Riding Barranca

by Laura Chester

  We only have another hour before heading back, so we try to make the best of being out in the fresh warm air. Australia seems especially child-and-dog-friendly. There are strollers and puppies everywhere. One jogging mother goes by at a fast clip pushing her baby ahead of her. The horses seem used to all the distractions and certainly know when they are headed for home. I ask Howie for one final short canter, but when he breaks out of it, I feel a twinge in my back and fear trouble for the long flight home. I will appreciate my own good horses more than ever.

  After dismounting, I notice that my inner thigh muscles are stressed, which I have not felt in years. At least I’ve had a bit of a workout, and Ayler was not bothered at all by the dander. He says repeatedly how happy he is to be riding again. I imagine the day when I can take Kailer and Cash out for a pony ride. What a pleasure that will be.

  After showering and packing up, I have to say goodbye to my grandsons. I feel weepy leaving them, not knowing when I will see them again. I have bought each of them a little truck. As they sit at an angle to each other in their highchairs, I kiss them over and over and tell them how much I love them. Clovis ushers me out of the house as I wipe away tears, giving me an understanding hug.

  ARIZONA

  Peanut’s Flying Mane

  Picking up Peanut

  After our two-week trip, we return to Patagonia jet-lagged. When I get up at eight in the morning, there is already a red blinking light signaling a message on my answering machine. I call Melinda back, and she wonders if I can make it over by nine to pick up Peanut before a threatening storm moves in. I thought she was going to have Peanut with her for a few more days, according to our agreement, but I don’t want to argue. She considers his training done.

  When I arrive, Melinda tells me that Peanut became buddies with the little calf in the next pen. But one night she put the two of them together in the same enclosure— Peanut became defensive of his space and really beat up on the poor little guy. The next morning the calf was all scarred up, shaking, and sorry-looking.

  Before I get in the saddle, she shows me some of the stretching exercises she has been doing with Peanut, using bites of carrot to make him turn his head back to touch his side, treat, then the other side, treat, bending way down, treat. I lower her stirrups to the last notch. They still seem short compared to what I’m used to, but she feels that I should have some bend in my knee, rather than riding with my legs hanging straight down.

  She is using a halter/bridle combination, which she’s willing to lend me until I can get an appropriate bit. Melinda doesn’t like Peanut’s usual bit that hangs too low in his mouth. He responds much better with a curb chain. She thinks I should buy an Imus Comfort Bit that has a lot of give.

  Out on the road, Melinda suggests that I sit back in the saddle more, letting my hips move with the horse, keeping my body relaxed and my shoulders still. This feels right. I get him into a flat walk. He does seem to have made great progress, though it is a bit difficult keeping him going straight ahead.

  Then she hops on and works him a while, making him stop and back up whenever he breaks into a pace. This is his reprimand, but when he moves nicely, she releases and praises him profusely. I can tell that he will need a lot of consistency and follow up before this gait locks into his young brain. But Melinda thinks he’s a fabulous horse. “He has so much potential, and he hasn’t gotten into any rotten habits like a lot of four-year-olds. His fast walk is just like a glide. I really fell in love with him. He only needs to pay attention. Whack him on the rear end if he needs to wake up. There you go.”

  She admits that she might be getting out of the training business. “It’s not the horses, but the people.” Was I one of those people? “I’m just not a people person,” she confesses. I understand, but we seem to get along pretty well. “It only takes one person to ruin your reputation,” she continues, talking about some horse owners that want her to do all the work, but who think they know how the work should be done.

  Melinda warns me about letting just anyone ride him. “That could ruin him,” she says. “And it’s important to warm him up and cool him down with at least fifteen minutes on either end. You can’t just cowboy out of the corral.” I wouldn’t do that anyway.

  Back in the yard, we transfer the leftover grain and hay into my truck. Peanut is easy to load. I approach her wild Indian mare, and Melinda says, “She won’t let you touch her,” but I go ahead and pat her anyway. The mare stands nicely while I stroke her shoulder. Melinda is surprised. Maybe I’m more of an animal person, too.

