The Dancing Morgans

My parents were sure I was an alien born into a family of non horse people.

My parents didn’t even really like horses.

The first horse I really remember was a big brown gelding named Fisher. He lived behind our house on 10,000 BLM acres outside of Sheridan, Wyoming. I must have been about four years old. My mother used to tell me about one winter when she looked out the kitchen window and could barely see me wandering out into the blizzard to ‘check on Fisher” to make sure he was ok.

The next horse was “Silver” a golden palomino gelding of unsure ancestry. He too lived on those 10,000 acres. Then there was Dhobi, a palomino Morgan-Arab cross known today as a Morab. I rode her all over those 10,000 acres. Interestingly enough I didn’t know how to really ride. I think I mostly just sat on her as she wandered around those vast Wyoming acres that were nestled up to the Big Horn Mountains. I had a unique and wonderful childhood.

Then my parents retired to California. I went through total culture shock as the horses were all sold and left behind. My parents retired to a small one acre lot south of San Francisco. I wasted away until I discovered a horse community about five miles from my parent’s home in Atherton, California. I found Woodside, California.
I was 14 years old and miserable in town. I biked (up hill both ways) to Woodside every day. I cleaned stalls for riding lessons and lived at the Canada Stables barn. Jack and Lois Melville made sure that I had horses to ride all though high school. I rode for miles in Huddart Park and managed to live and thrive because of the horses.

Horses came and went in my life as I married, went to college moved to LA and taught school. I had a daughter, divorced, moved back to Palo Alto, remarried and bought my little daughter her first pony. Pepper was my first pony too. He was 11 hands high and a POA. I rode him everywhere. Sarah was perched in front of me. We just went. I also drove him.

Later I bought Chualar’s Valentine, a registered Morgan Mare, and began driving seriously. Life made a turn. I was divorced again. Valentine was sold in order to buy a ranch in Oregon where my daughter, Sarah and I then moved.

We lived on our Rolling Wheel Ranch. I did most of the farming with Morgan horses that I purchased. I farmed, gathered cattle, and made Sarah ride. (She could ride, she just didn’t like to ride.....the horse gene skipped generations) picked up hay, rode the Auction yard alley ways, and fed the cattle in winter with a hay wagon pulled by Morgan Mares. I loved what I was doing.

Sarah went off to college. She was out jogging and was hit and killed by a car. My life folded. I became severely depressed. I tried to committee suicide. My dogs came around the corner of the barn where I was ready to step off a chair. I had a rope around my neck... I could not kill myself in front of my dogs. I took the rope off and stepped back into life.

Almost twelve years have passed since my daughter’s death. I never was able to “find myself’ again. I learned that you don’t “find yourself” you “create” yourself.

In the last twelve years I slowly gathered the dust and water around my shattered life and mixed the dust and mud together and then SLOWLY patted the mud into shape. The shape took a breath and life after death started for me. My Morgan horses are greatly responsible for my well being. So are my friends. I am again truly happy and well. Being happy and well is the greatest choice that I have made in my new creation of myself. I laugh often. I smile a lot. I ride five horses every day. I travel all over the world with other people’s horses. I travel all over the USA dancing with my horses. There is a good life after death after all.

Read an article published by W3 Magazine of the Mail Tribune, Medford, OR
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Carole Mercer ~ 2890 Alta Vista, Eagle Point, Oregon 97524 ~ 541-826-5998 ~ carts-carriages@ccountry.net

Site last updated October 14, 2009