The wind was howling when I arrived at the property. Ron met me at the truck. He had found us on Workaway.info , a site to match people with work experiences, and we are his first experience in that system. Normally, workawayers don’t work so hard. His blue gray eyes twinkled as he told me about all the things he had finished on this project. What a god-send! Earlier in the day he had finished tying the concertina wire back to the chainlink fence so it didn’t stick out, but not without loosing a bit of blood in the process. I covered the 800 lb bale of hay in the back of the truck with a tarp and we went inside to fix some dinner. He likes to eat a ketogenic diet for the most part. Cabbage and bone broth with brewers yeast sounded good to me.

While he was frying cabbage, I started messing around with the electrical breaker box. The labels were almost illegible, but soon we had lights and power. It started snowing sidewards and we lit the catalytic heater to take the chill from the room. Here in his 58th year of life, he is on a walk-about, maybe more accurately, a van-about. He wants to live in his van and follow the weather, take some landscape shots, and generally recover from years behind a programming desk. He is really smart, funny, and kind of philosophical, so we immediately fell into a deep discussion of life. It’s like we had always been friends.

I decided that the catalytic heater was a bit fumy so I turned it off and tried opening the electric oven door. It didn’t look like the varmits had been inside the oven which immediately started heating up, but pretty soon, it started smelling like roasting rat poop, so we turned it off and retired to our own nests. My nest was in the house and the smell of cooking rat poop lingered. It smelled more like boiling rat poop to me. It kept me awake for a while and the wind covered up the sound of the incessant freight trains and the semi’s rolling westward. Neon lights over the truckstop. It could not be a bigger contrast with Largo Canyon.

Saturday morning. Last minute preparations for the arrival of the first 15 horses. I called Sandy Johnson, but she was already gone and her husband said that she was moving horses. We went down the street to CJ’s feed store and bought a water trough and picked up 10 blocks of the salt I had ordered. CJ is a really nice person. She has a flock of hens and sells eggs. I’ve been keeping in touch with her over Facebook. She is going to unload the semi of hay when it comes with her big piece of hay moving equipment. She wanted to know how things were going so I told her about the P&Z meeting. The grizzled cowboy is her neighbor too. She said, “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’ll come around.” That was welcome news. She had never heard of needing a special use permit to have animals.

Ron and I adjusted the panels on the arrival pen until it seem stronger. We unloaded the 800 lb bale onto some railroad ties and filled the water. Now we just had to wait for horses. I used the wait to do some house keeping. I looked under the rangetop burners and realized that under the burners was a sea of floating rat poop, moistened by the rain dripping through the ceiling fan. I think the range needs to be replaced after the leak is fixed.

By midday, I was wondering about the horses, so I scoured around for Sandy Johnson’s cell number. She rarely answers it, but she did. They were moving horses somewhere else and wanted us to start picking up horses on Thursday. I called John and he got a bit miffed about all the effort we had put into being ready, including the $150 water trough. Our plans require continual adjustment, it’s just a fact of life.

It took some pressure off. On Sunday, John would bring the camper trailer and have Bill pull a load of railroad ties to put under the hay. Ron and I prepped the donkey and zebra pens. I am hiding the zebra behind the sale ring to keep him from attracting walk-ins. The set tourist hour is to keep people away from the animals in training during the rest of the time. My other goal for the tours is to generate enough income that I can hire a mucking specialist. Keeping 70 horses clean will require Herculean effort without the benefit of a river to float the poo away.. I have to paint a big sign for the front yard that says, “Visitors welcome during tour hours only. All other times: No trespassing.”

By early evening, we were exhausted. Ron offered to buy me dinner at the Wow Diner. It was really good and their tea service was exceptional with a big silver pot. I drank it slowly because we were so busy talking. We lingered, happy to be sitting in a warm space that didn’t smell of rat poop soup. The weather was milder, but this chest cold was starting to set in.

Back at the property, I cleaned and arranged my office, finally falling into a fitful sleep now that the wind let me hear the trains passing every 10 minutes. I woke up to a dog barking. A truck was pulling into our yard. I peeked through the blinds. It was a big fancy truck and horse trailer. It pulled forward, then backed up, then pulled past my window. It stopped and the occupants threw out a cardboard from a case of beer and some empty blue beer cans. I think the truck pulled into the grumpy cowboy’s driveway, but I had retreated to back under the covers. It was 2 a.m. Were the bars closing or was this just a late night arrival?

At five, I gave up pretending to sleep and got up to clean the bathroom, which was mostly scraping up soaked ceiling tiles and dead baby mice. I had a bucket of water. I could now pee indoors. When Ron came in, I was mopping with clorox. Improvements happen bit by bit. Ron said it was his birthday. Born 3/10/1961, so I took him out to breakfast.

Warning: the Wow Diner does not have good green chile. It’s a Texas version or something. But again, we lingered over that giant tea pot. He had told me stories about his grandparents on the first meal out. His grandfather was a character that found ways to circumvent the dictates of his wife. Over my half-eaten burrito, he told me the story of the grandparents immigrating from the Ukraine. They went to Pennsylvania and bought some run down farm to grow carrots like they had in the old country. Ron’s grandfather was a carrot farmer!!! Ron didn’t really know the story of Milan.

