The Red Pony and The Red Pony Ranch

I've been too embarrassed to admit it to most of the teachers here, but I hated The Red Pony the first time I read it. For years, I actually thought I hated Steinbeck because of how much I hated The Red Pony. In fact, I chose to share this truth in my application essay, and they still accepted me. Perhaps because Steinbeck later became one of my favorite authors even though I wasn't expecting it. Here's my opening...

In crafting this essay as a response to your “Dear Colleague” letter, it seems only right to begin with Steinbeck. “A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.” Why begin with such a foreboding answer? It is impossible to understand my love of Steinbeck’s work and my respect for his principles without knowing how I felt about Steinbeck during the spring of seventh grade. Allow me to set the scene. There were eighteen in the class, counting my middle-aged English teacher, and twelve of us were suburban preteen girls of the early 1990s. We had just finished Where the Red Fern Grows, a maudlin story about coon hunting, competition, and a boy whose love is unable to save his dogs. It was the first time I hated something I read for English class. We immediately cracked the spine of a book whose cover showed a boy, a horse, and a pasture: The Red Pony. While my adult self recognizes the reasons for teaching these books consecutively, my middle school self did not. I didn’t want to read about drought, a dead horse, or buzzards---lots of buzzards. Suffice to say, this was not the best introduction to Steinbeck. Flash forward two and a half years to the summer before tenth grade. East of Eden was on my list of assigned summer reading. At least The Red Pony was a short, quick read. The fat book with the distinctively “Steinbeck” orange spine was thrown in my backpack before a family vacation to the Bay Area, my first experience visiting anywhere west of Texas. I was awed by the Redwoods on the way to my family’s hotel, then most of the rest of my memories of the trip are lying outside, mountains in the distance, devouring the saga of the Trask family. I was particularly impressed with the character of Lee, and Steinbeck’s facility at using Lee to weave philosophy through the story. I rooted for Samuel’s optimism to pay off for him, and I dreaded the moment when Aron was going to realize that his mother was a prostitute. Even though I’ve always been a prolific reader, it’s the first time I remember paging through a book and taking notes to try to make sure I was understanding it correctly.

I included the East of Eden transformation because you can learn more about why I came to like Steinbeck, but the fact remains that The Red Pony is a dark book. While other teachers were thrilled that we were going to visit ranch from the book, I was ambivalent. I like seeing new places, but was I really interested in a desolate ranch where boys torment animals and horses die? However, (you knew that was coming, didn't you), in rereading The Red Pony for this institute, I was touched by its desperation and poignancy. Reading as a child of Jody's age, I sympathized with him. Or, more accurately, because I didn't sympathize with him, I didn't connect to the story. It's a story of the west, of loneliness, of masculinity, and of nurturing. As an adult, Carl and Billy Buck's competing notions of male nurturing take center stage, and Jody seems like a petulant schoolboy. The sense of loss of childhood by witnessing death and by learning that adults lie to children seems more realistic from the other side of the equation. (By the way, I'm referring to books 1-3 here. Leader of the People is sometimes included in The Red Pony collection, but not always. I think that's a better story all the way around, as it has all of the worldly sadness of The Red Pony but none of the buzzards.) Neither are fun stories to read, but that's not always the point. I understand now why we read it, and I'm glad to have visited the ranch.

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