FALLING OFF HORSES
(Note: I wrote this piece a number of years ago, and published it
in Terry Ross’s Magazine BLACK LAMB. Those of you who’d like
to read about riding to the hounds in Moore County, North Carolina,
back in the 1950s, should read Almet Jenls’s eerie parable “The Huntsman At The Gate,”
available, used, through Amazon)
Some weeks ago I got thrown. Sadie is a large, gentle American Quarterhorse mare with some drafthorse in her background, and I had ridden her many times before, up in New Hampshire. She lives in a stable set up by a young couple who are both expert riders, and very careful about matching their horses to their clients’ riding skills. I’d never had any trouble with Sadie before, except for a few arguments about her tendency to grab snacks from the green leaves along the trail. Her owners don’t have much pasturage, and although their horses are well-fed on hay and grain, of course it’s hard for them to resist the succulent new greenery in spring. I couldn’t deny Sadie the occasional mouthful of leaves, but I had to make it clear to her that I was driving: she got the nibble when I decided, not when she did. Basic riding discipline.
She didn’t throw me out of any resentment over the withheld greens. Horses really don’t hold minor grudges (although they certainly do harbor major ones, like being brutally mistreated). But although they have been domesticated almost as long as dogs, they are still very large herd animals who don’t like surprises, and carrying a rider still goes a little against their “horse sense.” Back in the Pleistocene when they were evolving, anything on their backs wanted to eat them. So horseback riding is a delicate compromise: the horse is a lot bigger and stronger and in some ways smarter that the rider, so the rider must forget his human pride, acknowledge that he’s sitting on the horse because of the animal’s probational tolerance, and rely on bluff to persuade the horse to be nice and not kill him.
The fragile contract is broken instantly when the horse gets spooked. In this case, Sadie and I were walking placidly through a cut-over patch of forest, and a deer suddenly pronked across the trail. Sadie went airborne, kicking and twisting, and I lost my seat in the big western saddle. She was tilted to the left, and in that stopped-time instant I thought of grabbing the saddle-horn and hoisting myself back aboard. But I weigh over two hundred pounds, and in that same elongated moment I realized that I’d probably pull Sadie down on top of me. So I relaxed and completed the fall, thump.
And I was very lucky. The cut patch was full of stumps and rocks, but I landed on a soft bank of earth. I bruised a leg, but I got back on and finished the ride. Generally it’s a good idea to get back on after a fall, if you are not completely busted up; and sometimes even if you’ve broken something, you have no choice. If you are miles from home, no matter how badly hurt you are, your horse is your only way back, unless you feel like walking on a broken leg.
My Aunt Sis Barnes, like my father and my other two aunts, was a fearless rider in her youth, going hell-for-leather over big fences during fox-hunts with the Moore County Hounds in the Sandhills country of North Carolina, and one day her horse clipped a front hoof on the top rail of a stout fence, somersaulted in the air, and came down on top of her. It was a wet day, and the ground was deep in mud, so my aunt wasn’t smashed flat. But she was not exactly a happy hunter. Still, she could ride, more or less, and she’d kept hold of her horse’s reins, and in the 1950s on a fox-hunt in the puckerweeds, nobody had a way of summoning help. So she remounted and rode home. She never blamed her horse: the hunt was riding at full gallop through brushy country, and the big fence surprised both her and her mount, who didn’t have time to set up properly for the jump. The horse wasn’t hurt, and aside from bruises, neither was my aunt.
My father, unlike his sisters, was rough on horses. He also took a silver flask of whiskey to the hunt-meetings, fairly standard practice among the male members of the Moore County Hounds in those days, but Dad went well beyond the traditional “Stirrup Cup” before the start of the hunt. The combination of booze and his belief that horses were stupid animals which had to be brutalized into submission was a bad one. He was vicious with the reins, yanking too hard on the bit and hurting his mounts’ tender mouths; he also used his spurs and riding crop with far too much enthusiasm. But he was an expert rider, according to the standards of his time, and he never had much trouble, until he rode my Aunt Judy’s mare Hi-Blende in a Christmas hunt one year.
