This is a story (you may begin to find a theme with these posts) about hospitality.  It is also about the town of Coldwater, Kansas.  The names and relationships below are falsified, but the fact that they were there remains the same.

The summer between my 8th and 9th grade, my family moved from Farmington, Missouri to Carson City, Nevada.  My parents, me, my younger sister, and our college-age brother along with four horses, a Welsh pony, and two cats.  We set out from Missouri in a U-Haul pulling a four and a half horse trailer, a Volare station wagon pulling an 18′ boat, and a Toyota Celica from back when they were tiny sports cars.

Well into Kansas, my mother and I (in the Volare), noticed the left rear wheel on the horse trailer beginning to wobble.  We noticed it about five seconds before the wobble went volcanic and the whole wheel ripped off the trailer and went bounding across a wheat field.  A few lug nuts had been loose, and the whole thing had gradually sawed itself off the lug bolts.

My brother (his car was the ancient Celica) retrieved the rogue wheel.  We loaded it into the boat and very carefully began to limp along the edge of the highway.  VERY slowly.  We definitely weren’t going to make Amarillo, where we had stalls and hotel reserved.  My parents portrayed it diplomatically as a grand adventure as evening started to roll around.  Privately, I think we all thought it was going to be a very long, horrible day.

A highway patrol officer came along and stopped us.  A very nice man, who looked at our caravan, and the Welsh pony with her head out the side to see what was going on, and decided we needed help.  “Well I’ll tell you what.  Go on up another X miles.  Milepost Y.  There’s a road on the right.  Go on up there ten miles and turn right, and you’ll see a sign for the fair grounds.  My brother’s buddy is up there.  I’ll call ahead and let him know you’re coming.”

We thanked the officer profusely, loaded ourselves back in the parade vehicles and limped along until we came to a fair grounds outside of Coldwater, Kansas.  The manager there explained that the stalls were… well, not so great.  But he could let us put the horses in the arena overnight.  Worked for us, they were used to being in pasture together.  The horse over the lost wheel got out of the trailer so shaky we were afraid she’d fall down.  We got them all brushed down, fed, and turned loose, and my dad was explaining cheerfully that we were going to camp out in the U-Haul when the manager came back.

“My sister-in-law’s cousin has a bed and breakfast she opens up when there’s a county fair or the rodeo.  I told her about you all and she said to send you over.”

We blinked.  Blinked.  Gulped.  Thanked the manager profusely.

“I’ll talk to Lenny over at the garage.  He has a nephew who does welding.  Between the two maybe they can help you out with that trailer.  Enough to get you into Amarillo, anyway.”

We thanked the manager some more, got into the station wagon and the Celica and headed down the road to see his sister-in-law’s cousin.  The Lady of the house came out to meet us, bundled us into her house and fed us dinner of left over stew with fresh rolls she took out of the oven as we sat down.  The rooms were freshly opened, the beds newly made, and she apologized for the closed air smell.  “Make sure you let the poor kitties out to stretch their legs.  Yes, yes, I know what the sign says.  It’s a misspelling.”  My mother found she had something in her eye.

In the morning this Lady fed us fresh-fried donuts, more biscuits, eggs, bacon… the whole midwestern ranch breakfast.  She sternly lectured my sister and I that we were to make sure we took donuts for the road.   We thanked the lady and went to feed the horses, my dad and brother went to take the trailer to the garage.  An hour later they were back.  With the trailer with all four wheels.  We loaded up four horses, one Welsh pony, and two cats.  We went on our way.

Those people scraped us up off the side of the road and were altogether amazing and wonderful to complete strangers.  Coldwater, Kansas will stand out in my mind to the end of my life as a town of exceptional grace, kindness, and hospitality.

Tags: horses, story
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This is the story of two horses from my parents’ breeding who deserved exactly what they’ve gotten.  Indulge me, if you will, in a bit of back story.

My parents raise Arabian horses, and now and then my father would look at some highly bred, dainty animal acting like a hummingbird on a halter and his comment was always the same.  “Well it’s pretty…  but I wouldn’t want that in my tent.”  Because we’d read somewhere that Bedouin would bring their horses into their large living tents.  They breed performance horses, not hummingbirds.

The first horse is a laconic, quietly stubborn animal named Panther.  He put out an eye in a stall accident.  We really don’t know what happened except that he bashed the upper rim of his eye socket down through his eyeball.  Did I want to save him, the vet asked, or put him down?  My parents were out of town.  It was my call.  “He probably won’t ever be the same,” they warned me.  “Horses don’t recover from pain very well, and his looks are ruined.”  I’d loaded him in the trailer, bleeding and in pain and scared half to death.  He’d walked up the ramp on sheer trust… and I couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t do it.