This led into a discussion of synchronicity, Carl Jung, individuation, and all my favorite topics. This was new stuff for the grandson of a carrot farmer. I just love coincidences and the whole carrot theme is so perfect for positive reinforcement horse trainers. Surely, it is a good omen. I need to pay careful attention to what I learn can learn from this man who now aspires to train donkeys.

Ron cleaned the back lot of junk, we moved railroad ties to the hay area, and I hammered off sharp edges in the pens. Finally, it was time for me to go. John and Bill would meet me on the road out near Pueblo Pintado. The route between Largo and Milan goes though the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation, a spectacular drive, but I was starting to feel really sick. A fever was coming on, but there were no easy choices. I had to get home to feed the animals their evening meal. John had considerately watered and portioned the hay so I only had to deliver it. I woke up at three to the sound of rain.

The semi-load of hay was delivered this (Monday) morning and CJ’s hay loader had a problem. We’ve postponed moving the stallions until tomorrow, when John will be here to help me. Sandy Johnson has said they will haul the Placitas Wild horses and then asked us to do it. Hard to keep track but the horses have to all be in Milan by the 19th. Tomorrow might be the day when we euthanize Dasher, the laminitic pony. That plan is still flexible.

I woke this morning at 3 to the sound of rain. The covers were hot and sticky, so I just got dressed and found my way down the hall to a cup of tea to soothe my hacking cough. I’m supposed to haul the stallions out of here today. Rain is often bad news for Largo Canyon roads.

That hacking cough is something I picked up in Milan. A cold or perhaps the result of sweeping up heaps of mouse droppings. The reality is though: I feel lucky to have mouse feces to sweep.

That little road-bump John was not worried about in the last post, turned out to be a wall. John came back to Largo to send me to the Planning and Zoning special meeting after he learned that one of the commissioners was very concerned mustangs would bring communicable diseases to the community.

On the way, I had to stop by the bank to deposit the check from Placitas Wild for the first truck load of hay. The bank manager pulled me aside to discuss the paperwork I was supposed to send her. Cripes! I’ve sent that woman so much paperwork as PDFs that it would take a ream of paper to print it out. She claimed that there were still five documents she needs, but I remember sending them before I went to Florida. Luckily I was packed to move to Milan and I had my computer with me. I sat across the desk from her and re-sent the files. She watched me send them, but then when they didn’t arrive in her mailbox, she was puzzled. She called the bank IT department. They had all the files I had sent. The people at the bank are trained to be so polite that you never get bugged. I left smiling but now concerned that I might be late for the meeting. Then, with no prior history of trouble, the truck did nothing when I turned the key. Totally dead. The spring wind was howling so I am quite sure that no one in the village of Bloomfield heard me scream. “NO! THIS CAN’T HAPPEN!” But in fact, it could happen, so I got out and raised the hood. I wiggled the battery clamps and the wires going into the regulator. Luck was with me and it started. I couldn’t take a chance so I did not shut it off until I was parked in front of Village Hall in Milan.

Inside, the walls were graced with a giant photo of men loading carrots onto a vintage truck. Milan was once the carrot capital of the United States, shipping carrots by rail. The property we had leased was on carrot growing soil. It’s a pink colored dirt that fills the sky in the spring wind. As I was driving into town, I noted that the freeway functioned as a windbreak and our field was not airborne. That would have discouraged me.

I got to Village Hall at 2:50, expecting a meeting at 3. I sat in the lobby studying the carrot farmers until the armed code enforcement officer came out and said the meeting was at 3:30. I considered whether I had time for a bite of lunch, but the truck was dead again. I looked into the toolbox to assess my capabilities (limited), selected some pliers, then opened the hood. I was repairing a loose and dirty wire when the code enforcer came out to smoke a cigarette. I started talking to him while I tightened the bolts.

It turns out that he’s just moved to Milan from Houston. Because I follow the local news, I knew that he was in the news last week for towing inoperable cars from the residential streets. I asked him how that project was going, knowing full well the residents were a little pissy on social media. He was still smoking when I closed the hood and made sure it would start. An inoperable vehicle in front of his office was unthinkable.

The meeting convened with the 3 members of the P&Z board sitting on a dais behind a bench desk, over which a cloth with the Village Seal hung at an odd angle. The code enforcer and the real estate agent sat with me at a wooden table. The members were an older Hispanic woman, a young active looking woman, and a skinny cowboy with a face of gray stubble.

It turned out he was the voice against us. He said we’d be bringing in diseases. I said wild horses are rarely sick when they come straight off the range. It was horses at shows and racetracks that spread most diseases. He asked about hay and when I said I had a semi coming on Monday, he said that wouldn’t last very long and in just a few weeks the horses world be starving. He got pretty heated about how there were going to be lots of dead horses. I replied that it was impossible to say something had no chance of happening, but that our 10 years of history was the only evidence I had to say it was not likely. The real estate agent started talking about the property’s history as a livestock auction. I learned that the grizzled cowboy lived across the street from us. The place with the cows and horses and roping arena. The real estate guy and the cowboy are recreational ropers. People hauling horses around the country, stop and rest their horses at the cowboy’s place. His concern for contagious diseases suddenly struck me as weird.

