Of Firsts, and Lasts..
The first time my wife looked at me and said "I'd like to get a horse", I thought she had lost her marbles. While I knew as a kid, she and her sister spent their summers on Cumberland Island with their grandparents and would catch the wild ponies on the island and ride them, I on the other hand had about as close to zero exposure to horses as one could get."Why on earth would you want to own livestock?" I said. This from a guy who had always loved critters. We had several cats, a few dogs and a house full of various parrots. Still, the notion of a 1500 pound hay burner just seemed extremely foreign to me.
With her dad's assistance, we acquired our first horse, a thoroughly misrepresented Arabian rescue that came with a bunch of issues. After throwing my wife into the wall of a round pen (causing a vertebra fracture in the process), we sent that one back. This horse wasn't just scared, he was mean, and dangerous.
As she was now going to be laid up for the better part of six months, and would have a lifetime of recurring back pain as a result, the horse folks recommended we look into a "gaited" horse, as they are much smoother rides.
This resulted in the "next" first. Trix, our first Tennessee Walker. As she was laid up, it resulted in several firsts for me as well. He needed training, and training meant riding. Since she wasn't able to ride, I had to. Nearly every day, for months.
This was followed by a few more firsts. The first time being on a newly broke horse that spooked and decided to haul ass regardless of what I may have thought about it. The first time being thrown off (thanks to a herd of llamas that decided to chase us). There were others as well.
After about a year, I was again buried in work gearing up for the annual "big" trade show at my job. This meant a couple months of 70-80 hour weeks. After getting through that once again a semblance of free time emerged, and I went with my wife out to where we were boarding Trix at. As we walked out to the pasture to bring him in, my wife handed me another halter.
She pointed to a highly startled looking brown horse I'd never seen before and said, "go put a halter on him and bring him in". Assuming she was doing a favor for one of the other boarders at the facility, I asked whose horse this was. She said, "he's yours. I got him for you a couple weeks ago."
So now I had my first horse. I learned he was an American Saddlebred (similar to a Walker in that they are both gaited) and she'd literally rescued him from the slaughter house by buying him at auction. There was nothing particularly special about him at first glance. He was just another of dozens if not hundreds of abused, neglected, abandoned or forgotten "livestock" horses that show up at auctions like this all over the country each week. Most of these were sold to the highest bidder to end up as dog food and Jello. We dubbed him Monarch, because he compared to our incredibly dull looking Tennessee Walker, he looked positively regal.
I had a few more firsts. I learned what happens to one of these noble creatures when they've been beaten and mistreated. Nobody could get in the stall with him because he was so terrified of what had apparently happened in the past in stalls with humans. He was nervous (more like permanently startled), but not mean.
We attended a John Lyons seminar (who along with Monty Roberts are the "real" horse whisperers, as the movie has little or nothing to do with the real understanding of how horses react, and in fact some of the things shown in the movie couldn't be farther from reality, but I digress). I learned a lot that day, and began to get a handle on the fact that these aren't just 1500 pound hayburners, but intelligent, elegant, noble and often entirely misunderstood creatures.
At this point I made a decision, well supported by my wife, that we would allow Monarch to come to terms with us on his timeframe, not ours. After the apparent years of abuse and neglect he had suffered before the fateful journey to the auction block, there was no way in hell we were going to push him into anything he wasn't ready for.
As a result, I began spending more time with him, and had a series of other firsts. The first time he didn't run away in the field when you approached him with a halter. The first time he didn't run to the far end of the stall when you entered. The first time he would actually come up to me to accept a horse cookie. The first time he let us brush him without spooking. The first time in the wash rack without needing a halter and cross ties.
The weeks, and then the months passed. New firsts came. The first time he got a bit and reins. The first adventure with a saddle pad, and then a saddle. And then the big first, the first time with a saddle and me. To be honest, I don't know who was more nervous, Monarch or myself. To his credit, he didn't spook. With my wife leading him, we made a few laps around the round pen, and when I got off, with tears in my eyes and gave him a huge hug. This magnificent animal, who had never done anything to anyone out of anger, or meanness, and had received nothing but beatings and horrific treatment at the hands of some pathetic excuses for human beings, had learned to bypass the instinctual reactions learned from years of abuse to actually trust someone enough to be on him.
