But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head. And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent in its bed. He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet. And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat. […] On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet. And the man from Snowy River on their heels. — The Man from Snowy River, Banjo Paterson, 1890
I was losing the pretty one. She was pulling ahead and away and almost past any influence and understanding I ever had of her. Ahead of me, below the cliffs, the glittering pale ocean and bright sky seemed to fold itself up toward me, out of any perspective, with the impossible logic of a painting by Matisse. For you, the pretty one, the horsewoman, all jeans and boots, had said, back in the muddy yard, as she assigned the dozen tourists to the waiting animals. On that day I had been desperately in search of omen and benediction—any hint of affection or adoration. That night I was scheduled to fly from Reykjavik to Los Angeles to meet up with the person I was seeing, and dreaming of marrying, in order to meet her circle of friends. I wanted them to like me. And so I took the pretty one to heart. And she was pretty. From her shoulders, what on a person you would call the nape of a neck, sprang an impossible mane: so thick, shaggy, glittering, the horsehair falling eighteen inches or more down her sides, wiry and silky all at once, and in so many colors: chocolate, coffee, honey, brass, copper, butter, gold.
Icelandics live longer than any other horses. They are all head, neck, and forequarters. They are tough and fast and sure-footed. They are the size of ponies, but there is nothing mild or diminutive or domestic about them. Visibly powerful and soft-eyed in a fay kind of way that’s almost sinister, they look like fairy tale illustrations of horses. They descend from a genetic bottleneck of the animals brought over on longboats in the century between about 850 and 950 CE—hardy animals in the manner of today’s Shetland and Connemara ponies, animals from islands and high places. There’s a theory that—by way of Kievan Rus and the Silk Roads—Icelandics closely incarnate the horses with which the Mongolians conquered their known world from Central Asia, where wild horses were first domesticated six thousand years ago. In the Icelandic Sagas the first named Icelandic is called Skalm, meaning sword-like. She was a living link to Sleipnir, the god Odin’s gray eight-legged steed. The name means the slippery one. Born of a union between the stallion Svaoilfari, meaning the unlucky traveler, and the god Loki incarnating himself as a mare. On Sleipnir—and in much tradition only on Sleipnir—Odin was able to travel between worlds, back and forth between life and the afterlife. And through the sky.
Icelandic horses are famous for possessing, in addition to the usual trots and canters and gallops, an additional gear called the flugskei∂, the flying pace, in which a complex kinetic and physiological magic makes the horse feel to its rider entirely motionless, even while moving at extraordinary speed.
It was at this flying pace that I was losing the horse out from under me.
The particular magic that, all my life, I had sometimes glimpsed in my father—the humor and glamor and even hauteur inside his cultivated placidity and his long working hours and business trips—was more accessible in his twin sisters. When I was seven years old, I lived for a while with the older sister, Marie, on her land outside of Canberra, Australia. When I was thirteen years old, I lived for a while with the younger sister, Lucie, on her land outside of Bogotá, Colombia. Everything I don’t long to change about myself—everything I was hoping those strangers in Los Angeles might perceive—dates from these two times and places.
My earliest memories of horses are of shoveling their sweet and barley-smelling feed pellets into buckets, in a big open-sided, corrugated steel and fiberglass shed. Marie had some kind of mean streak that was connected, at that time, to her boredom—and, I would work out later, to her feeling, at that time, of captivity. She liked to see what would happen. In the far paddock there was a tall and unruly horse, dark as a nightmare, that needed relocating from one field to another. Marie asked me to get on my bicycle and ride into the animal’s left side field of view. Which, she said, would help her steer the black horse through a series of gates, across some red dirt drives. Maybe she wanted me to feel like I was a part of things; maybe she wanted me outdoors; maybe she wanted to see what would happen. As I bicycled into its view, the horse spooked, ran, reared—a living thunderhead coming at me. I pedaled away, fell and bled onto the red dirt. A dog went crazy with animal delight at my falling and running. It was all claws and teeth, and it added to my cuts and scratches. Marie eventually corralled the horse. I had never until that moment been so physically afraid. Nobody noticed. Confounded by the experience, I stayed out of Marie’s line of sight for days. Years later she would divorce herself out of that hard place, and years after that she would tell me vaguely about her own year that followed that departure, when she had pretty much nothing—except eventually a new horse whose board she paid for with shifts driving taxis. When I first arrived on Marie’s property, I’d imagined my bicycle to be analogous to all her horses—it too had a saddle, the handlebars like the reins or the horse’s own ears, the front wheel like its heavy head—but after that moment the bicycle was embarrassing, tinselly, a tiny parody of all that beastly majesty.
