Horse Crazy (9 page)

Ha.

Amadeus was a 17'2 hand German Warmblood. He
was a handsome, spirited and highly-trained dressage horse. It
would be two years before I felt as confident as I did the day I
climbed on Amadeus' back.

Angel had me lunge him first. I'd experienced
being lunged while I was living in New Zealand. Doing the lunging
is at least as difficult, if not quite so physically uncomfortable.
Lunging a horse involves standing in the center of an imaginary
circle with a long lunge whip in one hand (depending on which way
you're lunging the horse) and a lunging line in the other. This
lunging line attaches to the snaffle bit which is connected to the
horse's mouth. The idea is to urge the horse forward á la the whip
and control him via the lunging line. The horse trots, walks, and
canters in a circle around you, obeying verbal commands from you,
while you become painfully and inevitably dizzy. (How George Morris
does this over and over again without then turning away and walking
into the side of a barn, I have no idea.)

Myself, I succeeded in dropping the lunging
whip in the mud a few times and then getting hopelessly entangled
in the lunge line. I'm sure Amadeus and Angel exchanged more than a
few glances that involved eyes rolling toward heaven.

When she was satisfied that I'd done what she
wanted or when it was evident that I could do no more, she gave me
a leg up on him.

With no neck strap to hang on to, but my
hands resting jauntily on my waist, she lunged us both in a circle
at a trot. The mud squished disconcertedly under us as we
plop-plop-plopped around the ring, me gripping with my thighs for
dear life in an attempt to post with no hands and still remain
astride, Amadeus wheezing in time to the post for no obvious
reason.

Although physically difficult, the no-hands
posting wasn't particularly scary. It was more a matter of
concentration, blending the mental and the physical in a
coordinated effort to perform the task. Within minutes of my
thinking this, Amadeus bucked me neatly and quite completely off
him by way of a swan dive over his head.

I missed the fence by millimeters and landed
on my hip and derriere. The mud, although making me less attractive
for my Christmas homecoming, no doubt saved my bones from
damage.

Angel, of course, was horrified and chattered
away in concern and possibly even guilt (she'd pooh-poohed my
hard-hat as superfluous for the lesson) while she helped me up and
led me back to The Beast.

I knew I had to get back on him and I would
have paid several hundred dollars not to. Because he was going to
do it again and that was as clear to me as the mud on my face.

I looked at Angel and knew I'd have to quit
my job, change my name, and maybe have plastic surgery to disguise
my appearance if I decided to back out now. Because it's not done.
Not unless you're going to give up riding and I couldn't make that
decision in the split second it requires that you bound back up
into the saddle.

So I shook. Very hard. And my hands shook and
my voice shook and my knees shook. And my mind projected an image
of me being brought home in a body cast to be propped up next to
the Christmas tree and then I allowed Angel to give me a shaky leg
up into the saddle.

"Lean back, this time. Don't let him get away
with that." She turned away to stride back to the middle of the
ring, flicking her lunge whip idly at the mud.

"I have nothing to hang onto." I
whimpered.

"That's because you're on a lunge line." She
said.

"But how do I let him not get away with
bucking me off, if I have no reins?" The more I talked, the more
desperate I could feel myself becoming. She wants to kill me, I
thought quietly. It'd be easier to fire me, but this way she can
make it look like an accident and she doesn't have to pay
unemployment compensation.

She relented and fashioned a pair of reins
for me.

"Don't rely on them," she warned, still
afraid I'd piddle around trying to save my life in lieu of learning
from her equestrian instruction. "But, if he bucks, lean back and
tug on them. Hard."

With my heart in the pit of my stomach and
that churning, I picked up the trot again. Within seconds, the dear
beast began to tuck his head.

The first little buck promised to be the
prelude to the biggie. He picked up his speed in order to send me
lots further this time and then went for it.

I could hear Angel shouting: "Lean back! Lean
back!" And when it happened, I leaned so far back, I thought I felt
his butt against the back of my head.