The months that followed were ones of discovery and joy.
The first time we encountered a terrifying Squirrelasaurus Rex on a trail. Monarch stopped cold, but neither startled nor bucked. Instead he turned his head and looked at me with his now nearly comical "super startled" expression as if to say, you see that? Is it going to eat me? A few pats on the neck and a hug, and he was reassured and we were on our way.
There was the first crossing of a stream, the first jump over a log, the first encounter with the oh so scary flapping plastic bag caught on a tree.
Then there was the first organized trail ride. It was on this beautiful property with steep hills and narrow passes. At one point, we were on a narrow path on the side of a hill with a very sheer drop off just a few feet from the edge of the trail. I hadn't been riding all that long yet, and as we moved further along, I was more than a little bit worried about what could happen if Monarch freaked out on me. Then the thing I was fearing the most happened. A few horses in front of us, some woman's quarter horse got spooked and started bucking. Most of the rest of the horses spooked as well, and I was surrounded by freaked out horses in front and behind me, bucking and just completely losing it. To my utter surprise, and total relief again Monarch just turned and looked at me with his patent pending super startled look, but he stood his ground and simply did not move. We were both scared shitless, but somehow, he trusted me enough to not move. I found out later that the woman's horse that spooked had been "trained" for months, and had been her riding horse for years. At that point, Monarch had been under saddle maybe a couple dozen times at best. I could not have been more proud.
There were other firsts.
The first time we got into a canter. For me it was half terrifying at first, but quickly led to pure exhilaration. For someone who's spent their life as an engineer, with a purely mechanical bent, I'd come to discover that the most sophisticated combination of gears, couplings and other mechanical contrivances couldn't hold a candle to the sheer elegance of motion that is a canter.
Shortly after that, was the first time Monarch got into a gait instead of a trot. He'd never been properly trained to gait, and for the longest time we wondered if he ever would. What they say about gaited horses is true, once you've experienced a gaited horse doing it's thing, there's nothing else like it in the world. You could hold a wine glass in the palm of your hand while flying across incredibly rough terrain and not spill a drop. Unlike a canter, which is fairly taxing to a horse, a gait can be maintained for extremely long periods of time. You can cover an immense amount of ground at a gait, leaving the non gated horses well in the dust. We'd go ride the trails out at Lake Lavon with friends on non gated horses, go all the way to the end of the trail, turn around and come back, and would meet them barely 1/4 of the way down the trail.
This led to my fascination with shooting video while riding. I had a full on ENG video camera (the big honking shoulder mount kind the news crews use). A $10,000 SteadyCam rig had nothing on Monarch. Had I known better, I'd have thought the very notion to be absurd at the best, and stupidly dangerous at worse. I'd be viewing the world through a 2" viewfinder, seeing the terrain way in front of the actual ground we'd be going over, and totally trusting Monarch to figure out where to go and how to get there. I'd drop the reins over the saddle horn, have one hand on the focus ring, and the other on the zoom, and just sort of steer him with a bit of nudge from my feet. We'd be tooling along at a full gait in a bumpy field going over hills, ridges and God knows what else, and the video that came out looked like it was shot from a crane on rails.
As the months passed, Monarch and I had become best buddies. While for his entire life he was always fearful of strangers, and would steer clear of anyone but me and my wife, he would stand for me and let me hug him for hours on end. And he dearly loved to go riding. With Trix, going out riding has always been an exercise in willpower. My wife's vs. Trix. That horse becomes entirely preoccupied with nothing more than going back the way you've came. Well that, and stopping to eat at every possible opportunity. When we'd hook the trailer up to the truck, Trix would head to the diametrically most opposite corner of the pasture he could find. Show Trix a saddle, and he starts looking for an escape route. Monarch on the other hand would get excited. He was never a problem to load, and would cheerfully come up the second he saw anything that even vaguely resembled a saddle.