The other horse is Rocket.  She was talented, athletic… and too tightly strung in the nerves.  Sometimes it happens to the best of breeders.  A horse that’s just the right genetic ‘knick’, but with a side order of too much.  A whisper of a leg and Rocket would GO.   There wasn’t ever enough MORE for Rocket.  She wanted to please you so badly she’d hurt herself if you let her.  And some damn fool let her.  She came home from a series of trainers and owners so damaged that if you took her into an arena she broke out in hives and foam.  Not even an exaggeration.  My parents thought she was probably ruined for riding.

They were horses I’d ridden, loved and adored.  Two ruined horses, now.  Except that there was nothing really wrong with them that time and patience wouldn’t cure.  The problem is that professional trainers don’t have time.  It’s worth money and they need to move horses along.  So. Panther (now gelded) and Rocket were living a life of early retirement.

In addition to these two horses, my parents had stumbled onto two of my friends.  Diane’s the calmest person I ever met.  Even upset, there’s a kind of stillness in her bones.  She’s solid.  Grounded.  Being one of the more glorious examples of ‘female’ I’ve ever met in my life is a side note.  She used to come down to my parents’ house on college breaks and groom and ride horses.   Rocket seemed to me to be her own personal Mt. Everest.  The one you couldn’t climb.  She spent a lot of hours with Rocket.  Some days she just hung out in the pasture with a brush, I think.  I’m not really sure how she did it, because I had a new baby and I didn’t have either Time or Patience.  Eventually she started to ride Rocket.  With a bit and a saddle.  In the arena eventually.  And slowly, Rocket stopped breaking out in hives and sweating.  Diane had had what professionals don’t have.  Time.  Patience.

Alex once told me that Diane was the first woman who hadn’t had the idiot notion to ask him what was more important – her or his boat.  Alex is a sailor.  He grew up sailing in Maine.  His sailboat is a wooden Friendship Sloop style little creature called ‘Bucephalus’.  He liked horses just fine.  Not like there was salt water to indulge in around northern Nevada.  He liked horses largely because Diane liked them, but he’d never ridden one until he came to visit my parents.  New England Yankee that he is, he promptly proved to have a taste for difficult, cantankerous creatures including the one-eyed, ‘oh yeah, you and whose army’ Panther who very much liked his retirement thank-you-very-damn-much.  Alex, however, apparently isn’t very good at ‘no’, and he’s down-right mulish about ‘oh hell no’.  And Alex had carrots.  And a brush.  And… say it with me, people… TIME.  And PATIENCE.

Diane, as happens in Real Life, got a great chance to go to grad school in Washington.  Being she’s a sensible woman, she took it.  Being not-so-sensible, she burst into tears one day because she realized she’d be leaving Rocket.  So they sucked up their seriously limited budgets and went to talk to my parents.  They sucked up their budget some more and found a place where they could keep the horses.

My mother called me and asked me very carefully if it was okay if she sold Rocket and Panther to Alex and Diane.  I had to think about that one pretty seriously.  Two of my babies.  Going off to live with Alex and Diane.  I thought about it seriously for a second and a half.  Rocket and Panther went off to Washington State.

I’ve seen Alex, Diane, Panther and Rocket once since then, heard from them more often than that.  There have been happy stories and sad ones, gleeful ones and frustrated ones.  The way it goes with horses.  Tonight I got this email, and I grinned from ear to ear.

“Dear John, Anne, and Sara,

Since you already know we’re crazy, I had to give you the latest story: Saturday we set up our guest bed out in the pasture and spent the night with the horses, just to see what would happen. We’d have just camped out with pads and sleeping bags, but figured we’d be a more easily avoidable obstacle in the bed, should something spook the horses.

The horses’ reactions were actually exactly the opposite of what I’d expected. Rocket was by far the more bold of the two; once she learned there might be carrot bits to be had, I wondered if we might have her in bed with us. Panther never really trusted the bed; he’d get ju-ust close enough to reach the carrot bits I’d hold at the edge of the mattress, but that was about it. On the other hand, once Diane and I rolled over to try and get some sleep, that was the last we saw of Rocket, while Panther kept orbitting back past us every couple of hours –probably because he knew I’d wake up enough to slip him another piece of carrot, but I like to think it was also because, as alpha, it was his job to keep track of Strange Things.

However, judging from the placement of manure piles, when I mucked the next morning, it really disrupted their nocturnal patterns, and whenever they trotted up from the lower section of the pasture they’d shy from the bed. So we slept inside last night. Still, it was a fun experiment.

And there isn’t much that’s more endearing than Rocket, reaching over the top of the headboard, pushing her nose down into the blankets I’ve pulled over my head and wiggling her nose against my ear to try and persuade me she ought to have more carrot bits.

One of you three was the first to point out to me that early on, among the Bedouin, Arabians were brought into the tents at night. I like to think of this as our small homage to that tradition.

It’s autumn in earnest, tonight, but come spring, we might have to try it again.

All the best,
Alex”

Sometimes even ‘ruined’ horses get what they deserve.  Time.  Patience.  Yeah.

[edited to correct the boat type, because, while I'm not a boat person, I *do* like my facts straight]

Tags: horses
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