Becoming the Storm
4 A Little Ride
BECAUSE LABOR DAY wasn’t until the seventh this year, we had two full weeks of school before the holiday. That also meant that we had only three days off after my two days of extra shooting before classes started.
I decided that I needed to survey the realm from an extra five feet up. I headed to the pasture Saturday morning to saddle Jingo.
“Morning, Brian,” Larry said when I got to the pasture.
“Hey, Larry. Riding lessons this morning?” I asked. Jingo trotted up to me before I even whistled and nuzzled my arm looking for carrots.
“Yes. The younger kids have been all over the horses since they got here. Every one of them has been taking part in caring for them, learning to groom them, and learning to ride,” Larry said. “We need more horses.”
“Holy shit! Are you serious? Do we have enough pasture and hay production for more horses? We scraped and ground an entire cutting this month. Are we even going to have enough to feed the guys we’ve got?” Damn! There I go again. I really needed to get control of myself. Larry wouldn’t suggest more horses if we couldn’t support them.
“Yes. If you want. Let me saddle Diablo and we’ll go for a ride. I know you want to get out and look at the whole ranch. You’ve been pretty busy this summer.”
“No kidding. I’d love to have you ride with me. I’ve got a ton of questions.”
“I’ll bet you do. And I’ve got a few myself,” Larry asked.
“Hey, you dudes!” Theresa yelled at us. “Don’t you ride off without me.” I turned to look at her. Damn! She sure got her shape back after Eleanor was born. Of course, Doreen snapped back into shape pretty quickly, too. She was a little softer in the tummy than she used to be, but she looked great. I resolved to visit the mother of my child later that day.
“Who’s the hot lady, Larry?” I asked.
“That’s no lady. That’s my wife.” We laughed as Theresa scowled at us. I couldn’t let it go.
“You got a new one? What happened to the nice matronly mother of your child? I can’t believe you went out and got a trophy wife already!” Theresa slugged me in the arm—pretty firmly.
“Just watch it you! I’ll cut off your supply of vitamins and butt cream,” she laughed.
“Oh, please don’t do that! Where’s Ellie?”
“La Madrina has her. Along with your son. She and Samantha and the triplets are playing school.”
“She’s only a year old!” I said. “And Matthew is only nine months.”
“And he will not let his cousin get ahead of him. I’ve never seen a little one progress so quickly. Have you seen them sign to each other?”
“Yes. Which reminds me that I need to enroll in that sign language course this fall. I’m no further along than they are,” I said. We’d all decided to learn sign language and teach it to the kids. Renee and Cassie had taken the lead. Renee was actually collecting data for her Masters’ thesis. I could finger spell and say “I love you.” That’s about it. We finished saddling our horses and headed out toward the woods.
Instead of entering the shelter of the trees, though, Larry turned and led us to the gate into the expansion pasture.
“By monitoring them closely, we were able to keep damage to the second pasture to a minimum during the wet spell. It’s on higher ground and drains a little better than the front pasture. We’ll have to till and seed the front pasture when it’s a little drier. They really tore it up,” Larry said.
“You actually had to cut this one?” I said, looking at how even the grass was all around.
“Carl and George came out and baled yesterday. Even with summer grazing, we put up fifty bales. The past two weeks of dry weather really let us get out and get some work done. By late September I expect to get another full cutting done on the production field. We’ll still be selling overage in November.”
“That’s amazing. So, we could support some more horses,” I said. We rode up toward the front of the property and toured the new development. Ron and his crew had laid out the roads and sewer and were going to try to have them in before winter weather got too bad. There was a much longer construction season down here than in Mishawaka. Three foundations were scheduled to be poured so NMH could deliver three houses before Christmas. Marshall and Martha were very excited that they might be in their new home by the holiday. It was the first one slated for delivery.
“It’s… Brian, we need to tell you something that will be hard,” Theresa said. “Most of your horses are rescues. We sold them to you. I know you chose the ones you wanted, but… They are getting old.”
