Moving On

I LOVED our farm.  We were the only boarders there aside from one retirement boardee.  N, the owner, took impeccable & customized care of Solo for me, adjusting his food as needed, giving him daily showers in hot weather, picking inappropriate weeds out of his paddock, & scratching his itchy spots.   It was a very satisfied horse who would canter up to the gate to meet me every day.

And I was in heaven. I couldn't brush/clean up/polish tack/comb mane/buy accessories fast enough to work out 25 years of pent-up horse possession.

I had new goals: (1) Teach Solo to longe without near-death experiences. I'm not addicted to longeing but I find a very useful tool both for strength & balance building & exercise on days that I am too tired or too hot to ride. (2) Rehab his feet. They were a flakey, cracky, nasty mess. We were loading him up on Super Bio-Zin & leaving him barefoot & N's farrier was a gifted worker of magic. (3) Create muscle tone. See previous description of hill work.


The two great loves of my life.

But nothing lasts forever. My job changed & I had to move three hours away. Much as it broke my heart to leave N's place behind, I was working for an agency I had spent years trying to get into & the new job was exactly what I wanted to do.

And it was the perfect opportunity to buy a truck & trailer! My current vehicle (2-door Explorer) was obviously not suitable for pulling a horse, so the search began.

Things I know now that I wish I had known then:

• You can get a clean title for ANYTHING in Georgia, no matter what has happened to it.
• When a truck is lifted, the wiring often gets majorly screwed up.
• People often lift trucks to hide front-end problems.
• You should always check to make sure the cloth pattern on all the seats matches, indicating original seats.
• Always check trailer hitch wiring BEFORE purchase.
• The overflow container for coolant should ALWAYS have some coolant in it.
• CARFAX is a joke. There's a LOT that doesn't show up on there.

Oh well.  It pulled great!  And I found an '88 WW 2-horse trailer that had just been reconditioned for a steal.  It had a full dressing room & was just what I needed.  It also happened to be 6'6" tall, but technically, Solo fit.  As long as he didn't want to raise his head very high.  I added some mats, did some patching on the inside lining with some plywood, fixed the window leaks with duct tape for that final redneck flourish...

And we were mobile!

And here is where I was going to post a picture of our first rig -- 98 Expedition in shockingly boring white with bright red little trailer behind.  But dammit if I can't find the picture, I swore I kept one. *sigh*  Well, if I can't find that, then you get the next best thing: Solo in his cute little outfit for riding IN said trailer:

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Circles of Doom

I had been told by the seller that Solo "didn't longe" because she had let another girl work with him and she had spun him in circles and hit him with the longe whip. How you could hit this horse, I had no idea.


(Sexy halter courtesy of Sunset Halters, you can make any colour you want!)

Ok, it's just a fear issue, I'll just take it slow then. This was my oh-so-confident assessment.

I merrily snapped the longe line onto our (awesome) new rope halter to keep things simple. We started out in a rough semblance of a circle-ish-like shape at a walk to the left. It was ugly, but it seemed ok.

"How about a little trot?" I asked.

"Mmmm, ok, I guess maybe, but I'm keeping my eye on you, lady," he replied.

"Ok, how about we switch directions and track right?"

"Unggghhh, I'm not so sure about this," he warned me with a look.

"It's ok, it's just going in a circle-ish-like oblong shape!" I assured him.

I asked him to trot. My calm, quiet, placid horse suddenly reared up and back at the same time, ripped the longe line out of my hands and ran off to the other side of the paddock, where he stopped, trembling, in the corner.

Oh shit. I had just discovered that we had our work cut out for us.

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With Great Power Comes Great Responsiblity

I hung on the fence for hours, my chin on the top board, just watching My Horse. He grazed, he rolled, he "talked" to his pasture neighbours (he was in his own paddock). And every second was mine.

And then it occurred to me: OMG, HE IS MINE! Like an anvil from the sky, the weight of that responsibility slammed into me so hard it left me reeling. I found myself slightly short of breath at the prospect of being completely in charge of this huge and complex life standing in front of me. Dear god, what had I gotten myself into?! I thought 20 years of riding, working, being around horses would pretty much prepare me but all of a sudden I felt like I knew nothing. What if he got sick? How would I know? I didn't even know what a horse's baseline vitals were supposed to be. Sure I could ride, but I had never learned MANAGEMENT. What was his weight supposed to be? What kind of wormer did I need? How often did he need shots? I was going to kill him, I just knew it....

