Her grandma’s conversion notwithstanding, until every animal owner is kind, competent, and ethical, Drew’s work will be needed. For now, she and the Rescue Foundation need much more help than she is able to afford on her salary mending saddles and other tack at a local saddlery.
“I know what it’s like to be not in control,” says Drew. “I want to help these animals. They are total innocents, they are our dependents.”
Her fences break, her 1989 Ford truck is hemorrhaging oil, there are vet bills and feed bills. But just now, this morning, a rescued mare—one of five that survived in a starved herd of ten—has given birth.
“She dropped a gorgeous palomino filly foal,” says Drew, squatting on the front steps of her white rambler home. Randy brings her a bouquet of dandelions. Drew chuckles. “I’ve mellowed; I’m not near so autistic,” she says. “I’ve learned to relax, express myself. It hasn’t been easy. Watching animals is what did it. How simply without guilt they express themselves, how forward they are, uncomplicated. They are happy within themselves. Horses don’t brag; a horse that feels good can prance and everybody rejoices in that prancing horse. When they show you joy, you revel in it with them. I love these creatures—the pigeons, the cats, all of them.”
11
CAN-DO CIMI
LORI SARNER, HER HORSE CIMMARON, AND THE PEGASUS RIDING ACADEMY FOR THE HANDICAPPED
SMALL ROSETTES OF scar tissue—circles of pink, white, and bare black hide—still bloom on Cimmaron’s hips and shoulders, the bedsore legacy of a trauma that few horses could survive and through which few owners would have stayed hopeful.
In 1986, Cimmaron, then a two-year-old colt, was en route to a Southern California training stable to begin his racing career. The young Thoroughbred had resisted getting into the trailer and was heavily tranquilized. As the truck raced down the highway, he fought the tie rope and flung himself upside down. His neck, still tied to the manger, was severely wrenched, and he sustained a concussion and a spinal cord injury. For a week he was half-conscious and rigid with pain while veterinarians tried anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, anything.
Unable to pay huge veterinary bills, and faced with a horse with limited prospects at best, his owner wanted him euthanized. Trainer Diana Thompson, who had done muscle massage and therapeutic touch on Cimmaron, persuaded him to relinquish the horse—and his bills—to her. “Depression is a big part of disability, and riding lifts people’s spirits,” says Pegasus director Lori Sarner. “Here it’s what they can do that counts.”
She enlisted the help of vets for acupuncture and homeopathy, and twelve days after the accident, Cimmaron, with the help of a dozen people, rose to his feet and walked.
What he couldn’t do was race again, although he could tolerate light riding. In 1992, Cimmaron was donated to the Pegasus Riding Academy for the Handicapped in Indio, California, and began giving mobility, hope, and fun to humans with injuries.
Pegasus is a little more than an acre of neatly raked and swept desert landscaped with petunias, rosemary, and daisies at the dead end of a dirt road. Two modular buildings serve as headquarters and the stable manager’s home, and pole corrals house up to twenty horses and ponies. It is flanked by a low building that, according to legend, once served as General Patton’s mess hall and is now a plumbing service. From there, it’s just desert stretching northeast toward the San Bernardino Mountains.
In the shade of his stall, Cimi chews and licks thoughtfully. He is a tall, glossy bay with shapely haunches and shoulders and a deep chest, indisputably a Thoroughbred of fine pedigree and imperturbable poise.
“Cimi has so much faith in us because he was on the ground for twelve days; he couldn’t fend for himself,” says Virginia Davis, Pegasus stable manager, readying him for the day’s work. “This horse is unflappable: wheelchairs bump him, people with walkers or canes are around, and he doesn’t spook. He was disabled himself, and now he gives back to disabled people.”
A middle-aged Brunhilda of the riding ring in huge tortoiseshell glasses, blonde bun, immaculate tan breeches, and tall black riding boots, Lori Sarner is president of Pegasus as well as its head instructor. She greets the volunteers who groom and saddle the horses and ready them for the morning’s riders. Today the volunteers include Pete Petersen, Penny Carpenter, and Lee Sherman, all fit senior citizens from surrounding suburbs.
