My Life With Horses--Part Seven

                                                by Laura Crum

            Once again, I’m going to say something that a lot of horse people won’t want to hear. And it is this: Taking a break from working with horses can be good. It can, in fact, provide the answers you were looking for. At least this is what happened for me.

            Depression forced me to take a break from riding and competing, and when I returned to riding, I knew I didn’t want to compete any more. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I knew I still loved horses; I knew that I had had enough of competition for one lifetime. And I felt absolutely free to find a new path with horses. I just didn’t know what that path would look like.

            I experimented, trying to find what would work for me. And I am sure that to many of my horse friends, some of what I did looked very silly. I rode in flip flops and drawstring pants, I seldom did anything more than saunter down the trail, I showed no interest in team roping, even though I had been so passionate about it for many years. I wanted my horses to become a natural, relaxing part of my life, like my garden and my dogs, not an “event” that I did. I wanted to ride (and live) in comfortable cloths that I could hike and ride and garden and nap in. I was done with tight Wrangler jeans and uncomfortable cowboy boots forever (after years of wearing them every day). I was done with worrying about what anyone else thought. And I was completely done with stressing my horses and myself in order to win some competition or other. I just wanted to enjoy my horses in a relaxing way that was pleasant for both me and them.

            It took a major life change (a year of depression in my case) to create enough space for me to really evaluate what I WANTED to do with horses now. Not what anyone else thought I should do. Not what I was accustomed to doing. Not what I had wanted in the past. What I actually wanted to do at this point in my life.

            I think this big “opening” also happens for others…but sometimes I think the person doesn’t see the opportunity in what seems like a disaster. Over and over I have seen the big life change come along for the impassioned horseperson, and I believe it can be a gift (though by its nature it is always pretty traumatic). But a horse wreck with accompanying injuries and fear, or the death or permanent lameness of a beloved horse, or (like me) a divorce and/or a depression, can all be catalysts that allow us to look clearly at our lives and perhaps change them for the better. And so, once I was no longer depressed, it became a delightfully open world for me, and I felt very free to find my chosen path, whatever it might be.

            After awhile I found that just puttering down the trail by myself wasn’t enough. My husband wasn’t really interested in riding, and I wanted a new project. I resolved to try breaking and training another colt and see how that felt. It had been maybe ten years since I had broken Plumber as a three year old, but I thought I still had the skills.

            And here is where I need to add that I have not mentioned all the horses I dealt with over the years. Were I to do that this saga would be MUCH longer. But in the time when I was passionate about cowhorse and cutting I worked for maybe half a dozen trainers and I started and/or helped to train at least a hundred young horses. Once I began team roping, I broke and trained several colts for my uncle Todd and my friend Wally, and I owned and trained a few colts that I later sold because they didn’t seem quite right for me. These horses haven’t come into the story because it would become just too long…and because they were never MY horses in the same way that Burt, Gunner, Flanigan and Plumber were my horses. At the same time, I spent many hours in my thirties breaking and training Ready, Breeze, Rebby, Lester…etc, and so I felt comfortable and confident taking on a three-year-old with thirty days on him as my next project. 

Danny, like Plumber, was a colt that I had known and liked since he was born. And I had no trouble with him at all to speak of in the training process. He wanted to crowhop a little and he was smart enough to be a challenge, but I never came anywhere near coming off of him. But…at 42 years old, and a lot more aware of my own feelings than I had been when I was younger, AND consciously experimenting to see what I wanted to do with horses, I soon discovered I no longer enjoyed training young horses. It required that I ride the horse consistently, and I found I didn’t want to feel forced to ride; some days I’d rather garden or ride bikes with my husband, or something else. And I no longer felt as confident physically as I had in my 20’s and 30’s. I became aware that my skills were rusty and that if I got dumped it was liable to hurt. Danny was a fairly easy colt, but he was a colt. Young horses do unpredictable things…I absolutely knew this truth after all the years I had spent breaking and training horses. I found that at this stage of my life I wasn’t really comfortable with that element of unpredictability/danger any more. It dawned on me that I didn’t want being hurt in a horse wreck to upend my currently very happy life. I rode Danny for six months and got him pretty well started, but I realized that no, this wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my time right now. And then I got pregnant.

(to be continued)

(This saga begins here.)

To read the book I wrote about training Danny (Hayburner) click on the title. This story was followed by Forged, in which my protagonist finally settles down and gets married.

My Life With Horses--Part Six

                                                by Laura Crum

            So just when you think you have it all figured out…it changes. I was enjoying team roping, but slowly my overall enjoyment began to grow less. Because no matter how hard I tried to dwell on the positive, I couldn’t help but see all the negatives in competition. This was the third competitive horseback event that I had immersed myself in, and it was more fair and more affordable than the first two. But it was just as hard on horses. In some ways it was much harder on horses than cutting.

