Galileo Press

FINDING MY DISTANCE
A Year in the Life of a Three-Day Event Rider
A Memoir by Julia Wendell

You can order Finding My Distance through:
Amazon.com — or — directly through our distributor.

“Julia Wendell writes of her year in search of a connection with her horses. As humor, sadness, life, and death gallop across the pages, we find she is writing about other connections as well. Her connection to her world, her family, and to life itself intrigues us, and her honesty and thoughtfulness resonate throughout her work. Wendell takes us on a ride through her world, yet we find at the end of it that she has been describing our own world as well.”

— Jim Wofford, Eventing coach and former Olympian
Author of Gymnastics: Systematic Training for Jumping Horses and
Training the Three-Day Event Horse and Rider
www.jimwofford.com

I too was a horse girl, then a poet. It’s a natural evolution. Julia Wendell’s Finding My Distance, A Year in the Life of a Three Day Event Rider is by a woman who has “mastered” both worlds and now gives us the story. Her evocation of the great beings she attends, trains, rides, and events, and their love of her, is powerful. As readers we rock to the canter and rise to the trot of beautiful prose (and poetry too), in privileged intimacy with her, in the unfolding of her race (this homestretch, these circles in the ring, this watercolor of the truth, this short life). Months later her horses who I know only on the page still live in me, as does she and her family and friends and the stunningly interesting horse world. Humor – wife and motherhood too! – a wonderful memoir.

— Sharon Doubiago
Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems
University of Pittsburgh, 2008;
My Father's Love, memoir, Red Hen, 2008

You can order Finding My Distance through:
Amazon.com — or — directly through our distributor.

Excerpt:

FINDING MY DISTANCE
A Year in the Life of a Three-Day Event Rider
A Memoir by Julia Wendell

Chapter One
In the Pasture of Dead Horses

December 1

We wake to torrential rain and wind, which stays with us all morning, until the wind blows the weather to Butler, Essex, the Chesapeake Bay. Clear sky emerges midafternoon. Weather has always been a dramatic aspect of our lives. We took the challenge of planning a farm on unsheltered land rising up from Greenspring Valley. I remember our Maryland neighbors looking askance at our project – they knew how much wind our ground got. We should have, too – there weren't any trees, except for a few crusty relics from the last century whose branches only grew on one side. A dilapidated snow fence encircled the wind-blasted tenant house that served as the property's "big" house. Maybe the farm would have been more aptly named Windhorse Farm, instead of An Otherwise Perfect Farm. But this name works well, too. "What's the Otherwise part?" people ask me. "It's for me to know and for you to find out," I tell them. The deep, dark secret is the allusion to my first book of poems, An Otherwise Perfect History – I don't like to admit that I write poems as well as ride horses. Let's just say you didn't hear it from me.

One of my plans for the day is to restart my three-year-old event prospect, Pruitt. The colt has been laid up since he hurt a foreleg six months ago running around his paddock. It took months for him to come sound again. December 1 is as good a date as any to start him up again, with five days of leftover turkey behind us.

One of our first creations at the farm was a huge, high-walled round pen for breaking, turning out fresh horses after layups, and lunging. Lunging is best for a young horse in the round pen – the round high walls prohibit distractions from the outside and, by virtue of their shape, encourage repetitions on a circle. Pruitt, a gangly 171/2-hand adolescent, is a little slow on the draw. If you want him to trot on Thursday, better ask him on Monday. Needless to say, he needs the structure of the round pen today, which is unusable in the rain and wind, as it has everything but a roof.

When you work outside, the weather you wake to is everything. Small consolation that some Buddhists say that winds carry prayers to Heaven. After a couple of mounts, I hunker down in my office, only to deal with multiple power outages as the prayers get the better of our farm, once again.

December 2

It is dry enough that I can put Pruitt on a rope in the round pen without him slipping and falling on his oversized tush. He remembers how to go in circles about as well as he ever did – which isn’t saying much. "What’s two plus two?" I say.
"Four," he says.
"What's two plus three?" I say.
"Four," he says.

With size comes laziness. I am exhausted after chasing Pruitt around the round pen with the lunge whip, getting more exercise than he does. I'll have to work on getting his gaits moving forward before I get back on him.

