Namaste

“Do you write?” she asked.

What? Words? Do I know how? What does she mean?! When posed a question and unwilling or unsure how to answer, ask, “Why do you ask?”

“It just came to me.” I’m thinking divine guidance. Which part of me says, ‘stuff and nonsense’ but most of me, the hopeful me, the trusting me, the me I most would like to be is a believer. A true unmitigated believer in miracles, prophets, magic, happy endings…Sadly, I quit my spiritual practice years ago. Like 13 years ago. No, even before the beginning of the Years of Loss and Devastation. I always wanted to be able to read people’s minds. I believed that meditation was part of the key to this particular skill. Then I decided that I didn’t actually give a crap about what people were thinking, what I really wanted was the power to control other people’s thoughts and actions. You see, things would be much better if I ruled the world. But life started falling into place for me, I had a good job, made decent money, had a great place to live, met a great man (or so I thought) and decided it was too much work learning how to bend the will of others to my own. So I gave it up. Also a passing thought that maybe world domination wasn’t the healthiest goal in spiritual practice.

So, do I write? No. Because what could I possibly have to write about? Except maybe my life as a sit-com. Or comedy of errors. Then I remembered that someone else had told me to write in a similar fashion and had even given me a subject – ‘relationship/partnering with horses and what horses, and my horse in particular had to teach humans’. However, I always thought (still do, actually) that writing should have a point. Now it’s been over ten years, that horse is gone and I still don’t know what the point is.

I do know that strange things happen and that particular horse saved my sanity when I was living in hell. That particular horse had a name – strange story. So, when I got him his name was Don Juan. Well, I didn’t like that. What would I call him? Donnie? That wouldn’t work – bad childhood memories. Juan? He was a Hannoverian/thoroughbred cross for god’s sake – German breeding. So I tried out a couple of names and nothing seemed to fit.

Before I agreed to take him (he was free because he had a “stopping” problem) he stayed in my trainer’s barn. I worked for her feeding, cleaning stalls, exercising horses, riding for sales videos in exchange for cheap rent and board and riding lessons. His paddock was next to a palpation chute that we used for hiding trash cans. I go to get him one day – I’ve got 45 minutes before I have to go back to work – and he’s taken the lids off all three cans, stomped on some of them and spread trash everywhere. My first thought, “You butthead.” Then I spent most of my 45 minutes cleaning up the mess he made.

So I ride him a few times and learn that riding up to a gate causes rearing and running backwards whether you intend to open the gate or not (butthead). New jumps cause three stops while the fourth attempt will be flawless, remember the stopping problem? (butthead) Lead changes must only be done two legs at a time never all four at once unless accompanied by bucking (Butthead).

Naturally, I was in love and took him home with me, all the way at the other end of my trainer’s riding arena, where joy of joys there is an automatic waterer. A tiny, little one with a lever that the horse pushes to make more water come out. No more spending my Sundays emptying a one hundred gallon water trough, scrubbing it with a brush and patiently waiting for it to refill. Just swish, swish and I’m done! I can even clean it on a work day if I want. So I watch him to make sure he can make the water come out. I feed him. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. I feed him again (this part happens a lot, where I feed horses). I pet his extra large head and trundle off to work. The barn where I galloped racehorses at the time was just a few miles down the road so I used to come home for lunch (usually two of them, I can be a bottomless pit sometimes). And there is my beautiful new horse playing with the lever as torrents of water flow over his feet, through his paddock, across my yard and into my neighbor’s field. I get out of my truck and his eyes get all big and he turns away from his waterer and he says to me, “Wow, would you look at this mess? What do you think happened here?” All Mr. Innocent. So I drag my hundred gallon water trough out of the shed, fill it up, turn off the cute, little, easy to clean waterer and call my neighbor to tell him not to water the alfalfa in his back lot because my BUTTHEAD horse did it for him. AND I only had time for one lunch that day.

And that’s how my horse came to be called Butthead.

He really was quite a good horse. Maybe a little quirky.

