Easter Escapades: Everybody Poops

posted June 15, 2012

Everybody poops.

It’s what we do with it that makes all the difference.

And yes, Grandma: I know I just typed the word “poop” in a public, online forum. I am so, so sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Take a moment to be embarrassed, maybe brew yourself some tea, and read on. Because this is the post you’ve been waiting for - the infamous how-did-Laura-ride-a-horse-around-a-Dublin-roundabout post.

Buckle up.

…er, saddle up, as the case may be.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t thaaaat exciting. The opening scene was pretty familiar, after all: The warm smell of hay and horses wafted through the open barn. The neighs and snorts from steeds both small and tall set the soundtrack, punctuated by the odd stamp of a hoof. The big, brown eyes of the resident barn dog gazed up at me, his brown-and-white spaniel head in my lap when he came over to welcome the stranger.

A sign, posted near the center of the barn read: “All horses bite. All horses kick.” And that, more than anything else, sent me cantering back down memory lane.

Disclaimer: I do not boast overwhelming amounts of riding experience. Over the years, I scraped together as much as I could - opportunity, finances, and parents allowing. This post is bound to be fraught with ignorance, misinformation, and botched terminology. To those of my readers with enough horse expertise to recognize it, know that I am sorry and embarrassed in advance. 

Again, many of the sounds, smells, and sights of my primary introduction to horses proved consistent. The scenery, of course, back in Texas, painted a slightly different landscape, with its gnarled and drought-toughened trees, dust catching the sunlight in the blisteringly hot arena, and Western saddles creaking timelessly over all. Dublin’s Phoenix Park, on the other hand, neighbored the Irish stables with velvety green plains, raindrops still glistening on leaves that fluttered in the breeze of the intermittent rain showers’ shadows.

But the sign, “All horses bite. All Horses kick,” recalled a voice from that sweltering, Texas scene, when Miss Joyce, riding instructor supreme and retired rodeo queen, stood in the center of that old arena in overalls and disheveled perm, her leathery hands clutching a megaphone. “Little giiiirrls! Horses kick on Tuesdays when the sun shines.”

We’d heard the message before:

“Little giiiirrls! Horses kick on Fridays when it’s 104 degrees.”

“Little giiiirrls! Horses kick on Mondays when it’s cloudy.”

“Little giiiirrls! Horses kick on Thursdays when we’re eating spaghetti for dinner.”

No matter which variation, Miss Joyce’s exhortation was Texas twang for “All horses bite. All horses kick.”

“Well, good, I thought. At least that seems pretty much the same.” I was about to ride in the English style for the first time in my life, and I was a little nervous. I thought I’d signed up for a touristy trail ride through Phoenix Park, one of the largest, walled city parks in Europe. (In planning my Dublin adventure, I’d reasoned that a horse ride would enable me to see much more of the massive park than going it on foot. Truthfully, that was my justification for finding a way to ride horses. That I’d be riding them in a park in Ireland, really, was just icing on the cake.) After arriving at the stables, following my extensive and meandering walk through the beginnings of Phoenix Park [see earlier postfor more details on said walk], I began to notice that everyone else at the stable already knew each other. Although the stable’s website didn’t make it glaringly clear, I’d unwittingly invited myself on a sort of weekly reward for the stable’s regular riders, which meant they’d all know what they were doing. And undoubtedly, within a few minutes, they’d know I did not.

Oops.

(To their credit, my Irish riding companions were nothing but cordial.)

I’m really not a bad rider, and some of you may be thinking, “western riding, English riding, how different can they be?” Well, let me introduce you to my crippling anxiety when it comes to anything even remotely resembling a sport.

When I’m relaxed and having fun, I’m only reasonably bad at most sports. Heck, I can even throw a football with moderately stunning accuracy, if not very far. But after I get nervous, it’s all over - doesn’t matter which sport we’re talking. Practicing the triple jump for a P.E. class in junior high, I once landed on my back, facing the wrong direction. I’m still not sure how I managed that. At a summer tennis camp, by the end of the week, each time I had to serve, I’d just hand the ball to my opponent; we both knew I couldn’t get it over the net. During a friendly game of cabbage ball, in college, I once had to swing at the ball (even bigger than a normal softball) roughly 37 times before hitting it even once, when my well-meaning friends decided the best way to teach me to play was to prohibit me from leaving the plate until I’d hit the ball. Boy, did that backfire.

In the fifth grade, a coach assured me, “Laura, I won’t fail you in P.E., because you just try so hard!” I’d never horribly embarrassed myself while riding horses before (Well, except for maybe an arguably misguided game of red-light-green-light that landed me in the ER…), but my sports-related blunders usually tend to skip rookie-fumble level and head straight for “shock-and-awe” disastrous. I think you’ll understand if I say I was concerned.

“So you’ve never ridden English before?” queried stable manager Colm.

Nope, I told him. When I confided that I’d also never before worn a helmet while riding, Colm looked decidedly scandalized.

“So have you ever posted?”

“Not even a little bit,” I answered honestly, hoping for some reassurance.

