Many years ago, I could be found every Friday afternoon at a barn in Hamblen, Hawkins, or Jefferson County with twenty or so other like-minded rednecks of my own age. We were studying Farm Animal Management via the Ag Program at Walters State, under the direction and supervision of Roger D. Brooks.

Farm Animal Management was a really good way to get killed. Perhaps I exaggerate. No, as I think back on it with a clear mind, really, I’m not. What would happen is we would all go to our morning classes, maybe skipping the last one in favor of some lunch at Sagebrush before heading out into the wilds. I was 18 (Farm Animal Management II was offered as an apprenticeship after completing the initial one the previous spring) but there were a few guys in class that were 21, because they were having too good a time to bother graduating and going to work full time. These were our apprentices. They had grown up punching cattle, riding horses, castrating everything from bull calves to the unlucky barn cat. They piled out of dented, scratched, and faded Chevrolet pickups with enough dirt in the floorboard and on the dash to send out for a soil sample. They dipped tobacco, they cussed, they wore starched Wranglers and sported belt buckles won at regional rodeos. They were boisterous, and witty, and quick on their feet. They wielded hot shots and shook paddles at aggressive cattle and scrambled up walls like they were half lizard when charged. They were the closest things to cowboys this Seymour girl had ever seen outside of a rinky-dink rodeo. And I was a little bit in love with every one of them.

Their job, it turned out, was to teach us how to work cattle. Their priority was to keep me alive.

Because I was “the horse girl”. I was the one who wore high boots and breeches on Monday so I’d be ready for my lesson that afternoon. I could change leads flawlessly from the back of my elegant blood bay Saddlebred, and side pass, and post a trot without stirrups. They recognized my ability in the saddle, and didn’t care a bit to let me ride their horses or tell the instructors that I could be trusted with the greenest or meanest horse on the place. I carried a cell phone and antibacterial gel in my pocket at all times, earning me the nickname “Miss Antibacterial” when they weren’t calling me something else. Usually something like, “WATCH OUT, AMY!!!” (Let me remind you, cell phones were a novelty in 1997, very few had them. But my car wasn’t trustworthy and I was driving back and forth to Morristown every day). I was pretty much a city girl by their standards, growing up in the suburbs of Knoxville and riding English instead of Western discipline. I was the one who was aware cattle needed shots, but that was something better left to the vet or my uncle. I knew that pigs underwent the knife at a few days old to rid them of their testosterone before it tainted the meat…but to tell me I’d be the one holding that scalpel? While the pig squealed? I was the one who was going to trim hooves on a goat that had contracted foot rot two weeks prior? Oh, God….

But I laid in there and eventually won their trust and their respect as I got squirted with blood time and time again from de-horning Holstein calves at Manley’s. I much preferred to be the burner, even though that smell would permeate my hair and wouldn’t hardly wash out for days on end. They watched cows sling snot directly into my face as they tried to jerk their way free from the headgate as I punched in their eartags or pushed meds into their necks. I even ate some Smoky Mountain Oysters at the annual calf fry. My true test came during the team ropings we put on at the Expo Center that spring of 1998. I had to wrap the steers’ horns before practice (and unwrap them at the end, when they were covered in manure). We could run them into the chute, but you couldn’t catch their head so you just had to go easy and be gentle. I ended up learning every one of their personalities and naming them accordingly. I especially remember Freckles. He was my favorite: strawberry colored with a sweet temperament. He was a straight tracker, too, and never one that got scored (that’s when you turn him out of the chute not to be roped. Culled, if you will). I would climb up on the board a couple of feet above the steer, watch for the header’s nod, and turn him loose. And thus, the “HAAAEEEY!!!” was born. Yes, if you ever got my voicemail prior to 2014, you are familiar with that particular greeting. There were a few instances where I had to bail off my perch due to some rank steer pitching a ring eyed fit, or a new horse in a wreck when confronted with all the action for the first time. But for three years, it was me there, tripping cattle every Tuesday night during the spring months for those early years that came to be known as the Winter Horse Series. Back then, we just did it for fun.

I made a lot of new friends on that Ag campus. I met a lot of people that I still communicate with today as both friends and work colleagues. College may not give you the experience you’ll utilize every day in a work environment, but it will teach you to be a better communicator and it will show you the importance of networking. That is, if you do it right. If you fully immerse yourself into meeting new people and devoting yourself to new experiences. If you’ll say yes before they even ask.

It was during the spring of 1998 that I met a tall brunette named Misty. She was a barrel racer and had a plan to major in Ag Ed. I had a beer habit and no plan further than Friday night. Her path was clearly defined, she just had trouble implementing it because it was so much more fun to ride horses than write term papers or analyze calculus. I had no path, I was wandering around in the woods, trying to find my way to the lake to go swimming or fishing, I’d decide when I got there. In the meantime, I’d eat pickles straight from the jar. And I’d write everybody’s English papers for them because it took me literally thirty minutes to turn out 1000 immaculate words on any given subject.

Naturally, we became fast friends and were pretty much inseparable for the next fourteen years. We went everywhere together: a John Lyons clinic over in Asheville where we ate McDonalds pancakes every morning because that’s all there was to eat, Round Robin Ropings and barrel races all over tarnation, every Taco Bell and Walmart in East Tennessee, a spur-of-the-moment trip to Ohio to pick up a massive drill bit, and a very memorable trip in Patsy through the gorge to a state Walking Horse show. We were on our way to her daddy’s to ride one afternoon, hummin’ along in her gold Ford dually, the lemon, when a Volkswagon bug decided to jump the median and go flipping over the windshield and across the cab of the truck, missing the trailer full of horses by a centimeter or two.

I saw God that day.

