Cry For The Species Equus

I got it straight from the horse’s mouth. Our chestnut mare Tahoe was laying on the ground in a stall at our rescue ranch with the winter sun shining on her face. She was too weak to stand for very long periods. I was attending to her with a very heavy heart. We were in the process of making the decision to euthanize her, and I was stroking her face.

“Hey Albert,” she said with her big brown eyes. “If horses are God’s gift to man, why would man treat them so badly? Why would they take the best years that we have to offer and use us up until we are spent, and then turn us out to the auction barns to be purchased by the killers? You know, it’s alright. I am tired, and I don’t have the strength to go on. I’m ready to let go. It is time.”

The scene has replayed in my mind a thousand times, especially each time that I helped another abused or dying horse move on. The answer has never come. The question still remains imprinted into my minds eye. I search for the answer. Not long after laying Tahoe to rest, both Kathy and I re-read Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, but our broken hearts found no solace. We only found a greater unanswered question in her words. Why would man mistreat beasts of burden so poorly and carelessly?

I spent many days backside at the Finger Lakes Race Track in Western New York State in the early 1980’s. I witnessed broken down thoroughbreds from Saratoga and Belmont with their front legs in ice buckets so that they would be able to run on arthritic and sore legs. I watched the blue goose (a horse ambulance) pull up to down horses with broken and shattered legs to remove them from the track so that the next race can begin. They were all former champions, and if you ever stood backside at a race horse barn when the bell rings and the gate opens, all the thoroughbreds are lined up with their chests pressed against the stalls ready and willing to run.

Willingness in animals shouldn’t be construed as a license for abuse. If you own an animal and it makes a living for you in any genre or form, then you owe it to them to treat them with the respect that they deserve. They at least deserve a dignified procession to the grave.

There is no genre of the horse world that is immune from it. I have had to protect my wife from barrel racing horses that were so stoved up and sore that to merely touch their flank they would try and kick her head off. She would still attempt to massage them so that they could run for their pretty little barrel racer.

I vividly remember the first time that my fingers slipped over the hair ball like protrusion on the nuchal ligament of a dressage horse that had been surgically altered. The purpose of the alteration was so that he couldn’t raise his head. I thought it was a spasm until my wife informed me it was a common practice to cosmetically correct conformation in some competitive circles. You snip the ligament at the base of the skull and it prevents the animal from standing with it’s head too high. They show better!

The American Mustang is standing in pens by the thousands as I write. They have nowhere to run. They are stuffed back to back and side to side. Collected by the thousands by the BLM, they are standing in urine and feces soaked surrounds with no chance of adoption. The economy has tanked, and no one is there to adopt them. They were supposedly rounded up because of the damage they are doing to grazing lands. They should inherit the earth, not the cattle that man wants to raise on it for their bloody thirst for meat.

My only answer came from our rescue quarter horse Sage, who we found in a barn full of miniatures, in the back dark recesses with sore and arthritic knees. One warm summer day, I was standing in the middle of one of our fields. I was watching a mother eagle teach her eaglet to fly. She would let it soar and when it got just far enough away she would give a shrill whistle and it would whistle back, then return to the nest. Sage walked up to me, stood alongside of me, and wrapped her neck and her big bucket head around my neck in an embrace. As a man, I have never been touched greater by animal husbandry.

Sometimes late at night, I’m ashamed to admit, that when I’m drifting off to sleep and my mind replays all the beautiful animals that it was my mission to bring to God, I cry for the species Equus.

Life's A Beach, Not A Mountain

The sound of waves crashing on the shore has always been an elixir for me. A respite, a repose from the craziness that is my life. My high school friend “Captain Zooms” and I discovered the joy of the ocean many years ago on a vacation to Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. We rented a catamaran and went sailing and wind surfing. Cruising inches off the ocean on a wind surfer, and lying out over a raised pontoon is all consuming. I have loved the ocean, and everything about it since that time.

I have learned well from mountains and the wilderness, especially at 14,000 feet in elevation. We are only temporary visitors at the summit, sometimes only for minutes at a time. Some climbers never summit at all.

Touloose, my life long ski companion and I have skied all over America, although we had never heli-skied with one another. We decided that on our last big ski vacation we would ski the Little Cottonwood Canyon of Utah including The Wasatch Powder Birds in Snowbird. On the day that we registered, it began to snow heavily and continued for the entire week. One to two feet of fresh powder fell every day. Our hopes dashed every morning by a call saying the weather was too bad for the helicopter to go up, even though the skiing was awesome on the mountain.

