Chasing a Dream: A Horseman's Memoir Read online

  My best friend Ed, whose father was an alcoholic, had been looking for an excuse to move out of his parents’ home. Together we rented a little duplex in Palisade with a bathroom shared with other tenants. The place was a dump, but it only cost us sixty dollars a month. When Coach Woodburn found out he took me aside and put his arm around me as he often did before I went into a match. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m concerned about you, Grant. I don’t want you to quit school.”

  But sports were important to me. “Coach, I have a good after-school job working for the town. I can support myself.” I told him I’d stay in school and keep wrestling. That he didn’t share my confidence made me want to prove him wrong. I became district champion, placed fourth in the state, and managed to squeak by financially. Wrestling earned me praise and encouragement from my coach and community, which boosted my self-esteem. Wrestling became my identity. The athletic skills and confidence I had gained would be crucial in later years when I started to work with horses.

  The following fall, Mom and Dad decided they would rather deal with my rebellion than have me living on my own. They gave in. With football season coming up, I couldn’t continue to work after school, so I returned home for my junior year. Our school had a rule that if you got caught drinking you would be suspended from sports for that season. I decided it wasn’t worth the risk, and stayed away from alcohol. I became a four-time district wrestling champion and placed third in the state as a senior.

  My career plan had been to become a high school agriculture teacher and wrestling coach, but my restlessness grew. Maybe I had read too many Louis L’Amour books about cowboys, who, like the mountain men, seemed to be the epitome of freedom and adventure. Somewhere about this time an idea hatched: I would saddle up and ride north, following the Rocky Mountains to Canada, living off the land along the way.

  Two colleges offered me full wrestling scholarships. But after training since I was nine years old, I wasn’t eager to dive into a college program and was worried about the academics. I was a slow reader and scored poorly on my ACT tests so I put their offers on hold to take a year off, work for the railroad, and save for college. So we could continue to roam together, I hauled Skeeter to a friend’s ranch along the railroad tracks near Cameo, Colorado.

  I was soon working in my beloved mountains earning more than my college-educated teachers. On the weekends we drove to Grand Junction to party, drink beer, shoot pool, and chase girls. Who needs college? we thought. Teachers made half of what I did and they didn’t have nearly as much fun. We were railroaders living wild and free--or so we thought.

  MISTAKES AND MOUNTAINS

  MISTAKES AND MOUNTAINS

  6

  BOND, COLORADO, 1976

  No job is more exciting than one that can kill you. Our task on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad rock gang was to protect the trains and rails from falling rocks. We would rappel down cliffs, hang in our harnesses above the tracks, and pry away loose rocks with large metal bars. Any rocks we couldn’t bar off we’d blow off with dynamite. The danger didn’t intimidate us. Like most young people we gave little thought to our mortality. The higher the risk, the greater the adrenaline rush. We were Railroad men!

  In Gorge Canyon, Colorado, during my first week on the job, my crewmates were scaling an unstable three-hundred-foot cliff while I helped clear rock at the bottom. While I worked, a loud rumble started above. The ground shook. Rocks started hitting all around me and I scrambled to get out of the way.

  After work I would sometimes ride Skeeter in the mountains, other times I’d fish on the river with our crew. Frequently, we workers took up residence at the Bond Bar, a place that hosted a rough mixture of railroad workers, cowboys, and the occasional hobo. These groups did not always get along. After work one night, Dan, a temporary member of our crew who’d had too much to drink, started spouting racist comments to a five-member Latino crew that we knew well. Some of them were our friends. The Latinos jawed back at Dan, who replied, “I’m ready to kick some Mexican ass. I’ll take on all of you right now.” The Latinos weren’t very large men, but they worked on the section gang. They were hard as the steel spikes they pounded all day.

  Dan was a big, stout man, but no match for five of these wiry little terriers. I though, He deserves to get his butt kicked. Maybe this’ll teach him to not run his mouth.

  “Let’s take it outside,” Dan said as he traipsed out the door, the Latinos on his heels.

  “I gotta see this,” I told my friend Will, and we jumped off our bar stools and followed.