I also saw terror in the eyes of the Beetle driver just before I saw the undercarriage.

It was Misty’s bright idea to expand the team ropings into a full-on schedule of horse events, to include a Speed Show. That’s a glorified barrel race that lasts all day, and all night, and into the next day, for those of you who are uninformed. “All” we had to do was line up some sponsors for the added money, get word out (remember, this was waaaaaay before the dawn of social media and email was a fairly new concept, so we were using the actual telephone and putting up flyers at every Ag related business we could think of), find somebody to drag the arena that actually knew what they were doing, enlist people to sign in riders and take entry money, tally payout, set barrels, and notate times. Oh, and to announce. But Misty was president, and I was VP, so what was I if not a lackey? So we trooped around to every western store, feed store, tack store, and bank that had a president who farmed, to beg, borrow, and steal. And that first year we got $2500 for added money. Which was damn good, if I do say so myself. Actually, now that I think about it, I believe we were shooting for $2500 and got $3K. At any rate, not too shabby.

But that turned out to be the easy part. There had never been an event like this in the Expo Center since they’d opened a few years prior. They had a motorcross, and some tractor pulls, and a rodeo or two, but nothing where the dirt was getting dug out in the same exact spot over and over and over. We calculated that the average depth of the dirt in the arena was about 24″. Misty had way more experience with this sort of thing than me, and if I had a dollar for every time we were at a show and I heard some barrel racer bitching that the “ground ain’t no count”, well, I certainly wouldn’t be working for a living today. It got so bad I even caught myself saying it every now and then, when warranted. But what could we do besides fret and pray?

It got so bad, the closer to the day we got, that Misty couldn’t eat. And that’s bad. We loved to eat. I need to tell you about the time we nearly burnt her house down fixing waffles on the griddle. She couldn’t sleep for worrying about somebody sliding into that first barrel and the horse hitting concrete and skidding and breaking a cannon bone or snapping a pastern. Which, in turn, would, of course, throw the rider, or possibly crush the rider, and then there’s that litany of problems eventually culminating in a lawsuit. Of course, we had a release of liability form, but you know how much those are worth.

I, myself, was more concerned with showing up to Chemistry every day to earn my C, and holding it together enough to keep my job selling dishes. I was sick of thinking about all the what-ifs. It was just as much a possibility that we wouldn’t have but a handful of people show up and dirt would be a non-issue. There were a million different scenarios, each one more fantastic than the next, but at the same time completely plausible. Because with horse people….well, you never can tell.

The day of the show dawns and it was full throttle all the livelong day. As the announcer, I was in the catbird seat at the top of the stairs overlooking the arena. I couldn’t see the hundreds of trailers filling the lot. I couldn’t see the lines of women of all ages wearing serious expressions under their big hair and bigger hats. I didn’t know that this would be the single largest money maker for any club at Walters State to date. And probably for the Expo Center, truth be told.

We sang the anthem, the Fawbush twins and I, I called for the barrels to be set, they picked a drag number, we tested the timers, and I called for our first runner.

And all day long it went like this. “Patty Ferguson with a 15.293, 15.293. Jessica Grady you’re up, Lauren Wells you’re on deck, Sadie Sims, you’re in the hole, Marcy Thomas, you be thinkin’ about it.” I drank Mountain Dews, I ate hot dogs and Little Debbies, and I recited times and names. And finally, finally, at about four in the morning, it was over. We got everybody paid. All us students were dead on our feet. People were asleep in the stands under blankets.

I marched down the stairs and straight across the arena, my destination the third barrel, where they twist out of that final turn and dig for home. I squatted at the base of the barrel and scooped some of that dirt into a mason jar I’d brought along for that purpose. And into it, I dropped a note.

“To ye of little faith,” it began. It spoke of late nights and and fervent pleas. I reminded her that the dirt held our blood, sweat, and tears. It had been prayed over, cussed, and kicked. It had been shook out of our hair, washed from our hands, and picked from our nose. It shaped us. In the end, it was the dirt that bound us.

I tied a bow made of baler twine around the seal and I presented it to Misty, our Ag Club President, who had pulled this monumental event off. And we all sat down and cried from sheer relief that it was over.

We learned a lot that first year. We learned that people get tired of setting barrels real fast. We learned that horses will bust through open panels (you need to tarp them and sometimes that doesn’t even work), we learned that getting a warm-up arena is vital, we learned to divide the show into two days. And most importantly, we learned that you won’t hit concrete. The dirt would hold.

It’s now 20 years later, and it’s known as the Winter 2020 Horse Series, but the name is stuck in my brain. Misty is now the professor of all these agriculture classes at Walters State. She’s now presiding at the front of Tech 130, watching the girls in the middle row borrow highlighters and lip gloss. She sees them sending texts to the lanky boy across the room instead of passing a note. They don’t go to Sagebrush, but sometimes they go to IHOP after class. They don’t play Rook in the lounge for hours on end, but maybe they do go shoot their new bows. She teaches them how to give injections, how to palpate, how not to get kicked in the teeth or run over. She shows them how to watch for the almost imperceptible nod that her best friend of many years excelled at. She coaches them at how to call times and names clearly. She doesn’t have the group of steady cowboys in every class now, they’re all green, but eager to learn. They’re the Future Farmers of America. And once she gets them trained up and they’ve scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind, a few come to Sevier County and stop by the USDA field office to see about getting a little help. And there they’ll meet me, the other girl from Wally High who remembers all too well the good ol’ days. In my office on the bottom row of a bookshelf, I have my textbooks from Animal Science, Horse Management, and, of course, Soil Science. In Misty’s office in the Tech Building at Walters State sets a jar of dirt. I’ll let you guess where it’s from.