Of Cowboys and Freedom

Warrior County Jail 1999. One more DUI. One more incarceration. This had become my new normal. My very first DUI at eighteen years old I cried like a little girl. Now, it’s “Oh, well!”

Here I was once again–washing police cars in the day, sitting alone in a cell at night, listening to the guy in the cell next to me drone on about how he was going to conquer the world once he got out.

This cold, dark cell is just an outward manifestation of what was going on in my soul. I had been a prisoner for years.

As a young boy growing up in the ‘50’s, I  could not get enough cowboy shows: The Lone Ranger, Roy Rodgers, Bonanza, Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke.

When I look back and consider what was the attraction,  it wasn’t the gun slinging or fights or bravado that had me hooked. It was the freedom these cowboys had—to saddle up their horse and ride wherever and whenever they wanted, sleep under the stars in the open range, moving around from one adventure to the next, helping the poor rancher fight the land barons, or the widow hold on to her property, and never answering to anybody.

The cowboy would do good and move on to his next adventure. He would just say goodbye to a girl or a friend and ride off. To a kid who got up when told, went to school on their time, did what he was told everywhere, at home, at school, at church—the freedom of the cowboy was my dream.

As I got a little older and got my first bike, I was a cowboy on two wheels. I got a sense of what that cowboy freedom felt like. I would take off early each Saturday morning on my bike and ride down the streets of my small town down through the wooded trails to the park by the Des Moines river. I would often meet up with my friends and we would ride all over town, creating our own adventures until the evening street lamps came on.

And then I got my drivers license. To be sixteen and not riding with your parents, going wherever you wanted—Ahh, the freedom.

On Saturday nights there was always a double feature at our one theater, and I would tell my parents I was going there—giving me four hours of complete freedom of movement on a Saturday night!

My college years brought the next level of freedom. Away from home for the first time, no one telling me when to get up or when to be home, or how I should spend my time. I always went to class—I had nightmares of being at the final exam not every having attended the class. So I didn’t miss.

But my college years also coincided with my drinking. When college was over, the drinking wasn’t.

So began my retreat from cowboy freedom into the prison of addiction.

I became a prisoner of fear- fear of people, fear of economic insecurity.

I became a prisoner of resentments and self-centeredness. I experienced life only in how things would or could affect me.

I became a prisoner of need. The need for acceptance, approval, respect, adoration.

I became a prisoner of the delusion that if I were perfect, I could manage myself and everyone around me.

Instead of the world as my range where I was free to roam, I had incarcerated myself in this cell of fear and self-centeredness. I became afraid to take risks, to stretch myself, to change.

While sitting in that cell in Warrior County, AL, I found myself suddenly on my knees, my arms raised to heaven, asking a God who I had abandoned to save my life. Somehow I suspected my end was not far off  if he didn’t intervene.

When I walked through the iron bars of my cell and out into the sunlight, I had an inner sense that my road to freedom had just now begun. I immediately entered a 28-day treatment and went directly from there to a longer term recovery house, where I was shown my way back to freedom. I have not had a drink since.

The irony is this; In my self-surrender to a God I had ceased to rely upon, I would become a cowboy again—free from the prison of fear and resentments and self-centeredness. Free to go out into this great and beautiful world, to do what I can with what I have to help others, like any good cowboy would do.

HI HO Silver, AWAY!!

Bob

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