What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (21 page)

SHOSHONE THE MAGIC PONY

happy childhood, I've always believed, is the worst possible preparation for life. Life is so different from childhood, it seems. The magic tricks have all been explained to us. The sparkle, we now realize, is all passive smoke and rearview mirrors. Maybe things were always this way, but I don't really think so. I think there was a time.

In 1953, when I was about seven years old, my parents took me to see Shoshone the Magic Pony. That was also the year that Tom and Min Friedman bought Echo Hill Ranch and turned it into a children's camp, providing thousands of boys and girls with many happy, carefree summers of fun. But although 1953 might've been a good year for the Friedmans and a good year for wine, it'd been a bad year for almost everybody and everything else. Hank Williams, along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had checked out of the mortal motel that year, quite possibly unaware that the other party had been there to begin with. Hank fried his brains and heart and other internal organs for our sins, using eleven different kinds of herbs and spices. Julius and Ethel, charged with spying for Russia, many thought falsely, were fried by our government and died declaring their innocence and their love for each other. Hank's songs declared his innocence and his love, inexplicably, for people. It is doubtful whether Hank and the Rosenbergs had anything in common at all, except that a small boy in Texas had cried when each of them died.

The boy had also cried the year before when Adlai Stevenson had lost the potato-sack hop at the company picnic to good ol' Ike, the Garth Brooks of all presidents, who turned out to be the most significant leader we'd had since Millard Fillmore and remained as popular as the bottle of ketchup on the kitchen table of America, even if Lenny Bruce and Judy Garland, who were destined to both die on toilets, like Elvis, remained in their rooms for the entire two terms of his presidency.

The kid had seemed to cry a bit back then, but fortunately, human tragedies of this sort never cut into his happy childhood. When he grew up, he continued to cry at times, though the tears were no longer visible in or to the naked eye, for he never let human tragedies of this sort cut into his cocktail hour. But during his childhood, it is very likely that his parents noticed the tears. That may have been the reason they took him to see Shoshone the Magic Pony.

These days, as we peer cautiously out across the grey listless afternoon that is adulthood, we seek and we find fewer and fewer surprises in life. What dreams we have are veiled in memory, etched in regret. Our minds go back to yesterday street and the summertime of our choosing. Maybe it's 1953. Maybe it's a little rodeo arena near Bandera, Texas, where the loud-speaker had just announced Shoshone the Magic Pony. My father and mother, Tom and Min, were sitting on the splintery bleachers next to me and my little brother Roger. And suddenly, all our eyes were on the center of the arena.

Shoshone came out prancing, led by an old cowboy with a big white beard. He took the reins and bridle off Shoshone and the horse bowed several times to the audience. Shoshone had a beautiful saddle and a large saddle blanket that seemed to glitter with sequins of red, white, and blue. Then the old cowboy stood back and the music began. It was "The Tennessee Waltz." And Shoshone the Magic Pony started to dance.

It was apparent from the outset, even to us children in the crowd, that there were two men inside the body of Shoshone. You could tell by the clever, intricate soft-shoe routine she was performing, by the fact that she often appeared to be moving hilariously in two directions at once, and by the funny and very unponylike way she now and again humped and arched her back to the music. I was laughing so hard I forgot for the moment about Hank Williams, Adlai Stevenson, the Rosenbergs, and myself. Whoever was inside there was so good, I even forgot that they were inside there.

Then "The Tennessee Waltz" was over.

Shoshone bowed a deep, theatrical bow. Everybody laughed and clapped and cheered. The old cowboy took off his hat. Then he took off his beard. Then he took off the old cowboy mask he was wearing and we saw to our amazement that the old-timer was in reality a very pretty young girl.

She took off Shoshone's saddle. Then she took off her saddle blanket. And there, to my total astonishment, stood only Shoshone the Magic Pony.

Shoshone was a real horse.

In the years that followed, as I grew up or simply got older, Shoshone served me well as a reminder of the duplicitous nature of man. Nothing is what it appears to be, I thought. But there are times when with awkward grace the odd comfort of this crazy world comes inexplicably close to my crazy heart. At times like these, I see Shoshone as a shining symbol of the galloping faith that some horses and some people will always remain exactly who they are.

THE HUMMINGBIRD MAN

wise old man named Slim, who wore a paper Rainbow bread cap, drank warm Jax beer in infinite quantities, listened faithfully to the hapless Houston Astros on the radio, and washed dishes at our family's ranch, once told me something I've never forgotten. He said, "You're born alone and you die alone, so you might as well get used to it." It didn't mean much to me then, but over the years I've come to believe that old Slim might have been on to something.

