Fever Bends the Mirror

Did I See It or Just Dream It?

Only once, a long time ago, did I ever get seriously sick. It lasted a week or so. I've never been hospitalized, but I probably should have been then. I didn't know what sickness I had, but I was  tempted to imagine it was some rare, exotic malady, Dengue fever or the like. It felt especially foreign and intriguing because it threw me into a sustained, fitful delirium, where I stayed for days. I remember thinking a lot during that illness, or thinking I was thinking, anyway. One thing I seemed to obsess over was that Hitler had been to the United States. Friends who came to visit me still remember my asking them When did Hitler come to the U.S.? That's what I asked: when, not if. I was convinced that he had been here and that I had missed the precise details in all my reading about the two world wars. I still recall the certainty of those feverish Hitler thoughts; it's as if the baking happening to my brain seared them into brands. (It did: When I was better, I still had to go check the Hitler business with H.G., who wasn't my lifetime mate yet, only someone I was selfishly flirting with.)

Here, now, I've been thinking of one particular incident with Scout during the past few days. The recollection weaves through sleep and wakefulness, pushes into the foreground, then recedes into the background. What is it about it that caused it to flower in the over-rich Petri dish that is me in a flu-state? I don't know.

Back in early 2008, I kept Scout at an expensive semi-private barn for a while. I put her there because my trainer's new horse was there and the indoor arena was huge. I was willing to scrape together the board in pursuit of the answer to the question about whether Scout and I would ever be able to partner. This barn wasn't elitist or smug, but there were a few expensive horses there, no matter that some of them seemed rarely to be ridden or even visited by their owners. It all motivated me to ride through the winter months, and I was in a regular lesson schedule with my trainer, as was Scout, who even played a role as a walk-trot school horse once a week.

I have to define "lesson" in this context. E always worked with me on my riding, but she also worked with me on how to ride Scout, in particular, and additionally worked with me on how to train Scout as I rode her. A three-layer sandwich slathered in patience. A four-layer sandwich, actually. E had to manage my fear, as well.

During a lesson one cold morning in March, Scout began to crow hop as we rode on a 20-ish meter ovally circle to the left. All the other horses were outside and she was ticked off. The crow hopping terrified me. I could hear E calling instructions, but her voice was drowned out by the rush of fear in my head. I quickly fell off. E was never judgmental about things like that. Calmly, efficiently, she checked on me, reminded me to breathe, and then went to fetch Scout.

I knew I would have to get back on, and I did. As I settled into the saddle and gathered the reins, E stood at Scout's head and repeated the instructions I had been unable to follow. She told me Scout would do the same thing, only this time I could be ready for it. Meanwhile, the tears were building up; my emotions had really seized. I could only nod. We walked on. We made it almost all the way through a wobbly, misshapen circle before Scout blew, and then she did. I was crying. Like a robot, mechanically, I followed E's instructions, and they worked. Scout crow hopped and I stayed on. I pushed her forward, I made her work. All of it worked. But none of it worked. I nodded, crying, while E pointed out everything I had done to bring Scout back to me. I got it, I understood, but I didn't care. My fear was just oozing out of me, it was what was defining the moment. And this was nothing like the fall that had led me to consider divorcing Scout in the first place.

That was Tuesday morning. Thursday night I went back to the barn. The fall had jarred me and I was sore. I did something I hadn't planned at all. I took Scout out of her stall, groomed her painstakingly as I like to, clipped my double-ended lead rope to her halter and led her to the arena. It was well lighted; it looked beautiful that night. From the mounting block, I slipped onto her bare, fuzzy back. There were people around, and a couple of them must have known about my fall. The barn owner did, I'm sure. She was a kind person. E finished brushing down her big mare, and then she and the barn owner stood leaning in the doorway. They weren't watching me, but they were being near, and I understood that. I lifted my knees and rested them against Scout's withers and then hunched low over her neck, stretching my sore back. Gently, she shifted underneath me, so soft, so easy. "I needed to sit on my pony," I said. I was really comfortable, familiar with me in my jeans, sweatshirt and scarf, wearing battery-powered hot socks, and familiar with Scout warm underneath me, comfortable to feel me, carry me, ready to dawdle on forever. Scout mindful that all the other horses were inside.

Horse as Self Portrait - Saxony

Saxony, the horse I probably should be:

Here she is wearing my favorite old scarf the other day.

In her excellent post Are You Like Your Horse, Kate over at A Year With Horses used the phrase "aspirational horses" to describe horses chosen by their owners for qualities they wish they had themselves. Maybe Saxony is that for me. I think I bought her for what she could help me become. For once, I'm the project.

I've only had her for three months, so if there's a self-portrait to be found in her, it can only be revealed with time. Right now, she's like me only because I chose her, a mare of the right size, the right age, the right temperament. It was a rational choice, one made from the head rather than the heart, and I had to exert some nearly dormant muscles of self-discipline to make that choice. It would have been easier for me to get swept up in another quasi-rescue, more romantic, less immediate.

