1. ordinary everyday suckage

They love to live in big groups and move around and graze for twenty hours a day, so we split them up and put them in 12×12 stalls and give them a handful of big meals. Eighty percent of show horses have ulcers. We give them grain to build up their muscle; the protein and carbs can make them colic or founder. Horses can’t throw up, so colic is often fatal. Founder is toxic buildup inside the hoofs, where the inflamed tissue can’t swell but must press against the hoof wall. It’s agonizing.

Showjumping champion and USET president William Steinkraus says we keep them like prisoners in solitary confinement.

Just sitting on their backs is bad enough; that’s where a big cat would jump on them to break their necks. The vast majority of us, myself absolutely included, ride badly and jab their mouths, kick their ribs and flop around on their backs.

And this is just the beginning.

2. advanced suckage in many diabolical forms

These are only the English sports, that I know reasonably well.

In dressage, aficionados of rollkur fill the horse’s mouth with bondage equipment that would not disgrace an Inquisition torturer, and force the animal to walk, trot and canter with its chin to its chest.

In showjumping, lazy trainers will have assistants lift the top pole of the fence to hit a jumping horse on the sensitive coronet band, a practice known as rapping or poling. It’s supposed to teach the horse to be more careful. What I think it teaches the horse is that neither its own best judgment nor the sense and goodwill of its rider are to be trusted.

Almost unbelievably, showjumping was also the sport where an unknown but large number of big-name trainers paid a hit man to electrocute their horses for the insurance money.

Eventing may be the ultimate test of horsemanship. It’s the sport I used to watch on TV with my dad, the one I always dreamed of competing in. It combines dressage and showjumping with a thrilling, gruelling cross-country course over fixed fences. In showjumping, if you hit a fence, the fence falls. In cross-country, you fall.

1997 was supposed to be a bad year for the sport. Three top riders died. But the bad year never ended. In the ten years that followed, thirty-seven more people have been killed. That’s not including the catastrophic injuries to riders, or the dead horses. Mike Winter’s Kingpin died at Kentucky Rolex this year. His heart exploded. Phillip Dutton’s Bailey Wick died at Jersey Fresh on the weekend. His pelvis broke and opened an artery. These days it’s considered a good upper-level 3DE if no horse or rider is killed or maimed.

I love eventing, but here’s a prediction so blindingly obvious at this point that it’s practically just an observation. If the sport doesn’t stop slaughtering its own athletes it won’t exist in another ten years.

Tricky Elle was sold, which I am pleased about, because all horses deserve their own person. There are also new school horses, including tricky Bella, to keep me on my toes. Bella is a bit smaller and a lot skinnier than the other horses I have been riding, with a somewhat upright shoulder and not much muscle on her neck. (Note that these conformational observations are purely technical; it is equally correct to point out that she is a fabulously beautiful copper-bright showjumper mare.) Although for quite different reasons, because she’s unquestionably a jumper and not a hunter, Bella, like Elle, pulls me all out of balance. And this is a bit scary but it’s mostly very challenging and interesting and makes me appreciate all over again what fun it is and what a huge privilege to ride a bunch of different horses at this exalted level.

In the horse world where I grew up, school horses of this quality simply didn’t exist. I went to a couple of very good riding schools, and when you reached the top standard – a half-Perch or an ancient OTTB – your only real choice was to go get a horse of your own and have private lessons, which is what I did, firstly with Alfie and Tina Wommelsdorf, and then many years later with Noah and David Murdoch. All the Olympians. Now these were peak experiences of my life, so let’s not go imagining that I am ungrateful. But the arrangement had some drawbacks, in that my progress in riding was intimately bound up not only with the capacity but also with the physical condition of one specific animal. Alfie was old, and then he got arthritis and had to be retired; Noah was hot, and then he got a stone bruise, and that was me out for months and months.

Today, instead of having a horse who is boyfriend-and-unborn-children-and-sporting-partner all rolled into one, I have been absorbed into a busy, efficient, successful East Coast-style hunter-jumper A barn, where excellent grooms clean and tack up the horses for me, and excellent trainers condition them, and excellent vets advise on their nutrition and health. The place just absolutely buoys my spirits with its attention to detail, with the many small meals the horses are fed, with the cleanliness of the tack and the aisles and the jumps. And like a proper unsentimental adult amateur in the European tradition, I have ridden four different horses in as many months. I have revelled in the clockwork generosity of Austin and Cassie, and I have worked hard to meet the challenges posed by Elle and Bella. It feels like gross disloyalty to say so, but I can’t help feeling I’ve learned more by switching around like this than I did in whole years at Samurai or Glenoaks.

