A quick note of disclosure and background: in the 1990s, Melinda Roth covered the politics and government beat for The Riverfront Times. For a bit, we shared a two-person cube, after the paper’s move to the University City Loop; that was a nice arrangement for a suite-mate, as she lived and worked in the state capital of Jefferson City for good chunks of the year, giving me a full, solo, mini-office. Following her tenure at the paper, she worked in politics more directly, as a Press Secretary for then-new Congressman Lacy Clay. She also served Missouri’s delegation of Democratic State Senators, serving as the press voice of that then-11-member contingent.
In recent years, we’d lost touch. So it was a bit surprising to recently see a note on Facebook, Roth touting a new blog that she’s keeping, called anyoneseenmyhorse.com. The blog, launched in January, serves as a media support arm to her new book, Mestengo: A Wild Mustang, A Writer on the Run and the Power of the Unexpected. It documents her move six years back, when she resettled in McHenry County, in northern Illinois, just outside of the little town of Woodstock. There, she found a classic farmhouse, in hopes of writing her first novel in a secluded, quiet setting.
As someone who had published a handful of successful nonfiction works, it was a daring move, but one that seemed to make a lot of sense in many respects. But the solitary life of a writer came to a relatively quick end when a neighboring farm’s barn burned down. In a moment of confusion with her Spanish-speaking neighbors, she essentially agreed to take on their entire animal kingdom, ranging from chickens to the mustang stallion that graces the cover of her book. While some of the initial group’s moved on or away, plenty of animals remain, despite her best efforts to find takers. And even as some animals have left her menagerie, others have taken their place.
“I have three horses and two little, miniature horses,” Roth says. “I found homes for the other horses. But the mustang and the white horse… these two boys weren’t getting along. As I started getting into the horse world, I learned that sticking a mare in there with them would get them to start behaving. You’d have a little herd at that point. So I’m boarding my vet’s mare and she kind of keeps the peace. I’d also read that miniatures would help, but as soon as I added them, the mustang tried to kill them; it picked one up by the scruff of the neck of the neck and tossed it. So that hasn’t really worked out. The minis are like useless lawn ornaments.
“From the book, I still have the mustang and white horse,” she adds. “I found homes for the sheep and for the goats. The cows went back to their original owner. So I’ve got the five horses. Probably about 30 chickens, ducks and geese; I don’t really know exactly how many, because they keep reproducing. And I’ve got two pigs. And… yeah, that’s it.”
While some of the animals make for interesting and entertaining cameos in the book, it’s the mustang that serves as the work’s centerpiece. In Roth’s construction of the book, she realized that she wanted to focus on the plight of the wild mustangs of the American west; her own came from Nevada to Northern Illinois through a series of unusual ownership moves, that animal surviving instead of being sent to a rendering plant. In studying up on her toughest-to-control new animal, she found that a variety of books had been written on the subject of the wild mustangs.
“When I started doing research, it slowly sank in,” she says. “I started checking out all these books. They were all very hard for me to read. I love animals, but I’m not sure that anyone wants to read about horses being slaughtered. It’s not something that you want to take in right before going to bed at night. It’s heavy, heavy stuff. I was hoping that my own story, about when I first moved here, would work as part of that other story. I didn’t think any of it was funny as it was happening, at all. But people who heard about it kept saying that these were funny stories.”
Roth’s Mestengo definitely has serious tales about the fate of America’s wild mustangs, many of which were used for dog food manufacture during the early parts of the 20th century. She balances out those admittedly “heavy” aspects with stories that show a deft comedic voice. One story, about a bat getting trapped in her bedroom, was an event that resulted in an amusing 911 call. That’s not the only nighttime adventure that she undertook in the early farm days, but it’s one that readers have picked up on.
