Image: Unsplash.
Recently I started dreaming about people I love speaking to me in the form of blue chat bubbles. Another dream: someone was on Facetime and I couldn’t reach through the complicated layers of space and time and screens to tap them on the back. I wake up with TikTok songs already stuck in my head. In real life: my housemate Zan and I are sitting on their bed, cold, and my rubber plant wilts in the other room, dropping its waxy leaves. My Barmah bush hat hangs on a hook nearby with a sprig of gum tucked in its band.
‘Can you do me a favour?’ I ask Zan. ‘I need you to change my Instagram password and never tell me what it is.’
*
The ‘Cowboy Phase’ is a stage of masculinity coined by author John Eldredge. He describes it as a pivotal period of development marked by ‘a time of great adventures’. He speaks of trips into the woods alone and travels abroad, seeking out danger: ‘A time of learning that he does, indeed, have what it takes.’ Now I feel left out.
My Barmah bush hat hangs on a hook nearby with a sprig of gum tucked in its band.
This hypermasculine character was popularised by the golden age of Western movies during the 1940s–1960s. Think John Wayne and rugged stories set on the American frontier. Eldredge’s phase reflects the radicalised figure of the cowboy, often on the fringes of society, tasked with the long-haul transportation of cattle across the plains and well-equipped to deal with any kind of danger along the way.
I’m lucky enough to have many kind men in my life. These are the kind of boys that always have the right screwdriver and bring you flowers and cakes on your birthday. I’d call them all cowboys in their own ways—beautiful, loyal, smart and strong. A friend of mine moved to Poland alone at the start of this year; I saw this as a very brave thing and still do. Another friend rode his bike straight through the guts of Tassie. Adventure, daring, danger…
Looking at my friends, I can see how Eldredge’s concept makes sense: they are performing well-trodden rites of passage. But women and genderqueer people have these experiences too: braving the world alone, escaping social expectations and the nine-to-five. This is why, despite its violent colonial origins, the archetype of the cowboy appeals to so many.
Look at the rise of queer artists in the country scene opening the genre up to an even wider audience. Look at local musicians raising awareness of ‘the long and important history of Indigenous country music’. Look at Beyoncé. Note that her album is titled Cowboy Carter. While the idea of the cowgirl has its own icons like Annie Oakley, the Western genre still feels inherently masculine. This is because, in pop-culture references at least, the cowgirl was an anomaly, an alien in an otherwise male world. The modern evolution of this character shines a light on the hidden histories of cowboys diverse in race, sexuality and gender, who arguably embodied the tell-tale strength and courage more than most.
Images, left to right: Pitjantjatjara singer-songwriter Frank Yamma (Source: frankyamma.com), queer country icon Orville Peck (Source: orvillepeck.com) and pop superstar Beyoncé (Source: beyonce.com).
For a lot of us, simply rejecting the modern world that has been forced on us all our lives is daring enough. Before my self-imposed social media ban, my Explore page was filled with solo camping and van life: pathways to nature and adventure. The ‘digital nomad’ plagues the internet, a modern iteration of the ‘lone ranger’. Cowboy fashion is trending, inspired by a period when clothes were made to be worn in the elements, to be long-lasting. Bootcut Wranglers, button-ups and hand-rolled cigarettes stand the test of time. In Fitzroy, I walk down the street and see Blundstones, RM Williams and cowboy boots.
*
The cowboy phase casts back to the analog way of doing things. Cowboys in pop culture always have a sense of nostalgia. I try to picture a cowboy Facetiming his girlfriend and can’t. She is doomed to wait for his return, staring forlornly out the window at some vast landscape. At least she can’t see that he’s already been online for hours. Inspired, I start handwriting letters, overwhelmed by the unread messages on my phone; all the people I need to stay in contact with, want to stay in contact with. I can’t handle being this accessible at any time. What happened to slow and deliberate communication?
Country music god Orville Peck sings old-school love songs with a modern twist. ‘Dead of Night’ is timeless and romantic: ‘The sun goes down, another dreamless night / You’re right by my side / You wake me up, you say it’s time to ride.’ In contrast, I got a reply on Hinge that read, ‘Great pose, really eventuating the boots.’
The cowboy phase casts back to the analog way of doing things.