  They had him surrounded like coyotes readying to take on a grizzly. One would run in and take a swing. When Dan had his back turned, another would run in and kick at him. It was quite comical and Will and I were laughing and surprised at how well Dan was fending them off.

  Then I heard one of them say, “I’m going to kill that SOB.” He headed for his truck. I figured he might be going after a gun. I wasn’t very happy with Dan and figured he needed a good whipping but he sure didn’t need to get shot, so I followed the man. Just as I figured, he pulled a pistol out of his truck and skulked back toward the fight. Dan had his back turned when the man leveled the gun. Without thinking I ran up behind and grabbed the guy around both arms, trapping the gun against his side, and lifted him off his feet. Will came running and helped wrestle the gun out of the man’s hand.

  Our crew dragged Dan out of the fight and convinced the Latinos to stop. Everyone calmed down, and we drove Dan home and sobered him up. The next morning he said, “I was really stupid last night. Thanks, man, for tackling that guy.”

  I thought about how much worse it could have been. For us, fighting was simply good entertainment, not a way for someone to get seriously hurt or killed. Heck, I occasionally enjoyed a good roll, too. Maybe my Irish blood got me going, but my wrestling experience made me good at it. But I would rather see the loser cry “uncle” and buy the winner a beer than see someone get shot.

  Our living quarters was a boxcar outfitted with bunk beds. One night I had one of my nightmares. Asleep, I sprang out of my upper bunk and landed on my feet running for the door screaming, “Look out, look out! There’s a big one coming down!” The boys scrambled out of their beds and, wide-eyed, started running for the door.

  “Where is it? Where is it?” they asked.

  When they realized I was asleep, they woke me and cursed at me. Everyone went back to sleep, but the next morning the laughter and teasing began and didn’t stop for days.

  During the next week I fell out of my bunk onto the floor every night. One of the crew nicknamed me “Bumpy.” For months everyone made fun of Bumpy. This was only a fraction of the teasing and joking.

  We were working in Rock Creek Canyon at a notorious location where two cliffs came together to form a wedge. Many huge rocks had fallen on the tracks there over the years. It was a dangerous spot, and we were uncertain as to how to tackle the task. Removing the wrong rock would cause the entire mountain to tumble onto the tracks. The crew had been watching this place and agreed that the whole mountainside should be brought down with dynamite. Frank, the foreman, was about to retire and didn’t want to cause the railroad to shut down for a day or two. “Just go up and clean up a few of those rocks on the outer edge,” he told my friend Paul and me.

  We belayed to two trees above the cliff and rappelled down to the rock at which Frank was pointing. Working together with our bars, we managed to pry the big rock loose. Suddenly, the mountain began to rumble. “The whole thing’s breaking loose!” I screamed to Paul as I shoved him clear of the falling rocks while I swung the other way and ducked underneath a big boulder. Boulders half the size of a car rolled right past my head and the rock I was hiding under was moving. I kicked out as far as I could, and swung under another rock. That rock was shaking, too, and I jumped and kicked and bounced all over the mountain dodging the falling rocks. Time fell into slow motion. This is what it’s going to feel like to die, I thought. There was no
fear, only an odd sort of objective observation: everything would soon be over.

  Just out of highschool Grant took on a job working on the rock gang for Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The work was dangerous and adventurous but paid well for a young man with no college education.

  I pictured myself as someone standing on the ground might see me, dangling underneath two rocks the size of train cars with my rope pinched between them. I thought, Somehow I survived all that, and now these two rocks are going to break loose and crush me. Dirt and small rocks were falling from underneath the boulders. Time was running out: I had to get out of there. I slipped out of my harness, scaled the cliff like a monkey, climbed to safety and checked on Paul, who hung from his rope. His helmet had been knocked off. Blood was oozing from his head. He said, “I’m ok. You pushed me out of the path of the slide.”

  Not a single scratch marked me, but my legs shook uncontrollably. Open-mouthed, we looked at each other in disbelief.

  That evening back at camp, I called home. Mom answered. “What happened to you this morning?” she asked.

  “I almost got killed. Why?”

  “At ten a.m. the Lord told me to get on my knees and pray for you.”

