Horse Girls

by Halimah Marcus

  I blame Freud. Well, to be fair, I blame the way the idea of the subconscious is often turned against people, used to sexualize and shame and to undermine individual agency. Search the complete works of Freud and you get 385 hits for the word horse. Most of these are in reference to “Little Hans,” one of Freud’s most famous case studies. Hans, a five-year-old, had seen a horse fall down and die in the street while pulling a heavily loaded furniture van and afterward developed a phobia of horses, particularly those pulling heavy loads. Freud, through a long correspondence with the boy’s father, concluded that Hans associated horses with his father because both had large penises, or, as Freud puts it, “widdlers.” (The word widdler appears 115 terrible times in Freud’s works.) Via an elaborate chain of frankly silly inferences, Freud determined that the root of Hans’s phobia was a fear his father would castrate him in punishment for his sexual impulses toward his mother. In Freud’s view, exhaustingly, sexual anxieties and urges saturate every person’s entire emotional life.

  Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, took things one step further when she wrote that “A little girl’s horse-craze betrays either her primitive autoerotic desires (if her enjoyment is confined to the rhythmic movement on the horse); or her identification with the caretaking mother (if she enjoys above all looking after the horse, grooming it, etc.); or her penis envy (if she identifies with the big powerful animal and treats it as an addition to her body); or her phallic sublimations (if it is her ambition to master the horse, to perform on it, etc.).” I can only speak for myself, but I’ve never been sexually stimulated by riding; I love tending to animals but have no desire to be a mother; I’m confident I don’t want a penis, even though I deeply resent the disproportionate power men wield in the world; when I ride, I don’t want to dominate horses but to collaborate with them. I like connecting with a living thing, being close to another body without that closeness carrying the significance it does with a human. Why can’t the love of horses be about horses? After all, sometimes a horse is just a horse.

  To me, a more likely explanation for Little Hans’s unease, rather than anything to do with widdlers, would be the trauma of witnessing, at close range, an animal die suddenly and in distress as a result of forced service to humans. Part of what makes horses compelling is the tension between their size and strength and their fragility (those slender legs!). Little Hans, long before he was ready, experienced a confrontation with a large animal’s mortality that probably served as a terrifying revelation about his own, as well as perhaps his own capacity for cruelty. (When Hans’s father asks him if he would like to whip and beat horses, the child replies yes and tells a made-up story about beating a horse. Hans sounds awful, honestly, but maybe his relish for sadism is one way of trying to release himself from the burden and discomfort of feeling compassion for the dead horse.) I suspect that children, and particularly girls, are drawn to horses as much because they recognize and relate to the animals’ vulnerability as by fascination with horses’ power. The union of horse and rider is a dynamic bargain: in exchange for borrowing the horse’s speed and power, the rider assumes the risk of losing control, of falling, of accidental death, of being responsible for injury to the horse.

  Though I held out longer than most, when I stopped riding I was still, at least on the surface, enacting the same old clichéd, told-you-so story: girl loves horses, girl grows up, girl leaves horses behind. I was living in Iowa City, in my second year of an MFA program, and my parents were paying to keep my horse at a barn forty minutes away. I was only riding once or twice a week, which was not enough, and I was getting embarrassed about the ostentatious privilege of owning an actual horse when most of my classmates were living independently off their modest fellowships and stipends. I hadn’t stopped loving horses or lost interest in them. There was no boyfriend jealous of my time and affection, no white-picket-fence dream eclipsing my dream of a perfect round in the hunter ring. The bottom line was that to keep riding would have been impractical and unaffordable, and, also, I was entering a stage of life where I wanted to be mobile and unencumbered. Most high school and college athletes take huge steps away from their sports after they get spat out into adulthood. Riders aren’t so different. Time and resources run short. Skills and fitness fade. Stakes lower, and questions arise about the point of continuing.