The afternoon brings worry. R. Huey is lame again. He will be turning seventeen in a few weeks and has come out of retirement three times after two suspensory tears, a pestering ankle chip, and a fractured coffin bone. You name the leg, he's had a problem with it. Huey was my first event horse and seems only to be happy when he's in work – the mark of a true eventer. Each time he's laid up, I worry that it will be the last, and it has been almost the last so many times. Today he is limping behind, on the same leg in which he broke a coffin bone two years ago. Our vet will come in the morning to confirm or relieve our fears. If we have to put him down, I want to bury him some place on the farm where the wind can’t get to him.

December 3

Huey crow hops out of his stall. Vet pulls out the x-ray machine, sharing our expectation that he's re-fractured the coffin bone. Seven months pregnant, Vet heaves herself over so she can dig out the hoof and is splattered with blood and pus from the abscess. We hoot with relief.

"Hue-ation Crustacean," she says, using the nickname she herself coined the first time she laid eyes on Huey. "There's my favorite patient," she says, gasping her huge way up to standing. "There’s my brave event horse."

Katie, my favorite groom, soaks Huey's ailing foot in the wash stall. Vet watches Pruitt jump shadows in the round pen. "I like him, I really do," she says, giving him her blessing, which I pretend doesn't count but always does. Vet has been with us since the first fence board went up ten years ago. Huey was her first patient at the farm. She gave him a once-over and a jog in the round pen just after we'd claimed him at the Laurel racetrack.

So all is well at Heartbreak Farm, as my mother used to call it.

December 4

My parents both died last year, my mother after a long illness and my father unexpectedly. In October of his eighty-fourth year, my father rode Huey on a trail ride. In November, he was swimming laps with my brother in Miami, then he was off to New Orleans for oysters at Brennan's with John and Barrett. In February he was dead. One of the surprising outcomes of settling my parents' estates is a recommitment to my life in Maryland, after making the decision to sell my parents' 250-acre farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Baltimore has become home for me in a way it hasn't been in the twenty-five years I've lived here.

My parents' house furniture will arrive next week. I've hoed out my attic and garage, thrown out first-marriage and college furniture I no longer wanted, and relegated pieces to the "pool" barn. This is an old barracks barn we renovated a few years ago for our growing kids, who needed a roomier space in which to stretch their teenage limbs. They promised not to drink and drive. We promised not to look into their condom-stash drawers or to say anything about the hookah. Up in the attic in a dusty box of kids' books, I run across Dad's favorite – My Father's Dragon – the copy that he'd bought for me when I was little and that I passed on to John and Caitlin so many years ago.

The cat who sends Elmer Elevator off on his quest to find the dragon in chains on Wild Island is identical to our current house cat, Bitten. When Bitten was a kitten, John and Caitlin's friend Tom, a summer houseguest, showed his trick of putting Bitten's head completely in his mouth. Living in Tom’s jaws for an entire summer at a critical period of her growth has affected Bitten in some dark way. Both Elmer's and my cat are striped and miniscule, both neurotic know-it-alls, constantly meowing for attention but never getting enough, longing for the halitosis of the dragon's cave.

December 5

I'm pretty good at taking lessons. First, a dressage lesson at G.'s farm on Surf Guitar. Later in the day, back home, lessons with my event coach on the two five-year-old prospects I'd bought from Peter Gray when my Advanced-level horse, Redmond, bowed a tendon. I wasn't replacing Redmond, but considering Surf Guitar's racing injuries, Huey's fourth retirement, and Pruitt's inability to process basic math, my stable definitely needed a makeover.

I hooked up with Coach in the summer of 2003 at Groton House Horse Trials. Katie and I had just made the nine-hour-plus drive from Baltimore in 90-degree heat with Redmond and Surf. Thirty miles outside of Boston, my father called to say that my mother would probably not last the weekend. I arrived at the show grounds, ran into Coach, whom I wasn't working with yet

"What do you need?" she said.
"Someone to ride my horses?" I said, half jokingly.
"Julia, you've got nice horses," she said, her explanation for why she would agree to compete horses she didn't know.

