Working on Mule Time

My mules will stand patiently in front of the wagon for hours every day with eyes forward but ears turned back awaiting my instructions. They will move a little and stop as the quail hunters move through the woods, all the while appearing oblivious to the shotguns blasts and the skittering dogs that run beneath them. All I need to do is rattle the reins and say a gentle “gitty up” for them to move and utter a “whoa” with a tug on the reins for them to stop. It all works like a machine until about four o’clock every afternoon. That is when Louise, the right-side mule, begins to act up whenever we stop. It starts with the toss of her head, progresses to the stomp of a foot, and culminates when she reaches over and tries to bite her partner, Thelma, on the neck. Thelma reacts by squealing and moving away—something that is difficult while harnessed to the wagon. I reach forward and flick Louise on the rump with my modified fishing rod and say a loud “Quit”. Both mules will stand still for a while, but after less than a minute Louise will toss her head and the process begins again.

I love my mules, but not in the late afternoon when I recall the thoughts of Harry S. Truman, who apparently knew a thing or two about mules when he said: My favorite animal is the mule. He has more horse sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating – and he knows when to stop working. We are supposed to stop working every day at about 4:45 so we can take our guests back to the house for dinner. Louise, it appears, is on a different clock. She wants to stop working on her own time—which is apparently at about four o’clock.

Thelma and Louise are a couple of beautiful blondes with long ears, large rumps, and oversized personalities. Thelma stands stoically every morning while I place her in harness. Louise, on the other hand, will occasionally lift a hind hoof as I am brushing her and threaten to kick me into next week. There may be nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule, as Mark Twain suggested, but I am doing my best not to receive my first one.

Louise, left, and Thelma

When they are in-harness and ready to pull and I give the command to “gitty up”, Louise jerks forward to get the wagon started and that’s the only work she does all day. The rest of the time, it is Thelma’s harness that is taut from pulling and it is Thelma that arrives back at the barn at the end of the day covered in sweat. Louise is as fresh as a vine-ripened tomato—no sweat, no heavy breathing, and eager to get out to the pasture for her evening graze.

Thelma and Louise are about seventeen years old, which puts them in their prime in mule years. The mules on the other wagon are each twenty seven and, with a life expectancy of thirty years or more, are nearing the end of their wagon-pulling days. That is why we are breaking in some new mules—a couple of light grey, short-haired, seven year old males I have taken to calling Bert and Ernie.

When they are pulling the wagon, Bert works on my left and is the steady one—much like Thelma. Ernie, on the other hand, is skittish. He refuses to walk through the wagon shed where we park the wagons at the end of the day. When I attempt to drive through the open shed so I can park the wagon, he suspiciously eyeballs the coiled hose, the garbage can, and the pallet of supplies on our right side and he eases to his left pushing Bert out of line. I have to stop the wagon and have someone pull the mules forward and into position. One evening as we were driving in at the end of the day, we encountered a basketball-sized pile of Spanish moss lying in the middle of the road. The horses stepped over it without hesitation but Ernie saw it before I did and tilted his head, looking at it nervously. The nearer we got, the higher he raised his head until he began to push Bert to the left into the tall grass at the edge of the road. No amount of pressure on the reins could pull them back in line. Thankfully there were no trees or ditches in our new path and I was able to wrangle them back into the road when the “danger” was safely passed.

Bert and Ernie came in at different times so they are not a pair of pulling mules that can work

Ernie, left, and Bert

together—at least not yet. This is most evident when I ask them to “gitty up” and they pull sideways in different directions. If I am not careful, they will even begin to back up. Eventually, after a lot of persuasion on my part, one of them will jerk forward and another uncertain journey will begin.

I view us as a team, my mules and me, with the three of us doing our part. I need them to pull the wagon as much as they need me to guide them. I get paid to drive a wagon and they also get paid—in food, water, safety and a life more at ease in the pasture than occasionally pulling a wagon.

When all is going well, I suppose driving a mule wagon looks effortless as we glide peacefully through the fields. But there are times when I wonder if Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had me in mind when he quipped, you will never appreciate the potentialities of the English language until you have heard a southern mule driver search the soul of a mule.

With Louise and the new boys, I have certainly used some colorful language when searching the soul of my mules—if there is a soul to search.

A peaceful pace

Being the driver of a mule-drawn wagon on a quail hunting plantation affords me plenty of time to think. Sometimes my thoughts are directed toward the job at hand—the mules, the horses, the dogs, and the hunters—and sometimes my thoughts are drawn to the conversations behind me on the wagon—conversations that I treat as confidential. And then there are the long periods of quiet that remind me of the quote often attributed to Winnie the Pooh author, A.A. Milne: “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits…”.

At the end of every hunt, we have a fifteen or twenty minute ride back to the house. The dogs are back in the wagon and the retriever is lying on the seat beside me as I follow the horse riders. The only sound is the conversation of the guests, the jingle of the mule harnesses, and the occasional bobwhite quail whistling in the tall grass. The pace is slow enough for a person to walk and I have never heard a guest complain about the length of our ride. In fact, people often remark on how peaceful it is and how they can feel their blood pressure going down.

Our wagon is like an old fashioned covered wagon with its heavy wooden body and tall, spoked (albeit rubber-tired) wheels. It is not a stretch to imagine a time when this type of transportation was the norm. My Grandma Porter told me of her grandparent’s trip from the Florida panhandle to Nacogdoches, Texas on a covered wagon in the mid-1800’s—a trip of about six hundred miles. Her grandmother walked the entire trip behind the wagon knitting socks for the men-folk. According to Google Maps, I could drive that trip in just under ten hours. My great, great grandma’s walk, at about three miles an hour, would probably have taken several months.

I wonder what it would be like for me to drive to work in the mornings on my wagon. I would not need to worry about running into deer or hogs. I wouldn’t be checking my speedometer or gas gauge. Of course the drive would last about three hours instead of fifteen minutes. It would be like commuting from Albany to Atlanta—with no ITunes or satellite radio. With all of that time, I could solve a lot of the world’s problems.

The people who hunt with us are busy people. They spend plenty of time on their mobile phones making deals and staying in touch with their offices. I even had one guest suggest that we make the wagon a “mobile hotspot” so he would have better phone reception. But on the ride to the house at the end of the day, all that seems to change. The phones stay in their pockets as their conversations steer away from business and toward family, good times, and the beauty that surrounds them.

In his Zen Habits blog, author Leo Babauta offers us Ten Essential Rules for Slowing Down and Enjoying Life More. The first five are to do less, to be present, to disconnect, to focus on people, and to appreciate nature. That about covers the experience of spending twenty minutes on a mule wagon. It certainly gives me time to think about such things as how the dog handler controls the pointers with a whistle and a “whoa”, why the retriever races out to find a quail with such enthusiasm, and what—if anything—the mules are thinking about as they stand immobile awaiting my command to “gitty-up”. I’ll let you know when I work out some answers. In the meantime, I think I’ll just sits.