Right to School

While the festival was winding down and I was wrangling my way through thousands of sunwashed, sometimes quite drunken revelers, my trainer continued to work with Saxony. She'd made one adjustment the same day I brought Saxony to the barn, sending me to buy a Baucher (bow-SHAY, at least that's my version) bit to replace the simple snaffle I'd been riding her in. I'm very curious to see how Saxony will go in the Baucher.

I'd told B pretty much everything I could think of about Saxony in the weeks prior to the move. It was an interesting recitation of facts and gaps. One of the things I told her about is how fussy Saxony is with her mouth during the bridling process. She offers much tonguing, yawning and rubbing as she settles the bit where she wants it, coupled then with producing sometimes copious amounts of drool during our rides. And I mean drool. It's not champagne, the fine white froth that sometimes results from the conversation between the hands of the rider and the mouth of the horse; it's just plain, clear drool. After having her examined by an equine dental specialist to rule out physical causes for her drooly fretfulness, I elected to wait until we were in training to make any changes to her tack. I don't know enough about bits and bitting to feel comfortable experimenting on my horse.

Because I trust my trainer, I went and bought the AlBaCon 5-1/4-inch Baucher she'd prescribed. This bit is made of German silver, with some copper added. B likes the Baucher for its steadiness in the horse's mouth. I'll see her ride Saxony in it on Thursday.

Meanwhile, B sent me a brief update during the weekend about what she was doing with Saxony, and it gave me a simple confidence boost in echoing some of what I already knew about her: "I rode her on Friday. She did very well. I can tell she's had some previous training. She was able to do both a shoulder in and haunches in at the walk. Her balance in the trot needs improvement, but I expect that to come quickly. She is weak in the canter, and needs to build her strength in the groundwork before we try cantering under saddle."

Naturally, I can't wait to get to the barn. Yes, I believe we'll come together, Saxony and I, and riding her will be wonderful, but right now nothing pleases me more to be learning about her. It's thrilling, completely thrilling.

Just Add Water

That's really how it felt yesterday, taking Saxony to our trainer's barn. I've never had her trailered anywhere. Would she load? Yes, she would, and she did. During the hour-long drive, she plucked at her hay net and stayed balanced and steady. She backed out of the trailer calmly.

Somehow, I swelled with pride walking her into the big, double-sided barn, even as she was offering all sorts of vocal stylings. For a grown mare, she has a baby-girlish voice full of squeals, squees and trills.

The barn is intimidating to me because it is so moneyed. Still, I've quashed that anxiety in myself for what my lessons give me. Last week I was invited to do a little trunk show of things from my Etsy shop, and the money was out in dining, deco and bling. Unless I was talking with someone about some fascinating old photograph or bit of equine ephemera, I blanched and hung back with the friends who'd come along to help. But having Saxony there at the barn changed that shyness for me. She's my peeps, I guess; I breathed easier. 

After we settled her in a stall, I sat down to watch B ride her own horse, listening down the aisle all the while for sounds from Saxony. She'd paw the floor from time to time, but was mostly silent, sampling the new hay. At some point, though, my instructor calmly remarked that Saxony had gotten out of her stall. She calmly remarked that. And yes, Saxony, unused to stall guards, had simply pushed through hers and wandered in search of my voice. I started to my feet and there she was, looking at me almost longingly. I took her back to her stall and closed the door behind us to linger with her for a while. She snuffled her hay and I just stood there stroking her shoulders and back.

After my friend S had her lesson and I'd finished mine, B surprised me by suggesting we start Saxony right then. Saxony was quite startled, herself. It's not a very good picture - I was too engaged and excited to pay attention to my camera.

It's not a day spa? Really?

And I felt, driving away from the barn at the end of a long day, many things. One, that it was the first all-horse day I've had in a such a long time. How wonderful they are, those days. Two, one chapter has ended completely and another has begun, a new chapter, fresh and only just hinting at what it contains. Three, the third, that I never rushed, never hurried, never commented in my own head about every step along the way. I took my horse where we will be for a while and all of it was good.

(I'm going to write my way through this big, new experience of taking a horse for training, but I can't begin in earnest until the festival where I work wraps up its season. I won't see Saxony for six days now, which means I'll miss five of her training sessions, but I'll be writing about all of it after that.)

It's Only an Ocean When There Isn't a Bridge

Or, How I Mythologized the Canter.

I'll be taking Saxony to my trainer in two weeks. We'll be there for four to six weeks. It's a first for me and I think it'll be a first for her too.

In my first horse life, after I graduated from wild summer-long bareback rides on a borrowed horse but found I hadn't left my love of horses behind, the options I saw were riding lessons or showing; I mean those were the milieus around me. People who wanted to learn to ride had riding instructors, and people who wanted to show had trainers. I would never show, didn't even have a horse, so I had a riding instructor. There was no middle ground; at least, I didn't know about any. I had some riding lessons and eventually I had a horse. She cost money, so I quit the lessons to pay her board. Several happy years passed during which I acquired two more horses. I became a better rider through miles and hours, but I didn't learn anything more about how to ride properly or well. Nothing, in fact.