  Young Daphne

  Daphne’s Visit

  Nice to have complete trust in one’s riding companion, and that is the case with my beautiful, blond niece, Daphne. She has ridden all of her life. One time, when I asked her how high she could jump, she responded, “I can jump just about anything.” She began riding with the Fairfax Hunt when she was ten, going at a full gallop for hours, jumping hedges and walls. But when Daphne turned twelve, a friend of her parents fell off during a hunt and was severely injured. Only then did her parents make her stop. She switched gears and went into show jumping, taking fences that were sometimes as high as six feet. I wonder if her parents were aware of this, as they dropped her off at the barn in the morning and picked her up at night.

  Getting out of the trailer, Tonka barges by me, knocking me down on the ground. Luckily it is unusually soft earth from all the rains and I’m not hurt, but I realize how I have to practice a more graceful and mannerly exit. I have to assert myself with him so that he knows who’s boss.

  This morning, we are riding down to the Sonoita Creek near Patagonia Lake. I am eager to see how the water is flowing after all the rain. The long desert slope down to the creek is covered with ocotillo. I tell Daphne how the tips of the long cactus wands will soon burst into a blazing red, but it might be another three weeks before the hillsides are painted with that sweep of color.

  From this distance, it looks like some of the cottonwoods along the creek have begun to bud out, but we are still a couple of weeks away from high spring. Daphne keeps saying how beautiful it is here—certainly the opposite of New York City, and I am glad that she can give her mind a good airing out. Tonka is going extremely well, especially after we cross the water and head down the well-maintained trail. For the most part, the mesquite branches are at a safe distance from our arms and legs, but I point out some cholla, and warn Daphne to give it a wide berth.

  I keep to the lead as it makes Tonka more relaxed. I am still having some difficulty with his choppy canter—if he gets in the wrong lead, it really feels scrambled, but if I start him off going up an ascent, he usually goes well, though he will never be as comfortable as Barranca.

  We follow the cairns, little towering piles of stacked rocks that mark the way. Moving downstream, we realize that we are the only ones here, not another hiker or rider in sight. It always feels exciting to have this place to ourselves, especially as we enter the area where large bluffs form on either side of the creek—we almost feel like Indian scouts. Finally reaching the long, narrow cave, we tie up both horses, and settle down on the sandy banks of the creek to eat our sandwiches in the sun.

  Heading home, Tonka gets into a beautiful fox trot. It’s a pleasure to feel him moving forward so nicely. As we climb back up the path toward the trailer, we talk about family. Daphne just spent a couple of nights with my mother in Scottsdale, and Mom’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse.

  Daphne reports that Mom’s caregiver, Wanda, described a recent hallucination where Mom thought my brother and I were playing in her fireplace. She kept yelling at Georgie to Stop It! He was shaking and choking me and she couldn’t get him to quit. This account sends a visceral shiver down through me. Could this be a memory of something that really happened, or was it simply a fabrication of her late-stage dementia?

  Laura and Georgie

  Certainly, growing up, I was not protected from my older brother. The message I received was that it was okay for h
im to attack me, that no one would look out for me, and that I had better learn how to run. If cries of complaint were taken to our mother-in-collusion, her only response was, “Don’t be a tattletale.”

  But my brother and I were also allies. When my parents were touring Europe, and our housekeeper, Margie, did something twisted, like make us eat raspberries crawling with ants, Georgie would jump up from the table and get on the antique, long-disconnected wall phone and pretend to call the operator, “Help, HELP!” At such moments I applauded him.

  If my brother was jealous of me, and cut off my fine, blond hair, trying to make me “be a boy,” I do not blame him now, for his behavior was not curtailed. Our mother gave him permission through her neglect.

