My seven-year-old son Luke is the only member of the family who has never embraced the equestrian lifestyle. This is partly because he has a natural inclination toward gadgets and machinery rather than horses, and partly because his ponies (we’ve tried several for him) tend to quickly pick up on his unassertive “passenger” riding style, and take full advantage of it. After being run off with a few too many times he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t want anything to do with riding at all.
Well, this is a cattle ranch: everyone has to be useful here. And neither Steve nor I was willing to accept that Luke would never experience the fun of helping to bring in the herd, or sorting cows and calves in a branding pen.
So about a week and a half ago Steve came home and announced that he’d found the perfect horse for Luke. “He’s just a loaner, but he’ll help Luke build his confidence up. He’s push-button safe.”
“A horse?” I asked. “Not a pony?”
Steve pointed out that a good horse is better than a bad pony.
I thought about that, and then said if Luke was game I was. So a few days later we all went to check out this paragon of obedience.
The instant we laid eyes on him, Luke and I started having second thoughts. This was a very *big* horse — bigger than any of the ones in our own string at home.
“He’s too big,” Luke declared, backpedaling a bit.
I tended to agree. I mean, it’s one thing to take a tumble off a 12-hand pony. A fall off this monster could break bones!
“Give him a try,” Steve urged. So we saddled up Gigantor (actually his name’s Beau), and Luke rode him around the yard, shaking like a leaf and whimpering the whole time. Luke I mean; Beau was fine. Maybe a little on the sluggish side, but that’s not such a bad thing for a kid who’s been soured by too many bolting ponies.
“He’s too big,” Luke repeated after the test drive.
“It’s totally up to you,” I told him. “We can take Beau home for you to ride, or you can go on riding Trinket.” Trinket is his current pony, a cute little thing with a scarily unpredictable streak.
He thought about it for a long moment, apparently weighing Beau’s lumbering compliance against Trinket’s perky stubbornness, and then mumbled, “I’ll take Beau.”
So we brought Beau home, gave him a few days to settle in, and then the four of us went on a family trail ride. Luke started out terrified, trembling, protesting loudly to all and sundry that he’d never wanted to learn to ride in the first place and lamenting about the unfairness of life in general. But by the end of the ride Beau’s laid-back obedience had lulled him out of his fear, and he even seemed to have gotten used to the size of his new mount. Steve and I agreed that we should do family rides every Sunday for as long as the nice weather holds out, to work on Luke’s riding.
Yesterday, to my amazement, Luke prompted us to start getting ready for our weekly ride. “Come on,” he pressed, “I thought we were going to ride on Sundays!”
Wow.
Since Luke was feeling more comfortable, and the weather was gorgeous, we went for a much longer ride this time. Beau and Luke (believe it or not, the Dukes of Hazard joke never occurred to me until I started writing this post) got along beautifully, and Luke even voluntarily trotted up at the front of the group for a while! Woohoo!
What a difference the right mount makes! We’re hoping this will be a turning point in Luke’s feelings about riding.
And many thanks to Ted and Bentley for the kind loan of their horse. :^)
We’ll have that boy ridin’ herd before he knows it!
In Other News…
I opened this blog account because it seemed like a good place to post pics and snippets from my recent road trip, but while I’ve been doing that the idea of having my own long-term personal blog has been gradually growing on me. I can address a broader range of subjects here than on my Mahogany site, and I really like the extra features and sense of community that WordPress offers. I’ve gotten comfy here. :^)
So, from here on out my ramblings will leave the Interstate and venture down the many winding paths that make up my life on a small cattle ranch in rural SoCal. Favorite topics will likely include gardening, books, food, family life, ranch life, and life in general, presented in a (hopefully) witty and amusing fashion for your entertainment.
Stay tuned!
DAYS 26 THROUGH 28 part II
We’d planned to check out the Mystery Castle in Phoenix on the return trip, but with Elizabeth not feeling well I was prepared to skip it and just head straight home. This suggestion was met with dismay by both kids, though, so on to the castle we went!
The Mystery Castle is at the center of a tale of woe and whimsy. Apparently in 1930 a man named Boyce Gulley found out that he had terminal tuberculosis. He reacted to this news by abandoning his wife and toddler daughter Mary Lou, running away to Phoenix, and building a castle there for the child he’d left behind. Not being a wealthy man, he chose a site near the town dump and built his castle out of whatever he could salvage: bits of cars and wagons, discarded bricks and blocks and stones, old bottles, you name it and he used it.
His wife and daughter never saw him again, or heard anything about him until after his death 15 years later, when they recieved legal notice of the property they’d inherited.
Something about this story tickled my kids’ imaginations in a big way; they really wanted to see a castle made of salvaged odds and ends for themselves.
