Seven Below

“Dad you should of seen the bird in front of me – he was bigger than you. And the moon went down on a buffalo.”

When your little boy tells you words like this and you’re a songwriter, your job is pretty easy. When Sam was only four years old we went out on the coldest day of the winter to feed the cows. It was a “hundred-mile day” – one of those that you can see forever in the dry cold air that lights up the world along the face of the Bighorns. The sky and the earth were waking up at the same time, unknown mysteries of the night were still afoot, and the day hadn’t totally taken over yet. There was magic in the air.

There was a spring for the cows to water at about a mile up the road from the barnyard so that’s where we’d go to feed. Our arrangement was tried and true: I’d put the truck in compound low gear, Sam would kneel on the front seat and drive, and I would feed the bales of hay off the back and look over the cows. This had worked out pretty well for us for a while. Things, however, took a little turn on this day.

The truck was stuck – and I mean stuck. Sam had run into an irrigation ditch that the snow had blown into and we weren’t getting out. I needed to head back to the barnyard to get a tractor so I could pull us out and that caused me to have a big decision to make: take Sam with me or leave him behind in the truck. I didn’t know much back then but I did know that little bodies froze fast. I decided to leave him behind and had to scare him enough to where he wouldn’t try to follow me.

Seven Below is a man’s interpretation of a little boy’s reality – something that we call magic.

 

Seven Below is available on the following Dave Munsick album: