Official member Hall of Lame

According to my recent reading, had I been born at any point before about 1940, I would've died or been killed, or at least irreparably maimed, before reaching my teens.

It was a brutal world for which accident-prone wimps like me were ill-equipped to thrive, or even survive.

Pam Burke

As the result of a clever, underhanded plot by a friend who knows my weaknesses too well, I am the newest volunteer helping the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame to prepare the 2013 nominees' biographies being compiled for the annual keepsake book.

It's all good clean fun for a good cause, so I forgive my friend. No, really, I do. Mostly, because the reading is fascinating.

These people are amazing, their stories are captivating, and I wish I could meet everyone of them, though I can't imagine why they would want to meet me.

These are the kind of people who started working when they were 8 years old. They bucked out a totally unbroke horse then used it herding cattle all day. They literally carved their homes out of the dirt.

They had careers when people of a certain gender weren't supposed to. They raised their siblings when they were just kids themselves, or they left their siblings behind in the comfort of their parents' arms to win a hard-fought living for themselves. They fed their own families of 14 children.

Who has 14 children? Who can do any of these things? Iron-fortified women and men of mettle. That's who.

They were clearly the awesomest of the awesome, whilst I started life as a nose picker and really haven't improved much from their.

One nominee, who was obviously awesome in his own right, moved his family from the prairie to a mountain town beyond Glacier National Park, but had his two oldest sons herd the cattle and horses across the Continental Divide to meet them at their new home. They were 14 and 12 years old. And they were finding their way across the wild, wild wilderness with their family's entire livestock livelihood.

I don't know how to express my awe without colorful cuss words and gesturing wildly with my hands. So I'll do this instead: !!!!!!

You know what I was doing at that age? I was still watching "Gilligan's Island" on TV after riding home from school on a heated bus then getting yelled at because I sat in front of the TV instead of doing my chores: Empty the dishwasher. So, yes, technically my one chore — one five-minute chore whose only hardship and threat to life was the occasional paring knife sitting point-upright in the silverware bin. Oh my. The horrors.

One nominee is a woman who married a guy who was, by all accounts, a rake and a scoundrel, so she divorced him, got her college degree, became an instructor and (oh, by the way) an internationally famous writer.

And she paid off all the dead-beat ex's debts.

You know why I went to college? Because I hated watching movies and knowing that they were referring to things I didn't know about. And because of "Jeopardy!" — I didn't know many of the answers.

So, basically, I went to college because I didn't have the initiative to do my own research. And then I really went exactly nowhere with the degree.

But I did pay off my own loans. Do I get survival points for that?

I just couldn't imagine growing up with so much responsibility and hard work.

If my parents had told me that I had to do something like find my way through the Rocky Mountains with a herd of livestock, I would've died the first night, out of sheer incompetence. I definitely would've been lost.

If they'd told me I had to help raise my siblings I would've been like, "You know, there's this girl named Mary who lives in a little house on the prairie, and she doesn't have to take care of her siblings."

And they'd tell me, in their reasonable voices, that it's because she's, y'know, blind, and her younger sister is almost her age and grown up enough to take of herself.

And I'd be all, like, "What? I gotta go blind to force these brats to grow up and take care of themselves? When is television and 'Gilligan's Island' going to be invented?! I'm tired of sitting around watching the worms wiggle out of the walls of this stupid sod hut!"

At which point, tired of waiting for the hard-living and my own stupidity to wean me out of the gene pool, my parents would've killed me — to put themselves out of their misery.

(I'm not what you would call a useful person at http://viewnorth40.wordpress.com.)