Sky-Y Summer 1

Working at Prescott YMCA Camp

Between my sophomore and junior years of high school (10-11) I was hired to work in the kitchen at the YMCA camp outside Prescott. We lived in a cement block shack (the blockhouse) divided into two rooms. We had to be careful with our shoes or scorpions would climb in as we slept. I said before we were in mountains but, as a Colorado boy, I should clarify that these were merely ponderosa forested hills. It was actually very pleasant country for hiking and horseback riding but nothing spectacular. Outside our blockhouse was a very tall tree that was struck by lighting two or three times during one particular thunderstorm that I slept through.

Besides the two summers I worked at the camp, I also would come up to work the occasional weekend event during the school year. At some point in all this time, I happened to hit a tarantula migration.  Once you get over the shock, it’s pretty cool to see dozens of huge dark spiders moving steadily across the pine needle covered ground. Strange but memorable. I seem to recall we took turns yelling “Stampede!” while carefully keeping our distance -- though these tarantulas were pretty harmless. I was mostly worried about accidentally stepping on one.

The camp had a freezing cold pool. At the beginning of each year we would have to fish out all the leaves and muck and then get the chlorination system running. Once all that was done we got to break it in for the season which involved a contest to see who could swim the most laps before going completely numb from the cold. My only other memories of that pool involve diving underwater to avoid the giant deer flies (like horse-flies but bigger and meaner) and swimming at dusk when bats would skim the pool to drink. This freaks out some people but I thought it was pretty cool. It’s not like they are going to hit you by mistake since their night vision is so much better than ours. Thanks to this experience I know to look for bats any time I’m around pools of water at dusk.

We also had a shooting range (at the time I owned a Walther P-38...

...  and the lifeguard had a Luger). I don’t think I ever hit anything I was shooting at with that gun but it looked really cool. The various parts were all manufactured during the war so they had the Swastika engraved on them, but the serial numbers didn’t match (they should all be the same) which I like to think contributed to the inaccuracy of the weapon. Since it’s the only 9mm I’ve ever fired I’ve never tested this theory.

There was also a corral with horses so that the campers could go for rides. The nice thing about working in the kitchen was that it left my mid-mornings and mid-afternoons free so I volunteered at the corral.

Horses

Mr. Rose had the concession for providing horseback riding at the camp. He lived in Globe (east of Phoenix in the middle of nowhere) where he bred horses that were a mix of Palomino and Tennessee Walker. You have to have ridden horses to appreciate this concept, actually you have to have ridden gaited horses like the Tennessee Walking Horse to fully appreciate this concept. The horses he bred looked like Palominos but when you rode them you discovered these wonderfully smooth gaits instead of the usual uncomfortable trot and canter. Once you’ve ridden a gaited horse you don’t want to ride anything else.

Mr. Rose came to Prescott with his wife, his son Rick, a hired hand, and a bunch of his own horses: Kimo, Princess, Duchess, Chieftain, Diablo, Prince (Rick’s horse). At one point he also brought up these two foals -- one mostly white and one mostly black -- that he would hitch up to a two pony gig. The foals were amazing. I think this must have been late spring and their coats were soft but fluffy like horses get if they are outside in the cold. Really a wonderful texture -- don’t pass up any opportunity to pet foals. People like to hitch similar horses together but these two opposites looked spectacular in harness... plus they were like big puppies trying to act all grown up.

He needed around 30 horses for the group rides so he bought a bunch of additional horses of varying quality for the summer. The horses were originally kept in a couple big corrals so we would first have to catch them (there’s a trick to this that involves looking anywhere but at the horse you are trying to catch), lead them to the tack shed to saddle them, secure them to a fence and get the campers up and their stirrups adjusted. Then Mr Rose would lead while a couple of us would bring up the rear of the line of riders. If there was a problem with a horse or rider, one of us would have to ride up from the rear to deal with it while the others held the rear (the horses would bolt for the barn if given half a chance).

What kind of problem could we have? A camper could fall off or not be able to get his horse moving. The worst thing that happened, the thing you always worry about as you’re saddling the horses, was when a cinch was too loose  and the saddle slipped around so the camper was being dragged upside down under the horse (the horses will push out their stomachs when you first put on the saddle so you have to sneak around later and tighten the cinch another notch). The poor kid was not up for riding by himself once we got him loose, so he ended up returning riding double with me. He was sitting behind me and holding on with a grip of steel.