I moved to hell to be with some guy. He “wanted” me, he “needed” me…What was I thinking? I find myself wondering that quite a lot actually. But he asked me, so I went. To my credit, the place wasn’t billed as hell when he talked about moving there. No, it was billed as a place of happy childhood memories for him, something he needed to do, clean up his grandmother’s house and property after she passed away so that “we” could sell it. Strangely, after I made the decision to go with him my landlord sold my house from around me so I needed a new place to live anyway. The landlord was really a pretty nice guy and tried to get the new owners to keep me on to help with their horses. Did I mention that I’ve never really had a terribly conventional lifestyle? I had a decent barn apartment (when the heater worked or it wasn’t cold) and a place for my horse to live (I also had a dog and a cat and yes, that is also a theme in my life) in exchange for feeding and exercising his two mares. They were both pretty, little chestnut quarter horses. Butthead TOWERED over them. He used to sample from the tops of their feeders when he walked by. In the evenings the girls would trot in from the pasture to their pens in the barn for dinner and in the mornings I’d let them out. When Butthead and I first moved in there the landlord was concerned about him being out with the girls. He was worried about how much bigger my horse was than his mares. But he was a just and kind king.

Also there was his abnormally large head. Frankly, I didn’t realize how big his head was until I tried to make my bridle fit him. I had to punch holes to the very ends of the cheek pieces and take the brow band off. Until an Olympic medalist was cleaning out her tack room and gave me a nice bridle that actually fit him. I wonder if she ever realized how important that gift is to me. I still have it.

Anyway, the first morning we’re there I turn out the girls and my horse protests. Nothing crazy. Just loud, a little bit of trotting back and forth, lots of whinnying and complete disinterest in breakfast. I watched him for a while to see if he is going to hurt himself but hey – I gotta go to work. I come from a business where there’s always someone waiting to take your place and maybe for a little less pay – no benefits, no weekends, if you didn’t work holidays you didn’t get paid and if you did work a holiday you certainly didn’t get paid anything extra. I was almost thirty years old before I got my first Christmas bonus. I fell down from shock. So my horse is upset that I turned his girlfriends out without him and they had known each other for maybe 12 hours so they were tight. He’s not doing anything dangerous so I go inside and watch from my window and there’s no change. Remember that my window is barely four feet from his paddock. I walk away from the window to finish getting ready for work and lo, the noise ceases. Naturally, I panic. I run back to the window to see if he’s inadvertently killed himself but he’s peacefully munching on his hay. He sees me in the window and he goes off again. So I test the phenomenon. I step back from the window, two whinnies then peace. Move to the window – pandemonium. Away from the window – solitude. You get the idea. That horse was totally playing me.

I seem to have this uncanny ability to acquire animals that are smarter than me. Although I did see through his con and I left him there without a single iota of guilt so maybe I’m smarter than I think.

So, I’m moving to hell. I’m getting ready to go and I look out and Butthead is laying down. I go out to check on him and he gets up, but I know he’s not right so I call my vet. Luckily we’re friends and I know her pretty well and more importantly she knows me and my horse. I tell her he’s colicking and how soon can you be here? “What’s he doing?” she asks.

Now this stops me in my tracks. Because at this point he looks perfectly normal and all he really was doing before was laying down. I’ve been around. I’ve dealt with colics and I know that a horse resting quietly that gets up when you approach isn’t necessarily colicking. “He layed down and when I looked closer he jumped up,” I tell her. My brain is churning making up reasons why I know he’s colicking during that silence you get when you tell someone something that doesn’t make sense and could potentially be a ‘crazy’ kind of statement. And many blessings heaped upon my friend and vet, she asks me, “When have you ever seen him laying down?” Eureka! That’s it! “Never.” I have never seen this horse laying down in the last year or so that I’ve had him. Does he lay down? Of course – he leaves evidence in his paddock. I’ve seen dirt on his knees, but never once have I seen him laying down.

She was there in less than ten minutes. A little different than dealing with my Southern veterinarians: “Well, what breed is your horse?” Really? “Well, I guess if you really want me to, I could come out and take a look.” Seriously? Get out here and you’re not just going to look at him, you’re going to drug him up and tube and oil him and fix him, dammit!

