Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was a short day that felt like a long one. The road curved and dived for a while
and hit bottom at the Snake River. We crossed at Central Ferry, where harvested wheat
was being loaded onto enormous barges. I soaked a hand towel in water and wrapped it
around my neck, tucking the ends into the front of my shirt. Then we climbed for seven
winding miles, and at the top—I stopped once for a breather—the muscles in my thighs
wouldn't stop twitching. I got off my bike and walked back and forth across the high-
way to get them to feel like my thighs again and emptied an entire water bottle, most of
it down my throat, the rest over my head. We'd had very little traffic, but I was so dis-
tracted by fatigue that I didn't hear the truck coming up the other side of the hill until
it blasted its air horn at me and I jumped, nearly tumbling over the barrier that separ-
ated the road from a steeply pitched wheat field. I remember feeling both proud of what
I'd accomplished for getting up the hill and entirely ready to take in an air-conditioned
movie.
From there, it was twenty miles or so, a good part of it downhill, to Dusty, an aptly
named town on the flats, where I stayed overnight in a bunkhouse at the Alkali Creek
Ranch. Tom had somehow found the place—it was pretty luxurious for a bunkhouse,
with a flat-screen television and a full kitchen—and reserved a spot for me. He, however,
had to go back to work. Margo picked him up—she brought us sandwiches and cold
beer—and an hour or so before dusk they took off. I immediately felt homesick for two
people whom just a few days earlier I had never met.
At the ranch, I met a friendly woman named Kimberley Gustafson, who operates
Alkali Creek Performance Horses, training animals she likens to world-class athletes for
cutting-horse competitions. These are contests that require horses to start, stop, and turn
on a dime as though they were working on a cattle range and having to separate, or cut,
one cow away from the herd. I can explain this to you now because she explained it to
me yesterday.
The sun was going down when Kimberley arrived with a trailer and led three strap-
ping three-year-olds onto the ranch grounds. There, in spite of having been through all-
day training at another site, they joined several other horses and ran joyously about,
whinnying, rearing, sprinting so their hooves kicked up thunder and dust, and finally
pretending to charge at Kimberley and me before pulling up with sudden casualness and
snorting mischievously. I was made nervous by this; she was not.
Then we went into the barn, where the company's trainer, Tim Johnson, demon-
strated cutting technique, riding a six-year-old named Roofie—short for Raise the Roof.
Tim used a common teaching tool in cutting, something called a pro-cutter or a string
cow. It's a fake cow, a bovine Halloween costume—a mask with horns mounted on a pul-
