No cowboys for El Rancho camp

041115Suptree A lacebark perhaps? The shoe tree at El Rancho. PICTURE / SUPPLIED

All year whenever we talked about camp, where we were going, what we'd do, how our parents could pay it off, I repeated the name over and over in my head. It sounded ... mysterious. It sounded ... like out of a movie. It sounded like the best place to go for a school camp.
I'm good at reading so I recognised the root word to the word "Rancho" - "ranch". That meant cowboys, horses, gunfights, stampeding cows and the food will be mostly baked beans. I'm not stupid, I realised this was a ranch for kids so there wouldn't be little glasses of brown water called whisky. I know that's alcohol. And of course there wouldn't be real guns. I've watched the cows go to uncle's milking shed; they sort of plod along, not really stampede, sooo that still leaves horses. My favourite animal!
I wasn't the only excited kid on the bus as we left that Tuesday morning. There was lots of chatter about who was in whose cabin, who had lollies and what activities we were looking forward to. A few kids looked a bit watery as they waved to their parents, but mostly we were thinking it was going to be meanage!
"We're here!" Mrs Bennett called out to the noisy bus-load. I poked my head up from behind the seat trying to stare out the driver's window for my first look at ... El Rancho! Its sign was boring - no pictures of cowboys or cactuses. However as the bus pulled in by the buildings I spied horses lazing in a paddock! Brown, shiny skin and swishy tails just waiting for this cowboy to jump into the saddle. But first things first; we unloaded the gear and sorted out our cabins. Then there was the usual get together so the teachers could set out the camp rules blah, blah, blah ... all the time horses were galloping around in my head.
"... so we won't be doing the horse riding activity, but we will go for a walk and feed them." Mrs Bennett's voice stabbed through my horse-soaked brain. I wasn't the only one grumbling as we put on shoes and jackets and trudged down a path. I got even grumpier as we veered away from "horse country" and into an area of trees.
"Whoa!!" Our group came to a sudden halt and in the blink of an eye all dreams of horses vanished from my mind.
There in front of us was the most incredible sight - a shoe tree! From the bottom to the top of a tall pine tree were shoes of all types nailed up. Some were right out on the branches. How did they get there? Why? Who? Questions raced amongst us. Everyone was shouting out saying which were their favourites. A couple of kids tried to pull some off but they were nailed in hard.
I gazed up at the tree of shoes in all sorts of colours and styles. I had just one question, "Where are the horses' shoes?"