Once underway, he would go as far as you liked, for as long as you liked. So much so that left to his own devices, he would go long past his endurance. We had to learn his limits because he would completely ignore them and would let your ride him into the ground without complaint if you'd let him. We didn't. There were times he'd get a bit pissy when I would turn him around to head back because he was all too willing to keep going.
Then we had another first, of the worst kind. Next to colic (every horse owners dreaded nightmare) is a serious injury. My wife reported that Monarch was seriously limping in the pasture. We took him into the vet, where our fears were confirmed. Monarch had somehow managed to fracture his front right shoulder blade. From the looks on the X-rays, it appeared to be an impact trauma. We never did find out the cause, but there were extremely serious concerns. Having to have him put down loomed as a very tangible possibility. Whether or not Monarch survived this would be entirely up to him. If he could learn to keep weight off the leg in question, he might stand a chance at healing. This was the kind of break that is inoperable due to it's location and the physiology of the bones involved.
We were worried sick, and there was little we could do. My wife spent weeks with him, nursing him, patiently and tirelessly giving him Bute ("the taste horses love", my ass). Ever the example of the spirit that overcomes, Monarch slowly improved. There were setbacks, and the two steps forward, one step back, became the theme of the next several months. DMSO became a full on part of our daily lexicon, as his other legs began to have issues from having to pull extra duty.
Despite all this, Monarch's indomitable spirit pulled through. Almost a year later, he was once again walking without a limp, and was free of pain. What had once been relegated to nothing more than a fond memory had now once again become a possibility. Slowly, carefully we began to ride again. While he had healed, it became apparent pretty quickly that he wasn't able to do what he was once capable of.
He started out ok, but within weeks, even after a relatively short ride, he was in pain. He would try to conceal it, and act like nothing was wrong as long as he though we were in eyeshot, but once he would get out of what he thought our range of vision was, the ever so slight limping would become apparent.
And so began the first of the lasts.
As much as he was willing, and as much as he loved to go riding, we made the painful decision to retire him permanently from the saddle. He would be free to live out the rest of his days in the pasture.
This began a new first. Monarch developed a predilection for following me in the pasture if I was walking around. This led to a new phenomena, wherein he would come right up behind me, and plop his huge head on my shoulder. If I walked, he would leave his head there and follow me where ever I went.
Meanwhile, my wife began to secretly look for a new riding horse for me. I'd told her when she got Monarch for me, that I really didn't want any new surprise additions to the stable, and if I was going to get another horse, that I wanted to see it first. So much for that. I came home from work one night, and she announced we needed to make a little road trip. We went to this Tennesee Walker stable, and it was one of these places that has a sand arena in the middle, flanked by rows of stalls on each side. One of the stalls appeared to have been mis-constructed. In every other stall, the half door was open and in most of them a horses head was poking out. Except for this one. Obviously the floor was raised in this one, as this horses head was poking out over the top rail. "What's up with that stall?" I asked. "Nothing", she said. "That's your new horse".
This guy was immense. Like just short of Guinness book immense. While he may have indeed been a Walker, he looked more like a Clydesdale to me. "Holy shit, he's HUGE", I said.
My wife replied, well you're a big fat white guy, and you need a much bigger horse. So when I found out about him, it made total sense.
So for the second time, my wife had bought a horse for me without having any clue that this was happening. We dubbed this one "Mainframe" as I'd started naming our horses after computers, beginning with a little mini we'd rescued that would try to climb in your lap, and he had been dubbed "Laptop".
For whatever reason, while a pleasant enough fellow, Mainframe and I never really achieved the sync that I'd had with Monarch. This was partially due to his previous training. He was being trained to be a "real" Walker, a competition horse. Those guys never get trained to understand that pulling back on the reins means slow down. In fact, it means the opposite. My first ride was a disaster. The trainer assumed I knew this, and when I didn't and he took off, he went like a bat out of hell. I pulled back on the reins to try to slow him down, and he made the jump to lightspeed. Within seconds I had a fairly spectacular wreck, was flat on my back with my wind knocked out, seeing stars, and was fairly terrified.
