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City kids meet the country

The Sierra Club's Inner City Outings gives Tampa and Plant City children a cowboy experience at the Starkey Ranch.

By STEVE THOMPSON
Published September 26, 2005

ODESSA - The moment felt about right for a song, so volunteer Lia Orlando tried to get one going.

Ho-omme on the raaaannge,

Where the deeeeer and the aaantelope plaaaaay ...

"And the buffalo do something," added 12-year-old Jordan Tullie, as he and his friends searched for the words.

Volunteer Carole Mehlman walked up wearing jeans, a big belt buckle, and pink country-western blouse.

"Hey, it's Cowboy Carole," Orlando said. "Give 'em a yee-haw, Carole."

Cowboy Carole did, then bragged: "I can do the two-step."

So the boys all made banjo sounds and Jermaine Campbell, 13, beat a rhythm on the long, wooden picnic table, and Cowboy Carole danced.

The boys, a dozen of them who live in the urban area west of the University of South Florida in Tampa, were visiting Starkey Ranch on Saturday morning.

The Sierra Club's program called Inner City Outings hooked up with Positive SPIN, a group that brought the boys in and another group of mostly eighth-grade girls from Marshall Middle School in Plant City.

The kids were getting treated to some rural scenery.

Time for the horseback ride, and the boys were first up, so they walked over to the stable.

Inside, it smelled like, well, a stable. "You can't smell that in Tampa," said Orlando, a volunteer with the Sierra Club.

Jermaine walked back out to get some fresher air.

"Did y'all already have the be-nice-to-horses chat with Diane? What'd she say?" Orlando asked the boys.

"Be nice to horses," Justin Tullie, 16, answered. (Justin is Jordan's brother. He wears his hair in braids that his friends call worms.)

Yeah, that, Orlando said. But also, don't forget to kiss them and scratch behind their ears.

Jordan was first to mount up.

"Put your foot right here, then swing on like a bike," the horse-handler told him. He did.

Jermaine was soon high over his horse too. "I'm a pimp. I'm a pimp," he said. But then his ride started wandering the wrong way. "Where's my horse going?"

They waited until everybody saddled up, and it was funny again each time one of their horses left what horses do on the ground.

Then they rambled down the trail, off into the Starkey wilderness.

[Last modified September 26, 2005, 01:18:19]