  “Well, I’m sure glad you did. I should be dead right now. The whole mountain came down on me. I didn’t even get a scratch. But it sure got my attention. My legs are still shaking.”

  Grant relaxes in the shade with Giddyup and Trapper, Locke’s dog, at Buckskin Crossing. The mules provided a great deal of companionship for Grant in his youth.

  Work was never the same after that. When I tried to climb again, fear gripped me. My legs shook and I became sick to my stomach. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t steady my nerves.

  A few days after the rock slide my friend who was keeping Skeeter called. The tone of his voice sounded ominous with a forced kind of steadiness. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Skeeter’s dead.”

  The unexpected news stunned me, and I didn’t know what to say or ask.

  “Got hit by a train,” he said.

  My beautiful palomino mule with the big, trusting eyes. My loyal friend. I let him down, I thought. My God, Skeeter is dead. The guilt gnawed at me. I wondered, What is it with railroads and trains, anyway? They had killed my mule and nearly killed me.

  My sense of adventure had evaporated; the fun had turned sour. If I was unable to climb, I couldn’t work, anyway. I thought, I better leave railroading while I can. I was nineteen years old, stumbling my way through life largely on my own as I had for years, learning by trial and error. I needed guidance and mentorship, but didn’t know it at the time. I only felt a lust for freedom and adventure. Mountain men and cowboys still had a hold on my imagination. I thought, If I’m ever going to ride the Rocky Mountains to Canada on my mules, now is the time.

  7

  PALISADE, COLORADO, 1977

  The rockslide and Skeeter’s death convinced me to put everything aside—the railroad, college, wrestling—and pursue my dream of riding along the Continental Divide to Canada. When I returned home and spilled my plan to my parents, Mom said, “That sounds great, like another one of your adventures. Grant, you have always heard the beat of a distant drum.”

  Dad said, “You need to stop this foolish dreaming and think about going to college, or at least getting a real job.”

  His reply was innocuous enough, a reaction many fathers might have, but it broke something in me. “You mean a real job like yours, Dad, one you hate?” At that moment I had never been more intent on pursuing my dream of living like a mountain man, or cowboy. I didn’t care what he said.

  After very little planning I assembled my animals. I borrowed a nice, gentle mule named Jack from my good friend Brian, and with money I had saved from the railroad I purchased a big gray mule I named Kate. Kate was a tall, rawboned, plain-headed mule with a lot of scars around her face. Her owner wouldn’t say what caused the scars, but the fact that she was head shy indicated that she may have been struck on the head and face.

  Kate had been started under saddle but was very mistrustful and fearful. I had some wild rides on her before she settled down. I laid her down several times, a method I had learned from a book written by an old-time horse trainer from the 1930s named Professor Jesse Beery. Following his instructions I used a thick cotton rope tied around her neck and drew her hind legs underneath her until she could no longer stand. She had to give in and lie down. This helpless position is very scary to a horse or mule. Vulnerable and frightened, she struggled against the rope and groaned in fear while I rubbed her all over her body, letting her know that although her life was in my hands I wasn’t going to hurt her. Though my execution of the process was a bit crude, it helped Kate overcome her fear of me. After several rides I discovered she was granite tough and could walk fast and smooth for long distances.

  Brian volunteered to trailer me to Wyoming, so we loaded Kate, Jack, pack saddles, panniers, my camping gear, a .22 pistol, and a Winchester lever-action .30 caliber rifle. I hugged Mom good-bye. “I’ll be praying for you,” she said.

  Dad kept arguing, trying to get me to change my mind even as I stepped into Brian’s old pickup and shut the door. Leaving behind the security of home, family, and friends felt scary but exciting. Finally, I was going to live my adventure and become a mountain man, cowboy, or whatever the country made of me.

  Brian hauled me as far as he could until darkness overcame us. He needed to turn around in time to get back to work the next morning. He dropped us next to a windmill somewhere north of Rawlins, Wyoming in the high desert sage near the Continental Divide. I didn’t know exactly where I was. My only reference was a Wyoming highway map, which did me no good in the middle of a sagebrush plain that ran farther than eyes could see. As Brian drove away I wondered if I would ever see him or my family again. At that moment, life felt very real. There I was, a nineteen-year-old kid all alone in a vast country, unsure about everything except that I had to continue.

