Wild Ride Home: Love, Loss, and a Little White Horse, a Family Memoir

PART I:

LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

Chapter 1.

Pressure and Release

A BALD EAGLE SKIMS ALONG the bluff where windblown Douglas firs, their exposed roots like talons, grip the eroding cliff. Gulls circle and warn the bird of prey not to come too close. One hundred fifty feet below, the Salish Sea crashes and stretches west to the Pacific.

I arrive on foot with an empty water bucket just as the morning sun spills across the field. Near the meadow gate a small, white horse and two mules are dozing. The horse’s delicate head flies up when he hears me coming. He nickers and nods. I sneak a lead rope around his neck (no time for hide-and-seek today) and brush his bright coat while he picks up a stick and waves it in the air as if conducting an orchestra. Come on, Buddy— I tell him, We have places to go. I toss the brush into the bucket along with my sandwich, skinny him out the gate so the mules won’t escape, then tack him up with an old bridle I’d saved since childhood. He gnaws at the bit, dancing in place. After sidling him over to a sawhorse, I jump up with one hand clutching both reins and a long hank of white mane, slip my leg over his bare back, and carefully lift the bucket in my other hand. As my weight settles, the bucket rattles and Buddy rears and skitters so frantically I have to drop it. So much for supplies. We head off down the road, Buddy’s legs in a whir, his nostrils wide, my heart beating fast.

Buddy isn’t the only cause for apprehension (he shies at everything from plastic bags to rabbits); it’s the thought of seeing horse people again. My teenage 4-H horse-show days return, and, even in middle age, insecurity rises like a warm flood. I can certainly ride this snappy gelding—I’ve been doing that all summer—but reentry into a world of the right tack or registered horses spooks me more than Buddy with the bucket.

After the mile ride to the Fairgrounds, the first person we see is a woman in shiny boots and breeches unloading a black horse from a trailer. I try not to think of my scratched-up logging boots, my red-and-gray fishing hat, or the car-wash brush I’d been using to groom Buddy, now left behind in the bucket along with my lunch.

Hi! the woman says. Cute little gray Arabian! Hey, if you need anything, I’ve got buckets and such.

Oh, thanks! I say, Yes, I could use a water bucket—I had to leave mine behind.

She sets one near an empty stall. I’ll see you up there! she smiles and points to where people are gathering. I fill the bucket, slip Buddy into the stall, and hurry to the outdoor arena. A compact man in jeans, tennis shoes, and a wide-brimmed, water-stained Australian Outback hat is talking to a cluster of women. A half-smoked cigarette hangs from his fingers. When I approach, he turns to me, his blue-gray eyes clear and welcoming. Hi, he says, holding out a strong, square hand. I’m Ken.

A young woman leads her bay Morgan into the arena, and Ken asks her horse’s name. Tika, she says and stops next to the mare’s shoulder while the rest of us retreat to the bleachers. The mare tenses as the woman mounts.

Hmmmm, Ken says. Why don’t you walk her out. The horse steps in a perfect circle, turning with agility and arching her neck like a professional dressage horse. I think of Buddy’s head carriage—wild and high—and wonder how this Morgan has come to be so compliant. Looks like she’s been told what to do so much she can’t even make a decision on her own, Ken says. To me the mare looks alive and full of zest, but Ken sees something else.

See her eyes? Ken turns to us. She is so afraid of doing the wrong thing, she can’t move out freely. She’s packed in there tight. I begin to see it. The horse’s eyes are wary and her shoulders tremble slightly, a shadow of sweat forming on her chest.

Tami, Ken says gently, Your horse may seem like a safe horse to ride, but someday she may lose her cool over something really small.

I wait for Ken to speak about seat, Tami’s hands, or her position. But riding is never discussed. He focuses only on the horse.

