Horsewoman: It’s Never Too Late to Learn a New Skill
Shardon is not a large horse. At least, I didn’t think so when the little girl led him into the ring and started warming him up for me. He’s a compact Dutch Arabian with a lovely copper coat.
But once I was in the saddle, the ground suddenly looked very far away. It was my very first riding lesson. We started off simply walking around the arena. Every circuit took us past a sign that read: “WARNING: Under Massachusetts law, an equine professional is not liable for any injury to, or the death of, a participant resulting from the inherent risks of equine activities.”
My equine professional tells me it’s time to pick up a trot. She explains the mechanism of posting, or rising in time with the horse’s motion. “When you’re ready, just squeeze with both heels. Gently. He’s very well trained.” In fact, he’s a former Grand Prix dressage champion, full name El Shardon von Belchock, and the minute I brush his sides, he’s off, his gait like a set of powerful pistons. As he flings me upward, I try to locate some core muscles. We’re going quite fast. The “or death” sign comes into my line of sight even more frequently. Wobbling in the stirrups, I wonder if this is such a good activity for a 53-year-old.
Knitting, perhaps. Pottery. Anything, really, that doesn’t require a death liability disclaimer.
I am coming to horses late because I did not grow up in the kind of suburb where little girls got riding lessons. I understood that this was so far beyond any reasonable ambit claim of childhood desire that I never even craved Breyer toys or checked out horsey novels from the library. The only equines I saw in our inner-city neighborhood belonged to the mounted police. Their arrival was an occasion of some excitement. My mother, hearing the clop of hooves on the blacktop, would run down the street, dustpan in hand, braving busy traffic to scoop up manure for her rose bushes.
I admired horses, in a kind of vague aesthetic way. I understood it would be marvelous to have a relationship with one—sort of like a very large dog. When I started writing historical fiction, people in my books had horses, and I enjoyed creating these steeds, giving them glossy black coats or roan speckles and personalities that were biddable or fiery as the story demanded. (It is painfully clear to me now that I had no idea what I was talking about. The horse care, as I have described it, is entirely suboptimal, and no one in their right mind gallops a horse downhill.)
Then, in the fall of 2008, I was invited to a writers’ retreat at a picturesquely shabby resort ranch in Santa Fe. My room overlooked corrals full of Apaloosas and Western Paints. I was draped over the split rail fence, admiring them, when the wrangler asked me if I’d like to ride.
“I don’t know how.”
“You don’t need to. These horses know their job. They won’t let you fall off.”
For some reason, I believed him. The next afternoon I followed as he led the way through pink arroyos fragrant with acacia. My horse was so surefooted that even cantering along a cliff edge seemed relaxing and unremarkable. Back home, just a week later, I was telling my friend Katy about this transcendent experience. She looked out my window, pensive.
“You’ve got a few acres here. You could have a horse.” She paused. “In fact, I could give you my horse. I’ve been worried about finding a good home for her.”
There were many things I might’ve said at that point. Many questions I could have asked. Instead, I made arrangements to fence half my property and turn my toolshed into a stall. A free horse! I signed up for riding lessons and began to explore the finer points of horse transportation.
This horse was not close by. In fact, this horse was in Mexico. Katy, a young entrepreneur, had been running a restaurant in San Miguel de Allende for a few years but had got tired of the grind and was ready to move on. Now that I’d agreed to adopt her 10-year-old palomino quarter horse, she was free to embark on her next adventure.
I should say that Mantiquilla was a beautiful horse. So beautiful that she’d starred in an ad. It was for a swift-acting antifungal cream that treats vaginal yeast infections. (Horse gallops. Voiceover: “Some things should be fast.”) In the months it took to build fences and find a horse transporter—I needed a vehicle with the kind of springy floor that protects delicate hocks, pasterns, fetlocks and stifles over long distances, plus a wrangler versed in complicated border formalities and evading drug cartels—I watched that ad a couple hundred times.
As well as learning a great deal of new information about hocks, pasterns, fetlocks and stifles, I also kept taking riding lessons. My second lesson was not on Shardon. Shardon was a full-sized horse and, after meeting me, the equine professional had noticed that I wasn’t strictly speaking a full-sized adult. She decided I could learn instead on Delilah, a large Welsh Cob pony. From my point of view, and probably Shardon’s, this was a great idea. The ground was a lot closer, and Delilah didn’t leap around in the air like the horsey version of Nureyev.
There were many lessons that winter and into the spring. Like novelists and clergy, equine professionals rely on a large store of metaphor. At various times, I was instructed to think of myself as a melting ice cream, a tower of wooden blocks, a puppet on a string; to imagine that between my butt and the saddle was one of my grandmother’s treasured Wedgwood plates, that in my hands were a pair of baby birds, that I was on a rotating bar stool, that I was carrying a tray of expensive canapes. In between these visualizations I also needed to obey a string of physical instructions: hands down eyes up soft elbows don’t grip with your knees more pressure from your calf keep those heels down don’t jam those heels down remember to breathe. And perhaps most useful: “If you’re going to fall, grab the mane. That’s why God put it there.”
