On the trail with Stephen Bly
Tate Aragon asked to look in the glove compartment of his pickup for a tube of deworming paste. I couldn’t find it, but I did discover a rusted spur rowel, a hatchet head, three 12 gauge shotgun shells, an “I Like Ike” campaign button, a petrified half a cheeseburger, an elk-head carved bar of soap, a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar with a hole shot through it, and a rubber rattlesnake. Tate explained, “That’s where I stow my dofunnies.”
Dofunnies—a cowboy’s name for trinkets carried in his war bag, usually tucked in the center of his bedroll. The old time trappers and scouts coined a similar word for anything fancy, whether shirt or boots or hat: fofarraw. Some fellas packed around plenty of dofunnies and fofarraw, that often slowed them down on the trail. We’ve got a junk drawer in our house for such things, where we toss odds and ends we don’t need, can’t use or don’t know where else to put them, but can’t bring ourselves to throw them away. No harm in that, as long as this stash doesn’t rob us of the space needed for more critical items.
