Posts Tagged ‘not complaining’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Poetry Challenge 67

April 28, 2011

After a month of sad news, the snow is melted and the temperatures are above freezing pretty much consistently.  We’re in what passes for spring in the Interior–the brown-up period of mud, dead grass, and January’s trash come back to remind us of winter’s events.   The air is warm and moist after months of dry and bitter cold.

In her blog Wild Roots Homestead, my neighbor, Emily, writes of her toddler’s reaction to seeing the dirt emerge after a whole winter’s snow.  “What’s that?” she asked, and Emily said, “It’s dirt, remember?”

So write about something that was once as familiar as dirt, but now seems new and strange–full of possibilities.

Post it in the comments and I’ll add it to this post.

————————————

This came from Karen at KD’s Bookblog:

At the Level of Dirt

Until Gram died when I was seven, I lived
at the level of dirt—powdery and dry
beneath the overarching honeysuckle
near the porch, drifted deep into cracks
of the empty carriage shed, scuffed
and tamped hard beneath my rope swing
hanging from one of four huge sugar maples.

The long gravel driveway ended in a patch
of yellow sand where I traced thin roads leading
nowhere. Our narrow blacktop circled
to the village either way. Side roads
without signs suggested nothing. Mostly,

Gram and I walked through the hayfield
and crossed a low stone wall to visit
Millie Stuart. She and Gram listened
to their stories on the radio. Millie died
first and her husband, Cecil, burned
things in a barrel. Ash drifted upward,
pulling my gaze away from the ground
where I stood, rooted and uprooted.

Karen Douglass

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 4 Comments »

Poetry Challenge 64

February 21, 2011

Winter Storm Advisory

Today I woke to small fast flakes falling straight down.  Out in the corral, the bottom rail of fence had disappeared under the top surface of the snow, and the wind swirled the falling and the accumulated snow from spruce branches into a gray mist above the impatient backs of the hungry horses.  When Jeter and I went out to feed them, we sank deep in it, fluffy and granular at once.  Out in the driveway, my car sat in snow up to the wheel wells.   Every step I took felt slowed-down and heavy, walking through all that knee-deep snow.  Jeter leapt from spot to spot rather than trying to walk in the stuff.

So, what should have been an ordinary Monday changed into a day spent shoveling snow, pushing it off the side of the driveway with snow scoops, then digging out the car and truck.   By late afternoon, we were done and sprawled out on the couch for a nap.

So, write about how the weather surprised you today–a small detail or an overwhelming one.  Write about the way that surprise changed a day, a moment, a thought.  See if a dog wanders through the poem.

—————

Here’s a response from Tim, a different take on snow:

 

I Jokes

I imagined that I chose to walk this morning
and found an old friend along the trail.
The frost bit our knuckles
when we each bared a right hand to shake
and ask “how’s the day?”
Snow fell down my collar, when I ducked
a branch so that we could walk side by side,
my breath taken for a moment.
Small things mattered: moose droppings on clean snow,
a weasel darting, angular and quick,
raven like a shade over our heads,
and the jokes we told, each trying
to insult the other: “how’s your wife,
and my kids?” nothing was sacred
except mothers.
For a long time we were loud and alive,
plumes of frosty laughter fogging the trail,
mukluks crunching crystals into hard pack,
pushing and pulling each other into diamond-hard willows
trying to win the day. Then the trail broke
into an open field; we had never walked this path.
Sun reflected off of the dust- soft snow,
so thick you knew it held the sound
of every small noise made in the night;
it was as if the light itself was noise
and the blanket of winter wanted the earth
to continue sleeping. Out of instinct, we tiptoed the periphery,
and told no jokes.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 2 Comments »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 16, 2011

Quest Finish

Still cold in the Interior.  The temperatures here on the ridge hovered around twenty below all day, slightly warmer than yesterday, but still cold to be out on the Chena River moving at a blazing five miles an hour behind a team of tired dogs.  As I went about my day of meetings and classes, phone calls and e-mails, part of my mind was always on the progress of mushers on the Quest trail.

