Western106 Roundup with Mark Wilson, Todd Conaway Alan Levine

Well, maybe we just better tell folks how we got roped into this.

Yep, this is how we do it in 106.

And I guess we gotta wonder how we got here in 106.

And we all have a story to tell.

And I guess I'll tell a bit of mine, if you don't mind.

Mark, how's that sound to you?

That'll be good, Todd. You don't talk much. I don't know much about you.

Well, let me tell ya.

I grew up in the way west.

I remember people saying, "Go west, young man."

But if I would have gone any further west, I would have needed a boat.

And I wanted to ride a horse.

I lived there by the big, salty puddle over in California.

And my hero was a fella named Jeremiah Johnson.

I wanted to be like Jeremiah.

Here's how he sounds.

Jeremiah Johnson made his way into the mountains, betting on forgetting all the troubles that he knew.

The trail was wide and narrow. The eagle or the sparrow showed the path he was to follow as it flew.

A mountain man's a lonely man and he leaves a lot behind.

It ought to have been different, but often times you'll find that the story doesn't always go the way you had in mind.

That's right. The story don't always go the way you had in mind, now does it?

How about you, Mark? What about your history with the west?

Well, like you, I was born out in California.

But you were down by the bay. I was born up in the hills.

We call it Hollywood. A lot of cowboys there, even when I was born.

My mama was from the New Mexico territories, though.

So even though we didn't have a TV, I got to meet and hang out with cowboys every summer.

I got to learn how to ride and shoot, visit the old homestead.

Some summers we'd take a hay bale cart ride around, see the old graveyards.

And then for the 4th of July, we'd go to the rodeo.

There my little cousins would be bucking and roping and getting thrown down all over the place.

So I always loved cowboys up close, you know.

But once we got a TV, then of course I watched some Bonanza and all that stuff.

But I really liked going to New Mexico every summer and wandering around in the desert

and finding stuff and seeing old Indian sites and visiting old ghost towns.

That's how I grew up.

Well, that's very nice.

I'd had about enough of the big salty pond, and I wanted to get up to where Jeremiah was.

So my pa and I, we moved to Prescott, Arizona, which was this little teeny town.

And there in that little teeny town, they filmed a movie that was close to my heart

because much like Jeremiah was dissatisfied or disillusioned with the war and he ran away to the mountains,

I was dissatisfied with the materialism I saw in that paradise by the beach.

And I wanted a smaller place.

And so pa and I moved to Prescott.

And Billy Jack was a character that was disenchanted too with the way things were.

Let's hear a little bit about that.

Listen children to a story that was written long ago

About a kingdom on a mountain and the valley above below

On the mountain was a treasure buried deep beneath a stone

And the valley above swore they'd have it for their burial

Go ahead and hate your neighbor, go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end

There won't be any trumpets blowing to come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after

One tin soldier rides away

You know, I could play that song over and over again but I'm going to stop it right there.

I felt like that one tin soldier riding away off into the sunset.

Mark, how about your great grandpappy? Tell us a little bit about him.

Well, great granddaddy, he was a cowboy, real cowboy.

He rode with one of them slaughter outfits out of Texas and they drove cattle

as far west as they could until they ran out of water.

But he was tired of punching cows so he homesteaded there in southwest New Mexico.

Of course it was the territories back then.

But he found a little place with a creek and built him a little cabin.

And still in the family. I've been to that cabin. Not much to it.

But the corrals right there, he died right there in that corral he built with his boots on.

But his daughter married the local shopkeeper, big old giant guy from Inverness, Scotland.

He got sold off as a kid and came out all by himself to the territories and spent seven years

learning how to run a general store. They called them mercantiles back then.

But then after seven years, his uncle McTavish helped him set up his own store.

So he got set free. So he married the little local girl from the homestead

and they had him six kids and one of them was my mom.

And that's how I got connected there to New Mexico.

When I was a kid, of course, he didn't have a store anymore.

