I'm going to be skipping around a bit, I guess. I was just reading a post from mugwumpchronicles.blogspot.com about an old horse named Annie, and she reminded me of an old horse who taught me a lot, when I was growing up.
He was one of Buzz's horses, and named Jetty.
I've found the only photo I have of Jetty, me riding him. Karen is on Honey, the palomino.
He was actually much more handsome than this Polaroid makes him look. His head was not that huge, and his butt not that small. I remember being appalled at this when it was taken, but I'm glad now that I saved it.
Jetty was not in the usual string of horses we little girls were allowed to ride. To ride Jetty, you had to earn the privilege. I worked my way up the ranks, first with Zero the sociopath pony, then Oscar the ugly palomino (who taught me that a horse will ALWAYS run back to the barn), then Little Dick the hackney stud pony (who helped put me on Buzz's good side, winning him 6-packs of Schlitz from unsuspecting patsies), until I reached the pinnacle: I was Jetty's rider. No one else was allowed to ride Jetty but me.
Jetty was beautiful. He was about 16H. A big red bay with black mane and tail, his coat shone dark copper in the sun. He was also pretty old - Buzz said he was about 25, 26 years old. When you looked at his back, you could believe it: he had a prominent wither with a bit of a swayback. He'd had a bowed tendon at some point in his life but it was now fully healed; and though it didn't bother him, he would twist his left foot out to the side in a little flipper-like movement when he moved.
Leading him along, he looked like a regular old horse, but once I clambered onto his back, he become the quintessential "noble mount", head tucked, neck arched, flaring nostrils - bigger than life, awe-inspiring. This horse never walked. His slow speed was "prance", and after that we had trot, then an incredible extended trot, then canter and gallop.
And then there was the "canter in place": if I held him back and asked for a canter with my leg, he would - only we wouldn't go anywhere. He'd also switch leads at a touch of my leg, every stride if I asked.
Idiot that I was back then, I didn't realize that a lot of what Jetty did was dressage - and higher level, at that.
What Buzz told us of his history was this: he'd been a lead horse at the track, and had been owned by Billy Cash, a track blacksmith at Suffolk Downs (I think it was Suffolk, not Rockingham). Buzz said he'd bowed the tendon there, and Billy Cash was going to have him put down because it was a bad bow and he didn't think he'd be able to get him sound.
But Buzz, who'd been trying to get Billy Cash to sell him for a long time, persuaded Billy to give Jetty to him. He wanted to try to get him sound.
And this is what he did: he set up a big sling, and supported Jetty in that sling for weeks to keep the weight off his leg, while wrapping it every day, until finally Jetty walked off sound. And aside from the flipper movement to the side, you wouldn't have known the leg had been injured.
This all happened before I started going to Buzz's barn. I hung on every word as he described putting up the sling, and getting it around Jetty's belly, and how some horses can't be slung up like that because they panic but Jetty was a perfect patient and he brought him around. Then he'd give Jetty a beer.
We all accepted Buzz's story because we were kids, and it sounded good to us. And it was all "a few years ago", we couldn't conceive of the possibility that Jetty's history could go back further. It's only in retrospect, thinking about the way that horse could move, that leads me to believe there had to have been more.
He was a good horse.
We would ride down to the Old Airport in Billerica: me on Jetty; Karen on either Honey (a palomino mare Buzz had brought home one day from the Shrewsbury Auction) or Heidi, a grade mare Buzz told us was Little Dick's daughter; Cherrie on either Heidi or another horse (I'm having trouble remembering all their names, sadly).
The ride over, Jetty would start to lather up: he never stopped prancing, you see. Karen would sing - usually "Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo", really loudly and really off-key. We'd laugh and joke, talking about family and boys and school and everything else. The ride down Aldrich Road always seemed both shorter than expected and longer than it was the day before, because we all anticipated what was to come. Even the horses would start to get excited as we approached the turn-off.
Turning in to a tree-lined path, we crossed through woods towards "the Pits". These were deep holes in the ground where we believed granite had been taken out years before, and that filled with water in the spring. There were often a bunch of older kids hanging out there, drinking and carrying on - it was always a bit scary passing them. But beyond them, we would arrive at the long, wide dirt path that went behind the abandoned hangar on Hopkins Street.
There, we'd race. Riding like indians and pretending we were jockeys, crouched over necks, their manes whipping our faces, our own hair streaming behind us and our grins wide and wild, we'd race until the dirt road ran out.
Then we'd turn around and do it again.
Jetty never won, though he tried. I'm not sure if it was age or that he'd pranced for nearly two miles, but I always was a little sad for him - I could tell he wanted to be fastest, he wanted to win, for me.
He was a good horse.
We had a lot of adventures over at the Old Airport. Hopefully I'll write about them sooner than I did this one.
