I.

I'm about five feet up a decrepit fence at Leo's ranch just outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. An enraged, newly-castrated bull is firing his dragon breath onto my naked calves. And while I can't see the blood dripping down the insides of his rod-and-piston thighs, he's so close-in its metallic odor encircles us. Since I can see the spearhead of his pearly horn, I realize it's the black and white, the one who made me nervous in the first place. And he's not dancing solo. I smell the sweet-grass, frothy sweat of five or six others, just slightly less insulted than the black and white, all wanting a piece of me now that the actual castrators are on the other side of a series of splintered fences.

My boyfriend Aaron, Leo, Dave the vet, and a quartet of real-life cowboys stand petrified as if they've seen Medusa: I swear they are motionless as totem poles! I need some help, but all I can think of to galvanize them is a hissed, "Gawddammit ... Aaron!" I see via peripheral vision an impaler-horn snake around like a cobra spring-loaded to strike, and Aaron raises his index finger to his lips whispering, - shhhhhhhh." I've got a $500 Minolta in my hand and am weighing the pros and cons of smashing it onto this aberrant bull's skull. But logic says it'll bounce right off his battleship head, and anyway, I just bought the camera.

Despite the arid snap in the Wyoming wind, I feel a trickle of sweat down the back of my neck, and I wonder if cattle, like dogs and tigers, can smell fear.

II.

But I'm ahead of myself. You need some background on how a girl from LA lands atop a fence at a bull castration outside Cheyenne. At this bowel-emptying moment, my mind is a whirligig of snapshot explanations. I picture my Mexican immigrant father push-mowing the lawn in a wife-beater tank, battered sandals and black dress socks half way up his pallid legs - a proud display for the neighbors that had me hiding inside. His hair swims in Dippidy-do and he's got mariachi music blasting on the transistor radio. I picture my mom cooking vinegary sauerkraut that wafts through our front door out to where I'm playing jacks with American kids who accordion their noses in unadulterated disgust. I picture all eyes riveted on my feet as Alan Arento's swanlike finger points at the orange suede shoes my grandmother lovingly posted from Berlin - shoes I never wore again. And I recall kids scattering across the cafeteria like roaches exposed to light, when my lunchbag unleashed the aroma of my herring-on-pumpernickel sandwiches. This slide show plainly reveals that I've arrived up this fence - figuratively anyway - because I'm not part of the general U.S. herd. A manifestation of opposites, I was always un-American, a Ger-Mexican painfully aware of being anything but Brady.

See, I'd just read Gretel Erlich, whose book The Solace of Open Spaces gave me an ideal. Her image of the venerable, modern cowboy defined my toll for the road to becoming an American, so I single-mindedly sought one out for myself. I could further explain my predicament by the previous bad day of trying to impress the new All-State wide-receiver, calf-branding, fly fishing, Colorado-cowboy boyfriend, who watched incredulously as I continually cast a lure into the opposite creek bank, artfully retrieving it in chunks. I needed some redemption. But there's Leo, too, who deserves some blame. Fed up with urban life, he sold his Compton, CA, liquor store and fled to this God-forsaken ranch after yet another holdup and the 1992 LA riots. Leo is about as knowledgeable on ranching as I am, and has failed to castrate several batches of boy calves who, now grown, have impregnated neighboring cows in the dead of winter. The surrounding ranchers called Aaron's cousin by marriage, Dave the vet, for help, and this morning I was caught up in the dust-devil castrating group that formed.

"Sure, I'll watch you all castrating Leo's bulls." Cool, I'd thought to myself, I can break in the Minolta with some real-life cowboy action shots. These guys looked like pros, how dangerous could it be? My option was to watch the Wyoming wind scoop loose topsoil in whooshes around the vast property circling Dave's place.

III.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm up a fence with nowhere to go. There's some tragicomic irony to being a card-carrying member of groups such as PETA and the ASPCA - hell I haven't eaten beef in years - while the very animals for which I bellyache are contemplating impaling my chigger-pocked rear flesh.

I hear this bull grunting, "fshow fshow fshow," as his frustrated exhalation strikes the back of my legs, and Jesus if he doesn't nudge me with the feverish helmet of his head, dead center of those spikey horns! I stay still and mute as a mannequin. When they channeled the hapless cattle into a visibly flimsy chute I'd sputtered, "you do use anesthesia, don't you?" The cowboy quartet, in tennis-spectator synchronicity, swung me a look of disgust and one of them hurled a trail of cola-toned juice from the caverns of his mouth. I've since learned that spitting chew after a question means hell no. Their horses were unloaded fully saddled at arrival, burdened and bred to be ready to roll. Dave the vet chuckled an explanation, "she's from California," which urged them - again in sync - to survey my regional cluelessness.

Later, after hearing the perceptible plink plink of testicles into a steel pail, I watched each offended bull get funneled, while bellowing his rebuttal, toward a holding pen. I watched the black and white one maneuver Mike Tyson-like over and ultimately through the suspect chute. I'd been smug in my safety, but this psycho guy plunged like a force of nature through a series of fences, mashing the planks like brittle autumn leaves. With buddies in tow, blitzing like a wedgebuster, he ultimately reached the end of the line--my observation area. I scrambled upward as far as I could go, a startled hen roosting precariously on the rotted railing.

So here we all are. Game pieces in a deadlocked moment, with the bulls in checkmate position. Time and breath are suspended, and even the prairie wind seems to pause for inhalation. Fixing my unblinking stare right at him, I realize that in addition to concerned, Aaron appears ... well, impressed. Suddenly, like dancers cued by an orchestra, the castrators begin to float into movement and Leo whistles for his dogs like cummings' balloonman. I sense the bulls assuming their own choreography, several bulging in and out of the pack like Popeye's cartoon biceps, and sweat seems to ditch every pore of my body. Then, out of nowhere come these two gargoyle Heelers, one who earlier sent out a low gurgled growl when I extended the back of my hand. Like gremlin warriors they weave, channel, and distract the incited beasts, as the quartet remove their hats (for the very first time), brandishing them like matador capes.

Moments later the bulls and the boys are half a football field from me, and I descend from my gang-plank perch awash with gratitude. Aaron beams proudly, and the quartet is now heading back my way with split-lipped grins of ocher incisors and gaping spaces. And somehow I've earned my cowgirl wings. "Shee-it," one of them says, the first sound other than spitting he's uttered today, "you did good, settin' up there still as a spider." Another says, "my wife'd been screechin' like a barn owl." The other two just shake their heads, sufficiently fooled by my non-plussed facade.

"Leo," I sing with bravado, "you need a stronger fence, that thing wouldn't hold back a rabbit."

Dave asks if I got a picture and I toss him an incredulous stare, while simultaneously surrendering to something I've never experienced, which is being a note in the drumbeat of the American dream. My dad picked fruit and dug irrigation ditches across the farms of this country, and my mom could cook and sew for twenty Camp Fire Girls, but I've never felt legit. I've had a bonafide cowgirl day, and although I don't quite know it yet, something has slid into my psyche, making me stand just a little bit taller.

And the dog that growled at me earlier trots up and licks my hand.

The afternoon recedes into my repertoire of turning-point days. Dave divorced Aaron's cousin not too long after, I've since returned to consuming beef, and I hear Leo packed it up and retired to Brookings, Oregon. But I kept the cowboy, and it's only in retrospect that I realize it was on this day I knew, as sure as I knew all the Brady girls were blonde, that I would marry this guy.