Saddle time

Today was one of those days in which, after getting some work done, I actually just got to ride around.

I’ve spent two years hacking around the hunt seat horses on occasion, warming them up for horse shows, funning around when there’s not much else to do, and this summer serving as a test rider for the judging clinic at the residential camp. Now, I’m finally learning enough to be riding the horses over fences.

There is a lot more thinking involved with these horses. I’ve observed a lot more active role played by the English riding teachers here as their students are riding and I can’t decide if it’s because their horses need more management than my own, if there is a tendency to “micromanage” in the best sense of the word, or if it’s just a style difference in teaching. I feel like all three of these things may be true–regardless, with the number of things I was told in just five minutes of riding a few days ago I felt as though I was never going to get this right.

Now, however, after today’s rides, I think things are falling into place. I rode a lovely mare called Clare over fences, who taught me to ride the horse rather than the fence, to keep pushing straight all the way to the jump, to give her support from my hands. Next I rode Murphy over the same course, a zippy Appendix who reminded me how important it was to ride not just the horse to the fence but the horse away from the fence, to keep things back under control, to sit in the corners.

In my flatwork, I hacked a variety of horses from a Quarter horse to a warmblood to a draft cross. I overheard one excellent word of advice from Nancy to one of our crossover riders: “You wouldn’t sit back like a western rider if you were on the way to a jump, would you?” With this concept in mind, I headed into my last ride of the day imagining that I was cantering up to a fence, and Nancy complimented my riding.

All that’s left now is luck of the draw.

Education

I stumbled upon an article today called “10 worst majors for your career” and found not too many surprises listed among the ten–philosophy, anthropology, various forms of fine art, and, of course, English. I knew this was a “bad” choice in terms of finding a permanent career. English is one of those self-propagating majors that seeks to create English majors who can then go out into the world to make more English majors. I’m not actually sure why. Certainly literature is awesome and it deserves to be appreciated, but realistically we’re not going to be able to singlehandedly save the classics by declaring ourselves English majors.

Of course, there were valuable skills I learned from my degree–not just things like written communication, how to sound moderately intelligent in person or on paper, how to edit, how to find the hidden meanings in things, how to read between the lines, and even a little bit of human psychology (it’s impossible to read THAT many novels and not start to understand how people think and react and lie), but also things like how to debate, how to network, how to make suggestions without being mean about it, how to take charge in a group conversation, how to listen and accept advice. All of these things are hugely important in almost any career path I could choose.

Like in my current job as western teacher/trainer for a university. I write about two dozen emails minimum a day, mostly to students but also to coworkers, superiors, and campus peers. I teach horseback riding, so I need not only a knowledge of horses, riding and developing horsemanship, but the ability to communicate these ideas verbally. I coach a team, so I need to not only develop horsemen but also plan shows, manage the team, motivate, inspire and coordinate. My responsibilities beyond the equestrian center are increasing gradually so my ability to communicate with other non-equestrians needs to remain sharp and clear.

I’m also creating ways for me to keep my writing skills fresh. I’ve written a number of articles about the equestrian program at Alfred (shameless advertising, but a good way for me to get my foot in the door regarding publications) and have been published in Today’s Equestrian, the IEA magazine Take the Reins, and finally what I consider a first real big step into writing, Ranch & Reata. I write a weekly column for the blog HorseNation and attempt to come up with a new “western” topic every week (hello, overwhelming.)

Still, most of the writing I’m doing is still riding on the coattails of my actual job. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but does throw into the light the fact that I’m in a fairly tenuous career path right now that can evaporate quickly–sure, I have a decent amount of job security right now, but in an extraordinarily specialized field. I would guess that there are maybe 200 jobs like mine across the country, teaching horsemanship at the collegiate level. I do not have the connections or start-up capital to start my own equestrian business. Without the university, I’m no one. I was not well-prepared for the job that I have now–nor, realistically, was I prepared for any job at all. Do I really want to do horses as a job? I speculated when taking this job that I would find out if I really wanted to do this or not, and I’m still not sure.

I don’t blame the University for this, necessarily. Instead, I will quote this blogger that I found, a lovely source of comfort for these moments of academic self-doubt:

The problem isn’t the degree. Rather, it’s the English faculty who lack knowledge and experience on their part. They don’t realize that, because teaching is all that they know or understand, they cannot tell students such as you all the possibilities an English degree embraces. They simply don’t realize how many other options are out there in the real world.

