Father's Little Dividend - Part 3

"Beware the fury of a patient man.”
John Dryden
British Poet, Dramatist and Critic of Literacy
1631-1700

“Thou call'st me dog before thou hadst a cause, But since I am a dog, beware my fangs”
William Shakespeare
English Dramatist, Playwright and Poet
1564-1616

"Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.”
Francis Quarles
English religious Poet
1592-1644

When I was a young teenager, 13 or 14, my parents took our family on a trip west to Montana and Wyoming. We visited Glacier and Yellowstone Parks, and another stop included a visit to a working (not 'dude') ranch. My father had been indulging my horse interest, which easily rivaled if not exceeded my love of dogs, since I was around 9 or 10. When I had been very small, my special time with my father was Saturday mornings, sitting in our pajamas on the floor of his den watching cartoons and old movies on television while my mother slept in, eating cereal out of the box while both of us drank large glasses of milk and laughed at having milk mustaches.

As I outgrew cartoons, riding on Saturday had replaced our mornings together, although dad preferred to catch up on his reading while I rode. It was the hour or so drive each way that comprised our time together. While I was actually in the saddle, my non-animal loving parent preferred not to watch me 'break my neck'. I preferred riding very large thoroughbred hunter jumpers, and thought hurtling over very large jumps on a very tall horse was the next best thing to riding hell for leather across country, hurtling over large fences and other natural obstacles like fallen tree trunks on very tall horses. The faster, the higher, the bigger the better as far as I was concerned, and the devil take the hindmost.

So while we stayed at the ranch, it seemed perfectly normal to my parents that I would choose to get up at crack of dawn or even before sunrise, in the mountains, volunteering to help bring in the horses to be ridden that day, before breakfast. What they hadn't known, and I hadn't thought necessary to tell them, was that we rode out to get the horses doubling up, and then those of us who were double riders, grabbed horses, and helped round up the rest and rode them in. This meant that maybe you used a bridle, and rode bareback, but more often just a hackamore or a halter and lead rope, relying on leg cues and neck reining for control. A few times, I rode with just a handful of mane and nothing else, including at least one occasion where I rode thundering past my parents waving to them madly, but they apparently didn't notice my lack of tack, given the clouds of dust and the commotion. Fair enough I suppose, given I was on the opposite side from them with some thirty horses in between, and they hadn't had breakfast or even coffee yet.

But it did surprise me when they drove up after a minor shopping trip to the nearest town which was some 60 or 70 miles away, each way, and became extremely upset to find me riding unbroken ranch horses in a corral, while a handful of the ranch hands sat around on the rails drinking beer, smoking cigars and chewing tobacco. I was having a very good time, the best time I had the entire vacation, doing something I enjoyed. The ranch hands got a break from their work. The horses had a lighter rider with gentler hands and voice; it seemed a win win situation to me. Given that the ranch hands tended to go for quicker, rougher training methods, which included not only drinking beer but breaking the bottles over the heads of the more unruly horses when they reared back, as evidenced by all of the broken brown glass in the corral sand and their own admissions. So, I thought I was doing a good thing. Now I will admit my derriere got bounced around a bit, but I knew how to ride. There is a slang term in riding, called 'daylight', that refers to an undesirable gap between saddle leather and rider's nether anatomy. I allowed precious little 'daylight', and I was never thrown either. I was able to get nearly as rapid a result as the more violent techniques, and had ridden more than a few horses before my parents uproar, without incident. While my parents objected to what they thought was dangerous, after the ranch hands explained what I had been doing rounding up horses every morning, it didn't seem nearly as bad as charging through mountainous terrain in dawn lighting for miles at speed. Although there was a...conversation about that later.

I was allowed to continue, but that...conversation, a rather one sided conversation, objected to my behaving inappropriately. They didn't think it was a good thing for a young woman to be hanging out with crusty ranch hands all afternoon, much less to be doing their dangerous jobs. To be fair to the ranch hands, I had first had to prove my abilities to their satisfaction, then begged like crazy. They were surprisingly self-censoring, compared to their usual earthier, cruder language, and delightfully courteous and solicitous of my well-being. This all took place in a very central location, the corral, with people coming and going, watching for awhile, leaving, coming back, so I didn't see the problem with spending a quantity of time with a group of older men. Well, to be more precise, I had calculated the risk pretty fairly to my abilities, and decided it was manageable, and I wasn't going to be a snob instead of having a good time doing what I liked, and was good at doing. I think I had much more fun than the rest of my family on that trip. I have made a habit of having a fun time doing my own thing, on family trips.

