When I was a kid we called them horse-apples or bois d'arc. We chunked those huge things at each other playing dumb-ass war games.

As an young adult I took an opportunity to quit my perfectly good job and ride off into the wind on a horseback trip with a cousin that would've placed us in Wyoming as an initial stop and ultimately would've taken us to northern British Columbia had everything worked the way we "planned". I am using the most ill-fitting, inaccurate usage of planning here as our only real preparation involved acclimating our mounts and our posteriors to the saddle and acquiring far too few items necessary to sustain such a journey at the time. Neither of us even carried a map. We just figured that with the limited funds available and a strong enough desire to taste the breeze we could figure it out on the way.

I will never forget one of our first nights on the "trail" out along the highway across central Texas when we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares. We were clearly a curiosity and a number of people watched as we plodded along thru town trying to keep our less dedicated steeds pointed down the right sidewalks. On the square, there was an old legacy business where a cobbler or saddle-maker had a shop and out front above the awning to advertise was a large sign and a kid-sized statuesque version of a paint horse hanging over the sidewalk to draw the eye to the small shop.

As we passed under that paint horse statue my own mount let fly a large volume of suitably digested plant matter from the previous morning's grazing of the Johnson grass growing along the highway where we pitched our bedrolls.

It was quite fitting and a perfect spot for a pile of horse shit and we all had a great chuckle.

Continuing out of town along one of the small farm-to-market roads where we hoped to find a spot to camp later we found ourselves passing the second-from-last house out by the city limits sign. There were people in the yard including several kids who were enthralled by our horses. A couple of the parents approached us and asked whether we could let their kids have a quick ride before we passed on out of town. Since our "schedules" were largely free of any planned events for that afternoon or any of the other upcoming afternoons we gladly agreed and were met with gleeful shouts as they jockeyed amongst themselves for the rights to plant the first butt in a saddle.

1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C). We surrendered our sweaty mounts to the exuberance of youth and the control of their parents and as we visited with the other parents waiting for their own child's turn we found ourselves invited to have supper and spend the night with their family. This was at the time a fantastic development for us since our supplies had been diminished a bit over the preceding days and the thought of a supper and a bedroll inside a house on the floor was quite appealing. The price on our end was quite agreeable too - allow the kids to ride our horses and they would take care of removing the saddles, brushing the horses down and grazing them in the backyard vegetation overnight. This was indeed luck of the purest kind and a clear sign from the universe that all would somehow work out in the end for us.

There were two related families living in this large two-story Victorian house that obviously needed a bit of love on the outside but was brim-full on the inside once they all were in their proper places for the evening. One of the husbands approached me and took me off to the side and this is the part where the bois d'arc comes into play in this long post that most will never read.

He told me that his wife had noticed that I was afflicted by a large protruding wart on my left elbow and that if I was agreeable that she would like to help me eliminate that wart but she was too shy to approach me about it. Well, I'm a bit of a shy person myself but she had made a proposition that I had to admit was quite attractive so we wandered over to where she was standing, under a huge bois d'arc tree that shaded a large part of their back yard.

After apologizing, she told me that she was Cherokee, originally from Oklahoma and that she had noticed my wart and wanted to help us since we had added so much joy to their kid's afternoons. She told me that they had a treatment for warts that would allow me to be rid of it in a few weeks if I could keep it going after we pulled out of town the next day. Well, I've always been open to learning anything that I didn't know yesterday so she asked to borrow my hunting knife that I carried sheathed on my hip. I have to admit that the prospect of backyard surgery with a hunting knife that might not be that sanitary was a bit concerning but I handed over the knife and she took it and started explaining what she would do and how I would need to continue in the next couple weeks.

I watched as she made a cut on a young bois d'arc limb through the bark along the growth direction and waited as the white sap began to flow. Using the edge of the knife she collected a large enough amount of sap to completely surround that large protrusion and coat it thoroughly. She said that I needed to let the sap dry in place and that if it all washed off in the rain to reapply as soon as possible so that it all stayed covered. She told me the sap was beneficial and if I could keep it covered for two weeks that within 6 weeks the wart would fall off and leave normal skin in its place.

As fate would have it and as luck sometimes goes there was no rain over the next few weeks to wash that sap from my elbow and all the sweat that I managed to produce couldn't erase the translucent black circle of dried sap from my elbow. Days after leaving these generous folks behind us, we had managed to find temporary work in a small town miles down the highway from this house on a local "ranch" working the absentee owner's cattle and in return we had use of a pole barn shed for nightly shelter and all the beans and cornbread we could eat at no charge. There was no shower or other facilities so normal hygiene for us would hold no great attraction for most people today. We developed a funk that could probably be classified as a gaseous bioweapon if it didn't burn up the tools used to analyze its noxious properties first.

After several weeks out on the ranch working every day in the heat we found ourselves invited guests of the ranch owner who would be visiting and hosting a party where we could mix and mingle with lots of people including several of the current crop of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. There would be good food with or without beans and plenty of it and best of all, free beer.

We decided that we had to confront the lingering clouds of man-funk and find a way to clean our dusty clothes and cowboy hats or we would need to decline this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Inquiring with the owner about how we could handle this dilemma we finally discovered something that we would've known in advance had we bothered to make any solid plans. We were less than a mile from the cool, clear waters of the mighty Brazos River. Armed with that knowledge, a sudden enthusiasm for cleanliness and a couple bars of Ivory soap that had seemed a bit of overkill due to the lack of water, we saddled our trusty mounts and rode over to that part of the ranch that butted up to the river.

Like a couple of school-boys playing hooky from class we shucked our duds, grabbed the soap and stepped off into the shallow clear waters, almost deep enough to reach the dangles and we began to splash that cold water all over and hoot and whoop loudly. This was more clean water than we had seen in one place since we last saw a lake weeks ago. As we stood there in the water in the sun and tried to power that soap through the accumulated crud the bar of soap found my left elbow. Now normally any hard contact on that wart would bring a sharp pain. That Ivory soap glided across that elbow with no hint of a bump or no pain from contact and I so bent everything around to inspect. The wart had fallen off all by itself and there was no indication other than a remnant halo of dirty, dried bois d'arc sap to suggest that anything had ever been there but regular skin. It had by that time been about 6 weeks since the lady had smeared that glob of sap on that elbow and I had not added nor subtracted anything in the meantime. There had been a dark circle of sap which held a bit of daily grit but otherwise was unchanged. With one treatment and a seemingly appropriate level of sunshine and neglect, that wart had fallen off and though it has been more than four decades it has not returned.

That is my true story. If you lasted this long you might've enjoyed being on that ride. Happy trails!