I stand in the dirt corral this evening, one arm draped around Toby's withers, head resting on his dusty coat, drinking in the musky warmth of the draft horse, the way the light reflects off of the liquid eye that rests upon me like a goose down comforter in brisk weather, when you are still sleeping with the windows wide open.
The autumn breeze mixes up our souls. We watch the sun burn down below the mesa in companionable silence.
I'm experiencing some problems with the blog. It's something to do with this Moveable Type platform, which is very good, but sometimes a little too advanced for me. ;-) I am working to fix the problem. Hopefully soon, but these things take me a while to figure out sometime.
Regarding comments, I don't know why they are working for some readers and not for others. I found my own responses to ELL recently in the "JUNK" comments folder and had to remove them from there to get them published. I have no idea what is going on.
So please bear with me.
Update: Looks like I got my templates fixed, so the site should look like it's supposed to now. I'm in the process of deleting approximately 2,500 comments, most of which are from some pretty unsavory sites. I fear that I've deleted some reader comments in the process. If I have, then I apologize. Love hearing from you all. Just not from the spammers. I've got a Helpdesk ticket into my web host, so hopefully they can help me out.
Just two years ago, when we’d been looking around for my first horse, we’d nearly been duped into buying one that was chronically unsound.
The owner, another work acquaintance of my dad’s, had the gray mare so drugged up with phenylbutazone during my test ride that we never knew. That mare rode as smooth as silk on top of all that bute, and I fell head over heels in love with her on the spot. Having been plunged into the alien territory where many parents with expendable income and a horse-crazed daughter often find themselves, my mom and dad—who had trouble enough with our neurotic dachshund—had decided to forego a pre-purchase exam by a vet.
So there I was, brimming with excitement at the fulfillment of a lifelong desire, the dream of so many girls, basking in the congratulations from the mare’s now previous owner on my acquisition of a really fine horse, when my dad, armed with the full power of his good looks and all that cultivated charm, asked the owner for the check back, just for a moment, purring in his slow, Oklahoma drawl that he needed to make a notation on it if she didn’t mind.
Well, that lady didn’t mind at all. In fact, she seemed perfectly tickled to hand the check over to my father, until he folded it neatly in half and stuck it in his pocket, advising her in a polite but firm tone—the kind with which no one would dare argue, at least at our house—that we’d decided otherwise.
The word came at me like one of the sucker punches I’d eventually find myself receiving from my first husband, who was more than a decade away in my future. I was speechless, dumbfounded, as my mother ushered me to the car, her arm around my shoulder. She was always the one who consoled me through the stuff like this.
As we drove off with me on the verge of tears in the backseat of her new Buick LeSabre, my dad explained that one of the college students who worked at the stable and who’d seen me taking lessons there from time to time had pulled him aside after he’d paid the gray mare's owner and warned him about her lameness.
She would never be sound, he said. The college student said that the owners had been toying with the idea of putting her down.
In between the sniffles that I wasn't supposed to let loose, because we had after all just escaped certain disaster by the skin of our teeth, and I should look at this from a practical perspective, I decided that this must have occurred while the woman, with all the enthusiasm of Pandora herself, was showing me the tack box that was also part of the deal.
In looking at the USDA Forest Service map for possible horseback routes up to Horse Thief Meadow this weekend, I see that there's a creek running through it.
I have a former sister-in-law from Southern CA with whom I used to hike nearly every weekend. We were married to brothers, and neither one of us was happy at the time, soothing each other through the threats, intimidation and her black eyes (Years later, after I'd divorced mine and she was still married to hers, I heard about her cracked vertebrae and ribs ...), hence our escapes to the wilderness.
Free-wheeling D. loved to go skinny-dipping. Get that woman near a body of water, and she'd shed her clothes faster than this girl who grew up as a fundamentalist evangelical and who was pretty certain such an act of human depravity might just send her straight to the pit could object. And then she'd talk me into it too. (She had a good ten years on me and had already mastered the art of persuasion.)
D. had grown up in La Jolla, and her folks had a place there on the ocean as well as in the Hamptons. Her first honeymoon with her first husband (who she'd lost shortly thereafter in an automobile accident, something which had wounded her deeply) had been a year of traveling the world. She was one of the most "sophisticated" people I'd met at that point in my life. D. was from another world compared to mine. Heck, I'd worn overalls to high school, a fact that cracked her up.
Almost twenty years ago, we got busted swimming bare-butt naked in the Santa Fe watershed, our dogs barking on the shore to tell us the rangers had arrived. They turned their backs while we scrambled up to the shore, shivering, and got into our clothes...
You'd think that would have stopped me from taking off my clothes and wading into the water once and for all, but D.'s influence has apparently stuck, given my swim after a long, hot horse trek to Lake Johnson last summer.
I haven't seen D. in years, but if I did, I'd give her a hug and tell her she had been good for me. That knowing her had helped me along the path to waking from a deep sleep. You see, that's what meeting someone from another world can do.
In spite of her circumstances, D. always seemed to know a little something about how to live in heaven, although never quite enough to get her out of her marriage to a thug.
There probably won't be any skinnydipping after the horse trek to Horse Thief Meadow this Sunday though. And it won't be because I'm concerned about any divine repercussions. It will simply be too cold up there.
