Me and Okapi

Originally uploaded by topayz4

It’s about as cool as looking at her with a photo of a live unicorn or griffin.

…and now everything smells evocative. I walked into my bedroom and through the open window came a fresh blue-green breath of the year I was 24.

There was a gopher snake at the farm. Jamey saw that it had eaten a mouse; there was a mouse shape halfway down its slender body. Jamey lifted it! Where I come from you do not take liberties with snakes to whom you haven’t been introduced. This snake was very forbearing. Julia did not get to pet it, though, and she wept all the way back to the domes.

When we first arrived there was a little bird peeping in the cabin. She beat herself against the windows overlooking the river until she was exhausted. Then she let me pick her up in my hands and carry her quickly to the door. Her feathers thrummed. She leapt into the air, apparently unharmed, and soared across the river to the trees on the far ridge.

We packed up the Jetta and hit the road on Friday. North over the GG Bridge to Santa Rosa, where we hit Trader Joe’s and stocked up on salad and filet mignon. North again to logging town Cloverdale then out on 128 to Boonville, funny little Anderson Valley enclave that used to have its own language. We grabbed a late lunch and I called my Dad to note that Boonville is Barraba’s Californian twin.

Up and over Mountain View Road, which predictably made Julia sick. Jeremy cleverly had her catch the product in his empty coffee cup, so clothes and car were unscathed. And then we were out in the coastal meadows, and we drove down the dirt road that leads through a redwood glen and down to Oz.

We parked on the gravel by the Garcia River and carried all our bags and groceries over the makeshift bridge and up through the oak glen. On the other side of the river, in a meadow ringed with redwoods, are two wooden geodesic domes. One dome has a kitchen and the other a bathtub, and there are five beds tucked into lofts and so on. The whole building is ringed with decks that look out on the river and meadow. There’s a hot shower out on the deck, under a tree.

We stayed there all weekend. Jamey and Carole and Rowan arrived late on Friday night, after seeing deer and a skunk and a bat and a wild boar on the drive up. We woke the next morning to hear all the children playing together happily. We made scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and a huge salad, and ate it out on the deck. We swam in the river. We made a fire in the potbellied stove and read library books. We napped. We made rack of lamb for dinner.

It was heaven. I feel really human again. I have lots to blog. Watch this space.

There’s a vertical fence – three blue and white poles stacked one on top of the other. You come into it by way of a long, easy half-circle on the right rein, and then you are supposed to land on the left canter lead, loop around a small gate and tackle another vertical.

Sounds so simple! I cannot get this right. The first time, when I was sort of on my game, Austin landed on the right, incorrect lead and did a flying change in the first stride out. Acceptable, but things have gone badly downhill from there.

This time he is taking the left turn on the wrong canter lead, curving his body to the outside. It’s like trying to ride a bicycle shaped like an irritated banana. In my eagerness to change his canter lead I have completely forgotten the second vertical, with this utterly predictable result: Austin sees it before I do and picks a long spot, more or less at random.

He launches into space. I am what is called “left behind”. His forward movement over the fence catapults me from the back of the saddle onto his neck and we land in complete disarray. I fail to fall off by purest luck.

Of course the next fence, an oxer with a pole in front and back, is the biggest and most imposing jump on the course. I have a Thing about oxers. It is an entirely irrational Thing, because horses like them perfectly well and they often jump better than plain old verticals. Nevertheless I can’t quite believe forward movement will carry us over. I think I picture a Wile E. Coyote species of fall, where we hover gallopping in the air for a minute or two before looking down in chagrin and plummeting into the gap between the two rails.

This by way of digression. I am, you will recall, hanging around Austin’s neck trying to recover the steering and brakes before the giant fence ahead.

I begin at the beginning. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. My entire riding life passes before my eyes, every lesson to be reapplied. Heels down, getting my calves back on the horse’s sides and my thighs and butt back in the saddle. Eyes up and locked onto our track. Back straight, shoulders back, chest out, hands low and forgiving and forward on the horse’s neck. The lightest check on the reins, to tell him I am back in business, and pressure from my restored calves, to bring his canter up and bouncy and strong into the oxer.

