Eating My Life

I miss this arena where I snap a longe line to my thoughts and try to move them out, pushing them past balking, bucking and distraction into some kind of steady, flexing rhythm. My mind needs that kind of work, lest it turn back on itself. It needs this place where I talk about what I long for when I can't be with it, plan the next thing for days that seem to never come. I have to say something when there's no time for me.

The festival is eating my life this year. I miss my horses. Thinking of them is compressed between tasks, endless words, numbers, phone calls, repeat calls, walking the festival amid the blazing heat, lifting, bending, watering the screaming plants, phones in both hands, radio at my hip. Enforce this, create that, ask him, follow up with her -

And there go the jousters riding bareback across the parking lot. I twist to watch them from my window, stinging a little at the sight. The idyllic mood I imagine them to enjoy has nothing to do with reality, it's just a dream of my own longing.

In truth, joust horses rarely connect, mostly won't connect; they could be gone before the next show. They live a narrow life defined someplace between livestock and labor. The dull uncertainty in their faces shows, but they are used to it. As animals will, they live for the next meal. There, astride them, the joust boys look happy and relaxed, and they are. It's not a show day, there are no screaming crowds, no armor, no dust, just a morning ride to stretch the horses before the heat comes to choke the day. I watch, a little pained, knowing my mares are okay without me, enjoying  better care than the joust herd ever will, but still, but still...

I saw them two weeks ago when the farrier came to do trims and look at Scout's mysterious hoof hole. Her cave-in was the result of an impact of some sort. She struck it against a fence post, took a glancing kick, or experienced a blunt trauma that knocked out a chunk. He shaped it much as we would a broken fingernail, smoothing rough snags and rasping away the load-bearing edges around it to keep it from cracking. I marveled at him being down on his hands and knees, face inches from her hoof, studying the divot with true professional curiosity.

Arriving for a brief interval into the lives of the horses both helps and hurts. I've really let them become a kind of compass for me, a rudder, a bellwether. Bellwether. That's it. As if it's they who lead me toward what I want to become and I am falling behind.

Second Round (Ebbing)

A long, dumb day at work, one that began for me at 5:00 a.m., ended perfectly -- in a way -- when I saw Dar being ridden by Jack. In the first instant, I didn't recognize him. I was parked on Bully Boy, my golf cart, talking with a friend, when I heard a horse approaching. I turned, intending to move out of the way. That's when I saw him. What a beautiful horse, I thought. In the next instant, I saw Dar. My emotions rose, but they were contained by rationality. I was glad to see that Dar was out and about, not simply left to return to his former wild-child self in the north pasture.

"This is Dar." I said to Melissa. "He's the one that --" But I was crying after just those few words and couldn't say anything more. I did know this day would come; it would be part of the process of giving Dar back. (I can't say letting him go, not tonight.) I knew that I would be doing something somewhere at the fair and before long there would go Dar carrying someone on his back, someone not me.

I have loved Scout since the day I got her; I still do. That love came from the place of not having a horse for 20 years. You love getting the horse as much, if not more, as the horse itself. I love Dar differently, though, very differently. I'm still trying to understand it. Some of what welled up in me tonight was the sharp hurt of how much I hoped for me and that horse. I had such hopes for him. I lusted after him in a way, felt such a blunt-force love for him, a connection from the gut. It shocked me to see him with someone else, and the grief of losing him hit me once again.

None of the jousters doubt my love for him. They see it in his fine health, his changed way of moving, his new headset. Jack, relaxed on Dar's back, smiled and murmured his sympathy. He's an 18-year-old boy who believes in his ability to make Dar perfect. And maybe he's right. He made it look easy. That's part of what I saw, part of what pushed me to tears. Why couldn't it have been that for me, someone so much better suited to give Dar a good life?

Melissa put her arm around me. "Talk me out of it," I said. In the moment, she did, enough to get me through the worst of it. "Remember the bucking," she said. Not too long ago, I learned Dar's early history. It was almost accidental, revealed unwittingly during a casual conversation, but left the hairs on the back of my neck standing. Bucking has been a part of Dar since before the jousters got him, never mind me.