There was all them Great Depressions and all that went on.

So he was living in Silver City, New Mexico and that's where I would go every summer.

And only later I found out that them streets I used to wander around as a kid,

those are the same streets Billy the Kid walked on.

Of course, back then we thought Billy the Kid was William Bonney.

And some of them school types, they looked into it and then they told his name was Henry Atrum.

Okay. Then they said, no, no, that wasn't it. His name was Henry McCarty.

Well, my great grandpappy's name was Charlie McCarty.

So there for a minute I thought, well, maybe I'm related to Billy the Kid.

But nah, there's a bunch of McCartys all over the West.

Though my grandma was Ola, Ola McCarty, but we aren't related to Billy the Kid.

But it was fun to find out that we walked on them same streets.

And then later on, when I got older, like you, I got tired of the way things were.

So that's when I went over to Arizona in the summers.

And there was this crazy Italian there named Paolo Soleri.

And he was building the city of the future.

So that wasn't too far from where you were in Prescott.

But I guess we never bumped into each other on horseback back then.

But I spent a lot of time there building the city of the future there.

Arco Sante, another Italian word.

So it's too bad. But here we are. And we met in this new way.

So tell me a little bit more about living up there in the hills.

I love that Prescott. They have the best Fourth of July in America, in my opinion.

Well, they had the oldest rodeo, so they claimed.

And yeah, it was a wild one.

I got to tell you, that town caused me a lot of problems.

I think looking back, from what little I can remember, the Fourth of July was a great time.

And I'd sit in the courthouse there where Billy Jack had his big fight with the mean men of the town of Prescott.

And watch all the tourists go by.

And that was a very pleasant time.

I was 16.

And I was there in Prescott for a few years.

And then I moved to Lake Havasu, which is in the middle of the desert.

And it was there that I learned to hear the desert.

And I thought I'd play you just a little bit of what the desert sounds like in my head every time I see it.

It could be the Navajo Nation. It could be anywhere in northern Arizona, New Mexico, the high desert.

This is what it sounds like to me.

And I'm going to come in at about 40 seconds, if I get my courage up, and I'm going to sing the very moment that this desert comes into my head.

But you've got to wait about 40 seconds to hear this.

So here we go. This is the desert sound in my head.

Here it comes. Here it comes. Listen.

Do you hear that?

Yeah, that's how the desert sounds.

And every time I see the desert, it sounds like the

And I don't know. I can't get enough of that sound.

Mark, that's my story from the big ocean to the hills of Prescott to the deserts of Lake Havasu.

And I know we met on a roundup or two, but we got anything more to share before we bring in our cowpoke that's somewhere in Wyoming?

Yeah, it looks like he's lost again, but luckily we got this little radio.

So let me see. I must have one good story to slip in here.

I was fascinated to learn that the day I was born was the day the last Pony Express rider died.

That's a long time from when he was a boy riding on the Pony Express to when I was born.

So I always found that fascinating. And I guess the thing I'd say about New Mexico that I love the most.

Now we just had us a big earthquake right here live on the radio, still shaking.

Car alarms going off. Damn, this desert is really someplace.

Wow.

So what was I saying? Oh, I was saying that the thing I like most about being out west was the different cultures.

You know, you had your Native Americans. We used to call them Indians or indigenous or different names.

And then right next to them, you had your Spanish people, and they've been here for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And then us newcomers came along and we got the Anglo culture, they call it out there in the desert.

And I just love the way they, you know, they don't get along perfect, but they managed to get along.

So that reminded me the same way here in California, same setup.

And I just wish we could see that everywhere we go.

That's wonderful. I love this land and these people.

Speaking of people, we've been missing one, our Cowpoke Allen.

We're saying hello to you. I know you're up there in the great state of Wyoming.

And here's what he sent us in the mail.

So let's give a listen to our Cowpoke Allen.

That's not it.

Well, people want to know the story of Western 106.

You got to talk to people who was there at the time, and that was me.

