Dublin

I have the window open to the sounds of the street below, cars and motorcycles rumbling by, doors slamming, people calling to each other and laughing as evening falls over the city of Dublin. The streets in this part of town are narrow and cobblestoned; many of them are closed to auto traffic and instead are traveled only by pedestrians.

We spent the day in stages walking through the center of the city, passing between locations varying in age from hundreds to thousands of years. Our charismatic tour guide pointed out especially the various sites in which Ireland’s famous writers lived or worked or gallivanted in buildings of stone and carving. On free time, we wandered idly from Temple Bar across the river, to St. Patrick’s Chapel and back again, pausing for a drink in a pub where we were politely asked to move to a different table so the traditional music performers could have a place to set up. Before dinner we met our guide again for yet another drink in yet another pub, listening to the patter between the locals making the accented English sound completely foreign.

I walked home alone from the restaurant after dinner, parting ways with various groups in our larger party as some filtered back into the bar district and others took the most direct route home with the guide. I wandered back on my own, pretending I lived in this city, walking the cobbled streets back to the historic and grand Central Hotel where I now sit with the window open, letting the sounds of the city filter through the curtain.

I think about what it would be like to stay here in this foreign city for some time, travel in the footsteps of so many great writers, seek inspiration in the same places they created their great works and lived their lives. I could walk around the city every day, sit by the river and canals, haunt Trinity College like the ghosts of old professors who are said to roam the grounds from time to time. I could live in a studio apartment high above the gleefully vivid streets and write down my stories.

It’s a nice thought, for the time being. The novelty of this new place is still shiny and fresh; I have not yet thought about the trees and hills and water and open air. Tomorrow brings new places yet again.

Waterfalls

Despite a sudden cold snap, sending our halcyon spring-cum-summer golden afternoons spiraling abruptly down into the lower 40s with fitful spats of blowing snow, I wriggled into more layers and started the car. Erik (my stalwart boyfriend of somewhat recent development) and I had planned to go to Grimes Glen and save actual freezing temperatures we were going to go. We picked up Rebecca and were heading out of the village in another little snow squall when Kaitlyn, my draft horse companion (aka “Hitch Bitch”) and coincidentally Erik’s twin sister, called and wanted in as well. I wheeled us about in the gas station, zipped back into the village and back out again, taking winding county roads north to Naples.

Grimes Glen is one of those spots that only seems to be advertised through word of mouth. (I did a little internet research and found out that this isn’t entirely true, but believing so totally adds to its allure.) One drives up the Main Street of the village of Naples, New York, and turns left down a random little side road with an old-fashioned scripted hanging sign pointing the way to “GRIMES GLEN.” One winds down a residential road dotted with ornate houses large and small before turning into a gravel parking lot, nondescript and anticlimactic, a wide and lively creek rushing by below. The footbridge to the start of one side of the trail has been replaced in the past year, but otherwise there is little to mark that this is in fact a well-traveled hiking trail.

In the heat of summer drought, one can either creek-stomp happily right up the bed against the flowing water or stepping-stone gamely from bank to bank. In high water, like Sunday’s trip, the trail vanishes into the water, making the trip up the creek an adventure of actual foot-marked trail, bushwhacking where the slope of the gorge walls is not too steep, edging along shelves of shale at the water’s edge or simply dunking one’s feet into the cold water and sloshing along. We did all of these things, fingers scrabbling at exposed roots like hand-holds or splashing right across the shallowest points, boots waterproof only to a certain depth before the fresh water simply flowed right over the top. I crossed the creekbed once on a fallen tree, skittering along sideways, low to the surface.

The Glen is home to three different waterfalls–if they are named, I know them not, nor is it important. All that matters is that they exist, far from the reach of development and well-marked trails with handrails and interpretive signs. It’s nearly impossible to get even to the most accessible lowest falls without getting at least a little bit dirty.