On our last morning at Snowbird, the sun rose over the peaks and burst across open snowfields filled to capacity with light, airy Wasatch Powder. We could here the Wumpf! Wumpf! Wumpf! of the Powder Bird helicopter heading into the pristine wilderness of the back country. The heli-ski run was never to be taken and we were only visitors there for a very short while.

Casting my fate to the wind has been a mantra of mine. I have enjoyed the freedom of going where I wanted, while living modestly. I started this pattern at a very young age and whenever I had more than a few thousand dollars saved I would spend it on an adventure.

When I hear the news today, my heart goes out to the unfortunate factory workers and civil servants who bought the dream of owning a home and retiring from their 40 year commitment with a pension. I am truly heart broken for them in their loss of the great American Dream. They gave up their youth and some of the best years of their lives. They get Na Da. Nothing, not even a job. No pension, no golden watch and fob. “Sorry, can’t extend unemployment benefits for you. We used the money to bail out the greedy bankers and to pay their bonuses for being the best and the brightest.”

I would like to lead a revolution of change. They say that if you really want to change, begin with yourself. I have both the desire and will power to make the change. We could all learn to make a change by putting more love into our hearts, a necessary self lesson for the change to begin.

Life is a Beach, not a mountain. I have always thought that Society had it figured all wrong. You should be allowed to experience life in the pursuit of your dreams for the first 1/3 of your life. The 2nd third of your life should be in pursuing financial security for the next phase. The last 1/3 should be in the pursuit of artistic endeavors that contribute to and enhance society as a whole.

I want to spend the last 1/3 of my life at the ocean. I will spend my days sailing, playing, and staying a while. The Great American Oil Spill has turned up the heat and the desire to enjoy the waters that are still around the bend from destruction. There still are pristine beaches in Oregon, and I want to go there and walk on them with Kathy, my wife, and have long talks and even longer writing sessions.

I write the best documentary of the mountains when I’m not living in them. Melville, who wrote lovingly of the sea only wrote successfully after he had left it. I want to make my final 1/3 of life the most powerful of all. I will work in the arts and bring about the change that I hope for America.

Kathy and I have begun the design of our retirement years. We have incorporated as Symposia Living Arts Inc. We will be promoting the Healing, Literary, Culinary, Visual, and Performing Arts. It simply is our time to shine. --- Albert Bianchine

If A Woman Were President

If a woman were President, she would slap the "Drill, Baby, Drill" Bitches and send them to their room. Sorry Mr. Obama, you were my choice, and I respect you immensely, but if a woman were in the White House, the oil spill would be cleaned up by now or BP’s assets would have been seized. Do you think putting 10,000 boats in the water to clean up the spill is unreasonable? I think the spill lasting for 59 days is unreasonable. What do you mean you don’t have the technology? Then why were you drilling that deep in the first place?

If a woman were President, the oil would never have made it to shore. She would have collected it before it ever got close. Let’s talk about low ball, flow rate, educated opinion guestimates. Expert, who? She would have called Joe The Plumber! Everyone knows that a good plumber is worth his weight in gold. In this case, it’s liquid gold in the form of black, ugly crude fowling our shores, beaches, and waterways, and killing our beloved sea creatures. She would have had compassion for the hard working men and women crying on camera over the loss of their heritage and livelihoods. She would have massively fined BP for every second past 48 hours that the leak continued making it economically prohibitive to allow the oil to continue to spew into the ocean. She would have never allowed them to use a chemical dispersant that hangs like large gobs of snot at the bottom of the ocean again killing all the bottom feeding creatures (especially since that chemical makeup is a mystery to everyone except BP.) I’ve heard the story before, proprietary blend in the natural gas drilling industry with the fluid used for fracing. Many women in my neighborhood came down with never before seen forms of Adrenal Cancer.

The spokespeople for BP are liars, and yes, they do have an English accent. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, you get the inference. If a woman were President, she would have the nerve to tell them we don’t want you here befouling our shoreline. Her rallying cry would be "America for the Americans." She would usher in a new period of isolationism and self-reliance on renewable energy.

A Woman President wouldn’t have gone to bed with the oil companies in the first place. She would have been held accountable to a higher standard for a lot less money. No, I am not referring to that “Drill, Baby, Drill” trailer bitch from Alaska who is rumored to have spent her publishing windfall on new boobs for Trailer Hubby Todd, I’m referring to a real woman President.

Are You Willing To Do Whatever It Takes?

