Horsekeeping Read online

  The newspaper’s police blotter is innocuous most of the time. A famous actress long-residing in Salisbury once read excerpts from it on The David Letterman Show to prove she’s a country girl. But the threat of finding one’s self on the “who did what” list keeps most of us honest and law-abiding, though it is off-putting when a friend’s escapades end up in print. Do you mention it amidst small talk at the deli counter or pretend you didn’t see it, unlikely as that may be with our slender newspaper? In a small town, the fact that everyone knows everyone else’s business ups the ante. Likewise, property ownership and transfer is the local spectator sport, and full-timers and weekenders alike indulge for the fun of it, but also to reassure themselves about the value of their sizable investments.

  But the gossip around town served us well in one respect: everyone had a friend we should talk to about running a horse business. Kissing a few frogs would be worth the free advice. Our neighbor John Bottass called immediately with a recommendation. Grateful that we took on El-Arabia, he might also have felt he owed me for saving his cows. Riding my bike last fall, I capped the hill at Shady Maple Farm, enjoying the long descent only to cruise into dozens of cows, fretting in the road and skewing every which way into the woods. I u-turned and pedaled hard back over the hill to sound the alert. John jumped in his truck, and his son Danny ran down the road to rustle up all that had now mysteriously disappeared. John kept driving, thinking his cows had followed the road, but on foot Danny and I spied a few confused heifers in the woods. Sounding a bell and banging a feed bucket, Danny coaxed about twenty of the worried from all directions. Seeing Danny lead a herd of relieved bovines up the middle of the road to the safety of home was reward enough. Danny and John knew each animal individually and accounted for all MIAs. While I could not imagine doing otherwise, John painted me the hero, believing that most people would not take the time to save a few tons of beef.

  John put us in touch with the Hanovers. Knowing they would be good people like John, we visited their small farm where they buy, train and resell horses. Real life horse traders, they needed space to expand. Their farm looked old, but it was clean, and they obviously cared for their animals. Scott and I guarded against expecting a horse barn to mirror our meticulous living room, but I wondered if I could ever get used to the inevitable farm messiness. The Hanovers had their hands full with a tough business and a disabled younger child, but their older daughter enthusiastically described her life on the farm, and they all freely parsed “Horse 101.” An appreciative audience, we absorbed our first mini-education. Though a match between us wouldn’t work—they wanted a leasing opportunity and were not able to relocate closer to our farm—they might be able to find or sell horses for us when the time came. Furthermore, the horse world is a small one, and most of its inhabitants are just plain nice to know.

  The Hanovers recounted a remarkable story. Their farm lies in the softly curving, lush Great Barrington valley that got walloped in 1989 by an awesome storm. Technically labeled a wind shear, most people called it a tornado even though the weather experts hesitate to acknowledge that tornadoes strike New England. Twenty years later, its path still registers on the side of the mountain where the trees lie flat in the same direction like so many matchsticks. The Hanovers lost several horses during the storm, including a draft horse that they never found.

  Now a draft horse is huge and can literally weigh over a ton. At eighteen hands, they stand six feet four inches tall at the withers, the top of the shoulder where the neck meets the back. Strong as oxen, historically they pulled the heaviest loads in hilly terrain and dragged iron plows across fields. It is hard to imagine one being swept away or so torn apart by wind as to simply disappear. Chuck Hanover understood my incredulity.

  “I couldn’t believe it either until I found his shoes stuck in the ground where I last saw him. I knew they were his because I shoed him myself that morning, and I adjusted them to his peculiar feet. We looked everywhere for the body or something, but never found a trace of him.”

  The poor fellow was yanked right out of his mud-sucked irons, similar to pedestrian accidents where still-tied human sneakers are strewn, incomprehensively to onlookers, near the wreck.