The twins and I pressed on to the uppermost falls, leaving Rebecca sitting Zenlike on a stone at the base of the middle falls. We had to use a rope to pull ourselves up the steep wall beside the falls, then cling to a second guide rope to edge carefully on a mountain-goat trail along the edge of the cliff. At the top of the falls the trail formed again at the waterline, placid and serene, in contrast to the white-knuckled ascent. Here the twins and I hopped and skipped from side to side of the creek, stomping in the shallows and edging along shale-walled curves, clambering over and under fallen trees. The twins, who still seem to speak some blood-related language that goes without words, moved steadily upstream as I darted and danced from stone to stone, remembering how a year ago in the middle of summer I could leap from rock to rock and never touch the water. I looked at them from time to time, so different yet so similar, feeling as though we were children on exploration, two dear friends I would have loved to have had all my life for mud and water and noise and skinned knees. There is no age too old for these things, however, and here we were, on this trail that was not a trail, only ever as old as we felt.

After reaching the upper falls and returning, edging carefully back down the ropes, we paused for a moment with Rebecca at the middle pool, feeling the mist from the water blown gently against our faces, watching a few chance snowflakes blending inconceivably with featherdown or flower petals or something else weightless and white, borne slowly upwards on the draft into the sky so high above us.

LP – Into the Wild

We made a wrong turn on our way back from Harrisburg yesterday, just me and Eileen of notabovetheordinary.wordpress.com. As seems to happen more often than not, I misinterpreted directions from the Human Atlas (thanks, Dad, I know you meant well but I am a moron) and we wound up fifty miles or so out of our way, speeding along a highway on the wrong side of the river following an indescribably lovely valley of steep-sided wooded hills just turning tawny green in a summerlike afternoon haze of golden light. The sun was in my eyes as we blazed west (completely in the wrong direction, which is beside the point here on out.)

Eileen played me a song that I insisted on hearing again and again, something about the rhythm, melody, percussion, theme, something putting me in mind immediately of driving up the East Fork, the sun behind us thinly veiled in a cloud of dust, the windows down as we drove too fast with the radio turned up too loud, songs just like this echoing off the mountains and valleys and scaring the pronghorn, our arms and feet and whole selves hanging out of windows and sun roofs as we screamed and inhaled and exhaled simply because we were alive and here.

For a few moments I was tempted to keep heading west, never turn north, never look up the directions on a Smartphone that actually had service and a connection and figure out how to get home, whatever that word meant for the time being. This is traditionally my migratory season, when I start to think west and west, packing bags and more winter coats to climb seven thousand feet and two thousand miles back into winter for a few weeks, ensconcing myself into a shack of a cabin on the ice-encrusted shore of a whitewater river until the morning sun made all the world glitter and sparkle in an instant of melting frost.

This evening I sat on the porch, surrounded arguably by the lightest population density on the East Coast, simply enjoying the evening air and chirping frogs and my neighbor who dropped by to exchange greetings. I am content here. The mountains and the sky and the horses and the west will not miss me. If I can’t actually be there, I am comforted in knowing at least that it still exists, simply locked away until it is needed again.

Training

It’s nearly the season where I can finally just work the horses and try to fix whatever habits they’ve picked up throughout the school year from dozens of students hacking them in circles. Most of the horses only need a maintenance ride or two–Wyatt refusing to lope nicely for beginners, Rey refusing to lope at all, et cetera–but others need some more serious work. Wow and Scotch are in constant need of tune-ups to remind them that they do, in fact, have a back end; Frank needs to remember that he can go forward. Then there are the rare few that developed major problems, like Batman, who learned to stand up in the middle of the ring with the high school reiners. This is going to take some long-term psychological therapy for him, aided by a loose-ring snaffle for a while.

Then there’s Red Guy. Red’s issues are a little circumstantial–for some reason, the majority of my riders got it through their heads that he was supposed to have a wide array of fancy buttons and spur stops and spent much of their time trying to make him do things he was not physically or mentally cut out to do. (What do I know? I’m just the coach.) Most of my riders figured it out by the end of the season, but Red Guy still spent an inordinate amount of time stuck behind the bridle, bullied into carrying himself that way and marching along behind the rider’s hands.

Today I slipped a loose-ring into his mouth and took him to the outdoor arena, letting him warm up at his own pace and then working him into a long trot. With leg to a steady, connecting hand, he was able to find the bit and carry himself on it, then gradually ease down to stretch, never ducking behind it and choking himself back. Once he was fully warmed up, we started bending and lateral work, making him step up underneath himself while keeping himself moving forward. Here he wanted to slip back behind my hands again, reminding me to keep the leg driving him forward and my hands light enough to prevent him from wanting to suck back.

