An American Cowboy: Profile of a Cowboy Poet
There are celebrities that everyone knows, and then there is the celebrity right under your nose in your own town. People pass him without even knowing it.
John Doran has worn many hats, a reflection of the kaleidoscope of his life- cowboy, firefighter, smokejumper, father, volunteer, mentor, poet, and defender of Twisp.
But more about that later. As with any story, it’s best to start from the beginning.
Pulling into a long driveway off Highway 20, I’m met by a tall man in a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache. He is wearing a red and black plaid vest over a light blue collared shirt. We walk up the stairs to his loft above a barn.
“I’m a cowboy,” he tells me before we step inside his quarters.
I’m there to cover a news story- Doran had recently returned from Elko, Nevada where he won first place in the poetry competition, and his daughter, Meghan Doran, won first place in the music competition at the 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering sponsored by the Western Folklife Center. It is akin to the Oscars in the world of Cowboy Poetry. Looking around his abode, it became clear that in order to understand the poet, I first had to understand the cowboy.
Stepping into his residence is like stepping into the 20th century. There is no smart screen TV, nothing outlandishly modern in his quaint quarters. He shows me his kitchen, which he remodeled himself with 75–80% repurposed and recycled materials. In an age where remodeling a kitchen costs thousands, Doran spent $200.
Prices at the store surprise him. Growing up on a ranch with 9 brothers and sisters, they largely provided for themselves.
“We were hippies before hippies were popular,” said Doran.
Snapshots of his life decorate his walls. A picture of him performing with his daughter. A framed flyer with his portrait from the Northwest Folklife Festival, where he was invited to perform. A photograph of him standing next to a plane in a smokejumper suit. It’s hard to believe they are the same person. One is of a kid with blonde moppy hair and shades, grinning in a smokejumper uniform, his entire future ahead of him, the other of a mature cowboy looking back at the camera, less adventurous and more established. The third iteration is the elder statesman standing before me, his face thinner but still exuding a zest for life.
Plaques, awards, badges, a picture of a burning building, pictures of Doran atop a horse on the ranch in one frame, descending with a parachute in the next, an entire life history that would take weeks to absorb, as Doran is a natural born storyteller.
Doran sits on a wooden chair in the corner of his small living room. To his right hangs a framed handkerchief from 1888 that his grandfather carried when he served in the Prussian army. It’s a diagram of how to clean and take care of a German Mauser rifle. To his left hang several real rifles, family heirlooms from the 19th century. Above the rifles, a shoulder mount of a handsome young buck bears witness to the goings on below. Across from me, a revolver sits in a holster on a table.
I start with the deer.
“It took me seven days of hunting every evening to get that one,” said Doran.
“Why did you want to get that one?” I asked.
“Hunting to me is something my father taught me from the time I was in preschool. Hunting to me isn’t the act of killing an animal. Hunting is making yourself one with the environment that you’re in at the time and learning it, and becoming close enough to it that when you look at a situation, you say, you know, if I were a deer, that’s what I would do.” Doran recounts a story about who was smarter. Doran won.
Doran guided kids to hunt deer and taught them how to spot small animals, like a Trapdoor Spider. “All my life I’ve been walking these hills and looking at everything that looks out of place,” he said about his spotting skills. A big giver, he works with Methow Recycles to host the annual Earth Day Festival on his property as well as shows for Methow Arts, free of charge to the organizers.
Doran grew up in Twisp on a ranch adjacent to his current property. “It was a little boy’s paradise, at least a little boy who wanted to be a cowboy,” said Doran. His father was a commodore in the Korean War. They moved to Twisp from Virginia when Doran was 4 years old.
Doran’s poetry is about the Methow Valley with a dose of spiritualism. After performing Cry the Home Ranch at an Earth Day event, one Native American elder put an arm around him and said- “you say in 2 minutes what it takes us to say in 20.” Doran’s poems are also about the timelessness of land, the importance of family, and the pitfalls of progress.
He fell in love with poetry in the Australian bush, where he worked as a firefighter when he was 18. On a black and white TV connected to a Rover, he was introduced to Banjo Paterson, whose verse was used in commercials for cigarettes, beer, and Port Royal Ready Rub. When he returned to town, Doran bought all the Australian poetry books he could find.
