2007_10_01_archive

Wild Horses for the Soul

Mustangs on the Mountain

Destined for slaughter, a herd of wild horses find reprieve -- and a

home -- near Wye.

If you've never been in the midst of a large group of horses, you

should try it. Even if you've been around a solitary horse or two,

even if you've ridden in the past, nothing quite prepares you for the

experience: Several tons of flesh crowding in on matchstick legs,

their coats rippling with color in the sun and their backs -- if you

could somehow freeze the muscle inside from its unending, tidal, fluid

movement -- like loamy hills. They smell of dust and straw and that

singular, not-quite-unpleasant horse smell -- musty and wholly animal;

strange to anyone not used to it.

If that wasn't enough, these horses, kept on the 40 acres of John

Houston Eccleston "Excy" Johnston's nonprofit Wingspur Wild Horse

Sanctuary near Wye, are about as wild as you'll find on this side of

the Rockies. Captured by the state of Nevada in the high desert, just

weeks away from a European or Asian dinner plate when Johnston bought

them off a "killer buyer" after getting a tip from a mustang rescue

organization, they still have the great majority of their wildness

about them: their instinctual hierarchy; their wariness; their own

language of lip trills and eye rolls and head shakes that only they

completely understand. For a city boy, standing among them -- the

horses snorting hot breath over my tape recorder and trying to eat the

notebook out of my hand -- is to be simultaneously terrified and in

awe of the beauty that nature can create when we aren't looking.

Their caretaker ("owner" doesn't fit these creatures by a mile), Excy

Johnston, is an unlikely cowboy. A scion of old money from Maryland --

his family made a scandalous amount from procurement contracts with

the Union Army during the Civil War -- about all that was left of the

family fortune by the time Johnston was born was a rambling estate in

Baltimore and his handed-down mouthful of a name. When Excy was 8, his

father, pining for the excitement of the West, bought a ranch near

Prescott, Ariz. and moved his family there. In short order, Excy

became a horseman. His silver-spoon past was sometimes at odds with

the rough-and-tumble young ranch hand he became. The summers he was 16

and 17, his grandmother convinced him to come back East to fulfill

what she saw as his social obligations. Those summers, Johnston split

his time between button-down functions and riding broncs at New

Jersey's famous Cowtown Rodeo.

"I would go to deb parties all week, and then go ride a bronc at

Cowtown on Saturday night," he said. "It was really a gas. You'd have

your tux on one night and then the next night you'd get out there and

ride a bronc."

Though he admits that rodeo was an addiction, there was a problem: he

wasn't very good at it. Seeing the broken old cowboys who had been in

the game for years, he decided the safer course was to seek an

education. That choice soon landed him at Texas Tech, where he

received a degree in architecture. After graduation, he hung out a