A Horseback Ride With Ferlinghetti

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Nostalgia: The Flying Y, Ralph the Crow and Billy the Goat

In the early 1970s I lived at the Flying Y Ranch with Scott, Sandi and Linda. The Flying Y was a horse boarding ranch up the hill in Mill Valley, near the Four Corners area of the Panoramic Highway, above Muir Beach and Muir Woods, on the south slope of Mount Tamalpais,

The Flying Y consisted of 11 acres of hillside, the occasional eucalyptus tree, a tottering goat shack and a three bedroom home that was apparently designed and constructed by the same firm that built the goat shack. You got there by navigating a steep, unpaved road, (Bayview Drive), a good portion of which turned into a sinkhole in the winter.

Just across the house from the top of the road there was an old dairy barn where we kept the horses who merited stalls. Next to that there was a horse riding area ringed entirely by discarded automobile tires. On a hot day the tires heated up. The scent of the hot rubber mixed with the omnipresent and pungent stink of horseshit created an unforgettable summer boquet, especially so since the ranch was in Marin County.

In winter, to fill in the Sinkhole it we'd throw in rocks, downed tree limbs, rotted lumber, used straw, and, now and then (if the hole was really hungry) a car tire. But the Sinkhole... like a runway model, she had no bottom.

Those visitors who knew enough to drive around the hole on their way up to the house lived to attempt to visit us another day.

Those who didn't... we'll, we'll never know what happened to them. They still might be driving around somewhere in the center of the earth, in a wet hell of clay, muck and lead, trying to figure out if they had taken a wrong turn (which they really hadn't).

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When we moved into the Flying Y we also inherited an ancient, shaggy, oversized, off-white goat named, with a singular lack of originality, Billy.

Billy lived in a decrepit one goat shack within spitting distance of the bedroom window, just past the septic tank. Billy had the disposition of a Stoic, a stomach made of iron suitable for digesting everything from bramble to stones. Also, a taste for poetry.

I know about Billy's digestive prowess and editorial affinities because:

1) I painted his shack a cheery hue of bone white once, and by the next morning he had licked the entire structure back to bare plywood;
2) I was in my twenties then, living the dream as a cowboy/poet with Eastern literary tastes, and Billy was my editor.

The way it worked was, I'd write a poem, go out to Billy's shack, read the poem to him, then submit it to his literary tastes..

As near as I can figure, Billy ate the poems he liked. He left uneaten the ones that didn't excite his interest or, uhm,. appetite.

He like most of the poems.

They are, unfortunately, lost forever as a result.

Either that or they were eventually turned into foodstuff for the sinkhole

Billy finally finally became older than the hills, and just about as mobile. When his last days approached, he was infirm, and in great pain.

I called Animal Control to have him "put down".
The officer arrived, listened to my explanation, made an accurate assessment of the situation, and then, to my utter surprise and shock, pulled out a 22 and shot Billy (more than once) in the head.

It was horrible.

I think they do things differently now.

I wrote a poem about the experience.
One of our horse boarders read it, and said that she thought I was"using" Billy just to write a poem. She didn't know that EVERYTHING in one's life is "fair game" to speak, compose or reflect upon... but I wasn't experienced enough back then to tell her this.

I wished that Billy had been around after I had written the poem about him so that I could have had HIS impression of it.

I like to think he would have eaten it.
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We also had a wild talking crow named Ralph who would come to visit us regularly. He didn't have an extensive vocabulary, but the fact that he had a vocabulalry at all was most impressive.

His vocabulary consisted of the word "ralph".

When Ralph landed on the fence by the North Forty- I mean the North Four- I'd go over to him and listen while he poured out the chronicle of his day, and the outsized hopes, dreams and aspirations he somehow managed to cram into his tiny little crow heart. And he did so using just his one word, which he combined with an astonishing array of gestures and intonations. Just so, can one sound become an encyclopedia or a symphony.

And there were horses... there was endless herd of horses, each unique.

There was Sister Mercy the wild quarter horse who would gallop off a cliff if she were given free rein; and leapin' Cinnamon; and statuesque, dumb Lucky, a Thoroughbred, descended from the Great Man) War; and Toad, and Babe, and Awahee Brave, Sandi's noble, bright-blanketed Appaloosa; and there was my own horse, Tennyson, a roan Tennessee Walker with a splashy white blaze and three white socks.