Butthead made it through that incident just fine. He was pretty irritated with me for a while. Colic can be a tricky thing, so after all his drugs wore off, several hours after everyone else got fed, he had his dinner served up to him in tiny fragments throughout the night. Fun for both of us. Full nights of uninterrupted sleep are completely overrated.

I gotta say that feeding times were joyous occasions when he felt well. It would start with a whinny when I stumbled out of the house in the morning. Not a cute, little ‘hello, good morning’ type nicker but a full throated, wake the dead kind of yell. He sounded like the dinosaur from the Land of the Lost. You know, that tv show where the family drives the car down a sink hole and ends up in a paradise except for the carnivorous beasts and sleestaks? Or maybe you don’t. I remembered the sound from the opening credits but I had to look up the part about the sleestaks. Anyway, there would be a pause while I prepared the meal and as soon as I came into view with it the whinnying would begin in earnest, followed by some head tossing and a little bit of prancing and a lot of pawing and stomping of hooves. When his bucket was placed before him he’d plow into it with one more hoof stomp and two steps sideways then he wouldn’t come up for air.

Most horses take a few mouthfuls, pick up their heads, look around, chew, take another bite, look around. Not him. That nose would go straight into the bucket and stay plastered there until it was licked clean. Twice a day for years, that was how he ate. (Pay attention that last part will be important later). I used to tell him what a horrible voice he had and did he really have to use it at the very top of his lungs? Funny what you miss most when it’s gone. Feeding times are quiet and peaceful now. Every once in a while James will nicker a little, he sounds kind of like an outboard boat motor. James used to be my youngest, then he was my middle horse and Port was the biggest brother. Port rarely ever utters a sound.

A couple of times I teased Butthead a little and brought his grain out then just stood nearby with it so I could watch him carry on for a while. He was really very entertaining. But as I’ve said, he was also very smart and he’d do his food dance and then he’d look at me with this cold calculating look in his eye and get all quiet. It scared me. I only withheld his food from him for funzies twice. I thought maybe the consequences for teasing him might be more than I could cope with.

After I was told the landlord was thinking about selling the property but before I realized such a sale was imminent, I was enjoying some peace and quiet at home when I started hearing things. It was this repetitive, squeaky, whiney sound. Not mechanical. Annoying. Crazy-making. When the dog started paying attention to the back wall of my apartment I decided it wasn’t in my head, she could hear it and be annoyed by it too. After I pulled the fridge and the stove away from the wall, we decided that it wasn’t coming from inside. So we scouted the storage area against the back wall and there, in the bucket of the tractor is this little orange, tiger striped cat having her fifth kitten. Thank god it wasn’t mice.

Part of me thinks, oh how sweet! I want a little tortoise shell kitten, part thinks, that noise better stop or I can’t be held accountable for my actions and the part that actually did something about the situation got a towel, some water and a bowl of cat food. The next day they were all gone. The tractor bucket probably wasn’t really the best place to be raising babies anyway. My warring selves start going at it again. They’ve plagued me for most of my existence. On the one hand there’s Yay! They’re gone – not my responsibility! On the other hand, Poor babies, out in the cold! They need food, shelter, neutering and spaying. I should be the provider of such luxuries!

I was pretty sure my cat, Bucket wouldn’t have approved of another cat in the house, let alone six of them. The dog would have been thrilled to have more friends. Butthead believed he was above all these petty concerns.

When I got home from work that day the mother cat met me in the driveway, braving the truck and the dog, meowing her fool head off (I live in the South now, I can say that). Believe it or not, she pulled a Lassie and led me to the new hiding place for her kittens. She wouldn’t let me touch her but was happy to let me check out her kittens and bring her more food and water. Every couple of days she’d move her kittens then show me where they were. My favorite place was in the manger of the landlord’s horse trailer. Man, that had to be a lot of work carrying five kittens one at a time in your mouth, climbing up through a horse trailer window and into the manger with no thumbs.

