Horses
Field report #14 - the monthly longer essay for supporters, plus recommendations for reading, listening, and sunglasses
A horse to me is muscle and heart, one way or another. Docile looks. Massive body. Not desert-eyed, but ocean-eyed, and the shoulders very broad.
I spent the past week at a Colorado horse ranch, an hour and a half outside of Denver, for a forthcoming GQ article. Horses were the point, days and days of horses, real and metaphorical, in ways I’ll elaborate when the story runs in October. For days we communed, we walked, we grazed. We did more technical things that fell under the term “groundwork,” a new word to me, a horse-world term for all that a person can do with a horse without being in a saddle: getting them to back up, to follow you around, to take precise steps. What the head wrangler could do with just a few clucks or gestures, standing 30 feet away from a horse, was astonishing.
That’s not the subject of this essay. The point here is about the charge that emerged between me and a horse rather suddenly. The first night, I told the head wrangler my height, weight, and experience in the saddle – none – and she assigned me Lucky, a Palomino gelding with whom I’d need to get intimate pretty fast because soon we’d be riding for hours up and down some steep trails in the mountains with serious exposure (ie., drop-off) on either side, which I should expect to get “seriously fucking dicey.”
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