Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  One Virginian in his late sixties, paralyzed from the waist down after a fall from a horse and forced to use braces and a walker, was back in the saddle two years later. “Riding is therapy,” he told the Times reporter. “I figure, the horse got me here, and it’s going to get me out of here.”

  In the fall of 1997, I embarked on a pilgrimage around New England to meet three wise horsewomen, hoping to get a better grip on why humans are attracted to horses. I aimed to visit the horse farms of a professor, a poet and a philosopher. It just so happens that all three women are published poets and philosophers by inclination and teachers by trade. Each in her own way has built her life around horses and has written intelligently and widely about them.

  First stop was the home of the professor. Golden Dream Farm, not really a farm but a small acreage named after a beloved horse, lies near Adamsville, Rhode Island. Set back from a quiet country road, the modest house sits atop a gentle hill where a homemade rubber horse hangs from a tree for grandchildren to ride in lieu of the obligatory tire. A silent little Shetland sheep dog welcomed me politely and discreetly at the door.

  Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence is a woman ahead of her time.

  Born in 1929, she spent the first fifteen years of her working life as a practicing veterinarian, the latter seventeen years teaching cultural anthropology at the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in Boston. And during those thirty-two years, Lawrence has witnessed a sea change in the way humans perceive animals.

  “At vet school,” she remembered, sitting on her couch with a cat on her lap and walls of books all around her, “if I had broached the subject of human-animal relationships, they would have thought me crazy. I always tell my students how lucky they are. We now teach vet students about dealing with the grief of clients who have lost a pet. That was unheard of years ago.” Lawrence’s own course at Tufts on human-animal relationships was the first of its kind and the first to be made part of the core curriculum, though other universities now offer similar ones.

  “Animals,” she told me, “are my life.” But it is the particular relationship between horses and humans that has long preoccupied Lawrence. Her books — among them Hoofbeats and Society: Studies of Human-Horse Interactions; Rodeo: An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame; and His Very Silence Speaks: Comanche — The Horse Who Survived Custer’s Last Stand — all strive to decipher why the horse holds such a pivotal place in the human heart.

  Lawrence laughed as she recalled the little war she had had with her academic publisher over the subtitle of the Comanche book. They had wanted it to read The Horse That and not, as Lawrence insisted, The Horse Who. For eons, language denied animals what she called “personhood.” A horse was an “it” and not a “he” or a “she.” Now even that is changing. Throughout my own book, I, like Lawrence, have conferred personhood on horses.

  If we ride or own horses these days, said Lawrence (as her cat left her lap for my notebook), it is because we want to — may, in fact, need to. “Humans have let each other down,” Lawrence argued. “Our society is so fragmented. I sometimes go to little towns and I see there the same wonderful sense of community that I see in preindustrial people — the ones who are left. If our needs were met by other humans, I wonder if we’d turn to animals the way we do. It’s about kinship. Even when relationships with other humans are satisfying, we still seek out animals because they offer us something that humans can’t.”

  When I asked Lawrence what the horse, in particular, offers in terms of kinship, she as much as said, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” When Lawrence thinks of the horse, she thinks of pleasant rides in New England woods, and a connection with nature. (The time her recently acquired Morgan mare, Easter Bonnet, shied and did not run off and leave her grounded rider was the beginning of her bond with that horse.) The power of the horse, and the risk implied, has immense appeal: a horse can buck and tear across a paddock, then brake by the fence for a child’s outstretched hand. The transformation can occur in seconds. How the horse embodies both the wild and the tame — this was much the focus of Lawrence’s rodeo book.

  “The fine-tuned communication between rider and horse,” she once wrote, “is both physical and mental, as the beauty and grace of the horse’s movement become qualities possessed by the rider. Even for people who do not ride, horses represent freedom, power and romantic beauty.”