The real estate agent revealed that he has another client that is considering buying the property as a horse hotel. Suddenly the cowboy and real estate agent were yelling at each other.

I interrupted them and offered a suggestion. We didnt need a permanent zone change. We would be happy with a temporary use permit. Try it, see how we operate.

We talked about veterinary inspection and vaccinations. The cowboy resolutely held to the vision of dead horses. The realtor asked if if the feed store had a permit for her poultry. Of course.

The young woman in the middle started talking about this was a great thing for the village. Like a kind of Wolf Park. I thanked her for comparing us to an impressive institution.

They sent the real estate agent and me out while they deliberated. We sat in the lobby and talked about carrot farming until they finally came and got us. They made a formal proposal to give me a 90 day permit and then they voted on it. The code enforcer stated I had to have the paperwork before I could bring any horses but the clerk would not be in until Monday. I said that was a problem because I was expecting a shipment of horses Saturday morning. The Wolf Park fan said she did see why we had to wait. I walked out of Village Hall happy to have sweeping mouse feces as my next job.

Dawn on the 27th of February was supposed to be a particularly propitious moment astrologically, so I thought I would avail myself of time to start working on some much needed fundraising. I had it in my brain that I was going to initiate this campaign, come hell or high-water. The universe had a concurrent plan to use my tiny speck of determination to remind me of how everything can go wrong.

It started when I was at the Progressive Horse Behavior and Training Forum in Florida. I was given the slot as the final speaker, so, of course, I didn’t give a moments thought to my flight home that very evening and I missed the flight. Frontier Airlines only flies between Orlando and Albuquerque every other day so I had to wait until the 26th. The fight was at 9 pm, but I was compelled to go the airport very early.

I dream of airports frequently. I don’t know what the archetypal meaning of airports is, but I felt at totally at home even though I was just hanging around for 12 hours. Well, actually I was on my computer doing things like finding boot prints and hoof prints. Now airports provide electricity for computers and charging phones. How convenient! Each person that I met or talked to seemed like they could have been in a dream. I enjoyed every minute.

Finally at 9 p.m., we boarded the plane. Frontier seats are not adjustable. You try to sleep strapped to the chair of torture. Orlando flights are always full of crying babies. Landing is such a relief.

I didn’t really have a plan other than to find the truck. I knew it would be dangerous to try to drive home arriving sometime after 3 a.m., but I had plans for that propitious moment at dawn and didn’t see the point of checking into a hotel. I was supposed to pick up catfood on the way home. Where do you get catfood at midnight? Walmart of course.

There was a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the Walmart. He was wrapped in a sleeping bag and looked rather cozy. A Walmart sleeping bag is cheaper than a hotel room. I bought one, along with the catfood and a big jar of peanuts. The gas station across the street looked open, but I had to wait until 1:30 a.m. before I was allowed to fuel. Wide awake, I departed civilization up Highway 550.

At about 2:30, I decided I needed to pee and pulled over. The gear shift got stuck. The key got stuck, The steering wheel wouldn’t move. I didn’t care. I pulled out my fund-raising project and started working on it. At 4:30 a.m. it was ready to launch, but I wanted to wait for dawn. I pulled the sleeping bag around me and fell asleep.

The sky was growing light as I opened my eyes. I turned on my computer and hit the send button. Click the image to make a donation. It’s good for both the project and for you.

Another crazy idea for fund raising that didn’t work. But it did make people laugh.

Five gray-haired women sat around the table in the dining room; I might have been the least gray. John, a gray-beard, sat at the other end of the table. Sandy Webb had organized the ladies of Placitas Wild to visit (and inspect) Mustang Camp to see if we really could be trusted. A lot was riding on it.

Of course, I didn’t trust them too much either. Wild Horse Advocates tend to be a slippery bunch. Women on a mission can get in the habit of carelessly stepping on you as if you were a convenient rock in the puddle they are crossing, leaving you to stew in the muck of their wake. Some of these women had been on this mission for decades. These horses mean a lot to them.

Before we sat down, we had toured the corrals and pens. Petting the animals that were interested and just looking at those that were not ready to trust strangers. The horse-whisperer, Lina, quietly studied the burros. These women were used to horses that aren’t pettable. Karen Tyler, the treasurer of the organization, asked to see the hay we feed. I felt their jealousy as we stepped into our barn and looked at the stacks of giant bales. They are feeding the wild herd at a rate of $1600 a week. Sandy Johnson has been footing this bill for years. Ouch!

I had let our horses from the barn pen and the tree pen out into the yard. They were busy interacting with each other, running along the hill, which was slick with melting snow and ice. Wingnut and Denali took turns trying to impress the girls from the tree pen with their high-pitched stallion screams. The Wild Horse Advocates felt at home.

The ladies’ chatter made me nervous. They were talking in five directions. Everything was still up in the air to them. They have a lot of older animals, what would happen to them? What is the deadline to get the animals moved? I started feeling like they were uncommitted. You know how I get.