Red is very broke–just not in the way that my riders seemed to want him to be. I remembered a snippet I heard at our team banquet last week: one of my students was commenting on that great feeling knowing that she had taught that–any–horse something. I recall being jarred by that statement, glancing around me at the coaches’ table, wondering if anyone else was struck by how far she had missed the mark. She had been one of our star riders all year long–truly, for most of her career at school. She had impeccable equitation on our show horses. Her speech was lovely, and the sentiment was clear; she was grateful for her experience riding on the team and for everything she had learned. But if there’s anything I try to get across to my students, it’s giving the horse the ride it wants–not the ride you want to have.

As Red Guy ambled around the outdoor to cool down, I sighed, knowing that despite working with this rider for three years I had failed to get across to her this most crucial lesson. Especially when riding a draw horse, we cannot force that horse to go the way we wish it to; we have to read the horse, discover the kind of rider that horse wants us to be, and use that skill to build a team, performing to the best of both partners’ ability. Poor Red was a victim of incorrect mentality, the rider’s desire to try to teach the horse to go how he or she wanted him to go, rather than being quiet for a moment or two and trying to listen to what the horse was saying.

Guilt washed over me, a sensation of failure. All I could do was to try harder with the next generation of riders, impress upon them that their greatest teacher was the one they were sitting on. All I have to go on is a hope that a year from now I won’t feel the need to have to retrain most of my horses, just continue riding.

Well, we can hope.

Seasonal

I’m not entirely certain if I’ve always been this way and living out here closer to real things has amplified it, or if living out here has awakened some instinct that’s buried in the average town mouse. At the end of last summer, when the air first started turning crisp, I went through a mad stage of boiling down tomatoes, baking sweet breads, experimenting with various slow-cook recipes, stacking firewood. My boss called it “nesting” and asked sarcastically-suspiciously if I was pregnant. (I wasn’t.) She then told me she did exactly the same thing.

Now that the days are growing longer and the air is warmer and rain soaks the earth rather than snow accumulating in crystal-piles, I’m struck with the urge to grow everything green, draw out elaborate plans for vegetable gardens, spending hours outside turning over the earth and tearing out clumps of grass roots, grinding mud into my chapped skin until it doesn’t wash out any more, razing a few years’ worth of accumulated weeds into what looks like rich, dark, damp soil, ready to receive seeds and seedlings. I have a hastily-drawn map in pen on my counter and a list of seeds and tools to purchase (tomato cages at the top of the list after last year’s feral tomato incident.)

I suppose I’ve inherited a lot of this from my mother, in the ways that such things are passed on without meaning to. I still remember sowing some sort of seed (my memory tells me it’s broccoli though I don’t recall ever growing that in our garden) and accidentally piling most of the seeds at one end of the furrow rather than spreading them evenly, and how disappointed Mom was. Sorry, Mom. That’s my brightest memory of tandem gardening.

I do remember other bits and pieces, though–silver dollar plants, blue cornflowers, the time I tried planting a bunch of apple seeds I picked out of a Red Delicious I was eating and stuffed into a big planter by the back door (needless to say, I did not grow an apple tree.) We used to sit in lawn chairs in the evening and watch the moonflowers open (nerds? Perhaps.)

I could do more–I could clear out the big raised bed near the goat house and plant summer squash, winter squash, in-between squash. Potatoes. Pumpkins. Heirloom things I would be growing mostly for the sake of saying I was growing them. Unfortunately gardening doesn’t seem to go well on a whim, and most of this would require more planning than I’ve already put into things. I’ll start small, with the one bed. Next year, the world. The herb garden. A compost heap. Moonflower vines on the mailbox, the fallen-down dock. There’s dirt ground into my very skin now.

Rocky Mountain echoes

This morning, standing in the doorway to the arena with a stack of cones on one arm as I prepared to set up the ring for Western II, I thought I heard from behind the barn Chilly’s wrangler call.

