“What’s that about ‘roaring water’?” she asked.
I downplayed the phone call, busying myself with the BELTTS and agreeing that, yeah, the race was a little wilder than I thought, but why worry? If we decided to go ahead with this, we still had plenty of time to prepare. Privately, I was worried. I was leading my wife, a struggling young friend, and three vulnerable animals into the mountains with no way to get them back out if we ran into trouble. There was a lot I had to find out, and it was time I got started.
19
You Rarely Win, But Sometimes You Do
Done right, this sport leads you to less of that mañana attitude. It’s here. Now. Real. It’s the secret of the pioneers: persistence, patience, and prairie.
—THE EVER-QUOTABLE CURTIS IMRIE
WHAM!
The slam of a screen door made my head jerk up. I’d just driven down a lonesome road near Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains and pulled into Hal Walter’s dirt driveway. When I got out of the car, some kid I’d never seen before banged out of the house and came barreling at me like he was dead-set on taking me out.
“Son,” I heard someone behind him shouting. “Son!”
Nothing about Sonny suggested he’d be any easier to stop than a ballistic missile. He was a kid on a mission, his fists clenched and legs pumping, but when he was a few steps away I realized by his angle of attack that his guidance system wasn’t necessarily trained on me; it was aiming more like left of center. Oh, shit. Even worse. Now I understood why the voice in the house was so panicky. Behind me, three mammoth creatures were pressed up against a paddock gate. Colorado donkeys aren’t a bunch of Flowers and Shermans; they’re a whole different breed, descended from wild stock that survived by stomping mountain lions to death. Hal watched a buddy get his teeth kicked out, and recently Hal himself got a nasty chomp. If a master burroman like Hal wasn’t safe in that corral, then clearly this kid’s mad dash was heading for trouble.
“Hey, hold up,” I called, but Sonny darted past and leaped for the gate. I braced for carnage—
And found Hal reaching out for a handshake.
“Good trip?” he asked. “Harrison, come over and say hello.”
So that was Harrison—aka “the Blur.” I knew a little about the Blur from my calls with Hal; I knew he was eleven years old and “neurodiverse,” a term Hal prefers to “autistic” because it “opens the possibilities,” as Hal puts it, “and sets aside stereotypes.” When Harrison was still little, his parents discovered he was a musical and mechanical whiz; he sang with perfect pitch, took up the piano with ease, aced computer games, and loved to take apart and reassemble locks and clocks for fun, the trickier the better. On his best days, Harrison will serenade his mom with Mumford and Sons songs, and on his worst…well, sometimes that’s the same day. During a middle school cross-country meet, Harrison was running beautifully until the noise of cheering made him flee and hide in the bushes. He wouldn’t come out until a kind woman with a golden retriever used the dog to coax Harrison to the finish line, which he crossed by rolling over and over like he was on fire. Harrison actually has terrific leg speed and the endurance of a horse—hence, “the Blur”—but it was impossible to predict from one meet to the next if he would run hard, or high-five everyone on the sidelines and finish last, or wade furiously into the crowd, swinging his fists, until Hal and his burro-racing compadres could grab him.
“Harrison, come on over,” Hal called again. “Let’s introduce Laredo.”
Harrison Walter, aka the Blur
Amazingly, the mammoth donkeys hadn’t even flinched when Harrison landed with a bang on the gate. “They understand him,” Hal told me, “and always have.” When Harrison was having a really tough afternoon as a youngster, Hal would scoot him outside and onto Laredo’s back. Within seconds, boy and burro would be ambling along, Laredo’s ears waving as Harrison sang “Yellow Submarine.” Few people alive know as much about burros as Hal and his wife, Mary, and thanks to the life they’ve created out here on the front range with Harrison, no one can match their hands-on experience when it comes to pairing these big animals with the neurologically diverse. I wanted to soak up everything they could teach me, especially about whether it was smart, or stupidly risky, to expose a vulnerable kid like Zeke to such a frustrating and potentially demoralizing sport. Sherman is adorable, but I’d learned firsthand that he needs only a minute to skyrocket your blood pressure and bottom out your self-esteem.
