PrintBack in the days of the dinosaur, before my best buddy and I had either sense or a proper trainer (trainers were unaffordable and sense was, um, in short supply), I spent a year as an exchange student at a university in England.
To help cover tuition and board, I worked as a combination au pair and stable manager for a woman who competed internationally. Since we were centrally located, I got lucky and attended some of the most important events and shows in the world. Badminton’s cross-country course was just a short hack from the farm, and I’d never seen anything like the jumps there.
Eventing was in its infancy in the States—most people had never even heard of the sport. One trip to the Badminton three-day event spiked my interest in potential equestrian challenges hitherto unknown. It looked like fun, and like the adrenaline rush to end adrenaline rushes. At that age, adrenaline-rushes are what life is all about.
On my return to the States, degree in hand, I rode for several years as a professional before gratifying my parents by making use of the very expensive education I’d supposedly absorbed.
About that time, Tory, my first horse, came into my life. Tory took delight in galloping cross-country (or, in fact, galloping anywhere as long as there was a jump within reach), and it was clear (at least to me) that Heaven had sent her to me to be my event horse.
The fact that she loathed dressage—she made that very clear to me and every judge who ever laid eyes on her—seemed to have escaped my notice. Then again, those were the days when you could survive a rotten dressage test with brilliant and clean cross-country and stadium rounds, and Tory could certainly produce brilliant, clean and fast rounds. (They even used to give bonus points for speed—we ate those up.)
I boarded her on a working cattle farm near the city. We had 1000 acres of barbed wire-fenced fields and woods which we shared with a herd of dairy cows, wild pigs, the local bow-hunting idiots and dirt-bike enthusiasts. Our jumps consisted of our own ingenuity and skill at scavenging: rusty oil drums, poles we made from broken fence rails, traffic cones (I won’t tell you where we got those), and coops and brush fences we built from scraps we begged (we did a lot of whining) from the lumber mill down the road.
We did have ditches and drops, but they were gullies washed out from storms and a deep creek that ran through the property. There were also copperheads, coyotes, porcupines, skunks and the occasional pack of feral dogs. Not to mention buzzards, wild turkeys, mother mockingbirds (have you ever been attacked by a nesting mockingbird?) and stray golf balls from the championship course across the highway.
A Partner In Crime
A year or so after I moved to this farm, I met another boarder with similar tastes and a similar lack of common sense. We immediately became friends, riding buddies and partners in crime. She’d even heard of eventing—she’d ridden off-and-on with one of the few upper-level American event riders during her school days—and she’d been bitten by the same “I want to do that too!” bug as I had.
When I started describing what I‘d seen in England to my friend, we decided, being young, foolish and indestructible, that eventing was the challenging horse sport, and that was where we should aim our poor unsuspecting horses.
