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| Me and Danny Boy, Circa '94 |
"Danny" (or "Dan" as I called him... "Danny Boy" was a mouthful for me at the time) was a half-Arabian, half-some-kind-of-pony that had been the product of a chance meeting between two unlikely parental candidates at a horse show. He was absolutely beautiful to look at; he had that classic "dished" face and was a bright, almost burgundy, hue of chestnut that set off his flaxen mane and tail. He was what modern quarter horse people would probably call "chromey" (the Arabian folk didn't have such a word back then... At least, not that I ever heard) with four tall white socks and an all-white face. At one time my grandparents had owned an Arabian breeding farm in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Danny Boy had been named after one of their horses--Decision Dan--by his owners at the time, who were close friends of theirs.
From the time I got Danny Boy until his dying day, he was a pain in the butt at best. I spent quite a bit of time looking up at him from the ground, clinging desperately to his mane as he took off at full-tilt into the sunset, and avoiding either his teeth or his feet. (There is a saying that goes something like, "a horse is uncomfortable in the middle and dangerous at both ends"... The part that they leave out is that ponies don't have enough "room" for the middle--they just have two ends.) Once, he crawled underneath his stall guard and set all of the horses in his wing of the stables free. Another time he shot out of the stall door when I opened it and ran out to the 30-acre pasture behind the barn, where he then proceeded to charge at me (ears pinned, teeth bared) for the next ten minutes, until my mother came to the rescue. A third time he escaped and ran through the forest, galloping all 99 acres of our farm, until he attempted to jump a fallen tree and ended up getting stuck in the branches.
When he wasn't busy running away, he was trying to buck me off, spooking, dodging, biting, kicking or refusing to stop. Despite riding him on the bottom hole of a low-port Kimberwicke, he still found it extremely easy to take off with me, usually dropping me off in the dirt somewhere and then speeding away to his stall, with his tail flagged and nostrils flared. On multiple occasions he made me scream and cry, and once I got so angry with him I even tried to trade him in for the flashy barrel racing pony that he was stabled next to, but it never lasted long. I'd get over whatever he'd done to upset me and go back to being madly in love with him.
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| My leadline debut at the age of 4 with Angie, my riding instructor. |
Danny Boy taught me a lot of things. I learned to jump on him, with my eyes squinted shut, my hands tangled in his long, golden mane and Angie, my faithful riding teacher at the time, running next to us with a lead rope clipped to Danny's bit, taking every single jump with me. Several years later, when Angie had moved away and I was riding at a three-day eventing barn with a different coach, I had my first experience riding cross-country with him. My very first cross county fence ever was a three-foot bank down into a ditch, two strides (four for my short-legged little pony) to a small log. At the time, I felt like I was jumping off of the Head of the Lake at Rolex--with one hand on the reins and leaned back in my saddle like a bronc rider. I remember later, the going down same drop on a full-sized horse felt like a half-step down, rather than launching into oblivion.
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| My little sister, Elizabeth and my dad congratulating me and Danny on our schooling show victory. |
When I was ten years old, I'd outgrown Danny Boy and got my first horse. "Chance" was a 15.3 ex-racehorse who had been a stallion living in a field, virtually untouched for the first six years of his life. Even though he'd been gelded for four years before I got him, he was still difficult at best when he was next to a mare and never once came out of the start box on cross country on more than two feet. Danny's naughty antics were literally child's play compared to Chance's over-dramatic airs above ground.
Danny came home to live with me for the next seven years. He lived out the rest of his days terrorizing our other horses, destroying every blanket we ever put on his body and finding ways to lose his grazing muzzle. I was right there beside him when he took his last breath on a cloudless night in late February 2007.
My first pony was not some $50,000 hunter eq. champion, or a "Steady Eddie" type schoolmaster, or even a very good friend in the beginning. But he was an excellent teacher, and taught me more about horses and myself than I ever gave him credit for at the time. I'm glad my first pony was a rotten little redhead. He taught me to stick on a horse that bucks, that tears don't fix anything, that if horses are loved (unconditionally) they will do anything for you, and he instilled in me an unhealthy obsession with chestnuts.
I couldn't have asked for more from my first pony.
