Colorado Nightmare

**The following is a little disjointed and rambling, partly because there is so much that needs to go into it that I couldn’t possibly hope to fit it all in. I started it a few days before August 19th, which marked 1 year since I flew home from Colorado, but mechanically it’s sort of all over the place and working hard to fix its flaws was so distasteful to me that I put off finishing it. Though I’ve never written publically about this before, and it’s certainly not my strongest writing, I feel the need to get it out somewhere, so here it is.**
     Most of you know that last summer was a nightmare for me.
     Some of you know that this translates into occasionally having nightmares about last summer.
Courtesy of several factors that will remain unindulged at the moment, the current addition of several of these quasi-nightmares to my sleeping mind has made me sufficiently emotional to once again take up my keyboard in an attempt to stifle the demons that skulk about on a too-recent shelf in my memory.
     When I think too deeply about what happened there, my breathing will actually become erratic. My heart will pound. My throat will grow thick. My eyes will become damp. I will then do a quick search of my surroundings and tightly hug whichever family member is closest to me, even if it is my adorable and exuberant yet exceedingly smelly German Shepherd mix.
     Having just jumped from the blogging high I experienced during my semester in Scotland (See my “Kilts and Cowboys” blog in the sidebar on the right), I had every intention to let my readers follow me as I worked through my summer job in Colorado. Even on the plane ride there, however, I experienced trouble. I attempted to use the ample travel time I had to do two very important things: finish a personal journal entry of my last evening in Scotland, and use my detailed notes to put together a blog about my trip to the Scottish Highlands the previous weekend. As is my wont, I put them off, and only a week or so after landing in the Rocky Mountains I began to realize that they might never be written (and they haven't been, which is a horrible shame because they would have made great blog posts.)
     I should have listened to my gut, right at the beginning, when the manager was annoyed by a Star Trek redshirt joke I made when she gave me my uniform. I should have booked my plane right then and jetted back home.
     I was jetlagged, having flown through seven time zones in three days. I was altitude sick, albeit mildly, having ascended 8,000 feet during my journey. I was exhausted, waking up for a 5:30 barn call followed by 12 to 15-hour workdays. I was usually hungry, working for managers that generally did not care whether or not their wranglers got to eat during the day. I was frustrated, being largely surrounded by people didn’t seem to understand me. 
     But the absolute worst thing was the homesickness. A few days after arriving, I received news from my sister that our step-grandfather had passed away, and shortly after that she reported that my aunt and uncle had lost Belle, their family dog. Somewhere in between, the CEO of Borders announced via e-mail that all of the stores still in operation would be closing permanently. Over a period of roughly four weeks in the middle of my summer, I cried every single day.
     One of the few passages that I managed to turn out which, based on the emotion conveyed, could have been written about almost any given day during those three months:

I’ll be honest: I don’t want to be here anymore. I’ve been here over 10 weeks, and I’ve wanted to go home – badly – for the last five or so. In the past two weeks, only on last Tuesday did I not cry at all; every other day has seen some little thing or another, as simple as half a thought and as obvious as a song about missing home, to cause me to burst into tears, sometimes in the middle of work.

     The downward spiral of my depression was worsened by my sudden and complete inability to write. The entire time I was there I managed to fill only a page and a half of loose leaf paper. By the time I left the barn at the end of the day, showered, and ate dinner, it was usually time to think about going to bed (though of course, talking to family on Skype always had first priority) and I rarely had the energy to think about doing anything else. The tax on my body drained me of creativity, so that even on my days off writing seemed a most unthinkable impossibility. This of course resulted in further stagnation of my creative juices – which sat unchurned in whatever chalice my brain reserves for them – which in turn led to a deeper depression, causing me to want to write even less. It was a spiral that alarmed me and led to a stunting and stiffening of my creativity that followed me through my last year at school and may still be looming just behind me, like some kind of B-movie monster, as evidenced by the relative sparseness of this blog.
     Early on, I put the following down in a Word document, in an attempt to chirp out a blog entry:

To be honest, I feel like I haven’t had the energy to do anything creative since I got to Colorado. I’ve had the time, yes, but the 12-14 hour days and the fatigue and, honestly, pain that I’ve been plagued with since I got here seems to have drained the creative energy from your favorite blogger. I’ve done very little creative writing, although I have written a paper for Dr. Swartz, and little reading aside from the Dave Barry book I got at the local bookstore. At various points I’ve thought about blogging, but I could not find a moment when any slight creativity showed up in tandem with a bout of energy at a time when I could actually write.

