As is the case with many good stories, I very nearly did not attend the most pivotal experience of my life to date.
It was mid-2020 and the world had ground to a halt. I had been offered, despite my certainty otherwise, a six-month horse training internship on a bison ranch in South Dakota. It was to begin that October, and I was desperately anxious about it.
I did not know anything firsthand about bison, or ranches. I knew many things firsthand about horses, though even that seemed inadequate in this new setting. I wondered if instead I should go through with my other plan, which was to enroll in a Master’s program in Budapest, studying urban and environmental anthropology. Hungary would surely be doable; this internship, on the other hand, was a wild card.
I asked my mom if she’d ever made a choice that, looking back, directed much of the course of the rest of her life. She told me that she’d almost, very nearly, moved to Alaska when my sister was young to study wolves at university. Instead, she moved to Santa Cruz, where in several years she had acquired a Bachelor’s degree and a husband — my dad. I wondered if in a parallel universe I had been born a wolf biologist’s daughter; myself, but not exactly.
I asked my dad (who, though incredibly well-traveled, had only ever really lived in one place) if he’d ever thought about leaving Santa Cruz and living elsewhere. He said, why would he? Everything he loved was right here — family, friends, good surf, good mountains to ski just a few hours away. Then after a pause he said: I have this feeling that if you take this internship, it will change your life.
I took the internship.
South Dakota and the Wilder Ranch are almost mythical in my memory: the several weeks I took driving there, the characters I met along the way, the snowstorm that deposited me, finally, on the ranch house doorstep, the vast beauty and peace of the ranch itself. I fell hard for the early mornings, waking up before the sun for chores and watching the very first tendrils of sunlight catch on the crisp snow. I fell hard for the feeling of working with my hands and my body for the first time in years after spending so long in my head at university. I loved the cold winter air, the cotton candy sunsets, the way I slept so deeply at the end of the day, my dreams filled with bison and horses huffing steamy breath in the snow. It felt good to be on horseback again, to smell horse sweat every day, to spend hours in the round pen and out riding in the pasture. I also fell, incidentally, (though it would take me months to admit it) for the green-eyed former stranger who’d been behind the ranch house door that first snowy night at the Wilder. I fell so hard for all of it that at the end of six months California was a distant memory I was nowhere near ready to go back to, so I didn’t. I asked around and sent emails and submitted applications and I got a job, a real paying job this time, as a wrangler at the Medano-Zapata Ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.
The San Luis Valley straddles the near-center of Colorado’s southernmost border, its 8,000 square miles stretching down into northern New Mexico. It is a vast corridor and crossroads historically and today it still serves as a passing-through place for most of its visitors. With the San Juan Mountains to the west and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, each range curving around to form a 125-mile long teardrop, the Valley is an upturned bowl, a pair of cupped hands with palms to the sky. Standing on the valley floor you are a speck staring up, and every direction you look there are mountains looking back. The sky is a dome above you. The movement of weather systems is visible from eighty or more miles away: summer thunderstorms that skirt along the borders of the mountains but never touch the ranch, leaving the air cool and metallic on your tongue but the sandy ground dry as ever, just the idea of rain; bulbous, hulking haboobs, giant sandstorms that the spring winds heave across the land, which threaten to tip over vans and trailers and at the very least always follow through on their promise of packing your molars full of grit; tendrils of mist that creep over the Sangres, a missive of weather from Westcliffe; a dark cloud that sits, isolated, over a single patch of valley miles west, virga reaching hopefully down towards the ground. Looks like rain over there today, you might say into the quiet cab of the truck.
In the Valley, the weather makes the world. But I didn’t know any of that when I first moved there.
Like the internship, those first few months I started every day scared. Scared I’d get lost out in the huge unfamiliar pastures, scared I’d forget the things I’d learned, scared I’d look dumb, scared everybody could tell I was a big old fraud from California cosplaying cowboy in chaps and a hat that still felt too new. The horses, and my coworkers who very quickly became my friends, were my bedrock of sanity and comfort, and I leaned on them heavily. I learned all sixty-something of the horses quicker than I thought I could, memorizing their names and personalities and quirks and stories so thoroughly that eventually I realized I could pick them all out just from the tip of an ear or the corner of a back hoof. The horses were my home, my heart, the thing that had brought me there in the first place, and they remained so for the entirety of my time at the ranch.
