The Horse, The Rider, The Land

This piece is a bit disjointed, but here is what it is about:

It is about cowboys, again. It is about the Adams Ranch, conservation, responsibility and cutting horses. It is about the work I did in my earliest years and how I am working to reconcile it with who I am. There is much I have left out here — about the pain, the heartbreak, the betrayals and all of the human things I am not ready to share. But there is the core of what I am thinking about here, and that is what I am able to share for now. In short, Florida for me is cowboys.

I am wary of the cowboy myth because I spent so much of my youth enveloped in it. By the time I was 15 years old, I wanted little or nothing to do with it. What I saw, behind all the talk about faith and family and an honest day’s work, was a lot of well-to-do guys playing dress-up. And the place I saw that most was when I was competing with cutting horses.

These are also fond memories to me — that myth cuts both ways, because whatever you act out also becomes reality, at least to some extent. And so I will write about the pastures and the people and the horses.

My cowboy days — my cutting horse days — were done in Florida. People don’t think of Florida as a cowboy state, but it very much is, and it has a long history of horses and cows that goes back for hundreds of years, especially in the center of the state, which we used to call “cow country” when I was a kid. So, finding people that wanted to ride cutting horses was fairly easy and fairly regional. But the cutting horse world here, like anywhere else, was more than just regional flavor; it was part of a larger tapestry, a sport born of necessity, hardened by history and formalized by bureaucracy.

The origins of horse cutting trace back to the real work of the range. Ranch hands needed to separate, or “cut,” a single calf from the herd for tasks like branding or medical treatment. Large herds grazed freely on open ranges, and strays would join other ranches’ herds, making annual or semi-annual roundups necessary.

Cowboys on these roundups kept a remuda of horses, ensuring they had specialized skills for assorted jobs. Horses that showed a unique awareness of cattle — a “cow sense” — with ears perked and eyes focused on the herd, were the elite of the remuda. This innate ability to read a cow, eye to eye, anticipating its every move, is what defines “cow sense.” These horses helped cowboys separate animals quicker and easier.

When the busy season slowed, cowboys, being who they were, started pitting their horses against each other to find out who had the best. Informal competitions were a measure of fun added to the work. The sport, like other ranch disciplines such as roping and reining, evolved during the 20th century from a ranch necessity to a sporting event held in horse show arenas.

The first recorded cutting horse exhibition was at the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1919. The following year, cutting became a competitive annual event there. The National Cutting Horse Association (NCHA) was founded in 1946 by a group of 13 cutting horse owners at that very same show. They saw the need for established rules and procedures. The first NCHA-sponsored cutting horse competition was held later that year in Dublin, Texas.

Early cutting was much different from what it is today. Contestants traveled in unreliable trucks to outdoor arenas of different shapes and sizes. Saddles might come from Sears, Roebuck and Co., manes were roached, tails short. Cattlemen brought cows in on a run for more action, using horses that doubled as turn-back horses; there were no herd holders. There was a lot of “snatch and grab” with two hands on the reins. The first shows were exhibitions, and anyone could judge. The one who threw the most dirt usually won. Winning might just get you enough gas money to get home.

Now modern equipment like squeeze chutes, ATVs, trucks and even helicopters have reduced the need for horses in routine ranch work. Motorized vehicles can locate and move herds faster with fewer hands. Cutting is mostly a competition sport, one favored by people with enough time and money to employ trainers to train their horses, many of which cost more than a house.

A typical competition involves a 2 1/2-minute run. The horse and rider move into a herd, breaking up the group until one cow makes eye contact with the horse. Once the horse locks its gaze, the rider lets go of the reins, and the horse takes over. The horse gets low to the ground, using its body to separate the cow and hold it back, anticipating the cow’s moves like a chess master.

I went to cutting horse shows for years before I ever rode into the arena. Most of my time was spent riding around the parking lot pasture with kids who had names like Cody, Dusty and Clay.

We were a loosely organized tribe navigating the adult world of horse trailers and tack stalls. There were clumsy attempts at fishing in murky ponds, ill-fated expeditions to catch hogs in the swampy ditches.

But I reach for memories of these days and they are scarce for some reason. We spent many weekends out and about loading horses and eating sandwiches my mother packed, and yet all I can gather is the sound of the PA system, the smell of the grill and the crunch of the grass beneath my feet. I can remember a bit of an awards banquet. As R.E.M. said, “these things they go away, replaced by every day.”