After nearly giving myself an aneurysm out of sheer panic, I had to swallow it all -- there was no turning back now! At least I had that tool without which all horse people would be lost: Google. There I could get so much information that I was in danger of being paralyzed into inaction, but dammit, I WOULD educate myself!

So I got to work. And I rode.





And I rode and I rode and I rode. And then I rode some more. With glee. There was no arena, but it didn't matter at this point. We needed conditioning. So we trotted up hills and walked down them. We walked up hills and trotted down them. We cantered across hills and circled up them.



It wasn't pretty, we were both out of shape and I couldn't afford lessons. I had purchased him with the lofty goal of "some messing around and maybe some 2'6" hunters." Of course, first we had to be able to trot for more than five minutes without being out of breath... But it was all about saddle time and that, at least, I knew how to do!

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Home At Last

It was Memorial Day weekend 2006. S.O. was away on business, so I could not drag him with me, but at least I had something to do now! I found a friend (N) to board him with. She generously drove with me to pick him up in her trailer. All the way there, I was buzzing with excitement, anticipation, and fear. What if the horse didn't like me? What if he turned out to be secretly crazy? What if he had some mysterious ailment/injury/handicap that would kill him six months from now? The horrible possibilities spun choking webs in my brain. I was stark-raving nuts.

When we turned up at the seller's farm, I turned over my envelope stuffed with a wild array of cash and money orders that I had pulled together the night before. I signed the bill of sale and collected a Coggins certificate. Naturally, Benson had stepped on his own hind foot that day and ripped open his coronet band on his white hind foot. It was bloody with a chunk missing. I choked inside, I think my eyes rolled back in my head as I thought, "See, I told you he would be hurt!" I just wanted him on the trailer and out of there.

After a brief period of uncertainty, Benson agreed to step on the trailer. The seller proceeded to turn out the mare that was his best friend, who then ran up and down the fence calling for him as rocked the trailer in a sudden panic. My heart broke for him and N was in tears for his distress as we pulled out. This wasn't starting well.

But we got him home with no further event, settled into his paddock, and let him inspect the place. "What do you want to feed him," N asked? "Ummmmmmmmm..." I knew nothing about horse feed, aside from the sweet feed we had when I worked at a boarding stable in the mid-90's. N, bless her heart, took over. Feed, amounts, hay, all taken care of. Farrier visit set up to rid us of those terrible shoes.

I was helpless to do anything but hang on the fence and stare. He was mine. Mine mine mine. Finally, no one could stop me from riding him whenever I wanted. I already had a shiny new halter and lead rope.




Grazing on the first day home.

I just needed a new name because "Benson" was horrendous and untenable for this shining hunk of a horse. So he became "Solaris" and in my star-struck eyes, he shone brighter than his namesake and his nickname, "Solo," carried its own hidden meaning: he was and is the cumulation of a lifetime of longing, my one true dream, my sole hope and goal come to fruition.

I drove home to write a name on my brush bucket.

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A Meeting of the Minds

I was tired of driving around, but one final ad caught my eye: a chestnut Appendix QH named "Benson," with a little chrome. The pictures weren't great, but he looked to have decent conformation and he was a good age (10). I decided what the heck, I wasn't doing anything else, and I drove two hours from to check him out.

I pulled into one of the million Carolina sandhills hobby farms and hopped out to meet the owner in the barn. As I walked in, Benson stood in quietly in the crossties awaiting my inspection. I looked at him. He looked at me. And something settled inside me.

I patted him on the neck and proceeded to look him over. He had the worst shoeing job I had ever seen with uneven gaps between hoof and shoe. Zero muscle tone. As I rubbed his lopsided white blaze his owner commented, "Huh, he trusts you. He doesn't do that for many people." So I asked to see him go and to ride him. A young European girl had been schooling him on the trails, said he didn't know a lot but seemed agreeable. She did a couple of circles at the trot and canter in the middle of the pasture (this is my actual video from that day, below) and then I threw my leg over.



He was crooked. He leaned hard on my left leg. He picked up the wrong canter lead. But he didn't fuss. And I felt safe. Which is a big deal to me -- due to aforementioned runaway Paint horse, I don't do bolters. Ever.

I loved him.

I brought a vet out a week later to do a Pre-Purchase Exam. Turned out not only was Benson criminally out of shape, he had bone spurs on his front coffin bones and if you pressed down on the right side of his SI, his back legs would buckle. His stifles popped and his back was lopsided.

I think I can fix that, I thought. "I'll take him," I said.

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