At the end of the day, I logged back into the Quest site to discover that there was a new leader, Dallas Seavey, a twenty-three-year-old rookie who planned on using the Quest as a training race for the Iditarod.   Rookies usually run this tough race a few years before they end up in the top four, but  Seavey isn’t a real rookie.  His father, Mitch, has been running long-distance dogs for years, and he is following the family tradition.   His bio says he’s been training dogs his whole life and this flawless run shows it.

But this race has been like a novel with its interwoven threads of drama.  I keep thinking of Jack London, a writer too often overlooked in the American literary canon, perhaps because his work–at least the Northern stories–seems so romanticized.  The relationships between men and dogs in White Fang and Call of the Wild seemed romantic to me before I lived in Alaska in their suggestion of  deep attachment between human and dog, yet that attachment is what a long race like the Quest is all about.  There’s also the race between mushers and their ultimate enemy, the cold.   Even the strongest musher can become slow-moving and slow-witted if some accident of the trail leaves him or her chilled.  Ghatt’s plunge into overflow, Neff’s delay by a blizzard at the most daunting summit of the trail, these are the accidents of the North, the luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We follow the Quest because it reminds us of our own fragile peace with the cold and dark of winter.  The race comes at the first return of light in February, when we start to consider the return of spring.  But winter hasn’t let go yet, as the temperatures of the last few days show.  I drove home today in dimming afternoon.  Behind me to the east, towards Canada and the path the mushers were on, the sky was slaty blue, darkening quickly.  Ahead of me, to the west there was a watery pale light lingering over the ridge.  I had plans of building a fire in the stove, feeding Mattie and Sam, eating a bit, then heading down to the river to see the first place winner come gliding in toward the finish.

But luck has its own ways.  The house was cold and it took me a while to realize that we were out of fuel oil and needed to make a run back to town for a gas can full to tide us over till the truck can come out tomorrow.  On the way down the hill, we saw what looked like a house fire on the flats–floodlights and smoke and flashing red and blue lights.  Like the mushers, we need to pay attention to what’s around us, to the details of survival that keep us going.

We came home and got the boiler going again.  The window in the woodstove is flickering with birch flames; the house is heating slowly.  Phoebe, the cat, is curled under my arm as I type, one paw resting on the laptop, purring slowly.  The remaining mushers on the trail will continue to come in over the next few days, including the handful of women on the trail, who I’ll write more about tomorrow.

Till then, congratulations to Dallas and to Sebastien, who followed him in short order.  Congratulations and a scratch on the ears for all good dogs who pay attention to the trail and lead us on.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

February 14, 2011

Yukon Quest

The leaders of the Yukon Quest are a day away from their finish in Fairbanks, after a long week and a half on the trail from White Horse, Yukon Territory.  When they left White Horse, the weather was balmy for the Interior in February–temperatures above zero, clear skies.  But in the last day or two temperatures in Fairbanks have dropped to thirty below, and for the mushers along the trail now between Dawson and Circle, strung out along the frozen Yukon or attempting Eagle Summit, it is even colder–in some spots nearly fifty below.

What started as a glorious race, the front-runners in high spirits about their dogs and their abilities, takes a perilous turn at about this point.  One musher, a multiple Quest winner, Hans Ghatt, broke through overflow–where water breaks over thick ice above  a stream–and became wet to his shoulders.  When  the next musher came upon him, he was going into hypothermia, and heard the musher approach as in a dream.  The second musher helped him back to the checkpoint, where he learned that he had frozen a couple of fingers, and, knowing when to accept the luck he had, he scratched from the race.

The leader, Hugh Neff, seemed to be burning up the trail, hours ahead of the others, but the cold and a storm on Eagle Summit stalled him and a second musher, who caught up with him and stalled as well.  A third musher came and helped Neff’s team up the hill, but near the summit, they turned and retreated back down the hill.  Now, the leaders have switched positions, and Neff may or may not get back on the trail again.

