Outside Of A Horse
The outside of a horse is good for in the inside of a man. I’m not sure when I first heard the term, but I’m sure it was uttered sometime in my youth. Maybe the local rodeo, maybe in passing, some farmhand or cowboy, some old-timer offering wisdom to men and boys who had either already heard it or were too young to understand it. For whatever reason, the phrase never affected me. Until his funeral.
It was Colorado. August. Family gathered in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of death. His brother spoke the words, braver than I would be, stronger than most. He wasn’t my uncle, but I called him that because third cousin-once-removed failed to encompass the connection, fails still to grasp what he and his brother mean to me. Too old to be cousins, too young to be grandfathers. Both knew my father, spilled blood with him on the mountain, and over time, spilled blood with me in the same way. Hunting elk is our family's communion, a religious act that connects us to the past, the present, and the heartbreak of inevitable death. Horses have been the harbingers of that death. Sometimes to the animals. Sometimes to us.
The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. My mother still remembers a ride they took together in the mountains of the San Isabel. She tells it like it was only yesterday, the four of them together, horses and humans, the pine tree shadows tickling the backs of all, the sun peeking through small holes in the canopy, the smell of fresh earth. He was a natural. Rode horses all his life; was comfortable around them in the way mothers are comfortable around children that aren’t their own.
I never was. Horses scared me. Everyone I knew seemed to know someone else who had either had their head kicked in or their back broken by one of the strange giants. Still, they were mysterious and attractive. Eventually, when I started guiding hunters on the Montana/Idaho border, I was forced to overcome my fears. We used them to bring hunters in, take dead elk out. Grown men were bucked off, kicked. Wildfires forced us out of the wilderness late one September. The horses got us home when it seemed like darkness and smoke were the only things left in the world. I began to love them, not even close to a horseman, but far from the skeptic I was in my youth.
The first horse I rode was basically a first date. The girl that became my wife took me to her in-laws where a grey horse with a tangled mane was let out of the coral for the first time in God-only-knows. The saddle was too loose, and as the stallion galloped off, then pitched and bucked, I slid comically to the side, almost parallel to the buffalo grass, my spine a rigid pole of fear, my hands and thighs a vice on anything they could find. Everyone behind me laughed, including my future in-laws, including my future ex-wife.
In West Texas, I worked on a 5-star resort and cattle ranch. Horses took guests on trail rides, brought rogue longhorns in from wild country. I fed them, helped the vet squeeze puss from the infected hoof of a big paint named Georgia. They walked freely around the adobe 2-bedroom I called home. Little Jimmy, a Morgan with deep black eyes, came into my yard to eat fresh grass around the chola cactus I watered in the evenings. One night, drunk and sick with self-pity, I walked to him in the moonlight as he grazed in the east pasture. He walked to me too, thinking I was bringing him handfuls of hay which had become my penchant. But I didn’t have hay, only tears. He took them anyway, nudged me with his face and neck as I wept into his warm, slick coat. Overhead, the clearest and starkest sky in the world covered us like a blanket with star holes, and I knew what my uncle must have known all his life.
The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. But not just man. My daughters have taken to them kindlier than I did. We’ve only been on a few rides, the kind that all tourists take when they trade their vacation hours for cowboy hats. I’m sure we look like tourists too, sitting atop most unnaturally, some of us in sneakers, others in shorts. There is a standard operating procedure that comes with horses - a sort of code left from the remnants of men and women perhaps harder than most of what the world births today. This hardness has rules, and the relic souls left around to see those rules broken don’t like it. Californians are ruining the west one might say. Greenhorns are a dime a dozen another might add. And although they have their points, I don’t think the horses care. I’m talking about the inside. The painted horse named Sundance my youngest rode in Montana didn’t seem to care. She took carrots from her hand as if it bore the oldest wrinkles, as if she’d broke a thousand mares.
If you’ve ever been scared of horses, that’s good. They can kill you. Just like cars and cancer. But if you’ve ever heard that saying whispered or mumbled in a corner bar, at the stockyard, in the school room, or even on the television set, know that there’s a reason. Know that connections can be made despite glaring danger. Know that there are still mysteries unexplained when it comes to humankind and the animals we share this world with. Know that those mysteries will continue beyond the explanation of science, beyond the evolution of artificial intelligence, beyond the reach of our most brilliant achievement. Know that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. And maybe its the other way around, too.