A year later, I had my horses in Ocala to get a jump start on that season. I got another phone call, this time in the middle of the night, from my brother, telling me that my father had stopped breathing and slipped into a coma after a routine surgery. Coach's husband rounded up my three horses and dog, who were stabled in a barn just outside of Ocala, plus my month's belongings, and hauled them up to Aiken, South Carolina. I rendezvoused with my animals after the funeral. Not only did Coach school my horses, but her pack of hounds schooled Daisy on proper howling technique, which she now performs at small dinner parties. When I finally got to Aiken, still shell-shocked from the funeral and aftermath of my father's death, rendered an automaton by the intensity of the previous weeks, all five dogs were performing the Sound of Music, Daisy howling right along. D, a Dog, a female dog. It was the first time I'd smiled in weeks. Coach now comes to the farm about once a month to give clinics.

I grew up with horses in in Pennsyltucky – what some call Northwest Pennsylvania. I was almost 6 feet tall in the seventh grade, but riding bareback came easier than basketball because I was so uncoordinated. Then came a fifteen-year hiatus from horses as I acquired my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and creative writing, then a career as an editor and teacher and mom. It wasn't until my four-year-old daughter perked up about wanting to ride a pony that I scheduled a lesson with Louise Halliday. As my little girl circled the ring on a white shaggy school pony, I remembered my own childhood with horses and stories of my mother's extensive showing experiences with saddlebreds. I thought of the poem my mother often shared with me, its author long lost.

I looked and I looked but I never found
In the spring sweet grass on the clovery ground,
Sign of the ring where the ponies ran,
Lucky and Princess and Ginger and Dan.

Around and around in a circle enchanted,
We rocked to the canter and rose to the trot,
While the sun beamed mellow, beat yellow and hot,
And slid down the sky with its rust rays slanted,
And the grass was pounded and trampled away.
But that was another, a happier day.

Oh I looked and I sighed but I could not discover
In the narrowest path in the close green clover
An old rusty horseshoe to prove where they ran,
Lucky and Princess and Ginger and Dan.

And I in my silk dress and flowered hat,
Car keys dangling, a white glove gone,
Waiting for a ghost child to shout, "Rack on!"
Silly in the sunlight crying like that,
Silly to sigh for a vanished spring,
Four lost ponies and a grass-covered ring.

I couldn't remember how the poem ended, so I sat in the car and wrote a rough draft of my own instead. Sometimes you live the poem before you write it. Sometimes you write the poem and then you live it.

I started taking hunt-seat lessons with Jill French at Oldfields School. Next came 83 acres and fifteen horses of my own, and a craving to become the best event rider I could. I tend to go whole hog, even when a thin slice off a flank might have been the wiser and happier choice.

My late start in the competition world has meant I've had to play catch-up. I've taken countless lessons and clinics over the last twelve years from Grant Schneidman, Sarah and Anthony Kuhlmann, Kim Meier and Marty Morani, Jimmy Wofford, and John Williams, as well as clinics from Anne Kursinski, Phillip Dutton, and Stephen Bradley. I'm hooked on riding lessons, happy to be a perpetual student in the art of eventing. Only a few of my equestrian pals know that I'm a trained teacher myself, in English and American literatures and creative writing. Although I no longer teach, I've continued my own internal dialogue of what makes a good teacher good and a bad teacher bad, no matter the game.

It took me seven years to earn my BA, MA, and MFA from Cornell and Boston Universities and the University of Iowa. It has taken almost fifteen years to have earned my adult amateur status in eventing. What makes a professional a professional, anyway?

At my first Two-Star, three-day event at Radnor Hunt Club, my husband tried to convince one of the volunteers, assigned to ward off traffic from the stabling area, that since I was an amateur, I needed extra entry badges for a larger support staff. The guard's reply? "Once you make it to Radnor, mister, there's no such thing as an amateur."

I'm proud of my amateur status, whatever it has come to mean beyond its dictionary definition, from the Latin amator, lover, or French, amour – beyond the passion that it takes to engage in anything that fully. At almost fifty, I want to be a student of eventing for as long as I'm able. I'm nowhere near earning my doctorate in the sport.

December 6
We rearrange my house to make room for my mother's furniture to fit inside. Katie works overtime. She and her boyfriend are also using the tractor bucket to string Christmas lights on the backyard Leyland cypress. Katie hoists Craig up in the bucket so he can reach the tallest branches. This used to be Barrett's and John's Christmas tradition, until John went off to college. Now it's Katie’s and Craig's turn to be elves. There's a painter in the house, and the phone is ringing off the hook with angst-ridden worries from both kids, who are anxious to get their school responsibilities over for the semester.

