When we were young…….

I was inspired several months ago to write about my journey with horses through each experience I had with the important horses in my life, much like Mr. Podhajsky did in “My Horses, My Teachers”, one of my favorite horse books growing up.

Of course, then I started thinking about which horses to include, and which horses to leave out, because I couldn’t include them all, there have been so many. I really thought about who was the first horse I should write about, and for a while, I thought it would be my wonderful leased thoroughbred/quarter horse Ike, who I was privileged enough to be able to lease from a grad student when I was 12-14 yrs old.

But really, if I’m going to write about the journey I’ve had with horses, I really can’t leave out Topy-A loppy eared 3 yr old Appaloosa probably cross (who knew?) who was won in a raffle at a fair. Inexplicably, Topy was trained to pull cart and only paced. (Maybe he was part Standardbred too, who knows)

What I did know was that the owners of this horse did not want to work with it and they were desperate for somebody to ride the thing. Well, of course, me and my best friend Teri jumped all over that-a free horse to ride!!! Cool!! We also managed to procure a very aged paint gelding named Sham, (or Shan, it was long ago, and my memory is not so great, lol) who was basically retired until we started playing with him again.

So me,my best friend, and these two unlikely suspects, set out on many preteen adventures in to the Michigan countryside.

We would pack a lunch and be gone all day on the weekends from sun up to sundown, pretty much. We would take them miles down the dirt road and ride in anybody’s field that looked like they wouldn’t mind. We “parked” under trees and ate our lunch we explored abandoned houses and let the horses eat grass while we played games. When in the woods and tied up downed tree limbs between trees with bailing twine to make makeshift cross country courses, where we would jump, sometimes bareback with halters. We would cross streams that in hindsight we had no business even trying to cross, but hey, we wanted to get to the other side, so off we set out trying to figure out how to get to the other side of that deeply banked stream. And we did. We never gave one seconds thought, or at least I didn’t, if this was feasible or safe with these horses that had no formal training to do what we were asking. I didn’t care and it didn’t matter. We were going to go on adventures and they were going to come with us and that’s exactly what happened.

We would ride back to our neighborhood which was probably eight or 9 miles from the barn across dirt roads and over a major interstate. Yes, the horses didn’t like that very much, but guess what? We did it anyway. I don’t remember being scared but I do remember listening well enough to our horses refusing to go over it through willful kicking, that I think we ended up hopping off and walking (ok, dragging) them on foot across. There was no way we weren’t going to go to our neighborhood and by the time we crossed this bridge, we were almost there. Ignorance is bliss.

Looking back on it I feel bad that we pushed our horses to do things so out of their comfort zone but on the flipside they always complied. I think now, that it was that steadfast confidence of a preteen that made it possible. This was before we started questioning who we are and what we could do. It was what it was. We wanted to go where we wanted to go. And go we did.

We would pretend we were race horses on the dirt country roads. We would walk a mile or two down the road and then we would race back. Thinking about it now we were so foolish and this was so dangerous but nothing bad ever happened. Topy would of course pace and if he broke into a gallop we would cheer with joy. Poor Sham probably thought we were insane but he dutifully complied.

We taught Topy how to canter in the arena, starting by galloping back to the barn, because this was like, my summers’ mission that year. Mostly because of course everybody said he doesn’t canter and you couldn’t get him to do it but at the end of the summer we did in fact to do it. I just wasn’t gonna take no for an answer and I knew that he could eventually do it if I persisted. It wasn’t pretty but there it was, a three beat canter and I had never even taken a lesson (who needs lessons, I thought, lol)!! Every time I fell off, which believe me, riding bareback on a horse that paces happened frequently, but I never once blamed the horse. Falling off was just something you did. You just got back up and you tried to ride better. I never thought of it as a negative thing and I never scolded Topy, because I knew he was trying. In hindsight, I had no idea what I was doing, none whatsoever. And we accomplished a lot.

Recounting these memories the last couple days has made me smile and tear up a little. The joy of simple times, of a mindset that we could do anything and go anywhere, the sky was the limit as our imaginations were huge. I’m beginning to realize now in my early 50s, that this was and still is, the place of real joy, this mindset of these preteens on the back roads of Michigan, really had it right all along.

The journey between this, now 40+ years ago, and now is still a large gap- but I tell you what… That gap is closing. What I experienced when I was a child with these horses and my best friend wasn’t a lesson because I hadn’t UNLEARNED it yet. It just was experienced and enjoyed, as it is meant to be. My home life might not have been perfect or a place of peace, but boy I tell you, the barn sure was! And it’s really no surprise to me 40 years later I live on a farm and I do horses for my living. And eventually I’ll get ALL the way back to this place on the back roads of Michigan where I lived with my friends, the horses and my bestie, where it totally didn’t matter where you came from, or how you were bred, or how you were trained, but we were together, in a place of unlimited possibilities, because we had no boundaries or judgement on ourselves, or for our horses. A place of peace, as Tania Kindersley so eloquently writes.

What a magnificent, motley bunch we were! Two 11 year olds, an aged paint gelding, and a three-year-old pacing Appaloosa racing down country roads together.

How awesomely lucky was I???

I fully plan to make it a full circle back to this joy very soon.

I can’t think of a better mission for all of us.