Rachel, Sophie and the Blustery Day

If I ever decide to go riding on a windy day again, remind me: this never turns out well.

It was on a blustery day that I fell off my horse (for the first and only time in the real world) and messed up my ankle. It was on that same day that Sophie caught a toe in the long grass and nearly took a nose dive, tossing Cam into a long forward aerial summersault.

Horses are nuts on a windy day, and I’ll tell you why: somebody makes you go into a really scary place – like an old warehouse or a jungle or something. So you walk carefully, tip-toeing, listening hard in case somebody should come up behind you, narrowing your eyes so you can peer into the shadows behind everything. Then suddenly, music just starts blasting from speakers all around you, and the darkness is replaced by a crazy, random storm of pulsating spotlights that pretty much blind you. How will you know when the guy with the mask is coming?  And when he comes, how will you tell till he’s right on top of you?

AAAAAA!!!!!

And that’s a windy day to a horse.

Horse in wind: you can tell that he’s all in a lather by noting the look on his nose.  Do you see it?  If a horse’s nose looks like that, DO NOT GET ON.  It means something’s up – wind up the tail, red flags up; he’s gonna up and do something you won’t like.

They can’t tell where sounds are coming from – because everything’s moving—grass, trees, scary things like bits of paper, clouds, the planet. And it’s all brushing together, whooshing and sighing and humming. And if there IS an important sound mixed in there somewhere, how can you tell what direction it’s coming from?

Same with smells. What should be plain scents, in the wind are just splinters and ribbons and shreds of smell flying every which way. Lions? Tigers? Bears? So you have to switch to 360 degree sight, which means no depth perception, which takes us back to paragraph 3.

A horse in wind is a neurotic horse.

Two sets of wind noses.  These two have their shorts in a knot because Sophie is out there on the grass – first horse on the first grass of the season – all alone, because Rachel is going to show up and want to ride her.  They have to wait.  Wind and waiting – thus the matched noses.

So, of course, Rachel and I went for our first Spring ride on a blustery day. Rachel was achin’ to go, got Sophie out, worked her on the ground for an hour, brushed her for an hour, saddled up – only to find that her planned riding partners were still an hour away from wanting to ride—and it was already late in the day. All dressed up and nowhere to go. So I (who wouldn’t want to ride on a nice spring day?) decided to show her a nice little trail just across the street. I saddled up my Zion and off we went, down the driveway, across the busy little street.

He’s so pretty when he’s mad.

Everything was lovely for the first 400 feet. We passed guys working on a clangy metal roof. We passed long horned cows in my neighbor, Bob’s, holding pens. We shouted at some people a street away who were sitting out on their brand new, darn cool porch. And the horses didn’t turn a hair.

Good Sophie.  Gentle Sophie. Civilized Sophie.

The lane runs behind some nice new houses. We looked them over happily as we rode, some still empty after a year and a half. Most of them hadn’t put a dent in the native ecology—yards all winter mud and dead weeds. Then we saw the Diligent Woman—she was out on her knees in the windy sunlight, doing some decorative brickwork as her kids played beside her. Her house had curtains. Her yard had been leveled. It was all staked with string, and there was a neat little rectangle of white rocks laid out, also staked and strung, waiting for the shed to come.

And that is where the ride began to bust a seam.

When all around have lost their heads: calm, boring Sophie.

I was in front, on Zion,  the (at the moment) well behaved Little Engine That Could. But Sophie, coming along behind us, suddenly saw something TRULY TERRIFYING and completely lost her mind. Now, keep in mind, this is my boring horse. My I-only-walk horse—the horse I can put anybody on at any time, the horse that once (we were told by the man who sold us this girl) stood still and coolly watched a mountain lion run by in pursuit of a deer.

Everybody else

Sophie

Now, smack in the middle of civilization, she spun around on her back foot, all bunched up to dash back down the road toward home. But she ran into something: the bit Rachel had pulled nearly up to Sophie’s ears. Frustrated in her forward lunge, Sophie went into reverse, backing up faster than I’ve ever seen her move forward, right into this woman’s yard. Sophie crashed through the property line string, lunged backward across the white rocks, sending them off everywhere, then made it halfway across the leveled mud, dragging both sets of string and leaving divots all over the place before Rachel got her to stop.

Rachel, who had kept her seat through all of this, is not a person to cross. When she says, “Move forward,” you forget that she weighs eighty three pounds and has lovely long wavy hair. Instead, you see fangs and burning eyes and the whip of doom. Zion and I backed gently away, apologizing volubly to the very nice, understanding woman, while Rachel explained to Sophie that whatever it was may have scared her was NOTHING next to Rachel herself.