  Cattle had eaten the sparse grass around the watering hole under the windmill. There was no use picketing Kate and Jack, so I tied to the windmill for the night, spread out my bedroll, and lay down staring up at a star-filled Wyoming night. Thoughts of my smallness in the world and of all that could go wrong melded together with a profound sense of possibility. I had never felt so alive.

  The next morning I woke to the sound of the mules, hungry and agitated, pawing the ground. “Ok,” I said, and crawled out of my bedroll. “Let’s go find you some feed.”

  I slurped a can of peaches and then saddled Jack, put the pack saddle on Kate, loaded the panniers, and headed northwest along Wyoming Highway 287. I was finally in the saddle and on my way just like a character from a Louis L’Amour novel. A song from the movie Jeremiah Johnson came to mind, and I sang the chorus to my mules over and over:

  “The way that you wander is the way that you choose,

  The day you tarry is the day that you lose.”

  Plenty of grass grew in the borrow ditch, so periodically I stopped to let the mules graze. The sound of tearing grass and munching relaxed me. An occasional car passed and people stared out their windows. After approximately twenty miles we camped by a stream in a rancher’s field.

  The next morning I wanted to get away from the noise and people traveling the highway. I turned my string south toward the Green Mountains, a long, narrow range that angles northwest through Wyoming and eventually ties into the majestic Wind River Range. As I traversed the Greens through an ocean of sagebrush, I kept running into barbed-wire fences, which caused me to either ride for miles to find a gate, or take the fence down, cross over, and then put it back up. Weary of this routine, I returned to the highway and continued along the borrow ditch to Jeffrey City, a small uranium-mining town surrounded by nothing but open county.

  Every mountain man and cowboy needs to drink a soda every once in a while, so I stopped at a gas station where a few locals suggested I ride along the old Oregon Trail,
the most important immigrant route traveled by settlers moving west. The Oregon Trail, they said, offered plenty of water and grass, and gates that allowed passage through the wire. Kate, Jack, and I headed north across the sage desert until we came to South Pass, where the Oregon Trail crosses the Rockies. I had only a vague idea of the historical significance of that place, of all who had passed and what they had experienced. In the distance ahead of us rose a jagged, snowcapped mountain range—the Wind River Range, the highest and most rugged mountains in Wyoming. That’s where we were headed.

  We camped on the Sweetwater River near a monument marking the spot where a party of Mormon pioneers had perished while trying to cross the mountains. Because they had departed too late in the season, an early storm caught them unexpectedly and prevented their moving. Sixty seven members of the party died from exposure or starvation. I couldn’t imagine how these pioneers, after trudging hundreds of miles across the plains, had pulled hand carts up the steep pass trail even on dry ground, let alone through deep snow. The dreams of many in this group of Mormon pioneers had ended in that location. The thought of their hardships and suffering left me unable to sleep. The place felt eerie as if haunted by spirits. Dark clouds rolling up the valley reminded me that snowstorms can strike any month of the year. The ominous clouds made me wonder what would become of my own dreams. Had I undertaken more of a trip than I was capable of handling? What was I doing out here, anyway? Not a soul knew my location. Kate, Jack, and I were alone in the world. The vastness of the country around me made me feel alone and vulnerable.

  The next morning a noise startled me awake. Something or someone was splashing around in the creek not far from my bedroll. Still edgy from lack of sleep, I reached over to my saddle and eased my pistol from its holster. Gun in hand and wearing my long johns, I slunk out of my bedroll and peeked through the willows. Fewer than twenty feet away stood a massive bull moose, the first I had ever seen. His size stunned me. He was much bigger than a mule. His huge antlers towered over my head. Grass hung from his long snout. Seeing me, his eyes widened. Is he going to charge? I wondered. I could not outrun him. My .22 pistol was about as useless as a BB gun. The moose snorted and bolted away down the creek. My heart raced and my legs shook. It took me several minutes to calm down enough to break camp and pack.