This mare is so kind. She expresses affection. She is trusting. She is willing, calm and steady-minded. She seems self-assured and doesn't generate drama. These are things worth aspiring to.

Her apparent fearlessness leaves me almost worried. Not that there's a dark secret lurking somewhere in her, but that I don't actually have a lot of experience owning a horse I can just get on and ride. Dealing with the drama of a "project" horse has become part of what I expect. I can't help but wonder whether I will miss it, as idiotic as that sounds. No, it's not idiotic, it's irrational. I know very well that what I'll miss is the "safety" I found in prep work and ground work and this thing and that thing, the many tasks I piled up that kept me from riding.

I look at Saxony and she's right there in front of me like a Nike billboard: Just do it. That strips me back to the bone, to the place where words don't matter, reminding me that I just want to ride again without fear.

Horse as Self Portrait - Dar

(Note to self: you are still prone to magical thinking about him, despite having got past the worst of having to give him back.)

Dar, the horse I probably should never be.

I was in love with Dar. Not at first. At first, I just thought he was everything that Scout wasn't. A young gelding still finding himself, not too much bad training to undo, not hot or spooky. Kind of a bonehead compared to her snap-judgment mind. A slow, heavy mover compared to her stiff, steppy speediness. In him I saw an exciting potential to begin again. If there can be such a thing as a "rebound" horse, then he was that for me, I guess. Of course, I say that now, as though it were a wise insight. It isn't. It's what I say to justify giving him back, to help my heart keep on shrugging him off.

I believe I idealize what we had in common. I think I projected more onto him than any other horse I've had in my life. It's almost funny to me now, since I was so certain I wasn't choosing him from an emotional place, not after Scout. What I actually did might have been worse. I chose him from a place of longing.

Dar had a lot of inner anger. He often expressed it through a sullen attitude. Unfortunately, the same can be true of me. Still, he was very curious about the world around him, just like me. We could both satisfy our curiosity to the point of being pushy and intrusive, barging our way into whatever we wanted to investigate. Sometimes curiosity is little more than a way to measure the lay of the land if one is fearful. That's true for me, but not him. He was not fearful.

Dar had a big physicality, lacking in grace. He was oaf-like, but could occasionally produce an energy that made him thrilling to watch. I also lack physical grace, except maybe in my hands. I can have a mind energy, though, that friends have told me can be thrilling to watch.

Soon after I got Dar, I realized that he carried a hard attitude deep within himself. He reminded me of how I was during a time in my life when I struggled to stop being bitter. It took me years to escape from that place; it was a fight I had to wage with myself. I thought I could help Dar do the same thing. It's that old thing of fixing another thing to fix yourself, dangerous, alluring, and almost always doomed to fail. I thought "fixing" Dar would finally put my strength in my own hands, bring it out of the private place where I keep it. I thought we would be strong together, that one day I'd be able to say, I won this horse away from his inner demons and now he has carried me away from mine.

Next installment: Saxony

Horse as Self-Portrait - Scout

Every now and then a strange sort of pulse beats through Hollywood and suddenly several major studios announce they are in pre-production on the same story, like a few years ago when we saw a couple films about Truman Capote writing In Cold Blood released back to back. Sometimes it's just cynicism (we've got to get a piece of that), sometimes it's just the Zeitgeist, and occasionally it might even be just coincidence.

I think it's all about the Zeitgeist in the horse world right now, however. Whether as a consequence of traumatic horse health issues, Denali, or getting a new horse after a painstaking search, Pie, or even just the coming winter keeping us on the ground with our horses, face to face, more than up on their backs, a good question has surfaced in some of my favorite blogs in the last day or two. It's a question about how like your horse you are, with a few variations.

I wish. I wish I was like any of the three horses that have been in my life since I came back to riding in 2004. Never mind. In fact, I am like them, just in not very practical or positive ways.

Scout, the horse I probably would be:

I'm way too much like Scout, who's the reason I started this journal in the first place. Back then, I'd just finished a year and half of agonizing over her before finally deciding to let her go. Putting her up for sale seemed somehow equivalent to giving up on myself too, though. It meant I might never face my fears about riding. But Scout and I were like two peas in a pod, and what kind of relationship can ever exist in one of those? We both carried too much tension, too much hyper-vigilance, and we fed off each other terribly. I could never fake it and she could never believe. She was an island unto herself when I got her, and while she let me in, it was her island, not mine. None of that matters now, because Scout came off the market as soon as she was injured and she'll be with me until I don't know when. I love her as a person more than as a horse, as odd as that may be. She's still too smart for her own good, and that's true of me sometimes, too. She doesn't take the time to savor every bite, and I also eat mindlessly. We're both a 7 on the fat-horse index. She knows me, and she knows I know her. We're best face to face with each other, and sometimes we're even great there.

Next installment: Dar.