Whenever I have a good reason to, I have my students read London’s story, “To Build A Fire,” which has special significance to them if they’ve been here a few winters or have grown up anywhere in Alaska.  In the story, the man is condemned by his insistence that reason is more reliable than the instincts of a dog.  Anyone who has followed the Quest knows differently.  The Quest dogs are hearts with legs and tails; they will do anything for their mushers, who, in turn, will do anything for their dogs.  One rookie musher sleeps in the hay along with her dogs when she camps at night.  Any Quest musher–even the toughest–gets teary eyed when talking about the dogs in the team.

So it’s tough on everyone when dogs die in the race, and they do.  Usually, after necropsy,it’s clear there’s a reason–an undetected weakness in a blood vessel, for example–but often the cause is unclear.  Like endurance horses or race horses, these dogs get constant veterinary care when they are at rest.  If there is any chance that a dog is ill or unfit, they are pulled from the race.  No mistreatment of dogs is tolerated by mushers or by race officials.  Still, the race itself is a risk,with long stretches of solitude, away from human contact.  Things happen.

The race is an elemental test of human and animal spirit–not for everyone.  And it’s starkly beautiful.  Photos of the teams running along the flat white highway of the Yukon against the backdrop of the river bluffs are dramatic and compelling.  There are few challenges that match it, even for an armchair follower like me.

Outside it’s dropping down below twenty below here on the ridge.  Mattie and Sam have long late-winter coats that keep them well-insulated, and I’ll head out before bedtime to take them another flake of hay.  I’ll look up at the waxing gibbous moon, if it’s still above the ridgeline behind the house, and think of those mushers on the trail, running and resting in the soft gray light, thinking of the hamburgers waiting for them at Angel Creek and of the flags on the Cushman Street bridge in Fairbanks, rising over the Chena River, the finish, and a well-deserved rest.  Any time they get there, someone will be there, cheering the dogs for a few more yards, welcoming them all home.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | 2 Comments »

Poetry Challenge 63

February 2, 2011

There’s more light on the corral every day now.  Each afternoon, as I leave campus, I take the measure of it–the level of dusk at 5 o’clock, or 4.  Soon, I’ll be able to come home with enough daylight to begin an evening longeing routine for Mattie and Sam, to get all of us in shape for riding season in May.

Last night, I ordered seeds–radishes, my favorite Chianti Rose tomatoes, Laciato kale, zukes and yellow crookneck squash, and an assortment of flowers that I may be able to convince to grow on the steep bank behind the house.

These are all signs of the easing of the season–and then there’s Groundhog Day.  I wrote about it here last year or the year before, but it’s a holiday that has a certain resonance in my memory of being a teenager in Central Pennsylvania: the smell of mud and manure, anticipating the first crocuses, and the ludicrous seriousness of the Slumbering Groundhog Lodge in Quarryville, PA.  I tell the story to my students every year–how the groundhog sees a blinding flash of light, sees his shadow, bolts back into his hole, and we have six more weeks of winter.  Or he doesn’t see the shadow and we have six more weeks till spring.  In either case, here in the Interior, we have three months till break-up, so we look for other signs–our moods lift, for example, as the sun cycles higher above the horizon.

You may be socked in with snow right now of mired in the bad news of the world.  What images keep you hopeful of spring?

Post a poem in response to this challenge and I’ll add it to this post.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | 1 Comment »

Poetry Challenge 60

December 18, 2010

Days away from solstice now.  The light is slaty blue in the deep afternoon–sundown around 3:30 and losing a minute and a half of daylight each day.  Temperatures hovering at around thirty below.  Things that don’t seem to belong together merge: the cold of metal feels hot to the touch; hands turn to flippers in  layers of gloves topped with mittens; the darkness holds light reflected in all directions by the white snow; the ice on the roads gains friction as the temperature drops; and deep in our drowsing psyches, some wild energy stirs, gives us dreams, reminds us of the extravagance of spring months away.  Someone asked what the brief time between sunrise and sunset should be called and I suggested “dawnset,” the state of daylight for us in the Interior this time of year.

