THE MIDDLE PLACE

I was 18 and just about to successfully complete my freshman year in college in Decorah, IA - which was amazing because I don’t remember attending classes. What I do remember was seeing my first naked man, who happened to be running across campus to deliver his senior paper to Main Hall before the 5pm deadline, when I stumbled into a career fair. It was thus that I walked into a room with men on the brain and left with a job. Not just any job though, this was a job working at a Christian Summer Camp driving draft horses around in a hay-cart. I found out later that they used horse-drawn carts in favor of cars to deliver daily meals because this was a more tried and true method of scaring the be-jeezus into or out of the little campers by showing them what their lives might be like if they were unlucky enough to be born Amish.

I must have been drunk - although I didn’t drink - or high - although I’d never actually accomplished this - on something because how I could manage to walk into a room with the sole intention of seeking out strapping young men and walk out of it 15 minutes later with a job involving waaay too much leather and draft animals was beyond my young mind. I took the job not because it was situated in a tiny western-Wisconsin town of less than 300 people and no gas station, not because I didn’t have the first idea how to drive draft horses let alone muck out stalls, and definitely not because it was a Christian Summer Camp of the type that would most likely involve boring in-depth Bible-Studies and sickeningly sweet sing-alongs; I took it because I was dizzy with the idea that I could, for the first time in my life, get a job out of my home state and work that job alone.

The freedom of choice and the freedom to get on the road and try it all out alone with no help from friends or family excited me to my core. The fear and doubt came later, but that moment was filled with possibility. I knew I could learn the job quickly, I was never afraid of working hard especially when animals were involved, and the alternative was returning to the summer I had always known. Previous summers had drifted sleepily by merely existing as stretches of time in my mind. They were comfortably ensconced in the boring safety of the Minneapolis suburbs with its unassuming and unwritten rules softly bumping into my choices, nudging them down the center of the road towards home.

After a couple of weeks visiting my parents in Eden Prairie, MN, I packed my belongings on a bright Saturday morning, piled them into the rusty white ’86 Oldsmobile Celebrity I had inherited from my older sister, and headed towards the border of Wisconsin. I rolled down all four of the windows and turned up the radio to compete with the roaring wind. It was a clear, warm day and the roads were long and sparsely populated with the couples visiting relatives for the weekend or Long-Haul truckers part way through their route between factories. The city made way for prairie and prairie made way for modest river bluffs too green to be foreboding but practically grandiose after hours of flat land dotted by run-down farm houses.

Somewhere between the border of Minnesota and La Crosse, WI, I broke down. This was not the auspicious beginning to my independent summer had hoped for. I cannot exactly remember what town I broke down in, but the only buildings there were situated right on the road and the land in that particular stretch of land was flat enough to see that there was nothing beyond them but solemn crop fields. I parked and sat in my car leaning against the plush navy seats feeling the heat seep in through the open windows and letting the buzz of insects settle into my wind-blown ears. I didn’t feel disappointment, but a bit desperate. I had only made it about a hundred and twenty five miles or so away from home and I needed help already. I made my way to the local mechanic to make a call home and another to the camp. As I sat for a couple of hours in the small lobby of the building I pushed around some old magazines and wished I had a bag full of new clothes instead of the same ones I knew so well. The mechanic finally informed me that essentially my car had decided that this small town was as far as it wanted to stray from home for a while. I started to feel it may have had willfully betrayed me and my bid for freedom, just one last nudge towards home that I had to shake off. When a beaten-up mini van from the camp finally arrived, I took my bags from its trunks and shrugged off the last shell of my former life.

I felt queasy and anxious to see my new summer home. I knew I was arriving to work, but I still felt like I could easily be a child heading off to camp for the first time. I wanted to meet my fellow campers and stay up late with them talking about what we knew about ourselves and how far we’d gone with boys; but now the day was fading, the towns were getting smaller, the granola bar I had greedily eaten at 2:30pm was a faded memory in my stomach, and I began to feel the desolation of my rash decision. When we finally arrived, the sun had set behind the rolling hills of the Mississippi River banks and the young staff was gathered at a picnic table outside of the large, main building we pulled up to. It seemed they were waiting for us to return and they all greeted me with genuine but swift politeness before heading into the building for a taco salad dinner.

