Natalie's Everyday Heroes: Adaptive saddle is 'real cowboy stuff'

 

DODGE COUNTY, Wis. (CBS 58) -- The earliest known saddles were created thousands of years ago. So, it doesn't seem like there'd be much room for improvement, right?

A Dodge County saddle maker got a request late last year, though, to make an adaptive saddle.

With one request: that it didn't look like a wheelchair on a horse.

Cutting, sewing, shining, and conditioning.

"All the way up under here, everything," Jon Rafel instructs, pointing to the leather yet to moisturized.

The team at Emmet Saddlery can make or restore just about any saddle.

"What you have here is cowboy stuff," Rafel said of what they do.

Rafel is the owner of Emmet Saddlery near Hustisford.

"We don't do the new style. We do the traditional way," he explained.

He's been at it a long time.

"I wore the clothes of a younger man. I'm going to guess 40 years maybe we've been at making saddles," he said.

So, it's not often his team is handed a new challenge.

"The other saddle makers would not take us on," Kay Nelson.

Nelson brought him that challenge last October.

"And the gears in my head started to go almost immediately," Rafel said.

Nelson needed a new saddle for her daughter, Sydni Mell.

"I was looking for a saddle that she wasn't afraid." Nelson said.

It's been more than two years since Sydni got in the saddle.

"The day of my accident which was April 16, 2022," she said. "I fell off of a bunker silo, so like a wall that was about 12 feet."

A spinal cord injury left her paralyzed from the belly button down.

"It doesn't feel like I'm in a wheelchair out there," Mell said of the new saddle.

And *that* is the whole point.

"This is called a 40 Wade, meaning a 1940 Clifford Wade," Rafel said, showing off the team's work.

The new saddle has a back rest, special seatbelts for security, and magnets in the stirrups to keep her feet in place.

"It brings a lot of my confidence back and more independence, which I really like," Sydni said.

It's appropriate she got the saddle on Mother's Day.

"It is my love and what happened is, after she was hurt, I didn't want to ride either because I felt so terrible leaving her," Nelson said.

Rafel knows his creation didn't just give riding back to Sydni.

"We swelled. Our hearts swelled. There were tears on my driveway," he said.

It gets the whole family back in the saddle.

"She has four legs now and they're moving. And she is not in a wheelchair, and she can do everything we're doing. So, it's, you know, priceless!" Nelson said.

Sydni will be a senior at UW Madison in the fall. She's studying dairy science.

And Emmet Saddlery hopes the design of this saddle can help others, too. For more information on Emmet Saddlery, visit Facebook.

If you'd like to nominate an Everyday Hero, send Natalie a message [email protected].