“Yup, I hear you,” Hal agreed, as I told him about my own Gang of Three while we stood at the gate, admiring his trio of racing burros. “Weird how much you love them when they can make you hate yourself.”
* * *
—
Over the years, Hal has been kicked, bitten, rope-burned, abandoned, and flat-out bewildered by burros. Mary, an exceptional athlete herself who won three straight World Championships in the early 1990s, was badly battered when her leg got tangled and a spooked donkey dragged her down a rocky trail. But all of that has been forgiven. Slate wiped clean. Because when Hal and Mary were at their lowest—when they realized their beautiful little boy would struggle for the rest of his life—the donkeys came through in ways they never could have imagined.
“I’m not melodramatic,” said Hal, kind of unnecessarily for a guy who looks handcrafted from hardwood and saddle leather. “But the best parts of me I owe to those animals.”
Hal and Mary met when they were just kids themselves, teenage freshmen at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Between classes, they hiked and ran and skied together, and when they graduated and embarked on careers—journalism for Hal, nursing for Mary—they chose their first home because it had enough pasture for Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the burro Hal had just adopted. Hal got his first taste of burro racing while still in college, when his phone rang out of the blue one evening with a call from Curtis Imrie. Curtis needed an extra set of legs to help with some burros he was prepping, and he’d been told Hal was a strong trailrunner. Hal was intrigued—and terrible. He finished his first race in last place, and spent the next eighteen years trying, and failing, to beat wily veterans like Curtis before finally breaking through to win an astonishing seven World Championships. Burros are probably the only reason he bothered to keep running. “Road races are so tedious and repetitive,” Hal told me. “But with burros, you’re totally focused. You never want to quit, because you feel like you’re one step away from solving this amazing puzzle.”
In 2015, Hal caught a stomach bug a week before the first race of the season, a little nine-miler in Georgetown, Colorado. He was too sick to run, but he’d promised he would drive a stock trailer with burros for two of his friends. Sleet was battering the windshield as he crossed the mountains, and that’s when he realized he had a flat tire. He pulled onto the shoulder, coughing and sniffling, and herded the burros out of the trailer. With freezing fingers, he changed the tire, wrangled the burros back on board, and sped off over icy roads to make it to the race on time. He arrived, soaked and shivering, only to find that one of the guys who’d asked him to haul a burro all that way had changed his mind and wasn’t going to run. To hell with it, Hal decided; I’ll race myself. He dug a pair of running tights out of the back of his truck and jogged to the line still wearing his heavy Filson barn coat. He was going to shuck the coat at the start but was still so cold that he left it on. Not surprisingly, Hal hit the halfway turn in last place. Leading the field was Justin Mock, a thirty-two-year-old Denver speedster who’d come to burro racing along a weirdly appropriate path: he’d lived on a ranch as a boy with a nasty pet zebra that chased him around, and that backyard survive-and-evade training eventually helped him become the top American finisher in the 2010 London Marathon and the fastest human ever to run the Bolder Boulder 10K in a gorilla suit. In the Georgetown burro race, Justin was heading toward the finish in first place when he looked back and saw some crazy guy in a flapping c
anvas coat bearing down on him. Justin sprinted. When he glanced back again, the madman was gone…only to pop up in the lead. Hal had waited for Justin to look left, then scooted right to win. He was fifty-five years old.
“I wouldn’t say burro racing consumed me,” Hal protests. But, yeah, okay; he did quit journalism for a while to pursue a career as a professional burro racer, hauling his stock trailer across the Southwest as he and Curtis pool-sharked from town to town in pursuit of cash prizes. And fine, he’ll admit it was the burros that finally got him to propose to Mary, inspiring him to take a knee next to the tub when she was up to her neck in bloody bathwater, cleaning her wounds after that brutal tumble on the trail. Burros don’t even stick with the sport as long as Hal; he’s been in the game so long he’s had to replace eight burros he felt had gotten too slow or too old. That’s right; donkeys have the longest work life of all equines, and it’s still shorter than Hal’s.