It will take some time for me to reconcile myself to the loss of Dar. There will be further blows and more raw emotion. I tell myself Just get through it however you can, one piece at a time. I think I'm being mature about that, not hiding from my emotions but not seeking them out, either. I'm just there, and sometimes there Dar is. But here's my fear. What if the absolutely wrong thing to do was give up on him? I just feel haunted by that possibility tonight, too tired after a long day.

It was really hard to see him.

Far, and Few Beyond

That's how my brother long ago mangled the familiar phrase "Few and far between." I laughed about it then, but today, I feel he may have had it right all along.

The last thing I wrote in this journal described simple things: how my horses were doing together, my grooming Scout and feeling close to her, and the sound of the summer train passing in the distance. It was easy to write because things felt all right. I knew I was readying myself to ride Scout, and Dar's progress in school was good. Underlying it was the quiet certainty of how important the horses are to me, so important that I won't let life turn it upside down. I've been living the priority, even as my busy season looms.

So. I went to the barn on Saturday morning prepared to noodle around with Scout before having a training session with Dar. I had a friend with me, and I love to introduce people to horses. K was coming out to meet me, too. She hoped to ride Scout herself. This is something we have talked about for weeks. K has her fears; I have mine. I happen to think her fears don't apply to a horse like Scout, so I was really looking forward to us working with Scout together.

I walked up to the grass arena. Dar lifted his head at the sound of my voice. I instantly realized that Scout was not with him. Seconds later, I saw that she was out in the big pasture with all the other horses. My mind formulated the concept that E had put Scout out because she knew we would be working with Dar. I was wrong. My cell phone rang. It was E, on her way back to the barn after errands. She told me that Dar and Scout had fought in the dry lot they share for morning feeding and she had separated them. She told me they were out to kill each other. She told me breaking them apart was hard and they were lucky not to have sustained serious injuries.

I sat there stunned for a couple of minutes, my friend sitting beside me. K arrived, and I told her the news. E was there a minute later. We all listened as she described what had happened and how hard she had worked to separate them. We all went together to examine both horses. Scout had swelling above her left knee, a scrape on the inside of her left hock, and a shallow, jagged cut across her vulva. Carefree, she stood calmly as I ran my hands over her, gazing at me. Dar had a clear hoof print embossed on the right side of his rump, a healthy patch of hair missing from the right side of his chest, and several scrapes caused by teeth raking down the right side of his neck. He showed less of the eagerness and curiosity he displays when people are with him. He didn't seem agitated to be alone in the grass arena.

I don't really remember the words, I just remember the sitting there, talking about the bad thing that had happened, the sober feeling of it, the heavy disappointment of it. The peculiar instant when I thought, I am so sick of bad things happening with my horses when I am not there to witness them. I never get to see it with my own eyes.

I really needed to see this thing happen. Because I didn't, I will never know what caused it. I will never know whether Scout was on the offensive or the defensive. The assumption defaults to Dar being the bad actor. He's the studdy, mouthy, pushy one. But what if Scout saw her chance to take him down a notch and went for it?

You think the worst. You do. I have no luck with horses. I'm not going to get there. I can't believe I have another horse that's not_____(fill in the blank.)

After that conversation ended, we decided to do the training session with Dar. As I led him out of the arena and down to the barn, Scout called after him. He answered back, but soon settled down in the cross ties. I tacked him up and returned to the arena. E began with a few minutes of in-hand work, then moved on to ground driving. I watched for signs of hostility, refusal, unwillingness or defiance in Dar. There were none. It would be easier for me if there had been. E removed the driving reins and led Dar to the mounting block. She got on him, and I led them back into the arena. I walked beside Dar, holding the lead rope loosely as E rode him in simple straight lines and wide circles. We'd done this on Thursday, her astride, me leading from the ground.

I walked with them until E told me to hand her the lead rope. She looped it over Dar's and moved him off at a walk. I followed about 15 feet to the side of them. There was my trainer riding my horse. She turned him, halted him, trotted him. He did just great.

So there was a huge fight and there was a great training session. Put them on the scales and they balance each other. They balance to zero. In two weeks, the jousters come back. I can hand him right back to them and say thanks for the tryout. I think I'm supposed to be smart enough to decide to do exactly that, but I don't know how to face it. I don't want to give him up, but I lack the knowledge to justify why I wouldn't.