The Christmas hunt was the last of the season, and it was always a wild and raucous affair. Hunt members who hadn’t ridden more than once or twice all year would show up for it, so the field was very large, very drunk, and out of shape. Because the New York and Boston vacationers whose money supported the Moore County Hounds expected good sport, the Huntsman and the other paid professionals who ran the hunt didn’t “cast” the hounds to find and chase an actual wild fox. In fact about 80% of real fox hunts ended inconclusively: the hounds never picked up the scent of a fox; they went yelping off after deer or raccoons or even some farmer’s bitch in heat; or if they did scare up a fox, the animal got away, either by finding a burrow (“going to earth”) in the case of a red fox, or climbing a tree if the fox was gray. So for guaranteed action, the night before the hunt meeting the Huntsman would go out on horseback dragging a burlap sack from the cage where his pathetic little stock of captured foxes was kept, spreading the powerful scent over a predetermined course full of twists and turns and enough big jumps to satisfy (or maim) the most reckless rider. Moore County’s Christmas event was always one of these drag-hunts.
Aunt Judy didn’t like Dad riding Hi-Blende. Her mare was small for a Thoroughbred, relatively young, still being schooled, tender-mouthed and a little skittish. Dad rode her as if she were a cow pony, and the horse didn’t like it. But that Christmas Dad invoked his rights as Big Brother, and more or less commandeered Aunt Judy’s filly. It was either that or hire a horse from the local livery stable, since there were no other available mounts. My grandmother had a lovely big gelding, Winning Way, whose nature matched his name, and after a few contretemps she’d made it clear to Dad that neither she nor Winning Way would tolerate his bad riding manners any longer. Of course a hired horse was beneath my father’s dignity, so over Aunt Judy’s loud protests Daddy went a-hunting on Hi-Blende.
He came back in an ambulance. I mentioned above that horses do harbor major grudges, and Hi-Blende certainly remembered being yanked around, gouged by spurs, and whipped on the flanks and buttocks for no reason she understood. Dad was more than usually drunk as the wild Christmas field set off that morning (think of the famous hunting scene in the film of Tom Jones for some idea of the chaos), and that, and the steel-reinforced bowler hat he was wearing, probably saved his life. Dad, in all the splendor of his pink coat (never called red, although of course it was), snow-white stock, fawn breeches and high black boots polished to a blinding luster by, well, me, actually, because my grandfather’s black handy-man drew the line at shining Massa’s boots, used the spurs and the crop freely to keep the filly at the front of the field, and finally Hi-Blende had had enough. Approaching a high double-board fence at a full gallop with Dad’s spurs bloodying her flanks, the filly just flat refused. Dug in her forelegs, dropped her head, and came to a full stop. Dad went over her withers and hit the fence head-first. The boards were rotten, or Dad’s interesting life would have ended right there. He passed halfway through the fence, rather like a large javelin, and hung there, his boots sticking out one side of it and his head and shoulders out the other, with the brim of his bowler resting on his shoulders, completely cold-cocked. Hi-Blende trotted placidly back to the stable without him.
The hunt went on, of course, but one of the professionals did ride to a nearby farmhouse to call an ambulance. Dad was still unconscious by the time the ambulance reached the hospital. But he woke up soon: the steel lining of the bowler had saved his skull, and the fact that he’d been drunk, and therefore pretty relaxed, when he hit the fence, had saved him from broken arms or legs. He dislocated a shoulder, but he didn’t even get a concussion, only a headache not much worse than one of his usual hangovers. Of course he never rode Hi-Blende again, by mutual consent. Dad used to tell me the filly was hopelessly vicious, but Aunt Judy rode her as if she and Hi-Blende had melted together to become a centaur. She didn’t wear spurs, never carried a riding whip, and barely touched the reins. The filly went over the ground like water.
You ride horses, you fall off sometimes, though seldom that spectacularly. A friend, an expert horsewoman who writes murder mysteries set against the background of Thoroughbred racing, told me her own riding instructor said that she couldn’t start calling herself a rider until she’d had ten falls. Less than ten wasn’t enough to teach alertness and dispel fear; more than ten was carelessness. Of course the rule doesn’t apply to professional riders, like jockeys. Anyone who follows Thoroughbred racing at all (or who has read SEABISCUIT or seen the movie) realizes that the small men and women with Popeye’s wrists and forearms more or less float above their horses, kept aboard by a preternatural sense of balance, an ability to sense and match the horses’ rhythms, and a vast supply of luck. Even so, jockeys fall often, and because their horses are traveling at about 35 miles an hour, in the middle of a jam of other horses galloping full out, their falls are perilous. Still, jockeys are tough, and they generally bounce up, unless they land on their heads or get stomped on.
