a weblog sharing info on outdoor skills and campfire musing by a guy who spends a bunch of time in pursuit of both
CULTURE
WHERE -
TALES ARE TOLD OF
Welcome to Roland Cheek's Weblog
Roland is a gifted writer with a knack for clarifying reality. Looking forward to more of his wisdom
- Carl Hanner e-mail
The famous Western artist Charles Manion Russell must have been having a bad day when, in a talk given to the Great Falls Booster Club in 1923, he said:
To access Roland's weblog and column archives
Tip o' the Day
Think opportunity -- that's my Tip O' the Day.
Jane and I have become accomplished opportunists during our latter years. That talent manifested itself after years of being somewhat circumscribed by the circles our horses could make over wilderness trails. Then, after a little over two decades guiding others to adventure, we retired with the professed desire to guide ourselves to the same end.
Unfortunately a life filled in the pursuit of fun had yielded little in the form of filthy lucre, so we were compelled to venture out into the great beyond with a van loaded with our books to sell. Jane, as a peddler, is good at her trade. She allows me to be her chauffeur during these latest of our circles. It was opportunism that permitted us to blink at a Nebraska map, note that we had a weekend free, and see Rock Creek State Park was but a few miles away.
As it turned out, Rock Creek State Park is situated on 300 acres of tall grass prairie, with several miles of hiking trails winding through it. A Pony Express way station, complete with the old log barn and replica corrals was there. And, as if that weren't enough, the Oregon Trail crossed Rock Creek right there on Park grounds.
There was a nice campground at the Rock Creek Park, with each site isolated from others amid rolling hills and junipter trees. Showers and restrooms were there, as well as macadam parking pads, electricity, and water at each site.
Parking pads? Electricity? Piped in water? Showers? Rest rooms? Is this the same folks who wrote the book Dance On the Wild Side, about their life of adventure in one of America's greatest wilderness?
I'm not sure if Ethan Lester, the 13-year-old Camarillo, California lad who likes my Westerns, has read any of my outdoor books. But Ethan isn't the only young person reading these days. Alexa Mrgich, a sixth-grader in Kalispell, Montana, wrote to say she's reading my book about elk [The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou}.
Alexa says, "I am probably the only girl you know that loves loves loves hunting." She says, "I go almost everday of hunting season, except for the week days." Alexa said her favorite story in my book is "where the 12-year-old boy and his grandfather go hunting".
If you find it bewildering that a young lass just entering her teens found The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou fine reading, consider that an officer on a U.S. Navy ship at sea liked it, too.
"I have just finished The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou. Wow! It was wonderful! I was transported from my stateroom aboard a destroyer to the wilderness I roamed as a teenager. Your tales were well told, enlightening, and dead on the money. The open ocean on a calm, clear night is beautiful, but I'll never hear the hoarse bellow of a rutting bull elk. Driving a warship into heavy seas and tailing green water on the bridge is exhulting, but not nearly as much as bucking into a northern blizzard and stumbling across grizzly tracks that haven't even begun to fill in [with snow]. Thank you for sharing with me. My dad has sent me the Thursday Great Falls Tribune no matter where I am in the world for the past 13 years. I have always enjoyed your columns, but this book was special.
Joel Stewart / USS Fife Dd 991
HORSE BLANKETS AND EQUINE SWIMMING POOLS
Hanover Farms spreads across several hundred acres of rolling picturesque Pennsylvania farmland, only a few miles from the Maryland line and roughly equi-distant from what is generally regarded as the high tide of the Confederacy, at Gettysburg. Hanover farms is owned by the Hanover Shoe Company, and is world famous for the champion trotting and pacing horses born and raised there.
Back during my "other" life as a guide and outfitter in the Bob Marshall Wilderness I had the privilege of guiding another Pennsylvania shoemaker for several of his annual fall hunting trips. Rufus told often of his own visits to Hanover Farms, expecially during the breeding farm's annual horse auction, where the outfit dispensed of the yearling colts who failed to cut the mustard as world-class competition horses. According to my friend, many of those fine-line Standardbred yearlings were puchased by the Amish in order to give their Sunday-go-to-meeting buggies a touch of class.
Hanover Farms annual surplus horse sale took place last November, just a week after Jane and I visited the famous Farm. We would've loved to take in the sale, too, (or at least I would've) but it wasn't in the cards. Besides Jane probably feared I might want to take a couple of ponies home, thereby somewhat cramping accommodations inside our tiny motor home.
During our visit, we had the pleasure of rubbing muzzles with Western Hanover, one of the Farms' most famous pacing animals, winner of millions of dollars in sulky racing. Western Hanover is a jet black, 17-year-old stallion who spends his post-racing years ogling as many of the Farms' 400 sexy brood mares as he can spot from the window of his spacious stall.
