The first thing I learned from breeding foals was that horses have nature and nurture, just like humans. Jackie was a sweet boy from the day he was born, and my favorite picture of him is from when he was about two months old. I had taken my four-year-old son with me to the barn, and he was wandering around in the outside paddock. I was in the stall. I turned to see them both looking at me through the door, and I said to my son, “Axel, give him a kiss.” He reached out his hand, drew Jackie’s nose toward his own face, and kissed him between the nostrils. I felt no sense of danger or dread—Jackie was friendly and calm, did not consider Axel to be a threat (Axel was a sweetheart, too). He was also too young for treats, so I wasn’t bribing him—he was just being himself, the offspring of Big Spruce and Biosymmetree.
I moved Mr. T. to a nearby stable with wonderful trails, an old racetrack, decent turnouts, and then there was an episode that illustrated both his athletic skills and his attachment to me. I got to the stable, saw he was turned out in the large green space inside the training track. I went there, called him. He came running toward me. My heart started to pound, as I imagined him knocking me down, but I didn’t move. He slid to a halt about two feet in front of me, his ears pricked. I petted him and gave him a carrot.
Eventually, I bred far too many horses, too many to support and enough to be fascinated by their similarities and differences. All the ones related to Big Spruce were friendly, attentive, thoughtful. One of them, Hornblower, a year younger than Jackie, spent some time at the racetrack, then was trained as a hunter. When he was about six, I sold him to a young girl, and a few months after he left, they let me know that one afternoon, she had been riding him, she had slipped to the right and might have fallen off, but he moved to the right, got himself underneath her, prevented the fall. Another time, I was leading my filly, Paras. Something in the woods spooked her and she jumped toward me, but she stopped herself, didn’t even touch me. Once I was riding Jackie and he spooked. I fell off, landed on my back. When I stood up and put my hand on the spot that hurt, he came over and sniffed it. I took my hand away. He nuzzled the spot.
I had other horses, horses I’d bought, who would buck me off and run away, but the ones I’d known from foalhood would always come to me, check on me. I also watched how they related to one another. For many years, Jackie was turned out with three of his female cousins. It was a big pasture and they enjoyed running around. He seemed to be especially attached to Essie, who was a year younger than he was. I would exercise them together, mounting one of them, sometimes bareback, then leading the other up the hill to the arena. While I rode the first one, the other one would wander around the arena. I would then dismount, climb on the other one, and ride that one while the first one wandered around. They were always calm and agreeable together.
All of the horses I bred who were related to one another were active, attentive, excellent movers, somewhat spooky, capable of learning, sensitive. I stopped using spurs or whips (I changed from a whip to a baton—a flexible stick with a red ball on the end that didn’t hurt if I used it, simply made a sound). It seemed as though they wanted to please, but were occasionally overcome by their own Thoroughbred liveliness. They had their preferences—Jackie loved to jump. Paras, who I ride now, would follow Jackie over some free jumps (I could also hold her, point to my husband on the other side, say, “Get the cookie!” and let her go, and watch her jump the jump and go straight to my husband), but if my trainer or I tried riding her over a jump, she would buck like mad.
When I tried to teach them voice commands, they learned them readily—not just “Whoa,” but “Halt,” “Walk,” Trot,” “Canter,” “Trot UP,” “Where’s Dad?” (which meant “Look for Jack,” my husband). Paras learned “Heel,” “Ah-Ah” (which meant stop acting up), “Wait,” and to come if I called, “PereSTROIka!” She also learned “Go to bed,” which meant “Go into your stall.” Ned, the last horse I bred, born two years after Paras, learned to come if I whistled a certain set of sounds. Ned also learned “Go left!” and “Go right!” Both of them knew more commands than any of our dogs.
