Special Delivery

We got a new pony delivered at two in the morning after a late night Dodger Game hobbling on a broken toe. Also it was the wee hours of Aug 19th, the day my son was born 21 years ago. Also my son was there.

That's some pretty sweet shit. When the guy pulled up finally, 12 hours behind schedule, he didn't get out of the truck which I thought was weird. He said the halter's in the back, and it took me awhile to figure out if it was in the truck or where and then he told me to go ahead and get the baby out. 

It's weird to go into someone else's trailer, it's like you wouldn't just open anyone's trunk especially someone you've only met twice, when he delivered horses 5 and 2 years ago. I open up the back and there's the little white baby deer, Meriwether, looking at me like oh hey I was wondering where you were all my life. All his four month life.

He jumps right out of the trailer and we can't believe how tiny he is, this is the first horse I've been up close to so little as my actual horse with tiny baby feet and soft baby fur. 

Then the guy is coming around the trailer and he's pushing a WALKER, and can barely WALK. I feel so bad that I was mad how late he was, and the last time he delivered a horse it was on Christmas morning, at like 3 am, and I even gave him a tip like, thanks for being late AND ruining Christmas. But then how many times do you get a horse delivered on Christmas. 

I think maybe this is the last time he's delivering horses for me. First because next time he'd be in a wheelchair apparently, and b because I'm only going to pick up my own horses from now on, I can see the truck and trailer section of my life is about to begin. My horsemanship is growing, I've evolved. 

Also I don't need any more horses. But it is addictive.

So Meri has been with us two weeks almost. He is a thoughtful, loving, funny, fluffy little guy. I was worried the guy had to next go pick up a draft horse and drive it to New Jersey. A draft horse is like a truck and trailer all on its own, and this guy can't even walk well. I hoped he would be okay.

My little wispy Meriwether is poking around loftily, not knowing that he has landed in the softest spot in the universe. 

Just like Nathan did, 21 years ago. I still have him, too.

anew

 Man, haven't been on here in awhile.

The horses have been less write-worthy, because they are serving a purpose which is ride me away from dementia mom care. So there's no time to write when you're deep in the jungle by the creek or out in the barn brushing a little bit of dust off.

Life is all functiony out there, that's the miracle. Things need water, and things need attention. 

Lately I've been looking at getting a foal because maybe things need to start anew. I've never done anew. It might a nice.

Or maybe we should go to Europe.

Or both.

Dangle

 I stand in water. Well the horse stands in water and my feet dangle above. 

Water and creek with jungle plants all around. I ride to go stand in water and then I ride back and then everything seems better.

The horses have not ever told me one thing.

They just go where I go because usually the place we end up is a good place, and I always bring them back to a safe place to eat. Home.

They're happy with the journey.

They take my drowned heart and we go to the water and release it into the muck and it swims around regenerating til healed and then we walk back new and this lasts at least 24 hours. I am not healed all the way through. But I am comforted, and the sun feels good, and the horses smell good, and my feet dangle.

This is important for a tall person.

Listen

I'm riding with this insane person well he's just left of insane, he's definitely in the turn lane heading toward it. He's been riding with me 2 months straight with his horse, and riding with me and my horses since August, so like six mos.

There is something about this relationship, where I never look at him, we are never face to face, in fact that would be weird. We are a voice either in front or behind, sometimes next to. We are always running, lately, we are trying out running with thundering fast feet under our own dangly ones.

I didn't run this much on my horse as a kid, and I certainly never ran this much using my own body.

There is something about the feel of the air with this companion and these horses, that dares us to just go. It's a certain meshing of safety, chaos, logic, dare, exhilaration, fright, happiness. I never pressed this level on my horse, it is a new level. He is much more comfortable at this level than I am but he has never sat in a hospital with a broken pelvis and ribs.

I am liking who I am, and how the world is shaping up around me. I am aware that I must do more to further my path. I must indeed hack away at all the weeds, even the scratchy mean ones, which is just the part of me that I don't use the most. That's what it is, with this new riding level, it is untried, so it is silent and huge and scary. I should realize that I am slogging through this world and it is all here for me, to pick through, and remember and choose my path and doggedly and faithfully be myself.
And listen.

Gilligan is on His Way

Because I'm stupid, there's a new horse coming here next week. Not my horse, but because I will do anything to avoid writing, I decided this guy who comes to ride with me needed his own horse and even though we've only  known each other a few months, he is now going to have his own horse and keep it at my house.

I don't actually NEED another horse here at my house. I have plenty of children and chickens and dogs and horses. Except the children seem to be leaving, one by one. In the way that apparently children do, in normal homes, like it's no big deal. I'm not having the easiest time with this. Why do people need to go and do things?

