Crazy Pinto Filly, German Version

Here's a girl working with her own crazy pinto filly. Same age, same colors, different country, different generation. She's got one thing over me, though. She's wearing a helmet. I never did. And it looks like she might have gotten a boy out of it, too.

Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks, Part III - Chapter 2

Continuing, here in Chapter 2, my previous post, Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks, Part III - Chapter 1.

It's amazing to me how fast we were going down that track. I can feel it all these years later, feel how I was falling with each stride, that my body could not keep up with her motion. From my standing position, I would fall toward the saddle again and again, little half-second drops during which my feet would loosen in the stirrups and I would dangle, midair, above the surging filly.

She ran full out with her head frozen against the sky, hiding somewhere within her body, out of her mind.

I can't recall how much distance remained between us and that sway- backed cable when I realized that the crazy pinto filly wouldn't see it. She was looking skyward, I was looking down the line. A still picture flashed in my mind as if from the future, the aftermath of what lay ahead. We would hit that wire, flip high, then scrape some number of feet into an oncoming car, if not land on top of one. A dead or dying horse, other innocent victims, broken limbs, me in terrible trouble with my parents, to be unforgiven forever by the trusting farm boy who owned the filly.

It's not quite fear that I felt in that moment, but more the rush of adrenaline that enables people to lift cars off of someone pinned underneath. It was like the accident had already happened and I was desperate to prevent further damage. The crazy pinto filly was not my partner, though, could not be. I had to figure it out by myself.

There's a strange roominess in seconds when you can't believe what's happening. In that space of shock I was casting about for ideas, but I wasn't a trained rider. Tools I might use today were unknown to me then. Out of that odd, panic calm, it came to me that I would have to bring the filly down, get her off her feet and down to the ground. I would have to throw me and take her with.

To the left of the track, I could see the back of the old roadhouse, with space behind for a few cars to park. At the edge of the parking lot stood a low cinderblock storage shed, closer to the tracks. To the right of the track was a deep shoulder that dropped off sharp into a thick woods. I knew we couldn't make that drop-off and land intact. I looked back to the left.

This is true: I think there was a second I thought to cry or scream out for help (to nothing, no one), but the sight of a car passing around the curve and away set me straight. I had to figure it out by myself.

I could say we were 50 yards away, or 50 feet away, but I can't see it like that. All I know is that suddenly the moment opened. Standing in the stirrups, I took up more rein. My hands were right there at the bit, and I had to bend my torso to avoid the filly's head. I bent to the left, I yanked the left rein to the side, and then I threw my weight to the left, heavy, heavy, into the left stirrup. Under me, I felt the filly lose her balance. It seemed like she was going down, but somehow she launched into a high, awkward jump, her half-falling momentum carrying us off the track and into space. We crashed into the back of that storage shed, or I did after she lurched, fighting to regain her feet, and swerved off the right edge of the shed. I, hanging to the left, met the cinderblock wall head on.  ...remember landing on my back and watching her left hind hoof roll off my reinless right hand.

The filly wound up standing near the back of the tavern, under a sagging porch overhang, wild-eyed and blowing, but standing. I want to say her bridle was gone, but it couldn't have been. 

Ego. I remember hearing the sound of voices. They might have been coming from inside the bar or around the front. The thought of certain embarrassment compelled me to my feet. I was unsteady in getting to the filly, but I tried to hurry.

I don't think about how we got home, but obviously we did. I'm sure I didn't get on her, though. The barn was just across the woods, up the street from that bar, so I must have led her back.

This wreck changed things for me and the crazy pinto filly. It's really dumb to say this, but that's when I think I first knew she was unhappy. Not to have said it in words like that back then, but also trying not to say it with words that come out of all I've learned about horses since then. I had a sense of the filly after this wreck that showed me, finally, that she was not something that existed just for me.

Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks, Part III - Chapter 1

This series includes Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks Part I and Part II, but I first wrote about her in Why Do I Ride?

The third epic wreck with the crazy pinto filly I think really was epic. It may have been the one responsible for, finally, the late dawning of reason in my 14-year-old mind. Maybe. I see now how, in its essence, it contained the raw ingredients that formed the fear cookies I'd find myself munching decades later. Those cookies. They taste uncommonly delicious when it's time for another round of whining, indulgent self-bashing, but in every other way they are terrible and offer no nutritional value whatsoever.