So write about opposites merging, their energy, their resolution into a whole.  Or write a complaint about the deep bitter cold.

 

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Poetry Challenge | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

November 23, 2010

Global What?

After the last post about the lovely time Mattie, Sam, and I had free-longeing in the deep dry snow, we in the Interior have been hit with two days of rain, fog, and ice.  While this kind of drippy weather is common in the Pacific Northwest, it’s unheard of here in the usually frozen north.  Our ground has been frozen for more than a month now, and the frost line is well below the surface.  What this means for us is that the rain on the roads turns snow first to slush, then to a thick layer of ice.  Everything—tree branches, fences, even horse manure—is coated with a slick clear layer of it.  It’s lovely in some ways, but it’s shut down the whole town and surrounding area for two days and counting.  The long-term forecast has it continuing until Wednesday night—too late for last minute Thanksgiving shopping.

The good news is that we just stayed home—then heard that even the university had cancelled classes, something that has never happened in my experience, even during periods of 60 below.  Articles in our local newspaper, the Daily News-Miner, show cars in ditches and the slick shine of ice on the roads.  Friends are calling and Facebooking each other to see how they’re holding up.  One friend is nearly out of coffee.  Another reports that a small willow fell on her mother’s car.  A third is tying on her and her sweetie’s ice skates, headed out to play hockey in the road.

Last night, we were settled in the living room with our laptops—remember the days when it would have been books?—when we heard a buzzing hum and saw a flash of green light out the window.  We looked at each other.

“What was that?” I asked.  The power stayed on, but, as usual, I thought of the horses and went out to check on them.  Sam, the watch horse, was standing outside the run-in shed, looking off up the hill behind me.  I went and checked them and took them a bit of hay to encourage them to stay in the shed.  Their coats were wet, but they didn’t seem cold.  On the way back in, I unplugged the water tank heater, still not sure what the strange light had been.  The snow was soggy with rain and a few small birches arched over the cutbank, glistening with ice.

Beck inside, I settled in once again, picking up the book, Horses in Human History. Suddenly we heard the sound again and saw the flash.  I pulled on my rubber muck boots and Mike put on his coat, and we opened the door.  The whole sky lit up green and the buzzing was louder than ever.  It seemed to be coming from up the hill where there is a power line cut running through the woods.  We called the electric co-op and learned that there were power outages everywhere and that they had just cut off power to that line.

Up until that point, I admit, it had been kind of fun—a bit of an extended holiday.  After that we thought of all the trees on our hill, how we lose a couple every summer in a windstorm.  Neither of us wanted to go to sleep, and when we did, it was with one ear open to the sounds of trees thumping.

Today, all’s well, but soggy.  I am headed out to the corral to put a waterproof blanket on Sam—more for my comfort than for his.  I’m planning alternative Thanksgiving dinners, since I don’t plan on driving out to shop—and the Seattle airport is hit with snow, as well, which means empty shelves for us.  We’ll have chicken and pecan pie, cranberry sauce from frozen cranberries, mashed potatoes from the buckets of potatoes stored in spruce shavings in our yet-unfinished tack room, and maybe some purple cabbage that’s out there, too.

By Thursday, temperatures are supposed to head back to normal for us—below zero.  All this slush will turn into glaciers. We’ll be chipping away at it for the rest of winter—an icy footing under the rest of winter’s snow.

And I’m wondering where this all is heading.  This weather blew over to us from Siberia, and it stretches the length of our state—Prudhoe to Anchorage—nearly 800 miles.  It sounds like the tail end of it is hitting the Pacific Northwest—so it’s possibly a 2000-mile weather system following a changing pattern of wind currents here in the North.  While the thought of the Interior developing weather like Alberta, as I heard once on NPR, has some appeal to a horse lover, the process of getting from here—the boreal forest, the deep cold of winters, the lovely dry air—to there is not a magical transformation, and means the loss of more than  just trees and grassland.