“That’s not a problem,” I said. “Silk is getting pretty old, too. She must be…”
“Thirty-two, Brian,” Larry said softly. “Jingo is thirty years old. Jubal and Timber are only twenty-three. The rest of the horses, except Rika, are between them. Rika is practically a filly by comparison. She’s only sixteen.”
“Are you… are you saying we shouldn’t be riding them any longer?” I asked. I reached down and petted Jingo’s neck. He was my buddy. Dad brought him home for me just… Shit! Five years ago.
“No,” Theresa said. “It’s not like that. But we need to take it easy on them. As long as Jingo wants to get out and go, then by all means ride him. You are the only one who does. Just like Hannah is the only one who ever gets on Silk. Well, except the babies.”
“Well, Maddie isn’t here that often.”
“No, but Ellie has already been on her as we walked her around the corral. And Hannah took Matthew in the Snugli. These old horses will love teaching our children to ride. But they aren’t ready to race the barrels anymore. And we shouldn’t take them out for miles and miles, even though that doesn’t happen as often here on the ranch as it did at Starbridge,” Theresa said.
“On the other hand, with thirty or forty people wanting to ride, all the horses get a workout—especially on weekends,” Larry said. We picked our way across the field toward Marshall and Martha’s house while I thought over what they said. I kept thinking I was growing up and getting old because I was almost twenty-one. Well, Silk had been a mature horse when I was four and Dad put me on her for the first time. Rika was only a spirited three-year-old when Betts got her dream horse. And Theresa and Larry were telling me they were old. They’d die. Sure, some horses live as long as forty, but it’s not that common. Especially for horses who have been working horses all their lives. I reached down and petted Jingo again and tried not to let my tears escape.
“Looks like Marshall and Martha have company,” I said. “We’d better not disturb them.”
“They’d shoot us on sight the next time if we didn’t stop and say hi,” Theresa said. We dismounted and were barely on the ground when Martha came out the door to welcome us.
“I just love it when you folks ride up on your big horses!” Martha said. “I feel like I’m in a Gunsmoke movie. Come in and have a cuppa with us. Del is here, too. He’ll want to meet you.”
We tromped into the house, all making sure we used the boot scraper next to the porch before we came up. Then we looked at our boots and all kicked them off outside the front door.
“If it isn’t the landlord,” Marshall laughed looking at me. “Brian, come meet Del Swanson. He was one of my son’s best friends.” I reached out to shake hands with the guy who I estimated was about the same age as my parents—maybe in his mid-forties. He had a big bushy beard and long hair. He had a high forehead, but his hair was still dark.
“This is my old lady, Maribelle,” he said, pulling a woman toward me. Holy shit! Sandy needed to meet these people. They were genuine hippies! She had long straight brown hair and wore a peasant blouse and a grannie skirt. She was very obviously braless. The fabric of her blouse was not heavy enough nor opaque enough to hide either the color or the definite points of her nipples.
“Very happy to meet you both, Mr. and Mrs. Swanson,” I said.
“Could you teach my kid some manners?” Maribelle said. “And my husband? Please, call me Maribelle.”
“And I’m Del, Brian. Marshall has been telling me all kinds of things about your ranch. You took over the old Wilkerson place,” Del said. Martha set cups of coffee in front of each of us and we settled in for a chat. I nodded to Del. “Too bad Rochelle turned into such a stick in the mud. Damn! We used to have fun.”
“You kids were all crazy,” Marshall said. “Max would hardly get home from school before he had a horse saddled to meet you two and Rochelle and her brother David. Didn’t your brother ride, too, Maribelle?”
“Yes, but he was five years younger, so most of the time it was the big kids trying to get away from him.”
“Same as it was with me and Junior,” Del said. “He was always trying to lose me tagging along. Didn’t succeed until he went to Nam. Damn it!”
“Del’s brother didn’t come back from that awful war,” Martha explained to us.