But it took me a long time, and a new trainer, to teach Paras to be a good riding horse. It turned out that the problem wasn’t hers, it was mine—I was giving her inconsistent signals, not understanding her nervousness about being out of balance, and her preference for a bitless bridle. Once my new trainer had analyzed what the problems were and I corrected myself, it was evident that she knew what she was supposed to do if I was able to give the proper signals. That didn’t mean she stopped being opinionated—she still hates to load into a trailer, she still doesn’t like new things, and she still won’t go in the lead on a trail. But if we want to maintain a friendship, which is what I want to do, then it is my job to understand her quirks and allow them, just as I wouldn’t serve roast beef for dinner if my vegetarian friend was coming.
I have won a few ribbons over the years and sold a few horses, but the primary thing I have gotten from my investment is the sense that they know me and they connect with me, the very thing I wanted most when I was young. What I didn’t know I would get was the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity about the nature of horses—their individuality, their intelligence, their readiness to communicate, the pleasure they take in some of the jobs we give them and the annoyance they feel about some of the others. As domesticated animals, they are not our servants, they are our collaborators, and they have feelings, or, let’s say, opinions, about collaborating.
The other thing I’ve learned that the horse books didn’t mention was that they all die, like Rivertown Gal, but not always as suddenly. The average life span of a horse is about a third of the average life span of a human, which means that I must understand that my dear friend will show me what death feels like and what it means in ways that I did not understand when I was fifteen. When I am riding my horse, we are moving through the world together, and one of the best forms of connection is the rhythm of my horse’s movement as it ripples through my own body, or my horse’s response to how my body moves—I can think of slowing down, and almost before I sit deep and touch the rein, my horse slows down. When I used to jump, what I enjoyed the most was how, just before the jump, my horse’s body and my body gathered energy together, and then put it into that graceful arc. My memories of the horses I’ve loved and lost are not only visual, they include all of my senses—the trees I saw on the trail ride, the sense of speed as we galloped. Once I let Mr. T. go around that practice racetrack at the speed he wanted to go—to signal he was allowed to do so I bridged my reins and leaned forward. He went so fast that my eyes watered. I remember the sound of the even clip-clop of a forward trot, the smoothness of Paras’s coat when I pet her on the neck, the smell of the barn. I love taking walks, and I love the natural world, but I feel lucky to have experienced much of the natural world from the back of a horse, and to be able to cherish those memories after the horse departs.
Daredevils
Maggie Shipstead
The summer I turned five, in 1988, my parents drove me and my older brother and our two golden retrievers from California to Michigan. My mother’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer in Ann Arbor. Somewhere in the Great Plains, left alone in a parking lot while we ate lunch, the dogs destroyed the interior of our Nissan station wagon. Of the seat belts, they left only jauntily waving flaps, and worse, they gnawed away the carpet in the back seat footwell to expose a hot metal pipe that would burn an unwary child’s feet. But it was the ‘80s, so we duct-taped what we could back together and carried on.
In midsummer, after my dad had gone back home to work, my mom proposed a weekend outing to Niagara Falls, just her and me and my brother. She must have desperately needed a break from illness and grief, and she told us it would be a fun adventure, which, for a timid child like myself, was not a persuasive sales pitch. I saw no need for fun adventures. Adventures were inherently not fun. I was safe and comfortable at my grandparents’ house, thank you very much, and so even though I had n
o idea what Niagara Falls was and little concept of waterfalls in general, my instinct was to react as if I had been asked if I wanted to be ritually sacrificed.
We went anyway. I was so obnoxious in the car, my mom pulled over somewhere in Ontario to swat me on the butt, but when we finally exited the highway onto a garish strip of wax museums and haunted houses and candy emporiums, my mood lifted. Niagara Falls, it turned out, was indeed fun. We visited tacky attractions and walked behind the Falls and went on a boat that nosed into the mists while everybody crowded on deck in blue raincoats to commune with the roar of the Great Lakes plunging off a cliff.
