Alistair Bane - The Beautiful Life of a Plain Chestnut Horse

 

 

When I was 13, I got my first horse. His name was Bo. He was a half an inch over pony class, a chestnut with anonymous breeding history. Not very well trained, a little bit mean and shaggy coated. But I didn't mind, because he was mine and I was willing to put the hours I knew it would take to train him in, because he was the one part of my life that didn't feel dark and dangerous. 

 

At that point, my dad had dropped me off with my mom in a small town in central Illinois. She had enrolled me in a Catholic school, where I was the only native person in an otherwise white school. I felt different, but that wasn't the only reason. The kids had another name for the reason I was different. Words like fag, queer, it and freak. I heard that all day. The teachers told me, if I didn't act so weird, maybe I wouldn't get in trouble, being bullied. When I went home, although my mom's words weren't quite that crude, her cinnamon was the same. Everything I did, how I walked, how I talked seemed disappointing. 

 

But every afternoon I would get to go to the stable, and saddle up Bo and go for a ride. I spent so much time grooming him and training him that within a few months, the first time we went into the dressage ring, he was flawless and we walked out with a long shiny satin blue ribbon in front of everyone who had thought that we were misfits. And for just that moment, everything felt good, like a story of redemption. 

 

But over the course of the next few months, as I entered eighth grade, it seemed like the bullying got worse. And at home, I had decided it was time that I finally said it out loud to my mother. I came out, and her reaction was everything I feared it would be and more, worse. I could almost feel her disapproval through the walls in the house. And at that point, it seemed like even when I was at the stable with Bo, those rides that time I had with him weren't enough. There's this darkness that was encroaching on my very spirit. A voice inside me that said, “Maybe there was no place I would ever belong and no use going on.” 

 

One Saturday morning, I found myself in the bathroom looking in the medicine cabinet and my mother's newly refilled prescription of tranquilizers, thinking that it would be so easy that night before bed to take them all. The kids would have no one to bully on Monday. My mother would have no one to say was embarrassing the family. I left them there, knowing they'd be there, and went out to the stable and I saddled up Bo. I decided that day I was going to do something good for him, something to make him happy, because even if I felt like I couldn't feel happiness anymore, he could. 

 

So, I rode him down by the airport where there's a long dirt road. I take him down there and let him just run to his heart's content. As we got near, I could feel him getting excited. He knew what was coming next. As we turned the corner onto that road, I step in my stirrups like I was a jockey in the Kentucky Derby. I let him have his reins and he took off. I had heard someone say once, “If you're a true horseman, there comes a day when the communication between you and your horse ceases to be the tug of rein or the nudge of a knee, and you simply become one with that animal.” 

 

And as he ran flat out down that road, I began to feel that happened. It was as if he and I could speak without any cues from myself. He ran faster and faster. And as we approached the end of the road, there's a dead-end sign. I didn't have to rein him in. He knew what to do. He slid to a stop, pivoted on his back legs and ran back the other direction. And as he did, it felt almost like that little horse's joy of being alive on a fall day, running full out under a crisp blue sky with the smell of the dried corn in the field next to us, came up through those reins and ran through my body like electricity. And so, that everything was suddenly quiet and clear and beautiful. 

 

We reached the end of the road, and standing there was a woman outside our car. She stopped and was watching us. She smiled, waved at me and said, “You and that horse, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.” “Thank you,” I said. And that was enough. In my culture, we say horses have the ability to heal, and I know that that's true.