JULY 31, 2022 – When I was a kid, my mother would take my sisters—or at least one or two of them—and me horseback riding. About 10 miles due east of town was the “Circle Pines” horse ranch, and it seemed that on a regular basis during the summer, Mother would load us into the car and take Main Street right past the courthouse, where Dad worked, and keep going, going, going, until we were in cowboy country. Today the location is in the midst of a sprawling suburban retail and residential district, wherein the ratio of concrete and asphalt to dirt and grass is about 10 to one.
We always rode the same horses, but now that I think about it, maybe those were the only horses that the “ranch” owned.
Blaze was everyone’s favorite. A rich brown, beautiful mare, she had a long white mark on the front of her head, hence the name. Rumor had it that Blaze refused to move at any pace beyond an easy walk because she’d lost a colt and thought it would return one day, so she didn’t want to canter or gallop for fear she’d scare the little one away.
Then there was “Salt,” an old gray. He was our speed too, and my sister Elsa got to ride him. Of us kids, she was the one that was most enthusiastic about horses. She even had a book called, How to Draw Horses, and a deck of cards featuring a horse that looked like Salt, which was the deck she used whenever we played “War” or “Go to the Dump.”
Buster was a black and brown horse, somewhat smaller than the other horses, so I was usually assigned to him.
Probably because I was barely out of kindergarten when Mother started taking us to “Circle Pines,” our rides were pretty tame. The woman who ran the place would lead us single file down a well-beaten path in and out of oak woods, across small, grassy fields, then along a vast, junk car graveyard, and back across a larger field to the stable area. Not counting the flies, what I remember best of these excursions were three things: 1. The instructions, “Never walk directly behind a horse—it might kick you” and “Always hold onto the horn”; 2. The incident during a break in one of the oak woods, when Salt stepped on Elsa’s foot and just stood there, oblivious to her distress; and 3. The time when I got thrown when Buster decided to be a bucking bronco.
This third memory was traumatic—for me, anyway. I don’t remember anyone else freaking out about it. Even Mother seemed nonchalant about it. But hey, that was the early 1960s.
On some prior outing, Elsa had told me that Buster didn’t like being second to another horse—unless we were just lollygagging along, which is how we rode horses, because, I thought, Blaze didn’t want to go any faster than at a walking pace. (Cont.)
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
