The Short End

My son rode out in the pasture with me last weekend, one of his first trips that involved traversing real landscape, and I was reminded of how it was to be a kid in the saddle. Especially a really short kid.

Horseback riding is not friendly to the vertically-challenged, unless you happen to be a Kentucky Derby jockey with a groom on hand to give you a leg up. Think about it…the shorter the person, the shorter the stirrup leathers, and therefore the greater the distance from stirrup to ground, when I already started at a serious disadvantage compared to my longer-legged cousins. How is that fair? 

Sadly, I never found any spare grooms loitering around the barn on the ol' ranch, although the hired man could be pressed into service in a pinch, if I caught him passing by on the way to the shop for whatever the only tool was that hadn't been packed in his toolbox, but turned out to be essential to replace a broken section on the swather.

More often, I had to make do with a hay bale or a bucket. Want to guess how long it takes a horse of average intelligence to figure out all he has to do is sidle away from the bucket to keep you from mounting up? About thirty seconds less than it takes a meaner than average horse to realize it's more fun to just knock you off the bucket. Or reach around, grab the hay bale with his teeth and yank it out from under you.

Somehow or other, I always managed to get aboard. Feet in stirrups, reins in hand, ready to go…except the horse didn't move, because a horse doesn't see a lot of sense in leaving the place where he gets grain and hay. 

"Just kick him," my dad always said. 

Yeah, sure. Easy for you, your feet reach down past the saddle blanket.

Once I got free of the barn's gravitational field I'd be on a roll, until we crossed the first slough west of the house, where the grass grows belly high. How was a horse to resist reaching down for a bite, ripping the reins right out of my hands? They'd slide clear to his ears, and despite hanging upside down from the front of the saddle by the tips of my boots I couldn’t reach them, so there we'd stay, the horse happily grazing, until someone noticed we'd stalled. 

My horse had two speeds: plod, and bone-jarring trot. The average rider counteracts a rough trot by placing weight on their feet. This is somewhat more challenging when your legs are stuck straight out on either side of a flat-backed, hog fat kid pony. I'd be pulling on the reins for dear life, every slam of his front feet on the ground bouncing me a little higher, until I looked like a paddle ball on the end of a rubber band. At some point my butt would fail to contact the center of the saddle and plonk! Off I went.

The north pasture was a field of horrors for a kid rider. Right off the bat, we'd have to cross a coulee. Going down usually wasn't bad. Going up was steep, though, and my horse would break into a lope, lunging for the top. If I wasn't screwed down real tight, he'd blow me right out the back of the saddle. Plonk! Arse over teakettle off his rump.

The absolute worst was crossing creeks. Now that I'm an adult, I own a whole herd of horses that will step sedately over and through waterways. Not so when I was my son's age. Back then, my horses approached creeks much like Evil Knievel approached Hell's Canyon, settling back on their haunches, winding up, and launching. My neck would snap, my feet would pop out of the stirrups, and…splat! Kid, meet creek.

Or hole. Or ditch. Or tree branch. Or plain old dirt, thanks to a rabbit or grouse popping out of the brush and sending my horse ten feet sideways. Good thing the ground wasn't near as hard back then as it is now, because most days I considered it a major victory to only fall off once. On the rare occasion I made it all the way home without a single tumble, my horse had one last trick. The shaking started at his ears, grew in magnitude as it traveled up his neck then burst into a full body earthquake, rattling my teeth, jangling my brain and rearranging every vertebrae in my spine.

Figures, that'd be the only time I couldn’t seem to fall off.

*

That'll Leave a Mark

I bruise often. No, I don't mean easily. At any given time I have two or three random bruises, and there's nothing easy or comfortable about most of them, although I often have a hard time recalling where they came from. Currently my left knee cap is a lovely shade of plum. I have a vague memory of whacking it on something. Under a desk, I think. It's hard to say. Not because it didn't hurt at the time, but because I blunder into so many obstacles that it's hard to decide which one left a mark.

Take the heater in my bedroom, one of those black cubes about six inches square. Every night I turn it on to warm up the icy floors before my husband takes his evening shower. And every night I turn it off before I go to sleep. Nearly every morning, I trip over it in the dark and stub my toes because I forgot to shove it safely under the end of the bed.

The trailer hitch on my Jeep is another notorious assailant. You'd think after the fifth or sixth time I raised a goose egg on my shin hauling groceries out of the back of the car, I'd get a clue, but somehow that hitch always comes as a total surprise.

Some bruises have not only left a mark, but a permanent impression on my psyche. The worst, hands down, was the first summer I lived in South Dakota. I'd gone to a friend's house for roping practice one sunny Saturday, the weather warm enough for a thin cotton tank top. I roped a big yearling, missed my slack, and instead of around his neck the loop came tight on one back leg.

My horse stopped. The calf kept going. And the breakaway hondo on my rope…didn't. Not until the rope was stretched taut, the five hundred pound calf dragged almost to a stop. Then, snap! The rope recoiled, straight back at me, the end lashing around my torso and bare upper arm like a bullwhip, the hondo nailing me in the ribs. 

There is a frozen moment, between the impact and the pain, when your brains scrambles to figure out how to eject from your body before the hurt sets in. I failed. I can't even describe how it felt without tears springing to my eyes. I peeled my shirt up to find a perfect impression of the hondo on my ribs, with a welt that snaked in a full coil across my stomach and arm. A rope tattoo, complete with the spiral ridges, that gradually morphed from red to purple to green then yellow over the following month. 

More recently, my child was invited to a birthday party. After driving an hour into town every day of the week to work, getting me into a car on a Sunday is like stuffing a cat into a barrel full of water. My husband offered to take our son to the party if I would help my dad bed down the calving barn. Fine by me. First I had to open the big double doors, which are held shut with a spring-loaded metal bar. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distance between the bar and my face, and when it popped open it smacked me in the cheekbone.

I walked around with a purple smudge under one eye for two weeks, looking as if that half of my head hadn't slept in a month. My husband declared it proof of what he'd always suspected: I would rather punch myself in the face than be sociable. 

*