Our ride began as an afternoon meander under cloudy skies on one of those autumn days that calls ahead to the coming winter. The filly and I went out in tack, me slipping around in a cheap cardboard-leather English saddle that was still slick and stiff from too little use. There was a guy I had a crush on, and I hoped to intrigue him by riding imperiously (though nonchalantly) past the place where he hung out juking cars with his friends. They'd all gaze in awe as we cantered by, the crazy pinto filly and me, but him, he would fall in love. So it goes, anyway.

I had to ride a couple of miles along an abandoned railroad track to reach the tired, faintly hostile country tavern beside which the guys labored to transform junkers on blocks into late-night blacktop cruisers. To reach the tracks, I rode east from the barn and then turned south, crossing through a fall-thinning woods. Nuts cracked down from the shedding hickory trees, grenading off branches. The crazy pinto filly quickly wound up into her mindless seesaw jig.

As a kid, I always felt older in the fall, melodramatic and full of self-seriousness. Though it was harder to sit the filly's jig in a saddle, I managed to drift along, daydreaming myself to be a lot of things I wasn't. A person this older guy, who knew zip about my crush on him, would find irresistible, for example.

Just as I was settling the details of my fantasy, the filly bolted. There, at the edge of the woods, turning onto the old rail line, she lost her mind. Loco. I had scant seconds to jerk back to awareness and regain my seat. That the crazy pinto filly was a bolter wasn't news to me. We'd had those rides before. In her worst moments, she flung her head skyward and rocketed forward, blind for all practical purposes. One time in the summer I'd run her right into a lake to save us.

So we were off. We had a long way down the tracks. I remember estimating it and double-checking it from my poor man's two-point position. I was just standing in the stirrups. The filly was going really fast, a full-bore gallop, when she flipped her head straight up. I saw a rolling eye. The drum of her hoof beats seemed deafening. In that convergence of sight and sound, I realized she was out of control.

(The things we learn later. I'd not had riding lessons. Whatever I thought I knew about riding came from reading the novels of Walter Farley and Marguerite Henry. My bible was My Friend Flicka, in which I saw myself and the filly. Sometimes I was the boy, Ken, and sometimes I was Flicka, the terrified filly he adored.)

We flew down the track, me balanced rigid between the stirrups and the reins. I remember the searing wind and the filly's forelock twisting like a dervish in the air, right before my eyes, her head torqued so high. Thud-thud, thud-thud; the ground was just peeling away beneath us. I was hauling on her mouth, leaning back hard, but the crazy pinto filly was lost in her fear and so much stronger than me.

The thing is, there was a cable hanging where the tracks had once met the road, one of those long, low-slung wires displaying a rusted No-Trespassing sign. At some instant, I remembered it was there. 

Up next: Chapter 2

Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks, Part II

The saga of the crazy pinto filly began here.

File Part II under Anatomy. Mine, that is.

By the time I was 14, I'd done countless miles on the crazy pinto filly. After the ridiculous reach-for-the-sky calamity during the previous summer, I'd become familiar with her wild ways through spill after spill, wreck after wreck. It was always something, me coming off of her, but I was used to it and still just a rubber-bandy kid made invincible by my love for her and my certainty of her love for me. It was all hearts and flowers, always summertime - she could never really hurt me.

Or so I thought. I didn't realize that we humans have a role to play there.

Since the crazy pinto filly was all about flight for me, escape and freedom, I had a routine designed to speed me through grooming and up onto her back. The kid I was back then wanted to ride; I had no inkling that decades later, grooming would become so central and valuable a part of my exchange with horses.

I'd get to the farm where she lived, lead her out of the dusty lot and tie her to a hitching post beside the barn. (I don't know why they had one; she was the only horse there.) A quick skidding of the body brush over her back and flanks, a little comb-out of her mane and tail, and I was done. It rarely occurred to me to pick out her feet. Impatient though I might be, I could get crabby if her white parts were dirty. Groomer or not, I had to get them clean. Resentfully, I would rag-rub away grass stains and dirt, all the while chafing to get underway.

