“I can’t believe there isn’t cell phone service here,” Anne whined, oblivious to the fact that her horse had stopped following the group.
Bored by her lack of direction, the horse had started nibbling a patch of grass on the side of the trail while she continued to tap away on her cellphone in vain, trying to update her Instagram status to “#bored.”
“Would you put that thing away?” I asked in an exasperated voice. “We didn’t come all this way to stare at a tiny screen.”
I scanned the landscape and the sky, loving every second of our trip to Wyoming.
“I like to stay in touch with my online friends,” she said. “Life didn’t stop just because we came out here, even though it feels like it.”
“Those aren’t your real friends, you know. Those are just people on the other side of a computer screen. They might not even be the people they say they are, and you’re wasting a beautiful day to try to talk to them. I invited you out here on this trip to get away from social media.”
I tried urging my horse forward to catch up with the group, but I must have been doing it wrong. The confused animal stood completely still while watching the rest of the group walk away with a mournful expression on his face.
“Whatever. All I know is I paid a ton of money to sit on the back of a horse and watch city people try to rope a wooden cow. I’m trying to find out what happened last night on television. I can’t get any updates on my phone.”
I let out a long sigh and shook my head.
The whole purpose of the week-long trip was to get away from technology, but more importantly, to get away from drama.
God knows, I had plenty of drama, both in the office and in my personal life.
What little personal life I had.
I certainly didn’t need to get updates about a phony reality show, not when I had a gorgeous setting like the ranch calling to me.
A guide from Mourning Dove Ranch approached us and offered to take us on a side route around the group to show us a few interesting rock formations.
I smiled and exclaimed, “Yes,” while Anne rolled her eyes and emphatically answered, “No.”
I shot my best friend an ugly glance before turning back to the guide.
“I would love to see them, thank you. Anne, I’ll catch up with you later.”
Anne gave a half-hearted wave over her shoulder with one hand while holding her cellphone up in the air with the other, still trying in vain to get a signal.
She muttered a few choice profanities under her breath and shoved the phone disgustedly back into her dainty pink purse, which was dangling from the saddle horn in front of her.
I pulled the reins gently to the left like we had been taught on our first day on the ranch, trying to make my horse follow the guide. Instead, my horse turned in a complete circle and ended up back where it had started, facing the rest of the riders.
My shoulders sagged.
Tina, my patient guide, smiled.
“Looks like you tugged a little too hard. Don’t forget to nudge with your heel while you lead. It tells the horse where to go. If you only use the reins, you only make her change direction. You have to use your foot to tell her to move forward, too.”
“I hate to kick an animal,” I explained sheepishly, knowing full well that several different ranchers had been reminding me through the entire trip to nudge with my boot.
It seemed like everyone out here had a nasty habit of wanting to kick a horse, even though at this very moment, I was starting to understand why they might want to.
“Don’t think of it as kicking it. Think of it as telling the horse what you want it to do in the language the horse understands. How would you feel if you woke up every single morning and had to go to work, but you had no idea what you were supposed to do when you got there? Other people had to tell you what to do when you started, and you need to tell your horse. Trust me, she doesn’t want to stand there, lost and confused. She wants to take you where you want to go. So tell her. Try again.”
I did as I was told, barely poking the animal in the flank with the back of my boot. My horse began to move slightly and then stopped. I tried again, a little more forcefully this time while tugging lightly on the reins. Amazingly, my horse followed Tina’s horse up over a small ridge of grassy hillside until the two of them stood on the top.
My heart stopped at the view.
Below me, miles of unbroken landscape stretched before me. The valley was ringed on three sides by beautiful rust-colored rocks that reached upward, forming walls around the valley that blocked the wind, leaving the grasses and wildflowers below us untouched.
“It’s gorgeous up here,” I exclaimed, delighting for the hundredth time in a new sight.
When I’d first found the ad for the week-long dude ranch vacation, my co-workers had laughed at me in a good-natured way, unable to imagine a city girl like me as a cowgirl.
They had made numerous jokes. I’d laughed along in the way that I always did. Now, I was the one getting the last laugh.
All those jerks back in their cubicles at the tech startup where I worked were stuck inside staring at computer screens while I was being enchanted by the glorious landscape.
I took a deep breath of untainted air.
There was nothing like this feeling back home in Seattle. The only parts of the city I ever saw were the office and my condo. Not counting the unrelenting rain and fog.
Lather, rinse, repeat, day in and day out.
“What is that little building down there?” I asked, pointing to a small dot to the left.
Tina lifted her hand to adjust her hat so she could see where I was pointing.
“You can’t see it from this distance, but that’s actually two buildings. One is the main house, the other is the barn. That’s an old ranch called ‘The Watering Hole.’”
“Really? Just sitting there in the middle of nowhere like that?”
I was perplexed that someone could live out here, all alone.
