Well, it's quite simply: spring time in New Mexico. When the wind blows and blows and it sure blows. Remember the Dust Bowl? Yeah, that happened out here too, and these are the winds that helped get all that dirt to Chicago.
The bad things about the winds, you probably already know: dust, trash, random noises, plastic bags, dust, strange smells from far away, everything drying out, general feeling of twitchyness, dust, average everyday things turning into monsters, you get the picture.
Wind for some reason, turns horses into that little frightened,
primal eohippus trotting through the forest, trying to avoid a big, toothy-jawed eohippus- eater. In the wind, benign things like leaves and rocks become terrible predators that are a master of disguise. People walking and on bicycles become horrible monsters just slavering for a nice hunk of horse. Even birds, those chirpy harbingers of better times, are suddenly vicious pteradactyles swooping down on theunwary pony.
But what you may not know about wind is it's a fabulous training tool. How many times have you been at a show where the wind kicks up and all of the sudden every other horse is a basket case? They can't concentrate on their rider, only on the wind.
Well let me tell you, for all his gaping training holes, Pip is the master of wind. I'm sure there's some Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings wind master, just call Pip that. (ok, yeah, I have to admit, he's the master of THAT wind too!)
We went out, Team Amanda, with Pip and Fiona. Now Pip is still young (rising 6), but compared with other horses his age, he's not had as much work. Which suits me just fine, as I'm trying to learn to teach him. I'll probably cover that in another blog. So Pip has not got as many arena miles on him as Fiona, the other horse today, who's 5 has.
Fiona is a lovely QH/Paint mare, and she is just a nice horse, and Amanda has been getting her professional training, and I tell you, it shows. She's collecting and doing nice lopes on the trail while me and Pip are still just trotting along.
However, today Pip showed his true colors, and they are /golden/.
We went out around noon, the forecast was wind into the afternoon, the morning had been very calm, so we reckoned that the wind probably wouldn't really get going til much later.
We were wrong.
About 100 yards from the barn, a huge thermal kicks up, leaves, dust, twigs, small insects (probably) went zinging around us, swirling and pulling Pip's mane every which way.
Crap, I thought, here we go, the horses are going to be nutso! I heard Fiona behind me spook at a rock. Well, ou know I thought, we'll just have a nice trail walk. Out onto the ditch, and Fiona is on RED ALERT. She's jumping at everything, rocks, leaves, her shadow, all of it. Pip is definately on alert, but it's more like Amber, and he's moving forward, fast, fast, in that almost shuffle that he can do when he's motivated. He was looking, but moving.
We got to perhaps the most frightening house on the ditch, it's like a junkyard/outdoor theater/hippy compound, and there's always something going on there. Which wouldn't be a problem if that wasn't the exact place we have to turn (away from the gyrating hippies, of course) and navagate a rather narrow dirt berm, with ditches on both sides. It's nerve wracking, because if a horse bolts sideways, you're going in. Pip and Fi round this hazard together, each moving away from the scary ditch (they've only seen 100's of times) into each other. Then sigh with relief when they see the creek. Muddy, leafy entry to the creek? No problem.
We cross the creek, but have to get up on top of the levee, which is high and exposed. Good for seeing any approaching horse-eating monsters. But now we have to descend into the dank, overgrown Bosque, the cottonwood forest that grows along the river! Horror! And mince along the well-worn and wide footpath, around dead trees (EEKKK!) and birds flitting (GAH!). Trotting was for a moment, out of the question, as Pip, being the pushy thing he is, had to go first. And he's pushy, but not stupid enough to actually RUN into the jaws of danger. But eventually he did go, and he lead a fair bit of the way, even with Bicycles, Pedestrians with Dogs, and Other Horses. And moving through everything else, the Wind.
I can say that Fiona, for all her arena training and stuff, had to follow most of the way to keep calm. Pip lead at the trot and the walk, and went past some pretty scary things like the champ that he is. Even on the way back, with the wind blowing hard now, and horses in fields acting like wild animals, Pip came through it in fine form. One spook, and not much at that, a few unintentional lane changes, and a couple full stops, forcing Fiona to take the lead. But other than that, I never felt like I was going to lose him, or that he would lose his mind. It was stellar. He's a superlative horse, I gotta say.
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