As I stand on the creek bank, however, I will definitely think of D. Just as I do each and every time I'm in the wilderness, and the water is calling to me.
I drive to work each morning and watch the aspen transform from green to gold on the Sangre de Cristos and the Pecos--northern New Mexico alchemy.
If all goes as planned, this Sunday we'll be riding the horses to Horsethief Meadow, at approximately 10,000 feet in the Pecos, realm of the aspen. There are places where the pine forest opens up into alpine meadows with stand after stand of quivering trees. And I always get the feeling, as I'm wandering down corridors of smooth, white trunks, beneath the high, blue vault, that I'm in a land filled with kings and goddesses and other nobles who nod their golden heads at me and my horse in passing. We must seem to be small creatures from their towering perspective.
It's not a problem I ever thought I'd have, but I do have too many horses. So the question is--who will get to go? I will probably take Teyla the appaloosa. She hasn't been out much. But I can see the disappointment all over quarter horse Pinon's body already. She always stands at the gate, begging to go, whenever I ride someone not her. She really needs to belong to a horse-crazed kid who can ride her a couple of times a day, but I couldn't bear to part with her, ol' long-legged occasionally snotty mare who I find that I love beyond reason.
The Big Boo and I are trotting through the back yard.
We circle the swingset. We circle the log splitter. We circle the vaulting barrel, of which he is still suspicious, but we manage a nervous circle nonetheless.
1,850 pounds of Percheron springing up off of the ground in great strides, onyx legs swinging beneath him, back rounded, neck arched, and I simply ... sit, because on Tobias it is this easy, especially after we work the buggers out on the longe.
We are practicing being soft. Soft. Soft. Soft. The advice of my vaulting coach, the classical dressage rider who's studied with some of the best, is chanting in my head like Ohmmmm.
I still my seat, still my hands, exhale slowly, and like a miracle, the big horse halts, and we find ourselves staring into the luminous face of the full moon rising above the horizon, climbing above Starvation Peak, ascending above Rowe Mesa, her cool arms outstretched over the tips of Toby's ears. He shivers in her radiance, nods his head, as if the moon and the mighty horse had arranged this meeting.
I feel suddenly like the unlikeliest of knights in my very own backyard, surrounded by the chain link fence.
We’ve spent most of the day at the draft horse show, and the kids have just ridden their fill, well, their maximum quota (at the approximately six bucks each for a less than two-minute thrill), of rides on the midway. This evening, we’ll attend the draft pull, a decidedly male affair after a day of carriage driving and fancy hats.
Now it’s mom’s turn.
I am waiting for what is hands-down the biggest, scariest ride on the midway. The words Xtreme Power flash in buzzing, gaudy lights way above what is a gigantic, twirling, spinning, churning, swing type of contraption suspended from beams of steel. As the Xtreme Power cars hurl back and forth in front of my eyes, then way up into the air above most of the other attractions, its riders screaming at the top of their lungs like they’re in the clutches of some man-eating beast, I’m thinking the machine is like this stupendous marriage of a roto-rooter, zipper, the home-made tree swing that my childhood friend Adam and his brother built in their backyard out of plywood and chains (the likes of which will never be seen again in our zealously safety conscious and litigation loving homeland) and a tilt-a-whirl on steroids.
C., my 10-year-old, is peering at me with a hang-dog expression from where he stands in the crowd with Dennis and his sister. He isn’t tall enough, my thrill-seeking gradeschooler, and can’t experience this monstrous contraption with me. He’s trying to make me feel guilty for going without him with those long eyelashes flickering over sad eyes, but it’s not working. I mouth the words Next Year.
I am third in line. In front of me are two teenaged boys almost resplendent in their gang gear. Their heads are shaved clean, and they are pierced in what appears to be many interesting places, at least that are visible to the eye. The other possibilities I don’t want to think about. One of them has a swastika on his forearm. I kind of doubt he has the four winds in mind. They turn and stare at me with their dead, level eyes, like two fish out of water in the midst of all the fresh air and festivity. I smile back briefly, it always seems the safest thing to do—be friendly, but not too friendly to people who seem like they’d just as soon eat you alive if you weren’t all out here in public.
They don’t smile back.
As the carnival guy locks us down into the seats of the Xtreme Power, as if we are all astronauts preparing for flight, I look across our little group of seats, and, wouldn't you know it--right across from me are those boys again, and one of the boys is glaring. Or perhaps it’s just an extension of the previous stare? Glaring with steel gray eyes like he’d like to kill me.
And I wonder if that kid has ever touched a horse.
Like he wished he had a handgun or something, right here, right now.
Or picked up the reins in his hands and experienced the power of a horse departing the earth in a gallop.
If it was just you and me, lady, on a lonely stretch of planet, you’d have a problem on your hands.
Or driven a team of horses. Or followed a trail into the mountains.
I wonder how any boy his young age can live on the earth and embrace death with such open arms, with red and black symbols of hate scrawled into his flesh. Instead of hoping he gets help, I find myself hoping he stays away from the horse barns. I comfort myself by thinking of all those gentle, doe-eyed draft horses stabled almost a universe away from the midway, where such boys might not care to tread. Horse shit. And all that. This is not a world of fairy tale endings.
