Sunday, February 17, 2008

Journey of the Heart

This weekend I had a dog show scheduled in San Marcos. Our family was looking forward to having this adventure together, a post-Valentines celebration weekend in a great little town. My husband's job suddenly required that he go out of town for the same weekend, and my oldest son had been invited to a birthday party he didn't want to miss. My mother agreed to take the oldest for the weekend, and I was on my own with the youngest, who is in his "terrible twos" phase (he has recently acquired a spitting habit).
Only I could not show the dog and monitor the youngest. I didn't want to drop out of the show (and lose the entry fees) because there was someone who wanted to look at my dog as a prospective mate for her female. The people who bred my dog Scout are like family to me. They offered to show him for me, but I would still need to do the grooming beforehand. I asked my friend Lara to come with me and be my baby wrangler.

Friday evening I was frantically preparing to leave: bathing and blowing out the dog, bathing the baby, bathing myself, packing three days worth of clothes and dog food, diapers and sippy cups. I hauled the dog kennel, grooming stand, misc equipment, clothing, diaper bag, bag of toys, cooler for youngests antibiotic and liquid refreshments, and geocaching bag out to the car, dropped off the oldest dog at Grandma's and checked with oldest kid, who had gone home sick from school with Grandma and was still not eating and feeling puny. He was watching movies and laying on the couch. Scout was embarrasingly wild and the toddler was trying to get into cabinets. We loaded back up, Scout, the baby, and I, and headed off to pick up Lara.

Once on the way, we started discussing dinner plans and there was a stop along the way for some fast food. It was dark and a light rain was falling. The young child, K, was fussy at first, but eventually fell to sleep in the drizzle of the rain on the roof and the steady lulls and pitches of a good conversation. We talked of everything under the moon. She told stories of her film industry, I told her stories of my past, including my time in the San Marcos area. I was taking her on a journey to a place I used to live, a piece of my history, only it was so ancient history by now that the details are faint.


I lived in that area of the world when I was a dozen years younger and working as a horse wrangler at a camp about seventeen miles from San Marcos. We came into "town" occasionally, mostly to eat at this great mexican joint by campus. That restaurant is no more, for which I was disappointed, but we did go to Los Cucos on Saturday so it was all good. We also briefly checked out the Outlet mall, mostly so I could run in and get some new shoes for K and I. It was raining lightly all day and was miserable weather to do some hard core geocaching, but we did managed to get a lot accomplished in that area nonetheless.
The best cache we did all day was a virtual, "grandfathered" in (Geocaching.com does not allow virtual caches as new listings anymore, and also does not allow commercial caches, in which you have to pay a fee to get to the cache, and this was both), in which you had to ride out on a glass-bottomed boat in AquaArena Center and answer a question when you got to the coordinates: which spring were you over when you reached this location? The boats took you over several natural springs formed by the Balcones Fault, and we got a great geography lesson while there.
In the later afternoon, we began the drive up to the Devils Backbone, the area that the camp was located at. We were doing some caching along the way. The highlights of our journey were as follows:
GCY8EF Blown Glass

This was a microcache outside of the Wimberley Glass Works building. Inside they hosted free glass blowing demonstrations all day, and we went inside to check it out. They were making a vase when we were there, and it was awe inspiring to watch them work.

Backbone Break

This small cache was located just to the side of the lookout point where we used to do firewatch for the camp. The lookout gives a great view of the Devils Backbone (zipcode 78666) ridge formations out here in the hill country, and has sentimental memories attached to it for me.
GCEF CenTex Prime
Wow! A "grandfather" cache! This one was hidden in 12/00 - check out the low GC #. This might be one of the 50 oldest active caches, not sure, but it is the oldest one I have found. It was a classic cache hidden in the classic style, and was in a great area, but still a 1/1 (diffculty/terrain). It was a park and grab, but no one would ever guess it was there.


Right after finding CenTex Prime, we got back on the road and I realized we were at the gate of the old camp, not 500 feet from the cache. We stopped in the driveway to turn around and I was tempted to go in and find the man who lived there, who had been my boss that summer working with the horses. I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do. So much time had passed. So we went on, turning around for a few miles and heading towards this one:
GC12BHB Out of Sight, Out of Mind
This cache was in an old Confederate soldier cemetary, and we spent quite a bit of time here checking out the history. It was so peaceful and the weather was just right. Scout and K enjoyed running around in the fenced yard, and we were digging the moment, Lara and I.

After this cache, we still had time and daylight, and we were in the mood for more, so I drive back west again, passing the gates of the camp for the second time. This time a truck was pulling into the drive, and I felt like they slowed ever slightly and I wondered if it was the ranger, and if he recognized me.

