Artificial Aids

With deep empathy, I watched a student of mine in last weekend's clinic trying to learn how to properly cue her horse to perform a collected trot. She struggled with the dozens of subtleties for mastering advanced dressage movements: how much "go!" versus how much "whoa" to ask for; how lightly versus how strongly to use the reins; how to use her body like a contortionist.

Doing my best to minimize confusion, I gave her very clear instructions one at a time. But even the clearest instructions often won't help. In fact, I wondered if maybe we shouldn't bother with this any further. You see, the cruel reality is that no matter how skilled a rider becomes in administering these complex aids, there will always be something outside her realm-- perhaps a deer bounding out of the trees or a dog bolting from its hiding place of tall grass-- that will produce a better collected trot. Then, the single thing she will need to do is hang on to the reins in terror. Without needing to give any cues whatsoever, she will enjoy a few moments of brilliant collected trot and fancy prancing, exactly the stuff she struggles to create on her own.

These savory riding moments, while indeed scary and unpleasant, are what I like to call the Artificial Aids. If you can get past the upsetting fact that you have lost control of your horse--and that a tumble from the saddle might be imminent-- these moments can teach you what the magic of dressage should feel like. In one pure condensed instant, you will feel the incredible ways in which a horse can use his body. And you won't expend one drop of effort to accomplish it. His neck will arch proudly, his back muscles will swell under you, his body will tone itself like a fighter, and he will bound across the arena with brawn and grace.

I became acquainted with the Artificial Aids early in my riding career. To be specific, I was a crying, petrified 9-year old the first time I felt a truly collected trot. And I never wanted to feel it again. Never mind that my mother had been trying to teach me about half-halts and collection for months to no avail. Mounted on my mother's F.E.I. Warmblood, I found myself in an airborne gait, due to a herd of deer that sprang from the woods on a fresh spring morning. We lurched and catapulted across the field, my spine whipping back and forth like a branch in wind. I held my breath and hoped for it to be over soon, whatever is WAS that we were doing. Through the wind rushing pat my ear, I heard my mother gushing praise. "Yes, that's great!" she called out. "That's an excellent collected trot, keep at it!"

How could anything be good about this?

I write with certainty that most of you know what I am referring to. Most students have experienced an unsolicited piaffe or passage due to a loose dog, a rattling El Camino, a horse running in a nearby field, or other prompts from nature. Unfortunately, most students fixate on the scary unpleasantness of these situations. But when I am working with riders like my student last week, I encourage them to embrace the next airborne spook with an open mind and a butt glued in the saddle. Try to let its affect counter-balance the hours of struggling to execute a proper half-halt that might finally tuck your horse's hindquarters under him and ride this one for free!

My former competitive trail mare, Charlotte, gave me a lot of chances to practice this idea. Given that she logged so many training miles, Charlotte rarely spent the energy to give things a second look, much less spook at them. Hereford cows were the exception. All other kinds of cows were fine, but for some reason Herefords sent the mare into a state of electricity. One moment we would be trotting rhythmically down a gravel road and the next we looked like an audition for the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion performers. Charlotte and I covered hundreds and hundreds of miles together both training and competing in distance events, and eventually I knew every hillside in Vermont or New Hampshire occupied by a Hereford. By that time, I quit leaning forward into a fetal position while clamping on to the reins and yelling at her to stop acting like a bonehead. Instead, I sat down in the saddle, lifted my chin, and rode the finest collected trot that mare could do. My mother, meanwhile, beamed with pride beside us on her unflappable Morgan as if to say "See? Do you finally feel what I've been trying to teach you?"

As I write this, signs of spring surround me: birds sing in the trees overhead, frisky barn cats roll around in the driveway, Harley motorcycle riders rev past the barn in shirt sleeves. These are all preludes to the great activity of warm evenings ahead-- bolting dogs, quail scuffling in shrubs, jumping deer. Consider this your warning to be ready. Sit down, look up, and take the next chance to stop cussing and start riding some unearned prancing!

What's Love Got to do with This?

The topic of Love came up last week, which produced a sobering dose of self-reflection. It probably came up because it's the one thing that unites us all to the selfless and expensive concept of owning horses, an endeavor that leaves most of us asking "why do I do this?" far more often than answers that question.

It all started in the barn aisle when my student began philosophizing about the particular type of longing that afflicts her. It's the type that drags her to the barn even when she can't determine if she's having fun or not, the type that makes her feel like an addict struggling along for several weeks with frustrations and financial setbacks waiting for that next high. She stood wringing her hands and shaking her head.