We need to uncover what’s in there, Ken says, and give this mare the opportunity to be in partnership, not fear. Ken lays his hand on the horse’s neck. What this horse needs is confidence. Ken’s language is completely new to me. No one talked this way in my 4-H group when I’d had my childhood horse, Lightfoot, or when I’d ridden other horses since. It was as if he were telling me something I knew but hadn’t ever been able to articulate.

When I go to check on Buddy at the break, I’m horrified to discover him weaving back and forth in his stall, his head swaying, his eyes in a panic. Buddy’s owner, my neighbor Fred, had told me that Buddy had done the same thing with him. That’s why he’d moved him out of a small paddock into the big field on Henry Street with two mules for company. I’d never seen Buddy in a stall before—he and the mules ran loose in the meadow—and the weaving disturbed me. Why had I brought Buddy to this training clinic without asking Fred? Was I in over my head? Horses were fraught with worry and crisis. I knew plenty about that.

Afraid someone might see Buddy’s neurosis, I quickly put on his bridle, lead him to the arena, and stand with him outside the gate. He rubs my shoulder with his nose and fidgets with the bit, sometimes trying to reach into my pocket.

When the group breaks for lunch Ken walks over and says, Are you coming to eat? There’s pizza for everyone. I perk up at the sound of food, but I can’t think of what I’d do with Buddy.

Oh, I think I’ll just wait here. My horse doesn’t seem to like the stall…, I say, lying about Buddy being mine, and hoping Ken won’t think me an idiot that he can’t be stabled.

Well, that’s okay. If he doesn’t like it, then don’t put him in there. Ken pointed over my shoulder. Why not just turn him loose in the arena?

In the arena? But how will we catch him? If I let him go, my charming friend might reveal his bad-boy side in front of all these nice people. In recent weeks he’d been harder and harder to catch in the meadow. When I tried to halter him, Buddy had dodged and galloped away, snorting, rearing, and tearing around the fence line, the mules following him like cardboard characters. When Buddy was fired up, there was no stopping him. One day he’d stolen my hat from my head and carried it off to the other side of the meadow. I’d laughed out loud, though, as he threw it up in the air as if saying, ha-HA! and kept on running, only to circle around, pick it up again and fling it like a Frisbee. But Buddy had also nipped me once. That was mostly why’d I’d come to this clinic. When my friend Stephanie told me about Ken helping her with her Friesian gelding Mateo, I’d signed up immediately.

Oh, don’t worry about catching him, Ken says. He’ll be fine. Come and eat.

I take off Buddy’s bridle and let him go. Ken shuts the gate as Buddy trots around, then settles into grazing along the edge of the fence.

How long have you had him?

Oh, actually…uh…he’s not my horse, I admit, but I’ve been spending time with him for about a year now.

How could I recount in a few sentences how Buddy had come into my life? My mother would have said, Draw the veil! I was not going to drop the word cancer into this bluebird of a day. Instead of explaining, I blurt out something I never expected to say out loud, But I hope that he might be someday, if my husband and I can afford to buy him. Of course, that day would exist only on a planet where our bank account gushed with fountains of extra cash. But I do not say this to Ken.

After lunch I ask if I should get the bridle.

Oh, no, Ken says. Let’s just see what he’s up to. He grinds his cigarette in the dirt, tosses it into the trash bin, and picks up a dressage whip leaning against the fence. I can’t imagine what Ken might do with Buddy without a halter or bridle. But he motions me into the arena and closes the gate. Ken makes a clucking sound and Buddy’s head flies up, a piece of grass hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. When Ken holds out his hand, Buddy takes off in a floating gallop, swinging his head as he whooshes past us, close but just out of reach. My heart flips up a notch. Buddy’s tail is straight up like a stick, and it streams out behind him like a flag.

Now he’s being rude, Ken says, without a trace of impatience or anger. You little shit! Ken waves his arm at Buddy, who wags his head just a few feet from Ken’s shoulder. You think you’re going to bite me, do you? Buddy feints left, then gallops around again snorting fiercely, nostrils flaring. Ken snaps the three-foot whip against his leg, forcing Buddy to turn in the opposite direction, his mane flying like a white wing, showing us he is king of the sky. But then Buddy spots something moving outside of the arena and he dodges and bolts past Ken.