     Almost every day, country music blared across the corral from a dusty stereo in the back room. There was a cd back there by a band called the Josh Abbot Band. I don’t know who it belonged to, but it took every fiber of my being not to break it in half. One time I actually had it in my hands. I could have done it. That cd was played over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and some days we heard nothing but those same 12 songs all day long. Thank Chan I have repressed almost all the songs. There are two that I cannot get rid of, but thankfully it is fairly easy to turn my mind from them when they plague me.
     The days when no country music blared, classic rock was blaring instead, from a playlist the manager created that contained a few Eagles songs, a mysteriously placed Matchbox Twenty song, and a distressing amount of John Mellencamp. I HATE Mellencamp. I can’t explain why, but even before Colorado, something about his voice or his music or his song style makes me want to stab a teddy bear. (One day, however, she played “Hell Freezes Over” from start to finish - it was the most fun I had all summer cleaning that corral.)
     The result of this is that I am now incredibly sensitive to country music, and those songs that I heard endlessly last summer sound horrid in my ears, especially those specifically released last summer. This makes it difficult to spend any significant amount of time in the car with my country music-obsessed sister. Among the songs I cannot listen to are: the beer in the console song, that ballad duet with Kelly Clarkson and whatshisface, anything by the Josh Abbot Band (SWEET CHAN ALIVE, HOW I LOATHE JOSH ABBOT AND HIS BAND), the song about heaven being far away, the “lie like a tree” song, the Kenny Chesney song about crazy, the “shake it for the catfish” song, and the barefoot blue jean song.
     Every Saturday I would have to ride with Chris (and sometimes Danette) to the barn’s sister stable to lead rides (where you get to follow exactly one ride before they send you off on your own). I was fortunate enough to have Chris and Danette there, as they were the two managers who actually listened to what I had to say, let me explain myself when they saw me doing something they thought was peculiar, and made sure their staff got to eat during the day. One day in particular, I had worked for 11 hours straight without a bite to eat. Rather than make me take the last ride of the day, Chris noticed that I was about to pass out, sent another wrangler in my place, and sent me into the kitchen for food. That was much more than I could have expected from some of the other managers.
     The trails at the sister stable, to make matters infinitely worse, were terrifying, and the horses that have to navigate them every day of the summer are quite amazing when one stops to think about it. Some of the climbs are legitimate 45º angles with nothing but bare rock to cling to. When a horse lunges up these rocks, it’s almost like being on a dolphin’s back. Going downhill over trails that are only slightly less steep is quite frightening, but what is scarier is worrying if a person on your ride is going to fall off (only happened to me once) n such a steep trail and get seriously injured.
     Many of you know the story of one of the more frustrating things that happened to me over the summer. The following is a passage about the incident that I succeeded in writing the first day I had off after it happened; it will give you some small idea about why I didn’t get along with most of the managers.

Last Friday I made a judgment call when I wasn’t supposed to. About 10 minutes into my first ride, Shorty began limping badly. The woman that was riding him was a horse person, so she instantly recognized that there was a problem. She told me that he seemed like he was working really hard and that she didn’t want to ride a lame horse, and asked if we could go back to the barn. This happened before we got to the place where the regular trail meets the shortcut trail (the one we use if we’re running late, that cuts a few minutes off the ride), so I gave the woman my guide horse and walked Shorty back to the barn. This, of course, was my mistake. Protocol dictates that if a horse comes up lame, even if you’ve just left the corral gates, you have to finish the ride. The day manager told me that this is not a judgment call – you finish the ride no matter what. Which means that there is no question involved; if I were to walk out the gate and have a horse trip and fracture his leg, protocol says that I must force him to walk the 2-hour trail (with no rider, of course – they’re not THAT barbaric), because that is what the customer paid for. Of course, we’re also expected to return to the barn before the 2 hours are up, though walking with a severely lame horse would mean taking a lot longer to complete the 2-hour loop.

As punishment for considering Shorty’s welfare on company time, I have to clean the corral by myself on either Sunday or Monday.

     However, it appeared that I was too valuable as an employee to spend a day cleaning the corral, because for the next few days we were too busy to afford losing a wrangler for an entire day. Instead I was made to do the end-of-day barn chores by myself for an evening, which took about 45 minutes and aside from the monumental amount of dust I inhaled, was much preferable to spending several hours shoveling manure in the hot sun.
     It is exceedingly important for me to point out that, three days after I brought him back to the barn, Shorty came in from the corral in the morning with a grade 5 lameness, what horsemen term “hopping lame” or “three-legged lame.” For those of you who are not horsemen, it is also important for me to explain that there are only three generally identified things that will make a horse grade 5 lame.  One is advanced laminitis, one is a sole abscess... and one is a bone fracture. Shorty refused to put weight on his right front, and a cursory examination confirmed that he had an abscess in the sole of his foot. He was removed from work for the rest of the summer, and sent home with the first shipment of horses.
     None of the managers mentioned that maybe I did do the right thing after all.

