monthly musings from JD
May 2009 - The Horse
When I was in the fourth grade, my family bought a horse.
We had just moved from Coffeeville, Kansas, where we had had cows, and pigs, (some of good size, although I don’t believe ‘hog’ stature had been reached), chickens, rabbits, cats, dogs, frogs, turtles, snakes (some okay, some not), and other various living critters. While my older brother, Kurt, and my older sister, Carol, and I had stolen a few unauthorized rides on horses before (some with disastrous consequences), we did not have one of our own.
After our little farm house in Coffeeville had burned down, my Step-Father, Paul, and Kurt, had climbed into our old red GMC pick-up truck, and they had driven west (just ahead of a lurking tornado) in search of a new place for us to live. The story goes that when they came over the crest of a hill and saw Canon City, Colorado (everyone calls it ‘Canyon’ City), Paul had said “This is the place.”
After a brief search for ‘suitable’ living quarters, they found, and rented, a small, operating berry farm, from a still madly in love older couple named the Flemings.
The Flemings grew, and sold, cherries, boysenberries, raspberries, grapes, apples, corn, tomatoes, onions, watermelons, cantaloupes, and just about every other kind of thrilling treat you could think of that would grow in that rich Colorado soil.
Returning the 600 or so miles back to Coffeeville, Pop and Kurt had gathered together whatever we had left, and Mom and Carol and me, and Teddy our tail-less dog, and, all jammed together in that old red truck, we set off to Colorado to start all over again.
Again.
“The Grapes Of Wrath”1.
There may have actually been a few chickens along for the ride.
One day, sometime later, we all woke up and we were living in Canyon City.
It would be from Ma Fleming, who, along with her loving husband, Pa, owned the property, that I learned one of my first solid truths about life. One day, asking her about a carton of berries that still had some dirt on them that she had just sold to a customer, I wondered why she didn’t wash the berries more thoroughly before she sold them.
“Aw hell honey,” she said to me in her gruff cigarette smoked voice, “a little dirt never hurt no body.”
No, Ma.
No it hasn’t.
Maybe a little dirt is good for all of us.
I was deeply depressed.
We all were.
We had just come through losing everything in the fire (my teddy bear), we were poor as the dirt that grew those delicious offerings, and, for the first time in my life, I would be going to school without my older brother and sister being there with me. For the previous three years, in Kansas, we had all attended The Walter Johnson School, named after the great long-ago baseball pitcher Walter Johnson, who came from Coffeeville. In that little one room school house, grades one through eight gathered during the school year, all 24 of us, and, taught by the Saint Mrs. Thelma Patterson, we all became a small, safe, protective family. I always knew that my brother and sister were there for me if I needed them.
But now, in Canon City, I would be taking the bus to the elementary school all alone, and I was out of my mind. So overwhelmed with fear and sadness and confusion and uncertainty, I used to cry every morning before school, begging to stay home.
At first, my mother, Vera, also battling her own demons, would walk me the half mile or so to the bus stop every morning. Holding my hand, walking beside me on the dirt road, she would do her best to talk me through my fear. My sorrow. Our loss. All I wanted to do was run back home and hide. Maybe, once or twice, she let me do that, but it finally came to the point where I realized that I was going to have to do this by myself.
Sometimes it seems the only way to live through the wound is to press ahead, and, finally, I did.
I lived.
Lady, the aforementioned horse, played a giant part in my fourth grade survival.
She lifted our spirits immediately.
She was an absolute beauty.
A sleek shiny chestnut, she had a white face, white above her hooves, an exquisite mane, and the sweetest disposition a fourth grader could have ever wished for. I have often thought that perhaps animals can sense, and yes, feel, the wounds of their human companions. Lady surely felt mine. She compensated. Despite my countless foolish little boy stupid actions, she never once gave a hint she wished me harm, instead exhibiting a patience and a loving spirit that would forever make me a grand lover of horses. Oh those eyes. Oh those sweet, sweet, deep dark eyes.
She wasn’t an especially large horse (they’re measured in ‘hands’), but to me, she was a God. A beautiful, four-legged, chestnut God.
