Shared by Grace Worm, Barn Counselor, Summer 2015 and former camper.

This love story began as an email, with Emma Bundy telling me that I would probably be a barn and ropes course counselor during program areas.

I was ecstatic. I was afraid she was going to tell me that they needed someone to run the garden (I kill every plant I touch) or arts and crafts (I would be like a kid in an office supply shop). I had grown up riding horses, but it had been years since I had been on a ride. Lessons are expensive and despite the stereotypes about Texas, there were no barns near where I had lived in Austin, nor in the National Parks of Utah. I had been volunteering with rescue horses but this hardly made me feel prepared to spend a summer leading kids on trail rides.

I arrived at camp with my car packed full of all my worldly possessions and a nervous excitement to see if the place I remembered from my childhood could possibly live up to my memory of it. Over the week of training, I met my fellow barn counselors and grew more and more nervous as I listened to their horse resumes. They had been lucky enough to own their own horses for years (I grew up in a military family and a horse wouldn’t fit in the moving truck) and were still showing and competing into their university years. It seemed like forever until we got a chance to go down to the barn and actually meet the horses we would be working with. I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to go down to the barn, I had only been told I would “probably” be a barn counselor. But I was too excited to miss the opportunity, so I made my way down to the barn on the hill to see what it was all about. A short woman with a huge smile and a mischievous  wink in her eye introduced herself as Casey, the barn director and our fearless leader, boss, horse guru, and friend for the summer. She gave us a stack of stapled papers titled “The Horsemanship Program” and started going over our duties. Casey had only made four copies since she, like me, hadn’t know what “probably barn counselor Grace” meant. But the smell of the horses and the thought of working with them every day was very quickly convincing me that “probably barn counselor” meant “most definitely barn counselor unless someone physically kicked me out of the barn.”

That day we got the famous butt tour of the horses. They were eating their hay during afternoon feeding and so our introduction to them was limited to Casey calling out seemingly endless amounts of names while we all struggled to recognize one brown horse butt form another brown horse butt. I remember thinking that it was impossible. I was never going to learn all of the counselors’ names, and then all of the hundred plus campers’ names when they came next week AND be able to remember and distinguish one brown butt’s name from another brown butt’s name. Casey then outlined our duties, first of which included morning poop scooping every morning and 5am feeding during our assigned day of the week.

Over the next weeks those mornings became some of my favorite times at camp. Campers moved in and made themselves at home at the Bar 717, I started going on and then eventually leading trail rides. And on the rare occasion when I left the barn, I learned how to help people through facing their fears on the ropes course. But the mornings were my special times at the barn. I started getting to know my fellow barn counselors, I could even tell the difference between Cheyenne and Sinead, and I was still working hard to learn all of the horses’ names. The ones that were different colored or went out on rides a lot came first and then I started to learn little tricks from Casey to keep the others straight. Campers came in droves to help scoop poop then disappeared as the week went on and camp began to wear them out. Still, I learned in leaps. Which horses were sick, who liked to escape (I’m looking at you Picante), who had funny issues with their feet, who was a top dog, who disliked who? At the same time I got to know myself and my fellow barn counselors. Who were best friends (Michaela and Surprise), who liked to drag, who liked to lead, who would run out of Vespers if they thought a horse was in trouble (Sinead), who was a western gal (Cheyenne), who could jump, who could recognize when a horse was hurt or grumpy, who liked to meditate in the barn (Izzy), and the boss who was always there to spot trouble a mile away (Casey). At the same time I was learning the trails, how to put campers with a horse that would suit them, which other counselors could be depended upon to help us in those early mornings (Lewis, Kyle, Evan) and which campers had that special horse sense.

I was watching two parts of camp come together in a beautiful way, I was getting to know campers and the horses and the barn counselors better as individuals and then I was watching them interact as a team. I watched older campers, shy when they first came into the barn, teaching younger campers how to pick feet or put on a saddle. I watched campers wake up morning after morning to help us get the horses ready, even when they didn’t have to. I saw the wonder in someone’s eyes at trotting for the first time in a lesson and I saw my fellow barn counselors grow increasingly confident in teaching those lessons. It was like the barn was a special little island on camp where you could learn a new language and complete new way of being.

And then one morning, I woke up groggy and cold to drag myself down to the barn and it happened. I looked around and I knew every single one of the horse’s names. And not without  thinking hard, I knew them without trying. And I looked at my fellow barn counselors and found that I knew them too. I knew what made them laugh, and I knew that I could trust them with whatever we were doing that day. And I knew like me, they had come to love the horses and place we were working with.  Somehow, along the way, I had gone from “probably” being a barn counselor to finding a home within a home at my life at the Bar 717. I went from not knowing any of the horses’ butts to counting them as my friends and my colleagues. I had already learned so much, and I never stopped learning the whole rest of the summer.

A last word: There are countless moments and campers and counselors that were special and incredibly important to me this summer outside of the barn. But the barn counselors are a special community within a community, and I am SO proud of the hard work and profound effort they put into taking care of the horses and campers with the utmost respect and love this summer. This is my special thanks to the horses and my horse girls.