If you've read this blog before, you might be aware that I have a tendency to act first, ask later. (Think later too, if you ask my mother.) This is not always a bad thing.. Most of the world's innovations were created by such people; some by complete accident.
Such is the tale of the sabertoothed pony shadow..
I'm not sure if you know this, but at fourteen, I knew everything. I kid you not. Absolutely everything. Now, I know that's not true. At fourteen, you only think you have mastered the secrets of the universe. You're sneaking wine coolers from your mom's meager supply of liquor, and you're riding your pony like you stole him. You can converse with the adults like a "grown up", maybe even convince a few that you're a hop skip away from eighteen, but when you're alone, you still pretend your Cow has suddenly transformed into fire-breathing racehorse prancing up to the Derby.
Maybe that last one was just me..
Anyway, I decided to stop riding when I was thirteen. I was starting to dance for our school's dance team and also playing basketball and volley ball. Trading my boots for pom poms seemed like a decent idea. Not that I wouldn't trail ride or play with the old Cow some.. I just didn't want the pressure.
Around this time, one of our boarders purchased a mutt of a horse. He was dappled gray, fat and sassy, and horribly cute. "You have to come meet Ungodly-Redneck-Name!" My mom coaxed.
About a month after they brought him home, I finally did. He and Hamlet met me at the gate, a lethal combination of pony syndrome. I offered my hand out to him, and he peered back at me, an inquistive intelligence that I'd never encountered before. He had long white lashes, and he batted them innocently as he sniffed my hand.
Then he nipped me.
"Son of a-!" I jerked away from the fence, glaring at the pony who still seemed quite intrigued. It was then I saw the whorl, running half-way up his neck. Back then I had standards that may seem a bit strange.
1. No whorls running up the neck. (I've leased/owned four since.)
2. No double whorls on the forehead. (Miss Manners is a full on double whorled girl.)
Are you confused yet? Good.
So, a quick explanation. In some cultures, a whorl running up the neck is considered a sign of bad luck (along with having a white sock on the right front leg). In fact, in the Bedouin culture, this marking was referred to as "the shredded collar". There was a custom to rip one's shirt collars off while mourning.. See the connection? A horse with two swirls on his face is thought to be more emotional and over-reactive.. Not my cup of tea at all. Granted, every horse I've ever liked has been just this side of normal. The crazy side, that is.
Now, please note that these are all superstition. They aren't fact, so don't get your feathers ruffled or your panties in a bunch just because I said your horse was bad luck or nuts.
Ungodly-Redneck-Name had the biggest swirl I'd ever seen running up his throat. I spun and made my way back to the barn. "That horse is trouble," I told my mom later. "And he's bad luck."
I bet you're thinking this is one of those sweet stories where I turned out to be wrong. But it's not. Ungodly-Redneck-Name was way too smart for his own good, and we lived in fear that he'd evolve to have opposable thumbs. He tore apart gates. He broke fences. He behaved like he was scared to walk through the barn, and heaven forbid you try to put him on a trailer.
It was all a game though. He'd play the "I'm so scared!" act with his owner and then placidly plod through the barn when I took the lead. If he were human, I imagined he'd be a smooth-talking Eddie from Leave It To Beaver, greasing the parents and then doing whatever he wanted.
Finally, his owner decided he was too much. She was going to take him to the sale barn, where he would bounce around from owner to owner before subsequently ending up in a can. She offered him to me.
I took the bait, and at fourteen, I bought my first pony. He was dirt cheap, but the check bounced by 20 cents. I asked for her to sign a bill of sale. In our drawers, we have the check with the byline of "Ungodly-Redneck-Name" and my overly-cutesy handwritten bill of sale.
After about two weeks of referring to him as the Alpo Pony, we shortened it to just Pony.
Pony was and is one of the strangest horse personalities I've encountered. He'd groom me one day, nip me the next. He'd be perfect and then perfectly horrid (while no one watched and while everyone watched, of course.). I loved him, from his dapples to his sporadic episodes, because he was mine.
All mine.
At the time, I had a friend who also rode a pony, and we'd hop on bareback and ride for hours. There's a big creek that runs near our farm, and we'd splash in it and ride until we found an opening. We'd steer our ponies out of the bank, zipping through the fields with a youthfulness only found on the back of a horse and away from parental vision.
"Are we allowed in here?"
"Do you see anybody?"
"... No."
"Then yes. We are."
(Sorry, Mom.)
Because of this, we'd end up miles from home. For my friend, this was nothing.. Her pony was well-behaved and somewhere between 11.3 and 12.2 hands. For me, each ride was a game of "Can I Keep My Butt on the Pony?", mixed in with a little prayer. Pony is 14.2 hands and not easy to scramble on to. Plus you never want to fall off miles from home.
And if you get off, you want to make damn sure your horse doesn't leave you to walk through the overgrown grass up the world's steepest hill in soggy tall boots. But that's another story.
It was on one of these days that we'd taken off, zipping through pastures like hellions. We'd dare each other to ride across new pastures, flicking nervous glances at the houses on the property. While in one field, a giant Hummer had pulled into the driveway. We scattered like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Splashing into the creek, my friend turned to me. "Where do you think we are?"
I shrugged. I had no clue. In typical teenaged fashion, she shrugged also, and before we could get too concerned, we were pulling our legs up our ponies' back to avoid being soaked by deeper water. We'd been riding for about an hour, trying to escape farther and farther from the fenced-in fields of home.
We finally hopped out into a field we'd meandered through earlier. I gave Pony a long rein. He plugged along like the world's best trail horse. My friend did the same, and her tiny mount stretched and snorted. With the summer sun beaming down and the sway of our horses' walks and the untouched field with no modern convience in sight, it felt like everything was perfect.
I kept one hand on the rein and turned to face my friend. We chatted as I leaned on Pony's amble behind. Then he saw the manhole.
Manholes, you see, are evil. They eat ponies. Especially the gray ones. Those are super tasty.
He jumped and wheeled, and it was one of those moments where you're thanking God that the grass is thick.
Now, most bad ponies would have headed for the hills by the time you were bouncing off the ground (when you're old, you just splat.), but Pony just stopped and started grazing a yard or two away from where he dumped me. I rolled up on my side, pleased to see him nibbling and not making a mad dash away. I crawled to my knees and realized with horror that he was standing on - not one - but both sides of his reins.
On each side of his face, he had about three inches of slack before the reins went under his hooves.
I knew what was going to happen. It felt like slow motion. "No, Pony, no," I soothed. "Don't move."
As I stepped forward, he jerked his head up, popping the leather apart with an anguished cry. (Oh, wait.. The cry was me.) I grabbed him before he could break anything else. It's okay, I thought. Surely he just broke his reins. Maybe I didn't have the cheekpieces really fastened.
I was wrong. He'd broken the metal buckles of each cheekpiece, stranding us an hour from home without a cell phone or twine or any feasible way to reassemble the bridle. I fiddled with the bit, trying to concoct some way to stabilize it in his mouth without the cheekpieces. It looked like one Girl would be leading a now fidgeting Pony all the way home.
As he fidgeted, he brushed my hand with his bad luck swirl. Then he stepped on me.
Maybe, I thought, the Bedouins had it right.
(part 2 coming soon.)
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