The rhythms of tacking up in the mornings at corrals also became, despite the pressures of the busy season, a place of comfort and familiarity for me. Cinches and latigos and the smell of old leather I knew; the heft and swing of a saddle up onto a horse’s back I knew; and very soon I also knew the sound of my friends’ talk and laughter in the chilly morning sun, their working rhythms, the flow of us all as a team together.
That first season I spent at Zapata is embedded so deeply in my memory, though now the subsequent years are layered over it with such thickness it’s hard to pick apart. I do know those initial months were a shock of cold wind and feeling the work and the weather carve into me like nothing had done before. It was glorious. It was simple. It was golden. It was everything. It was my whole world.
Once or twice a week my days would start with the morning wrangle. Early in the season, it would be entirely in the dark — the full or half moon sometimes gave thin light, but usually it was just stars. I’d catch my horse in the dark, saddle him in the dark, ride out to the pasture in the dark. I’d sit still up on a hill and listen, see if I could hear any horses moving or catch a glimpse of starlight reflected off one with a lighter-colored coat. Then I’d call, a long whooooo-ooooo; sometimes the horses would come to that call, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Once, early in the year — I can’t recall any more which year it was — I sat up on a hill in the pasture just as I’ve described. I called, long and loud once or twice, and sat still to listen again. From somewhere in front of me and below me, I heard the soft thud of hoofbeats on frost-covered sand, and then there they were; the whole herd swept up and past me on the hill, running full tilt towards corrals. I could just barely see their outlines in the dark but I could smell them, hear them, feel the pounding of their hooves as they rushed past and all I could do was laugh out loud and go after them. Right then I felt absolutely and perfectly alive.
In the spring and summer, morning wrangle was a significantly warmer and brighter affair though we were still usually up before the sun. The light would be hazily pink over the mountains, the air soft and gentle with none of the bite of winter. In the deepest months of summer the grass would be heavy and green and fragrant from the previous night’s rain, the mosquitoes and the meadowlarks bursting out ahead of me, stirred up by my horse’s hooves.
Sometimes, I’d sing out my call to the horses, and the coyotes would sing back.
In the autumn, it would begin to darken again, though now we weren’t alone in the pre-dawn chill. The elk would come in closer to the ranch during their rut, often bedding down in the thick grass of the pastures just beyond corrals. Sometimes trotting out under the stars, I’d come up on them unawares asleep in the dark, half-asleep myself, and suddenly all around me would be the swish-swish of grass against elk legs, the clack-clack of hooves against hooves as they moved shoulder to shoulder away from whatever had just awoken them. I’d rein in my horse, heart pounding, wide awake now — sorry, sorry, I’d say to the elk.
Eventually the scared-ness I had started each day with turned into something else. A sense of belonging, maybe, or the feeling that somehow this place had taken me in. The patterns of weather and land and animals became familiar to me, and over the years watching the turn of the seasons they became like old friends. I knew the owls in the tree on the road to the old Medano Ranch headquarters because I’d watched them grow up for months, and their siblings the year before. I knew the coyote that liked to hang around close to the lodge, had helped cut him out of a smooth wire fence last year, his coat thick and russet-gray. I knew the look of that fat purple thunderhead, and as a matter of fact had been caught out in one just like it last week, fat pellets of hail collecting in the upturned cuff of my jeans. I knew very well the smell of the rabbitbrush in the rain, which fallen tree to turn at in order to catch the trail back up from the creekbed, and where the best spot was to catch a glimpse of the sandhill cranes that migrated through in the spring and fall. My hands and forearms were tanned from the elbow down, and my face from the eyebrows down. I was lean and six hours or more in the saddle a day felt like breathing: easy, normal. My hat had collected a thick rind of dust along the band; my chaps were scratched and stained from greasewood thorns and barbed wire. In the summers during lunchtime I would lay back on the ground and put my hat over my eyes. I could feel the sand beneath my shoulder blades, and imagined the aquifers even deeper below. The wind would shush through the trees above me, and my hat would smell of salt and straw. Good summer smells. I liked being a creature of the Valley.