Today, for example, I had several moments when I thought I was having a very bad lesson. Bella and I got into an unconstructive loop where I was worried about my crest release and kept slowing and slowing her down and looking at the fences or the ground near them instead of up and over and away. And she is little and fast and likes to go go go, and she got more and more irked with me and ended up having a bad chip in front of one oxer. Same old lesson: let go. I had to ease up and trust her speed. I had to look up and over the fences and trust that she would get me where we were going.

And as soon as I did all this, of course, I found my balance on her and she forgave me for everything and we went racing around and over the jumps in glorious style, and the sun came out and I listened to Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba all the way home and my blood turned to apple brandy in my veins.

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.

I haven’t posted about riding for a while because the week after my last post, about falling off Elle, I fell off again. That one was worse. Again at the canter transition, but this time Elle tripped and I went over her head and faceplanted in the arena sand. (The fabulous Miss Kirsty alone in the universe made me feel better about it: I twittered that I had sand in my hair and up my nose and she replied “I am so hot for you right now.”)

Otherwise I felt like hell. Riding, which was supposed to replace Zoloft as the key endorphin guarantor of my week, had become a problem instead. I was afraid again, of falling, of hurting myself, of looking like a prize idiot. The week after the second fall I had to have a long stern conversation with myself on the drive down.

I don’t know if I can put this conversation into words. I just read Samuel Delany’s “The Tale of Old Venn” (I am only now noticing the brilliance of that title) which not only describes but tries to embody the limitations of language in encapsulating lived experience. There’s a passage in which one of Venn’s students, trying to absorb the lesson, suddenly wakes up to the play of sunlight in the leaves, the air on her skin, the distant hum of human affairs – direct sensory input. And she feels, right down in her gut, for the first time, the way language acts as a bottleneck for conveying the truth of life. However precise and brilliant the language, most of life is left out.

You’ll laugh – Salome did – when I say that reading this was the first time I realized it. I have lived in my head for so long. I have lived other peoples’ lives in books far more vividly than I ever lived my own, right up until Christmas Day 2002. And here my tale loops around. I want to make a lame Derrida-derivative pun about the Christmas *present*, but for you, dear reader, I will refrain. Feel the love.

I thought about Claire’s birth on that drive down to the barn. I thought about how I needed to find the strength to push, and how I thought it would kill me, and then the moment came when I was perfectly okay with that; I was happy enough to die if it meant that Claire would be born. At which point of course my body opened and Claire was born.

We are mortal. Forward movement is movement towards our death. To get back on the horse means accepting that I might fall off again and hurt or kill myself; but the alternative is not to live at all. Oh, these words are so hopelessly inadequate! I couldn’t know this thing until I felt it in my body, and I can’t convey it to you except in cliches. This is why it is so hard to communicate between generations! I look at myself in my twenties, pathetically cyclothymic, my judgment hopeless, my competence all over the map, and I wish I could give that smooth-skinned young self some of my own wry strength. But where did the strength come from? From all those mistakes, all those falls, all that fear, every time I got back on the damn horse. There are no shortcuts.

I rode Elle that day and we jumped a course in a light and forward and happy frame, as well as could be imagined given my current fitness and capacity. For my next lesson I rode Austin, my friend Beth’s magical Paint and an old, old friend of mine too, my partner in winning the first blue ribbon of my life. Austin and I get on like a house on fire. He’s a jumper, as opposed to Elle’s hunter style, much more what I am used to from Noah and the Samarai days, and I feel so safe and confident on him. We jumped a 2’3″ course! Which is tiny but still! It was amazing!

My classmate Olynda was on Elle for that lesson and this was fascinating to watch. Olynda is an ex-eventer like me, used to an uphill horse like Austin, and like me she found Elle’s long low frame very disconcerting. It was reassuring to see someone else struggle with her balance trying to make the transition from jumper to hunter style. There’s a real difference! It’s not just me!

Yesterday, greatly enfeebled by a hot sun and a very sore shoulder, I rode Elle again. It was not by any means a brilliant lesson, but I am finding my balance. I am learning to give with my hands and hips when I ask for a canter, and to make my lower leg the foundation of my seat so that I don’t risk toppling off. I also suddenly and completely got the point of show hunters.

The action of the field hunter is efficient: the horse does not waste energy bending its legs any more than it has to. This relates back to the hunt field, where the horse had to work for several hours on end, often galloping, and inefficient movement would tire the horse more quickly.

I got Elle into her perfect, cadenced, hypnotic, rocking-horse canter, and despite my various infirmities, I felt like I could stay there all day. If I haven’t already alienated every one of my dozen readers worldwide (you can blame Rose for encouraging me), I will write further obsessive essays about the origins of English equestrian culture in foxhunting and the balanced versus the hunter seat. You can’t wait! I love horses. Did you know?

