That fateful first ride took place at my
grandfather's (my mother's father: Clarence Burkey's) farm when I was about 7 or 8 years
old. My pap Burkey had a trailer on two acres of land that he farmed. More like gardened
really. It was a smaller version of the farm he had lost years before because
of health problems suffered by my grandmother. She tried to commit suicide and
survived. Back in those days someone who did something like that was considered crazy, so
she was put in a mental hospital for a couple years. The medical bills were just too much
and pap had to sell everything to pay off the debts. Later my pap went to work at a
shoe factory and worked on this little 2 acre farm in the evenings and on weekends. He
didn't have many animals, some chickens and two dogs that barked a lot. This story really
has many different chapters to it. Several years after buying this little place, my
grandfather had a stroke and later a heart attack and still more strokes that finally left
him paralyzed on the entire right side of his body. He couldn't talk, lost the use of his
right arm and hand, and ended up in a nursing home where for 18 years he suffered numerous
other surgeries. Eventually losing both of this legs from gangrene, he was diabetic.
Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning all this is I was born and raised all my life in a small
college town. I had cable TV, stereos, every toy you could think of, all my pap had was
this 2nd hand trailer without any of the "city" plug ins. Have you ever
seen the sci-fi movie Logan's Run, where the women Logan escaped with says "I HATE
OUTSIDE", after they were on the run outside the protection of the domed city
and everything was crawling with bugs and lizards. It never failed that I'd
get bit up by bugs or stung by a bee when at pap's little "farmette", so I
wasn't a happy camper. There was also some resentment between my grandparents and
there children. They'd all gotten married and moved to town to get away from the
farming lifestyle, and then pap would keep putting out these big gardens that he wasn't
able to take care of so we'd have to visit on the weekends and rotate his crops. My
parents would bitch and complain all the way to the farm, and all the way back home
again. So I was in fact seeing this farm through my parents eyes. Another reason I
disliked this farm was the boxed in feeling. Two acres isn't a lot of land to start with.
On one side of this lot was a fenced in field with cattle that would sometimes come for a
visit. Across the street was a cornfield, on the other end was one half of my pap's garden
followed by a wooded lot, and behind the trailer was the rest of pap's garden with more
woods beyond that. So, I always had this closed in feeling whenever we went to visit. It
was out in the middle of nowhere, and the road that went past his place didn't get used
much. I always felt so alone there..
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Another good part to this story involves my very first horseback ride. Some of pap's neighbors had kids into 4H and they had horses and often came riding by when we were there. Pap made arrangements for my sister and I to go riding. This is another one of those moments that I will never forget for many different reasons. For one, I was from town and these boys on horseback where from the country. (City slickers and country hicks. And hey, I was on vacation...) We had nothing in common, especially the way we dressed. These two boys were all decked out in their western attire; cowboy hats and boots, jeans, western shirts, real cowboy gear just like on TV. Guess what I was wearing that fateful day? A pair of flowered shorts, a lime green muscle T-shirt which everybody teased me about because I was a skinny kid without any muscles, and a pair of cheap flip flops. I was embarrassed about the way I looked, I felt grossly inadequate, small, inferior. But pap wouldn't take no for an answer and tossed me up in front of the one cowboy. He told me to hold on to the saddle horn and off we went for a nice little slow ride. The other reason I will never forget this ride was because my privates were pressed tight against the saddle horn, and every time the horse would canter, by balls were getting pinched and crushed. My first ride was not only embarrassing but also painful. Through the experience I will never forget the sights, sounds, and smells from horseback. Seeing the world from a higher perspective. So ends my first experience with cowboys and horseback riding.
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