When they got to our table and asked us if we had any requests, I couldn't come up with a single song for Cowboy Ernie to play. But later that evening, when Elizabeth and I were the first two city slickers to show up at the The Red Dog Saloon, I found myself wondering whether Ernie could play something he had written himself. 

Now Ernie was the shy one. 

"How about 'Coyote's Howl?'" Basia asked. "I really love that song."

"I'm not even sure I remember the words," Ernie said.

"I do," she smiled.

Basia leaned her head on her Singing Cowboy's shoulder. Then Ernie started strumming the tune that's been playing in my mind ever since. Click here to listen to it -- the lyrics are at the end of this post -- then I'll tell you more about this real-life cowboy hero and the song that's become this blog's Unfinished Business anthem. 

Ernie grew up on the prairie to the sound of coyotes howling;  I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, to the sound of lawnmowers whirring: It would seem that we couldn't have grown up more differently in terms of environment and culture. Yet, in "Coyote's Howl," Ernie expresses the exact same longings and unease that motivated me -- at age 54 and after losing my job -- to spend an entire year tending to the unfinished emotional business of my life. "Or have I changed and rearranged my dreams of long ago?" It was the same question I had asked myself as I struggled to close circles and make amends.

Ernie was born in Idaho Falls in the same year I was --1953. His father, Ernie Sites, Sr., was a professional baseball player, mostly in the minor leagues but for a short time before World War II he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and roomed with Hall of Fame shortstop Honus Wagner, then in the twilight of his coaching career. (In an interview at age 90, Ernie Sr.'s one recollection of "The Flying Dutchman," whose 1909 baseball card recently made news by selling for $262,000, was that "he snored loud.")  

To supplement his baseball income, Ernie Sr. became a member of the sheet-metal union and took work wherever he could find it during the off-season. In 1960, he moved the family from Austin, Minnesota, where he'd been playing minor-league ball and working at the Hormel meat-packing plant, to Wendell, Idaho, where he bought a ranch at the edge of the desert. 

Ernie had an idyllic childhood. He and his five siblings would help their parents with farm chores then venture off into the sagebrush and gullies where they'd practice target-shooting, search for arrowheads and other Native American artifacts and explore tunnels and caves that had been carved out millions of years earlier by flowing lava. 

Ernie's hero growing up was Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist who dispensed homespun philosophy and political opinion while doing rope tricks. Ernie was a pretty good roper himself --  "It's how you caught horses, calves, pigs, chickens and your little sister," he says -- but Rogers inspired him to set his sights on mastering the pop-over, wedding ring, flat loop, 60-foot big loop, Texas skip and other tricks that would later become part of his act.

Ernie's other heroes were his mother -- "a Mormon ranching wife with high moral standards and strict rules of conduct" -- and his maternal grandfather, who worked variously as a rancher, sheep herder and government trapper. "He never took delight in killing any animal he caught," Ernie says. "He had the same respect for the land."

Ernie began playing the guitar when he was eight. He was so good that his mother encouraged him to perform at church socials. His teacher, a tenor in the church choir, owned a barbershop in town and would give Ernie voice and guitar lessons while he cut hair. ( "I felt sorry for anybody who got his hair cut when I was singing off-key.") Little by little, Ernie says, "my guitar became my best friend. I'd carry it everywhere, strapped to my back. It became part of who I was." 

When he was 17, Ernie began playing local saloons and pizza parlors for a root beer, slice of pizza and $30 a performance. That summer he traveled 80 miles north to Bellevue, where his mother had grown up, and to Sun Valley, the biggest tourist destination in the state. He still remembers the scent of the pine trees and the brisk mountain air, and the people who'd come to Sun Valley from Europe and elsewhere to fish, hike and commune with nature. 

"I'd go up into the hills with my guitar, write some poetry and sing my brains out to the river," he recalls. "Then I'd wander down into the town and talk to people from all over the world. Sun Valley fed that artistic part of me that needed to touch the world." 

Like so many kids in Wendell, Ernie got married right out of high school. Over the next 22 years he and his wife raised seven kids. To cobble together a living, Ernie hauled hay, cut firewood, did ranch work for hire and worked for the Idaho Fish and Game Department stocking steelhead hatcheries. He joined a union so he could become a journeyman carpenter.

Eventually Ernie learned that he could earn a lot more money singing at clubs and dinner houses and selling his own CDs; so like his father before him, he took to the road, entertaining at rodeos and music festivals. One gig led to another, and he ended up performing behind artists like Mo Bandy, Rex Allen, Patsy Montana, Bonnie Raitt, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Chris Ledoux, Gene Autry, Riders in the Sky, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and the Sons of the Pioneers.

You don't need to be a cowboy music fan to know some of these names. If you grew up anywhere in America in the 1950s -- from Seattle to St. Louis to Miami to Dallas to the Ohio of my youth --  you were raised on a diet of cowboy heroes and culture. Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Wyatt Earp; Bonanza and Gunsmoke; Jesse James and Billy the Kid;  Annie Oakley, "Buffalo Bill" Cody and "Wild Bill" Hickock; Hopalong Cassidy, Tanto,The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. They dominated 1950s television. "Hi Ho Silver!" "Happy Trails to You!"

So Ernie and I had a lot more in common than it may have seemed. While I was riding my bicycle on paved sidewalks, and he was herding cows and roping his little sister, we were humming the same cowboy tunes and dreaming the same cowboy dreams and imbibing the same cowboy ethos that was shaping boys all across America. 

By the time we were teenagers, my suburban friends and I had left our toy guns and coonskin hats far behind. We were dancing to the Stones and Doors and marching against a war that seemed to grow out of that ethos of guns and frontier-conquering violence. We found ourselves identifying with the spirituality and sacred rituals of the Native Americans who the frontiersmen had fought and displaced. 

Ernie, on the other hand, stayed true to his cowboy roots. "Cowboy music and culture is about a man's relationship with nature and animals, and the sense of freedom and independence you get in wide open spaces," he explains. "That was important to me. And I didn't want to see it die."