I will try and not fill up the holes entirely with horses and horse related products. I could maybe learn to sell my writing, or be kinder to people or share myself a little more. I don't really know what I'm doing here if not for children, and horses have always sort of kept me buoyant, even in the worst of times. Even if I'm in the hospital from lack of buoyancy from falling from horses.

My body is getting older, it's telling me. I'm only 53. The numbers are silly, but they are telling me, your time is running thin, lady. There's still much to do.

We'll start with pairing this horse and this human. This horse has a Gilligan personality and so does the owner. I like the pairing, and the happily ever after which includes much work. But the trail's the thing. It might not cure the baby bye bye blues, or cure anything, but I don't go there to cure I just go to breathe.

Dude Ranch

Lately I've been taking out some guest riders. I get bored and put my craigslist ad for trail riding and I usually get some fat ladies who used to ride as kids but are missing horses. Not always fat, but I did have to put a weight limit in my ad after the last one. Dewey has ballerina ankles.

The latest two have been guys, Armenian Bakery Owner and Medi-Vac Helicopter pilot with a side of throat cancer.

I don't usually ride with guys because what if they murder me so I told them to meet me up at the school. The only other dude who came to ride was Travis the Fireman (an actual person) and he was everything you'd expect in a fireman. Tall, polite, sweet and I never saw him again. Although he did talk to Nathan about becoming a fireman.

So I didn't know for sure if the Armenian Bakery dude was a dude because his name was Cartin and isn't that a container? But he was for sure a guy and I took the dogs since I thought that might be a deterrent to murder if he had that on his mind. He paid me his 40 bucks and signed his life away on my waiver and then got on Dewey the most patient guest riding horse there is. Dewey sighed and got to work. Cartin looked short but then once on I had to adjust his stirrups for longer legs. The man is like all head, like his head is like the size of storage locker, and apparently the rest is legs. Fresh Bread makes this kind of person.

The trail is good for Cartin, who is actually a really nice guy once I realized he wasn't in it for the killing. He loves to be outside, he makes his kids camp and fish, and he wanted to ride to "shut down" as he put it. I don't usually shut down on horseback because that sounds like a safety hazard, but he's right that the anxious city me does shut down and the regular life outdoors me opens up and allows breeze and trees and birds and morning light. Cartin was someone I didn't quite know how much to talk - riding with a stranger is sort of like getting a massage, you cringe when your masseuse starts talking, the whole point is to NOT talk. But you're moving through the world on a beast, so you have to have SOME talk or it's weird, so on a date scale, not too much talking, not awkward with silence, maybe not the person you want to spend your whole life with, but as a ride, it was like a solid 5. Just sort of boringly just right.

Then that same week came Drew, who because of his name had no choice BUT to become a helicopter medi-vac pilot, who is a huge animal lover and whose texts were full of Awesomes! Because of the chopper I thought in person would he yell all his conversations? In person, he was like someone you'd meet at an AA meeting - all tatted up, skinny, looks like he lives on coffee, whose voice is scratchy like someone ran over Bette Davis because he had throat cancer - but I can't say one mean thing about Drew because when I meet Drew, I am in instant love. No, man, as riding buddies go, he's the perfect match. First of all, I don't know him, so there's plenty to talk about. He's someone who LOOKS like someone I might be scared of normally, but he's straightforward, smart, kind, whimsical, has a weird job, has a kid my kid's age, thinks rich people who rent his helicopter are wasteful, had an actual LUNG in an ice chest riding shotgun next to him.

Drew's dream is to have a few horses of his own and get a ranch in New Mexico and be in the quiet. Lots of riders come to me that are trying out horses to see if they can do it, and I feel lucky to be here in our busy city to help aim anyone in the direction of riding and wilderness. So Drew and I do a few rides, one in the little trail nearby and one out in the water where I know he will be dying of happiness. My friend Linette says that there's something funny about taking people on trail and only talking to someone about important things when you never have to look them in the eye. That's why I function best on trail, you can say whatever you want, what is said on the trail stays on the trail. You're sort of suspended in mid air with your legs dangling, this causes all sorts of freedom of speech.

Wild wanderings these days on trails I know pretty well. Although the huge winter rains here swelled up the river and when it came back down, it's all changed so now it flows a whole different way. The water trail through the woods I used to ride all the time is now all sand, like it never existed.

But the same river is only a few feet away, doing a different path. That's the one I'm on now.

Wobbles

So three in the morning the dogs were barking and I thought is someone breaking in or something?

I go out and there's nothing, but I think I hear Maggie the mare who has figured out how to get out the tiny gate and into the chicken area and eat all the chicken food and then come over into the backyard where I'm worried she'll fall in the pool so I go out to make sure she's not causing trouble.