We twirl, we ascend, we plummet almost to our deaths and then back again. I try not to look at the gang boy who’s in the clutches of the Xtreme Power with me and everybody else, but a couple of times I find that I just can’t help myself. As our eyes meet across the ocean of air, I get the impression that he’s pissed off at the idea of anything alive.
And right now I am, being swung back and forth in an arc I have no hope or desire to control.
The fat little boy next to me is grinning from ear to ear. The knuckles of his pudgy hands are almost white. He has lost every pretense of cool during flight. And I am laughing. I am laughing. I am laughing. I am laughing with the fat little boy, and the woman wearing all that gold, and the teenaged girl who had been worried about her hair getting all messed up but who’s now holding her arms way up above her head with the thrill of the wind, and the couple of ranch boys whose cowboy boots are somewhere down there on the ground where they left them, and the gang boys with their cold eyes, and at my little boy’s look of abject disappointment from where he stands looking up at me, momentarily left behind.
I laugh at the complete and ridiculous joy of being tossed up and down by a giant who is playing with all of us.
This is the mystery of life and its masks. What're you going to do when the thing breaks, and it starts winding down? Are you just going to become an old dog getting older and older, sinking back into your body? Or in the moment of the full moon have you made the jump to the solar light? -- Joseph Campbell
When my daughter was much smaller, I made her a Pegasus costume for the mythology fair at school, complete with feathered wings and a white-horse mask I bought on the internet. A white cotton bodysuit I painstakingly painted with silver clouds, stars, lightning bolts, the moon. Yards of snowy yarn for the tail. When we arrived at school, I remember holding the hand of the pint-sized mythological creature as we walked across the playground. I had to re-adjust her wings a few times, because the tips were nearly dragging the ground. One wing caught on the playground equipment, from which a teacher and I managed to extricate her.
When my now 11-year-old daughter J. and I arrived at the Dressage Barn on Saturday for our vaulting exhibition, we made our way across the property with its well-maintained arenas and barns. The equestrian center was filled with middle-aged dressage women bustling about in their jodphurs and tall black boots. As we strolled past the stalls of Hanoverians, I felt suddenly very conspicuous in my boot-legged spandex pants, tank top, and gymnast shoes. Nothing very flashy, mind you. It was a pretty conservative get up. But the uncomfortable feeling was almost overwhelming. Like I was in one of those childhood dreams where you show up for school in your pajamas.
Or worse.
I found myself wishing for my Levis, my cowboy boots, and my flannel shirt, painfully aware of the extra pounds over what is still, admittedly, a pretty well-working musculature. I allowed the wrinkles around my eyes, my mouth, and the flesh that gravity is beginning to get the better of, in spite of Joseph Pilates, to condemn me--to whisper deep inside that I wasn't quite up to any of this, and that I should just quit.
Who the hell do I think I am? the question refused to stop swirling around inside of my head as we found the vaulting horse Shakespeare in his stall and then went to warm up on the vaulting barrel. As I helped J. work through her compulsory vaulting moves on the barrel, I was wishing with every fiber of my being that today I was one of the moms sitting on the sidelines sipping iced tea and watching our angels riding their horses in the egg and spoon race around the cones. But I'd made a commitment to my friend to do this vaulting exhibition, and if you knew my friend you'd know that nothing short of death would serve as an escape clause.
After the demo, a woman about my same age seeks me out in the barn and tells me she wants to vault. How does she sign up? she asks. Her face is flushed, excited. She tells me I was really good. Really wonderful. I begin to explain that I haven't vaulted for a year, that I'm way rusty, kind of the can-do part of the demo. And then she puts her hand on my arm and stops me. "Really, it was beautiful," she says. "Like a meditation."
And then I remember that part. Not the part where I got stuck on the upswing from my seat to my knees, broken in two like an old rag doll who's still able to pull herself back together in a pinch. In kinder circles that would be referred to as resiliency. But the part where Shakespeare cantered rhythmically around the twenty-meter circle with me on his back, arms stretched way above my head, hands touching the clouds. And afterwards, there was applause.
The woman is grinning at me. A meditation.
On the Great Plains in the center of America, one may have this experience once every month. On the fifteenth day of each lunar cycle, the sun sets in the west just as the full moon rises in the east. They're exactly the same size, even the same color, and they're visible at exactly the same moment. That's the moment of the fullness of your powers in midlife, when your zeal for your own life has reached its apogee. From that moment it must remain in your spirit, in your mind. The moon is symbolic of the body's life, which carries its death within it. The sun is symbolic of the pure spirit that has no darkness, no death in it. It is this pure spirit that can watch with compassion as your body goes the way of all bodies. It can share in the amplitude of your spiritual experience of the life of all creatures.--Joseph Campbell
After the vaulting exhibition, where she performed an arabesque and a flag and a stand on the back of a seventeen-hand flesh and blood Pegasus with a sixteen-year old vaulter who could very well be Helen of Troy herself, with all of that bloom of beauty that I suspect could launch a thousand ships just about any day now, and that coil of golden hair at the nape of her long, strong neck--my 11-year-old daughter is so filled with herself, so up and over the top with just a glimpse of her own potential, that she simply has to spend some time by herself when we get home, taking it all in until she's saturated, fat, almost faint with the knowledge of what is just the beginning of her myth, her very own journey.