Lucie’s land was a flower farm. Alstroemerias and roses. Green in its valley and forested and soft and lush where Marie’s—all ghostly white-barked eucalypts and black scorched gums—had been dry and stark and open to an infinite sky. Weekend after weekend, Lucie would send me up onto the back of Chocolate, the most placid of all horses, cocoa-colored, gray-muzzled, who had already by then seemingly lived forever, been the teacher of generations of cousins. Lucie, like her brother my father, knew how to recede: at first she would ride alongside on her high-stepping pale horse with its concave Arabian head; then she would only saddle up Chocolate and send me alone up and down the long drive. Then—a vagueness and a drift of interest that was also sufficiently a vote of confidence—she would leave the saddling to me and a farmhand. Forty or fewer weekends, forty or fewer rides in all. The drive was a kilometer or so through the long vault of tree canopies; the ride was back and forth from the farmhouse gate, curving and dipping out of line of sight from the house, to the main gate to the highway with its fast and colorful village-to-village buses. The trick was to shift through the gears—walk to trot to canter to gallop. It was like doing laps in an Olympic pool. When eventually I could reliably shift, with only the hint of a touch of the outer edges of my hands, below the pinky fingers, along Chocolate’s bristly shoulders, from the jostle of the trot to the smooth roll of the canter, I noticed that this was the greatest happiness I had ever known. Because I was so lonely I chose to take the infinite patience of the animal personally, as if it was there with me in some kind of unspoken conspiracy. Now it seems to me that all the children who rode Chocolate must have, to her, simply been the same one child. This sensation of tacit intimacy is the dream that horse riding encourages—of collaborative communion without language toward an inscrutable inhuman intelligence and a companionate vessel of life force and a far higher power. In other words, prayer.
When our mind compels us to speak of our soul, one of my spiritual teachers remarked many years later, we mean our body. We mean the twin being into which we are incarnate, whose independent interest in living and whose understanding of the means of life, by being constant and intricate, will always exceed our own. There is an education about our bodies to be found in the intelligence of animals.
Back home in my suburban public high school—its two thousand students; its dour red brick and its fake-Colonial white trim and its bright fluorescent ceilings and its chain link; its quadrangle hard and factional in a way that made me think of every prison yard on every cop and detective show I had ever watched on television after school—I tried one time to get back in the saddle. The school in some kind of aspirational affiliation with a nearby private academy ran a muddy green van on weekends out to its riding school. And if you joined the riding club you could go. There were prim whitewashed fences and tidy hedges. It was early spring—dew and mist. When I got there, they didn’t have enough gear—helmets and boots and tack—for everyone, and as the newest arrival of lowest rank I spent the next two hours waiting, in the parking lot by the barns, locked inside the van. It had been socially almost impossible as a boy to join that club because in that time and place there was something exclusively feminine about riding—unicorns and jodhpurs and horse girls—that invited bullying. I never tried again.
Until Iceland. It had been a work trip, a week of chaperoning college students not much younger than myself to look at hyperborean landscapes and Nordic architecture. It was the second week of March, still icy on that island. I had an extra useless day at the end of the itinerary, before a long overnight series of connections to California. I’d sat in the lobby of my dingy hotel late in the evening before—tired and restless with dread and hope—and not known what to do with myself until I picked up one of those colorful printed pamphlets of local activities and businesses that even in the age of the internet seem to survive in a certain kind of hotel lobby. I left a telephone message for their van to pick me up very early the next day. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I did that. Proud, I chose the advanced group. Looking back, I understand that I had, to myself, something to prove.
When the van pulled up to the barns I was relieved somehow that it didn’t seem all that slick—it all had the look of an extra business improvised onto inherited acreage—or even especially safe. There was a gratifying wildness to it. Everything had the jury-rigged look I remembered from working farms: loops of blue nylon rope as latches on gates, the stirrups for the tourists’ horses not fine leatherwork and ironwork but crude and heavy hand-made loops of heavy welded steel. I had been preemptively embarrassed that it was going to be some kind of dude ranch for city folk, or a cloying seaside pony ride out of a storybook British childhood. Everyone know how to ride? the horsewoman briskly asked as we stood in the cold and windswept yard. Nobody said no. Good. The horses know the way better than you, she said, keep your hands loose and low. Don’t cut into their mouths. The dozen animals spun around placidly as each tourist was boosted onto their backs. The ascent to their backs was a spiral. I was up and onto the pretty one. We went single-file out into the wilderness.