It wasn’t always rosy, of course. There were long days of dealing with recalcitrant cattle, ornery horses, unkind guests; there were days so cold I thought that surely, this time, I’d take off my boots to find my toes gone, and other days so hot I thought I could feel my insides cooking in real time. There were coworkers I didn’t like, or who didn’t like me. There were some days I thought I might actually commit a serious crime if I had to answer the same questions, have the same conversations, see the same people as I had the day before. Every year there were months of tiny gnats, then months of mosquitoes, then months of black flies and horse flies, during which my arms and legs — because they’d bite even through denim — would be a patchwork of hot welts. The ancient linoleum of our floor was peeling up; the fridge stank of something rotten; the mice wouldn’t stop stashing scavenged almonds in our boots; the furnace was, potentially, a carbon monoxide hazard, or perhaps the house was simply haunted. We lost horses to colic, injury, and old age; I would put on a tough face and then go home and cry into my pillow at night. I remember every single one, and I still miss them.
Sometimes I wondered what this job was doing to my body and my mind; was I just a people-pleasing, horse-tacking machine? Would I ever be truly hydrated again? Would my hands look ten years older than the rest of my body forever? Was it worth the isolation from virtually everyone in my life who wasn’t currently residing on these 103,000 acres in rural Colorado? Answers varied day to day. In my most exhausted and frustrated moments I would swear up, down, and sideways that this season would be my last season.
But — but.
The heat would break in a glorious afternoon thunderstorm. My fingers would de-thaw over the wood stove that someone had stoked before I had come home. I’d share a spoonful of my morning oatmeal with my favorite horse and laugh as she shook her head at the taste. I’d sniff the sagey, soapy scent of rabbitbrush when I pinched off a sprig riding by, and that night I’d sit around a bonfire watching the moon come up over the mountains and feeling so heart-full I could have cried. The first hint of green would peek out on the cottonwoods in the spring, and I would know I’d have to stick around to see them turn flame-yellow in the fall. I experienced no moment so singularly terrible that it wasn’t eventually forgiven by the grace of the small beautiful things that existed quietly in each day, and I experienced not a moment of awe or joy that wasn’t equally tempered by the toughness of work and undeniable frustrations of life there.
At the end of every day, good or bad, I’d call Max — the same green eyes and brown cowboy hat I’d fallen for in South Dakota, although now he was hundreds of miles away in Texas or Wyoming, his voice coming through the phone tinnily from the top of a mountain or the top of a water tower. I missed him terribly and told him so but mostly I told him all the little pieces of my day, all the things that made up my entire world. I’d say something like, tonight I pushed out the horses at sunset and when I was riding back the air was just cooling down, and I could smell the creek in the cottonwoods by corrals, and the sun was setting over the San Juans and when I looked over it had left just the tiniest sliver of light, like an orange rind over the mountains.
Some part of me is pretty sure that when my time is up a piece of me will go back there, a whisper of a ghost on a whisper of a ghost horse, up early to sing with the coyotes while the elk still sleep.
Looking back on my first few years at Zapata, they do seem endless, rich as they were in depth and sensory experience, and I think in some ways I felt I would exist there forever. I felt sometimes like I could barely imagine a world beyond the ranch. And why would I go anywhere else, when everything I loved was right there?
As it happens, though, the last summer I spent at Zapata was also the summer my dad died.
When he got sick, he gave me his car — a white Nissan Pathfinder that he’d gotten lifted with huge beefy tires, so he and my mom could drive it down every single back road they could find. On the inside of nearly every door frame there’s bumper stickers; he didn’t really like them on the exterior of the car, so he put them where you could only see from the inside, or with the doors open. OLD GUYS RULE, one says. I love it. When he gave me the car, he also told me to keep the string of beads hanging from the rearview mirror. It’s a bunch of little ceramic cylinders, each a different mismatched color; right in the center hanging at the bottom is a little ceramic whale. I made it for him when I was a kid, probably five or six; it’s been re-strung many times and has hung from the rearview mirror of every car my dad has owned since.