  When I finished my MFA, I had no idea what I was going to do long term, careerwise. I knew enough not to bank on supporting myself with my writing, but I got a small fellowship for the year after I graduated: enough money to go somewhere for a while and make a start on a novel, certainly not enough to keep a horse. Even if my parents had been willing to keep paying for me to ride, I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want to be beholden, nor did I want to be a drain on them. My life wouldn’t be my own until I paid for it myself. We sold the horse. I packed my riding stuff into my tack trunk and put it in storage.

  I didn’t get on a horse for eight years.

  When I look back at who I was then in relation to who I am now, I can feel, in a wordless, almost tactile way, the continuity of my essential, innate self (the child who cries at the idea of a new experience), but I also see large, improbable shifts in outward circumstances and trajectory. That Niagara Falls summer, I would have seemed an unlikely candidate to become a travel writer. A novelist, sure, safe inside my hidey-hole, but someone who takes trips interesting enough to write about? Hard to believe. But that’s what has happened: I’ve established a side hustle in travel journalism, specializing in adventure-oriented trips. A photographer traveling with me on assignment said that his editor had remarked that he only ever had to buy medevac insurance for freelancers on my stories. I was flattered. Change often seems inevitable in retrospect, when that part of the narrative has already been lived and worked through, when an undeniable outcome trails the connected dots of causality behind it. But change is often imperceptible while it’s happening.

  The idea of epiphany looms large for students of fiction writing, or at least it did when I was a student. We—those in my writing workshops—usually seemed to accept that the best, most artful goal a short story could accomplish was to lead a character convincingly to an epiphany. The action of a story, ideally, would be a sort of Rube Goldberg machine that had as its payoff a realization that permanently and pervasively realigns the character’s internal reality and, as more than one of my teachers put it, changes everything, forever. (For instance, a man might realize that his fear of horses is actually about widdlers. That, in fact, everything is about widdlers.) One problem, though, is that coming up with such a realization places a demand of profundity on writers that is so difficult to achieve, the ambition itself can become paralyzing. As a result, fiction workshops are awash in short stories where the main character, inscrutable to both reader and writer, stares off into the distance, thinking something unknowable that has, in some unarticulated way, changed everything.

  In life, an epiphany is less often an all-encompassing end in itself than a trigger for a small change or progression and might only be apparent or emerge as important later. An epiphany might be a turning cog in a process of growth that requires effort and patience. A small epiphany (Niagara Falls is a pleasant destination; my instinct to stay in my comfort zone has the potential to rob me of meaningful experiences) may change behavior in ways that facilitate more realizations along the same theme (jumping the horse over the jump despite being nervous gives me a sense of accomplishment), which may, over time, equip one to take larger risks, and all of this might eventually begin to form a pattern, maybe a practice, that might slowly change everything.

  With hindsight, I can trace a path from one risk to another and see how each facilitated the next, even though, in the living, life tends to feel more like a series of blind corners and baffling junctures: the maze as seen from above versus the maze from the lab rat’s perspective. There were the round-the-world plane tickets my friend Miranda and I bought after college, the dangerous bus ride we took into the Himalayas
, the extraordinarily foolish decision I made to let strange men drive me alone out of Delhi (it’s a long story) that turned out okay but still haunts me with what-ifs—one risk too far. There was my choice to use my little fellowship from Iowa to spend eight months, the off-season months, on Nantucket, where I knew no one and never met anyone, while I wrote the first draft of a first book. In such deep solitude, time moved strangely, cyclically, bouncing and rolling like a tumbleweed. I got weird and anxious and overly rigid about my daily routine, but I emerged from the island as though from a crucible, newly unafraid of loneliness and boredom.

  Once I understood that being alone wouldn’t kill me or even make me miserable, I was liberated to go where I wanted, when I wanted. That novel I wrote in Nantucket, against all odds, paid for my life for a while. I’d ended a long-distance relationship I’d felt so oppressed and smothered by that I couldn’t imagine ever wanting another. I started traveling alone. I wrote my second book quickly, in five months I spent abroad, not really talking to anyone. After that, I went to New Zealand and drove around the South Island by myself. After that, I lived on the side of a mountain in Montana with my dog for a couple months. Of course, these choices were facilitated by a densely woven safety net of privilege. During a period when I couldn’t decide where to live, my parents let me hang out at their house for months at a time, and they took care of my dog when I was away. If I had failed or my income simply dried up, I knew I would have somewhere to go and time to pick myself up again.