I know such things are impossible, but perhaps caught in the white noise of the shavings tractor running in and out of the barn was a ghost, an echo, the phantoms of my annual memories rising to the surface. This would be, after all, the time of year when my thoughts and my face and feet would normally all be pointed west, to days of dust and evenings of clear clear sky, dusk settling to turn the Absarokas red-roan, the horses surging from field to field in the twilight in one swift flowing motion like water bursting from a dam.

It’s been in most of my stories recently, the ones I tell people who only partially want to hear them, about long mornings on the hunt for horses on the BLM, little details I cannot enunciate in such a way that they sound like they matter, the tiniest bits of a day that I panic and worry will fade forever unless I say them out loud.

I wonder how many years it might take for the western quickening to fade away. I’m not sure I ever want it to. It’s instinctual, like a sunflower turning its face to follow the light.

Syracuse

Walking to my car this afternoon to leave the show for the last time, from the barn to the little lot behind the coliseum where I had parked, I looked around me: in one direction lay the grandstand and track, in the other a few more acres of parking lot and exposition building; on one side the fairgrounds were bordered by highways and train tracks and on the other industrial towers billowing steam or otherwise in the air. This seems like an unlikely place for a show grounds, and yet here for four days the place was a small mess of activity, horses coming and going from the stables to the schooling arena and into the show ring.

The barn building must be quite old; it’s like walking into a church with an immensely high wooden ceiling in tiers, old sky lights, cobwebs up high in the corners, pigeons and doves cooing in the morning, filtered-glass windows banging to and fro in the wind. It’s the kind of place that would be easy to imagine being haunted on a spooky day, cavernous and cold, the rows of stalls with their metal-grate doors and easily-slipping latches giving the place an old-city-public-barn feel, the kind of place where you might imagine striding in with your boots and riding whip and hiring a livery horse to hack around the cobblestoned streets of the city with. This place was the world for a few days, and it felt strange to leave it this afternoon, the cold early-spring sun on my face.

For days I had done nothing but oil hooves, braid and unbraid tails, polish clean coats with a soft brush, tack and untack, wrap and unwrap, pick stalls, throw hay, drag the hose up and down the aisle to fill buckets, make sure our ten horses were turned out like champions and ready in the mounting arena exactly on time. We stood by the gate in the coliseum and watched our horses carry children over courses and around on the flat, helping them get mounted and organized, accepting their thanks and sometimes even their hugs after a good ride.

In the pre-dawn mornings, coolers thrown over the rumps of our horses as we stood clustered in the tunnel waiting for our chance to step from the dim recesses into the brightly-lit coliseum to school, we gathered our reins, adjusted our gloves, smoothed the manes of our horses. Did we take a moment to look up, live in that exact moment, that transition, the journey from the darkness into the light, the sensation of stepping into the ring? Was it a moment that even merited notice?

The days went by in a blur of fourteen- or sixteen-hour stretched dashing from barn to ring to arena and back, taking our horses here and there, tending to their needs often long before our own, watching dreams be confirmed or shattered depending on the ride, the emotions of the horse show lost on us behind the scenes, simply hoping for a good trip and perfect behavior from our string of ten. Entering the real world again each evening as the sun went down was unreal, a blurring of the senses that made no impression upon me at all as I sped down the highway, navigated the streets and boulevards, found my way to my boyfriend’s apartment, collapsed into bed to rise six hours later and do it all again.

These are moments that will be lost. The slippery feel of showsheen in a gray tail sliding between fingers. The metallic bang of an old barn window, the creak of an ancient hinge on a stall door. The bugler calling each class to the ring in his full dress. The order and neatness of my aisle at the end of the day, the stall fronts organized and everything swept tidily back. The acrid scent of hoof oil and the scalloped pattern it leaves on a cold aisle floor. The hollow clopping echo of hoofbeats down the aisle as our horses called one of their own back home again. The brightness of the sunlight as I stepped out of the barn for the last time, passing beneath the whitewashed brick archway, a horse in hand to load into the trailer. These are not the moments that impress greatly on the mind or memory. This does not make them any less worth the recall.

What I thought of when my boss said “You’re living the dream!” this morning.

No, really. My job is great. Just caught me at a bad moment.

