“To ride on a horse is to fly without wings.” ~ Author unknown

One of my nieces from America is coming to visit later this year. She is at that age in a young girl’s life when her thoughts, dreams and hopes for the future all pivot on one thing: her love of horses. For the moment she contents herself with her stable full of toy horses great and small, but I know that when she takes one of those toy horses in her hand and gallops it across the kitchen counter she is imagining herself clinging breathlessly to the back of a mighty steed, riding like the wind.

How do I know this? Because I was once a horse-mad young girl myself.

For my brother’s first birthday he was given a toy bouncy horse. This was similar to a rocking horse body, only instead of being mounted on rockers it was attached to a frame by some heavy-duty, probably lethal coiled springs.  I’m not sure if they even make such things anymore or if they have been deemed too dangerous to tiny fingers. The object was to get on the horse, settle yourself into the “saddle”, put your feet in the “stirrups” and commence bouncing with all your heart and soul.

If the photos are anything to go by my brother was not impressed and burst into tears at the sight of it, but my mother says he was just over tired.

By the time I came along several years later that poor horse had seen some hard riding, but it was beautiful in our eyes. It had developed a terrible squeak in its springs so that you made a horrible racket whenever you sped up to anything faster than a trot, but it still figured prominently in many of our games, being both getaway horse for the bank robbers and posse horse for the sheriff and deputies.

Oh how I loved to climb aboard old faithful with the flared nostrils and the flying mane. I’d grab hold of the “reins” (handles that came out of either side of his head), stretch my feet down to the stirrups, throw my head back and lose myself in the glorious freedom of a gallop across the countryside.

Photos show that my enthusiasm knew no bounds, and I also didn’t share very well yet, since it doesn’t appear that I was always very good about getting off to let my sister take her turn.

From our loudly squeaking plastic steed we all eventually graduated to the real thing. My first ride on a real live member of the equine family was when my grandmother gave me a pony ride at some local fair. The poor ponies were tethered to a ring and spent their entire shift walking in a circle with a long procession of small children kicking them in the sides. I loved every minute of it.

Then there was the trail ride we eagerly coerced our parents into taking us on during a stay at Lake Tahoe. I was the only one too young still to ride a horse on her own, so I was assigned to share with my father. He’s a tall man, so the horse he was given was quite tall as well. I remember being lifted up, up, up and placed in the saddle in front of my father. It was a Western saddle with a large pommel, and I felt rather like John Wayne in the movies when I casually rested my hand there and surveyed the world so far below me. If only there had been some cattle to rope I probably would have felt capable of roping them, so great was my feeling of confidence as I sat there with my father protectively holding onto me.

My brother and sister were both assigned commonplace smaller horses befitting their sizes, but my mother was given, oh joy of joys, a black and white pinto, just like Little Joe’s horse on Bonanza. I was in love with that horse – and a little bit with Little Joe, too – but my mother said she had to struggle with it the whole way because it kept trying to turn around and head back for the barn, or turn its head and bite her leg. This was my first experience with the hard lesson that not all horses are noble and sweet. Some are downright contrary.

Several years later the potential contrariness of horses was brought home to me when a woman my mother worked for offered to let me and my sister ride her horses. We were about eleven and thirteen then, and by that time I had read every Black Stallion book ever written. I knew a lot about horses. Or I thought I did.

On the appointed day we showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed and a little nervous. The woman who owned the horses had a very casual approach to the whole thing. She told some story about her niece or someone, age 14, who had taken a bad fall off a horse the day before and suffered a terrible concussion. We were then helped onto the backs of a couple of supposedly well-mannered horses and set loose in a sloping field dotted with trees. Trying to maintain a calm aura of control I squeezed my thighs as instructed and guided my horse toward the centre of the field. For the first time I was riding a horse without a long line of other horses to follow. I could ramble at will. In actuality we rambled where the horse willed, and where that ornery horse willed was straight up the hill to a tree with a low-hanging branch. Only a quick sideways lean saved me from being swept off onto the hard ground several feet below.

“Yeah, be careful of Sparkey,” yelled the horse’s owner from the bottom of the hill. “He likes to scrape people off under trees.”

Now you tell me.

Needless to say that was the one and only time we went riding at her place.

Many years later a different problem arose in my relationship with the horse. I knew from my reading of the Black Stallion books and all of the Dick Francis mysteries that weight was always a key issue for horse and rider. If you want to go fast you have to go light. As I grew up and turned from a sturdy girl into a tall, sturdy woman a whole new set of embarrassing experiences awaited me in my continuing quest to ride like the wind.

