It is said in some cultures that there are four spiritually significant relationships with women in every man's life. One represents the mother, one the daughter, one the sister and one the grandmother. It is also said out West that horses are much like women. I am sure it is safe to turn that around for the ladies and say the same thing holds true for them as they seek their spiritual brothers, sons, fathers and grandfathers. It must be remembered that prior to the sixteenth century, there were no horses in North America for the men to compare women to. I reckon they likely compared them to the buffalo and occasionally to the mountain lion. Men were likely compared to the wolf and occasionally to the bear.
These are symbolic attempts to explain and understand something that is inexplicable. Every group of humans has a different version but the intent is the same as is the necessity. Anything we could describe in a book and fit in a chapel couldn't be what I call God. If we could actually understand the bond between a man and a woman, we would have destroyed that bond which is rooted in the Mystery. We cannot do autopsies on living specimens. Dead things alone cannot really instruct us.
When I was a toddler in Texas, my mother took me to visit a friend of hers. The lady had a couple of horses and I was put upon the bare back of a mother horse while the two ladies chatted. It was in a small pasture and as I clung to two chubby fistfuls of brown mane, the mare walked off slowly to the far end of the enclosure with her young colt. I felt happy and secure on the massive beast and somehow I knew it was a mommy and gentle by nature.
When they got to where the grass was fat, they began to crop the thick shoots. I had been riding way up high on the neck because my little legs were too short to straddle its shoulders and the more hair I had in my hands the better I felt. The third time she lowered her head to nip some grass, I slid all the way down, somersaulted over her ears and landed in a patch of bunch-grass. She nickered and tenderly nosed me back upright and continued eating nearby. I couldn't get back on nor could I find my way back to my mother.
Seven or eight years later I went rent-a-horse riding in Louisiana. I was with a party of four or five and I had brought my own money from saved earnings in my newly purchased fancy leather wallet. It had oak leaf stamping and had Spanish lacing all along the edges. Inside were some irreplaceable baseball cards and such treasures. While trotting along the sunbaked blue clay grassland, it popped out of the ass-pocket of my jeans. That's when I first discovered why people rode “English”, though I never heard that term until many years later.
The first gal I married had a horse in her yard. It was in the Nevada desert and the first time I rode it was the first time I had ever visited her house. Her father was a retired Air Force Colonel and the way I met him was unique. The gal let me ride the mare and warned me that she hated boys because her older brother had been cruel to her. She said she would try all sorts of tricks. She would try to wipe my legs into cactus and bolt from a standstill.
Turned out she was right. After a few tense moments the filly sensed I was OK and settled down. She let me canter to and fro in the 40 Celsius alkali morning. A dust-cloud coming from the road way out by Sunrise Mountain betrayed the return of the Colonel, whom I was anxious to shake hands with. The horse was anxious too. As the Cadillac got closer both of us could see the fresh bale of hay poking out of the lashed down trunk.
The car pulled up in front of the entrance to the house and the Colonel opened a big sliding glass door and went inside from the patio. As I rode up to the patio where my gal was waiting, I thought what a wasteful man the Colonel was for leaving the door open and letting all the air-conditioning out. I kept this to myself. When I reigned up by the patio and prepared to dismount, the horse bolted into the house through the door. I whacked my sun-addled noggin on the door-frame hard enough to shake the house.
To the sound of my girl's convulsive laughter on the patio, I tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness inside the house. Outdoors in the white sand my pupils had gone down to pin-points. I wore neither sun-glasses nor hats in those days as I had shoulder length hair. I didn't like people whose eyes I couldn't see and didn't ever hide my own. Presently, my eyes adjusted to the dark cool house.
We were alongside a bar. The Colonel was giving a sugar-cube to the horse and had already poured two Scotch on the Rocks. He reached over the bar, shook my hand and handed me a glass. Not too long later, that man was my father-in-law. My eighteen year old wife was a sweet happy creature who played guitar and sang like an angel. She couldn't make toast or boil water and you could say she fit the archetype of the spiritual daughter mentioned at the beginning of this essay. She grew up and went away.
