Twenty-Fourteen: A Recap (part 2)

May-October: The Ranch

This next bit is probably going to be incredibly long…so please bear with me.

After staying with Kas for a night, she asked me if I could pick up an espresso machine on my way to the ranch. I agreed to this scheme. That morning I had also gotten wind that one of the girls I had worked with last year was flying in to Denver that morning, but she didn't have a ride. So I volunteered to pick her up. At the time that seemed like an innocent bit of good-will. It turned into a fiasco of driving to the wrong terminal, having to leave the airport and come all the way back around the get to the right terminal, trying to find her, finally managing to pick her up, and THEN going to get the espresso machine.

The good part was that we stopped for late breakfast/early lunch with Josiah, the videographer from last year. He had driven up from Texas about a week before. Once he heard that I was driving my own car, he looked out the window from Chick-fil-A and asked which one was mine. Cue the following exchange:

Me: See that dirty green car? Mine's the silver one right next to it.

J: Oh. *pause* See that dirty green car? That one's mine.

Apparently he had been caught in a dust storm on the way from Texas, and what with the snow and rain and mud on the ranch his car was looking a little worse for wear.

But anyway….moving on to the ranch! We arrived sometime in the early afternoon, and all the way up the mountain I could feel myself getting more and more excited to see the ranch. After all, the last time I had seen it, the place was half-buried under a mudslide. But I knew that people had been working on it all winter. Surely the place was looking better than it did.

When we finally pulled in the front gate…I almost felt like crying. The place looked better, it really did. But I knew that they needed to have the place open in a week, and all I could see was mud and heavy equipment and patches of melting snow. It looked like a construction zone. (The place was cleaned up in time for opening, but the very first impression was a little depressing.)

As a wrangler, the vast majority of the first week was spent on trail maintenance. One memorable moment of walking all over the mudslide, and then walking up a steep trail trying to keep up with Nick (the head wrangler) and nearly dying in the process sticks out very vividly in my memory. The rest of the time we were picking rocks from the new arena—that is, the new arena area, since the arena hadn't been built yet and we wranglers were going to build it over the summer—and getting horses from the lower pastures and helping the farriers and basically spending a great deal of time doing a lot of hard, manual labor. It was during this time that our wrangler group had to get to know each other and decide whether or not we would work well together.

Here are the wranglers, by the way!

L-R, back row: Andrew, Terry (honorary), Austin, Casey, Derek, EB, me, Larry (honorary)
L-R, front row: Claire (honorary), Gabrielle, Tori, Sara (women's work crew boss), Levi (ranch kid)

Can you tell that we have a hard time taking pictures of just wranglers? XD

The one face that I sorely missed was that of EB. 

EB and Copper

 

Me, Gabrielle, EB, Tori (otherwise known as 'EB and the triplets')

She's a few months younger than me, but for some reason it seems like she's much older and wiser (To be fair: though we're the same age, she's spent her years at a much higher RPM than me). I spent a lot of time in 2013 sitting quietly in her workshop and watching her work with leather and talking about people and life…so we became rather good friends. I still count her as a very dear, close friend. So when I heard that she wasn't coming back in 2014 I was pretty devastated. The first reaction, if I'm very honest, was 'if EB isn't there, then I don't want to go'. Thankfully I quickly came to my senses and decided that it would still be good if she wasn't there.

The summer wouldn't be complete without a description of the horses on my string, so here goes.

Chester-pony

Chase (part Bashkir Curly, a horse that has kinky/wavy hair)

Grace (aka Brunhilde, as I affectionately called her)

There was a bay gelding without a name, but I called him 'Patchy' due to some hairless spots on his face and neck. He started off as a major thorn in my side, but by the end of the summer I was starting to like him. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of him. :/

There's so much that I can say about the summer…to keep everything from dragging out too terribly long I'll try to condense it into the general impression left on me.

I started off feeling very optimistic: I was doing something I loved (that is, working with horses), with people that I liked, and was having a great time doing it. I really fell in love with the horses on my string, which probably wasn't the greatest idea but there you have it. I also came to know the horses in the guest string so well that I could tell who was who at just a glance; I knew their temperaments and little quirks and what set them off and what calmed them down. I was learning an immense amount about riding and training and absolutely reveled in it.

I had also become friends with everyone in our wrangler group—some better than others, of course—and had struck up what seemed to be a great friendship with one of the guys. And that, so I thought, would be that.

About a month into all this, I realized that I was developing slightly more than friendly feelings towards this guy. And I hated it, because (a) there's a 'no-purple' rule (i.e., no dating) and (b) I really wasn't sure if this guy was a good person to feel that way towards. So I tried not to worry too much about it.

A couple of weeks later—well, a long story short, we had something of a falling out. I recovered from the incident and thought it was all okay. But one thing led to another and my interactions with this guy for the rest of the summer turned into one misunderstanding after another. I let it affect how I felt, and spent several weeks feeling like a dark cloud was hanging over me. I tried not to let it affect how I interacted with guests, but I started withdrawing more and more from staff: when work was done I would retreat to make phone calls or write in my journal or draw, and end up not going to supper or to the extra-curricular events most nights.

In short, I allowed the summer to become rather isolated and hellish. There's no other way to put it. I found out slowly that it wasn't just me feeling that way—some of the other girls, who I had withdrawn from partly because we weren't around each other much and partly because I didn't try to see them in my time off, said that the tendency to isolate was same for a lot of people. By the middle to the latter half of the summer, most of the people who were staying all the way through were feeling burnt out and beaten down, like they couldn't wait to go home. This was a huge change from last year, where I felt like I didn't want to leave.

There was a lot of good stuff that happened, a lot of funny things, a lot of sad things, and a lot of bad stuff. Last summer was simultaneously the best, most difficult, most stretching, most strengthening time of my life. I made some great friends, and turned down some potentially great friendships. I made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot about how people work. I learned a LOT about horses and discovered how badly I miss them when I can't be around them for twelve hours a day. All these lessons were dearly bought.

But at the end of the summer, it was easy to leave. I don't say that like it's a good thing—but I was so ready to move on and have my own space again and to not be living out of the contents of a suitcase.

Oh yes, and before I forget: in September, I cut all of my hair off.

I had been thinking about it for a long time, so it wasn't exactly a spur-of-the-moment thing. I used to say that I would never cut all my hair off, and then I started thinking about it, and mused, and made a secret Pinterest board, and thought some more, for well over a year. In retrospect, considering how the summer had gone, there was something a little symbolic about getting rid of the hair. It was almost as if I was tossing away all of the issues and stupidity of the year with it.

I've ended up LOVING it. Ease of management aside, I think it makes me look older. It seemed that the majority of the time people assumed that I was 18 or 19, and when one is almost 23 that's a little depressing. Now people ask if I'm still in college, so I guess that's an improvement. 

Tada.....

For most of the summer, I had been working out negotiations with my aunt for deciding whether or not I would be moving to northern Arkansas to work with her. That brings us to the month of October…

(stay tuned for part 3!)