This time I am not left behind. This time I am taken up in the Rapture.

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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

It is a Princess Clock.

I drove Claire out to Coastal Camp this morning.

Some explanation for the non-USonians may be called for: school is out, and thanks to the weird counterintuitive school calendar around here this means we rejoice in our graduating-kindergartener’s company for the next eleven weeks. Fortunately everyone else is in the same boat, so there are many options for parking your beloved short person with responsible adults during the working day. I went a bit mad with credit cards back in February, and Claire got the classic career mom’s overcompensatory holidays: spring break at Acrosports, then this camp, a science camp in Noe and a Mandarin immersion program over the summer.

My God, but Rodeo Lagoon is beautiful in the morning. It’s a green-grey, steep-sided valley, full of wildflowers, that opens out to the green-grey Pacific. Flocks of turkeys walked around gobbling; Claire found them hilarious. I left her with the very sweet and competent camp counselors, and she grinned and gave me two thumbs up as I drove away. It felt like ripping my heart out. These days my separation anxiety is worse than hers. I suspect that trend will continue.

Three deer walked in front of my car and stopped and looked at me with their lovely inhuman expressionless faces, like models. One had a scruffy little fawn, white spots still bright on its rump.

How come grownups don’t get summer camp?

“Look, mummy!”

Julia has her dress pulled up like an apron. It is full of sand.

“It is my baby belly,” she explains.

“You’re having a baby?”

“Yes.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“What’s her name?”

Julia looks thoughtfully into her dress.

“Sandy.”

Claire’s choice for bedtime reading was the Cartoon Shakespeare Twelfth Night.

At YO’S SUSHI, soaking up Asahi beer and SUNSHINE. The children are fed MISO. IDYLLIC, it is.

ME: Hey Claire, there’s a position coming open on the Supreme Court.

CLAIRE: Hmm?

ME: Do you think you could finish your law degree by, oh, say June?

CLAIRE: But I’m just a kid.

ME: But I’ve always wanted to say “my daughter, the Supreme Court justice.”

CLAIRE, PRAGMATICALLY: Well, you just said it.

There is a PAUSE.

ME: I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long.

JEREMY: At least we know she has the right kind of legalistic mind.

In my last riding lesson on Cassie, Mare of Mares, I was mistakenly put in with a group of shiny teenysomethings who are rillyrilly good. It ended with us having to do flying changes at the canter, without stirrups. It was rillyrilly hard!

Afterwards one of the sparkly young X-Men said to me: “You looked good on her.”

It is embarrassing how pleased I still am, over a week later, at this crumb of praise.

My goodness but I made myself ill last week. I got on a plane on Wednesday sort-of-knowing that I was coming down with something nasty, and when I got to my destination I could neither swallow nor hear. My ears popped about twelve hours later, at which point EVERYTHING BECAME VERY LOUD; then I got on another plane to come home and the same thing happened again.

But my throat stayed raw and horrible for days and days. Talking hurt, breathing hurt and swallowing my own saliva felt like choking down a small roll of rusty barbwire. Every. Damn. Time. I do not think I am particularly wimpy, despite my brothers’ longstanding characterization of me as such; I have had broken ankle bones and ribs and gotten back on the fool horses that gave them to me, and I gave birth to my two babies without any epidurals. Beat that, boyos! But I trudged up to the Emergency Room on Saturday and described my throat pain, unironically, as “severe.” The doctors were very nice but it was viral, which I sort of knew. Nothing to be done. I went home and went to bed.

By Saturday night I was having fever dreams of striking originality. There was a sort of architectural quality to them. It was rather like watching a freight train pass, with its cars made of large pale pastel blocks of light. I tried to harness these dreams and was given various insights, among which was the in-retrospect-blindingly-obvious fact that working myself into exhaustion and subsequent viral pharyngitis is self-defeating behaviour on a number of levels. I set to changing my priorities, which felt like a physical process of lifting giant perspex concentric circles and clicking them back into place in a different order. When I got it right it was deeply satisfying, like solving a puzzle, and I finally went to sleep.