            I was getting to the end of watching horses be trashed in order to win. In any form, for any reason. I was sick of seeing people be too hard on a horse because they wanted to win a damn event. I didn’t do this to my own horses, but it was all around me. My fourth mystery novel, Roped, had a lot to do with these feelings.

            I became aware that I was less and less interested in winning and less happy at team roping competitions. I began focusing on horse packing in the mountains more and more. Flanigan was my main mount at this time and he proved to be a wonderful mountain horse. We made many, many trips together, including some that were over a week long and covered a couple of hundred miles over many high Sierra passes. Here we are Wood Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

            But despite my riding in the mountains from time to time, the thing that dominated my life was roping. I practiced twice a week and I competed on weekends. It was my life. Training horses and competing at horse events had been my life for twenty years. I didn’t know how to quit. Once in awhile I would stay home and putter around my garden on the weekends and just turn my horses out to graze…and I was aware that I would RATHER do this than go roping. But the honest truth was I felt guilty if I didn’t go. All my friends were going. Surely I should go, too?

            I had retired Gunner from competition at this point, due to arthritic changes. I was still roping on Flanigan, and I had trained my young horse, Plumber, to be ready to compete. But something was wrong. The heart had gone out of it for me. I knew how I felt, but I didn’t know how to change. So life made a change for me.

            I am going to say something here that not all horse people will want to hear. But it is absolutely true (at least for me). I had spent my life focusing on horses to such a degree that I didn’t think very hard about much else. I didn’t, for instance, think about how to create a happy marriage. I never gave much thought to having children. I was too busy with my horses. And now I was forty years old and competing on horses was beginning to seem meaningless and downright upsetting. I still loved my horses, but I went off to the ropings completely uninterested in winning or even performing well. “Please don’t let any horses or people or cattle get hurt,” was the only thought in my mind. “Let whoever needs to win, win.” By which you can see that the joy had really gone out of it. But I kept doing it. Because I didn’t know how to quit. And this is where life stepped in.

            In my 40^th year my husband fell in love with another woman and left me. And between this, and the very real angst I already felt due to losing my lifelong passion for horseback competitions, I fell into a true depression.

            Those people who have been depressed themselves will know what this means. For those who have not, I will say that depression is far more like being sick with the flu than it is like being “sad.” I had tons of physical symptoms. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I felt physically terrible. It wasn’t as if I could just sit around on the couch relaxing and feeling sad. I felt so awful that I was desperate to feel better. You know when you have a really bad flu how everything is just misery? That’s how depression was for me.

            And yes, I did try to get help. That’s what everyone says. Get help, there is medication, etc, etc, etc. Well, I am here to tell you that this doesn’t work for everybody. I saw three separate shrinks for a year straight, I took at least ten different anti-depressant meds (not simultaneously). None of it helped at all. Some of the meds just made me feel worse. The only thing that gave a little relief was a couple of glasses of wine in the evening. But the relief was always short-lived.

            And yes again, I contemplated suicide. That’s how meaningless everything seemed. But I honestly felt that I needed to survive for the sake of my animals. At the same time, I couldn’t really care for them. I did not go roping; I did not even ride. I had to drag myself through the most basic of horse chores—feeding and watering. Anything more seemed beyond me, and even this much was very hard to do. My friends and family helped me feed my horses…and they went to the grocery store and brought me food so that I would eat. Yes, it was that bad.

            But it passed. I just had to walk through it, one step at a time. It wasn’t easy. More like going through a severe illness than any other way I can think of to describe it. I felt like shit…all the time. And I endured it and continued to put one foot in front of the other. More than that, I contemplated my life and tried to see what the depression might be trying to teach me. Because strange though it sounds, that depression, as I began to understand, came to me for a reason. When I look back on it, I learned some very important things during the year I was depressed. But that didn’t make it easy to bear.

It lasted a year. Until finally it lifted of its own accord. A year and one month after it began, it left me for good. I was involved with a new man and I went to Europe with him, and suddenly life was worth living again. And I still had my horses. Thanks to my friend, Wally, who did much of the feeding and caring for them during the year I was depressed.

            The thing is that awful though it was, the depression was actually a gift. I emerged from it changed—for good. I no longer felt that I had to compete on my horses in order to achieve something. I felt perfectly free to interact with my horses in whatever way was best for me and them. And I knew that I would never again prioritize horse competitions and horse training over my marriage.

            At this point I was re-married and I knew I wanted to have a child. I still had Burt and Gunner, who were both retired, and Flanigan and Plumber. My friend Wally was roping on Flanigan and Plumber and having a fine time with them. And me? I went on the occasional trail ride on Plumber with my new husband riding Flanigan alongside me and felt that life was good.

            But there were still more changes to come. (To be continued.)

PS—I wrote Slickrock about my horse packing adventures, and Breakaway about my battle with depression during this period of my life. These books are, of course, fiction, not memoir. All my novels have classic mystery plots involving murder and such, and this sort of drama did not come my way in real life, thank goodness. But all the background material in the stories is drawn from my own experiences. Click on the titles to find the Kindle editions of these books.