Looking back, of course, I see that grooming could have been a way to reach the filly and maybe help with some of the discontent she manifested by jigging, bolting, rearing, etc., but at the time, through my needy eyes, she could do no wrong, had never done wrong.

There I was one weekday afternoon, a perfect, dry summer day, working at a stubborn grass stain on the filly's left foreleg. As I rubbed at the stain, I planned our ride. We would follow a creek that flowed behind my parents' house, well behind it, and dawdle along the treeline until sunset.

The stain persisted. In a fit of pique, I dragged my rag through the water trough and dropped to my knees in front of the filly. She stepped forward. I felt an impact, knee to face, but what got my attention was the water flowing from my eyes. I couldn't see for the water. A few minutes passed as I waited for my eyes to clear. I remember touching my face here and there.

We didn't end up riding the treeline. I cut the ride short because I felt oddly tired. The walk home from the barn seemed long, and I was drowsy with sun when I walked in the door. My mother sat clicking away at her typewriter, composing her dog newsletter, but she glanced up when she heard the screen door snap shut.

"What have you done to your face?" she barked. "What the bloody hell have you done!" I had no clue. Not until I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw that my nose was canted to the left, laying just flat against my cheek.

That was one rare instance where ignorance was not bliss for me. You should never kneel in front of a horse's leg, rather always keep to the side. Oh, but I learned it that night, learned it forever. I will never forget the sound and the sensation when the E.R. doctor leveraged my nose somewhat back in place with a shiny metal rod that he pulled (rowing-like) with both hands. I will never forget the grinding crunch of his best effort, the one that brought my nose back to the neighborhood, if not back home. That sound outlived my raccoon eyes deep into the summer, and I can loop it over and over, even now.

Crazy Pinto Filly Wrecks, Part I

I wrote here, last October, about an utterly mental pinto filly who was instrumental in saving my sanity when I was a child, and I've been thinking about her ever since. She was the horse of my fearlessness, the horse I rode in that bliss of ignorance that I mention in my header. Because she's lost to childhood memories and treasure boxes long since discarded, I have no pictures. This one will have to do. Never mind the lack of reins. They rarely helped.

I cannot believe I don't remember her name. That's part of the reason I've been thinking about her, hoping that reliving some of our rides will help me recover her name from the depths. The other part of thinking about her is recalling the wrecks we survived, the amazing, helmetless, catastrophic, terrifying, scream-worthy, funny wrecks. And when I say funny, I'm thinking of the gargling-with-shaved-glass kind of funny.

One of the more spectacular wrecks happened in front of my mother. She had readily offloaded 13-year-old me to the filly with few questions other than whether I had permission to ride her. A part-time basement dog groomer, my mother  offered me a rare moment of warmth the day she buzzed the pinto filly's whiskers away with an old set of Oster clippers. I clung to hopes of us bonding through the filly.

Until one high-summer afternoon. That hot, dry Saturday, I walked a mile to the farm where the crazy pinto filly lived, bridled her and clambered aboard her jigging back. There was an abandoned quarry on the other side of a woods nearby where I sometimes took her swimming. I'd ride her right into the water. Often I had no choice because she'd be bolting. This day, I thought I'd stop by our house on the way to the quarry. I was proud of myself when I was riding the filly and wanted my mother to be proud of me too.

The filly jigged alongside the country road. I remember the cicadas sawing through the dusty silence. I'd have to cross the blacktop to enter our driveway, just coming visible over a rise in the road. I heard a car approaching, but it meant nothing to me. This was in the 70s, a mythic time when drivers slowed to a crawl or even stopped to let riders pass.

I was crossing to the house, in front of a patiently waiting station wagon, when the crazy pinto filly lost her senses. That swimming horse spotted a puddle in the middle of the road, some oil or antifreeze glinting in a divot. She reared high. I slipped forward onto her neck, glued lizard-like in place, aware of the occupants of the station wagon watching rapt as the filly came back down to earth. I urged her forward, and up she went again. At the periphery of my vision, a heavy shadow lumbered toward us. The crazy pinto filly stretched high toward the sun, too high, like that moment at the top of the swing when the chains go loose. I felt air between me and her, but I stuck there. We teetered in the vertical and then, in an instant, fell backwards.

