Prompt #3: Clydesdale-Quarterhorse Mix.

Not long after my father passed away, my mother, suddenly not taking for granted how short life is, started doing a lot more of what made her happy. By the end of 2009, she went ahead and purchased a rescued horse named Cici and started making a weekly habit of going down to the stables in Black Diamond.

My mother is a funny lady sometimes. She was born in the Garlic Gulch area, the Little Italy of Seattle that sadly, doesn’t exist anymore. Before she was too old, she moved to the southwest part of the county to Burien, an area that wouldn’t come it’s own city until 1993. Her entire life has been spent in and around the city. Her memories consist of working downtown, summers spent watching airshows by Lake Washington, fish and chips on Alki, and going to the Pike Place Market for her grocery shopping. She is a city slicker through and through. Yet, if you talked to her now, you wouldn’t see that so much. She listens to the country station, vacations in the Inland Empire instead of near the rainforest or the Pacific, fantasizes about cowboys, and spends her time lately at the base of Mt. Rainier where she keeps her horses.

I went ahead and told her one day that her past doesn’t seem to match her present very well. She then told me I was too young to remember, but around where we grew up betwixt Burien and Renton, was a thoroughbred horsetrack called Longacres that was demolished in 1992. Apparently it was quite a sight, the glacier-tilled ground conducive to racing, six-digit purses, and an appearance of Seattle Slew himself running for cancer research. After my mother finished telling the story of how she had sneaked into a VIP lounge and was hit on by James Caan, I went to do some research about the lost track. The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, an extremely useful tool for my thesis, had quite a bit of information about Longacres. Remembering the nostalgic glint in my mother’s eyes, nothing I read was more unforgettable than this line:

Many had generational associations extending back to Longacres’ earliest days, and for these the loss of the track was a personal threat to both lifestyle and livelihood.

Unlike my mother, I was not nearly as attached or even all that interested in horses and often declined her invitations to join her at the stables in Black Diamond. I’m not sure exactly when I started going along with her on our weekends off. One thing I love about my home is how despite the fact that Seattle stretches nearly thirty plus miles from north to south, all it takes is twenty minutes, by ferry or highway to be resoundingly out of the city. It wasn’t long before we were in flooded organic farms alongside the Green River, with highland cows gawking at us as much as we did them.

As you probably weren’t expecting, I never had a close attachment to my mother’s horse, Cici. She was temperamental, unfriendly, and forced my mother into surgery after she bucked her off. Realizing that she was not a horse for a novice like my mother, she was sold off and sadly died of colic shortly after being picked up by her owner. But there’s an adage that hung in the barnhouse of the stables: Once you a buy horse, you don’t stop with just one. My mother purchased another, an American thoroughbred colt named Dude, who was simply too young and too massive to ride.

Despite not having any attachment to a horse yet, I found myself curious about them. My mother’s friend and horsetrainer, the Gayle to her Oprah, Marie devoted her whole life to tending and breaking horses. She wasn’t alone at the stables. Every horse owner, stable hand, there was an odd mythology behind them I simply wasn’t getting. This was at a time when I thought horses, simply, were just very dumb animals. (Granted, they still can be sometimes.) But when so many people are strongly attached to an animal, well, you have to admit you may be wrong about something.

This is when I began reading about the history of horses. The thing that captured my attention was how, in this world, there only true one wild horse. That would be the critically endangered Prezwalski’s horse. It wasn’t long before I became curious about the differences between a wild and domestic/feral horses and looked into behaviors. They’re really quite a curious prey animal in that although they’ll flee, they’ll also stand their ground. I would learn from Marie that it’s important too, as a human, to stand one’s ground against them as in their structure, we can be see as a subordinate and prone to be nicked and charged. Instead of being mad at Cici, I became more sympathetic towards her when I realized that horses have impressive memories and realized, much like my beloved Belgian shepherd at home, she was likely abused. I learned about the differences and roles in mares, colts, and foals. Although it’s still in progress, I learned and am still learning above the variance of breeds and what exactly being a cold or warmblood entails. At this point in my reading, well, I found myself actually enjoying going to the stables with my mother.

Still, my interest in horses was relatively at arm’s length and it wasn’t until my mother brought home a Clydesdale-Quarterhorse mix named Dunny that I began to have an attachment. Dunny, due to his breeding and growing up in an environment filled with noise, was not easily spooked. He was and is calm and gentle, if but a bit clumsy. I was a little bit nervous when my mother called him over and told me to keep my hand flat while I fed him. He took it, stood there, and let me get closer and scratch him behind the ear. So it began every weekend when I would take him from his pen, get the scrub brush, and go to town on his mud-matted hair and mane. Occasionally, he’d try to jerk away from the metallic circle brush and step on my boots, but I’d never get upset. At times, with Marie’s encouragement, I’d have to be firm and lead him by his rein with authority, uncomfortable as that makes me at times with animals. This would all end up a bonding experience with Dunny and it was hard, much harder than I thought when I drove off to Pittsburgh for school.

Even though my interest in horses still learns towards curiosity instead of affection, I had certainly come a long way from someone who shot his mother down each time he was invited out to Black Diamond.