Ronnie Dee--The Horse Ride

At the Courier-Journal newspaper, we would often get some rich kid on college furlough, shoved off on us for the summer. I guess to show "the value of hard work" or something. This particular year we got the son of the vice president of a large company, who had recently moved from Chicago. There were seven of us youngsters and we were a fairly raucous bunch. Sometimes these summer guys were real duds, but this kid was a hoot. His name was Gary and he fit right in.

We made fast friends and one day before leaving work, he asked my work mate J.B. and me if we wanted to go horseback riding on the coming saturday. His family belonged to the prestigious Rock Creek Riding Club and we said, "Sure, we'd love to!"

So Gary said he would reserve three horses for one o'clock, and casually asked, "You all do know how to ride a horse, don't you?"

"Oh, of course," said J.B., "My uncle owns a ranch in Kansas and I go out there every year."

Then I piped up, "Yeah, I worked horses over at Miles Park for a couple of years."

"Great," chirped Gary, "I'll see you guys saturday."

After he left, I inquired about J.B.'s uncle and he said, "Hell no, I don't even have an uncle in Kansas."

I then admitted that I had never been on a horse, except to have my picture taken, and we both laughed nervously.

Come Saturday, I picked up J.B. and we decided to come clean with Gary and confess to our equestrian inexperience. He freaked out. "Oh no, you guys. Oh my God, we're gonna get kicked out of the club. Oh, my God."

We tried to assuage him and assured him we would try our best to do the right thing. We asked him to give us a few pointers and he calmed down a bit, and said, "OK, first you take the reins and.

I butted in, "The reins, what's that?"

And again he exploded, "OH MY GOD!" and slumped down in the car seat.

"Gary, Gary, I'm just kidding. I really know what the reins are," I confidently assured him.

"OK, OK, no more kidding, please," he begged.

We agreed and finally got to the club. The wrangler, or whatever they call the ostler at a snooty riding club brought out our steeds. Three monstrous beasts with rippling muscles and flowing manes, tossing their heads and stamping around. I thought of those fearsome destrier warhorses the Knights Templar rode across the Holy Land. Gary's mount was named Roddy, while J.B. and I drew Surefire and Joker, or something like that. Gary and J.B. hopped right on and ambled out toward the park. I couldn't even mount the thing because my jeans were too tight and I was unable to lift my leg high enough to reach the stirrup. So the wrangler came over to boost me up and I nearly went right over the other side. That would have ended my adventure immediately, but I grabbed the saddle and hung on. Naturally, it was an English saddle. "There'll be no western saddles here. This is a riding club, not a rodeo." I can hear them now.

Once on top, I couldn't get him to move and I was a lot higher up than it looked from the ground.. He just stood there for a minute, then sauntered over to the side of the barn and began chomping grass. Once again, the wrangler came over, grabbed the halter and led us around to the front of the barn where my companions awaited and informed me to, "Give him a couple of 'tsks' and kick him a little when you want to go. Pull back on the reins and say, 'whoa,' when you want him to stop."

OK, now that I knew what to do, I practiced "tsking" and kicking, and pulling and "whoa"-ing every few feet down the path. When we entered the park, Surefire had me figured out and was aware that I had no idea what I was doing. I, too, realized that I was now nothing more than a passenger and we had just begun. He began cantering down the way. If you have never been on a cantering horse, all I can say is that, If you ever are, I hope you have had some good dental work. If you haven't, cantering will dislodge all of your fillings. I was bounced like a ragdoll for quite some time when my horse suddenly stopped. He just stood there thinking things over when he turned and began his starting gate practice. He took off like a shot, but I held on because I was quite wary by this time and ready for whatever trick he might throw at me.

At this moment, a jolt of fear went through me as I suddenly recalled a horrific incident which had happened in Louisville a few weeks earlier. In a different park, a teenage boy had been thrown by a horse and dragged to his death. It was just a fleeting thought, as I had my own troubles right now. We thundered down the path at a pretty good rate as I kept hollering, "WHOA, WHOA!"