Ten years after that long flight to Los Angeles, I used to fly to San Francisco. By that time, my father was twenty years into his Parkinson’s disease, the neurological disorder that first paralyzes or involuntarily animates the body, and then progressively steals the mind. His neurologist was blunt: There’s no cure. But it’s very well-researched. The drugs are amazing. We want to maximize quality of life and we want the body to die before the brain takes the mind into the late stage psychosis. The drugs were amazing. He endured. But by the time of my visits to him in his facility, on a ridge at the tail of the Sierras overlooking the Bay from the heights of Oakland, he was far diminished. He spoke less and less. He walked not at all. The facility, in its red brick and chain link and fluorescent lights, and in its uncanny cheer laid over an ineffable and ubiquitous atmosphere of fury, reminded me precisely of my high school. The staff didn’t like it when you opened the windows. Everything was very clean.
One consequence of my dad’s disease, in combination with sitting alone in his room all the time, was a retreat into a private world—hallucinations, conversations with people who weren’t there. I remember overhearing him talking in that room to the high school versions of Lucie and Marie. He was persuading them he was old enough to come along with them to a party. So I tried to give him experiences of the world outside. Tactile and empirical evidence of the wild world as it was. There was a hippie spice and herb apothecary down on Shattuck Avenue, so I would stop on my way uphill and buy him a brown paper bag of cloves to smell. Here, I would think toward him, is something from the earth. At his previous facility back on the East Coast—even more red brick, even more ambience of violence—I had figured out that if I could dress him for outdoors and lift him into his wheelchair and then get that wheelchair across many curbs and down certain side roads and trails without sidewalks, I could steer him through a gap in a low stone wall into the back of an arboretum that a local university maintained for their research deliberately in a state resembling wildness, a simulated primeval forest. It was a little like making it into Narnia.
Pushing him those long distances in the wheelchair, over pine needles and broken ground, was like riding a horse. Just as sitting on the back of a horse exactly positions your field of view above and behind the field of view of the animal, aligns your spine with its spine, your eyes with its eyes, so does pushing a wheelchair align you with the person in the chair. You are looking at the nape of their neck. You are seeing, but not quite, what they see. You and they are moving exactly at the same pace, but not in the same way. You and they are in some kind of unspoken conspiracy that you hope is communion.
There was no simulated primeval forest near the Oakland facility. No local Eden. I had searched. There was a strip mall and an office park, a six lane surface road, following the line of the top of the ridge, that felt like a highway. Everything was made for cars. If you wanted to take a resident outdoors you were supposed to take them down a narrow ramp past the parking lot into a prim paved and fenced courtyard—no smoking—that felt like the quadrangle at my high school, and from which, if you were seated in a wheelchair, you could not see the view down to Bay and the distant Golden Gate. After many visits, I finally pushed him East: away from that notional view, away from the grounds of the facility and across those six lanes and downhill, to the back of the ridge. I had no idea what was over there. I was surprised to find, in some kind of surprising arroyo of wilderness that in a West Coast way had pushed deep into the exurban landscape, a horse ranch.
There was a dappled meadow where the horses grazed. There was a kind of yard, open to the sides under a high corrugated roof, not so different from the shed where I had shoveled the barley-smelling feed pellets for Marie. As at her farm, there was the smell of eucalyptus trees. Everything was in those colors I came to associate with that time: the trees a dark piney green or else the faded gray green of the eucalyptus, the tall grasses bleached a golden yellow. In the yard you could see riding lessons, the student rider doing loops and figure eights while the instructor stood holding a long stick or a parabola of rope. Suddenly seeing the big glossy animals with their flickering and muscular sides was, after the parking lots, the strip mall, the six lanes of the surface road, was, even from fifty feet away, like returning to your senses. Witnessing those animals was like welcoming messengers from another world. My dad sat up and attended. He observed them conscientiously. His gaze followed them as they walked around in steady ellipses. After that, visit after visit, we went back and back and back. We would stop at the point where the asphalt gave way to the dirt road, about fifty feet away and twenty feet uphill from the gates to the meadows on one side of the dirt road, and the training yard on the other. At this threshold I could leave the chair’s wheels on the asphalt but take my dad’s feet off of their footrests and sometimes also out of their shoes and place them in the dirt and he could with what remained of his physical ability, push his feet with discernible pleasure into its yielding surface and scuff them back and forth as from a distance we watched the horses below.