My Life as a (So-Called) Writer
Part 1
I wrote my first short story when I was 7 years old.
Do you remember Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? The books with the bleak, surreal, black and white drawings that were more far more nightmarish than the stories themselves? Well, what I did, essentially, was take a Scary Story called “The Barking Ghost” and re-write it in a notebook with sloppy second-grade handwriting and sloppy second-grade grammar. I was at that blissful age where I had never heard of copyright laws and knew nothing of “writing for an audience” or even the basic concept of generating your own story ideas. The end result was pretty awful, but at the time I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done.
I had created a piece of literature.
Granted, my mother (and possibly my grandmother) were the only people who read this creation of my genius, and their reactions were probably less than ecstatic. I didn’t see my dad on the day I wrote it (and I had probably forgotten about it by the day after), and my big sister Cindy was probably busy poking me or hoarding all the good toys or otherwise antagonizing me, as was her wont at the time. So my work had an extremely narrow readership.
Later that same year my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Bartley, announced that we would be writing stories in class. Judging by my memory, this involved not only writing our own stories but coloring our own book covers and binding then with two pieces of yarn.
I don't remember how much time we devoted to the project, but the end result for me was a 9 or so -paged story capped at both ends with a teddy bear-shaped piece of laminated paper. I seem to remember that Mrs. Bartley only wanted the stories to be about 5 pages, but I of course couldn't tell my story - about a little girl who gets a wonderful teddy bear and then, in a climactic plot twist, loses it - in only 5 pages, especially when you consider how big my handwriting was. This tendency to write way more than I was expected to would follow me for a long, long time.
I again felt that I had created a masterpiece, and although I'm sure I still have that little book somewhere, I do not recall what kind of reception it got from my small reader base.
A little over a year later my readership expanded considerably. I don’t recall having any great penchant for writing in the intervening time, but I recall the Young Authors competition as my first foray into legitimate writing. I still had no concept of originality, taking my character names from Lisa Frank and various cartoons I was enamored with and focusing on a simple plotline that any child could identify with. This was also in the heyday of my obsession with drawing, however, and I got to illustrate the book myself and, with the help of my teachers, turn it into an actual bound work of art. I received a blue ribbon for Best Story, a really pretty multi-colored one for Best Illustrations, a plaque (which I still have), and a trip to Lorain County Community College (where I would later attend school but which at the time felt like another planet) to see a speaker (or speakers). I can’t remember who the speaker(s?) was (were?). All I remember is that he (one of them?) was a man who told a story about a dog that is running a race and gets chopped in half (don’t ask me why), and his owner sews him together with two legs under him and two legs sticking out of his back. The dog wins the race by using his legs in twos, so that when one pair got tired the other pair could take over. The speaker used the first two fingers on each hand to illustrate this.
What a bizarre memory. Anyway, my point is that I got recognition for writing from someone other than my mom. And that was pretty neat.
I have an assortment of random memories from this period of drawing a LOT. I filled page after page of a notebook or two or three with pictures. Tons of pictures. I drew all the time, and so did Cindy. Mostly I drew animals, and most of those animals were doing people things, like grocery shopping or trying on clothes or going to school. I didn’t write a lot, but one could argue that these pictures were stories in themselves; often there were speech bubbles to let you know exactly what my animals were thinking or saying. Perhaps there was something there that suggested a longing to create new creatures that only exist on paper, complete with personalities and lives and friends and emotions and all that. But this idea is only just coming to me as I write this. Perhaps I was just a kid that liked to draw.
This love of drawing led me definitively into what could be my most important, and possibly most embarrassing, writing effort to date. Like a lot of people my age, I became obsessed with The Lion King as soon as I saw it in theaters back in ‘94. By 4th grade I could recite the entire movie by heart and had almost destroyed the soundtrack cassette by overplaying it. I love the characters, the artwork, the music, and the story. A great deal of my in-class artwork became focused on acacia trees and African savannahs, and my personal drawing time was spent on recreating the characters from the movie. I believe at the end of this era my Lion King folder boasted roughly 60 drawings and included every character in the movie. I copied them from the books and coloring pages I had, and prided myself on being able to tell people that none of them were traced (it was a constant irritation during this period when people, mostly grownups, would use the dismissive term “trace” to describe my pictures, and I was constantly correcting them).
In 6th grade I had the brilliant (I thought) idea to take my favorite movie and recreate it in written form, turning the animals into people. For character inspiration I turned to my favorite band (Hanson), my classmates (Zach Gress and Samantha Martin), and family (Dad and brother-in-law), and although the work was horribly misguided and senseless, I loved every minute of the process. I worked on it for months, finished it before the end of that year and started on the sequel, which was never finished, now that I think about it. I had realized how silly the endeavor was, but I kept the manuscript for posterity. I still have it.
