It Begins With a Dream

My journey to Devil’s Garden began in early August, 2023 when I read the book The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant. In short, it is the story of Mr. Grant’s dream to ride along the same trail as the Pony Express riders used during their short reign as the world’s premier (at the time) mail delivery system. I can’t put my finger on exactly why this made me want to ride a horse across the country. Or maybe I can. Maybe….

Maybe the road to Devil’s Garden actually started long, long ago. Perhaps when I was born, in fact. Like many little girls, I was born horse crazy. I used to cut horses out of cigarette ads in my mother’s discarded magazines, trimming away the riders and tack as much as possible. It was easy to pretend they were wild horses, running free in the wild Colorado plains outside our windows. Sometimes I even dreamed that I was a horse, running free with them.

Over the years I’ve had a few horses. Most came and went within a few years, but one stayed for 30 years. Amber was actually my daughter’s 4-H show pony. She was a palomino Walking pony that we got for free because she had “inadvertently” been bred on her first heat as a yearling and that stunted her growth. Although her sire was 16 hands, and her dam 15.2, Amber topped out at 13.3—in shoes. But she was the sanest horse who ever walked the earth, and would do anything to try to please her people. I have a ton of stories that I’ll share at some point, but for now I’ll just mention that we had her until she died, 11 months after my older son passed. I hope they are galloping across meadows and mountains and taking care of each other.

After Amber passed, I didn’t look for the opportunity to have another horse. The Pandemic forced my husband into retirement and that’s not the kind of income that supports horse pursuits. But, as CuChullaine O’Reilly, FRGS, Founder of the Long Rider’s Guild says in his wonderful book The Encyclopedia of Equestrian Exploration, Vol. III (page 64): “It’s not that they can’t just uproot themselves physically, as much as that they can’t break away emotionally from the system in which they were born, which they know in their soul is destroying them and nevertheless to which they will die in obedience.” O’Reilly is talking about me, about the class of people who might have the money, were they to reallocate their spending, but who are born into a slavery of the soul traps us all with its insistence that we cannot possibly succeed at this thing we might dream of doing.

I have wrestled all my life with this iron-clad insistence that my dreams cannot possibly come true, perhaps even that I don’t deserve for them to come true. Even now I struggle to break free of that societal prison. It would be so easy to give up, but giving up means allowing my soul to be crushed. I need accountability to succeed. I hope that this page will provide that. I hope that by sharing my dream and my struggle to break free, you too, will find the strength to follow your dreams.

Bibliography

O’Reilly, C. (2017). The encyclopaedia of equestrian exploration: A study of the geographic and spiritual equestrian journey, based upon the philosophy of harmonious horsemanship, pg. 64. Long Riders’ Guild Press.