The horses are kept cool in their stalls by a misting system that automatically sprays cool water into the air when the temperature hits ninety degrees. Because the desert heat can reach as high as 130 degrees in the summer, they work only November through April. Their job is giving thirty- to forty-minute rides to handicapped adults and kids, reviving their bodies and their spirits.
And soon the riders roll in. In addition to a legless man in a wheelchair (a former highway patrol officer hit by a drunk driver), there are a dozen retarded children and brain-injured adults sipping drinks and eating snacks while talking in a shady ringside pavilion. Each rider wears a helmet and is attended by a helper on foot on each side, while another assistant leads the horse. One of the first eager riders is René Myers, who rolls her wheelchair up a loading ramp that brings her level with the horse’s back. Cimi is led into the slot between the ramps, and with a boost from Pete, René settles onto the saddle. René was thrown from a car when she was eleven and suffered a brain injury. She used to show quarter horses as a girl and now, at thirty, she retains something of a rider’s posture and ease, her long legs falling naturally into the proper heels-down position.
The Pegasus arena holds traffic cones, a low basketball hoop, and a soccer ball. With riders and attendants at the ready, Lori strides into the center of the ring and gives the command, “Walk on!”
Another rider, Bernie, clutches a pommel strap with his left hand; his right hand is a claw, his ankles turn in, and his toes are pointed and rigid. Penny, Pete, Lee, and other volunteers lead the horses forward. “Hahaha!” Bernie yells to the desert morning, his face flushed with joy. “Yahoo! Yahoooo!” Over Bernie’s raw, crowing laughter, Lori says to us, “He’s our hooray Henry.”
“Okay, do a floppy doll with your right hand!” says Lori, and those who can, shake their hands. “Now take a deep breath and blow it out,” she calls to the circling riders. “And now a whirligig; move the fingers on your affected hand,” she says. “And look through the horse’s ears! Up up up with the chin. Now close your eyes,” she orders.
“With your left hand, do turkey wings, and everybody say gobble, gobble, gobble. Okay, now put your right hand on your shoulder.”
After a few turns around the ring, René mops her face with her good left hand. At Lori’s command to bow, riders bend forward as much as they can. When René bows, her dark hair falls and melds into Cimi’s mane, and her face rests on his neck in a combination of happy exhaustion and affection.
The mounted games work both sides of the body, limber the muscles, encourage better breathing, and improve balance. And they are just plain fun, as when the riders shoot hoops on horseback. With their assistants at their sides, René, Bernie, and the others ride purposefully up to the hoop and launch a soccer ball through the ring without pausing.
By the time Lori commands, “Go ho ho ho way down deep in your throat like Santa Claus,” there are already smiles on every face. “This is not a pony ride—the horse is an apparatus for a mild form of physical therapy,” says Lori. “Put a person on a horse, and they think and use motor skills. They literally get a mental lift.”
In the 1980s, when Lori and her husband were living in London, she volunteered to help at a stable behind Buckingham Palace that featured a riding program for the disabled. At that time, she says, there were more than nine hundred riding-therapy chapters throughout Britain and Northern Ireland helping handicapped children.
When the Sarners moved to Palm Springs, California, she found a tiny bankrupt stable and launched Pegasus with one old pony named Patches. Cimmaron was the first donated horse. “I got into this because m
y mother was partially crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and deaf,” Lori says. “These people are people, too, and one of the things I can give them because I love and know horses is exercise from the horse.”
“Horses have always been our servants; they fought our battles, pulled our loads, hauled us around,” she says. “In this century, we just use them for racing and pleasure, and we are losing them in every country in the world. They are expensive, not easy to keep, they take a lot of land, and that’s becoming a scarcity in this country. We’ve made the horse a pouf, just a show horse. Take away the work ethic from a horse, and you take away a large part of his being. If we put them to work again, they will have real value. My point is to educate people that the horse can heal as well as pull loads and fight battles and go to war.”
Cimmaron, an injured Thoroughbred racehorse, will never race but has found a career at Pegasus Riding Academy near Palm Springs, California.