“It crushed Mom and Dad. Especially when I acted out as a drugged-up hippie protester. We ran off to a commune in California and spent six years hiding from cops, rangers, FBI agents, and military informers,” Del said. “After January of ’73, they quit looking for us. Then in September of ’74, Ford offered us all conditional amnesty. I took it. I was tired of hiding out.”
“What was the condition?” I asked.
“Two years public service. I’d met a Forest Ranger named Dick Raybould up near where we were squatted near Guatay. He was a decent guy and stopped by when he was on patrol to make sure we were keeping our place clean and not destroying anything. He was there that morning when he got a call on his CB that some power lines were down and had started a fire. It was being whipped up by the Santa Ana winds and was spreading fast. All rangers were being called in for fire suppression. He jumped in his jeep and looked straight at me. ‘You coming?’ he said. It was like he knew something. I jumped in the jeep and we took off just like that. I was on a fire line for two months.”
“He never even said goodbye,” Maribelle said. “For two months I sat up in that commune with our four-year-old wondering if I was ever going to see him again. The bastard.”
“Well, it got me interested in forestry,” Del continued, patting Maribelle on her thigh. She grabbed hold of his hand like she never wanted to let go. “When Ford offered amnesty, I took it and put in for service with the Forest Service. I didn’t have a degree in forestry, but Dick became my mentor and I finally did get a degree. We spent a lot of lonely time up in a fire tower,” he laughed.
“Are you still a Ranger?” I asked. His story was pretty cool in my mind. He looked at his wife and put his arm around her.
“Maribelle has been fighting some cancer and we decided we needed to come home. Treatment is going well, though. Look! She still has her hair,” Del laughed. She rolled her eyes.
“For Pete’s sake, Del. They aren’t treating me with radiation,” she said. “They just went in and cut the shit out and said I’m fine now. It wasn’t that bad. We can go back to the woods if you want to.” Del took her hand and brought it to his lips.
“Honey, you’re the only thing in this world I love more than the forest. I think we’ll stay here where you can be checked on regularly. The job over in Brown County is going to do us fine.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I love you, old lady.” There was an awkward silence for a minute as they looked at each other and we looked anywhere else.
“Well, I was telling Del and Maribelle that our new home was going to be finished by the holiday and you’d be looking for a renter for this old place. Seems the two of them like the idea,” Marshall said.
“I hadn’t even thought that far ahead. You sound like our kind of people,” I said. “You know we are attempting to create a community out here with the intention of incorporating eventually. Would you be in favor of that?”
“Well, if there were stipulations protecting forest and farmland, then yes,” Del said. “In fact, I’d agree to having our quarter annexed into the community.”
“Your quarter?” I said.
“Del and Maribelle own the quarter section, 160 acres, directly behind our place. You’ve been riding through their woods on a regular basis,” Marshall said. “That means that we’d probably have near enough votes to include the entire section plus a little in the community.”
“Well, we’ve been having some difficulty with the folks in the development in the southeast corner. There’s twenty houses on that property and only about half have expressed an interest in joining the community,” I said. The vote was slated for the spring primary and we were still short the required supermajority, even with the division of the original ranch and the new village we were creating. There were specific rules regarding who could vote on this kind of issue. Some people in the clan weren’t eligible to vote.
“I’ll help get them on our side,” Maribelle said. “My dad made it possible for a lot of those people to have their little ranch houses and horse acres. And he still owns three-quarters of that corner. I’ll tell him supporting the community is a requirement to get me to move back. Or to move out.”
We talked so long that Martha finally convinced us all to stay for lunch. She had a big steamy casserole in the oven and somehow I didn’t think our meeting with the Swansons was a complete accident. In fact, I was pretty sure Larry and Theresa were in on it.
By the end, I’d agreed to rent Marshall and Martha’s place to them after the new home was finished. They were eager to get it done as they were currently staying with Maribelle’s parents and it was driving them both crazy. We were trying to figure out how we could best integrate the southeast development with the new village and the ranch. It worried me a little.
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