Chapter 32
That head of his has been occupied with contemporary
society’s insoluble problems for so long, and he is
still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless
energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will
probably not live to see them come to fruition.
—THEO VAN GOGH, 1889
“YOU’VE GOT TO HEAR THIS,” Barefoot Ted said, grabbing my arm.
Damn. He caught me just as I was trying to slink away from the madness of the street party and limp off to the hotel to collapse. I’d already heard Barefoot Ted’s entire postrace commentary, including his observation that human urine is both nutrient-rich and an effective tooth whitener, and I couldn’t imagine anything he could possibly say that would be more compelling than a deep sleep in a soft bed. But it wasn’t Ted telling stories this time. It was Caballo.
Barefoot Ted pulled me back into Mamá Tita’s garden, where Caballo was holding Scott and Billy and a few of the others spellbound. “You ever wake up in an emergency room,” Caballo was saying, “and wondered whether you wanted to wake up at all?” With that, he launched into the story I’d been waiting nearly two years to hear. It didn’t take me long to grasp why he’d chosen that moment. At dawn, we’d all be scattering and heading home. Caballo didn’t want us to forget what we shared, so for the first time, he was revealing who he was.
————
He was born Michael Randall Hickman, son of a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant whose postings moved the family up and down the West Coast. As a skinny loner who constantly had to defend himself in new schools, young Mike’s first priority every time they moved was to find the nearest Police Athletic League and sign up for boxing lessons.
Brawny kids would smirk and pound their gloves together as they watched the geek with the silky hippie hair gangle his way into the ring, but their grins died as soon as that long left arm began snapping jabs into their eyes. Mike Hickman was a sensitive kid who hated hurting people, but that didn’t stop him from getting really good at it. “The guys I liked best were the big, muscular ones, ’cause they’d keep coming after me,” he recalled. “But the first time I ever knocked out a guy, I cried. For a long time after that, I didn’t knock out anybody.”
After high school, Mike went off to Humboldt State to study Eastern religions and Native American history. To pay tuition, he began fighting in backroom smokers, billing himself as the Gypsy Cowboy. Because he was fearless about walking into gyms that rarely saw a white face, much less a vegetarian white face spouting off about universal harmony and wheatgrass juice, the Cowboy soon had all the action he could handle. Small-time Mexican promoters loved to pull him aside and whisper deals in his ear.
“Oye, compay,” they’d say. “Listen up, my friend. We’re going to start a chisme, a little whisper, that you’re a top amateur from back east. The gringos are gonna love it, man. Every gabacho in the house is going to bet their kids on you.”
The Gypsy Cowboy shrugged. “Fine by me.”
“Just dance around so you don’t get slaughtered till the fourth,” they’d warn him—or the third, or the seventh, whichever round the fix had been set for. The Cowboy could hold his own against gigantic black heavyweights by dodging and clinching up until it was time for him to hit the canvas, but against the speedy Latino middleweights, he had to fight for his life. “Man, sometimes they had to haul my bleeding butt out of there,” he’d say. But even after leaving school, he stuck with it. “I just wandered the country fighting. Taking dives, winning some, losing but really winning others, mostly putting on good shows and learning how to fight and not get hurt.”
After a few years of scrapping along in the fight game’s underworld, the Cowboy took his winnings and flew to Maui. There, he turned his back on the resorts and headed east, toward the damp, dark side of the island and the hidden shrines of Hana. He was looking for a purpose for his life. Instead, he found Smitty, a hermit who lived in a hidden cave. Smitty led Mike to a cave of his own, then began guiding him to Maui’s hidden sacred sites.
“Smitty is the guy who first got me into running,” Caballo told us. Sometimes, they’d set out in the middle of the night to run the twenty miles up the Kaupo Trail to the House of the Sun at the top of 10,000- foot Mount Haleakala. They’d sit quietly as the first rays of morning sparkled on the Pacific, then run back down again, fueled only by wild papayas they’d knocked from the trees. Gradually, the backroom brawler named Mike Hickman disappeared. In his place arose Micah True, a name inspired by “the courageous and fearless spirit” of the Old Testament prophet Micah and the loyalty of an old mutt called True Dog. “I don’t always live up to True Dog’s example,” Caballo would say. “But it’s something to shoot for.”