While out rounding up horses for the day, I came across a big red thoroughbred that someone out east had 'dumped' with the ranch owner. He hadn't been ridden in at least three years, and I was intrigued. We brought him back in and got him saddled up; to be fair, it took two strong men holding his head for me to get in the saddle. We tried using only one strong man, but he was lifted clean off his feet. My dear mother was having hysterics on cue. But after a bit of riding, he turned out to have excellent manners (rather like the ranch hands) and I fell in love with him. I brushed him, found and soothed his sore spots and where he liked to be rubbed. By the second day he was following me around without even a lead rope or halter, more like a dog than a horse, and I could ride him at will. I wanted to bring him back with us but mother won out with "he's too big, he's dangerous, he scares me". One of my dogs couldn't have been more protective of my safety than that horse was; he became quite territorial.

So, a few years later it did not surprise my parents to find that when my debate coach was 'stuck' covering the journalism class while the usual teacher was on sabbatical, he signed up a group from the debate team for the class. The journalism class produced the school paper, which immediately became massive litter; it deserved to be trash, it was so badly written it was garbage. The first I knew I was taking 'journalism' was when my fall schedule arrived, a few weeks before school. My then-boyfriend, from the debate team, the same brave soul who chastised me for going off like a grenade on the bully, and I, were the co-editors; it wasn't a choice. We were simply told. We were also given the direction to make this rag worth reading, make it interesting, make it relevant, or you flunk.

Another member of our debate team, great guy, worked part time at the local McDonald's. Due to unseasonable weather, lots of rain, high water levels, the Mickey D's had developed a problem with their garbage dumpsters and sewer rats. He and the other guys who worked late night shifts, especially on weekends, objected to having to brave the rats, and were fired.

I thought that was unfair, I was even angry on his behalf. So I decided that the newspaper would do a full front page color photo expose of the rats. The staff were students, the customers were students, students from the nearby parochial schools were customers too. It was perfect. We gave them the chance to correct the garbage problem, but they were too cheap. We gave them the chance to hire back our debate team friend and the others, with a raise, but they had already replaced them with more 'compliant' students they could bully because they needed the money. So, we ran the edition, copied the health department, and copied the local metro big papers. Knight Ridder ran with it, B-section, prominently.

My co-editor boy- friend was a good sport about it all; he didn't leave me to face any of it alone, even though I was far more the driving force behind the whole thing than he was. We drastically exceeded our allotted budget for the entire journalism class, with our little project. I was never able to verify that the difference was made up from a collection in the teacher's lounge, but that was the rumor. The debate coach wouldn't say; he just grinned a lot, and told us to "carry on", and leave the rest to him.

The first my parents learned that their darling daughter had been taking photos in close proximity at 2 a.m. to piles of garbage swarming with many quite large sewer rats was when McDonald's, the Corporate, not the mere franchised McDonald's, threatened to sue our school district, if we didn't print a retraction. It was the only time in my entire life I was called to the office because I was in trouble, along with the poor dear boyfriend, and our journalism teacher/debate coach. We were threatened with expulsion, which particularly troubled me as I had already taken my college boards as a junior, and applied to the only college I planned on attending. I was accepted during my journalism adventure, my junior year of high school. High school graduation was not strictly required by that college; but it was definitely required of me by my parents.

The debate coach declined the retraction. We just shut up and nodded; we had faith, but it wasn't an easy faith. The debate coach was correct, although the school district's lawyers squirmed for a good few days. It turned out, or so it was explained to us, that because the Knight Ridder newspapers had run our story - giving us full credit for the information - that the McDonalds Corporation would have to sue them also, if they sued our school district. The suit was dropped, an offer was extended to our debate team friends and the other students who were fired to be rehired, at a raise. My boyfriend, poor darling, and I continued to strip-mine the story veins of students employed by area restaurants for exposes that made us very readable - and led to at least one more health department intervention. We got our 'A's for the class, the paper was well read, a boycott developed among not only our students, but other students from schools in the area until things improved, not only at the McDonalds but at the other restaurants that used student-aged labor. Most of all I learned the important lesson that I already knew about dogs and horses, that also with adversaries, size shouldn't intimidate.

My poor parents learned that their children (my red-headed younger sibling subsequently followed a similar course of independent minded indignation) tended to do things our parents never could anticipate forbidding us to do; things that seemed very logical to us but rather unexpected to them, especially when we were angry, and worst when we were angry on behalf of others, two legged, four legged,....others.

I have become angry again recently, on behalf of others.....