Not everyone could make a funny story out of diving off a thirty-foot windmill into a holding tank with (because of a certain inattention to detail) three feet of water in it. Or out of a day that started with being stung by three scorpions roughly the size of draft animals and went downhill from there. Or out of managing to get your three-year-old grandson bucked off a bull, higher than you'd ever seen a kid fly. Brummett has. Through the wit and the one-liners, Brummett portrays an American West in which the old way awkwardly accommodates the new, in which the day's drudgery is seasoned with humor and punctuated by practical jokes, and in which the irrepressible frontier spirit continues to prevail.