As I hear her describe the horse-girls in her neighborhood, my mind floods with memories of the deepest devotion. When I was twelve, the target of my love was horses. Although it felt like a secret passion, unique and nameless, I was not alone in my equinomania. Child psychologists don’t offer horse love as a formal stage in a pre-adolescent girl’s development, but I’ve taken an informal survey over the years, and found that eight out of ten girls go through a stage of horse idolatry. Boys like horses, and often feel a shared sense of magic, but they don’t yearn for horses with the same magnetic devotion that girls do. This operatic longing, as powerful and obsessive as a love affair, fills every corner of a girl’s life, sending her into raptures, mobilizing her daydreams, giving her life meaning. Even girls who can’t draw can at least draw a horse, and they often fill the margins of school notebooks with horse heads. They usually have plastic horses and riders to play with, books about horses, and they invent games in which they ride (or become) spectacular horses. As a budding writer, I started a horse newspaper for the kids in my neighborhood, but stopped when I realized how time-consuming it would be to write out every copy in longhand. Then I began writing a novel about a horse named Stormy and a girl who loved him. A surprising number of girls keep horse scrapbooks. I still have mine, begun on my twelfth birthday, and it’s the diary of a typical horse maniac. It begins with a copy of “The Horse’s Prayer,” an anonymous, Dickensian appeal for the fair treatment of horses, which ends with “You will not consider me irreverent if I ask this in the name of Him who was born in a Stable. Amen.” The yellowed pages that follow contain an array of black-and-white photographs of people and their horses, cartoons about horses, newspaper clippings about horses for sale, postcards of horses, famous cowboys and cowgirls posing beside their horses, young equestrians at horse camp sitting astride their horses, a playing card (the eight of spades) with a horse head on the picture side, newspaper stories about horse shows or horse owners, a Christmas card from a girl named Gayle posing happily beside her white horse, many photo-portraits of Arabian stallions whose owners were standing them at stud, a movie-magazine shot of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard playing with two foals, and—my prize possession—a snapshot of me standing beside Gallant Masterpiece, a horse I thought the pinnacle of beauty and power. My ecstatic smile is because, at that moment, just touching so magnificent a creature, I had entered the gates of paradise. Sometimes the owner allowed me to brush the huge thoroughbred’s head. On one occasion, in the paddock, he lifted me onto the horse and nearly fainted when the horse bolted with me aboard, and I slipped all over its back, down its neck, and around its withers, without actually falling off. A few minutes later, the owner caught up to us, and he was shaking with panic and worry, but I had hung on to the mane and was having the time of my life. The scrapbook also contains the first poem I ever memorized. I had to recite it in front of the class in sixth grade, and I stumbled badly over the word convulsively. It was “The Ballad of the White Stallion,” a tale of primal fury, ghost horses, gutty hunters, lots of decorative imagery, and a big-hearted stallion, both godlike and unyielding, described as “A lonely spirit—/But free….” I can recite it to this day.
Early human history is saturated with horse worship, but for women the relationship goes even deeper, to the core of their psychology. It also goes sideways into sociology. As I discovered growing up in the sixties, girls didn’t have high-adrenaline sports to jolt the nerves and make the heart stampede. Swimming was one acceptable “girl’s sport,” but it didn’t produce a hard sweat, let alone the roller coaster of excitement that adolescents crave. Boys had football, wrestling, track, basketball, and motorcycles—ways to use themselves with exhilaration and power. We girls were forced to boil with the lid on tight. Some took up ice skating and ballet, but many more rode horses.