  In retrospect, I think the only one Mom managed to protect from scrutiny was our darling father. She took the fall for him. She became “Mean Margaret,” the black hole in our seemingly perfect, extended family, which allowed my father to maintain his pose in his nearly spotless, infallible armor. With her well-used rag, she’d wipe away all telltale signs of his misbehavior and get the dark, oily stain on herself.

  For years, every summer, Mom threatened our father with divorce, telling him she would smear his name and misdeeds all over the paper. But then she tried to reason it all away—“This often happens to older men. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was with a more attractive person.” But of course she felt betrayed. Meanwhile, we all basically turned our heads and blocked her out, immune to her outbursts, unless we were all having dinner upstairs in the carriage house apartment and she rode by on her electric golf cart, stopping down below to announce, “We haven’t made love in twelve years! How do you like that?”

  I think that if she had been married to a more masculine, dominant man, one who didn’t encourage her dark side, she might have been a happier, more loving person. But no one was questioning our father’s behavior any more than they were trying to understand hers.

  I was the scapegoat, sacrificed on the altar of their misalliance. My presence kept her eyes off of other targets of warranted jealousy. While I knew that he loved our mother and the four of us immeasurably, what he kept locked in the closet of his brain was the most exciting thing!

  For some reason it was easy for me to forgive my father. I was more connected to him. When he was recovering from his esophageal cancer operation, Mom left for Arizona, and I was called in to look after him.

  When I arrived at Milwaukee’s Columbia Hospital, he looked amazingly good, not like death warmed over, as I had expected. His color and humor were excellent. But he was distressed by the tube that ran into his nose and down his throat. He had an IV in his arm, but this nose tube was most disturbing, especially when he tried to talk. But talk he did, for a good two hours, until I realized that I had worn him out. The next day he had a sore throat.

  Popi Rides Again

  While I was there in the hospital room, Mom called from Scottsdale. It was hard to believe that she had left two days after his cancer surgery. But now I realized that my father had probably urged her to go, knowing that it would make things easier on them both. He was happy to talk to her long distance, and I overheard him telling her that he loved her. This made me feel good, just as it had when I was a little girl and he told me that he loved me very much, but that he loved my mother most. I wished she had believed that.

  The last time Reverend Lee showed up at the hospital, Popi told him that he should just pray for him, he didn’t need to visit, but here Reverend Lee was again. I found him to be a very likable young man. He seemed particularly open and nonjudgmental.

  Popi said he believed that heaven was a spiritual longing common to all people, the idea more important than the fact. “I think heaven is probably on some cloud,” he continued, “but I’m not sure which one. I go to Church to support your mother, unless the horses need exercise. Am I damned?”

  My father claimed to be an agnostic (not atheist). “I try to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I tend to believe that when a flower dies, its petals are simply blown away—that’s the end of it.”

  The next morning Popi was ready to get that damn tube out of his nose and throat. The nurse had promised him, and he was getting frantic about it. He had held on up to this point and it had tested his patience right up to the end, but now he threatened to pull it out himself if someone didn’t come immediately and do it for him. I had rarely seen him so agitated.

  I got on the phone, and a nurse rushed in. One simple yank and the deed was done. What a relief. He was so grateful. Popi had not eaten any food for a week, receiving all of his nourishment through the tube that fed into his stomach.

  When Reverend Lee arrived, I put a sign on the door—Do Not Disturb—and my father called the nurse’s station and said, “No phone calls now. I’m receiving Extreme Unction!”

  Reverend Lee read several blessings from the Book of Common Prayer. Then he took some holy oil and marked my father’s forehead in the shape of the cross. He opened a silver pyx that he had hanging around his neck. Like a large locket, it opened to reveal the host, a little cross stamped into the middle of each wafer. He put one on my father’s tongue and gave me one, too. Then, the three of us held hands and recited the Lord’s Prayer. But I heard Popi stop, and I knew he was crying. They say that the Holy Spirit is present when there are heartfelt tears. By the end of the prayer, Popi joined in again, but he was still feeling weak and weepy.

