Equus
In one corner of a raging world, beast and man find common ground.
Dirt sprays, flung behind frantic flying hooves. Lucy throws her head, eyes wide, and never stops running. The round pen my dad built just a week ago is around sixty feet in diameter, so the only place she can go is around and around and around. Our blue heeler Sammie—my dad’s great protector—charges at those four scattered heels with her ears back, weaving through them precariously, if skillfully, and growling.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Dad curses, hands rising to clutch the top of his bald head. I shout at the dog, then jump to press myself against the fence as Lucy passes again, her heaving belly sweeping warm and weighty against my back. The saddle—her first—hangs upside down, the stirrups dragging, tripping her again and again.
My dad steps into her pathway, “Woah, woah, just stop baby, just stop,” then scuttles back as she charges forth. She orbits him twice more before he tries again, stepping directly in front of her. She slows, dances a bit, raising up just a little on her back legs, then comes down in a hard stop. Dad, with both hands out, approaches. He touches her nose, then her heaving chest, then her legs. She waits, eyes still wild, as he stands up and grabs up the halter, stroking her neck and whispering through it all. Never breaking eye contact with her, he reaches down and unclasps the saddle, letting it fall to the ground. “I’m so sorry, girl.”
It was a stupid mistake: He hadn’t pulled it on tight enough. It was the first time he’d saddled her, and now, at this moment, she was afraid of it, and doubtful of him. He looks at me and asks, “What is the equivalent of ‘getting back in the saddle’ for a horse, you think?”
I was eight years old the last time my dad last trained a horse—Lucy’s mother, Éclaire, named for the bolt of lightning delicately poised in the center of her forehead. “I remember Claire being the sweetest baby I had ever started,” he said. “Just beautiful, smart.”
Before Éclaire, he had trained twelve other horses, including her brother, her uncle, her aunt, and her mother, Gigi, the very first pony of his own as an adult. Gigi was born the same year I was, in 1996. Her name was short for Garden Girl, an eponym for my two-year-old cousin’s mispronunciation of my name as “baby Garden.”
“We can’t tell the horse not to be afraid, because that request would be unreasonable. But we can teach him what we want him to do when he does become afraid.”
—John Lyons
From that lineage grew a herd of a dozen fat, pasture-raised quarter horses—each of which my dad trained for us to ride.
“I really loved starting them,” said my dad. “I wasn’t a trail rider, we didn’t compete, don’t have cattle. I just enjoyed this process of taking this wild beast and teaching it to ride. And then they were ours.”
They were ours. They’d stand majestic against the backdrop of our Cajun prairie sunsets, earthy and warm and larger than life. We aren’t riders, our family. My oldest brother is the only one of us who ever became totally confident in it. When we were small, though, we’d all go out together and take turns on the horses my dad had trained. There are oh so many sweet memories of hot summer days spent on JoJo or Leo or Sugarfoot’s back, following our dad around our pasture or trotting down to the Bayou Nezpique. More than anything, these beasts were our pets—gorgeous creatures who’d meet us at the fenceline, let us untangle the elf knots in their mane, chew hay from our hands.
On an evening in March of this year, I sat with my parents on the dock of our camp in Oakdale. The sky was blanketed in clouds, the air gray, the water still. Our conversations held an unfamiliar heaviness to them, edging around the new realities we each were facing in the wake of this global pandemic. We mourned the threatened milestones of this big year: my brother’s baby on the way, my wedding, my younger brothers’ eighth grade and high school graduations. We spoke aloud of the risks my parents both face working in a medical clinic, and the financial strains of trying to keep its doors open. And my mom—who has asthma—admitted her deepset fear of getting sick, then dying alone. Of her parents dying alone. It was the first time, I think, we’ve ever—so concretely—talked about fear.
Later that night, things brightened a bit by the distractions of a bustling family dinner, Dad turned to me and said, “You know what I did yesterday? With all this new free time?
“I built a round pen.”
In the sixteen years between Éclaire’s training and Lucy’s, a drought brought Dad to sell off most of our horses. Though his involvement with the racehorse business kept ponies rotating through our pastures, we never got to keep them, and urologists don’t train racehorses. Life passed by, as it does, in the whirlwind that comes of living with a family of seven.
But now, for the first time since I was a child, Dad’s got a pony of his own again. Lucy was born in 2018, a gorgeous, extroverted miniature of her mother. Even before Dad started her training, she’d meet him at the fence and stick her nose in his face.
