A Mule for All Seasons

LAMAR, COLORADO -- Oris Reed of Lamar is a fourth generation mule man.
And he is a first generation professional writer.
The two talents have teamed up to produce several books about mules and his younger days in Colorado and Oregon.
Writing as Oris George, his latest book is Along the Back Roads of Yesterday.
It relates several humorous and serious incidents when he was a young boy. One of the funniest: a contrary mule stopped suddenly and young Oris was treated to hot steamy “mule apples”, a gift from the mule.
Oris was often in trouble, and one reason was his good friend, Henry, whom Oris describes as the Eddie Haskell of his day.
‘He would buy the bullets and get you to shoot them…” Oris recalled during a breakfast meeting at Java Jackie’s in Las Animas. “He never met a girl he did not fall in love with.”
Henry is a factor in several of the tales Oris weaves in his latest book.
Two earlier books, out of print, tell similar nostalgic tales from the past.
Oris enjoys writing nostalgia because “it takes the edge off hard times. Those were tough times.”
Tough times, indeed. There are some sad moments in the book when a fiasco by Oris leaves the family really tight on money. Sometimes the available cash was measured in coins. And it was troubled times for Oris, as he often seemed knee deep in trouble. Oris took the heat for wrecking the family truck….that Henry had been driving, of course.
His first years were spent on the family farm in Fremont County, Colorado.
“When I was five I had a mule I rode all over the country by myself.“
Then the family moved to Oregon, where the family farmed 1,600 acres with mule power. Oris now says every man should have two mules. But back then he drove up to 12 head at a time, working and showing.
He won many ribbons and admits to being “a show off in those days.”
Now, he seems more modest, but enjoy showing off his writing gift, which was discovered his senior year in high school.
Encouraged to enter a writing contest, he won district and state honors.
He wrote some articles for a newspaper, then got more serious when he was in the Army.
“I got to France….I wrote a column for a French newspaper about rural life in the U. S. It was translated. In time I got good enough to write in French.”
Back home, he continued to write articles and published a book. He also farmed, but got sick and quit farming and went to New Mexico.
There, he took a journalism class from famed mystery writer Tony Hillerman. They clashed
“He was teaching interpretative reporting, which I did not believe in and do not now.
“We fought until I left the class.”
A few years later he ran into Hillerman at a book signing.
“Do you know me?” the author asked.
“I told him I was writing a novel and he asked to read it. Can you imagine the writers who would give an arm to have him read their writing?
Hillerman gave a thumbs up..
“He told me not to go to school but to get with it.”
And Oris has. He has three more books in the works right now.
Though he has no mules now at his place near Lamar, Oris is still respected as a mule man and is a director of the North American Saddle Mule Association.

Seasons Change

Dale Pond’s Institute has indeed been hopping in recent weeks, as he reports this week.
If you have an important skill to contribute or would like to donate a tidy sum of money to help the cause, hint, hint, you might consider a visit to La Junta, Colorado to meet Dale if you have not already. Dale already has an extensive and varied list of friends from all over the world. And when winter began to wane and spring arrived I began to see more and more how he is linked to the world from this out of the way town along the Santa Fe Trail.
When I was in elementary and middle school, I visited a relative’s large sheep and cattle ranch on the Montana plains for three summers. Looking back, what struck me was how people found their way to the ranch each summer from nearby Utah as well as far off New York, Canada and of course, the Old World. The Murnion clan was anything but isolated from the world.
And Dale is the same way. Every day his mind is in contact with people globally. Sometimes to transact a sale, other times to share or give knowledge or information. I often hear his busy cell phone ringing away.
Arriving Friday to do my humble cataloging, I was diverted outdoors to do a modest amount of brush trimming along the street, where Robert Otey could not reach due to extension cord limitations. So I got out my hedge clippers and chain saw and cord from my car trunk and cut back the branches that extended into the street. I was making a weak effort to make up for not showing up Tuesday, as expected.
I put in half an hour and had to marvel at the extensive brush and tree cutting Robert had already accomplished the previous few days in heat that got into triple digits on Tuesday. Otey was a hands-on volunteer who got a needed job done. The result was impressive, I could actually now see through the trees and shrubs. Trimmings remained piled everywhere along the curbside for eventual removal.
After my chain got stuck and fell off and I had essentially completed a measly 40 feet or so of brush, I considered that Divine Will and retreated indoors to my comfort zone of book cataloging in the library.
Maybe two hours later when I was expecting to close down and go off to lunch, Ja’na dropped by to say that lunch would be late. Another free meal? Ja’na has truly been a blessing to the institute. While Dale is a good host and chef himself, Ja’na has assumed much of the mid-day cooking, which has freed Dale to contemplate and work on his higher calling.
And that is another parallel to the Montana ranch, by the way. My Aunt Rose Ellen never knew if there would be four or fourteen for lunch any given day. Some days I saw people just suddenly appear around lunch time, I never knew who they all were, but some were county workers and others were neighbors or buyers. They would show up, expecting to be fed. My Aunt would simply send me out to the root cellar to grab another bottle or two of home-canned beef and more potatoes would be peeled to stretch the meal.
Ja’na can cook for a few or a crowd too. It does not phase her. And her cooking I have to say is much more flavorful than our basic Irish meat and potatoes fare. But she makes it look as easy as Aunt Rose Ellen did. (So did my late Uncle Dick, who was a Navy chef on an aircraft carrier before he retired and ended up making those food displays you used to see on the original Love Boat. In fact, one episode of that series was dedicated to Dick Reilly in his memory.)
So there is no more pleasant sound than that of a Buddhist type bell ringing through the institute, calling one and all to dinner.
The quiet somewhat empty institute when I first started dropping by has now shaken off the rest of winter and is now filled with activity and motion and contemplation and spirited conversation and happy bantering.
What I perceived as a quiet spell has come to an end and the Institute is now building energy for the tasks and goals that are before Dale now and to come in the future.
While the setting is not the same as that in the Guess Who Classic “No Time“, some of the words are appropriate.
“Seasons change and so did I …. You need not wonder why.”