Blowing in the Wind at the Horse Camp!

My new computer is set up so that the first page clues me in to what month and day it is, and the local weather conditions. The trouble is it gives me the weather in Happy, Texas. Today I fiddled around and finally brought up the weather conditions here in Boulevard, California. This morning’s report said it was 39 degrees with a 5 mph wind at 5 a.m. That might have been true down in Campo where the weather is often peculiar, but not up here 2000 feet higher up the mountain. My goosebumps said it was in the high forties or low fifties, and the wind was at least 15 mph. It’s a lot stronger now, at noon, and predicted to go to 55-mph gusts before tomorrow. I let some of my most adventurous cats out at 10 a.m., and their scampering looked more like they were being blown about by the wind. None of them stayed out very long. They would rather sit comfortably on my bed looking out the window at the blue jays being battered by the wind.

I found out when dawn broke that it was not coyotes, but horses, that kept the dogs barking much of the night. There were four scruffy mustangs in our dooryard when I let Smokey out. He charged at them outraged that they would trespass on his territory, but they just shambled on without even giving him a glance. They belong to the Kumeyaay cousins from Mexico who are living in a reservation house across the arroyo temporarily. They have a huge stack of bales of alfalfa covered with a blue tarp, so I don’t know why their horses are so thin. Allowing them free range isn’t very helpful because we haven’t had rain that amounted to more than sprinkles since about last January. There isn’t much for them to graze on.

Going back to the daily report of Della, my computer, on Happy, Texas, I looked it up this morning. It is a place in the Texas panhandle, where long ago cowboys with a thirsty herd of longhorns, discovered water in a draw. They named it Happy Draw. In 1891 a rancher named Hugh Currie established a ranch, a post office and a stagecoach station, and people came there to live. They had to live somewhere, and the land was probably cheap. They shortened the name to Happy. But the railroad did, as railroads are wont to do; they laid their tracks two miles away, so the town had to be moved to the tracks. That was in 1906. Soon they had the Plains Lumber and Feed Store, White’s General Store, a grain elevator and a water tower, as well as a whole lot of people, including a mayor and two commissioners. By 1940 the town had grown to 576 people, and by 2000 the population had grown to 647 lucky folks.

So that is probably more than you wanted to know about Happy, Texas. Oh yes, this morning it was cloudy, the temperature was 60 degrees and the wind was coming from the south at 18 mph.

Back up here in the mountains east of San Diego, the wind is whistling and howling around corners, tossing oak tree branches wildly, and battering the metal awnings on my trailer. I have already battened the hatches, and we will just hunker down and ride it out, while reading, watching TV and cruising the Web.