Tragedies and Blessings.

I was staring down my mid life crisis.  It was the eve of my 40th birthday and we were living in a deed restricted community in Florida. It was, by all accounts, the American dream.   We had someone else mowing our manicured lawn.  We had a company that came by weekly and checked our in ground pool and added water if we needed it.  I had a dock with sail boat access to the Gulf Of Mexico.  Living on a cul-de-sac in Punta Gorda Isles was considered a privilege reserved for the well off in our community and we were in the center of it.  One night Melissa and I were watching TV and enjoying a lukewarm glass of Merlot, Melissa turned to me and without batting an eye, she says: “Lets buy a farm."  I damn near peed myself sitting on our luxurious sectional couch.

The saddles that we had in our living room were a warning to me that I had failed to heed for years.  I knew that my beloved had always held a special place in her heart for the outlying areas where cattle and horses graze.  I took a moment to process the suggestion.  Honestly, what boy never dreamed of being a cowboy with his loyal steed? Riding the trails, six gun on his hip?  I very nervously replied: “OK."  So our adventure into the country began.  We settled on a three bedroom home.  The house had a configurable 8 stall barn attached to the garage.  The whole property is about 10 miles outside of town on five acres. It was a bank owned short sale and it took us 18 months to close on the property.   I cashed in my meager retirement fund to rehab the house and land to suit the woman who had dedicated her love to me.  I was honored to do it, and in the end we found ourselves in a place that we both fell in love with.

Well, now we had a problem.  Here we sat on an 8 stall barn and not a single animal to our name.  Time to shop for a horse I guess.   We both searched Craigslist for months looking for just the right animal.  Then, there he was. A pure white and a little flea bitten Arabian gelding.  His name: Blanco- Spanish for white.  I sent Melissa up to Sarasota to bring home our new tenant.  She showed up about 8 hours later flushed with frustration and saying that Blanco had been more than a hand full to try to get into the trailer. But there he was in all his glory sitting in our front paddock.  I had had 18 months to read up on horses and specifically their behavior.  I knew that this moment was going to be critical in establishing our relationship in the future.

I was standing at the fence line when they opened the gate to the trailer.  I knew that he was going to run up to me.  I was also well informed that it was very important that I did not flinch when he did.  Out he burst from that trailer and headed straight for the fence where I was standing.  Sure enough, at a distance of about 3 feet, I jumped back and immediately regretted it.  As that gelding turned to head the other way I caught a glimpse of his gaze, and I swear I could very easily read what he was saying: ” I got your number."

For the next couple of months, Blanco minded me, but he never really respected me.  I knew it was the end result of our first encounter where I showed him I was afraid, but I did not know how to fix it.  Then the worst thing imaginable happened.  Blanco foundered.  In a nutshell, founder is a condition that causes the horses body to produce a chemical that attacks their hoofs.  The worst case scenario is akin to having your ankle bone shoved through the bottom of your foot.  In such cases, founder is most certainly fatal.  Blanco was bedridden for months.  Locked in a stall where we worked tirelessly to try to save his life.  Doctors, x-rays, medications, foot wraps, and farriers became the norm.  It also became normal to find one of us sleeping in the stall all night, holding Blanco’s head off the cold floor of the stall while he slept, in an effort to offer him some additional measure of comfort.

Eventually, Blanco started to show signs of improvement.  We had special made horseshoes put on him that slowed the progress of the founder and helped him regain a lot of his mobility.  The lingering question that we constantly batted around: “Will we ever get to ride him?" The answer was always just out of our reach.   As he recovered, I noticed something.  His attitude toward me had changed.  I could always tell that he was exceptionally smart, and now he was letting me see it.  He listened to me now and showed sincere signs of affection when I was around him.  In my human narcissism, I came to the conclusion that the animal had come to respect me because I had helped take care of him during his illness.  Boy was I dead wrong about that one. Blanco respected me now, but for an entirely different reason than I had concluded.

I found the answer in a book written by a very smart old Cowboy named Buck Brannaman.  (The Horse Whisperer movie was based on him.) You see, we humans are predators.  Horses are prey animals.  They know this full and well.  When a horse looks at you it is always measuring you up as a potential threat to their life.  In the wild, predators kill their prey most prominently by asphyxiation via the neck.  They attack, bring down the prey and use their jaws on the animals neck to choke it to death.  Brannaman had explained the process wherein you hold down a horse on the ground and exert pressure via a knee on the side of its neck.  Doing this causes the animal to believe that you are going to kill it.  The end result is that the horse, unable to get up, comes to the conclusion that it is going to die and gives up hope.  This process is used to break unruly animals and is not recommended as a regular training tool because of the psychological impact it can have.

So there was my answer.  Those nights where I was sitting on the floor of that stall, holding Blancos head in my lap, I had inadvertently bonded with him.  Not because he basked in the attention I was giving him, but because he was utterly terrified that I was going to kill him.  When he realized that I would not take his life, he respected me for not doing so.  It is truly marvelous how arrogant we can be as humans when we don’t pay attention to nature.  The day finally came when we realized that it would be forever out of my grasp to ride Blanco.  But when that time came, I had learned how to communicate with him and compare him to the behavior of some of the other horses.  I can still easily see how marvelous he would have been under saddle.  Blanco is the kind of horse that cowboys train to do all form of amazing tricks.  I know now, that it will truly be one of the great tragedies of my lifetime that I never got to ride him.  It will also go down as one of the biggest blessings that I had the opportunity to learn from him.

Blanco is still with us.  He spends most of his time manicuring my new lawn.