Athletically, horseback riding is an apparatus sport, like driving a racing car or skiing: you magnify your body’s strength and agility through the horse, which becomes a part of your anatomy that you can teach and perfect. The shy and introverted, who might be turned off by team sports, were never alone on horseback, where they could leap high fences, race the wind, and lead a secret life as a superhero. A horse will exhaust you as royally as a football scrimmage, but at its highest level riding becomes an abstract art form: dressage on the ground, haute école (what Lipizzans do) in the air. It demands the discipline of Zen, the taut muscles of dance, and the timing of gymnastics. Then, too, one has the sense of learning a craft, as well as belonging to a club complete with esoteric grips and special lingo. The uniform—jodhpurs, blue jeans, or riding britches—fits the calf snugly and accentuates one’s gender. When, only a few decades ago, women rode sidesaddle, they had to struggle with long culottes, under which they wore doeskin pantaloons, under which they wore satin trousers. It was considered indelicate for a woman to have a massive horse between her legs. So women went to dressmakers, where they sat on a mock-up sidesaddle, so that inseams of different lengths could be measured. It wouldn’t do to have an extra yard of doeskin, pantaloon, and satin dangling from the leg that’s wrapped around the pommel. What an awful business it must have been to walk in that getup. How on earth did they sit comfortably at prehunt breakfasts, with their underclothes down to the ankle on one leg and above the knee on the other?
About the time a knack for coping with life becomes essential (that is, before a girl can drive a car), she can at least hop onto a horse and jog out into the woods, or dawdle chorelessly along a country road. Because she finds an escape route that hurts no one and works, it sticks with her lifelong. Many a girl has learned how to give affection by being around horses, living creatures she can talk to and caress, and trust with fragile ideas or unrepeatable secrets. Something that has real personality, but does not demand or censor, something big and strong that sweeps her off her feet, and carries her at a lope (a word perilously close to elope) out into the raging surfeit of summer, or the death wish of autumn, or the bud-breaking chaos of spring.
Older, married perhaps, a woman discovers how many frustrations can be left at the stable door. She can groom, take warmth from, and ride a horse, which doesn’t complain, or get acne before the prom, or need a car, or stint her sexually, or cheat on her. Although it’s bad form in riding to accentuate the pelvis, the hips roll with deep sensuality, and though riders of both sexes hotly deny it, during a slow trot or a canter the body moves a lot like it does in intercourse. The simple truth is that a horse is a big, powerful, mobile thing between a woman’s legs, a half ton of snort and lather. Most people prefer not to think of riding in that way, but, throughout history, riding has been associated with pagan sensuality. Even etymologically, if one just considers the technical terms for the parts of the saddle, one discovers that a rider is seated between the male {pommel, knob at the hilt of a sword, slang for penis) and the female (cantle, wedge-shaped slice, slang for vulva). It has always been tacitly understood that when a rider mounts up she rocks between the male and female life forces.
Eyebrows raise when one mentions women and horses, because the sexuality of horses is so obvious, fiery, and dramatic. The huge creatures called horses have in their shape and the way they move more than a suggestion of virility. When a mare comes into estrus her personality changes, and that is something a child quickly notices. Stallions have enormous penises, and they mount mares with a great commotion of hooves, flying manes, bared teeth, and screaming. But, despite our use of the word “stud” to identify a lusty male, most women don’t fantasize about mating with horses, although I’m sure a small number do, the most famous being Catherine the Great, who supposedly had a special harness created to restrain the reach of her favorite stallion. It isn’t that women wish to have sex with horses; it’s the horses embody their sexuality.
“Havelock Ellis suggests that girls may ride as a form of masturbation. What do you think?” I ask Linda.
“When you’re astride a horse, racing across the field, you are riding this giant p
hallus, and it can have a masturbatory quality to it, when your little clitoris is rubbing right against the horse. That might, for a girl, be an unnameable experience, because very few little girls have mothers who tell them about orgasm or sexual feelings in the vagina and the clitoris. Even today, that’s not information usually given to young girls. And that sense of a secret sexuality is important.
“When I was in seventh grade, that is, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old, there were two pastimes that were my very private things that I never spoke about to another soul, not to another girl, certainly. I thought they were my feelings and experiences alone. One was that we had in our backyard a giant T-bar that was part of a clothesline. Children like to do acrobatics. I used to climb this pole, and the reason I would climb it is because I would usually have an orgasm when I did. The motion would arouse me, and I felt powerful sexual feelings that were dizzying and scary but also wonderful. So I sought them out again, though I didn’t want anyone to know what it was about—I didn’t know myself what it was about. I had absolutely no name for those feelings because I didn’t know they were anything other girls had ever had happen to them. We had to climb ropes in gym that year, and I could never get to the very top because halfway up I would have an orgasm. It was the same motion. So it occurs to me that young girls who ride horses may have similar experiences on horseback that they can’t tell anyone. First, because they wouldn’t know how to describe it; and second, because it’s in that part of the body you don’t talk about.