I would rush home after school, and if I got there before my brother and sister, I would, in my hilarious way, attempt to saddle Lady. Horses have a way (I think they sometimes goof on humans) of somehow swelling up and holding their breath while being saddled. This makes their bellies ‘bigger’. Since the saddle is held on to the animal by a cinch that runs under their bellies and is connected to each side of the saddle, once I would get the cinch ‘connected securely’ , Lady would wait for me to try to mount her, and then exhale, therefore becoming much smaller around her middle, and causing the cinch to loosen and the saddle to slide over to her side. This would cause me to unceremoniously fall to the ground. I swear she would then look back at me and smile, although, perhaps to spare my feelings, she never made a sound. “Oh Lady, damn you!”, I would holler with fourth grade authority.
She loved it.
I did not.
At first I would simply give up and ride her bare back (I fell off a lot), but then, somehow I ultimately devised a way (standing on a box I think) to actually get the saddle to ‘stay’ on her, and then we would be off for the ride. Dashing through the open fields around our house, Lady and I would keep our eyes open for the prairie dog holes that could trip her, and the wounded fourth grader and the beautiful gentle chestnut God-Horse would fly.
This has gone on for thousands of years.
This should always go on.
Lady cost seventy-five dollars.
She was worth a fortune to us.
Sometimes the amount we pay for something has no bearing on the affect it has on us.
Sometimes value cannot be measured by value.
Lady was our horse, and she helped save us.
Me.
I loved her for it then. I love her for it now.
I love them all.
I have doubted for many years that we are the ‘higher’ life form. Other then the ‘opposing thumb’ thing, it seems to me that animals are much more evolved then we are.
We only lived in Canon for a year. My parents got jobs at the Martin Marietta plant outside of Denver, and exactly one summer after Lady became a part of our family, we had to sell her. This broke all of our hearts, and I’m sure hers, but we couldn’t take her with us. We would be moving to Littleton, and we were headed for the great American dream of the time; the suburbs.
We couldn’t keep a horse in the back yard in the ‘burbs.’
We all cried the day she left.
She did too.
I’m sorry Lady. Sometimes life gets in the way.
I have kept you in my heart forever.
Years passed.
About seven or eight years ago, for fun, I was in a band that played ‘fish songs’. Songs about the fishing experience. Angler music. It was delightful, and silly, and I wasn’t the ‘front man’, and I always had a grand time doing it. I love singing harmony, and our three part vocals sparkled.
So it was, through that band, that I found myself in a very special little resort well outside of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Baja. Rancho Leonero. There’s not a whole lot to do there if you don’t go out for the big ones. Not caring to do that, during the day, I would do my usual routine of laying in the sun, swimming in the water, drinking El Pacifico beer, laughing a lot in this paradise, and reading. While the others were out looking for the marlin and the dorado, I would usually end up laying in a hammock with a book.
The book I was reading at the time was ‘Seabiscuit’2,.
The Biscuit was the most famous living thing of the depression.
The Biscuit was the symbol of his time.
The Biscuit was a beat-up, almost cast aside, counted out, dismissed, rejected, disrespected, down on his luck, ornery, could be dangerous, already a little on the ‘old’ side, horse.
The Biscuit also just happened to be the greatest horse to ever race on the American stage.
He was us.
He represented the hopes of the down and out. The ‘little people.’
Because other broken down humans ‘saved’ him, he saved us.
The American spirit embraced him in that dark time, and he did not let us down. His ultimate duel with the great War Admiral, after suffering a terrible and life-threatening leg injury, ridden by an equally seriously injured jockey, stands for all time as the culmination of inter-species achievement. It would not be until the great Secretariat shattered the triple crown by twenty-some lengths years and years later that the world would see another such courageous effort by a horse and rider.
The horse knows.
I believe the horse knows.
Both Biscuit and Secretariat knew.
“Now, Biscuit,” his jockey Red had called into Biscuit’s ear when it was time for them to make their move, a move that might have killed both of them.
“Now Biscuit,” Red had called when it was time for them to ride into immortality.
And with that what is considered one of the greatest home-stretch runs in American horse racing history began.
Their legs held.
They won.
They were not supposed to.
Laying in the hammock in the quiet hot of the afternoon shade, I finished the last several chapters. After reading and loving his story, there was no way to savor those final words without being profoundly moved. Although there were several other people also reading sitting nearby in chairs facing me, my silent tears flowed freely. No one cared, nor did anyone think there was anything particularly unusual about a man laying in a hammock silently sobbing his eyes out. Comforted by the sound of the sea, and the wind, and knowing that no one cared, I finished the book, and simply closed it across my chest and wept.
