Idyll Banter by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400080717
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

IT’S NOT MIND OVER MATTER—IT’S MIND OVER MANURE

THIS AUTUMN I fell off a horse for the first time. I’ve been riding for three years, and so I was due.

I was cantering in a rutted field dotted with spindly apple trees and a few boulders the size of Volkswagens, and one second the horse and I were paralleling a fence by a road, and the next I was on the ground looking up at him as he snitched leaves off a tree beside us. I was—and this seems all too appropriate—directly beside a fresh pile of poop left by one of his pals from the stable where I ride.

Falling was a humbling experience, though not because I have ever deluded myself for even a nanosecond that I have the slightest idea what I’m doing when I’m on a horse. I only started riding because I was researching the experience for a book, and because it struck me as one more hobby I could share with my daughter as she grew up. We ride together once a week. Over time, however, I discovered how much pleasure I, too, was deriving from riding: the sense of power and speed, the feeling of accomplishment, the reality that here was another way to indulge the mid-life demons that besiege a man once he is forty.

No, falling was troubling for the simple reason that it revealed to me just how in thrall our bodies are to our minds. (As Yogi Berra is alleged to have said about baseball, “It’s ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.”)

Without wanting to subject anyone—least of all myself—to some completely ill-advised and uninformed armchair psychotherapy, I believe I fell in part because on the way to the stable I’d been listening on the car radio to actor Christopher Reeve discuss his new book, Nothing Is Impossible, on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

It is difficult to think of Reeve without recalling the tragic equestrian accident in 1995 that left him a quadriplegic. This was especially true that afternoon because he and Gross were discussing both what he cannot do and the small but astonishing strides he has made as a result of vigorous physical therapy.

And so as I tacked up the horse I kept imagining that moment years ago when Reeve was thrown from his mount. And then I saw over and over in my mind the loop of film from Gone With the Wind when little Bonnie Blue Butler takes a header off her small but energetic pony and dies.

I was riding alone that day on a stallion named J.T. I like J.T. a lot, and not simply because he’s the only male at the stable who is—and I will try to be delicate about this—intact. J.T. is an aging Morgan show horse, whose moniker is short for “Justin Time.” I think the world of this animal because he has a kind disposition with inept riders like me, and because he still loves to run. I’ve ridden him almost exclusively this year.

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