Horsekeeping (45 page)

 

 

TWO DAYS LATER BOBBI HAD A SURPRISE.

“Why don't we go into the jump field today?”

“Um, okay, I guess,” I replied in my customary conflicted state, game and wary at once.

Our jump field is a larger grass paddock with a variety of man-made obstacles—low and higher white fences, round half-barrels, rectangles that mimic stone walls. These also grace the riding ring but the big difference is in the footing—artificial versus natural. The grass jump field decidedly lacks the soft rubbery dirt graded and pitched to perfection of the ring. There are subtle, irregular gradations that I hadn't noticed; I actually thought it quite flat until I got in there atop four legs instead
of two. Lots to worry about: slippery grass, divots and lumps, rocks and wet spots, the menacing tree in the corner, the thoroughfare of woods and brush along the one side, horses running and squealing in the paddock next door, and, and, and. . . .

Negotiating this uncontrolled environment, I half-expected the dump and run. We trotted a few clumsy passes around the jumps. I picked up a canter. Bandi was forward today, excited in this new territory.
Slow down, boy.

“Keep his motor going up the hill and half-halt on the way down to slow and help him keep his balance weighted behind,” Bobbi cautioned.

His motor seemed just fine to me, so I relied too much on the reins, but I was doing it, actually cantering the intimidating jump field, through the divots and lumps, the rocks and wet spots, the menacing tree and the long row of brush, and impressing the well-behaved horses next door so much that I began to relax and enjoy the ride. We had excised the course of all unknowns. I smiled. As I sailed past the now kindly waving tree in the left corner, Bandi hairy-eyeballed a threat, dropped his left shoulder, spun, left me to fend for myself, and bolted like an escaped convict clear across the paddock and through the open gate toward the barn. Feeling the ground shake beneath the entire length of my splayed form, I marveled at the speed and power of receding Bandi's rippling haunches and the glint of four silver-soled hooves as he thunderously fled.
What awesome power,
I thought.
Thank God I'm not riding that!

Bobbi claims experienced horses know it is wrong to dump their riders, and Bandi's a smart horse. No longer running from the tree, this frightened, naughty child ran from Bobbi and me, evading his punishment. Laid out sideways in the grass, I registered my disbelief at the speed of my fall while taking account of body parts:
Back feels okay, head didn't hit the ground, arm bends, hip works, no pain—stand up, shake it off, track down my horse
.
Been here, done this.

I shook out my legs and stamped my feet. Bobbi brushed dirt and grass from my back as we turned toward the barn.

“I hope he doesn't run into the road. I think the main gate is open,” I said, as we hustled along Bandi's getaway route.

“He'll probably head for the barn but stop for some grass on the way. You know he's a chow hound,” Bobbi assured me.

Meghan came running.

“Are you alright?” she panted.

“Yes, yes. Pride damaged, nothing else,” I said, quite the veteran of the dump and run now.

“Where is he?” Bobbi asked, nonchalant, with that same brave face I don with my kids after a close call no matter how petrified I am.

“He stopped to eat some grass before he got to the barn, and Brandy caught him easily enough.”

“That's Bandi alright, never one to pass up a free meal,” Bobbi and I exchanged a knowing look.

Brandy walked a high-stepping, reluctant Bandi back into the jump field. I squinted him the evil-eye, and his agitated whites flashed in all directions of his jerking head.

“You can't keep doing this to your mother, Bandi. You've been out here before. You're too seasoned for this.” Bobbi tugged the bridle at his guilty, frothy cheek.

“Bandi, I'm too old to keep landing in the dirt. I love you, but you have to stop. That tree is not a monster, and we passed it about six times.” I talked right into his face, spitting my anger,
mano-a-mano
.

His half-dollar sized baby browns registered cognition of his fault, “
mea culpa,”
or so I imagined, and a determined Bobbi did what she had to do. She hoisted herself up and pushed the Bandicoot through his paces, working him tightly, forcing him to focus and snap to. She was stronger with him than I'd yet seen, though nowhere near cruel. At Bandi's slightest boggle, she kicked him hard or yanked the reins. Closely in control, she used every fiber of her arms, torso, hips, legs and feet, immediately body-checking his every excuse to ignore a command. She didn't give him an inch. In this test of wills, I bet on Bobbi. Sure enough, my
chastised soldier fell in line. I sat stone petrified on one of the jumps and tried to quell my thumping heart.
Don't piss him off
, I thought, because I knew what was coming.