  In our mechanized age, said Lawrence, we need the horse’s spirit. The horse fills us with nostalgia for a simpler time. Her own field research told Lawrence that while a cop in a cruiser is just a cop, a cop on a horse is seen as a blue knight. “No one,” she once wrote, “pats a cruiser.” Riding, she believes, keeps you young — in a physical way and in a deeper way. Lawrence described a study of British geriatrics who bored their visitors with their ailments until the oldsters were given pet budgies, whereupon the birds became the focus, to everyone’s delight. “Horses,” said Lawrence, “are in that category, too. The horse takes you outside yourself.” Finally, there is the horse’s undeniable beauty. Lawrence uttered six words to express her admiration: “I just love looking at them.”

  Stop two. The poet’s house. Pobiz Farm. Down at the end of Parade Ground Cemetery Road, near Warner, New Hampshire. The “poetry business,” Maxine Kumin’s name for her calling — writing and teaching poetry, reading at far-flung literary festivals — brings in enough income to let her breed and train horses, the first of them an abused horse called Taboo, rescued in 1974 from a trip to the abbatoir. Kumin is very good at both poetry and horses: the Pulitzer Prize she won in 1973 will attest to the former and I will attest to the latter.

  We were walking up a steep hill on her 175-acre farm to get to the flat where she works her horses. The late-October sun was uncommonly kind; the leaves, still luminous. At seventy-two and bothered by arthritis, she no longer enters endurance riding events as she long did. “It grieves me,” she said, “that I can’t do it anymore.” But she still rides, still competes in combined driving events (to the horror of her children, for this horse-and-buggy sport can be dangerous). I confessed to Kumin, sheepishly, that I do not actually own a horse. The look she gave me on the hill was all at once quizzical, maternal and sympathetic, and she stopped in her tracks to deliver it. “How do you stand it?” she then asked.

  Maxine Kumin has written almost two dozen books of poetry, short stories, novels and essays. The horse, especially communicating with the horse, is a prominent theme in most of them. In Looking for Luck, she wonders, “Perhaps in the last great turn of the wheel / I was some sort of grazing animal …” In Deep: Country Essays contains the revelation that manure mixed with wood shavings smelled better to her as a child than perfume, and still does.

  In Women, Animals, and Vegetables, she describes her childhood obsession with horses. She rode at a stable for $1 an hour or in exchange for stall mucking but never actually owned a horse until she was in her forties and bought Welsh ponies for one of her daughters. The derelict farm in the Mink Hills then looked nothing so neat and attuned to the seasonal round as Pobiz Farm does now.

  There is a stillness about the place: we talked on a little patio facing the nearby barn and paddock, and the sound of dry leaves skittering in circles at Kumin’s feet seemed singularly fresh, as if I were hearing it for the first time. At one point during our chat, a bird called from the banked forest that surrounds the farm and she immediately recognized the song as that of a cardinal.

  My sense is that Kumin and her husband, Victor, know every inch of the farm they bought in 1963 and made their permanent home in 1976. At the heart of that profound sense of place is the horse.

  “Horses have been our salvation,” she said, kindly shooing two dogs who had come to me for a pat. “The horses keep us young. We’re both so physically active. Victor is seventy-six, and he still rides his brood mare, who’s twenty-one and is still opinionated, single-minded, twitchy and wonderful. We had guests from Texas the oth
er day, and they observed that our four horses are our children now. That’s certainly true. The bond is very, very tight. Maybe it’s because we live in a technical age, but the horse seems so tactile, so physical and emotional, not programmed or mechanized. The horse is different every day, and a day without horses is a lost day.”

  Like Lawrence the professor, Kumin the poet finds in her four horses (part Arab every one), a connection with nature. Both lean and seemingly ageless, the Kumins are still carving out trails in the rock-strewn forest. Maxine Kumin loves the ritual, “the dailiness,” she called it — the feeding, the turnout to pasture, the tacking up, the greeting at the gate. She loves the risk; at most combined driving events someone’s cart turns over. She loves what the horse demands and still teaches: patience, perseverance — “how you can’t muscle a horse and how you have to rely on better, subtler, nonverbal ways to get through.” One of her horses refused to be harnessed to a cart for an entire year, but Kumin and Wendy Churchill, a local trainer hired on for these and other horse-related duties on the farm, did indeed finally get through.