My mother had a spider monkey when she was a little girl. I'm hoping to run across a picture of it in the stacks of photo albums and memorabilia that will accompany the antiques, the armoires and butler's tables, the Limoges and Krizias, the David Robertses and Maritza Morgans. All I've ever wanted for Christmas since I was a little girl was a monkey. "We had to get rid of my monkey because he bit me. Repeatedly," was my mother's explanation for why I would never receive that gift. As if all monkeys were biters. Barrett doesn't think much more of the critter, nor John.

"All they do is throw their shit at you and masturbate," Vet has told me.
"Can't you geld them?" I said.
"Would you really want to geld something so close to being human?" she replied.

Three-thirty brings my third ride of the day, on Calvin, my five-year-old Irish-shaped horse. My back and shoulder are sore, but we bundle up against the cold and go into the late-afternoon Maryland countryside, where you can still hack for miles and never cross your path. Vibrant blue overhead, lush green underneath, the sun listing and leaning and giving us a wee taste of urgency, our tall shadows growing taller as we go, leading our way. We seek out a neighbor's stream. Calvin plops in up to his knees and stands there, not wanting to move. A great blue heron’s pewter mass lifts in slow motion. I wish I could get off and wade up to my own aching back. We step over some rocks, climb up the bank, and canter off, covering ground briskly toward home. Calvin spooks at a few deer trying to hunker down in the woods for the night, hiding from the smell of human beings and black powder this time of year. Every hectic thing in my day is suspended in these moments with Calvin, in which there seems to be no before, no after.

December 7

Grayness all around. A gray, cold sky, the kind of day you don't want to venture out into. A cold alternative is better than the warmer crush of meetings and errands and physical therapy appointments I have ahead of me. I am trying to find the perfect recipe in my baking of a somewhat older athlete. Self-rising flour. Lots of kneading. Hmmm.

Surf Guitar enjoys his hack after two weeks of Pythagorean flatwork: circles, diagonals, serpentines. He doesn't care about the weather. He only cares about showing off his new medium trot to me as we chug our way up hills and down. Daisy runs off again on another scent, deep into the woods across Mount Zion Road. One sense cancels out the other, and she becomes instantly deaf when she's on a deer.

As nighttime comes, so does a phone call from a non-horsy friend, warning me about a woman he's read of in the paper who was thrown from her Arabian and paralyzed. It's clear that he wants to scare me off horses, but could he possibly think this information would have that kind of power? I'm sure the hurt woman would understand my sentiments. A friend of mine, Brenda Herzog, who had her own freak riding accident years ago, teaches riding lessons from her hand pedal-driven golf cart and has initiated her own children, whom she had after her catastrophe, into our marvelous world.

I make a note to send my friend clippings of articles about the dangers of cholesterol.

December 8
It's always nice when a barnful of horses jogs sound, especially around this place. We began this weekly ritual at the farm after Redmond bowed his tendon last summer. We trot the horses on the driveway one by one to check for soundness. It's too easy to talk your way out of a problem when there's only an internal dialogue going on. I'd noticed the ever-so-slight changed profile of Redmond's leg but thought I was imagining it. Of course, I wasn't. I learned the hard way: when you have several horses going, a husband who worries when horses are too sound and therefore not trying hard enough, and a groom who sees lameness that isn't there for fear of not seeing anything at all, it's best to face up to a jog each week, to run your hands up and down the legs, to confer, to trot off. It's also a good time to bring up any training worries or other issues regarding each horse. Above all, it's great practice for the official jogs at the three-day events.

Today, there isn't any cringing at all. Everyone is spot on sound.

December 9

The only horse who didn't jog yesterday was Huey, who is due to get a shoe back on today. Vet shows up to confer with the blacksmith. It's dicey for farriers when vets get involved in foot issues. Vet feels that Huey's infected corn is the result of allowing his heels to grow unevenly – horses get pressure points on their feet just as humans do, and corns can result. Which means that she has something to say about the quality of Bryan's shoeing. Today is a good-mood day for Vet, however. With sugar in her voice, she asks the farrier to float Huey's heel before putting the shoe back on. Bryan pares down the heel so no part of the outside of Huey's foot will rest on the shoe, and thus no pressure point can result. Huey is back in work – one more time. If only it were so easy for the others.