"It's like chronically being in love with the bad boy in high school," she finally announced. Skeptical, I pondered her analogy, hoping of course to settle on a definition of desire that was lots more high-minded. Wasn't horsemanship, after all, a classical tradition with its roots in nobility and aristocracy? Surely, we were more sophisticated in our pursuit of it than sappy high school girls chasing after the unavailable football quarterback, no?

For my student, though, it felt like an affliction rather than affection and horses were that bad boy with low slung shoulders and a swagger, trapping her in a cycle of swooning-heartbreak-pursuit-swooning again.

Myself, I pondered a more idealistic and self-serving definition over the next days. If we were going to talk about Love, I hoped to believe that I had found the ultimately satisfying lifelong romance. Where some folks like my student might be chasing after the bad boy, I on the other hand had a passionate one-of-a-kind affair.

Right?

This begged for a description of the starting point. One cannot discuss Love without admitting where, when, and for whom the feelings first arose that made trumpets blare in one's chest and inspire lines of poetry and cause one to admit that he or she would never again be the same. Do me a favor and think about this yourself for a moment. My own pondering led me to a starkly juvenile confession: my version of Love was no more sophisticated than my student's. In fact, she now seemed like a Hollywood romance starlet while I belonged in a trashy tabloid, at best.
My first Love was a black mare named Sheba. I was six years old. I'm pretty sure my parents bought Sheba with the hopes that she might kill me or at the very least gallop into the next county and get me out of their hair.

In one word, Sheba was dreadful. She was mean, high-strung, prone to biting, and bucked off anyone who tried to ride her. I adored her. I couldn't get enough of the nasty little horse. I drew pictures for her, wrote my school reports about her, molded clay figurines of her. And of course I tried to show her off to all the neighbor kids.

I brushed and polished her smooth black coat until it shined like river silt. And then I mounted up and took off through Mr. Eddy's field which ran the length of West Street for a couple miles, allowing me to showcase my fine steed, and love of my life, at a full gallop to passers-by for as long as I could stay on. Of course, staying on Sheba was the tricky part. I generally only made it half-way down the field before Sheba dumped me right in front of my neighbor Jackie who was a fellow six-year old equestrian and rival of mine. In my many years of trying, I'm pretty sure I never succeeded in impressing Jackie with my riding nor my ruffian mount.

On one particular snowy December day, I set about my usual routine to impress Jackie with Sheba on my 300th attempt. A couple feet of snow covered Mr. Eddy's field, adding some beauty and drama to the scene, I thought, with a trill in my chest! Wait until Jackie saw us streaking through the snow at top speeds. If only I can stay on, if only I can stay on, I chanted. And then, in the demure way a high school prom queen begs her bad boy to stop ditching her and flirting with other girls, I buried my nose in Sheba's mane and asked her gently to please not throw me off. Just this once. Just today, okay? Feeling like we struck an agreement, I swung my leg over the saddle and we hit hypersonic speed within seconds. Snow flew around us and Sheba ran with every ounce of might in her body. What a feeling!, I marveled.

Jackie noticed us, too, and stopped in her driveway for a moment looking straight out at Mr. Eddy's field. Here is my chance at last, I shrieked into the storm. On this 300th attempt, Sheba then bucked and twisted so violently that I flew off the right side and caught my boot in the stirrup. She proceeded to gallop with me dangling upside down, my head and shoulders bumping along the ground, trying my best to turn away from her hooves. I tried repeatedly to break my foot loose from the stirrup but it wedged below the heel. I realized that I would either perish soon or eventually Sheba might stop running. But in either case, I would be dragged for a good long time. And I was.

Finally, Jackie- who for the record WAS very impressed by the spectacle, though not in the way I intended-- came to my rescue. She charged through the snow, jumped off a stone wall, and grabbed Sheba's reins to pull her to a stop. She said nothing, just made sure I was okay, which I more or less was except for a broken ego. I took Sheba's reins and limped alongside her up the road back to our barn reflecting on how closely I just came to breaking my neck. I expected to feel anger towards my demonic horse or feel sworn into being more cautious or maybe quitting horses altogether and finding a different interest.

But you know how it is when you're a sucker for the bad boy.

Later that night, I pulled out my quilted pink Holly Hobbie diary and wrote down the day's events. My mother still has this pathetic diary entry. It goes like this:
"Today, I rode Sheba in Mr. Eddy's field. It was snowing. She bucked me off. I was dragged. I love her."

Had I been a bit more foreseeing, I should have added "I am officially doomed for life with an incurable affliction, God save my soul."