This is the kind of moment that always takes my breath away in equestrian vaulting. Here my daughter is vaulting with sixteen-year-old I. today at the demo we did at the big dressage barn open-house. This was during the warmup. I. is sitting astride Irish Draft Shakespeare's neck with her legs in the cossack straps and J. is standing immediately behind the surcingle.
Each time I see this move, the phrase the wind beneath my wings comes to mind, as one vaulter supports the other.
From a stand, I. supported J. into a modified arabesque.
It always stirs me--this moment in equestrian vaulting when one vaulter supports another in such a profound way. Right now, without I.'s support, my daughter J. simply couldn't do this. But with the kind of confidence and strength this supported exercise stimulates, she will soon be able to soar on her own. And then, she'll be helping the others.
We're off to the NM State Fair today in Albuquerque. It's the Draft Horse Show. Hours and hours of draft horses. I am in heaven already at the thought of all those heavy horses and the order of fried bread with powdered sugar on top that I am planning on eating. State fair fried bread--the food of the gods.
Of course, it is raining. Torrential, cold, silver stuff that happens at the high altitudes. You see it walking towards you from miles away among the rolling hills and the mesas as it strays down off of the Pecos mountains and then all of a sudden you are in the middle of a deluge. The horses are not very pleased, to say the least. The heeler dogs are muddy, wet messes but they are in my kitchen chewing on their rawhide bones as I write this because I'm, well ... a big softie. Nothing that can't be mopped up.
So I will leave you with this this morning -- a really nice vaulting photo. I had to come up with some brochures last night for our vaulting demonstration at the dressage barn this Saturday. I like the interplay between coach, vaulter, and horse. Here's the little bio I wrote about our vaulting coach for the brochure--
Vaulting instructor M. is a retired dance professional who has made her home in Santa Fe for the last 26 years. She is a student of Classical Dressage, a Pilates instructor, and the coach of Free Spirit Vaulters, a team who placed at the national-level competition of the American Vaulting Association (AVA). She’s taught both children and adults to vault, and coached one forty-year-old mom of two to place first in bronze-level compulsories at the Region IV competition. (Now who could that be?!)
From the feel of Miss Polka Dots' coat this morning, seems that winter is on its way. Are your horses starting to get their warm coats?
In a blink of an eye, they will all look like shaggy bears, and I'll be busting the ice off of the top of the water tank, because the stock tank heater will give out on me like it does every year, several times.
Sometimes I think ol' Jehovah could get himself a pretty good job as a lighting director on the Broadway stage in New York City, if he was of a mind to.
Might be a bit of a reprieve from hanging this kind of elaborate beauty outside of my front porch every morning.
An Equestrian Adventurer on the Trail of Ghengis Khan
Wow. This is the kind of adventure I dream of.
From timcopejourneys.com. Hortobagy, Hungary - Tim Cope, 28, who for three years and two months has been travelling in the ‘hoofsteps’ of Genghis Khan on an epic 10,000km horseback journey from Mongolia to Hungary – the first person in living memory to attempt this journey is due to finish on September 22.
On 31 May 2004, Tim set out to travel 10,000 km on the trail of Genghis Khan from Mongolia to Hungary by horse. Within a week, his horses were stolen but undeterred Tim continued with his three horses and intrepid canine companion, Tigon, who has had numerous adventures of his own along the way (including being stolen, frozen and hit by a car).
Although he’s faced temperatures ranging from –52 to 54°C, Tim says adventure is not about conquering the elements but about experiencing the world by immersing himself in different cultures, landscapes and situations. On this epic journey, Tim has been researching the heritage and life of the nomads who live on the vast Eurasian steppe.
Tim says: “I wanted to know what it was like to be a nomad to travel to Europe by horse and understand what connections remain between the different cultures stretching from Mongolia to Hungary”.
I think this is simply one of the most delightful photos I've seen.
Any equestrian blog that's entitled Smells Horsey, just has to be good. And after reading freelance writer Anne's accounts of her family's life with horses, I will be visiting there often. Definitely check out Smells Horsey: Real Life with Horses.
We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man—the horse. So we called it šunka waken, “holy dog.” For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful. --Lakota Holy Man Lame Deer
I love to watch my children and their horses.
It's impossible to tell from this photo, but the coat my daughter is wearing is just about The Rattiest Horse Jacket Around. The fleece is almost bare, the elbows are almost gone, the zipper works sometimes, and it will take a good deal of energy to part her from it. J. gets attached.
The only answer is when the weather gets cooler, this one won't be sufficiently warm, and then I'll switch The Horse Jacket out with a new one from the local tack store. Sneaky mom stuff. But not all that sneaky, because we still have The Horse Jacket prior to this one. A faded red affair with black horses that's hanging in the back of her closet and will most likely do so until she's at least in college.
Last night, J. did some vaulting on Caprichosa. This is very informal stuff. We use a halter and longe line, no side reins, and the very lightweight vaulting surcingle (that's all I've got at home right now) because of Cap's sensible and generous nature and the fact that she usually seems to enjoy it very much. Typical of her breed, she's highly intelligent, and seems to funnel the antics on her back through a refined sense of equine curiosity and a bit of bemusement. I don't believe the horse would tolerate it if we decided to get really serious about it with her, however. We just kind of hang loose, and keep it fun, and then she's thoroughly engaged in the process. It makes for good practice.