When I came back to horses after 2o years off, I remembered the familiarity of them, the habitual nature of wanting them, the whole love of being able to touch them. I remembered all those things and it made it so easy to come back. What I overlooked was that I had never learned how to ride from beginning to end, through all three gaits, not to mention any of the other myriad nuances.

I returned to horses in the unexpected company of a fast, sturdy, opinionated mare who I eventually learned to be frightened of. I felt that I did not know how to ride her the way, perhaps, that she should be ridden. I didn't know what way that was, exactly, just that whatever it was, I didn't know it.  So I took riding lessons, the option I remembered from all those years ago. I hired someone to instruct me and "train" my mare. Fits and starts, fits and starts. There was never unity, never a unified course. I never "finished" those riding lessons and she never "finished" her training. (Understanding neither of those endeavors is ever finished, but I mean the basics roughed in.)

That's history and now is now. Before my lesson with B began today, I mentioned cantering. I was thinking that Saxony would be arriving at the barn in two weeks and those things felt connected, to me. "I'm not going to say never," B said to me, "but not until your sitting trot is there. You can't canter without it." I felt chastened and elated at the same time. Chastened like an eight-year-old, Oh, I'm not that good? Elated like an adult suddenly understanding something key, Oh, I can't canter without it? I get it. B went on to say that the canter is simpler to sit once a rider has command of the sitting trot.

It feels lame to write this, because I've had so much experience with horses, done real time with them in my own relative way. But no, I didn't continue with my lessons back then, so I never made it to the sitting trot. All these years intervening and then to come back seated on a high-spirited, spooky mare and find myself wondering what comes between the trot and the canter? Hmm. I just couldn't get Scout into a canter without both of us wigging out. There was a void there, so I filled it with fear, simple as that, and began to broadcast it, too. The canter became huge in my mind, mythic.

It didn't help at all that I had a riding instructor that used to call it "the C word." Literally. She'd say something like, "Just another couple of lessons and we'll start work on 'the C word'." Oceanlike, my fear of the canter grew, spreading as a sea of impossibility in front of me. It also became, in the negative space around it, the zenith, the height of my ambition: Cannot be a rider without it.

My thighs are just burning as I write this, sore from so much rising trot, sitting trot, rising trot, sitting. I get it. Someone has told me. I am being taught the sitting trot. It is hard, hard work, and I would go back there in an hour if I could.

Where Have I Been?

The last time I experienced a real moment with my mare was in April, I think, though my mind turns back to January, really, in the way I am about connecting with horses. I had such a distracting, hard winter. It squeezed me from all sides, squeezed her out to the distance.

In part, I let that happen. Something in me said let it rest. But that voice was barely a whisper against the din of self-recrimination. We humans are so flawed in how we bargain with the days, with time, with meaning.  I am, anyway.

I just could not. Horse. 

My work caught me up then, the summer-long freight train of the festival. It's always the same journey to the same destination, always speeding, always hurtling by. Goes so fast, I can't take it in, but then I've been on that train so many times, what more is there to see? It feels like that, like I've seen it all.

But I haven't, of course. It's just finding the time to notice, or being in the right place at the right time. I watched a young new horse try on the joust, his eyes quick and shifting to take in the sweep of stimulus before him: color, sound, collision. I never took my eyes off his face, just couldn't because the process of his struggle to understand was so vividly expressed upon it. It looks like he'll make it, but he has a choice in the matter. That's the very thing that could make him a great joust horse, his having the choice.

Here at the festival I'm the unofficial Dr. Doolittle. People bring all manner of creatures to me, believing I'll know just what to do. I've tucked young bats back into trees, hosted stunned birds in my guest room until the crowds have gone, crawled belly first under old decking to recover baby wood ducks who'd fallen through. I understand the impulse of people who don't know what to do, but can't stand to worry.

I would go up to the barn from time to time and see her, check on her in the worst of the summer's heat, shine her up with an oily fly spray. She comes when I call her. Never once has she asked Where have you been? But I have. I am.

Midnight Handoff

In my years of working at the festival, I've met only one horse who seemed truly born to be a joust horse, seemed not only to understand his work but to thrive on it. That made him completely unique in my estimation. Rather than performing as a half-resigned automaton grinding through a changeless routine, K was a showman who knew how to reach the crowd every bit as dramatically as his dashing, theatrical rider did. He loved his work.