High Maintenance

Without naming any particular facility, I will say that I found myself last week staring unabashedly at what can only be described as complete and utter disrepair. And, no, I was not at the county dump or the scene of an earthquake. Quite the contrary, I was at a place where folks pay big bucks to be. Or more accurately, they pay big bucks for their horses to be there.


Call me unrealistic or snobby, but in my opinion any place that shares a sentence with 'big bucks' should be of a certain decorum. I'm not instating high standards here; I'm just looking for basic infrastructure. Read as: fence posts that stand vertically to the ground rather than bending over in insect-riddled, rotting splinters; stall walls made from legitimate building materials instead of baling twine, hoses, cardboard; gates and cross-ties that actually latch; arenas without weeds growing in them. Stuff like this. For some reason, these requirements are becoming more difficult to find.


This situation gives my mother justification to say "I told you so." You see, I spent most of my childhood enslaved in what I believed to be a cruel regime of child labor (which meant I had a few chores around our New England horse farm) and whined constantly about the endless lists of things to be repaired, fixed, maintained. My mother used to chant her mantra "upkeep, upkeep, upkeep" around our farm, reminding us that, without constant maintenance, a farm would fall into disrepair faster than anyone suspected. I originally thought she herself was being a little high maintenance, but now I have to admit that she was right.


My brother and I formed a labor party of two at Maranatha Training Stables, my parents' farm. We did everything from prune our fruit orchard to stacking firewood to painting fence boards. We spent so much time painting pasture fences, in fact, that I occasionally still see white paddock fencing stretching for miles when I close my eyes. Of all the treasures on our farm, my mother was proudest of those wooden fences. Every board, every post, and every nail was painted a perfect white. Should a board get chewed on or kicked by a horse, her labor party (the aforementioned offspring) hustled out there with replacement lumber along with a pail of paint.

I will admit that 36 acres of this fencing IS a lovely sight. But the adult in me is the one who can admit this, the adult who suffers severe nostalgia for so much pristine perfection on a horse facility. The kid in me secretly hated that fencing. It meant nothing to me but achy wrists and paint gunked under my nails and hours of boring labor. What was the point in any of it? Wouldn't twine and duct tape and cardboard suffice for fencing AND be a lot easier?

Initially, my brother and I were paid-- if you can call microscopic figures that--by the hour. We earned something like $1 per hour for painting those never-ending fences and the task consumed our entire summer breaks from school. We tried convincing ourselves it was better than working at the video store or bagging groceries at the supermarket. But it wasn't until the end of summer that we made it better by sheer childhood cleverness. One day with his hand permanently frozen in a claw-like position from grasping the brush handle, my brother realized we would be paid the same amount per hour regardless how many sections of fencing we accomplished. So, why were we working so hard?, he mused? Why not just slack off? And that, gentle reader, is how an 8-year old and a 9-year old introduced themselves to often inefficient ways of capitalism.

Being the older wiser one, he convinced me that mom would never know our productivity had dropped off and we would still collect our $1 per hour. So, when we got out to the perimeter fencing of our property, most of it out of sight from the main barn or house, we would lay down our paint brushes and go skip stones in the creek. Or build bike jumps or collect grasshoppers. Shucking off the guilt that sometimes reared its head, we told ourselves that abandoning our job was just fine because, at the end of the day, all those perfectly white fences didn't really matter. Wouldn't twine and duct tape and cardboard suffice for fencing, anyway?

One sunny afternoon in August, we hid our paint cans and crawled into the expansive raspberry patch to take naps. We were asleep for probably two hours when a shadow slanted across our blissful sunshine and stirred us awake. And in our repose, we looked up to see my mother staring down at us. Needless to write, much lecturing ensued. The lengthy and sometimes poetic scolding covered the grounds of employee ethics, general good behavior, workmanship, etc. But my mother's primary disappointment came not from her children's sneaky ethics. More hurtful to her was the fact that we abandoned her prized white fences. She reminded us in the raspberry patch of their beauty, their value, their sheer aesthetic superiority to something like twine or cardboard.

For us, that afternoon fell into the category of moments where children think their parent is greatly over-reacting. I held that belief for a number of years, bolstered by the bitterness of having to give back most of my summer wages. In fact, I think I held onto the secret animosity towards those summers of white fence painting until just last week when I stood aghast at the dilapidation around me that qualified as a bona fide boarding facility. In that moment, I finally got my answer. NO, twine and duct tape and cardboard do not suffice as fencing. A familiar ache crept into my wrists briefly as I reflected on all those acres of white wooden fences at Maranatha Training Stables. I couldn't promise I'd be a more productive employee now than I was as a mischievously napping 8-year old, but something in me felt compelled to nail up some boards and brush paint across them. My chest tensed with urgency and excitement. White fences! Wooden boards!

