Just after our wedding, Dan’s mom sent me the only video taken of his childhood, a fifteen-second clip of a four-year-old boy in a basement. The little boy is wearing a cowboy hat, jeans, chaps, a western shirt and vest. On his hip is a toy gun he’s drawing with impressive speed for the camera. I watched that video a dozen times when it was first given to us, because I see that little boy every day in my fifty-eight year old husband. Dan had always been hooked.

I, on the other hand, had always been respectfully afraid of horses. When I was six, my family drove in our blue Buick station wagon from my childhood home in Winnetka, Illinois, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a summer adventure. My brother Jon was nine, old enough for his own horse the day we played city slickers. I rode the rocky trail with my dad. Nestled between him and the saddle horn, I was lulled into a sense of complacency by the rhythmic gait of Star and the sheer exhaustion of my first visit to the mountains.

The magic of that visit has never faded, perhaps because it was so different from my northern Chicago suburb. I grew up on a grass-lined street with Oak and Elm trees that threw giant green canopies in the spring. Our white stucco house was a block from Lake Michigan where I spent my summers sailing, swimming and walking home barefoot with sand on my feet. We played outside until dark, had campouts in tents in the backyard, and rode our bikes to town for candy. The summers smelled like fresh cut grass, all day, every day. In the winter, my brother pulled me on a sled to the neighborhood park and the patch of grass the fire department flooded each winter creating an ice rink where we could skate. Afterward, we made hot chocolate from scratch with cocoa and warm milk and a heavy dose of marshmallows. My brother and I ran as wild as we could in our splendidly sweet and ridiculously safe little suburb.

Jackson Hole was entirely different. The sheer scale of the jagged rocky Tetons rising abruptly, almost violently, from the vast flat plains was startlingly and seemed to infect everyone with a spirit of excited adventure. I loved the smell and sound of the wooden-plank sidewalks in town, the four arches on the main green made of elk antlers, the stores selling cowboy boots and cowboy hats, the photos of elk and moose and raw nature everywhere. I loved the smell of mountain pines and the way the temperature dropped thirty degrees at night. To a six-year-old, the rugged environment seemed magical, full of adventure and freedom and open spaces.

And I got to ride a horse for the first time. Not just a pony in a tiny circle, but a huge horse, in the mountains, up and down trails and across streams. It was heaven. But on that day, just after lunch and without warning, Star spooked, rearing up on his back legs to paw at an imaginary enemy. Then he took off running. Suddenly I could feel my dad’s arms and legs rigid and unforgiving as he jerked back on the reins to no effect. I leaned forward, grabbed Star’s mane, and held on. All around me, muscle tensed in fear. Behind us, I could hear the guides screaming as Star raced and stumbled through trees and brush, finally coming to stop just above a steep cliff. With a few choice expletives, my dad jumped down, pulled me off Star, grabbed the reins, and started back on foot to find Jon who had been on his own horse when Star spooked. I ran behind, trying to keep up. When we reached the others, Jon was atop his horse. My older brother’s eyes were wide and wired, but he was smiling, proudly receiving accolades and compliments from the guides. Amid the adrenaline-induced cacophony, my mom sat mute and white, paralyzed by fear atop her own horse who hadn’t run a step. That was my introduction to horses.

When I was twenty-two, I played in a charity ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the Christopher Reeves Foundation. The fundraiser was held ten months after the US Women’s Ice hockey team, on which I had been the goaltender, had won a gold medal in the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. My hockey career had begun eighteen years prior, when at four years old, I had followed my brother onto the rink wearing figure skates my parents rented for me. I sat down in the middle of the rink and cried until they acquiesced to give me black skates like my brother. The next year I started hockey, and the year after that, I fell in love with goaltending. I played year round, always the only girl on my team. I didn’t switch to women’s hockey until after high school. I played two years for the Dartmouth College women’s team before leaving college to train with the National Team. Two years later, we won an Olympic gold medal.

In the years that followed, I still occasionally made appearances like the one at the Garden. In a photo taken that day, I am kneeling next to Wayne Gretzky who’s holding the microphone as Christopher speaks about the importance of funding innovative research to cure spinal cord injuries. Christopher paused frequently as the ventilator breathed for him. The wheelchair, the ventilator, and the lives drastically altered were the result of a horseback riding accident that had shattered his first and second vertebrae and left him paralyzed from the neck down.

The theme of these and a dozen other random fragments of memory made me very afraid of horses for most of my life. But the truth is, what I am most afraid of is falling asleep and missing my life. What I am most afraid of is living a pre-ordained, routine sort of life, safe within scripted boundaries. No. The fire within me is more than wanderlust, more than a need for adventure or to test myself in the world; it is a profound passionate need to honor the fact, the sheer outrageous privilege, that I am alive. It is a hunger so deep and all encompassing, my only recourse is to give in. I am here for the ride. I am present. I am here.