And I’m talking about flat-racing here. Also in Moore County, North Carolina, back in the 50s, there was a renowned steeple-chase jockey named Dooley Adams, and I used to go over to the small practice race-course where he schooled his mounts over gigantic fences at top speed. He was a taciturn man, like most champions of very dangerous sports, but he did tell me that steeple-chasing killed many more jockeys – and horses – than flat-racing. Made sense: I remembered my aunt’s somersaulting fall, my Dad’s transformation into a human javelin, and I shuddered to think of what could happen when there were six or seven horses trying to jump the same fence at the same time. Mr. Adams had taken many a hard fall, and although he was probably only in his late 30s when I met him, he was already pretty beat up, and phasing out his active racing career.
Of course most pleasure-riders aren’t professional jockeys, and there aren’t very many fox-hunts still active in this country today. “The pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable,” as Oscar Wilde put it. But serious amateurs have taken up what’s called eventing, usually a three-day competition (it’s an Olympic sport and you’ve probably seen parts of it on TV) involving a course over increasingly difficult jumps, in which rider and mount are judged not merely by their ability to complete the course without knocking a bar down, but for their speed over the course and the grace they exhibit during the ride. And eventers fall. Superman himself – Christopher Reeve – was paralyzed by a terrible fall in an eventing meet. And he was accounted a very careful rider, who had properly walked the course on foot before the competition to scope out tricky turns and places where his horse would have to change leads (shift gait at the gallop from the left to the right front foot or vice versa) to prepare for a double jump up and off a bank, across a water hazard, or over a couple of gates set at a nasty angle.
I’ve been talking about experts, so let’s get to cowboys. My wife Patsy, an Eastern girl, went out to Wyoming in the late sixties to work on the White Grass Ranch, one of the oldest dude outfits in Jackson Hole. She fell in love with Wyoming, with horses, and a cowboy or two, and she had no fear. The White Grass animals were “dude horses,” generally about as spirited as the plastic coin-operated ponies outside convenience stores. She and her friends worked hard cleaning cabins and waiting tables, but in their off-hours they were allowed to ride unsupervised, and they fell off a lot. One of Patsy’s goofiest memories of her White Grass days was a time when she and her friend Liz were sort of lounging, bareback, on a couple of the slowest and laziest of the dude horses, usually assigned to children. Liz was on an old black mare named Star, who was so fat the little kids’ legs stuck almost straight out when they were riding her. Liz has admitted she wasn’t paying much attention to Star: riding her was like riding a couch with legs. But Star was certainly paying attention to Liz, and at one point she simply stopped, hitched up her rump a little, and shrugged her rider off. A gentle fall, and Liz got up laughing. But Patsy remembered the incident: even the gentlest and laziest horse doesn’t like being disrespected, any more than people do.
In any case, knock wood, Patsy has never been thrown, although she sustained a concussion once while she was clinging grimly to her seat during a little fuss episode on a livelier animal, when her horse jittered under a tree and Patsy’s head banged a low limb. No wussie helmets for cowgirls, of course. Patsy stayed aboard and didn’t even realize the subsequent three days of high fever, nausea and blinding headaches meant she had a concussion, until she survived it without brain damage. Tough woman, my wife.
The cowboys – the paid staff who led White Grass’s trail rides and tried to keep the dudes from falling off – were all young men and fine riders. Few of them were native Westerners: they tended to be guys from back East who loved riding and were wrangling dudes on the ranch during their summer breaks from places like Princeton. The White Grass owner had a problem with his young wranglers, because all of them wanted to compete as bronc-riders in the various small rodeos that flourished throughout the Valley, from the formal one, with cash prizes, held each week during the summer in Jackson, to impromptu get-togethers on other ranches.
The problem was that saddle-bronc and bareback rodeo events are bonebreakers, skull-bangers, and sometimes even killers, even for champion riders. I won’t touch on bull-riding, which is an abomination: rodeo was originally invented by Mexican vaqueros in the early 19th century, and adapted by their American counterparts a little later. It was a way for cowboys to show off their skills at the normal work on a ranch, during a roundup, or on a cattle-drive: riding, roping cattle, maybe a little calf-rassling to bring a young steer down for branding. Riding a bull is to cowboying as professional wrestling is to the real thing. But bullriders sometimes get killed, and pro wrestlers get steadier pay.