Don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't wish to create a ritzy place that could justify charging boarders a fortune to be there. Nah, I might even charge less than the facilities falling into disrepair. I would just want visitors to pride me every day on the aesthetic superiority of my white fences.

Horseplay

My friend Carmen's adorable daughter Simone is, against all logic, horse-obsessed. I, too, suffered horse obsession as a child, but unlike Simone, I lived on a farm, so my craze seemed mostly normal. Simone, however, lives in a condominium in a high-density neighborhood in a populated metropolitan area. Neither her parents nor friends share her equine enthusiasm; it developed in her apparently out of the blue. This charming little blond-haired girl now has horse pajamas, pony coloring books, Breyer models, a wooden stable, horse-themed Valentine's cards and cookie cutters, etc. She is afflicted so severely that all the non-horse people around her can only scratch their heads.

To me, Simone proves a hypothesis from my trainer in Portugal. He said to me one day, "It's either in your blood or it's not." He meant it didn't matter what any person's financial situation, environmental influences, or anything else happened to be. If horses were "in your blood," you were fated to have an undying affection for them. Some folks might not actualize this fate until later in life, he pondered, while others seize on it immediately at birth. Simone appears to fall into the latter category, which warms my heart because so did I.

As a young child on our farm and surrounded by horses all day, I still wanted to play horse games at night, read horse books, or make horse drawings. I couldn't get enough. My elementary school teachers telephoned my parents on several occasions to express concern over my potential neurosis. Meanwhile, I submitted book reports about The Black Stallion, science projects about veterinary topics, history essays about ancient breeds, and I invented four-legged games at recess. My teachers panicked about this single-mindedness and told my parents to make some kind of intervention. As if they hadn't tried.

Indeed, they gave me Barbie dolls, bicycles, mini baking sets, and Lincoln Logs. But I only wanted horses, horses, and more horses. My parents had to give up and pray that I matured-- magically somehow-- into a well-rounded adult. And mostly I have. Or at least I trick myself into believing that. Then, moments like one last week rattle me out of that comfy daydream. I was chatting with Carmen on her couch when suddenly I noticed across the room a small stable filled with Breyer horse models. Childlike, I bolted off the couch mid-sentence (I believe we were discussing grown-up stuff like politics) and ran over to it. Simone joined my side instantly and I begged her to show me the little stable.

She obliged but only after her tiny hands showed me her "favorite" member of the barn, a thick-necked plastic draft horse. My favorite was the Appaloosa with splotches painted on his rump, although Simone didn't get around to asking me which one I liked best. She was excitedly relaying the details of her pretend farm to me, like the fact that all twelve of her horses were stallions. And the Palomino one didn't get along with the others. And that her horses had just gone into the stable for the night before I came over. "Uh-huh, uh-huh," I followed along, instantly a four- year- old again myself. Oooooh, my chest filled up with joy when I remembered my own Breyer stable and teeny weeny pasture fences and the endless hours of "playing horse." I was starting to feel like Simone and I were birds of a feather, never mind the nearly thirty years between us.

Then she offered to show me the 'rocking horse' that she'd received for Christmas, which I agreed to in a heartbeat. We skittered upstairs to her bedroom and within a moment, I gave thanks for the nearly 30 years between us. A lot has changed between the days of making up four-legged galloping games at recess and today. Namely, technology has intervened. Had I owned a rocking horse of the likes that Simone now possessed, I never would have stood a chance at being a well-rounded adult. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never would have left my bedroom.

Simone's "toy" horse is frighteningly lifelike. "Rosebud" stands as tall as a Shetland pony, is able to swish her tail and move her head and neck. She even chomps carrots and makes chewing noises. She is able to carry a grown adult on her back and when the rider swings her arm overhead and says "giddyup," the horse actually does. Its body starts herky-jerking and the fuzzy little technological beast makes clomp-clomp noises. When I pulled on the reins, it stopped.

whoa.

Wide-eyed, deeply envious, and truly speechless, I curried this almost-real horse's hair and assured Simone she was the luckiest girl on the planet. As for whether she stands a chance of ever "out-growing" her horse-obsession, I'd say there's no way. But I secretly hope she does because I've got a place in my house already picked out for Rosebud.