Wait...Wyoming?
This morning, as I trailed Sam up through a long meadow in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming on a palomino Walking Horse, who I think is named Lucky, I shook my head a little at the oddness of my life.
It’s fair to say Sam and I are versatile.
Two weeks ago Captain Sam was wearing flip-flops and shorts, fixing a generator on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Today he’s riding a merle horse named Merle through some of the biggest country I’ve ever seen, besides Alaska, as we round up a herd of horses together and drive them back to the corrals like it’s 1920.
I arrived two days ago at TP Ranch which, I was told, is the second oldest dude ranch in the United States. It sits in a valley flanked by other historic dude ranches just south and west of Sheridan Wyoming. It’s reported, and I’m not making this up, on the neighboring ranch is a cabin where Ernest Hemingway wrote the first draft of A Farewell to Arms.
He didn’t finish it up here though. According to a newspaper article written in 1928, Papa had to go back to Sheridan because maybe he was having too much fun and needed to knuckle down on the book.
Huh.
Wyoming is crazy.
It’s vast and empty, jagged and smooth, green and wheat yellow against a massive blue sky. This is one reason it keeps reminding me of Alaska.
The second is, this morning as Sam was rolling up the windows of my car, which is parked outside the manager cabin right by the corrals, a bull moose trotted past us, through the corral gates, and up the mountainside. Just like that.
“HFS,” I said without abbreviating.
Sam and I stared at each other as one of the old-timers wandered by and said, “Ha, welcome to TP.”
The moose was only a baby really, maybe three or so, but that rack was huge and the hoofprints he left in the fine Wyoming dust were as big as Sam’s hand. Evidently, several members of the TP horse string, who pack people of varying skill levels through the Cloud Peak Wilderness, like to cut and run when they see moose.
I get that.
How did this happen?
I won’t bore you with the details so here’s a quick summary.
It’s hot and wet in Pensacola in the summer - like tropical hot and wet. Pensacola is also a place where both tourists and hurricanes like to summer. We adore Pensacola eight months of the year, she’s so beautiful - the other four she has a really good personality.
So when this old ranch popped up needing a manager, who can ride, rope, hammer, and paint, do with his hands that most men cain’t….and it was in the mountains. Sam flew up for a visit.
That’s basically why my head was spinning this morning following Sam and Wally up the meadow on a horse named Lucky. Who does things like this? Who rents the house, loads the car, and makes a 180-degree life change on two-weeks notice?
Plus, I turned 50 last week. My butt has not been in a saddle for two or three years, but you know what they say…. It’s like riding a bike.
Is it though? I thought as Lucky wove through the trees, long trotting down a pretty steep valley chasing a herd of 38 horses. I reminded myself to focus on all the things currently going right and stay in the center of myself and Lucky.
Sometimes You Have to Say Yes.
So as I sit at my computer at an old roll-top desk in a cabin with spotty internet and literally thousands of miles of alpine trails behind me, I’m reminded there were 1000 points where we could have said no to all of this.
We could have made the easier choice and stayed right inside our sweaty comfort zone, but instead, we grabbed Wally, a few saddles, and drove 1900 miles, until we arrived somewhere back in 1900.
I’m going to write a lot of this down because it is an unusual experience, to say the least, but I’m also going to TikTok a bit because our internet, which obviously isn’t 1900 but it’s not 2022 either, seems happier with the short snippety stuff.
If you want to follow along with that, do it here.
Wait…some of you are thinking, don’t you have a pretty lively life coaching company? How are you doing that?
Yes, yes I do but remember that hiatus I said I was taking this summer?
I was afraid to do it, to test the flexibility structures I’d built into the business, but I did it anyway and I’ve found that sometimes when you loosen your grip on the things you’re sure will break, they get stronger and more interesting.
There’s a lesson in that somewhere.
In any case, we are firing up The Meaning of Midlife Academy sometime around Labor Day. This is a great place to learn how to say yes to stuff even if you’re afraid. If you want to hear about it when we open it back up, click here.