Back to the Beginning, Again

And what you have to understand is, he changed everything. Everything, overnight.

He stepped off of the trailer the morning after we met him, at seven o'clock, the sun barely up and the mockingbirds just beginning to stir. It was cold. It was muddy. He barely had any hair. I wonder, on this hot June afternoon, how he felt on the stock-trailer ride up I-95, without a blanket to block the December wind.

I took the cotton lead rope from Curtis, the Plum Crazy Cowboy, and there he was, my horse, blinking gently in the sunrise, ears pricked, looking from empty fields to the double barns and the sounds of breakfasting horses.

There he was, my horse.

Poor Smuckers, it was like he never existed, his quiet lack of personality, his ambling walk, his gentle acceptance of everything except rolltops. He was forgotten. I remember so little of Smuckers, and the amnesia started that morning.

Rillo - we already called him Rillo, we named him that on the drive home, there was never any thought of changing his name from Amarillo - Rillo walked quietly beside me into the barn, into the first stall on the right, and I took off his halter, handed it back to Curtis, and wrote on the dry-erase stall sign. "Amarillo. Owner, Natalie Keller." I hung Smucker's leather halter on the peg, and the red-and-white striped nylon lead rope. I hung an anti-sweat sheet on the blanket bar. I did everything I could to personalize the stall, make it look like the other ones in the barn, to shout, "Here is MY horse, and here are HIS things, and he is just as good as your horse!"

Curtis sold my mother a bareback pad he just happened to have in the truck - I needed one because one of my friends had one, and they were very much in vogue in Brevard County pre-teen hunter riding circles at the time. I put it in my locker, with my cheap little wide tree close-contact that had fit Smuckers but would probably not fit Rillo, and my $19.95 Essex bridle with a plain raised noseband and laced reins from State Line Tack, fitted with a loose-ring snaffle that looked a quarter-inch too small for Rillo, and a couple of Grooma brushes that said "Smuckers" in permanent marker on them. That was my locker. It wasn't bursting full like the other boarders' yet, but I had good faith that it would in time.

I went back to my horse and watched him look out the window, watched him eat his hay cautiously, pressed my finger to his nose everytime he blew at me through the bars.

My horse, my horse, my horse.

I am tearing up a little thinking about him.

The picture is from Canterbury Horse Trials in 2000. I am laughing at a rank bay trying to buck Ralph Hill off on the other side of the warm-up ring. Ralph was laughing, too.

Head-long Towards the Crash

In 1996 I was boarding Rillo at an under-supervised eventing barn/riding school filled with horse-crazy teenagers running completely wild. We had spent the previous summer there from dawn to dusk, dumped off by our parents who all commuted "down the road" to D.C., some to perform important government functions and some to sell things to the government.

A long-haired Jesus look-alike named Edgar took care of the horses. He welcomed our presence in the summers - we did all the morning chores and he slept in. I'm not sure what the agreement was - our parents were all paying for full board - but as soon as we got to the barn, we started bringing in horses, dumping feed, and filling watering buckets. Edgar, in exchange, kept the radio on DC101 and educated us about alternative music and the Grateful Dead. Coming from Florida, which was still stuck on grunge and where the Dead were unheard of, I found this useful information.

Up until this point, Rillo and I had been doing dressage, with the occasional fence thrown in, but I had not had any formal jumping training with him. I feverishly rushed my mother to Maryland Saddlery, where we selected a deep-seated all purpose saddle that I jump in to this day. I love that saddle. You can call in no-purpose if you like, and it absolutely puts my lower-leg too far forward, but for Rillo and I, this position suited me admirably.

Why? Because we settled right into a weekly riding lesson with my "advanced" friends. . . and began jumping completely on talent and without any preparation. To the very last fence we took together, this gap in his education would show. Rillo took every fence headlong, with passionate abandon and fierce concentration, but without any recognition of the fence to follow. The gridwork and poles that might have taught him to keep his head up and his velocity down were skipped over in favor of fun and excitement.

In my defense, I was fifteen and had a crowd of like-minded friends for the first time in my life. I had to keep up with them. And the two years of dressage meant that I could bring him back to me and that I did indeed learn to shorten and lengthen him - but he would never do it without being told to.

