Faraway Horses (5 page)

I went from having grades in the C’s, D’s, and F’s to pretty much straight A’s. I got a few B’s, but I was on the honor roll almost every quarter I was in high school. Smokie became a good student, too. Schoolwork came a little harder for him, but he studied harder than I did. That seems to be the way with a lot of siblings. One will be a good student and things will come easy, and the other will be a good student because he worked hard at it. I probably could have gotten all A’s if I’d studied, but all I wanted to do was play basketball, run on the track team, and chase girls.

This was in the mid-1970s, and all the other kids were listening to rock and roll. I didn’t. I listened to country music, and I dressed like a cowboy. I didn’t do a lot of the things the other kids were doing. I was too grown up for some of it, and I’d seen some things in life that a lot of those kids would never see. But I was still popular. I was the student body president, and I was on the varsity basketball team, so I wasn’t a total square. In a small school like that, even if you were a little bit square, you could still be part of the “in” crowd.

As far as girlfriends went, I had a few of them, too. You had to be careful not to trade around too often because you didn’t have to be very outgoing before you’d gone through every eligible girl around. Changing girlfriends was hard in another way, too, because we all knew each other so well that the girls were more like our sisters than girlfriends.

Smokie was never too interested in riding horses. He was more interested in the machinery, and putting up hay, and
being more mechanical. It’s what led him into the Coast Guard right out of high school. After he left the ranch, he kept up his rope tricks a little bit. He can still do a few, and he rides once in a while, but he never really got into being a horseman and a cowboy like I did. It seems that if you grow up on a ranch, you either leave hoping you never see a cow or a horse again, or you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to get a ranch of your own put together. It seems to be one extreme or the other.

Smokie has a wife and kids now, and he has a happy life. We see each other every so often, but I don’t feel as if we have to reaffirm our relationship because we’ve been through so much together. I guess it must be like having gone to war with someone. Side by side, we felt fear and we shared it, and we held each other when we were scared that we were both going to die. Living through the tough times together created a bond that is everlasting. If I’ve needed him, he’s been there for me. When my first wife, Adrian, was in a coma, he left his Coast Guard station and took the chance of getting in quite a bit of trouble with his superiors, because he had to be with his little brother at such an awfully desperate time.

Smokie is a great guy. We will always be the best of friends, and we will always love each other deeply.

Forrest told me one time, “Son, if you want to ensure that you’ll always be able to eat, learn how to ride a colt and learn how to shoe a horse.” He taught me how to shoe
horses, and, believe me, it wasn’t pretty. The only horses that neighboring ranchers trusted me with were the ones that were about as tough to shoe as anything that came down the line. They figured there wasn’t a lot of risk in letting me try to tack a set of shoes on them.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I wanted to make my living with my head higher than my butt, so I learned how to ride colts. Forrest raised a lot of Appaloosas and some Quarter Horses on the ranch, and he got me started riding the youngsters. It was pretty rough, and some of the things we did weren’t very kind, but we did the best we could with what we knew. We’d tie up a hind foot to get the young horse saddled. Then I’d step on while Forrest threw the gate open, and off I’d go for a ride. It was a rough deal. We didn’t work horses in a round corral, and it never dawned on us that getting a horse comfortable might help us live a little longer.

Most days were very long ones. These horses weren’t Ladybirds. I wasn’t being put on pets. There were a lot of wrecks, a lot of bronc rides, and a lot of runaways. In those days, everything we did seemed to be in a big cloud of dust. I rode a lot of tough horses at the ranch, and I learned what the reality of riding is all about.

I rode colts all through my junior and senior years of high school. I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning and ride two or three young ones before I’d get on the bus to go to school. In the evening, I’d ride another one or two when the weather allowed. That gave me quite a bit of experience by
the time I turned eighteen, and I’d made a little money at it. For each kid Forrest and Betsy took in, the county gave them only a hundred bucks a month, so we foster kids had to help pay for our meals, clothes, and other expenses. By riding other people’s colts, I made enough to pay my share. I even saved enough to buy a used tan-and-rust four-door Plymouth Belvedere sedan that had more rust than paint. Smokie and I drove it back and forth to basketball practice when school was in session.

