I was a cowboy once (and ate English peas)...

I wuz a cowboy once... for about two hours..I graduated from high school in East Tenn.in 1957 Myself and 5 of my buddies had summer jobs that year working at a Green giant pea cannery in Waitsburg,Washington....
All six of us piled into one of the guy's 51 ford 2 door and with a luggage rack on top and headed across country...(that trip was before interstate highways,took a week and is a story within itself) ...

After I had been working at the cannery a few weeks,I met a local girl whose father owned a ranch outside of town.She asked me if i ever ridden horses and invited me to go riding at the ranch....I told her,of course,I had ridden horses but left out that part about never having rode anything plow horses with no saddle...

We go out to the ranch and there were several ranch hands around the barns and corrals(just like in the movies)...they had her this beautiful palomino horse saddled up for her that looked just like Trigger...they had me an old brown ugly horse like the bad guys rode in movies....
We set off out across the ranch and that horse she was riding was one those horses that can't walk straight...it would go down the trail sideways and was always hopping around and prancing along....she told me she had rode that horse in the rose bowl parade the previous year.....meanwhile "Ole plug' they had given me just kinda walked along and if you kicked him hard enough,he'd get up to a slow trot...Meanwhile "crazy sumbitch" she was riding would run off and leave me then she'd come galloping back......

When we headed back toward the barn,she asked me if I wanted to ride her horse which I took as her "asking me if i was afraid to ride her horse"...At 17 years old,I didn't have sense enough to be afraid of much...she did warn me that i had to keep the horse tightly reined or it would run away with me....I'm thinking..."I'll break it's damn fool neck if he tries that with me".....
things went pretty good for a little ways til we turned onto this road that led back to the barn then next thing I know "crazy sumbitch' is running at least 60 mph....I had long since turned loose those reins(pulling back on them wasn't doing no good anyway)and had a death grip on the saddle with both hands and i think a lip lock on the saddle horn too....
what made it even worse was that sumbitch runs up to barn like that with me hanging on for dear life....of course all them cowboys are watching and laughing their azz off at me....they probably still sit around the campfires and talk about the time that tenderfoot from back east tried to ride "crazy sumbitch"....
after wading around in slimy green English peas all summer,I ain't eat an English pea since 1957..... and I ain't felt real comfortable on a horse either....

 

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