  Little by little, my life began to diverge from what I had thought it would be. The siren song of the white picket fence hadn’t been what pulled me away from horses, but, when I was in my teens and twenties and contemplated the future, I always imagined myself married, settled, categorizable in a social category that inspired less unease than “single woman.” Sometime around my thirtieth birthday, though, I stopped imagining that life, not all at once but slowly, without even noticing, until one day the vision was gone. Nothing concrete came to replace it, no clearly defined alternative. Instead there were questions and fleeting wishes, flickers of possibility. I had not been able to predict my past. Why should I be able to predict my future?

  After my second book came out, I was offered an assignment writing a profile of a ballet dancer for a travel magazine. When I’d finished, in what would turn out to be a consequential fit of boldness and also one of those unexpected inflection points in a life, I asked the editor if I could start pitching story ideas. My first pitch that went through was a trip to the rugged subantarctic islands south of New Zealand that I had noticed in a guidebook when I’d visited the country two years before. Getting to those islands meant spending almost two weeks on a small ship in the notoriously stormy Southern Ocean. I was nervous, but my nervousness faded once we left port. The twenty-foot (and bigger) swells I’d feared were a reality, but the reality was, somehow, not frightening. The staff and crew of the ship was accustomed to the huge seas and paid them little notice, casually inclining their bodies with the motion as they went about their business, only bothering to hold on to something when the ship rolled to thirty degrees or so. I imitated them as best I could and was lucky not to be seasick, just sleep-deprived from sliding up and down my bunk. If the sea had been flat, I realized, I would have been disappointed.

  The man who owned the expedition company was on board, running the trip, and after a week or so, I began to suspect something was brewing between us even though we were so different we had difficulties signaling interest. In the hour before dinner when all the passengers hung out in the ship’s bar, he would wordlessly plonk down an extra bowl of coveted and strictly rationed potato chips at my table and walk away. Mostly it was just a feeling. I was skittish and verbal; he was gruff and intense, given to staring out at the sea with such concentration he looked almost tormented. At first I couldn’t decide if I was into him; then I decided I was. He was three decades older and fundamentally alien, seemingly unafraid of everything I found most daunting. He’d spent big swathes of his life camping in the bush and contending with the massive, frigid swells of the Southern Ocean and snowmobiling across Siberian sea ice. He knew about birds and plants. Harsh, inaccessible places tugged on him, and he followed his geographical yearnings not recklessly but not fearfully either, with a single-minded tenacity.

  Nothing happened on that trip, but we kept in touch. Before long, via email, we’d bluntly acknowledged our attraction, plonking it down like another bowl of potato chips, and decided we’d like to see each other again. Writing to me via satellite phone from his ship, he always included the wind speed and direction. Wind 30 knots, WSW. Thinking of you. My friends referred to him as O.S., Old Salt.

  For our first date, he invited me on a five-week-long commercial trip he was leading to the remote Ross Sea region of Antarctica. Going was a massive gamble—there was no escape route if, three days in, it turned out we didn’t like each other or had bad sexual chemistry—but I went anyway. I wore a staff uniform and tended bar in heavy seas, helped get people in and out of inflatable Zodiac rafts, sat bird-watching in the bridge beside O.S. Royal albatross. Wandering albatross. Sooty shearwater. I saw icebergs as big as cities. I saw the abandoned huts of explorers, frozen volcanoes, hooting masses of nesting penguins. In the evenings, I went to O.S.’s cabin and got in his bunk with him while the midnight sun streamed through the porthole. In a love letter he left under my pillow, he wrote that I was “like a wildflower—a beautiful subantarctic megaherb just coming into blossom.”