“Well, no, it’s not in the middle of nowhere. The whole thing is the ranch. It’s about five hundred acres,” Tina explained. “No one lives there now, but once upon it a time it was a pretty little place. They raised a few head of livestock, nothing massive, but the owner died suddenly—I think it was about two years ago—and it reverted to the bank. The bank has been trying to sell it ever since. So far there has been no serious interest in the place.”
As we turned to go back to the group, I caught up with Anne and shared my news, ready to burst.
“I think I know why I had to come out here.”
Anne looked at me over the top of her oversized sunglasses, now resorting to scrolling through old text messages on her phone to pass the time.
“And what exactly is this vision quest you had in the last five minutes?” she asked sarcastically.
“I want to buy a ranch.”
I braced myself for the impact of Anne’s expected onslaught and was vaguely disappointed when she didn’t even react. She simply dismissed my remark with a wave in my direction.
“You’ve had a heat stroke or something. I’m not talking to you until you get out of the sun and right in the head.”
“I’m not kidding. I’m deadly serious. I want to look into buying a ranch.”
I stuck my jaw out and sat ramrod-straight in my saddle. It wasn’t a position I used very often, but when I did, it was a done deal.
I had made up my mind.
“And what am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Go back to Seattle and tell everybody you decided to play Little House on the Prairie while we were out here? You’re being ridiculous.”
“I don’t care what you tell them. I’m staying here in Wyoming. At least until the end of the summer.”
I looked off in the distance, trying to see the small ranch that was calling to me.
“And what about your house, Miss Cowgirl? Your car? Oh, and you know...your cushy job?”
“I don’t care about any of that. I want to take a closer look at that ranch, maybe even make an offer on it. It wouldn’t be a problem to sell the condo and as for my job…it’s already gone.”
Anne’s mouth dropped open in surprise and she stopped tapping her cellphone screen.
Now I had her full attention.
“You lost your job?” she asked. “And the first thing you wanted to do was go on vacation?”
“Not exactly,” I replied. “The company is downsizing. They offered the first round of older employees a large severance package if we were willing to take the deal. I knew I could take the deal now or wait for the axe to fall later. I took the deal.”
“I hope it was a good one,” she said. “I can’t believe you didn’t mention this before now.”
“The deal was decent. I felt like it would be a mistake to turn it down. I have enough to make an investment into another business even. Like a ranch.”
“Whatever,” Anne answered, still not convinced that I wasn’t playing with her. “If you want to stay out here and keep pretending to be a cowgirl, I can’t stop you. I’m not staying. I’ve got a life back home and I like it, thank you very much. You can stay out here and sleep with rocks for pillows and pee behind a big old prickly cactus all you want. I’m out of here.”
After the group made its way back to the ranch, I pulled Tina aside to ask her some questions about ‘The Watering Hole’ ranch.
“How do I get in touch with the bank?” I asked, waiting for Tina to laugh at me like everyone else I knew.
“I’m sure my boss has the number in the main house, I can check with him,” Tina offered. “You do realize that’s a primitive ranch, right? There’s no fancy air-conditioned tractors or massive combines like on television. Anything you decide to do with it is going to have to be fairly simple. It’s more like a camping spot than a ranch. You would be buying the land more than the buildings.”
“I hadn’t thought about what I would do with it. I just know I want to stay out here and breathe in fresh air every day for the rest of my life. Or at least for a while longer, I should say.”
“Spoken like a true cowboy, or cowgirl,” Tina said.
She threw an arm around my shoulders and walked with me to the barn to groom our horses before lunch.
“I’ll go talk to Boss, and if he has a name to talk to at the bank, we can even take the truck into town before you have to head home.”
“I’m not planning on going home yet. I have a couple more weeks of vacation I can take.”
“Really?” Tina asked, concern showing on her face. “Hang on a second, I thought you were interested in buying the ranch so you’d own a little property out here, maybe come back and visit every so often when you feel like getting away from it all. Are you talking about buying a place and moving here? Like, now?”
“Yes, I am,” I replied confidently. “I’ve been stuck in a city all my life and never knew people live like you do on this ranch. I know you get some people—no names mentioned—who come out here and play cowboy for a week, then can’t wait to get back to their fancy cars and their Chinese food delivery. I don’t want to go back to that life. I don’t want this to end.”
Tina eyed me skeptically before nodding her head thoughtfully as she brushed her horse.
“I completely understand. I couldn’t imagine living in a place where there’s no grass growing between my feet.”
“I can imagine it, because I’ve lived it my whole life,” I said.
I placed my saddle on the wall rack and aimed a hose from the wall at my horse’s sweaty side, raking with my fingernails at the place where the hair was pushed down from being pressed under the saddle.
