A Tale of Two Slushes

Sent to the younger sister of one of my partners in crime at Buzz's barn. She'd posted about just watching True Grit again, and that her favorite scene was where John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and charges at the villains with a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.


I don't know if Karen ever told you about the time we went to the variety store on 129 (Mike's Corner Variety, right?) for slushes, against Buzz's direct orders to stay off the road.

She and I think it was Cherry Berry went in for the slushes, while I held the horses. When they came back, Karen handed me my slush and hers, so I put the reins in my teeth (on Jetty) and she went to climb on (I think Heidi).

Heidi started to move off, so Jetty thought we were going home, and turned and started trotting/prancing off (remember how he never walked)?

My reins-in-my-teeth ride ended less than stellarly: I fell off, still clutching the slushes, right on the only hard part of that mostly dirt parking lot: a big slab of concrete. Karen and Cherry raced off to get Jetty who was running down the middle of 129 (we didn't want him running into the barn riderless, or Buzz would have banished us) while I lay on the concrete moaning.

They caught him, and brought him back, and I rode him home (really wishing he'd just friggin WALK for a change). I'd bruised my tailbone, and it was probably the most painful injury I'd ever had.

Here's a photo of Jetty - the only one I have, sadly. He was much more handsome than this Polaroid made him appear; he had lovely proportions, not a huge head and small butt. That's Karen on Honey, behind us.

Jetty

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.

Oscar the Palomino

I grew up watching Rex Trailer a local TV "Cowboy". Rex had Goldrush, a gorgeous palomino. And of course there was Roy Rogers and Trigger, and let's not forget Mr. Ed. All beautiful palominos.

Oscar was a palomino, too. Well technically. He was kind of yellow, with a kind of beige-whitish mane and tail.

That's as far as his resemblence to the aforementioned palominos went.

Not to put too fine a point on it: Oscar was butt-ugly. He had a big head with a roman nose. If you've ever read the Terry Pratchett Discworld stories: Oscar was the equine equivalent of the Igors, without the stitches and scars. He looked as if someone threw horse parts in a pile, then asked a bunch of preschoolers to pin the pieces together to make a horsie.

However, Oscar had one HUGE thing going for him: he wasn't Zero.

Oscar was a bit over 15 hands, too - we'd graduated to a horse! We still sometimes had to ride Zero if someone else (actually his eventual owner) was riding Oscar - but we'd managed to advance a grade in the Buzz School of Equitation, which was heady stuff.

Not to say Oscar was well-trained. Nope, no one would ever have said that. Oscar was pretty typical of Buzz's herd of little-girl-dream-crushers: like Zero before him, he often seemed to be striving to destroy all the horse-as-magical-creature fantasies we might have had the misfortune to entertain.

We were stubborn little sods, though. We. Loved. Horses. And Oscar was certainly more... something, granted not magical, than Zero. Bigger? Less homicidal? Something...

Oscar lived in a straight stall - you don't see them much anymore. When he wasn't being ridden or let out to graze, he basically stood there. His manger was in front of him; he could twist around a bit; he could move forward and backward a few feet. It's possible, though I don't remember it, that he could lay down - I've seen some horses manage it in a straight stall.

The ponies were also in straight stalls; but being smaller they were able to turn and look out into the aisle, watch what was going on. For Oscar it was just too narrow for him to turn around.

It was however, wide enough for a girl or two to squeeze in next to him and brush him - which is what Cherry and I did one day. I was on Oscar's left side, near his shoulders; Cherry was on his right, near his rump. Karen being late to the party, was straddling the half-wall separating Oscar's stall from the next horse (I think it was Little Dick) on the same side as I, behind me and to my right. The wall to the right was a full wall - his stall was next to the tackroom. Oscar was probably dozing - I think life in the straight stall didn't offer him too much to get excited about.

I don't know why, but Karen apparently decided that she couldn't really brush him from the wall, so decided to hop on his back.

Her plan, not well thought out, was of course poorly executed. Squatting, balanced on the balls of her feet, teetering, with her left hand holding the post that the stall door was hung on, she tried to launch herself onto his back and swing her left leg over him.

But she was off-balance: instead of her leg going over his back she kicked him - pretty hard - right in the kidneys.

A horse generally will try to run away from anything scary or painful. Oscar, dozing only moments before, found himself being attacked - probably soon to be disemboweled - with nowhere to go. His only choice was to defend himself; jaws agape, he turned towards the monster on his left side.

And there I stood, happily currying his shoulder, humming.

A huge bug-eyed, curled-lip, bared-teeth, roman-nosed yellow head snaked at me, a blur of fear and anger and of course, teeth: I know I'm repeating myself with the teeth thing, but they were pretty memorable. He bit me right in the cheek. On my face. If I look for it I can still find the scar.

My mother was appalled: to add insult to injury, she made me get a tetanus shot.

It was a while before I forgave Karen for that incident.

I have at least one more Oscar story before I move on to Little Dick and Jetty. If you read this earlier, and you're confused about the new title: I decided to change it since this story doesn't even mention Buzz. The next Oscar story will.

Oh, by the way:

Just in case you don't realize it: we were doing a really stupid thing. We did a lot of stupid things. When I look back on it, it's a wonder I survived some of the stupid things we did.

Just saying.

Buzz

When I was around 11 or 12, a fellow-horse crazy friend named Cherrie told me about this old guy who had horses and ponies, and who would let you ride them if you cleaned the horse and it's stall. It happened that he was renting the barn that belonged to another friend, Karen's, grandmother.