It was maybe in the fall, September, just off the summer work.

I got a message from Wild Bill Jenner at Kansas State University, who'd been part of DS106 for a while.

And he said that there was an option for me to co-teach a course with him at Kansas State University.

And I was like, yeah, and we were talking about it and how like other, you know, folks like Jim Groom and others had been teaching DS106

with sort of like themes of TV shows, Twilight Zone and Wires or stuff like that, or I don't know.

And so I don't know if the theme was a good idea, but it was like Bill and I started talking and we both love Westerns.

So we got this idea to build a DS106 course around Western that would be offered at Kansas State University.

And I went out because like I had done the same once for this movie.

They asked me to be the stranger, and I did these opening lines for some movie about Bowen or Ruggs or something like that.

Lovisky, Ladoosky, I can't remember, big something like that.

And the opening scene was this thing with tumbleweed.

So I kind of recreated it a little bit as a teaser trailer I made early on.

Well, in the East, somewhere in Virginia, there was this open course in digital storytelling I want to tell you about, a course named DS106.

At least that was the handle its loving students gave it.

This DS106 course, it said it was for life.

Now, for life, that's not any kind of language we use where I come from.

But there was a lot of DS106 that did not make a whole lot of sense to me, and what those students did likewise.

But then again, maybe it's why I found this course so darn interesting.

They call Kansas State University the Wildcats.

I didn't find any cats there to be that exactly, but there are some nice folks there.

I can't say I've seen London, and I've never been to France, and I ain't seen no Queen or dang undies, as the fellow says.

But I'll tell you what, what I've seen at Kansas State and the storytelling class that will unfold in 2016,

well, I guess I've seen anything as stupefying as you'd seen in any of those other places.

And in English, too, so I can die with a smile on my face.

And we started working on it. I took an old domain I had, 106tricks.net,

and I wrangled it up into a new theme flavor and did a whole bunch of like GIFs and stuff,

getting people excited about it, announcing it.

And Bill and I got together and we did this little thing of, you know, a ride in the story frontier.

We went out on the trail and was just jawing about what we're going to do.

Well, howdy, Bill. Man, look at Kansas. There's a whole lot of space out there.

Yeah, so you're going to hire me to do some storytelling at KSU, eh?

You've done this before, right? You've run this route?

I don't know, like what people might be interested in, what for students, what they're going to,

maybe why they would want to take, you know, ride with us and take this course.

Well, that's OK, because that's what we're going to do in DS106.

We might not risk death, but we might risk creative expression, making mistakes, trying new things.

We were all excited about it and we were ready to go.

Like the course was all set up and boom, Bill sent me a message in like December,

like weeks before the course was starting, something about the trail bosses at Kansas State University.

I never got the inside story. They just canceled the whole shebang.

And so the course was over and there wouldn't be a course with real students at Kansas.

And my, we were disappointed. But, you know, I was thinking, you know, a couple of years ago,

DS106 did this headless thing, a course with no teacher.

And I don't know, I got inspired and started remixing my spaghetti westerns.

And I just love me some Clint Eastwood being the man with no name.

I kind of came up with a man with no course. And I did like the first couple of weeks of the class.

We did some podcasts. We were tweeting. People were, you know, starting along and doing stuff.

People got rolled in like Mark Corbett Wilson and Todd Conaway.

He came along. He'd done stuff before. And Kevin Hodgson, Dog Tracks, was doing cartoons.

And Sandy Brown, Jensen Brown, Jensen Brown was involved.

And a bunch of other folks were kind of doing daily creates and making some stuff.

And I don't know. I don't know what happened. We just kind of just petered out.

That's the last thing I remember. And so now they're asking me, you know, what about this Western 106?

And we're doing this here all summer camp radio show about it. And I don't know. Like, where do we go?

Well, that old Alan, boy, he's about the only person I know get excited about a classroom full of nobody

or a herd full of no cattle, no doggies. He's out there teaching himself out there on the high plains.