Thoughts of Steve Reeves ran through my brain. I didn't find the incident nearly as amusing as the rest of the "Real Walker Types" did.
I gave it several attempts after that, and got tossed a couple more times.
While I'd been tossed once by Trix, it was under a completely understandable circumstance. A herd of Llamas chasing your ass was one thing, but just wigging out and throwing you off when you're just sitting there was another thing.
This led to another last. I hung up the reins. In all the years I'd had with Monarch, he never really scared me once. I somehow knew that he would never, ever intentionally hurt me, and in all the times Monarch and I rode, there was one first that never came. He never threw me, hell, he never so much as bucked or even reared. Mainframe, while just a big dumb semi friendly horse on the ground, was (at least to me) pretty damn scary in the saddle. The fact that he was way the hell taller than Monarch didn't help either. It was a lot further to fall, and in the years since we started with the horses, I had gotten older, and wasn't bouncing back from these sorts of things like I would have in my younger days.
So for at least as far as I was concerned, my riding days were over.
Time moves on. A new project emerged at work, which while ultimately spectacularly successful, required my absolute focus, and countless hours for a good couple years. Once it picked up steam and I was able to hire others to help out, I again began to have some free time. I'd rediscovered my love of live music, and a new hobby (some would call it an obsession) of photography. The combination of the two resulted in my newfound love of concert photography.
I began going all over the country, shooting live music performances at every opportunity, and with time started getting pretty good at it. This led to creating websites to exhibit my work, and eventually to creating a collaborative site with other photographers. It has been an immense amount of fun.
Meanwhile we began a series of moves to various boarding stables, and my wife's love for the horses resulted in us eventually having a whole herd of them. After the guy who ran the last boarding stable we were at skipped town with all the tenant's rent money (funny how the horsing business tends to attract the lowest common denominator of the sketchiest sort) we went to the property owners and agreed to take over running the stables. At last, Monarch, Trix and the rest of the herd would have a stable place (no pun intended) to call home. This lasted for almost six years, until we hit an impasse with the property owners.
At this point I'd about had it with the ongoing drama of running a stable, and after almost a decade of my wife's pleas to get our own place, I acquiesced. I'd had it, she'd had it, and we bought our own place, outside of town. At long last, none of our herd would ever have to worry about other tenants, incompetent other boarders who had no business owning a horse in the first place, or any of the other myriads of little issues that had been surfacing on and off for over a decade. So this was another last (no more boarding) and a first (our own place).
By this point, taking care of our herd had become my wife's full time job. She had immersed herself in everything one could learn about the handling, training, and caring for the horses. We have more subscriptions to various horse related periodicals than one can shake a stick at, and more training videos and books than you could believe even exist. Our house is chock full of things with titles like "The treatment of (insert random virtually unheard of horse ailment here) in Equines" and the like.
Meanwhile Monarch was steadily getting older. What was once his proud stature began to slowly give way to the swayback look of an older horse. Around his once elegant eyes ever increasing hollows began to appear. Where he once would come screaming across the pasture to see you, he would slow to a cantor, then a gait, then a trot, and eventually to just a walk.
He started having difficulties keeping weight on. My wife researched “teh intrawebz” tirelessly, and began finding various supplements to keep weight on him. High calorie feeds, various oils and fat supplements, you name it, we have it.
And finally, it didn't matter what you put in Monarch. He was eating God knows how many thousands of calories a day, and he kept losing weight.
He wasn't one of those horrid example of a starving horse the populate oh so many of the horse related websites and forums my wife reads diligently, but it was apparent the downhill slide had began.
And thus, after a couple days of my wife being very moody and depressed, she announced on Friday night after work, that it was time to do the only kind thing left we could do.
She'd scheduled the vet to come out on Monday to give him "The pink juice". Monarch had reached the end of the road. He wasn't in bad shape yet, but there was no questioning that he would get there, whether it be weeks or months, and there was simply no way that we would let this magnificent creature suffer after so many years of giving us so much.