“A lot of people bring that one up,” she says. “And what’s in the book wasn’t the half of it. When I was writing this stuff down, my fear was that people wouldn’t believe it, that they’d think I was making it all this stuff up. I can’t tell you how many times I called animal control. I forget if I put this in the book, but when I moved in, I still had a pitbull from Randy [Grim of Stray Rescue]. On my second night, I was by myself. There’s a big dairy barn down the hill and I heard this horrible screaming noise. I really thought that someone was being murdered. I called 911. It turned out to be a screech owl. The sheriff and emergency personnel are out and I’m really embarrassed by this, but they said it was okay, that this kind of thing happened a lot. A week later, the pit bull was in the front yard, chewing on what looked like a human leg bone. Here, I thought this dog was proving my point about about someone being murdered in the barn. I called 911 again. It turned out that it was the long leg bone of a deer. I can’t tell you how many stupid scenes like that happened.
“If you’re not used to living in this environment, it’s all very creepy and weird,” Roth notes. “I’ve gotten to know the sheriff here very well. His name is Wally.”
It wasn’t Wally, though, who convinced Roth to switch her writing efforts from the novel to another piece of nonfiction. The connection was spurred by her own inextricable history with Stray Rescue’s Grim. While working at the RFT, Roth wrote an award-winning cover story on Grim’s tracking of a group of Washington Park strays, “Dead Dogs Walking.” The story in many respects made Grim a household name in St. Louis. They continued their collaboration with a book called The Man Who Talks to Dogs, a book that helped move his name into the national conversation about animal rescue.
The book was eventually optioned as a potential film, with Norman Stephens signing on as the producer. In taking a call from Stephens one day, Roth’s writing plans took a major twist.
“He’s actually the one who encouraged me to do this book,” she remembers. “We were talking about something on the phone and it doesn’t get good reception in the house. I had to go outside to keep the call and I was walking down the driveway. Once I got outside, the chickens and geese and goats all started following me, thinking that I’d feed them. He didn’t know where I was living and all of that. I made a run for my car; here, I’m on the phone really wanting to make a good impression. And all the chickens flew onto the car and began pecking at the windshield, trying to get at me. I just kind of had a meltdown and told him this other story.
“It turns out that his wife is really in love with the wild mustangs,” she adds. “He’s the one who said that I should write the book about mustangs, but by telling my story about living with one. My concern had been that it can be such a dreary, horrible bit of subject matter and there have been other books written on them. But I really meant to write the story in a way that would get the mustang stuff across, almost subliminally.”
Roth still has some real moments with that animal. It lived about six years in the wild and wasn’t gelded when arriving in Illinois, causing it to be hard-wired by that early life in the wild, before its eventual capture-and-sale by the Bureau of Land Management. A couple of owners kept him, one of which was quite abusive to the headstrong horse. As fate would have it, when her neighbor’s barn burned down, Roth’s personal quest to write a novel soon stopped, with an entirely new life’s plan emerging.
“These horses are bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of their behaviors,” she admits. “People have come out to train them, but they’re unpredictable and the mustang simply hates people. This was a horse that lived in the wild in Nevada and that’s simply how he came to know the world.”
In a nice, long, 45-minute chat about her rural life, happening seven miles south of the Wisconsin border, Roth sometimes mentions that she’s ready to move back to St. Louis, or to nearby Chicago, where her family lives. But she’s also resigned to the idea that she’ll be on the farm in Woodstock until the animals pass or find new homes, which could be a while. It’s an interesting conundrum, and even she’s not sure how the next few chapters of this story are going to be written.
In the meantime, she’ll blog about those very stories, keeping her writing muscles intact; while, at the same time admitting that her physical muscles have never been put to the test as much as they have in the past half-decade. In telling her stories, particularly with the book Mestengo, her reading audience may end up being people already involved in the animal rescue world. Her hope, though, is that a general audience picks up on the tales from her current life. She believes some very basic American dreams are presented in Mestengo.
“We all have it in the back of our head, the idea of moving to the country,” she says. “It’s not like On Golden Pond most of the time. A lot of it’s dreary or dreadful. But everyone thinks about it. So ‘everyone’ who I was writing for when doing the book.”
Information on Mestengo, as well as new stories from the farm, can be found at: anyoneseenmyhorse.com.
