Despite the fact that I wear pearl snaps, Wrangler jeans, and have more country music than anything else on my iPod, I’m in no way country. I think I bought my pearl snaps for a fraternity party, and liked the design, the triple buttons on the cuff make me feel classy, and the way you can dramatically rip off a pearl snap is one of the most undervalued things in the world. There’s a Wrangler outlet store in Story City north of Des Moines, and you can’t beat the quality/price combo. And well, my dad grew up in a country-esque suburb (as opposed to my straight up suburban upbringing) so he played George Strait, George Jones, and Garth Brooks in car trips as a kid-so there’s your country music. So, I bet you never would’ve thought that moving to Costa Rica would’ve provided me with the opportunity to corral my first horse. Well it did. And corral the horse I did, shirtless mind you. Yes, the answer is yes, I bragged for at least a week to anyone who would listen about how I corralled my first horse-shirtless-and all the man points I earned doing it.
This all happened during a mostly delightful trip to my host mom’s parents’ farm during semana santa (Holy Week). My host mom’s dad and her younger brother manage the farm, which produces cheese (they live too far off the main road to be able to sell the milk-so they just let it sit and sell the cheese). They also grow some pineapples, sugarcane, and papaya-and little bits of all sorts of other stuff. They have about 15 or 20 horses, some of which are workhorses, and I’m assuming the others are just to sell. Her sisters and most of the cousins, as well as some second cousins were at the farm all week. Many of the aunts/great aunts are super evangelistic fundamentalist Christian and most of their conversation centers around this. This doesn’t interest me, and I have little to offer in their other conversation topic: complaining about their kids, husbands, exes, and babies' daddies. So, I hang out with the cousins. We spent the days riding horses, swimming in the river, or playing pick up games of soccer. Needless to say I came back all sorts of sunburned. But I had a great time. Only downside of the trip was the three hour possessed by tongues type shouting worship session that went on in the kitchen one night while all of us kids were trying to sleep. Luckily for me, listening to podcasts on the porch kept me out of the family disputes that the worship session induced. So, that was my holy week.
Oh, yeah, I corralled a horse. So, before we took the big horse ride, I was helping out the oldest two cousins and the uncle in the barn. By helping I mean I held the door open/closed as they moved a giant cement sink. But, hey, somebody’s got to keep the calves from escaping. So, I was able to snag an early morning ride on one of the horses. When I was out there, another cousin came down and said that I should ride the horse in so he could bring a loose horse up to the barn. I asked if I could do it. He said it was difficult. I said it couldn’t be that hard, give me a try. He did. And, the first 90% of the trip was easy as could be. Ride behind the loose horse, cut him off as he gingerly tried to stray back to the pasture. As we pushed up the hill to the barn, I was feeling pretty good about ol’ Cowboy Ken. In my defense, I didn’t totally understand which set of fences I was supposed to get the horse to turn into. On the other hand, I didn’t get the horse to go into any of the sets of fences. As we got to the top of the hill, and I tried to get my horse on the left of the loose horse, she darted off the path, down the other side of the hill and into the wide open pasture before I could even react.
So, I chased her down through the other pasture, right through the gorgeous herd of all the other horses, back up the hill, to the entrance to the barn. She escaped me again. We went down and up again. She escaped at the last minute again. Yes, the cousin had warned me that this is exactly what happened. I guess I don’t know why the horse doesn’t just run away to begin with, but maybe they just really messing with the punks that sit on their backs and make them run around all day. On my fourth attempt, with some help coaxing her in from André, one of the cousins, we were able to get the horse in the barn, saddled up and ready for the horse ride to the river we would take later that day. So, maybe I didn’t earn as many man points as I told everybody, but hey, a horse corralled is a horse corralled.
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