Western Hanover is fond of peppermint lifesavers.
There are many barns and stables, paddocks and pastures spotted across the lush green lands of Hanover Farms. Good graveled roads, some winding, others geometrically perfect, crisscrossed the land. Most of those roads were tree-lined: big sugar maples, oaks, cottonwoods. Fine-lined mares in sorrel, bay, brown, and grey grazed contentedly behind miles and miles of whitewashed plank fences; frisky colts gamboled among them. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of mares and colts paid us not the slightest attention as we idled by.
There was but one lady gatekeeping the buildings we approached -- one was the stable housing breeding stallions; one was Western Hanover. The lady proved both kind and garrulous, telling us she'd worked there for 29 years. It was she who opened Western Hanover's stall and allowed me to whisper sweet nothings to one of the most striking horses I've ever seen.
Gazing out at the many meadows where mares and colts grazed, I asked the friendly gatekeeper if the Farms stabled them each evening?
"There are hundreds of horses out there!" she exclaimed.
"What about during the winter?"
"Oh they're out all winter." She thought, then said, "Except when they're ready to foal. Then they're cycled through the foaling barns -- maybe a couple of weeks for each mare. And that's in rotation; they don't all foal at once."
I said, "The winters must be mild. Right?"
"We sometimes get a lot of snow."
"And they're still left out to pasture?"
"Yes, they're fed on the ground. After all, they're horses."
Jane and I caught eyes. We were both thinking of the hordes of wealthy equine afficionados who're moving into the valley were we live. They build heated Windsor Castle-type barns where their half-dozen impeccably blooded show horses are brought in each evening to be spoiled and sponged, pampered and powdered. I turned back to the Hanover Farms lady. "Do you blanket your horses?"
She scoffed. "Never. Again, they're horses." I smiled. Jane and I know folks in our valley who blanket their ponies in July. I've always felt sorry for them -- the horses, not the poeple. I asked the Hanover lady, "Is this a silly question, but do you have a swimming pool to exercise your critters?"
She peered down her nose. "That's for race horses, not for our horses."
I glanced back down the runway at Western Hanover's stall -- at the horse who'd brought Hanover Farms millions at winner's circles. What an abused animal -- no swimming pool! And at one of America's premier breeding farms -- will wonders never cease! Jane and I know of at least three postage stamp horse ranches owned by the wealthy in our Flathead Valley where pampered nags dwell in barns equipped with Olympic-sized swimming pools to make their extravagant masters and mistresses feel as if they care more about their ponies than we ordinary Great Unwashed care about ours.
Someday I'd like them to explain the consistent way Hanover Farms produce trotting horse champions with horses treated pretty much the same way ponies were treated in Montana before the days of horse blankets and equine swimming pools to burnish the snooty noses of Beverly Hills' asylum escapees.
You reckon those pools and blankets are for the ponies? Or are they for the folks who own those ponies?
Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:
www.rolandcheek.com
Recent Weblogs
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
for more info about these and other Roland Cheek books
There's a bunch of specific info about Roland's books, columns, and archives. By clicking on the button to the left, one can see Roland's synopsis of each book, read reviews, and even access the first chapter of each of his titles. With Roland's books, there's no reason to buy a "pig in a poke."
for detailed info about each of Roland's books
Read Reviews
Read their first chapters
For interested educators, this weblog is especially applicable for use in history, economic, and ag classes, as well as for journalism students.
Roland, of course, visits schools. For more information on his program alternatives, go to:
In my book a pioneer was a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.
In all my experience in the wilderness wild, I find two of God's creatures especially fascinating: the ones you've read about above: elk and grizzly bears. Perhaps grizzlies are twice as fascinating because I've written two books about them, and only one for elk.
Learning To Talk Bear is Roland's best selling book, in its 5th printing. The book depicts his own learning curve to understanding the great beasts
An entire book devoted to a single charismatic grizzly bear
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to visit Roland's newspaper columns and weblog archives
source links for additional info
Next Tuesday:
CAPITAL AND LABOR -- A CONFLICT?
www.campfireculture.com
Sure is. And these days Jane is loving every minute of it. These days, when we wake up and rain is pounding down on the roof of our little motor home, we eye each other, burrow a little deeper into our pillows, and murmur, "I don't have anything pressing to do today, do you?"
Opportunisim took us to visit Palo Duro Canyon, famed in Western history, in the Texas Panhandle. There we hiked their several miles of trails, hunkered down and watch Rio Grande turkeys while the gobblers gobbled, then flew from their nightime perches in live oak trees. We saw honest-to-God Texas longhorns, horned toads, road runners, and rattlesnakes.
Opportunity. Seize it!
