by Ann Romney
I never filled that place in my heart, though. A marriage and raising five children in Boston kept me much too occupied to ride again. I would think about Sobie from time to time, I would tell the boys about her, and I promised myself that sometime I would start riding again. I didn’t expect to find that emotional connection that I’d had with that horse, but riding was something that I’d loved deeply. After my diagnosis, and facing an uncertain future, I knew it was time.
Truthfully, I wasn’t even certain I would be able to ride. People who haven’t ridden have no understanding of how physically difficult it can be to control an incredibly strong animal weighing as much as a thousand pounds. With my balance problems, at times I was having difficulty simply staying upright in a chair, so the concept of sitting in a saddle and commanding an animal made me a little bit nervous. But I believed this might be my last opportunity to find that happy place of my childhood, before my disease made it impossible, so I was determined at least to try.
The first day Mitt and I arrived in Salt Lake, the Olympic Committee held a press conference. It was a major story: the turnaround expert from Boston had come to save the Salt Lake City Olympics. After the conference, I opened my day planner, found the number I had been given, and called a horse trainer named Margo Gogan. I knew nothing about her other than that she was considered to be an excellent teacher, but this was the only name I had.
I introduced myself and told her that my husband and I had just moved into the area and I wanted to start taking lessons. It was obvious she had never heard the name Romney, and I suspected that even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. She very politely told me that she was completely booked and that there was no chance she would be able to add another client to her already filled schedule. Her stalls were full; there just was no room for another horse. She did offer to add me to her waiting list, although she admitted that she didn’t know how long it would be until it was my turn.
I wouldn’t let her off the phone. The fact that she had no interest at all in training me made me want to train with her even more. I began dropping little hints about why we had come to Utah, mentioning “the Winter Olympics,” and eventually I got her attention. “Oh, yes,” she finally agreed, “I’ve heard something on the news about this Mitt Romney guy. That’s you?”
As Margo told me later, much later, “I thought Ann Romney was an awfully pushy broad, but I’m pretty pushy, too. The Olympics were very important to all of us living here, and I thought if she and her husband were coming all the way to Utah to help us with this, the least I could do was meet her.”
Margo had no idea that this stranger was about to burst into her life. She expected to meet some aggressive woman, give her some information and recommendations about other equestrian centers in the area, shake hands, and send her on her way. I believed I had a limited amount of time to fulfill this promise I’d made to myself, and I intended to spend each minute wisely. So I put on a pair of riding breeches and drove out to meet her. I was going to ride.
What possessed me to put on those jodhpurs I will never know, but I wanted this woman to know I was serious, that I was ready to get started right away. I really wanted this. The good news was that when I walked into the barn wearing breeches and a little riding hat, she didn’t laugh at me.
Margo was tall, about five eight, and wore her blond hair in a casual ponytail, and everything about her exuded calm and confidence. We connected the moment we started talking. I told her the truth about my disease; I wanted her to know what she was getting into. It didn’t seem to bother her at all. I pretty much recognized in Margo the same streak of practicality that I have: This is what it is; you can do it or you can’t do it. You can spend all day wishing, but you’ll get a lot more accomplished with one minute of doing. That first day was incredible. Within a few minutes we had gotten away from horses and were talking about those things in life that really matter. We talked about spiritual things, about family, God, what Mitt and I had been doing in Boston, and how scary it was to have been diagnosed with MS.
Among the things about Margo that immediately appealed to me was her bluntness. She asked a question I supposed a lot of people had wondered about but no one had asked: How did it feel to have something that money couldn’t fix or make go away? I wasn’t hesitant about answering that, telling her that money had never been the essential aspect of our lives. While Mitt and I appreciated what we had—and boy, did we know how fortunate we were—the things that mattered to us really were those things money couldn’t buy: our love for each other, our family, and our church. It just had never been part of our thinking that being wealthy would or should insulate us from life’s challenges. And while obviously having money made dealing with the ramifications of the disease simpler, it didn’t change who I was. In fact, as I would learn much later, the stages that I was working my way through were common for anyone who has faced a sudden and life-changing challenge, whatever their financial situation. I had gone through the first stage, denial. I had accepted the reality of my situation, and I had set out to make the best of it. I knew there was no cure for MS, but I was determined to fight it as much as I was capable of doing—and the best way to do that was to live the best life possible.
By the time we were finished talking, we were friends, having bonded over our love for horses. It was a friendship that would only grow through the years. For me, one of the hardest aspects of moving to Salt Lake had been leaving Laraine. We spoke on the phone, and she would come out to visit, but I missed having her around on a day-to-day basis. While our friendship with Laraine would endure, and we still often meet in various places for events and celebrations, Margo filled the huge void.