What a character. Well, there was Alan riding off into the distance by himself.

And along comes some folk. And some of those folk were people we know.

Cowpoke we know. One of them was the infamous, infamous Talky Tina.

And we'll get back to her later on, but let's just take a short commercial break

and spend a couple minutes with our friend, our true friend, Talky Tina.

Do you feel like something is missing from your life?

Are you finding yourself lacking in arts and lacking in friends?

If so, it is time for you to add some DS106 to your life.

Plus, if you meet the necessary criteria as outlined on my web form, iamtalkytina.com,

you can even get a true friend's badge to say you are a true friend.

Yes, all of these things and more can be yours if you join the DS106 digital storytelling community.

Do it today. Check out www.ds106.us or www.iamtalkytina.com/truefriends.

Well, bye.

DS106, all the way.

That girl was out of her mind. I got to tell you.

I got a pal by the name of Hatch Jack. We'll hear a little bit about him in a little while.

And that Tina and Hatch Jack, boy, that was something.

But let's continue with our pal Alan and Bill from the great state of Kansas

and maybe hear a little bit more about the course, what they were trying to do before everything fell apart.

Mark, you ready? I know it's been shaking over there in California. That's pretty amazing.

4.6 earthquake live on the radio. You heard it here first. Mark, you still with us?

Oh, yeah. Just adds to the wild ride, a DS106 radio.

Well, I'm glad to have you. We feel blessed that you're here.

We're going to listen to just a little bit of Bill and Alan on the storytelling frontier.

This was done in 2016 out on the open range with a bunch of cowpokes headed with them.

And let's take a listen to what Bill and Alan were thinking out there on the frontier in the early days.

Well, howdy, Bill. Howdy. Man, look at Kansas. There's a whole lot of space out there.

Yeah, it's a ways off. Yeah. So you're going to hire me to do some storytelling at KSUA.

That's what I hear tell. You've done this before, right? You've run this route.

Yeah, I've been down this route a couple of times. So what do you need to know about Kansas State University?

Well, I don't know, like what people might be interested in, what for students, what they're going to maybe why they would want to take, you know, ride with us and take this course.

Well, most of our students are young and skinny and wiry.

They're just barely 18 and they're willing to risk death daily.

Well, that's OK, because that's what we're going to do in DS106.

We might not risk death, but we might risk creative expression, making mistakes, trying new things.

Yeah, my students, they're always up for a new adventure. So this might be just the course for them.

I sure hope so. And this like anybody at K-State from like all over Kansas can do this, right?

Yeah, they don't even have to be at K-State.

It's like the people of Kansas just want to get some experience with creating on the Web and making videos and audios and learning how to use their computer and just how to tell stories with media.

Anybody can do this just on their own, right? They don't even have to be signed up with us.

They can just jump right in there and do however much they want.

That's pretty darn good. And so like, well, I've just been through Kansas once and it was dark and I didn't really see what's what's like Kansas have to do with like the West, because I'm always thinking of out here in Arizona, like Monument Valley where John Ford did his movies.

Kansas is the old West. You've seen that show Gunsmoke.

Oh, yeah. Miss Kitty. Oh, boy.

They were in Kansas.

Of course. That was Kansas.

That's Dodge City, Kansas.

The Kansas State University is right near the end of the old Chisholm Trail.

Man.

It's where they brought the cattle up from Texas. This is where they ran the railroads to. And the people back East didn't want them Texas cattle coming into their town. So they run the railroads out into the frontiers of Kansas and brought them here.

And that's how they got the beef back East.

If they don't have the West, like there might be people in Oregon or New York that you know the West.

Now we can go really broad as to what it means. It doesn't just have to be like, you know, cactus and sagebrush and cowboys and horses like like this cowboys up in space, man.

I'm going to stop right there with the space part because I don't know.

I don't know about cowboys in space.

But, uh, you know, you know, Todd, that reminds me of a story.

I thought it would.

