Once, a Gate with No Fence
Rolls of rusted barbed wire, rotted fence posts, plenty of bent, burnt orange staples and nails. Once, in the badlands, a gate with no fence, freestanding, like a question. Droppings of sheep; droppings of bear; droppings of elk; droppings of mule and white-tail deer; droppings, once, of an owl, dry and crumbling with small bones.
A moose once stepped onto the trail to face me, as if inviting me to joust, and my horse spun and bolted without my asking, snorting at me afterward as if to say: “That was some creature!”
I’d tell that story to dudes who white-knuckled their saddle horn down a steep single-track, tell them not to worry because a horse has four legs and doesn’t want to fall either.
Once, a dude asked me, “Are you always this calm?” I thought back to times I’d sat on horses and given in to panic, learned that it usually earned me a deposit into the dirt, costing me years of visits to my chiropractor. But I didn’t tell dudes about horse wrecks. Not while in the saddle, when I needed their their heels down, their shoulders back, their hips loose.
Tiny forests of wild chamomile, sunbleached cowbones, a calf’s eartag, the toppled beams of a homesteader’s cabin, eerie in its precarity. Once, while I was riding in the Fourth of July parade, a man stepped in front of my horse and said, “What’s your name, Squaw?”; if only all such encounters were on horseback, where my spur-tapped gelding nearly plowed him over.
In a thrift store, a pair of fleece-lined boots with rubber soles and rabbit fur-lined tops, a flower-shaped mother-of-pearl belt buckle with only one petal missing. Every week on a mountain ride, a bottle of Jack Daniels that we’d all take a pull from, the heat of the whiskey spreading our chests. Far-off heartache, and how someone told me, “He’s in another time zone. I wouldn’t worry too much about that.” How I eventually let my head be tipped back by tan and cracked fingers, slipped my tongue into joy and the anonymity of the vast land and my puny life upon it.
Tiny angular stones, sharp and sturdy as horseshoe nails, fashioned by some human hand hundreds of years ago and affixed to spears or arrows. Freshly shed antlers nestled in sagebrush; the wallow of a calf under a hot iron; a warm beer while sitting on a straw bale on the back of the flatbed. We’d have to roll the windows up as we kicked hay off the back; the boss would yell at us if the cab got filled with green flecks. Once, a deceptively small saddle sore on a sorrel gelding that we pricked with a syringe, squirting puss in an arc across the corral. Up Button Draw, a headless, skinned bear, left to fester. How I learned, over time, to retrace a trail back that I’d taken out too far, looking for the markers and cairns I’d left to mark my way, or how sometimes just wandered till I wound up back at the saddlebarn.
Early dark mornings, the yank of boots and slough of jeans over my calves, the lasso-like tying of the day’s silk scarf. The cabin where I slept in the handmade bed and mattress thin as a saddle blanket; the mice that once ran through my hair as I slept, which woke me but I was too tired to care.
I told myself when I came to the ranch that I would only stay one season. I must have known this to be a lie, even though once I found a petroglyph on a boulder—a large, horned figure that seemed to dash after two puny people-shapes, who ran along the rock’s crevice. Sometimes that valley downright chased people out of it, if they couldn’t take all it had on offer: washboard roads, a single feedstore that sold expired dewormer, a bar where you could still smoke inside, and a winter that was only endurable by attending the occasional fish fry.
I tried to leave once. Said I wasn’t returning. Had important things to do. Came back anyway, starved. Eventually I did leave and didn’t come back for twelve years. When I went back to visit, one man I worked with was still there, still singing Ian Tyson songs and putting dudes on sturdy Mexican stock. Long after that, he left, too.
Once I rode beneath a herd of bighorn sheep for a full five minutes before I looked up to see them—serious and almost translucent against the sandy spires of the badlands.
Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and an Enneagram 4. She has an M.A. in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her work can be found in Split Rock Review, Wild Roof Journal, CALYX Journal, San Antonio Review, and others. She is the Editorial Director and Co-Founder of Abraxas Review. You’ll find her in the garden, coffee in hand, or can connect with her at https://marinsmithwrites.wordpress.com/