I’m not a scientist, but I know scientists here working on problems related to global warming—fish diseases, melting ice lenses, sea ice retreat, insects killing the boreal forest.  Things are out of whack, and we are just beginning to grapple with what it takes to think and act our way through it.

Meanwhile, coffee’s on.  I’m going to wrap this up and go dry off Sam, then settle in for a good game of Scrabble.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

October 31, 2010

Halloween night, and winter is here for real.  The moon is past the quarter, slimming to crescent, and the night sky is dark with gathering clouds moving over the valley from the south.  This week, after a long, gradual fall, we had a day of snow and dropping temperatures, so that now snow sits fluffy and dry on the ground, the fence line, the garden beds.  It’s just in time for an Interior Halloween.  Puffy parkas fill out a costume nicely, and kids are unrecognizable in them.

We don’t have many kids in the neighborhood, though a family with three kids has moved in across the street since May.  I’ve given up preparing for kids to come trick or treat, so Halloween passes by like any other day, except that it signals a return to Alaska Standard Time—an extra hour of sleep the first day, darker afternoons for the rest of winter.

Today I went out to work with Mattie and Sam a bit.  Their coats are growing in like thick plush, delightful to touch.  In the mornings when I go out to feed them, sleepy and grateful for the interval of outdoor time that chore offers, I lean my arm over Sam’s back and press my face into his fur.  He’s like a hooved teddy bear, despite his bad behavior at summer’s end.  Mattie is less cuddly in winter.  Cold makes her cranky, but she’ll let me run my hand under her mane and scratch her on the forehead.  She feels like thick velvet and, even with the long coat, gleams in sunlight.

The riding season ended for us shortly after classes began at the university.  We had one last clinic with Hannah in September, during which Sam had a spectacular bucking fit, and Mattie and I earned our Bronze Horsemasters rating on the flat.  I’ve been concerned about Sam—we will never know what set him off: a yellow jacket or the sight of horses and riders emerging from the woods in a nearby field or some soreness or just perversity.  Trish, who was riding him, hit the dirt but fell well and primarily injured her confidence.   Later in the week, Colleen, the vet, came out and we stress tested him for lameness and found that he was very sore in his right front pastern and slightly sore in the left.  We checked saddle fit, and the saddle that had fit him like a glove in the beginning of summer now put pressure on his withers, which had filled out, and the saddle generally didn’t fit the contours of his back as well.  She also gave him a full chiropractic treatment and he seemed to relax immediately.  Poor guy.  By today, he was trotting soundly.  Nevertheless, I’ll have him on a joint supplement for the winter, and probably forever.

It’s been the political season, too.  I reflect back on the entry I wrote when Obama was inaugurated—how happy and hopeful I felt.  This political season has been gritty and stranger than usual, even in Alaska, where we have a three-way race for Senator.  I follow politics avidly, though I rarely write about them here.  As someone who teaches writing and whose students are often on their first tentative steps toward entering the academic world after years of working, raising kids, or being in the military, I usually avoid discussing politics in the classroom, and it’s become a habit.  Still, I’m saddened that language has become such a victim of the political process, including an Orwellian style of doublespeak. I’m sadder still that the shouting and vitriol has obscured the efforts of a few decent candidates.

I imagine the world a better place if the “nice guys,” the ones who view public office as a service to humanity rather than a ladder to power or some idea of religious entitlement, would get elected and govern politely.  I’d like it if I’d get phone calls from the winning candidates, like the ones I’m getting from the campaigns, that ask me what I think, what ideas I have, or give me a heads up on the process.  I imagine them all sitting down over scones and coffee and chatting pleasantly about their vision for the world: I want them to want more gardens, more poetry and music, and lots of smart children who have a good and lively place to go learn every day.   I want my friend, who is sick and housebound and watches Glen Beck every day, to get her Medicare and the in-home help she needs—without a sense of irony, but just because it’s what she deserves as a neighbor in the wider national community that we all belong to.