So we galloped cross-country, we crashed through jumper shows, collecting ribbons, we practiced "puissance" in the indoor arena, inadvertently jumping six feet after someone swore that the standards were only five foot, and we prepped for the first event of the season: Red Hills Pony Club. April 26. Some days you do not forget.

How I Found Him

In the picture, I'm newly pregnant and saying good-bye before I leave for New York City. The horse is my old love, Rillo.

When I was thirteen, still grieving the death of my first horse, a dimly remembered red quarter horse named Smuckers, my mother decided I had to have another horse. Smuckers had been gone for about eight months. I was bored and considering getting into trouble in some mediocre adolescent manner. I went into the woods behind the house to plot. I remember I'd just had some shouting match with my mother, but I don't remember what it was about. It was two days before Christmas.

"NATALIE!" came from the house.

I ignored it and went on laying plans to start fires and do other tiresome thirteen-year-old acts of rebellion.

"NATALIE!"

"WHAT!"

"COME IN AND GET READY TO GO AND SEE THIS HORSE!"

Horse? Okay.

We'd seen one other horse that I can recall, a six year old Thoroughbred mare named Annie. She was dark bay, delicately built, with tremulous, worried eyes. She had picked delicately through the muddy riding arena at the boarding stable along the St. John's River and we had driven away shaking our heads a little. Cute, but no. With childish impatience, I was certain that I was never going to find the right horse. I didn't realize then that every horse is for sale, for the right price. Certainly Thoroughbreds.

We drove to Fort Pierce, a dull two hours south on the interstate. We listened to a tape of "Octave" by The Moody Blues. The one with "Nights in White Satin." I can still repeat the poem at the end, and when I do, I picture a cloudy December afternoon, driving south through pine scrub filled with cattle.

We passed through orange-scented groves, past a Tropicana bottling plant, drove down a long sand road to the barn and arena of one of those thousand acre cattle and citrus ranches that are still common in Florida. A red-headed man in a cowboy hat introduced himself as Curtis. He drove a teal green F-350 dually with purple lettering across the windshield. "PLUM CRAZY." While we were talking, a horse wandered up and casually took a bite out of the bug shield across the front, inadvertantly teaching me a few great new cuss words.

He showed us his two Thoroughbreds for sale. They were in a muddy paddock together. (Everything was muddy that day. I think it had been a wet December.)

There was a plain bay and a dark bay. The plain bay had a white star, was in good condition, and clearly had a good temper. I can see them walking across the paddock towards us. I still see it as it happened, my gaze sliding from the plain bay to the dark bay just behind him, lurking in the corner.

He was skin and bone, perhaps a very low 3 on the scale, and he had no hair at all across his flanks and down his hindquarters. His eyes were both bright and quiet. He looked trusting. He came to us and I shoved aside the inquiring nose of the plain bay - I think his name was Indian - and went straight for that skeleton of a dark bay.

I'd left my girth at home and there were no English girths within ten miles of that barn, so Curtis cinched on a Western saddle while I bridled him with a plain fat loose-ring. I got on in the roping arena while he described the horse's background: claimed cheaply at Tampa, abandoned by owners with financial troubles that seemed to necessitate that they visit foreign climes, found in a sandlot by a concerned young woman, delivered to Curtis to rehab with only a copy of his papers to keep anyone from racing him again. Curtis took him on trail rides, moved cattle from field to field, and popped him over enough logs and ditches to think he'd be a nice English horse. He curried him and washed him and got off the rain rot that had left him hairless.

I nudged him into a trot and got a bouncy trot full of suspension and air-time. Too much, in fact, for that Western saddle. I asked for a canter and got a springy, joyful gallop. I stood in the stirrups and felt it. You know, it.

A picture worth a thousand words

This is a picture of the time that I didn't trust.

Over and over again, he reminded me that I could trust him. That he would take care of me.

Amarillo came to me when I was thirteen. He was too much horse for me, and I wasn't scared of anything. We were a good match. We learned dressage together. I taught him to jump by trial-and-error. I put him wrong, gave him bad spots, misjudged pace, and he took care of me. Again and again.

We went from the insulated small-town hunter world that existed in Florida at the time to the old-fashioned eventing-and-hunting world of Maryland and our lives changed forever.