The White Grass owner naturally didn’t want his dude-wranglers winding up like Montgomery Clift’s bronc-rider character in The Misfits, concussed, confused and out of the money for good. So the young machos were prohibited from deliberately risking a fall, as long as they worked for White Grass. Of course most of them managed to ignore the ban. But the very finest riders Patsy met out there had no interest in bronc-riding. It’s all about domination, and the horses have been bred to be crazy, and tortured into further madness by bucking-straps secured around their tenderest parts. No sport for a horse-lover, and Patsy’s real cowboys didn’t much mess with it.
The reason, ultimately, that I fell off Sadie was that Patsy never fell out of love with Wyoming. Her friend Liz lives near us in New Hampshire today, and a few years back there was a reunion of many of the people who had worked at the White Grass Ranch over the years, until the owner died and the place, located inside Grand Teton National Park, was gobbled up by the park and abandoned as a dude ranch. She and Liz went to the reunion and had a hell of a time.
Since then, each summer the two of them and a few other women friends from the White Grass days have been going back to Wyoming for a pack-trip. No husbands or male Significant Others allowed: just women and cowboys. I am assured there is no hanky-panky on the pack-trips: the organizers are thoroughly married men and very professional, and the camp cook is a no-nonsense woman. But as a sort of wifely bribe for my agreement to the annual Ladies’ Pack Trip, Patsy has been paying for us both to spend a week on another dude ranch, Moose Head, a very fancy place. She uses her time to get her riding muscles ready for the pack trip. I use it just to ride. At the end of the stay I am put on a plane back east, and Patsy meets her women friends for another week on horseback in the Absaroka Range of the Rockies. Despite the luxurious stay on the dude ranch each summer, I remain ferociously envious of her pack trips. Well, she’s a better rider than I am.
But the first time I went out to Moose Head Ranch I was fifty-nine and hadn’t been on a horse since I was sixteen. It showed. For the first morning ride Patsy and I joined the other dudes at the corral where the saddled and bridled horses are brought out by Moose Head’s wranglers (yet another set of imported college kids who love riding, this crew mostly from the South). The Head Wrangler, a real Wyoming cowboy, once a champion roper, told me, “Mr. Tompkins, I apologize, but you’re going to have to wait a little. Thing is, your horse- now, she’s a sweet mare, we even named her Lady- well, she’s new to the herd, and she’s kinda…well, she’s like the kid in kindergarten who runs with scissors and doesn’t play well with others. Lady, she’s fine with people, but she’s having a little period of adjustment with the other horses, so we’re bringing her out last.” So all the wranglers and dudes, already mounted, got to witness the horrible spectacle of me trying to hoist my out-of-shape bulk into the saddle. It took awhile, and I think some people shot videos. Lady did prove ladylike toward me during our rides together, but I had only begun to be able to ignore the screaming from my stiff legs and butt enough to enjoy my rides, on the fourth day of my stay, and I had to be packed back East the next morning. My second stay at Moose Head wasn’t much better for my butt or my dignity.
So I was very happy when the riding stable opened near us in New Hampshire a year ago. Regular riding has indeed strengthened my legs, and perhaps this year the other dudes won’t take pictures of me trying to get on my horse. I’m sixty-one as I write this, and of course I’ll never be the rider I was as a kid in North Carolina, where I learned to ride and eventually took jumps at the gallop, though never in a pink coat.
When I was eleven my grandparents took me and my five-year-old brother for a year to their winter vacation house in the Moore County hunt country, while our mother and father were thrashing through an acrimonious divorce. We’d been living in a small house in a suburb of Detroit, and every night I heard the shouting and screaming coming up from the living room through the heating register of my second-floor bedroom, and every night I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in any more than I believed in Santa Claus, that a miracle would happen and my parents would stop fighting and not get a divorce. Eventually my nightly appeals to the Great Vacancy petered out: I started just putting the pillow over my ears and trying to go to sleep. What my brother made of the situation I don’t know because he’s never told me. But he joined the Transcendental Meditation Movement fulltime back in the early seventies, ran for Vice President twice on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Natural Law ticket, and currently resides in an all-male celibate ashram in northern India.
I knew my parents were going to divorce long before my grandmother told me so. Mike and I had been put on a plane from Detroit to New York City, and we were staying overnight at my grandparents’ Park Avenue penthouse. I was taking a bath and my grandmother startled me by coming into the bathroom and actually starting to scrub my back, as if I were still the baby she’d washed when I was first born. She gave me the usual chat: “Your Mummy and Daddy love you and Mike very much but they are having some grownup trouble and they have to stay apart for awhile, blah blah blah.” Grownup trouble my naked and embarrassed ass. Mummy and Daddy hated each others’ guts, and told each other so very colorfully every night.