He’s afraid now, see? Ken says. Buddy gallops full out. The whites of his eyes are like moons. He’s scared himself; if we’re not careful, he’ll lose his head. I know that horses are flight animals, and everything that frightens them is connected to prey behavior. The reason horses survived at all—millions of years before humans—was their ability to escape predators. Clearly, Buddy is wired for flight. Ken turns to all of us, To a horse, every blue tarp in the wind... (or, I thought, each rattly bucket on their back) ...is a potential death threat, a cougar ready to pounce.

When Buddy gallops back, Ken sends him in the other direction. Buddy tosses his head, blows his nostrils, and sidesteps like a gymnast. But this time, instead of swinging his arm in defense, Ken begins to laugh.

"Wait a minute. This horse is not out to threaten me. Yes, he thinks he’s a big shot, and he’s a bit of an asshole, but actually—no, he’s a clown! Look at him! Everyone laughs as Buddy calms down, prances around nodding his head, showing off like a kid who has run away from his mom but does a cartwheel to charm her anyway.

This horse is in love with his own body, Ken says, and we all silently agree as Buddy glides by like a dancer.

Ken approaches Buddy again, this time striding toward him, then backing up, just like a dancer himself. He snaps the whip not to hit or scare Buddy, but to get his attention. Buddy comes to a full stop, his tracks making an 11 in the dust.

It’s a lot about pressure, Ken says to me. Actually, the release of pressure. Horses learn not from the pressure itself, but the absence of it. That’s how they talk. He moves toward Buddy, then backs off when Buddy recoils slightly, as if they are one breathing lung. When Ken steps back, Buddy comes toward him cautiously.

There’s an invisible pocket of energy between you and your horse. When you release the energy it’s a reward. When you give clear intention with it, it has meaning and power. Horses are always looking for that safety.

Sure enough, as Ken holds out his hand as an invitation, Buddy walks straight toward him, ears forward, curious. Ken allows Buddy to touch his outstretched fingers and then, with a tiny step toward him, he clucks, asking him to step back. Buddy does so immediately and stands open-faced, ready for what’s next.

He’s had somebody work him hard in the past, Ken says. Someone has chased him around. Did you see the way he responded to my tiny pressure before?

Fred had told me Buddy was saved from an exotic animal farm—where he was confined knee-deep in manure before he ended up with a local woman. And then Fred.

Buddy follows Ken like a puppy. When Ken stops walking, Buddy stops, too. I marvel. No bridle. No halter. Just two guys taking a stroll.

Catching a horse? Nipping? Problems with the bit? Head tossing? They’re all the same, really, Ken tells us. "Once you get right with the horse—when you address the fear, the confusion, or the past—and provide strong, calm leadership, these things will disappear. Buddy reaches over with his nose, and Ken politely clucks at him to keep his distance. Buddy backs up and lets out a big sigh. Spaciousness surrounds all three of us. I feel my own body relax.

Ken turns to me. Whatever you don’t know about yourself, your horse’ll show you. If you’re impatient, he’ll be afraid. If you’re not focused and clear, he will reflect your distraction.

Ken wiggles his index finger in the air, and Buddy moves back another step.

Buddy will be more comfortable and less naughty when you are clear about your own intention. And—by the way…, Ken says, you are not a scratching post. I saw him with you over there at the gate watching the other lessons.

Ken must have eyes in the back of his head.

When you rode in this morning, I knew you two were a unit. You clearly have a connection with this horse. I reach out and touch Buddy’s neck as if to confirm what Ken is saying. Buddy has a way of making bad things shrink and disappear.

