My First Wild Ride

I'm not sure when I caught the horse bug but this was first grade and my mother knit the sweater and I picked the pattern.

Not long after that I made my way through “The Black Stallion” and I was gone. I went to a one-room school and nothing was more exciting than the arrival of the Bookmobile. Four kids were allowed to go at a time, starting with the first row. As one kid returned the next was released. I was like a horse in the starting gate and when my turn finally came I would run for that bus and go straight to the section where they kept Walter Farley. 50 years later I know right where that is. We were allowed three books apiece and I devoured them. The sequel to The Black Stallion wherein Alex goes to Arabia and ends up galloping through the desert at night on the Black’s bare back being chased by Bedouins (whatever they were) profoundly influenced my life as a reader and a horse lover.

About that time my uncle bought a black and white paint stud pony named King and put him in our pasture. I was under orders to “not fool with that pony unless someone was around.” Having been duly warned I waited until Unc was out of sight to jump on King’s back. He almost cured me of my daydreams of galloping bareback after Bedouins by immediately pitching me off over his head.

I say almost because I had one more memorable experience of that variety. My cousins Donny and Dave were five and seven years older than me. To me they were like gods. To them I was like a pet. Fun to have tag along, good for a laugh. I fetched perfectly. When Dave started dating Connie I could see it was a match made in heaven. She was beautiful, he had that DA haircut and just one eyebrow that went all the way across. He had Thunder, she had Sparky. They were a perfect match, down to their Palomino hides, Sparky and Thunder that is. Donny, I hung around the farm with constantly. Dave—not so much, you don’t just hang with a God. A not so horse related but most memorable event happened during this time. A friend of Donny‘s, Phil Atwood, who had a powder blue Chevy convertible, stopped by on a Sunday to see if Donny wanted to go to the stock car races. By some miracle they offered to take me, but my mom did something she almost never did. She said “No” and she did not waver, probably because she had Aunt Helen there as reinforcement. I was crushed. They didn’t seem to see that they were snuffing out the opportunity of a lifetime. I think there may have been talk in the kitchen that led Dave to ask if I wanted to go with him to visit Connie. Imagine how much he wanted me along on that day. We made pizza and gave the dog a bath and I never forgot it. At their 40th anniversary party I told the story and then I asked “Do you remember that at all?” Of course, neither did and I said how typical it was of them, performing an act of great kindness without giving it a thought. 

Donny had a big buckskin mare named Blondie who spent her whole life hanging around in the pasture. The only reason Donny had her was because Dave had a horse. One hot summer afternoon when I was retrieving the cows from the very far reaches of the pasture I stopped to pet Blondie and this time “Riders of the Purple Sage” popped into my mind. I coaxed her next to a big rock and hopped on. The second I hit her back she was off at a dead run. I clung to her mane in total terror. It looked like 15 feet to the ground which was strewn with boulders and we were going 50 miles an hour. She scattered the cows and beelined for the barn. She went down into a rocky draw, leaped the brook and up the other side without slowing a beat. When the ground leveled out I saw a grassy spot and I bailed. By the time I stopped rolling she had stopped and was eating grass. I had to walk back a half mile and re-gather the cows. This whole adventure was in plain sight of the barn so I was pretty sheepish when I walked in behind the last cow but no one said a word about my wild ride. I think it was just a coincidence that Connie offered to teach me to ride shortly after that but it would have been just like my Uncle Wilson to not say anything to me but say to Connie “You better teach that kid what a bridle and saddle are before he kills himself.” What I know about riding she taught me that summer and I got to do my daydreaming on Thunder––complete with bridle and saddle.