No one said a word.
A good five minutes passed.
Finally, someone asked, very quietly, “Good book?”
“Yes.”
The story of the life and death of the greatest race horse in American history had again placed me up on Lady, and the little wounded poor boy, and the inexpensive little chestnut horse, had again run hard with the wind and the sea and the earth of America, and together, we had been saved.
Just like the Biscuit, we were free.
Years passed again.
Last Saturday, a horse named Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby, arguably the most important horse race in the world.
He was a 50-1 bet.
These are very poor odds.
A horse at these odds is not supposed to win.
Bird had originally sold for 9,500 bucks. He was, therefore, not a horse anyone took ‘seriously’, at least no one in the ‘racing community’.
The track for the running of the Derby was wet and muddy. These are dangerous conditions for any horse and rider. Falls will, and do, kill them.
Other then Dunkirk stumbling out of the gate, but not falling, the race was safely off.
As is my custom, I called out ‘Safe Journey!”
The race was a muddy mess.
Nothing of much importance seemed to be happening, but no one was falling.
At the top of the final stretch, Mine That Bird was so far behind the rest of the field that he could not be seen on TV.
And then, the strangest thing happened.
Sliding him along the rail, his jockey Calvin Borel asked him for more.
(“Now Biscuit.”)
And Mine That Bird, probably just an average, inexpensive horse, began his move. Gliding along as if running on smooth, dry dirt, the Bird began passing other horses as if they weren’t really running. With elegant ease and breathtaking grace, first by two’s, and then by three’s, he surged forward. About half-way down the stretch, Calvin squeezed him through an impossibly tiny space on the rail, a hole that invited disaster if they couldn’t make it, but, once cleared, the Bird and the Bo-rail were gone.
The Bird was on fire.
They were unaware this was not supposed to happen.
The average, inexpensive horse, a gelding, ridden by the man with a grade school education, ran free of the others, and kept right on running until they had won the 2009 Kentucky Derby by six and one half lengths.
The last time a horse and rider had won by that much was the triple crown winner Assault in 1946, and they had won by eight.
The world was stunned.
Calvin openly wept, so wishing his “momma and daddy” could be alive to “see how their boy turned out” (Oh they know, Calvin). He kissed a rose and threw it into the heavens. He loved on the Bird in joy.
The Bird didn’t look especially spent.
The trainer, wearing a large black cowboy hat and hobbling across the grass on crutches with a broken leg, wept behind his dark sunglasses. A real cowboy, he’d pulled the Bird in a trailer all the way from New Mexico to Kentucky, and that is a long, long way. New Mexico is not considered much of a ‘player’ in the Derby. He, Woolley Jr., wasn’t considered much of a player either. That’s changed.
Mine That Bird seemed delighted with all the attention. The red roses in the winner’s blanket looked beautiful laying across his shoulders.
Just as surely as Seabiscuit defeating War Admiral forever entered him into legend, Mine That Bird also claimed his place in the Great Book of Greatness. Just another famous, inexpensive, regular, smallish gelding, who happened to win perhaps the greatest horse race in the world.
Mine That Bird looks a whole lot like Lady.
A lot like us.
Disrespected, dismissed, overlooked, run-of-the-mill, this ‘inexpensive’ little horse seized his moment, and won the biggest race in America.
Just like the Biscuit.
Just like Lady.
Whether it be saving a wounded little boy, or saving a nearly hopeless nation, these magnificent creatures remind us of our immortality.
Our possibilities.
Our ability to overcome in the face of insurmountable obstacles.
Thank you, Bird.
In a couple weeks, Mine that Bird will run again.
It doesn’t matter whether he wins.
His simple presence is evidence of our eternal quest.
Win or lose, for those few minutes, we will all witness, and be a part of, greatness.
His.
Ours.
Biscuit’s.
Lady’s.
Run Bird.
Run.
Run for Lady.
Run for Biscuit.
Run for War Admiral.
Run for all the others who have ever run in the race.
Run for all the others who ever will.
Run for us.
Run.
Safe Journey!!!
“A little dirt never hurt nobody.”
When I was in the fourth grade, my family bought a horse named Lady.
With much love and gratitude.
James Dawson
May 5, 2009
New York
1John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath, Viking Press, April, 1939
2Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Random House, March, 2001
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