Horses at Summer Camp: Seahorse, Tango and MooMoo Get into Trouble
Summer Camp Riding Instructor Rule Number One reads as follows:
We do not race the horses.
Actually this is not Rule Number One, not exactly. As it turns out, the list of rules for aspiring camp riding instructors is the kind of list that cannot reasonably contain every rule, and thus there will always be a few rules that one must break in order to discover that they are on the list.
The summer that Tango, MooMoo and I discovered this particular rule, we were experiencing something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, the state of not knowing the full extend of what one doesn’t know—of being thwarted in one’s climb out of ignorance by not recognizing one’s ignorance in the first place.
The three of us were employed as the assistant (in-training) riding instructors at our summer camp that year. We were about seventeen at that time and had on average about ten years of serious horseback riding experience behind us. Since constantly carrying young campers around can have a corrosive effect on a horse’s sensitivity to a rider’s signals, it was part of our job to saddle up three of the horses each day and “school” them for an hour or so, or remind them of the standard expectations and communications that pass between rider and ridden.
We would do this around four in the afternoon. As a trio, we would saddle up our designated horses in need of schooling and then disappear for a while. With no supervision beyond ourselves, the six of us would head off into the wilderness to find fallen logs to jump, rivers to cross, fields in which to execute fancy maneuvers, and long trails on which we would remind the ridden that it wasn’t always so irritating or confusing to be a trail horse after all. We were trusted in two important areas: Our horseback riding skill and our general sense of judgment. Both were put to the test occasionally (why else be required to spend a year as a trainee?) and both were sometimes called into question.
The horrified riding director discovered our impromptu Kentucky Derbies on a fateful afternoon when a group of children had gathered at the edge of our racing meadow to watch and cheer. Up until that day, weeks had gone by with at least two races taking place every afternoon. (Winner of the first round battling the third.)
In our innocence, we would pair up at the base of a hill of flowers in a certain endless field. When the flag dropped, we would charge up the hill and around a bend, then go thundering down the edge of the forest for a few hundred yards to the finish line.
The horses were not trained for this level of exertion, unfortunately. We could easily have injured them. But in the ignorance and heedlessness of the moment, it seemed clear to us that the horses loved this. We rarely saw them so focused and excited. And most of them never ran so fast or so beautifully, even when we prodded them up to speed around the safe perimeters of the corral.
To us, this was the best moment of an already pretty great day—after all it was summer, and we were young, and none of life’s serious heartbreaks had touched us yet. We were at camp! And as for the horses, they had been plodding around in a ring for too much of the day and too much of the year and far too much of their lives. They wanted to toss their heads in the air and snort at each other and race! They seemed quite clear in their communication of this to us.
As so often happens in this world, the end of ignorance is the end of something else as well.
I had just dropped the flag and watched MooMoo go flying off on Dancer, side by side with Tango on a dun colored quarter horse. The children at the edge of the field cheered for one team or the other. As I watched, Dancer fell behind by a few steps and then seemed to rise to the occasion, lowering her head and throwing her heart into every stride. She had just caught up with the dun horse and was about to pull ahead, inspiring a miniature roar among her fans, when I heard someone speak behind me.
“Seahorse!”
“Yes?”
I turned around.
“What… the hell….?”
The riding director stood on the ground glaring up at me. At twenty-four, she was the oldest and most responsible person in a five mile radius. After a quick moment of confusion, she looked angrier than I had ever seen her.
And that was that—the end of our tournament series. It was the closest any of our horses would ever get to the triple crown.
It was for the best. There’s no doubt about this. But as we endured the blistering wrath of the director (which lasted for days), we grew under her tutelage. And we learned how to take better care of those who were under our own charge in turn. We became better stewards to our campers and the animals who depended on us to act in their best interest. In so doing, we moved from our current level of stupidity to the next level up, where the adventures we’d get into would be of a type one degree smarter than our current adventures.
These adventures would not end of course. Twenty years later they still haven’t–I’ll be learning all my life, I hope, from the stupid things I do. But I’ll always remember that field of Queen Anne’s lace, and the way the ground shook under the hooves of our friends, and the way the little birds fled from the stampeding path of our recklessness and our joy.
- Erin Sweeney