A long time ago, on a reservation 5 hours from Tucson, if you go by way of Gila Bend, nobody had air conditioners. Swamp coolers, yeah, but no AC. I think only a few stores in town ran air conditioners. I know my family sure didn’t have AC, and the summer heat was sweltering. Still is even today. We had the canals to cool us off during the day and swamp coolers that chugged out barely cooled air, if that. Sometimes when the heat was ridiculously stifling, we’d place ice cubes in front of the cooler and sit directly in front of the tray of ice to cool off. A waste of time! Never worked! We were all skinny back then and I’m kind of thinking the heat had something to do with that. The weight just rolled off of us in rivers of sweat!
My dad grew alfalfa in one field and cotton in the other. Canals were all around us — this is why we were taught to swim at a very young age — and when the fields were irrigated, the night cooled off considerably. Those nights we slept on a flat bed trailer under the stars. We’d haul our mattresses out to the trailer, taking a pillow and a blanket with us since the early morning hours often turned chilly. Howling coyotes scared us and loud bull frogs annoyed us but come the hours before the sun rose, a small herd of wild horses with their young came to feed off Dad’s haystack or in the alfalfa field. They came silently, like phantoms, but one of us would wake to a sound and nudge the others awake. Sometimes they’d be so close to where we were sleeping that we could smell them. We’d watch them feed and interact with our heads kept down and our mouths tightly shut. It’s a very fond, beautiful memory. They were magnificent creatures that came from the distant mesas (some might call them hills and not mesas) flowing away from the treeless mountains. They’d traveled through the desert to get to the farm. We never saw them during the daylight hours, not even when we hiked the hills or explored the desert, and they didn’t come every morning. Sometimes we wouldn’t see them for weeks but we were always in awe when they appeared. I wrote about them in my novel Falling Stars.
They stopped coming after a few years. We don’t know what happened to them, what kept from from visiting our fields. Human encroachment, I suppose. Isn’t that always the case? But I keep thinking that maybe their leader, the stallion, was a wise creature, and for some reason I believe that their disappearance from our area occurred after a few men trapped a mare in the early morning hours. The stallion waited and neighed frantically in the desert for her. She broke her neck trying to escape, attempting to hurdle a fence to race for freedom. She was put out of her misery with a single shot and the stallion quickly vanished.
I remember that too. The memory is one I wish I could permanently erase from my mind. My mother and I cried over that, as did my sister. My mother taught us to love and respect animals from a very early age. She often reminded us that happiness and sadness were companions but if we were strong we could overcome the sadness and be happy again. The image of those early morning visits, of those wild horses, especially of their young, remain vivid in my mind today and I am thankful for that.
Image: megahdwall.com