Hal Walter proving that an old burro racer can still beat elite marathoners
But all of it—all those freezing mountaintop miles, the mountains of hay he’s had to buy and stack, and the miserable hours he’s spent tromping through storms in search of lost strays—it all made sense when Harrison was born. Hal thought he’d gotten pretty good at training donkeys. He never realized they were training him.
* * *
—
Mary was the first to suspect something was wrong. “She was the only one, to be honest,” Hal said. Mary, listening to her husband tell the story, glanced over to make sure Harrison was still engrossed in his video game, then nodded in agreement. When Harrison was barely a year old, she began to notice things that worried her—and her alone. “Hal just didn’t want to believe it,” she said.
We’ve come inside the Walters’ charming farmhouse, with its sweeping views of the grassy-green Colorado mesa stretching to the red-streaked mountains. Earlier that morning, Mary had been having a tough time with Harrison; now that he’d grown taller, stronger, and louder, his outbursts were harder to manage. At the moment, though, there was no hint that their lives could be anything other than perfect. Harrison is a terrific-looking kid, a lean young rascal with a tousle of blondish curls and a playful gleam in his eye. Just like Hal, Mary is sun-browned and fit, gracious and wry, a thoughtful listener who’s quick to laugh and add a smart insight. You wouldn’t suspect trouble was lurking in this family—and Hal didn’t, for a very long time, even when Harrison almost died.
Twice when Harrison was little, Hal had to leap into action when he was choking, compressing his chest with baby Heimlich pushes until food erupted from Harrison’s windpipe. Just accidents, Hal muttered when Mary insisted that eating problems are an early red flag. So were Harrison’s other quirks, she pointed out. Like repeating the same word, over and over. And obsessively opening and closing doors. And the way he’d dart around wildly, not aware that he was heading straight for the furniture. And what about his extreme skin sensitivity? “He would not wear gloves of any type,” Hal conceded. “A loose string in a sock could cost you an entire morning with screaming and tantrums.”
Over Hal’s objections, Mary had Harrison examined by specialists. During one session, Hal began to fume when the therapist kept referring to Harrison’s “autistic-like” behavior. “My inner cowboy just wanted to toss the psychologist out the front door,” Hal grumbled. But that night, he heard Mary crying privately in despair, and he finally woke up to what he had to do. It was time to stop fighting his son’s situation, Hal realized, and start helping. But how? He was a wrangler, a grab-it-and-heave-it kind of guy. Why the heck else would he still be busting his hump as a knock-around reporter and ranch manager when he could have settled into an office job years ago? Hal bet that if those psychologists had gotten a look at him, they’d’ve been writing him a prescription too. How was he going to help Harrison when he could barely sit still himself?
Yup, Curtis Imrie agreed when Hal opened up to him. If this autism spectrum is real, you’re probably on it.
But so am I, Curtis added. Seriously, think about all our burro buddies, he reminded Hal: Tom Sobal, who was such a loner he liked to race under fake names; and Clint Roberts, who got knifed by his girlfriend’s ex; and their dear lost pal, Rob Pedretti…They were wild and wonderful, every one of them, the best of companions and marvelously compassionate burromen, but c’mon: no one would ever argue that they weren’t a little off-kilter.
Maybe that’s how we self-medicate, Curtis mused. We throw a halter on our partner and head for the high places, climbing toward the sky until something reboots our brains and makes us feel right again, whether it be the whispering pines, or our hammering hearts, or the steady breathing of a gentle companion.
We weirdos are the last custodians of lost wisdom, Curtis believed. We’re like the square pegs of the past, all those mystics and miners who roamed the world with donkeys, because we know that when it comes to round holes, four hooves is the way we fit in.
After all, look what it did for young Ben Wann.
* * *
—
Three hours away, near Denver, ten-year-old Ben had suffered an epileptic seizure so severe that it took a week in the hospital before he could speak again. Ben’s parents, Brad and Amber Wann, were terrified that the next attack could kill him. Nothing seemed to help, but anyone who’s met the Wanns knows that if you really want to fire them up, tell them there’s nothing they can do.
