Patience (lower case p) and I never spent much time together—I am many things, but patient isn’t one of them. Anyone reading this who knows me is probably nodding sagely. I did, however, have occasion to spend four years of my life with Patience (capital P), who happened to be a very temperamental mustang mare. Before I met this particular mustang, I imagined them to be very large horses, but Patience was in fact rather low to the ground. She was, for lack of a better descriptor, compact: short of leg, broad of attitude. Anyone who knows me is nodding sagely again, because that description sounds remarkably familiar to them. She was, in many respects, my equine other half.
I guess it’s not hugely surprising that I’ve always had an affinity for horses; I grew up reading fantasy novels, and what’s a fantasy novel without extensive travel on horseback? I also took to it more readily than the other extracurriculars that were available when I was a child—not graceful enough to dance, not athletic enough to play soccer, not nearly coordinated enough to be a gymnast without endangering myself and others. I guess I had the blunt force of personality and stubbornness that suited me to be in the saddle. My nerdy roots served me well in my chosen activity when I picked up an introductory trick from an author who clearly knew her way around a horse.
The way you introduce yourself to a horse is to blow your breath into its nose. Literally. Considering the fact that a human breathing into another human’s face generally indicates that one is prone on the floor and the other is (hopefully) trained in CPR, walking straight up to a very large animal and blowing at it may seem a little odd. I’ve done it, though, many times, and it has surprising (and somewhat surprised) results. The horses to whom I have introduced myself in this way suddenly stand very still, and it’s strangely clear that you’ve got their full attention. After they take in your breath, they give you theirs in return with a huff of warm air. It’s a strange and wonderful intimacy to have with someone you’ve just met.
Not that all of my interactions with horses have been serene and intimate. I’ve been scraped off on walls, dumped in the dirt, bitten, kicked, bucked off, stomped on, snotted on, and knocked over with a purposeful bump of a hip. My first instructor, though, was a very wise woman, and if there were no bones erupting from my skin after a fall, she’d put me right back up in the saddle again. I learned to go back because, at the end of the day, the alternative was not being on a horse, and why the hell would I want that?
In high school, I worked for a barn down the road from my house, and that was where I met Patience. I probably spent more waking hours at the barn than I did at home. Aside from the perk of free saddle time in exchange for labor, the barn gave me a very concrete purpose. I had expected to go to the same high school as my sisters, follow an established path, excel in a certain way, and make my own mark in a familiar setting: that was the plan. The plan was not, by any stretch of the imagination, to move to California and get thrown into an insanely competitive school full of kids who had grown up in Berkeley. I had been preparing to measure my success by a certain metric, and that metric was suddenly, cruelly gone. It may not have been healthy, but it was a fairly straightforward arrangement to do my damnedest to best my sisters’ high school achievements. That had been my purpose; it was how I would know when I had succeeded. Now that was gone, and I didn’t know what the hell my purpose was.
Except to throw hay over a fence in the morning. To mix a bran mash for Bandit and wait for him to finish so I could put him back in his paddock and go home to get ready for school. To ride Patience around and around in the ring. To hose down the horses in the worst of the summer heat. To shovel shit. Every day.
And every day, it was absolutely worth it.
When a friend of mine was killed in a car accident my senior year, I hid at the barn. Lots of people were willing to tell me what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, when I should stop feeling it, and as a result, I was not willing to spend time with lots of people. The horses were boarded at a larger winter facility, and I spent a lot of time in those weeks squatting in Patience’s stall. They were all trained as therapy horses, and for some reason, they knew—and I mean really knew—exactly when they had a child in the saddle, and when they had what the barn called an “able bodied rider.” I like to think Patience saved up for me: for every docile moment in lessons, she’d give me maybe a minute and a half of hell when I was in the saddle. I also like to think that during that winter, she knew I was in trouble—I never got a single bite, crushed toe, or even a laid back ear. Instead, she stood by mildly while I sat in the wood shavings, arched her neck in ecstasy when I rubbed her girth line, and, in one very memorable instance, crooked her head over my shoulder and waited quietly while I hugged her neck and sobbed like I would break in half.
There are very few expectations in a barn, short of adherence to a feeding and watering schedule. We are expected to make so much of ourselves so quickly, and the age at which we are expected to do it just keeps getting younger. Even when you’re simply reflecting your own frightening expectations back at yourself off of other people, it’s still easy to burn in the glare. It’s understandable, I think, that as a teenager, sometimes I just got tired of wondering what people thought, how I was measuring up, looking around and wondering what was another person’s judgment of me and what was just a reflection of my judgment of myself. Thankfully, miraculously, for a few years I found a place with no reflective surfaces and the good company of horses.
Recently I went to a concert given by Jeffrey Foucault, who is my favorite musician on this earth and a friend of mine in a very loose sense. Jeffrey has a very particular way with words, such that when he sings, it’s like the Holy Spirit walks in, sits down, and orders a beer. On this particular night in February, he sang a new song in which a line contracted my ribcage around my lungs:
Last night I drank the breath of horses.
And I thought about how many hours I spent, soaked in sweat, dirt under my fingernails, smelling to high heaven and swearing to Patience I’d sell her for meatballs and carpeting if she didn’t stop yanking her lead rope. In every one of those hours I was drinking the breath of horses.
Time well spent.
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