I made an appointment to take the little family in to the humane society a day or two before I planned to move to hell but she moved them again. I told the new owner about them, hoping that she would find them and take care of them. I was all packed and ready to go. It was dark out and I was several hours behind schedule. Butthead was loaded up in my little horse trailer that he didn’t really fit in, Bucket was panicking in her crate and the dog was relieved that she was coming with us. I was getting in my truck to drive away when the mother cat came out of a culvert to show me where her kittens were. I cried all the way to the highway. I didn’t take it as an omen. I probably should have.

When I got to my new home there was no paddock for my horse. I had been assured that there would be a nice pipe corral all safe and ready for him. There was not. I ended up putting him in the yard. It had a chain link fence, bordered on one side by the house and on another side the detached garage. There wasn’t a lot of junk scattered around but there were a lot of rocks. Boxes and crates of them, piles of them, jumbles. After a few days the pipe pen was finally acquired and then laid there outside the chain link. Questions regarding safe housing for my horse were met with irritation. Then Butthead broke a window scratching his ass on it. My pipe corral was up and ready to go in a matter of hours.

Of course I was the one who had to pay to fix the window. Funny how all the rules changed. That guy lived with me for months and I never asked him for a penny. I paid the rent but since I worked in exchange for housing, I guess he thought that meant free. I paid the utilities and bought food. Cooked it. Dealt with the landlord, “How many people do you have living there?” See, he wasn’t the first stray I’d taken in. I let another ‘friend’ stay with me when her boyfriend broke up with her and she couldn’t stay in their house any longer. ‘The Guy’ was only there for a few days before ‘The Friend’ left to move back in with her parents. I, like the fool that I am, cosigned for her to buy a stereo at Circuit City. Months, maybe a year later I get a phone call about why am I past due on my account. “What are you talking about?” I say. Well, I figured it out and I called her to say that this is my credit too that she’s mucking up and I’m happy to help her but would prefer to do it in thirty or forty dollar increments, please don’t wait until they want three hundred dollars. She was very apologetic and she’d take care of it and I was so pleased that she knew I was still her friend and I knew that she wouldn’t ever put me in such a tight spot again. I wasn’t making a whole lot of money then, ‘barely getting by’ springs to mind. I didn’t have three hundred dollars laying around to pay off someone else’s debt.

So a few months roll by and I get another phone call (not from The Friend), “why haven’t you paid up?” Ugh. So, yes, I made monthly payments on an eight hundred dollar stereo that I did not actually have the pleasure of listening to. (What? “Isn’t eight hundred dollars a lot to pay for a stereo?’ you ask? Why yes, yes it is. And no, the credit agreement that I signed was much closer to two hundred than to eight hundred. I have no idea what the rest of that money bought her.)

I’ve often expressed my irritation with my mother for teaching me that people don’t lie and are generally trustworthy. I grew to adulthood honestly believing that people spoke truth. I had absolutely no concept that people were capable of pretending to be something or someone they are not. It has taken me a long, long time to learn that lesson and I still struggle with it. I’m a trusting person at my very basic core level and I now consider that trait something of a fault. I used to be proud of it but it’s caused me a considerable amount of heartache. Gullible. Not in the sense of jokes and trickery, because that’s all just in fun, but in the sense of people say what they mean and mean what they say. They don’t prevaricate or obfuscate. They don’t tell you they’ll meet you after work because you broke up with your boyfriend and all of your family lives on the other side of the country and then not bother to show up. They don’t tell you, “I love you, I’m in it for the long haul, I want to grow old with you” then meet you on the doorstep and tell you it’s ‘not working’ for them. What does that even mean? “It’s not working, we get along fine, we don’t have any major issues, we don’t fight, but it’s not working, I still love you but it’s not ever going to work.” That doesn’t even make sense. Bastard. Can you see how I view this trusting thing as a major character flaw?

I’ve decided that my family is like a large pack of benevolent wolves. Loquacious, benevolent wolves. If they have a problem with you, you will know it, because they will tell you. I also come by my weirdness honestly. That thought occurred to me watching my father use a leaf blower to clear the snow off his car. Knowing full well that my sister’s car was stuck at the end of his driveway and no one was going anywhere until the nephew with the snow plow showed up.

