All this week the Wings Like Eagles annual equestrian vaulting camp has been going on. This year we’re going to be having a second week of camp as well, so we can serve more kids. Vaulting is great because you can have a whole bunch of kids be in contact with only a few horses in a short period of time, unlike English riding, which requires different saddles, hard hats, and a lot of time. Wings Like Eagles is a ministry to kids with special needs, which we describe pretty broadly. There are several therapeutic riding programs in the area that serve kids with physical handicaps, but we’re the only one which reaches out kids with disabled siblings, ADD, ADHD, learning disabilities, broken families, deployed parents, or pastor or missionary parents. It’s all completely free of charge except for a t-shirt fee and a registration fee that covers insurance through the Boy Scouts of America, of which we are a Venture Crew. If you can’t even come up with that $15, we’ll waive it.

So all week the kids have been learning how to do gymnastics on the backs of moving horses, which is a pretty cool and unusual feat to accomplish, though really not all that difficult. I can add to my resume that I know how to teach equestrian vaulting, and sometimes it’s all this administrative assistant and accountant to keep from yelling outside, “Keep your head down!”

The big event was yesterday, a performance for the parents of all the things the kids had learned this week, followed by a pot luck. Berck was working, so while I’m usually not around on Saturdays, I decided to show up and enjoy being outside with the kids for once. When I was gone week before last, Michele said that someone asked, after hearing my name over and over again, “Who IS Joanna anyway?” Someone else answered, “Well, Joanna is like the glue that holds this whole place together.”

The performance was supposed to start a little after ten. About then I heard sirens and saw half a dozen firetrucks screaming down the driveway. We didn’t seem to be suffering an emergency anywhere, but then someone pointed to a puff of smoke coming from the ridge just south of the ranch. It looked like it was in the woods right on the fence line between the Air Force Academy the Delacroces’ ranch. Actually, it may not have been on their ranch but on some vacant land that is owned by a real estate firm. The firetrucks turned around and went back out to Woodcarver Rd and parked along the road, presumably to figure out what to do next. They couldn’t get to the fire from that side anyway because of the creek. Michele went inside to call the Delacroces. The firetrucks were blocking the road, and people were backing up trying to get in, so I walked down there to ask them to move. A train came and blocked my path for a minute, and then when I got up to the firetrucks, they had moved enough out of the way for some guys on Harleys to come in and watch their niece perform. I talked to one of the firemen and told him everything I knew about how to get to the fire and asked that they made sure to let people through because this was our biggest event of the year. Then I walked back down and got to the riding ring just as the performance was starting.

The horses had been put in the pasture and the paddock opened up as a parking lot. The parents watched from the west side of the paddock through the fence into the riding ring. This set up seemed to work really well. There was plenty of parking and plenty of room to watch. I stood near the southwestern corner of the riding ring where Sharon, one of our weekly regular homeschool moms, was holding Lil’ Bub. Abby was being lounged on that end of the arena, and every time she came around, she looked at Bub in concern, occasionally nickering to him. He was perfecting content to taste everything in sight: the hog wire, the fence posts, his lead line. He had been decked out in red, white, and blue, with streamers flowing from his little foal halter and another bunch attached to his tail and kept falling off. An American flag had been painted onto his rump, which somehow seems to violate the Flag Code but was still awfully cute.

The kids did their thing. Sparkle only acted up once. Abby’s only problem was being convinced to trot right as she was doing her circuit check of Lil’ Bub. Nikki had probably broken her heel dismounting from a standing canter on Thursday, so she was sitting while all the kids were standing along the far fence, enthusiastically clapping for each of their compatriots’ performances. There were endless “mills,” “flags,” “princes,” and “crosses,” several stands, a couple of gutsy shoulder stands, several leapfrog dismounts, and one or two of my favorite, “dead-man” dismounts. There were also a couple of new moves the kids had invented. At the end, the kids ran out of the ring, hands on hips, the loungers jogged out with their horses, and Sharon let Lil’ Bub go, who flew after his mom, streamers flying.

