Horse Crazy

by Susan Kiernan

  Alongside bit converters and saddle soap, you'll want to place ice packs, aspirin, ace bandages and Ben Gay. Maybe young sprigs can ride all day and bounce out of bed ready to play hard at recess, but for the older horse-hobbyist, getting up from a prone position often requires a force of will that feels much like a reenactment of Lazarus.

  Of course, it's not just riders; anyone who's active will probably get hurt sooner or later. The idea is to heal faster when you do get hurt. Your body is pretty resilient and can bounce back amazingly well from large doses of abuse and in very little time. But one of the most important lessons to understand, especially the older you get, is that hurting yourself isn't really the end of the world. Usually, you'll recover. And hurting yourself is sometimes what you need to risk in order to get the maximum pleasure from whatever physical event you're involved. At least it seems to be with horses.

  Without the danger, the mad gallop through the woods wouldn't be nearly as thrilling, the joy of sailing over a four-foot fence wouldn't be nearly as exhilarating. You have to risk something. There it is. And sometimes what you risk tells you something about what you value.

  Unless you've broken a bone or dislocated something major, most of the time you can treat your own horse-induced hurts and scrapes yourself. Pulled muscles and tendons are by far the most common horse-related injuries. If you don't stretch adequately before each ride you'll probably pull something now and then. And almost always below the waist, although a hard-pulling mount on Sunday can have you show up at the office on Monday looking like you're trying out for a pasture scarecrow's job: arms starched straight out or bent woodenly at the elbow in stiff memorial to your beast's triumph the day before. But mostly, it's pulled something-or-other along your inner thigh, knee, calf, hip or buttocks.

  Fact is, most horse people are sore a good deal of the time. (Which, I suppose, could account for why they're so cross a good deal of the time.) If you ride regularly, it's true that your legs might not ache the next day but your back might feel tense or your neck won't be quite right, or you'll have twisted your ankle a little or picked up some splinters or slammed the feed box lid on your hand.

  A barn or a stable with its various animals and equipment is simply more likely to give you a bruise or a scratch than meeting friends for a drink at your local pub.

  Usually the rule of thumb is to stop using the injured part of your anatomy until it stops hurting. This doesn't mean you stop riding however. I once pulled a tendon on an inner thigh that took nearly six months to heal because I kept re-stressing it every time I rode. If you take a month off to tidy up one of your lesser injuries, you can expect to sit a horse like a somnolent jellyfish your next several times out.

  One girl I know was so worried about losing her seat while a broken leg healed (don't ask) that she continued to do ring work with her leg in a cast. Many horse people wouldn't think twice about riding with sprained ankles, nerve-damaged backs, even broken feet.

  A rider's legs take nearly forever to develop. An incredible amount of work is needed to fine-tune the ability to make each calf muscle telegraph its own, separate message to the horse by a subtle yet definite flex or to train your born-normal feet to automatically conform to unnatural and initially painful positions, and then to be held like that for hours. (If you thought the Orientals were bad to bind women's feet, wait until you see what your own poor ankles and toes are in for when you start caring about your riding form.) It would take a lot more than a few pulled thigh muscles or even a fractured toe to relearn all that. So many riders ride with pain. It's a slower, more uncomfortable, way to heal. But it beats losing the muscle tone and discipline you've worked so hard to attain.

  Fear of injury is one of the reasons why many riders stretch before they mount up. Besides lessening your chances of hurting yourself in the first place, the more flexible you are, the faster you'll recover from an injury when it happens.

  There's a temptation, after a grueling (but heavenly) trail ride-- a ride where you slide to the ground aching and moaning--to want to sink into a hot tub or curl up with a heating pad to soothe and assuage all the unpleasant things you did to your body that day. Unfortunately, an ice pack (and a stiff-upper) is more what's needed. Applying heat too soon to swellings and general boo-boos is bad because it dilates the blood vessels and you want to be constricting those little darlings. The ice will help reduce swelling and the less swelling you have, the less pain you'll have and the more you'll be able to move the injured area. And the sooner you can be moving and rehabilitating your injury, the sooner you'll be back in the saddle again. Or, as is most often the case, back in the saddle again but without the intermittent screams of pain that so often herald the process of mounting and dismounting.

  If you spend much time at a place where there are horses and riders, you will see slings. And splints, and casts and limping. It happens. Sometimes you just have to ask how it happened. And usually, there's a perfectly good explanation.

  "Oh, I was riding my uncle's thoroughbred who'd never been off the racetrack before and I was on him bareback and was trying to fasten my helmet strap when the farmer shot off his rifle at some pesky dogs in the yard..."

  Explanations such as this one merit a sigh of mild relief from the listener. Other explanations, however, are not so reassuring, as in the case of one heavily bandaged forearm.

  "My horse bit me. No reason. Always was a sweet horse. Just reached over and started chomping."

  "But I guess you feed him treats a lot by hand, right?"

  "No, I don't believe in that."

  "But he must've been acting a little grumpy? Come on, you had to have provoked him in some way!"