The faculty I worked with as an undergraduate were fabulous people. But like my slightly-stuffy and mostly-doddery grandfather, they’re living out their lives in academia–not the real world. Like a lot of fine artists, they don’t like to imagine the mundane humdrum part of the world, the part that says we do need to work for money sometimes.

So here ends my vacation of linguistic drifting, snoozing comfortably within the cocoon of my “day job.” It’s time to build up my writing and editing chops again, get myself back into shape, force myself to write more, search more, find places to publish, people for whom to edit, ways to get those connections. I can definitely use that degree in English. I’ll just have to get a little creative.

That said, this is really just a bit elaborate lead-in to the fact that I’m going to be starting NaNoWriMo again in less than 48 hours. One novel, one month. It never needs to see the light of day again. What will I write about? I have a hundred different ideas.

It’s good to be back.

English

This is the prep week for getting all of the horses slightly fit for residential camp, which begins on Sunday. My little string of horses to work includes Tres, Wow, my mother’s former pony Evie and Scotch, a perpetually-green paint gelding. I’ve been working all of these horses hunt seat and doing a little bit of jumping, getting back to my own “roots.” Even Tres has been popping over some little crossrails with much more panache than he demonstrated back in January.

Among these four, Scotch has been my special project for a few years–I stuck up for him when no one liked him as a western horse and then showed everyone what he would be capable of as a hunter. Last summer Becca supervised me attempting to start him over fences–generally, he’s got a pretty good attitude about it, he just forgets to do things like pick all four legs up. Or, my personal favorite, he has so much attitude and personal pride about actually making it over the fence without knocking it down that he lands, slams on the brakes, throws his head down and hops. He managed to buck me off last summer with this maneuver and he managed it a second time today.

The first fence, he cleared, threw his head down and propped hard–I, naturally, shrieked, as I do, lost both stirrups, slid way off to one side, clawed my way back to center as Scotch threw his head up and thought about accelerating, slammed my face into his mane and then wound up sitting on his neck as he trotted away. I threw myself back into the saddle as Scotch began to pick up speed and yanked him into a tiny circle, amazed with my own brilliance.

“That’s not going to work a second time…” I warned Becca.

“You’re fine. Do it again.”

“No, really. I’m going to come off if it happens again.”

“Go do it again.”

Apparently my attempts to warn Becca that I absolutely 100% knew this was going to end poorly and that obviously we were overfacing either me or Scotch or both, I figured that maybe she did know best and maybe somehow it wouldn’t happen this time. Needless to say, it happened again and true to form I simply fell off as Becca laughed at me. Fortunately I had succeeded in getting my point across and she very kindly lowered the fence for me to jump a few more times with much better results.

Beth, our lovely new barn manager, came out to observe Becca riding Merlot and me riding Wow, and she showed me a few very simple training exercises that made a huge difference in Wow’s form. It was nice to stand and chat with someone experienced who was pretty mellow about teaching–she wasn’t showing off her knowledge or taking the stance of “trainer” but just sharing some things she thought were pretty neat, which I appreciated a lot. She’s a lot of fun to have around. After Wow had been put through his paces I stood chatting with Beth in the center of the ring, sharing my cross-country experiences from the Bitterroot and the thrills of galloping the course in a line of five, flying over obstacles as the colts thundered along on either side, running with the jumpers.

 

I’m coming to realize with each passing week that I live “at” the Holler that the most interesting people come through here. Not just the clientele, which is varied and eclectic, but the people who pass through to work for a few weeks, a stop on some crazy organic cross-country tour–not unlike the ranch in some ways. Becca and I went to the Holler last night for pizza and wine and wound up spending the entire night at the bar chatting with my next-door-neighbor Micky and their new “intern” of sorts named Jamie from Cornwall, England. Micky spent a large part of the night telling us the story of himself and his wife-to-be and mother-of-his-son-to-be-in-a-few-months Tammy, which had us transfixed and beaming like a fairytale. Jamie has a summer-long work visa and is simply hopping around the country from cool job to job; he’s here for about three weeks before his next adventure at a farm somewhere in Ohio. He told us a sweet story about an old lady in Elmira who adopted him for an afternoon after listening to him play guitar; she showed him around to the library and made sure he was back at the bus stop in time. He’s lodged right across the dirt road from me though it seems unlikely I’ll see too much more of him–he did just go bouncing across Micky’s lawn in a golf cart but he looked a bit busy.

I had forgotten how much exposure, if fragmented, I’d had to British culture every single summer for the past six years, until now. Say what you want about stereotypically attractive English accents; to me, they sound a little bit like a home away from home, the old sound of the summers on the ranch.