Swept from the corners of my mind….
Note: Rebecca is a pseudonym, for obvious reasons.
Teeth clattering, shoulders stiff, I hung on to the reins and horn after she asked, “Do you think you can handle a trot?” The jouncing increased as I tried to stay upright on the old mare who was deliberately making her pace as rough as possible. She claims she asked about going faster. I woke up alone in an empty field, questioning who I was, with one shoe off to my left, and the other to my right. Fade back to black.
Rebecca and I were in high school together and had a mutual friend, an old man on the edge of the city who had horses left over from when he drove large chuckwagons in death-defying races. Chuckwagon culture is devil-may-care. The drivers take good care of their horses and ignore their own pain. There is no pampering of humans. Lee no longer raced but still raised part-blood Thoroughbreds for his own pleasure. His casual management was a magnet for horse-mad teen girls. Rebecca had been a frequent visitor and had claimed one mount for her own. I was new to the game. Dressed in late-90s finery, including three inch wooden-bottomed platform clogs, I dropped in on Lee and ran into Rebecca. It was a beautiful day, and she wanted a riding companion.
I’m braver than I am brilliant. First declining due to inappropriate footwear (I knew that much), she talked me into it with a promise of only sticking to a walk.
Rebecca quickly tacked up Butler with an English saddle, then helped me tack up Old Sister with a western one. Staying on top of a horse takes core muscles and leg strength, even in a western saddle. You’re supposed to put your weight on the balls of your feet to stay balanced. Clogs are not designed to stay on your feet, much less stay in a stirrup. Old Sister wasn’t very happy about leaving the barn with a shaky lump on her back, but I felt I was doing okay until Butler began to trot through a gap in the hedges towards a field.
Barn-sour Sister sharing her annoyance with jarring stomps and trying to snatch the reins from my white knuckles. I clung to the horse like a toddler being left at daycare. Teeth rattling, jamming my feet forward to keep them in the stirrups, I fought to stay upright. Rebecca (claims) she asked, “Can you handle a canter?” as she took off at high speed. Sister’s responses escalated. I remember nothing.
I woke sprawled on my back in a field, staring at puffy clouds in a beautiful blue sky. I looked around. Alone. One clog several feet left of me, the other even further right. Fade back to black.
Awake. Ask the sky, “Who am I?” It took a while, but I got that one. Back to black.
“What day is it?” A tentative answer. Black returns.
Finally, “How did I get here?” twinkled through my head as I saw a decrepit truck with an old man, a young woman, and a hairy dog pulling into the field. Lee started laughing as soon as he got out. Chortling, wiping his eyes and even slapping his knee he declared, “Hell-a-damn, girl your a** plowed a furrow for ten yards!” Then I was crammed in the truck and have no more memories of the day.
I do, however, have one other memory of riding with Rebecca.
Rebecca grew up in Prince Albert. After we graduated, she went to Ontario to get certified as an English Riding Instructor. With that heady paperwork came a British accent. Shortly after her return we met again at Lee’s and she made an offer.
As she was an instructor, she was willing to give me riding lessons. She would only charge ten dollars a lesson because I would be her first student. I was a wee bit cautious because of the disaster of our first ride together. She was persuasive, I was naive, and the deal was sealed.
Sister’s psychotic half-brother, Butler, was Rebecca’s mount. She turned him into a show horse, but he nothing changed his antisocial attacks. He calmly kicked his farrier through the caraganas, regularly bolted from abnormally colored plants, or the whisper of ghosts and just wasn’t trustworthy. Not the horse of my dreams.
Rebecca slung an English saddle on the wild-eyed nutbar. To my Western-rider eyes, it was a leather postage stamp. Where was the rest of it? The horn? The curved seat? The solid stirrups? A few ounces of leather tied to his midsection had half circles of metal dangling from thin straps down on each side (stirrups, I assumed). Then the stirrups were taken off. That was it for passenger safety.
Leather straps appeared on his head. One circled from ears to jowls, a figure eight lay across his nose, more ran from his mouth up his cheeks. Another strap holding the bit under the chin. An extra circle of raised leather encircled the nose with straps leading up to the ears. The last strap was a thicker piece encircling the nose, buckling to a bunch of the other straps, with a swivel on top. Four reins (two per side) were attached to the bit, then looped twice high up the neck, well of reach of the rider. There was more leather on the head of this horse than on its back.
Rebecca led Butler to an open area in a field, only distinguished by a circle of plowed dirt about twenty feet across. No fence, no guardrail, just a big patch of softer dirt. A long lead was attached to the swivel, and she went to stand in the center of the circle, long carriage-style whip in hand. I was to sit atop and do exercises while she used the whip and lead to keep him walking in the circle.
I twisted left and right, made arm circles, and various flexes. Then Rebecca told me to bring the leg closest to her up to the saddle. “Bend your knee and hang onto your ankle. “ Awkward shifting, lifting, puffing and pulling by my jeans hem let Butler know things were changing. He launched, bolting as I hurtled through the air, calling on his racing ancestors for guidance.
Face down in the dirt I assess the situation. No concussion, so that’s good. I roll over and eye the pair of them, spitting out the first of the dirt that took days to get out of my ears and teeth.
“I knew better than to do this,” I thought.
“I’m going to let this lesson be free,” said the certified English Trainer.
Cathy Bendle finds humour in the quirks of everyday life, from training teachers to dodging housework. When not writing, she’s either laughing at her pets, frantically Googling for her work assignments, or playing on her iPad. Her column appears every other Wednesday.
