Ride on, cowgirl!
The girl’s horseback ballet caught our attention over a long line of glowing tail lights at dusk. My husband and I had exited Interstate 25 to head westbound home into Erie when she literally popped up on the horizon.
She stood on her horse to face the sun setting over the Rockies, her arms relaxed at her sides. Then, this girl rotated, crouched, and slid into the saddle backwards to face east and return smiles and waves from passersby like us. People inching toward an intersection that needs a traffic light — not a stop sign — during rush hours.
We didn’t know her name or her story then.
But I knew she and the dark horse standing with slack reins had spent lots of time together.
It takes so much quality time, especially with large creatures wired for flight, to develop the kind of trust this pair displayed on their muddy stage during that warm spell in mid January.
So, I felt sure the girl understood something about horses that she will one day translate to people — that everyone’s got a wild card in them somewhere, for better or worse.
The trick is to study the rest of the deck and hedge some bets around it in order to have fun playing the game.
This week I finally knocked on some doors to meet her, the cowgirl living in a suburban ZIP code with the freshest face I’ve seen yet of “today’s new country,” celebrated on Denver’s KWBL radio — 106.7 The Bull, with studios in the Denver Tech Center.
“I love people,” Devarey Edmiston, 9, said between spoonfuls of her after school snack — leftover, home cooked pork green chili. “But you know about the haters. Some people used to say, ‘Get away from the road. You don’t belong there.’”
In fact, Devarey lives in the brown ranch house on that the intersection’s northeast corner with the sprawling cottonwood tree in the front yard. Under its branches she and her brother, Chayse Edmiston, 15, practice roping a sawhorse with a black plastic dummy calf head.
If she doesn’t belong there, then where?
That question comes up at school, too, she said. After her family moved from Longmont to Erie four years ago, Devarey’s been winning over classmates there who told her that she doesn’t fit in wearing ranch work boots.
Now, only one of those “city girls” remains catty, she said. The rest have come to accept her alternative lifestyle on the fringe of an exploding suburbia.
“Anyway, more people who drive by the corner tell me, ‘You’re so good at that! You should do that every day — I wish I could do what you do!” Devarey continued.
Her Hello Show there started during the last stretch of the worst part of the pandemic.
Sometimes, she waves from a standstill. Other times, she’s a blur.
“See that field back there?” Devarey said, glancing east through the kitchen’s smudged sliding glass door. “Sometimes, me and Booger just book it, out there.”
Her dad, Zach Edmiston, 38, dubbed the gelding Booger for flicking him off during their first time out together leading a trail ride for tourists in Estes Park.
Despite that feistiness in 2013, by 2015 Booger had bonded with him and calmed down considerably. So, he rescued the horse from the truck loaded for the kill pen to become eventual fast friends with his daughter — a
youngster so motivated to ride that as a kindergartener she wouldn’t wait for an adult to saddle up.
Instead, she haltered the horse, stood on the old tractor tire ring that keeps hay from blowing away, and then hopped on bareback.
“She’s a lot of self taught,” Zach Edmiston said.
This relational richness comes across to commuters who spot her just every now and again these days greeting incoming traffic to Erie.
But while visiting with Devarey in her living room as she cuddled Cowboy, her patchy guinea pig, something stands out much more than her riding skills.
It’s her pluck and the down-home way her parents have brought her up to help out and to welcome with them anyone who is hungry for food or for their disappearing lifestyle along the near Front Range.
So, all sorts of people — especially struggling young people — stop in for supper or to share apples and carrots with the animals, Devarey’s mother, Jennifer Peek, 37, said.
Peek raises 30 sheep and 30 goats on site.
Devarey’s father works at the Cleland Dairy a mile or so down the road that runs by their home. But the Longmont native still helps his dad do repairs at the family’s longrunning Longmont shop — Open 6K Leather & Tack on Hover Street — and spent the last 20-plus years as a bullfighter in cowboy protection programs yearround at rodeos near and far.
“But he doesn’t like being called a clown,” Devarey said of the dangerous rodeo job — distracting broncs and bulls that could trample or charge fallen riders.
She respects the risks and the rewards of rodeo sports.
But Devarey already longs to age out of the “Under 10” age category in the kids’ Gymkhana rodeo events. Last summer, she won red and yellow third and fourth place ribbons running barrels, poles, flags, and keyhole events on Booger in Greeley.
This winter she joined 4-H Club.
When the family’s mare, Rain, drops a foal any day now, Devarey has a name all picked out: “Cloudy.”
“That horse is going to be my new and improved — well, not improved on Booger — but my new horse to ride next,” she said.