A Day on Horseback, from Hell to Maybury
Finally, a long-promised entry about a recent spring afternoon of adventure and mischief and thunder through the woods on four legs...
The original plan was to go to Hell, but they wouldn't take us...
It was three years ago that silmaril and xpioti very kindly invited me, at the tail end of a bitter week's worth of politics in Chicago and DC, out to a peaceful evening at the farm, with Stoney and Chance and the rest of their four-legged friends. We drove into the rolling hills, on winding roads winding amidst the trees, to the farm where Stoney lived. The farm's dogs greeted us happily; the air burst with the smell of grass and horses, and the sky shone with the pastels of early evening. It was quiet and calm there in a way so utterly different and natural from the frenzied, tight-wound chaos of the Hyatt Regency I had spent more than a week in before; the perfect antidote for the previous days of stress and strum...
I had forgotten just how magnificent horses are. xpioti introduced us to them all, each in each stable, horses chestnut and dappled and spotted and black, each with their own personality. We took time to feed them grass and mints from our hands; to rub them gently on their heads; to take two of them out for a walk down a grassy lane between corrals out to the meadow in the far back of the farm. Walking out there, in the stillness and quiet, with no other sound than the rustle of grass under our feet and the breathing of the horses, it was wonderful and relaxing and so much more. We watched the horses roll in the dirt. We said hello to Jacob, the donkey and to the many cats who roamed the farm. And as sunset turned to dusk and the first stars appeared in the clear, high sky, we left the farm, another set of happy memories tucked away. That was my first experience with horses in almost half a lifetime. This entry is about the second.
- It was also silmaril, who *four* years before, had first introduced me to Jesse on a merry medieval evening in the basement of the Armory, as told elsewhere; Jesse who subsequently came to my home town for her own graduate school and from which arose many happy adventures over these many past years. And it was adventuring that Jesse randomly decided one evening a Tuesday not long ago that she wanted to do. Quoteth her via e-mail:
- Subject: Adventures
I feel like adventures should happen soon. I am in need of adventures. What are you doing on Wednesday and/or Thursday during the daytimeish hours? And what's a good place to have an adventure that's not too terribly far away from here (ie, within an hour or two drive)?
boing.
And so the original plan was to go riding through Hell. :-)
Nobody is entirely sure why the pleasant little town tucked into the rolling hills a few miles north-northwest of Ann Arbor picked up the unlikely name of Hell, Michigan, providing weathercasters an annual bout of amusement as they show it merrily snowing in Hell. But Hell also had the Hell Creek Ranch, a place of horse-back rides through wood and valley; and when this was suggested to Jesse, her reply involved a very large amount of bouncing and the repeated excited use of the word "Horsies!" Hee!
A few phone calls quickly revealed the unhappy fact that they had stopped offering rides through Hell. Subsequent Googleage -- first to find other riding locations, then to Google's satellite footage archive to see which of those riding locations had the prettiest scenery -- happily unveiled Maybury State Park in Northville as an alternative. And so one Wednesday afternoon we set out ("Vrooom!") in Jesse's car, out to the stables at Maybury, for a afternoon's ride.
- Jesse had once ridden much, including a spectacular ride across the Scottish highlands, as a young girl; but it had been more than a decade since she had last touched the reins. I myself had ridden. Once. As a Boy Scout more than half a lifetime ago. Fortunately, horses are intelligent creatures, more than capable of accomodating a dolt like me, and so it was on a cool, brisk Michigan spring afternoon we were mounted by the helpful staff at Maybury and briefly instructed in the rudimentaries of horsemanship. (It's not the staff's fault my heels are too low and my feet are in the wrong position, despite the heeled boots. That would be the operator's (my) inexperience/incompetence at work. :-) )
G.W. was the name of the gentleman equine upon which I was mounted, a big gentle powerful horse of breed I did not catch. He was quite a patient and responsive horse, more than willing to put up with the confusing signals his obviously brain-addled rider would give him and figuring out where he was supposed to go anyway. After some practice in the corral, it was out onto the trails with our trail guide we rode...
The thousand acres of Maybury State Park feature gently rolling hills, pocket-vest valleys, and woods alive with the new growth of spring. The wide horse trails wound and dove and drove across little creeks and over ridge-lines and loped across and about, and our column of horses rode briskly along the way. The day was cool and crisp and comfortable and the horses friendly and spry. This wasn't a quiet round around the petting zoo, this was a real ride through real woods -- especially when the guide broke us loose on the straightaways and opened up the ride to a trot...
I have nothing but the uttermost rudiments of horsemanship, having been on a horse exactly once in my lifetime before. Jesse later told me that there is a specific trick to riding on a trotting horse, one that her muscle memory restored to her swiftly, much to her delight. I, in contrast, didn't even know one is supposed to do something specific to ride smoothly a fast-moving horse, and so simply bumpity-bumpity-bumped hard on the saddle, hanging hard onto the saddle's horn, grinning ear to ear, mavelously delighted to be racing along on four legs up and over the hills. We had to keep the speed down -- precisely because the guide was keeping the speed to something the unskilled (like me) could safely handle -- but even the "slow" trot was still, to me, a tremendous, marvelous rush. WhoHoo! :-)
Maybe powering along on a motocross bike is the same rush. But a motorbike isn't as intelligent as a horse, doesn't as deftly dance up and down the trails the way a living, breathing, thinking horse does, and a bike would drown everything out with it's buzz-saw roar. And for the hopeless romantic SCAdian fantasy geek that I cheerfully admit that I am, there's a certain something about charging through the woods on a horseback no machine could ever match. (At least until they start selling Imperial Speeder Bikes.) I'd be lying if I said I didn't catch myself humming Howard Shore's Rohan theme, as we rode for over an hour over the newly blooming leaves and horsehead ferns poking up out of the previous autumn's leaves, the overhead stormclouds, by a stroke of tremendous luck, holding out until literally the moment we returned to the stables before letting go.
Jesse had a marvelous time; so did I. Made more so by a lovely late lunch with missysedai just a short hour's drive south to Toledo, before racing back north to make a dance appointment for her and a manuscript meeting for me. And the seeds of yet more future mischief, of a visit with missyedai as our guide to the hidden treasures of Tecumseh, of chocolate and cheese and clotted cream. But that be a story for days yet to come, an adventure yet to happen, another adventure like the one so mischieviously to begin out of the blue and spent thundering down trails on four swift feet.
In my first laboratory here at Michigan, one of the MD/PhD junior professors in the laboratory, a young academic physican in pediatric hematology/oncology, spent his weekends at the stables with his horses. He spoke much and often of his horse-riding hobby, a hobby which has only continued to grow as he rose through the ranks of the ivory tower, professor by weekday, horseman by evening and weekend. I could easily see myself doing the same down the road, on weekends trading the white coat for riding boots and racing over the hills, living the romance and the thunder silmaril and xpioti and blueeowyn and Jesse first reawakened in me. :-)