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Show The Emery County Review, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Life Is Swell Sitting Pretty B1 For Misha Addley, your beauty is her business Emery and Carbon Counties, Utah u Living in the San Rafael Swell Area u B5 Photo by James L. Davis Jim Jensen feeds his horses outisde his home in Castle Dale. TALES Horse At 82, Jim Jensen still loves training, and talking, about his horses James L. Davis J im Jensen knows a thing or two about horses. He should, they have been a part of his life for most of his 82 years. He has ridden them, trained them, broke them, cared for them, and on occasion cussed them. But mostly, he has loved them. Loved being around them, loved being a horseman. And that love hasn’t changed in him a bit over the years, even though family and friends might wish that it had, if not for his health, then at least for their nerves. But for Jim, the fact that they worry over him seems to amuse him just a bit. “Art Olsen and Lee Jeffs, they’re good buddies and we ride a lot together. Art Olsen told me don’t you be breaking any more horses. He saw me riding across the road and said you be careful there,” Jim said with a grin. Jim will tell you that he is careful with his horses, but that doesn’t stop him from riding them and it doesn’t stop him from training them, although he no longer trains horses for other people, he does have a couple in his corral in Castle Dale that he plans to train. He just can’t help himself, just like he can’t help but ride and during the summer and fall he can be found on horseback, riding easily down the side streets of Castle Dale, enjoying the feeling of being on horseback. The only thing that has changed is that now he stays closer to home. But he didn’t always and as he sits in the kitchen of his small home he flips through books of photographs, stopping from time to time to point out a picture that brings back memories. In almost every picture there is a horse. “This one here,” he pauses to point to a picture of a horse. “This is a mare I raised and broke. She was one heck of a mare. She was really put together. When I was herding cows up on Gentry I had to go down a grade that was steeper than hell and I wouldn’t get off her and lead her. She went down sideways and never slipped a bit. She was a plum good horse,” he said with a satisfied smile. Some of his favorite stories come from times when he was herding cows on Gentry Mountain and it isn’t long until he has come across another photograph that brings back memories, and a story. “I was on Gentry herding cows and Taking care of his nightly chores. this bear had killed a calf and ate everything up but the legs two weeks before. I told the guys that were camped about a mile up from me at the head of Gentry that we had set this snare for the bear. About 9 that night they said, ‘well you’ve got your bear’ and I said how can you tell and they said it was squealing. It got up in these trees and stayed there all night and it was deader than hell. But these two guys had their guns with them and they had to shoot it in the head before they could get up there close to it. Chicken---,” Jim cackled with humor at the memory and moves on through his picture book. Born and raised in Huntington, Jim hasn’t spent all his life around horses and he will tell you so with just a slight tinge of regret. There was a time when he lived in Oregon, working for a sawmill, where he had no chance to ride. And then there was World War II, which suspended his riding for a time. But when he was able to get back home to Emery County, he had a horse and rode whenever he could; for work, for pleasure, for a way of life that he holds onto dearly. Although horses are a love of his, they aren’t his only love, or even his greatest love. That love belonged to his wife, Elaine. He met her at her home in Castle Dale and married her in 1947. The house that he sits in, quietly flipping through photographs is the very same house that his wife lived in when he was courting her. “She was born here,” Jim said softly. “And she died here.” Elaine passed away on Oct. 13 and Jim is subdued when he talks about his wife of almost 61 years. Together Jim and Elaine had three children, Renee, John and Kevin. Renee passed away in 1960. And while Jim knows that his sons worry about him riding, but that doesn’t stop him from doing so. While it may not be as easy to get up on a horse as it once was, he manages just fine, especially when he has horses that are trained well enough to know where to stand so he can boost himself up when needed. As he goes outside to do his chores for the day, he walks through his corral in his back yard and throws his horses some hay and it is there that he smiles as he cares for the animals he loves. He’ll keep on riding for a while. He can’t help it. “I love ‘em,” he said. “Love ‘em.” |