Spiritually Transformative Events.

During the summer between my junior and senior year of high school I suddenly realized that I was falling into the same rut my friends were falling into. We all had girlfriends with whom we were too serious, and it was obvious to me that I needed to change, because if I did not I would do as everyone else who was in the rut was doing, marry soon after graduation, live in a little box house with a lovely garden, picket fence and have 2.5 children and a damn poodle dog.....that was not for me.

The first thing I did to facilitate the change was break up with lovely little Johnni Lou, sell my horse, sell my pickup and move to the place of my birth in northern New Mexico to live with my grandparents and finish my senior year there. Things had become too hectic where I was. I was becoming a wild drunken party animal who hated school and anything and everything to do with it. A teacher had once told me that I was so stupid that I would never amount to anything, and so I went about proving him correct. My grades were so bad that I almost flunked out of the 11th grade. I barely made it, but my best friend Dale faced having to do the 11th grade over again the next year.

In the area of southern New Mexico where I grew up, dancing was the major form of recreation on a Saturday night, and so we were at a dance somewhere within a two hundred and fifty mile radius of home on any given weekend. I knew that I had to change when I woke up one Sunday morning with a blinding hangover and not knowing where I was. I eventually remembered that I had driven to a dance in a school house, in Lake Valley the previous night, but how the hell did I end up in the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico sixty miles away and what happened to my truck.

I eventually found my truck in reasonably good shape, and drove home, but this event was the definitive moment in which I determined to change my life and make the move north. I started my senior year of high school determined to improve my life and I soon found that it was one of the best decisions of my life. The high school in Roy, New Mexico had good teachers who cared about me, and took the time with me to figure out how to teach me. My grades shot up for the first time since I was in grade school, and I felt contentment for the first time in years. I graduated about 8th in a class of eighteen, but at least I graduated.

The little cowtown of Roy sits at six thousand feet just east of the Canadian River Canon right in the middle of the Kiowa Grasslands, and it has to be the coldest, windiest, loneliest place on the planet, at least that is how it seemed to me at the time. That winter I worked for Babe Kid on his ranch in Burro Canon on the weekends, and became friends with Louis Hughes, Magin and Selso Martinez and many others, old cowboys long dead, who respected me and taught me to respect them.

When I look back upon that move, that drastic move (it seemed so at the time) I made was probably one of the most spiritually tranformative events of my life, and I thank God that I was inspired to do it, otherwise I doubt that I would have had the adventurous life I have had, not afraid to make changes in my life. Not afraid to color outside of the lines, not afraid to be seen as different or controversial. I could have ended up like my friends, who when I have met them since are unhappily married to their high school girl friends, or they are on their second or third marriages, still live in a little box house, the garden is overgrown, still have a delapidated picket fence, 2.5 children and a damn poodle dog that needs grooming. That could have been me!