I wonder what my daughter--the one who gets attached, the one who keeps a clipping from Caprichosa's mane in a little medicine bag in her armoire--will remember about the Andalusian horse when she looks back on her across the years from the perspective of a mature woman? The horse who now carries her way up into the mountains through the sunshine and the hail to deep, high country lakes and lets her stand on her back while she walks quietly and carefully in circles, keeping all of that Andalusian power in check.
Will she think of the glimmer in the mare's eye, that hint of the big spirit?
Me and Miss Long Legs (Pinon) on Round Mountain in the Pecos Wilderness.
No photo can do justice to the sheer scope of this country. We have just ridden an hour up a snarl of switchbacks to get here. The kind of terrain that used to have my flat-lander's heart pounding in my chest and me reminding myself to "breathe! breathe ..." and "for heaven's sakes do not look down."
Well, I am better at that looking down thing these days. Also the breathing part in this country. It helps to have a solid, trustworthy horse for these types of forays. Even if she does like to walk on the outside edge of the trails.
I came across the word picadero in my reading some time ago. It means “temple of the horse”. Essentially, a picadero is a small, square ménage or riding arena. Over the years, I’ve come to think of my round pen as the “temple of the horse” here on my little ranch. It is the place where I work with my horses and hopefully achieve harmony there. In vaulting, we work on a 20-meter circle. I’ve come to view that circle as a bit of a temple as well.
Yesterday, I spent a good while with my vaulting coach remembering to use my breath as I sat on her Irish Draft Shakespeare on the 20-meter circle and practiced some compulsory moves.
The exercise we went through was this—
Inhale, filling your lungs and abdomen with breath and then exhale, lengthening up through the pelvic floor, the abdomen, the sternum, the chest, the neck, the head. You feel the breath circulating up and through your chest as your shoulder blades widen down your back and flutter out.
Like wings. It occurs to me. Like the wings of an angel. And I'm not speaking of the Hallmark angels, the one on the top of the Christmas tree, or cherubs with arrows. I'm talking of something else, but about which I can only ask questions.
Is this part of all of this recent interest in horses and spirit in a lot of the content that is being generated in the equestrian world? As riders and as vaulters we pay attention to the breath. And isn’t the breath a mystery? The very life within us? And from that springs this gift of human consciousness? I think the answer is yes.
When meditating, one breathes in and out, circulating the breath into the lungs, into the abdomen, and upon exhalation, the breath travels from the base of the spine up and out. It’s a way to pay attention to the very essence of ourselves, to that “I” that has nothing to do with ego. To that “I” that is the authentic self. Who I am without all of the outside trappings or my ideas about who I may think I am.
I think of the exchanges of breath that occur between two horses meeting for the first time. It is an almost ritualized greeting. I greet my horses this way many times. I've passed this along to my kids. I sometimes see them standing nostril to nostril with a horse when they go down to the pasture. What is it that we are sharing with each other--horse and human during these exchanges?
Breath. Pneuma. Spirit. Sometimes experienced in the simple act of saying hello to an equine friend or on the back of a horse when sitting the walk, trot, canter.
This is why I often think of the work I do on horseback as occurring within a temple. The Temple of the Horse. I can sit on the horse’s back and have an encounter with the divine through the direct experience of the breath and other things I have no words for. In the Temple of the Horse I have experienced gnosis. It happens that I am sometimes carried on a broad equine’s back into the unknowable, ineffable mystery. It is the deep knowledge of experience that words can barely describe. It is no longer the faith of a little child. Nor is this the knowledge of smug, self-assurance and dogma.
Portrait of a Blue Heeler on a Blue Equestrian Vaulting Barrel
Here Lila Jane (my daughter wanted to name her Lila, and I wanted to name her Jane) is working on the vaulting barrel in the back yard. She's got this stand move down pretty well, I think. However, if she continues to insist on doing it backwards--which makes it no longer a compulsory move, but a freestyle--then she's going to need to scootch her bob tail closer to the handles. (And please don't send me any nasty emails about what a meanie I am for chopping off my dogs tails and then making a stew out of them or something. I didn't. They came to me that way. Sans tails. I don't agree with it. But it's pretty common here in New Mexico. [And I just made up the stew part ...]) Got to give her credit for trying a backwards stand, though. It's particularly courageous when your tail has been "lobbed off by someone so &%#!ing stupid, I mean, someone who should never even own a dog blah blah blah". (A little taste of how some charming people communicate with you on the blogosphere.) There's that whole balance issue, etc. Standing facing the tail-end of the horse is tough to accomplish on a moving horse, even at a walk.
I need to talk to her about this head-first dismount thing, though...
It's amazing what you can do with a tractor and a front-end loader and a little time by yourself. Just moved this big heavy barrel from the garage to the backyard. I'm going to be demonstrating vaulting for a group of dressage riders next week at my coach's new barn. Apparently they are all around my age. So I have to practice. Quite a lot. And then a little more. J. asked me to move it outside anyway for her. How I have gotten talked into this, I'm not quite sure. I will not be wearing a unitard.
