phone company, although
he didn’t have a suit on, I
could tell he usually wore
one, and his Dad, Julius
who everyone called Jules.
Chris’s twenty-year-old
son, Quinton, worked at
Kennedy Meadows as one
of the cowboys and was
going to help guide us up
the mountain, along with
a co-cowboy everyone
called “Cowboy Dan.” Pancho was our trail boss and number
one mule wrangler, horse expert and chef. Three generations of
Helblings, Marty, Steve, Pancho, Cowboy Dan, and me.
For hours there was only the sounds of the horses hoofs, and
birds singing.
Yankee stirred up a varmit and his bark echoed off the side
of the mountain. Then I heard a voice calling to us, Rosica! I
could hear his booming voice, and the sounds of his horse
galloping for sometime before he came into view. Riding a gigantic dappled grey beauty of a horse he came out of the woods
and rode up the narrow trail towards us. Voice still booming,
he greeted each rider by offering a sip of whiskey from his
leather-covered flask. John Rosica was decked out in full cowboy regalia, from his flat brimmed cowboy hat to his silver
spurred boots. He sported a holster with a gun on his right
and a knife on his left. Buttery leather chaps, scarf around his
neck and a handmade shirt and vest completed the picture. He
rode the last hour with us telling adventure stories of his summer, asking questions about our trip and about us. And then
we rode into camp, I was still sitting on my horse, wondering
what was going to happen to my legs when my feet touched the
ground when a cowboy came over, looked up at me and said
“Would you like a margarita?” Really? Was this some kind
of cowboy middle of nowhere joke on this tired dust covered
women from the East? Nope, it was real. “Yes, I would, thank
you very much.”
By the time breakfast was over, the mules were packed and
our horses were saddled and ready to go. A Charlie Sheen line
from Apocalypse Now was playing in my head. I changed the
wording to fit my own situation. “I was going to the best place
in the world and I didn’t even know it yet. Hours away and
Twenty-three miles up the mountain that snaked through the
wilderness like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Rosica.”
The su