My Love Affair With Horses

 

Writing is like painting in that you use words to paint a picture.  The choice of words and phrases can be likened unto the lines and shades in a sketch.    The idea is formed, sometimes in advance, sometimes as you go along, developing itself as the words grow.  The mind, like a seeping spring, contently turning over thoughts, thoughts of this and that which sometimes turn into a stream that channels itself into a story or pome.  Today I would like to tell the story of my love affair with horses.

I never was around horses as a child, though at time I have told that lie, and did spend a day riding a trail horse while I was in Guantanamo Bay as a young Marine.  Other than that the only other time I had straddled a horse was on a trail ride at Stone Mountain, GA back in the mid-60s as I was absconding to Hawaii with the law not far behind (another story).  That was a nice ride, there was my brother, who had taken us to the airport in Atlanta, the girl who was making the trip with me, sorry girl but you name has long ago left me.  I could divert here and tell the story of the reason for that trip, the woman who was making it with me, and out adventures in Hawaii until we decided that we were not meant for each other, but that would be digressing from this story, my love affair with horses.

Back to Stone Mountain, It was a beautiful sunny day, hot out, but nice in the shade of the trees we were riding under.  We had paid our fees, and they assigned us horses.  Having never saddled a horse I did not know enough to check the girth to insure it was snug enough.  About half way through the ride, on a part of the trail where there was a deep ravine to one side, and trees right up to the edge of the trail on the other side, just where the trail made a hard left turn, my saddled slipped to side where the ravine was.  Of course I had not learned how to re-center a saddle by shifting my weight in the stirrups yet, it was my second ride.  I was in my mid-twenties on this ride, and I left horses for a very long time, going on to Hawaii, becoming both a sailor, buying and living on a 35 foot sloop for two years, and a hippy, again a different story and one I may tell sometime.

Time marched on its want say anything way; I came back from Hawaii, did my bit in the pin to pay the government back for having the audacity of using Marijuana, and was picked up after I was paroled by the woman who was to become my first wife.  To cut this story way short, after 21 years she left with the kids to Florida, and I stayed in Tennessee.   I want say any more about this period of my life for now, except to tell you that there was never any love between us on my part.  I married her because she got pregnant and told me flat out that if I did not marry her that she would abort the child.  I could not abide that, so we married in a Court House in Chicago, not even a kiss after the “I do”, I was pissed, but decided to do the best I could both for her and the child(ren), my bed, I made it.

Jump forward 22 years, the ex gone, and me alone for the first time in a very long time.  I started going dancing a lot, my ex never liked to dance, and playing around with a lot of different women.  Though out my marred life I had escaped the unhappy part of my life by going to school, when you are working your way to an understanding of calculus, deferential equations, statistics, political science, computer science, you don’t have time to dwell upon how your life could have been happier.  At the time I was working for an OEM firm that made Medical Imaging Equipment, and was sent to Ervin, California on a regular bases for varying amounts of time from a week or two, or a month or more depending upon the complexity of the equipment that they were training me to be able to maintain and repair should it break.

In Tustin I found this two-stepping bar, Coyotes Joe’s that I liked to hang out at and dance when I could.  It was there that I met Rena.  I was 49 when I met her, and we hit it off.  I was with a date at the club when I first saw her, she was smashing.  While my date was occupied with some of her friends, I struck up a conversation with Rena.  I told her that I was there with someone, but that it was just casual but I would not dump my date while I with her, and all of that aside I told her that I would love to go dancing with her next weekend, and gave her my hotel room and phone number.

Well for a long time I did not dance with anyone else in California.  We did lots of things together, and hooked up again on me next trip out west.  Besides dancing we went to Disneyland, to Medieval World, Wild West World, walked on Laguna Beach, and thoroughly enjoyed each other company.  On that second trip she road back to El Paso with me, I always drove out on these trip for the chance to see the country, we spent the night there, found a place to go dancing, and the next morning I dropped her off at the airport so she could fly home, and I drove back to my part of the world.