Brad is a big, bearded, burly-looking bruiser who rocks your world for a living by installing booming speakers inside your furniture. Amber is warm-hearted and sweet and half Brad’s size, but when it comes to protecting their kids, it’s a coin toss who you’d want in the fight. Take medicinal cannabis, for example: when Amber found that hemp oil could be effective, she made sure Ben always had some on hand even after the school called children’s protective services on her. Amber took her fight all the way to the state capital, and didn’t back off until the legislature legalized cannabis medicines in the school system.
No wonder that soon after she heard about equine therapy, Curtis’s phone was ringing. Curtis had never done anything like this before. He was an aging bachelor who lived, very quietly and happily, deep in the woods with his girlfriend and his half-wild herd along a washout that’s more ruts than road. But what the hell; if the Wanns were up for a long drive and a little sweat, they were welcome to visit. Curtis had the Wann family come over for Thanksgiving, and in the middle of the meal, Ben suddenly spasmed into a seizure. “Ben has no memory of it,” Amber says. “But Curtis—oh god, it broke Curtis’s heart. We got Ben outside with the animals and he was okay.”
Ben recovered from that seizure, but Curtis never would. From that day on, he committed himself to anything he and his burros could do to help Ben. You only truly bond with your burro when you work together, Curtis believed, so he persuaded the Wanns to join him for outings in the high country. “First time we get there, he takes us five miles straight the hell up Mount Harvard,” Brad Wann would later tell me, still a little miffed that he had to walk while Ben got to ride McMurphy, one of Curtis’s best racing burros. “Fourteen thousand feet!”
“Why did you name him McMurphy?” Amber asked Curtis.
“After the crazy guy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Curtis replied, which didn’t alarm Amber as much as maybe it should have.
“In my gut, I knew it was okay,” Amber would recall. “As soon as Benjamin was on his back, that burro’s ears went up. He looked regal. Like he had a purpose: I have this special package to carry.” Amber was also thrilled to see Ben so happy. “I was this depressed mom at home with an epileptic child, and now I’m thinking, This could be it. This animal therapy is for real—”
And that’s when McMurphy tripped.
“Craziest thing,” Curtis said. “McMurphy goes down in the dirt. I knew what was going to happen next ’cause I’ve seen it a thous
and times. Animal falls, rolls over, comes back up on its feet. That’s why so many horse riders break a leg—from the horse rolling over them. But you should have seen McMurphy. He’s about to roll and somehow he stops and fights his body back the other way. Some DNA in him to protect that child.”
“It’s like he suddenly remembered Ben and went ‘Whoops,’ and put himself in reverse,” Brad said. “I wanted to kiss him.”
“You should have,” Amber told him. “I did.”
For the Wanns, that tumble sealed the deal. It’s been four years now and they’ve been a dedicated burro clan ever since. They show up at every race, three generations strong; Amber’s parents even got a pair of mini donkeys so they can hike along behind the grandkids. “Our family doesn’t do other sports on the weekend,” Brad explained. “We do this.” Ben’s seizures have disappeared for as long as six months at a time, and his stamina and self-confidence are through the roof.
“It’s been so cool to see the joy in Ben’s face as he gets off the meds,” Curtis reflected. “Burros have brought a measure of sanity to that family.”
* * *
—
Like acupuncture and meditation, equine therapy lives in that anecdotal world where plenty of credible people are convinced it works but can’t prove why. As a medical approach, it’s both older than the Hippocratic oath and newer than Lasik; ancient Greek healers, including Hippocrates himself, prescribed horseback rides as a treatment for chronic pain and emotional maladies, and by World War One it had been adopted by British hospitals to help heal wounded soldiers. Yet in the United States, equine therapy didn’t become widespread until the 1990s, when mental health workers began testing its potential with problems that no other treatment seemed to solve.
Running with Sherman Page 20