From that moment on, everything became a series of lasts to me. The last trip to the barn. His last bath. The last time my wife would lovingly comb out his once magnificent mane and tail. His last trip to his favorite feed bucket.
She'd asked me to bring my camera on Sunday. For the first time since I'd began taking pictures, I had an assignment that I dreaded, because I knew what it meant.
We went out to the barn, and give him a proper bath. While Monarch always enjoyed a good bath, he was never all that keen about getting his face wet, and this time was no exception. He pinned his ears flat back, as he always has, but like always never made anything approaching a threatening move.
I squeegee’d him down while my wife combed out the knots incurred from rolling in the mud from the previous night's thunderstorm. Yet another last.
Afterwards we went for a walk in the pasture, one last time with his immense head on my shoulder.
I took pictures, only to find that I'd forgotten to charge my batteries on my main camera, and had to run back to the trailer to get my backup.
I brought him into the gate area, and took off his halter for the last time. He trotted around the area, and while the pictures may show an old, swaybacked horse with sunken eyes and the beginning of ribs showing, all I could see was the most magnificent animal I've had the honor of knowing in my entire life.
With shots in the can, I let him back out into the pasture, for the last time.
We had to fill the various water troughs, which with the poor water pressure we have out at the place took quite some time. Normally this is an irritant for my wife, because it takes so long, but I'd have been happy had the pressure been half of what it was, because while the troughs filled, I got to spend just a few more minutes with Big M.
I started pulling up grass and handing it to him, and I talked to him. What a good boy he was, how how much fun we had had together over the years, and just how honored I was that after all the people he'd encountered that had treated him so poorly, that he had chosen me to trust.
When the last trough was full, I went back to the trailer to retrieve my cameras. My wife asked me if I'd said goodbye, and while I'd thought so, part of me in the back of my mind knew i hadn't.
Monarch had moved to the back part of the pasture, and I made one last walk to him.
He was grazing when I got to him, and when he realized I was there he lifted his head up. I wrapped my arms around his huge neck.
And despite a day of incredibly difficult lasts, one final first. In all the years, in all our travels, adventures and many challenges, I'd never been sad in his company. Concerned, worried, and scared for his well being, but never sad.
And now, I was sad. A horrific ache hit me.
I cried my eyes out, sobbing uncontrollably for a good solid hour.
And finally, I'd reached that point you reach, when there's no tears left, when there's just no energy left to take any more grief or pain or loss, when conscious thoughts have gone away and no words form in your head and all you're left is a very peculiar stillness.
it was only then that it occurred to me. Monarch had been holding me up the whole time. Even the pace of his breathing had slowed and had an immense calming effect on me. This old horse, even in the twilight of his life, in his last remaining hours, hadn't moved an inch. With anyone else, even my wife who had spent countless thousands of hours with him over the almost fifteen years he'd been a part of our lives, he wouldn't have held still for more than a minute or two.
But for me, in his last parting gift of so many he'd given me over the years, so many memories that I will treasure until my last breath, he had all the time in the world.
I'd talked to a dear friend prior on the way out to the barn that last time, that if I were to do anything else, I should honor the spirit of this amazing noble animal.
And to the best that my feeble words can express, I can only hope that I have.
Fare the well my friend.
And while I'll never know the date he came into this world, I shall never forget the date he left us.
Monarch
Monday, August 3rd, 2009.
He went peacefully, without fear, without pain, and very much loved by those of us privileged enough to have known him.
May all the rest of these magnificent creatures we share our world with do the same.
And while the decision to do so may seem at the moment to be the hardest thing in the world to do, over the years I've come to see it as the last great gift we can give to those creatures who give us some much, and add such great color and joy to our lives. To leave this world while still having a good quality of life, is SO much better than a misery filled wasting away. Quite simply it is the difference between selfless, and selfish. And while difficult, if you can view it in that light, even through the pain of the loss, there is a certain knowing that comes with it that one has done the right thing. And there comes a peace with that, and before too long the pain of the loss of your friend fades, and is replaced with a lifetime's worth of fond memories of moments shared, adventures experienced, and the great shared learnings that were had.