I yanked his head up so hard, I could hear
him gag on the bit in a strangled gurgle. He stopped. I was shaking
harder than I was before, but I'd had the last word. And the sorry
bastard knew it.

We stood there--the two of us--quivering for
a good five minutes. I hoped hopelessly that Angel wouldn't want to
break the spell by having us continue, but she was insistent. In
her opinion, the problem had been solved and off we go. I knew the
problem was only postponed. That it was there as big as my new fear
of the big German horse.

Later, untacking him, he stepped on my foot
and blew snot on my parka. I was so unnerved by the whole
experience that I drove a hundred miles toward my family Christmas
in Florida before I realized I still had on my rubber riding
boots.

Maybe the incident, isolated and unusual in
itself, would not have developed into the full-fledge phobia that
it did had I not experienced a disconcerting episode with
mild-mannered old Traveler the next week.

It was one of those exceptional, rare days
when poky Traveler felt like partying. I was on him, bareback, for
perhaps a total of four minutes and I was scared to death.

All he did was prance a bit, unrequested, and
twitch his ears a little more than usual. I slid to the ground and
buried my face in his neck. Amadeus--the Horse from Hell was one
thing, but to be unnerved by Traveler, the gentlest horse on the
farm, was something else. It meant, to me, that I couldn't handle
it anymore. I'd lost whatever confidence I'd ever had with
horses.

This was underscored the next few times I
attempted to ride. If the horse's ears twitched, instead of
thinking he was listening to me or sounds around him, I thought it
might be the prelude to a bolt--he'd heard something and was now
going to run for his life with me clinging to his back (I could
only hope).

When he ran, and I would see this as clearly
in my mind as if I were running a movie reel, he would either run
into branches and trees that would poke my eyes out and break all
my arms and legs, or I would bounce off him, probably onto a
railroad track with an oncoming train bearing down.

If I were sitting on the horse and we were
not moving, which was by now my favorite gait, I would think: if he
shies, we'll fall down that little cliff and roll in that barbwire.
His body will crush mine as we roll, embedding it in the barbwire
(which I won't feel because I'll be too involved with my many
compound fractures.)

Sometimes, when I mounted, I would get a
mental flash of me in a wheel chair, or I would hear, quick as a
snake, before I could stop it, the voice of some authority saying:
"It's her spine. She'll never walk, talk, move, eat, blink, or be
able to change channels on a television set again."

Healthy or rational fear is when you know
something could be a risk, but you're able to measure its danger
with an objective view of your own ability.

Healthy fear is what keeps you from doing 90
mph in front of the Highway Patrol Station. Healthy fear is fear
that makes sense. What I was feeling was real, but the reasons for
the feeling weren't rooted in reality.

Discouraged and feeling no real hope that my
new-found timorousness would dissipate on its own, I turned to
structured lessons as a way of regaining my confidence.

Lessons are important and helpful to the
green rider, probably even indispensable, but the time to take them
is when you're excited to learn all about horses and have no
emotional baggage or prior business to work out with them.

What I really needed, in retrospect, was to
take long, boring walks on horseback until the boredom outweighed
the fears. Or private lessons, with a patient instructor who really
understood the problem.

What I did was enroll in group lessons. Group
lessons, however, were not the answer and although they did me no
real harm, and did, in fact, correct the techniques of my saddle
position while keeping me around horses, they did nothing for my
confidence level.

I remained afraid and had to force myself,
with what felt like a considerable amount of weekly bravery, to
continue to attend.

Chapter Seven

Formal Riding Lessons

The Yellow Pages are a fine way of finding
riding academies near you, as are bulletin boards at tack shops and
boarding facilities.

If you know people who have horses, they can
probably clue you in to good riding instructors, but, in many
cases, you'll have to bring your own horse to the lesson.

Although group lessons were probably not what
I needed at the particular time I sought them out, the academy I
found was, nonetheless, clean and convenient and, as it turned out,
a fascinating study in horses and people.