Bellboy

Noah

Zoom right in and you’ll see them.

…although I still maintain it doesn’t count if you land on your feet, facing the horse and holding the reins. More of a rapid involuntary dismount, right? I’m riding a new mare, the beautiful Elle, who is a Glenoaks veteran like me and who was originally imported from, um, Australia. She’s for sale, so if you didn’t get me anything for my birthday…

…KIDDING. Anyway about Elle; she’s just as beautifully trained as Cassie, but she’s less sort of lenient. Cassie will take the most liberal and generous interpretation of your aids and act on that. She’s a progressive on the Supreme Court. Elle requires things to be *just* *so*; she’s the Biblical literalist of lovely bay hunter-jumpers, with a strict constructionist position on the Constitution.

I learned this after the fall – look, all that happened was that a breeze went through some fabric tacked to the judge’s kiosk, and when I looked down the horse had teleported eighteen inches to the right and I had not. If I’d only kept my heels down, LIKE ERIN WAS TELLING ME TO DO, I would have teleported with her. Anyway, that was our first canter transition. After poor Erin, my sainted instructor, had hoisted me back on the horse, we cantered again on that side, no fallings-off, then tried again on the other side.

I thought I was keeping good contact with the outside rein but there is a tendency, when one has recently arisen from the dirt, to mistake good contact for hanging-on-like-grim-death. Erin brought this to my attention and told me to ease up on the poor mare’s mouth. I did so and behold, Elle moved fluidly into the canter. The second time we tried this the contrast was even more pronounced. With no more than a gesture of relinquishment in my outside shoulder, Elle picked up the contact and cantered away.

Always the same lesson: freely forward. Let go of the resistance. Do not fear. I was all messy and disorganized because, different horse, trying to feel for her likes and dislikes, her rhythm and cadence. Even more than Cassie does, Elle thinks in cadence – it’s one of the differences between jumpers, who have to be clever and forgiving, and hunters, who are judged on the hypnotic qualities of their canter. Have you seen the fantastic, the amazing film The Triplets of Belleville? There’s this running metaphor where racing cyclists whinny and snort like thoroughbreds, and it’s funny and apt because of this quality of being unwilling to break rhythm. My challenge with Elle is to sit still, to stop fussing with my reins, to keep my heels down, to be quiet. “Point her where you want her to go and ask her to go forward,” said Erin.

You could argue that Elle broke rhythm when she shied but in fact if I’d had a softer, more secure seat, we would have changed direction in perfect rhythm with each other. And indeed the bewildered expression she gave me was that of a sleepwalker woken too abruptly: What are you doing on the ground? Why aren’t you where you are supposed to be?

The good news is that slight resistance in my outside shoulder on the canter transition is about all the fear I felt after the fall. That’s a lot better than I felt for the first year or so of riding Noah, my first really good big horse. I was scared pretty much every second I was on his back. And not without reason; when I fell off him I tended to land on fences and get hurt. And I fell off a lot, because I had the reins in a stranglehold and no horse needs that.

It took me a long long long time to let go. If what you’re scared of is that the horse is going to take off and you’re going to fall off, how can you release the brakes? Only through faith. And in the end, I did. Just before we sold him, when I was riding him very nicely over big fences, I held the contact as lightly as you would hold an egg.

This fall hurt my dignity but nothing else. I got back on and rode this sweet mare and got three flying changes out of her – two of them decent and one quite nice. Part of the pleasure of starting again is feeling the years and years of riding behind me – the teenage bolting around like a lunatic and learning how to land on my feet, the years in my twenties when David drummed cadence into me – coming up and helping, like a whale surfacing under a struggling swimmer. As if those years weren’t wasted after all; as if all is not lost.

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.

I dreamed I had him back. He was strong and young and happy, his coat shining orange, his mane long and tangled, his expression intelligent and wry. I can still feel the hot sun on his neck, and smell his unforgettable scent, mixed with the eucalyptus flowers.

This time I had enough money, and he wasn’t going to die of cancer, and everything was going to be okay.

We went to the farm today. Bellboy, the world’s best pony, Claire’s pony, just turned 35. His mother made it to 37. Claire and Julia both got to ride him. He’s the pony I learned to ride on when I was 13; did I mention that?

As we were leaving I walked into the garden and found him in the sun, grazing on the green, green grass, looking exactly like a unicorn.

I want to burn that sight into my eyes so that I will never forget it.

ETA: Julia as she fell asleep said “I loff Bellboy. I loff horses.”

My heart went nova.

Then: “I loff toast.”