I will be out on the corner Tuesday waving signs for the candidates I support.  For a brief time, before I get too cold to hold my sign up, I’ll imagine a world where these things are true and possible, and I’ll wave at my neighbors as they drive by.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | 4 Comments »

The View from Mattie’s Pillow

September 18, 2010

After a three-week rainy period in August, we have been enjoying a long sunny fall these past few weeks. The leaves turned so gradually from green to gold to tawny orange, that it’s been hard to note the time when the turn began or shifted from one phase to another. The temperatures have gone up to the seventies every day, at least in some places. And, knock on wood, there has been no frost in the garden yet.

We are scrambling with winter chores, but the bright days and warm air make it hard to keep the sense of urgency we get when we are haying or cutting wood after a bite of frost. Today we had our friend Steve Sayer come out to wire the back Arctic entry, which will double as a tack room once we finish the insulation and inner walls. I spent time in the corral, working on my new manure composting bins, based on a design I found on the Horses for Clean Water website.

The tomato plants in the greenhouse are still green and putting out flowers. The vines are heavy with green tomatoes, still ripening. If I can time it right, I’ll leave them out there till just before the first hard frost—lengthening the season with a space heater for a week if need be. Then I’ll pick the tomatoes and store them in newspaper in a dark place to ripen. We may have them till November, if we’re lucky. The lemon cukes are still producing fuzzy, pale yellow round cucumbers that taste so delicate and faintly of lemon. The peppers, all the varieties we grew this year, are turning a hot red, long commas and parentheses of them dangling from arrowhead shaped leaves.

So much to do, but I feel the season in pause. I long for it to stay into November—as if I were longing for the place I live to shift and become central California or Provence. I often feel as if the change of seasons here in the Interior is not so much a change of light—though it very much is—as a slippage of geography. In summer, we slip south, so that Alaska may actually be where it appears on some maps—somewhere west of Catalina Island. And by fall, we’re chugging steadily back north again to nestle in under the Arctic Circle in time for snow, the aurora, ice fog—I’ll stop at that. It doesn’t bear too much thinking about, though it does bear preparation.

The horses are growing in winter coats. Sam’s coat is an inch long or more by now. Mattie’s is shorter, but velvety and dark, almost dappled. They approve of trucks turning up the driveway with loads of hay.

As for me, I am tired after a day shoveling manure and loading hay. The moon is a pale oval, like a smooth oyster shell dangling over the mountains to the south. After the long summer of gardening and riding, I have plenty to think about and write here. But the moon coaxes my sleepiness. It will have to wait till tomorrow.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in View from Mattie's Pillow | Leave a Comment »

The Post of Don Sam Incognito

August 27, 2010

Trickster Horse and Trickster Season

Today Trish and I went on a late afternoon trail ride.  It’s late summer—early fall, actually, but who wants to mention that—and the weather is changing.  We’re having cooler nights now that it’s getting dark, not just dusky, and the light has a bit more of a slant to it.  There’s less heat in the sun, though mid-day can get up to the 70s if it’s a cloudless day.   But the light shifts quickly in the sky now.  When we began grooming and tacking up, there was sun across the length of the corral.  By the time we were on the horses, the sun had slipped behind the crest of the ridge above us and we were in shadow and in cooler air.  We could see the sun bright on the valley below, even on the houses and treetops down the road.  We decided to follow the sun to see if we could catch up to it.