I ate mostly in silence so I could take in their eager conversation. My ears hummed with the information of these strangers: who knew whom and for how long, who was new and where they had come from, and what their various roles were to be. Aileen and her husband had come from Las Vegas. He was a PhD student in Theological Philosophy and she was a retired show-girl. She poured on about how they met in the early 90’s when she was still dancing and he still had hair and how now she was job-less and living off his small fellowship stipend. She was positively thrilled to be here to help run the camp’s craft barn, but it was clear that her husband was not. Aileen offered us all smiles with her simple face as she excused herself for being a bit overweight for a dancer and offered up the story of the moment when she first wore the large head-dress of a real Las Vegas show girl. She laughed shyly as she rose to wipe her teary eyes in the peace of the dingy restroom while her husband sat stonily by and seemed to physically punish the stale taco salad for the transgression of marrying a wife too simple to argue the finer points of doctrine with.

Laurie and Adam had met two years ago as camp counselors and were now engaged. They spoke of their relish for nurturing young children in the faith each summer and spoke with bubbling excitement about tying the knot later in the summer in the very field we were now sitting above. They were so young and happy, but as seniors in college, they seemed ancient and knowledgeable to my eyes and I began to think that a Christian summer camp might be the very place to find a nice humble boyfriend to share the long summer with.

Eric was a blue-eyed, fair-haired counselor of 4 years and was junior in college from South Dakota - although he didn’t know what he was majoring in yet. He good-naturedly confessed that he might not graduate and would rather stay a camp counselor as long as he could. Eric offered to bring his guitar out later and go over some of the camp songs with everyone and I thought that I might be able to see myself kissing his kind face despite his slightly jiggly tummy and bad breath.

When the lens of their inquiry swung its way toward me, I owned up that I had never worked at a Christian camp before and hadn’t much in the way of horse skills for that matter, but I smiled as pleasantly as possible and encouraged someone else to speak. I waylaid Eric after dinner broke up and we chatted lightly for an hour about what camp was like when it was flooded with children and about my hometown back in Minnesota. After two days of casual chats like this, Eric and I were joined at the hip and I was in love with the adventure of my summer.

The sweetness of this young infatuation plus the terrifying new responsibility of caring for a barn full of horses made me vibrate with energy and nerves through every waking hour until I collapsed exhausted onto my bunk bed each night. Simple facts such as how I would have to set my alarm for 5:30am each morning, round up the horses, get them fed, tack up the draft horses, load up breakfast for delivery and keep the draft horses away from the lamas they found so terrifying - all without an older adults supervising my every move - thrilled and frightened me to the bone. I would watch the clock nervously from the minute I woke and practically ran out to the barn to fetch my assigned round-up horse Rocky, worrying all the time that this morning I wouldn’t be able to find the horses in the field or that my draft horses would pick today to refuse to come in to the coral and force me to show up to the kitchen on foot to the staff know how I had failed to get the cart hooked up in time to deliver breakfast to the campers at the end of the long valley. The freshness of my responsibility and the rawness of my nerves made it seem that every task and every moment was an important matter. The moments were made of hot, glowing fire, each one having to be handled with full attention and I was their unwitting handler, unable to put them down long enough to back away and see that they were small, manageable tasks and it really didn’t matter 15 minutes one way or another when I delivered breakfast, or even if I delivered breakfast at all. The campers would survive and so would I. But for the time being, I went on with importance and the tight electricity of fear clashing about in my breast and loving every minute of it.

My favorite moment of each morning was settling the draft horses into their stall and lifting the heavy harnesses onto their backs. The leather was old, heavy and smelled of real work and the feel of it against my flesh gave me a rough strength. I walked with a wider stride, sat back into my hip when standing, and looked about the valley with a long and steady gaze after handling the harnesses. My overalls started to reek of the leather and horse-sweat even after washing. During the long, hot days in the barn, when it was time for mid-day break, I did not return with the others to the cool main building above the field where we slept and they conversed. I remained alone in the barn to sleep on the back of the fatter of the two draft horses, taking in his scent and the dust of the barn while I was lulled to sleep by the beat of the taller draft horse’s feet stamping heavily against the abuses of pestering flies. When I wasn’t tired, I imagined our small herd of twelve donated trail horses were Mustangs straight from the ranges of Montana and that I was breaking them in to be as gentle as lambs; I imagined my mixed breed draft horses were a matched set of Belgians as nimble as circus ponies; and I imagined driving into town on the weekends and passing an older man in a store who would think “Now there’s a hard worker. I bet she knows how to handle herself around a barn”. I had found a direction and a passion with no help from my parents, with no recommendation from a friend, and I alone had picked up the reigns and made my way into the territory that would make a woman out of me.