The answer is a resounding yes! It wasn’t always that way for me where writing is concerned. I expected success without being willing to contribute the time or effort. I had many mentors when I was a ski bum. The world’s greatest mentors, I boast. I have always related skiing to writing. There is a similar flow to both when you are performing well. Dropping into a deep powder run is treacherous. There is always the possibility that the mountainside will slide. I stood atop many a knarly Utah ski run with my good friend, Touloose, a ski patrolman. I learned how to probe the snow with my pole, or make a long traverse across the run to test the consistency and stability of the run. Many times, after climbing for hours into the back country of the Wasatch National Forest, we would each take a turn skiing a steep and deep slope and critique the others skiing ability. We would say, “You have got to commit to the mountain, stay forward, stop sitting back, gravity is your friend.”

Perhaps the most applicable lesson that skiing taught me where writing is concerned, is that often we would ski up to a particularly challenging ski run and stop. Big mistake, never stop at the top, it gives you time to look down in to the face of certain death. You freeze. You stop, sometimes your knees knock together and your body involuntarily shakes. I mean, we arrived at places where if you missed the first turn as you dropped in, you would likely die. It generally included big ugly rock faces and narrow chutes, steep mountain sides, deep powder snow. There always seemed to be a giant tree right in the middle of the chute. It was always at your second turn, so the entire time you are trying to concentrate on your first turn you are preoccupied with that damn tree and the second turn. It taught you to live in the second, and not to get ahead of yourself. Unless you made the first turn, there would be no second. So when you would stop, it would give you all the time in the world to think about how you were going to miss that first turn and crash into the tree and hit your head and careen down the hill bouncing off the rocks of the steep chute until you were history. It is where having a companion skier was the key. I remember vividly looking at Touloose at those difficult moments and he would smile from under his Sherpa hat. In his all too familiar cackle he would say, “The Lord hates a coward!” He would smile, and drop in. I, of course, had no choice but to follow.

The point is where writing is concerned, I have always written up to the lip of the steep, and stopped. I have never been willing to let myself go. I have never been willing to pull the writing trigger, to drop over the edge and noodle up the writing run.

Some people read the end of a book first- so this is for those who like a happy ending.

Act III
Scene III

Setting: University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, evening poetry writing workshop.

Enter: Writer with backpack. He sets the backpack next to desk at the front of the classroom. He takes out several books and sets them on top of the desk. He turns and writes his name on the blackboard. Turning, he faces the class and smiles as he unbuttons his sports jacket.

The Teacher (ME) says: “Good evening class. Before I begin, I would like to invite you all to the McKenzie River Lodge this weekend. We are having a get together to celebrate my new book contract. I have been fortunate enough to have received a contract for my Historical Novel, the corresponding film, and the music score! There will horseback riding along the Pacific Northwest Trail, and a vegetarian picnic with our own organic vegetables.”

A loud crash is heard as the classroom door hits the wall. A dazed student with dread locks and a rainbow colored knit hat stands in the entrance.

“Wow, sorry for being late man. I spaced out and didn’t realize the time,” he says turning to the teacher.

“Good evening Brian, how good of you to join us,” the teacher smiles. He looks sideways knowingly at the young man. He reminds him a lot of himself as a youth. He was inappropriate, loud, and abrasive. Brian doesn’t quite seem to fit in. Perhaps he never will. There is wisdom in knowing that he gave up fitting in many years ago. Some of the best writers are those that are the outriders of society.

“As I was saying, you’re invited to join us for a celebration of our WRITEMYFIRE contract.”

He turns and walks to the front of the classroom.

“Let’s have some writing fun.”

--- Albert Bianchine

Emerald And Pearl ~ Miracles At The Ranch

I love writing about our years at the ranch. Miracles appeared in the oddest of places at the oddest of times. Our two white baby kittens, Emerald and Pearl appeared in a trailer load of alfalfa hay one hot summer afternoon. We had loaded the trailer ourselves with freshly baled hay directly from the field. The trailer was packed, front to back. We closed the back doors, and drove over 30 miles to our little ranch. When we unloaded the trailer, there, among the bales of hay, were the two most adorable long haired gems of kittens. Emerald and Pearl were perfect names for the two females. They immediately became the queens of the ranch.

We already had a huge brood of ranch cats. Our Queen Bee, Betty (“You can call me Elizabeth”) had just given birth to Rastus, Alvin, Calvin, Marion, Brother Pete, and my good friend, Dom (Domnick) Big Mike’s Boy from another Mom, and Mike himself. They rounded out the gender balance at the ranch.

They were lovers, and lounged in the hay where I had built a little shelf out of bales for them to eat and sleep. Pearl became every one’s little Pearly Girly. Early mornings on the ranch were cold and often windy. I remember one particularly cold morning (as I was bending down to pick up several flakes of hay) when Pearl jumped up and wrapped her furry little self around my neck. It would become our morning ritual. She would purr in my ear and keep my neck warm as I would walk the fields and hay and grain the horses and goats. Pearl was the girl of the ranch, and even Emerald adored her sister. There was something special about them both, but Pearly Girl was the Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Students fell in love with her, and she would stay wrapped up in Kathy’s Jacket while she taught all morning.

