The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

What I Told Her

I looked at the child on the borrowed pony. I looked down the ridge at the red going on for a quarter mile.

Past it I could just see the corner of Lane’s gate standing shut in the sun with no cars at it.

I thought about all the ways to answer her. I could have told her it was mine, bought and cleared and earned with a chainsaw in twelve days.

I could have told her the whole sorry tangle of it, the heirs and the deed that was never drawn and the cousin who put a price sticker on a padlock.

But that was not what she was asking, and I knew it.

And I knew what my grandfather would have said, because I had heard him say it. Standing in this exact spot with his hand on a pony’s neck, to a different scared child a long time ago.

“It’s yours,” I told her. “It belongs to whoever climbs it.”

“My grandpa cut this trail with a dozer before I was born, and he let the color go free to anybody who’d come look at it. That’s the only kind of owning that ever stuck to this ridge.”

“You rode up it. That makes it yours as much as anybody’s.”

She looked at me to see if I was making fun of her. I was not, and she saw that, and something settled in her face.

“My daddy’s offshore till Christmas,” she said, out of nowhere, the way children hand you a thing when they have decided you are safe. “He’d have liked this.”

“Then you remember it hard,” I said, “and you tell him every bit of it when he calls.”

“The red and the leaves coming down and old Biscuit walking you up here like a gentleman. You give him the whole thing.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

And she reached down and patted that old pony on the neck, twice, the careful way she did everything, and we rode on into the color together at the head of the line.