The last time we stopped to do that—which was also my last visit with him before the very last one—one of the instructors, a horsewoman, all jeans and boots just like the one in Iceland, noticed us from that distance. She had been riding at speed, languid, leaning far back in the saddle, one-underhanded hand scooped around the reins, with absolute grace. She dismounted and looped the reins of her animal around one of those dark and green trees that were like giant bonsai, and she walked slowly up toward us, with that cowboy walk of John Wayne. Far behind her in the meadow, the half dozen horses were placid, the twirling of their ears and the slow rising and lowering of their heads as they grazed almost the only motion, under the rustling eucalyptus. For the most part, when I pushed my dad around the world in those times, strangers were kind. Folded into his chair he had the strange charisma of a baby bundled into its stroller. I thought, maybe she’ll invite us to take a closer look. I thought—more wildly and more desperately and more insanely—maybe she will tell us about some program where we can get him up on horseback. She stopped at ten feet away. She stood with her arms folded and said, can I help you? Suddenly she reminded me of a cop. It’s a nice spot, I said. Looking more closely at her face I could see flicker across it familiar micro-expressions of disgust and horror. This was the other, rarer, reaction of strangers—to my dad’s hunched and twisted and visibly ravaged body with its uncanny combination of stillness and motion—that I had also come to recognize. He’s not allowed here, she said. His wheelchair is scaring the horses.
I could have argued the point. We were on a public right of way. The horses far behind her did not seem scared. I remembered how back on Marie’s farm my shiny little bicycle—not so different from a wheelchair—had maybe maybe maybe sparkled in the sunlight so as to spook the black mare. Horses could startle and stampede at something so small and so strange, I knew. So what she said, even as I knew it to be untrue in that moment, was not unfounded in possibility. She was afraid of something. But it was not fear on her face but disgust. The revulsion in her expression was something I knew myself to have felt—intrusively, unexpectedly, suddenly—at the spectacle of my dad’s body at stray moments, even as I had come to know it so well in the familiar routines of carrying and cleaning. When because I couldn’t bathe all of him, I just washed his feet with hot water in a heavy old porcelain salad bowl. There at the threshold between the asphalt and the dirt, my dad wasn’t attending to the content of the speech between me and the horsewoman—he was looking past her at the horses—but I knew that something instinctive and atavistic and animal in him would attune to the tone and tenor of whatever exchange the woman and I would get into. And would spook him. And that the emotional valence of that spooking would stay unresolved and perseverated in him for hours or days. I cannot lose control of this, I thought. Thank you, I said warmly and loudly and across my dad’s right ear, as if she had just made some kind of generous offer. Thank you so much! I put my body between him and her, my back to her, blocking her from his line of sight, and busied myself with putting on his shoes and putting his feet into their footrests, not so different from getting them into stirrups. I brought my eyes down into his line of sight to meet his. I prayed peace into him. Dad, I said, Are you ready to go?
I cannot lose her, I thought. I had already lost her. The pretty one, even right there below me, was, with me, beyond all communion. The wilderness of Iceland had been as sudden as the wilderness of that arroyo snaking its way toward the strip mall. As soon as we lost sight of the homestead we might have been on another planet. Because there were no trees, and in the strange northern sunlight, the faraway seemed distant and the distant faraway. The horses had surefootedly and methodically held their narrow lines, traversing hillsides so steep they were almost cliffs, above conical valleys that were the mouths of old volcanoes, they I could never have managed on foot. The ride had been long and bright. Scintillating wind on my face and hands. I had been blissed out by the pretty one’s precision, by the green land and the blue sky. When it happened I had been gazing lazily across the valley over my right shoulder at a pack of wild horses that were just starting to run—their heads suddenly high, their manes and tails unfurled straight out behind them like banners—on the steep hillside opposite. Faster and faster, they ran. Ahead of us, where the hillsides converged and the valley narrowed, the torrent of wild horses was suddenly all around us and with us and in us, and it became us—disillusioning us from any false distinction between wild and tame; over there and right here; consensus reality and psychosis; immanent and the transcendent. Everything moved ever faster as the two hillsides converged and all the horses ran shoulder to shoulder, mane to tail, and all sped up into the speed of the wild stampede. Here, at last, the flying pace.