And...Exhale

My horse story has been churning and roiling incessantly inside of me for months now, ever since the moment I learned the extent of Scout's injury. Since then, it's been only and always one step forward, two steps back, or that is how it has felt. Just when I think I've decided, when I've resolved myself to the next step, something happens to erase it. The fact of that has created a sense of pressure in me completely unlike others that life brings, something about the imperative that is horses. They cannot be discarded. I don't know how to discard them.

Because the winter skewed oddly this year, the worst of it coming later than usual, it neatly contained Scout's dilemma and kept me from having to face it in the long term. Conveniently, winter is mostly the off-season for horses and riders, especially for those of us who can't afford a big-dollar facility. Nevertheless, even as I accepted that Scout would be in recovery, Dar loomed ever larger, blooming and unused, in the background. I really felt him there, felt the urgency of needing to take him up before he turned into his own thing and left me behind. It hasn't been a good feeling.

The things you say to yourself when confronted with an unexpected turn of events, an unlucky, bad turn of events. Early morning has always been the worst time of day for me, all my life. I linger at the outer edge of sleep, where a relentless, droning chatter loops in my mind, all of it irrational, much of it bruising. If I'm lucky, I sleep it off; if I'm not, I carry it with me into the day.

You have no business having one horse, let alone two. You can't afford either of them.
You just shouldn't have taken Dar.
If you hadn't moved Scout, none of this would have happened.
She won't be sound, even if you did have the guts to ride her.
Dar's probably an asshole, too.
Just walk away.

Usually, I don't talk about my predawn horror thoughts, but lately all the churning has been getting to me. I told H.G. about it yesterday. I fell in love with him for many reasons, but at the time, his wisdom was something I didn't even perceive; it's a fringe benefit. "This is like a major car breakdown," he told me. "A blown head gasket or a stripped transmission. The car was already running rough, and you can't afford to get a new one, so what choice do you have but to suck it up and pay for the repair? And yes, with a credit card."

That's what we did with Scout, because we love her, because that's what we had to do in that moment. She had a broken bone and it had to be removed.

She's been on daily turnout since January 16th, almost two months. This week I began to see her unsoundness. During the first month of her turnout, I didn't scrutinize her. She'd been injured, gone through surgery and then nine weeks of stall rest; I didn't expect her to move normally, especially in the poor footing of snow and ice. A couple of weeks ago, I started to tune in. The surgeon had told me she should be fit for riding after six weeks of turnout. But no. No, she's not. I know Scout, and I can see she's far from normal, I think I can see that she's in pain. And the soundness wouldn't matter anyway, not to me, because it's not me that would ride her. I made that choice long ago, the night I put her pictures up on Dreamhorse. Scout's not the horse that's going to help me gain a foothold against my fear; she's just a horse I love. But soundness will matter if I have to give her up.

On CNN last week, I heard someone say the recession has ended and the economic recovery has begun. Not here, not in our house. Here, the recession has only just begun. For the first time, I've seen that I can't keep both of the horses. And I don't even know how to accept that, let alone what to do about it.

So you go scraping for money. Erin and I went out early this morning, drove 35 miles to a tack sale with stuff we could sell. They had overbooked the facility, though, and we couldn't set up. We drove back to the barn and decided to work with Dar in the snow-covered outdoor arena. It was there, during our session, that I felt myself breathe in a way I haven't for a couple of weeks, or maybe longer. Yes, much longer. I think I inhaled sharply the day Scout's fracture was diagnosed and I didn't release that particular breath until this morning.

Because he learned. Because we finished cutting in his sport-horse mane, because his feet looked great. Because he just isn't herdbound, and stood fairly quietly in the crossties. Because he hadn't forgotten all of his work on the longe line from last fall. Because he didn't buck or pin his ears. Because he resisted once and soon lost that argument. Because later, Keely, now in heat, backed into him and he didn't care. So, I exhaled, realizing one of the horses is a going concern, I can work with one of the horses.

And that's all it was, a simple lift, a brief clearing of my mind. Take it while you can get it. Just moments ago, Erin called to say Dar had climbed aboard provocative Keely once again. Ugh, and oh no. I so hoped he wouldn't be a studdy gelding.

And...inhale.