Her blue eyes were alluring and deep and she held court with her fellow creatures at the food bowl. I had to buy metal cages to trap her pet skunk that would eat with her early mornings and had to move her cat food from public access because she liked to share it with the goats, Jack London, his wife Daisy, and his daughter, Justin’s Little Rose. They came one and all. As Emerald and Pearl grew older, it became apparent to us that Emmy wasn’t Emerald, but she was Tom. We had Tom fixed for every one’s comfort.

Tom and Pearl were inseparable and endlessly basked in the afternoon sun. Sadly, our Pearly Girl left us all too soon. The ranch was saddened beyond belief but none more than my friend Tom. He was inconsolable in his grief. He was depressed, hardly ate, and became a grouchy and sad loner.

We soon moved to our new ranch. I loaded Snowy, and Buddy in the trailer and put Dom and Tom in a cat carrier. Traveling down the windy Dry Hollow Rd., I looked in the rear view mirror of my Ford flat bed to the horse trailer just in time to see what I thought was a white sheet of paper blowing away. It was my friend Tom. I believe his grief was too great, unlike Humpty Dumpty, my Tom jumped instead of fell. We searched the roadsides for days to no avail, Tom (Emerald) and Pearl had disappeared as quickly as they had appeared.

Miracles. Albert Bianchine

Having The Heart For It

Great racehorses are said to have great hearts. The average size of a race horse’s heart is 6lbs. The Veterinarian that performed the autopsy on Secretariat estimated that his heart was three times the size of a normal horse’s heart at about 22 lbs. Secretariat’s large heart is from the x-chromosome received from his Dam. It is called the x-factor and was traced to the Dam, Pocahontas. Her lineage is traced back 200 years to the Great Eclipse who had a heart that weighed 14 lbs. It is why Secretariat was able to win the Triple Crown and the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths establishing a new track record that still stands today.

Several years ago, we were living on a ranch south of the Town of Silt, Colorado along County Rd. 331 or Dry Hollow Road. We lived in a log home built in the late 1800’s, a home that had a Sears Kit Home shell built around the logs in the early 1900’s. It was on a twenty five acre parcel with a large stream running through the property at the base of a 100acre Mesa. It had great character. It once was the center or hub of activity because it had the only water and well. Ranchers and farmers would bring their livestock and horses there to refresh and nourish. It had the feel of antiquity. The bluffs above were inhabited by hoot owls, nesting red tailed hawks, and bald eagles. We found out quite by accident that a large mountain lion called the ranch and the bluffs home. My good cat friend, Big Mike, disappeared our very first night there. He was the man. Unfortunately unknown to us, the big, big cat was THE MAN. We never saw Mike again.

Welcome to “The Hadios.” Life was hard but wonderful. Only Big Mike’s son Dom, a more timid version of his dad was able to survive. Our rescue ranch had grown and we needed the extra land for the horses and for our school. Students were coming to Kathy’s classes from all over the world. It was great enjoyment filled with learning, healing, and miracles.

The geological structure of the semi-arid landscape, and rocky formations also lent itself to natural gas drilling. The large gas companies did just that. We often joked that it was Saudi-Silt. The regulations on the number of gas wells that could be drilled in a certain area were deregulated under George Bush’s Administration. Everywhere you looked at night you saw miniature Eiffel Towers lit and working. The support crews for wells are tremendous and the flow of traffic and trucks were at times almost unbearable. So were the accidents, too numerous to mention. The current catastrophe in the Gulf is not an isolated incident. It is business as usual.

One particular full moon evening I was awoken by Kathy who was sitting beside our bedroom window. Our little ranch house was surrounded by a massive herd of Elk. She was quietly listening to them communicate. We had no idea that they clicked, whistled, grunted, and talked so much. It was a moving experience. We at first thought how blessed we were, but soon realized that they weren’t there because we had a particularly good aura about our ranch. They were there because it was the only safe haven amidst the drilling and fracing the goes on 24 hours, seven days a week. The poor animals habitat had been filled by brightly lit towers with drilling equipment and trucks that are never ending. They were dazed, confused and milling about because their migratory paths and grazing grounds were no longer.

We operated a healing ranch where amazing therapy was given to wretched animals who desperately needed it. There was nothing we could do for these creatures. We went to bed saddened beyond any grief we had ever known. They were gone in the morning. Only the big cat was there, out in the tree, calling out my friend Dom, but he was always too smart to fall for his ploy.

