Horse-loving lawyer left the law to help run a Colorado ranch

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by Ami Cullen, author of the book Running Free, an Incredible Story of Love, survival, and how 200 horses trapped in a wildfire helped one woman find her soul. Ami, thanks so much for joining us.

Ami Cullen:

Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Rawles:

So that subhead kind of says it all, but let’s ground people in how you came to write this book, which is based on your lived experience.

Ami Cullen:

Yeah, so obviously I started writing this book after we lived through the East Troublesome Fire, which was in October of 2020. And I tied in personal aspects of my life, the fire, my experience with horses to create the story and ended up fictionalizing some of the main characters and characters that were in the story to help basically tell a better story.

Lee Rawles:

And before you were director of equestrian operations at the C Lazy U Ranch, you were an attorney, you are an attorney. Can you talk a little bit about your pre ranch life?

Ami Cullen:

Sure. So I grew up on the East Coast. I’m actually grew up outside Philadelphia. Went to law school at the Catholic University in Washington dc Barred dc, Maryland and Colorado. They’re all currently inactive, but took the Maryland bar, did well enough to get my license in DC and then practiced my law firm was in Bethesda, Maryland. And I mostly did medical malpractice defense litigation for my time there. I did some tax, some estate and trust work as well, but mostly litigation during my time as a practicing attorney.

Lee Rawles:

So as you said, you fictionalized in running free your experiences. The main character is Emmy, and Emmy is a lawyer from Philly who takes a vacation to a dude ranch and suddenly realizes, wait, I need more of this. I need this as part of my life. Was that how you came to realize that you wanted to do this?

Ami Cullen:

Exactly. So I grew up, I was pretty competitive, English hunter, jumper rider, so I was involved with horses, gosh, for as long as I can remember. And I was always competing, always riding. And one of my best friends who I had grown up showing horses with suggested that we went go on this dude ranch vacation. And ironically, I did not want to go. I was like, we own horses, we ride all the time. Why are we going to go on a horse vacation? And she was pretty much like, shut up. You are my one friend that I know will love this more than anyone. And I was pretty young. I think I had passed theBar 2004 or five, so I think it was 2006 was maybe my first time going to the ranch on vacation. But that’s all that it was a girl trip to a dude ranch and we rode horses that week and I had just the most amazing time and we pretty much decided that would be like our annual girl trip every summer. So we had a week carved out every summer where we pretty much took the same vacation to the same ranch, went the same week, and I just absolutely loved it. Fast forward a couple years later, I think 2010 or 2011, I found out Maryland had reciprocity with Colorado so I could wave into the Colorado bar. So I kind of started joking around that I was going to quit my law firm and play Wrangler for six months, and ultimately that’s what I ended up doing.

Lee Rawles:

Joke, but not a joke.

Ami Cullen:

Yeah.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I know what a dude ranch is because I was a little girl who read books about horses growing up, although I never owned one and only rode one occasionally. But I think that there might be some listeners who hear Dude Ranch and are unclear on the concept. So could you just talk a little bit about what is the dude ranch and a little bit about the sea, lazy U Ranch where you work?

Ami Cullen:

Yeah, absolutely. So the Sea Lazy U Ranch is, it’s been a dude ranch or a guest ranch for, well about 105 years now. And the ranch owns over 200 horses, 8,500 acres. It’s in the mountains, so it’s located in Granby, Colorado, if you’re familiar with Colorado at all. It’s not too far from the Winter Park Ski resort. So about two hours from Denver. And it’s absolutely magical, especially for someone like myself that rode horses. You’re signed your horse for the week, you get to basically bond with that horse and ride that horse all over the mountains and all the rides are broken down into different levels. So somebody like myself who had quite the background with horses, let’s place more in an advanced riding group. So we were able to go out and really just ride Trot Lo all over the countryside, do big, long, all day rides, move cattle.