Anytime we could spring out of the ranch was a big party for us, and we’d take off and go to a rodeo. None of us could afford a horse trailer or roping horses, so we’d throw a bronc saddle in the trunk of our car and take off for the weekend. Saddle broncs were my event. We didn’t have much money, but we could live pretty cheap, and like a lot of kids in those days, we’d figure out a way to get someone to buy us a couple of bottles of Boone’s Farm or Annie Green Springs. If not, we’d forgo eating so we could afford a couple of bottles of that two-dollar wine.

And away we’d go riding bucking horses, chewing tobacco, telling cowboy stories, and chasing girls—all the stuff kids do that we hope to hell our own kids don’t do. We never hurt anybody, and it was a pretty harmless kind of fun.

I looked up to Royce because I thought he was pretty cool. He was older than I was, and he was a cowboy, which is what I wanted to be. I tried to copy some of things that he did, like chew tobacco. All the other cowboys that I was
hanging around chewed, and I guess that’s why I started. I quit a number of years ago, and I’m just glad I never got into doing drugs, or anything like that, because quitting chew was hard enough to do.

I didn’t ride many broncs during my senior year in high school. In fact, I had pretty much quit rodeoing. It seemed every time I’d go, it was a net loss. Even if I rode well and made a little money, by the time I’d finished driving my car here and there across the country, buying meals and chasing around with the girls, I didn’t have anything left.

I enjoyed riding bucking horses. I wasn’t bad at it, and I rode a few, but it didn’t take me too long to figure out I had a lot better future learning how to get them to quit bucking. I was going to need a little nest egg to get out on my own, so after I graduated, I stayed home and rode colts all summer.

I’ve long since gotten over the hard times that I had as a kid, and I’ve learned from the things that pointed me toward the future rather than kept me in the past. Sometimes people may not understand how to approach an abused horse or one that’s had a lot of trouble. They’re so afraid of making mistakes that sometimes the biggest mistake they make is doing nothing. If the Shirleys had dwelled on the troubles my brother and I had had instead of providing us with discipline and a sense of direction, we would eventually have become spoiled, even more spoiled than kids who had been raised in a privileged home with unlimited amounts of money and material possessions. We’d have been spoiled because we’d have
realized that Forrest and Betsy were willing to make exceptions for us because of our situation. Thank goodness they didn’t do that.

That time in my life, from the first day on the Shirleys’ ranch, made me understand the needs of horses that have been treated poorly and are scared or troubled. You can’t just fix things by showing them love while doing nothing with them. You have to give them some direction, a purpose, a job. They need something to do, a direction to take, a vision of the future so that the past eventually becomes irrelevant. A mistreated horse has more needs than a horse that has had a nice upbringing. You need to be understanding, and you need to have empathy, but you also need to know that an excess of empathy can get you into trouble. You need to provide discipline without forcing it.

Discipline isn’t a dirty word. Far from it. Discipline is the one thing that separates us from chaos and anarchy. Discipline implies timing. It’s the precursor to good behavior, and it never comes from bad behavior. People who associate discipline with punishment are wrong: with discipline, punishment is unnecessary.

Without discipline, it would be easy to become the kind of man my dad was.

Generally speaking, I despise and loathe noxious weeds. Some would think this is because they’re the scourge of the West, and because they deprive the cattle on our ranch from eating perfectly good grass that would otherwise have grown
there. Actually, there are many scourges of the West, and although noxious weeds are one, I have other reasons for not liking them.

Starting about the time I was thirteen, I began to develop an imagination that was a little too busy for the adults around me to manage. Out back of our log horse barn was a small pasture that sat right on the creek bottom. It was a nice shady spot, and it was the home of our milk cow. She was a Jersey, a credit to her breed and gender, except that she was world famous among our cowboys who hated milking because she had terribly small teats.