  I watched as Kumin took horse and phaeton (the wooden cart) for a few warm-up trips around the little exercise track up on the flat. Then I climbed aboard and joined Churchill, who continued the workout. Still wearing her white crash helmet, Kumin stood in the center looking on, alert to every nuance in the horse’s step. She has an easy, round laughter that warms like wool and I heard it often down on the patio; not so up here: the horse-proud Kumin remained steadfastly and seriously attentive to the details of training and competing.

  It is “a sweet mystery” to her why some individuals seem immune to the pull of horses; others, so smitten. Kumin had few friends as a child, and by the age of eight the horse had filled a void in her life. I asked her to ponder the argument, that an obsession with horses marks a retreat from the human race, that to love horses more is to love humans less.

  “Then so be it,” Kumin said without hesitating. “If I have to sacrifice something to maintain my connection with horses, then let it be. I’m not a hermit, but I don’t have a huge need for a lot of social relationships. I’m happy here on the hill, in my solitude.”

  She once wrote in a poem, “I believe in the gift of the horse, / which is magic …” Only by magic, she explained to me, could “something this big, this speedy, this unruly when loose, come to me in this wonderful way. It does seem magic to me to see them running around at liberty, galloping back and forth with their tails over their backs.”

  Perhaps we make too much of the horse-human connection, she concedes. It may say something of our own foibles, our own desire “to stay connected.” This thing for horses — the poet and the professor would agree — is indeed about kinship, about connecting. “When we go out with windfall apples to catch our critters,” Kumin wrote in Women, Animals, and Vegetables — which reads at times like a primer on horse husbandry — “and they come bucketing in from the far pasture, glistening with good health and high spirits, we know we’ve caught the right magnificent obsession.”

  Last stop on my journey was the philosopher’s house, but Vicki Hearne — author of Adam’s Task, Animal Happiness and Bandit, among others — was ailing that day and we never did meet except on the phone. I had to imagine her house in the Connecticut woods at the end of Horsehill Road, where we were to have coffee by a red barn and talk horses. I have the impression that her house on an acre and a half of land is not entirely rural, but rural enough that her cats must remain indoor cats or be preyed upon by neighborhood coyotes.

  I first encountered the name Vicki Hearne in a New Yorker article about horses published in the late 1980s and I have been a fan of her writing ever since. As philosophers are wont to do, she sees the complexity of things, and her writing often demands attentiveness. A poet and an animal trainer, she has a deep and abiding interest in the language of animals. A former professor at Yale, she possesses an innate desire to teach, and what I take from her writing is an ongoing theme about the sophistication of animals and the need for humans to pay more attention to catch the creatures’ drift.

  “My thinking, such as it is,” she wrote in Animal Happiness, “I learned from the animals, for whom happiness is usually a matter of getting the job done. Clear that fence, fetch in those sheep, move those calves, win that race, find that guy, retrieve that bird.” An accomplished rider who has trained dogs and horses for at least three decades, Hearne argues — and I believe she is right — that the happy horse is the one who knows his job and does it.

  Hearne’s earliest conscious memory is of sitting on a fence reading a story by Rudyard Kipling, with her collie and a horse nearby. It struck her then that dog, horse and poetry were all she really needed in life.

  “Our senses sweetly ordered / in the lift and fall of hooves,” Hearne once wrote in a poem. I asked her to put that in plainer terms, and she replied — as I knew she would — that she had already done so. This much she did say: “When I wrote that poem I was unable to conceive of poetry without conceiving of horsemanship, and vice versa.”

