Dancer and the Water Gap
Or, The Dangers of Teaching a Horse a Lesson
I’m a writer. Okay, that’s not much of a cognitive leap to sort out. You’re reading words I’ve written. More to the point I’m a storyteller. Have been for as long as I can remember. I was the kid in second grade that got up and told a story at show and tell time even if I didn’t have anything to show. Much of the time I made up stories about epic bike wrecks and imaginary adventures I had in the woods around my home. When I was home, out playing in the woods, I was always imagining sword fights, dastardly villains, and damsels in distress ( I know, I know, damsels don’t do distress these days). The point being, most of the time my mind was a far far away imagining stories that were better than the one I was living. Except, I was living a pretty great story. Let me share one with you from what I like to call Cowboy Days.
Water Gap
My dad is a cowboy. The real deal. Not some dude dressed in button down shirt, designer jeans, and a department store hat. Not a rodeo cowboy. A real life working cowboy. These days he’s a saddle maker out in Jackson Hole part of Wyoming. This is part of the story of our time in a little place called La Sale, Utah.
Dad took a job with La Salle Livestock just before the end of my freshman year of highschool. Up to that point I vaguely knew that dad had been a cowboy or was a cowboy. At the time he worked as a ditch rider for an irrigation company managing the water collection and distribution for local farmers in our part of the Montezuma Valley. That particular job involved a fair bit of horseback riding to get to parts of the streams and creeks that fed the Summit Ridge Irrigation Company’s network of reservoirs. So I was familiar with horses and could ride. Though I must admit I was a timid and indifferent rider at best in those days.
That of course changed when we packed up all our worldly possessions and our four horses and headed to Utah. La Salle Live Stock kept a significant portion of their herd in the mountains of Colorado for the summer at a place called Ground Hog. You can find it if you google it. Suffice it to say that it was all either uphill or down hill with Ground Hog creek running through the middle of it. And, Ground Hog Creek is where this part of the tale ends.
Dad, my brother, myself, and sometimes mom lived in the camp at Ground Hog. The camp consisted of two camp trailers, and outhouse, a large pasture for the horses, and a couple corrals constructed from Aspen poles. No running water, no electricity, no air conditioning. Though being up in the mountains meant that it never really got much above eighty degrees.
Part of cowboying is riding fence. You saddle a horse, load the saddlebags with lunch, fencing pliers, staples, a few bundles of bailing wire and a few feet of barbed wire. Then you mount up and start riding along the fence line. If or more often when you find a spot that needs fixing you dismount and get to work. Lather, rinse, repeat until it gets close to getting dark or you’ve finished the particular stretch of fence.
So far so good. Even a teenager can handle that task. And I did, quite often. This, of course, gave me ample opportunity to improve my indifferent horsemanship. Which did improve. To the point that I decided I would take mom’s horse, Dancer, out to repair the water gap over Ground Hog creek. Dancer hated crossing moving water of any kind and if I were going to fix the spot where the fence crossed the swift flowing creek well, we were going to have to cross that creek a time or two. And, Dancer had nearly thrown mom while crossing that very spot earlier in the week. Being a loving son young and full of piss and vinegar I was going to fix that damnable beast. So, I saddled Dancer, loaded my saddle bags, and off we went.
Arriving at the creek I had the foresight to anticipate some difficulty, so I emptied my saddlebags on the creek bank before we got down to the business of teaching Dancer that crossing Ground Hog creek was something he was going to have to get used to doing.
Saddlebags unloaded, I remounted and headed for the creek. Predictably Dancer balked. I gave him a light touch with the spurs. Dancer spun in a circle and began a little crow-hopping. Just to express his displeasure I suspect. A year earlier that little display would have probably been enough excitement for me. Not now. No sir. I’d been cowboying, in the mountains, riding damned near every day. Dad called me a cowboy and that was high praise. No way was I letting that damnable horse beat me.
So, I reigned Dancer in, rode back up the trail a bit and hooked him with those spurs. We hit that creek at a run. And we crossed it. With the adrenaline of that success singing in my veins I decided we were gonna do it again. And we did three or four more times. Then, on the fourth or fifth crossing, I still don’t recall which one Dancer decided he’d humored me long enough. Right there in the middle of Ground Hog creek we had our own little rodeo. No more gentle crow-hopping about with a light spin or two. Oh no. Dancer set to bucking in earnest. Sunfishing and whirling like we were out in Vegas at the National Finals Rodeo. And, damned if I didn’t hang on. I stayed with him for every stomach dropping leap and bone jarring landing. Right up to the point where he started slipping on the slick river rocks in the bottom of the creek. One second, I was on top the next we were going down in a heap of horseflesh and saddle leather.
It’s funny how your mind works when everything goes to hell. All I could think was the stories dad had told of horses falling and how damned dangerous it was. In a panic I kicked free of the stirrups and jumped. Lucky for me Dancer didn’t land on me. Unfortunately, he got up faster than I did. And, while I was still trying to stand up in knee-deep water so cold it hurt, Dancer trotted back to camp.
Cold, wet, and thoroughly pissed I did the only thing left to do. I waded to the bank, picked up my tools, and got to work fixing that damned water gap.