December 10

Katie has to shoo a herd of deer away while out on a hack with Surf Guitar. Surf is unruffled as Katie yells at the does to move out of their path. The time of year is so hard on deer, as they are pursued from every angle. Maybe they've gotten tired of running away. Their instinct wrung out, they'd rather join Surf and follow him back to the cozy barn and the piles of hay.

December 13

I take needles and fluid into my spine. One bee sting for each agony. The pain doctor identifies misshapen facets where needles will work their magic. A digital x-ray machine hovers over my head. I lie on my stomach, my pants pulled down, but otherwise untwitched. I imagine jumps in my future if I can only get rid of the pain. I think of Redmond and Huey and Surf Guitar in the wash stall, the dripping of chalky blood to signify a bad joint's been accurately tapped, the patience with which they've waited, so many times, not knowing why, but trusting.

December 14

I get so distracted jump schooling Houston and Surf Guitar that by the time I realize the dogs are gone, I have to form a posse to find them. I head one way on the golf cart while Katie goes the other on the Gator. They've been gone for well more than an hour. I call through the trees and over the stubble of fields until my voice is all sand-and-gravel sounding. Finally, Noodles, Katie's shepherd mix, slinks toward home from across the far field with Daisy, my yellow lab, close behind. Our lab puppy is nowhere in sight. Yet another half hour and nearly frantic in my calling, I spot a brown speck in the distance with something dangling from its jaws. Simon bounds over the corn stubble, delighted to show me his catch. I look on, amazed at the transformation in his seven-month-old body. He now resembles a boa constrictor who has just swallowed a hat. Simon's sealskin body is bulging at the middle from his grotesque meal of deer parts, proof swinging fleshily from his frothing mouth. Some are days for losing dogs and finding dogs, for feasting on the forbidden, a first snow in the air, winter settling in over the cut, tawny bean fields of our Maryland.

December 15

We bought Surf Guitar as a yearling for $1,600 at the Timonium auction in 1996, just as we were falling in love with the quirky sounds of Dick Dale. Barrett had already had a history with the colt, having taken care of Surf's mother, Cynical Gal, at a breeding farm. He had held the mare's leg as she was being bred to Surf's sire. One day she determinedly picked up another groom with her teeth and threw her to the ground, shattering the human's femur. Then of course there was the nipple – Surf Guitar's older half sister had bitten it right off a trainer's chest.

I'd stand at the gate watching Surf Guitar grow – endlessly. I had an agonizing time getting the bridle over his ultrasensitive ears when breaking him and had to take the bridle apart to get the mission accomplished. Everything about him was too big, and slow. He was plumb exhausted all the time, would lay down for hours on end in his stall, with zero energy or patience for my training antics. Only after we caught him rocking back and forth on his haunches in his stall did we realize how he was expending all of his energies. Masturbation. At least fifteen times a day. We promptly had him gelded by Vet, who was awestruck by his package. "Good thing he's a horse," I said. Vet threw his huge Jupiter testicles on our barn roof, for good luck, as if our fortune were tied to something fed upon by crows.

We like to give our young horses some galloping at the track, even if they never run in a race. It helps both their bones and minds to develop and set. But I had my eye on Surf Guitar as an event prospect. I like a tall horse, and this one certainly promised to be that. He grew to 17 feet, 3 inches, a few fists taller than most. I took him to Laurel to gallop for a trainer so he could evaluate him as a racing prospect, but I couldn't get him out of a lumpy, slow canter on the track. Pappy Manuel must have seen something in him he liked, despite my unsuccessful gallop. At Surf's first race, they had trouble finding a girth big enough and had to send the valet back to the jockey room while the rest of the horses were being tacked in the saddling paddock, anxious for the start of the race. No one could believe Surf was a full Thoroughbred. He looked like a Clydesdale on the racetrack beside all the other small-boned, greyhound types.

Surf Guitar had one racing strategy. Because of his size, he wasn't the handiest of racehorses and wasn't agile in a pack. If he was going to win, he had to swing to the outside and run around all the others, which his big moonwalk stride often enabled him to do.