At any rate, I quit my job to be with ‘a guy’ and help him out. He’d gotten an inheritance (which I found out later was significantly more than he’d told me) and wanted to move to the desert to clean up his grandmother’s house so we can put it on the market. And I cleaned all right. Forty years of someone else’s life. Junk in the garage, rocks in the yard and somebody’s teeth in the medicine cabinet and now he wants money for groceries, utilities and oh, by the way, he doesn’t think dogs belong in the house. Isn’t that something you mention before your girlfriend quits her job, packs all her belongings and all her dependents and moves four hundred miles to be with you? Six years my dog had full house privileges. God, I’m such an idiot.

Once I got there I felt trapped. I don’t think I would have made it out of there with a shred of sanity intact if it hadn’t been for my buttheaded horse. I would go out in the morning before the world became an oven and just ride in the hills for hours. When the pipe pen finally got put up, it turned out to be pretty small so I would always spend a portion of my ride letting Butthead do what he wanted. He’d nose around in the sand, wander up and down the washes, try to scare the dog…"Beware the horse with a sense of humor." I wonder who was the first to say that.

We were out one day and I was letting him pick his way through the desert and he lay down. I freaked out. “Oh my god! My horse is colicking! I’ve been out here for over an hour, he’s colicking and I never even noticed something was wrong! What if he ate oleander? I’m the worst horse owner ever! What am I gonna do? We’re miles from home in the middle of this godforsaken desert and he’s gonna die out here!” I can think really fast if it doesn’t have to be in any kind of order. I jumped off him in a complete panic and he starts to roll so I’m going to pull him to his feet by his reins and my adrenaline and carry him home, super woman that I am. When I got up by his head, I swear to god he did a double take (not the last time I would see a horse double take, either). He looked shocked and got back up on his feet without a single tug from me then looked away. I went through all the checks I could think of, capillary refill time (hard to do when your horse is trying to avoid looking at you), pulse, respiration, dehydration pinch test and I listened for gut sounds. I watched him to see if he’d give any other indication of colic – no pawing or stretching and didn’t try to lay down again. He didn’t look at his belly but he was very studiously not looking at me. I started walking toward home and every time I looked back at him, he’d look away really fast. So at this point I had a relative degree of certainty that he wasn’t colicking at all. Perhaps what was really going on here was that he forgot I was with him. I’d been letting him do his own thing for quite a while and frankly I was doing some daydreaming of my own. But honestly, what was he thinking? “I’m a free, wild mustang out here in the middle of nowhere with no saddle (or human) on my back, no bridle, all by myself and isn’t this a lovely place to have a good roll?”

When we got home I gave him a snack to see how his appetite was (he was starving). I broke up his dinner into five servings. I got the happy food dance for each and every mini meal. Definitely not colicking. This incident, however was not as good as the time he let himself out of his house and went straight to the feed store. True story.

I love how the computer tells me that “colicking” isn’t a word. I wonder if it considers colicked a word…nope, there’s a squiggly red line under colicked too. I’ve heard before that horsemen have their own vocabulary. I’ve found that when I’ve been social with non horse people that I follow their conversations just fine, they’re just not terribly interesting. Then they ask me how I spent my day…Good times.

I took a Spanish class once. I’d picked up bits here and there but I wanted to be fluent. The guys I worked with at the time would help me with my homework - feed me words that I needed for my job that, oddly enough weren’t to be found in my handy dandy English-Spanish Dictionary. I really liked my teacher, she would do extra things for us sometimes, cook traditional foods, tell stories about growing up in the Yucatan…I got to where I was struggling a little to keep up in the class. We’d reached the point where I had to actually do the homework in order to not be completely lost when we got together but it was foaling season. See – if you’re a professional breeding/training farm manager I don’t have to explain what that means to you. If you are not then you don’t realize that a horse job is 24/7, you don’t get out of your regular job duties if you were up all night waiting for one of the little buggers to get up and get a drink already. Don’t even get me started on placentas. I hate placenta. I think that was the year we had 11 mares pregnant. Which was better than the following year when we were expecting 13 foals.