Rena ran a travel agency, and got a lot of deeply discounted, sometimes free, plane tickets.  One week she flew out to St Louis, and we met and spent the day visiting Grant’s Farm, spent the night together nearby, and she flew home in the morning.   A month or so later she got a ticket to Nashville, and came over for the weekend.  I wanted to do something romantic with her, and on the way from Humboldt, just a little north of Jackson, I noted a billboard advertising Loretta Lynn’s Farm and Stables Horse Riding.  That would do it, I though, and this thought changed me for the rest of my life.

I picked her up at the airport early that morning; we spent the morning at Opera Land Hotel, had lunch, and then headed back to my place, which was not very much, then just a one bed room apartment.  Most of my money was going to pay off the debt that my ex had ran up on my credit cards before she left, I had credit cards that only she knew I had!  I do not want to get off onto a tangent about that, but it still galls me when I think about it.

On the way home I swung off the Interstate, and took her up to Loretta Lynn’s Farm, she thought that horseback riding was a great idea.  I paid out $30 for the hour ride; we were the only ones on the trail other than the guide that took us around.  When he asked us what type of horse we wanted Rena said a calm one, and I said a spirited one.  Vicariously I was a cowboy, because of all the western I had watched, see them mount, and ride, neither my mind nor my body hesitated, and I road just like I had been doing it all of my life.  I was fifty years old that day, that day I fell in love with horses.

That love grew on me though over the next summer.  Rena and I had decided to move in together, she would sell her house in Long Beach, and on my next trip over I would fly out, and she would pack her van and a U-Haul with the stuff she wanted to bring with her, store the rest, and I would drive up back to Tennessee.   Now there is more to this story about her selling her house then her just wanting to move in with me.  Her husband had left her, but her two grown sons had not, and both were still living with her.  She was at her wits end trying out how to get them out to live on their own, and this was a perfect opportunity.  If she sold the house, and left the state then they would have to make it with their own effort.

You know how it is that what seems perfect in the glow of infatuation but flaws are reviled as familiarity wares in?   Rena first taste of a side of me that she did not like came as we were diving out of California and into New Mexico; she wanted me to stop for gas before we started down that long stretch of road through the land that connect California and New Mexico.  I looked at the gauge, remembered about where the next station was, and said that we had plenty.  As we went through that beautiful landscape the gauge got nearer and nearer to empty.  Rena was chewing me out for not having stopped for gas before, and just how pissed she was going to be if we ran out of gas.

 Not all that’s well ends well, for we came into a gas station 20 or so miles before we would have ran out of gas, but it pointed out to Rena the different in our risk aversions.

We made it all the way back to Tennessee without any more disagreements.   Moved her into my apartment, and set up housekeeping.  I found another place, much nearer then Loretta Lynn’s place, Chickasaw State Park, down near Mississippi almost strait south from Humboldt.  Every weekend that we were not out doing something else we would go riding Saturday and Sunday for an hour or two.  They only charged $10 an hour instead of the $15 that Loretta did (no, I never got to meet Loretta).

All this summer we rode hours and hours on many different horse, but winter was coming on.  Rena had never driven in snow, and the thought of riding with me in the snow gave her no comfort.  That along with all the other cultural shocks she had endured, no bike trails, no one to play tennis with, no street light, not being able to go to a restaurant and drink coffee and read the newspaper half the morning without them wanting you to leave the table for other patrons.  All of this, along with some other things, which I won’t go into, led her to decide to move back to Long Beach before winter set in.  We parted on good terms, met a few more times at various places for a night or two, and talked over the phone until she got a boyfriend who did not want her to carry on her friendship with me any longer.  Now it has been years since we have spoken.  We took my Mother and Aunt Ulane to New York just before she went back, that trip in of itself make another nice lone story, and the picture above was taken on that trip.