But when you were standing by the gate earlier? I saw some disrespect. Were you aware of that? Ken takes the bridle from the fencepost, puts it on Buddy, and rubs his forehead. Buddy blinks, obedient and relaxed. It isn’t good for you or for Buddy to allow him to do that. He needs the solid assurance that you respect yourself.

Ken’s words stir something deep inside me. They are true about Buddy, with whom I am deeply smitten, but they also resonate with what had happened years before, when I was blown from one life into another. Which, in turn, had brought me to this very afternoon. Like Buddy, I’d seen my share of wild relationships—both human and animal. And I, too, had lost my head a few times. Maybe that’s why I felt such a kinship with this horse. Ken’s lesson revealed that Buddy and I were actually afraid of the same things: Death. Entrapment. Being misunderstood. And mistreated, yes. But there was something else.

Ken hands me Buddy’s reins and adjusts his hat. I mean, would you want a person to come up and do that to you? Push you around, invade your space? Would you stand there and take it just because you loved him?

Chapter 2.

The Rope Trail

IN NEW MEXICO, DEATH WAS always sniffing around the edges. I found myself stopping on the highway to scoot—with a folded newspaper—migrating tarantulas safely to the other side. I hovered over injured magpies to keep the cats away, and I breathed deeply to calm the wave of heat and sorrow when I drove past yet another freshly killed dog along the road. Living in the mountains of Northern New Mexico, so close to the jaws of nature, my skin felt peeled back, everything exposed to the light. I’d been seduced anyway—by its dangerous beauty, off-the-grid artists, ancient pueblos, and the powerful rivers and mountains. All hopelessly alluring.

By the time I reached my late thirties, I’d fallen in love a number of times. Not only with compelling men, but also with geographies. I’d been beguiled by rural Vermont, by England, and after that Boston, a city I came to adore. I always seemed to be chasing a mysterious dream that included my idea of a place as much as the place itself: the storybook New England villages along the sleepy Connecticut River, the footpath that led from my house southwest of London to where the Magna Carta was signed, the steeple of the Old North Church I could see from my Boston apartment—these were places where real stuff had happened, unlike the wet, mossy coast of Washington where I’d grown up. Captain Puget was the only big star of our history books, which barely mentioned the myriad coastal Indian tribes who’d flourished on our shores long before European explorers cruised in.

To the mild consternation of my parents, I also seemed to choose circumstances that included marginal financial stability, yet promised—and delivered—freedom and adventure. As I see it now, I was driven not by what I wanted to be so much as how I wanted to live. In fact, the settings, both rural and urban, were integral to that dream—as if watching myself live into a story while creating new ones. The French philosopher Pascal said, Imagination cannot make fools wise, but she can make them happy. New Mexico unwittingly offered me both: boundless happiness and a strong dose of wisdom.

The spring I was 35 I packed up my Ford Festiva, left Boston, and drove with my black-and-white mustachioed cat, Badger, west to Riojos for the summer. I ended up staying seven years. I taught workshops at the Pueblo and repaired houses with a local carpenter, wrote art reviews for a New Mexico magazine, played my flute at a local pub. And I learned to fly-fish.

After years in Britain and on the East Coast, the space of New Mexico felt like a homecoming, and the life I cobbled together was precarious but exhilarating. On the phone my mother would gently ask about the snowstorms. Did I have snow tires? And how was my bank account? Was Badger managing to dodge the coyotes and the lightning? What about men?

I hadn’t a clue, of course, that I would eventually be flushed from that magical place, but in the meantime, I drank up the high desert for all it was worth. I practiced my fly-cast on the Rio Hondo, which flowed right outside my door, and I snagged trout for dinner. Once, after riding a friend’s quarter horse gelding far across the mesa, I called my mother just to say, Mom, I can die now! And we laughed, she knowing exactly what I meant—that I was so full with my joy, I couldn’t imagine more.