He turned 24 earlier this year. Over the horizon came the glimmer of retirement, perhaps at summer's end. At least a slowdown to smaller shows and school gigs. K's owner began searching for a second horse, a successor of sorts, who, with time, might learn to fill the shoes of big K. He found that horse yesterday, a seven-year-old Appendix gelding bright with potential, and trailered him to the fair. Turned loose in the big north pasture where K had been knee deep in grass, solitary and relaxing, the new horse set out across the hill to meet him. It seems they hit it off instantly, running, snorting, playing through dusk, their hoofbeats echoing long after dark.

Somewhere in the night, big K decided he'd found the heir it seems he'd been searching for, too, and handed off the gig. His family went out to the pasture this morning to feed the two and found him dead, fallen mid-stride, the new horse standing watch over him. Some of us thought instantly of the wisdom of horses, to know when it is time to go, to know they can lay down without the bonds of society tethering them to life when they are tired. Heartbroken, K's family faced their new horse in the intimacy of grief. He touched their shoulders and stayed close as they circled around K, curling low in the grass where he lay, the one in a million who made it look like anything but work. He was a star, a magician who breathed dynamic life into the myth of the warhorse, show after show after show. That was K, and he will be sorely missed.

 

Mining the Dormant Seam

After too long an absence, I returned to my riding instructor several weeks ago, the one I found late last summer. Today I had my third lesson. I take these lessons at mid-morning, after I've awakened, but before I can begin to quicken with the day.

I am so willing to work and learn; I mean, I surrender nearly all self-consciousness in front of this very skilled rider/instructor. The only time I flush is during the in-hand work that begins each lesson. Time slows, seemingly hobbled by my fumbling with the longe line, side reins and whip. We start with a minute or two on the circle, the line threaded through the snaffle bit of the double bridle, then add a side rein, switching it all when we reverse direction. After the old schoolmaster is stretched out, I do close in-hand work, moving him around my outstretched arm, keeping him bent and crossing under. It feels awkward simply because it lacks the fluidity of routine, is all. I'll get better at it.

I wondered if we would have to go back to the beginning when I first returned. I wondered if I would realize that I had only imagined the seemingly instant connection between my instructor's ability to teach and my ability to learn. I hadn't imagined it, and we didn't have to go back to the beginning. Some rust cracked off, spiraling gently to the ground, when she moved my leg back three inches. That took two minutes. Since then, we picked up from where we left off.

Today she began to mine a dormant seam, activating muscles in me that I think I never used when riding, didn't know to use. They are muscles one needs to rely on for a deep and centered seat. I am thankful they were still there in me, forgotten but not gone. It made me realize that, for me, what this instructor will teach me is how to ride my mare with my body, not just my mind. There are some tools which only the body can provide. The mind, for all its self-importance, has little provenance when those tools are required. All my thoughts designed to reduce anxiety come to nothing without my body knowing itself in the saddle. I am excited to see it so plainly.

My mare is shining with good health and ready strength. I am going to take her to my instructor's barn for the month of August, and September too if I can manage it. There I sense we will emerge toward one another together, I feel it. Already, I'm counting the days.

Bumping Up Against Her

Sometimes I think when I talk about Saxony or write about her, I make it sound like I think she is dumb. She isn't dumb. She taught me something big the other week, something I was way overdue on learning. It's simple what she taught me: that she is fully present when I am fully present. What's dumb is how hard it was for me to see that.

The Friday before last, I felt an urge to go out to the barn and see her. I drove there with no plan in mind, just gave myself the freedom to go. She came right to the fence line, as usual, when I pulled up. We did our looking at each other thing. In the barn, I groomed her, and I really sank into it. I felt I had that time, a perspective which has been rare for me during the last few months. And grooming her opened something in me, enough that I let things fall away from the foremost agitation in my mind. She sighed at some point, deeply, and sort of wrung her body out, like a clenching and releasing of all her muscles. After that, it felt right to tack her up, and that's what I did.

I've ridden her here and there through the past couple of months, mostly bareback, mostly contained wanders and idles in the ring. I haven't wanted us to go in full tack. It's me. I haven't wanted to go in full tack.

We did a ride of purpose and intention. I wasn't thinking about anything else. I finished transitions, up and down, rode her up into the walk from the trot and reverse, corrected myself when I began to drift away from my seat. I stay tuned to her, feeling how she was going. Whenever I felt I might float up into my hamster-wheel head, I picked one of the letters mounted on the top fence rail and rode to it. Then another, and another.

She's an inquisitive mare, likes to look, and wants to move to see better whatever has drawn her attention. I don't want that. She can look, but she doesn't need to head toward the thing. We worked on that. I rode her to a square halt in the center of the ring. We stood there and practiced just looking, together. I told her, "There are the horses across the street. That's that guy on his tractor. There's Gracie on the porch. Over there, they are trying to load Gambler into the trailer." We looked at all of it. After a few moments, she turned her head to touch my booted toe with her nose. That's when I understood that she was fully present, she was connected to me. She'd just been looking around, but not away.