It was just, you name it, if you can do it on a horse, we do it at the ranch. And so that was really my first time really just kind of leaving that hunter jumper English world behind and getting to pretending more or less that I was a cowgirl for a week. But in addition to just being a horse riding ranch, we also have a five star spa. There’s five star dining facilities. The accommodations are pretty high end. And then there’s activities for someone like my husband, for example, who does not ride horses, who’s a big mountain bike guy, and hiking, fly fishing in the winter. The ranch turns into basically a winter wonderland. We have pond hockey addition to downhill skiing, cross country skiing, snowmobiling, you name it. If you can do it outside in Colorado, we pretty much cover it. We also have a big hunting program at the ranch currently I oversee the whole equestrian operation. So like I said, we have over 200 horses. And when I was a guest, one of the things that was pretty amazing for me is I had never really seen that many horses in one place. Living together in a herd and then watching the herd run all over the property to different pastures was something that just really, I can’t explain it, but it was just absolutely amazing to witness and I just wanted to be a part of it.

Lee Rawles:

And I want to circle back to the time period when you were joking. Ha, maybe I’ll take a six month break from being a lawyer, which I’m very serious about, guys. I’m for sure going to be a lawyer in Colorado too. I’m just taking these six months off. There is a quote from the book, Emmy thinks this, and I wondered, is this the thought that you had? Which is maybe you’re afraid to ask the difficult questions about your life because you’re afraid of the answers.

Ami Cullen:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you go to school, you study really hard. I took out obviously student loans. I worked really, really hard for my degree. And then you’ve worked really, really hard to pass theBar exam and get a job and do well. And I was definitely on that track. And walking away from that was even to this day, I still have moments where I question what was I thinking? But I’ve been out of it now 13, I’m almost 13 years later. But absolutely very much paralleled how I was thinking.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. We will start talking about the east troublesome fire of October, 2020. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Ami Cullen discussing her book Running Free. So Ami, October 20th is actually my birthday, but in 2020, that was a ominous day for you. Could you ground us a little bit in the beginning of this adventure and during the book you go back and forth between a lot of different time periods as you learn more about Emmy and how she came to the ranch. But you do open on sort of an ominous call from the county fire chief. Is that how it started for you in real life?

Ami Cullen:

No, that’s definitely a little bit embellished in the book, but how it started for us in real life is we were working and you notice smoke in the horizon. And ironically that summer there was a lot of different wildfires in Colorado. So smoke in the horizon was something that was just kind of a thing. And being from the east coast, I was pretty naive in understanding what that actually meant. But realized pretty quickly that there was a fire that was close to the ranch and our police chief and fire chief, they, they basically went on the internet every single night to give updates on the fire. So we were aware that it was close, that everyone was doing their hardest to get it contained, but I never really perceived it as a threat until maybe two days before we got the first pre evacuation notice.

And then what became smoke in the horizon all of a sudden became this thick blanket of smoke. There was ash falling on us while we were out riding horses and working the horses were obviously struggling to breathe, their eyes were watering. It just became what I was witnessing and watching online and in my head thinking we’re fine all of a sudden became something that was very much my reality. So not having too much experience with fire, really any experience with fire, just watching how it affected the horses, I instinctively just made the decision that we would be moving the old horses. I had some horses with injuries, we were going to get them off the property and I was fortunate enough to be able to take ’em to my vet’s property, which was out of the smoke and out of the fire danger. And then I kind of frantically, I will say, started trying to figure out what you do with 200 horses if you have to evacuate.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and let’s talk about the scale of the evacuation because not only are you having to move 200 horses to a safe area, you have guests, I took a look at the Sea Lazy U Ranch employee photo. It looks like there are almost a hundred people in that photo. So you have the staff, the guests, the horses, and a danger that people don’t always think about with evacuation is injuries can happen in the evacuation. You may think you’re moving, especially an animal to safety, but that might be such a scary or stressful experience that harms the animal

Ami Cullen:

A hundred percent. Yeah.

Lee Rawles:

So do you think that your analytical lawyer brain helped you out at all in these decision-making crises?

Ami Cullen:

I’d like to think that it did. To organize that many horses and try to find that many trailers, you really have to just kind of realize how quickly you have to depend on your network and the people involved. So kind of backing up, we did evacuate the guests a couple of days before we actually got the official pre evacuation notice for the ranch. And then I guess organizing the first evacuation, talk a little bit about the horses and the herd with a herd of 200 horses. But within that herd there’s cliques. I always like to describe it as similar to high school. You have your popular girls, your band geeks, your computer nerds, whatever it is, but it’s very cliquey within the herd. So I made the decision that we would kind of start loading these horses up with their groups of friends and that helped keep the chaos a little bit more under control and organized.

