Let me just say I’m not keen on horse riding. But somehow I ended up on the back of one at Canyon Corral while we were in Yellowstone. Granted, it was totally geared for mainstream greenhorns. You plod along a trail for an hour, and the hardest thing you do is lift your horse’s head away from the grass it keeps trying to eat. For Leah, who is spending the summer working at a stable and helping run horse camps, who loves nothing better than to canter around a field all afternoon, and whose favorite smell is horse manure, it was downright boring. For me, not.
Before we set out, Jessica, the head cowgirl, sat us down—about 15 of us—for a few pointers. Which mainly consisted of trotting out all the stories of people falling off while they were fiddling with their cameras (hence, no cameras allowed) or when their horses spooked because someone’s baseball cap blew off (no caps allowed either). “Also,” she said, “normally horses need to have a little space, but we ask that you keep these horses nose to tail because bison have been known to charge our line-up.”
Well, that’s just great. (And partway through the ride, I learned my husband’s horse actually had a scar from being gored by a bison. I did not need to know that.) Here’s the truth: The last time I was on a horse, at 12, it didn’t go well. I was just sitting on my horse, minding my own business, but I was also holding the reigns of a second horse while my two friends were trying to round up a third horse who’d escaped his corral. The horse whose reigns I was holding brushed against the horse I was sitting on and next thing I knew, I was flying through the air. Right after I hit the ground, something very big rolled on me. Only momentarily, mind you, but it was enough to knock the wind out of me, and when I finally could breathe, my ribs hurt like a mother. In fact, taking a deep breath of any kind hurt for six months.
So, when one of the horses at Canyon got a watering hose wrapped around his foot and freaked, I was not happy. This was while the cowboys were helping folks up onto their horses. The kids, about six of them, were all down at the other end of the corral and didn’t even notice, but the two horses near me already had mounted riders, and those horses got agitated and it was clear neither rider knew what to do to calm them. I was still on the ground between the fence and my horse, not far from the agitated horses. But all the employees were busy trying to get the hose off the horse’s hoof, and left the “riders” to figure out their horses on their own, while Hosey careened around, flicking its leg out behind itself. My horse kept shifting closer to me, while I meanwhile was eyeballing an escape route through the split-rail fence if he got too close. I did not need squashed ribs again.
And here’s the thing about horse riding: you’re not supposed to let your horse know you’re nervous, because “they can tell,” everyone says. So even if the cowboys can’t tell, my horse surely can, and how am I supposed to fake it? And that in itself is stressful. By the time I got on my horse I was completely pretending I wanted to be here. But they did give me a super mellow horse, who did nothing more than twitch his skin to rid himself of mosquitoes, so maybe they did know, after all.
The ride itself was beautiful, through open, rolling country (I kept my eye open for bison, of course). But we also rode on a narrower trail directly next to a canyon edge (ah, so that’s why they call it Canyon). I don’t know if other people were nervous, too, but I noticed that the only people talking were the kids. Maybe the adults were meditating on the views. I, myself, was so busy not looking down and praying no one would be stung by a bee while we were a foot away from the edge that I had a hard time taking in anything.
But we made it back to the corral without any mishaps, and I wondered if Jessica had made up those stories. Still, I was so relieved to swing off my horse at the end of the ride that I’m thinking I might sit out the horse riding next time.