  STILL IN SEARCH OF A FARM MANAGER, my second call led me to Bobbi (short for Roberta) Carleton. Not only has Bobbi been on the back of a horse since the age of nine months (she is forty-four), but she lives only a mile away, as the crow flies—three miles by car—on our own winding Twin Lakes Road. Moreover, she has been on the lookout for an interesting horse opportunity since relocating from Dutchess County in New York, where she ran a large stable for a Rockefeller, to marry Chip. Bobbi and Chip erected a six-stall barn and riding ring on their property for Bobbi’s horses. A day after a promising introductory meeting at our house, we loaded up the kids to check out their place. We found their light blue colonial farmhouse appealing and the barn and horses immaculate, just as she had described. Chip warmly shook our hands and welcomed us into the barn where Bobbi wrestled with a horse.

  The tack room bulged with ribbons (even though Chip said most rested in boxes) attesting to Bobbi’s expertise as an “L” judge and advanced dressage rider. I liked the idea of dressage more and more. I saw it as ballroom dancing with a balletic horse rather than the un-rhythmic shuffling around my husband and I call dancing. And I could lead, or so I thought. Requiring pinpoint agility and speechless communication between horse and rider, it is sanely contained within a ring. It is so quiet and slow, how hard could it be? Hunt and jumping courses cover so much more ground, and the speed tilts wild and dangerous. I like control. Atop a fifteen-hundred-pound, muscle-bound, speedy herd animal, I like it even more. Let’s face it: the Christopher Reeve accident inclined many of us to rethink this sport. Superman’s death after years as a quadriplegic adds not a little to my anxiety both for my family’s safety and as a liability issue. Most horsey people do not mention the “P” word, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think about paralysis, probably more than they’d admit.

  Without prompting, Bobbi stressed safety and the cleanliness and care of the horses and their environment, priorities that calmed my aging, worry-about-my-kids-all-the-time, animal-loving heart. She and Chip had also rescued several hard to manage dogs from the pound. Canine-ites also, we eagerly asked to see the beasts we heard barking from the house.

  “They are two wonderful shepherds, absolute sweethearts, but they aren’t great with strangers. Who knows what happened before we got them, but it couldn’t have been good.”

  As if on cue, “bing” chimed a timer from the house.

  “Oh, that’s the special food I cook up for them. Twice a day, they know it’s coming.”

  This woman is conscientious with a heart of gold, I thought. As an extra bonus, Chip volunteers for the local fire department and is a motor head, loving nothing better than mucking around with tractors and heavy equipment. With no shortage of that kind of work on a farm, these two were a find.

  Their horses clamored for attention, and Bobbi introduced each one with more ceremony than I did my children. All five friendly horses clearly adored her and Chip, nudging and nickering. Half-blind Theo shied at Elliot’s touch, so Bobbi, ruffling his mane, explained to approach from his seeing side.

  “One time old Theo banged his other eye, swelling it completely shut for a whole day. Completely confused, he walked into everything. I spent a full day leading him around wherever he wanted to go.” Closing her eyes and goofily bumping around, she had both my kids giggling and play-acting two blind old racehorses.

  I admired Bobbi’s skill at maneuvering her seventeen-hand (six feet at the withers, where the neck meets the back), young horse Toby through a shower and into his fresh straw-bedded doublewide stall. Chip referred to this silly young gelding that hardly knew his own strength as the “Big Galoopas,” and suffered “the Tobster” with the humor generally afforded a brawny, thick-headed younger brother. Bobbi bred Toby for eventual sale but found she couldn’t pa
rt with him. She chattered all the while with a ready white smile and crystal blue eyes. Latvian, athletic and “blonde by choice,” she exuded grace and confidence even though Toby shied and pranced indelicately about. Her hands were intelligent with skill, guiding this rambunctious horse and his complex arrangement of gear even as her mind was focused on us. She openly shared her evident knowledge about all things horse-related and our conversation flowed full and easy. We all envisioned the same horse farm—casual, very clean, safe and up-to-date, but definitely not fancy.