  “What do you think Christ meant by: My Father’s house has many mansions…I’m going to prepare a place for you?” Then he started to cry again. I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder.

  Reverend Lee responded, “I interpret that to mean that God has many rooms for many different kinds of people, space for all. It’s my own personal belief that no one will be turned away from God’s Love unless he out-and-out rejects God and His gifts.”

  I believed that no one would be turned away from God’s Love, period.

  When I told my sister Cia about this, she thought our father might have been concerned about the quality of his residence on the other side—would it be up to snuff? Would there be a mansion on that side, too?

  Popi was appreciative of everything I did—the posters I bought to hang on the hospital walls, the egg carton foam pad I got for the bed, the new scrapbook for his get-well cards. It was filling up quickly. I ordered a hospital bed for my parents’ apartment, then went out and bought food to stock their kitchen, ordered vitamins, which he would never take, antioxidant tea, which he would never drink, and shark fin powder, which he would return. But mainly, what I did was distract him.

  I wanted to do all I could, as if my efforts might make a difference in the final outcome. I wanted to get things set up before my mother came home. I dreaded that changing of the guard, for as much as she said she appreciated what I was doing, I knew underneath that she would be angry at me for doing what she could not.

  Finally, the conscience-buzzer went off in her brain, and she realized that maybe she should be in Milwaukee taking care of her critically ill husband. She was suddenly concerned about the cancer that had been detected in his lymph nodes and insisted that he could not get chemo. “Everyone who gets chemo dies.”

  My weepiness seemed to be an expression of my helplessness. I found myself sitting at a stop sign, waiting for the light to change until I realized—this was not a light: I could go. I felt as if some part of my brain was displaced, that I could easily forget where I was, where I was going, who I was calling on the telephone. I felt oddly removed, absent from myself.

  Then, I braced myself for my mother’s return. I had changed her sheets and made her bed. The apartment was immaculate. But on entering the apartment, she started moving bouquets around as if each one had been set down in the wrong place.

  She said how wonderful I had been to come and take care of her husband, but then, in the same breath, she went on to tell me how she had played golf on Tuesday and tennis on Wednesday. I was appalled.

  “The
doctors want Popi to come home on Friday,” I told her.

  “He’s not coming here until Monday when I’m ready for him,” she snapped. I guess she needed four days to unpack her things. Wanda was being flown all the way from Arizona to help her rearrange her closet.

  The first day home, she had scheduled a hair appointment in Hartland, an hour away, and she wondered if I wanted to go along and have a massage. I declined.

  On arriving at the hospital, one of my cousins was visiting with his kids. Mom came in like a fury ordering everyone to leave, insisting that children should not be allowed to visit. He could catch pneumonia. Yes, and he could catch a lot of things spending an extra four days in the hospital.

  I could visibly see my father’s spirits drop. He was upset by her outburst. He was not strong enough to take it. He told her she should not come to the hospital if she was going to bring so much tension with her. She stayed fifteen minutes, then left. “This is all too much for me.”

  I suggested that it might be fun to share Chinese takeout with Popi at the hospital that evening, but she wanted to treat me to some new, fancy restaurant, and I felt obliged to go. Once we had settled into our leather booth, she recounted how my niece, Daphne, had gotten so upset about Popi that she started crying at school, unable to finish her exam. Hearing this, I started to cry as well. Mom was horrified. “For heaven’s sake, don’t cry here in the restaurant!”

  I wanted to discuss what the doctors had said and her only response was, “I don’t want to talk about him. I’m sick of talking about him.”

  Everything she said rubbed me wrong—how he could have NO visitors. No phone calls either. Even though the doctors wanted him up, leading a normal life, moving, exercising, getting his metabolism going, but she insisted, “I need some time to rest.” As far as she was concerned, he shouldn’t have gotten cancer. He shouldn’t have done this to her!