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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

EDITORIAL: THE RURAL LIFE
Horse Map

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: September 6, 2008
I have enormous respect for a horse’s sense of place, its acute memory  
for terrain. I have been riding when my horse suddenly pauses because  
some detail in the landscape has changed — a fallen branch has been  
moved aside or a stream bed has gone dry — while I struggle to  
remember what that detail might have been. A horse’s attention is  
particular, not abstract or symbolic. It shows in the cant of its  
ears, the flicker of its eyes, the fluidity or hesitation of its gait.

In the mid-’90s, my wife and I used to haul our horses to Wyoming, to  
ride in horse-training clinics and with ranching friends. The horses  
stood quietly in the trailer, watching as Ohio or Iowa or South Dakota  
went past. I wondered, as I always do, just what they were noticing,  
and how it was being imprinted on their minds. Thinking of those  
things somehow made it clear that the signs along the freeway —  
flashing neon, enormous billboards — were designed for a less  
attentive species. And it’s true. Every time I’ve gotten in trouble on  
horseback, it was because my attention had wandered.

Last week I drove past the farm I lived on when I first moved to the  
country. I hadn’t really expected to go that way. But there I was  
suddenly, in a little hollow along a river, and there was a shed I’d  
built and, now that I think of it, the creek that trickled down off  
the mountain to the east. I thought of a border terrier named Tonic  
who lived there too, and it all seemed impossibly distant. I wondered  
if the human ability to map our world is somehow connected to how  
separate the past sometimes seems.

It’s a question I’d like to be able to ask my horses. Are the past and  
the present the same for you? Do you remember those trips west and the  
herd you came from? Or would you have to relive it all for the  
memories to come alive?