  This is a good match, I thought to myself, and I heard Scott’s answering sigh of relief signaling yes, she seems just perfect. Our side of the partnership was clinched as we witnessed Chip enjoy a head massage from Bobbi’s prized horse. “Dream Weaver,” also known as “Angel,” is Toby’s older sister. As Chip leaned his sinewy shoulders against the stall door talking away, Angel poked her head through the metal yoke and worked her thick, surprisingly soft whiskered lips back and forth over the entire surface of his scalp. Angel kept her teeth safely closed but vigorously articulated in between each hair from Chip’s forehead to the back of his neck and from ear to ear. It was an act of intimacy possible only through loving care and time spent, an earned camaraderie of man and beast. As my kids looked on with mouths agape, Chip laughed, his voice smoker-deep.

  “It feels really good, but you need a hair wash afterwards.”

  He came away not in the least self-conscious with his gooey hair sticking up in all directions, a saliva-gelled Mohawk gone awry. Angel whinnied and nuzzled his plaid flannel shirt gently, and Chip absentmindedly pulled at the bits of chewed grass and hay braided into his hair. Their contentment was palpable.

  The next day, our kids’ sitter Marie mentioned that fellow-fireman Chip designated Elliot and Jane the nicest and most well-behaved children he had ever seen. Hmmm, taste and honesty to boot, I laughed to myself. We quickly determined Bobbi’s salary requirements, and she eagerly took the job. Bobbi would line up the workforce to hit the ground running as soon as we closed in May and help us decide what to demolish, renovate and add. Once we opened for business, she would manage all aspects of the farm, from taking care of and training up to thirty-eight horses as boarders, to finding, training, and caring for horses for our family’s use, giving lessons and maybe even staging some shows. This grim farm was signing a new lease, and Arcadian visions of its transformation danced merrily in our heads.

  Bobbi lost no time choosing quality barn builders, plumbers, electricians, painters, fencers, well-diggers and septic system experts. As often happens with home purchases, what seemed possible to live with before ownership became impossible afterwards, and the redo list grew by inches. By the second week of April, the “while ya’s” had infected us all—“while you’re changing the roof, ya’ may as well add skylights; while you’re replacing the plastic windows, ya’ may as well use glass; while you’re sprucing up the indoor riding ring, ya’ may as well build out a viewing room.” Our while-ya’s were spawning while-ya’s like some out-of-control DNA experiment. In the end we planned to rip out and replace all the stalls, re-roof the main barn and refit all the outbuildings with new, commercial grade gutters. Copious water runs off a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot barn roof, pouring a lake in the outdoor riding area we had renamed the skating rink. We decided to replace all the electric wiring and lighting that the inspector condoned but that everyone else had emphasized was extremely hazardous, having actually sparked a few fires. Finally, we could not resist renovating the pleasing but dilapidated peg and groove round pen to serve as a viewing venue for shows (here we really were getting ahead of ourselves), and as a shade haven in the summer.

  “We can make some money from food concessions out of the refurbished gazebo once it’s fixed up,” I said, confident in my income-producing reason to renew my favorite structure.

  “That’s a lot of hotdogs, pal,” Scott teased. “And who’s going to cook and serve? . . . You?” He gave me the “you poor mutt” head shake.

  The list grew like the mold creeping up from the bottoms of the stalls: for the indoor ring, add glass windows along the one wall to brighten the dark interior, go for dust-free footing (rather than a sand/dirt mix that needs watering), and consider a heating system to achieve thirty degrees when the mercury plummets.

  “Why bother with that?” I asked Bobbi.

  “Well, riding in thirty feels pretty good when it’s minus ten outside.”

  I figured I would flash my “gentleman farmer” card then—if I’m the one shelling out all the money, I’ll opt to stay in my toasty kitchen with a cup of steaming tea when it hits zero—a fair weather rider.

  Then there were the mundane but essential items: lay down concrete in the barn aisles to keep down dust, add another heated tack room, build up the lower pastures and replace all the fencing: buying fencing by the mile just sounds wrong, I thought. This in addition to new sliding barn doors (that actually slide), the removal of dead and dangerous trees, new plantings for shade and aesthetics, the replacement of rotted wood from and the staining of all buildings, and a complete renovation of the cottage, including a new bathroom and kitchen, for the on-site farmhand.