“When I was young, I was quite a tomboy, and I felt tremendous pride about this because I thought it meant I was more like a boy, and I wanted to be because boys had more fun. I know that women who are absolutely committed to the most feminist position feel that we’re no different from men. But I think we’re very different—in our psychology, our interests, the way we relate to our bodies and other people. There is this whole inner life, this sexual self that you cannot see directly unless you take a mirror to it or probe inside with a speculum. You’re hidden inside. Boys have all this equipment. It’s right out there. They can control it. They can show it off to other boys, to girls. Imagine doing that with your vagina. What are you going to look at? Until you get a partner who wants to look at it and explore it, and then it’s fabulous.”
“Because you’re introduced to almost invisible parts of yourself,” I add.
“And then you discover it’s interesting and beautiful. So I think that sense of mystery about sex is very real. And there’s a difference in male and female stances toward the world. Men penetrate, take hold of, go into …”
“Play golf … put balls into holes?”
She laughs. “Exactly. Women wrap their legs around horses. For a lot of girls, the horse love disappears once the sexual energy gets transferred to men. There’s a certain age at which one seems to outgrow horses. I think horses may be more common to little girls who are rejecting the way society wants to define their femininity, which has now changed, so there may be a difference between girls now and how they were when I was growing up. But I remember that, in addition to horse stories, I read incessantly about wild animals, the lone wolf, the dogs that got separated from their masters and had to live in the wild for years. I loved the wildness and the independence of the animals. Once the beast became an ordinary man the story was changed for me, and it lost its power. I always felt that transformation at the end—which somehow brought everybody back to a normal state of reality—was such a betrayal of what the story was supposed to be about. Part of what you love about the craggy beast is its deformity, roughness—the grotesqueness and the tender heart within. Once he becomes beautiful and grand and looks like Dan Quayle, who gives a damn?”
Laughing, I tell her about the framed double photographs beside my bed—stills from Jean Cocteau’s classic film Beauty and the Beast. Fairy tales are full of women who marry animals, not all of whom change to princes.
“Why do you think women are attracted to that beautiful beast?” I ask.
“The obvious answer is the sexual power of the beast, which promises to be enormous and terrifying, which is very exciting and stimulating. Socially and sexually, there’s something deeply gratifying to most women about being swept away, and not just because it allows you not to feel responsibility for it—although that was certainly important in the fifties. When you stand at the ocean and see all that raging power—it’s a thrill. To this day, when I fly in an airplane and it sets down and throws those engines in reverse and the whole plane trembles and roars, it thrills me, I love it. There may be fewer avenues for women to assert their sexuality. The beast is that sexual power, along with the sense that somewhere deep inside him lurks a vulnerability which she can see, she can touch. That gives her power. Look how many women fall in love with cowboys—whether he really is a Marlboro man on the ranch or not—someone who is tough and silent; and she alone is going to find her way to his heart. There’s something seductive about taming the wild beast in him, which, of course, makes for an unhappy love affair, because if you’re a cowboy you just have to ride off into the sunset. Or, if she does tame him, then he wasn’t a real cowboy after all. So she loses either way.”
Throughout time, there have been stories about conquering a minotaur or dragon or some other fearsome force of nature. We have soft, penetrable skin, we are so fragile in this world. Earlier cultures were terrified of thunder; through the halls of lightning walked the gods whom humans needed to appease or vanquish. Men have traditionally faced the monster during hunts. A woman on horseback alternately masters and is mastered by that part of her nature which is a wild, snorting, powerful, mane-tossing beast, full of swerve and beauty. No one understood this better than D. H. Lawrence. In St. Mawr, a novella about women and horses, the main character is bewitched by a beautiful stallion, whose nerves are like rockets. Intending to buy him, she thinks of the world he represents:
It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed…. There was, perhaps, a curious barbaric exultance in bare, dark will devoid of emotion or personal feeling…. He was so powerful, and so dangerous. But in his dark eye, that looked, with its cloudy brown pupil, a cloud within a dark fire, like a world beyond our world, there was a dark vitality glowing, and within the fire, another sort of wisdom. She felt sure of it: even when he put his ears back, and bared his teeth, and his great eyes came bolting out of his naked horse’s head, and she saw demons upon demons in the chaos of his horrid eyes.
