This morning as I was leaving the house and driving to a tax appointment I was treated to a very cool sight: one of the local cowboys had gone to visit a friend and had ridden his horse (there are a number of small horse ranches nearby) and left it tied to their fence.
I was transfixed by the sight of the placid beast: tied in front of a bland, peach-colored stucco house, his head raised as he watched the cars drive past, as curious about them as they were about him, no doubt.
When I was still employed (happily or other wise) I would make the early morning commute down Avenue S and often would find myself politely stopping to let a man, or a couple of men, out for their morning ride cross the usually busy street. It is a surreal and beautiful sight: their horses are in full western saddle, the men, usually Hispanic, wear sweat-stained cowboy hats to shade their dark faces, have thick coils of rope tied next to their hips and ride down that queer strip of greenery that is neither park nor median and runs along one side of the street. If I’m lucky sometimes they notice I’m a girl and they tip their hats to me. One morning one of them, in fringed leather chaps (I kid you not) saw me, lifted his hand to be sure he had my attention and then expertly reared the horse up: my own private Sunday morning show.
They are a vestige of a history rarely acknowledged here in Antelope Valley (where, yes, Antelopes DID once run): the tale of the valley before the incorporation of the cities, when it was all farms and open range. Once upon a time (not so terribly long ago) all of these tract homes weren’t even vague dreams and the land was wide and open and run by cowboys and tanned famers growing fruit and alfalfa and ranging sheep and goats. Here on my side of town it’s easy to see the final vestiges of farms long since gone defunct being hemmed in by the rapid tide of housing booms. The houses are only foundations now, the water tanks long since collapsed, but they ARE still there, for now, as is the final, clinging remnants of the barbwire fences.
Drive out 47th Street East on an early morning and you might catch a glimpse of life here before ALL of this: big flocks of sheep and acres of freshly sprouting fields.
I imagine that once the housing crisis reverts back to its bubble-and-boom state, and the tract homes begin their consuming crawl once more, that at some point the new batch of yuppies will arrive. They will quietly drive out the Hispanic families that currently dominate my neighborhood and then, then, they will raise hell about that horse smell, or the sound of roosters calling in the morning and one new city ordinance after another will drive the cowboys and their horses and even the farms out of my neighborhood and further and further west and east, like the foam pushed at the front of an ocean wave.
I cannot help but think what an unnoticed loss it will be when no one will be treated to the sight of a horse tied up in front of someone’s home on a Friday morning anymore.