Some people would be too disgusted to run their carefully manicured nails over the side of a dirty horse, but I loved the feeling of its wiry hair beneath my hands. This animal had carried me out over the plain all morning, and now it was my turn to take away some of that stress. Plus, the loving nuzzling from the horse after every grooming made it all worth it.
Tina didn’t look convinced.
“There’s more to ranching than putting on a cowboy hat and saddling up a horse. It’s going to be hard work. There’s a reason these ranches come up for sale often. Either the owner dies and no one in the family wants to live like this, or the owner himself can’t take it anymore and he heads for a town. We’ve even seen some ranchers who just turn their animals out loose to fend for themselves and then lock the door behind them. Not even bothering to put the place up for sale. They just walk away.”
“I appreciate you telling me all that. I know it will be hard, but it can’t be worse than waking up every day to go to work in a stressful job, then coming home to my empty condo. I can’t breathe when I think of going back there. Not when I’ve been out here where my lungs have had the first chance in my whole life to breathe fresh air.”
Tina smiled as we led our haltered horses to the pasture next to the barn to get some rest and munch on the hay piled in the middle.
“You’ve described what is possibly the best reason I’ve ever heard for someone taking to country life. I can’t argue with that logic. C’mon, let’s go in the house and talk to Boss.”
The owner of the Mourning Dove Ranch, Jim Miller, gave me the phone number for the bank, and then cautioned me as gently as he could.
“Leah, it’s one thing to come out here for a week and rough it a little. It’s something else to try to live off the land. I’d be irresponsible if I let one of my guests come out here and get swept away by the cowboy lifestyle. I mean, think about it this way. You couldn’t even come out here for a week on the ranch without bringing your friend from home. You’re about to leave everything you’ve known and spend a lot of your money to do it. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
“Not at all,” I answered before turning serious. “That’s why I’m doing it. Taking this vacation to your ranch was the craziest thing I’ve ever done, and you’re right, it was so crazy that I couldn’t even sign up without bringing along someone for moral support. That right there is the reason I need to do this.
“I’ve lived my whole life playing it safe, afraid to take risks. You wouldn’t believe how many people thought I’d gone off the deep end just for saying I was coming out here on vacation. But you see, that’s why I have to do this. I’m tired of living scared, and of watching from the sidelines while other people get to live. It’s time I do a few things for myself, and if that means making some monumental mistakes, then I’ll own up to those, too.”
Jim sat back in his chair, looking out the window for a minute before speaking.
“I’m going to make you a deal. I’ve known that place was for sale and thought about buying it because it borders my property. I’ve never really put any effort into looking at it other than just to let it rest in the back of my mind. If you buy the ranch and if it doesn’t work out for you, I’ll buy it from you, by taking over loan payments. Whatever you sink into it will be gone, but at least you’ll be out from under it. Does that sound fair?”
“Hardly,” I laughed. “I’m no realtor, but don’t people usually come out ahead when they sell land?”
In the back of my mind, I had to wonder if there wasn’t some trick to this. Maybe Jim had wanted this property all along and was waiting for some other sucker to buy it first?
Maybe there were tax liens against it, or improvements that had to be made under the law?
Then after the right greenhorn came along and blew all that money, Jim could swoop down like a cattle baron from the Old West days and rob me blind.
I could just see it now...
“Precisely,” he answered smugly.
Something about the look on his kind, weathered old face made me think again.
“Leah, I want you to go for it. I want you to get your ranch and make something of it. Most of all, I want you to be happy. That’s why I’m willing to be a safety net, but what I won’t do is become a way out. Because if you knew the whole time that you could just get your money back and head home without any losses, you wouldn’t have any reason to tough it out. If you don’t want to lose everything that you’ve sunk into it, then you’re going to have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when times get tough and forge ahead, no excuses.”
I thought about what he said and decided he was right.
The only way I wouldn’t chicken out was if I knew I had a lot at stake. Losing my down payment plus whatever payments I’d made would be a huge incentive not to give up if things didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted.
“It’s a deal, Jim, and now that you explain it that way, I guess it makes a lot of sense. If I don’t want to lose out, then I’m going to have to be a big girl and push on through.”
I shook his hand, taking the piece of paper with the banker’s name on it and sliding it into my pocket.
“I appreciate your willingness to even offer, by the way. A lot of people back home would have told me I’m being stupid and impulsive.”
“Oh, I never said I didn’t think this was stupid and impulsive,” he said with a smile that made his wrinkled old face even more creased, still holding onto my hand. “Everyone deserves a chance to try something new and make a fresh start. And if you fail, it won’t be because you didn’t try. No matter how it works out for you with the ranch, you’ll be a stronger, wiser person for doing it, and I want to support that.”
We walked out of his office and back outside, into the sunshine that had first shone on me when I arrived on the charter bus from the airport along with a dozen other would-be cowboys.
Whatever things were going on in their lives, I knew one thing for certain: things were going to change for me, starting right now.