I am wondering what the potential is for total heeler havoc with this big interesting blue thing in the back yard. As you can see, they are already trying it out. I expect there will be fights over who gets to sit on it. Thankfully, it's too heavy for them to carry around as they frolic, which is what the tenacious heeler sisters really like to do when they get a hold of something interesting. Frolic. Loads of it. Life is one big heeler frolic.
Now I'm just thinking out loud here ... but ... is this a potential circus act? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Vaulting Heelers. Can I quit my day job now???
(Oops. shouldn't have mentioned the word c-i-r-c-u-s. The self-righteous, animal rights wacko nut jobs who know absolutely nothing about me will be after me now about how teaching pets to do tricks is The Root of All Evil and blah blah blah ... and then that's generally when I respond--Well, what have you done? How many dogs, cats, and horses have you rescued and either taken superb care of for the remainder of their natural lives or found good homes for???
And the answer is more often than not resounding silence. Or you go look at their profiles on MySpace, which are sometimes plastered with photos of whales and cute dolphins, and learn that the only pet they've ever had is a goldfish, not even a gerbil. They'd probably run in terror if my horses came cantering up to them in the pasture, just because they wanted to say hello and were hoping that they might have something good to eat in their pocket--because, after all, you know, these self-appointed guardians have had so much first-hand experience with heelers, and horses, and whales.)
This beautiful photo Meadow Mists is by displaced soul on Flickr. Check out all of displaced soul's photographs. They are really beautiful. See the set entitled Land of Enchantment, which is what New Mexico is called.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. --William Blake
We are up at dawn to go cut wood. They say when you cut wood, it warms you three times before you ever even get around to burning it--once when you cut it, once when you split it, and once when you stack it. But this morning is cold, and I didn't bring my jacket. "You'll warm up once we get going," Dennis says. He is the wood cutter in the family, wielding the Stihl chainsaw that still makes me nervous with all those steel teeth, it's rip cord brain, it's gasoline breath. It seems a little too eager for an arm or a leg when all it gets is a mouth full of tree sap. I keep a wary eye on it.
I am the stacker. Me and the kids. We pile the fresh cut logs into the back of the truck until it's full. But they're at their dad's this weekend.
The clouds are hanging low, so low they settle on the buffalo grass until they are embraced by the drought-brown blades. The morning is all wrapped up in lamb's wool, strangely insulated. Usually the sun is so bright here you have to wear a hat, a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and boots, even in the heat of summer, just to not get eaten up by it. I'm talking devoured. One look around at the weathered fenceposts, weathered barns, weathered sunflowers, weathered blackbirds, weathered coyotes, weathered faces of the people who've lived here close to the sun for a very long time at something like 6,400 feet above sea level and higher, and you'd understand what I'm talking about.
I'm sitting on the tail gate of the truck, drinking my coffee, watching the mist walking between the Ponderosa like long-legged, silver giants. The idea that I have a whole thermos full of the hot, black elixir is making up for the fact that my polarfleece jacket is draped over one of the pine chairs in my dining room at home, a place that might as well exist in a whole different universe from where I am right now with the mist settling on my face in ozone-tinged droplets. I close my eyes, hear the argent ghosts murmuring, but I can't make out the words. Lick my lips. The taste of clouds and coffee is not unpleasant. I take another sip of the scalding stuff and watch the heelers disappear down the Forest Service road, squeezing through the weathered gate that hangs at a crazy angle between two weathered fence posts that aren't long for this world. The sister dogs travel side-by-side, like they are yoked together, and disappear into the shimmering curtain of white.
I step off of the back of the truck, and walk towards the gate. Stretch my hand out just on the other side, across the uneven top where the sun has been cribbing, naughty boy. And for a moment, I hope he gets a case of the colic. I try to touch the mist. But it disappears beneath my fingertips. Swirls and dissipates into mystery. I wonder what is on the other side of that gate, and where my silly dogs have gone off to.
One good rip of the cord, and the greedy chainsaw is chewing up all the silence of the morning. It flies all around us in pieces and bits to cover the earth like mulch. The heelers come trotting back like wind-up dog toys, tin ears pricked as if they are trying to see me through the increasing drizzle that makes me think longingly of polarfleece.
I'm surprised that the pale denizens of the Ponderosa forest don't turn tail and run. They cluster together beneath the pines land watch, like the the herd of Forest Service horses that usually winter here.
This is what we will be doing again come October. If there's anyone in the Santa Fe area who'd like to join us, send me an email. You can check out Free Spirit Vaulters as well, and contact information is on that site. Equestrian vaulting is a tremendous way to develop the rider's seat.
Our coach is excellent--a retired ballerina and a classical dressage rider. My daughter is chomping at the bit to begin again. (My son isn't going to, despite my best attempts and stories about how the knights probably vaulted as did the cavalry. Which is OK.) J.'s still young enough to not mind if I vault with her. I suppose she's also thinking that I'll be her longer and horse handler once we get Toby up and running as a vaulting horse, so she's kind of stuck with me anyway in this sport. I never really intended to do this. I started taking the kids to practice, and pretty soon I was longing the vaulting horse for equestrian vaulting practices (A pretty good experience in and of itself. Th longer must to keep the vaulting horse cantering beautifully, consistently, rhymically around the circle while kids are standing on her back, Doing handstands, etc.), and then before you know it -- I'm vaulting.