The morning my dad died, I was at the ranch, out in a pasture with the horses. I couldn’t make it to California in time, but, as I decided with the stubbornness I’d inherited from him, when it comes to matters of the spirit location is unimportant. I would sit vigil with my dad as he passed and I would make sure he was not alone.
I took the string of beads with the little ceramic whale off the rearview mirror; I figured it was the best option I had for a physical object that anchored us together. I walked out into the pasture and sat on a blanket, facing the mountains, and I held the beads tightly in my hand. The horses, curious, wandered over to investigate. I closed my eyes and sent my voice and my thoughts out across the vaults of my mind and the distance that separated me from my dad. I talked to him and told him that I was there. And though it wasn’t immediate, after a minute or two, there he was too. I could hear his voice in my mind and feel his presence just as strongly as if he were sitting next to me. Somehow I was with him, or he was with me, or we’d simply met in the middle somewhere.
I talked to him about some of my favorite memories: skateboarding down the hill together in front of our house when I was still small enough to fit on the board in front of him, or that day swimming in the ocean when a huge pod of dolphins swam with us, in circles beneath us and beside us with their big smooth backs breaching the surface, close enough to touch.
It was windy that day in the pasture. It got quiet in my mind and I asked my dad if he was still there, if he was ready to go. He said no, not yet — I’d like to listen to the wind for a while.
So we did, for a while.
I could picture him clear as day, in his old straw hat and hiking boots with his walking stick, as ready for adventure as he ever was. I could feel him looking over the edge into whatever’s next. On my better days since then, I fear death a little less knowing that my dad is on the other side of it.
After he’d gone I just sat there and cried and cried in the pasture at the foot of the mountains, rocking back and forth holding onto those beads so tightly. Around me, the horses stood and napped and breathed down my neck, warm and grassy. To me, my grief felt huge and impossible, like it might burst out of my skin entirely if I didn’t figure out where to put it.
To the mountains, though, I’m sure it was small.
Thinking about it now I cannot begin to count or quantify the things that the ranch and the Valley held for me. Joy, exhaustion, awe, utter peace and stillness; the feeling of feral aliveness I’ve never felt anywhere else but on the back of a horse at top speed through a wide-open landscape; the salt of my body in sweat or tears or blood soaked into the dry sand or the dry air. The sound of my voice raised in laughter and frustration. My silent prayers to the land asking it to take care of me, for the clouds to uncover the moon so I could see, or for the purple thunderheads to hold off on the hail for twenty more minutes. My gratitude when it sometimes answered. My grief, witnessed by no one but the mountains and the horses who were my friends. No other place could have fit it all. I arrived there at the exact middle of my twenties and for the next four years poured out everything that was me into the sand and the wide open dome of the sky. In return I received a life scrubbed raw and clean by the wind and sun, and bonds to people and animals stronger than any I’d had before. And I received my self back, different and strange sometimes for having lived through that time and space, but my self nonetheless.
I left the ranch for the last time in mid-October after one final bonfire under the stars. Max and I drove quietly home in my dad’s Nissan, the whale bead swaying as we turned through the green front gates and out onto the highway. At that moment we were, almost precisely to the day, four years older than the night we met — me exhausted from hours spent driving in a snowstorm, Max in a flannel shirt opening the ranch house door. I held his hand as we drove, and it felt warm and familiar, just like his voice had every night on the phone when we still lived hundreds of miles apart and he had to climb water towers just to talk to me.
Very early the next morning we drove west out of the San Luis Valley. I felt sure we’d be back, but probably not for a while. As the sun rose I watched the Sangres and the sand dunes grow smaller in the rearview mirror, as rosy and beautiful in the dawn light as the first day I saw them and every morning wrangle since.
SGBRSH 