The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

Up the Ridge

We lined out at nine.

I put my mare at the head of it because somebody has to lead. Kim put the 4-H kids right behind me so the ponies would follow a steady horse.

The rest of the club stretched out behind that, forty riders and a few on foot, up the creek bottom and onto the grade.

Rhoda rode up front. I had told Kim to put her on Biscuit right off my mare’s tail.

I looked back and the child was sitting that old paint pony with her reins the careful way she had been taught, and her helmet strap buckled, and her whole face open like a window.

“You doing all right back there?” I called to her.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said, too quiet, and then, louder, like she had decided to be brave, “Yes, ma’am, we’re doing real good.”

The grade climbed the north face the slow way my grandfather had cut it. The horses walked up it easy through the oak.

Then we came into the first of the maples and the children went quiet all at once. You could hear it happen behind me, the talking stop.

The color was at its peak. The sugar maples Grandpa had let stand threw red up against the blue.

The morning sun came down through them so that the whole trail was lit the color of a stained-glass window in a country church.

Leaves were coming down one and two at a time with no wind, just letting go. They fell across the horses and the children in their helmets, and the ponies walked through them shin-deep.

A little boy behind Rhoda said, “It’s like riding inside a fire that doesn’t burn you.”

I have thought about that line a hundred times since, that a child said that.

We came out on top at the shoulder, fifty yards above the quiet gate. Right where my grandfather used to stand in his good hat and count the children going by.

I pulled my mare up there and let the line come up past me the way he used to. And I counted them.

I counted every rider that went by me into the color, and I got to fifty-one.

The last of them was an old man from the club named Virgil who had ridden up on a mule, and he touched his hat to me as he passed the way you touch your hat in church.

Rhoda stopped her pony beside me at the top. She did not say anything for a minute.

She was looking out over the whole blazing ridge and down at the hollow where all the trailers were, and I watched her work something out in her mind.

“Miss,” she said finally. “Whose trail is this?”