Suddenly we were hurling ourselves across fields larger than we'd ever seen before, racing down slopes steeper than we'd ever thought of, swimming through rivers in the short summers and hopping ice-fringed ravines during the winters that seemed to last forever. I introduced him to snow and he introduced me to running hell-bent back to the barn, a Florida-bred scared out of his wits by the white stuff that had taken over his world.

We went back to Florida and mucked around for a few years, teaching lessons here and there, doing some dressage, bored out of our minds, until we found ourselves in the Promised Land, Ocala, amongst the live oaks and the horsey set, surrounded by Thoroughbreds. I settled in Rillo's hometown, Williston, and one day cold-called his breeder by sifting through the white pages and saying, "Hi, do you breed Thoroughbred horses? Remember Amarillo Elbert...?" I just wanted to tell him how much I loved the horse he'd bred. One of these days I want to walk up to him at OBS and show him this picture.

There wasn't any money for regular lessons, but by good luck and poor career choices I managed to squeeze in one with Christina Schlusemeyer and another with Peter Atkins just before our inaguaral Training Level event as an independent duo. I think we did Novice level at Basingstoke and had a pause at the water that the jump judge interpreted as a stop. Mike Winter was good enough to walk the stadium-jumping course with me and we did great until the combination, where Rillo flattened out and dropped a rail. Whatever the case, we went to Canterbury to do their fairly straight-forward Training course sans-trainer, as we always did.

We went hurtling across the course without incident until the ditch and wall. I am afraid of ditch and wall fences. I can't help myself. They frighten me. And because I was without a trainer, I didn't have a pep talk. Or a plan. The plan was to trust Rillo.

Rillo, you see, didn't refuse fences. I had once tacked up Rillo to go for a trail ride. We went ambling down the driveway of the farm (I was about sixteen, and at a farm inhabited entirely by rabid eventing fans between the age of 14 and 18. It was amazing.) and came across a new fence that had been built into one of the pastures. It was a fairly large, maxed-out Training level picnic table. The other teenagers shrieked that it was too scary to jump.

Rillo literally gathered himself up and dragged me to the fence. About three strides out he broke into a canter. I trusted him. The girl that had been sitting on the picnic table trusted him too. She knew he'd go over anything he was pointed out. She scurried out of the way just in time. Good thing, too, since Rillo seemed to pause in mid-air, reassess how wide the table was, dragging one hind hoof across the fresh black paint of the top boards, before completing the leap. It was the strangest jump I'd ever taken, and entirely too large for my skill level at the time, but I knew Rillo would jump it. I trusted him.

As we came bolting across the long galloping path towards the ditch and wall, I waited for Rillo's decision. If he wanted to jump it, fine. I'd close my eyes and we'd go over it. If he didn't want to jump it, well - that would be fine too. I would trust him, as I always had.

Five strides out, Rillo's head came up from its customary place between his knees, and his ears fixed on the fence. His weight shifted back, and his stride shortened. Then faltered.

I should have put my leg on him. I should have sat up and dropped my heel, pressing my calf firmly on his side, and told him something encouraging, like, "Let's get on!"

I sat in the saddle and waited. I put my hands down on his neck and waited for him to slide to a halt. I supposed we'd re-approach, and re-assess, after the refusal.

Two strides out, Rillo remembered that jumping was his job, and that he never refused anything.

He threw in an extra stride and launched.

I heard a gasp from the jump judge, who had probably already filled in my first refusal. Hell, she'd probably already picked up her radio and reported it. We had been so lacking in impulsion, cantering down to that fence, that no one in their right mind would have tried to send their horse over it.

Rillo jumped the fence perfectly, a beautiful parabola, arcing in the sort of bascule that only a long-backed horse can show you, (none of that back-cracking u-shape that a short-backed horse gives you) and landed only a little harder than usual before driving off towards the cow pasture.

I also jumped the fence beautifully, but since I'd been caught unawares, I was about half a stride behind him. Look in the picture and admire my crest release, and think how nice I would look if he were just taking off, instead of in full flight.

I landed so hard on his neck (because by the time he hit the ground, my legs were practically on the cantle of the saddle) that I nearly rolled over his off shoulder. He was already head down, galloping hard, driving down the gallop path, and flicked an ear back at me which said, "Why would you think I would stop?"

I should have trusted him.