The Verig Riding Academy in Atlanta has been
teaching students how to ride for three decades. They've produced
hundreds of trophies and championships for their students in
national competitions of dressage, cross country and stadium
jumping.

In the old days, the Verig's techniques of
riding and instruction were called "foreign". Now they're accepted
all over the country as the norm.

Dr. Verig and his wife came to the United
States in 1952 from Austria. They'd once trained German equestrians
for the Olympic games and perhaps because of this and their
involvement in the war effort of World War II, there remained a
gentle mantle of mystery and romantic adventure about the
place.

Old Mrs. Verig would toddle out to the barn
every evening in her bathrobe and slippers from the family's nearby
house to mutter to any of the students who'd listen about how the
academy wasn't like it used to be and how her daughter--the current
instructor--had it all wrong.

Her daughter, Valerie, seemed to have a lot
of patience with the old woman, who could be very noisy and very
insistent about her point, especially when she was observing a
lesson in progress.

Mrs. Verig had been a top-level dressage
rider in her day, had trained in her native Austria and fled the
old country with her husband and their horses during the second
World War.

Every night, the old woman would pad out to
the stall of her Lippizan stallion, Mestoza, and say goodnight to
him by offering him a carrot between her teeth, which he always
took very gently from her to the amazement of whatever new audience
was in the barn that evening.

She said that her husband had ridden Mestoza
out of Austria, across the border, narrowly escaping the Nazis, and
they had then brought him to America.

Mestoza was 24 years old and it was thought
that it was probably Mestoza's sire that she was talking about.
Nevertheless, it was a magnificent story of a young girl during the
war, her beloved Lippizan, and her dashing, daring husband.

Another version of the story, although a
little less thrilling, says that the Doctor simply made a buying
trip to Austria in 1964 for the Lippizan nucleus of breeding
stallions and mares. But Verig was a commander in the Germany
calvary in World War II, and his wife did help prepare the horses
for combat--and both worked for the Allies at one point--so maybe
there was a horse-lift or two at some time during the war--and the
beloved stallion that dashed passionately to freedom and safety and
into the young Mrs. V's waiting arms might really have
existed--although dead now for over forty years.

The horse in the stall today is still called
Mestoza, named after the original sire of one of the six Lippizaner
dynasties. Mrs. V was still the only one who was able to get a
bridle on or calm this Mestoza, whoever he was, the son or the
sire.

In any event, Mrs. V and Mestoza provided me
with the only case I'd ever witnessed of a true, consistent
affection between a horse and a human. He didn't just tolerate her.
He honestly seemed to love her. She may have been a little daft
now, but, in her day, she and Mestoza had performed brilliantly
together in competition, both here and abroad, countless times.

The original Lippizans were imported to
Austria, the Verig's home, from Spain and Italy. They were bred for
a gentle, obedient nature for over 200 years. Usually short, around
15 to 15'3 hands, they appear and behave with a look of
nobility--from their arched necks, pronounced withers, long back
and perfectly turned feet.

Known for what's called their "airs above the
ground", (meaning all the leaping and half-flying choreographic
movements that they do) the Lippizan is the embodiment of the
dressage horse. Being a grueling but awe-inspiring test of a
horse's memory and manners, dressage (the art of training horses to
perform movements in a balanced and obedient manner) demands a high
degree of understanding between horse and rider. It's an excellent
discipline and especially good for the green rider looking to
perfect her seat.

My goal, before I ever rode solo again, was
to make my seat absolutely secure. Dressage is the riding
discipline to do that.

The dressage seat uses a longer stirrup than
does the hunter or jumper seat, giving greater security and more
communication with the horse, as more of your leg is in contact. As
a result of the lessons, I became so comfortable with the longer
stirrup that it was a year before I could wean myself off it and go
back to the slightly shorter stirrup needed for jumping. And even
then, I felt like my knees were riding around by my chin, Steve
Cauthan-style.