I was recently having a conversation about safety and the sport of horseback riding. My experience with horses didn’t have a lot to do with safety. I’m probably lucky to be alive.
This particular mom turned to me and said she heard a cry that the horse with her daughter on it was going down. The horse had hit a soft patch in the arena and was getting ready to roll, saddle, rider and all. The mom raced to the arena and someone asked if her daughter knew the emergency dismount.
Emergency dismount? Isn’t that just getting off the horse as damn fast as possible? Dismount, but do it super fast. Sometimes we’d call this a bail if the horse was running away with you at breakneck speed and doing motorcycle turns.
Actually, we did a lot of things in general when I was a kid that would be frowned upon now, if not grounds for arrest as child neglect or endangerment. Remember riding your bike without a helmet? Sitting in the back of a pick-up truck, cool breeze blowing through your hair while going 65 or more on the interstate?
Growing up on a farm, we had a lot of freedom with our chosen activities. Frankly speaking, we could do a lot of things if no one was looking, and tattling was an unspeakable offense. Our days were filled with endless, dangerous possibilities.
We could walk the cross beams of the barn, 50 feet off the floor, like a gymnast’s balance beam (yikes! could have fallen and broken my neck!). We played in the quick sand of grain in the grain bins (yikes! could have suffocated!). I even was buried alive once, sort of. A big 4 by six foot hole was dug for some reason or other and my cousins thought it would be funny to dare me to stay in there with a board covering the entrance/exit. There I go, could have suffocated again.
My adventures with horses were pretty much unsupervised. We road bareback and galloped across the fields. I was bucked off, thrown into fences, side swiped on trees and posts and more. The death-defying adventures of my childhood causes the present day parent in me to break out in a sweat. Good thing I knew the common sense emergency dismount that I still use today–if things look bad, bail fast.
2 Comments
I recall a few of my own death-defying experiences on the old farm. In my early riding days, the pictured equine wonder was hell bent on bucking, scraping and otherwise removing me from his back by any means possible. Spunky. He revelled in my fear. I like to think I’m the better for surviving him. We eventually grew to love each other and I wouldn’t trade those bareback days for anything.
Oh, Midwin, that old boy was a beauty. Beautiful and crazy, but isn’t that often the way? He’s cantering across Horse Heaven right now, turning like a motorcycle and running under low hanging branches.
Post a Comment