I first started horseback riding in middle school when I found an instructor about 10-15 minutes from my house. Lessons with Jimmy were pretty straight forward. In fact, although I remember walking, jogging, and loping, I don't ever remember being taught to do these things properly. I vaguely remember a discussion about diagonals and posting, but at the tender age of maybe 12 years old, this went over my head at the time. I was mostly there to ride - not improve on any skills, and we did a lot of playing, barrel racing, poles, etc. I only ever rode there in the summer time (although he had an indoor arena), and then one day out of the blue, Jimmy called to say that he was no longer offering riding lessons. End of horseback riding experience number one.
Devastated, I managed to find another instructor not far from Jimmy's barn. Navenda was a teacher who worked at the same school as my mother. I liked Navenda, but Navenda had grown up with horses her whole life and to say she was the quintessential "farmgirl" would be an understatement. She was particularly rough, and I remember most vividly riding her three-year old filly, a horse that would buck for an hour straight as long as I continued to ask it to lope. Not having had any "real" equestrian training, this was enough to jolt me into stopping riding for awhile.
Then all of a sudden, a friend of mine called to tell me that Jimmy was back in business. So out we went to relive the easy days of games and fun. It is possible in my fuzzy memory that the order of my horseback riding experiences actually goes Jimmy, break, Jimmy, break, Navenda, but regardless, the second time I went to Jimmy's, I did so with two of my friends. Looking back, I wonder how I learned anything at all. There were really only two horses to ride, and four of us in a lesson (one girl riding her own horse, and the other three of us sharing two horses - you do the math on that one). I jumped for the first time that summer at Jimmy's. I did so in a Western saddle, completely unprepared, having never done poles, knowing nothing about two-point, but thankfully on a rock-solid horse named Casper. Casper went up and over the jump, and I am told from onlookers that Casper planted all four feet entirely on the ground before I collapsed to the ground beside him. End of jumping career.
That summer we also did horse camp at Jimmy's which was a week long experience of me sleeping on the floor with a bunch of other girls and doing slave labour in the barn. Since only four of us were old enough to push wheelbarrows, we did most of the work. Complain as I do, I still loved every minute of it.
After Jimmy and Navenda, I was slightly put off/scarred from my horseback riding experiences, and I didn't ride again until university. Jimmy ended his lessons abruptly (again), and Navenda and her three-year-old bronco had left me in a position where I was starting to get timid around horses. But I have always wanted a horse, and so I would not be deterred. A friend of my father's had a barn not far from where we lived, and in my second summer of university, I decided to start riding there. I think we got slightly lost in translation because although I obviously "knew" how to ride, I was by no means an experienced rider. Maureen got me to ride her prize-winning barrel horse who had been cooped up all winter. This was fine until I asked her to lope. There happened to be barrels in the arena, and that horse took off around them like a rocketship. If you know anything about barrel racing, then you know that the last leg of the race is to gallop as fast as you can OUT the gate, which in this case, also happened to be open. Maureen's boyfriend actually had to leap out in front of me to stop the horse from going through the gate because I was physically incapable of stopping her. On top of my past experiences with horses, this was not a good thing, but perhaps it could have been rectified if I hadn't then got sick with pleurisy and shingles and was forced to stop horseback riding for the summer. In other words, I really never got the chance to "get back on the horse".
After successfully terrifying myself, I didn't decide to ride again for another two years when I ended up going back to Navenda's barn. I started taking lessons from Navenda's father, who usually taught the lessons at the barn (except for the summer that I took lessons from Navenda). Paul was a saint, and he took me very slow up through the gaits until I finally wasn't absolutely terrified at the lope that my horse was going to try to buck me to the ground, throw me, or bolt on me. Because I was going back to school in September (and starting law school), I ended up switching from him to an instuctor in the town where I now live, a man who actually cattle-penned with Paul.
Keith was another saint. He was the first instructor I ever had who actually properly taught me what to do and how to behave around horses. He actually had to properly teach me to dismount - that was how uninformed I was at the time. But because I bring so much bad mojo with me to barns, Keith's barn ended up burning down one ill-fated night only a couple months after I was there. Three horses died and the rest were saved by a brave 17 year old girl who was sleeping in her trailer outside the barn at the time. I was devastated, utterly devastated, and to fill the void of my first good horse experience, I found the barn where I ride at now.
Fast forward 7 months, and I had Walker. It is ironic, in a way, that I have ridden few well-behaved horses in my years. When I first started at Cindy's, I would never have put up with bucking. I had way too many bad experiences over the years to deal with a horse that does any of that foolishness. But finding a horse that you love and simply putting more time in the saddle changes a lot of your outlook. Now I am much less timid and I am able to put my bad experiences behind me. Just in time for some new ones with Walker. :)
Oh, and as a funny little aside, when I first met Walker (I mean day one), I decided to bring him treats. When I whipped out my little plastic baggie of carrots, Walker freaked out and almost kicked me in his stall. It turns out he is afraid of plastic bags (his one true fear), and to this day, he will not even look at a carrot. Who needs good experiences anyway? :)
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