Aspen Grove

If I ever got to rewind my checkered life, it would be back to when I was 20, herding horses on the Teton Mountains, high above the historic White Grass Ranch in Wyoming’s jaw-dropping Jackson Hole. My daily routine as a ranch wrangler was to roll out of bed in the twilight, grab a waiting pony from the corral and ride out to round up other ponies overnighting in some alpine meadow. My mount was a slick black steed called Shilling, and we were soon zigzagging up the trails, our ears pricked for the bells of grazing horses drinking in their last moments of freedom before we wrangled them back down home. The peaks soared thousands of dizzying feet without foothills to interrupt the view. The mist rose from the valley floor where the Snake River twinkled, the moose wallowed and the speedy pronghorn antelope roamed. It was fall, the elk had started to bugle, and the leaves were turning from green to gold. We halted by an aspen grove between two worlds: above, the wild one with cliffs thrusting skyward, underneath, the warm one, sunny and mellow. I had everything to look forward to -- a college degree, a promising career, and a young woman who could overlook my awkward stance and adolescent angst. She didn’t care if I hit the mother lode. But even then, I knew I’d never be richer or sit taller than in that saddle, surveying the waking earth steaming in the mist below. Nor would I feel freer than by those aspens -- at one with my horse and at peace with the globe.