  Bobbi came by in mid-April with the estimates clutched in her hand. We sat on the back patio, all of us nervous. While the spring birds twittered, Bobbi solemnly revealed a total twice that of the generous number Scott and I had filed in our heads as “couldn’t possibly be more than.” Our “head number,” we thought, gave us ample room for a hot tub or some other crazy indulgence should we think of one. We carefully padded our head number to cushion ourselves against the blow of a high estimate. Yet we knew Bobbi had done her best and that there was no getting around the cost for what we had chosen.

  “What do you think, Scott?” I asked, heart pounding.

  “It’s a lot of money.”

  “I know,” Bobbi winced. “I could keep working on it, get some more bids.”

  “Maybe Velvet and I should get a paper route?” I joked.

  Silence.

  How could it be so expensive, I wondered? It’s an ugly old barn. “I guess you better keep your day job, Scott.”

  Silence.

  “Let’s sleep on it. If we see our way clear tomorrow morning, we’ll send in the deposits,” he frowned, already working numbers out in his head.

  “I’ll do my best to trim costs,” Bobbi assured, serious.

  We parted with queasy guts signaling that this was no longer an amusing hobby but a serious business venture with much at stake.

  Scott and I jumped on our bikes both to release the adrenalin of “the number” and to discuss what to do.

  “Any second thoughts?” he asked as we puffed up our first hill.

  “It IS a shocking number.”

  “If I had known what’s involved . . .”

  I didn’t want him to say it—that we should turn this ship around.

  “Maybe it’s like having children,” I interjected. “If you knew all that was coming at you for the next twenty years, no one in her right mind would do it and we’d have been extinct a long time ago. But, yes. I’m having second thoughts, too.” We glided along a low flat. “We could still back out, couldn’t we?”

  “Not out of the purchase, but we could take the buildings down and return the fields to hay. That would be practically free compared to what we’re talking about.”

  Pausing, he looked right at me.

  “I suppose having kids was worth it. But, do you think you’ll really like having a horse farm? You know, actually find it fun?”

  The kid thing is a running joke between us. Married fourteen years before ambivalently taking the plunge, when parenting gets tough we ask each other: “Whose idea was it to have these no-neck monsters anyway?” He accuses me of not liking them, and I retort that I would love having them if I had a wife like he has. But his due-diligence into my staying power regarding farming reminded me that for a no-nonsense, tough-minded, relentlessly practi
cal investment banker, deep down my husband is an aspiring romantic. The guy doesn’t desire to ride, isn’t crazy about animals, has an insanely busy life, but wanted to do this thing for me, knowing that already I was too emotionally invested to turn back. Over the past two weekends I had watched my kids play with a week-old foal, born to the last remaining boarder at El-Arabia, a mare too close to term to evict. The sweetest animal any of us had ever met, we were licked and nibbled all over by toothless filly gums and batted with long dark lashes framing oversized, curious eyes. We “ooohed” and “ahhhed” at Thea’s attentive mothering of little Rosie, the pushing and probing, her teaching loving yet stern. We awed at the power, speed and knock-kneed majesty of this lanky, tottering new life, unable to tear ourselves away. Overcome with beatitude, I had recklessly promised Elliot and Jane their own foals to raise—a promise I whispered out of Scott’s earshot.

  I saw Scott’s “fun” question as my chance, and I went for it.

  “Absolutely I would have fun, no question there, but what an amazing experience. It would be wrong to kill a farm, and think how great it could be for the kids.” I smiled, warming to my subject. “Jane will have horses instead of boyfriends. Elliot will be active and engaged rather than a teenage slug on the couch. We don’t allow television, Nintendo or many computer games, the least we can do is buy them a horse farm.” I gave Scott a wink, and he rolled his eyes in return.

  Our conversations about money and our indulged children always go like this: he rides the brake, and I’m full speed on the gas. Usually we stay on the road. We pedaled our bikes faster, powered by the adrenaline of a major decision.

  “I guess it comes down to the horse’s ass rule.”

  “Aptly named,” I said, “but how is it applied?”

  “Do you wake up after it’s all said and done and feel like a horse’s ass?”

  He wasn’t kidding; I knew he used this internal restraint meter to make decisions.