The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

The Gate

The padlock was new. I could tell because the shackle still had the sticker price on it, a little orange tag that said eleven ninety-nine.

My cousin Lane had not bothered to peel it off before he hung it on the gate my grandfather built in 1961.

I sat on my mare in the gravel turnaround and read the sign bolted to the top rail. It was one of those plastic ones you buy at the farm store, the kind that comes with press-on letters.

Private trail, it said. Day pass, fifteen dollars per rider. Cash at the gate.

Fifteen dollars a head. I did the arithmetic the way you do when something is wrong and your mind tries to busy itself.

Our saddle club brought thirty, sometimes forty riders on color weekend. That was six hundred dollars Lane meant to collect for the right to cross ground that had never cost any of us a dime.

My mare shifted under me and blew out through her nose. She knew this turnaround.

We had come up here every October for as long as I had owned her. Before her on the gelding, and before him on a pony when I was small enough that my daddy led me by a lead rope.

Lane was standing on the other side of the gate in a canvas coat, holding a metal cash box like a man at a church raffle.

He had a card table set up and a folding chair and a space heater running off a little generator that chugged behind him.

“Morning,” he said. He said it careful.

“You locked the ridge,” I said.

“I fenced my part of it.” He set the box on the table. “There’s nothing says a man can’t fence his own ground.”

“Which part of it, Lane,” I said. “Show me the line. Walk out here and show me where your third stops and mine starts.”

He did not move. He could not, and we both knew it.

There was no line and there never had been. The ridge was one hill with one old man’s name on all of it, and the only thing Lane had that said different was a padlock with the price still on it.

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You can’t.”

I turned my mare around in the gravel then. I did not raise my voice and I did not say anything mean.

A scream would have given him something to tell his wife about, the cousin who came up the hill hollering.

I rode back down the road at a walk and let him sit there with his cash box in the cold. I counted maples on the way down, and I thought about the children who would not get to ride.