This was tantamount to heaven on earth for a horse-poor daughter of clinging-to-lower-middle class parents.

And so I came to meet Buzz.

Buzz had prepubescent and pubescent girls fluttering around him like bees around apple blossoms. Before you jump to any conclusions: he wasn't a pedophile - unless pedophiles endear themselves to children by saying things like "Hey, chicken legs - where the hell do you think you're going with that horse, did you brush his tail?" or "Get back on that goddamned horse, you goddamned farmer!" He loved his horses; young girls on the other hand - with their high-pitched voices and daily dramas - he sometimes barely tolerated.

I think of him as a New England cowboy - and a real oldstyle horseman. He didn't ride any more by the time I met him, but was keeping around all his old horses because he owed it to them, I think. Occasionally too, he would add to the herd after trips to the Shrewsbury auction on tack or supply runs. He didn't have a trailer, he'd just toss the horse into the bed of his pickup and bring it home.

Days he worked as a meat packer at the Finast Supermarkets, unloading sides of frozen beef from trucks. He'd start work at 5AM, and then he'd come to the barn around 3-3:30 in the afternoon to open up - the door was padlocked shut.

He liked his beer, and after a six-pack or two he sometimes would tell us stories of his riding days. One that I still remember was about his beloved Harry the Horse, a big paint he'd ride to the Oaks, a bar in Billerica. He said he and Harry would both get shitfaced drunk - apparently they served horses there. Then he would laugh, and say that one time, when riding home along the Shawsheen River after an evening at the Oaks, he and Harry tipped over and fell in. He'd laugh, take a sip of his Schlitz, and say "Harry was a hell of a horse..."

In hindsight, I have to say that he had a pretty sick sense of humor: "Harry the Horse"? "Little Richard" (a stud hackney pony he usually referred to as "Little Dick")? But it all went way over my head back then - I was pretty naive.

Every afternoon when Buzz arrived, speeding up the dirt drive in his Chevy pickup, we'd be waiting. The horses would be too: we could hear them nickering their greetings from inside. He'd unpadlock the bolt and slide the two doors wide, letting in the fresh air and sunlight.

Then they'd be set free: he'd go to each stall, open the stall door, take them by their halters to the opened door and let them go, standing back to watch each one of them gallop out into the unfenced field, tails up, manes streaming, nostrils flaring.

There was about 15 acres of land, and those horses and ponies never wandered off it. The newly-added horses would stay with the herd, and he never had to chase down a horse who'd gone walkabout.

It never occurred to me at the time that any of this was odd - the fenceless turnout, the horses locked up tight until 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon - I was a kid, it was what it was.

The horses didn't seem to care, either - or not that I remember. Maybe I'm just romanticizing it: knowing what I know about horses now, I can't imagine there NOT being a lot of neighing and kicking and carrying on to be let out FIRST.

Instead what I remember is feeling an incredible thrill standing next to Buzz to watch them running, kicking, bucking, and cavorting with each other. We were blessed to witness it, and we knew it: young and old, they drank in the glorious smells of grass and trees and flowers; they channelled their inner wild horse - and we got to watch.

It was and continues to be a sight that takes my breath away.

As for letting us ride: Buzz had a rule. Well actually, he had a lot of rules and some of them we actually followed - at least when we were within his eyesight. I'm pretty sure he knew about our transgressions too, but he never let on. We really were brats.

But this one rule was one we couldn't bend: no saddles - he didn't want us falling and getting our feet caught in the stirrup and dragged.

The "falling" part was a given; the dragged part was what he was interested in avoiding. So we all rode bareback.

That wasn't to say he just said "Here, clean this horse - clean his stall - you're good to go, have fun!" Nope. You had to *earn* the right to ride one of his animals.

Buzz had a system to cull out the dilletantes in his gaggle of horse-crazy sycophants: It was named Zero.

Zero was a paint pony of about 13hh, with the attitude of Godzilla with a hangover.

Zero hated little girls. While grooming him, he'd try to bite you, kick you, and stomp on your feet. Once you'd finished, and after Buzz had inspected him for cleanliness and an untangled tail, the real fun began.

This was the routine:

Lead Zero out to the driveway, keeping his teeth an arms distance away from your body. Gather up the reins, grab a hunk of mane, and face his back.

Block his attempt to bite your butt. Watch his hind leg for a muscle twitch heralding an attempt to kick you in the leg.

Chase Zero around as he does spins on the forehand, all the while trying to cow-kick your knee.

After about 10 rotations, launch yourself at his back.

If you're lucky you get on and don't flip over his back to the other side, because he stops spinning the moment you're airborn, and he'll stomp you if you're on the ground.

Wrap your legs as tightly around his fat belly as you can and hold on to that hunk of mane, because the next thing that happens is you're on a pony who's galloping across the field bee-lining for some trees to knock you off on, meanwhile tossing in a few bucks and crow-hops just to let you know he can.

Zero was the great equalizer.

I'm proud to say I survived him - many fell by the wayside - literally and figuratively - and were so disheartened they were never seen at the barn again.

Those of us who managed to survive Zero and kept coming back - and that's not to say we didn't fall by the wayside literally ourselves, we just were too stubborn to give in - were offered another mount after a couple of weeks.

For Karen, Cherrie, and myself, it was Oscar.


I'll continue about Buzz in another post.