But my dear grandmother, who had endured years of subtle brutality at the hands of my grandfather, yet had managed to stay married to the old bastard, went on sweetly. Mike and I would be spending the next year at the place in North Carolina, “…until Mummy and Daddy decide what to do, dearest.” And she mentioned that of course I would be taught to ride. “There’s a lovely pony waiting for you,” she told me.
My parents get a divorce, and I get a pony? Hey, it sounded like a plan!
The pony turned out to be a Welsh cob named Ladybug, actually more a small horse than a pony, a grumpy old mare who had already taught too many kids to ride. She was nice as pie in the practice ring where my strict instructor taught me the basics, but once my teacher pronounced me ready to take Ladybug out on my own, I quickly began leaving off the “Lady” part and just called her Bug. Because Bug knew dozens of ways to get me off her back. I was a cranky, spoiled child, and there were days when my general confusion over being transported to a strange place and a school where everyone talked funny and some of my classmates were fifteen years old and dumb as stumps was too much for me, and I took out my frustration on the horse, deliberately riding her sloppily and angrily.
She would have none of it. She rubbed me off against trees, she crowhopped and pitched me into the red clay banks along the trails, she grabbed the bit in her teeth and set off at a hard gallop I couldn’t sit to, until I eventually bailed off on my own. I never got hurt – Bug was small, and I was small, too, and bouncy. But several times, like her namesake, she “flew away home” without me, and I had to walk several miles back to the barn in riding boots. My riding instructor never blamed the horse, which I felt was outrageously unfair. Instead, when I finally limped in, she set me to sponging Bug down with warm water, drying her with gunny-sacks, working her over with curry-comb and brush, and picking pebbles and mud out of her hooves. And when that was done, I had to clean the tack, using saddle-soap to get the sweat and foam and dirt off the saddle and bridle and bring the leather up to a soft sheen. My riding instructor was hardly the sort of guru my brother has dedicated his life to (she was a wild Tarheel woman, one of the hunt professionals, who hopped into bed with most of the rich married guys who paid her salary), but she taught me Zen and the Art of Equine Maintenance, with a lot of help from old Bug. Hard, dirty work, patience, endless concentration. In time I reached an accommodation with Bug and became a fairly good rider, for an eleven-year old. I began enjoying my trips with her before and after school (well, anything was better than that school). Of course Bug kept shrugging me off whenever I got too cocky. Once, after watching Dooley Adams at work, I took her out with my stirrup-leathers shortened to jockey-length, so I could stand up in them at the gallop, hunched over Bug’s neck. She threw me hard that time, and I wound up sitting in a patch of cat-briars, literally seeing stars. The mare came over and began grazing on the new spring grass near me, and when I finally stood up she gave me a long, level look. “That’s for nothing. Be careful.” But she let me ride her home.
My mother and father’s divorce was settled, and Dad instantly married the woman he’d been screwing, and after a miserable year of trying to make it on her own in New York, Mother married the man she’d left to marry Dad – a man, who conveniently, had just been divorced from his own first wife. Dad’s second wife was very rich, and she had a winter vacation house in Pinehurst (also in Moore County), rather grander than my grandparents’ place in Southern Pines, which they had sold by then. So Dad could keep on tally-ho-ing in his hunt finery, and on my Christmas vacations, I could ride with him. Bug was gone- I was never told what had happened to her- and I was riding hired horses. But so was Dad: his rich wife wasn’t part of the horsey set. Though I never fell off my hired horses, although they took bigger jumps than short Bug could have managed, I never got to know them very well. And Dad kept on drinking and brutalizing his own mounts. Eventually his second wife sued him for divorce on the then-new grounds of mental cruelty, and that was the end of my North Carolina equestrian daze. Dad went through two more wives and a steady girlfriend in the years that followed, and got too old and sick to ride. And I went through a brief, ill-advised marriage myself, which ended more or less amicably.
I met Patsy one summer on a beach on Cape Cod, and followed her back to Wyoming, where I met some of her cowboy friends. I inveigled her back east, and after seven years of living together in New York, we finally married. We’re still together, and one reason I’ve never made a fuss about her reunions with old White Grass friends, and her pack-trips without me, is that every day when we’re together I look at her, remember my father, my family, and my own failed first marriage, and think that there are an awful lot of ways to fall off your horse if you stop paying attention. And it doesn’t much matter who’s the horse and who’s the rider.