I had shed the comfort of home and did not look back for assistance. After college, I might hop into my car and take off to the Southwest to work my way through the ranches with only a postcard’s glance toward home. I had always felt I was held at arms-length from my friends, never taking them fully into my heart or being taken into theirs and this only firmed my newly formed resolve to keep moving, to fashion my life out of change and solitude. Horses, land and the road were good companions for this. They took you places, accompanied you and accepted you all without judgment or asking more than their due. Best of all, their conversation was full of questions that did not have a wrong answer, “Where to now? Would you like to stay for a while?” and statements that hung from every corner and branch waiting for you to pull them towards you or let them hang, “Lovely evening. That field is especially flat. Azure: let’s see what shade it is today.” It was with this new spark in my heart and raw excitement in my limbs that I set myself apart from the humanity that had filled my life in the past 18 years - so anxious to rid myself of what was smothering me with memories of awkward youth.

On a Monday morning not long into the summer, I hoisted the heavy harnesses onto my draft horses, hooked up the half dozen odd straps and lead them plodding out to the hitching post by the hay-cart. It was bright and slightly crisp that morning and too early for any other staff members to be awake, but I was already hot and sweaty from my excited exertion and had been moving quickly all morning with anticipation of getting to the load-up site a full ten minutes early. I was thinking with pride of how little time I had needed to learn how to hook up my horses to the cart as I finished untwisting some lines between the two powerful beasts. They stared sleepily at the post, stamped their heavy hoofs into the soft ground and snorted cloudy puffs of warm breath into the chilly air as I unhooked their lead ropes from the post and drew the hard leather reigns up to my driving seat at the front of the large hay-cart.

Once I climbed aboard, I looked down upon my horses and noticed the crisscrossing of the lines between them looked off. Had I attached them wrong? “Uh” I exclaimed with a little exhalation of impatience. I certainly had attached them in the wrong place. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just jump down and fix them; this is why I have eyes, to check my mistakes”. But time was not on my side. The camp’s two lamas, that the draft horses were so wildly afraid of, had gotten loose some time in the night and were now wandering around the coral and what was worse, my draft horses had seen them the very moment I was jumping down from the cart. Piercing cries immediately ripped from their throats. They threw their heads and began thrashing violently about and the clatter of the heavy hay-cart behind them only frightened them more as they worked against each other to get as far away from the lamas as quickly as possible. I leapt back onto the cart to instinctively grab the reigns as it was speeding away, but as I did so the realization of the useless reigns and the gathering speed of the cart slammed into my frenzied brain. “Oh! How could I have let this happen?” I screamed in my brain as I shouted commands to “Whoa” at the charging horses.

Pull as I might I knew that there was no controlling this runaway team and time seemed to slow even as we careened through the gates of the coral and into the field below the main building. I wanted so much to regain control, to steer them away from harm, and I knew that even if I wanted to, jumping off the high cart at that speed was no longer an option. We were alone, my horses and I, flying across the lonely yard towards the unknown. I had plenty of time to see how the long leather lines were miss-hooked so that the horses would not feel each other’s movements and my pulling put pressure on one side of their bits but not the other, but I continued to pull and shout commands at them in a low, loud voice as I frantically wondered whether they’d regain composure before reaching the road or whether they’d take me tumbling into a ditch. I could feel my shame for thinking I was ready for this independence and the anguish of my own self-destruction bathe me with a cold sweat; but mostly I felt stupid for still holding onto the reigns and for thinking that they were ever of real use.

The last thing I knew, as I gripped the reigns still hoping that my fervent wishing might make them suddenly direct the horses calmly back to the barn, was that the taller horse was veering to the left of a wide oak tree towards the open field and the fatter horse was turning to the right of the tree towards the direction of the main building that housed a sleeping staff and all the comforts therein; but I - I was staring at the middle place and its dried, graying bark rushing towards me with all the intent and purpose it could muster.