The confused babblings of someone who’s spent too long in the sun
Tales from Date Creek Ranch – Lady, part horse, part evil
By the time I was five or six I was judged old enough to ride my own horse during round up. At last I could begin to earn my keep. The horse for beginners on Date Creek Ranch was Lady, a horse so ancient she had turned white, speckled with little brown spots, like...
Tales from Date Creek Ranch – Early memories
A joshua tree. Some of my very earliest childhood memories on the ranch, when I was three or four years old, are of riding behind my father during round up. (Round up being that time when the cattle are gathered off the range and brought into the corrals, in case...
Tales from Date Creek Ranch – Humble beginnings
The old barn. Still standing somehow. Sixty square miles of hard-packed dirt and caliche, filled with rocks, greasewood, cactus and more rocks. Twenty-six miles from the sleepy town of Wickenburg, straddling Highway 93 and Date Creek. That’s Date Creek Ranch.Now...
Tales from Date Creek Ranch – Introduction
I grew up on a working cattle ranch in the Arizona desert in the 1960’s and ‘70’s and it wasn’t easy. There was too much work and never enough people to do it. Bankruptcy loomed over us constantly. Everything was always broken or about to break. Dad yelled a lot....
It was quite a decade…
At my birthday party, 10 years ago. Now that the 10's have ended, it seems everyone is doing a retrospective and I figured, hey, why not me? So here's my attempt at it. At the beginning of the decade I was still teaching high school English at a small charter...
Dragon Queen of Chaos
Chapter 1 Jarryd’s mother was arguing with the shop keeper, a little man with a round head dotted with random tufts of gray hair. “All the color washed out of this ribbon the first time I washed it. Look at it. It’s practically gray. Who wants to wear a gray ribbon in...