Her pasture wasn’t used for anything else because it was completely full of cockleburs. Some refer to these botanical wonders as “burdock.” It’ll grow six feet high, and some plants have hundreds of burrs on them. If you get them in your hair, you just about have to get a haircut. Those burrs are like balls of Velcro or something out of a science-fiction movie.

Every once in a while, between calving and putting up hay and winter feeding, we’d have a little time on our hands in between projects on the ranch. That’s when occasionally I’d find myself bordering on getting into trouble. Forrest was always quite cognizant of this. He knew what I had in mind way before I’d even thought about it. About the time I was going to start causing trouble with the other boys or was on the verge of destroying something, I’d find myself down in the milk-cow pasture chopping weeds with a shovel. Forrest would send me down there with nothing but an irrigating shovel and instructions to dig up the burdock.

This task was tough when properly equipped for the battle, but armed with only a dull irrigating shovel, it was a mammoth undertaking for a little whelp like me. I hated that job. Every thirty days or so, I’d find myself back down in the pasture where it seemed there were three times as many cockleburs as there had been before—all that chopping had merely made them spread out.

For a few years I didn’t really catch on to the relationship between mischievous behavior and weed cutting. As I got a little older, I began to behave a little better. A certain sense of maturity came on, I guess. I was making money on my own then, riding colts and becoming more responsible, and I didn’t have to chop cockleburs quite as often.

However, about the time I was a senior in high school, I found myself down in the cow pasture again. I don’t remember exactly what I had done wrong, but it probably had something to do with staying out too late. I wasn’t too far from striking out and living on my own, and I figured I knew damn near everything a fellow needed to know.

Loaded with this infinite wisdom, I finally went up to the house and said, “Forrest, I’ve decided that you don’t have a very good system here. You don’t really know much about weeds, because I’ve been cutting weeds for five years on this ranch, and they’re just as bad now as they ever were, if not worse. And I’ve chopped my last weed. I refuse to cut another cocklebur. If you’ll go get a weed sprayer, I’ll be
happy to spray every weed on the ranch, but cutting weeds is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

He just laughed. He never said a thing—he just laughed.

A few months later I moved out on my own and started pursuing my life. Oddly enough, within two weeks after I left, Forrest went to town and bought a weed sprayer. It took one trip through to kill every cocklebur in the cow pasture. And they never came back.

Of course, at the time, I thought Forrest was trying to get me to kill all the weeds. He was actually having me preserve them until he was done raising his boys, and I was the last one. After I was gone he didn’t need the burdock anymore. The weed patch had served its purpose.

Sometimes you’ll work with colts that may be a little bit the way I was, kind of looking for an adventure when time permits. These colts are not bad, they don’t want to be bad, and they’re not trying to make things bad for you. They just might need a little something to do. They don’t need to be whipped, or knocked on, any more than I did as a kid. They just need to be directed, or better yet, redirected. So the work you do with colts like this may be like putting them in the cocklebur patch for a period of time. But don’t make them spend all their time in there. Give them opportunities to come out. You’ll find that eventually they’ll catch on. Punishing a horse for doing something wrong is no solution. A kick in the gut solves nothing. You’ll be farther
ahead of the game if you redirect him toward where you’d like him to go.

Whenever I think back to the cocklebur patch, I realize we all have our weeds to clear in life. I learned more with that shovel than I can say. At the time, I sure wished Forrest had bought that weed sprayer a lot earlier, but he didn’t, and he probably saved me from the “domino effect” of bad behavior had my idle time gone unchecked.

This was the first example in my life of a person making the wrong thing difficult, and the right thing easy, as opposed to making the wrong thing impossible through intimidation. Forrest and Betsy gave me an understanding of what real love was about, what devotion meant, and how a lesson can be shared, not dictated. I think, above all, Forrest gave me a clear understanding of the difference between discipline and punishment.