Well, John and I had found another possibility. Years and years ago, he had helped sell some land to the Valley Livestock Auction in Milan, New Mexico. He had also sold them a prefabricated building he salvaged from a uranium operation in Churchrock. It had been the auction office until the whole livestock industry changed and the little auction houses all went out of business. The building and pens have sat vacant for 20 years. When we went to see it, I expected a lot of dust and cobwebs.

It has a block of pens on five acres between I-40 and Route 66. Amtrack races by twice a day. The truckstop is within walking distance. There is a giant billboard on the back side, near the highway, advertising T-shirts at Bowlin’s Trading Post. The highway department is the next door neighbor.

Maybe someone has cleaned the building twice a year for the last 20 years? It’s kind of spiffy. A person could definitely live in that wood paneled space, if they weren’t going to use it as a place of business. The pens are another story. There are 60 of them. Half are 16ft by 24 ft, and the rest are 24ft by 32 ft. Everything is connected by narrow alleys.

The pens have three pipe rails and a panel of mesh wire grid. The mesh is a dangerous size for horses, who invariably kick at the neighbor horse, and could get their legs through the mesh with disastrous results. There is 3444 feet of this mesh that has to be removed. It is welded to the pipe. None of the gates are horse safe because they are made out of angle iron and mesh. We sat in the truckstop over a plate of green chile cheese fries and debated what to do.

We have to replace the gates. That’s easy. Could we cover the rest of the mesh with smaller mesh? That would cost more than $1 per foot. A poly mesh (plastic) cover would cost around $0.56 and it would need to be on both sides of the wire mesh. If we just totally remove the mesh, will the horses be likely to wiggle out? What about batten tape rails, how do we attach it to pipe. We finally settled on one or two strands of poly coated wire. The total cost would be around $1,000, not counting gates.

I inventoried our panels. If we move them to Milan, we can have some nice big paddocks for the horses to run. It all works and, if we buy just 17 more heavy duty panels, we would have a truly optimized situation. Okay, we just need the horses… well that and a few people to help me.

I need to start recruiting, I know that I do, but my feet seem to be dragging on it. What part of my intuition is telling me to take this slow? I am not sure. Maybe it’s the conflicting plan I had to get the online class going and require people to learn something before they come. I get up early every morning and work on the classes. Someday I will show you. But, let’s be honest, how can I recruit when I don’t have a place and I don’t have horses? It is like a giant Rubik’s cube that I have to rotate into place in the wee hours of the morning while I would rather be sleeping than staring at the ceiling.

So the ladies sat down at the dining room table. I handed them our Training Protocol Pamphlet. It was like the movie where the people adrift at sea have a shore bird land on the bow. They sense salvation is at hand. We spent a long time talking about how our program works, our adoption policies, how we work with the BLM, and what we have to do differently with the Humane Society horses. In the movie, they are on-board with the Coast Guard now.

We talk about the Milan facility and how it simplifies a lot of things. Mustang Camp has enough money for the renovations needed (thanks to you!) PlacitasWild and MustangCamp start planning to move horses. We will ask the ASPCA to help us craft an adoption agreement that meets the needs of both organizations. They will create a spreadsheet of their horses. We will arrange life to take the bachelor band for gelding as the first order of business. We hope the Milan vet is mustang-friendly. My job is to call him on Monday.

They have to raise money for the expenses of dealing with the horses. We have given them a ball park of $600 for those we also get adopted and $500 for those they get adopted, not including gelding. Everyone is working from a list of things to do.

The yard horses stampede past the dining room window where we work. They are wet with the sloppy mud along the hill. They remind us of what we are doing here.

The Placitas horses have been a problem for decades. There are foals and there are ancient ones. The BLM has been involved at the Regional Office. These horses have press agents. Have you seen their calendar? (buy one) It will be a pretty powerful statement if Mustang Camp, in just a few months, helps these horses gracefully transition into privatization. Fathers of young girls should be warned, we will soon be wanting your daughter to adopt a pony! I am a woman on a mission.

ps. The lease isn’t signed and I just got word that the ladies are looking at some other options. We are going to just have to see where this takes us. I will call the vet anyway to see about getting Pete and Trevor fixed.

The definition of Mytho-poetic says it’s a men’s therapeutic approach to mental health that has Jungian roots. Ditch the gender requirement. Being a devout mytho-poetic person is the only thing that keeps me sane.

I recently wrote a piece on perspective framing for animals trainers if you are unfamiliar with this idea. I became aware of this framing concept a few weeks ago, but now I wonder how I lived so long without it? It comes from Cognitive Behavior Therapy ideas if you want to Google it.

One of the Jungian principles is that one should always seek to resolve conflicts in their awareness by holding the conflicting frames so close together that a transcendent frame can emerge that encompasses both sides of the conflict. People are getting better than they used to be about having multiple points of view simultaneously. I am getting really good at doing something and not doing it at the same time.

Right now we seem to be living in a pressure cooker. I dare say you are feeling it too. There is an intense need to do something, but every which way is blocked. The pressure is building. It is taking it’s toll on everyone… or maybe it’s just me. Trying desperately to make something happen, but blocked. The steam is building up.