  You won’t like his body, my mother had warned. It won’t be what you’re used to. And it wasn’t, but I did like it. My friends and family had not been wrong to be skeptical of my choice to go on a five-week, 5,500-nautical-mile first date with a stranger, but when my gamble paid off I felt more than lucky: I felt truly bold.

  Perhaps predictably, my relationship with O.S. didn’t translate well to dry land. We were together less than a year. With him, I’d felt hyperaware of the limits of my competence. I wasn’t tough or rugged. I was the girlfriend. He was interested in my improving my skills, but mostly insofar as improved skills would help slot me into his life. Once, when we were lazing around in his bunk, he said in an offhand way that if I liked being on the ship I could earn a basic maritime certification, which would make it easier for me to be a regular staff member and travel with him more. I liked that idea, but I didn’t like how, one time, when we spent a whole afternoon and evening with friends of his, I wasn’t included in the conversation. It never even came up that I was a writer. Because I was so much younger than O.S., I was assumed to be an accessory, maybe even a gold digger. I expected as much from strangers (in public I often felt protective of him, tried to demonstrate with my body language that I was an active participant in our relationship), but I sensed that his friends’ lack of curiosity was intended almost as a mercy, sparing me from having to explain the existence I’d wanted to escape badly enough to take up with someone with whom I had so little in common.

  It’s not quite that I wanted to be O.S.; I was realistic enough to know I wasn’t going to spend my life wandering the seas and frozen wastelands, accruing esoteric expertise. It’s more that I realized I couldn’t emulate the parts of him I admired—his dauntlessness and his self-sufficiency—while being his girlfriend. By the time we broke up, I’d started purposefully pitching more travel stories that would give me opportunities to grow, possibly change. Slowly I was becoming a timid person outwardly leading the life of an adventurous person. I was afraid of deep water, but, for a story, I swam in the open ocean with humpback whales. I learned to scuba dive so I could go spearfishing with a famous chef. I fretted about plane crashes, but I flew in a small plane over the Arctic Ocean as the cloud ceiling pushed us lower and lower, toward the black water. Was I an adventurous person? Or an impostor of unusual dedication? Or neither? Or both? When does what you do become who you are? Or doesn’t it?

  When I got back on a horse, it was on a wind-whipped estancia in Chile
an Patagonia. The animal was short and sturdy, with a huge long mane heavy as a doormat. I was on an assignment I’d pushily campaigned for: a multiday horse trek through Torres del Paine National Park with my best friend Bailey. A female buddy story, I told my editor, about rediscovering our equestrian youth. The night before we started, Bailey and I lay awake, wondering if we still knew how to ride. When we’d met on our college equestrian team, we’d both been at our peak skills. She not only rode extremely well but managed to be a steely competitor without seeming to sacrifice her generous good nature. The year after graduation, we’d shared an apartment with two other girls and, somewhere in those aimless months, among many hatched and forgotten plans, we’d decided we would one day ride in Patagonia.

  It turned out, eleven years later, we could still ride functionally enough, but this riding was like nothing I’d ever done before. The stirrups on our fat sheepskin saddles were positioned so our legs stuck out in front of us as we cantered across grassy flats and followed beret-wearing gauchos up steep, muddy mountains while wind and rain abraded our faces. The horses picked their way through fallen timber and latticed root systems. They slid down granite slopes so sheer and bare I could smell their shoes burning against the rock. They waded into cold, chest-deep water without hesitation. This was the stuff of my younger self’s trail-riding nightmares, but I was starting to understand something I hadn’t internalized during years of riding in circles in enclosed arenas: horses can take you out into the world. Humans have recognized this potential since prehistory, but somehow, for me, it was an epiphany. For the first time, I was experiencing riding at its most utilitarian and gloriously primal, getting from one place to another, passing through a magnificent landscape without engine noise or crowds, aboard sure-footed animals whose stoic hardiness made my heart swell with that old horse love. Every night, after hours on the trail, Bailey and I collapsed in our tent, groaning in pain, naming all the body parts that hurt—knees, ankles, butts, backs—and also exchanging fantasies about how we could keep riding after the trek. We wondered if we could find a way to take lessons, to get back into it.