When you look back at chapters of your life, though, there are certain moments that stand out as prescient, symbolic. It isn’t till later, when you’ve risen above the chaos, that you see a larger symmetry unfolding. Even now, long after leaving that ravishing sky, I return to a September day I went fishing with my friend Juan. The aspens stippled gold across the Sangre de Christos, and the sky was a deep, cerulean blue. Juan, a novelist, was at least a decade older, an experienced fisherman, and it was always an honor to fish with him.

That afternoon we drove several miles out to the very edge of the vast canyon. He said he wanted to show me the Rope Trail, named for its near-vertical drop from the mesa to the gushing Rio Grande below. The path, hidden from the casual observer, isn’t far from the bridge that spans the Gorge. When you drive across the mesa, the bridge—a dizzying 650 feet above the white water—is only visible right before you cross. In an instant the Earth falls away and you are flying over the canyon, its sheer rock cliffs plummeting to the river carving through the fissure. A river guide friend had told me about a cougar who’d attempted to cross that bridge one night. When the cat got to the middle of the trestle, an oncoming car blinded him so completely that in one clean leap, he cleared the guardrail, headlights catching only his disappearing tail. My friend had found the body not far from where Juan and I were headed.

This way! Juan hollered as I slammed the truck door. We slipped and skidded down the rocky trail, Juan’s red bandana fluttering; I followed his lead. As we descended around giant boulders, he pointed out a red-tail hawk nest tucked in the crevices, white dung splattered over the rocks like Anasazi petroglyphs. Bones of small mammals lay scattered around the nest. The merciless sun glared, and I was careful to keep from pitching downward toward the river below.

Juan scrambled on, pointing to the ravens circling above us on a thermal, their guttural cries echoing off the canyon walls. As we descended, sending a flush of pebbles ahead, we hung to scrub pine and sagebrush, clutching our rod cases, sometimes using them as walking sticks to break a possible fall. When we reached the bottom, the cool river air soothed our faces. We sat on a big rock, put up our rods, and tied on some flies. I played it safe and pulled out a wooly bugger, but Juan tied a complicated double-drop with a nymph on one tippet and an elk-hair caddis on the other.

We began our ritual of leapfrogging. He fished a section, I fished a section, and then when one of us finished, we veered around the other. We worked our way upstream toward the arc of the bridge above us. In my first years of fly-fishing, I’d dreamed about it almost nightly. The smell of cottonwoods on the bank, the perfect cast, and the tug of a trout on the line. I dreamed of rivers I’d never seen and the flow of water moving against my legs. I also had nightmares of landing other creatures: bright green birds with hooks in their beaks or a horse that couldn’t untangle itself from the line. Sometimes in my dream I’d start reeling in a submerged beast, and, just when it was about to surface, I’d wake with a jerk, my heart flapping. But mostly I dreamed I was pregnant, filled with a fish growing inside me, moving to the sound of water, the river carrying us faster and faster downstream.

It was strange how fishing awakened the desire for my own spawning. The men I’d been involved with in Riojos had not worked out, however. One had died swiftly and unexpectedly from lung cancer; the other was no longer able to have children. I’d been hopeful for each of those romances. The shock, grief, and disappointment just drove me more deeply to the rivers—the fragrance of cottonwoods, the sound of water over stone. And each time I cast my fly into the current, I think I was also casting for a lasting mate.

The life-giving force of fishing, however, seemed paradoxical to that moment when a trout flupps on the line. After all, predator behavior was new to me. As I’d learned to fish, I also learned that each delicate flip of the line tied me closer to an ancient survival ritual. And each time I felt the rush of a trout on the line and the smatter in the water, I was startled by the unfamiliar elation washing through my body, as though there were something necessary about the swift violence, the death.

Juan and I fished upstream, leapfrogging toward the bridge, its trusses arching high above us like flying buttresses. I cast out over the riffles, and soon I felt that thrilling bump on the line. A silver shower scattered the air as the trout fought and splashed. I set the hook and landed him near the bank.

