Q & A: Where the Arrow Points to the Rainbow

Q: How did you first get into horses? Why horses?

A. Not a short answer to that...Here's the long one.


It’s funny how things turn out.
When I was a kid in black leather and blue jeans, lurking on the streets of Chicago like some kind of petulant shark, one of the worst insults you could spit at somebody was to call him a “farmer.”
Or “clod-hopper.”
Or "shit-kicker. "
Or “Clem,” to be short and cute.

If you’d ever told me back then that one day I would be more than happy to trade the comforting city cacophony and the stench of exhaust fumes for the lullabye of horses munching on grass and the aroma of fresh manure, I’d have slapped the white right off your face.
But very often, after something completely unexpected happens, you can look back over the whole course of events and see how obviously inevitable that something was.
I guess this is a good example.

As I understand it, I was born a little pre-maturely (and in some ways, some might say, I’ve been ahead of my time ever since). But I wasn’t very strong, and I almost didn’t make it. While still an infant, I got pneumonia, double pneumonia, actually. I gather that everyone was pretty sure I was going to die, but I managed to disappoint them. Then, when I was maybe four years old, I was reading the funny papers and munching a piece of cake – chocolate cake, if I recall correctly, with coconut frosting – and I absently began to chew on a lamp cord.

To tell the truth, I really don’t have much memory about what happened next.
But I guess it fried me pretty good. I was bedridden for quite a while, slathered in Unguentine burn ointment and swathed in bandages. Ate everything through a straw. Lips always dry and cracked, it hurt, anyway

It was during that time that I first had THE DREAM. It went like this:
I was way up high, like I was 8 feet tall, walking along with my feet never touching the ground, as if I were flying.
Walking beside me was an elderly Indian, his features nearly lost among the wrinkles. A hawk nose. Whispy remains of white hair, thinning bald on top, stirred gently by the wind. Skimpy braids wrapped in blood red cloth. He worn some kind of robe wrapped around shoulders, fur nearly as white as his own hair. His weathered skin stretched across stringy muscle and I could just glimpse a pair of ragged scars, one on each half of his chest, like a pair of exclamation points.
He was singing to himself in a high, scratchy voice, not words, really, just an Indian version of scat. We paused a moment and stood together looking out over a vast prairie panorama and he fell suddenly silent.

Then he looked up at me and spoke in an odd language which I somehow understood. He pointed a bony finger at me and said, dead-serious, “Go where the arrow points to the rainbow.”

I was completely baffled.
What the hell did THAT mean?

And he apparently thought my bewilderment was delightful because at that point his smile-wrinkles ate up his face and, with a phlegmy chuckle, he went back to his song...


When I woke up, not quite re-oriented from dreamtime.
And the dream had been incredibly vivid. I fully expected him to be sitting there beside my bed. I could still hear those words, his gulch-dry voice still in my ears. "Go where the arrow points to the rainbow."

I had no more idea what it meant, awake than I had asleep, so I decided it didn’t really mean anything. After all, I’d had weird dreams both before and after my little joust with electricity and I figured this was just another one.

I was wrong.


(TO BE CONTINUED)