Progression

There are days that I really simply don’t feel like riding–like Friday, in which the amount of paperwork I felt I needed to do was outweighing the need to ride all of my western horses who were just going to be wild after a weekend waiting for a hunt seat show to wrap up anyway. The horses seem to understand when they don’t get worked, but coworkers and peers and supervisors never seem to be quite as forgiving when things are not turned in or completed.

Regardless, I wrapped up enough little things on my to-do list to merit getting into the barn again. I rode a set of five, keeping in the back of my mind that I would also be jumping a horse in a clinic later that evening.

I began my day with Spider, an old Appaloosa mare on trial. She had arrived at Alfred late the previous evening thanks to a long day of shipping with my friend Chilly from the ranch, driving first from Alfred to State College, then to Quakertown, then back to Alfred again. Spider was unsure in the arena and will definitely take a lot more riding. In a less-than-optimistic mood, I turned her over to the farrier for front shoes.

My next mount was R-Star, a reining mare with a reluctant and sassy streak which was not evident in this ride. Having some light maintenance done recently on her stifles, she rode out fairly nicely–she’s a talented, well-broke mare but has never really been one of my favorites; she’s not comfortable to ride nor does she seem to have much of a personality of any kind. I spent a few moments playing with her steering and brakes off just my leg and weight, weaving in and out of jump standards and other assorted hunt seat detritus in the arena. I put her up after a brief ride and dragged on to the next horse.

My next steed was Batman, a very talented reining gelding who is surprisingly light on his feet for being slightly bigger than the “average” reiner. At this point, the course for the hunt seat show had been set in the arena and he cast all sorts of hairy eyeballs at the various fences, pickets, poles and flowerboxes and I amused myself for a few minutes by playing “shoot the gap” and riding him between pieces of fences. He mellowed out a lot as we went, a small portion of the amount of mellowing-out he’s done since arriving at Alfred last spring. He’s still got a bit of a twist in his poll to the left which makes me suspect minor chiropractic issues.

The students had cleared out of the barn by now so I took advantage of the quiet arena to lunge Barbie, one of Harry’s horses, an extraordinarily petite palomino reining mare. She bolted about like a wild thing on the lunge line for a solid fifteen minutes, which is quite a long time for that kind of sustained activity. Essentially my following ride was a cool-down for her and I simply jogged and loped a bit until she had stopped blowing so hard.

Running out of time before the start of the clinic, I popped my last horse on the lunge line, old sweet Roan, old enough to be ageless yet still remarkably spry. He moved better than I had ever seen him on the line and blew off just enough steam that I felt comfortable simply slipping on his bridle and sliding on bareback for a brief hack. I was surprised as he jogged slowly around the arena that he was sounder and easier to sit to unsaddled than saddled (suggestive not only of closer connection but a poor-fitting saddle, perhaps) and even loped around easily on both leads–he’s notorious for having a terrible right lead. These are the perks of being in your mid- to upper-twenties and still reining once a week. Feeling much happier and accomplished with my day, I returned Roan to his stall and prepared myself for the jumping clinic.

The clinic was lots of fun with Pat Bostwick from Ohio, one of Nancy’s connections and friends. I rode Wow, who has been featured in this blog from time to time as a hunt-seat-trying-to-be-western horse who apparently also has a passion and knack for jumping. I had an excellent evening jumping Wow around the low course, including one tricky section with a rollback off the wall into a bending line. Hard to describe, hard to ride, but fun when we nailed it.

Six horses in as many hours. Such is life.

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.

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.