Breaking Horses

There was a ranch down the street where I grew up in rural Southern California, just thirty minutes due east from Los Angeles. It was a horse ranch and on any day if you walked by the ranch, you could see true cowboys breaking horses. There was a corral near the street and without sidewalks, the fine, powdery, golden Chino dirt puffed onto the ranch owned by Old Lady Saterly. She was a tough, weathered women whose masculine cowboy clothes were the same every day: a plaid shirt covered with a rawhide leather vest with fringe, a large sweat-stained Stetson hat, worn out denim pants, chaps and cowboy boots with the toes turned up like she had been dancing ballet. Old Lady Saterly barked orders at her workers and sometimes when she got mad, I could hear her down by our house. She could yell louder than my mom, the neighborhood “old fish wife.”

I would walk down the dirt sidewalk, passing the few dusty plots of land between us and peek around a bush at the edge of the ranch. The majestic horses pulled at my attention like big bold magnets and despite being told to “never go down there,” I couldn’t help sneaking away every chance I got to be with them. I would pet them and tell them my stories and they would listen and nuzzle my head as if to console me. I watched the cowboys work the horses in the Southern California sun. Some of the cowboys sat on the fence rails while one mounted a horse without a saddle and was bucked around the corral. The men on the fence would talk, chew tobacco, and spit on the ground, causing the dust to mushroom like a wisp of smoke. They would work like this for hours, taking turns with different horses and getting thrown to the ground only to get back up, grab the reins, and onto the horse again. I didn’t understand everything they did and struggled to square what I saw on TV and in movies with the daily activities on the ranch. I became more and more curious as days, weeks, months passed. I just wanted answers. Why did some horses come into the corral with a saddle and some didn’t? Why did the men take turns? How could a person get a job like this? Did they live there like in the cowboy movies I was so fond of watching? Was there a triangle to signal meal time? The questions went on and on.

I had to know. I needed to get closer and maybe even ask my questions. I wanted to become a cowboy that worked with horses. It was my dream job. If I lived on the ranch, I could be with the horses all the time and not with my bickering parents or the bullies at school.

It was hard not to think about the horses and cowboys. If I couldn’t make it down to Saterly’s, I would be daydreaming about that ranch.

Only two doors down lived my babysitter. As if I needed one. But when my parents went out in the evenings Janie would come and make sure I stayed in bed, didn’t go out of the house and was safe. Janie had a beautiful chestnut horse and a small barn. If my mom had to go someplace on the weekends, I’d stay with Janie at her house. We would go to the barn and she would let me groom Chestnut. I realize now that I was being conned like Tom Sawyer. But unlike the original story, I didn’t mind and I learned a lot from taking care of Chestnut. She was older and gentle and I could ride her around the barn and the yard. Janie would bring over a ladder and have me climb up onto Chestnut. With no saddle and just the reins in my hands, I learned how to steer the horse around in a tight circle in the barn. She always seemed to get a little jerky and once she bolted out of the barn into the corral. It felt like flying, only something in me knew I couldn’t stay aloft for long. I dug my knees into Chestnut’s flanks so I wouldn’t slide off like one of the cowboys at Saterly’s. I held on to the reins and my determination until “BOOM,” I was on the ground just like some of the cowboys down the at the ranch.

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