The Site Visit on Horseback
The appraiser asked to see the far pasture on horseback, and my oldest mare had very definite opinions about his stirrups.
When I was on the other side of the desk, I thought a site visit was a pleasant thing. You drove out, looked at the barn, and had lunch. Then I bought a ranch, and a young appraiser from Denver called to say he would be coming to look at the property. He asked, hopefully, if there was a way to see the far pasture, which is a mile and a half from the house and not reachable by truck in spring. I said there was, and that it involved a horse.
He turned up in new boots and a very clean hat. I do not know where he got the outfit, but it had an air of having been bought on the way. I saddled up my mare Clementine, a twenty-year-old bay who has taken more beginners across more pastures than anyone in the county. She is gentle, she is patient, and she has a strong sense of her own dignity. I put him on her, adjusted the stirrups, and handed him the reins. She looked back at him slowly, the way a teacher looks at a student who has not done the reading.
We set off at a walk. Clementine took a route of her own devising, which led us first to the water tank, then to a particular patch of clover, and then to a shady cottonwood, where she stopped and refused to proceed. The appraiser consulted his clipboard. He said that according to the map we should be a half mile farther north. I said Clementine had her own survey. He nodded, because he was a decent man, and he spent the next twenty minutes assessing the cottonwood.
By the time we got back, he had a full page of notes on the tree, a splash of mud on the hat, and a new respect for the horse. He said the pasture value was fine, though he had never seen the far end. I said that few have. He wrote down a note about the water access, which Clementine had thoroughly examined. I later read in a rural guide that appraisers value a ranch in part by how it is actually used, and in that case, I felt we had done well. The appraiser sent a Christmas card to Clementine the following year, addressed to the barn. She has it in her stall. If you want to hear more about horses with strong opinions, the rodeo stories at farm.FM are full of them.