Government shut down, so we can’t negotiate for horses. The Mustang Heritage Foundation closes shop for the duration. Maybe they will reopen the adoption program, maybe not. My promised 200 horses have escaped. I am despondent.

Kathleen Kraft calls and is interested in leasing her place on the hill. Buck up, Camper! This is movement in the right direction. We meet for lunch in Bernalillo. We can have all 250 acres of her ranch for $750 a month. We know we have to do it, if we can. We draft a lease and send it to her for review.

Days go by. I get the check from Facebook and it brings the project funds to up over $12,000. Plenty to get started if we can just get horses. More days go by. I start sinking into despair and start planning a “drop-dead” date at which I will return all the major donations.

The government re-opens (short lived ray of hope), but the Mustang Heritage Foundation notifies everyone that they are not funding more TIP adoptions. No horses can be picked up in the foreseeable future. I feel my dream is about to die. John and I discuss alternate plans for our lives. We start thinking that going into a sustainability model might be good. We have social security and a good garden spot. That might be really nice.

Then the phone rings, it’s Sandy Webb. A very upbeat person, she explains that she is looking for somewhere for about 70 mustangs to go. I tell her that I have no room at the sanctuary. We keep talking because I can sense that these horses are kind of out of options. I keep thinking that I can’t just get involved with some crazy project when I need to be training BLM mustangs. I am kind of stuck in that frame so I don’t hear the message right away. I hang on the phone biting my lip while she continues talking.

These are the somewhat famous Placitas Horses that were placed in a sanctuary about 3 years ago. They went to 300 acres on the San Felipe Reservation, but now they are getting kicked off as of February 19th. The tribe will give them to the BLM. These horses are famous. They have been at the center of wild horse rights for decades. There has been a lot of money spent on litigating their fate. They have drained peoples bank accounts. The BLM might just sell them to kill buyers as that would be totally legal.

Standing there with the phone to my ear, my heart starts breaking for all the people that have gone to bat for these horses. I agree to do what I can.

I send out an email to the rescues. “Get ready to take in as many horses as you can. The Placitas horses are being removed from sanctuary.” I admit to myself that they probably won’t take more than a few.

Seventy wild horses and no place to go. CRAP, CRAP, CRAP! I try to go about my day. I start pulling the ice out of troughs and refilling the water. My mind wanders and frames slide together like a Venn diagram. Okay, I have an idea. I text Sandy to call me ASAP.

I don’t have any horses to train anyway, so I could take them all, train them and get them adopted, if we could raise the money to pay for it. It’s possible. It’s breaking up the herd and dispersing them, but it is keeping them from heading to Mexico to become horse burger. But by the next morning, it seems impossible. I am speaking at a conference on the 22nd. How can I get the horses before then? By the following day, I am thinking that the horse advocates aren’t going to let the horses be separated. I start sinking into despair, which I try to counter by making a budget.

I don’t know if that helps, but it keeps a person busy for a while. I have four versions: one version is the get-out-of-mustang-training version that focuses on liquidation; a second version is training 30 BLM horses here; a third version involves moving to the Tucumcari ranch and training 70 BLM horses (that’s the one that makes a little money). The final version models moving to the ranch and training 70 Placitas horses. It would cost under $50k to pull that off with volunteer labor. It can be done.

Sandy calls and asks if I could prepare a budget. I smile.

Well, training the Placitas horses would certainly catapult us to fame (or notoriety). It’s not a done deal, but it’s where I seem to be headed at this point. And not heading at the same time!

At about 12:30 every day, breakfast is digested and the animals are ready to take an interest in working for food. I grab some lunch and force myself to head out the door. The animals just live in the wind and snow, they don’t mind, but I am not so tough. I can lapse into feeling sorry for myself. But that’s just it… I need that Tucumcari training pod.

In my mind’s eye, the ground is dry, the wind is slowed by a windbreak surrounding the pens. It’s bright, but nothing glaring. If it’s cold, you might see the horse’s breath rising like steam. If it’s hot, it’s shady. Okay, perhaps a bit grandiose for one mustang trainer, but I won’t be alone there.

Not the Quonset hut, is it? I started thinking about the feedlot next door and the county dump on the other side of Jack Mae’s land and realized that there might be a reason for so many birds. The season of ice is not the season of flies. We won’t know until spring, but a long time ago, John bought an RV park 2 miles from a dairy. The flies filled people’s RVs and it had to be abandoned. When I mentioned flies, he shuddered.

Let’s be honest, a bare piece of land out of the farmed bottom land with a pod on it is what we really want. So when Rob Morper sent us an email about his mother’s property, we would have started drooling except for one thing: the price tag. $5,000/acre or at least $225,000. I like this property because it is raw upland, near the Interstate, and just across the ditch from the Quay County Fairgrounds. I don’t need the whole 40+ acres, 20 will do. Okay, but even if we had the money would it make sense to buy it?