So when Dan said to me one spring day before the twins were born and before Aubrey, “I want horses. We need a barn,” I responded “Okay.” He drew up plans, and we cleared land and built that barn: two stalls, a tack room, a feed room, and an upstairs storage room-turned-office for me. Then we bought a tractor, cleared more land, removing trees, shrubs, roots and rocks, and built a fence around the new field. We hired a hydro-seeding company to truck in soil and spray seed, then we waited for grass.

I loved my new office in the barn and the enclosed field outside our bedroom. But despite the purpose of both additions, horses were still just a quaint idea. Something we might pet, something to which we might feed carrots and apples, something to look pretty in our new pretty field. I loved the idea horses, but in my fourth decade of life, I knew it was exactly that, an idea with which I was in love. Like, say, the idea of being in love with the bad boy, then finding myself less in love with the flying shot glasses in the bar at two a.m., the random girl’s voice on the answering machine at four a.m., or the half-filled beer bottles of chaw spit and cigarettes littering his car and apartment.

The idea versus the real thing, in other words, is a lesson I’ve had to learn more than a few times. Like how I loved pottery until I took one class and realized there exist less frustrating ways of creating beauty. Or how I loved the idea of Bikram yoga until I spent an hour exercising in a sauna and left lightheaded and weak from dehydration, “cleansed,” as the instructor told me. Or how climbing a few of the world’s tallest peaks seemed a laudable goal until I realized my toes turn white in thirty-five degree weather.

Horses were an idea I liked and a passion of Dan’s I was happy to support from afar.

Of course, I knew at some point I’d need to learn how to be safe on and around horses, especially if Kalvin and Grace were going to ride. But that was theoretical, in the distance somewhere, out there someday. Until one day, Dan said in passing, “I set up that riding lesson for Monday with Dallas.”

“What riding lesson?” I asked. “Who is Dallas?”

“She’s a trainer at the barn.”

Ugh, I thought. I had other plans for Monday. It had been almost ten months since the incident, and perhaps Dan thought it was time for me to get back into the saddle of life, so to speak.

*

(November 2012)

At the barn, Dallas started me on a twenty-two-year-old mare named River.

“She’s the horse we put the kids on,” she said.

I turned to look, expecting a pony, and raised my eyebrows at the large animal.

“She’s completely bombproof,” Dan added. He had already ridden River, but I didn’t appreciate the violent metaphor. Need I remind him about the ride on Star when I was seven?

Dallas handed me a mess of loops and rope. “Here’s your halter.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“You’re going to go catch her and bring her inside.” We were standing in a field with a dozen horses.

“Uh, what am I supposed to do?”

“I’ll show you with Beau,” Dallas said.

I followed her and Dan, dragging my halter toward a golden horse who took one look at our approach and walked the other direction. Dallas cut a wide path to the right and re-approached Beau, herding him towards Dan and me.

“You have to keep an eye on Beau, he will bite occasionally,” Dallas warned. I took a preventative step back, though I was nowhere in biting range. Then Dallas drew two diagonals in the dirt, starting at Beau’s front hooves and moving forward and out at forty-five degree angles. “This is where to stand when you’re close to a horse. He can see you here, but he can’t step on you.”

I looked down at my soft boots. That would hurt. Badly.

“Find the end of the neck loop and run one hand under his neck and the other hand over his neck, like this.” Dallas had her arm around the horse’s head. “His nose goes through this loop here, then tie off the neck loop. The nose loop should be above the nose bone, not down on the cartilage, so if it slips, take the slack out of the neck loop.”

That’s a lotta loops.

“Your turn,” she said.

I found the loop in the ropes that looked the most like what Dallas had slipped over Beau’s nose.

“It’s upside down,” she said.

I flipped it around.

“River’s a good girl, she won’t hurt you. We’ll wait over by the gate.” Then she turned and walked away.

“Seriously?” I mumbled, as I tromped through a pile of poop on my way to River who was standing forty yards away. When I got to River, I glanced back at Dallas and Dan. They were talking, oblivious to my plight. I felt my heart speed up and my breath get shallow. “Okay then girl, it’s you and me.” I tried not to sound scared.

River just watched me, her eyes were passive or disgusted, I couldn’t tell.

“Be nice to me, I’m a beginner, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

River twitched her ears at some invisible annoyance.

“I have a deep and well-founded fear of your kind, so please don’t bite me, step on me, roll on me, or kick me, okay?”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t run, so I reached out to pet the side of her neck. I waited for her to rear up and kick me; I was ready to bolt at her slightest twitch. River just stood there, completely still.

I moved in a bit closer, drawing Dallas’ safe zones on the ground in front of River. “Okay, I’m just going to put this thingy over your neck here,” I said, extending my arms as far as they would go. My fear left me decidedly off balance as I reached around her neck. I threaded the end through the loop, pulled it snug, tied it off, and then I stepped back. Something looked off. The nose loop was hanging straight down, flapping free, clearly not on River’s nose.