Sierra

It’s a well-known fact. 10 year-old boys commonly scope their horizon for male role models as stepping stones to navigate them towards their own manhood. I was no different, and frankly I didn’t have far to look. My dad was a gregarious, axe-wielding, hard-working, hero of his high school football team with the scars to prove it. He often had sawdust, moss, or small twigs in his brown curly hair, a result of his never-ending chainsawing in our woods. I remember my dad racing one day to the kitchen sink clutching his bleeding hand while his work crew was splitting rounds outside with a raging, smokey hydraulic wood splitter. My dad once also drove 100 miles with a broken leg without knowing it. 

Another key data point for me at this age was the Lone Ranger. Confident and brave, the Lone Ranger was constantly performing heroics in bleak western settings atop Silver, his beautiful charger. Any young boy could imagine himself behind that black mask and in the saddle atop that muscular white horse. That black mask said to us, “This could be you.” One day my collection of plastic horses, plaid cowboy shirts, pistols, bandanas, cowboy hats, home-made black mask and cowboy belt buckle added the ultimate prize: a living, breathing horse.

Blond mane and tail, wild eyes, and a brown coat that could barely contain the energy and bulging musculature of this giant beast, he entered our corral. “He’ll grow into it”, said Grampa Dave when asked if perhaps the horse was a little too big for me. A family photo from the day this horse arrived shows a little boy looking sternly at the camera as he touches the horse’s muzzle. But that stern look was actually masking a fierce pride welling up inside of me, a simple pride that I was now associated with this magnificent animal. We named our horse Sierra because he was as big as a mountain.

Sierra ushered in a whole new universe of novelty. Hay cubes, bale hooks, flakes of alfalfa, bits, cleaning out “the frog”, salt licks. Sierra quickly established that he had a mind of his own. He knocked my cousin off down a steep ravine. He also bucked my art teacher off in the gravel pit. But Sierra and my dad became kindred spirits, and as such, my dad was the only person who could control him. And so Sierra became my dad’s horse. In fact, together they made a real-life centaur: boots and hooves the same dusty brown, home-made sweater and appaloosa coat the same burnt sienna. Both wild.

“He’s ornery”, announced Grampa Dave. Over the course of the next few years, Sierra acted skittish and disobedient. Nevertheless my dad continued to ride him through the narrow trails, loose gravel, and snapping Bishop pine branches of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Sierra learned that my dad would not tolerate shenanigans, and he more or less put up with these rides. It was beautiful to see Sierra out on the Pacific coast, running free in the sand, the sunlight shining through his glorious tail and mane, and ocean foam splashing on his coat. Refreshment in the ocean after a long ride.

It was eventually diagnosed that Sierra was losing his eyesight. This is what made him ornery, skittish and unpredictable. Increasingly, every ride outside the familiar corral and into the woods was an act of blind faith. After recognizing this tragedy, I learned an unexpected lesson about adulthood from Sierra quite apart from his obvious strength and wild machismo which initially impressed ten year-old me. That fear can grip the strongest amongst us. That outward appearances can be deceptive. That manhood has nothing to do with muscles. 

And that no real man wears a mask.