So there comes that fateful day where we had to write a paragraph about what we did that day. I delivered a colt. Well, the mare delivered a colt. I hovered nervously and made note of times, colors, sex, stands and nurses, etc. Oh yeah, and the placenta. Blech. Guess what – foaling, not in my dictionary. Bay colt, not in my dictionary. So the guys help me with my vocabulary and I dutifully write my paragraph (on four hours of sleep) and I take it to my class and I read it aloud to a group of people (not my favorite thing to do). Maybe my least favorite thing to do after have whipped cream anywhere near me and go in elevators. (I had an interesting childhood in a family with significantly more sense of humor than is strictly healthy) and I finish to dumbfounded silence and my teacher says to me, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I could feel my face turn red and considered holding up my homework to see if it will catch on fire from the heat and possibly put me out of my misery. Or just give me horribly disfiguring burn scars. Now, I know that a llegua is a mare and a potrillo is a colt. I have used them in sentences before to great success, but my Spanish teacher didn’t follow anything I said and even after I told her in English what I’d written insisted that I wasn’t using real words. That was the beginning of the end of my ability to attend Spanish class. Now I’m trying to learn sign language. I am not hopeful.

I lived in hell for six months and I don’t recall anything that I liked about it. Well, I did spend an incredible amount of time riding my horse in the desert. We learned how to half pass with the help of some cactus. I also got pretty good at picking cactus spines out of my horse’s legs. You see – those three statements characterize my entire life. Every good thing that comes to me has something bad attached to it. I suppose that could be said the other way around too. I hated living in the desert/I got to spend hours every day just enjoying my horse’s company. My horse and I learned how to half pass together/by me seeing cactus ahead and using my legs to bend his body around them, him ignoring my cues and getting stuck with cactus spines until he quit ignoring me. I developed a skill useful to desert dwellers (cactus spine removal)/by getting both of us stuck full of cactus spines. God, I hated it there.

I forgot what I was talking about.

Oh right, living in the desert. I was unemployed for a while. Which looking back couldn’t have been all that long since I only lived there from September to March however, someone wasn’t too pleased that I wasn’t paying him for half of everything while he dictated arbitrary rules and disappeared for days on end with no word about where he was or when he was coming home. I worked thoroughbred sales at the time, three or so each year. It was four or five days of hard work, decent money and it was always fun to work with trained professionals who were not likely to get you killed through their own stupidity. It was dangerous enough just in general without people telling you to do stupid stuff. Anyway, I was still looking for a job while I was working a thoroughbred sale and my friend George referred me to this guy who played polo that needed some help. Well, lucky me! My first full time professional horse job was in polo! So I got hired there, because that’s how you get hired in the horse industry, you have to know someone and/or have a reputation. Or the farm has to be so dangerous or poorly managed no one that has a reputation will work there so they hire anyone willing to get hurt.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in the desert so I’ll tell you how things went. We were in the high desert near Palm Springs and in the morning I would go out and enjoy the food dance, break the ice on the water trough and get fresh water for the rabbit bowl. I didn’t have any pet rabbits at the time but after the third one drowned in my water trough I realized that if I wanted to keep my disinfectant bill down I’d have to provide the wild things with their own bowl so they wouldn’t be obligated to climb up into Butthead’s trough and drown there. Also, dead bunnies kinda make me cry. I hate crying. Then I would load up my dog and The Guy’s dog and drive the hour or so to Thermal and my new job where it would be 90 degrees or more before noon. There were 8 horses, two were lame so I really only had to work six of them. Two sets and cool them out then done. Well there was tack cleaning, grooming, bandaging and that sort of stuff but what the heck - incidentals.