I agree that, you know, people when they think of the West, they don't think of Kansas very much but as they were saying that's where the Chisholm Trail went.

But also that was the beginning of the Santa Fe Trail.

So before there was what we call the West, Kansas was the West.

But you know how Americans were they just kept going and going and going.

So one of my favorite writers about the West was an old boy named Charles Lummis.

And he was from back east of course, everybody's from back east.

But he came out to the West and there he was in Kansas.

But he wanted to keep going because you know that Horace Greeley fella just said keep going west young man.

So he listened to that newspaper writer.

So he sent him a letter out to California and he got him a job in Los Angles as they used to call it.

At the newspaper, they had a new newspaper called the Times.

And so they said sure come on out, we'll hire you.

And so he said alright I'll be right out there and he started walking.

From Kansas City he walked all the way to Los Angeles, California.

Wrote a wonderful book about it and he built him a little stone house on a creek here in Los Angeles.

And he started the Southwest Museum which is one of the best Indian or indigenous or Native American museums anywhere in the world.

So talking about Kansas City that reminds me of old Charles Lummis.

Hey who's that riding up to our campfire?

Hey it's me, I think you're talking about me like I'm dead.

Why? It's you what? I mean Alan?

Yeah.

Where are you?

I'm in Wyoming and I'm just out from the range for just a couple minutes because I gotta feed my horses.

But I heard you were talking on the radio, what's happening here?

Well there's been an earthquake over by the California way and right here on the radio live it was an earthquake.

We've been revisiting Kansas and hearing you tell some stories.

Kind of some tall tales like I know you do.

Not sure when you're telling the truth or not but we've been hearing about your class that nobody showed up to.

Yeah well I think they'll still come, I'm just waiting okay.

Are you having a nice time in Wyoming?

I am but my radio signal is kind of weak but I just want to make sure I came in and roused you guys up.

Is anybody listening?

I am yeah.

Okay, let's go that counts.

I'm listening, I got an echo.

Alright well.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about Hatchet Jack before you take off. We're going to be talking about old Hatchet Jack here in a minute.

That's right.

He's one of my best friends, a true true cowboy who always comes through even though he's dead.

Well we heard from Talky Tina and I know you had said you'd seen her not too long ago and wondering if she was going to show up to our roundup here.

Well you know you never know with Tina.

I messaged her and she didn't say anything.

So now I think I got to keep looking over my shoulder and making sure there's no doll at the top of the stairs who's going to trip me up or something.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's dangerous world.

Okay, well, that was very nice. We heard from Cowpoke Alan out there in the great state of Wyoming, and we're going to hear a little bit more from Alan.

Right now this is, he did an advertisement, and, you know, considering nobody showed up to the hoedown, they had a lot of stuff out there on the internet.

Let's just listen to one minute of Alan trying to wrangle up some students.

I think this is Alan singing.

He sings real good.

Well, somewhere in Virginia, there was this open course in digital storytelling I want to tell you about.

A course named DS106.

At least that was the handle it's loving students gave it.

This DS106 course, it said it was for life.

Now for life, that's not any kind of language we use where I come from.

There was a lot of DS106 that did not make a whole lot of sense to me.

Well, and that about explains it.

Not a lot makes sense to old cowboy Alan.

And not a lot of people showed up.

And so it was the course with no name.

It was the teacher without a course.

It was everything that we have come to known as Western 106 is literally nothing.

The wide open range with nobody out there, no dogs, no nothing.

And Alan was sad that nobody showed up to the hoedown.

And he tried to explain that to himself and others in the week two.

So it was the second week of class.

Nobody showed up.

It was a sad day.

He'd made a website and nobody was coming to the hoedown.

So let's take a listen to Alan talking about nobody showing up to the parade.

Hear the sad music.

It was a mournful time.

Yo, about last week, I got my blog started, sent it to DS106.

I saw my blog post, a bunch of others.

And many others of us did too.

But what does it all mean?

