The Horse

What must be faced

I’m 12. Living in a dusty town in New Mexico near the border of Texas, a place where the Martian red sand grows peanuts and tumbleweeds.

My mother’s parents live here, and that’s why we ended up here over 9 years before, when my mother set off from Iowa with four kids in a car and not much else. She ran out of gas just miles from town.

They live in a trailer house a few miles outside of town on a plot of land. Built a shanty barn of wood poles and rusted corrugated metal that creaks and flaps in the near-constant winds. There’s not much here to stop them, just horizon for miles and miles. My grandparents’ section of this endlessness is framed with barbed wire.

I remember Granny planting irises in a bed all along the back of the trailer house. It seemed like such a futile gesture. But now I know that she knew beauty, she knew how to create a brightness where none had been before.

My grandparents occasionally have animals on the property, and I’m always enthralled—the turkey who became Thanksgiving dinner, T-Bone the calf that became burgers, and horses Grampa would break for riding. And oh…the horses! A dream for a young girl whose grandpa would spin stories of teaching me to ride and maybe someday I could be in the rodeo. A dream for a girl who drew them endlessly. A dream for a girl who imagined running so strong and so free.

When we pull up into the driveway, the first thing I do is go see the horses. Sometimes they’re in the barn and sometimes they’re out on the “pasture,” though it’s hard to call it this because there’s not much plant life. I spend hours out there looking for wire and metal fragments in exchange for a nickel, a dime from my grandpa.

This day, I run out to the rusted metal gate, looking for the yearling colt Grampa is breaking. He is a reddish chestnut brown with black mane and tail, and I just love him. Everyone else goes into the house. I climb over the rails and head out to greet him.

He is happy to see me, and warmly accepts my long, open-handed strokes. I feel the muscles of his graceful neck, his rippling shoulders, down his flank to the curve of his rump, and of course his soft, soft muzzle. I gaze into his warm dark eyes. I breathe in the horse sweat, the atmosphere of this creature.

With thoughts of Granny’s sweet tea on my mind, I turn around for the barn, about 100 feet away. And I hear big hooves behind me.

*da dum, da dum, da dum…* Then a moment of suspension…an eternity of silence…an inhalation before the wave…

A sickening thud. His forearms land on my shoulders, nearly buckling me in half. I have done the thing Grampa said never to do…I turned my back…

I stagger, somehow keeping my legs beneath me. The gravity subsides and I begin to sprint for the barn.

*da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum…* I know this moment.

His weight on me again, and still somehow I do not fall to the ground where I would certainly be stomped into the red dirt. Despair floods me—I will never make it to the barn. And so

I spin around, throwing my arms out wide, getting as big as I can. A sound rips from my throat—no, my body. My eyes arrow into his.

The horse skids to a halt in a cloud of red dust, his front legs locked and outstretched before him, eyes open and big, ears cocked forward awaiting my cue. The murderous monster I’m expecting is not there—he’s as playful as a puppy.

I hold him in my gaze, stepping backward slowly, my arms in front of me with hands open. “Whoa…whoa…whoa…” until I feel the barn looming behind me.

Now it’s safe. I turn and run into the cool shaded darkness of the barn, the star-like pinpricks of light on the ground from the holes in the metal roof. I run to the back pens, sliding between the bars that hold the horse out and me in. Hands on my knees, I heave to catch my breath. All the emergency energy coursing through me begins to drain, down down through my feet into the earth. My heart may break my ribcage and run free. I’m completely exhausted.

I slide through the rails and walk to the trailer house, past the irises to the back door. I sit down at the small table in the kitchen. Mom, Granny, Grampa gathered there, talking. Mom turns to me, “What happened to your leg?”

I look down to see a hoof-sized circle abrasion on my right calf, oozing blood from parallel scrapes and a purple bruise already rising. I don’t know it yet, but my muscle will carry an indentation for years to come.

“Oh, I must’ve scraped it on the barbed wire fence.”

And with that, the portal closed. I chose secrecy, thinking I was protecting the horse from Grampa’s wrath. I know now that it would have most likely been laughter at my expense and an “I told you so.”

But this was me, in the dream of my life, getting lucid. Growing up. Accepting a fierce independence rooted firmly in the knowing that I can take care of myself. Admirable, sure. But the shadow side of that coin is an inability to ask for help and a habit of overburdening myself with things no one has asked me to carry.

I would be the vigilant one, the awake one, the decisive one.

I would be the rigid one, the stubborn one, the lonely one.

The unbreakable one who can somehow shatter into a million pieces.

It was my first step into the archetypal descent, the end of childhood, a journey that wouldn’t fully unfold for a few more years. But these are the choicepoints we face before we know why or how. These are the times we lay bricks down into our foundations, made of the earth we stand on. (Even today, when I step off a plane onto the ground there, the mineral sound beneath my feet is of such familiarity. This…I know this…I am this.) And the horse is a signpost on my spiraling path. I’ve now met several horses, and the turning around and the facing never gets easier.

I do not know what providence was with me that day. No one had taught me to do that, to do what was necessary to prevent a playful horse from killing me. But whatever it is that lives inside me, it is strong and its voice is pure. It knows better than I what to do—my logical mind cannot keep up with the speed of conscious awareness, or the grace of intuition. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the years since, it’s to listen, to heed it at all costs.