I love country and folk music because I want to listen to something heartfelt; there’s a ruggedness and simplicity to it. I don’t want to listen to someone singing about hitting it from the back so they don’t get attached. I want 1965-Newport-Folk-Festival Bob Dylan to show up at my house and sing to me about how I ‘laugh like the flowers’. I think about trying to meet people, but now love feels too digitised and overwhelming. I begin to find solace in actions that feel grounded and real. At least I can see the trees in Edinburgh Gardens when I walk to the post box, at least I can hear the heels of my boots clack and know that I am moving, that I am whole and I am human.
*
Curious, I Google ‘cowboy phase women’ and find nothing. I am seeking an explanation for this feeling I have of needing to run away. I find a random Quora thread where someone called Chad Smith says that ‘All women go through a hoe phase’. Is this really all we get? So, I make an account and comment ‘You are a fuckwit’ under Chad’s post and close the window. BANG! The internet thinks the only cowboy phase women experience has to do with sex and their bodies (insert reverse cowgirl joke here).
I know this can’t be the case. Last year, I went to Europe alone and came back changed in all the ways they talk about. Rural Switzerland isn’t the Wild West, but navigating it solo gave me a whole new kind of confidence. In other words, I found out that I ‘have what it takes’. Since then, I haven’t been able to shake the need to keep being challenged. I’ve come dangerously close to getting into Urbexing just to feel like I’m connecting with some wild, animal part of myself.
About once a month I go out into the bush. I ride off into the hills in my car with my wide-brimmed hat and yellow backpack, like Clint Eastwood at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I do this to have a good, hard conversation with myself, alone. Not a sitting-in-my-room-in-my-share-house-alone, but a real—sometimes slightly scary—alone. I’ll admit it’s taken time to work up the courage to hike solo. Out in the Grampians in April, I remember thinking of that TikTok trend—man or bear? Out here, a snake would be more fitting, but either way, I’d take the animal, and I think most women agreed.
I can talk out loud there, and touch the trees, or pick tiny flowers to tuck in the band of my hat. I grew up in between the ocean and Queensland rainforests. I didn’t realise until I moved to Melbourne just how much that closeness to nature had affected me. How I took it all for granted. While I love this city, my friends, my house, I am plagued with anxiety that only intensifies the longer I fall into a nature-less routine.
*
In a recent interview, Helen Garner said that there used to be a ‘looseness in society’. These days, she adds, ‘things are much more hard-edged and desperate’. It seems everybody is in a constant state of anxiety. She can’t imagine the same type of ‘sprawling life’ they had in the 1970s happening today. So, what’s changed? A pandemic, wars, a housing crisis, existential environmental dread… Overwhelmed by world news, overwhelmed by personal news, all fighting for space in my mind, like some stand-off in a Western movie, bullets ricocheting off buildings while I sit in the middle on the wooden verandah, a helpless damsel.
Sometimes I sit in peak-hour traffic up Punt Road and stare out at all the people behind their tinted windows, the city looming nearby, tram cords twisting grotesquely overhead, and think, we don’t need all of this. We are losing our humanness at a rapid pace, that crucial connection to the earth and each other. Everything feels so dystopian now. I get a message from the hiking app AllTrails that says ‘Lily! You have not touched a tree in three weeks!’ Joni Mitchell plays through my Bluetooth: ‘Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?’
I am plagued with anxiety that only intensifies the longer I fall into a nature-less routine.
When I’m itching to be outside, I wonder what exactly I’m running away from. I worry I’m having some kind of Into the Wild-style breakdown. I worry that I’ve forgotten what a whip bird sounds like. And that’s just it, the worry. Layers upon layers of problems—personal, romantic, political, cultural, psychological, parasocial—are bogging down my brain.
But when I hike, I feel strong. My legs move, and I know they have carried me many places and will continue to do so. I sit on rocks and get very still to see if the wallabies will come any closer. Sometimes I’ll swim naked in a gorge. I sweat and I stink and I’m out of breath and I don’t care. What else should I care about besides mountains and trees and rivers? Kind friends, an occasional adventure. Not much, this cowboy would argue.
At least it’s a good place to start. Zan changes my password, and I am one degree closer to a world that I prefer, where the most important things exist beyond the barrier of a screen.