Last month, I was working on a speculative theory of fundraising requiring lots of letters of support. I wanted to stack them up on the list of 200 supporters with skin in the game. I asked the USFS, the MHF, the BLM, the ASPCS, the HSUS, APNM, and any other organization with a snappy abbreviation to send me a letter. I even wrote the letters for them. They could just fluff up the pillow, and send back the letter. My next target would be my congress people. My political adviser, Don Schrieber, vetted my letter to congress, said to attach other support letters, and wished me luck. I waited for the first round of support. The USFS and the MHF came through for me. I waited hoping to hear from the BLM. The days turned into weeks. It was like being 25 and waiting for someone you thought was going to be a hot date to call… but they never do. All the stages of grief and agony are the same: Denial, anger, suffering, and ultimately acceptance.

There is a college professor of economics at Utah State whose disclaimer on his work says he does not get grants from the Koch Foundation. The disclaimer catches your attention because the paper is about the economics of the Wild Horse and Burro program and seems irrelevant (just as it does here). With no help from the Koch brothers, Paul Jakus reviewed the literature addressing the benefits and costs of the whole program. It’s great reading for a long winter night. A few facts of interest:

• Every horse with some training in the BLM data base was adopted and on average, at a higher price, proving there is a substantial payoff to training.
• The average gather cost is $782. Short-term holding (STH) costs around $7/day/animal, while long-term holding costs about $1.50/day/animal, which makes $2555/year for STH. The average adoption costs the BLM $2,575.

If I understand Dr. Jakus correctly, why don’t we have that letter of support from the BLM? Every animal we get out of holding is a big savings for the government. We can’t really move forward without an arrangement with the agency. Can you imagine that we all (you included) climb through the gates of hell to get the facility built and then the BLM says, “Ooops, we ran out of money. No more horses for you.” No skin off their noses. Of course, I am compelled to go down with the ship, so there I am collapsed, a gray ashen heap in a white pod on the edge of the prairie. You watch helplessly as I breathe my last. Crikey! We don’t want to go down that road!

John and I sit around the wood stove ruminating about the barriers to our success. We need funding, we need agency commitment. All the economic development programs help for-profit businesses, not 501(c)3 charities. Do we need to change our status? Over the years, whenever we have had problems being a non-profit, we have used my personal credentials (Dunn’s Number, Tax ID, and SAM registration) to get contracts. I have a pretty good performance record as Yr Okay Corral. Would they fund Yr Okay Corral and then Mustang Camp could return to doing equine rescue and education?

Another possibility is social impact bonding (SIB). A non-profit gets a government agency to commit to pay for impacts (like getting horses adopted). The non-profit sells bonds tied to the agencies commitment. There are a bunch of companies that specialize in bonding socially beneficial NGOs (like us). The bonds are retired as the government agencies pay for services. We could offer bonds ourselves or let one of the companies do it.

Oh, yeah. They are on furlough. Can’t get horses, can’t adopt horses, can’t call Washington. It’s got to be tough to lose their paychecks. The skin is off their noses on this one. I hope they have a parlor stove and a warm fire to ride out the winter storms. It’s the season of ice.

We left Largo Canyon in a snow-storm, heading north to take advantage of the somewhat better road. It was still early enough for the muddy road to be frozen solid. I had a pile of checks and cash to get deposited in the bank. Since I was never one to expect community support, the $2045 in my purse from our supporters was an ineffable treasure of love to be kept safe in the growing savings account. As we bumped and slid our way to town, empowered by the $12,000 we had accumulated in donations and a promise from the Mustang Heritage Foundation (MHF) to pay for 200 adoptions, John and I discussed our plan to secure a location to start training horses in the next few months.

The original plan (build the facility, train animals, get them adopted, bill the MHF) called for two months of operating money to be in the bank, giving us time to get horses through the training and into adoption, before we had to run solely on earned income. We realized that sticking with this plan meant we were letting time slip through our fingers; we worried that the MHF commitment to provide animals might vanish if we didn’t perform in a timely way.

What if we didn’t wait for the operating capital but we just boot-strapped our cash position by getting five or six horses into training immediately, then as the weather warmed up, getting volunteers to ratchet production to 10 horses a month? By July we could afford full scale production with paid staff. Sounded good on paper, we just needed a place to start. We had to find an affordable place that offered shelter from the prairie winds.

This wasn’t our first trip to Tucumcari this week. Google Earth had taken us to a virtual view of the farms and fields as we sat by the parlor wood-stove at home. We studied the maps carefully, looking for large and numerous pens that had an unused appearance.  You might like to look at some of them yourself:

I was partial to the Racetrack Training Facility. It was covered in Kochia scoparia (a.k.a. Curtis weed) so it had not been used in years. There were almost 25 empty stalls jutting out from a central barn. The row of long straight pens were intriguing. I could start there tomorrow if I got it leased. It was owned by the former Magistrate Judge, D.J. Garrett, who according to my research was about 68 years old and retired. Not in the phone book. Hmm. Magistrate court would not give us his number. Hmm. Not on Facebook or Twitter. Hmmm. We were going to have to track him down.

