Here in the homogenized 21st century, it is gratifying to know there are still places in America that are so culturally distinct they feel almost like foreign lands.

Clinton Cox and his roping partner practice their skills at the ZN ranch. (Photo by David Horsey)

In the past 15 months, I have traveled to both Vietnam and Egypt. As rich and illuminating as my travels through those cultures proved to be, my week-long immersion into the life of rural Montana was equally fascinating. At a remote ranch sprawling for 29,000 acres just south of the Saskatchewan border, I discovered an American way of life that most city-dwellers would find as exotic as the streets of Hanoi or the markets of Luxor -- exotic, but not unfamiliar. The familiarity comes from cowboy movies and stories our parents told about growing up in small towns. What makes it exotic is the surprise that such a world still exists.

The pristine Ford Escape Hybrid picked up a little off-road dirt. (Photo by David Horsey)

Driving north from Malta, Montana, where a dance at the VFW hall gave me my first sudden indication that I had entered a different America (see Dispatch 5), I was part of a small caravan of apprentice cowboys in trucks pulling horse trailers and a mobile kitchen. We turned onto a gravel road toward the tiny town of Whitewater. There, we passed the local school that boasts less than 50 students, K through 12. After the gravel road came the rain-soaked dirt road with a muddy surface that was as slick as snow. We pushed on, mile after mile, as the mud coated our vehicles with a thick brown gumbo. The dirt road eventually became just two rutted tracks and those finally gave out as we reached our campsite next to a solitary corral set amid a vast rolling prairie. I set up my tent in the wind and rain, someone made a campfire and we settled into the emptiness.

The view from my tent. (Photo by David Horsey)

In truth, though there were no roads or buildings or telephone poles or power lines in sight, this was not an empty place. For one thing it was filled with sounds I never hear in the city. Meadowlarks and a dozen other kinds of birds sang from dawn to dark. I seldom saw them. There were no trees; the birds made their homes amid the high grass, low brush and tiny wildflowers. The birdsong was gorgeous and, at sunset, the chorus was joined by coyotes howling in the near distance, frogs croaking in a little pond, cattle bawling from over the hill and free-running horses neighing as night came on.

Over several days, we rode down through coulees that led into a dry, dramatic valley bisected by the meandering course of Frenchman Creek. It was a world of jutting rock hills, wild grass, spikey cactus and ancient petrified wood where jackrabbits skittered through the sagebrush. We rousted cattle out of their hiding places and drove them back to the higher ground near our camp. Those forays on horseback into the beautiful, twisted land were like rides back in time. A 19th century settler brought back to life and set down in that place would not have any idea how much the world had changed. In fact, it was a topography little altered in many millennia -- at least not since the sea that once existed there receded and left behind the rock-hard seashells that are now easy to find on the sandy ground.

The view of Frenchman Creek from Haystack Rock. (Photo by David Horsey)

The work we did also felt part of a different time -- though, in fact, it is still as much a part of the fabric of American life as any other kind of labor. It is just that the activities of ranchers and farmers are now at the periphery, rather than the center, of our economy and culture. Most of us seldom witness the work, but, every morning, men mount horses and ride out to mend fences and tend cattle and set irrigation lines. Their children practice roping and riding and join in when there is branding to be done. Ranch women work as full partners in the hard chores and cook a distinctive cuisine of casseroles and ribs and creamy, calorie-rich desserts that cannot be found in any urban restaurant or at any of the cloned fast food joints that infest interstate exits all over the United States. These ranch people tend to look at city folk like me with polite amusement, but they appreciate a willingness to work and to learn. They gave me a horse and a job to do and I did it to the best of my novice abilities, knowing fully that I was skimming the good stuff off the top -- the riding and the cow chasing and the summer-camp camaraderie. I recognized that they would still be there doing a thousand less enjoyable tasks, day after day, in the worst kinds of weather, long after I had returned to an air conditioned newsroom in the heart of the big city.

Rancher Clinton Cox moves his herd to the branding grounds. (Photo by David Horsey)

On branding day, we gathered a herd of 500 cattle and drove them to a pen where calves were separated from cows. Branding irons were heated in a roaring wood fire. Riders on horseback roped the calves and dragged them to where local teenagers wrestled them to the ground. The calves got inoculated and then, in a moment of pain and burning hide, received the rancher's brand and were let go to find their mothers again. This all happened in a glorious chaos of horses and calves and hot iron and good-natured young men and women that went on for several hours until the work was done. Then cowboys and neighbors and volunteers from the city got back on horses or climbed into trucks and returned to camp where a big supper was laid out in a communal scene that is repeated thousands of times each spring in cattle country.

Redmond glass artist, Bill Ayers, lends a hand at branding. (Photo by David Horsey)

My hero in all these adventures was 75-year-old Connie Cox, an old rodeo cowboy who won enough money riding bucking horses to buy this ranch in the 1960s. He's now turned it over to his son Clinton, but Connie has barely slowed down. He was right in the middle of it all, roping the calves, driving the herd and riding his horse with as much skill as a man in his twenties. In this world, men don't retire and become channel-surfing armchair riders letting their bodies and minds fade away; they keep doing what they've always done as long as they can. If Connie's body creaks more than it once did, he at least has a hard-earned wisdom that a younger man cannot claim. He is also funny as hell and generous as a saint. I feel privileged to have met him and been allowed to enter into his part of America. And I'll be back.

Connie Cox, veteran cowboy and Epic Trails boss. (Photo by David Horsey)