You want to know something sad? I can’t remember any of their names. If it’s any consolation I can’t remember the name of the guy who owned them and paid me either. They were pretty good horses. I can’t speak for how they played but to work around, I mostly liked them. They weren’t hard to catch, they wouldn’t come to me, but they didn’t run away either and two of them didn’t pony well. Again the language barrier – Ponying is when you ride one horse and lead one or more all at the same time. The horse you ride is your pony horse, the horses you lead you pony. See? It makes perfect sense. You always want to rotate which horses you pony and which you pony off of because ostensibly your pony horse is working harder than the ones you pony. I’ll say one thing about polo- they know how to fit a horse up. Racehorse trainers should take lessons from them, racehorses would be in much better shape for the work they do. So one young horse would just let you drag him along. Not fun for me and he led the same way. He was also one of the lame ones so he got a reprieve. The other would go along with you, then hang back a little, then without warning he’d whip across behind you so you either let go or lost an arm. Even so, you get your arm twisted around behind you far enough it’s not really possible to hold onto a 1,000 pound animal that’s intent on leaving. He did it every time I ponied him.

The facility was pretty nice, there was a gallop track, an exercise track around the perimeter and several arenas, one of which was right outside the barn I worked from. It was bordered by a date farm. That was interesting. The horses’ owner wanted me to use the mechanical hotwalker to cool the horses out rather than paying extra for me to tackwalk or handwalk them. I’m not really keen on hotwalkers. The horses usually figure out that if they plant their feet the walker stops, then they just hang out. I kept telling the owner that they aren’t getting walked and his solution was a pellet gun. I’m not kidding. He brought me a pellet gun. I picked it up and aimed but I couldn’t actually pull the trigger, even though I was pretty irritated by this one bay horse. Yeah, can’t remember their names but if I saw one of them I’d totally recognize them. I still can’t believe this guy wanted me to shoot the horses for stopping the walker. That’s not even the worst thing I’ve dealt with.

My solution was to teach The Guy’s dog to keep them moving. She was a Queensland Heeler and we got her because she had a bit of a cow chasing problem. Her name was Sarah, she was blue. I loved her. I never had a problem with her chasing the horses. She’d go near the pasture, I’d call her and she’d come right back to me. She’d follow me around on my sets, doing laps around the property happy as a clam. My dog didn’t really like the set up. She was a greyhound/great dane mix, harlequin colored but with a longer coat than either a greyhound or a great dane. When I first got her the polo barn I worked at had a tiny exercise track at the far end of the property, so trail ride to the track and laps then trail ride back to the barn. My dog, Vamp her name was, would hunt lizards and play with her border collie bestie, Sophie while we did our laps on the track. Just going around the property with nothing to hunt wasn’t her thing. She would go around once then wait for us at the barn.

To deal with the horse that got away every time it was his turn to be ponied, I started riding him in my western saddle. You know, the kind with the big horn in the front? I think most people believe it was put there to hold onto, but really it is to dally your ropes when you're working with cows. Also to lean your elbows on when you stop on a ridge to take in the beauty of the range and the prosperity of your herds. I guess. I did a soft dally, just once around the horn with my lead rope and wouldn't you know, he got away from me again? Slower motion than normal but he still pulled the rope out of my hands. Next time he is really not going to get away from me, I'm taking extra dallies and I wrapped my rope around my saddle horn as many times as it would fit. We get 40 feet from the barn and he tries it again. I manage to hold onto him even though he pulled my saddle half off my pony horse, nearly knocked us over, and I got rope burns on my thigh and my saddle horn. When I realized that I'd smashed my fingers so hard between the rope and the horn that blood was oozing out the pores of my fingers, I decided it was in my best interest to put the horses away and go home, via a fast food restaurant to get a cup of ice for my poor swollen fingers. I order an iced tea, extra ice, hold the iced tea. "We can't do that, ma'am." First of all, don't ma'am me, secondly, I'll pay for the tea, just don't put any in the cup. I iced my hand on the way home in a cup of iced tea. To punish the cashier, I made him look at my swollen, bloody fingers. When I got home, no one was there, no notes, no messages. I didn't see The Guy for 3 more days. I gave Sarah the Blue Heeler permission to bite the horse. She thought it was the best thing she'd ever done and that horse never pulled back again.

