents at that time, with a 2½-year-old son.

Nowadays, everybody seems to think he has a pretty good handle on where he’s going and how to get there because we’ve all got a GPS system in the car or on the phone.