Tag: Wyoming

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Hooves, by Phillip Hoyle

Hooves are more a fantasy than a reality for me, the sound of hooves on the ground more a live radio show trick than an experience of being near live horses. I guess that is part of my city life upbringing although our city had the grand population of 20,000 and sat in central Kansas. There were real horses nearby.
I remember my grandfather Schmedemann’s team of horses that pulled the hay wagon during bailing. I sat on Grandpa’s wagons and imagined flipping the reins to make those huge animals pull me, but due to their size, I kept my distance. I remember their stalls in the north end of the stock barn and the leather strips they wore on their backs to keep the flies off while they worked. I don’t recall just when they were no longer around, sometime in my mid-childhood, but I’m sure I learned the phrase “sent to the glue factory” around then. I don’t know if it was at all true. I did like their large hooves and the shoes they wore.
I recall real hoof sounds from horses in hometown parades, the Cheyenne Wyoming Frontier Days in 1959, and other parades and rodeos in following years, right up to Denver’s Pridefest Parade I started watching in 1999.
The only horses I actually rode besides the pony in a pony ring at an Estes Park resort were likewise in Colorado years apart, two trail rides. The first when I was a teenager I recall in vivid detail. The trail master shouted, “Pull your reins to the right,” to us not long after we’d begun the climb above the Big Thompson River. I didn’t understand or was too preoccupied with my daydreams not to even have heard him. My horse probably didn’t know that much English or looked to see the trail master. She walked the path several times a day all summer long but that afternoon saw off to our left the small bear that concerned the trail leader. I didn’t know what was going on but remember my horses’ hooves clattering on the rocks as she tried to push ahead of other horses on the trail. That’s when I heard the follow-up command shouted at me. “Hey you, pull your reins to the right,” and to everyone else again, “Don’t let them see the bear.” I did so and finally realized the problem. Both the horse and I were okay. The bear was probably laughing. Of course, I’d never even heard of a laughing bear.
The other ride was with a youth group I led. We were at a resort on Grand Mesa. Most of the kids wanted a trail ride. I joined them and held my very young daughter in my lap. About two minutes into the ride she fell asleep. I held her close to me as we went up and down steep slopes, jerking and jostling with the rhythm of the horse. She slept calmly the whole ride while my arms got very, very tired.
I can still play gallop like we kids did in childhood but I rarely do so these days. My grandkids grew up. I have some great grandkids but don’t know if they will ever want to play horse. Maybe I’ll find out at Christmas.
© 9 October 2017  
About the Author  
Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general, he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”
He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com
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My Most Meaningful Vacation, by Betsy

