Dude Ranch

Dude ranch pg.95

It was a muggy day for a family road trip with no air conditioning. I was wedged between my older brother and sister in the back seat of our station wagon. My sixteen year old, gum popping sister was on my right.  Her bleached hair was whipping in my face from the open car window. My eighteen year old brother was composing a song on my left.  The neck of his guitar was out his window and the butt end was jammed in my side but I didn’t mind.  His song was about my Uncle being a western sheriff who loses his star and it made us all laugh.  We were headed to The Blue Mountain Guest Ranch in central Oregon and meeting up with my Uncle Ken and his family for a week long vacation together.  The last big vacation we took we stayed at a resort in Hawaii where I learned to swim, we all got matching Hawaiian outfits, and we drank fruity drinks by the pool.  Horseback riding and hiking was quite a departure from what my mother would call a “vacation”. Looking back, there must have been quite a deal struck between her and my father for her to agree to do this.  

We arrived at the giant old farm house filled with antique furniture and I was instantly captivated.  This house had hidden stairways, a massive kitchen and giant porches built to accommodate large groups of ranch hands or serve those traveling by on a wagon train long ago. A far cry from our cramped hotel room in Hawaii. It smelled different here.  The juniper and sage smelled wild and sharp compared to the asphalt and mown lawn smells of my residential home. I could tell the adventure quotient was high here. I would not be disappointed. There wasn’t an aspect of that week that didn’t change me.  It was a summer camp, best birthday, favorite adventure book, kind of vacation.  

I was eight and my favorite cousin Larry was nine.  Larry was Tom Sawyer to my Becky.  He was mischievous and a little wild and I was afraid of getting in trouble and giggly. We were outside sun up to sun down playing by the hot springs pond. I had never seen a pond that had steam coming off of it, smelled like rotten eggs and was teeming with so much life.  I couldn’t have loved anything better. In the family photos from that vacation, my typically pasty white skin was indian brown and my hair white from sun exposure, a testament to the hours spent outdoors. I learned how to choose the best skipping stones, catch water skippers and build dams. I laughed at every antic Larry pulled and there were many.  My sides hurt from laughing so much. Both families got together every evening to swim in the hot springs fed pool behind the house. This was necessary to relieve the saddle soreness from our daily horseback rides.  Being the most inexperienced, I rode Rockie, the small, 20 year old, sad excuse for a horse that was an exotic stallion in my youthful, greenhorn mind.  At home I had always pretended my stingray bike was a horse and now I was atop a real horse, trail riding the untamed west. In my imagination the well worn trail was uncharted indian territory where my posse and I tracked dangerous and unsavory outlaws.

One day we went on an actual hike up an actual mountain trail.  I had never been on a hike before.  A walk around the block in the suburbs is no substitute for hiking. The Strawberry Lake trail had signposts that told you how far it was to your destination. I wasn’t exactly sure how long a mile was but I remember boasting to my friends when I got home that I had been on a six mile mountain hike.  We walked so long that even my 8 year old feet hurt when we got to the top.  Beautiful Strawberry lake was our reward and we all took our shoes off and soaked our feet in the ice cold, mountain water.  I sat next to my mother by the lake.  I looked at her cooling her high heel deformed feet in the water.  It was the first and last time I would ever see her “outdoorsy”. One morning she took a walk by herself and came back with stories of deer and a fierce badger with large claws that had followed her.  I wasn’t sure what a badger was but I was alittle worried by these unknown dangers of country life.  From then on my brother pretended to beat back badgers in front of my mother whenever we went outside and I was relieved by his smart ass behavior.  Maybe badgers aren’t really that scary.

The proprietors of the dude ranch served enormous breakfasts.  We ate steak, potatoes, biscuits and gravy, all for breakfast!!! My mind was blown by this more than anything else.  The revelation that the rules of the table could be bent was transformational.  The daughter of a home economics major, even at 8 I knew a lot about the proper way to set a table, where your elbows belong and how to dab my mouth before taking a drink so as not to get crumbs in my milk. Table rules were not something you messed with at our house. Dinner food for breakfast was unprecedented and taking things to a whole new level.

The only downside to my experience at the ranch were the huge lightning storms each night.  In my lowland home town the weather was always mild. Drizzle followed by partly cloudy was nothing to get excited about. The teeth rattling thunder however, galvanized my experience at the ranch in the way only pure terror can.  Being the youngest and not accustomed to so much daily activity, I naturally went to bed first.  Alone upstairs in a room with tall dormer windows I felt exposed and vulnerable to all that jagged lightning. My father taught me how to count between flashes and rumbles to determine if the storm was getting closer or moving on but this didn’t mitigate my distress. The nearby hot springs, pool and the impressive height of the old farm house seemed lightning rich targets to my mind.  My limited understanding of the mysterious ways of electricity only added to my extreme unease.  My heart raced with fear.  I know I lost the battle with myself between my need to be comforted by my parents and not wanting to look foolish in front of my cousins. I went down stairs repeatedly, probably even crying which was only natural when death was so imminent.

The combination of so many first and extreme experiences, places this week at the top of my all time best days of childhood.  Constant physical exertion, new territories, cousins, horses, swimming and life threatening storms heightened all of my senses and ultimately shaped who I am today.

I now own a ranch not that far from the Blue Mountain guest ranch.  There are nights when the lightning gets my heart racing and the tree toppling winds have me praying for my life.  I married a man who has a line item on his resume that reads Hiking and Climbing guide.  He has taken me on grand hikes all over the west and I have countless times soaked my tired feet in mountain lakes.  I don’t own a horse but I have a pond and stream where my children have found giant water bugs and learned to skim rocks. I don’t have a giant ranch house but I have a small cozy one where I commonly serve biscuits and gravy for breakfast.

Recently my husband and I were walking around our farm discussing future projects when we saw a large hole near the chicken coop.  My childhood fears were awakened and my eyes got wide.  Pete, concerned by its proximity to the coop, looked at me and in a low, ominous voice said “It could be a badger.”