I blessed the fish over and over again, trying not to drop him in the sand. I blessed him partly to calm myself, partly because I was still not accustomed to the glittery package of life when I finally received it. I breathed in and out, mouthing a grace, smacked its head against a rock, and gently laid it on the fresh grass in my creel, a practice I’d learned from a friend at the Pueblo. I stood up, trembly and dazed, as if I’d just made love.

I tied on a hopper and slowly cast upstream. Just as a cutthroat rose to my fly, a sound like dynamite exploded in the middle of the river. I drew back as the bursting PLASHT echoed off the canyon walls. In a split second Juan yelled, Ruuuuuuuuun! and then Cover your head! My animal instincts were already moving my body toward the shadow of the bridge. I followed Juan as fast as I could over the slippery rocks, the fly on my line looping in the air like penmanship.

There’s kids up there! Damn them! Juan, said, out of breath. He squinted skyward. Sure enough, we could just make out the heads of two teenage boys leaning over the railing hundreds of feet above us. One of them held another huge stone over his head. When the boy let go of the small boulder it seemed to take forever to fall, like a slow-motion clip in a movie. I tried to calculate where it would land but followed Juan’s lead and froze. It finally crashed with a huge commotion just a short cast from where we stood, water rising in a violent plume. My hands shook, as if we were being hunted. Nowhere to hide. It was useless to yell over the roar of the river, so we warily watched the boys until they finally ambled to the other side of the bridge then disappeared.

We’d lost our enthusiasm, and there was nothing to do but head home. In any other place one might have reported those kids to the police, but such occurrences were common in Northern New Mexico, like lightning on the mesa, bubonic plague rampant in the prairie dogs, flash floods down the arroyos, loose horses struck by drunk drivers, or the domestic murders that never got solved. The longer I lived there, the more I was privy to the whisper of death always lurking below the surface.

I often think about that day in the Gorge—a slippery descent into a deep canyon, dodging more and more stones, and the long, slow ascent back to high ground. But that day I wasn’t dwelling on darkness; I was too busy falling in love with the glittery trout wrapped in grass in my creel, the fading light washing the Pueblo’s sacred mountain a deep lavender, and the thrill of having survived falling rocks. When we emerged onto the mesa, Juan and I laughed at what we’d eluded and popped open a couple of beers from his cooler. He said he couldn’t wait to tell his girlfriend. The only thing missing in my life, I thought, as the old truck bumped across the mesa toward town, was a good man. After five years in this intoxicating place, I needed someone with whom I could share this sky, someone to ride the river with, as my fly-fisherman grandfather used to say. It was no coincidence that the New Mexico state license plate was emblazoned with Land of Enchantment.

Chapter 3.

The Beltane Fires

WITHIN A WEEK AFTER THAT day with Juan, a painter friend asked if I’d like to meet his pal visiting from Chicago—apparently a world-class fly-fisherman—looking for angling companions in the area. You guys have a lot in common, Pasco said. Would you be willing to share a secret fishing spot or two? I think you’ll like him. I knew his father back in the day, and I’ve known Trey for years. The following Saturday I was hiking another trail to the Rio Grande, several miles downstream from the Rope Trail. This one, however, was not steep and did not include a bridge where stones could fly. It was one of my favorite places to fish; I loved the way that big river shouldered through the Gorge, a hidden pool at every bend.

Trey was a paragon of enthusiasm. We’d been talking nonstop since he’d picked me up in his red Trooper, and we arrived at the trailhead in high spirits. Tall, affable, with jet-black hair, his mind was agile and curious. Not to mention his accent. He told me he’d grown up in the Scottish Highlands. The lochs and streams taught me the language of trout! he said with a tongue-in-cheek flourish, grinning at me briefly while tying a double-hackle onto his tippet. His smile was generous, and his long fingers tied the knot with ease.

I learned he was a dealer of antiquarian books, mostly natural history. Birds in particular, but birds of prey were his specialty, he said. He’d come west to Santa Fe to appraise the library of a collector who’d recently died. "It’s a big collection and