Thursday, December 31, 2009

Welcome to My Blog - Lessons from the Rescue

Welcome to My Blog – Lessons from the Rescue
For as long as I can remember I have been horse crazy. I grew up at the Jersey shore during the era of the TV western. It was a great place to grow up, only minutes from the beach, but it wasn’t exactly horse country. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Roy Rogers and Gene Autry riding across the small black and white screen and wishing I lived at a time or in a place where horses were in everyone’s back yard.

My earliest experiences with horses were not all that positive. My parents weren’t very well to do and didn’t have the money to give me riding lessons. I befriended a girl in town who owned a horse. She was a homely girl with thick, coke bottle glasses and acne and she was lonely. The first time I rode her horse; it ran off and dumped me on the way back to the barn. I broke my wrist and spent two months in a cast. That ended the friendship but not my enthusiasm for horses.

In college I took lessons at a local farm. Because I didn’t have the money to pay for lessons, I bargained with the owner to swap barn work for the opportunity to ride a big bay gelding. I rode him until he shied at something while we were walking back to the barn after a trail ride and dumped me. I bruised my coccyx bone and didn’t sit comfortably for several weeks. About the time I felt well enough to begin riding again, I fell while throwing straw bails out of the hay loft and tore cartilage in my left knee. That ended my riding for several years but it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for horses.

It wasn’t until I had my first non-teaching job that I was able to afford riding lessons again. I rode twice a week at a local stable in a class for beginners. I was the oldest person in the class by at least 20 years. I might have felt a little silly among all those children but I came faithfully and eventually I developed a feel for riding a horse. Nevertheless, I wanted more. I wanted a horse I could have a relationship with, a horse I didn’t have to share with other lesson riders, a horse of my very own.

The first horse I had to myself was a horse I leased from a girl who had gone to college. He was a bay thoroughbred, heavy on his forehand with a hard mouth and was prone to quitting when asked to jump. Still, he taught me a lot about basic horse handling and when the lease was up, I was ready to jump into horse ownership. By dumb luck I found Max, a nine year old chestnut appaloosa gelding, who had been brought by his owner to college and then abandoned when she fell in love. I purchased him for $1700 and for the next 23 year he was my partner and friend.

Max was 32 years old when he died. Since he was 7/8ths thoroughbred, I thought it would be a good thing to get a rescued thoroughbred as my next horse. I worked with a local horse rescue and adopted a 12 year old grandson of Seattle Slew named ReadytoGo. It was not a successful adoption. Ready was a beautiful horse but he was way too much horse for me. I wasn’t a confident enough rider for him and he sensed my apprehension. He shied at nothing and I never was able to ride him outside of the riding ring. After working with him for nine months, my confidence was shattered. One day I sat down on my tack trunk, looked at my riding instructor and said, “I don’t want to do this anymore. This horse is going to kill me.”

I think that is when I first realized that I didn’t just want to be a horse owner, I wanted to be a real horsewoman, someone who understood what makes a horse tick. I wanted to know enough to be able to work confidently with a horse like Ready and have us both make progress. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that with Ready. I had too much to learn and he had too many issues so I donated him back and found a six year old paint whose disposition was more suited to my own. Then I found a different horse rescue in the area where I lived and began to volunteer my time. The director of the rescue told me about a guy named Pat Parelli, a practitioner of natural horsemanship and I was on my way.

This blog is a record of my journey to become a better horsewoman. It will not be a chronological record but it will tell the story of what I am learning along the way. I hope you will follow along with my journey.