At two years old, she’s the perfect age to start. On the first day of training, I stood at the fence and watched my dad at the center of the pen, circling a rope through the air, snapping it just behind her as she ran around and around and around. It’s a scenario that, to the untrained eye, looks precarious, dangerous even. But even I could see that there was something happening, something being forged, between the two of them.
Monty Roberts once famously said, “Horses are our silent partners. When we learn their language, this partnership grows strong.” Perhaps the most iconic and radical horse whisperer of the twentieth century, Roberts’ training philosophy is built on the mythic origins of his time spent, as a thirteen year-old, observing the behaviors of mustangs in the Nevada desert. In studying their patterns, he learned to “speak” the language of horses, which he calls “Equus.”
In stark differentiation from the previous generation’s efforts to “break” a horse—defeating them through violence to establish dominance—Roberts preaches a method focused on communication and mutual understanding between horse and man.
“A lot of people think the man’s crazy,” says my dad. “But it’s incredible how when you go do it, every horse does what he said. It’s like the horse read the damn book too.”
Over the years, my father has used Roberts’ philosophies of communication and nonviolence—often distilled through the more practical methodologies of another great horse trainer, John Lyons—to develop his own practice. It’s a program with the goal, as Lyons says, for “the horse to be my partner … someone I can trust and who trusts me; someone I don’t have to force to do something.”
“You start to control the horse,” my dad describes. “Roberts talks about body position, head position, hand position. This is a flight animal. Horses are built to run when they are afraid. You tap into that, square your shoulders at the hindquarters, and you can move her. It’s like mind control.”
And if you watch closely, says Dad, you’ll see certain things. A horse uses its ears to monitor her surroundings. As she runs, she’ll eventually stop moving the one closest to you, the inside ear—a sign of respect. Then she’ll start to bend her head inwards, towards you at the center of the circle, and she’ll move her mouth in chewing motions, running her tongue along the outside of her mouth, signifying that she is not afraid. Then finally, she’ll put her head down towards the ground, in recognition of your dominance.
“You can drop everything, walk around with no lead rope, nothing. She’ll follow right behind. You’ve made the connection."
—Marcel LaHaye
According to Roberts, these tiny signals are the horse’s way of asking permission to stop running. “You pick a spot where you want her to stop, then you step back,” says Dad. Taking a submissive stance, Dad invites the horse to approach him. At first, she shifts around nervously, looking away. He bends his shoulders forward, speaking softly to her, trying to catch her eyes with his own. And she comes.
Roberts calls this “joining up,”—perhaps the most important milestone in training a horse. “It is the moment when the horse decides that it is better to be with the person than to go away,” he says.
As soon as the horse joins up to Dad, he’ll rub down her chest, in between her front legs, down to her feet. “You’ve got this nervous horse, who is now letting you into their most vulnerable places,” he says. “It’s about trust.”
Then—for me—the most remarkable part: The horse will follow him, wherever he goes. “You can drop everything, walk around with no lead rope, nothing. She’ll follow right behind. You’ve made the connection, the same connection a dominant horse will make with a younger horse …” Dad pauses and smiles, “if you believe all that crap.”
Once he gets Lucy settled down from the saddle mishap, Dad removes her halter and starts walking around the pen. Leadless, she follows, nose to his shoulder. He hasn’t lost her.
Standing in the center of the pen with one hand on the halter, Dad reaches down and grabs up the saddle again. He asks me to hold her. I stand by her head, looking her in the eyes, whispering sweet nothings as Dad slowly eases the *scary thing* back into place on her back. Her feet dance a bit. He takes my place at her head, and with a deep, blustering breath, she calms.
In John Lyons’ book Lyons on Horses, he writes, “We can’t tell the horse not to be afraid, because that request would be unreasonable. But we can teach him what we want him to do when he does become afraid.”
Watching my dad in the open air, walking in circles with his new partner at his shoulder, I think about the ways fear can coexist with growth. Perhaps growth isn’t the right word. Maybe it’s simply being. Fear is inevitable, particularly when it comes to the relentless shades of unknown that we are facing now. But there is space to be found—enmeshed in all this darkness—for revisiting ourselves, our dormant passions and our deepest values. What do we do with this wild, unpredictable fear? Let’s make something new. Let’s make something ours.