  We traded a few horse stories, and she told me about her horse Peppy (aka Peppermint Twist), an Appaloosa she once jumped seven feet nine inches at a puissance event in San Francisco. “When I met him,” said Hearne, “he was crazy, but he did love to jump. He went from being a killer horse to being my safest school horse. I had a blind student and Peppy knew she was blind and took care with her. If a beginner rider was on his back and was shifting forward, he would do something with his shoulder and helpfully reseat the rider. But if you put someone around him who did not respect him, he’d see horse eaters everywhere. One day there was a man in the paddock next to his. The man was a dude and he was just throwing his weight around. Peppy jumped from his paddock and came within two inches of that man.”

  “Just to blow some wind at him?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Hearne. “Just to blow some wind at him.”

  Like many others, she seems to have been possessed early by thoughts of horses. She remembers as a toddler being in a car with her father as they drove past a herd of horses and asking what those animals were. “Horses,” her father replied. “Where’s my horse?” young Vicki wanted to know.

  Hearne understands the many ways that horses attract humans. Nostalgia — “Horsemanship is like any of the humanities. Its impetus is a fiction about restoring the golden age.” Friendship — “Basically, when I buy a horse or a dog or a cat, he or she has a home with me for life.” Passion — Our stories about horsemen, she observed in Adam’s Task, whether from history books or children’s tales of horse-inspired heroism, “are allegories about what it is to know what interests you.” So many people go through life without ever discovering what it is they care most deeply about; those who love horses have no such doubts, and so it is, says Hearne, that “the passion for a life with horses is so powerful in this culture.”

  Monty Roberts will tell you that his book, The Man Who Listens to Horses, is blessed with a poetic — and quite wrong-headed — title. The horse, especially the wild horse, he will say, is largely a quiet animal. Monty does not so much listen to horses; he watches them with a keen and learned eye. In the same way, the horse does not so much listen to his rider as read him. But in the notion of listening — by both horses and humans — is contained a kind of poetic truth that moves us closer yet to understanding horse fever.

  Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence told me about a study done of girls at Pony Clubs. A very high percentage of girls polled actually confided in their horses and ponies. As far as those girls were concerned, their horses did them the courtesy of at least listening. Maxine Kumin believes that what lies at the heart of the girl-horse whirlwind connection is the horse’s constancy in a world that seems to the girl fragile and unreliable.

  The horsiness of young girls has long been seen as sexual, and the New York City artist Janet Biggs finds at least some wisdom in that explanation. Yet she would also agree with Kumin: the horse offers to yo
ung girls a sense of control in a world that seems to them quite out of control.

  Biggs has put on so many horse-related art exhibitions and video installations that she now jokingly refers to herself as “a horse artist.” In one, called Girls and Horses (the photograph “Celeste in Her Bedroom,” on this page, comes from that exhibition), a rotating projector casts on the wall a twelve-foot-tall image of a girl riding a dressage horse, while eight television monitors elsewhere in the gallery show other images: children playing horse with each other; riding mechanical horses, stick ponies, their fathers’ backs. The piece, said Biggs, explores childhood fears, anxieties and, maybe most of all, pleasure.

  “The attraction that young girls feel for horses,” Biggs told me, “is an attraction to power that girls don’t experience elsewhere in their lives. You can have no control over other parts of your life, but you get on this twelve-hundred-pound animal and he does what you say. Part of pleasure is power. Beauty is also part of the attraction, and so is historical romance.”

  Biggs rode as a child and teenager, then left riding for eighteen years until she rediscovered it three years ago. She now rides five days a week, rising at 4:30 A.M. daily to teach riding or train horses or, as an auxiliary parks patroller, to ride in Central Park. Janet Biggs has rediscovered a childhood passion. Some of the ribbons in that photograph “Celeste in Her Bedroom” were won by Janet when she was as young and horse keen as Celeste. One New York critic observed of Girls and Horses that “The overriding picture … is one of happy girls consumed.”

  Horses are such wonderful teachers, horse gentlers say. It sounded mystical when I first heard it, even silly. I conjured this horse in a scholar’s cap at the blackboard, pointer in hoof, citing a quotation from Hegel …

  I know a little of what that phrase intends, thanks in part to a letter from another rider on that Wyoming ride.