After Rena left I kept going to Chickasaw Park every weekend, and riding.  After a while the two boys who worked as trail guides and wranglers for the lady who ran the concession told me that I should just work with them, ride for free, and get paid $25 a day for doing it.  Now my day job was paying about $60 K, but I jumped on it with the understanding that service engineer job had priorities.  I also confessed that I would have to be taught how to saddle a horse.  I was 51 years old.

Looking back through the years I have had many good and bad stretches in my life, the time I spent riding at Chickasaw was one of the better periods of my life.  I would spend the week working on CTs, Nuclear Cameras, RF Rooms, and sometimes MRIs.  Then on Saturday and Sunday, and whatever holiday, I would drive the hour it took to get to Chickasaw, help round the horses, 30 to 65 depending upon the time of year and how many renters we had coming for rides.

We had to walk out into a 50-60 acre pasture to herd the horses back in to a job that they were not always eager to do.  After running them into a corral, we catch and take them out one at a time to be brushed and tacked up.  Each horse had its own rig that it had to be mated with, in all the time I was there I never did get as good at matching a name to a horse as those two boys were.

After the horse was tacked up we would tie then to the picket line.  The horses would wait there until some renters came, and then we would match the horses to the renters according to three criteria:

The size of the renter, the ability of the renter, and whether or not this horse should be beside that one or not.  Some horse liked each other, some would tolerate others, and some just hated some horse and would pick a fight if every next to that horse.  Almost all riders had to have a trail guide to go with them.  Only a few, who we could trust not to gallop the horse the whole way would we let go out alone.  Small groups would get one wrangler, medium size would get two, and large groups would get three.  There were only three of us, so any more renters coming while we were all out had to wait until the last group got back.

When we got back and dismounted the renters we took the horses strait to the water troth and let them drink their fill.  This myth of a horse colic if it is allowed to drink too much water is just that, a myth, and long as the water is not very cold they can drink their fill without any harm.  After they drank their fill we would take them back to the picket line at the end of rotation so they could get as much rest as possible before their next trip.  Each trip was about an hour or more depending upon how much you let the horses run.

We would start the rides at 8 in the morning; take the last renters out at 5 in the evening.  When we were done for the day we had a long feeding troth that went the length of the barn that we would pore rice brain in, the horses were allowed to eat their fill, and would, on their own, leave the barn when they had their fill and run to the pasture, when the last horse decided to go, we would shut the gate, and go out and ride for fun.  We did a lot of what we called rough riding.  Trey to take a horse up a hill way too step to climb just to see how far he would make it up before spinning around to go back down.  Taking horses down ravines way too steep to climb back up, so steep that the horse had to slide on its butt the whole way down.  We would race down the dirt roads in the park in the dark as fast as the horses would go, unable to see anything ahead, but knowing that your horse could.  That is as close to flying as I ever came.

After finishing up Saturday night I would drive back to Humboldt, get cleaned up, and then go dancing.  Sometimes I would go to a joint up in Dyersburg, just south of Kentucky.  Other times I would go to a club in the Holiday Inn in Jackson.  Yet other time I would go to the joint that the sheriff in “Walking Tall” had his fight with.  I had a lot of dance partners, and got laid quit often, but I always got up in time to be back at Chickasaw in time to round up the horses on Sunday morning.

I bought my first horse there an Arabian they called Ahab but I renamed him Gallivant.  The reason I bought his was that the way I was riding if I was to hurt a horse I would have much rather it have been my own horse then someone else’s.   When I transferred to North Carolina from Tennessee I brought Gallivant with me, he is buried at the tree line in the west pasture, in spite of the hard riding he had to do with me he lived to be 35 years old, 20 of those years with me.  I got my second horse in Tennessee also, Tazmania, who still riding the trails with me; she was two years old when I got her back in ’95.  That makes her about 17 now, and she is still eager to take me any where I might wish to go.

This has been the longest love affair in my life, other than with the marines, out living all the ones with all of my women, with sailing, mountain climbing, thou my love of women is longer and not yet dead.  I hope yet to have a woman in my life that I hold dearer than my horses.