I hear water gushing so I'm like dammit Maggie, she must've broken a water pipe and I go into their area and there's a flood happening but I caught it early so I go over to the water pipe and there's no one to help so I do what Tim taught me which is look at the base of the pipe for a shut off valve and it looks like there's one buried in the dirt so I'm kneeling in wet dirt in my boxers and digging with my fingers in hard dirt and I get the valve and will it by some miracle actually shut off the water? And it moves and it DOES! I am amazed at myself for finally fixing a boy thing somehow on my own in the middle of the night and the flood is not so bad thanks to the dogs for waking me up now instead of later. So I clean up horse poop barefoot since I'm already out there and I hate a mess and there's my boarder's horse, an OTTB, laying right next to the flood and not seeming to care, sleeping, so I just go back to bed after dipping my feet in the pool.

Then I hear again the sound of horse hooves hitting metal piping and I'm thinking dammit Maggie she is really getting into the chicken area now so I get back up and go out and there's the boarder horse, and he's flinging himself all around in the dirt like crazily. I watch him, frozen, because this is weird. He's laying down like a normal horse but then he can't get up. He rolls and it's like his legs aren't working, he flops and throws himself to get up and his legs just don't work, they don't belong to him, they aren't reaching under him to help him up like normal. I think oh shit he got his leg stuck under that water pipe and broke his leg. Something is so wrong.

So I have to wake up my boarder and knocking softly on anyone's door at 3 am is not the thing anyone wants to do or hear.

She comes out and we watch this horse fling himself all over and then I start getting worried because he's going to hit the water heater or the wall or break everything and himself - a 1200 pound whale flailing around in a too small corral is a disaster movie.

I tell her to call her vet because we need a sedative, and she calls him and her old cigarette smelling cowboy ex boyfriend and the cowboy shows up.

We again try and understand what has happened, checking the horse's legs, which all seem to be intact, and trying to get the horse up, and trying to angle him for safety while trying to stay out of his way.

After 2 hours and some sedative and no vet, we get him shakily standing. He's like a baby who is just learning to walk he has no balance at all.

The sun is suddenly coming up and I go back to bed for an hour and then the vet comes and it is a stroke or a broken vertebrae and I'm thinking how do they get dead horses out of backyards? Because are we having to put him to sleep and he is huge.

The horse looks like a boxer with swollen eyes and cuts and swelling all over his body from his fight with balance and the ground. The boarder and I have tried to remain calm and figure out what to do.

In the next six days he stays in one small area, and eats and drinks and barely walks. One time he's standing and we're watching him and he just falls over suddenly. But after that he manages to stay on his feet and slowly start to walk funny, tiny steps with a weak back end, all mismatched weirdly like the kind of walk you do in a horse costume when one person's the head and another is the butt and nobody knows where you're going.

The vet says he has a 50/50 chance of making it.

My horse licks his knees. My boarder thinks it's because he's a healing horse but I think it's because he had some food on his knees. Maybe it's both. Except I know my horse. He's a kindhearted horse, but more than that he loves food.

She has an animal communicator out even though she hasn't been able to pay her rent. I try not to laugh but I'm getting now a little bit worried. And I'm open to voodoo shit, sure, that's cool, but animal communicator is the one thing that can be totally made up and no horse is going to tell you anything different. Because they can't talk. She could in fact be making it ALL up.

My horse comes up to her and she says the horse is showing her on her body all the places where the boarder horse is hurt. I'm thinking my horse is checking your pockets for snacks. But. Okay.

She tells us the chickens are happy.

THE CHICKENS ARE HAPPY. Of course the chickens are happy. Their brain is the size of one sand. No doubt they are happy.

She then gives an expensive laundry list of all the things we have to do for stroke horse, and my boarder who never listens to anything I have to say even though she is new to horses, she suddenly wants to do everything this quack who is talking to my chickens wants her to do.

I told her no I will not electrify my fences. No I will not feed special hay. No - have you looked at my horses? My horses are fat, healthy and happy. I will continue to do what I am doing to give them the life that is obviously working. Overworking in fact.

I am sorry for her huge, ill-used ex racetrack thoroughbred who was hard used and then thrown out, and then romantically adopted by her with the thought that you can love anything into being better. We had a feral dog that I did the same thing with and he was never normal. He just cost a lot less to feed, and a dog is not a horse. A horse is a partner and unless you're rich, not a great pet to upkeep. Especially if you're not riding him.

I'm hoping she will find him a home with a big pasture where he can stretch his long legs and be a companion horse for someone else's horse. That is a horse's ultimate dream anyway. To just hang out in a meadow and not have to do anything. Heck that's MY dream.

In the meantime I will try not to be mean in the meantime because she is a nice person and we need the rent too, and her horse isn't dangerous. But I hope she will do what he needs, and maybe we'll see where we all end up. This horse was not the ideal companion on the trail anyway, maybe he's best resting the rest of his life. I have hope for him.

Wobbles, the stroke horse. Still standing. So far.