When I was ten I wanted to be just like them

wear their wide-brimmed hats and oiled slickers

watched my mother whisper to the horses

learned to speak their language until they understood.

I wanted to be just like the Cowgirls.

Alone between the hay bales in the barn

the wooly ponies in the back pasture

I rode with my mother and the Cowgirls on all their wild adventures

and my legs were a mustang, the sage brush were the cattle

until I grew up and got a pony of my own.

Then I rode my pony

braided and sheened

english tack and jodhpur boots

trusting a language the judges couldn't hear

following the course to the sound of the Cowgirls whooping and hollering for me on the sideline.

And I never won blues

with my style not stiff and collected like a hunter's

rode easy and free with my heart not my hands

rode, as soon as I was old enough alongside the Cowgirls

wide-brimmed hat and oiled slicker

laughing and hollering to the chimes of the spurs

murr of the cattle

in a moment between childhood and rigid adolescence

when all that's left is reckless abandonment

and horses.

And I sit in my dorm room

listening to the rain outside my window

hear only the splash of hooves on creek-bed stones

rhythm of sand under thunder

hear the freedom echo in their whistles and hollers

and know that I will always have chaps hanging in my closet

So There I Was

So there I was, chasing the end of the day up the winding country road on a black horse, leading beside me a paint, a palomino, a sorrel and a bay, the shadows casting geometric patterns in the rows of cabbage and rutabaga across the fields to our right, the echo of hooves on asphalt bouncing off the visible walls of light that reveal the day's relinquish of duty to define sun and shadow and as we passed through these rays, separating them like liquid, I found myself so utterly present that all I could think of at that moment was, here I am.

As dog-tired as I was at the end of a long day that just seemed to keep getting worse, and despite the 95 degree heat, kept reminding me that when it rains it pours, I felt powerful and unreservedly alive trotting up the road with five horses in my hands, feeling the steady, forward movement of our bodies that became a single motion, a single action as if there was more than a set of reins and four lead ropes connecting us, as if we could have trotted through the night without breaking stride. A mile ahead of me was the ranch, hay already thrown down in the pasture, the rest of the herd already eating, which is what kept the steady pace and the pricked ears of my five companions. A mile behind us the rig sat on the side of the road, hood up, smoke rising up from the engine. I had already decided it was a bad day before I pulled to the side of the road in a cloud of engine steam and started unloading the horses out of the stock trailer to pony them home.

I heard the moan of his dirt bike from around the bend in the road and the horses heard it before I did. The paint and the palomino were tugging on their ropes, pulling ahead of the horse I was riding, as we rounded the corner and approached the bridge. He put the bike in neutral and waited for us to cross, grinning at me with my mess of horses and letting out a low whistle. I gave the horses' ropes a yank and brought them back alongside my horse. They were anticipating dinner and energized by the change in routine, all except for the bay, who dragged behind me, ears flopping and with a look of dull irritation on his face. The little sorrel, the only horse on my left side, pushed against my leg as we crossed the bridge, putting as much distance between himself and the rumbling dirt bike as he could. I was entertained by the thought that crossed my mind as we continued up the road and I heard him shift gears and pull a wheelie behind me as he headed out to the over-heated truck: his dirt bike is a four stroke not a two stroke. I smiled at the random bits of knowledge I had learned from him about motorcycles, trucks, hot-rod cars, tack, broncs, and cowboy style, and wondered what pieces I'd forgotten about football, baseball, surfing, and rugby.

We broke into a lope once we hit the dirt road and I started thinking about what was ahead of me and what was behind me in my life other than the ranch and the broke-down truck. The future was dangerous in possibility. I saw it like I imagined the Dakotas and the other mid-western states I'd never been to but envisioned as terrifying expanses of nothing, wide oceans of wheat that stretched in all directions and waved in the humid wind like a sea sick sailor's worst nightmare. The blankness of my future was accentuated by the jumbled activity of what lay directly behind me. I was at that undefined age between youth and what is too often referred to as "the real world," where dependency and responsibility blur and leave you feeling the weight of the world one minute and light as air the next. I lived alone, paid my bills, wrestled with my own daily struggles, felt like I'd lived through a lifetime of experiences, but all too often felt like I was still a child, wide-eyed and restless, with a world at my feet that I feared with the insecurity of a toddler, challenged with the ignorance of adolescence, and entered one day at a time with the confidence and cautious calculations of adulthood.

The roar of truck tires grinding on gravel turned my head just as it sent the horses dancing sideways. He was yelling out the window and motioning with his arm to get us off the road. He was making a run for the ranch on a busted radiator hose that he had, as he would later refer to it as, "oakie-engineered," at least until we could get down to the auto body shop and buy a new hose. The horses lost every last bit of patience after the truck flew by, the empty stock trailer rattling behind it, stirring up dust that blinded us as we knocked up against one another and I, too, gave up my composure as the end of this day beckoned just around the corner and up the hill. Their hooves tore unevenly at first into the gravel road as I drew back on the power that my horse leaned into his reins and yanked at the bay and the sorrel who dragged behind me refusing to break a trot while the paint and the palomino hauled on their ropes, ears pricked and nostrils flared, until, almost at once, the rhythm evened and the crunch of gravel sounded suddenly like the gait of a single horse. As the evening closed in and Aaron climbed out of the steaming truck, we galloped into the yard in a single motion and my five horses skidded, snorting, to a halt in front of their pasture gate. I sat for a moment, appreciating the sudden stillness around me, beneath me, in the cooling, lavender air of approaching night that enveloped us, a half moon suspended just above the silhouetted hill of the upper pasture where the rest of the herd munched peacefully on alfalfa, the remains of this day that I thought would never end left only in the yellow corner of the western sky, and I thought, so here I am.