The Pegasus horses include former polo ponies retired because of injury; a champion show jumper with one blind eye; a two-thousand-pound, one-time logging horse; and a retired Welsh show pony that was once purchased for a child competitor for ten thousand dollars.
Riders have favorites, and so do the horses: a girl named Debbie only rides Cimmaron, and when she dismounts, he moves his head over for a hug and kiss. Love and physical exercise are part of the healing equation, but every stroke patient who comes to Pegasus has experienced depression. And for men in particular, a horse bolsters their flagging macho, Lori explains.
“Here they are all John Wayne,” says Lori, whose husband suffers from Parkinson’s disease. “If they can do exercise and therapy on a horse, it’s more fun and something they consider manly and out of doors. They take to this therapy and work hard, and we make it a bit competitive. Most cannot raise their affected arm, and their leg is partly paralyzed, and when they ride with other stroke patients who can get an arm up, they think, ‘I want to do what he’s doing!’ Because we ride as a group, they see what other people have done. In a clinical environment alone with a therapist, they don’t get this opportunity.”
Medical training schools are recognizing the emotional and physical therapeutic values of riding, and often nursing students from the College of the Desert or the University of California at Riverside take part in Pegasus classes.
“People who have suffered a stroke had a life before it, and they have had a good life, and when a stroke hits them, they are reduced to nothing,” says Lori. “We make them use both hands, and to get three baskets in a row is a very big deal! Then when their friends talk about their golf game or tennis, they can say, ‘Hey, I rode a horse today.’ They feel like a person again.”
In the sunlight of the ring, Cimmaron walks steadily, rhythmically. René’s neck, hips, and legs move in concert with the horse’s neck, back, and ribs. For those who can’t walk, the motions of riding are the closest thing in nature to the motion of a walking human.
Not everyone takes to riding immediately or voluntarily: a dark-haired autistic boy on a smaller horse is screaming, “I want to get off!” his nose running, his face wet with angry tears. Lori has seen this before and is unperturbed. “I have a credo: God has no stepchildren. That’s the foundation of Pegasus,” Lori says. “We have to be here for those who are difficult. It’s easy to love the lovable, not so easy with the very difficult, the handful, but they need us most.”
One reluctant rider had suffered from ovarian cancer and a stroke. She was undernourished, depressed, and passive. “At first, all she did was sit and cry,” Lori recalls. “We put her in the saddle, and she rode around on the horse crying; we didn’t care. After she rode for six weeks, she got well enough to fill out applications and get into assisted living for low-income people instead of being shifted around to friends. Riding helped her focus, she gained weight, and her whole life started to take shape.”
“Depression is a big part of disability, and riding lifts people’s spirits,” says Lori. “Here it’s what they can do that counts.”
12
NOT WITHOUT MY SON
ELTON ACKERS AND HIS DOG, PEEWEE
FIVEDAYS AFTER Hurricane Katrina, the streets of New Orleans ran glassy with an evil gumbo of toxic chemicals, swollen corpses, live electric lines, uprooted giant oaks and magnolias, shattered glass, drowned cars, and rotting food. The Big Easy had finally taken the big hit, and up and down the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, especially in the Mississippi Delta soup bowl that circles New Orleans, people and animals were missing.
And Elton and Geneva Ackers had had enough. They sat on the steps of the New Orleans Convention Center in the stench and heat with thousands of other hungry and terrified people. “My baby say to me, ‘Honey, I’m hungry, ’” says Elton. “And I worried about my dog.”
“I went upstairs, and they had dead bodies where they keep the meat,” Elton recalls. “A baby, a white woman, and a black man died on a table right in front of me and my wife. There wasn’t no doctors. The chief of police come with the National Guard, and he told us a lie. He say the water goin’ down. And he say they gonna bring us food, but most people too sick to eat.”
“And she say, ‘Oh, baby, we not staying inside here.’ I tell her I goin’ home to get some food and come back with my dog,” Elton tells us. At 5:00 a.m. on Friday, armed only with a flashlight, Elton started down Magazine Street, wading and climbing over debris and traveling three miles to their home on Robert Street, where he had left his dog, PeeWee, with Mac, a friend’s pug, for company.