Lee Rawles:

And when you’re loading them up, how are you finding the vehicles to do this? You mentioned your network, is this just people from your county? Is this people from further away? How was this done?

Ami Cullen:

So the first evacuation, because there was actually two, was basically the county. So people with horse trailers, my general manager at the time made some phone calls. I have a lot of young 20-year-old girls that work for me. They all got on social media and started putting out blasts of needing help. Before you know it, we had, I’d say 50 plus trailers helping us make trips to these two local pastures that were out of the pre evacuation zone. That’s how the first evacuation went. The second one, we basically needed help from all over the entire state of Colorado. We had people driving five plus hours to help us evacuate the second time. And it all, I have to say, as much as social media can, it’s a love hate thing. It really, I think, saved us, had the fire happened 20 years prior, I don’t know if we would’ve been able to network as quickly as we did and get the help as quickly as we were able to.

Lee Rawles:

Telephone trees can only do so much. So when we come to the aftermath of the fire and the recovery, you don’t go into it as much in running free, but what was the damage to the ranch? I read on Wikipedia that the east troublesome fire was the second biggest fire in Colorado’s history as a state.

Ami Cullen:

So

Lee Rawles:

The destruction was really massive.

Ami Cullen:

It was also the fastest moving fire, which is part of what prompted me even to want to write the story. There were times when it seemed like I was in a movie with aliens dropping bombs. It was just flames and fire everywhere. But after the fire, the destruction was pretty, it was pretty vast and we lost all of our fence lines. So a lot of the horse pastures were damaged, which you don’t really think about. But it led afterwards to quite a few injuries of horses like getting spurt sticks and tendons and things that I was not prepared for. We lost our barn, we lost all of our hay for the year, and that’s a couple hundred, I don’t even how many tons, but it was a lot of hay. Our hay shed burned, our barn burned, we lost several staff housing units. We lost a guest cabin and then we lost seven member homes on the property as well.

And then almost every single cabin or building had some sort of damage, either smoke damage or we have this big patio house, pool house. That roof had actually caught on fire and the firefighters were actually able to put that out before the building went up. So there was quite a lot of destruction. And just in general, the land that was really hard to see afterwards driving through the ranch after the fire, we had elk that had gotten stuck in fence, that had burned a lot of dead wildlife, dead trees. So it was, yeah, in addition to structures, there was a lot of damage to the land.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and I wondered, as I was reading, I thought, can you even put horses back in a charred pasture or do they need it to have healthy, fresh grass? That’s just something I don’t know as someone who isn’t horse savvy.

Ami Cullen:

So oddly enough, the ranch has these big meadows and our winter pasture is one of those big meadows. And the fire did not hit that meadow, those close meadows at all. And the reason is, is we flooded them with, we opened all the irrigation ditches and flooded those meadows as part of our pre evacuation evacuation process. So those pastures did not burn. And what actually put the fire out was snow. So when we brought the horses back a couple weeks later, the pasture where they were going to winter was coated with snow and it was completely intact. That fence line did not burn. So we were able to come home and have the horses back on the property a couple weeks after the fire.

Lee Rawles:

And that was a moment in running free where a character says ice storm. And I’m like, oh my gosh. And I wanted to look it up because I thought, what a dramatic, at that point, you’ve already been through essentially two evacuations, and in the middle of the second one you find out there’s an ice storm, there’s snow, and it’s the kind of real life happening that feels almost unreal in a book. You’re like, nah, they’ve just been through two major scary evacuations, an ice storm. But that really

Ami Cullen:

Happened. Yeah, and that’s exactly what I thought in the moment too. I was like, how is this actually happening? So in order to get to the ranch, you have to go over birth had passed. So basically the weather had, and I’m not a meteorologist or weather person, so forgive me if I’m not describing this correctly, but basically had two very different climates where we were really dry and on fire. The other side of the pass was getting a lot of moisture and a early fall freeze. So when the trailers crested the pass and were getting on 70, I 70 was covered in ice. So we then had trailers, jackknife, getting horses to this safe place that we were going. And when I got there the next day, the entire pasture, all the water had frozen. We were breaking ice, everything was coated in ice or snow. So the horses literally went from one fire environment to winter with a trailer ride.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take another break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Ami Cullen, author of Running Free. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Ami Cullen. So Ami, I want to get into the writing process of running free a little bit. How did this turn into a book for you?