Twenty minutes she worked that horse. Until she could get her to walk by that place without flinching. All we could figure was that the click of the electric fence that had just been put up that day along the far side of the path had scared her. Then Rachel handed me her reins and put back every white rock and re-attached all the strings. Which I should have done. It was my stupid horse, after-all.

We set off again, determined to finish the ride.

But Sophie was beset by demons. Everything scared her. The fence around the backyard of the next house? Alarming. The above ground swimming pool after that? TERRIFYING pool toys. We made it briskly past the last house, entered the little windblown woods, came in sight of the river, and then Sophie just slammed on the breaks. Rachel lost a stirrup, but not her presence of mind, something we should have thought to pack along for the horse.

I am still thinking it through and cannot figure it out. This is our mountain horse, the brave girl. Maybe the river in early spring flood was too loud and raucous, maybe the people and motor scooters and bicycles and dogs that were flashing by on the jogging path on the other side of the river were too confusing. And the wind, the constant wind in the dead grass, rattling the just blossomed trees?

I did end up showing Rachel the trail. I rode. She walked. She wouldn’t trade horses with me for a long time, but she decided that being on the ground was better than ending up on it. Even so, as they walked Sophie—“Was that a squirrel? Was that a leapord?”—kept trying to jump up into her arms. So finally, we did trade. And for a while, we both walked, leading the horses. I had to walk; Sophie was too tall for me to get my foot into the stirrup. Well, one time I finally got it up there, but when I tried to pull myself up, the saddle slid down her side. So we had to reset the tack and tighten the dang girth, and I never could reach the stirrup after that. Till we came to a scary, rusty gate, which I climbed for a mounting block.  It rattled  and clanked like an ancient Edsel – which didn’t seem to worry Sophie any at all.

So we both mounted up – Rachel on my baby, me on the day’s Crazy Horse. Who was perfect for me all the way back down the lane. But Zi? He was tired of walking, I guess, and pretty soon, he and Rachel were shooting down the lane line something out of a pin-ball game, pinging from one side of the trail to the other.

My neighbor who owns the big horned cattle? He has this huge sand arena he’s offered to let me use for years. So we stopped there on the way home, unwilling to let either horse get off scott-free after the day’s performance. This arena really is huge; Bob uses it for cow roping practice. We traded horses again, and Zi took off under me at a quick, chopping trot – his very worst. For the next fifteen minutes I just ran the wrinkles out of him in the arena, doing figure eights and cantering down the straight. And Rachel did the same with Miss Brainless.

Sophie at a run.  There is no gait like this one known in the civilized horse world.

It was on one of my canters that I saw quick movement out of the tail of my eye. Before I could turn and look, I heard Rachel roaring. Sophie—Sophie the lazy bum—had finally gone into a canter for her, then had dropped her head and crow-hopped twice. G, working on the electric fence across Center street in our pasture, had seen the whole thing. Bucking. Amazing.

Sophie, trying to get jiggy

And now Rachel was really mad. How that horse kept her feet after being circled at sixty miles an hour for the next thirty minutes, I’m sure I don’t know.

But by the time they were finished, so was Zion (who, every time we passed the closed gate, drifted as close to it as he could, just to make sure it was still closed). So we walked the horses past Bob’s house and across the busy street. They were very happy to be home, until we made them back up through the front gate and then all the way down the 275 foot drive to the barn.

It was such a nice ride.

I cannot imagine how any kid of Rachel’s would dare cross her.

When I fed Sophie today, she was all soft eyes and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth. Good thing for her it was Sunday. So now I have my work cut out for me. It’s really not unusual for horses to have a few bumps in them at the end of a long, riderless winter. But this was like the worm turning. She was quiet as a mouse after Rachel finally worked her tail off in the arena. We’ll see how she does next week.

So I meant to ask you—anybody want to come riding with me tomorrow??

Addendum:   Sophie and I took a quiet little walk today.  With her, you have to be quiet, I guess.  We re-traced our steps and took as much time as we needed to examine all the frightening things on the lane: the brown fence, the paving stone patio somebody is building, the pool toys.  I just waited while she made up her mind about them.  We walked the whole trail, and came to peace with it.  I think.

Then we went into the arena again and I worked her through a lot of ground skills.  It wasn’t till I had sent her into a walking circle, then trotting circle that I remembered that I’d left my gloves at home.  I asked for a canter anyway, and she went PANIC on me.  Rope burns.  Tomorrow, we’ll do this again.  With gloves.