There were blissful moments. The first time I cantered on Delilah it was as if a rocking horse had suddenly come to life. The sound of the air changed and we seemed to be flying. Of course, I couldn’t steer and canter at the same time. My efforts to avoid running my pony right into the “or death” sign were met by giggles from the little girls busily sailing their mounts over oxers or executing artful piaffes and pirouettes.
In the barn after lessons, those same little girls giggled as I mixed up the headstall and the browband, the cantle and the pommel, the cooler and the rainsheet. But gradually I learned these things, as well as the relative nutritional value of first and second cut hay, of timothy pellets and alfalfa; how to pick hooves, clean sheaths, dress wounds, administer de-wormers.
I had ample time. Months had passed, yet Mantiquilla remained in San Miguel. I won’t detail the delays and frustrations inherent in dealing with two governments and a volatile border. Luckily, my friend Katy was a resourceful and persuasive young woman (cf horse foist) and her connections were good enough to locate Mario, perhaps the only man with the skill set to pull off a journey that had just got several hundred miles longer, since the closest crossing point had been closed due to extreme violence in the area.
By the time the horse trailer pulled into our driveway on July 4thweekend, the price tag for my free horse was well north of $10,000. But she was so beautiful. Katy came over and showed my son how to ride her around the yard bareback. After she’d rested for a few days, I took her out for our first trail ride. It went fine, after the bit where, because I hadn’t properly adjusted the girth, I ended up riding upside down under her belly.
I look back on that trail ride now and I truly believe that God protects stupid people. For some reason, Mantiquilla let me take her, alone, into dense woods which would have been entirely strange to a horse from the alta plano. I did not know enough then to realize that her heavy breathing and wildly swiveling ears indicated a terrified horse who would have been quite justified in pitching me over a cliff and running for it. It may be that my ignorance protected me. My relaxed, euphoric state may have given her just enough reassurance to get us home before she had a nervous breakdown.
Within a month, Mantiquilla had figured out that I didn’t have a clue. She had been raised on a working ranch, with hard-handed cowboys, and then ridden by Katy, who was expert and fearless. By the time autumn segued into severe Massachusetts winter, Mantiquilla, unused to the cold, was in a foul mood and thoroughly pissed with my lack of competence. My equine professional was giving me a lesson in the backyard when Mantiquilla bucked, and no amount of mane grabbing was going to keep me from hitting the very hard ground.
“We usually try to get back on,” my instructor noted.
“Yes,” I said from the ground. “I will.”
“But you have to stand up first.”
That proved to be a bit of a stumbling block.
As well as learning hocks and stifles, thanks to Mantiquilla I’m now more knowledgeable about human anatomy. I know that there’s a bone in the pelvis called a superior remus. I had broken mine.
As I learned to use the crutches and adjusted to sleeping on the sofa because I couldn’t do stairs, I sought advice as to how to make Mantiquilla happier. I ordered every book I could find on horse care, equine psychology and better riding skills. I quickly concluded that Mantiquilla, a herd animal, had been psychologically abused by the lack of a stable mate. So we welcomed Maisy, a cute miniature horse with a big personality. I had a saddle fitter come. A horse masseuse. A vet with a portable ultrasound. I got a new farrier. A whole bunch of dietary supplements.
Including the orthopedist’s bills, the price of my free horse was now edging over $20,000. But the real cost was that I wasn’t getting any work done. The novel I was supposed to be writing languished. All I wanted to think about was horses. I was making up for all the pony club books I hadn’t read in childhood, devouring the entire Jane Smiley oeuvre—not just her adult titles such as Horse Heaven, but also her entire YA series, The Horses of Oak Valley Ranch. Just at the point when the red ink looked set to overtake the balance sheet, I heard about a 19th-century American racehorse with an extraordinary story and managed to convince my publisher to let me write a novel about him. My obsession could now be passed off as “research.”
Once I got to the point where I only needed to use crutches part of the time, Mantiquilla and I resumed lessons. I moved to a smaller barn with fewer little girls and more women of a certain age who didn’t giggle. Also, the “or death” sign was in the parking lot, not the riding ring, so I didn’t have to look at it more than once per lesson. I bought a vest that worked like a personal air bag. If you leave the saddle unintentionally, a CO2 cannister explodes, the vest inflates and you’re the Michelin Man before you hit the ground. When Mantiquilla reared on the trail and dumped me in the bushes, I didn’t break a thing.
Maisy had been a big success for Mantiquilla. She loved her little companion. She loved her so much that if I separated them—say, to go riding—she would find a way to throw me and bolt back to the barn.
Like a woman in an abusive relationship, after every incident I kept hoping that things between us would somehow be different. We were going to make it work, I was certain of it.
And then there was that one last lesson. She was acting up and my teacher suggested she hop on and “work the kinks out a bit.” Mantiquilla bucked. My instructor re-centered herself, and the horse bucked again, spinning as if she were auditioning for the rodeo. When my equine professional got off the ground and dusted herself down, I accepted that I had to make a new plan for this horse.
She now belongs to an expert young rider with long blonde hair that exactly matches Mantiquilla’s mane. They understand each other. Together, they won the teen division of the Connecticut barrel racing championships.
Meanwhile, I learned of a small, 20-year-old mare named Valentine. She was calm, gentle, exquisitely trained, never bucked or reared, and had a sense of humor. She lived 10 minutes’ drive from my house.
For my 60th birthday, I bought myself a pony.
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