A lot of stuff.

We could just tweet more easily.

Did you do a blog post?

No.

I tweeted a daily crate.

Juan, did you blog your ideas about Western?

No.

Did any of you?

Well, no.

Nobody did.

And that's why it was so sad.

It was an awful thing to see such a good man out there trying to do good in the world, teach a class, and nobody showed up.

Except a few people, as Alan noted, one of them being HatchetJack.

Now, Mark, did you have any real experience with HatchetJack?

No.

I didn't know anything about all this blogging and looking for students and none of that.

I just saw somebody talk about DS106, and I looked around, and I saw Western106.

I said, "Well, a Western? I'm Western."

So I just started doing them little daily crates and looking around.

And that's why I bumped into you, and then I bumped into Alan, but I didn't know about any of this.

Well, I tell you what.

Let's hear a little bit from Cowpoke Ron.

He was of the Bergeron faith and of the Bergeron clan, if I recall correctly.

Here is one of his audios from the TDC 1486, which must have taken place a gazillion years ago.

Let's hear what Ron has to say about DS106 and Western106.

"I'll ride that bad horse like it's a little lamb."

Well, I don't know what that means.

But that was Ron, and let's get back to maybe some HatchetJack.

So HatchetJack come to us from the summer of a blip--no.

HatchetJack come to us through Camp McGuffin, where HatchetJack was paid to be a camp counselor in one of the bunks.

And this is where he met, I believe, Takitina.

And here's our friend Alan going out of his way, trying to rustle up people to play in his Western106 class.

And let's hear what he and HatchetJack had to say.

[wind howling]

I think he interviewed him on top of a mountain in the snow.

"I sure hope I can find old HatchetJack. He sure been up in this mountain a long time."

[wind howling]

"HatchetJack, is that you? Are you still frozen to the ground?"

"Still here, Jeremiah. How are you?"

"Well, I'm doing okay, Hatchet. But I got some new things, and that's what I want to talk to you about."

"You ain't quite as pretty as you used to be, Jeremiah."

"Well, you know, all these years out in the mountain. You, though, you have held up quite the same."

"I thank you. I got a new blog post here."

[wind howling]

"All right, I think you want me to, like, take it and go down the mountain and put it on the internet for you?"

"You can take it and my gun."

"All right. Well, I don't know if I want the gun. I'm not really into guns like I used to."

"Well, we're doing a new version of DS106, you know, digital storytelling. Remember that one we did a couple stretches ago?"

"Well, I did, and they visited me up here on my mountain on occasion."

"Well, there's going to be a new one, and it's about westerns."

"Giddy up, partner. That sounds just fine by Hatchet Jack."

"Well, it was going to be another round getting rounded up in January of 2016. That's not far off. You think you can get out of the snow by then?"

"Oh, Hatchet Jack will be there. All..."

"Well, as it turns out, Hatchet Jack never made it off that mountain."

"But, uh, Alan went back down the mountain to start telling everybody about the Western 106."

"And old Hatchet Jack, he stayed up on that mountain singing songs about his new girl, Tina. Talky Tina."

"And let's just hear one minute of this awful song by Hatchet Jack."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"That's possibly one of the most embarrassing things Hatchet Jack ever did, and he put it on the internet."

"Well, he sounds pretty good for a man that's been frozen for decades."

"Not bad, huh? I know. Pretty remarkable."

"Well, uh, we have a little bit of Western music to play."

"Here, we're going to play some rye whiskey and get our little world together."

"We got about ten more minutes, so let's hear some rye whiskey."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"Now this is some real music."

"I like this. I agree."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"I'm walking up my little edge from my bow, and I'll make myself welcome wherever I go."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"Oh, that's the sound I was looking for. The hooting and the hollering."

"That's what we needed with the Western 106, was more hooting and more hollering."

"How about some turkey in the straw? Let's listen to that."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"Oh, now you can dance this."

"I love me a banjo."