Before the pot luck started, Nikki and I kept the fundraising thermometer she’d made updated with how much money we’d raised so far. Every time we brought in another $100 another counselor got dunked. There were several ways to give. Instead of putting the desserts at the end of the pot luck line, we charged a modest amount for each cookie, brownie, or piece of pie. There were DVD’s of a slide show of pictures from the previous week for $12. There was a silent auction of things like a quilt one mom made, riding lessons by Michele, Nikki, and Lisa, and a coffee table book about ranches that Michele made sure she won. You could also adopt a horse or pay to come out and pet and take pictures with your horse. Two of the male counselors went around with hats collecting money. When they got to $150, we’d shave off their hair. I kept going around trying to keep a running tally so I could announce when the next counselor got dunked in the water tank. When I figured we’d probably bottomed out, we announced open season on dunking, and everyone got wet. It was a warm summer day, and I think everyone enjoyed cooling off. There were no flies, I think thanks to the fly predators I distributed last month.

I was counting up the mounds of cash and checks in my “office” when Michele came in asked me, “Wanna go buy a sheep with me?” “When?” “Now?” I told her to let me finish my counting and we’d go. By now the firetrucks and disappeared and the smoke on the ridge had trickled to a whiff. We took JB and the truck and headed down to Pueblo, actually, what I think is in an unincorporated town called Mesa which now has a Pueblo address, just east of the city on old Highway 50. I love Highway 50 because it seems like you’re going back in time. Most of the buildings along it were built in the 50s and 60s or even earlier.

We turned off and went a couple of blocks south to a block of houses on 1 to 1/2 acre lots and parked at the house with a front lawn over grown with weeds and carousel horses (and other animals) in various states of repair sprouting out of the ground. A couple of shelties barked in greeting from behind the fence. I pushed our way through a gate designed to spring shut from the inside and entered a maze of weeds, corrugated metal, chicken wire, and junk. A guy emerged from an open barn further ahead and yelled, “Who’s that makin’ my dogs bark?” Roger grinned toothless from behind a gigantic white horseshoe mustache. He chain smoked Marlboroughs the whole time. He told us to be careful of the precarious stack of alfalfa waiting to be stacked properly in the barn as he led us around. We were there to buy a ram, but he started showing us every animal we came to starting, with a beautiful, laid back Icelandic stallion pony. Michele drooled over him and considered bringing Gracie down to, as Roger put it, “be his girlfriend.” Next were the miniature Sicilian donkeys, all of whom wanted their heads scratched. Then there were sheep after sheep after sheep, all sorts of different kinds that I can’t remember all the different ones. There were also goats, zebus, alpacas, llamas, and miniature mule. There was also a newborn Shetland colt, who at about a foot and a half high was about the cutest equine thing we’d ever seen, Michele and I agreed.

Have I mentioned we came to buy a ram? “Here are the birds,” Roger said, and led us through a maze of chicken wire through pen after pen of exotic pheasants, peacocks, white peacocks, ducks, doves, and all sorts of other birds I couldn’t begin to remember. Then he took us into a shed full of rabbits, then into the room where he keeps all the immature birds. Then we went into the aviary, which was full of bird cages holding parrots, parakeets, cockatiels, love birds, various finches, button quail, and pretty much any bird you could find in any pet store except macaws. Next was the rows of different varieties of bobwhites. Then the incubator room with the incubator, dryer, aquariums with heat lamps and without. He said he goes through every three days and collects all the eggs and marks them with a Sharpie saying what they are and puts them in the incubator. There were cats running around everywhere. Roger said Gypsie, who is spayed, was his, but the rest had all the mice and dry food, two and a half pounds a day, they could eat. He figured there were 30 cats running around and, we could have as many as we wanted. We managed to catch one little kitten, because at the ranch we’re always running out of cats. JB decided to name her Tamar.

JB was in heaven with all of these animals to see. “Joanna!” he kept squealing, “Look at THAT!” Roger seemed to love showing off his animals, especially kids, though his vocabulary was pretty colorful. We were looking at one pheasant when he spotted an egg laid way high up on a shelf. “Goddam bitch! What the hell did she do that for? Jesus.”

Michele eventually decided not to buy a ram, because all of Roger’s had horns. But we had a kitten and a promise to come back. Her current plan is to bring Gracie, her Shetland pony, down and breed her to Chocolata, the stud miniature donkey, and get a mule who will, presumably, guard the sheep. I told her I’d never heard of mules guarding sheep, but I’m sure a mule isn’t going to let a coyote eat it without a good kick in the teeth, so if the sheep stick with it, maybe they’ll be okay.

We drove back to Monument. The ridge had finally stopped smoking altogether. I finished counting my money and fixed the wireless network. Duncan and Michele fed me salad and garlic cheese bread on sourdough donated by Panera (apparently, they donate all of their bread at the end each day to any non-profit who signs up to get it) that hadn’t been eaten yet. Then I drove home tired and sunburned.