The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

Getting the Word Out

Now, you cannot just open a trail. You have to tell people.

And you have to do it without being the woman who went to war with her own cousin on Facebook, because Ruth down at the church reads all that and she would not have forgiven me a mean word. She would have been right not to.

So I kept it plain. I called the Prairie Hollow secretary, Brenda, and told her the fall color ride was on as always, same Saturday.

But that we would be putting in from the hollow this year off my bottom ground. New trailhead. To pass it down the phone tree.

I did not say why. I did not have to.

Word travels on our road the way water travels downhill. By the second day everybody knew the ride had moved and everybody knew the reason, and not one person needed it explained.

The 4-H leader was a young woman named Kim who had taken over the horse project when old Mr. Pruitt passed. She called me that evening.

“I’ve got nine kids signed up to ride,” she said. “Is it true the color ride is still free?”

“It’s always been free,” I said. “It’s free this year too.”

There was a little quiet on the line. “Some of these families,” she said, and then she stopped.

I understood what she was trying to say without shaming anybody. Some of these families did not have fifteen dollars a head to look at leaves.

“Kim,” I said. “Nobody pays a cent to ride up my grandpa’s ridge. Not this year, not any year. You bring your kids to the hollow at nine.”

There was one girl I want to tell you about.

Her name was Rhoda, and she was eleven, and she belonged to a family that had moved onto the old Bachman place the spring before.

The father worked offshore and was gone most of the year and the mother cleaned at the school.

Rhoda was one of those quiet children who stands at the edge of the horse lot and watches everybody else’s animal and never asks for anything.