[Rusty left a lucrative law career in Atlanta to pursue a dream of being a cowboy. Leaving home proved difficult in both expected and unexpected ways. The short story below describes the day Rusty and 13 year old son Ben left Atlanta bound for a new life out west.]
LEAVING HOME
By: Rusty Tolley
At daybreak on a warm, muggy morning in September, the farewell party gathered at the “farm” to say their good-byes to Ben and me. The group consisted of my parents, my in-laws and my wife, Leah, who was staying behind temporarily to sell the house. We had already hooked onto the horse trailer. All that remained before leaving was to say good-bye and load the horses.
It was an emotional moment. I had always enjoyed a very close relationship with my Mom and Dad, and I had come to love and respect Leah’s parents as well. I now embarked on a journey that would separate us by the better part of the American continent. Moreover, I would be separated from all things familiar. I had never lived that far away from “home”.
In a conversation much later, Stan, my ranch boss, was telling me about leaving home when he was fifteen to break horses with his uncle and then make his own way in the world. When he finished his tale he asked, “How old were you when you left home?” I thought about it for a moment. “Forty-one”, I replied.
Leaving was difficult not only because of my own emotions, but also because I knew something of what my parents and in-laws must be feeling. In addition to concerns about the distance that would separate them from their children, they had added burdens. I learned something about the emotional attachment grandparents have to their grandchildren when my I first informed my Mom we were moving to Arizona. “Are you taking Ben?” she asked.
My parents and In-laws were also dealing with the unspoken question of whether I had lost my mind. As late as two days before our departure, my Mom had mused, “There must be something you’re not telling us,” as I tried to explain again that I had not been fired, and that resigning from a well known law firm to work on an unknown ranch on the other side of the country was something I actually wanted to do. I knew Leah’s parents had similar concerns.
Part of the problem was my inability to convey how unfulfilling practicing law had become and how important it was to me to pursue my passion for the cowboy way. Part of the problem was their inability to comprehend my perspective even if I had been able to articulate it. They were born during the Great Depression and raised in its long shadow. If a household was fortunate enough to include a man with a paying job, he and everyone else did everything they could to keep it. One might be heard to complain about losing the farm, the home or the mule, but not about an “unfulfilling” job.
Here I was not just quitting a job, but forfeiting a financially lucrative career; a career that provided a hint of status, of having “made it”; a career that made your parents proud. Here I was, giving up all of this for the opportunity, from my parents’ perspective, to shovel horse manure in Arizona.
I want to make it clear that neither my parents nor Leah’s were ever unsupportive. To the contrary, they were more supportive than I could have ever imagined and certainly more understanding than I will be if my kids ever pull a similar stunt on me. They were supportive; but they were also concerned, anxious, and probably confused. I was aware of and sympathetic to these feelings as Ben and I said farewell in the driveway, and I was certainly aware of my own fears and the sense of sadness that always accompanies leaving loved ones. All of this, of course, made the whole scene more emotional. The men’s eyes grew misty. The women sobbed. Big hugs were exchanged. Now it was time to leave.……………………………………………………………………………………………..
Ben and I withdrew a short distance to a barn at the edge of the pasture bordering the driveway and began the last remaining task: loading the horses. Doc, Rooster and Cochise waited in blissful ignorance in their stalls. In five minutes we had the halters on, and beginning with Doc, we started loading. Doc (Holliday) was my horse. He was a tall, gangly four-year-old, palomino-paint gelding. He was smart and generally got along well with people. His best attribute this morning and for the remainder of the trip was that he was an easy loader. Rooster (Cogburn), Ben’s horse, was a stout, dependable, dun quarter horse. Almost 14 years old, Rooster had narrowed all of the possible motivations of a horse down to one: food. Rooster would patiently endure all things so long as being fed at the end of the task remained a viable prospect. Like Doc, Rooster presented no loading difficulties.
Leah’s horse, Cochise, was, in every way, a horse of a different color. He was a beautiful, near perfect, specimen of an Appaloosa, a breed developed more than 200 years ago by the Nez Perce Indians native to the Northwestern United States. Unfortunately, he also fit what I later learned was the southwestern cowboy’s stereotype of the modern day descendants of the breed. The cowboy rap on today’s Appaloosas was that they tended to be moody, untrustworthy and stupid. My exposure to real cowboys later revealed there were more Appaloosa jokes than dumb-blonde anecdotes. While the breed has many fans, Arizona cowboys are not among them.
This morning I was ignorant of the prejudice against Appaloosas and of Cochise’s tendency to fit the stereotype. True enough, Leah had complained several times that he did not always respond to her cues. Often, I would swap horses with her and respond, truthfully, that he seemed fine to me. Leah remained skeptical. For my part, arrogance and an inflated sense of my horsemanship skills lead me to conclude that Cochise just needed to be ridden by someone who let him know “who’s boss”.
For the record, Ben, who had already shown a budding intuition regarding horses, and who generally sided with his Mom on unsettled matters, referred to Cochise as a “jack-ass”. I attributed this mostly to Ben’s fondness for his Mom and for the word “jack-ass”, which sounded like cussing, but really wasn’t.
Though my veil of ignorance regarding Cochise’s true character had not been lifted, the light pierced through this morning when Cochise refused to load.