So, what is it that makes a vacation meaningful anyway? I can’t honestly think of any vacation that I have ever taken that was not meaningful. Some maybe were more meaningful than others that is definitely true. I will have to focus on vacations of the last, say, 50 years. Choosing from all the vacations of my lifetime is too overwhelming. My memory just isn’t that good.
I have had a few trips abroad—the heart of Europe as well as remote places like the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, the train trip through South Africa, plus visits to Canada, Mexico, and Central America. All these trips were memorable and certainly meaningful. Simply experiencing other cultures, and other ways of life is about the best educational experience a person can have. We learn from living among or simply observing others that our way is not the only way.  Our language is not the only language, our humor is not the only kind of humor, our cuisine is not the only kind.
My idea of a great vacation is an exploit filled with excitement, new experiences, and adventure.  I have traveled on vacation by plane, train, boat, car, bicycle, and on foot. One of my most memorable “vacations” was cycling across the United States, from Pacific to Atlantic. I have written several stories about that trip which I took in 2005.
The thing about traveling by bicycle is that you see so much more detail along the way, including the wildlife, sometimes in the form of road kill.
Probably most of my vacations have been of the camping variety. I love camping whether in the wilderness or just off the highway.
When I was married to Bill and the three children were young, we used to take backpacking trips. Bill was always looking for fishing opportunities. I hated fishing. Not enough action. But there was plenty for all of us to do on those adventures while Bill was fishing. I very much enjoyed the hiking, setting up camp,  and being in the mountain environment with nature.
When Gill and I first got together we went backpacking one summer in the Wind River Range in Wyoming.  That was the time she cut a gash in her knee and I saved her from bleeding to death with my Girl Scout first aid kit which happened to have some butterfly bandages in it. She still has a scar on her knee today which I want to pass around the table for all of you to see.
This, one of our first vacations together, could have been meaningful in that it had the potential for being our last vacation together.  But Gill stuck with me in spite of the fact that it was not her idea of a vacation. I actually think it was the butterfly bandages that saved our relationship.
After we had been together a short time, we went to a style of camping more to her liking—car camping. Gill had a VW camper van—a Westphalia— in which we had taken some day trips during our courtship. It may not have been an actual vacation, rather a weekend, when we took the Westy to Rocky Mountain National Park. This was a meaningful trip to me, and I will never forget it. It definitely portended of a meaningful ritual which would become a part of my life every day for the rest of my life. We were driving along through the park admiring the sights when Gill pulled over off the road and came to a stop. “It’s tea time,” she wailed. She jumped into the back, opened the galley, put the kettle on and brewed the tea, and served me a dainty cup of perfect British tea—with milk, of course, not cream.  I am a person who likes structure and some rituals. So, I became hooked on four o’clock tea time for life.
I also became quite enamored of the idea of a camper van for road trips. The Westy was very old and worn out and had to go soon after we started living together. But we both were enthusiastic about having a camping vehicle. So, a few years after selling the Westy we bought a used VW Eurovan—a later model of the Westphalia.  We named her Brunie, short for Brunhilda. She was a big boned woman. The three of us —Gill, Brunie, and I—spent 13 years together, traveled over 200,000 miles in too many trips to count. It was an awesome relationship. All of our vacations together were meaningful because we traveled in almost every state, except Hawaii and Alaska, always had a comfortable place to sleep, we felt safe, and were always warm and dry. Because of Brunie we saw the country, we learned history and geology, we experienced things and places we never dreamed existed. I might add we met all kinds of people who would always approach us in the campground wanting to meet us? No wanting a look at Brunie. 
Some of the more memorable places we visited had been selected as a destination like the national parks, state parks, oceanside settings, historical sites, desert oases.  Others we just happened upon by chance.  We always kept a diary on these trips because we knew as we grew older we would forget where it was that we saw that amazing sunrise, that moose grazing beside the road, those sheep on the cliff above, that approaching tornado. Or all we had, learned, heard, and experienced would become blurred.  And Gill was constantly snapping photos, so we have thousands of those to remind us. Some places were quite ordinary, some elaborate, some filled us with awe, some sights were beautiful beyond imagination, some curious, but not one was not worth the visit. Some of our favorite, nearby places we have been back to several times such as Hovenweep, Canyonlands, Hamburger Rock, Arches N.P., and  Yellowstone.
There has not been one trip or sojourn that was not meaningful.  Most meaningful? Impossible to say.
© 1 Dec 2017 
About the Author 
Betsy has been active in
the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old
Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been
retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major
activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a
volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading,
writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage.
She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren.
Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her
life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.
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Scars, by Gillian

