By Shad Sullivan

To my surprise, there was a sweet spirit in the air that fell across the city. A far cry from the stories I’ve heard about this wilderness they call a concrete jungle. Indeed, I was dumbfounded that the marbled urban walls went straight to the heavens as far as the eye could see, in every direction. In my life, I have never seen so many buildings, and certainly none of this size and magnitude. Along with that, the city lights from my 52nd hotel floor in the dark of the night negated any resemblance of the midnight and at the same time created an unmatched beauty akin to the solitude provided by Rocky Mountain starlight. The constant moan created by the revolving hub of transportation and the occasional press of the horn strangely reminded me of Colorado’s Blue River coursing its way to a lower elevation with a bugling elk streamlined somewhere in the distance. The experience was quietly patriotic, yet, uniquely American. Oddly, it felt like going home as an adult, it was warm but I knew I didn’t belong.

My wife and I, along with our son, traveled to New York City to watch my friend Andy Hedges and Friends perform his latest album “Roll On, Cowboys” at Carnegie Hall. Truthfully, the concert experience in that venue was a once in-a-lifetime event for our family and alone made the trip to the Big Apple worthwhile. However, it became so much more.

At the show, Roll on Cowboys at Carnegie Hall, featuring, Andy Hedges, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Dom Flemons, Pipp Gillette, Maggie Rose Hedges, Brenn Hill, Corb Lund, Waddie Mitchell, Brigid Reedy, Tom Russell, Rod Taylor, and Andy Wilkinson.

In her never-ending quest for organization and structure, my wife Thea, started planning out the trip months in advance. Quickly, she bought the plane tickets and started on the itinerary that would carve out a path and the rules of visitation to every tourist destination she saw fit. Our timeline was perfected, steps were counted and Beatty and I fell in line following mama to every sight like a catfish on a dragline. Assuredly, through 15,000 steps a day, my complaint was constant and Beatty lagged behind his mama who was yanking him full speed ahead. I can easily admit that the sights were outstanding and the New York skyline was a sight to see all by itself. We put in a heavy four days and were able to see the soul-stirring Statue of Liberty. It was everything I had imagined and more. The Empire State Building was perfected in a night tour along with our trip to the Top of the Rock. Thea vowed to endure the half-a-million people at the Museum of Natural History and took a selfie with every single animal from the movie “Night at the Museum,” while I pouted and gave her an hour to get it done. The food… oh my gosh, the food was worth the extra ten pounds I came home with. A carriage ride through the 800-acre Central Park was a gift to us from our friends at the Cavalry Group and did you know that an apartment overlooking that park can rent for 100K per month? Unreal. To round it out, the 9/11 Memorial Museum was the heaviest of breath I took on the trip and perhaps the heaviest of my life-long museum visits. I still remember that day.

Throughout my life, I have heard how horribly rude the people of New York City are. But that was not my experience. In fact, it was just the opposite. I found them to be happy and polite, enthusiastic and intriguing. Of course, I am a cowboy and hundreds were enamored by my black hat. If I heard, “beautiful hat” or “I bet you’re from Texas” once, I heard it no less than 200 times. I could separate the tourists from the locals fairly easily and found them to be hard-working, kind, and patriotic. Most seemed pro-America, pro-Trump and certainly pro-New York City. I felt welcome everywhere and hope to visit again one day.

It was the people, yes the people, that made NYC so enjoyable. The bell-men, the cab drivers, the waiters, the bartenders, and it was an Uber driver named Nassir.

Nassir was a young man when he came to America and we easily struck up a conversation of our American lives. In 1992 searching for a better life, Nassir’s single mother immigrated to America and enrolled in college with a dream of becoming a PhD. To support them, Nassir went to work as a janitor in the basement of the World Trade Center. During the thirty-minute drive to our destination, he asked me if I remembered where I was on 9/11. I told him the story of that day we were shipping cattle on the Hawkin’s Ranch in the Nebraska sandhills. Of course, he didn’t understand what any of my story meant, but he knew we had a connection to that fateful day. We each remembered.

Through the years his Nigerian mother had studied her way through college and, indeed, became a Ph.D. While Nassir never received any formal education, he was very proud of her and rightfully so. He went on to tell me that he was working the night shifts in the lower-level of one of the towers, while his mother had landed a job teaching at a foreign University. On the morning of 9/11, he left his shift at 5 a.m., went home, showered, and went to bed. Nassir relayed that midmorning his telephone rang and he would pick it up and slam it down, trying to get some rest. Five times he slammed the telephone down before he finally picked it up to hear his mother’s voice on the other end of the line. “What is going on over there!” she continued to ask him in a panic. He had no idea of the urgency. She told him what she had seen on the TV and immediately Nassir headed from his apartment to the WTC. Unbeknownst to him as to what had truly taken place.

He was quiet in the relay of his story explaining that as he watched the second plane hit, he witnessed dozens of Americans jump to their death. “What else could they do?” he said, “they had nowhere to go and only death staring them down.” Nassir was well-controlled in his broken dialect, but I understood every word. In his remembrance of that day and in the dark of the night, I saw tears streaming down his face. Twenty-three years later, those tears rolled down his dark cheeks in his mourning. His voice quivered and the raw emotion was penetrating. He told me he would never forget what he saw and that he was proud to be an American citizen. Admittedly, I welled up and shed a tear or two with him, recalling every moment of that day so long ago.

I was humbled by his openness, and why he was so open didn’t matter. At that moment, we were Americans interwoven by the same experience, viewed differently, with 2,000 miles in between. An American from Nigeria and a cowboy from cattle country.

Shad Sullivan ranches in Texas and Colorado.

Tears of Nassir: A Ranchers Trip to NYC

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