OLSON FAMILY SCRAPBOOK III – UNCATCHABLE REX, A HORSE – BY – TIM OLSON

                                                                    REX 

                                                               FOR JAKE

 I’ve been indebted to Jake for a long time ago – well, not just Jake, I’ve got to include brothers Dave and Ken.  Remember Rex?  That white horse with the measles around the chest and an unruly mane that no one could catch?  Still, I reckon you are the one who came up with the tom fool idea of buying a horse that had run loose for a couple of years in the pasture next to Bob Johnson’s for a couple of years up there on the hill above Parkland.

The first time I saw Rex was in the shed in the pasture across from your place.  One look at that white, wild eyed, stamping horse and I flattened my skinny 13 year-old body next to the side of the stall.  While Dave held Rex’s bobbing head to keep him somewhat grounded, you kneed a bloated Rex in the stomach and cinched up the saddle that cost sixty dollars more than the forty dollar horse. Ken must have gotten the short straw, because he was waiting for the first ride.  When Ken mounted, Rex collapsed his gut, the saddle rolled underneath, and Ken scrambled to get out of the way of Rex’s crow-hopping around the paddock, knocking smithereens out of the saddle.  For the rest of that fall and winter, I used to ride my bicycle down to your place after school, walk over to the pasture with that creek bisecting it and stand staring at that horse on the far side of the swollen stream with a bridge at the east end of the pasture.  Tried to get close to him without much luck but, I was scared to death of him.

That winter you guys spent  more time chasing that horse than riding him.  Remember the time you threw an apple at him?  “Grab him, I got him in the left eye and he’s blinded.”  Sometimes there was no solution but for two guys to sacrifice a ride, wade across that chilly, thigh high stream and take away Rex’s advantage.  One time smiles turned to frustrated epithets when a corralled Rex neatly cleared the paddock fence and took off, splashing across the stream.

The following spring, you left for the seminary, Ken joined the Marines, and Dave entered the clandestine life of the CIA. I got the best of the deal – I got the horse.  And for that, I’m forever indebted to you.  Naturally, I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with Rex except maybe worship him from a distant corner of the pasture.  Before leaving Parkland, you got me in touch with Bob Johnson and we moved Rex to a small corral where Rex couldn’t run from me and I couldn’t escape from him.  Rex, being more in tune with his needs than I was, soon learned that Timmy was oats and hay; I not so quickly learned that Rex ran from me because he was frightened, not because he was ornery or mean.  Eventually, we became buddies.

Before the summer was over, Bob and I moved Rex to a pasture for grass, and Rex and I got to know each other well enough that he ran from one end of the pasture to the other just to piss me off.  He’d stand at one end of the pasture, ears pricked, still as a statue.  I’d approach him slowly with oats in my hand, hoping to grab the halter. He’d take the oats, rear up, and away he’d gallop to the other end.  I would chase and curse him with whatever few words were available to me. Then he’d come ambling over to me, “OK, you want to ride me? Here I am. Let’s go! Wasn’t this fun?”  I’m not sure I ever got to the point I could reach up directly to take his halter, but would always start at the shoulder.  The ferrier told me he suspected that Rex had been abused and would be head shy all his life.

What fun we had!  Rex and I and a friend, Tom Richards, and his genuine pinto pony, Wahoo, would ride all day on the Fort Lewis Reservation and the Olsens let us camp out at their Spanaway Ranch. After riding, Tom and I would belly up to the fountain at the local drug store and have a ten cent root beer.  On one occasion we saddled up after dark and haunted the back roads of the park where McCord Air Force guys used to park with their dates and make out.  We placed one horse on each side of a windshield and the heavily breathing couple inside coming up for a little breather found themselves staring at a couple of horse muzzles blowing steam right back at them.  This one guy lurched out of the car with his shorts not yet up and chased us down the road.  All he got for his efforts was a couple of horses’ butts and tails disappearing around the bend.

After a couple of years, adolescence reared up in me and I decided that Rex and I needed to “belong.”  I joined the Junior Riding Club where Rex and I seemed to be always a step off in the drills and my too big Stetson kept falling off; I took part in the Parkland Roundup where Rex got kicked in the jaw and bucked me off in a crowd; I entered him in Western Pleasure at a horse show where we got eliminated at the first cut.  I’d comb that mane for half an hour; Rex would shake his head and the mane would fall catywampus on both sides of his neck.  In short, Rex and I were a great duo, but he didn’t get along all that well with other horses and I didn’t fit very well with the horse club.

I wish I could write that Rex and I returned to our earlier happy ways.  No, I still had lots of lessons to learn about where I belonged and where I didn’t.  While I banged my shrimpy body against tackles in football turnout and attempted to dribble the length of the floor in basketball practice, Rex fattened up on grass and apples in a big pasture and then lost weight during a winter in a small enclosure behind the basketball coach’s place.  As spring rolled around, Severin Hildre said he could use one more Olson boy on the Rap III in Alaska and it was time to sell; my riding days were over and my fishing days were beginning.

An elderly couple raising their orphaned grandson answered my advertisement.  They lived on several acres out by Graham and their grandson wanted a horse. Rex and I had one more ride from Parkland to Graham where I turned him over to a kid as happy as I was the first time Rex, rather than being spooked, had trotted over to the fence in Bob Johnson’s corral for his oats and to have his muzzle rubbed.  I drove out to visit Rex a few times the following fall where I found him grass fed, well ridden, and sassy.  The smiling kid told me, “Rex is the fastest horse of all my friends.  No one can keep up!”  And added, “Be careful, my horse is apt to brush you off on the corner of the barn.  I’m the only one who can really ride him.” I smiled, remembering my first efforts,

Thanks a bunch, Rex was the best part of my early teenage years!  And what I didn’t know when I sold him was that my riding days weren’t really over . . .