In so many ways we were alike. Like me, Margo had fallen in love with horses when she was a young girl. Watching the equestrian competition in the Olympics when she was ten years old, she noted that the riders held their reins in two hands. “I’m a little girl from out west,” she said, “where it’s all rodeo and western. I wanted to ride with two reins and I just pestered and pushed until it happened. When I was eleven, I learned to weld and helped my father build a barn. When the barn was finished and ready for horses to be let in, he let me stay home from school. ‘You know why I let you miss school for this?’ he asked. I shook my head, and he told me, ‘Just be still and listen.’ I did, and the only sound was the horses munching on the hay. ‘Now just smell that smell.’ The fresh wood, the fresh shavings, reminded me of Christmas. I never forgot that. That barn became my safe haven, the place I could go and be alone with my horses.”
Several members of Margo’s family were musicians; an uncle even played with the San Francisco Philharmonic. Margo didn’t have that ability, so she decided that “the horse would be how I expressed myself. We groom the arena every day—meaning we’d break up dirt clods and level the earth—and I love to have the first ride in the morning. I make my own designs on the ground.” Some mornings I would get there early enough to see her carefully grooming the dirt on her tractor while opera music, usually Andrea Bocelli, blared from the loudspeakers.
I had spent my life in the cities of the Midwest and the East, while she was a westerner who loved open spaces, but I knew we’d found our common ground when she said, “I may not be able to speak to people in their language, but I can speak to any horse anywhere in the world.”
At seventeen she started teaching hunters and jumpers, but eventually focused on dressage, and became one of the most respected teachers of that type of riding. Dressage is a really difficult sport. Often called horse ballet, it is a five- or six-minute choreographed performance often set to music in which a horse and rider have to perform a series of both mandatory and optional movements that highlight the grace, beauty, and power of the animal, and its connection to the rider. The rider’s objective is to make it look easy, almost as if he or she isn’t doing anything but sitting straight up on the horse while out for a comfortable ride. (In fact, the better a rider is, the less it looks like she is do
ing.) In fact, the rider is controlling every movement of the horse, every change of direction, every change in its gait, with subtle motions such as applying pressure with a leg and shifting weight. The rider isn’t even permitted to use voice commands to control the horse. In competitions, as many as seven judges rate each horse and rider against the accepted standards, the way gymnastics is judged, rather than rating them against other competitors.
I had never done dressage, but it seemed perfect for me. There is no jumping, and the horse is always under control, so it cuts down any possible risk—although, at some point, everybody gets thrown. When I first started learning dressage, I asked Margo about how long it would take to become good at it, and she smiled and guessed, “Maybe ten years.” It’s similar to Mitt trying to perfect his golf swing—it’s a sport where you are never going to reach perfection, but the challenge is to continue improving.
Although I was completely honest with Margo about my MS, I insisted she not take it easy with me. I wanted her to train me exactly the way she worked with her other students. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said, a promise she certainly fulfilled. Margo explained that she had some experience working with people with disabilities. Only a few years earlier, she had trained the young son of a friend of hers who was suffering from cerebral palsy. His disability was far more pronounced than mine; he had only limited control over his body. Margo and her friend figured out a way to keep him safely secured in the saddle using Velcro. The horseback riding proved to be a very important aspect of his therapy. In fact, there is a long history of horses being used for therapeutic purposes, especially with children. Horses seem to have an intuitive sense of how to work with people with disabilities. Apparently, as I learned, riding offers physical, emotional, and psychological benefits: For people who can’t walk, being on a horse is as close as they can get to having legs that work. They benefit from balancing in the saddle, which stimulates circulation and respiration and tones the same muscle groups as those used in walking. For someone like me, it helps build postural strength. Some research shows that it also affects the central nervous system, helping people harmonize their movements. Yet my motive for starting to ride again wasn’t for any type of therapy. I wasn’t doing this because of my MS. I wanted to do it in spite of my MS. This was a long-delayed pleasure I had earned.
That first day, Margo and I sat talking for almost an hour. Then she suggested, “Let’s see what you can do.” I leaped at the chance, quickly pulling on my riding boots—except they no longer fit. The steroid treatments had made my whole body puffy. I felt like one of Cinderella’s stepsisters trying to force her foot into the glass slipper. But I managed to get up on a horse that day, and within seconds I understood the derivation of the expression “back in the saddle again.” It means regaining a comfort level in the performance of a task. I hadn’t ridden in more than three decades, but the feelings came roaring back. As a rider, I did everything wrong: I was bouncing all over the place. I had no strength at all. I was pulling on a rein to hold on, which meant I was pulling on the horse’s mouth. That horse and I were completely out of rhythm. To someone like Margo, watching me ride that horse must have been like Leonard Bernstein listening to an elementary school recital. But I loved it.
I took one ride around the small arena—it was only about 150 feet by 75 feet, so tiny—but I learned within a few seconds that dressage is much more physically tiring than it looks. In less than a minute I was exhausted. In dressage, the rider doesn’t slump over the saddle, holding on to the horn as he or she would on a trail ride. There is no saddle horn to hold on to, so the rider has to hold her entire core upright while relaxing her arms and legs and trying to absorb the movement of the horse—all while still exerting enough force to control this big animal. Margo once described it as trying to stay on a narrow balance beam that’s in motion. By the time I finished that single loop, I was exhausted—exhilarated but exhausted. Just one loop had drained all my energy.
