Horsing Around

Whoever it was who said "a horse is a horse" was a blooming idiot.  Horses in fact have different motivations and life goals.  The one pictured above, for instance, wanted me dead.

I'm not kidding.

Here's what happened:

My wife and I naively accepted an invitation to go to horseback riding at the house of a friend who owned four of them (horses, that is.)   Our only prior riding experience had been at one of those touristy places in Gatlinburg where you pay $50 to ride a pre-selected route, and the horses already know every step of the trail and exactly what they are supposed to do, even if they are being ridden by a jar of ketchup.      

We came expecting roughly the same, except that maybe by now we'd be capable of handling an occasional trot. We had vague ideas of what we were doing, but we needed horses with low self-esteem who desperately sought their riders' approval. 

To our surprise, these horses, were just... well, horses.  They were good horses, they just weren't trained to adhere to the beck and call of strangers who didn't have a complete idea of what they were doing.  These horses didn't mind being ridden by their owners, but they had the same reaction to being sat on and told what to do by a 200 pound stranger that you or I would. 

As we ventured into a partially blazed trail in the woods, my horse for the day, Comet, decided that she would protest my presence by making a habit of clearing the trees on our wooded trail with only four inches to spare on the righthand side. This meant she cleared each tree just fine, but my right leg slammed into each and every one.

Thankfully, she stopped doing this after three of four trees, but it didn't feel much better when she switched to banging me against trees on the left side.

After a couple collisions, I pulled her reigns to the opposite direction each time we started getting close to the edge of the trail, but this only cause her to temporarily stop and laugh at my misfortune before continuing on exactly as planned.

Mr. Ed would have never done something like that.
 
My wife faired slightly better on her horse until it decided to enter a near sprint to keep up with the horse in front of it, one ridden by its owner, and thus who actually liked the person who was riding it.
When that horse started moving, our horses behind it followed fast on its trail, and the speed and bumpiness of the trail caused my wife to fall off to the left side.

At that point, Comet, whose only two gears on Sunday were "slow walk interrupted by long sessions of grazing" and "homicidal sprint" decided that it would be fitting to buck me off while engaged in the latter and dispatch me to the left as well, just beside my wife.  It was a chivalrous gesture on her part, I suppose, and she somehow even caused her (Comet's) saddle to break in the process. 

At least now when I go to the beach next month both sides of me will have roughly equal bruising. 

In fairness, not all my bruises are attributable to Comet. I can't blame her for waning a more  competent rider.  Had she not almost broken my wrist by violently throwing me to the ground at full speed, I'd say I feel bad for her. 

My body looks like a peach that's just ridden a roller coaster and feels like a pinata, but it wasn't all Comet's fault.

Almost half my cuts, scrapes and bruises stem from a series of low hanging branches along the trail, and as a result of those same branches my wife and I currently sport matching neck scrapes that resemble what we would look like if we assaulted each other with butterknives. 

I have gigantic red marks on both my inner thighs from saddle abrasion.  Riding uses a series of leg muscles, and my leg and groin muscles hurt in spots where I didn't even know muscles existed.  I suppose that's just as well, given that I won't be using any of those groin muscles anytime soon, considering the location of my wife's saddle-abrasion bruise. 

When we finally got off our horses and hobbled to car to drive home, my wife asked if I had a good time and if I'd do it again. 

"Yes," I said, "but next time I want an idiot-proof horse." 

Because my bruises testify that I need one.