I was somewhat better the next morning and have been feeling profoundly happy ever since. Still sick enough to cancel riding, but well enough to take great pleasure in seeing friends and going to a little movie and hanging with my best girls. Tonight I threw Claire and Jules in the bath, and made dinner for them with strawberries for dessert, and walked Claire through piano practice while Julia sang along, and brushed their teeth and read them the Dragons pop-up book and put them to bed. A perfectly ordinary evening shot through with pure golden joy.

[14:00] mizchalmers: remember that time we got married?
[14:00] FurHordinge: oh yeah, that time
[14:00] FurHordinge: happy anniversary of that time
[14:00] mizchalmers: back atcha
[14:00] mizchalmers: mister
[14:00] FurHordinge: missus

Nerding out over birthday geography, I am especially tickled to see Canada, Argentina and Mexico making strong showings on my world map of love. Yoz is listed as The Internet because he was spending the day as a series of tubes.

You know you’re all well-dressed, well-read and discerning types. Puppies and babies gravitate towards you.

Francis: I hear that Sausage Day is a new holiday
Yatima: a celebration of all things sausage
Francis: I assumed it was a post-Valentine’s celebration of all things not very romantic or not involving any special effort
Yatima: i laugh every time i think about it
a lone sausage
Francis: as I was IMing to Rose about it:
[12:33] francis heaney: “Here, I bought you a Hershey bar. It was on sale.”
[12:34] francis heaney: “I ate half of it already.”
Yatima: “happy sausage day!”
funny you should mention it
jeremy got given free hershey’s bars, the little ones, and keeps offering them to me
i’m all “hersheys? …thanks, pet”
Francis: I’m actually addicted to the tiny Special Darks
Yatima: i eat michael recchiuti
and scharffen berger
when i settle, i settle for lindt
Francis: I only eat chocolates that were hand delivered to me from Germany
Yatima: gigantic, unashamed chocolate snob
germany? bah
the chocolate baths on venus, or nothing
Francis: MY chocolate comes from ATLANTIS
Yatima: MY chocolate comes from the civilization that DROWNED atlantis for its inferior choc
you can’t buy this chocolate
Francis: it is transported from the future and is made of special cocoa-treated stem cells
Yatima: you have to donate your menstrual blood
for the stem cells
HA
beat that, sausage
Francis: *hard to breathe*
*too much laughing*
also here is the Sausage Day Gift of the Magi:
Yatima: i sold the corkscrew to get you a tin of cat food, but you sold the tin opener to get me a bottle of two buck chuck

Trying to explain riding, real riding, why it matters to me and what it feels like, is like trying to get a firm grip on the flesh of a mango. Rose suggested “exhilarating” the other day, which is correct but incomplete. Swinging on a swing is exhilarating. With riding there is concentration and discipline, work and patience, all layered on top the speed and flight. I tried “internal combustion Zen.”

I cannot, I simply can’t process my luck in having found McIntosh Stables. I trained with Toni back in the day and when I walked into the barn I found that the office manager is another very dear old friend, Beth. I won a Medal round at Creekside on her beautiful Paint horse Austin, who was chewing on his hay in a spotlessly clean stall around the corner. That was one of the two best rides of my life, the other being the stadium round on Wilma the Wonder Pony at the Rancho Murieta 3-day in 2002.

In each case the entire round was complete in my head before I started. I knew the strides into each fence. I knew how the horse would move underneath me, and how I would react. I was outside of time. All I had to do was sit there.

David Murdoch – David the great, my trainer when I had Noah – taught me about cadence. It’s an incredibly powerful and subtle idea in riding, which I don’t completely understand but which I would presently describe as – let’s see.

Horses have cadence naturally, by the way; it’s what makes them beautiful to look at when they move. We describe some horses as being good movers – Noah had spectacular movement, for example, and Alfie had a very fine trot. But we’re splitting hairs there, distinguishing the best of the best, because pretty much any horse moves with the heartbreaking elegance and expressiveness of an inhumanly athletic dancer. Of course they do. Their lives depend upon it.