“Okay, are you ready to get back on?” Bobbi asked after their intense ten minute session. She maintained a firm grip as she halted in front of me. Bandi's wild eyes avoided mine.

“Do I have to?” I whined, knowing I'm the one he must respect.

Bobbi boosted me up, and breathlessly I clambered through some trot work and two canters. Bandi sweated but behaved.

“Okay, bring him down to a walk.”

The Good Bobbi showed mercy; it's over
.

“Feel like doing a little jumping?” Bobbi added, smiling, as if it were the most natural question in the world. Clearly, she had moved on.

“Um, not really. . . .”

What can she be thinking
?

“Will he be okay?” I wanted to be a good soldier, too.

“Let's just do a few,” she suggested.

I circled around and trotted the first little jump. Well, Bandi pretty much stepped over it.

“Keep him going, faster trot.
Think
canter, and if he canters afterward just ride him straight to the next jump and stop.”

Lacking the much desired ability to disappear into thin air, I did as I was told. I didn't chicken out, but I was so, so close. Internally, my anxiety about anxiety warned me a balk might end my riding career. Admitting fear out loud makes it real and more incapacitating. I swallowed my protest, and Bandi jumped the rails, landing with a quick sideways shift, almost a spin.

“Good girl,” Bobbi enthused, “You caught him. He was going to do it again and you got him!”

At first, euphoria:
Yes! I contained him.
Then, W
ait a minute. The damn horse tried to do it again
. I slumped. I lacked the energy to fight this on a regular basis. He was testing, and winning—Bandicoot: four; Bok: one.

“Go around again and take both jumps. Let him canter between them if he wants to,” Bobbi pushed.

I managed the two jumps with my heart in my throat, not once but twice, each clearance a little tidier. Bobbi determined it a quality finish. I knew she was architecting my confidence, but I didn't trust its efficacy. In fact, I deflated in the afterglow, having the time to repeatedly analyze Bandi's instinct to flee, how powerfully unconditional it was, and unstoppable. A canter is a cakewalk compared to a bolting horse. The reverberation of the ground as I lay in the grass imprinted my body memory from my scalp to my toes. Bandi's retreat grew to mythical, biblical proportions in my head in the dead of that night; I pictured those chariot-pulling, overly muscular, rearing horses in Italian renaissance paintings, and the frantic-eyed, foaming, bulging-veined Roman war steeds cast in marble and stone. Inhuman power and might—how could I, a mere simpering mortal, dominate it? What right do we have? We deserve what we get.

Normal people don't obsess like this
, I thought to my wimpy self at 3 a.m. in my warm, safe bed.
Why on earth am I doing this, and am I nuts to encourage my kids to take this ride on the wild side?
I was back at square one: that green—literally and figuratively—novice that barely made it through the Riga Meadow show after being thrown the first time. Worse, I registered that Bandi's first pre-show jitters dump was not a fluke but the tip of the iceberg.
Why can't I learn to focus on the successes and not be such a chicken shit? What compels me to keep at it?

I tried to reason it out. Maybe I chose horses the way some people do sports cars as a mid-life crisis go-to: a romantic nostalgia trip of wind-in-the-hair escape to youth and the past. Horseback as an early mode of transportation was central to American historic process and identity. We have always been a largish country, spread out, and before the combustion engine the horse with attachments settled us and our stuff across it, like so many glacial pebbles, enabling us to explore all our borders: “A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness” as the
anthem goes. Sounds good—in a song. Unfortunately, we now are slavishly dependent on Ford and GM. The SUV craze capitalized on this yearning to trail-blaze, and many of us sport over-equipped suspensions gas-guzzling across groomed highways. Thus, our equinous skills have rusted. We like to think we could swing up on the bare back of a wild stallion and yee-ha for the hills like the Native American boy in the animated Disney movie
Spirit
, but even if the romantic mind is willing, the body (the irony to top all ironies as we age) is weak, and a convertible can serve just as well.

Yet riding persists as a psychic, pioneer spirit sound bite from the Lewis and Clark days; a man or a woman on a horse, no motor noise, no asphalt, no exhaust—well, except for manure and methane—through woods, fields, winding trails, over mountains, through rivers, deep into canyons, along impossibly narrow paths on the edges of cliffs. Indulgent landowners even forgive trespassing for the magic of “The Hunt.” And our farm's immediate neighbors are delighted through their parted curtains to glimpse Weatogue equestrians crisscrossing their cornfields. They ride vicariously. Not many of us take advantage of such neighborly
largesse
on foot, but with a horse the possibility of borderless exploration is there. And the horse makes all the difference. I rail at the SUV with New Jersey plates rolling through my alfalfa field to shine the deer (though I might have done the same thing in my in-search-for-adventure, property-less youth), but HORSES crushing my tender new grasses, and farmer Duprey's baby corn, render me starry-eyed.

From novels and movies I yearned after those Victorian sidesaddle heroines riding feverishly alongside their
beaux
or to be the rugged, endlessly forgiving horse gal in a Western movie scene involving a sunset, a handsome cowboy in fringed chaps and lots of rough, dusty love:
the way life used to be.
Well, sort of. At least my farm is a legitimate recreation: not a movie cam in sight, no Chaps (the brand)-clad legs riding a taxi up Madison Avenue. For us actual riders that style of glamour is certainly eclipsed—the grime, the falls, the challenging horse, the cost, the
just plain hard, endless work—but still the ideal beckons. Tweaking our dormant, tougher core of old, the whole riding
tableau
is delightfully, compellingly picturesque.

The devotion horses inspire is seductive. Strong men have shed plentiful tears upon the deaths of their devoted, hoofed partners. That men weep over their totaled Porsche highway warriors just can't compare. Horse crazy lieutenants under General Patton risked men's lives rescuing Polish Arabians from slaughter behind starving enemy lines during WWII to preserve superb ancient bloodlines from extinction. And most people are gaga even about their all too imperfect, garden-variety nags, as I was becoming about Bandi. I wanted so badly to
know
him, yet the horse species remains tantalizingly remote. Any connection we do manage borders on the miraculous, addicting us greedily to reach for more. That we can motivate all fifteen hundred pounds of them to work with a leg push, and dance with a ring finger squeeze on the reins is quite something.

But motor heads wax eloquent about their reliable, fine-tuned engines, and the convertible cruising west on the open road also is an iconic American nostalgia trip that Kerouac romanticized, and that Thelma and Louise took to a dramatic, postmodern
denouement
. But it really all began with the horse, that long trail ride morphed into the internally combusted escape, our more modern method of going west, checking out the national parks, lighting out for the territory, heading for the hills, going for “it”—freedom or bust. I may never, but just knowing I
can
traverse more rugged, remote terrain is fulfilling, even if I stick to the dressage ring with my imagination trotting me the rest of the way. Unlike us, horses have changed so little. They are the living scrap book that embeds us into our history. How about a safe electric golf cart, you say? Yeah, maybe, but few people with any sense of style, adventure or history would place the cart before the horse.

But this horse business is a challenging quest. The canon is encyclopedic with more “material,” physical and psychological, to learn than I could have ever guessed. The latent scholar in me despaired. After one
and a half years of pecking, I had barely nicked the surface. The required knowledge is endless, and though I owned a horse farm, I lacked the advantage of the full-time student. Plus I was old with limited years. What I wanted was that youthful thrill again, like falling in love, or being moved for the first time by classic literature. Who wouldn't want more of those highs? Are they still possible for the creaky and stale? Could horses spark those plugs again?

What I got was a good grounding in the basics—daily care, the tack, the bodies, the ailments, the personalities, and the traumas, the risks, not to mention some little bit about the actual riding. I had developed an appreciation of the species based on active acquaintance. Plus, I was surprising myself—the base note in any learning experience—by testing my mettle and staying power. I was, and still am, prideful and disappointed at turns, having to summon bravery and stare down cowardice often in the same day or even during the same ride. And when I hearkened back to my initial anxiety at simply standing in a stall with Bandi, or leading him in from his paddock on my own, I measured progress, and it was rich enough, even if modest, to gratify.