January 16, 2026
Another One Of Those Montana Days
Jamie’s still sick but the illness has diminished, and she’s gaining strength. You know Jamie - Ebullience is her middle name (or one of them) - so if she’s not cheering you on and flashing that megawatt smile there’s something wrong. Well, there was, and it was scary, but the worst is over, and now we can smile again.
I keep a photo taped to the edge of a bookcase facing my desk so I can stare directly at it. Four young girls on bareback riding side by side across a field towards us. The Bitteroot Mountains are in the background. It’s a wonderful picture, a classic, and reminds us of our Montana Days, days which we believe really cemented our relationship. Both of us had been pretty wild. I joke and say it’s like that great defensive end of the old Baltimore Colts, Big Daddy Lipscomb, used to say when asked how he got to the ball carrier with such unerring accuracy. “I picks ‘em up ‘n’ throws ‘em aside ‘til I gits to the one I want.” That about summed up our dating styles. But in Montana it was just the two of us. No phone. No indoor plumbing. A tiny house in which we couldn’t get away from each other if we wanted to, but we didn’t want to. And horses. Two of them: Woody, J’s horse, a buckskin, and Flame, a blood bay, my horse. Then a third. Woody was pregnant and Little Bit, an albino, dropped.
I don’t know whether it was before or after the birth although I suspect it was before because in my mind’s eye there is no Little Bit. There are two riders coming down from the mountains breaking the tree line facing hundreds of yards of open meadow leading back to the corral. I don’t know whose idea it was - it might have been the horses’ - but suddenly both mounts erupted into a full out run, side by side, digging up turf, thundering across that open ground . We could have hit a gopher hole. We could have been killed, but, really, I think that’s when we became a unit, racing side by side towards home.
I started riding horses at summer camp when I was twelve, rode my Boy Scoutmaster's horses from thirteen to sixteen, often on overnight camping trips, rode in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona as a college freshman, and managed the college stables in my early twenties, riding the Indiana hills and valleys every day. But of all my hundreds of rides, the most memorable was coming out of Havasupai Canyon at a full gallop with Marsha. Cloudless blue sky over red-rock canyon walls above, thundering hooves over red earth below -- I understand how something like that makes two individuals a unit.