After his first couple of wins and a broken tibia that brought him back to the farm for a respite, we decided to retire him to eventing – that is, if he'd pass a vetting. Which he did not do. According to Vet, the spurs in his hocks were so bad he'd never hold up, a diagnosis confirmed by the track veterinarian. We sent him back to the track and, in order to cut our losses, ran him at a level at which we were pretty sure he would be claimed. And he was. From there on, he changed hands repeatedly, ended up running through all of his allowance conditions, and overall won several hundred thousand. Not bad for a $1,600 yearling, even if we weren't the ones making the money. We'd sent Surf Guitar off to college, and he'd struck it rich. No matter how we looked at it, we were proud parents.

I spent several years missing Surf Guitar, staring dreamily at his portrait that Barrett had commissioned for me one Christmas – if we couldn't have him in the flesh, then at least we'd have him on our wall. We kept up with his progress at the Maryland, then Delaware and New York tracks. When he finally dropped in value, Barrett and Caitlin suggested to my mother that she buy him back for my forty-sixth birthday. I had hinted that I wanted Surf even more than I wanted a monkey. Barrett donned a suit reserved for weddings and funerals and drove to Penn National to pick him up. We brought the precious cargo back into our barn, took off the leg wraps and ran our hands up and down the tendons, and found a hot and swollen front suspensory. Subsequent ultrasounds confirmed there were bony fragments, multiple avulsions where the suspensory had torn away from the bone. Once again, two vets told us he'd never be good for anything. Vet advised that once we gave him time off and he healed well enough, then we should donate him to a local school as a school horse.

That was just enough ammunition for me to load my big old shotgun of hope.

I worked with him slowly. Surf Guitar would tell me when he wanted to quit. In the meantime, I'd keep riding him. From Huey I'd learned that every day is a gift. From Surf I learned that every hour is a gift as well. Every minute is your birthday and your Christmas if you want it to be.

That was three years ago. Two months ago, Surf completed a One Star at Morven Park. The video from the event just arrived today. Barrett and I sit around the television with glasses of Chardonnay and bowls of popcorn balanced on our knees, marveling at our 18-hand anomaly skipping over the Preliminary obstacles as if they were speed bumps, his massive stride almost convincing us that the tape was in slow motion.

When I think of the soul of this farm, I think of Surf Guitar.

In the Pasture of Dead Horses

Light rain, and I’m carbound,
fiddling with my keys,
watching my helmeted children

repeat themselves on the backs of saddled ponies
circling a weather-worn ring
north of Baltimore.

So around and around the ring I imagine
you must have wheeled,
as the mustached trainer, nervously

cropping his thigh, barked pointers from center ring.
My mother seeming to float above her cut-back saddle
as you racked on.

I'd heard of the ribbons
you sported before the war.
Before your trainer was called to the North Sea

and the groom to the South Pacific. Before my mother,
ambushed by marriage and childbirth, left, too,
and returned to the house of her childhood.

Fifty years of opening the same window
to the usual shadows and drafts.
Daylight struck over & over.

I'd ride over you,
coaxing my pony down the hillside
that cradled your secret of bones.

Impatient in your dark nest,
you’d kick inside the earth, the hillside shimmering.
Though you were not so much as an indentation

your bones lay beneath.
The goldenrod coloring the hillside
late summer, your temperamental monument.

Still, I was told you were there,
Noble Knight, Solid Mahogany, Emerald Future.
The hillside was a mirror

in my mother's life, and then in my own.
We opened our eyes to see into it.
All my young life, I believed you were there.

I'd canter bareback dodging brush & limb,
down the hillside graves to the Sugar Bush,
where Grandfather's sapping shed sank

plank by rotting plank to the earth,
and the maple trees grew huge and unwieldy, left long untapped.
Where the body-stench of crude oil rose from pockets

in the Pennsylvanian marsh,
and the trails that I pretended wound forever
ended. I sensed you were there.

As I sense we are repeated
on the backs of saddled ponies,
my mother, my children, and I –

carbound, fiddling with my keys,
a young woman revised
in the thunky staccato of small hooves

wearing circles in a ring
each circuit ending
and ending again.

"In the Pasture of Dead Horses" first appeared in The Journal, and then again in the 1995 Pushcart Anthology, and again in the collection, Wheeler Lane (Igneus Press, 1998)

You can order Finding My Distance through:
Amazon.com — or — directly through our distributor.