During one of his vision-seeking runs through the rain forest, the newly reborn Micah True met a beautiful young woman from Seattle who was visiting on vacation. They couldn’t have been more different—Melinda was a psychology grad student and the daughter of a wealthy investment banker, while Micah was, quite literally, a caveman—but they fell in love. After a year in the wilderness, Micah decided it was time to return to the world.
Wham! The Gypsy Cowboy knocked out his third opponent…
… and his fourth …
… and his fifth …
With Melinda in his corner and those rain-forest runs powering his legs, Micah was virtually untouchable; he could dance and shuffle until the other fighter’s arms felt like cement. Once his fists drooped, Micah would dart in and hammer him to the canvas. “I was inspired by love, man,” Micah said. He and Melinda settled in Boulder, Colorado, where he could run the mountain trails and get bouts in Denver arenas.
“He sure didn’t look like a fighter,” Don Tobin, then the Rocky Mountain lightweight kickboxing champion, later told me. “He had real long hair and was carrying this crusty old pair of gloves, like they were handed down from Rocky Graziano.” Don Tobin became the Cowboy’s friend and occasional sparring partner, and to this day, he marvels at the Cowboy’s work ethic. “He was doing unbelievable training on his own. For his thirtieth birthday, he went out and ran thirty miles. Thirty miles!” Few American marathoners were putting up those numbers.
By the time his unbeaten streak reached 12-0, the Cowboy’s reputation was formidable enough to land him on the cover of Denver’s weekly newspaper, Westword. Under the headline FIST CITY was a full-page photo of Micah, bare-chested and sweaty, fists cocked and hair swinging, his eyes in the same glower I saw twenty years later when I surprised him in Creel. “I’ll fight anybody for the right amount of money,” the Cowboy was quoted as saying.
Anybody, eh? That article fell into the hands of an ESPN kick-boxing promoter, who quickly tracked down the Cowboy and made an offer. Even though Micah was a boxer, not a kickboxer, she was willing to put him in the ring for a nationally televised bout against Larry Shepherd, America’s fourth-ranked light heavyweight. Micah loved the publicity and the big payday, but smelled a rat. Just a few months before, he had been a homeless hippie meditating on a mountaintop; now, they were pitting him against a martial artist who could break cinder blocks with his head. “It was all a big joke to them, man,” Micah says. “I was this long-haired hippie they wanted to shove into the ring for laughs.”
What happened next summarizes Caballo’s entire life story: the easiest choices he ever had to make were the ones between prudence and pride. When the bell clanged on ESPN’s Superfight Night, the Gypsy Cowboy abandoned his usual canny strategy of dodging and dancing. Instead, he sprinted self-righteously across the ring and battered Shepherd with a furious barrage of lefts and rights. “He didn’t know what I was doing, so he covered up in the corner to figure it out,” Micah would recall. Micah cocked his right arm for a hay-maker, but got a better idea. “I kicked him in the face so hard, I broke my toe,” Micah says. “And his nose.”
Dingdingding.
Micah’s arm was jerked into the air, while a doctor began probing Shepherd’s eyes to make sure his retinas were still attached. Another KO for the Gypsy Cowboy. He couldn’t wait to get back home to celebrate with Melinda. But Melinda, he discovered, had a knockout of her own to deliver. And long before that conversation was over— long before she’d finished telling him about the affair and her plans to leave him for another man and move back to Seattle—Micah’s brain was buzzing with questions. Not for her; for him.
He’d just smashed a man’s face on national TV, and why? To be great in someone else’s eyes? To be a performer whose achievements were only measured by someone else’s affection? He wasn’t stupid; he could connect the dots between the nervous boy with the Great Santini dad and the lonely, love-hungry drifter he’d become. Was he a great fighter, in other words, or just a needy one?
Soon after, Karate magazine called. The year-end rankings were about to come out, the reporter said, and the Gypsy Cowboy’s upset had made him the fifth-ranked light-heavyweight kickboxer in America. The Cowboy’s career was about to skyrocket; once Karate hit the stands and the offers started pouring in, he’d have plenty of big-money opportunities to find out whether he truly loved fighting, or was fighting to be loved.
“Excuse me,” Micah told the reporter. “But I just decided to retire.”