Tilt

The nail on my left middle finger is flattened at one angle, bent back under pressure and then torn off so I could continue playing, ignoring the discomfort to push down the pairs of strings between frets, continue to make chords rich and warm to fill the cathedral of the upstairs of the cabin, music floating out over the resting backyard, alive and green.

we stood
steady as the stars in the wood
so happy-hearted in the warmth
rang true inside these bones

In the warm of the afternoon, the big aisle-end doors pulled open to allow the fresh breeze to kick up dust and scraps the entire length of the barn, everyone was cheerful despite the flurry of packing for the Nationals in Syracuse, the rush of laundry and collecting equipment that became somehow far-flung all over the property, labeling and organizing and sorting and condensing and packing and trying to predict everything we might need for five days of horse show.

I rode in the bed of the truck around the corner to help Justin move ton-totes of grain, feeling suddenly transported back to the ranch, sitting on the bed of a truck in the blowing dust under the sun in a cool breeze, watching another man move ton-totes of grain from place to place, no one around but the staff, no students or guests or anyone requiring guidance and catering, just the workers here to do an honest job. Rebecca and I found ways to amuse ourselves and Nancy and Justin throughout the afternoon, everyone gleeful in the sunshine and warmth despite imminent deadlines and the knowledge of the stress of the coming days like a gloomy cloud.

To further my mental flashback I sat on the edge of my bed this evening and banged out chords on the mandolin, vowing that I would actually learn to play songs this summer rather than transpose everything to C so I could sing it quietly here to myself, wanting an audience and wanting no one to hear me here, singing to the trees and hills and birds that darted from tree to feeder and back again, banging about on the metal roof. I thought about the songs we used to sing on the footbridge over the East Fork, feet dangling into open space, water splashing here and there to lick our ankles, or else gathered around a bonfire at midnight, sparks and stars dancing together in the sky and the Highland cattle coming to stand at the buck-and-pole to wonder in their little bovine brains what we were doing, belting out the words to “Wagon Wheel” off-key but together in a different kind of harmony.

Here, though, there is no one, but here I have green grass and close-nestling hills and a chorus of peeping frogs that echo fainter and fainter and tell me that spring has arrived, with or without the redroan Absarokas melting snow into the river, a different place but the same fellowship of work and warm and cool evenings melting into starlight and songs.

Birdhouse

In my ongoing quest to connect myself with the natural world, I’ve been keeping a bird feeder fully stocked on the porch for most of the winter, catching more and more glimpses of birds as the days grow longer and I actually come home before the sun goes down completely. I attract the usual assortment of chickadees, juncos, nuthatches, some striped brown thing I can’t identify, the occasional cardinal, a pair of titmice (bless Erik that he didn’t openly giggle when I identified that pair.)

The dark side of this porch of chirping activity is the attraction of the wide sliding doors into the kitchen. A few moments after Erik pulled out of the driveway to head back to school, I was standing at the sink doing dishes when I heard a hollow thump which made me jump and whirl away from the sink to investigate.

A dark gray junco fluttered once, twice, on the porch, flopped into a pile of sticks by the door (a long-ago attempt from Rebecca to collect kindling for me) and laid there pitifully, one wing outstretched, little body panting with the shock of what on earth had just happened to it. I stared down from inside, partially hopeful that it was still alive, partially guilty for failing to put up those window-stickies I had thought about the last time I had killed a pair of birds elsewhere.

As I finished the dishes and continued to putter around the downstairs, I kept an eye on the dark gray bundle of feathers, noting sinkingly as it shut its little eyes and seemed to withdraw into itself. I changed a load of laundry, swept the upstairs, aware that probably in the morning I’d have to dispose of a small bird corpse into the graveyard of wee creatures (mostly a collection of mice I pitch out of the various traps all over the cabin.)

I glanced down again after putting up the broom and dustpan and was surprised to see the bird sitting upright, blinking its dark beady eyes. A gathering of juncos had appeared on the porch, picking through the remnants dropped by the more vivacious chickadees, more of the little gray birds than I had seen here all together, as though there were gathered to give their fellow a few words of encouragement. I stepped closer to the glass, startling the fallen bird, who gave a hop, another hop, spread his wings and fluttered away, alive to crash through the window another day.