These days, I live in a wonderful home in a beautiful community, and I write. I think often of the days on the ranch, hearing my cell phone ringing and not being able to find it. Only to discover that my trickster Appaloosa Snowy was on the other side of the enclosure with it between his lips and shaking his head up and down. Laughing at me because he had stolen it from my pocket while I was mending fences, I got pretty good at mending fences after the herd of Elk would come and huddle at our little refuge. I never minded.

It brings me back to having a heart, a big one at that. I don’t write now because I have the heart to, the truth is, I write because I don’t have the heart not to.
Albert Bianchine

The Beaten Path Is For Beaten People

I want to be a hippie again, and walk the Pacific Northwest Trail along the McKenzie River in Oregon. I want to walk in the meadows, and picnic with my wife Kathy among the blossoming wild flowers. I want to write poetry and prose. Perhaps some of it might be good. I want learn to write sonnets, and to play a guitar. Maybe I will finish The Ballad of Tom Dylan. It will be the last song in the CD entitled Living the American Dream. It is the music score for my screenplay about the history of Arapahoe Basin in Colorado. It includes a rousing remake of the song I had too much to dream last night. It will be the song that will be playing when the credits are rolling and all the movie goers are beginning to leave the theatre. They will be talking about how breathtakingly beautiful the mountain is that sits just below the Continental Divide, and how dastardly the Senator who owned Ralston Purina was that bought the mountain in 1978. They will remember what it was like to be a carefree hippie in blue jeans with long hair and a beard and to have people say things like, “Who does he think he is, Christ?”

My movie will remind everyone what it was like before you realized that nothing ever changed. The revolution of the 60’s came and went, and we fought in the streets. The Senators and Corporations had an iron tight grip on America, and the progress of it. The words of Paul Simon were true, “All the people bowed and prayed to the neon Gods they made … And the sign flashed out it’s warning, left it’s seed while it was storming … And the sign said the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.”

I started the project when I was living above my musician friend Gordon Grey on Van Antwerp Rd. in Niskayuna, New York. Over the years, my interest in song writing, poetry and prose slowly faded. The glimmer of light in my soul was almost extinguished. Oh! I made the occasional rumblings, something about writing the great American Novel.

I then went to work in a wealthy Colorado ski resort where I was called upon to design expensive systems to melt snow and ice from sidewalks and driveways. The fabulously famous and wealthy individuals had endless dollars to spend on the conveniences. They didn’t want to get their Apres Ski Fur Boots wet when leaving their ski vacation home (one of their six vacation homes.) Their Range Rovers or H2 Hummers just couldn’t get close enough to the marble floors that lined the entry way.

I became very good at it (and wasting millions of BTU’s of heat doing it.) Maybe BP should have called me to solve their ice crystal problem in the containment dome. I have been a plumber for thirty years now. I can run a pipe anywhere and automatically melt anything and waste a tremendous amount of natural resources doing it. I’m that good. I might have even checked the backup battery on the "fail safe" device, had I been called upon.

President Barack Obama is a hero that I admire greatly. He has inspired me to write again. I don’t have many men-hero’s anymore. They have all been such a disappointment. The real reason I am writing again is because of something my wife Kathy said to me in passing. She was discussing writing a blog. “You know Al, you could be the next Kilroy, the face and hands on the freight trains years ago that said “Kilroy was here.” The hippie in me liked that.

Maybe I’ll be the next folk hero like Johnny Appleseed. The difference will be that I will write blogs that go viral. Then I’ll move to Oregon and hike through the Sisters Wilderness along Century Drive over the Santiam Pass. I will climb Three Fingered Jack. It reminds me a lot of the Grand Traverse. I’ll go into Eugene to The University of Oregon and have poetry readings and teach workshops and chant “Peace and Love.” I’ll invite all of the children to fill empty auditorium seats to enjoy my work. Everywhere I go I will leave people with little pieces of paper filled with poetic prose to give them all something to think about when I’m gone.

Sometimes when I’m driving in my work truck to install another incredibly expensive snowmelt system, in the shadows of my nemesis, a large Oil and Gas Company, I try not to resent them for single handedly driving us from our ranch. Natural gas was bubbling up from the creek. They installed a gas sensor near the crawl space of my house, even though there was “nothing to worry about.” And even if there was, the gas bubbling up in the creek near where my horses drank was not their fault.

If I’m really quiet, and I am meditating, I can almost hear the song. My soul wants to be a hippie again, because the beaten path is for beaten people.
Albert Bianchine