“Get in the trailer, Jack-ass”, I ordered. After a dozen approaches and the same number of refusals, Ben’s moniker seemed appropriate. Following a few more refusals, “jack-ass” deteriorated to less flattering terms. The morning was full now and the stifling humidity that I looked forward to leaving behind had manifested itself. My Resistol hatband began producing sweat by the quart that cascaded down my face and neck. My eyebrows proved insufficient to divert the salty deluge. As a result, I began seeing two Appaloosas refusing to load, which did nothing to improve my humor.
To make matters worse, Ben started making suggestions and even asked me to let him try loading the horse. “Not now, Ben”, I said. This was not a job for 13 year-old kid. This was serious, and it could be dangerous.
I resorted to a host of tactics I had read about in several different horsemanship publications. These involved, among other things, putting gentle, but constant, pressure on the horse’s head and then releasing it when the horse moved in the right direction. Cochise obviously had not read these publications because he now refused to move at all. I abandoned the “kinder/gentler” approach. Now I was pulling on his head and beating on his rear with a buggy whip.
Cochise did not kick; he did not paw; he did not lay his ears back. He did absolutely nothing, while I worked myself into a froth pulling, pushing and whipping.
My goal then changed from getting Cochise to load, to the more modest objective of trying to convince him to acknowledge my existence. He would not. My resulting emotional state confirmed the philosophical truth that the ultimate insult to human beings is not death, but being ignored.
The terrible short and long-term implications of the situation swept over me like a grass fire on the Great Plains. The immediate problem was dealing with the good-bye party that had gathered. We had just closed the emotional parting scene. Tender words appropriate to a journey of unknown duration and outcome had been spoken. All social conventions now dictated that we leave now. You just can’t bid someone such an emotional farewell, then turn around and announce that, because an Appaloosa won’t step onto a trailer, you’ll be sticking around, and, by the way, what’s for lunch?
The irony of the situation made it worse. I was leaving to live a life as a cowboy. Yet the journey could not begin because I wasn’t enough of a cowboy to get a horse loaded on a trailer.
Beyond the social awkwardness, other factors demanded that we leave. For starters, the only job I had now was in Arizona. I did think briefly of calling named partner Clay Long, telling him my cowboy idea had lost some of its luster and asking him if I could have my partnership back. In the end, I decided I’d rather be homeless than try to explain why I decided to come back without ever leaving the driveway.
I determined to analyze available options. “I’ll leave the SOB here”, I thought, but realized that would not work. Cochise could not stay at the farm because we were selling it. It would take too long to make arrangements to board the horse. Moreover, I realized, in a sudden panic, that given my new financial status, I could not afford to board a horse in any event.
I was beside myself. My first day of a great western adventure was not going according to script. In a last ditch effort to resolve the situation, I did what I often did in times of crisis: I asked myself what John Wayne would do. The answer was both obvious and brilliant. He’d shoot the Jack-ass where he stood.
I told Ben to hold the lead rope. I wiped my glasses enough that I wasn’t seeing double and began rummaging through some of the boxes in the pick-up to locate my Ruger Single Six .44 Magnum and some cartridges. “What are you doing, Dad?”, Ben asked. “Just hold the rope, son”, I replied. There would be time for explaining later.
As my search for the gun lengthened and the temperature in the truck soared, some of the initial brilliance of John Wayne’s solution began to fade. Another torrent of sweat had forced the return of my double vision, and I wasn’t sure I could hit a target even the size of a horse. Disposing of the corpse of a thousand pound animal in this sweltering heat presented another problem. This wasn’t exactly a gold fish you could flush down the toilet. I also remembered the tremendous explosion involved in shooting the .44 magnum. I did not have any earplugs handy. I wasn’t sure the satisfaction of blowing the Jack-ass’ brains out was a sufficient tradeoff for living the rest of my life deaf. Finally, I wondered if there would really be any such satisfaction as I took a moment to ponder the moral and legal implications of shooting an unarmed horse. Cochise presented a huge problem, but I wasn’t sure I could convince a jury that his refusal to step on a trailer amounted to an immediate threat of death or bodily harm.
While I was contemplating conducting my defense for “equestricide” in sign language, Ben appeared at the door of the truck. “I told you to hold the horse. Where is he?” I demanded. “On the trailer”, he replied. “Why are you sweating so much?”
I was dumbstruck. “What did you do?” I asked. He explained that the last time we went to a rodeo, he had watched a cowboy who was having trouble loading his horse. “The guy just started acting like he didn’t care whether the horse loaded or not and started walking the horse around in tighter and tighter circles away from the trailer. When the circle got so tight the horse had to turn into his hip, the guy let him see the trailer door and the horse went in. Maybe because the horse thought it was better than walking around in circles. I don’t know. I just tried it and it worked,” he said.
I had the unusual sensation of experiencing both pride and embarrassment at the same time. “Good job”, I finally managed. “Let’s go. I imagine your Mom and Grandparents are getting hot standing there waiting for us to leave.”
Ben never did say, “I told you so.” He didn’t have to. I think we both realized, at that moment, that, in addition to starting a great adventure, we were entering a wonderful, though sometimes uncomfortable, period in our relationship where, in many situations, the son, for the first time, would be more competent than the father.
Rusty Tolley