With Eagles Wings

Today we entered into our second parade of the season, opening for the Lamont County Fair! Stan's boys and myself partook of the festivities through the non-profit group With Eagles Wings from Arapahoe, Wyoming. This group offers assistance to young men, women, and adolescents who struggle with chemical dependency and other issues, and the teens of this group have started some group therapy work with us once or twice a week at Stan's house. I hope you have the chance to check out my snapfish site so you can see all the pictures!

The night before the parade was as insane as I hope it gets around here. First off, no one around here likes to get up before 11am besides me, and even I fall short a few mornings a week after late night sweat lodge ceremonies! As we are winding down, trying to get into bed early by 10pm, Stan informs me that his two young nephews who normally help him out during the night and leaving with their uncle at midnight to go pick up some supplies for the parade. Which means I have to sleep in the house in case Stan needs anything during the night. As I am about to drift off, the young mother of Stan's grandson drops off her 1 year-old after her aunt threatened to hide him and take him away! So she brings this little baby, who had just been sleeping, into our house at the same time Stan's nephews start fighting over who got to sleep on the floor beside my couch when they got back from getting supplies. Suddenly I have a screaming, overtired, cranky baby in my arms as I am supposed to be getting some sleep. The boys are fighting, baby screaming, Stan yelling, and of course, the reason we have the baby is because its mom wanted to go out and party instead of caring for her kid. Arrrrg... Resentment, resentment... The boys finally take off, and teenage Sequoia comes in and takes the baby. Throughout the night the baby has nightmares and screams so loudly, that even with earplugs, my skin crawls. Everything is quiet, the boys come back complete with a full-on couch they decide to move into the living room at 3 o'clock in the morning. I get so fed up with the noise I finally grab my pillow and go back out to my peaceful tipi and catch some z's. At 4:30am another young mother comes into my tipi, crying that she needs a ride home and needs my phone. I let her borrow it only to have Daniel come back into the tipi, screaming at me to not lend my phone out to someone who is drunk and needs to stay put. Ack. I finally just get up since we need to get up anyway to get ready for the parade.

Once everyone got up, parade preparations went smoothly and everyone had a great time! The boys looked awesome in their warpaint, and they are hoping to win First Place for Mounted participants in this parade as they did in the Lander parade. After the parade we all jumped into Stan's pickup truck and headed down to the swimmin' hole to cool down in the 90F heat! Later, back at Stan's, the 3-week old foal I have been trying gently tame to my presence was lying down taking a nap, and it finally let me come right up to it and rub it all over - it never even got up! It just enjoyed its little massage. Afterwards I cooked dinner for about 20 people and we had a small, super hot sweat lodge ceremony. I ate and promptly fell asleep, the moon and stars lighting up my tipi, happy that the night before was not an omen for the day ahead.

You Just Never Know...

Western Diamondback Rattlesnake

Ahhh... Just another typical day of housework and looking after children... or is it??

Finally fed up with the state of Stan's bathroom, I decided it was time for an overhaul. The 300 bath towels, medical supplies, Daniel's various hair clips and hair products and hair brushes and rubberbands and all the other pretty boy items needed to be dealt with. The obvious place for much of these was the cupboard under the sink. As I opened the cupboard door to put them away, a large, coiled rattlesnake greeted me with a loud hiss (I think he was sitting on his rattle)! Ack!!

I quickly shut the door and summoned the guys who were all sitting around in the kitchen smoking and swapping stories. It was the fastest I ever saw this bunch jump up to attention, and several of them took turns bashing the snake without much success. Ken finally grabbed it by its tail, swung it around, and smacked its head on the bathtub, leaving me with the addition of snake blood and a soggy dead mouse to clean up.

I now peek into cupboards before I open them up all the way, I jump a little more at weird sounds in the grass, and in addition to shaking my sleeping bag out each night, I hang it up during the day.

As The World Turns

"In the far and mighty West
Where the crimson sun seeks rest,
There's a growing splendid State that lies above,
On the breast of this great land;
Where the massive Rockies stand,
There's Wyoming young and strong, the State I love!"
-Wyoming State Song

Two days before 4th of July, Stan decided it would be a great idea to throw a bunch of at-risk teenagers (most of which had only ridden for one day of their lives) onto half-tame, barely trailer-trained mustang/arabian horses and put them all into the blistering hot Lander 4th of July Parade complete with hoards of children running amok and spraying fire hoses - yeeeeeehaw!! Being the thoughtful (*cough*: scared to death) and service-oriented person I am (*cough*: not insane), I look it upon myself to drive the truck with Stan so he would be able to come along and all the others could participate in the riding crazy horses in the city streets part.