  "I walked up to him and said 'Hi, boy.'"

  "Well! There you are!"

  When an Incident occurs on a horse farm or stable or riding academy, everybody stops what they're doing. The Incident could be a quiet horse suddenly rebelling on a lunge line, or a rider-less horse's sudden appearance, stirrups flying, reins flapping, or just any situation that threatens to be dangerous.

  A couple of riders may be embroiled in an interesting, even heated conversation, but if, in the background somewhere, there is a rider in the process of urging an obviously balking horse past some terrifying object--a red jacket hung on a tractor wheel or a pile of two by fours lying suspiciously on the ground--the talking riders will unconsciously devote at least half of their attention to the possible-Incident-about-to-happen.

  The rider-radar that, if not built-in, is quickly learned, that makes one aware and alert at all times. Horses are unpredictable and they are way too big for that to be a wholly comfortable status of things.

  But, for most horse people, this very discomfort is a big part of their attraction. In your normal day-to-day pick-up-the-dry-cleaning, don't-forget-the-milk schedule of life, you don't typically experience fear or that heady pump of adrenaline that a herd of stampeding horses bearing down upon you can evoke.

  Unless they live in the Middle East, your non-riding friends don't have to periodically be very brave or to make their bodies react and perform when they're in a tight spot. With riding and horses, there's romance, but also a constant trial of oneself.

  Our lives are normally so safe, so easy, so risk-free. The result of not living your life, or at least a part of your life like that, is exhilaration. You're not sprawled on a couch watching someone else live their life on television, you're concentrating with every molecule in your tensed body upon the fence at the bottom of the hill--jutting out at an irregular angle--vicious and challenging. And if you feel afraid, think of it instead as feeling alive. And when you think of it this way, it might even be a little easier to see why some horse people feel superior.

  The difference for me, is that now when I mildly fanaticize about galloping furiously through dusty velds of gold and green, my assegai punctuating the muggy, azure African night in great swings over my head, I'm also conscious of whether or not I'm on the correct lead.

  For all th
e pains and mess and expense, the love a horse and the pleasures of riding offer very potent rewards. For every cold morning spent mucking out a stall or roaming a twenty-acre field looking for your animal, there's a moment of triumph, a sheer instance of glory, a time or two of inexplicable joy when you've just come in from a blood-tingling gallop over fence and log with good friends.

  There's the exquisite, very possibly unequaled pleasure of an ice-cold Coca-Cola going down after an hour's dusty ring-riding and another hour of horse-tending in 95-degree heat. There's the simple delight of a cold tack room--smelling deliciously of horses and leather--with your winter afternoon's ride behind you and a steaming mug of milky sweet coffee warming your hands.

  Rediscovering the sky and all its colors, the clouds, baby cows, secret clearings in the woods, the feeling of being thirty-something and Annie Oakley too.

  Horses can bring back the kid in you faster than H.G. Well's Time Machine. For one thing, the last time you got this dirty definitely had to have been pre-pantyhose days. To come home with dirt on your knees is one of those carefree pleasures belonging back there with mismatched socks and being able to go out in public without mascara.

  After all these years of simply showering off the dust of the city air or your own body oils, how much more satisfying to take a bath when you've got real grime. When was the last time you simply wiped your filthy hands on your pant legs--or on your shirt? It's not done. But at the end of a long day at the stables, with no Handy-Wipe in sight and jodhpurs that have changed colors anyway, that simple act can bring back your childhood--complete with screen doors slamming and Mom calling you to dinner--faster than any tattered photo or faded Super 8.

  All the heroic fantasies borne from those same Saturday afternoon matinees still live when you climb on horseback. Scanning the horizon, looking for God knows what, Indians, rustlers, cattle stampedes...anything but the typical. For once the anticipation is not for the sight of your boyfriend's BMW or your Mom's landing DC-10.

  Going by way of horse is, in many ways, going back into time. And that's a powerful benefit in itself. Whether you're riding to the hounds in your terribly clever pinks, smart boots and top hat or casually loping along a grassy ravine in checked shirt and denims, your cowboy hat flying gaily behind you like a fluttering flag, it's fantasy-time and it's steeped in the past.

  The way they rode to the hunt in Jolly-Olde many hundreds of years ago and the way they scouted the Old West, the look's the same, the feeling's the same. And all of it, in great part, because the horse is the same.

  And maybe that's the greatest gift of all from the horse. He is single-handedly capable of transporting you back to the sweetest part of your childhood--your girlhood, your boyhood. He really can make all the dreams of adventure and independence come true.

  And maybe, just might be, who knows? If you're very careful about the horse you choose, when you really need him to, he'll go get the sheriff when you're pinned under the rock slide.

  .

  * * *

  1 A degenerative disease of the navicular bone in the horse's foot

  2 Swamp fever is an incurable, usually fatal disease that affects horses pastured near (surprisingly enough) ponds or swamps. A Coggins test will detect the swamp fever antibodies in a horse and most barns require your horse to have an annual test.

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