Horse Time

Now that that last little adventure is over, and my personal responsibilities have subsided for awhile,  I am beginning a new odyssey of the Black Phoebe as I flit away from hearth and back again.  Staying available to family and loved ones and yet adventuring in my mind into new worlds.  Mere steps away from home.

I have recently been thinking that because of my aversion to the hubris of humans, in this case horse-back riders, that I have never really gotten to know horses very well.  Dogs, cats, even a canary, but with these pets  I never tried to ride them.  I admit that I get judgmental when I see someone on a horse.  It seems like the ultimate in vanity to elect to subjugate and be carried about by an animal.  I feel the same way about rickshaws and pedicabs.  This may be a product of living entirely in the age of the combustion engine.  For me though it seems incredibly arrogant to ride an animal.  My heart is not in it.

When I was a teenager I rode the pony rides at Tilden Park.  I took lessons with the Girl Scouts as a teen, and in my third year of college I took riding lessons.  Riding a horse is definitely exciting.  I enjoyed all of these times with horses though I was aware of my fear of such a large animal.  I had been run-away-with at a dude ranch in Red Bluff, all the way back to the barn and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.  The best thing these exposures did was impress my mother-in-law enough of my horsemanship to remove this skill, at  least this one thing, from her list of snarkies.

I mused over my lack of recent knowledge of these magnificent, HUGE, creatures, and realized most of my interaction with them in the last twenty years has been entirely holding the back of my hand near their nostrils to let them sniff.  Occasionally I would touch their neck from behind the safety of a fence.  I muse over many things and never act on them, and this recurrent though not necessary desire might have remained un-acted on.

There are many trails near my home where I walk our dog, Barkeley.  One day after going down a steep hill my knees began to ache.  (This occurs frequently now that I hiked down the eastern escarpment of the Sierra in about three hours at the end of my Sierra crossing).  To counter the pain I began a very weird goose step that looked like I was bicycling a Victorian large-wheel bike.  I thought I was alone but I had attracted the attention and concern of a tall woman on horseback.   She veered off her trail to check on whether I was OK.  I think tall women on large horses are more brave and more equipped to be heroic than hikers.

It turned out she was a woman I had met earlier who owned a stable very near our house.  We chatted, and I do go on, and in my blather I told her how I had been thinking about finding someone in town that would introduce me to horses without my having to ride them.   She said that I was not the only person who had asked her about this kind of 'lesson' and she had been musing how to construct such an approach for people like myself.  She suggested an introduction to horses for free the next week and I took her up on the idea.