Motorcycle cowboy

Summer 1966


They drove by all hours of the day and night, those boys on their Hondas and Suzukis. My ear was as tuned in to the whine of their motors as a goose is to a gander. Sometimes they stopped at my house, the ones I knew. Rod and Lynn, Ted and Farrel.

I met Rod at the Pioneer Day Rodeo. The Pioneer Day Rodeo was a bit of a conundrum in and of itself. Established to commemorate the coming of the Mormon Pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, in Idaho Falls it attracted the cowboys from the surrounding counties. Cowboys didn't exactly live up to the high standards the Mormons set. There was drinking and chewing and wild talk at the rodeos themselves. Who knows what went on afterwards.

I went to the rodeo with my best friend Shirley. Well, we actually drove over with my parents who never missed a rodeo. My father was a sort of reformed cowboy, a Mormon who cowboyed when he was young and never quite got it out of his blood. Shirley and I didn't want to sit in the stands; my mother wasn't as interested in the rodeo as my father and she had eyes in back of her head. I was just shy of 16, Shirley was getting close to 17, and the sap was rising in us. We wanted to move around, to watch the cowboys out of the ring. You couldn't smile and say "hi" to anyone engaged in the business of bronc riding; he just wouldn't see you at all. But if you were out there in the field after he got off, he just might notice you while he was walking off his cramps. Rod wasn't a rodeo cowboy. He was just walking around the fields himself, wanting to talk to bull riders and bronc busters, hoping somebody would give him a hand, start him out rodeoing. He noticed me and I said "hi". I was a good girl and so was Shirley. We went home with Mom and Dad, but Rod had my phone number in his pocket when he climbed on his Suzuki.

It was only a matter of days before he rang the doorbell, asked me to go for a ride on the back of his bike. He showed me the exhaust and told me to be careful climbing on. I didn't say anything about the scar I had on the inside of my thigh from straddling a bike like his in my cutoffs. I just wore long jeans. I climbed on and put my arms around him soft, not really holding on. He turned and smiled at me with his big brown eyes, then took off like a bat out of .....well, you know where. I grabbed hard and held tight; it was that or fall off. He laughed softly and turned his head as he said "That's better." We ate up the miles on that Suzuki with the wind in our hair and our mouths smiling so big we were lucky we didn't catch bugs on our teeth.

Rod was stocky and tough. He worked that summer moving sprinkler pipes. In those days boys were anxious to do a man's job, pitting their strength against the 10 foot lengths of pipe and moving them down the field. He was also gentle and respectful. He wasn't Mormon, though I was, and he knew I didn't drink. He did. From here it looks like underage drinking and a crying shame. From there, he was bold and daring and a little bit bad. He never once came around when he had been drinking. He never once invited me to a kegger, although he couldn't resist bragging about them when he would come to see me, always out of earshot of my parents. I wasn't quite 16, so I couldn't date yet, but that was a new rule in the church and Mom wasn't quite sure what she thought of it. She figured motorcycle rides weren't dates, and though he wasn't a "member", he was a nice boy and respectful, so she didn't object to our rides. She would have shooed him out with her broom if she knew about the drinking.

It seemed like a long time that I listened for the phone, that I listened for the sound of that Suzuki motor bike turning in the drive. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn't have been, looking back, because by the time school started, Rod had quit coming round. No fight, no words, just more days between his phone calls and visits until one day I knew he wasn't coming back. I still carry the memory of him standing in the dark in my front yard, pulling me into a close embrace. "Oh, you're sweet," he whispered into my neck, his breath almost choked off. Though he never took advantage of me, never even kissed me, he made me a woman that night with those three little words.

Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006