Today We Turn Left

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Successfully taking THE turn left in the village at that certain corner felt like a milestone of relief and success in the journey that is Rocky’s rehab, or ongoing training.

What do you mean successfully turning left I hear you cry? It’s a simple street corner, you just go around it. What is the big deal?

Well, yes, we do simply go around the corner. But in horse terms there are many ways to go around it. Sideways, backwards, scared, rushing, one step at a time. All of which have achieved the simple objective of getting around the corner, but none of which, in horse training terms, are necessarily a success in terms of simply going around the corner. And there are some special reasons why this corner is so significant.

When you have a horse with severe separation anxiety, every turning or crossing can become a seemingly insurmountable barrier to independent, forwards progress. I have a picture map in my head of obstacles that Rocky and I have gradually overcome.

The first landmark is the main road that we couldn’t cross alone, at least not with me on board. I ‘solved’ this problem by getting off to lead him across the road. I knew I could do this safely because there is a bench 100m further on down the side street that I can then use as a mounting block to get back on.

It then took us a while to leave the environs of the bench. I would get back on and he would go sideways and backwards and anywhere but forwards and therefore further away from home. He had a very strict sense of the precise diameter of his circle of safety around his home base.

The next stage was that he would cross the road with me on top but refuse to pass the bench. A few more weeks of riding out with friends for company and confidence helped us to get the short route around the village nailed until we were able to navigate it alone.

Our other regular route around the village doesn’t involve crossing the main road. We use this as the early training hack for all the young and new horses, because there is no main road to negotiate. Instead, we turn left, tootle through the estate, left again through the immaculate gardens of groomed suburbia and then arrive at the crucial corner- turning right takes us along to the cul de sac which we then use as a turning circle to reverse the route and come home. This circuit is familiar, safe, easy and non threatening.

Turning right at that corner is also turning towards home, as the crow flies, and the horse knows, even though we don’t use it as a way straight home on most of our normal hacking routes.

Horses always know where they are in relation to home. They always know the quickest way home as the crow flies. What they don’t always know is how the road layout goes, or what fences, bridges or rivers might be in the way.

I learned this years ago with Paddy. When we first used to go for our enormous long adventures around Delamere Forest, it was all too easy to get lost. We were on livery there in the good old days, when being able to walk in a wild and beautiful forest was considered entertainment enough, before the forest had to make a profit, and the Forestry Commission put up glossy information signs everywhere, and laid out children’s activity trails and erected huge Gruffalo carvings, and felled vast tranches of trees to make way for the holiday cabins. In those halcyon days, when we got lost, we knew to look over the treetops for the radio mast on the crest of the big hill. Heading for that mast would take you back to the yard and cups of tea and safety.

Except there was one part of the forest where you couldn’t see the radio mast. And I didn’t know the forest all that well in those early days. And the trails in that deepest, furthest away part of the forest were laid out in overlapping loops rather than a nice logical grid. Mobile phones were in their infancy, we didn’t have 4G or Google maps with a satellite setting that showed you where you were on the paths cut through the forest. All Paddy and I had was each other, in the often fading light.

One day Paddy and I were hopelessly lost, or should I say I was. I remembered back to the old cowboy stories of horses finding their own way home, and I had nothing to lose so I gave him his head and let him choose the direction of travel at each identical forestry trail intersection. And we did indeed get closer and closer to home with each confidently chosen path. The boy was doing fab, he knew exactly where to go.

Until we arrived chest on to the long side of one very large field, marked out by three stranded barbed wire fences, so close yet so far away from the welcome sight of the familiar track that led back to the yard!

I mentally tossed a coin and turned right. The narrow little path that led through the trees around the edge of the field was obviously well travelled by dog walkers albeit no horses. And it led around the field with no more obstacles except the narrow stile (feet up on to the pommel of the saddle to squeeze through) that let us onto the familiar track home.

That moment of choice turned out to be a gift from the universe – the little travelled track opened up a bit, and, running on perfect undulating leaf mould and sandy soil, it became one of our favourite canter tracks. Its remoteness was the key – for many years this propitious find was the last natural surface available for us to canter on as the forest tracks were gradually hard-cored and widened and rolled and stoned and “improved” to allow parents in unsuitable shoes to pay for parking and walk, pushing their thin wheeled city buggies, and then even take Segway tours all over our previously wild and beautiful place.

But nowadays we are on a different livery yard, on the outskirts of town with the motorways humming in the background, and our local hacking now involves tours of the neat and manicured streets of an affluent and immaculate commuter estate. Think of a British version of Stepford Wives and you would have it down to a tee.

Turning left at the special corner takes us further away from home, towards the cycleway and also our longer looping routes around the countryside. So as well as turning away from home, as the crow flies, away from safety, turning left here also means that more work or effort will be required.

The horse is crossing his own invisible barrier away from the safe circle of home into dragon country.

More challenges will be encountered on this route out into the country. We often meet pods of competitive road cyclists, racing their own wrist-timers in a pure fug of adrenaline and focused aggression. There are whole families out for a stroll, with screaming toddlers either waddling around or hidden in prams and buggies. Or the baby cyclists, wobbling around erratically on their tiny trikes, often with little control over their direction or destiny.

Other hazards on these longer countryside routes include the poorly socialised city dogs. Dogs who rarely see horses will be leaping around, straining at their leads or even worse, harrying at the horses heels, barking and yapping furiously, completely unlike our farm dogs who have learnt to carefully ignore the bloody great animals in their midst.

So all in all turning left at the crucial corner is a challenge, for horse and for rider.

My stupid human worry about us having difficulty turning left is ridiculous but not quite spurious. The lady who lives on the bungalow on the crucial corner is really obsessive about her precious postage stamp lawn. And Rocky has reversed onto it, bum almost to the bay windows, traversed the green square sideways in perfect full pass and once cut across it at full pelt, on our previous misadventures. She will graciously accept white wine as a peace offering but I can tell the hoof prints might as well have trampled into her heart.

One of the key tenets of mindfulness is that we must stay in the moment and not allow ourselves to worry about that which has not yet occurred.

So yesterday Rocky and I were striding out boldly in the lead as my friend and companion shouted out “do you want to be on the inside or the outside?”

“We’re just going for it” I called back.

Rocky stepped out, relaised we were going left, tried backwards once, sideways once, but his sturdy and trusty companion carried on straight around the corner on the outside of us and the next thing we knew, we had all turned left.

Easily, successfully, with no stress and no argument and only a tiny little shimmy of anxiety. For the first time since September. For the first time since his back surgery.

Today we turned left.

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