As we drove, we passed by the western edge of the camp and all of a sudden I could see myself there. It was at that moment that I realized that this was not a trip out to a place where I used to live, this was a trip to a place where I fell in love...with my horse. That summer was a magic summer of forming a bond with a living animal that I could not leave behind. Most of my friends are aware of the story of how I earned my horse while I was there, how he was a horse that could not be tamed, had been living there for two years unable to be ridden by anyone, but how I developed a bond with him and he became "my horse". As we drove past the pinion and sage of the back part of the trails, I thought of the picture I took from in the saddle, the view from the ride, with his neck and ears out in front and the hill country all around, and how I felt I wanted to live there forever. At the end of the summer, I offered the ranger about half of what I had made working there, delibrately mentioning it in front of the councilmen who made these kind of decisions and knowing it was more than the horse had been bought for. Later he told me privately that he wanted to sell him to his brother, who wanted to make him into a roping horse. So I seduced his brother at the end of the summer, had a wild affair with him out there, even met up with him once after the summer ended there at the lookout point, until he willingly agreed to drop his desire for the horse, and after several months of waiting for a swamp fever quarantine to be lifted, the ranger had driven that horse to me in College Station, in return for the money I had offered for him originally.


That time in my life was a time of "gain", a time of acheiving a dream I had always had, the dream of owning my own horse. Bullseye was a part of my life for five years, and we grew together and moved together, from College Station to Colorado, to Northern California to Oregon. I sold him when I was in Oregon, during a time when our relationship had become strained, and I have grieved for him all seven years since then, and our story, which had been this beautiful story of the love between a young woman and the horse of her dreams, had become a story of loss.

I wasn't prepared to face the memories of when we fell in love, and suddenly here it was, the place, the emotions, the memories swirling through my heart as I pointed the car past and on to Fisher, for yet another cemetary cache. I tried not to think about it anymore, but I realized that this loss was perhaps one of the reasons I didn't want to stop in to talk to the ranger. For years, I thought I could never forget that magical summer, because I had this living, breathing reminder of it for always, but now, so many years later, it would just be a sad story of how we have to let go of our dreams, let go of the things we love sometimes in order to move ahead.

On our way back from that area, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming out to say hello before falling for the evening, and we saw the most incredible rainbow. It stretched the entire length of sky and as we came towards it, the road seemed to be taking us directly to its end. We had been silent in our thoughts, listening to Pink Floyd, but we had a momentary lapse of silence when I mentioned that we just might be headed straight towards that pot of gold. Lara agreed that this road would in fact end directly at the gold under that rainbow.

At one point, I was headed straight for the rainbow and looked out my window with slight trepidation at the way the road went straight down in front of me, but I saw ahead that the road would come back up. That is the way I will forever remember that drive now - the mountains and valleys of the hill country road, the ups and downs, and how I thought that was just how life was - when you see the yourself coming down a hill, that just means there is a road taking you back up on the other side, that coming down only means you are coming back up. I talked this over with Lara and she completely saw what I was talking about, but maybe it is because we are both bipolar and our lives are ruled by the mountains and valleys anyway that she was able to understand why that road seemed metaphorical.

On our drive, we had passed by Riley's on the Backbone hamburger joint several times, another place we used to hang out at a lot when I lved there. It was close, cheap, and the burgers were great, and sometimes if you were lucky you could get a cold beer, too. I had longed to take stop at Riley's for old times sake, but it had changed. The back patio was covered in glass, and it looked like it was under construction or not open. After we passed Riley's for the third time and still stuck by our decision not to go in, we saw another place, a big Tex-Mex place, two stories high and decorated with lights. It looked like a great, fun place to have a meal, but the baby was quietly sleeping and we didn't want to wake him to go inside.

By the time we made it back to our hotel that night, we were exhausted and dirty from the dog show and caching and could not wait to veg out and get cleaned off. However, when we got to the hotel, we realized we were missing Lara's purse! Last I had seen it, she had set it down at the Confederate soldier graveyard! We had to make the drive back up there and get out, in the dark, and go hunt her purse in the spooky graveyard.

The next day we didn't find any caches, although the weather was great. A professional handler had offered to show my dog for free, and since he was showing under a judge who has mentioned in the past she likes him, I really thought it was his day. Unfortunately, he got another red ribbon in his class, the fourth one in the past four shows he has been to, effectively knocking him out of advancing to the next round and eliminating any chance at points.
By the time we left San Marcos, we were done with the town and everything in it. We did some light caching on the way home, bringing the weekend total up to sixteen, which is what I needed to be able to move ahead in the standings. We had a great time on the road home, talking of everything under the sun, and I was so glad I had her along to share this time with me.

It was bitterweet to walk away from that place without closing the door on the memories, without experiencing a big win to make it worth the money and time we invested with the dog, without stopping in at Riley's on the Backbone hamburger joint while we were there, but I also had a great time checking out the town with Lara and K, and I have new memories now for the town to take away some of the pain from the old ones, the ones that were so good that it hurts to have to let them go. It made me think of Riley's, and how now the camp staff probably hangs out at the swanky Mexican place instead. Sometimes things change inside us, like they do in the areas we remember, and although those places were good, sometimes they get replaced with something even better. Sometimes the heart has to have walls taken out to allow for more light to come in. We can be sad for the way it used to be, but the changes allow for something even better to take root.

1 comment:

Josh said...

That's nice that you got to experience the things at the caches. That's why someone put a cache there. Whenever I go back to a place from my past like that, it always seems so small. Interesting how time and life experiences change your perspective on those memories. Great story.