Doran made a connection with Rudyard Kipling’s poem Gunga Din that he memorized in high school. “Those were called Barack Room Ballads. In Australia, they called them Bush Ballads, and in America, they called it Cowboy Poetry. All the same stuff… I fell in love with poetry like that. I came home and I had all these Australian poetry books and I’d read them, just have fun with them, but I never thought of becoming a poet. I never thought I was good enough for that. I’m just a stupid-ass ranch kid. I like to fight fires. That was my deal.”
After a stint in Australia, Doran worked for three years as a smokejumper in the North Cascades. He spent a quarter of his summer’s wages on a set of bag pipes and taught himself to play. He would end up piping with musicians in Australia, Ireland and England.
When he was old enough, at age 21, Doran joined the Wenatchee Fire Department, where he worked for 16 years. He organized the St. Patrick’s day celebration with former Wenatchee mayor Jim Lynch. He began performing on bagpipes with his daughter Meghan when she was 14 years old.
Doran’s skills as a firefighter were recognized early on. “I was promoted one day after I had enough time and grade. I know firefighting. I can’t make my telephone work. I don’t own a computer. I have a hard time just with a regular radio, but I can fight fire. Fighting fire and riding horses is something… I don’t think you could find anyone in the valley that could compete with me when I was young.”
In 2015, Doran’s ranch was used as a base by the Forest Service to fight the Twisp River Fire. Doran knew he had to contain the fire on his ranch or else it would reach the town of Twisp. When the Forest Service came to his ranch to enforce a mandatory evacuation, Doran convinced them otherwise. Using his experience in firefighting, Doran advised the commander, who was from out of town and unfamiliar with the local landscape. The fire was contained and and never reached the town of Twisp. Doran’s efforts were chronicled by the Seattle Times.
Doran returned to Twisp regularly to help his parents on the ranch, but after an injury on the job, he retired from firefighting and returned to the ranch full-time. “I should not be alive,” he said. “I’ve been kicked in the head, I’ve been airlifted out of Pesayten, mule pulled me off a bridge…I’ve been shot and had to ride 19 miles with a bullet through my leg that could have killed me…. Blown out of a building, fell down a well, fell off roofs a couple times.”
Doran wrote his first poem in his early forties after he was hit by a horse on a hunting and packing trip to Starvation Mountain in Beaver Creek area. He went to Winthrop to get a burger and a beer. One of his friends noticed a big nob on his head and insisted Doran tell the story. His friend laughed so hard, he told Doran to write it down. Doran went home and for the first time, tried his hand in poetry.
“I’m scratching my head. How do you write a poem? I can’t remember anything from English Lit. Just baffled, so I said, ‘What were you doing John?’ ‘Well, I was leading in a hunting camp on a cold and nasty day.’ I said, hey, that sounds kind of interesting. ‘I had my hat screwed down around my ears, it had been snowing most of the day.’ Hey wait, that’s poetry! So I wrote the whole story in verse and it was good. It was really good.”
Doran’s very first poem, Zambo’s Dance, is one of his most requested and one of the ones he performed in February when he won the contest in Elko. The voting was done by judges and a tallied popular vote. Doran was competing with cowboy poets from Australia, Mexico, Canada, US, Scotland, Ireland and England.
After writing his first poem, Doran wrote 15 more poems in the span of a month. “They just started coming out of me.” Doran had tapped into the Irish tradition of storytelling, a heritage of language, singing, poetry, and style that he was introduced to by his father. American Cowboy poetry developed with the westward expansion. The Irish in particular brought a style of entertainment in the age before television and radio.
“I learned to write my poems from inside and when I recite, to let that come out, and that’s why I’m so animated. I’m getting that out into the ether.”
These days, an old injury makes it difficult for him to write with his right hand. AI can transcribe his speech into text, but he is waiting for his daughter’s next visit to help him sort through the technology. He only recently got a smartphone, which he still struggles with. He tells time by the pattern of the day. He doesn’t like traveling to the west side. His inspiration is the land in the Methow.
“I am blessed to be a part of something that is bigger than all of us.”
