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Arizona rancher, poet celebrates vanishing way of lifeArizona Under the blazing July sun, rancher Rolf Flake looks over his beloved Corriente cattle. It's at least 117 degrees, a temperature seemingly unfit for any living thing to be outside, and beads of sweat drip from his forehead and glide along the lines of his weathered face to his neck. "They're a tough old breed," says Flake. For a moment it's unclear if the Gilbert man is talking about the Corrientes or cowboys like himself. At 76, Flake is the real deal, a true Arizona cowboy who lives his life on horseback tending cattle and watching the sky for rain. He's also a poet who writes about life on the ranch. As National Cowboy Day was July 28, Flake wants you to know that he and others like him are not a dying breed. "In this urban society you just don't see them," says Flake. "They're off the road." Riding his horse, Scooter--"Not a real dignified name for a horse," Flake concedes, affectionately patting the horse's neck--Flake deftly sorts the cattle with the help of family friend Joseph Kimball and Kimball's daughters Rachel, 15, and Kaycee Jo, 5. The four have been at Ironwood Corral--the ranch Flake's brother, Keith, leases on state land--since the early morning. The air may be hot and suffocating, but there's work to be done, and it isn't glamorous. The cattle have to be fed and prepared for a journey in an air-conditioned truck to Texas. The truck--which Flake's son, Reed, is driving down from Snowflake--has yet to arrive. Today's cowboy is defined in different ways. There are the rodeo cowboys--Flake sees them as athletes--and the people who saddle a horse every weekend for trail rides. But they don't work the land like Flake, and that's the difference. "A real cowboy is not out here saying, 'Hey I'm a cowboy,'" says Kimball, a Queen Creek resident. "He's out here proving it by what he does." Flake is dressed in the standard cowboy uniform--handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, long-sleeved plaid shirt, Wrangler jeans held up by suspenders, cowboy boots. Technically, Flake is retired, but he continues to work the ranch for his brother because ranching is in his blood; his family has been in the cattle business since 1878. Flake's great-grandfather and grandfather settled Snowflake and gave the town its name. U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake and state Sen. Jake Flake are cousins. At least 15 of the Flake families in Snowflake own and operate ranches. "I've been at it in one form or another all my life," says Flake, who rises every day at 5:30 a.m., and heads over to the Ironwood Corral to do his daily chores in triple-digit temperatures. Feeding cattle, checking fences occasionally vandalized by ATV riders, filling water troughs--the list is never-ending. "I don't know how he does it," say Flake's wife of 53 years, Jean, a self-described city girl who met the poet and rancher during an assembly at Brigham Young University. "Ranching has always been his life, and he doesn't know what else to do." Flake never imagined he would become a poet. He's worked most of his adult life as a farm and ranch appraiser before putting verse on paper at the age of 52. "It's kind of hard to get a cowboy to come out of the woodwork and write a poem," says Flake. "Until this cowboy poetry movement got going, there were a lot of cowboys who wrote verse and would never recite it to anyone. I was kind of that way." Flake had left his job as an appraiser for the Federal Land Bank, a federally chartered cooperative that lent money to farmers and ranchers at no profit, to start his own appraisal business. "When we were first starting that little venture, time was heavy on my hands," says Flake, who had himself enjoyed cowboy poetry. "One day I was sitting here in the old office just seeing if I could write a poem." The result was four poems about spring, summer, fall and winter in northern Arizona. Flake wrote them in one sitting. If Flake were to write about this day, perhaps his pen (he hates to use a computer) would paint a portrait of perseverance and sweat, glory and pride in an honest day's work. "Rolf Flake is one of the state's best-known cowboy poets," says Marshall Trimble, the state's official historian. "He's the real McCoy when it comes to knowing the business. He comes by his knowledge firsthand from long hours staring at a cow's tail from the back of a horse...His credentials would fill the bed of a pickup truck." Date: 9/10/07
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