Anniversary
Copyright© 2026 by Vonalt
Chapter 8: Learning To Be a Man of the West
Cletus asked to have two horses saddled for him and me after breakfast the following morning. We were going on a long ride and wouldn’t be back for lunch. Edna was going to prepare something for us to eat on the trail.
We went out to the corral where the wranglers had the horses waiting for us and saddled up. I let Cletus lead, as he knew where we were going. Cletus would point something out along the way to our destination, and relate a story about it during his youth. I think that every rock outcropping along the trail held some significance for him.
We had left the ranch behind after an hour of riding, and were traveling along a trail on BLM land. These federally owned public lands were open for recreational use. Paths branched off from the main trail, which Cletus said had been made by people riding UTVs and dirt bikes. He mentioned that they were scarring the land, and I had to agree. You could see erosion wherever the machines had cut across the desert, tearing up what little plant life there was and leaving ugly scars in the washes and canyons.
We came across a spot where people had dumped old appliances, tires, furniture, and other trash, a little farther on. It made for an ugly eyesore in what was otherwise a pristine desert landscape.
We had gone only another half mile when some fools drove past us at a high rate of speed, leaving us choking in the dust that they kicked up. The horse that I was riding became skittish and tried to bolt. It was all I could do to calm the gelding down and keep from being thrown. Cletus motioned for us to stop, then dismounted and had me get down as well. I was sure that if another vehicle came roaring by, it would throw me to the ground and send my horse running back to the stables.
“What you’ve seen and experienced is exactly why I support the BLM closing these lands to general use. Those idiots who passed us had no business traveling like that. We could have been hurt by their actions,” Cletus said angrily.
I didn’t say a thing and just nodded in agreement.
Cletus reached into his saddlebags and pulled out several objects that looked like wooden blocks with long nails sticking out of them.
“I bet you know what these are,” Cletus said.
“They look like homemade caltrops,” I said.
“Out here, these would be devastating to truck tires. People would think twice about coming out if they knew these were waiting for them. Think about the cost of new tires and the tow to get a truck out. It would make anyone hesitate to come back a second time, let alone act like a fool,” Cletus said, laughing.
I had no argument with him. I was still coughing from the dust the truck had kicked up and wasn’t sure I wanted to get back on my horse, which was still skittish.
Cletus carefully scattered them across the dirt road, making sure they were hard to spot from a fast-moving truck.
“Come on, let’s walk our horses for a bit until they settle down. I still have a lot that I want to show you and share,” Cletus said.
I followed right behind him as he led the way, bushwhacking across the desert sand. The desert in this part of Utah was red, and the rock outcroppings were red as well. Zion National Park was only thirty miles or so northwest of where we were, and the mountains were visible on the horizon. We must have walked nearly two miles before Cletus called for a temporary halt. This was to give the horses a rest and a chance to drink some water from a small desert pool kept filled from a nearby hillside weep. They were a lot calmer than they had been half an hour earlier. Cletus thought it would be okay to mount up and ride again.
I heard the roar of an engine coming back our way in the distance behind us. I turned around and saw the rooster-tail plume of dust behind the truck, and then it suddenly stopped. Cletus began to laugh, and I quickly caught on to what he was laughing about and joined him. Someone would have an expensive tow bill and money to spend on a new set of tires. Maybe they would learn from their folly, but I doubted it.
We started off again, moving in a northwestern direction, and soon came to an outcrop of red rock. The pile of rocks covered a good two acres of land. Cletus got down from his horse and gestured for me to follow him. We led our horses over to a scrubby bush and tied the reins to it. The horses would wait patiently for us to return, as they had been trained to do.
Cletus pointed to a spot up on the rock pile where I could make out crude drawings scratched into the stone. I could see now why Cletus wanted to share this with me. It was not every day you came across Indian pictographs that hadn’t been defaced. Even I knew that, and I was still an uneducated Easterner.
We spent an hour climbing over that outcropping while Cletus explained what the symbols meant, which tribes had made them, and roughly when they were created. According to him, the pictographs were about a thousand years old. I couldn’t decide which amazed me more, the artwork itself or the depth of Cletus’s knowledge about it. It was a toss-up in my mind.
It was close enough to lunchtime that Cletus declared it was time to eat, so we got out the bags of food that Edna had prepared for us ... We sat in the shade of the outcropping and ate, talking about everything that came to mind. I mentioned to Cletus that I had met an Apache woman on my ride west. She had declared her claim to me and considered us engaged, even though we had only seen each other at the convenience store where she worked for fifteen minutes, plus four phone calls.
Cletus laughed and said he personally knew what I was talking about. He had been on leave from the Army before being shipped off to Vietnam. He went to say goodbye to his grandmother, perhaps for the last time, when the girl next door came over. She came to say hello, saw him, and declared her intentions while he was away in Vietnam. Cletus said it had been that long before the girl let him know about his future.
She was waiting when he came back a year later, and she wouldn’t accept any excuse for him not marrying her. That young girl happened to be Edna; she was fifteen at the time they met. She was seventeen and he was twenty when they married after his return. They had been happily married ever since. All I had to do was ask her, and she would tell me the truth. He laughed at his own joke.
It was past noon when Cletus said we still had a couple more places to stop before we could get back in time for supper. We cleaned up after ourselves, mounted the horses again, and headed off in a southeasterly direction. I could see the mountains that made up Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks over my left shoulder. They sat far out on the horizon, but we could still make them out. I wasn’t used to riding that long, and my backside had started to complain. I sure hoped that it wouldn’t be much longer before we were out of the saddle.
I looked at my watch as Cletus brought us to a stop at the mouth of a small box canyon. I noticed shotweapon shells and brass casings of all sizes from rifle and pistol rounds on the ground. I waited, curious to see what Cletus wanted to show me here.
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