I Found You, Grandpa Bill

In the San Jacinto Mountains © Erin Faith Allen

Rattlesnake warning signs everywhere. Thank goodness for these hiking boots.

Footsteps crunching over dry and sacred earth. Air rich with the smell of high noon sun scorching everything in sight, and the cicadas singing along.

It's hot as hell, and my heart is exploding.

I smile.

I'm here, Grandpa. I found you.

It seems my Grandpa Bill didn't really fit inside boxes, and spent his life trying to get free.

On his official documents from World War II, it says his last place of employment before the war was a working ranch that doubled as a holiday lodge. His job was entertainer. He rode bucking horses and sang cowboy songs for guests on holiday.

This seems fitting for the man who hopped a hobo train as a teenager during the Great Depression, riding from West Virginia to Los Angeles to make a new life for himself. He toured California with his cowboy band. He was a gifted musician and an eccentric man all around. I can picture him easily: 5'10, blond hair and blue eyes, cowboy hat tilted back, chin lifting as he hit the high notes.

I have been searching for the location and history of the ranch for several years. To finally walk these grounds high up in the San Jacinto Mountains was a personal quest. Not much is left. The lodge where my Grandfather sang and played his guitar has left its fireplace and partial walls behind, standing at 5,000 feet in the mountain air. I stood in the ruins and tried to hear his voice echoing through what remained of the timber-lined walls.

I think I did.

From up here he would drop down to the Pacific Theater with the 7th Infantry Division, fighting in hand-to-hand combat against the Japanese across the islands, earning a Combat Infantryman Badge.

Life would never be the same. The war was pretty hard on my Grandpa Bill.

He came home and had two sons and two daughters. One of his sons he named Bill, who is my father. He would also go to war, spending time in Vietnam. War was hard on my dad, too.

Today the ranch site is a wild horse rescue center. The mustangs here are descendants of cavalry horses. They too have war running through their veins.

The horses are paired with veterans returning from combat. Neither the horse nor the veteran is broken or expected to conform. The wild spirit of the horse is trusted and honored. The soul of the combat veteran is too. The woman from the program told me that what happens when you simply let them run together defies description and language.

I couldn't help but wonder if the pasture where the mustangs run is the same ground where my Grandpa Bill once rode bucking horses in 1943.

He was kind of a bucking horse himself, come to think of it.

I hope wherever he is, he is running free.

Love you, Grandpa Bill. Always have, always will.