May 30th
I herded two wild horses...on foot
Rode on a four wheeler.
Listened to a discussion on how to castrate sheep
...these firsts are supposed to be done with intention, which means I'm not doing so well. That said I also rode for the first time in a few years on a horse that hadn't been touched for six months. It went...okay.
I want to give you some perspective on what an average day looks like. Obviously I can't do that yet seeing as my first full day was today. Regardless, I'll tell you about today. I woke up at six, actually I first woke up at four and the silence was tremendous, which seems ironic as there are animals all over the property and bugs and birds making all kinds of noise during the day. But yeah, six o'clock I started getting up and dressed. Made a breakfast of OH! Another first. I had almond milk in my cereal. That was intentional. So breakfast and then out to start working with the horses and cutting down the weeds in the round pen. There's only one horse who is truly trained and that's a Paint named Herman. Having all not been groomed for months their manes and tails were completely tangled and dreaded with these strange sticky weeds that look like some kind of toy you'd get out of a gum ball machine. After taking out half of Herman's hair to get them out, the rancher I'm staying with told me to hop on him. Not thinking....at all...about the fact he hadn't been ridden for months I said sure and hopped on. This proved to be a huge mistake because I did not have bug spray on and now I look like I have the mumps. Going out to the east pasture we walked through grass that was up to two to two and a half feet high. All the bucking, balking, kicking, head tossing and stomping aside, the mosquitoes were by FAR the least enjoyable aspect of the ride. Other than that it was just like sitting on a pissed off couch, since that's what a Western saddles feel like anyway...couches, Herman brought the crazy.
After that we got two other horses exercised in a round pen and our exercise was chasing them around to get them in there. Nothing too crazy. By then it was 9:15 and I was ready for lunch. Instead we both ate a bunch of Oreos and went out to hitch the trailer to the truck so we could pick up the other two mustangs the neighbor had been keeping. The "town" we're in has a post office that's closing (how you can close a post office I don't know) and a 'store' that is probably smaller than your kitchen yet contains more liquor. If everybody in town owns a few hundred acres at least and the rest is two building how does one call it a town. We passed a sign that said Pop:481. That doesn't count. That's not a population it's a collection. There are people with more antique spoons in their house then there are people here.
The Rancher points out neighbors to me who have simple names I can't remember and who live miles and miles away despite being 'next door'. I'm not condoning violence, but if you wanted to hide a body... It rained on and off all day and driving down the dirt road to get to the friend with his horses turned semi treacherous quickly. The man with the horses remakes covered wagons from antique parts then leads trails with them and his horses. It's a weird hobby, but what else is one to do out there. I say make your Oregon Trail wagons, if it makes him happy who gives a fuck. This man was a fascinating character. He successfully chewed a toothpick while over the course of an hour lunging one horse, trailering another, smoking two cigarettes and drinking two cups of coffee. He also called me Sasha which is admirable in that I can appreciate people who really don't give a fuck.
After castration chatting over coffee, two Canadians showed up to buy tipis for their baby lambs. Apparently that's a thing, keeps the babies and their moms warm.( Learned something today, didn't ya?) We headed back to the ranch to unload the brother, Thunder,3, and his sister, Cheyenne,2. After struggle fest 2014 of getting Cheyenne into the trailer, both horses refused to get out, putting one leg on the ground then freaking out and hopping back in. Eventually we got them both out and were able to exercise them before reintroducing them to their herd, which included their mother. The reintroduction did not go well as the other horses took it upon themselves to put the new ones in their pecking order. Lots of running, biting and kicking. After being in the house for less than a half hour we noticed the two outside and saw they had jumped the fence to get away from the rest. The pasture goes on for acres so instead of trying to catch them we just attempted to herd them to a separate pen. This worked until one stepped on a ribbon, freaked out and ran away. On the second attempt she ran right up to the barbed wire fence she jumped out of, stopped, and jumped right back in. Fast forward, long story short, you don't care, we caught them both and hopefully they will be there tomorrow morning, if not they'll come back eventually...I think.
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| Cheyenne and I |
We were pretty much done for the day by this point though I was exhausted by eleven and again at a quarter til three. That will probably be even worse by tomorrow. However, as the Rancher says, it really doesn't feel like work...as I count the burst blood vessels in my hand. But he's right. When I was ready to pass out at eleven I felt guilty, thinking back to when I was in Boston I had all this energy. I thought to myself I should make a point to start doing yoga in the morning before I start outside. Then it dawns on me, when I was in Boston I wasn't doing jack shit! I did yoga, ate bacon, and slept for twelve hours a day and oh yeah I didn't do any work!
The Rancher tells me things never go the way as planned. I nod that I understand, but I don't think he believes me. This may sound weird, but I really feel like living in Bangkok made me a much smarter functional human being. I am now accustomed to things never going the way they should. With the elimination of the expectation things will go according to plan, I am now drastically less stressed out. I also have really honed in on my executive planning skills, running through plan B, C, and D before even executing A. These two things with a somewhat competent level of independence make me a highly functional person. I am not always confident that I can do things however, I know I've overcome many challenges and I use this evidence as motivation to do the best I can in a given situation. You either figure it out or you don't, but let's be real here are you really not going to figure it out? Come on now, you totally will.
Anyways, I'm really happy with my decision to come out here. Normally when I make a big decision
by the second day I get this 'oh shit, I've made a huge mistake' feeling. This wasn't a big decision, it's two weeks of my time, but even so I'm in the middle of nowhere. I could be easily murdered and disguarded or turned into one of those psycho cases where the girl is raised by cattle and lives in a shed for ten years. I even thought about all those happening and thought 'eh, I could probably deal'. What the fuck has happened to me? Am I like the Apache helicopter of human beings now? Not quite...but maybe.