What lures me still when I ride is the disciplined panic of a horse flirting with a tantrum at every turn, the delicate, voluptuous play of muscles, the grace-sprung power. This became especially clear to me one cold winter day a few years ago, when I rode an Appaloosa mare bareback, trotting her swiftly through tight hairpin turns, and for the first time I really stuck, without sliding or jiggling. My legs hugged her belly like a cinch, and her heart pounded against my knees as she paced. Deeply I sat, fixed to the slap, slap, slap, slap of her trot, and the counterpoint thud-plod, thud-plod of her heart, enchanted by a soft percussion I felt part of, floating above the syncopated rhythm like a melody. A sweet, leathery steam rose from her chest and neck. When I fretted her belly lightly with my calf, she rolled into a long rippling, and I felt at home in the pumping of her shoulders, the sweet dank odor of hot fur, the rhythmic gesturing of her head. My legs tingled with half a dozen pulses, some of them my own. Reckless with exhilaration, I jumped her bareback over several low fences, gripping her steamy hide as we sprang over fence after fence, leaving earth for a moment between the blunt stanchions, and leaping through the gristly winter light toward the sun, now setting right at the end of the valley like a hot yellow liquid pouring out. As my legs began to reason gently with her body, we rose over a fence like a fogbank, below which lay the world of humans. For those slender moments, I felt heart-poundingly creatural, and reveled in the thrill of speed and sunlight, part of an ea
rth-ecstasy as old as the runes. Life blew through my veins as the wind charged through the winter trees. Huge, oily-looking ravens sounded as if they were choking on lengths of blanket. And then night began seeping over the hillsides like a long spill of black ink, erasing everything civilized and safe.
As we are finishing lunch, Linda’s former husband strolls by, with his new wife and his two small children. Linda is remarried, too; and she and her ex live only a few houses away from each other, so that all the children in both families have become part of one extended family. Their arrangement is often lauded by local folk as sensitive and enlightened. His nine-year-old daughter, Hannah, rushes to Linda and gives her a hug, then shows off her brand-new white western boots.
“Those are pretty boots!” she tells her.
The girl squirms shyly and says, “I got them to wear riding horses.” Just saying that excites her, and she adds, “You know what, I go to Four-H, and we brush the horses and then ride them!”
“Look what I’m wearing,” I say, pulling my feet from under the table to show her a pair of black western boots. Around the ankle of the right boot is a red leather strap studded with small silver hearts. “Mine are for riding horses, too.”
Her eyes catch fire. She looks at me more intently. Then she smiles with the secret understanding of a fellow Freemason. After lunch, I hurry home to watch show-jumping finals on television, while I pack for a journey that will carry me across time and distance to where horse love began.
Flying across New York State, I look down on the evergreens, sharp as arrowheads, the forested hills, and the green-and-brown corduroy of farm fields. Last week I rode through the deserts of the Southwest, where at night the sobbing of wolves twists deep into your dreams, and by day eagles show their feathered bloomers to the world as they fly. In only a few hours I have galloped into another climate, another ecosystem, another culture, thanks to that modern-day horse, the airplane, whose energy we even define as “horsepower.” Sailing aloft in a sheath of gleaming steel, while the planet turns gently below, I move forward in time by means of a pocket miracle even children take for granted. We can throw a switch and make sunlight dawn in a dark room; turn a knob and change an icy porch to summer. After such marvels, why should it surprise us that we have taught metal to fly? Or that we can gallop on the wind like the horse gods of old? Or that we can make a pilgrimage at 25,000 feet? Our planes go back and forth, but time goes only one way in nature, and in clocks, with each moment becoming a greater state of disorder than the one before it. Everything decays. Even we, who will become old and may betray our dreams. Even the living, breathing, many-laked Adirondacks below me, ablaze with what we have come to call autumn. Then I finally see JFK in the distance, flickering with haze. In some ways, time is the least plausible of our fictions. Trying to corral time is like trying to hobble a ghost, but horses have helped to make that ghost visible.