Nothing to fear
On the first day of a holiday on horseback in the Rocky Mountains, a similar thing happened. Suddenly, while I was riding along an old railroad bed, it bucketed rain. The wind blew my slicker up and, in an instant, I was soaked to the skin. As lightning flashed and thunder roared and I poked along wishing I were home in a hot bath, something caught my eye. I lifted my head; there was a cow moose beside me. I was stunned. She was unconcerned. It took me a minute to realize that she had nothing to fear in Banff National Park, including me.
The next night we shared our campground with a buck and a doe who curled up and slept nearby while we ate dinner around the campfire. On my second trip, we sat on our horses and watched two young grizzlies watch us back.
"It was magical"
Another time, on a press junket in Jamaica, I went riding in the hills overlooking Montego Bay. To my delight, I found myself outside Rose Hall's Great House, then a dilapidated mansion once owned by Annie Palmer, the white witch rumoured to have murdered as many as seven husbands in the days of colonial rule. I rode my lop-eared steed up the laneway and sat there thinking about Annie and her voodoo while my guide huddled in the woods, too afraid of ghosts ("duppies," he called them) to come near. It was magical.
So was a ride on a very frisky young gelding with the handsome, strapping actor Robert Urich in the ethereal dusk of the Hollywood Hills. He died of cancer not long after, but I never forgot how happy and chatty he was that night. Me, too.
Everything is an adventure
To sit up high on a horse, riding unlimited vistas or a meandering pasture fence line is always an adventure. As a young woman I used to pretend I was the rancher's daughter in an old western, riding to town for the sheriff.
Now, I am the rancher, out patrolling my property, making sure the fences are holding and the cattle aren't stuck in a gulch. I can be a pioneer in the Red River Valley, an outlaw, a great lady or a hard-scrabble prospector. I can be anything I like in my imagination, where my horsey friends are the Daltons or the Earps or, maybe more truthfully now, the Over-the-Hill Gang.
From the country to the city
Of course, my real riding buddies have changed over the years. When I was a child, my father worked in the unusual trade of training show horses for the rich, so everywhere we lived there were palatial barns.
When I moved to Toronto, I discovered the somewhat less glamorous digs known as boarding stables, which is where most of us middle-class horse-crazy types keep our horses. But rich or poor, horse people are horse people. First and foremost, they like animals (most barns include various resident cats and everybody's dog). And secondly, they would rather be out in all kinds of weather than walking some mall. Oh, they work for a living, too, which means crawling in traffic and drowning in e-mails and "Mom, we're out of milk." But unlike my best pals at the office, horsey friends are the easiest to make because we share not only the stresses of modern-day living but also the antidote.
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