On 4th of July, I got up at 5am - which was when everyone said they had wanted to get up - and spent the next hour and a half being a highly caffeinated human snooze button. We had to be at the parade - 30 minutes away - by 8:30am. Everyone started casually rolling out of bed at 6:30am and were outside to start trailering 11 horses by 7:30am. Using various tools (corral fence posts, large sticks, lead ropes, trailer doors, strong strapping men and one with a bunch of broken ribs) we finally trailered all the horses by 8:10am. Only two of the horses reared inside the trailer and tried bashing their brains in. We made it to the parade slightly late, but then again, nothing much was going on at that point, so we ended up with plenty of time to saddle horses, paint horses, and decorate the pickup truck with blankets, posters, and fancily dressed young Indian girls armed with giant bags of candy.

The parade was the biggest one I have ever seen! It took 2 hot, sweaty hours to make it down 10 city blocks, and man, they do parades differently in The Great West - everything here but particularly parenting out here is a huge contrast to Boulder, Colorado parenting/hovering. I'm pretty sure parents weren't even on the same block as their 2 and 3 year-olds as I spent most of my time peering out from blankets hanging over the window and windshield, dodging tiny children playing in the spray from the firetruck in front of us and viewing the 10-foot space between us and them as a mobile crosswalk. Apparently, to the horror of some of our riders, several ran right up to our horses thinking they were as tame and friendly as fairground ponies. The firefighters thought they were being merciful in the heat of the day by spraying their firehoses at the horses, but let me tell you, these horses typically spook when you start filling their water troughs up with a garden hose!

At the end of the day, everyone was hot, sweaty, and happy, the paint was running off of the horses, and the horses went onto the trailer much more readily than they had in the morning. 4th of July is quite a popular celebration out here - fireworks are available most of the year and isn't it precious how even the youngest of children hold them with their bare hands as they stand out in the middle of the dark streets in their own homemade fireworks arsenal, ahem, I mean, display?? That being said, we celebrated with a giant BBQ complete with steaks cooked on a charcoal grill that had been preheated in 1 minute flat with a giant blow torch - man, living where there are no laws, or at least no one to enforce them, totally rocks! The celebratory night ended with every square inch of Lander being lit up by giant, stadium-style fireworks!

Yeeeehaw!!

Wind River Reservation, Arapahoe - west central Wyoming - The Wind River Indian Reservation spans 2.2 million acres and is home to 2,500 Eastern Shoshone and more than 5,000 Northern Arapaho Indians. The Northern Arapaho were not originally given a reservation by the US Government, and instead had to find space on what was originally the Shoshone reservation. This was a big sacrifice and problem considering the Shoshone used to be everyone's enemy! The Arapaho had to petition the government to allow them to be able to live on the reservation, and so, this small space - probably only half of which is usable, which was originally only designated for one tribe, is now home to two tribes.

I am spending my summer living on the hot, dusty reservation at the home of my friend, Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho Indian who has a particularly novel and gentle approach to taming horses, and has also found a way of helping at-risk youth through working with horses. Stan is a lesson in courage and tenacity - besides the fact that he is not too far from the ripe old age of 50, living on an exceptionally poor reservation rife with alcoholism, drug abuse, and unemployment, and besides the fact that he has already outlived two sons, a few siblings, and several close friends, he was also injured in an accident nearly 30 years ago that rendered him quadriplegic. Through all of this, he has become a medicine man and recognized elder of his tribe, he has developed his horse taming method, and he has also opened his home to several foster children, and travels around the country speaking about his experiences. You can visit his website for more info, or you can come down and take a clinic!! http://www.stanaddison.com/ Or you can come down to keep me company! Please!! For the love of god!! Visit me...

Ahem. Anyway. I spend my nights in a tipi next to the corral. It is one of the few places that stays relatively cool, and for some reason, is also a spot that most of the kids who run amok here don't generally think to look for me, begging for entertainment, piggy back rides, and if all else fails, start calling me names (especially creative ones, like 'Tonya Dumb-butt') and wrestling with me in order to rouse my attention. Yes, being a tall, female white person, I am novel entertainment. Akin to an amusement ride.

I spend my days being a surrogate housewife and ranch hand to about 10 people living in a small mobile home - cook up breakfast, sweep up the floor, throw a load of laundry in, go for a walk before everyone gets up at the early hour of noon, feed and water the horses, lay up the tack to dry out, hang up the laundry, clean up the kitchen, put up with endless bad jokes and teasing, check business email, pick up mail, delegate chores, saddle up the horses, ride, nap in the tipi, entertain children, help new riders, put chicken in the oven for a 11pm dinner, feed the dogs, take a shower, go to bed by midnight. Every few days we have a sweat lodge ceremony which breaks up the monotony, and my favorite new thing to throw into the mix - a visit to the "neighborhood" coffee house (it's 20 miles away in Lander) with velvet couches, jazzy music, dark moody walls, wireless access, and tied for First Place for awesomeness is the rich espresso and the cute barista guy. I'm not so far from civilization afterall.