I live alone now in the lodge, where my late parents once lived, and I'm getting used to it. Being a member of the Orphan Club is not so bad. Sooner or later, fate will pluck us all up by our pretty necks. If you have a family of your own, maybe you won't feel it quite as much. Or maybe you will. I'm married to the wind, and my children are my animals and the books I've written, and I love them all. I don't play favorites. But I miss my mom and dad. In the past fifty years, thousands of kids have known Uncle Tom and Aunt Min. They bought our ranch outside Medina in 1953, named it Echo Hill, and made it into a camp for boys and girls. Echo Hill will be open again this summer, and though the kids will ride horses, swim in the river, and explore the hills, they will not get to meet Uncle Tom and Aunt Min.

My mother died in May 1985, just a few weeks before camp started, and my father died in August 2002, just a few weeks after camp was over. I can still see my mother at her desk, going over her cluttered clipboard with all the camp rosters and menus. I can see her at the Navajo campfire, at the big hoe-down, at the friendship circle under the stars. I can see my dad wearing a pith helmet and waving to the kids in the charter buses. I can see him raising the flag in the morning, slicing the watermelon at picnic suppers, sitting in a lawn chair out in front of the lodge, talking patiently to a kid having problems with his bunkmates. If you saw him sitting quietly there, you'd think he was talking to one of his old friends. Many of those kids became just that.

I don't know how many baby fawns ago it was, how many stray dogs and cats ago, or how many homesick kids ago, but fifty years is a long time in camp years. Yet time, as they say, is the money of love. And Tom and Min put a lot of all those things into Echo Hill. Most of their adult lives were given over to children, daddy longlegs, arrowheads, songs, and stars. They lived in a little green valley surrounded by gentle hills, where the sky was as blue as the river, the river ran pure, the waterfalls sparkled clear in the summer sun, and the campfire embers never really seemed to die. I was just a kid, but looking back, that's the way I remember it.

What I remember most of all are the hummingbirds. It might have been 1953 when my mother hung out the first hummingbird feeder on the front porch of the lodge. The grown-up, outside world liked Ike that year and loved Lucy, and Hank Williams died, as did Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I believe now that I might have been vaguely aware of these things occurring even back then, but it was those tiny, wondrous rainbows of flying color that really caught my eye. And those first few brave hummingbirds had come thousands of miles, all the way from Mexico and Central America, just to be with us at Echo Hill. Every year the hummers would make this long migration, arriving almost precisely on March 15, the Ides of March. They would leave late in the summer, their departure usually depending upon how much fun they had had at camp.

For those first few years, in the early fifties, the hummingbird population, as well as the number of campers, was fairly sparse, but as the green summers flashed by, more and more kids and hummingbirds came to Echo Hill. The hummingbirds nested every year in the same juniper tree next to the lodge. Decades later, after my mother's death, the tree began to die as well. Yet even when there were only a few green branches left, the hummers continued to make that tree their summer home. Some of the staff thought the tree was an eyesore and more than once offered to cut it down, but Tom wouldn't hear of it. I think he regarded the hummingbirds as little pieces of my mother's soul.

My father and I more or less took over the hummingbird program together in 1985. As time went by, we grew into the job. It was amazing how creatures so tiny could have such a profound influence on your peace of mind and the way you looked at the world. My father, of course, did many other things besides feeding the hummingbirds. I, unfortunately, did not. That was how I gradually came to be known as the Hummingbird Man of Echo Hill.

Tom and I disagreed, sometimes almost violently, about the feeding methods for these fragile little creatures. He measured exactly four scoops of sugar and two drops of red food coloring into the water for each feeder. I eyeballed the whole process, using much more sugar and blending many weird colors into the mix. Whatever our disagreements over methodology, the hummer population grew. This past summer, it registered more than a hundred birds at "happy hour." Tom confided to me that once, long ago, he mixed a little gin in with the hummers' formula and they seemed to have a particularly lively happy hour. Min was not happy about it, however, and firmly put a stop to this practice.

Now, on bright, cold mornings, I stand in front of the old lodge, squinting into the brittle Hill Country sunlight, hoping, I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a hummingbird or of my mother or my father. They've all migrated far away, and the conventional wisdom is that only the hummingbirds are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother hanging up that first feeder. The juniper tree blew down in a storm two winters ago, but the hummers have found other places to nest. One of them is in my heart.

And I still see my dad sitting under the dead juniper tree, only the tree doesn't seem dead, and neither does he. It takes a big man to sit there with a little hummingbird book, taking the time to talk to a group of small boys. He is telling them that there are more than three hundred species of hummingbirds. They are the smallest of all birds, he says, and also the fastest. They're also, he tells the kids, the only birds who can fly backwards. The little boys seem very excited about the notion of flying backwards. They'd like to try that themselves, they say. So would I.