The IMAX theater had an exhibit of the barrels and giant rubber balls and glorified tin cans that daredevils (a new word for me) had stuffed themselves into before going over the Falls. Surprisingly, most survived. The first ever was a woman named Annie Edson Taylor. She went over in 1901, on her sixty-third birthday, though she claimed to be twenty years younger. She’d hoped the stunt would make her rich and famous. It didn’t. One of the most recent was a guy named Karel Soucek in 1984, who’d taken the plunge in a red cylinder painted with his name and the not particularly catchy motto, “It’s not whether you fail or triumph, it’s that you keep your word . . . and at least try!” He’d survived the Falls but was killed seven months later when the same cylinder was dropped from the ceiling of the Houston Astrodome with him inside and missed the tank of water it was supposed to land in.
I peered into the battered homespun containers and recoiled at the same time I felt a submerged pull of fascination. Why would people do this? I tried to imagine being shut inside a barrel or rubber ball, feeling the pushing, bobbing river give way to falling. In most of the containers, the daredevils couldn’t even see out. They just had to hope their plunging vehicle wouldn’t break up on impact, as happened to a man named Red Hill Jr. in 1951, or that they wouldn’t be held under the down-rushing water and suffocate, as happened to George Stathakis in 1930, or that their ballast wouldn’t break through the bottom of their barrel and take them with it, leaving behind only an arm, as happened to Charles Stephens in 1920. Breathless placards and canned narration played up the idea of the Falls exerting an irresistible magnetism. Risk itself was the allure, as well as the hoped-for exhilaration of survival.
There was something titillating about the helplessness of the people going over the Falls, something intriguing about the idea that an act requiring no skill or knowledge, only pure, foolish bravery, might somehow change the people who survived it, let them glimpse something at the dark, fluttering edge of mortality that could not be encountered any other way. Freud theorized that we all possess instincts toward life and creation, which he designated as Eros, but also toward death and destruction, or Thanatos, which underpins the popular concept of a death wish. Modern researchers, however, like psychologist Kenneth Carter in his book Buzz! Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies, have found that people who are willing to take risks in pursuit of powerful experiences and sensations have no more of a desire to die than those who prefer more mild thrills, like knitting. Rather, risk- and sensation-seekers seem wired to seek extremes in order to feel alive. As a child, I didn’t know anything about any of that, but in considering the daredevils, for the first time I found myself curious about what might lie on the other side of risk.
But going to Niagara Falls did not make me bold. Horses did.
Or, bold-ish. Within reason.
I don’t know when or why I decided I wanted to ride horses. The impulse feels innate, preverbal, somehow pre-knowing-horses-exist, as essential a part of myself as my contradictory lack of gutsiness. My mother had wanted to ride as a child, but her parents couldn’t afford lessons. Maybe I inherited the trait from her, some obscure allele expressed as an urge to cultivate herds of plastic Breyer horses and check out every library book with a horse on the cover. When I was seven, we moved to a different town, and I was bribed to go quietly with the promise that I could take riding lessons at a barn near our new house. So began the long, slow morphing of small me, beaming in rubber boots aboard a plodding school horse, into teenage and early-twenties me, stern in professional action shots taken midair at horse shows as I jumped my increasingly fancy mounts over fences that were three feet, then three and a half, then four.
Fear was a part of riding from the beginning. I was afraid when the horse scooted or bucked or spooked, afraid when the jumps got higher, afraid when my trainer suggested I go for a trail ride because you never knew what was going to happen out there among barking dogs and lawn sprinklers and bushes that abruptly disgorged speeding rabbits or flapping clouds of doves. None of these things posed any physical threat to a horse, but horses are bad at assessing danger. Some people think it’s a sign of stupidity that a thousand-pound animal might leap into the air and race away when, say, a breeze rolls an empty paper cup along the ground, but, in terms of evolution, the reaction makes sense. As a prey species, prehistoric horses’ survival hinged on reacting swiftly to unexpected movements and sounds. Horses who ignored the rustling grass as the sabre-toothed tiger crept closer (“Chill out, guys, I’m sure it’s fine”) were less likely to stay in the gene pool than those that bolted. This was an animal I could relate to.