John’s favorite was Daniel’s Feedlot, a protected and abandoned property on the west side of town that was accessible across a narrow bridge. We were finding property owners names using the property tax database that the counties use. Most properties have parcel numbers and names. Some have mailing addresses and a few have phone numbers. Daniel’s was another mystery. John called his brother, who is a big-wig in the Mason’s of NM. There have always been a lot of Mason’s in eastern NM and the history of this state since 1877 is intricately bound with the history of the Masons. So of course, the Daniel’s clan would be Masons and, of course, John’s brother would know him. Of course. We left messages on Daniel’s phone a week before setting out on the journey. Of course he had not returned the calls.

John had looked at the Kraft place last time he drove through Tucumcari on the way to Texas. It’s clean and well-kept. A little set of pens on a hilltop in the middle of a large ranch. The realtor told us it was owned by a woman who is a nurse-practitioner in Edgewood, NM and she is a little eccentric. We thought it sounded hopeful. But she is not in the phone book and not on social media, and her place of employment won’t take a message or give us contact info. I left her a message on LinkedIn, but she had not responded. Is there a pattern here?

So it was a clear winter evening as we drove east on I-40. The sky turned pink and I was reminded of the December night before my son was born in 1978. His father and I were doing reforestation contracts with the US Forest Service and there was a bid due in Springerville, AZ for some tree planting. The sky was that same shimmering pink in the evening dusk as we pulled into Gallup, NM for the night. Gallup, another Route 66 town. Just as now, we did not have a television at home, so I flipped the hotel TV on and we watched what seemed to be very appropriate for the environment: the
National Finals Rodeo. We watched the bareback bronc riders before falling asleep. My son was born the next day in the hospital at Springerville. That was 40 years ago, but it all came flooding into my mind as we drove east to Tucumcari.

Earlier in the day, I had called my brother on his cell phone. He is a truck driver and delivers pork from Oklahoma to Oakland, CA and wine from Napa, CA to Albuquerque. He can usually be found somewhere along I-40 and he happened to be leaving Tucumcari when I caught him. He would go on to pick up the pork and come back to Tucumcari for the night. We could have breakfast together in the morning. Meanwhile he suggested that we try the Silver Moon Cafe in Santa Rosa. The green enchiladas were superb, he said.

As we pulled into the parking lot in front of the Silver Moon, there was a large thin sliver of the new moon hanging in the sky. The world seemed wrapped in a layer of perfection. Money in the bank, good food, a captivating adventure, and celestial magic. Of course the enchiladas were superb. It wasn’t far to Tucumcari.

I had made reservations at the America’s Best Value Inns, where some people left negative ratings for the beds being too firm. It was a plus in our estimation. A girl with a London accent checked us in. Her parents own the motel. She considers Tucumcari a little too quiet for her tastes. We were worried that the truck wouldn’t start in the morning without being plugged in for a couple of hours, so she let us park near the front door, where the only external plug-in was for the whole building.

Flipping the TV on, I plopped down on the bed. Of course it was the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, NV and, of course, we watched the bareback bronc riders. They don’t wear helmets, but they do wear neck braces. They lay down on the horses back and raise their free hand to signal that the gate should open. NRCA broncs are top-notch buckers, professionals, that get 8 seconds to abuse cowboys as much as they wish. It’s not a bad life for a horse. No one got killed and I shut the TV off when it was done, thinking about my kid, my life, my crazy project to help get mustangs adopted. The firm bed was perfect.

In the morning it was cold. We turned the heat on. Neither of us offered to go plug the truck in. I got up at 4:30 and worked on the presentation I want to give at the Progressive Horse Forum. My presentation is going to be about credentialing science-based horse trainers. At 6:30, I called my brother, Mike, who was sleeping in his semi truck one exit west on the freeway. He has an electronic logbook that keeps track of his driving hours. He wouldn’t be allowed to drive until 9:30. Our truck started and we picked Mike up from the truckstop parking lot.

My brother is not your typical truck driver. He was a martial arts instructor and an acupuncturist before he started driving trucks. He is concerned about health and fitness, so he enjoyed being taken away from the food landscape provided by the truckstop world. We headed out to the Racetrack training facility on our way to breakfast.

There was a long narrow building visible from the road, so I got out and walked into the driveway. The pens were kennels and some of them had hound dogs. The barn was no more than 6 feet high. The racetrack was for greyhounds. We no longer needed to find the Magistrate Judge, it wasn’t going to work. How totally absurd!

It was still very early on Sunday morning. The world was pretty quiet. We drove across Tucumcari to the Daniel’s Feedlot bridge, which had a chain and a lock across it. The world was still asleep. We stepped over the chain and walked in. A gravel road led up a slope to a building and some pens. Some old house trailers had fallen into shreds on the side. A few big trucks and grain feeders stood among the weeds. The tumbleweeds and dried curtis-weed looked like a grass fire ready to happen. The pens were okay but would have to have another higher fence rail to be mustang-ready. It looked like a workable setup once the brush was cleared.