Tennyson was originally named Tennessee Sun before I bought him. He was good friends with Mocha, the floppy eared Toggenberg goat who inherited Billy's shack, but not Billy's position as editor.

Mocha was more of a prose goat.

Mocha loved to ride with Tennnyson and me as we cantered across the Diaz, dropped down the valley near the slopes of Mount Tam and trotted through Tinkerbelle's Ranch, on the way to Muir Beach.

(Mocha also loved escaping, butting his way into the house, and eating cut roses.)

Tennyson was the best and only horse I ever owned, if such a thing is possible as "owning" an animal..
After several years he came down with cancer of the eye, and I had to sell him to pay for the operation.
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When your age is older than 19 and maybe just a little older than thirty, there is little mercy that the Universe will allow you. There are a lot more sinkholes than magical crows. There are numberless Mochas who will butt into your place and ravage your cut roses.

For me, in my twenties, it was an age when I knew more animals than people.

For Liz, John, Tara, Chrissy, Sue, Brendan, Cheryl... what is it?

Rilke wrote:
"The important thing is not to know your destination, but to live each moment into the future as you are now: and there the meaning will be clear to you."

(What Rilke really said is probably much different, but I'm trying to remember a quote from many years ago, and this is probably as close to it as I can come...)
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Gratuitous tidbits on the Flying Y:

The ranch had its literary side: I had met Lawrence Ferlinghetti at a feed lot in Point Reyes. He accepted my invitation to come riding with Linda and me.

Sometimes we'd ride through "The Pipeline", a heavily forested trail, speckled with hobbit-inspired houses leading near the summit of Mount Tamalpais, the silhouette of which resembles a Sleeping Princess, they say.

OK, a Sleeping Princess wearing for trees and boulders, a dirt road here and there, a spaceship observatory for a crown, and little else. A Sleeping Princess with a HUGE forehead and a receding chin: but they DON"T say that.

Once, Ferlinghetti and I rode our horses down to Green Gulch, a Zen community near Mill Valley where his friend Richard Baker was Roshi.

Usually Green Gulch was a quiet, rather isolated place to visit. But today the place was guarded by several official- looking uniformed guards who were wearing purple berets, and armed with "Walky Talkies".

"Wow," Ferlinghetti exclaimed, "It looks like the Buddhist Police have taken over. I wonder wha..."

Just then a look of chagrined enlightenment crossed his face.
Like Tonto and the Lone Ranger stumbling into an Apache birthday party, we had ridden into the ceremony to commemorate the death of Alan Watts, the teacher,writer and complex explorer of the human spiritual condition.

Watts somehow ended up juggling the Dharma, the Book, and the Bottle, with mixed results.

But now, by Buddhist measures, his time in the Bardo Realm was sending, and the moment when he would experience his karmic rebirth was at hand....

And the ceremony recognizing this was By Invitation Only, in the real of humans.

Ferlinghetti and I were the only ones to be allowed in on horseback.
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One day he surprised Linda and me by offering us the keys to his getaway place in Big Sur This is the same location where Kerouac once stayed, terrified and paranoid of the cabin's spectacular isolation....

(To Be Continued...)

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Comments

[Kim Combs]

James the Talking Crow
I grew up in Mill Valley in the 60s and 70s. There was a talking crow that visited all of the elementary schools at lunchtime. He would perch on the baseball backstop and squawk "My name is James. I am a crow. I can talk. Can you fly?" That is all he would say and he would always say it in that order. As kids we loved it and fed him all the bread crusts he could eat. He would visit, Old Mill, Park, and Tam Valley, but I especially remember him at Edna McGuire middle school about 1967/68. All the kids who grew up in Mill Valley at hat time would undoubtably remember him. Kim

[Gianna Wills]

Riding at The Flying Y
I to rode there. I used to ride Dixie. Used to ride there with Mrs. Yates. Took lessons and rode around Mt Tam. It was the best time ever!!!!! I rember Linda and Sandi. I still have a picture of Sandi on her horse. Rode Lucky on and off too. Royce the race horse, Tonka, Tinac, Robbie, Blanche's horse. There was even an album cover for the Doobie Brothers shot there with some of the horses. One of the best times of my life!