The stories a corral tells

Fiction inspired by my beloved state and an old rodeo grounds

After 20+ years of writing journalism, marketing copy and narrative nonfiction, I’m writing fiction, which yes, is terrifying, thank you for asking.

As I’m on this new adventure, thank you for supporting my work through one-time gifts, subscriptions or of course liking, commenting and sharing. Your readership and support mean the world to me.

This piece is something I wrote as a prologue for a longer work, which is still under construction so who knows how it will turn out. It’s my attempt at the sort of fiction I like to read, fiction grounded in true experiences. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and again, thank you for reading.

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There’s an old rodeo corral in New Valley, Oregon. It has dark wooden fences and worn plank bleachers, a peeling sign upon which you can just make out a dark-skinned cowboy and a bucking horse.

All around are the yellow meadows and scrub-covered buttes of the high desert. Long stems flex and bend in the wind, they grow in tufts rather than carpets, they are desert grasses for a land of inconsistent moisture. From a distance it appears to be good range-land, but it’s breathtakingly arid, it can only support one cow per 25 acres, a ridiculous number that would make farmers in the green valley past the mountains laugh, out where the snow is sparse but the rain is plentiful, the place where the pioneers meant to go but some got stuck in this brown territory instead.

But add water and this desert grows the best alfalfa in the country, hay worth so much it’s exported to faraway places like Japan and Korea, sold by the pound instead of the bale. The farmers without the infrastructure for this wealth grow instead hay for dairy farms and beef ranches, others grow onions or potatoes, hardy things that withstand cold climates. But production requires water, the thing that men have warred over in this valley for generations. The white men want to divert the blue water for farming, the Indians want to fight over the riverbank, the fish, the river which has already changed, is always changing. Water is life, and it is watched with jealousy and longing here, in a place in which a few acres of water can turn useless brown range into the green of the American Dream.

The pioneers came here with their hopes, hearing tell of the fertile country over the Cascade Mountains, and some settled just shy of that Eden. Perhaps they were tired, or liked the dry air, or simply wanted a few less people around, a motivation still common in our underpopulated state. Kit Carson came with hubris and hostility in his heart,“Kit Carson Park” is still there, a beautiful place for a picnic on Klamath Lake, not far from where he and his men murdered an entire village, that’s a stain on the folklore, but true nonetheless. There are also pink salmon, tan deer, chocolate-brown elk, rushes for building homes, water to drink. Of course there were also people, because as much as we like to think humans are in charge, top of the food chain and whatnot, we are simply following nature, begging it for water and food for ourselves and our children. Despite the realities that all of us are easily butchered or drowned, that life is far less likely than we imagine, Carson and his men had no such humility. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we can say there was no one here, white men discovered it, here on the far edge of the world? Of course the people who were here did plenty opf warring too, because that’s how humanity works. There is no clean explorer, no noble savage. Everyone is simply here, thrown into this wilderness of plenty. Who we become is determined by the choices made with this bounty.

Even today, this part of Oregon is young and headstrong, an explosive country of deadly risk, a place where “Water Wars” still make headlines in the local paper. You hear tell of the occasional shoot-out on a remote ranch, or men of different colors leaving one another to rot on the banks of the crystal-blue river, the way their great-grandfathers left one other with arrows in their backs.

But even in disputes over water, grazing, rights to the river which no one can truly claim - horses - paints, appaloosas, quarter horses, rank studs of all varieties - are a shared language. At the rodeo, boys of every color yearn to prove themselves on the back of a real hell-raiser. Some of them come off and don’t move, so some mothers refuse to watch, instead wringing floured hands at the doorway of small, hot kitchens in tiny ranch-houses, knowing their sons are about to nod their heads with youthful confidence in a tight chute. Mothers know: when you’re up against a wild-eyed thousand-pound animal in a wooden corral there are no victors, only those who endure.

But the boys don’t pay this fear any mind. They kiss their mothers without remorse and proudly show off the buckles, the silver proofs of survival. Those who don’t understand rodeo think it’s a showy business, it’s what hardened men do to defenseless animals for a good time. Sure, there are those mean-spirited bullies who want to prove they can overpower an animal because they’ve never won an argument with a preson. But nobody sees a young man bucked off a horse and thinks the horse is losing. For these boys, they’re getting bucked off in tiny corrals on dirt roads anyway. Doing it in front of a crowd, maybe even a pretty girl or two, is a better alternative. If you can’t make it riding broncs, what can you do, in a land taken by force?

These multi-colored boys share a language of horses and risk. They grow into men who use their aggression spurring a wild horse instead of shooting their other-colored brethren. When they’re wise enough to choose a good woman and a piece of land and stop chasing death, they’ve broken many horses and many bones. They’ve learned to get along despite the wars all around in water and politics and land and desperation, in a place founded on colors, on how milky or not the skin is when starched cotton snuck up past the elbow, how much green one could force from the ground, the raging white-blue of the river in high spring, the deep red of a side of local beef.

Living to old age is not something that these multi-colored young ruffians thought much about, but of course it happens, and no one is more surprised than the young men who are suddenly old. The creaking in their backs resembled the creaking of their mother’s rockers. They have earned stiffness in their many-times-broken fingers, now fumbling with knots despite having hobbled young studs and roped calves in laughter and fearlessness for years.

Now the no-longer-young men, with their long memories, hang battered arms out of pickup windows to tell their stories; stories the old corral keeps too, in windswept confidence.