The Cowgirls Club

I yearned to be a cowgirl. Not when I was six, or eight, or twelve but when I was past 40.

I grew up watching the usual westerns on TV in the mid-1950s and early ‘60s. But cow wrangling was so obviously and overwhelmingly man’s work in those dry, dusty settings that it never even crossed my mind it could become my reality.

But along the way, I did manage to go riding, first on family vacations and much later on ranch vacations. You get to observe everything high on horseback. And since it requires only the mildest effort, you get to think a lot there in the saddle, too. So I never feel as contented, as relaxed as when I’ve been riding.

My mother was an accomplished rider—a city girl like me mastering the equestrian arts at an adult camo. Her love of riding became the motivation for my parents taking us riding as a family on trips to Saratoga. I never took riding lessons until I, too,  was an adult–living in Brooklyn where I found instructors conducting classes in Prospect Park.

The nuances of English technique were a challenge, but I did finally manage to “post to a trot.”

I wasn’t all that good at it but I took it seriously enough to have knee-high black riding boots custom-crafted for me and order calf-colored jodhpurs with a snug fit that made me at least feel like a true horsewoman.

After the quirky demands of English riding style, it was all too easy to switch to American Western riding during several vacations on a working cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. 

I rode round-up there one late Spring, befriending the Mexican ranch foreman and his sons with my high- school Spanish and riding confidently and swiftly enough to capture a stray calf or herd the alarmed long and short-horned cattle into the pens for the annual branding ritual.

I tried my own hand at it, braving the plumes of dust the young Caballeros stirred up as they roped the yearlings and tolerating the stench of burning hide as they held one poor victim down and helped me press the hot iron into its flesh.

My guilt was absolved by the casual way they jumped up and quickly forgot the incident, sauntering casually off once released.

The young Mexican rancheros–friends by now, having bonded over a red-hot branding iron, stoked the fire and passed around homemade mescal in mason jars with comatose, shriveled brown worms lying along the glass bottoms. They barbecued “rocky mountain oysters”—for neutering was step three of the roping and branding, turning future bulls into steers. They served the grilled “oysters” in-between saltine crackers with plenty of homemade, roof=shredding hot sauce and I was curious enough to try a couple. They tasted just as you’d expect from the look of them, only charred. But it was the potency of the hot sauce and homemade mescal combination which assaulted my stomach and curbed my appetite that afternoon. Or maybe I started to think about what we’d been munching on.

None of these rougher aspects of my western adventures abated my desire to be a cowgirl in the Southwest. I even began to investigate renting an empty cottage on the ranch where I had stayed. But work took over my life and then life overtook my dreams, and pushed them far into the background and I didn’t go horseback riding again until after I’d moved to Colorado.

It took me nearly two years of living in “the Rockies” before I got back in the saddle. When I finally did, it was because of the promise I’d made to an eight-year-old friend, that when I moved out to Colorado we’d start the Cowgirls Club and go riding—no boys allowed—as she had three brothers who annoyed her in an eight-year-old kind of way.

Young girls and horses—a perpetual love affair. The beauty, passion, and adventure of their short years rolled into one big, gentle beast with a long silken tail and flowing mane. Little girls dream of horses: white, black, red, painted, and sometimes zebras and unicorns and yearn constantly to own and ride them.

Later, they become teenagers and in a flash seem to forget all about these equestrian obsessions, transferring that overwhelming energy and longing onto much less worthy creatures—teenage boys. But I think the ache to become one with the gorgeous creatures of the four-legged variety never really leaves them.

My ailing finances delayed my promise to Christy—the eight-year-old– for a year. So, it turned out that for her ninth birthday we saddled up and rode with a guided group along with two of her friends in the Garden of the Gods above Colorado Springs on a stunning late-October morning.

It felt so familiar and natural for me to be riding again, up on a big brown and blond horse named Wrangler, It was as comfortable as it had ever felt. And my own passion for the feel and sights and smell of horses returned step by step along the trail through red boulders perched precariously upon each other forming whimsical shapes and among scattered sagebrush and high country cactus on what was called the Scotsman Trail.

The Colorado Springs stable hands who led us out on the dusty trail that day of the Cowgirls’ Club first ride were tourist-oriented and under-experienced, compared with my Arizona ranch Caballeros. They made us clop, clop, clop slowly, in a single line up to the start of the trail through suburban streets, past neat little houses decorated for Halloween. They had us cautiously avoiding street traffic, walking our mounts around joggers and parked cars until we got to the entrance. Inexperienced riders at the front of the line kept requiring attention as only first-time riders can and a golf cart with a third guide rode near us and took our pictures on the top of the ridge, photos offered later at the gift shop on the way out for just 9.95, your western adventure to show the folks back home.

But we were “back home,” so it was only about the ride for me and my three young companions. Our trail leaders had been trained for double-duty as tourist guides and at sporadic moments during the hour-long ride– spectacular and satisfying in scenery alone—the pretend cowboy bringing up the rear of our–who looked the part with a creamy white Stetson perched in a slant on his head and a droopy mustache to cement the look–put on a wrangler’s dialect and spontaneously interrupt our serenity with his well-intentioned and well-rehearsed monotone descriptions of the view and local history trivia. After ten minutes, I gladly would have paid him extra for his silence.

I think Christy and her two friends, one of whom makes semi-weekly excursions to the riding stables, one of whom had never been on a horse, liked the experience but were disappointed to find out that true guided trail-riding hardly almost never involves going faster than a slow, plodding walk.

On the ranch we had walked atop the horses most of the time but every now and again would break into a trot or a canter or even a thrilling gallop. I remember mi amigo, the ranch foreman looking at me with a smile and asking “Corrida?”—did I want to run—and off we’d go. With experienced riders, horses really do like to run. But with groups of tourists, they’d rather just go back to the stables and eat.

I never really knew if the girls enjoyed the experience or if it didn’t really match their expectations stirred up by their dreams. They were all fairly subdued on the ride back into town.

That was the first and last ride of the Cowgirls Club of Colorado. I left the Rockies to return to upstate New York and Christy is grown and married now. And I haven’t been on horseback since.

But the desire is still dreaming on. There’s still a cowgirl deep inside me, restless for the trail, longing for the saddle. It’s kind of a quiet ache by now, one that can only be stilled on a sunny Autumn afternoon someday in the future when I will be warmed by the comfort of sitting up high, riding boots in the stirrups, leather reins in hand, dust kicking up from a beautiful beast with a silken mane and a long flowing tail with whom I would be blessed to ride again as one.