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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: Homestead <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Verlyn klinks about horse memory
  • Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 21:45:26 -0500

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?



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