SINCE THAT DAY
Since day 3 we’ve
had moments like those of Day 2 and moments like those of the “breakthrough
day”. But it’s been like a plane slowly taking off, gaining altitude. Each day
we work with her seems to make her calmer in the stall, builds up more mutual
trust. I think the trust part has been at the heart of this entire exercise.
After all, we were total strangers to each other only a few months ago.
The unnerving thing about this gift horse of ours is how much she seems to pick up from us, whether we are aware of it or not. You can almost tell what kind of a mood her handler is in, from the way the horse is carrying herself, walking alongside whoever happens to be leading her out of the barn in the morning.
One day we came
out for a training session after I had spent the night at my grandma’s
deathbed. I was tired and grumbling; frustrated with the experience of several
hours of painfully acute impotence and seeming futility. I had watched the
features and body language of a woman I dearly loved for the better part of a
day and a half, searching desperately for signs of communication as she slipped
farther and farther from this world. When we reached the paddock Lady would not
come to us or allow herself to be caught- at least not by us, while we were
feuding.
“She’s nervous.
She’s dangerous.”
“She’s not
dangerous. You’re nervous.”
“Maybe this isn’t
going to work out. Do we really want to be putting all this time into this?
Should we just give it up?”
All the pent- up
feelings of waste and impotence at the nursing home welled up inside of me. I
felt a ferocious need to control something, to make something happen. I grabbed
her halter and drove her around the paddock alpha herd boss style. It wasn’t
pretty, but it worked. What began as a work of bullish pigheaded “I’ll show
you!” faith ended with a white flag of surrender. “I can’t do this today.” I
handed Shane the rope and headed for the house vowing to sell the horse first
chance I got.
That afternoon
Shane had the best training session with her yet.
“I don’t think we
should sell the horse.” Shane said later that night.
I broke down.
“I don’t want to
sell the horse,” I said. “I just don’t want my grandma to die.”
Since that day Shane
has taken Lady out of the trial confines of her paddock and worked her out in
the open field, going up and down the imagined rows of the future potato field
and pumpkin patch. Each time he does this it’s like he’s writing a love note to
the future, a pledge of good things to come, ground to be cultivated, crops to
be harvested. He’s showing her how to fit in on this farm. They are building
mutual trust.
We’ve learned
that the days we want to throw in the towel with the horse are days when
something else is going on- something which is bothering us and which we are
telegraphing to the horse or allowing ourselves to be distracted by. It strikes
me that these are the days when we most need the horse, and the work.
Ron said it well
the day we met him and Lady:
“Doesn’t
matter what’s going on with you-whatever troubles you’re having in your life.
Get on a horse and the troubles go straight out of you, through the horse down
into the ground.”
I suppose that
makes them lightning rods. In that, horses are a lot like farms in general. So
many moments working on a farm feel filled with futility and folly, for every
bit you learn, or every year you gain in experience, you are humiliatingly
aware of the dizzying mountains of knowledge that you lack and need. It’s easy
at times to forget that that very thing is often what makes farming so
rewarding.
Sometimes it seems
as if, like a horse, the farm also is a lightning rod for every lint scrap of
trouble and toil, every twine ball knot of worry and struggle…but then too,
working the farm, it all goes into the ground and mercifully you find you are
the better for it.
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