“Well, you’ll learn today,” Colm replied matter-of-factly, turning to help another rider with her horse. “Because you’ll have to.”

I believe the technical term for the reaction happening in my brain, at that point, was…

Yikes.

They assigned me to a massive, gorgeous, black-and-white paint named Caesar and helped me tack up. Even if it hadn’t been a couple of years since I’d last ridden, the equipment looked pretty foreign to me. And, remember: I was a teensy bit nervous. But besides the differences in saddles, distinctions between English and western style riding became steadily clearer to my inexperienced eyes.

Early on, the Irish riders had haughtily compared western saddles to horseback sofas, saying that when riding English, you can’t just lounge in the saddle. (I know quite a few western riders who might balk at that assessment.) The horses were trained for two-handed, direct-contact reining, instead of neck reining. The stirrups sat higher. And, obviously, English saddles conspicuously skip the saddle horn - it wouldn’t be much use, anyway, since English riders practice direct contact reining and don’t generally go around lassoing cattle.

But some of the most striking differences between my experiences in English- and Western- style riding involved defecation.

[I hereby apologize for the direction this post has taken. It may interest no one else. And I promise that, baring some unforeseeable and unignorable future event, I will never use this blog as a forum for poop discussion ever, ever again.]

Back in the day, Miss Joyce used to tell us, “Don’t let him stop! Horses can walk and poop at the same time. Kick him!” She only allowed horses to pause for urination and, at that point, asked riders to stand in their stirrups to relieve pressure on their horses’ kidneys. These Irish riders stopped and stood for both jobs. It was all very civilized.

Miss Joyce also used to instructed riders to keep their horses from skirting the poop. “Make him walk through it. It’s not going to hurt him!” she’d say. “YOU tell him where to go, not the other way around!” Colm, on the other hand, requested that riders circumnavigate any fecal matter in the arena, pointing out that pre-trampled poop would be so much easier to scoop up. Poop was seldom scooped in Miss Joyce’s arena…only quite inexperienced, young riders made the mistake of playing in that sand.

These differences may not mean much to most of my readers, but they captured the differences between English and western styles of riding, as I perceived them. While English celebrates refinement and pristine form, western chases function, first and foremost - even if that means getting a little dirty.

Thankfully, said distinctions failed to prove insurmountable, and I never embarrassed myself too terribly much. Fortunately, some of the more ornery horses I’d ridden in the past had required direct-contact reining, so that wasn’t exactly a new concept, and I actually prefer it to neck reining. Having to learn two-handed reining also meant I’d already needed to ride without dependence on a saddle horn, so that didn’t faze me either. I observed and absorbed the poop-related etiquette fairly quickly, so my biggest challenge presented itself in the dreaded form of posting.

(In case you’re new to the equine scene, posting is that thing English riders do when they’re bouncing up and down as their horse trots. It’s actually a much smoother way to ride a trot than the western way of simply “sitting” it. And while English riders may not acknowledge it in their western counterparts, I’d argue that both techniques require skill.)

Colm, as it turns out, was right: I learned because I had to. We trotted out of the stable, through a Dublin round-a-bout (The cars all actually stopped to let the long line of horses through, and no one even honked at us! I kept glancing around, thinking, “There’s no way this is real life.”), and back into Phoenix Park. And have I mentioned how big Phoenix Park is? So, yeah. I learned to post. …those English riders REALLY like to trot. (Side note: Posting required extensive use of muscles I didn’t know I had, previous to this experience. I was sore to the point of limping for the next couple of days.)

And actually, posting was pretty fun. I’m sure I wasn’t doing it well, but even my uneducated attempts kept the almost nonstop trotting enjoyable.

Pretty quickly, I decided that no matter how awkward my trail-ride-crashing seemed, riding through Phoenix park was definitely a good choice. We covered so much more ground than I could have on foot and ventured much father into the untamed sectors of the park than I would have dared on my own, given my previously documented directional challenges. We trotted through kelly green meadows, up and down rolling hills, and under canopies of green-leafed woods.

My favorite sight, however, were the deer. In Texas, you might see a handful of deer at a time. They’re all this delicate, light-brown color, and they spook at the slightest provocation. The deer in Phoenix Park, however, run in herds. That’s right, I saw a HERD of deer. There had to be more than 50 deer, all grazing together near a strand of tall trees at the center of a meadow. And they varied in color, some being light brown, others very dark. What’s more, their coats seemed to be a little longer than those I’ve seen on Texas deer. (Although, it did occur to me that perhaps these deer were sporting some kind of “winter coat.” I know next to nothing about deer.)

We rode our horses within 40 feet of the herd. None of those deer batted an eye. Unbelievable.

Shortly after encountering the deer, we trotted on back to the stables, and I caught a cab back to my hostel, relieved to finally be able to rest my overworked feet.

Dublin was fun and quite pretty, but without a doubt, riding a horse through Phoenix Park was the highlight of my stay.

Meet the gentle giant, Caesar. Sadly, this is the only photo I have, documenting my experience. Since I was fairly busy learning how to post and trying not to look like an idiot, I figured also attempting some horseback photography would not be my best idea.

original post available here.