Letter from Utah: Part 6 of 12

This post is part 6 in a series of 12. You can download the entire essay by clicking here, or you can read the serial installments as they appear.

The next day we ride horses through Red Canyon. If I regret anything in my life, it is that 1) I did not make out with Ron Bock when I had the chance, and 2) that we did not have our picture taken with Jim, our real-life Red Canyon cowboy guide. It is the last weekend they will send tours through the canyon—this is the end of the tourist season—and Kip and I are the only two people on this trip. Jim drives us away from the hotel parking lot—“We’ll see y’all in a couple of days,” the other guy jokes—and gives us a brief lesson on horse handling. We stand by the corral, awaiting his word that it’s “safe to come toward the horses.” Jim selects Rio, a huge brown stallion, for Kip, and Kip climbs onto Rio’s back, fitting his toes into the stirrups and handling the reigns like a pro.

Jim turns to me. “We’re going to put you on this mousy brown gal over here. Her name’s Cinderella.”

I’m not sure what to make of this—whether her name might as well have been Judy Garland, or if this is just coincidence, but she is a beautiful creature, with the smart, careful eyes that horses have, and a dark mane, nearly black, that feels rough and dry in my fingers. We set off onto the horse trail, which meanders along a dry creek bed, through red cliffs and stands of ponderosa pine. Jim feels the need to make conversation, it’s his job to give us a good time, I suppose.

“New York, is it?” he asks. “Well, shoot. Y’all sure are quiet back there. Everything okay?” He is somewhat unsure about our silence.

I try to explain that in New York all we get is noise. Sirens and subway trains and crying babies and dumb conversations and advertising and ringtones and that ubiquitous city buzz—we came here for quiet. He tells us about his time guiding at basically every famous ranch you can think of from Montana to Colorado and Texas and California, in his more than forty years of working with horses—“and people,” he says.

“How many people live in New York,” Jim asks.

“Almost nine million,” I say.

“What’s that like, nine million?”

“You’re never alone,” I say.

“I’m never alone,” he says, “I got my horse.”

He tells us how his sister lives in New York City, she’s a bond trader or a banker or something, I can’t exactly determine from his description. He’s never been to visit, and he doesn’t volunteer why.

“So how did you get into this business,” I ask.

“I left home at 15 with my first horse, well, ‘cuz I had to, and I never looked back.” I almost ask him what chain of events led to his removal—on his own terms or someone else’s, I don’t know—but something stops me, and for a moment, I’m afraid of the answer. Jim is the kind of man who knows what he is capable of. This is not to say he’s simple, or low on ambition—it’ just me filling in the blanks, with my over-active imagination and bent toward character-driven fiction. Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with me.

Later, when Jim mentions a girlfriend who he “dragged over from California,” I’m glad. On the ride back to the Ruby’s Inn, he pushes us to visit the Paunsaugunt Wildlife Museum, of which he is the off-season caretaker, and a family-run diner where they’ll give us 10% off if we tell them we rode with him that day. We skip both, anxious to get back to the Thunderbird Lodge, home of the too-casual waitresses, and as the neon outside promises, the “ho-made” pies.