“Some parts, the water rise high; some parts, the water rise low,” he says. Near home, the “water comin’ up to here,” he says, indicating his chest.
Like thousands of other residents, Elton and Geneva had waited too long to get out of town. The rain tore down and a tree smashed through their roof, but the wind was so strong they couldn’t hear it fall. When the water rolled up the street and into their house, they set up a barbecue on a neighbor’s porch, and camped there, stranded. I asked Elton why they hadn’t left sooner.
“In Betsy [Hurricane Betsy in 1985] the water didn’t take and come up as high as this,” he explains. “We look at the water risin’, and we never had nothing like that before. We had a portable TV, and it say the water gon’ rise nine feet more, but then we couldn’t start the car—the water take and kill all the ’lectric. So we say we just gon’ sit here till somebody come get us.”
Finally they climbed into a rescue boat, leaving food and water for the two dogs, expecting to be home in a day or two at most. The boat driver refused to take PeeWee and Mac.
As the days passed in the convention center, Elton worried about PeeWee every minute. And when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he took action. When he opened his front door, the dogs greeted him with desperate eagerness. Storm water had saturated the furniture and floors of the shotgun-style bungalow. But the gas was still on, and Elton boiled some eggs, made tuna salad from canned tuna, and fed himself and the dogs, and he dug out
Hurricane Katrina survivors Elton Ackers and his dog,
PeeWee, in a ruined home in New Orleans. Thousands of pets left behind died, but Elton went back for PeeWee.
a change of clothes for himself and Geneva. Then he bagged up additional food and water and hiked back through the water to the center. It was about noon on the first of a month of ninety-degree rainless days that followed the hurricane.
At the center, Elton left the supplies with Geneva. Then he headed home again.
“I tell her they three buses left, and they gon’ make you get on the buses, but I ain’t goin’,” he explains. “I worried ’bout my dog.”
On Sunday, as Elton sat with PeeWee and Mac, a helicopter whirled above their house, shearing off the few shingles that had not been blown away by the hurricane or skinned off by the fallen tree. “The roof wide open on account of the tree, and the man say we send you a boat, you got to get in,” Elton says. “And I say no, I’m not gon’ get on it this time. Not wi
thout my son.”
Now, six months after the hurricane, it is ten in the morning, and the old men on Robert Street are at their positions holding down various porches on the block. They sit on the verandah at Gladys’s house next-door to Elton’s bungalow and on the stoop at Roland’s across the street. They do not sit indoors on the new ivory faux suede sofas bought with insurance money, a short one for PeeWee and a longer one for Elton and Geneva. They lounge outdoors with their beer cans, surveying the variegated philodendrons twining up porch pillars, the jasmine blooming again on the chain-link fences, the hedges and trees struggling to revive from a salt water soaking, and the piles of mattresses, plaster, tires, and mildewed furniture heaped at the curb. They watch Mexican roofing crews remove blue tarps and reshingle roofs.
Geneva, who works as a cashier at a local Walgreens, is gone for the day. Elton, retired from construction jobs at oil plants, is home with PeeWee, tracking the neighborhood news, which is shouted across the street.
“What’s happenin’, Ed?”
“Hey Duke-Duke!”
“Hey, alright, how ya’ll feelin’?”
“You goin’ to the parade?” someone asks Elton.
“Ain’t getting in no crowds,” says Elton. “Where he gone today?”
“He went fishin’. See what he come back with. I tol’ him you catch ’em and I cook ’em.”
Elton at sixty-three is lean and fine-featured with bright, even teeth and piercing hazel-gold eyes set against glossy black skin. PeeWee at seven years old is also compact, a moist, rich chocolate-cake black with undertones of dun on his legs.
“When he born, he was tan,” says Elton, offering us baby pictures of his puppy, black with tan points, cuddled up to a plush toy chimpanzee. PeeWee tolerates us, but his gaze and his considerable ears are always fixed on Elton with the fierce quiet of a professional bodyguard. He is Elton’s security system in more ways than one. “I bring him to church in the car and leave the glass down but don’t worry ’bout nobody get in the car,” Elton says, proud of his friend, his four-legged son.
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