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Horse Lessons
- University of Iowa Press
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109 Horse Lessons Horse crazy: as a kid, I lived the stereotype. I read all the horse books in the library, collected horse figurines, doodled horses in the margins of my school notebooks, snapped to attention whenever a horse appeared on TV or in a movie. I pranced and cantered more than I walked. Once I finally wore my parents down and got a horse, I morphed into a zealous competitor in the small pond of the local horse show scene, entering my plump buckskin mare in everything from jumping classes to gymkhana events to fifty-mile trail rides. My friends were similarly inclined, so our conversations as well as our spats revolved around horses rather than boys, clothes, or makeup. By the time I was in high school I was focused on dressage and planned to train horses for a living, but parental pressure and my mind’s preference for varied input nudged me toward college. I tried boarding the sorrel gelding I was riding then, but the expense and inconvenience were too much, and I sent him back to the pasture at my dad’s house. horse lessons 110 For years, finances and circumstance made having a backyard horse again impractical, and I pushed all things equine to my brain’s back forty. After I met Doug and we moved to fourteen acres in the foothills outside of Boulder, the remuda came trotting back to the front yard. The land was steep, though, as well as rocky, heavily wooded, and lacking in grass. We could have put up a corral and sustained a horse on hay, but I had acquired a different mindset by then: wandering the slopes of Sand Gulch and Fourmile Canyon brought home the realization that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice a patch of land to my equine desires. I’d begun to figure the costs of horsekeeping as something more than the price of feed and tack. When we decided to leave Boulder, finding a place with pasture for horses was a key consideration. The hills rolling off the northern flank of Cap Rock Ridge promised to recreate my adolescent idyll of walking out of the house and going for a ride. Making the transition away from Boulder took six years, and the phased process of building stretched over another three, but in the fall of 2004, our belongings were finally in the house instead of stored in the barn, construction and landscaping projects no longer occupied all of our free time, and we had fenced a few acres adjacent to the barn. I started shopping for a horse. This experience was like entering the seedy singles market late in life. I was old enough to know what sort of partnership I was looking for and pragmatic enough to know that I wasn’t likely to find My Perfect Equine, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the personal ad oversell I encountered. The “wellbuilt athlete” showed a mean streak under saddle; the “nice mover” seemed like a dimwit; and the gelding advertised to be “about sixteen hands tall,” a good size for me, turned out to be much shorter— such a dink that I didn’t even bother to take my boots out of the car. Compounding the frustrations horse lessons 111 of the marketing hype was the fact that I had been, literally, out of the saddle for more than a decade. Although I took some lessons in anticipation of starting to ride again, I was awkward and out of shape. The morning after one of my first test rides, on a bay Quarter Horse gelding, I was humiliated to find bruises blooming across my seat bones. Despite the bruised butt experience, I called the owner of the bay a few weeks later. I’d met enough rejects by then to be more appreciative of his sound limbs and mellow attitude. I packed my comfy old English saddle in the back of the car and went back for another look and a second test ride. To my fanny’s relief, I found that the western saddle had been more of an issue than the horse’s movement. He wasn’t quite as tall as the horse of my dreams, but I liked that he was interested in what was going on around him without being flighty. He was nice looking, with all-black legs and a black mane and tail that set off his mahogany hide nicely. He came from a...