This “castle” is really something. The materials it was built from were very Southwestern in flavor, so the final product is equal parts Camelot and Spanish Hacienda:
Nearly all the furniture, both inside and out in the courtyards, was built-in. Doesn’t this guest bed look comfy:
There are a total of 13 fireplaces in the castle. Because Phoenix can get, you know, a little chilly for three or four weeks out of the year. ;^)
Here’s one of the windows in the chapel:
Mary Lou Gully actually still lives in the castle her father built for her. Some of–well, *most* of her decor choices are a bit eccentric.
This is the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft that comes down into the “tavern.” The top of the shaft looks like a wishing well on an upper courtyard. Pretty nifty design for keeping partygoers well-supplied:
Poor Elizabeth skipped most of the inner tour for fear of throwing up inside the castle, but she did make it through the whole visit without any mishaps.
My pics don’t really do this place justice–it’s quite the architectural wonder.
When we’d seen everything there was to see, we got back in the car and headed for home. Here’s a shot of Palm Desert as seen from a few miles farther up the Palms To Pines Hwy:
We arrived home a little past 8pm, local time, and immediately got buried under an avalanche of happy dogs and a happy Steve. I helped Elizabeth get settled into a warm bath, and then just kicked back and enjoyed being home again.
This road trip was an amazing experience. Three weeks later the kids are still talking about things they saw and did from one end of the country to the other. As for me, I’ve settled back into the domestic routine with a fresh sense of contentment and appreciation for the life I have here. Just in time for Thanksgiving, I have reconnected with my thankfulness.
Life is good. :^)
DAYS 26 THROUGH 28 part I
We left Aaron’s house on Friday morning en route to Odessa TX. Texas is a freaking big state; it takes a while to get through.
Saturday we drove from Odessa back to Lordsburg NM.
Sunday morning things got interesting. An excerpt from the travel journal entry I made the next day, Monday:
Yesterday wasn’t one of our better days. Elizabeth got hit by some sort of stomach bug; either that or the overdose of Zoo candy finally caught up with her. All I know is that as we were getting ready to leave Lordsburg she suddenly spewed technicolor vomit on the hotel parking lot.
And again in the restaurant where we stopped for breakfast.
And again in the restaurant’s restroom. Twice.
And at random intervals throughout the day.
Pretty much all we could do was keep her well-supplied with barf bags and sanitizing wet wipes. The mere mention of food was enough to set her off. She was just miserable.
It was a very long day. But even the less-than-ideal circumstances didn’t squelch the kids’ youthful curiousity and sense of adventure. Somewhere near El Paso we’d begun seeing billboards advertising “THE THING,” whatever that was. By the time we got to Arizona THE THING billboards were all over the place, and by the time we got to the appropriate exit Luke and even Elizabeth were wild to find out what THE THING might be. I admit to a certain amount of curiousity myself. So, we took the exit, pulled into the parking lot of a big gift/souvenir store, and plunked down a grand total of $2.50 to see THE THING.
As tourist traps go, this was one of the strangest I’d ever seen. It was a museum of sorts, full of random oddities. We walked through a series of sheds; the first was full of old vehicles (including a 1937 Rolls Royce which is “believed” to have been used by Hitler) and figures carved out of wood (from classic wooden Indians and the oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon to a bizarre life-size display of torturers and their victims).
The second shed was full of…um…well…I don’t know what they were. Someone had taken branches and chunks of wood and added a few details here and there to turn them into creatures. There were dozens of them. A few samples:
Finally we come to the third shed. Here are more of the weird tree animals, and the actual THING.
THE THING is apparently a mummified woman holding a mummified baby, both encased in glass and concrete. There are no details given as to who they were or where they hail from, and the longer I looked at them the more they looked like they might just be papier maché. You be the judge:
Our curiousity satisfied (sort of), we continued on our way.
DAY 25
Thursday morning Aaron and Kris took us to a great park where the kids could unleash their energy on something other than the house. It had a terrific playground, complete with climbing wall…
…space exploration ops…
…all sorts of swings (that’s Mandi on the tire swing with Luke)…
…and a bunch of other fun stuff. Gotta say, Frankenclown sorta gave me the wiggins…
…but I’m not a fan of clowns anyway. Clowns are scary. And btw, see that kid with the red bow in her hair? Did Not Play Well With Others. She attempted to bully pretty much every other child on the playground, then zeroed in on Brendon. Maybe he looked like an easy target, being the youngest and all. Kris was not amused, and soon sent the little thug on her way.
We spent a few hours at the park, long enough for the kids to get all the frolicking out of their systems. But the fun was just beginning, because that evening we took Luke, Elizabeth and Mandi to the Fort Worth Zoo for its Halloween Boo At The Zoo event. Everything a kid could want: candy, critters, spooky decorations…
“Lasers charged; fire at will!”
Hang like an Egyptian…
I liked the cool pumpkin sculptures:
And the kids had a blast in the Blue Room, where they got to see themselves projected into a tv image:
Day 25 was definitely an all-around success. :^)
An Invincible Summer 