11 months, Many horses, 2 surgeries, and 1 San Francisco Apartment

Sunday, November 3rd, 2013

San Francisco, CA

Well I suppose that 11 months between posts may seem like neglect. I am posting now as much to make my own life clear to myself as well as to those of you who might care to know.

Since the previous post, I had moved to Inyokern, CA and lived at a horse ranch for 3 months in the creosote bushes and sandy expansive landscape of Indian Wells Valley. This experience was full of learning, anxiety, and a sense of unrest. I would wake up each day at 6:00am save for one day off which varied week to week. I fed the horses in a beat up Mazda truck with the maintenence person and cleaned out the horses' paddocks. Then one of the owners would bring us breakfast and I was directed to apply different training methods with 2-3 horses in the morning, 2-3 horses in the afternoon. Some of the training was riding, some was working with the horses from the ground. I enjoyed the experience, however I felt under qualified for the daunting task of training what can often times be very unpredictable animals.

From the desert I was offered a job after much prodding at a horse stable in Oakland. This was a perfect

scenario to reintroduce a desert mountain traveler to society. After arriving to the 16' trailer at the back of the ranch property, I realized that I had managed the not so easy task of making a place in the Bay Area.

Those same pangs of culture shock that I had felt at times in Italy hit me again when I would cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. The concrete, the people, I am still so amazed that we live this way. Then after awhile it will seem
amazing again that that people live in rural areas as well.

I was hired on in Oakland to start up a string of horses to offer trail rides to the public. Straight forward and daunting enough, I attempted the task to the best of my ability. I was succeeding until May 19th, when I took a horse out for a lead training ride. This horse was very nervous and lacked confidence, I

was on a 'confidence building' ride in a way, bringing him down a steep narrow trail into a canyon, then out again, to a horse show in the adjacent park, then back home. On the way home I felt that the horse was improving, so I had him jump over a few logs in the woods to provide a new task. We jumped the last log, landed on a patch of pine needles which were on top of pavement. This horse had aluminum shoes on all 4 feet, and he slipped on the slick rock and fell onto my leg. This event shifted my life completely from that point forward.

I was allowed to stay at the ranch during my recovery, and I taught Arts & Crafts at the summer horse camp offered there. One day when I was crutching from the trailer to the ranch office, i
tripped over an extension cord and tore something in my knee. I was facing another surgery on that.

The decision to leave the ranch was mutual, I knew that I couldn't offer physical labor with a recovering ankle and injured knee, so I was taken into my boyfriends' apartment in Nob Hill of San Francisco. From here I applied to a few jobs here and there, then by some freak stroke of luck, landed a position as an Afterschool Teacher for the YMCA. I am now working there from 3-6 daily, attempting to teach Art to 11-13 year olds.

This past year has been very inspiring and scary. There have been times when I felt that I might have to 'fold' and crawl back to the East Coast. This has not been the case so far, and I have found a new family in every place I have stopped through. California is still a wonderful state in my eyes.