I asked my dad recently how he got involved in cutting horses, and the answer went back to my grandfather, Tom. Tom was a true cowboy who spent his adulthood managing ranches all over the Southwest. In the late 1980s, he started cutting and even founded a small association in East Texas. Within a few years, he would send a few horses down to my dad in South Florida, and our lives would change dramatically.

Dad is someone willing to work at anything he loves, and he practiced cutting obsessively. We rode most every night. At first our scores were poor. But as time went on, we got better. Dad would even eventually become the chapter president for the Gold Coast Cutting Horse Association in South Florida — a role he told me he enjoyed and would have continued doing if we hadn’t moved to Texas.

When we got to Texas, the daily grind of ranch work — and a lack of cutting horse organizations — slowed our competitive aims. Funnily enough, in a state known for cowboys, I did my least amount of cowboy work. Even now, I think I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I ever rode a horse on dad’s ranch.

A more visceral connection to the specific, often overlooked beauty of the Florida landscape took root for me. The almost alien feel of the sandy soil shifting beneath my worn-out boots, the ethereal sight of Spanish moss hanging heavy and still from the ancient live oaks, the sudden, startling calls of the wading birds echoing across a nearby marsh. For me, the gator country was also the cowboy country.

One of the places we spent a lot of time at was the Adams Ranch in Fort Pierce, and I have been thinking about that land a lot these days and how much it shaped my ideas about the environment and Florida itself.

Its owner, Alto “Bud” Adams Jr., was a true Floridian and an ardent conservationist. His father, Alto, had served as chief justice on Florida’s Supreme Court and also ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor. Their ranch was huge and sprawling and also gave the Adams family significant political sway in the state.

Bud, who I never knew personally, always represented some of the better aspects of Florida’s nature to me. He was probably a Republican, or at least conservative-leaning, but he had a true appreciation for the land and used his knowledge of it to develop specific methods of care for it. As a result, the Adams Ranch thrived. He was also a photographer and published several photo books of his work — almost all of which revolved around life on the Adams Ranch.

He was not involved in the day-to-day operations — funnily enough, a man named “Buddy Adams” (no relation) did that work — but he was known to come around and check things out from time to time. He was regarded as something of a celebrity in our Florida cowboy world. His father had bought the land for $1.50 an acre in the 1930s. It would end up making them some of the most iconic Floridians that ever lived.

We held many of our cuttings on the Adams Ranch, and I loved to run wild there. To be on a horse in Florida is one of the most underrated and sublime pleasures there is. The vast expanses, the hammocks in the distance, the rain clouds gathering in the late afternoon. When I am still, I can feel it stir in my soul. I am grateful that it was a piece of my short voyage on this beautiful planet.

So there is this split inside me. I want to do what so many have done in these silly American culture wars and condemn the cowboys and those folks that still wear the big hats and walk around in boots, but yet, it’s a pretty big part of how I actually grew up.

And as wealthy landholders go, I find a lot to admire in the quiet, thoughtful nature of Bud Adams — he’s 100 times more the cowboy to me than, say, John Wayne.

In recent years, I have been drawn back into my cowboy past, and I think it is because of the stability it provides. That stability has little to do with clothing or tradition or “faith and family and freedom,” although those things seem just fine by me.

It has to do with responsibility. I use this word specifically because I asked my dad one time what he had learned from a lifetime of caring for animals, and he thought hard on it, only answering me a few days later after he had time to reflect. The answer he shared with me was that word — responsibility. Animals, he said, didn’t care about your mood or if you wanted to be out in the rain or not. They needed to be fed.

That rhythm, that routine. That mindset — that has carried me out of the darkness of my life and into new sunshine.

And maybe there is a memory that I was looking for, one that was always a little retouched. I can remember going with dad to a cutting that wasn’t at the Adams ranch — I think it was out on the western edge of Palm Beach County. We woke up well before sunrise and loaded up the horses and got on the road, all packed up for a day trip. I can remember the sun rising over the river of grass and the feeling of hope and expansiveness it gave me, so much so that even back then I felt like I could see us driving across those wide-open roads from a helicopter’s view up above. That red and orange and pink sunrise. Not many folks get to see it, but the cowboys do.

So, here I am again, knocking on the door of who I am and who I want to be, trying again to reconcile them into some new thing that makes sense and feels real to me and that I can hold on to and that will give me the fuel to go do the next thing I need to do.