Kix on 66 was open for breakfast and we had lots of time to drink coffee and ponder the situation. At 9:30, Mike was back on the road and we were back on the hunt. As the day progressed, we realized that there are very few unoccupied farms, that the horses here tend to be very large, that windbreaks for animals were very common, and that every big set of pens outside the Daniels and Kraft facilities were full of cows. We learned about Fort Bascom, where the cavalry had based to fight the Comanche and Kiowa Indians around the time of the Civil War. Tucumcari had a lot of different names over the years, but had settled on it’s current one in about 1903. There are a lot of abandoned motels on the old Route 66, but the total number of rooms in the town has probably increased with all the big chain hotels at the five freeway exits. It doesn’t look like a run-down impoverished community. It is certainly not waiting for a mustang-training facility to show up.

The phone rang. It was Daniels. He didn’t want to sell or lease his property. He was firm. We drove around some more.

We had just been in the neighborhood where the ostrich and emu farms are plentiful and were driving up HWY 52, when John noticed the Quonset Hut barn had pens sticking out one side. It’s next to the NM State Agriculture Forage Research Station. We pulled in and the gate was open. The barn was surrounded with coppery colored wild turkeys that melted into the grassy field as we approached. It was idyllic. It had been a horse facility at some time and was in a state of abandonment. There were five pens. A white owl flew out of the Quonset hut when I peeked inside. A pair of hawks watched us from the sky above. My brother drives past this place twice a week. There are giant old trees and it feels protected. We returned to the hotel to figure out who to contact.

The tax records show Jack Maes to be the owner. He was, at one time, the City Manager of Tucumcari. He does not live in Quay County, but has been a vagabond city manager in many places. The Internet trail he leaves suggests he may be a rather controversial character. He knows the meaning of “early termination”. His family is from Las Vegas, NM and so is his landline. The landline and the cell phone both are answered by a “We’re sorry. This number has been temporarily disconnected” message. Jack might be down on his luck and want to sell that property. We kept trying, but got nowhere with our efforts to locate him. We considered that sending him a letter might be our best bet, but even that seemed unlikely to work. In the age of cellphones and email addresses, people are actually harder to find than ever. By this time, I was exhausted and lay on the bed, too tired to even pick up the TV remote and find a rodeo. Not that I like rodeo even. I was depressed with our lack of success.

As the sky grew dark, John suggested going to the movie theater. Wow, what a crazy idea! Sunday night in Tucumcari and we are going to go to a movie? The vintage movie theater is called the Orpheon and, and, yes, there was a 6:30 showing of a movie called “Instant Family”. Sounded less bad than watching an endless series of commercials on television, so we went. Here is the RottenTomatoes review and the trailer.

Definitely a schmaltzy movie, but the Orpheon costs just $6 a ticket, and, while seating 700, four people were in the audience. The movie is about some people that, intending to do something good, take on the task of transitioning some children from a lifetime of neglect to being part of a functional world. They meet with hardships, their efforts aren’t appreciated by many, they feel like giving up at various points, but they don’t. They know that what they do with their lives as house remodelers is taking things that other people don’t want and giving them to value. They know that these children are the continuation of that story. They don’t give up.

Wow! We take animals that are unwanted and help them transition into a new life. Few people appreciate what that means or why we would do it. There was a ton of meaning in this schmaltzy movie for our journey. It was synchronicity at work. We no longer felt defeated. It had been only a temporary setback. We knew that giving up isn’t an option.

As our hotel room started to cool down with the morning chill, we got out of our firm bed and packed up the truck. A cinnamon roll and coffee for the road, we were westbound. Somewhere west of Santa Rosa, we turned north on HWY 82 to Las Vegas. The sun came up over a beautiful landscape. It was 7:30 a.m. when we knocked at the last known address for Jack Maes.

A man too young to be Jack answered the door. The Maes had lived there years ago. We drove around Las Vegas in the cold morning air wondering what to do. John and I got married in Las Vegas, NM in 1993 in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. We were supposed to be married at the courthouse, but we didn’t have any witnesses. The Magistrate judge was willing to step next door, where the desk clerk and the restaurant chef were our witnesses. We had come to Las Vegas on the train on that snowy night, and the stationmaster had been very helpful to us so we drove to the station and got out to consider our next move. Sitting in the station, I searched the internet and found another address for Jack and his wife Joann.

No one was home, so we wrote a note and stuck it on the door. I was pessimistic. It didn’t look like someone of the right age lived there. The tiny kids bikes suggested a younger family. It may be the wrong address. But Jack’s mother died some years ago and her family is listed in the obituary. We can find him.

John’s phone rang as we drove back to the interstate. The caller ID said Manuel Armijo but the call disconnected before John could answer. It made me think of Antonio Armijo, the first commercial trader to move goods down the Spanish Trail in 1830. Our house in Largo Canyon sits on Antonio’s pathway, a route now marked with National Trail markers showing a man and a pack burro walking. John pushed the call back button, and then called Manuel “Antonio” by mistake. Manuel denied having tried to call us, but he claimed to be a detective in Taos. John instinctively spilled his guts about our search for Jack, trying to elicit some helpful advice from a professional.  Manuel was friendly enough, but wasn’t getting involved. Another odd random event along our trail.

So that is where we are as of 12/11/2018. We will find Jack Maes. If nothing comes of that, we will return to the plan to build the facility on open ground and see if, meanwhile, we can’t train some horses along the Spanish Trail (at home in Largo Canyon).