The odd thing is that no one really criticized my cheesy adaptation. My classmates thought it was cool, my teachers didn’t express an opinion, and my parents kept mostly quiet, probably because they didn’t want to tell me that if I wanted to write a story people would read, I had to come up with something original. The only family member that tried to gently talk some reality into me was my aunt Joanne. She said something about “originality” that, although I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time, I haven’t forgotten since.
(I had a typo in the previous paragraph that Microsoft Word didn’t catch – apparently “ingot” is a legitimate word. I means, a “slab, lump, brick, or bar.” Interesting.)
If I consider my “Barking Ghost” effort to be my first short story, I think of “Capsized” as my first official short story. I wrote it for Mrs. Thomas’s class in 7th grade, during “Great Lakes Week”, which I vaguely remember as a week wherein all the lessons in our classes, even Math, were tied together by a relevance to the Great Lakes. In Mrs. Thomas’s class we were divided into groups and each group was assigned a lake, and we were given free creative rein to do whatever we wanted with the topic – game show, factual report, anecdote, poem, or what have you. I ended up writing a story about a family that takes a vacation boat ride on Lake Michigan, only to have it attacked by a massive lake monster. The inspiration for the monster was a combination of Nessie (of Loch Ness fame) and Joanna (of The Rescuers Down Under fame), and the ending was pleasantly ambiguous. It wasn’t the greatest story ever written, by far, but I think coming from a 12-year old it was certainly serviceable.
But the thing that intrigued me the most was that I had loved the process of writing it. It was a story all my own.
And I got notice from my teacher and my classmates.
And I just started three sentences with conjunctions, but I’m almost 25 now and I think my creative license ought to allow for that.
Other than that I don’t recall writing much in the way of short stories in middle school, but I do remember freewriting in 8th grade. I hated it. Mrs. Chapin made us do it all the time – once a week, if I recall, we had to turn in two pages – and I never had the slightest clue what to write. I still have those composition books, with entries that fluctuate between diary-like admissions about missing my stepbrother, who was my best friend as a little girl and who had abandoned our family when I was 11, snippets of lines from movies and television shows, and random ramblings about the nonsensicalness of freewriting. I didn’t understand the concept of freewriting at the time, but by the time I got to college I was doing it on my own. But that’s for later on in this timeline.
It would be impossible to write about my middle school forays with pencil and paper without talking about Justin, Clarke, and Billy. Their story was inspired by the X-Men movie that came out in 2000, and the characters were adaptations of the Hanson brothers, with whom you may recall I spent a good chunk of my pre-pubescent life positively OBSESSED. These characters were not as far removed from the actual Hansons than the ones mentioned above in the Lion King adaptation, but they were at least acceptable, and more or less original, characters who had a unique story to tell.
This story, which has remained untitled and unfinished, was an important creative step in my life for several reasons. It was the first time I saw writing as a sustained activity – something that required prolonged attention and passion to keep it from dying. I learned (I remember my aunt Diane driving this home for me) the importance of not dating myself; I had included specific references to television shows, movies and musicians that were important to me at the time but which added nothing to the story and were far from being timeless or universal. I discovered that no matter how much you love your creation, you cannot sustain your engine on your own love alone. There are some writers that write strictly for themselves, but for those of us that hope to someday be marketable, it is not enough to be your only reader.
This is where Cindy stepped into the picture. Remember Cindy? The big sister who hoarded all the good toys from me several paragraphs ago? Well, she was still antagonizing me on a regular basis at this point, but she did something else as well, something that affected me in a positive way and encouraged me to keep writing.
She became my first fan.
She offered to read my story out loud to me before we went to bed at night, giving me feedback from a reader’s point of view, pointing out which parts were contradictory, what made no sense, what was well-composed and what she did and didn’t understand. She read my story when all of my peers were engrossed in Harry Potter and paid little attention to the sweat and blood I was putting into my own masterpiece. This is a little embarrassing to make public, but there’s a wee part of me that harbors a sort of juvenile grudge against the Harry Potter franchise for appearing when it did. Ridiculous as it is to say, I saw Harry as an adversary that was too strong for my middle school efforts, and I resented him for it.
Anyway, my point is that Cindy liked my characters, wanted to follow their story, and encouraged me to finish it, and maybe someday I will. Granted, the beginning of that story is now well over a decade old (she can probably remember the first sentence as well as I can) and would need some serious (SERIOUS) reworking, but I still have the original copy, and may someday attempt to give it new life. I still have all the notes I took during those readings. They’re in a really nice journal that my friend Jayna had gotten me for Christmas.
I don’t know how much longer this post should go on. I feel like it’s already way too long. Maybe I’m boring you guys.
I was in Dr. Lix’s class today and he encouraged us to think about a story from our pasts that we could use to connect with an audience while giving a presentation. That got me thinking about all this, and I figured it might make for an interesting blog post.
If you’re interested, I can finish with my experiences in high school and college in another post. Let me know.
♥
SM