Commuting

Trading in Chacos for Cowboy Boots: An Old West Dream Deferred

By Ryan Bentley, 5-27-11

	The horse'll take oats in his, thanks.

I usually just see cars whizzing by when I look up from my computer. The other day at the coffee shop, though, I spotted a young lady on a horse. Just out for a ride down the main drag in Emmett, Idaho: population 6,000, about 21 miles from Boise.

I watched for a couple minutes while she casually rode her Cayuse along the sidewalk. No one honked. A couple people waved. She waved back.

She reigned in her steed at the walk-up window at the local drive-in, jumped down to order her milkshake, exchanged a few comments with the staff and answered a couple text messages while she waited.

A couple kids decked out in skateboard clothes stopped munching on their fries and stared. The horse didn’t seem to care a bit. The white hair and whiskers around its mouth gave away he’d literally been around the block a few times. Once, the lady’s transportation tried to stick its head through the order window.

The wind kicked up right as the milkshake wizards at the drive-in finished the equestrian’s order. She pulled a snow leopard print fleece coat off the saddle, zipped it up and saddled up; a milkshake and reins in one hand and cell phone pressed to her head with the other. The whole scene seemed so contradictive, but right somehow. Anything and everything happens in rural Idaho.

I’d witnessed similar events before in developing nations, minus the milkshake.

I’ve often sped by people on carts pulled by horses or other draft animals. I’ve run through downtown Managua, Nicaragua, and had a brand-new Land Rover pass me with small children on a mangy horse following right behind. It’s common to see imported cars and horses alike parked outside the mall.

I’m just not quite used to that sort of thing in the United States. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. People still rode their horses around as normal transportation up into the 1960s.

The woman and her horse got me to wonder at the feasibility of transportation taking a literal a step back in time.

Since then, I’ve seen many more people riding around town. One evening a couple young women rode their horses to Albertsons to pick up some groceries.

The same horse I’d seen all summer still stood at the hitching rail long after I stopped biking to work this past winter. A local girl rides a couple miles to the café near the highway. The horse just stands outside and waits like its ancestors before it.

One old cowboy doesn’t trailer his horse to transport it from one range to another. He just rides through Horseshoe Bend, Idaho, population 700ish. I’ve laughed a couple times when I’ve seen him ride through town on a Friday. Every weekend, thousands of people leave the Boise area and head to McCall for the weekend. Locals call the traffic the “McCall Crawl.” I wonder what people think when the old cow hand on his horse trots by while they sit in an endless line of cars burning fuel.

I doubt I’ll ever see many regular horseback commuters in Central Idaho. But those who occasionally saddle up to ride around town seem to muster up thoughts of the Old West.

I used to help my grandfather on his ranch in Washington. He’d tell me stories of his childhood in South Dakota in the 1950s.

He relayed a deep sense of freedom whenever he’d jump on his horse and ride Duke to town or anywhere. That freedom helped develop a longing to explore.

He’d ride his horse bareback at breakneck speeds to school and then slide his mount to a quick stop at the door and leap off to impress his peers.

One day, he and his friends rode more than 80 miles across the prairie, just to try to see what lay over that endless horizon. His horse personified freedom, and that never left him. His father taught him to ride and his father before him.

My grandfather taught me to ride.

I’ll never forget hunting trips into the mountains. My place in history, technology, didn’t matter. I was an explorer.

I never really had my own horse. I lived in the city and had a bicycle. While fun and freeing, my bike never compared to the fire-eyed war horse I wanted to leap onto and escape the city.

I’ve grown up and moved to Idaho to work as an outfitter. I climb, raft, kayak, ski and wear Chacos. I don’t own a pair of cowboy boots.

I wish I did.

Last summer, I was cleaning some climbing gear, and from the window I heard the sound of hooves on the pavement. I looked out and a father, mounted on his cowpony, led another horse with his young daughter on it across the Payette River Bridge. The little girl seemed so small on that big old horse. She just held onto the saddle horn and bounced down the road singing or shouting at her dad. She didn’t seem to notice the string of cars that followed her.

Most of the people out for a ride through town seem to just want a little diversion and fun. But in riding, they help keep a little bit of the flavor of the Old West alive.

Ryan Bentley, along with his wife Susan, live along the banks of the Payette River in Emmett. They spend the majority of their time roving around Idaho’s rivers rocks and roads as guides with YD Adventures.

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