Eight Seconds of Freedom: My Country Awakening
In 1994, a girlfriend opened my eyes to the heart and soul of American Country music. As a Canadian, I’d traversed the backroads and highways of the United States, knowing its landscape like the palm of my hand—better, even, than the Americans I met. I had memories in every American state. But my heart belonged to Metallica, Iron Maiden, and the heavy riffs that thundered through my veins. Country? I dismissed it as mere folk music, a soundtrack for line dancing and boots clacking on wooden floors.
Oh, how wrong I was. My girlfriend was from Saskatchewan, which is a Canadian province akin to warm beer. But over a few weeks, she exposed me to elements that appealed to her and the music ripped my heart free. It added a missing piece to my American puzzle. Country music grabbed me headfirst into its rich narratives, playful lyrics, epic tomes, and soulful melodies. I learned what an eight-second ride meant, the adrenaline rush of trying to stay atop a bucking bronco as it fought for freedom, and I dove into the genre like it was my own personal Area 51.
Fast forward two years, and life took a different turn. After quitting our jobs at a small publishing company, we found ourselves driving through the vast American West, eventually settling in Laramie, Wyoming, where I scraped by with illegal work. I was a gas station attendant and a mechanic's apprentice, earning a meager four bucks an hour. My girlfriend, longing for something more glamorous, turned her nose up at waitressing under the table, fearing it would lead to her being sent back home. I couldn’t believe the absurdity of it all. If I had lost access to America, my life would have crashed. I'd spent a year of my life working illegally, waiting to be caught and deported. She had never even seen an actual ocean wave, who was she kidding?
One night, after a long shift, I returned to our motel in an old Dodge pickup truck—“Old Blue,” they called it, despite its black body and lone blue door. She had splurged on a $60 coffee maker from Walmart, while I was toiling away for $40 a day. My love for her slipped through my fingers like gritty Texas sand.
Desperate for an escape, I found solace in the local bar, where I shared drinks with real cowboys—six rugged souls with stories etched into their weathered faces. They beckoned me to join them for six weeks of work, driving a hundred head of cattle to Denver, Colorado. My heart raced at the thought. I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was a boy, and the allure of that cowboy life felt thrilling and terrifying. But my girlfriend axed it with her usual "absolutely not" and that was that.
When money grew tight, we moved in with Jerry, my boss—the gas station owner, a man whose obsession with firearms was evident in the way guns spilled from his dresser drawers. My girlfriend hated every second we spent at Jerry's. She was insistant as she sipped her goddamn coffee. As I learned to install shocks on a Ford F-150, she was glued to Jerry's 200 channels, lost in a current world that felt increasingly foreign to me. My Dad offered to pay for her Greyhound home, if I stayed on and continued living a Wyoming life. But I felt responsible for going back when absolutely all hope was gone and trying to find a real job in the real world.
I loved pumping gas in an American town of 10,000 people. I knew the locals. I shoveled their driveways and plowed their lots with Old Blue and her snowplow. If I were pumping gas back "home," I'd be suicidal. In Wyoming, it was freedom. At any time I could leave and never look back. I could go to Kentucky and pump gas and be happy for a while.
Eventually, we returned to Vancouver, defeated by the unforgiving Snowy Range of Wyoming. In a twist of fate, I chose to leave her behind and take my father’s advice to explore Europe with my brother and cousins. I spent the next six months in Estonia, driving a bus for the first Christian missionaries to plant their flag in the Baltic state, newly freed two years from Soviet rule.
Amidst my cassette tapes—Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, and Mötley Crüe—was a lone Garth Brooks album. One frigid night, as a blizzard howled outside, I drove missionaries to a village. They left me alone, knowing I wasn’t there for God (I think it was a mutual understanding between us), and I played my music. It was then that Garth’s “I’m Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)” began to play. The lyrics hit me hard, especially a line that sparked my curiosity in a world where answers were still sought in libraries:
"...a worn-out tape of Chris LeDoux/ lonely women and bad booze/ seem to be the only friends I've left at all./ And the white lines are getting longer/ and the saddle's gettin' cold/ And I'm much too young to feel this damn old."
Who was Chris LeDoux? How had I, and everyone I knew who claimed to be a country fan, missed this incredible artist? A genuine cowboy who rode rodeos and made music as a heartfelt side passion—he even recorded a song with Jon Bon Jovi!
I dove into his music, downloading every album, pouring over every lyric, captivated by his spirit and the rawness of his rodeo life. An eight-second ride—a test of skill and courage—became a metaphor for the wildness of life itself. It was more than just a time limit; it was a dance with danger, a fleeting moment of glory before the inevitable dismount and mad dash from an angry bull.
Chris LeDoux faced a cruel fate, his life cut short by a brutal battle with cancer, but his music lived on, whispering stories of the cowboy life to anyone willing to listen. I still can’t fathom why, despite his brilliance, no one seems to know his name. Pound for pound he deserves a Johnny Cash legacy. It’s baffling that such a talented songwriter and Hall of Fame rodeo champion slipped under the radar, not ever hitting my ears through the radio waves of months of Wyoming, Oklahoma, and even Nashville. No one I've asked knows his work.
So here’s to Garth Brooks—thank you for that one song, for introducing me to our shared friend, Chris LeDoux, in a post-Soviet Estonia where the missionaries were pushing me to accept Christ as my co-pilot. In that moment, amidst the blizzards and the loneliness, I found a connection to a world I never knew I longed for, a world where the spirit of the cowboy lives on in song.