I've been riding my other steed--my bicycle, that is--every day at lunch this summer to try and stay in some modicum of shape. I don't know if I will mount at a canter ever again because my left knee is still messed up from slipping on the shale on the Cave Creek trail in the Pecos last summer. I don't seem to have a lot of spring in my knees these days, the stuff required to vault yourself up onto that horse's back at canter, and need to work on it. That means lots of ballet jumps, whatever those are officially called, I'm no ballerina. I am definitely going to give equestrian vaulting a go this fall.
Can a horse save your life? Can you be rescued by an equine? Yes, yes. From ill-tempered ex-husbands who enjoyed throwing their weight around and lots of other, actually, much scarier and ultimately more threatening things. Our letters, like the one in the gnostic Hymn of the Pearl, show up in the most surprising shapes and sizes. Mine came to me not on kingfisher's wings, but on four hooves ...
The Andalusian mare who er ... "belonged" ... to me for years and who began to claim my daughter for her own a while ago. Eventually, I made that inevitable outcome official and "gave" Caprichosa to J.
Is there a story in being rescued by the Horse of Kings? And how does one tell it without sounding like a whining, puny victim? Which one of course, is not. This is, after all, a story of galloping on.
Well, I'd better stop procrastinating here on my blog, which is easy to do--you see it's much simpler to write little snippets right off of the top of my head and post them here then try to put together something coherent and meaningful that anyone else would really like to read and possibly want to add to their library--and go find out.
Has a horse rescued you? Does horsemanship help you to stay more awake when there's so much around that's trying to lull us to sleep? What special things have you learned from your horse(s)? What kinds of horse stories interest you?
Every kid ought to get to ride in the back of a pickup truck out in the middle of the woods. At least once in their lives.
We're driving slow on the dirt Forest service roads, looking for a good place to cut wood. So if you're cringing, there's truly nothing to cringe about. This is always an adventure for my kids, and they've been doing this for years. Dogs, mom, kids all pile into the back of the old GMC and we're off, scouting out trees as Dennis drives us all down the rutted roads. You should see us looking for the Christmas tree each year. Sometimes we see elk.
We don't cut these big ponderosas. Our permit is for the pinon and the juniper. By clearing those out, we're making room for the ponderosa to flourish.
I've just gone through the process of becoming a Mentor in the Santa Fe schools for a child at risk. During the training we were told that a lot of these kids are bored, angry, restless, have difficult family lives, are flunking out, in trouble at school, could be here illegally, may not speak much English, don't read, etc. We talked about resiliency and why some kids thrive even in difficult circumstances while others don't.
I think about the resiliency of these Ponderosas. I think they were almost gone on the mesa, and now there are groves.
I have this dream about bringing horses to kids one of these days. Kids who need them.
So I'll begin here. This small step in the public schools for one hour a week on school property. I'm anxious to meet the child they match me with and begin. I am hoping that I am up to the task. It's time to give back. Praxis.
Every kid should get to ride in the back of a pickup truck beneath the blue sky on a gorgeous late summer day and fill their lungs to the brim with all this fresh air and possibility. Every kid.
Just a little housekeeping. I've re-opened comments. I've gotten so many nice emails from folks. I'd closed comments down for a while, in fact, had to clean out literally thousands over the course of a year (if you can believe that) because I was getting a ton of spam, and apparently I'm not sufficiently technically adept to figure out how to block them all.
I've set my spam blocker to Super Aggressive Anti Spam Mode. Anyway, I think I have.
So to any spammers out there, know that if you fill my comments box with garbage I will mail you box after box of fresh gooey green horse poop ...
Check out Transylvanian Horseman--A fascinating horse blog and all around good read
From my little ranch here in northern New Mexico, the Carpathian Forest in Transylvania conjures up images of deep mystery and beauty in my imagination. Of somewhere, well ... else. A place many of us might visit only in our dreams.
I don't know if I'll ever get to travel to Julian and Danielle's Stefan cel Mare Equestrian Centre in Romania, but what I can do is travel through the words of a very excellent writer and storyteller as Julian blogs about their daily life on his blog Transylvanian Horseman. Definitely check this out. You are in for a real treat as this Transylvanian Horseman shares with you his vision of --
Stunning mountains, quiet and unspoiled, shelter a land and a way of life that has changed little in generations. Here, working horses still outnumber motor vehicles, providing transportation for people and goods and cultivating fields. Food is grown and produced locally, using age-old methods. The hardworking, hospitable people gather in close communities where family is the centre of life.
It rumbles along the top of his pasture at least five times a day on schedule. It races past the round pen. I practice getting him used to the train by standing with him on the far side of the railroad road, holding the leadrope with just enough slack so he doesn't feel trapped and talking to him while the massive machine snakes by, its sheer tonnage rattling the sand and rocks beneath boots, hooves, and the freckled paws of the ever present heeler dogs. The Percheron horse stands still as a picture while I wave to the Amtrak sometimes. I can just barely make out the shadows of the tourists traveling in the glass observation car. They wave back. No doubt impressed by my big brave horse and pretty cattle dogs.
