King Fish

My father was too polite to not accept the donkey standing in front of him. It had been a crisp spring day and he and my brother had piled into the farm pick up to get the free pony that my dad had been offered. They drove to a friend’s house to hook-up the borrowed livestock trailer full of hope and excitement – hope for the fortuitous bounty that they were about to receive.

My brother, who was about 8 or 9, had wanted a horse for quite a while. Eager to learn to ride and to have an animal all his own like the cowboys in the books, he had asked my parents who didn’t have enough to buy an animal like that. The older kids from the neighboring farm up the gravel road, Guthrie Road, had beautiful Arabian horses. They were proud animals, with long lines, gorgeous flowing manes and graceful, powerful legs. The mother had a little car she would drive to town with bumper stickers extolling the glory of Arabian horses. That was the ideal, but that was just too far out of reach for us.

My parents were new to the farming scene, having left the beaches of Ventura and Oxnard to find a better life for their young children out in the Oregon countryside. They put all of their money into a 20-acre run down ranch and bought a few head of cattle, some chickens, and a surly sow named Rosa who ate the roof off of her pen. Add some stray barn cats and a slightly deranged dog that my brother inadvertently adopted at a farm auction and our house was more circus than proper ranch. The missing piece was a horse – or so we thought.

Which was why, when my dad’s coworker, having heard how much my brother wanted a horse, offered to give my dad a free horse, my dad couldn’t believe his luck. “Well, it’s more of a pony than a horse,” he admitted. “But young boys should start with a pony first anyway…graduate to a horse when they are more seasoned.” All we had to do was come and pick up the pony at his farm and it was ours.

When they arrived at the man’s farm a few days later, they didn’t see any horses around – or ponies for that matter. Like most farms in that part of Oregon, the place was a bit unkempt with an old barn and some abandoned implements parked around. The man came out and promised to go and get the pony, so my brother and father backed the trailer around and waited eagerly.

It wasn’t what they saw at first that was alarming, but what they heard. The bray of an angry defiant donkey in the distance, “heeeeeeee haw hee haw hee haw….heeeeeee haw hee haw hee haw” was not what they’d expected. The braying grew louder and more irritated until around the side of the barn came the man with the “pony”.

And we aren’t talking about a donkey that looked or acted like a pony. This was a Jerusalem donkey – Jesus could have ridden right into the city on this one with palm fronds dropped at his feet. Grey body with black hair in its ridge back - huge ears and a little nose. To say that my brother and father were shocked is an understatement. “Here is King Fish” the man said oblivious to the unblinking faces in front of him. So they thanked the man, loaded up the mad braying donkey, and drove it home.

What do you do with an untamed donkey on an aspiring cattle ranch, but let it run up and down the fence line like a convict looking for the escape hatch? It didn’t help that our farm was situated along one of the main thoroughfares between the countryside and the nearest town. The donkey looked ridiculously out of place and brayed unbelievably loudly – so much so that real ranchers, the 4th and 5th generation kind, from miles away would slow down as they drove by to see what was making all the racket. How my father held the gaze of these ranchers as they chided him as an ill-equipped California boy trying out his hand at farming, is beyond me. But that’s my dad in a nutshell: eternally optimistic, humble, determined, and willing to take whatever chances he could to make something work for his family.

We eventually sold the donkey (although I can’t imagine who took King Fish) and the angry sow, Rosa. More cattle were added over time, as well as a couple of proper ponies named Cassiopeia and Sparky, and eventually a beautiful quarter horse named Terrible Beau. And we started to look more like we belonged on that ranch. Underneath it all, through the good times and the bad my father never wavered, never quit, never stopped believing that we were going to make it. In this, he gave us a gift of character that we can only carry with pride and honor.