I remember the long arc down and I remember my mother heaving across the lawn, tailed by several yapping Cocker Spaniels. I remember the chrome bumper of the station wagon as I fell past it to the blacktop. I came to rest there in the road pinched under the withers of the crazy pinto filly. She balanced unevenly atop my sternum for a second or two, long enough for my mother to bellow, "You get out from under that horse right now!"

Like it was a choice I made. The thing is, that was hysterically funny to me, but I couldn't actually laugh while pinned under an 800-pound horse. I discovered that your head kind of explodes when you have to eat a deep laugh. It wasn't until the crazy pinto filly had scrambled to her feet that I was able to let it out, pulling myself up alongside her in the summer heat; then laugh, I did, standing in the shadow of my mother who had decided just then that horses and me were all wrong together.

Those poor people in the station wagon. And then we went swimming, the crazy pinto filly and me. 

This really happened, so I don't have to imagine it, but even so, I can't imagine that I was once that unafraid.

Why Do I Ride?

That question, in general, was raised in an excellent piece, found here, Grey Horse Matters: The Horse Gene, the other day. It's a good question, but for me it follows secondary to what I see as the first question: Why Do I Horse?

Because the simple, tangible reality of time spent with horses feels like precisely that to me: Real. Depending on your circumstances, perceptions of the actual, the present, the "real" can be elusive. "It's relative," people used to say, where today they might say, "Whatever."

But that reality is hard won; it was for me. I was born overseas to parents lashed tight together with cords spun from bitterness, deception and fear. It was a strangling life for them, let alone their accidental children. Trapped in just what "is" as a child, reality isn't even a concept until the first major thing happens, good or bad, that throws you out of yourself and then back in in a single involuntary instant. In my case, I would have been better off staying in "is." Reality, when I recognized it, trapped me between myself and my parents in the inexhaustible chokehold that exists between predator and prey. I became responsible for managing my own safety, or knowing that, anyway, but never understanding it. It was an oppressive climate of uncertainty and vigilant self-consciousness, one in which I was always struggling to stay invisible, desperate not be caught out by the din of terror clamoring in my head. There, I learned myself as a reactive creature, not a person, not an identity, not a being separate and apart from the forces threatening it. Trapped between the assaults wrought by one parent and the cool, unseeing facade erected by the other, I was never free.

Until the first time I stood near a horse. I don't even remember her name. She was a crazy pinto mare, a filly, really, who'd been ridden too young by the six-foot-tall farm boy who owned her. His farm was one of three on the long blacktop road where our little bi-level ranch house had been built, oddly out of place, and quickly sold to my parents. I don't know why my parents moved to the country. For me, it just meant there would be no place to run, no one to turn to. But I could get away with walks in "nature." My father approved of what he called the "American pastoral setting," so unlike what he had experienced in wartime Poland, while my mother preferred her dogs above all else and gave little care to absent children.

My walks took me again and again to that pinto filly. I would stretch my hands through the paddock fence, feeding her long grass from the roadside. There never seemed to be any people around, and she was alone. One day I climbed the fence and slipped onto her back. I can still remember the warmth of the sun on her sides. She trotted easily under a low-hanging branch and scraped me off, then went back to snuffling among the weeds.

There had been animals before, for me. My mother was a dog breeder, and we'd once had a cat. When whelping boxes had to be cleaned, the litters of puppies were brought to me for safekeeping. I loved those times, loved how it was to be with creatures just as vulnerable as me, but it was different with the filly. She was bigger than me, stronger than me, taller than me. She was a whole separate being who could react to me as she pleased. For the first time in my life, I wanted someone to like me. That someone just happened to be a horse. I wanted her approval, and I worked really hard to get it.

I think that is it with me and horses. Somehow, their self-awareness drew me in when I was a child, and it keeps me with them today. It's not a consciousness that we can know, I don't think, but we can sense it, just as they can sense ours. A dog will see you, a cat will regard you, but a horse will look at you. That pinto filly looked at me when I couldn't even see myself, and then I did.