It Takes A Village To Save A Horse

It was a cold, snowy January evening when Susan Wirth and Jürgen Frank stepped onto a road that would lead them to the question every horse owner dreads--just how far will I go to save my horse?

Months later, they had their answer—to debt and exhaustion.

But the answer is less noteworthy than the journey to it, because in the search for that answer, they discovered the true meaning of the words love, devotion, friendship and courage. And on that road they entered that night, they also discovered the bridge that connects the heart of a horse to the heart of a human.

This is the story of a horse, but more importantly, it's a story about people, about how one horse brought out what's best in people.

Perhaps most of all, it's a story of hope in a world where daily news images lead us to believe that humans have lost their humanity.

It all began in the fall of 2004, when Wirth, 39 and a native German living and working in New York City, decided to pursue her childhood dream of owning a horse. She'd grown up in South Africa and lived in the United States since 1989. She began riding as a child, and for the previous year she'd ridden at Lost Island Farm in Falls Village, Conn., a dressage training barn owned by Corinna Scheller.

"In South Africa, riding was one of the things that you just did as a simple pastime, but more like bush riding. I had no idea what a proper seat or anything was, but Corinna is correcting my ways," Wirth said.

Frank, 43, her boyfriend of many years, is also from Germany. The two met in the United States and shared a career interest. She is—or was—a photo editor with a German magazine. He's a freelance photographer. What he didn't initially share was Wirth's interest in riding. But he picked it up three years ago, driven by a desire to avoid weekend loneliness.

"She said, 'Why don't you try it and see if you like it?' So I did," Frank said. In 2004, having decided to purchase her own horse, Wirth and Frank set off to Germany with Scheller, 41, also a native of Germany. What they found was an 11-year-old Russian-bred gelding named Goldfever but better known by his barn name of Aragon.

"It was a challenge finding something big enough for Jürgen to ride as well," Scheller said.

Frank stands 6'4". Aragon is 16.1 hands. Frank jokes that compared to the other horses in Scheller's barn, Aragon is a peanut, and he doubts the two women were really thinking of him when they purchased the horse. They disagree.

"I really was looking for a horse that Jürgen and I could ride together," Wirth said, "but I fell in love with Aragon's character."

Emergency Survived?

Still, when they got him home in September 2004, they found he wasn't quite what they'd expected. His papers were in Russian, and none of them could read Russian.

"The way he moved and the way he looked, we thought for sure he was a Russian Trakehner," Scheller said. "So, we thought we bought a warmblood. It wasn't until much later that we found out he was a cross between Thoroughbred and Russian Don."

But Aragon was trained to the equivalent of fourth level, and in movement and personality, he was a dream horse.