Horseback politics

I cannot climb aboard a good horse and ride through tax policy, school funding or election laws. I can’t brush down a nervous colt, warm the bit in my hand and gently convince him to go chase data centers with me or round up coal mines. The souls of horses need more honest work.

But I can, and I have, mounted up and watched a horse’s ears turn forward, and felt him relax and quicken his pace beneath me as we make our way through a country that God created to make noble the souls of both horses and men.

Boil it all down, and I care much less about what people do to make money or gain power or shove the needle this way or that than I care about what happens in the landscape of my home. I care more about being able to track a stray through the sagebrush or to ride through stirrup-deep meadow grass than I care about the Gross State Product.

For these reasons, and for others I can’t express in words, I will always support political leaders who will honor and respect our earthly heritage over those who would sacrifice it to the profit motive.

I probably think this way partly because of my upbringing around horses and partly because Wyoming is the ancestral home of the horse. The fossils of their first equine forebears were found in the northern Bighorn Basin. I have never been able to separate Wyoming and horses in my mind.

Horses were absent from North America for millennia: Nobody really knows why, but they just up and left. Those must have been bleak centuries in Wyoming without the omega-shaped hoofprints of horses on her soil. They returned to the New World on Spanish ships, and I like to think they breathed a sigh of relief and felt welcome to come back home.

It’s hard for me to reconcile life on horseback with life in post-industrial Wyoming. The two seem incongruous, almost incompatible. Yet here we are, able to saddle up and chase cows across land that overlies more subterranean energy than exists under the Arabian Peninsula.

Millions of tourists visit Wyoming every year and leave behind billions of dollars in our cash registers. But you can still throw a diamond hitch over a packsaddle, mount a good horse, wander up some icy and gin-clear unnamed creek, and spend as much time as you want never seeing another person or their money.

You can do this in plenty of places all over Wyoming, and it’s something that I’m unwilling to lose. It’s something that I’m not willing to sell.

Cormac McCarthy, who wrote about the American West with prose that would make Hemingway blush with envy, described the feeling of riding as “the ruby-meated heart of a horse beating between your knees.” That is the most honest way, the purest way, to see our home — horseback.

It is a switchback climb up a steep trail, standing in the stirrups to keep your weight off your horse’s organs as he lifts you through the rocks and the trees. It is loosening the latigo at the mountain’s crest so your horse can catch his breath, and looking out over some broad basin and feeling at home. That sense of awe cannot be duplicated by looking at a hefty balance on a bank statement.

No price that can be put on that, and that feeling is likely why the Code of the West draws a line in the dust and says, “Some things are not for sale.” That is the real bottom line in Wyoming.

Every pain my skeleton feels that keeps me from falling asleep is because Wyoming touched me unhorsed, and I can remember the circumstances of every buck-off and broken bone. The head of Sunday Morning Creek, when Badger blew up and tossed me into the rocks. Little Shoe Draw when Blackjacked spooked at a rattlesnake and unloaded me. The round corral at the ID, the arena at the Woodchoppers rodeo in Encampment — every snap of bone is a reminder in my complicated relationship with Wyoming and horses.

Yet, the exhilaration of being horseback in this place overpowers everything else. Everything!

So, this is the rocky and windswept hill I will die on. Anyone who wants to line their pockets by turning Wyoming into a place of commerce that will break a horse’s heart will have me as an enemy for life.