About seven years later, I was invited to go horse riding with a group of bank employees in Canada. I was the new guy and was asked if I could pick up one of the other employees to bring to the ranch. She was a pretty little gal I had glanced at more than a few times at work but we hadn't ever spoken much. At the corral we all chose our horses according to our level of skill. I remember asking for one that could run, although I was only going on my fourth ride ever.
We walked our mounts as a group, slow as molasses along a salt-marsh road until we could see a beach. When the horse ridden by the gal whom I had driven in my car smelled the water it took off like a rocket. My horse sprang into action and gave chase. I didn't know how to ride that fast but the horse and the moment showed me how. I felt like I had been doing it all my life. I looked back at the others who were almost too small to see, such was the distance we had covered.
I turned around and focused on the jet-black braids of the gal I was chasing and caught up. When we got back to the corral, we found out that our two horses were lovers. I had randomly chosen the male and the gal who became my second wife and the mother of my first born son had randomly chosen the mare. Five years later we were married. She had a burr under her saddle that I couldn't fix and I turned her loose for the sake of both of us another five years later.
Once, her and I went to pick up a nanny for our son at the airport in Vancouver and before I had cleared the parking lot, my old Volkswagen van died. The lady we had just picked up hopped out without a word and began to help me push start the ailing vehicle while my wife hurled verbal abuse by way of assistance. I was already gone in spirit but hadn't figured out just how or when to sort out the unhealthy state of my affairs. Soon I got my courage up and made my irrevocable decision.
After I was moved out and officially single, I wanted to again go horse riding. I invited my brother-in-law, his two children and the nanny who had helped me push start the van. We went to a different coastal ranch and all chose our own horses. It was a beautiful sunny day and everyone was having a good time. There were several miles of dirt road to walk along before we could run the horses on the soft sand of the beach.
I asked for a horse that had the equivalent of power steering and brakes. That is, it could be controlled with light touches on the reins. While we sauntered down the road a bunch of cars came from the North behind us heading for the beach. My niece was complaining that her horse was too slow, too fast, too stupid and that she hadn't really wanted to go in the first place. My brother-in-law was trying to encourage her when her horse started back for the corral. He rode back to try and get her turned around while my nephew minded his own along with the woman I had invited.
The cars got close. We were alongside a deep machine-cut drainage ditch and I suggested that we all rein in our horses until the vehicles passed. I gave a light backward tug to stop my horse. It started to dance nervously. I tugged again, very lightly and it went into reverse. I remembered the power steering and brakes request and lightened my tugs.
As my mount started to do a crazy dance there beside the ditch, I had to give a good hard tug on the leather. The horse complied and backed herself right into the ditch. It all happened fast. When I got my bearings, I was pressed into the soft mud of the side of the canal by the shoulder of the horse and staring right into its eye which was as big as a pie plate. My head was about eighteen inches above the duckweed covered water. I began to laugh when I realized that I could have been crushed in a drier ditch or drowned in a deeper one. It was a good day but I wasn't going to die.
The horse was as well sunk into the soft muck as I was and the top of the ditch was so high above both our heads that all we could see was a ribbon of blue lined with blackberry bushes. Way down was a massive culvert where a road crossed the ditch. I could hear my niece crying, my brother-in-law and nephew calling and the woman I'd invited asking if I was alive. I couldn't see any of them.
I tried to calm the stricken horse so it didn't struggle too much. Every time it panicked I risked getting the breath squeezed out of me and the animal became mired deeper into the mud. When she was sunk to her armpits, I managed to get clear. I couldn't crawl out the slippery vertical sides, so I began to cut weeds and overhanging brambles. I shouted up for my woman friend to go get the farmer.
While she was gone I managed to pile armloads of brush in front of the horse and then I clawed a few crude steps onto the boggy sides of the canal. I finally got to where I could reach the off-road side and once up there I cut brush which I threw into the ditch. I clawed two huge steps and tried to pull the horse up onto that side. It almost worked. She saw the step and made a huge effort to scramble onto the piled twigs and brambles.