Ami Cullen:

So oddly enough, I’ve obviously never written a book and I’ve never really written creatively. I played around with it for fun, but never could kind of figure it out. So after the fire, I started pretty much writing everything down that happened. I just felt the need to record it. I didn’t want it to get lost because there was so much that happened where in emotions and the events itself, and I wrote probably 80 pages pretty quickly. And ironically it read very much like facts of illegal brief. It was very much boom, boom, boom, boom. You’re taking

Lee Rawles:

Deposition of yourself. Yeah,

Ami Cullen:

It’s exactly how it read. And so the process of me trying to become creative, it was tough. I struggled with it. I had definitely had help. And that’s how I kind of came to fictionalize some of the people, the character based on myself. I wasn’t comfortable writing a memoir, writing about myself, but it was easy to turn some aspects of my life into a character. And that was the process. And it took me quite a years and a lot of headache and aggravation to kind of get there just because of not having that background in my writing skills.

Lee Rawles:

One of the characters I was really interested in as to whether this was a real mentor figure in your life, is Russell the head wrangler in the book running free? Is this based on a real person? Is this a compilation of other mentor figures in your life? I found him very warm and approachable

Ami Cullen:

Based on a real person, but every character is a compilation of several people in my life. But absolutely, and I did work for somebody just like that and he’s a big part of my life still and a big influence on the direction my life has taken. So it pays homage to him. But there’s some aspects of that character that I had to fictionalize just to make it not so personal.

Lee Rawles:

And there are a number of moments in the book where your character and you Emmy had to take on a leadership role in a very uncertain climate and situation, realizing the people were looking to you in a moment of emergency and knowing you had to rise to the occasion. And in it you draw parallels between the kind of leadership you need to have with humans and horsemanship. And I’d love to hear more from you about that. How do you use your horse skills in your business life?

Ami Cullen:

This is honestly one of my favorite subjects to talk about, and I actually will put clinics on for corporate groups or adults that are struggling because there’s so many parallels. One of the greatest things about horses is that they are able to basically mirror your emotions. So if you come off as unsure or overconfident, a little abrupt, whatever it is, or if you’re having a bad day, they will pick up on that immediately. So a lot of it has to do with how your nonverbals are and how you’re choosing to communicate and choosing to be in a moment. And so even though my emotions were at an all time high as well as my team, one thing horses teach you is you have to be in control of your emotions. They’re never going to follow you if they deem you as somebody that’s not a leader.

And horses in general, they’re in a herd especially, they’re always looking for who the leader is and they want to leader, they want somebody to tell them what to do. They’re prey animals, so their instinct is to run away from danger. So to have that trust with horses, it parallels humans I think all the time because when you’re leading young women or leading your coworkers or maybe you have to go talk to your boss, your nonverbals will say a lot about your confidence. So there’s a lot of parallels to it and it’s actually, it’s amazing. We’ll put people in the round pen and you might have somebody that’s a little bit meek or fearful and the horse will do absolutely nothing for them. They’ll just kind of staring contest. We might have somebody that thinks they know exactly what they’re doing and they go in with a really high level of energy and the horse will just tune them out completely. So you have to find that balance just very similar to how you have to find that balance with people to get the horse to listen and respect you. So it’s pretty cool actually,

Lee Rawles:

I don’t know if you intended this parallel as the author, but as a reader, I was reading a little bit about Emmy’s background in the hunter jumper writing world versus the more, you call it cowboy riding out west where you might suddenly come upon a moose and it’s baby versus a much more controlled environment. And it made me think of the difference between sort of theoreticals in law school and learning all these principles and then all of a sudden you’re in a real world with a client who’s not perfect and a lot of craziness going on, and it’s a very different environment. I don’t know if that is just in my mind or if you think that there’s a parallel there too, but that’s certainly something that I thought about while reading.

