I have just returned from a vacation with most of my family to the border of Arizona. Yes, I will post pictures. I did not ride as much as I would have liked, since my beloved Amy was with me. Initially, I thought that she would miss out on the enjoyment of riding a horse, but the head wrangler George insisted that he find a time when he could lead her. Once she had gotten on a horse, she became much more enthusiastic.
One of the problems of selling the experience to someone who has not ridden in that part of the country is twofold. The first is that describing riding horses does not evoke the kind of excitement and thrill which would persuade people to try it. It is not true, incidentally, that you just sit there and let the horse do all the work. You have to control and direct the beast who is much larger and stronger than you. If you don't take control, he'll be tearing up shrubbery left and right and stopping at random. The second reason that riding horses is a hard sell is the dissonance between the description of the desert (particularly when it is not in full bloom) and the actual experience of the desert. The sand and the dirt and the ubiquitous spiky bushes, the heat and the lose rocks and the dust, they all individually appear unappealing in prospect but somehow the combination produces a wonderful and heady experience, much like malodorous ingredients in composition produce exquisite perfume.
We rode through arroyos, the normally dry ditches which fill flush with the rains. Camping in a river bed is the prime example of outdoors stupidity. We rode across former floodplains where relic riparian trees were stranded, orphaned of their ecological soulmates, the beavers. I can't say I am entirely sorrowful about the absence of beavers: since I was a child, beavers have returned to Lake Tahoe and brought giardia in their wake. We rode across the fields of short grass which are the poor and stunted reflection of the tall grass of the settlers' prairie. The cattle consumed the tall grass, which allowed erosion of the soil; the erosion of the soil choked the streams that fed the floodplains. We rode up the rocky mountains to petroglyphs left by the Hohokam culture, whose legacy all the tribes of the Southwest claim, with varying degrees of legitimacy. When I was on a mission to Navajoland, I visited one of their rock shelter dwellings.
