The tip-off came from a finance guy in an intellectual-property firm.
I would hazard to guess that is not where most folks seek enlightenment regarding horses.
But that’s where I found myself in the fall of 2011: working at a company that bought, sold, and licensed patents for various kinds of technology, mostly digital and computer-related, all of it over my head.
This company had hired me a few years prior to draft various communications for the founding executives.
It was a good job, and I was lucky to have any job at all in those times, and I knew it.
Nevertheless, I struggled mightily to reconcile corporate culture with my unruly nature.
I’d ventured just about as far from my roots as one life could take me and I wasn’t sure I would ever find my way back.
I didn’t grow up to be a lawyer or an engineer or a programmer—just a writer, pecking at a keyboard, pushing words around, dreaming up story after story in my head, and selling them.
Once upon a time, in my early 20s, I lived in a big cities and worked on the staff of various magazines, in a proper office, with colleagues, copy machines, and salaried compensation.
But I’d left those jobs and those cities and gone country again in my 30s.
I settled in rural New England where, for nearly two decades, I enjoyed the privileged, penurious life of a freelance: rolling out of bed and onto the laptop, pitching editors and prodding sources on the phone, scribbling notes in the margins, taking walks in the woods over lunchtime, chugging coffee on deadline, writing and writing and writing and always writing, into the wee late hours of the night.
In this fashion I whiled away my hours and days and years as the internet slowly ravaged the fortunes of the print publications that paid my bills.
When the world economy collapsed in 2008, my business model, hand-to-mouth in the best of times, became entirely untenable.
I was down to my last dime when a colleague in the tech sector put out a call for an editor, and I answered it.
I left my friends, family, and failing career and moved clear across the country to the opposite coast.
The new job was in the suburbs, everywhere pavement and curbs and power lines and parking lots.
There I was expected to do normal things that somehow felt like torture to me.
Five days a week, I drove through heavy traffic to an underground parking garage wearing a face full of makeup and my Sunday go-to-meetin’ clothes.
I rode the elevator up from the bowels of a concrete building to a cheerless cubicle with blanching blue-white overhead light.
I ate chips and string cheese straight from the package over the sink in the grey-and-beige break room.
I sat in darkened conference rooms through hours of endlessly looping Power-Point presentations.
I filed dutiful self-evaluations and kept a smooth demeanor in performance reviews.
I grimaced only ever-so-slightly when my teammates said “leverage” and “incentivize” for the thousandth time, like rocks thrown against my head.
I never did get used to any of it.
One weekday morning, in this occupational fugue state and my too-clean clothes, I stopped by a coworker’s office to discuss some trivial point in a document, and as I was leaving he said,
Hey, you like horses, right?
I stopped in the doorway, wondering what could possibly come next.
My wife made me watch this movie about a cowboy last night, he said.
A documentary.
I thought I’d hate it, but it made me cry.
Well I didn’t care so much about cowboys, but that last bit got my attention.
I guess I’d assumed those corporate types don’t cry.
The tedium of intellectual-property law would surely move me to tears, yet these consummate professionals toiled day in and day out with stubbornly dry eyes.
I thought they were tough as turtles.
Apparently I was wrong.
On the strength of this revelation, I determined to watch the cowboy movie at my earliest opportunity.
Back then I didn’t live on a farm, of course, so my evenings were uncomplicated by fence repairs, veterinary crises, end-of-day chores, and screaming colts.
I simply went home, ate takeout dinner, changed into my pajamas, got a bowl of ice cream, stretched out on the couch, reached for the clicker, and cued up that documentary.
And I cried too, although likely not for the same reason my friend at the firm did.
I poke a little fun at him here, but I’ll be forever grateful to my kind colleague who pointed me in the direction of the award-winning documentary Buck.
The New Colt 