Making the Gypsy Cowboy disappear was even simpler than dispensing with Mike Hickman. Everything Micah couldn’t carry on his back was discarded. The phone was disconnected, the apartment abandoned. Home became a ’69 Chevy pickup. By night, he slept in a sleeping bag in the back. By day, he hired himself out to mow lawns and move furniture. Every hour in between, he ran. If he couldn’t have Melinda, he’d settle for exhaustion. “I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning, run twenty miles, and it would be a beautiful thing,” Micah said. “Then I’d work all day and want to feel that way again. So I’d go home, drink a beer, eat some beans, and run some more.”
He had no idea if he was fast or slow, talented or terrible, until one summer weekend in 1986 when he drove up to Laramie, Wyoming, to take a stab at the Rocky Mountain Double Marathon. He surprised even himself by winning in six hours and twelve minutes, knocking off back-to-back trail marathons in a scratch over three hours each. Racing ultras, he discovered, was even tougher than prizefighting. In the ring, the other fighter determines how hard you’re hit, but on the trail, your punishment is in your own hands. For a guy looking to beat himself into numbness, extreme running could be an awfully attractive sport.
Maybe I could even go pro, if I could just get over these nagging injuries…. That thought was running through Micah’s mind as he coasted on his bike down a steep Boulder street. Next thing he knew, he was blinking into bright lights in the emergency room of Boulder Community Hospital, his eyes caked with blood and his forehead full of stitches. Best he could recall, he’d hit a gravel slick and sailed over the handlebars.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” the doctor told him, which was one way of looking at it. Another was that death was still a problem hanging over his head. Micah had just turned forty-one, and despite his ultrarunning prowess, the view from that ER gurney was none too pretty. He had no health insurance, no home, no close family, and no steady work. He didn’t have enough money to stay overnight for observation, and he didn’t have a bed to recover on if he checked out.
Poor and free was the way he’d chosen to live, but was it the way he wanted to die? A friend let Micah mend on her sofa, and there, for the next few days, he pondered his future. Only lucky rebels go out in a blaze of glory, as Micah knew very well. Ever since second grade, he’d idolized Geronimo, the Apache brave who used to escape the U.S. cavalry by running through the Arizona badlands on foot. But how did Geronimo end up? As a prisoner, dying drunk in a ditch on a dusty reservation.
Once Micah recovered, he headed to Leadville. And there, during a magical night running through the woods with Martimano Cervantes, he found his answers. Geronimo couldn’t run free forever, but maybe a “gringo Indio” could. A gringo Indio who owed nothing, needed no one, and wasn’t afraid to disappear from the planet without a trace.
“So what do you live on?” I asked.
“Sweat,” Caballo said. Every summer, he leaves his hut and rides buses back to Boulder, where his ancient pickup truck awaits him behind the house of a friendly farmer. For two or three months, he resumes the identity of Micah True and scrounges up freelance furniture-moving jobs. As soon as he has enough cash to last another year, he’s gone, vanishing down to the bottom of the canyons and stepping back into the sandals of El Caballo Blanco.
“When I get too old to work, I’ll do what Geronimo would’ve if they’d left him alone,” Caballo said. “I’ll walk off into the deep canyons and find a quiet place to lie down.” There was no melodrama or self-pity in the way Caballo said this, just the understanding that someday, the life he’d chosen would require one last disappearing act.
“So maybe I’ll see you all again,” Caballo concluded, as Tita was killing the lights and shooing us off to bed. “Or maybe I won’t.”
By sunup the next morning, the soldiers of Urique were waiting by the old minibus that was idling outside Tita’s restaurant. When Jenn arrived, they snapped to attention.
“Hasta luego, Brujita,” they called.
Jenn blew them screen-siren kisses with a big sweep of her arm, then climbed aboard. Barefoot Ted got on next, climbing up gingerly. His feet were so thickly swathed in cloth bandages, they barely fit inside his Japanese bathhouse flip-flops. “They’re not bad, really,” he insisted. “Just a little tender.” He squeezed in next to Scott, who willingly slid over to make room.
The rest of us filed in and made our sore bodies as comfortable as possible for the jouncing trip ahead. The village tortilla-maker (who’s also the village barber, shoemaker, and bus driver) slid behind the wheel and revved the rattling engine. Outside, Caballo and Bob Francis walked the length of the bus, pressing their hands against each of our windows.
Manuel Luna, Arnulfo, and Silvino stood next to them as the bus pulled out. The rest of the Tarahumara had set off already on the long hike home, but even though these three had the greatest distance to travel, they’d waited around to see us off. For a long time afterward, I could see them standing in the road, waving, until the entire town of Urique disappeared behind us in a cloud of dust.