Another time a cinch broke and I had to switch mounts and ride back bareback, which I’m not good at. Usually nothing bad happened and we just had a pleasant ride through the woods. I would ride any horse that was too problematic for the campers. Often I rode Kimo because he was afraid of any kind of rock outcropping, which, of course, the area was full of. You would have to dance him between rocks. 

Freckles

Another horse I initially had to ride but later grew to love was a little speckled, gray gelding named Freckles. 

Freckles the non-super horse.

He was a handful but also a great, spirited ride. We participated in the 4th of July parade in Prescott and I rode Freckles (in the rain) all the way to town and back and in the parade. He was very popular in the parade since he was always acting up, moving sideways, bucking, being a little ass. He was my favorite and I ended up riding him a lot including little trips we took to other camps in the area to show them the horses (there were girls our age at some of these camps hence our willingness to volunteer). After one of these demonstrations at another camp, we were riding back on forest trails after dark on a moonless -- pitch black -- night. I couldn’t see anything. I just had to trust that the horse knew where he was going because if he had walked over a cliff I couldn’t have stopped him. It was unsettling at first but eventually kind of magical.

Some of my best and worst horse stories/memories have to do with riding stallions (surprising I didn't catch the gay). Diablo I only rode once, when they had him in for breeding purposes, but I gave him his head on a long dirt road and had all I could do to just hang on. I was tricked into riding Chieftain from the corral to the tack room bareback with just a halter -- at that point I was very inexperienced with horses (and the hi-jinks of horse people). He bolted straight for this tree that had clearance only to the top of his back so that I was scrapped off and fell into the manure pile conveniently located under the tree. Which at least gave me a nice soft landing.

Rick always rode Prince who he had trained so that he could ride and control him while standing on the seat of his saddle. This is one of the things we would show off at the other camps. Rick and Prince were a great team unless someone (me) hit Prince in the rump with a pine-cone while Rick was standing on his saddle. Then Rick got to demonstrate running through the forest debris in his socks to catch his horse.

I didn’t mention feeding the horses. We would also have to drive to a farm area just north of Prescott to load the back of a pickup with more bales of hay than it had been designed to hold. Then we had to off load those bales into the covered, but open to the air, storage area next to the corral. Then we hauled bales to the manger where we cut or un-twisted the wires and then broke the bale up into giant flakes of hay we could then spread out for the horses to eat.

That first summer the monsoon was particularly strong and we had thunderstorms every afternoon for over 30 straight days. When I think back on the moments in my life that I would most like to relive, two always come to mind: lying on a grassy hillside above the Pacific near Muir Beach with some friends as a litter of young goats raced and played around and over us, and lying atop that pile of hay in Prescott during an afternoon thunderstorm, enchanted by the sound of the rain on the tin roof above and the blended smell of supersaturated air, pine forest, and fragrant hay.

Corral Building

As the summer progressed Mr. Rose added horses and the horses lost patience with each other so that we had to spread them out. This meant building improvised stalls located beyond the regular corral and tack room. In return for getting to ride Freckles on a regular basis (like a camper could be trusted to control him) I got to build a stall for “my” horse. This meant borrowing some rope and a hand ax and riding Freckles into the forest to find some likely lumber. The forest here was rather overgrown so it was not hard to locate small trees of the correct diameter for both posts and rails. I would fell them and whack off the branches with the ax, and then drag them back to the corral (this is where Western saddles come in handy). The larger trees would be sawed down to post height segments, while the rails were just trimmed down to match up. A little work with a post hole digger (Hi, River) and then the rails were secured to the posts with wire left over from hay bales. And la voila, a perfectly serviceable horse stall for the investment of a little labor and the capital represented by the borrowed tools.

There were actually some interesting people working at the camp in one capacity or another. There were these brothers from California who drove a pair of lovely Corvairs and all but worshiped the Beach Boys. There were college boys who I think introduced me to Simon & Garfunkel. They also took me along to foreign movies at Prescott’s lone “art” cinema where, I couldn’t help noticing,  the people on the screen were not always fully clothed. Back at the blockhouse, we also determined, quite scientifically, that you could indeed light your farts.

That was the first summer. The second summer was rather different.