Let’s take one particular time when a group of friends and I were visiting Vail, Colorado. It was autumn, probably the most spectacularly beautiful time of year to visit the Rockies. The aspens which covered the lower slopes and valleys appeared to be hung with luminous gold coins which fluttered and danced in the sunlight in sharp contrast to the deep azure sky. What better time and place to go horseback riding, we thought.

We were full of the giddy high spirits that you have when you’re single, in your twenties and with a group of friends you’ve known for years. None of us had any real riding experience, which was good. We were all on equal footing and no one could queen it over the others and start shouting out instructions like ,”Keep your heels down!” or other annoying know-it-all directions.

At the dude ranch we all checked in, affirmed our requests for gentle horses for non-experienced riders – apparently they had some real rip-snorters for those who like getting bucked about – and huddled nervously beside a dusty corral waiting to be sized up and assigned a mount.

Here’s where the embarrassing part came in.

My sister stood at the corral fence with her straight nose, high cheekbones, shiny straight almost-black hair and slender build looking elegant and refined and graceful. Even for such an outing as this she probably wore jewellery coordinated to go with her stylish clothes. The man in charge of assigning horses to riders looked her up and down and called out over his shoulder, “Bring out Dainty Lady,” or some such name. It was Dainty Lady, or Sweet Duchess, or something lovely and soft and gentle like my sister.

I stood at the corral fence, tall and hefty, with my huge head, my snub nose and my frizzy flyaway brown hair, looking like a good-natured, clumsy giant next to my graceful sister. I was wearing jeans and a baggy sweater that came almost to my knees. Graceful and elegant I was not. The trail boss looked at me, and although I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually spit a stream of chewing tobacco juice onto the ground by his boot, in my memory that’s what I see him doing before shouting over his shoulder with a bellow that echoed off the canyon walls surrounding us, “Bring out Goliath!”

Humiliations galore.

Nevertheless, in spite of these setbacks, I persisted in my love of the horse, though it took on more the nature of a long-distance relationship than a true romance. From time to time when vacationing in some idyllic locale I would sign up for another one of those follow-the-leader trail rides, and at long last realized one of my childhood dreams of riding a horse on the beach.

The reality was a far cry from my dreams. It was a lovely ride, don’t get me wrong. I was assigned a nice horse named Sandman – nothing shaming in that – and we rode down through the pine woods and across the dunes to the water’s edge. There the two girls leading the ride gave us some rudimentary directions for how to tell our horses to trot and set us loose. Sandman wasn’t in the mood to trot, but eventually I did coax a bit of speed out of him. The sun was sparkling on the water, gulls mewled overhead, the briny breeze was refreshing – it was all exactly how I had imagined it as a child. All that is, except for the fact that I realized I don’t actually know how to ride a horse properly. Every time I came down the horse seemed to be coming up, and you know what I decided? Saddles are hard.

After our ride my brother-in-law, niece and I limped to the nearest Starbucks for a pick-me-up. OK, maybe my niece didn’t limp, but teenagers are more resilient, and she also seemed to be going up when her horse was going up and down when it was going down without all that painful meeting in the middle that I was doing.

That was the last time I rode a horse. Perhaps the dream, having been finally realized, was able to quietly fade away. Now my relationship with the horse has taken on a whole new aspect, one I never quite anticipated.

We live in a very horsey neighbourhood. Equestrian centres abound in this area and many of our country neighbours own horses. It is quite common to come upon a pony-drawn trap or riders walking single-file down the country lanes around us, and our walks along the public footpaths frequently take us smack dab through the middle of a field where inquisitive horses come over to greet us. Oftentimes during the summer months I will hear the clop clop of hooves on pavement and look outside to see two or three people on horseback walking down the middle of our street. They often ride up the street to the gap in the trees and then canter back down the field where we walk the dog.

And here is where my new relationship with the horse comes into play, for now I see him not as the wind beneath my wings, but as the fertilizer beneath my flowers. If I am out walking my dog and we come upon a pile of fresh horse manure I confess that I use one of my little doggie pick-up bags to scoop up a handful of it and carry it home like a rare treasure. Allowed to age a little bit and then turned into manure tea it makes a lovely fertilizer for my flowers, which have all been blooming beautifully as a result.

I still love horses. There is a freedom and magnificence in the sight of a running horse which has no parallel, and when a horse and its rider have a good relationship it is a thing of beauty to see them working in partnership. I can enjoy watching it now without a pang of envy and with no regrets.

But my little niece cannot yet, and I can understand how she feels. She has begged me to find someplace for her to ride a horse when she comes to visit, and so now I have embarked on another new adventure – vetting equestrian centres to find one that will let a little American girl fulfill her dream of riding a horse, riding like the wind, across a field in England.

“You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.” ~ Stan Laurel