Surefire had his head down, so I was afraid to pull on the reins as it might cause him to tumble head over heels and that wouldn't be good. One thing I realized; it was a lot easier to ride him at full gallop than at a canter. It was much smoother and more rhythmic, and actually kind of fun, but the ground looked pretty far down and whizzed past. After a while I just dropped the reins, they weren't doing me any good anyway, and grabbed hold of the saddle as best I could. At one point, I roared past J.B., who was sitting on Joker off to the side. I said to him later, "That must have been really funny when I zoomed by hollering 'Whoa, whoa' and my horse not slowing down a bit."

He said, "I was so scared, I don't even remember seeing you go by."

My horse finally stopped running and wandered out to the nearby road. He looked left and then right and decided to go left, toward the stables, just walking down the center of the road. Fortunately it was lightly traveled and as we started into the turn of the club driveway, Surefire really sensed home and suddenly bolted ahead at full speed again. This time I was totally unprepared and slipped over to my left as he surged forward. I grabbed the saddle as best I could and was hanging on by my fingertips. I looked like an Indian in the old movies, who would hang way off the side of his horse and shoot at the calvary underneath the horse's belly. Only I didn't have a weapon and those driveway rocks looked sharp and close, as did the hooves so I pulled with every ounce of strength I had and slowly pulled myself upright again. A tremendous feat of strength. Probably my personal best. I had also been gripping the horse with my legs as tightly as possible for most of the ride, and was still doing that.

For a fleeting moment I was elated and then another old movie scene raced through my mind. You know the one, where a cowboy grabs a low hanging tree limb and drops to the ground from a speeding horse or buckboard, unharmed. That one. The thought immediately vanished, however, because the branch was approaching rapidly and at the last possible millisecond, I ducked. The branch skimmed the top of my head and again I felt a flash of relief, when my next crisis loomed right in front of me. Surefire was charging straight at a lineup of four or five cars parked between us and the barn.

I immediately thought, "Now I'm really dead. He's going to try to jump those cars and he can't do it, he can't do it!"

More visions of me in the hospital, in traction at best. At the last second, Surefire swerved to the left, deftly slipping around the cars, to my immense relief. Then, my last obstacle, the barn wall rose before us a very short distance away and he still wasn't slowing down.

"He's gone crazy and now he's making a mad dash for home and we're going to crash right through the wall of the barn!," I screamed inside my head.

But miraculously he screeched to a halt, a nose from the wall and nearly threw me over his head. I laboriously lifted my leg over and slid from his back and my knees buckled. I almost fell, but somehow staggered toward the riders' lounge without a glance backward, leaving my sweaty and exhausted mount to the wrangler's care. I grabbed a coke and collapsed in a leather lounge chair. A short time later, J.B. came in, seemingly as wrung out as I.

He told me, "Man, I'm ready to try almost anything, but I'll never do that again."

"I concur J.B., I concur," I replied.

Come Monday, Gary was upset with the two of us. "The stable guy was really mad about his horses being misused," he told us.

We apologized sincerely as we didn't want to get him in hot water, and he finally said it was okay. We did feel bad because Gary was a good guy, but it was also, so funny that we couldn't tell anyone what had happened for about four days, because we would get hysterical, spitting and sputtering every time we tried to talk about it.

One scene I often chuckled over was watching J.B. from behind. He was a short guy with short legs and long, but thin hair. When his horse would canter, it looked like J.B. would fly off the saddle about two feet with his legs straight out to the sides and his hair bouncing straight up in the air.

There was a young girl practicing her dressage in a corral off to the left of the driveway and I wondered what was going through her mind as she watched some obvious fool come thundering down the drive hanging on for dear life.

Now that was one incident where I actually thought I might die four or five times. It was hilarious to talk about after, but there was nothing too funny about it while it was happening. My upper thighs were so sore, I couldn't walk right for over a week. Despite my travails of that day, I still love horses, but the only future involvement I'll have with them will be to put ten bucks on an exacta.