Back in the Saddle : A Day on the Trail in the Laguna Mountains, Near Julian

“Anything out there I should see?”

“No, just . . . a bunch of trees.”

The stableboy finished cinching up the horse. He looked far too grumpy and enigmatic for this early hour of the morning. He wore the expression that you often see on young actors and pop figures--a weary brand of soulfulness. But I couldn’t stop and figure it out, because I had a date with this horse. Her name was Cuss, an 8-year-old appaloosa with a small head and a steady gait. The urge to ride a horse had been creeping up on me for some time, and the night before, when I passed the Mt. Laguna stables, the deal was done. I had to ride. At dawn. I do not claim any mystic relationship to horses, although I do think that time spent with them tends to be epic. A horse can turn an ordinary morning into a real occasion. It was all I could ask of an autumn day.

From the stables, the trail went up a steep and narrow path. Cuss’ hooves clattered on the rocks and slipped in the mud from recent rains. She decided that enough was enough and stopped in her tracks. I looked down the hill and saw the stableboy watching all this with a sad regard. The hill must have been a test for the new riders. Not one of life’s supreme tests, perhaps, but a test just the same. And I had betrayed myself as just another rube from the city. The stableboy finally walked away, shaking his head, and I gave Cuss a meaningful prod with my heel.

My basketball shoes carried no spurs.

She grunted and heaved, and all that muscle and bone rolled around under me as we climbed. This, it occurred to me, was no way to get acquainted. I jumped off and pulled her unwilling bulk up the last few hundred feet. At the summit, we were suddenly out of the shadows and in the bright morning sun. About 6,000 feet closer to heaven.

I pulled myself back into the saddle and returned to the slow work of getting to know a horse. You’ve got to reckon with their sense of pride before you get their sense of humor. There were oaks and pines up top, and tawny sheaves of dried grass and purple wildflowers. In this brutish clear light, even the bare, dead trunks of trees looked alive with omens. Through the mazy latticework of branches, the world was mauve and gold and watery bright. The wet leaves slapped past my face.

The Laguna Mountains are among the places in California where the terrain changes every nine miles into something completely different. An hour’s drive over the hills and you’d be in San Diego, on the seashore. For all the times I’ve floorboarded up and down the Interstate between Los Angeles and San Diego, I had forgotten about all the crazylegged geography to be found up here in the hills. To the north are rolling grasslands that remind you of the high Colorado plains. Tumble east off these mountains and you land in the scorching flats of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a place not unlike the Lower Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Some of the hilly sections another few miles south could be northern Mexico. In fact, if you were of a mind to be anywhere but where you are, this would be a good place to be.

It took about half an hour for Cuss and me to become compadres . The testing period was over, and she barely needed a pull on the reins to change direction. A line from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” came to me: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Like the thread of a song, it kept replaying, and it had a different meaning every time. “The horses of instruction”? Say, I’m just waking up out here, and the country reverie is all I need to drive away the city and all its wised-up tigers of wrath. I’ll settle for the horse’s instructions. The horse knows the way.

The path wandered up culverts and along ravines and through a thick and silent woods. I could just as well have hiked this trail. But with a horse you’ve got a guide, a pal who won’t take any guff, a ton of muscle straining beneath you, ready in an instant to take off in calamitous soaring. Her ears pricked up when I called her name. She bobbled and trotted along.

His name was Ed. Twenty years old. Doleful, green eyes and thick, dark hair that was powdery from the stables. From the looks of him, he could have been descended from Irish revolutionaries. But he seemed half asleep, and when he spoke, it was with a low, scratchy groan. He had to struggle for expression. While he loosened the saddle on Cuss, I asked him how he came to work at Mt. Laguna Stables. Ten or so horses wandered around under the pines, and the usual dogs lazed in the hay.

“I was removed from my home,” Ed said in a slow, matter-of-fact cadence. “And shortly after that my father removed me from the ranch. I got in my car and drove. I just said, ‘Well, I’m going as far as I can on this tank of gas.’ ”

It sounded like a tale that had been reviewed many times in his mind. “Thought I’d try the Mt. Laguna area,” he went on. “And I got here and saw horses roaming near the road, and so I came in here. My boss--or, the lady who’d become my boss--said to grab a shovel, a broom and a wheelbarrow. So I did that.” He allowed himself his first smile.

“When she came back, she saw that I’d done three stalls and done them good. So she said, ‘You hungry?’ I told her, ‘Yes, ma’am, I haven’t eaten in two days.’ ”

He sat down at a weathered picnic table, fished out an unfiltered cigarette and lit it up with a match and a fair amount of attitude. “That was Aug. 15, 1984,” he said.

“Plans? Not at this moment. I’m just taking every day as it comes. Not thinking about the future, and not worrying about the past.” He shrugged. “Well. Sometimes I worry about the past.”

“It sounds,” I said, “like you’ve had some past.”

He nodded silently and looked off at the horses. He had evidently been schooled properly in how not to throw around too much of a personal story.

“I like it up here. But . . . there’s not too many people my age. Some a little younger, some a little older. But I don’t fit in with either group.”

It must be a problem common to small towns, I ventured. Kids want to leave right at 18.

He nodded. “I might move on someday. Go . . . “ He gave it some thought. “To Oregon, maybe,” he said after a bit. “I’d love to split one of those California redwoods. They’re so big.”

He walked over and leaned on a fence to study a brown-and-white appaloosa nosing around his corral. “Bodie over there, when he gets to running, he’s like Pegasus. You can’t even feel him touch the earth as you ride. He’ll do 45 miles an hour. At least.”

He judged the other horses, and he could finally speak with eloquence and relaxation. Then it was almost as though he heard himself talking. He abruptly turned and walked away. “Well,” he said, “I gotta go clean a stall.” The dogs picked up and went with him.

I drove the 20 miles north to Julian. I had a room at the inn. Julian is the epicenter of picturesque living out here. On the edge of the Cleveland National Forest, it is surrounded by apple and pear orchards. The roads are fine and winding, too, and nothing but sin and temptation to people who consider themselves smooth customers behind the wheel.

Julian was a down-at-the-heels gold-mining town that managed to revive itself and become precious on its visual merits. A number of rustic eateries are grouped around its single intersection. If the merchants should give any more emphasis to the town’s history, this pleasant little hamlet could one day look like an exhibit at Knott’s Berry Farm. Right now it seems to be holding its own.

I was ready to get back to my room, not only to scrub off the horse sweat but because it was such a terrific room. The Julian Farms Lodge is a four-unit affair, overrun with ivy and flowers. It being a week day, I managed to luck into what the desk clerk claimed to be the most-requested room, No. 3. It was pretty cozy. Fine little touches abounded, such as a black iron stove and a dark-blue semi-canopy over the bed. It appeared to be the honeymoon suite. I couldn’t remember--in hotels in places as far-flung as Paris, New York or Indianapolis, a sweeter room.

After a hot shower (with green-apple soap provided by the management), I dressed and packed. But still, some kind of autumnal sentimentality hung over me. Maybe this was Julian’s main attraction.

In a little nook was a lounging bed bordered with white, frilly pillows. I sat down and opened up the half-bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that came with the room. It was Menghini wine, grown and bottled in Julian. An off-white light filtered through the curtains, and Mozart’s “Posthorn” was on the radio. It was all too fine to last. I didn’t want to check out, I wanted to rent the room out for a longer spell. What would they charge by the century?

I poured another half glass and waited for the knock at the door.