In other places, the location of the sun is easy to judge if you know the time of day.  Noon equals straight overhead.  Morning means sun in the east.  Evening, sun in the west.  But here in the northern interior, the sun is on a circular path.  In midsummer, it circles from northeast to northwest—roughly rising and setting in the north with a long swing around to the south.  In winter it blips over the horizon from south-southeast to south-southwest.   On any day between those two extremes, it can rise on any degree of the circle between those summer and winter rising points, depending on the progress of the seasons.  It’s orderly, but constantly shifting along the horizon.  It can be confusing to anyone not used to the place, and it makes any temperate zone understanding of the path of the sun useless.

So on our ride, we took a turn up a hill and were in bright sun again.  And there Sam decided to turn around.

Trish has been riding Sam most of the summer and they have become good partners.  Casey, who rode Sam last summer, has been riding other horses, looking for greater challenges and hoping to get some jumping in.  But Trish and Sam have come a long way—or had until she needed to take a break to travel and then move.  Now she’s back and Sam is testing her all over again to see if she is a rider he can trust.

When the light hit us face on, Sam stopped.  Mattie, the good trail horse, kept walking on, though she cocked an ear back to keep track of what her corral buddy was up to.  Sam had been pushing it—walking close to the edge of the ditch by the road or turning about suddenly as if he had decided to head back—the way I do when I suddenly realize, driving to school, that I’ve left my glasses on the kitchen table.  Trish had maneuvered him out of it.  She had the riding bat, after all, and Sam usually respects its mere presence in her hand.

This time he refused to go up the sunny road, and in their maneuvering back and forth—Trish trying to back him and he refusing to go—they ended up working their way up the road we had turned off of.   I turned Mattie to join them and we walked to the end of the road to the ridge road, as if it were our intention all along.  Sam walked peacefully along and kept pretty calm as we turned around and headed for the road we had tried to turn up.  We turned, he seemed OK, and then he stopped again, and backed precariously close to the edge of a steep hill that sloped sharply down from the side of the road.   Finally, I suggested that Trish get off and lead Sam for a ways—she showing him that there’s nothing to be afraid of and he complying by going in the direction he was trying to avoid.  It seemed to work.  He calmed down and walked along till she got back on again.  We did this once or twice more, Trish staying calm with him and not letting him go the way he wanted.

It’s frustrating to work with a horse as smart and as world-weary as Sam.  He knows so much and much of it is not productive to a smooth partnership with humans.  We have been trail riding many times before, but two rides ago, Trish moved him to the side of the road as a car was passing and his foot slipped a little on the loose gravel under some tall grass and he could feel the edge of the hill behind him.  It was scary for both of them and he refused to go where Trish told him immediately after that.  That’s when we finally resorted to leading him back past the spot then mounting to ride him back again.  It seemed to work, and Trish speculated that Sam had lost confidence in her at the moment his foot slipped.

It seems possible to me.   Sam has known a lot of good and bad riders and, while he respects the good and fair riders, he has no time for bad ones.  My reading of Sam is that he’s taking our measure all the time—measuring us against some ideal human of his past, and measuring us without much faith that we will live up to that ideal.  When he first came to us, his eye was dull, untrusting, doubtful.  Now, mostly, it’s humorous, mischievous, and soft.  He doesn’t mean us any harm, but he can’t help playing his tricks on us. In my imagined inner world of Sam, he’s testing Trish all over again to see how she’ll deal with him.  Can he count on her not to lead him off the cliff?  If he decides that he can, she’ll be able to ride him however she wants to.  Till then, he’s going to challenge her every step of the way.

When we finally rode back down our road, the sun was gone, but, in the way of light here in the north, we were just at the beginning of a few hours of gradual lingering dusk and twilight.  In the birches and aspens, we spotted a few yellow leaves, clearly yellow, not the result of disease or leaf miners.  The F word that no one wants to say.  Late summer, that is.

We untacked the horses and gave them hay.  They were glad to eat, glad to be back in the corral.  Sam stood quietly while Trish untacked him, then she stood watching him while he munched his hay.  He’s a special horse, and all of us who spend time with him feel his tricksterish magic.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in The Post of Don Sam Incognito | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
%d bloggers like this: