Horsemanship

Fixer Upper

/ Tessa Pagones / 2 Comments

My last post (Reading Season) sent me down a rabbit trail of horse books from my childhood. Some of them I still have, or have gotten new copies of in recent(ish) years. Some I haven’t seen or read since grade school, so I went looking online to remind myself of the stories. After reading the description of one of these books, I got curious about what book sellers had to say about some of the others. A small sample, starting with the one that started the search:

Big Jump for Robin (Suzanne Wilding): “To help her family with financial difficulties, Robin sells her beloved pony to a wealthy family with whose problems she soon becomes involved.”

Summer Pony (Jean Slaughter Doty): “Ginny has always dreamed of having her very own pony, so when her parents agree to rent her a pony for the summer, Ginny is thrilled! But when Mokey arrives, she is shaggy, dirty, and half-starved–not at all what Ginny had in mind. Can Ginny still have the summer of her dreams?”

The Secret Horse (Marion Holland): “Nickie and Gail are two horse-mad and horse-less girls. They hatch up a daring plan to steal a neglected and abandoned horse from the local pound and keep it in secret.”

I still have my childhood copy of Misty of Chincoteague, so I decided to reread that for the first time in decades. I found that I had forgotten over the years that it didn’t start out being about Misty. Paul and Maureen were working odd jobs and saving every penny so they could buy the wildest and wiliest of all the wild ponies, The Phantom. No one knew that she had a foal (Misty) by her side, but that foal would be the only reason she was caught that year. Much of the book is about getting Phantom used to being handled and ridden, though they never do get the wild out of her.

There were Disney princess movies when I was young – certainly Snow White and Cinderella long preceded me – but for me, the fairy tales that stuck with me were these horse stories. In particular, stories in which the main character has no money for horses, and also frequently no appropriate facility to house a horse, but she is able to beg, borrow, or steal a horse anyway – Summer Pony, The Secret Horse. Stories in which the protagonist tames the wild horse – The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague. Stories in which the main character has a great deal of horse know-how but no money, so she indentures herself to someone who has both money and horses – Big Jump for Robin.

Some aspects of these stories matched my reality with horses. I lived in the city, I certainly didn’t have the money to own a horse, and there were times my family didn’t seem to have the money for me to take lessons. My sister and I both cleaned stalls at the barn in exchange for lessons on and off during junior high and high school. We talked about pooling our resources to partially lease one of the school horses, but we could never agree on which horse and in all likelihood we didn’t have enough resources to pool most of the time.

Looking back at these books feels like hearing a new-to-me story about someone in my family that suddenly makes me realize that a part of my crazy that I thought was unique to me is in fact something I come by honestly. I’m not sure how I missed that my particular horse crazies are so common. Not just in that others in numbers great or small would have read these same books, but in that the books were written in the first place. The themes preceded the books enough to make the books necessary, or at least possible.

There is a mix of unlikely fantasy and scary reality in the books I loved. The girls in The Secret Horse not only have to steal the horse, they have to find an abandoned barn to keep him in (in the middle of Washington DC) – and they do. The wild horse tamings of The Black Stallion and Misty are improbable but something I’m sure every young horse lover dreams of. I know I did. The scary reality parts mostly have to do with horse illness or injury. Early in Summer Pony, Mokey gets out of the converted garage the family uses to house her and gorges herself on apples, leading to a very scary night of colic. It is worth noting that in Winter Pony, the sequel to Summer Pony, Mokey (because of course Ginny was able to keep her past summer) turns out to be in foal from a stallion at the farm where they found her. Because what first-time horse owner doesn’t need a carelessly and accidentally bred foal to raise?

The protagonist of a book called Half Pint and Others was my early role model for both running a lesson barn on the cheap and for doing stupid things with horses and mostly getting away with it. Over the course of one summer she puts a new horse out in a field that he promptly get out of, she tries to rush her own horse onto a trailer and gets her ankle tromped on, she has to euthanize a horse she was given that turns out to be terminally lame, she breaks her arm falling out of the hay loft, and she spends far too much time chasing loose horses or treating their wounds once she finally gets them back home.

Taming the wild horse, nursing the sick or maltreated horse back to health, turning the nag into a dream horse – and doing it all on a shoestring budget with inadequate facilities – these are surprisingly hard ideas to let go of. With three horses outside my window now, I know that in my heart I am still that horse-crazy, horse-less girl. My father was born in 1926 and he grew up with a Depression era view of scarcity that never really left him. I feel like there’s an equivalent for people who grew up wanting horses but who didn’t have money for horses. We never really believe that we can afford them, or that we deserve them, or we never stop thinking that the one we save or find or capture in the wild will, against all odds and also against all our experience, become the horse of our dreams.

I spent twenty formative years figuring out how to spend the least amount of money to get access to horses. The horse world thrives (I say this in the present tense without knowing for sure, but I bet it’s still true) on the desire of horse-crazy kids and young adults to do just about anything in exchange for time with horses. I traded work for lessons, I traded work for housing. I arranged my life to have no expenses because I couldn’t earn enough money to pay them. I rode crazy horses. I worked crazy schedules. I was thirty years old before I ever had a job where I had two days off in a row, and older than that before I had a weekend on the weekend. I trained horses for sale so that I didn’t have to put any money out up front, and the owner and I would split the sale profits in whatever way we agreed (usually not in my favor).

The horses who were the easiest to get access to for free were often the hardest to ride. I took a lot of pride in being able to ride those horses, and also in becoming known as someone who could ride them. It is fair to say that I went looking for difficult horses, though I wouldn’t have said that at the time. Once I finally broke a few bones (after a decade of the luck of the young and foolhardy), I became more afraid of the difficult horses, but my sense of who I was was so tied up in being the one who wasn’t scared of the scary ones that it wasn’t just a matter of not being willing to admit I was scared – I didn’t even recognize that fear was what I was feeling.

When I found my first horse that, while green, didn’t come with a host of issues that needed to be overcome, I almost let her slip by me. My riding instructor at the time was after me for months to try her and I kept finding other worse horses to look at instead. She was for sale, and since (as usual) I didn’t have any money to buy a horse, I was looking for another lease-to-sell arrangement. When I finally did go see her, I liked her ok but she wasn’t very exciting (i.e. not actively dangerous). I talked her owner into a lease-to-sell with a six month time frame. I realized after about a month that this was the horse I had been wanting pretty much my whole life, but didn’t think I’d ever find. Her owner agreed to a payment schedule, and she and I learned together for the next nineteen years.

As I read this over I see that my history with horses looks a lot like a history of bad relationships. I did realize that at some point. I remember saying of my first big bay gelding that I supposed it was an improvement that I was limiting my desire to fix the broken to horses instead of continuing to include humans in my scope. I still have my second bay gelding, who I bought about 15 years after the first one, as proof that recognizing a pattern doesn’t make it go all the way away.

I don’t know that stories of appropriately matched horses and riders learning safely together would make very exciting books to read, but I would love to see those stories lived out in the experience of more real life ponies and little girls. My time with my own horses has taken another turn recently, and I’m no longer trying to train them to do anything. I am, however, welcoming all the ways in which they are trying to train me. I want my horses’ horse stories to be boring stories about peaceful interactions with humans, instead of the story of how they keep having to try to to fix the broken one.

Tall, Dark and Handsome

/ Tessa Pagones / 2 Comments

I’m sure there’s a joke to be had about how I like my male horses – tall, dark and handsome, yes, but also – gelded? troubled? – but what I do know is that the geldings I have picked as riding horses tend to have a lot in common. The three I have chosen have been bay with strong black points, similar height, and with no interest in the job they were trained to do before I met them.

Soldier was a thoroughbred trained to foxhunt. I got him as a lease-to-sell project, with the intent of training him as an event horse. As it turned out, a horse who will run and jump with a group of other horses does not necessarily have any interest in jumping when he is alone on a cross country course, and a horse who has only ever seen natural fences on the hunt course may not have any idea what to do with painted jumps in an arena. His approach to a stadium jumping course went something like this: gallop towards the first fence, screech to a halt, take off from all four feet at once, land on all four feet on the other side, bolt to the next fence and repeat. After it became clear he would never be an eventer at even the lowest level (Super Chicken, they call it locally, or Ever Green), his owner sent him back out on a foxhunt with an interested buyer who Soldier promptly dumped and nearly put in the hospital. He eventually found his way to a great home with a woman who wanted mostly to do dressage and trail ride.

Wy came along about 5 years after Soldier. His full name was Wy’East, the native name of Mount Hood, the highest peak in Oregon where his breeder was from. He had been bred and trained to be a dressage horse (his breeder had dreams of him taking her to the Olympics) but was deemed neither sound nor sane enough for that job. That put him squarely in my equine specialty of what a friend once dubbed “the lame and the insane.” His first owner was my dressage instructor at the time she had him up for sale. When I rode him for the first time in a lesson with her I wound up on the ground pretty quickly, as his riders often did. I don’t remember landing, but I do remember getting up and saying “You son of a bitch, get back here” as I went to get him from the other side of the indoor arena. His owner, used to people sitting on the ground and crying after coming off him, agreed to sell him to me on a payment plan.

I had no designs on Wy as a dressage horse, and I let him show me what he was interested in, which was mostly trail riding, though he also loved jumping tiny fences as if they were Puissance walls. With the pressure off he got a lot saner, but he didn’t get any sounder, and I still had vague ideas at that time about having a horse I could compete in some discipline. I decided that he might be happier in a home where all the person wanted to do was trail ride, so I sold him to a nice man who wanted just that.

Several years after I sold Wy, and several farms after the last one where he had lived with us, we were house hunting again, looking for a place for us and our three mares. We were thinking about a house that had the right amount of land, but the land was mostly wooded. While we investigated how much it would cost to turn woods into pasture, we looked at barns where we might keep the horses in the interim.