We all have them. Don’t
try to tell me you don’t. Nobody gets to our age without them.
The first one I remember
acquiring came along when I was seven or eight. Mum and Dad and I were
wandering through the woods picking blackberries when a sharp, jagged, end of a
broken-off small branch scraped a gash in my thigh. These days I’m sure it
would be off to the ER for stitches, with perhaps a butterfly bandage to keep
it together on the way, but back then we were expected to suck it up and
soldier on; the result being a scar wider than necessary and very long-lasting.
I still have it.
Roughly forty years later
I needed a butterfly bandage again when I fell on sharp rock edges while
backpacking in the Shoshone Wilderness Area, miles from anywhere. But this time
I was carefully tended to by my beautiful Betsy, who had the foresight to carry
butterfly bandages in her pack.
Back again in the old
days, in college, I slipped at the top of some icy steps and fell, with my knee
doubled under me, onto the metal blade of a boot scraper. Now that one did
require stitches. But that was all it got. These days we’d be given all kinds
of physical therapy; exercises to help it heal as efficiently as possible, but
in 1959 I was on my own. It hurt like Hell to bend it, so a couple of days
later, on a bus, I stretched my leg out beneath the seat in front of me. The
bus got in an accident, the seat above my leg came down on it and hyperextended
my knee. That hurt like Hell. A week later, with my knee the size of a
football, I went off for a long-planned week’s hiking trip with a classmate.
Well, I was madly in unacknowledged love with the woman! What’s a girl to do?
Not surprisingly, I have had a lot of trouble with that knee over the years but
I’ve worked hard at keeping it in working condition, mainly through water
aerobics. It remains functional, and actually gives me less pain than it did
twenty years ago, though I’m not off on any more backpacking or even hiking
trips.
A few years back I broke
my ankle – just a simple break. It healed perfectly, leaving no scars. Then, as
some of you might recall, I broke my wrist a couple of years ago. That was a
compound fracture, requiring surgery, nuts and bolts, and a long scar which has
now basically disappeared. My ankle and wrist both healed quickly, fully
functioning in record time. That, of course, in addition to skillful surgeons,
is because I diligently did every therapeutic exercise I was given, painful
though they often were. I would like to think that I have become a little less dumb
in dealing with injuries, over the years, but much of that is because
healthcare professionals know so much more these days. Our job is just to
follow their excellent advice.
Which, it seems to me, is
much the same for our inner, psychological, scars as for our outer, physical,
injuries.
As a child, and even as a
student, I had no more idea how to deal with my inner than my outer pains.
Neither, come to that, did my parents. All of us colluded in some strange way
to pretend I had no injuries, inside or out. Just get on with life, denying the
pain. I’ve written often enough about my childhood angst so I’m not going to
repeat it, but I rode roughshod over it just as I did my mashed knee, making
both worse while denying there was a problem. Over the years, I have paid
heavily enough for that. But, as I gained knowledge and sought expert advise to
try to make my knee more functional and less painful, so I did with my inner
dysfunctions. Endless physical therapy, endless psychotherapy. Both mostly of
the self-help variety, but they worked. The trouble is, it’s so much harder to
go back; to try to fix those old inner and outer scars years later. Now, I try
to deal with both immediately. Keep exercising that wrist, don’t let that scar
tissue form or I’ll be sorry. Take those emotions out and look at them right
now. Work them over. I don’t want that psychological scar tissue building up,
either.
I don’t expect to stop
receiving wounds, and so the scars that mark them, either physical or
emotional. But as I age, perhaps becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical
scarring, I hope to balance it with a healthy decrease in psychological
scarring. Due largely to my attempts to follow the spiritual path, and in no
small part to this group where I find healing by writing out and sharing my
problems, my wounds are less deep, less painful, and heal more readily. Little
scar tissue has the chance to form. Even those big bad deep wounds don’t get
reopened as once they did. Those are the ones that are there because I’m a woman.
Because I am gay. I am happy about both, but being female or being GLB or T
leaves you constantly open to painful slashes of hate-filled sabers. Oh they
are not usually directed at me, personally, but I feel the stab of the knife of
every woman murdered because she wants an education, or refuses to hide away
her body, and of every gay man murdered in Uganda or left to die in Wyoming.
It’s certainly not that I find any of those horrors less painful, nor, alas,
less frequent. I simply, for the most part, recognize the pain sooner, deal
with it better, avoid reopening those old wounds.
Yet I am happy to have
scars. How can you live any kind of eventful, meaningful, life, and not have
them? We are battle-scarred warriors who, having fought the good fight, did not
come out unscathed. As Kahlil Gibran puts it,
“Out of
suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are
seared with scars.”
© 30 June 2015 
About the Author 

I
was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to
the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the
Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised
four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting
myself as a lesbian. I have been with
my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.