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

[Hatchet Jack's "Feeling Alone" plays]

"Well, this sounds just like I imagined that chorus, had it happened, would have sounded."

"Just like that. Hooting, hollering, boot stomping, around the campfire."

"I can't imagine anything better. Mark?"

"Yep, just some homemade music. Nothing fancy."

"Nobody from New York City's ever gonna buy that song."

You know, one thing I learned in the Western 106, with all the four students in it,

was a little bit about a composer, and I don't even know how to say his last name exactly, but Marconi.

So, as a child, as many people were, we watched Westerns, them spaghetti Westerns.

And I hear this music all the time, but I didn't know until I was 55 years old who had done the music.

And I'd like to thank Alan and the other four people in that class for bringing this to me.

And I thought maybe we'd just hear a little bit of that before we go here. Here we go.

Sounds just like the desert to me. High desert, high plains, rhythm.

I got some fond memories of this music going way back to my childhood.

And I'm thankful for the few people that made it into the DS106 Western class for helping me learn these things.

And, Mark, we're gonna head on out here in a moment.

We got one more song to play, a little bit of fire.

Well, before we go, I just wanted to say that this has been a real pleasure.

I know that I never watched any of them Italian Western movies when I was a kid.

But I appreciate that now, and I really do enjoy the music you've been sharing.

My favorite Western movie still is Brave Cowboy, or Lonely Are the Brave.

It's got two names. I always get confused. One's a book, one's a movie.

But I always loved that movie because it was about the cowboy that just didn't want to become modern.

So he just kept the old cowboy ways and came and went as he pleased and didn't fill out no papers for anybody.

And, you know, it didn't have such a happy ending, but it was a real good movie.

It reminded me of the Billy Jacks and the other movie characters we've been talking about,

about that person out West that just goes her own way.

That's what this show's about, about striking out even if your class doesn't quite come together.

But you never know who's going to show up. I found it later on.

And we had a real good time in Western 106.

So I just wanted to say that before we slide on out of here.

Well, let's do that.

We'll get back to our campfire here and here we go.

Let's see.

Starring America's great Western singers, Boy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage.

Well, I think that radio has been tuned to the wrong time zone.

Let me fiddle with it here a bit and see if I can't find something better for us to listen to while we're going out of here.

Oh, I like this.

It's Italian.

This is nice.

Looking up at the stars above us with our cowboy boots off, sipping some cowboy coffee.

Dreaming of the classes with no students, just the wide open class, the wide open prairie, the wide open internet and stars above us.

Yeah, it's hard to believe we've been sitting around this fire for all these years.

Maybe we ought to get up and see if we can stir up some trouble.

Maybe we'll head up to Wyoming and see what Alan's doing.

Yeah, I'll bet he's causing some trouble gathering some Western stories.

Do people even want to hear the Western stories?

Just want machines to make them or what?

I don't know.

I'm going to go make my own Western stories.

Well, yeah, who the hell would want machine stories?

It's bad enough we're always talking with machines.

It all started when they started stringing up them telegraph wires.

Things just have not been the same.

That was the end of it all, wasn't it?

Them damn tele wires.

The radio.

What the hell was that?

What were they thinking?

The radio.

God almighty.

That's where DS106 has taught us that we don't have to just listen to stories.

We can make our own stories.

That's the whole point of this radio show today is just look around and find a couple of folks

and just start making your own stories.

That's what we love.

That's right, Mark.

I could not agree more.

I thank you for being here with us today around this beautiful high prairie, stars above us.

It's beautiful.

Yep, the big sky, like they say up in Montana and Wyoming.

It's a beautiful country.

Alan, wherever you are, take care on your travels.

Talky Tina, I'm glad you didn't make it.

Hatch Jack, we know where you are.

Mark, I hope you don't get any aftershocks.

Me too.

Yeah, I think we're about done here.

We just got a little bit of campfire to take us out here and close our eyes and rest our weary heads back after a long day.

We'll see you out there on the next round up.