Butthead and I left hell shortly after that incident. We eventually found a new landing spot that worked a lot better for us for nearly a decade. My horse stayed quirky but our time in the desert together was maybe the best thing for us and he wasn't really a butthead anymore, but my steadfast steed, good and brave and true. I would pony the rehab horses off him and I swear to god after the first ride he would do all the work and I would just sit there holding ropes. He would time the rides (say the rehab plan was 5 minutes walk, 2 minutes trot, 5 minutes walk, etc.) and change gaits appropriately. If the horse being ponied bulled ahead he would pin his ears and show his teeth until the rehab slowed down. If they lagged behind he would threaten with a hind leg until they caught up. But, if the rehab was genuinely scared or anxious, Butthead would pace them, let them bounce off him until they settled into place. When the times increased (say from 2 minutes trot to 5) I would ask him to keep going, he'd look back at me, Are you sure? Yes. And the next day he would do 5 minutes of trot. No idea how he did it.

Obviously, it was time for a new name. I still had the same dilemma that I had when I first got him. We tried dozens of names and nothing seemed to work. Finally, a friend suggested Namaste. "The divine in me recognizes the divine in you." I went to his pen moments after the food dance had finished and he is deep into his bucket. He doesn't even look at me, standing there with his blanket. "I know you need a new name." He stopped chewing and I got a side eye but his nose was still pressed into his bowl as hard as he could. "This is the last chance. If you want to be called Namaste, give me a sign and no one will ever call you Butthead again. Otherwise it's going to be Butthead for the rest of your life." He picked his head up and looked straight at me. Then he took the 4 steps between us. I held his blanket out and he stuck his head in it. He stood stock still while I did all the straps. Years I spent wrestling him into his blanket while he ate his grain because he refused to lift his head even for a second. I couldn't squeeze my hand between his nose and his bowl and here he stood, stock still, letting me pet him with his dinner 4 steps away. "Ok, your name is Namaste." He took a deep breath, nuzzled me and quietly went back to his bowl. (I told you this part would be important.) I kept my promise to him.

According to something I read by Joseph Campbell, “If you say no to a single factor in your life you have unravelled the whole thing and the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power and the greater life's pain the greater life’s reply.” Yeah, still waiting for some of that misery to pay off.

I say no a lot. Not to people, generally. But to what happens in my life. I tend to give people just about anything that they ask for. Take care of this farm and all the horses on it? Sure, no problem. Oh, it takes 13 hours a day to do that and you’re only going to pay me for 7 and a half? Ok. Because if I won’t do it, who will? Someone’s got to take care of all those horses. Oh and you’re not going to tell me that someone is coming to try a horse that you have for sale and you forgot to actually be here to meet them? Ok, I’ll ride this horse that I’ve never even had on a lead rope, much less ridden. Oh, they bought him, that’s great. Congratulations on that $10,000 I just made for you. Or that time when I spent the night throwing up – all night – and came in to show a horse to a buyer. Grooming, tacking, walk, trot, canter. Both directions. Yes, jumping him as well. Yes, they bought the horse. Congratulations on that $15,000 I just made for you! I don’t remember how I got off the horse. I do remember laying on the floor in the tack room kinda wishing I was dead. That wish didn’t come true. Mostly I think that’s a good thing, but the last few years have really had me thinking I turned off my good, true path somewhere along the line and maybe that would have been a good time to make my exit before all that bad stuff went down. I don’t think I started saying, ‘No!” until after the really bad things started happening. I distinctly recall saying yes to a lot of things that certainly presented themselves as great opportunities that turned out to not even remotely be in my best interests. I’m so gullible.

Namaste’s death triggered the beginning of the Years of Loss and Devastation. Within a couple of years I lost almost everything and I had never dealt with so much grief and anger. I always bought into that happily ever after crap but that's not really how life works is it?

So I think I might have figured out the point of writing this. Catharsis.

Namaste

I work for a non-profit sanctuary so I am extra grateful for any tips and if each of you could have 1000 of your friends give this a read that would be helpful also. I hope you enjoyed my first effort here on this platform. Stay wild, Be free.