“But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses”

Jane Smiley


As a young girl, I trailed behind my mother when she went to the riding stable, an inglorious conglomeration of pipe corrals and dusty riding rings that sat next to the city dump.  To me, it was a wonderland. The barn’s owner, Jane, looked like she had come straight out of a TV Western. Her piercing blue eyes peered out from a face that was as brown and corrugated as a cardboard box.  Her daughter and son-in- law, who ran the place and gave lessons, wore hand-tooled western belts with silver conches on them and gazed at the world from beneath the brims of Western-style hats.  Here, at ETI Corral 8, I learned to walk, trot, canter and jump, and more than that, I learned how to dream.  Every horse held the promise of a glorious mystery about to unfold.

When I was ten, we moved to a house where we could keep horses in our own backyard—we had a corral that meandered down the side of a California slope.  The garage was my tack room; the driveway was my grooming box.  Our hay sat on wooden pallets in the backyard, and during the rainy season, we covered it with a big blue tarp to keep it dry.  Through that corral passed a motley assortment of horses—my own horse, plus some unwanted castoffs from the neighborhood—a nineteen-year-old thoroughbred, a shaggy Shetland pony, a petite gray named Princess who liked to break through the fence and run back to the cozy stable where she used to live.

Every week I rode to Pony Club meetings on a windy hilltop that afforded a view of the entire Los Angeles basin.  At Pony Club, there were rules of horsemanship and riding. By the time I was fourteen, I gave riding lessons for money and taught at riding camps in the summer. At fifteen, I was combing the back lots of Southern California, picking up horses for a song, giving them a bit of training and trying to convince the parents of neighborhood girls to buy them and take them home. When I was sixteen, my event horse, Pretty Boy Floyd, and I had our best year ever.  We were chosen to participate in the National Junior Three Day Event Championships in Lexington, Kentucky and competed in the 1976 Olympic Selection Trials.

But horse crazy girls grow up and move on. I went to college, then joined the Peace Corps, then went back to school to become a nurse-midwife. Then at last I started writing books.  My days of riding were left far behind. I have four children, a job, a dog, a husband.  I have all of the accoutrements of a grown-up life.

But, I still think that everything I know I learned from horses.  If I close my eyes, I’m going at a fast gallop across the California hills, my hands buried in my horse’s mane, my dreams hurtling forward at the same speed.