Last Friday I shared a bit about my love of horses and my dream to own, or be involved with them, again. I also mentioned that it was my Dad who sparked, and fanned my passion for horses. Today I want to share a little more about him…
Dad was raised on a cattle ranch, the fourth of five children, to a pair of pioneering spirits who, quite literally, carved a life out of the Caribou-Chilcotin wilderness.
Dad’s early years were spent in a cabin without running water or electricity. When he was five or so, they moved a mile or so to a better site on the property closer to the main road, to shorten the distance Dad and his siblings had to ride their horses to school. There, Grandma and Grandpa built a newer house with two floors, bedrooms up and kitchen/living/tiny bathroom down. It wasn’t a huge house; only three bedrooms. The two boys shared one bedroom, the three girls a second bedroom, and the master for Grandma and Grandpa. Water was gathered at the hand pump outside and brought inside with buckets. Trees on the property were cleared to make hay fields, the downed timber converted to barns, fencing, and fuel for the wood stove and wood furnace to help prepare meals and heat the house. It was everything you’ve ever read about or watched in a 19th-Century western novel or program, only this was the first half of the 20th century. Pioneers. Ranchers. Salt-of-the-earth, no-nonsense people with no time for frivolity. Every day was an exercise in survival.
Didn’t put the garden in? You did, but forgot to water/weed it? Don’t feel like harvesting the produce or preparing/canning it? Starve.
Too tired to chop wood? Freeze.
-30 outside and blowing snow? Well-water hand-pump frozen? Not keen on going outside to thaw it and get water? Dehydrate, in your stinking clothes.
-30 outside and blowing snow? Sun’s not up and you really, really, don’t want to put on your woollies to trace the team and stack a hundred hay bales on the sleigh only to cut the binder-twine and toss those same hundred bales off again over the next three hours to feed the cattle dependent on you for their survival? You all starve.
That’s just how it was. Do. Or. Die. No time for hurt feelings or achy muscles.
Now in his seventies, Dad still lives by the same cowboy code and work ethic: Fear, reluctance is not an option. Get it done. In fact, he’s still getting done, working as an electrical Lineman, as he has for fifty years. Get it done, was his philosophy with horses, too.
Treat them with respect. Care well for them (I didn’t get breakfast/dinner until I’d fed my horses). But never, ever, let them bully you. Own the round pen. Show who’s boss. Earn the horse’s respect, first. Lovey-dovey it later, when it knows better than to turn its back on you.
Thank you, Dad, for sharing with me your wisdom, and for making my little-girl dreams come true. <3
Deborah
The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.
~Katherine Patterson
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