I hear the train whistle blowing in the distance, through the pinon and the juniper. Toby is chugging up the last steep hill on the rutted road before we get home, a nearly 2,000 pound freight train in his own right. I'm feeling all smug and happy because we've had a lovely, light ride. The horse doesn't feel the need to rush as much as he used to, and I'm starting to ride him with a tickle of the rein and my intentions. Soon we'll no longer travel as two, but as one--at least some of the time, I am thinking. After all, you've got to start somewhere. I've seen glimpses of it this afternoon, as I sit his lofty, round strides, feel all that happiness rippling beneath me, because the young horse loves to get out, and I'm filled to the brim with myself and him.
As we reach the top of the hill, the coal black train engine careens by. Toby stops, stands, and stares, his ears pricked forward, the tenacious heeler sisters panting at his heels. See, all of that sacking out work has paid off, I am congratulating myself as the red cars rattle by us now. They wobble back and forth on their steel wheels, nearly hynoptizing the both of us, until Toby awakes from the trance like someone's just jabbed him with a cattle prod and he's all of a sudden seeing the train for the very first time. The horse launches himself forward with the full throttle of all the equine flight instinct that's been buried in him since the beginning of horse time, and races away from the train, the iron beast that he's just decided will devour him in one gulp.
He will race.
He will race.
He will race as far away from the threat as possible.
And I will hold on with knees and hands and what's left of my puny intentions. I hold the horse for a moment. We hang suspended in the air, but he's gained too much momentum with all of that muscle and sinew and bone and fear. He's too strong, and he's not listening. And then we're through what's left of the old ranch fence--the remnants of another age, when this land was filled with sheep and adobe homesteads instead of doublewides and broken beer bottles and pit bulls chained to concrete blocks and worse--the strands of barbed wire that I am all too painfully aware of because I've been passing by them on horseback for years now, always careful of them, because barbed wire is anathema. Some are splayed across the ground. Some are coiled up like rattlesnakes waiting to strike. One hangs by a rusty nail or two, suspended between the juniper posts a couple of feet off the ground.
I land flat on my back right in the snarl of barbed wire with stirrups and silver buckles flashing above my head, like the pain rifling through my side and my shoulder. Toby is a black shadow against the sky. The ground is shaking and quaking, and the heelers are barking, and I wait for what seems like a very long time. A very long time is more than a few ticks of the clock that I'm surprised to find myself clutching inside my head just about as tenaciously as I held onto the reins. I wait to be rended to shreds by the barbed wire I suspect the big horse is dragging behind him. The barbed wire that the horse is going to be all tangled up in, and that's going to catch up with me any moment now, and God knows what else.
It's funny how calmly I am anticipating my own demise when all of the control I delude myself every waking moment into thinking that I possess is now vanished into the hard blue ether of what just seconds ago was an agreeable afternoon. On my back in the barbed wire, I'm no longer cradled in the hands of angels, at least not the ones they talked about at Sunday School so long ago. Right now my ass belongs to the laws of physics and matter and the hard-hearted universe. I guess you could call them angels if you want to. But they're anything but nice.
I rip my riding pants and other things getting out of the wire and find Toby trotting back and forth along the back of the new neighbor's dirt yard. A man and woman are standing at the back of their singlewide, staring in disbelief at the super-sized intruder. I hate it that this is the way we meet for the very first time. I point at the horse losing it in their back lot and yell, "I'm sorry," not sure they speak English. They look worried that the big beast will mow their house down like a tornado, right off of its cinderblocks into the dirt.
The percheron holds his head way up in the air, rolling his eyes, prancing like some kind of circus creature. If he could speak, he'd be squealing, "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared." Well, I am too. The heelers are trying to help me round him up, but they're making it worse. So I call them to me, and then all of a sudden I must pop up onto Toby's field of vision. I must register somewhere in the terrified horse's mind. His equine radar. Because he hones in on me like a missile and barrels towards me like a frightened child, bunching himself up into a stop. And we are eye to eye. His nostrils are flaring. Their insides are flaming red, red as the train cars. I feel the blood coursing through his veins, matching the rhythm of my own.
The big horse lowers his head, seeking relief. I lay my hand on his neck. It's hot and wet. He relaxes at my touch, and my knees are suddenly weak, but I kneel to check him, afraid of what I will find in his flesh, all that muscle, all that soul, all that spirit, contained in only skin and a sleek black coat. His leg is bleeding, a cut, just through the skin, up way high above his knee. I check him all over.
There's nothing else.
We are lucky.
I am feeling sick because I let the young horse get hurt. I want to cry, but I can't. If I'm not calm, then neither is Toby, and he's counting on me right now. The heelers are whining. It's a keen now. I should have stood at the horse's head when the train passed, like I have in the past, to give him courage. I let the afternoon and the beauty of a good ride plus thirty-plus years of horsemanship go to my head, and I wasn't careful enough.
I see that I am bleeding through the jaggedy holes in my riding pants. I can hear my mother asking me pointedly in her Oklahoma drawl just when was the last time that I had a tetanus shot, and I'm suddenly painfully aware of all of my human frailty. At my age, I still haven't had enough experience with that sort of thing. Trains, that is. And apparently a lot more.
I bury my head in Toby's coarse black mane and try to tell him that I am sorry.
Hello. My name is Bazz and I'm a horse. Not just any horse mind, I'm a big bloody horse and a very emotional one at that. I live in Buninyong (which for those that don't know is near Ballarat in Victoria, Australia). bazzyboy.net
