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?
[Homestead] Verlyn klinks about horse memory,
Gene GeRue, 09/07/2008