In 1999, Springer rewarded herself... by going on a ride in Costa Rica where people cooked breakfast for her and she rode the native ponies across native countryside. By the time she got back, she'd decided she could make her beloved collection of Missouri foxtrotters pay for themselves by employing them in the guest operation and promoting her farm as a place where a person could see the Ozarks on the region's indigenous breed...

...Carol Springer is something of a grande dame in thrift jeans, bantering and gracious and bossy in a velvet way...

Springer... rides all the time and all over the place. Her own farm is 460 acres, but she has somehow managed to persuade her neighbors in the Meramec Valley to let her lead rides across their farms as well, creating the vast reservoir of land and space that trail riders need to be happy. (If we have to ride back the same way we rode out, we don't feel wild and free anymore; we feel hemmed in and grumpy, and the illusion's spoiled.)

"How did you persuade them to let us go across their property, Carol?" I asked her, recognizing the accomplishment for a feat in this litigious age.

"Now, Florence, I didn't persuade anyone," she said. "I just told them what a good idea I thought it was, and they agreed."

I could see her upturned face, naked of anything but keenest enthusiasm for this plan of hers. The guy opens and shuts his mouth like a guppy and then discovers himself saying, "Yes, of course, you're welcome to come here."

The Army Corps of Engineers' acquisition of land for a dam across the Meramec literally ruined the civilization in the valley, tore it out by the roots. Only 10 percent of the former owners rebought their farms at the auctions the Corps held 20 years after starting to acquire land. Springer seems to have set about reknitting the community, entwining her new neighbors in all sorts of undertakings, at whatever levels of involvement they will tolerate.

Carol conducts EarthFoot's "5 Days of trail Riding in the Missouri Ozarks" experience.