Ami Cullen:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s great. You can study and prepare for everything and then the real world doesn’t always work out the way you planned it. I can probably draw parallels a lot of places, but law school practicing and then being that competitive hunter jumper, really formal structured type rider, yeah, I can ride horses, but it’s pretty clueless as to what to do when I came head to head with a moose. And I don’t think you get prepared for anything other than just living through it. And then you start building on your experiences to become better equipped to deal.

Lee Rawles:

And I just am going to say it, I think moose are too big to be allowed. I saw one in person for the first time in my teens and I went, no, that is wrong. That is too large. That belongs to another time.

Ami Cullen:

And that was part of in the book, there’s part of the irony of that. My previous life is pencil skirts, high heels, subways cities, and then I am thrown into this other world and everything kind of changed, but I had to learn quickly.

Lee Rawles:

Well, you and I are talking in December, it’s about to be the new year. A lot of people are taking this time to sort of reflect on what they want their new year to look like, whether it’s making a resolution or thinking about, Hey, is this what I really want my life to look like? And a pitch that you made at the very end of Running Free was to encourage people to just try riding. And I’d love for you to talk about that a little bit.

Ami Cullen:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Horses, there’s a stigma. They’re expensive. It’s not really a sport. I remember growing up I had my horse friends and then my high school friends and it never really connected. And I do think there so much lessons that horses teach, whether it’s just the responsibility of the young kid that has to go out to the barn and help clean stalls, learning to control your emotions on top of an animal. I do encourage it. And even if you just go to be around them or to learn to groom them or to experience a leadership class with them, there’s so much that you can learn from these animals. And there is a bit of zen when you kind of achieve it. We go to yoga, we work out, we do all these things, and you can go to the barn, get a good workout in just because you’re doing chores and then calm your energy down because you have no choice if you’re working and working alongside horses. So I do think there’s a lot of parallels and if people don’t have that in their life or they have a child that’s like, I want to ride horses, I do think it’s something that everybody should experience on some level, even if it’s on a vacation or at a neighbor’s house or pursue it as more of a sport. There’s a lot to be learned.

Lee Rawles:

And I think there are plenty of people who maybe like me read a lot of horse books as a kid but didn’t have access to riding. Is equestrian something that’s available to start as a beginner when you’re older?

Ami Cullen:

Absolutely. I teach a lot of people beginner lessons, and that’s actually one of the beauties of working at the ranch. I have put 95-year-old ladies on horses and that’s their first time they’ve ever been on a horse and they wanted to do it before they passed away. I mean all different levels of people. And the thing about at the ranch where I work the CLIA U is that I do have all different types of horses. So I have horses that are very safe where I am able to put someone that’s elderly or someone that’s handicapped on a horse. I’m also able to put somebody like my husband who’s terrified of horses on a horse and him have a good experience. So yeah, there’s always a way I think to find it that even living in DC there’s therapeutic riding places that are always looking for volunteers. There’s a lot that you can do. There’s horse rescues that are looking for volunteers. Even if you don’t really want to commit to the sport and the lessons and the commitment that is horses, there’s ways that you can involve yourself. For sure.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Ami, thank you again for appearing on the Modern Long Library. If people want to find Running Free or learn more about you or the Sea Lazy U Ranch, is there anywhere you’d point them to a website?

Ami Cullen:

My book Running Free is available on Amazon. I also have a website running free horses.org. The Sea Lazy U Ranch has a website, sea lazy u.com, I think. And I’m also on social media as well as the ranch and the Ranch’s. Social media has a lot of content if you’re interested. There’s also the Colorado Dude and Guest Ranch Association as well as the Dude Ranch Association. If say you wanted to go to a ranch in Montana or Arizona, there’s ranches all over the country where you can go and have a good time.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you to Ami and thank you to you, my listeners, for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a book you’d like me to check out and talk to the author about, you can always reach me at books at ABA Journal dot com.