I had to lean over and rest on that old horse’s neck. But I couldn’t wait to do it again. It wasn’t as if the depression that had been surrounding me suddenly lifted and the sun shone brightly, but at least there was a break in the overcast. It would be more than a month before I made a complete circuit of the arena without having to pause to regain my strength. The first time I managed to do it, Margo just nodded her head in approval. Neither of us made a big deal about it, but inside I was thrilled. It was so hard to measure progress in my new life. This was now a milestone.
I rode Margo’s training horses for several sessions. Before any real teaching can be done, a rider has to get comfortable on horseback. Beginners in dressage need to ride experienced and tolerant horses that are calm in the arena and willing to work with an inexperienced rider. They are the equine equivalent of a bike with training wheels. Their purpose is to help a rider overcome any fears and apprehension. The next step is for a rider to get her own horse and train with it until the horse and rider are a team. It is one thing to get on a horse and lead it through the mechanics, the programmed movements, but doing it beautifully requires developing a real partnership with the animal. It means getting to know and understand the horse on a very deep level. It means working with the horse in the arena, being with it in the barn, grooming it and caring for it. The horse has to trust its rider completely—but the rider also has to have confidence in the horse. Eventually, the horse and rider will develop their own unique means of communication, and it’s different with every horse. When it happens, though, the team goes through its paces in complete harmony. While it’s a beautiful thing to watch, it’s even better to be part of that special relationship.
It often takes as long as a year for a new rider to be ready to take that step, but I was in a big rush. I didn’t know how much longer I’d physically be capable of riding. After only a few weeks Margo was satisfied that I could handle myself on a horse, so it was time to find the right horse for me.
I came into the barn one morning and Margo told me she had the perfect horse for me: a grandson of the great Secretariat. I was instantly impressed. Many people consider Big Red, as Secretariat was affectionately known, the greatest racehorse of all time. I assumed his grandson would reflect the same noble bearing. When Margo led me into the barn and introduced me to Buddy, I guessed he had come from the other side of the family. Although he had the same chestnut coloring for which his grandfather was known, the resemblance stopped there. Secretariat had spent fifteen years in stud and had sired six hundred foals, but few of them had even a small percentage of his great heart and speed. And Buddy clearly was not one of them.
Buddy had been born in Margo’s stalls, so she had a great deal of affection for him. He had a good straight back, strong legs, and correctly aligned hooves—but truthfully, he was pretty unspectacular. Well, he certainly wasn’t intimidating like his grandpa. Still, he was a beautiful horse in his own way. Margo led him out of his stall. I got on and took a brief ride around the arena. I felt completely comfortable on him. He was a lackluster horse, but then, I was a lackluster rider. We were a perfect match.
After a single lap we left the arena and started up a hill that took us away from the barn. Just Buddy and me. And as we rode up that gradual slope I was overcome with emotion. The previous few months had been an unending whirlwind of life-changing events. As we moved slowly toward the top of the hill, a wave of emotional memories flooded my body. I was fourteen years old again and healthy and free.
We meandered toward a peak that allowed us to overlook the beautiful Heber Valley. Buddy answered every slight tug on the reins. I was on the top of the mountain looking out at the Wasatch Mountains, and for the first time in months I felt strong enough to cry.
In those few minutes, Buddy and I formed our relationship. From that moment on, we were completely comfortable. It was as if I was finally able to take one very deep, very long breath. Tears I had been holding back streamed down my face. When we got back to the barn, Margo looked at me
with concern. Was I okay? Was everything all right? Everything’s fine, I told her. It was just so beautiful. “I feel like a girl of fourteen again.”
After that, I went to the barn every day I was able to, to do whatever I could to help. The equestrian center was like going home for me, and I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to groom my horse, I wanted to muck the stall, I wanted to put the blankets on and comb his mane. I was dirty and exhausted, and I wore out very fast, but while I had the energy, it was so much fun for me. I met all the girls at the barn, and we would sit and talk, and when we did, I would hear the echo of my own early years. They were young, independent, and sassy; they could throw a saddle on a horse, go out into the woods, and cut lumber with their chainsaw, and be back home in time to get a manicure and have their hair done. My world was opening up again.
Mitt was thrilled that I had found something so meaningful to me, although he didn’t understand it at all. We’d met soon after Sobie was sold, and I had pretty much stopped riding, so while he’d heard all the stories, we had lived our whole life without horses being part of things. Now suddenly the poor guy had to adjust to this whole new world, and truthfully, he was kind of baffled by it. For a time he thought it was just going to be something that excited me temporarily, that I would enjoy it and then something else would attract my attention. So he was surprised, and eventually very pleased, when he accepted the fact that horses were going to be a permanent part of our life. Eventually he began telling people that he wanted to send me to the Betty Ford Clinic for Horse Addiction, but he finally realized that there is no cure for it.