Unearthing a life.....

EQUUS REMEMBERED
I can not personally recall my earliest association with those lofty creatures of the Equus genera that have dogged my footsteps throughout life. However, reliable family mythology has it that, when I had arrived at the advanced age of six weeks old, my mother took it into her head to surprise my father with a photograph of me sitting on a horse. To this purpose she enlisted the aid of my grandfather’s horse ‘Jap’ and Dad’s thirteen year old brother Don. The plan was for Don to conceal himself as best he could behind ‘Jap’ and then hold me up in a sitting position - on the horse - while keeping his hands out of sight of the camera (a green fake leather covered Brownie box camera being wielded by my mother).
.
The plan did not execute well. I would be loath to suggest that my mother had a half-baked idea there … lest she rise from the grave and smite me for being ‘smart alecky’. But the way the story was told many years later, Don popped me up onto the horse’s back, ‘Jap’ shied violently away, creating a condition where Don no longer had hold of me and there was no longer a horse under me. I crashed. To the ground. On my head.
.
No picture.
.
I did acquire an abrasive wound to one side of my noggin, which I assume they attended to in some inept way or another. When my father came home from work that day, Mom told him that I had gotten my head wedged in between the bed and the wall … resulting in the observable wound. She was nineteen at the time and had aged well past thirty before my father (and I) ever heard the truth of that day.
.
I do have this photograph taken about four years later … where I’m up on ’Jap’ with my Grandpa Charlie. I do have a memory that I associate with this picture, but it might have happened a couple years later - or maybe not. Grandpa had saddled the horse in preparation of something, maybe this picture … and he was riding around to get the horse in position. ’Jap’ had tricked him with the old inflated belly tactic and as they jogged in a circle, the horse ’deflated’, the saddle rotated to beneath the horse, and Grandpa crashed into the dust. My memory is an image of him hitting the ground and the dust flying up around him.
.
When I was about nine, horseback riding re-intruded on my life. We had moved to Smyrna, a tiny town on the Milwaukee Railroad, ten miles east of the Columbia River. My closest friends and playmates were two sisters who lived on a cattle ranch four miles to the east of us. They would show up at our house on two horses and invite me and my brother and my sister to go riding. That entailed having three kids on the smaller horse, ’Topsy’ - because it was reasonably well behaved - and two on the bigger horse that was constantly trying to return ‘home’ to barn and feed. ‘Jess’ was his name and he had severe control issues.
.
Things deteriorated for me when they acquired a third horse, ‘Bird’, but only had two saddles. They started showing up with the saddleless ‘Bird’ in tow and insisted on teaching us all how to ride bareback. I never mastered the technique. I couldn’t even ride bareback poorly. As soon as the horse began forward motion - almost always at a trot - I would bounce backward along his spine …. boing, boing, boing …. and fall off the back end. In those rare instances where I managed to stay aboard for a brief spell, I would part company with my steed at the first point where he changed direction. I had a tendency to slavishly follow the original line of motion.
.
Thus I became a rider of saddled horses only. And as the number of available horses increased, I fell heir to old ‘Jess’. Tall and middle aged and behaving like a homing pigeon.
.
When I was twelve, I cut a chunk of flesh off my left wrist in a broken window ‘accident’, and had to spend several weeks with it heavily bandaged and encased in foam rubber for protection from blows that might mess up the stitches. So I’m up on ‘Jess’ trying to control him one-handed, there’s four other horses, and we arrive at this single-wire fence across a canyon four miles west of Smyrna. One of the valley ranchers had strung this single strand of barbed wire about five feet off the ground to prevent wild horses from coming down the canyon and getting to the creek for water, while his cattle would just lower their heads and walk under.
.
It was barring our way.
.
Lou Ann, the older sister, managed to pry a staple out of a fairly tall fence post and lift the wire up to rest on the top of the post. I had the tallest horse, so everyone else led their horses under ahead of me. They were milling around on the other side and Lou Ann was the only one back in the saddle …. as I cautiously led old ‘Jess’ under the wire. Disaster! He was an inch too tall. The saddle horn hooked the wire and ‘Jess’ felt the tension, he bunched his horsey muscles and lunged forward. The wire ‘screamed’ as it tightened, stretched, and popped and I could feel him coming. I tried to run, but he hit me with his chest and rocketed me into a nearby sagebrush. All the horses raced away up the canyon. Lou Ann chased them down and grabbed the reins on two of them and led them back … the other two followed along.
.
A quick inspection showed that we had created a hundred yard gap in the fencing. So, with the enthusiasm of un-apprehended culprits, we took off up the sandy canyon at a gallop. ‘Jess’ stepped on a post buried in the sand; it rolled; and he came down on his front knees, causing my bandaged left wrist to come whistling down with great force onto the top of the saddle horn. Oh, Great Pain! And incidental bleeding seeping from under the bandaging. The damage was minor and nothing came of it. A few weeks later, the rancher came into the post office (my Mom was postmaster) and told her that so-and-so had torn down a quarter mile of his fence so’s they could run their horses down onto his creek bottom. By the time the truth of the fence destruction surfaced, all us kids were middle-aged and the rancher was living in a nursing home somewhere.
.
Actually I was the big-mouth that did it. Sitting around the dinner table with bothers and sisters at an ‘event’ at our parent’s home …. Playing that old “Do you remember when we ….” game. I spun the tale of how ‘Jess’ and I ripped out Mr. Boeh’s fence right there in front of my mother. She was a lot mellower than she’d been twenty-five years earlier … and thereafter always claimed she’d had to wait for her kids to turn forty before she found out what we were doing when we were children. I’m sure it’s best that way.
.
By the time I was a teenager, I was a pretty decent rider so long as there was a saddle. I was not in the same league as the two Chadbourne girls, or my little sister Norma, or their friend Mildred …. not only could they all four ride bareback, they could all ride at a lope while standing up on the horse’s bare back. For a couple years there, I actually did occasional small jobs of cowboying … not much, but some. And during this time, my sister’s boyfriend and I went riding west from town on his horse with me behind him and the saddle. I would do a couple wraps of the saddle strings around my hands so’s I could snug down against the saddle and keep from bouncing off.
.
We were three miles from my home (six from his) when he stopped and dismounted to relieve himself. While this was going on, I slid back onto the horse’s rump to stretch my legs … and crazy Dick whipped around and sent a stream of pee arcing towards his horse’s head. The horse went straight up in the air - and I went even higher, while churning my hands to get loose from the saddle strings. The Gods were with me and I became detached just before he hit the ground and went sideways. I made a magnificent three-point landing on my knees and forehead, except that my forehead came down in a greasewood bush and collected several thorns. The horse fled back towards Smyrna.
.
The last horse I had dealings with was three million years old and came out of the Taunton fossil beds a bone at a time. He never gave me any trouble whatsoever.