There was a good sized boarding farm close to the woodland house. We arranged to visit, and the owner – something of a cowboy in the middle of hunter/jumper, eventer, and foxhunter territory – showed us around while we told him about our mares. I was explaining about my slutty thoroughbred mare Trappe, and telling stories on her mare-in-heat behavior, when I said “Of course, that was when we still had Wy.” The cowboy said “You had a horse named Wy? We have a horse here named Wy.” I said “Is it ‘Y’ as in the letter Y, or ‘Why’ as in ‘Why Did I Buy This Horse?'” He said he didn’t know; the owner just called him Wy, or sometimes Beast. Even though Wy’s most common nickname when I had him was Wy Beast, I still didn’t make the connection. “He’s a big, bay Hanoverian gelding,” said the cowboy as he pointed behind me. This finally sunk in, and I turned around and saw my horse looking at me over the fence of his paddock. I ran over to him and he buried his big head in my chest.

Wy had come to this farm through two different owners after he got sick while with the guy I sold him to. The diagnosis by the time I saw him was possibly EPM (equine protozoal myeloencephalitis), but no one was really sure. Some kind of degenerative neurological condition, definitely. He was not rideable, and his owner was trying to decide what to do next. I wasn’t sure what to do next either. I did nothing for about two weeks, and then one Sunday I woke up and said to Rose, “I had a dream about Wy last night and he told me to come get him. I want to go back to the farm to see him.” When we got to the farm I told the cowboy about my dream, and he looked at me like I was a little nuts, which I had expected. I said “I know it sounds weird” and he interrupted me and said “No, I don’t think it’s weird at all – it’s just that his owner just had the vet out yesterday and he said there’s nothing else they can do and she was asking if I knew how to reach you to talk about having you take him back.”

Wy came home to us and the three mares he had lived with before, though at a different farm. When we first put him out in the field with them, he spent a couple of days with a look on his face like “I had the weirdest dream – but here we all are together so I guess it really was a dream.” The mares – especially the slutty thoroughbred – were thrilled to have him back. We didn’t buy the woodland house, but we did buy the house where we live now. By that time we had acquired one more filly and we also had a foal on the way. They all lived at our vet’s farm for a few months while we put in fence and a barn here, and then they came home.

Less than two months after we brought the horses home, Wy had gone downhill enough that we had to put him down. He couldn’t reliably stand up without his knees buckling, and he walked like an old drunk man. With Trappe standing close at all times and trying to prop him up, I was worried that I would come home to find them both on the ground with her squashed beneath him. Our vet, who hadn’t seen Wy since he came home to us, took one look and said “You know you don’t have a choice about this, right?” which, true or not, was what I needed to hear. We buried Wy near the barn, and everyone that drives onto our property drives by his grave. A year after we buried him, an acorn sprouted in the middle of his grave, and that oak tree is now about 30 feet tall.

Wy left a lot of legacies. One of them is one of our family mantras: “Don’t pick up the reins.” It took me until the second time I came off of him to realize how he got people off so consistently. He would wait until his rider had a good hold of the reins, and then he would duck his giant head down between his knees and pull the rider off balance, and then he’d throw in a buck with a twist and off the rider would pop. The thing was, he always had something a little off in his back and hind end, and his buck really was not that athletic. I discovered that if, when he put his head down, I let go of the reins, he could buck all he wanted and it would not unseat me. It was that rein yank that created the problem. It became something Rose and I would say any time anyone verbally tried to knock us off balance in an argument – don’t pick up the reins and you won’t find yourself getting into a fight.

Finn is a legacy of Wy’s. I’m sure it’s no coincidence how much they look alike, or that Finn was another horse that someone tried to turn in to a dressage horse when he neither understood what was being asked of him nor was he interested in it. I don’t know that I would have brought Finn home if I hadn’t known Wy, and I don’t think I would have listened to him as much as I have when he tells me what he does and does not want to do and what he can and can’t handle. I still needed some reminders, like the first time I asked Finn to trot and he said “I can’t” and I mistook that for “I need some encouragement” rather than “I really can’t do that right now.” I said “Come on, you can do it!” and then I was up in the air looking down at his back, and then I was on the ground with him looking down at me with a look that said “I told you I can’t and I really meant it.” I got up, dropped my pants to get the sand out of my underwear, pulled myself together, and got back on with a different attitude. Finn is the Truth Serum Horse in his own right, but I know how to listen to him because of Wy.

Wy’s biggest legacy for me is to pay attention and to trust my gut. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that we went to look at one house so that we’d meet the realtor who took us to see another house that was the reason we went to look at the barn where I found the horse and was able to bring him home. Life doesn’t always run in straight lines, but I find that if I just keep moving forward – and if I don’t pick up the reins to try to control something I have no business trying to control in the first place – I end up where I need to be.