I became a proficient, experienced rider, but I wasn’t particularly talented. I never developed the unflappable confidence the best equestrians have, nor did I burn with ambition to jump ever higher. At any level of riding, you can be badly injured or die from a fluke accident, but as the fence rails creep up, you must be ever more precise and decisive in order to get around a course safely. If you allow your body to transmit uncertainty to your horse, he might refuse or run out, launching you off his back and onto the jump. If you get picky and nervous, you might arrive at the base of the jump too soon or too late, forcing the horse to take off from an awkward distance, and the bigger the jump, the more likely you both are to find yourselves tangled in a collapsing heap of heavy, clattering poles.
Getting better, though, meant pushing myself, and gradually I found my way to an ethos of Doing It Anyway. When my trainer raised the jumps, I’d tamp down my dread and adrenaline and pick up the canter and go. Usually things turned out fine. Being afraid, I slowly came to understand, doesn’t necessarily mean imminent doom. It’s just a feeling, an evolutionary warning, and with practice you can learn to set it aside. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to push myself quite so hard. Why didn’t I just top out at a fence height where I was comfortable and keep trying to improve my technique? After all, what I loved about riding wasn’t the endless boundary pushing but rather the collaboration with the horse and the tantalizing hope of a perfect ride. Pride drove me, I suppose, and my competitive nature, my inability to reject a futile quest to keep up with the equestrian Joneses. I suspect that, for many or most elite riders, jumping higher doesn’t mean Doing It Anyway but rather Doing It Because. Sensation-seeking, as a personality trait, is complicated to assess, but to excel in a dangerous sport, it’s helpful to have the kind of brain chemistry that makes physical risk its own reward, as opposed to an inner obstacle that must be surmounted along with the actual jump.
I stopped riding thirteen years ago, when I was twenty-four, well after it had become clear that not only would I not be able to fund a wildly expensive sport in the foreseeable future but also that I wasn’t on the verge of the kind of settled life that allows for the care of a large animal and a commitment to steady training. And—the question lurked—what would that training be for, anyway? I loved horses, yes, and I had ridden for a long time, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t all that good, nor did I know how to ride just for the pleasure of it. After I aged out of the cutthroat world of junior equitation, I found myself competing in amateur divisions mostly against middle-aged women who had ridden as juniors and then returned to the sport following long hiatuses spent establishing families and/or careers. My impression was that most of them were somehow able to devote staggering quantities of time a
nd money to riding while also staying pretty mellow about the whole enterprise. They seemed to be having fun, whereas I didn’t know how. Riding wasn’t just a hobby to me, but I didn’t know what it was. Then, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. I quit, and horses became my past.
There’s a cultural narrative floating around that goes beyond acknowledging the special fascination horses hold for (some) girls and instead dismisses a love of horses as inherently girlish—the fleeting and cutely bemusing preoccupation of a harmless demographic. As girlhood is temporary, so, too, are horses something to be grown out of: stand-in love objects for the boys and men that will eventually supplant them, outlets for nascent romantic urges that will inevitably redirect toward wife- and motherhood. This is, of course, a patronizing and heteronormative take and also one that ignores the boys and men who love horses, but its assumptions are more ingrained and pervasive than they have any right to be. “Better horses than boys,” parents say about their rider daughters, as though the two are mutually exclusive, as though the girls at my barn weren’t always enticing the few boys in our midst up to the hayloft to play truth or dare. When a love of horses gets conflated with romantic love or sexual passion, the underlying implication is that girls aren’t capable of really knowing what they’re interested in or what they want to do with their bodies. The minds of girls are treated with condescension, as muddles of misdirected impulses and bewildered horniness, gauzy pink zones of confusion where the desire to ride a horse is indistinguishable from wanting to have sex with a man.
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