A good way to understand who horses are, why they are themselves, is to watch them running around at liberty.

Anyway, the idea of cadence in riding is to let the horse move like that even though there’s a rider on its back. (My teachers’ teacher Franz Mairinger wrote an entire book about this.) One of the subconcepts of cadence is “free forward movement,” a term you’ll see over and over again in serious discussions of riding. Movement should not only be forward, although forwardness is extremely important; horse and rider should fearlessly embrace whatever lies ahead. But freedom is also key. There should be no constraint, no blocking, no coercion, no cruelty, no discord, no jarring, only harmony. A horse should flow through you like a river around a stone, like pain. Do you know that trick when you have a broken leg or are in labor, when you forget the last moment and the next one and just let the pain go?

I am digressing again. The damn mango, it is slippery.

To get to this point as a rider you need a lot of very simple and practical techniques – balance, heels down, shoulders back, strong core, quiet leg and hand, loose shoulders, look where you’re going. But you also need a kind of – I grope for and fail to find the words. A stillness in your heart. Goodwill. Trust. Lack of fear. Forgiveness. Absolute patience. Lack of ego. Things are going to go wrong; the horse will evade or baulk, because you are not Alois Podhajsky and you are insufficiently Pure of Heart. Doesn’t matter. Failure, like pain, should run through you moment by moment.

So. Assuming you can be clear and open and perfectly correct yet kind, and give quiet but firm aids for the walk and trot and canter and halt, you create the conditions in which you can ride through cadence. If you don’t actively impede your horse, he or she will find a good rhythm, a free forward gait. This feels wonderful! Your job then is to collect, for shorter, more powerful strides, or extend, for longer, lower strides. Change gears, if you will. A collected canter for going uphill – ie, over a fence. A more extended canter for long straights.

You do this, ideally, by knowing that your horse is going to do it. Truly. I do know how wiggy that sounds. But horses communicate by feel, by gesture, by touch. They express themselves through balance and cadence. You also, though you don’t know it, you monkey with hypergraphia you, you speak through your body and breath.

So if you are on a good horse (and by grace I have been lucky enough to ride some magnificent horses, like Austin, and Alfie, and Noah, and Wilma) the aids for, say, a twenty meter circle include things like looking at the path of the circle. Your horse can feel that your head has turned. Your horse will follow the path you see.

All of which is to give some context to my ride on Cassie yesterday. It was the first time I had ridden seriously in many, many years, but because Cassie is a beautifully trained horse with the temper of an angel, I was able to channel my inner David and my inner Colonel Podhajsky, and ride a 20-meter circle at the canter by looking at where I wanted to go. And then I cantered on the diagonal and looked around the corner and she hopped onto the other lead in a perfect flying change.

The first time she did it I had to pull her up because I was alternately laughing and crying. I can’t ride flying changes! What was my trainer thinking? But every other time I asked her to do it, we nailed it. She gathered herself up in the air and struck off on the other canter lead like being a small Pegasus is no big deal, like her nerdy monkey rider could actually ride. With cadence. She danced for me, a big old Canadian Warmblood mare with a long back and a spiky mane.

I can’t explain even to myself what it is about horses, although I used to try. Why horses? Why me? I had theories of snobbery, but the truth is their horsiness is pretty much the only thing that interests me about the English upper class. I secretly wanted to go to Oxford so someone would invite me to their stately home to go hunting. Next I thought I might have been ruined by books, and one day I will write a great essay on horses in English children’s literature from Enid Bagnold to KM Peyton. But the books were just the intersection of the two great passions of mine, not their source.

The truth is (and you thought I was being wiggy before! Take cover! California in the house!) that when God broke herself into particles of consciousness to run the simulation that is this universe, I got the books and the horses. They’re important to me because they are. I didn’t get opera or Nascar, not in this life. Team sports and languages were, by and large, parcelled out to other people. I got some politics and a fair old dab of science and technology. I got these kids to raise, the best and scariest and happiest job by far. But for comfort and joy, God gave me books and horses.

I can’t thank her enough.