One of my favorite Charlie Mackesy quotes goes like this:
“I can’t see a way through”, said the boy.
“Can you see your next step?”
“Yes”
“Just take that”, said the horse.
I feel like that’s been the story of my life. Growing up, changing paths a few times because what I really wanted to do was trained out of me, traveling and later moving to a new continent, some years later the need to somehow figure things out on my own.
Horses have been one of the only constants in my life. Never once would I have dreamed I’d be living alone in the mountainous middle of nowhere, Colorado, surrounded by wild horses, loyal German Shepherds and willful cats.
I vividly remember not knowing that horses could climb hills (I grew up at sea level, our tallest ‘mountain’ was 30ft tall, that’s where all the kids flocked to for sledding on the very occasional inch of snow).
My first encounter with a guy in a cowboy hat is one I’ll never forget, because I didn’t actually know that cowboys were real (I thought they’d long gone extinct, and yes there’s an embarrassing but funny story hiding in there somewhere).
Fast forward a few more years and I finally discovered, after years and years of working with domestics with people problems and other man-made challenges, that there were still real wild Mustangs and that a lot of them were looking for homes.
What started as slowly gentling one wild horse at a time morphed into a nonprofit organization that works with dozens of wild horses each year.
And here we are, I have a wonderful, colorful network of supportive people around me and together we’ve gentled well over 100 Mustangs and helped them find their humans.
(Sidenote: If you don’t particularly like horses but you pay taxes… You’re welcome. Here’s why: Each wild horse that lives out its life in holding costs the tax payer approx. 55k, yes $55,000, and that’s a pre-Covid number; hay prices alone have all but doubled since.)
I had no way to predict, as a little nerdy, horse-crazy kid that grew up in east Germany and was bullied at school for not being cool/pretty/whatever enough, that I’d end up doing what I’m doing now.
I still feel like I’m putting one foot in front of the other without being able to see all that lies ahead, but I’m learning to trust the process.
The best thing I’ve learned through this work and the people I meet along the way is that there are many more good people out there than bad ones, that we can all mess up and learn and grow, and we’re all just here trying to do the best we can with what we know at the time. That’s what gives me hope every day to get up and try again.
As for this ride, scenic as it was, I think I got a little more “mature hair” from it. Bushwhacking along an unplanned route, ending up in a mess of downed timber, in mud, climbing up some Man from Snowy River type hill that looked a lot less steep from the bottom than it actually was, and on the way back coming around a turn just to end up nose to nose with cow moose… All to see a hidden lake the GPS said was really close. I think I used every cussword I know in at least two different languages (English and German) on that ride. We finally made it, the lake was beautiful, both Mustangs did great, nobody died, and it made for yet another pack trip story for the book I hope to write one day. Definitely another one foot in front of the other, trust your horse and hope it all works out kinda day of backcountry bliss.