She got her feet on the raft, lunged at the first step but broke through the second one. Now temporarily free she proceeded down the canal. I jumped back into the ditch and kept her moving until we reached the culvert. There we stayed trading stories until my gal friend returned with a cranky old Dutchman who arrived cussing in two languages.
He hitched up a big chain around the horse's neck and dragged her out onto the field with his four by four. He returned my money and confessed that the horse had spooked three times that week and had wound up in the ditch each time. As the fragrant mud dried on my clothes I laughed at my good fortune of not having worn my Tony Lama boots. I had worn old carpenter boots instead. That was my first date with the lady I have been married to for the past thirty years and who is the mother of my second son.
I spent thirty years delivering mail for Canada Post. In my last year I had a run in with technology. It was Christmas and I signed for a package so the recipient wouldn't have to stand in a long line to claim it. The mailboxes at his building were very secure and the customer was happy. The sender in Japan was not. He tracked the delivery on-line and concerned by my alien signature, he contacted Canada Post. After twenty-nine years with an unblemished work record, I was sentenced to a three day suspension. No big deal to some men but to me it was devastating and a crack started to grow in my calm exterior.
It was not from a compulsion for perfection that I was crushed, rather it was from shame and frustration. I am a father and I learned long ago that my sons listen not to what I say but carefully note everything I do. Therefore, the way I taught them was by example and this new negligence born of becoming complacent over many years at the same job was a horrible example in my books. Underlying that was a torrent of unexpressed childhood emotions to do with abuse and neglect.
I went into the little Post Office interview room and took my medicine like a man. When I emerged, I knew I'd fallen into a deep emotional ditch. A switch had been flipped. It was so sudden and debilitating that my wife and family couldn't fix it nor could they pull me out of my swamp. I was going to explode in frustrated rage and then drown in tears, there at work on that day and at that moment. All that was required was the tiniest little push. The first person I saw was a gal I didn't know at all.
She had worked beside me for a short while and we had rarely spoken. I was like a turtle completely out of its shell tight-rope walking with a stick of dynamite in it's jaws and the fuse was lit. I was sunk and going deeper fast, a hair's breadth away from being a nonfunctional fool. The young woman asked me a simple question and when I finished my reply, it was 7:30 PM. I cannot remember all of what I said but the story began at a point when I was about four years old.
Within a few days, she knew more about me than I did. I discovered much about myself that I hadn't known. Her presence kept predators away for the next year while I found my feet. Every bad road I'd ever known lay all around me beckoning. Slowly, I was led out of the ditch. She fed me carrots, listened to my stories and showed respect to me, my sons and to my wife. She cut branches, pulled on my reins and made steps. Why she did this is and shall remain a precious mystery. She acted with unselfish honesty and paramount dignity. I cannot say if she was my spiritual sister, daughter, mother or grandmother. I know that I shall never forget her as long as I live and that there is a room in my heart that belongs only to her.
I was sitting on my porch one day after I retired and glanced at a tin full of river sand I was using as an ashtray. It was originally full of Chinese almond milk powder. There was a picture of a pretty lady playing a lute and a logo with a horse. The writing was in Chinese and I recognized one of the characters. It was the same as the family name of the young woman who had stood by me at work and it translated as “horse.”
There is no adequate way to repay the kindness of certain souls who act beyond our understanding. I have been blessed that way. I stand in humble awe with every reason to be honest, to be brave, to be gentle and to be strong. The bar in my life has been set mighty high by horses and by women. I write songs, I write poems, I tell my stories and I write essays.
I wouldn't trade my wife for this world and the next. She has stood by me through every catastrophe since our coming together and has celebrated every little triumph along the way. I could never find adequate words to chronicle the happiness, peace and loyalty she bestows on me. I know that I would not have recognized this beloved wife when I first saw her if not for the other women I'd known before.
I also know that I wouldn't have managed to get back up and fight through my last days at the Post Office had it not been for an infectiously brave, unconsciously wise, innately strong and spiritually kind young woman named Horse who helped me out of my ditch and then sent me homeward. This essay was written for her with unconditional love and evergreen admiration.
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