If you’ve been in a car crash or a burning place, or even in smaller binds and disasters, you know how this works. Everything moves very quickly and also you have a lot of time to think. I saw a tourist just ahead of me fall out of the saddle and go under the horses. Afterward I heard someone say that their hip bones had been shattered. I saw another tourist dragged along, seemingly insensate, her ankle held in the steel loop of her stirrup. At the flying pace there was even above this violence a simultaneous sensation of placidity—it was instead the landscape of cliffs and hillsides and the strangely near horizon of the distant ocean that moved around us at impossible speed. There was no stopping anything. I have, I had time to think, to get off this horse. I have to do it gracefully. Her name was Josta—short for Jóarrstathir. Which meant the dwelling place of the horse warrior.
I remembered some Sunday afternoon, just before that time I spent at Marie’s land, in which my father—it felt like a visit even though it was his home as much as mine—had tried to show me how to ride that same little bicycle that had spooked the black mare. He didn’t succeed. I just watched him. On his own bike—an ancient and heavy and monumental green Raleigh—he had a nimble and gymnastic and European and old-fashioned and glamorous way of dismounting: a bella figura gesture of placing all the weight on the right pedal, straightening the right leg that held that weight to its fullest vertical, and—bicycle still at speed—lowering his spine to the horizontal, then raising the left leg to extend the line of the spine, and bringing it down across the centerline of the bike so it was free and next to the right, even as the right was still on the pedal. That left foot would hit the ground running—and then, off its pedal, the right—and dashing beside it he would gradually slow the pace of the bike itself.
I have never been able to do that on a bicycle, before or since. But caught in the stampede I was able to recall and recreate the procedure, there with Jóarrstathir. First I let her have her head—meaning first no tension, and then no hands, on the reins—just a trace of communication by touch through the knees, my right hand on her right shoulder. Then my left foot reaching for the ground between my right foot and her right side, and running by the time I lifted my right foot out of the stirrup. Then I was running beside her for an endless instant in a pocket of space between her and the wild horses. And then she was running, with the rest of them, far away. Leaving me in sudden silence and retching breath. I remember slipping down her side—my fingertips spread and light on her body to keep me oriented in space and time, smoothly with the whorling grain of the hair; touching her right hip with my left hip, her right shoulder with my left shoulder; my left toes reaching as long and delicately as if they had learned something from the horse’s own. Animal from animal. I was in congruent motion with her and even—and only in that moment of mutual departure—one in being. It all went faster than the time it has taken you to read this. But you know how time works. When I remember my life the longest years—the graded and measured years at that high school, the sanitary and clinical years at hospitals and facilities with my father—all accordion down in their repetitive way to nothing. The brief times that I lived on Marie’s land, and on Lucie’s land; and with the woman from Los Angeles—those times now billow out like banners and those days become longer than years.
Eternity, as the teaching goes, is not later. I suspect that by the moment of my death the time I spent sliding across and down Josta’s side, from hip to shoulder, there in the heart of the stampede among the wild horses, there at the dwelling place of the horse warrior as she pulled away into the further valley—as even in that very moment I was full and fully conscious of the hope simultaneous with fear of becoming and being someone in whom a beloved and her friends could see magic hidden even from myself, that hope and fear that had driven me to spend the useless extra day trying to ride a horse through a wilderness—will seem to have lasted as long as all the rest of my life. Hope that I could be that someone. Fear because if I could be, then all impossible things—including of course the moment of my death—might be possible.
Sometimes—say, a wedding day—all of life moves under you at the flying pace. Other times—say, my hundred identical walks to and through the supermarket during the two years of covid lockdowns in Manhattan that I like so many spent alone and unassisted—will collapse into nothing. My single achievement during that enduringly isolating time was to, on those supermarket walks, recite and memorize the first twelve lines of The Man from Snowy River. This is the canonical exemplar of folk Australian cowboy poetry written in 1890 by the irresistibly named Banjo Paterson. Whatever fog that the virus settled then onto my brain today already steals the words back. The hero of the ballad, the man from Snowy River, is an undersized rider on an undersized horse, who after being rejected by them joins a posse of the local country’s finest riders to retrieve a thoroughbred colt—offspring of the champion Regret—that had escaped to join the local wild horses. In legend, long after the end of the poem, the man from Snowy River dies at 33. In the action of the poem, this horse warrior finds his true dwelling place, which is far past the faltering posse and at the center of those wild horses’ stampede—down a steep stony valley, his own horse, “blood from hip to shoulder with the spur.” From which place, he, “alone and unassisted brought them back.” I think about him—the slippery one, the unlucky traveler—leaving and returning across that valley dividing wilderness and homecoming, mortality and divinity: a god between worlds.
 | A guest post by
|
Amazing writing. Beautiful.