LIVIN' IN THE WILD WILD WEST

(Pancho, Pancho, where are you now?)

Many years ago, before anyone was born, the Cisco Kid came galloping out of a cathode-ray tube and left hoofprints all over my brain. He was handsome, dressed in black, and rode a big horse as white as his teeth. A few seconds behind this stirring entrance always came his congenial, swarthy, and decidedly un-politically correct sidekick Pancho, enthusiastically flailing a lesser mount and calling out in a plaintive, heavily-accented voice, "hey Ceesco, wait for me-e!"

I can't remember, but I hope he wasn't riding a burro! [Note: he wasn't.] Anyway, didn't Pat Brady ride a white mule, or was that Gabby Hayes? Sidekicks usually had to make do with less than the best, but they had hearts of gold and never hurt anybody.( And remember, Tonto was not a sidekick but a "faithful Indian companion." There's a huge difference!)

"Hey, Ceesco, wait for me-e!"

Sometimes I feel like a sidekick in a computer western. I still don't have a G3. I don't have any USB gadgets, and forget FireWire! For that matter I'm still using OS 8.1 and don't have a single complaint. Oh, I want a blue-and-white. I want to install OS 8.6. I even want a G4 Sawtooth. (Why stop there? I want fame! Success! I want a hotrod BMW!) And sooner or later I'll get the latest shootin' irons, 'cause you never know what you're gonna run into out West. Speaking of which:

Once upon a time yours truly was piloting a Volkswagen Beetle filled with three college friends and camping gear across the vasties of West Texas on a spring break trip to Big Bend National Park. We must have been really dumb, because we didn't know we were supposed to go to Florida and chase girls. Nobody went to Padre Island or Port Aransas then because it was still B.C. (Before Condos), and there wasn't anything at those places except a few surf fishermen and miles and miles of dunes, so Big Bend it was. Mountains! Desert! And a few Apache and Commanche ghosts -- It should be pointed out that this was indeed after the word "hippy" had been invented, though that's not what we were, and we were traveling through country that had certainly never seen one. But that didn't matter to a couple of eagle-eyed Texas highway patrolmen having a break at the only cafe open that evening in Ozona.

No, when we four scruffy, bleary-eyed, non-natives walked in to grab a few donuts and coffee, one of the officers parted the venetian blinds and peered out at our car. Texas' finest are nothing if not alert, and he must have noted right away (a) the funny little foreign car, and (b) the Austin (shudder!) license plates! The reason we knew that, of course, was that the patrolmen got up and left before we did, and when we went back out to the car, they were sitting in their black-and-white Plymouth cruiser staring at us from behind their silver shades.

I cooly fired up all 36 horses and eased the VW out onto the highway, heading for the sunset as the cafe and the patrol car receded in my rear-view mirror. Whew! By now some of you are thinking we were worried about being arrested, but you would be wrong. This was West Texas in a year I won't mention, and we were afraid of being killed, castrated, beaten up, peed on, or otherwise hassled. We didn't even have long hair, although one of our number, a wiry, shifty-eyed art student, was the type to naturally attract trouble as art students do, and we later found out that he had been carrying morning-glory seeds! Not the least bit illegal, but still. (Did I mention this was West Texas??)

No sooner had we all begun to relax and started to breathe again did I dare to glance once more in the mirror: uh-oh! You know what was coming up fast, a great big highway patrol car with its 454 cubic inch hemi-head V-8 at full blare. You could feel the damned thing throbbing and rumbling, especially when it pulled right up to the little pretend-bumper on the old Beetle! I kept on going just a little under the speed limit, since there weren't any sirens or flashers, while the cruiser hung no more than six inches behind. It was the old Flinch Test! If we did anything the least bit unusual, even acknowledged their presence, anything could happen and probably would. (I don't know how we knew this. Probably from instinct, being Texans too.) Sheer terror!

"Hey, Ceesco, wait for me-e!" (Where's that Cisco Kid when you really need him, huh?)

As it happened, after several miles of this the officers either got bored or were called to the scene of a real crime. They pulled over at a roadside park, did one of those one-two police U-turns, and hightailed it back to Ozona, leaving us free to proceed to our overnight stop at a picnic area overlooking the Pecos River canyon. We spread our sleeping bags out on the cement tables and eventually calmed down enough to sleep. . .

This was and is a very significant spot. When you leave the picnic area, get back on the highway, and continue across the bridge high over the gorge, you'll find yourself literally "west of the Pecos," which is nothing to sneeze at. Ahead of you lie hundreds of miles of undulating, rocky terrain with nary a gas station nor water fountain in sight. You'd better stop at Langtry, just down the road and off to the south, where you might be able to stock up on a few essentials. While you're there, be sure to visit the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center and Cactus Garden, where there are real bathrooms and a water fountain!

And the point of this deceptively benign tale would be? We're all living in some version of the wild West, whether we know it or not. Every aspect of our lives is built on the most tenuous of foundations, nothing is ever certain, and everything can change in an instant!

(This is of course not necessarily a bad thing.)

Less than three feet away from me is a hard drive spinning at 7200 rpm, a stack of tiny thin disks containing all my work of the past year, a bunch of zeros and ones encoded in little magnetized bits of oxides. Most of this is "backed up" in like manner on other equally vulnerable disks, and I sit here thinking I'm hot stuff with something to show for my life. (Uh-huh.) In a few months my wife and I will take a pissed-off cat and a finite amount of cash and hit the road heading for a new life in the real geographical West. My main source of income is a Web site, a place that doesn't even exist except in the minds of people whose retinas are bombarded by photons issuing from cathode-ray tubes not unlike the one that first introduced me to ole Cisco.*

Under the circumstances I don't really give a damn about whether I'm playing computer catch-up. I could be dead by the time you read this. Hell, I could be dead, reincarnated as a Third World baby, and be dead again by the time you read this! ("In the meantime, Big Boy, what did you DO?") Me, I'm off to find Pancho and drink some tequila. (I'll bet he knows his way around a bottle of Sauza.**)

The most anyone can hope for is to be remembered for something good. So until next week, if it ever comes, you might want to recall this metaphor of livin' in the wild wild West. When God drops the Big One, I wanna be in bed beside adobe walls, watching the sun coming up over the mountains, one hand on my wife's cute little naked butt and the other on my Mac (how'd that get in there?), listening to the damn cat purr and shouting,

"Hey, Ceesco, wait for me-e!"

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and welcomes comments. His own Web site, the ZOO ZONE, can take you places you've never been. Is that good?!?

The Farr Site Forum is again open for business and the Archives is where you go to find the smoking guns. . .

* Who did after all leave hoofprints, clearly visible below, all over my brain.

** Pancho would explain it this way: Cuervo is for tourists, and Herradura is too rich for sidekicks.

January 08, 2009